ART364B - Tiffany Ludwig
“Telling stories in the public realm: what has been removed”
By Two Girls Working: Tiffany Ludwig and Renee Piechocki
Two Girls Working is the collaboration of Tiffany Ludwig and Renee Piechocki. Since 2001 they have created the project, Trappings, http://www.twogirlsworking.com.
Over the course of the past ten years while working on Trappings, we have encountered a few different kinds of censorship. We’ve had pieces removed from exhibitions before they were installed. We’ve had participants directly ask us to remove portions of their interviews. We’ve had participants ask to be removed from our project immediately, after being interviewed (before we edited the interview), and after being presented in our project for years. We had a momentary cause for alarm when our publisher mentioned that some of her colleagues thought we should remove the word “power” from the title to make it more approachable. We’d still love to believe we misunderstood them. And we’ve had artworks curated into exhibitions, while others were left out. Maybe not censorship, but an act of editing, yes.
As artists and collaborators we have had continuous discussions about this kind of content removal or a curator’s preference. Despite the fact that we have release forms from all of the women and girls who have participated in our project, we have always and without question followed the wishes of our participants to remove their names, certain content, or their entire interview. It is our position that the stories are theirs, and they choose to share them with us as artists and the public that views Trappings. When specific works of art have been removed by a curator, we have also chosen not to argue. Well, not too much. We ask them to consider if they are being too cautious about their audience, and at times that argument has enabled a work to stay in a show. But not always.
Our most recent exhibition, Trappings: Portraits, had its launch in rather public gallery settings: airports. First at the Miami International Airport’s MIA Gallery (October 2010) and this month it will open at the Portland International Airport gallery (April 2011). In both locations we have been asked to remove, change, or alter the content of the exhibition.
Our intention with Trappings is to share as many stories as possible with as wide an audience as possible. To do this, we created a project that was multi-faceted. Trappings began with an interview session where groups of women were asked to respond to the question: what do you wear that makes you feel powerful?. The sessions were held within private or public spaces and were art, performance, and dialogue experiences. The project could have ended there, artistically speaking, but we chose to bring these conversations from the private realm to a broader audience: first galleries and museums, then public venues such as city buses, streetscapes, and health clinics.
In creating these exhibitions we’ve decided that having a piece removed from an installation will not spell the end of the exhibition. Yes, it’s censorship, yes it’s limiting what an audience sees in that installation, but the entire body of work continues to exist and is fully and publicly presented on our website and in other installations. Maybe our reluctant acceptance of being asked to remove content from a few of our exhibitions is because we feel like we are actually getting away with something; securing the influence of the project question and igniting dialogue about feminism, power, personal identity, and presentation in anyone’s daily life is the goal of the project.
Public or private, space is political. Private galleries, public exhibition spaces, and the spaces influenced by artists through public art installations are all awash in their own politics and climates of control. In exchange for our flexibility and being aware of the politics and being able to work with them, we get to talk shop (feminism, power, and women’ s voices) within them.
Recently removed artworks:
From our national traveling exhibition: Trappings: Stories of Women, Power and Clothing
One of the women in this piece had a discussion about rape too sensitive for a corporate gallery:
From our recent exhibition: Trappings: Portraits
The slogan on this T-shirt was too sexual for a public gallery:
The ankh in this photo was seen as too religious for a public gallery:
This Women in Black gathering was seen as too political for a public gallery:
Removed from the project
This woman asked us to remove her interview because she feared conservative relatives would not like her being seen on the Internet:
Comments
I am rather stunned that this work would be removed by curators, especially as your work deals with issues of identity, culture, power: didn't they know what the project was when they contacted you? But I guess, I shouldn't be all that surprised. I think often curators and administrators are willing to go to a new place, and there are a lot of factors that hold their visions in check. Also, once images as powerful as these are seen in person, they take on a new life--one that has a bigger impact that someone just reading a prospectus might reallze. It takes a very strong person to throw those contraints open: especially in this economy-with limited funding and fewer jobs. I am very glad you had this forum to show these pieces, and have a converstation about them.
It seems at first glance, that a lot of the pieces asked to be removed really dealt with issues of sexuality, and poilitics. But in reality, they all challenge the idea of women's power, and autonomy in all aspects of their lives. Which, really is what your project is about.
As someone who has been following your project for years now, I am so looking forward to where your next project will take you.
I absolutely love what this project implies for the larger question of censorship. For instance, how is it that if one in three girls experiences some form of sexual abuse we so rarely hear of it? When women speak out about their experiences as second class citizens, they are censored in many different ways. They are marked as psychologically unstable, inappropriate, loud, and a host of other slanders. Once they lose their power of fertility, they are invisible (just talk to any middle-aged woman about how she is treated in society). I consider that some form of censorship as well if we accept that censorship is a form of repression and exclusion.
And then, of course, we censor ourselves. Many feminists claim our own worst enemy is ourselves and other women. We are the ones with the most at stake and so censor one another out of anger, fear, and frankly, just simple ability to "get one over" (I see this all the time between women, and it is heartbreaking).
Gender is the ultimate religion of our world. Even in feminist circles, we are asked to temper our language and to be more inclusive. If taking out the word "power" is what is going to create readership, I'm pretty sure the conversation is already dead!