Martha Wilson, recognized today as one of the founding artists of performative self-representation art, comes from the New York scene that deployed stand-up rather than a more theatrical and accessorized vision of performance in the manner of Judy Chicago, for example. Encouraged by the artist Vito Acconci, and later by Lucy Lippard, an art critic and activist in the promotion of women artists, who recognized the dematerialization of conceptual art in Martha Wilson's practice, particularly in her use of the text/photo relationship. Martha moved from Halifax to New York in the early 1970s, where she found solidarity among women and founded a punk band, Disband, and an archive, The Franklin Furnace.
LISE GUÉHENNEUX You are known as a feminist artist of the 1970s, with numerous texts linking your artistic practice to the feminist activism of the period. But while you may have sisterly ties with certain artists, it is clear on a formal level that there is a wide gulf between your approach and that of an artist such as Judy Chicago during your first meeting in the 1970s (Woman House). If you organize your practice and creative pursuits into projects, how do you approach these projects?
MARTHA WILSON My art medium is my woman's body. However, I arrived at this strategy by way of language. My boyfriend was studying printmaking at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and I was studying English Literature across the street at Dalhousie University. The Conceptual artists of the 1970s were visiting NSCAD: Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Beuys, Jan Dibbets, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner. When I discovered visual art could be made of language, I started making art.
During the 1970s, there was no feminist community in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Like men, the women were competitive with one another. When my boyfriend dumped me, I moved to New York to find out if I really was an artist. There, a feminist named Judith Siegel cook me under her wing, introducing me to various consciousness-raising groups until I found one (mostly composed of artists) that I liked. Lucy Lippard, whom I had met in 1973 when she visited NSCAD, put me in her "c. 7,500" show, through which I met other women artists. There was a strong and active feminist community publishing Heresies magazine, organizing AIR gallery, holding performance events and even founding a school, the Feminist Art Institute. When the No Wave music scene hit Lower Manhattan in the late 1970s, I founded Disband, an all-girl Punk band of women artists who didn't know how to play any instruments.
LG What material resources do you use, for example, to create the self-portrait of a character whose skin you are trying to penetrate?
MW Politics and performance art are one and the same. At the end of Disband, we were performing as the members of Ronald Reagan's cabinet, and I was Alexander M. Plague (instead of Haig), Jr. After Disband disbanded in 1982, I did one performance as Alexander, one as Ronald Reagan, and then I found Nancy Reagan, who was pretty crazy, so I was Nancy for the Reagan years. It seemed natural to be the wife of the next president, George W. Bush. I was also Barbara Bush, the mother of President George W. Bush. But here is the story of why I was Tipper Gore instead of Hillary Clinton for the Clinton years: MTV threw an inaugural ball for Bill Clinton, who came on the causeway into the crowd playing the saxophone. The youth of America were overjoyed! Then Hillary came out, then Al Gore came out, then Tipper Gore came out. Then the mood in the room changed, and the youth of America booed Tipper off the stage! This is because she had gotten Parental Advisory Language put on records and CDs to let parents know if there was dirty language in the songs. So I was Tipper for the Clinton years. My material consists of costumes and scripts which I write after reading what these political personae have actually said. (I am glad to enter and then leave their bodies!)
LG From the live videos of your performances with Disband co the photographic series in which you employ the conceptual "manner", has there been a shift in your artistic approach? For example, do you have studio practice today? Do you work on your set designs at home, in a photography studio with photography tools or do you delegate this process to a technician? In short, do you see your "work" in terms of a specific expertise?
MW Studio practice: No. I develop the concept for the work, and then I hire friends and colleagues who know how to do stuff. For example, when I wanted to transform myself into Melania Trump, I hired Nancy Burson, an artist and friend who developed the software we can use to transform our faces into Elvis Presley or Andy Warhol's face.
LG Has the switch to all-digital technology changed the way you work, beyond the mere technical efficiency?
MW I am seventy-five years old and don't know how to use digital technology, so I hire people who know how to use it.
LG How do you create this "place of intersection between image and text"? Or as a music critic might ask: "Do you write the lyrics before the music?"
MW Generally, I develop the concept for the text, then develop the image. For example, I did a portrait of myself as Donald Trump in collaboration with artist Kathy Grove. She found a site in front of the Surrogate Court building in Midtown Manhattan; then she digitally reproduced Donald Trump's face and hair; then she stuck my eyes, nose and mouth in the middle. The piece is called Thump, and the title is in the image.
LG Where do you get the aesthetic codes for the images you create?
MW Humor is important. People may change their minds if you can make them laugh, so I try to use irony, satire, hyperbole, all the tools a comedian uses, to critique contemporary life.
LG You are a pioneer in creating feminist archives. Is the Franklin Furnace a tool for connecting women, in addition to creating an archive co preserve women from historical oblivion?
