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Studio International, Feb. 1974
(one of a series of columns) (very slitely revised)

SIX

Is there a women's art?
What do you mean - an art by women?
A lot of women do art, but is there an art made only by women?
All women?
No, just an art, no matter how little of it - not a style and not a technique, but something broader - that's done only by women.
I don't know. Is there?
Well, there should be. Women's experiences - social and biological - in this and every other society, is different from men's.
And every person's experience is different from every other person's.
Art is individual.
It's still possible to generalize about it. Black experience is different from white. Poor is different from rich. 
Child's art is different from adult's. And women's is different from men's.
And every person's experience is
different from every other person's.
Art is individual.
It's still possible to generalize about it. Black experience is different from white. Poor is different from rich.
Child's art is different from adult's.
And women's is different from men's.
  But art is a mixture. Art is androgynous.
  Sure, artists are probably more androgynous than 'normal' people. Like male artists, no matter how macho they are (or because of it) have more of the women in them that some other men is other professions. God knows women artists have traditionally had to have some 'male' in them to get the hell up and create something on the primary level - or rather to have it seen as such. [[strikethrough]] because [[/strikethrough]] it takes imagination to transcend your sex. 
 But it's dangerous - like buildin a house on sand.  If you don't know your own identity, the real meaning of your own experience, you can't just jump up & "transcend". 
Eva Hesse once described the female part of her art as its sensitivity and the male part its strength. Hopefully a year later she would have realized it could all be unified, that strength is female too.
  Why will so few women admit to using their own bodies or biological experience as subject-matter-conscious or unconscious? [[strikethrough]] common

You're lucky, then. Another reason women don't like art to be seen though their bodies is that women have been sex objects all along and to let your art be seen that way is just falling right back into the same old rut.
  Not once attitudes are changed. Not once you can be proud of being a woman.
  Nobody whose consciousness has been raised wants to be seen as just a vagina, an interior space, a cunt. You're hardly doing women a favour by laying that kind of restriction on them.
  It's not a restriction. It's a basic element to our own identities we have to come to terms with. Did you hear yourself say 'just a vagina'? Anyway, I didn't say that sexual or biological identity was the only factor in women's art. But to make art that is together, unified with the marker, that too has to be acknowledged instead of apologized for. And it's there. I looked at the New York Women's Art Registry - something like 2500 slides of women's work; I saw them with a man and he kept saying' a man couldn't have made this work'. It wasn't necessarily a compliment, but it was a fact we could both see. A huge amount of the work, especially the more naive or funky (and therefore  often more directly inside art, less affected by bandwagon art word numbers) did have blatant sexual subject matter even when it's visible, by saying 'oh, I wasn't thinking about that so is it isn't there. Sex is bound to be a factor in women's work precisely because women have been sex objects and are much more aware of their bodies than men. Men are aware of their pricks. Women are aware that every movement make in public is supposed to have sexual content for the opposite sex. Some of that has to come out in the work. When it's absolutely absent, when it isn't even suggested, I wonder.
  But that's like the cliché about women are irrational and men are rational ; women are illogical, men are logical. You're taking women down to the level of mere bodies, while men can repress that and are allowed to make art with their minds. 
  No. No, not at all. Just that good art by either sex, no matter how 'objective' or 'non-objective', has to have both elements or it's dead. But system. Like formalist or minimal art is popularly supposed to be logical because it looks like it should be, while work with a more obviously psychological basis is called illogical. I'd like to see those terms forgotten and have people look at everything according to a new set of criteria, criteria that don't imply value judgements through the use of certain code words or phrases. When I write that something is illogical in art, and I like it, I have to add 'marvellously illogical' or it will be seen as a putdown. Not so with logic, which I often think is 'merely logical'. R.D. Laing pointed out the same thing about subjective and objective; he said it was always 'merely subjective'. I'm constantly called illogical, and I don't care, because for me it's logical, according to my own system. 
  Crazy lady.
  Maybe, but I know that a certain kind of fragmentation, certain rhythms, are wholly sensible to me even if I can't analyse them. I find that fragmentation more and more often in the art - written and visual - of women who are willing to risk something, willing to let more of themselves out, let more of themselves be subject to ridicule according to the prevailing systems. Part of the energy that emerges from that impetus is sexual. Part is intellectual in a new way. of course there's still an endless stream of art by women who are copying the old way, who are scared to alter the mathematics or geometry or logic or whatever it is they're interested in towards a new and perhaps more vulnerable model. I'm certainly not saying that any of those things should be taboo for women's art. But I'm convinced that women feel them differently and that either does come out or should come out in the art. Like the way so many women artists are using geometry or the grid primarily to blur its neat edges, to alter its meaning, to subtly screw up the kind of order that runs the world. The most convincing women's art I see, of any style, is very personal, and by being very personal finds a system of its own. 
  But you're so vague.
I know. On one hand I don't want to draw any conclusions. I mistrust conclusions because they get taken for granted and stop the flow of things. On the other hand, even if I wanted to, I couldn't draw conclusions on this subject now because I don't know enough. And because society hasn't radically changed yet for women, so what we're seeing is a mixture of what women really want to do and what they think they should do - ...[[strikethrough]] in either direction [[/strikethrough]] toward male [[strikethrough]] values or toward female values.[[/strikethrough]]