Writing Girl-Machine: the inner journey is hard.

By Ruth Skilbeck

 I wrote this a few days ago, before the piece on Sex, Art and the Inner World, and am publishing it now here as part of the documentation of writing of the inner world, subjectivity and desire and the social, in Girl-Machine my novel in progress. After I wrote these notes (quoted below), I read the article on changing attitudes to women’s sexuality through history, which was very relevant to my thoughts recorded here, about my ancestors, and anxieties, also documented here were somewhat allayed. The experience of doing this writing, about the inner world and experiences of the self, in social contexts, has increased my awareness of how hard this can be emotionally. It increased my deep appreciation of the women artists working in all media, who create self-based art, that presents ‘naked’ reflections of themselves, honestly explores representations of sexuality, sexual selves, and female subjectivity, as personal experience and art reflection, as political and social, and their bravery in raising our level of consciousness on the social level through their doing so.

In effect it’s a way of literally and symbolically “occupying” the bodies of women that have been represented as ‘objects of desire’ by male artists throughout art history, as projections of male artists’ perceptions and devoid of female subjectivity.  Women artists are reclaiming female bodies, as their own subjects, and part of this is reflection and interrogation of the issues to do with “the gaze” – such as this article.

Diane Mantzaris,

Refugee: Slaves of State, 2012,

206cm (Height) x 120cm (Width)

C-Type Photograph

The power and value of this is that it counters the dissociation of contemporary society, and modernity which is literally and symbolically manifest in the mass media, and our largely unconscious ingestion of images, of representations of women as sexualized objects in advertising, mass media, and porn, that are dissociated from the people who are represented and the people who make the images- to make profit in capitalist consumer media society. The effects and affects of this dissociation is manifest and articulated by countless individuals around the world in symptoms of internalized anxiety and phobias about their own bodies, selves, and relations with others, creating barriers to real communication and meaningful relationships, in the cultures of neo-liberalism and consumer capitalism which create casualization in the workplace and in personal intimate relations between people. These are connected, through the unconscious feelings we have about ourselves, and our own self confidence and values about what is meaningful in life, appearance – and certain kinds of objectified “approved” appearance- has far too much “value” attached in the media cultures that are sponsored and fed and manipulated by advertising and vested profit interests in the products and ideologies re-presented and reproduced in media cultures.

Through women artists reclaiming the right to self-representation, and doing this they reposition the personal as political, and representations of desire as social, and their art counters the commodification and objectification of women that oppresses and subjugates women (and men) around the world. The processes of engaging with these artists and their works, and the wider social issues of the importance of women documenting and recording their own experiences, as personal reflection and art, for the purposes of raising awareness of consciousness of humanity and countering the agents of oppression of women, has also strengthened my faith in what I am doing in my writing, and its legitimacy, and driven away the temporary anxieties of creating this new work.  

Together we can create change, through mutual support and building community strength.

So I am continuing to write Girl-Machine, and it is almost finished.   I am publishing these notes from the moment of doubt to show that it is ok to have moments of doubt, it is part of the process of creating, and all artists have to face and find ways of dealing with this. My way here, is to make public as part of the process of writing, the notes and anxieties that are usually left out of public view, and excluded, so that the art work arrives as finished product, a fait accompli dissociated from the labour, sweat, pain and human toil of the process that created it and gave it birth.

I believe that part of the social and personal value of art is the connection it enables both audience and artists to the source of our humanity, what makes us human, our deepest selves, and our feelings, through communication- on a real level. So as part of this, I am sharing some of the inner journey of the process of making a work of self-based art from written language, concepts, memories, desire, and reflection on how women, and young women experience and live in society.

This is in contrast to the myth of the independent woman as “cold, inaccessible, and free” which was the way in which artist Tamara de Lempicka was described by her daughter, Kizette, in her self portrait (Autoportait in the Green Bugatti, 1925)  in the “machine age”, of the 1920s, driving her car: "The self-portrait of Tamara de Lempicka is a real image of the independent woman who asserts herself. Her hands are gloved, she is helmeted, and inaccessible; a cold and disturbing beauty [through which] pierces a formidable being—this woman is free! “This is also a myth I seek to explore, and puncture, in Girl-Machine, in London in the media consumer culture of 1980s when: “The ultimate kick is to remain completely impervious, to feel nothing, as the other person falls utterly in love with your; as remote, uncaring and invulnerable as a machine.” (Girl-Machine).