MW Franklin Furnace is not solely a feminist archive but let me tell you a story about why I founded the organization: Through Lucy Lippard's show, "c. 7,500," I met Jacki Apple, an artist who was living in New York. We collaborated on a performance artwork. in 1973, then I moved to NYC in 1974. Jacki made an appointment for us to show our work to Ivan Karp, director of O.K.Harris Gallery. He looked at our work, then started yelling, "Why are you showing me this? It's terrible! I would never show it!" (My work was shown at the Pompidou in 2021, Martha Wilson in Halifax,1972-1974.) So I decided to open an art space that would collect and present time-based forms such as artists' books, temporary installations and performance art – and to show at least 50% women.
LG Certain traumas can never be healed, but if you look back at your career and your various artistic works as a single score - as you did for Martha Wilson in Halifax: 1972-1974, the exhibition at Centre Georges Pompidou in 2011 - can you say how your artistic practice has changed your life as a woman?
MW What made me mad a couple of decades ago was the term "Post-Feminist." Women remain second-class citizens the world over, and in some places like Iran and Afghanistan, women fear for their lives when they try to advance themselves. I welcome any effort to fight our second-class state of being.
LG Your experience of how the powers that be fail to work hard enough on the emancipation of women in society, particularly during their education, is unfortunately still quite topical, as change is hard to come by. For example, female students are required to know more about feminist texts than male students, and they are graded on this knowledge which they are expected to take responsibility for, whereas male students are not required to do anything of the sort. How do you account for this requirement that holds only women hostage?
MW When I told my mentor at NSCAD that I wanted to become an artist, he said, "Women don't make it in the art world. But if you're serious, you'll make black-and white art." I immediately walked across the street and bought a roll of color film at the drugstore.
LG Women sculptors are often credited with a predilection for organic forms, a penchant they are said to share. How was your work's use of the codes of conceptual art received in the art scene of the 1970s?
MW The female sculptor Lynda Benglis had a giant impact on me, because in 1974 she bought a two-page spread in Artforum magazine, then pictured herself naked, greased up, wearing sunglasses and holding a giant dildo. Here was a woman sculptor making a political statement in an art magazine (Artforum got hate mail and some staff left the magazine). I believe this piece certainly drew on the codes of Conceptual Art, but was engaged in the real world as experienced by women; most of the Conceptual Art by male artists were mind games that did not relate to the lived experience of women.
LG Were your distancing and "humorous strategy" taken into account in the highly structuralist context of the 1970s? The humorous strategy is often close to satire, where the use of caricature fluctuates between a self-presentation at times as a clown and at others as a joker, a diabolical character who reveals the underside of the political scene through public figures. Do you use photography as a "revealer"?
MW My performance artwork consists of photo/text works and video documentation. The words are critical to revealing the humorous purpose of the work.
LG Does this act of slipping into a character's skin in order to absorb their qualities act as a way to blow up the preferred narratives of the society of the spectacle – a magical ritual made possible by staged photography?
MW When I was impersonating First Ladies of U.S. presidents, I tried to go into the brain of Nancy Reagan to develop the text of the performance. But when I got to Donald Trump, I couldn't find any there (as Gertrude Stein would have said). So for my performance as Donald, I am really talking about my relationship to the art world during the last fifty years.
LG How do you see your work after the installation in the space of “Invisible: Works on Aging 1972-2022,” the solo exhibition at FRAC sud - Cice de l'Art Contemporain (Marseille)?
MW It was Muriel Enjalran's idea (director of FRAC). I had a residency at Art Explora in Paris last summer and visited Marseille to show Muriel my work. She decided that she wanted to focus on aging – a subject I have been treating since the early days of my career, without ever thinking about focusing on this as a subject.
LG The right to abortion is under threat all over the world. In France, it is written into law only as a "freedom,” which may ultimately release the government from its responsibility to reimburse the procedure. How did you react to the abortion ban reinstated in many states in the United States - an unprecedented setback for a woman's right to control her own body and life?
MW Oh my God! I read the news every day about states that are banning abortion, and others that are providing safe spaces for women to have one. Now there is a focus on contraception. Women's rights are a MESS in the U.S.!
LG Now that you've gained visibility on the international art scene and are shown in some of the world's leading institutions, has your vision as an artist changed?
MW Nope, I'm making a new work that will be a fake Chuck Close portrait of myself at age seventy-five comprised of headshots of old women.
LG The opening of your exhibition in Marseille was cancelled due to an uprising by young people from the housing projects on the city's outskirts. How did you cope with this situation?
MW Muriel threw a brunch on the Saturday after my cancelled opening on Friday, June 30, where I got to have substantive conversations with my friends and colleagues who had traveled to Marseille for my opening.