RIP Nancy Spero

So Nancy Spero, a wonderful visual artist, died about 10 days ago, and I've been thinking a lot about her and Dickinson. Both were radical women who bent the media they created in to make them do what they wanted. They had no respect for boundaries, one might say. Spero (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Spero) was a feminist who exposed the experiences of women in ways that could not be ignored. When what she wanted to explore got beyond her own hands, she moved from printmaking to collage, using the works of others to punctuate her work. When it got to raucas for the frame, she created installations, painted it onto walls. When it wouldn't sit still, she went to video. It was the art she followed, not the theory or the reality of the boundaries of form.

I first came to Spero's work through her use of the Sheela na Gig, an ancient Irish (Celtic) figure of a woman reaching down with her hands and holding open her vagina. (Probably to scare off her date!) Spero used these figures as a frieze in one of her emplacements. Imagine a room framed by them. This performance of the feminine inspired me as did her ambition and daring.

Dickinson is like this, too. She strips her words of all the comforts of context or narrative until we are alone with the words, "wrecked solitary there." And she also used drawings and collage to enhance her work, usually for comic effect. (See http://www.emilydickinson.org/cartoon/carindex.html) But mostly it's the exuberance of their work that links them, their impatience with people who say "what," as Dickinson put it in one of her letters. Their willingness to go directly into experience and drag it onto the page, the wall, the screen that makes them so compelling.

Their work is hard to translate, to capture, to "print," as Dickinson would put it. Dickinson's work resists the page or defies it. Spero's work often had to be walked through or stood within. So the experience of the work becomes the work. The texts themselves aren't stable enough to offer a defined version. The viewer/reader is always left with something to put together, to decipher or decide. This is the art that moves me.