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8

Q. How do you define what makes art look like it was made by a man?

First of all, it's a very hard question to answer because there's very little art that's made by women, OK? That's very important. But there's a lot of books that are written by women. Now, one of the things I've been doing the last couple of years is reading books by women, almost exclusively. And one thing I'm discovering is that when I look at work, or read books that are by men, there's always some kind of an emotional gap for me, like I can't completely identify. Generally I can't--let's say in books, I can't identify with the women at all, cause they're usually just objects in the books. Think about it. Or they're incomplete human beings, it's always the men in the books who are really the major figures, the ones who are doing things; and since I see myself as doing things, I always have to identify with the men in the books. So that leaves a gap for me an emotional gap in terms of my experience in reading a book. It's the same thing in looking at art. I think that there's a fundamental difference in form organization between men and women; that is, my body is organized around a central core, I don't have any cantilever things. Erection is a cantilever; it's a physical, an emotional experience of a cantilever; that's very foreign to me. See, there's this idea, men have this idea that art is asexual, that it doesn't in any way reflect their bodies or their limitations, but that's because they think that their perception of reality is reality. It never occurs to them that there's some other form of reality where they are perceived differently than they perceive themselves, for example; and so, there's this whole myth about art being asexual and a-racial. Do you follow what I'm saying? O.K. So they, men would never admit that their work is at all conditioned by their bodies; they would get outraged, most men get outraged at that suggestion, but the fact is it's true. And one of the ways in which I've seen it operate is between my husband and me; and we've talked a lot about it; we've seen a lot about that, moves he would make and moves that I would make that are very different.

I think also it's very different experientially to be soft; I think it very different experientially to have a sensation of going this way, of your body going this way, which I think women have and I think you can see it in George O'Keefe, and you can see it in Lee Bontique, you can see it in my work very clearly. Lee Bontique did a tremendous thing; she really