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Kaucyila Brooke
Tracing Women's Press
August 1-31 2024
The 6 drawings in Kaucyila Brooke’s installation are texts traced from 1970s issues of Women's Press, a feminist publication in Eugene, Oregon.
Leaving aside the content for a moment, I think about what it means to re-draw old typography in this way. The artist has hand-traced the typeset text on thick paper with black marker pen, faithfully copying the slightly enlarged offset printing on a light table.
The printed journals are old, the drawings are new, but the technology of drawing is of course much older than typography. This technique that points to the past and an even older past, bypassing photographic and digital technologies, adds to the weight of the message: this is not handwriting, but tracing a printed message by hand--a significant distinction, I think. Remember that pre-typography, important texts used to be copied by hand. Also note that Brooke’s other work is in photography, a practice that also has re-production built into it. See also for example her photo project “Vitrinen in Arbeit” showing how the “framing” of artifacts affects our perception in Vienna’s Natural History Museum https://kaucyilabrooke.com/vitrinen-in-arbeit-20022005
On the one hand, the work emits meaning to the viewer/reader who is seeing these old texts now hand-drawn in the present time and in an art context.
On the other hand, the performance and experience of re-writing, this somatizing -embodying- of ideas, affects the artist herself as she re-internalizes the politics and consciousness through art. In re-animating the texts, she is making copies and originals at the same time. This is an active remembering and reminding, not memorializing.
Coming to the question of what the artist has selected to copy and what we are reading, it is striking that Brooke--reflecting in her own technique the practices of the journal--has chosen to center the marginal and procedural information in Women’s Press. In this way she brings the behind-the-scenes to the proscenium–to turn a spotlight on what is neglected or forgotten in the history of feminism. This artist’s formative years as a lesbian anarchist meant that she was steeped in anti-authoritarian prefigurative politics: that is, the way feminist activists modeled and enacted in advance, within their activism, the things they wanted to achieve. Critiquing patriarchal society and the equally patriarchal left, they emphasized the values of collectivity, participatory democracy, horizontality, inclusiveness, transparency, group authorship. We now read it in the many “we” of the text, and the detailing of financial and other problems that the movement was working out: “we need a typewriter with ribbon” “we only exclude rhetoric” “we need your help” “we’re sorry."
Many contemporary academic and political anthologies have published the important theoretical texts that came out of 1970s feminism. But “we” are different now. Feminist practices have changed and diversified: Many women wrote scholarly books.
By contrast, as she traces the masthead, the classifieds, or the editorial decisions, Brooke curates a way of thinking of the minutiae of feminist history in such a way that form becomes content and content becomes form. Process and product reflect each other.
Annetta Kapon for Proxy Gallery
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