Saturday 16 March 2013 

Writing the inner journey is hard

It’s hard to remain or keep trying to remain conscious, and to be aware of how one feels, and try to have some understanding of where this is coming from.

It’s hard, and I am having a lot of difficulty over the past two or three days with barriers that have come up in my writing, of my inner censor, and I admit it is fear, that is causing some apprehension of the reception of my work if I publish writing on sexuality, and consciousness and subjectivity. This happened before when the Breakfast with Monica story was published. I was so apprehensive of the reception it did not make me feel good that it was published but instead extremely anxious (even though it had a nom de plume. That was when my marriage was ending). And even though I was writing about sexuality from a woman’s perspective that grounded the sexual act in human reflection.

Even though this was my aim and intention in writing this book (Girl –Machine) now I am doing it, and writing it, I am being overcome by the same anxiety and fear.

And this is despite the good conversations on Facebook that have been triggered by my article on women artists censorship and the comments of how much we need to have women artists and mother artists making art about these very things that I am tackling in my book- female sexuality, bodies, consciousness, subjectivity and how women cope in the world we live in, I am doing all that and have had such positive response that shows this is so needed – because not many are doing this especially in Australia where art is censored silently (and self-censored).

This should make me feel like I am doing well that I am able to write about it in my book in progress. But instead I have been paralysed by inner doubts- even to the degree of today hours of agonizing over what would my ancestors (from the 18^th century!) have thought about my writing about sexuality? And seriously worrying about what their ghosts and ancestor-spirits would think and are thinking now about my writing the novel Girl Machine? (As there is now some small reference I made to them in the Dublin section). And instead thinking that I should write a “proper” book, novel - historical interweaving about them and my search to find my lost ancestry which I have now, and not bother with the little novel first person novels I have been “working on” for so long in my “inner writing” and my novels that never get published, as I have not even tried to publish them.

This whole rumination fear stopped me in my tracks yesterday, which was the day that I had planned to finish the novel and send it to the publisher. 

It is now after 5 in the morning and I have been awake all night.

The thing that made me feel a little better was reading an article that my friend Karen linked to on her blog that I saw in blog feed about kundalini bad sex experience written by a woman who writes about and lives the SM B and D lifestyle. Not that my book is about this- but what she was writing about the experiences of inner consciousness in the body was very interesting and human and made me feel more human.

This shows me, must show me that this is the value of my writing that I have been trying to do, too.

It is the difficult hard things that trouble us, that are those that we or I must tackle as by doing so what I write may have value and meaning for others, that may help them to feel more human too. Writing about sexuality with human awareness and reflection, has this power, and it is so much needed as sexuality women’s sexuality has been hijacked for the centuries of modern life, and not just women’s in objectifying men are also losing out on their chance to experience deeper meaning within them selves, and …..

on it goes.

When I research my ancestors what I see is that they loved each other, they had fulfilling happy lives as they loved each other and were loyal to each other.

And I think that in my life the modern lives in modernity we have lost that.

They had better lives then.

I know I am being negative, I am negative I can only write this and I am trying to do what? Not trying to work through it I am just off loading some negativity. Because it’s another dark night of the soul and I am alone in the cottage in the middle of the night with a head that is ringing with pressure and pain.

3/23/13 5:39 AM

A few late nights later, I am very excited to find in my internet research images of both Andrew Hastings Doyle and Sophia Isabella Doyle (nee Norris)  - my x 7 great grandfather and grandmother (political exiles, Andrew was exiled to Australia for life for his part in the Irish Uprisings around 1798, Sophia Isabella who was of Hugenot descent and, according to one story I have read related to Irish aristocracy, went with him and with their 3 young children, as a free settler and fee paying passenger). There is a photograph of Andrew that must be one of the earliest taken in Australia in the early 19^th century, and a portrait he painted of Sophia Isabella, he was an artist and printmaker, by profession.

I will publish these images in the Daily Fugue soon, writing on their story, in the further ongoing unfolding of my story of finding my motherline.

