I’d been thinking a lot about this course, partly inspired by reading Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Parade, a book that narrates the changing position of the female artist in a male dominated world, a novel that also meditates, albeit implicitly, on femaleness itself, and that recognizes that femaleness may also be embodied in a man, opening a door to a different kind of artist, to a different kind of art making – a kind of art making that is not about domination and control but submission to the work itself, along with an openness to what might happen, making possible a kind of power gained precisely through its relinquishment – a genuine empowerment. And it is, in part, this question of femaleness and maleness that intrigues me, and the weaving of this question through a life and through a work.
All the artists we meet in Parade are named G. The first G whom we meet—a dominating man, a misogynistic painter based on George Baselitz—is a male artist.
The writer within us, and what are willing to open ourselves up to? Ourselves and then our lives?
We are at a place in time when we can allow the writer within us to emerge, when this relinquishment, which is also an empowerment, has become, at least for most of us, a genuine possibility.
The “is” in the title for this course is quite intentional. The artists whose work we will be reading and looking at and discussing are all women, “The woman is an artist”; but the artist we will be exploring here is also female in this larger sense, “The artist is a woman.”
The final artist named G we meet in Parade — a man who became famous while working anonymously under a pseudonym (based on the French film director Eric Rohmer who was born under the name of either Jean Marie Maurice Schérer or Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer – this uncertainty is itself beautiful), a man for whom “invisibility was [the] conduit to self-expression,” a man who wondered why “a work need[ed] to be identified with a person,” a man who dreamed of becoming a camera—is a female artist.
This course presents us with an opportunity to meditate explicitly (through our class discussions) upon these ideas, and implicitly (through the works we will be engaging with so closely, through the words we will be writing), while also, through this process of paying attention (paying more attention) and letting ourselves go, making something from ourselves that is also something more.
Learn more about the course here: https://marginalamericannotes.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=2019&action=edit
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