ISSUE continues to support artists in new ways in response to COVID-19’s impact on public assembly and our subsequent suspension of public programming. ISSUE is pleased to present With Womens Work, an online series commissioning artists to create new works inspired by scores included in Womens Work, a magazine edited and self-published by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood in New York City. Originally published in 1975, Womens Work sought to highlight the overlooked work of female artists working at the cusp of the visual arts, music, and performance and is a collection of performance scores. In addition to Knowles and Lockwood, it included the work of Beth Anderson, Ruth Anderson, Jacki Apple, Barbara Benary, Sari Dienes, Nye Ffarrabas (Bici Forbes), Simone Forti, Wendy Greenberg, Heidi Von Gunden, Françoise Janicot, Christina Kubisch, Carol Law, Mary Lucier, Lisa Mikulchik, Ann Noël (Ann Williams), Pauline Oliveros, Takako Saito, Carolee Schneemann, Mieko Shiomi, Elaine Summers, Carole Weber, Julie Winter, and Marilyn Wood.
Schedule
crys cole: Wednesday, February 3rd, 2021
Ayano Elson: Wednesday, February 10th, 2021
Crystal Peñalosa: Thursday, February 11th, 2021
SYANIDE: Wednesday, February 17th, 2021
Julia Santoli: Thursday, February 18th, 2021
Mayaa Tsadka: Wednesday, February 23rd, 2021
Sokunthary Svay: Thursday, February 24th, 2021
Mariana Valencia: Wednesday, March 3rd, 2021
Auclair: Thursday, April 15th, 2021
Annabelle Playe: Wednesday, April 23rd, 2021
Ogemdi Ude: Thursday, April 24th, 2021
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix: Wednesday, April 28th, 2021
Sydney Spann: Thursday, April 29th, 2021
Savannah Harris: Wednesday, October 20th, 2021
Throughout 2021, With Womens Work presented a group of fourteen artists who were asked to choose a score to interpret and respond to through their own working process.
The Womens Work publication offers an invaluable counterpoint to the male avant-garde canon, evidencing a network of diverse artists relating their score-based practices to the feminist art movement of the 1970s that tended to focus on more traditional visual media. Womens Work was republished as a facsimile edition by Primary Information in 2019 edited by James Hoff and Irene Revell. As highlighted by Primary Information, the original editors of the magazine were and remain adamant that the works should be performed; that they not remain static as an artifact.
“The gendering/identification of artists as female […] has been controversial for as far back as I can remember. Pauline Oliveros was far from the first woman composer to protest it. As a young composer I too wanted simply to be identified as a composer, but as the herstory of women musicians in western music was gradually brought forward by the women's music movement and the essential work of major feminist musicologists [...] I came to recognise that ignoring my gender, sort of neutering myself denied the culturally implicit and obvious gendering of 'composer' as male, which has had major effects on access for composing women until recently. I also realised that by accepting that my gender was integral to my composer's identity, I could help to encourage younger women to assert themselves as composers also. Role models matter ...”
“We wanted to publish work which other people could pick up and do: that aspect of it was really important…this was not anecdotal, this was not archival material, it was live material. You look at a score, you do it.”
– Annea Lockwood
This initiative will complement ISSUE’s online series including the Isolated Field Recordings Series, The Steve Circuit: Downtown New York’s Subterranean Spirit, Distant Pairs Series, as well as work publishing archival documentation on online platforms. All this work is currently collected and streamable on our expansive Archive page on the ISSUE website. ISSUE currently maintains a publicly accessible archive of hundreds of published video and audio recordings. These materials are a freely accessible collection of performance documentation that spans our recent and historic work.