Images:

Andromeda (also known as The Slave) by Tamara de Lempicka.

Andromeda was a popular subject of 19^th century painting, represented by male artists. In the classical Greek myth Andromeda was chained to a rock on the coastline as a sacrifice to a sea monster sent by Poseidon to avenge her mother’s hubris in declaring her daughter to be more beautiful than the sea nymphs.

Tamara de Lempicka was a refugee, exile from the Russian revolution, and in her later works she also painted refugees of the German Holocaust.

*Refugee: Slaves of State by Diane Mantzaris

The work has visual references to the Andromeda myth and its representations- by Tamara de Lempicka in her Andromeda (also known as The Slave) - and is a feminist, politically aware counterpoint to the 19th century male artists' representations of the myth of Andromeda, a popular subject of 19th painting represented by male artists.

Diane Mantzaris has an émigré background.

de Lempicak-Foxhall, Baroness Kizette (1987), Phillips Charles, ed., Passion by Design: The Art and Times of Tamara de Lempicka, New York: Abbeville Press, p. 77

Post Script and the Fugue Goes On

Each ending is just a new beginning.  Energy never ends, it migrates into new forms. And so it is with the fugue, the musical circular form of reinvention.

This is a potent form for all who have experienced the suppressing forces of colonisation, as it enables a means of countering oppression through answering back, to those colonising forces, and in one's own voice. 

Never has this been more needed than now, in the history of humankind. As we enter the digital labyrinth where we have allowed machines, computers, to dictate and determine how we communicate, and how we present ourselves to others in the world. 

Right now I am ready to throw this Mac out the  window as it is so hard to work with. It's so easy - too easy- to chat on Facebook, and write emails (which can be hacked as has happened to me several times).  It's also good for writing blog posts. 

But as a writer trying to use it to organise projects, and files, it is a nightmare. I am returning to the form of the art journal to write my narrative of finding my family and their finding me through the mysterious channels that are not the prerogative of cyber space but which exist beyond this. In our very DNA and in the telepathic energies that exist in another wider dimension than machines. 

From now on, I will record the journey of this writing, as well as making observations from time to time, on the wider cultural and social - and "unconscious"  landscapes in which I work.

Ruth Skilbeck

Art Writing Is Not Dead (It's Just Gone Online)

By Ruth Skilbeck

Over the last couple of years there have been reports, in the mainstream and even online media, of the supposed demise of arts journalism. These reports have come not only from publications in Australia (homebase of Arts Features International)– which had until  relatively recently tended to take the back foot in the art world as connoted in the antipodean moniker ‘Down Under.’

Sure, there have been a number of reports from here about this. But notes of change have also rung out from the former heart of the art world: the UK. A long feature article in The Art Newspaper in 2009 spelt out a mixed prognosis, “let’s be clear: arts journalism has never had it easy.” * What the discerning reader may note in reading these pieces is that they have more in common than the doom and gloom, they were all written in 2009. This was the year of calamity in the world of art journalism, when art periodicals  folded all over the place.  But now, it seems the winds of changing are blowing back again, and what is returning is a new rush of interest in art writing and arts journalism.

After years of neglect arts journalism is finally making its way into university courses in Australia, as well as in the US, Canada and the UK along with new forms of cultural journalism. It would be even more surprising if it were not so. The meaning of art journalism is wider than art in and of itself; it correlates to art as culture, and art as the new cultural language and form of visual communication in the global art world. Over the last 10 years social and economic changes in the  region, around Australia, have seen countries that formerly were hidden behind a curtain now openly participating in the art world, for example as seen in the new gallery scenes, Biennales and art fairs in countries such as China, Singapore, the Philippines.

At the same time contemporary art museums and art galleries around the world have, at least in the fortunate peaceful zones, become cross cultural melting pots and meeting points, safe cultural havens where people of the world can communicate through the medium of contemporary art, and come to appreciate and understand each others cultural heritage (and not seek to blow it up it, as has been a sad warring counterbalance to peace communication in this century).

The spread of Biennale and art fairs, and the ever-expanding programs and institutions of contemporary art museums in virtual and life modes, are evidence of the effects of ongoing global social change and mobility.

