WHO'S ABJECT NOW BITCH? / 2009
OR,CRIME SCENE CONSISTENT WITH A PARTICULAR DOUBLE HOMICIDE
Oh wow, you’re letting me
show in your gallery? The gallery I pretty much conceptualized while I was in
bed with you? That’s amazing! And you want me to do something slick, that
doesn’t interrupt your white cube too much. Awesome! What a wonderful opportunity…
Courting,
sex and love relationships all revolve around power relations. In heterosexual
love relationships this equates to power relations between men and women – relations
echoed not only in the personal but also the political, cultural and legal
spheres in an essentially heteronormative and phallogocentric society. Does this
mean that every time we (as Woman) fall in love (swooning, pining and all) with
a man that we are re-enforcing those power relations that allow for patriarchal
hegemonies? In admitting the violence inherent in relationships and in sex with
men, and yet still engaging in its practice, am I (as subject and artist)
allowing rape to happen elsewhere? If “for a woman, love is defined
as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation”1, then
is love felt by a woman always inherently masochistic? And then in love, but
without sexual satisfaction, are we destined to be fearful, chaotic and
hysterical as our uterI strangle us in revolt?
Linda Stupart’s
Who’s Abject Now Bitch? or, crime scene consistent with
a particular double homicide acknowledges and interrupts the
artworld boys’ club that is in many ways embodied by YOUNGBLACKMAN, in an
exhibition that addresses the difficulties in claiming agency as a young woman
artist.
Notes:
1.Dworkin, A. 1981. Our Blood. London:
Perigee.
