This article, "The Personal Becomes Political in Time," by Martha Wilson, was first published in n.paradoxa international feminist art journal, volume 5, 2000.
I wrote these words when I was half my age today:
I am drafting my own blueprint. I am writing my way out of this well. I am writing to discover an Answer. I am creating my resource out of an abscence that I feel in the "real" me. All my values have been contributed from the outside, from my parents, my lovers. How do I know what "I" like, what I don't like? I let my room get messy to discover whether "I" like it that way. I listen to music to discern what "I" like. I am alone. In a panic I run to eat something sweet. I have to stop myself by force. I sit myself back down in my kitchen chair. I stare straight ahead, my right arm resting on the table. The backs of my lenses are silver; I am staring inward, I see nothing in front of me. I sip nervously at a diet soda and consciously lower my shoulders. I find muscles knotted every few minutes and have to unravel them by will. I write the same questions over and over in my diary: What do I really want to do? I am 26 and unencumbered. I have been groomed in English Literature and Art. I want to be passionately involved in something, to be able to immerse myself in something. But you don't know what you like until you do it. I am not yet able to feel my way up the wall. I will have to rationalize my way out. I will create myself into the absent center through action. Out of the building blocks floating there I will select and discard, select and discard, until I have constructed an igloo, a personality. Writing will be my first brick.
01. "Posturing: Drag" Form determines feeling, so that if I pose in a role I can experience a foreign emotion. This was an attempt at double sex transformation; I am dressed in "drag" so that the transformation is from female into male, back into female. Theoretically, the uninitiated audience sees only half of this process, from "male" into "female." February, 1972. Photo by Doug Waterman02. "Captivating a Man" A reversal of the means by which a woman captivates a man: The man is made attractive by the woman. In heterosexual reversal, the power of makeup turns back on itself; captivation is emasculation. September, 1972. Photo of Richards Jarden by Martha Wilson
03. and 04. "Painted Lady" As a "painted lady" I may be seen by others as an object, but my purpose is to defend "masking." Instead of making myself up as someone else (which would limit expression), for this piece I made myself up as myself, exaggerating or stylizing my own skin, lip and hair color, hair style, bone structure and so on. Experimentally, the application of makeup helped me objectify myself; comparison of the introverted "before" expression and the extroverted "after" expression demonstrates that disguise makes more various expression of self possible. Exaggeration and stylization of my surface results in disappearance of "my own" features, or sensation of an absence of preconditions. A range of possible expression, of unaccustomed attitudes, can fill this vacuum; absence of the self is the free space in which expression plays. Thus the "obstacle," the painted surface, is ironically the means of expression. May, 1972. Photos by Richards Jarden
05. "Selfportrait" Credibility equals reality, so that "self" depends not on who you think you are, but on who others think you appear to be. In the space below, write your impressions of me, and return the slip to the box at the door. In so doing, you are creating me, and subverting the meaning of the term "selfportrait." Cambridge, MA, April 7, l973 Photo by Paul McMahon
06. and 07. "I make up the image of my perfection/I make up the image of my deformity" Photos by Alan Comfort