Other movements are occurring around the world such as the new mothers art movements (M.A.M) a new form of feminism in arts which rather gloriously continues the work of the Women s Art Movement (W.A.M.) of the nineteen seventies.

These are all positive signs of art as the currency of global cultural communication. And all these rapid changes also bring into focus the incredible need for art writing and arts journalism that is investigative and clear. Not only in reporting on and analysing the new trends but in building up the relational aspects of understanding and cultural exchange through dialogue and discussion which are processes, exemplified in artist and arts journalist interviews.

The doom and gloom reports, in recent media, are however counter-balanced by acknowledging that the demise of arts journalism in newspapers is not a sign of the demise of arts journalism.  (If anything it is a sign of the demise of newspapers and their financial inability to support as large a staff in this era of crisis: digitization and cost cutting for traditional media). Moving with the times arts journalism has gone online, as have communities of artists, and audiences of viewers and readers who form the international contemporary art world. Emerging in new forms and modes of online art writing.

As a further sign of the changes of the last few years, that have affected all journalists, and arts journalists in very specific ways, blogging has now been recognised by the UN as a form of journalism.

© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck, 2012

First published in www.ruthskilbeck.com

The Hidden Mother

By Ruth Skilbeck

In the late Victorian and Edwardian era, in the early days of black and white photography, there was a popular photographic portrait practice – now know as The Hidden Mother.

Babies and young children were photographed in images where their mother was both present and absent, literally concealed – hidden, often (to our eyes) hilariously clumsily, or eerily, under a spread, which could be carpet or a curtain.

The hidden mother was a covered-up, obscured shape that, in some shots, the infant was sitting on, in others the hidden mother was a strange standing presence shrouded in a patterned bedspread standing next to or behind the child. In each of the images the mother was completely ‘hidden’ – no part of her protruded from the covering, yet in most of them the hidden mother was impossible not to see.

The rationale behind covering up the mother – which overturned the Madonna and child genre of painting representation of mothers and their children was that, the sight of the mother distracted the eye from the image of the child. Yet the child felt more secure in the photographic studio having their photograph taken if the mother was also ‘there.’

This strange solution of absence and presence was surely disturbing for the child- let alone the mother under the heavy stifling carpet or curtain- and the expressions on the faces of the children in hidden mother portraits show their distress and bewilderment. None are smiling or relaxed, they all look disturbed and haunted by the knowledge of the absent presence of their hidden mother.

The popular photographic portrait practice of  ‘the hidden mother’ now in retrospect serves as a reflexive visual metaphor for the highly ambivalent ways in which mothers were regarded in late Victorian and Edwardian society, and in Australia in the twentieth century decades known as ‘the stolen generations’- when under an official White Australia Policy children of “part Aboriginal” mothers were routinely taken from their mothers and their mothers’ existence was erased from official and family records; this was a practice that affected not only “part Aboriginal” mothers but also the children of mothers who for a multitude of reasons were not considered socially or officially acceptable (or perhaps the mothers had died, in childbirth or when the children were very young.) Rather than remembering these mothers, official policy erased their memory and presence from the record, so that their families were supposed to never know who they were (as was the case in my own family history). Yet, like the shape of the hidden mother under the carpet or the curtain, the mothers’ presence remained, in a way that was disturbing, eerie and impossible to ignore and not be aware of, for those who started to search. Like looking at the photos of the hidden mother. The shape of the concealed mother remains in the picture frame.

The images of the hidden mother have a great resonance and have struck a chord with hundreds of thousands of users in the blogosphere

http://www.retronaut.co/2011/10/the-invisible-mother/.

The Hidden Mother flickr photo sharing group started 32 months ago (0ctober  2010). Here’s a link to the first entries:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/1264520@N21/pool/.

The Hidden Mother group rapidly gained hundred of members and hundreds of images of children with ‘hidden mothers’.

What is most interesting is the level of interest in the group. The images of the hidden mother- that most have not known about- have spiked a huge response in the blogosphere.  Some photographs have received thousands of hit per day. The members report in the discussion pages on their surprise at the popularity of their photographic curiosities.

I came across this site through a link to another photographic archive on Retronaut that a friend posted on Facebook. When I looked it up my eye was immediately drawn to the archive of the Hidden Mother, on the menu next to the rules on dating.

When I clicked on it I was astonished to see these images - that add another dimension and context to my own research into Australia’s forgotten mothers, in the decades known as ‘the stolen generations’.

Was this a style of photography that was practiced in Australia?

I will put this onto my research project agenda to find out.

5/28/12

© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck, 2012

Call Out for Australia’s Forgotten Mothers

When I return from Canada I realize that I must do it.  I must make a memorial for Australia’s Forgotten Mothers. I must actualize the idea that came to me in a rite of empassioned writing on my mother and my forbidden unknown grandmother

        

whose presence came to me through the mists of absence and forgetting

I must make a plinth and cover it with the names of Australia’s forgotten mothers, erased and lost from official records.

 I will call out for people to send the names of mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers who were lost and hidden and eradicated from official records in the 20th century decades of the stolen generations.

The decades that the returned and fallen soldiers from the world wars were memorialized and remembered, and returned, over and over again.

This will be my research project for the next 3 years, culminating in 2015, the hundred-year anniversary of Gallipoli, birth of the ANZAC legend.  The erection of the plinth -could it be a more female shape, say, an oval, or heart shape that can be walked through like a doorway or shell or grove, like Persephone’s grove…with a spring bubbling up from the underworld…

Covered with the names in tear shaped, fertility-symbol shaped, plaques.

Accompanied by a book of names and stories: stories of the mothers lost by their relatives.

A book that recounts the birth of the project, from conceptual idea to fruition in materialized form, the progression from the personal dimension of vision, dream, inspiration, ideation to the social realm of language and culture.

I have made a drawing of the shape of the structure, which includes a central figurative statue of a mother and child. My first thought is that it should be constructed at Balmoral, in the park on the esplanade, or perhaps on the oval, on the edge of the trees, or as I keep thinking, on top of Georges Heights up with the artists’ studios… with the 360 degree view of the harbor, although it’s windy and unprotected up there,

I think I like the idea of the grove or grotto most of all on the (edge of the) oval, and I could bury Mum’s ashes there… or at least some of them…like a blessing, her blessing.

The shape of the memorial would echo the shape of the caves at Balmoral, the caves where the first nation’s people lived… looking out over the placid stretch of water now known as middle harbor.

18.5.2012

© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck, 2012

Interview: Tracey Emin and Ruth Skilbeck

In interview: Ruth Skilbeck & Tracey Emin at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2004  

                                                                                                            
                                     Photograph © Copyright Ruth Skilbeck


Professor Tracey Emin and Ruth Skilbeck pondering the art of travelling light in 2004. 


In the photo I am interviewing Tracey Emin, who at the time was attracting media epithets such as  'bad-girl' of British Art, and 'Britain's biggest art celebrity'.


Tracey came to Sydney in 2004 for the opening of her exhibition, Fear, War and the Scream at Roslyn Oxley9 gallery.


Tracey's stories of her adolescent experiences of rape and racial abuse, transformed into the material  form of her art catapulted her into the upper echelons of the art world when she was picked up out of her struggling artist's life in an East End council flat by Charles Saatchi. Achieving cultural and political prominence in the 80s, Saatchi, is the advertising agency director who advised the Thatcher government, then turned to contemporary art. In the mid-90s Tracey Emin became one of  Saatchi's  curated group of Young British Artists, that also included Damien Hirst and the Chapman Brothers. No longer so 'young', their work continues to be represented by Jay Jopling in London's White Cube gallery.


Sitting in the sun on the terrace of the gallery, we were talking literally and metaphorically about 'the Art of Travelling Light'. A stream of consciousness that began when I asked her about how she flies. We devised a story concept of Tracey Emin's Art of Travelling Light -with tips on how to fly aesthetically with minimal baggage- or in Tracey's case designer luggage. Above the detritus of relationship breakdowns, addictions, life's crises. With friends and other animals (Tracey had a much loved cat); through the transformed subjectivity of art.


An alchemy that seems even more apt now.






© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck 2011




My story 'Tracey Emin Down Under' is published in POL Oxygen-Design, Art, Architecture, Issue 2, 2003.