Do As I Say, and Not As I Do

Bad Girls
ed. Marcia Tucker
New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, 144 pages
ISBN 0-262-70053-0 $19.95 softcover

Bad Girls is the latest collaborative effort from the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the MIT Press. Their previous three are Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists (1989), Discourses: Conversations in Post-modern Art and Culture (1990), and Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (1990). Like the others, Bad Girls is an edited volume, introduced by Marcia Tucker - the most frequent provider of the institutional, authorial, and conceptual legitimation of the series.


In many ways Bad Girls falls within the parameters of the other publications, but in many ways it differs. It is a catalogue of two 1994 exhibits, Bad Girls, held in New York, and Bad Girls West, held in Los Angeles. The introductory/celebratory statements and acknowledgements usual in art exhibit catalogues are present, written by the curators of the bi-coastal exhibits, Marcia Tucker for New York's Bad Girls and Marcia Tanner for Los Angeles' Bad Girls West. The main body of the book consists of four articles, of which the first two set the conceptual and historical stage. In order, the four articles are: "Attack of the Giant Ninja Barbies," by Marcia Tucker; "Mother Laughed: The Bad Girls Avant-Garde," by Marcia Tanner; "'All That She Wants': Transgressions, Appropriations, and Art" by Linda Goode Bryant; and "Possessed," by Cheryl Dunye. There is a "checklist" of the art works included in Bad Girls and Bad Girls West, and a Bad Girls bibliography compiled by Daniel Cornell. Throughout the book are photographs of art by the artists in the exhibits and photographs of famous artists such as Luise Bourgeois, entertainers such as Liza Minelli and Donna Summers, movie stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda (as Barbarella), television personalities such as Jane Pauley, and a host of others, presumably American "bad girls" that this viewer/reader could not identify. It is a handsome volume, with mostly black-and-white and some colour plates, politically provocative and witty photographs - especially the reproduction of Linda Bengliss' (p. 83) advertisement in Art Forum and Keith Boadwee's Jasmine Swami (p. 95). But reviewing a book which is an edited volume of essays and an exhibit catalogue is a tricky business. It is tricky to review museum publications - even if the museum is collaborating with a major university press or is as supportive of racial/ethnic/sexual inclusion as the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Catalogues are part of the ancillary materials offering a context in which art can be recognized;[1] they construct and sustain master narratives, rhethorical frames that delimit how we think and speak about art. Catalogues are not innocent texts and they are not noted for their disinterested scholarship, as their editors would have us believe. And then again, this very fact, that they say one thing and do another, is what makes such texts valuable for critical cultural studies. My criticisms of this book are a consequence of my positioning within a critical discourse of art institutions and practices, to which a short book review can make only scant reference. My basic understanding draws on the Bourdieusian notion of artistic field, and is enriched by works from the new museology[2] and enlightened by postcolonial feminism.

The weakest of the essays is Cheryl Dunye's "Possessed," a chatty, self-absorbed narrative about the perils of coming out (or going in), crises of identity of a black/white/lesbian/not-lesbian/bad/good girl. This is the kind of essay one expects to find in the high-society, high-fashion glossies, pleasing all and offending none with its cutesy politics. In "Mother Laughed," Marcia Tanner attempts to answer the question "What kind of mothers did the bad girls have?" She provides a genealogy that goes back to Artemisia Gentileschi - now that's a radical beginning, is it not?- and moves on to her rather disparate contemporary epigones such as Cindi Lauper, Donna Summers, Yoko Ono, Luise Bourgeois, Faith Ringgold, and Cindy Sherman, among many others, all culled from the disciplinary archives of institutionalized feminism and American popular culture. There is nothing new or enlightening in her discussion of their contribution to girl badness in art or everyday life, as her remarks in passing about Lorena Bobbit, Heidi Fleiss, and the film Pretty Woman would have us believe.

I want to focus at some length on Marcia Tucker's essay partly because of the role she has played in the museum's consecrating practices, but also because her writing is paradigmatic of the apolitical postmodern feminism favoured by contemporary museum personnel, who, knowingly or not, continue to mask the museum's underpinnings in a value system based entirely on private collection, evaluation, display, and circulation of commodities - in other words, in modernism. Marcia Tucker credits two events with setting her on her path of organizing the Bad Girls exhibit, "a visit to Coney Island and her participation in the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade." These events helped her focus on the "pleasures of misbehaving," the "bad girls sensibility," with the help of Mikhail Bakhtin's notions of the "carnivalesque." Her understanding of the "carnivalesque" comes to her second hand - as is the case with most uses of Bakhtin's work in the art world - from Peter Stallybrass'[3] and Allon White's definition of it as "a loose amalgam of procession, feasting, competition, games and spectacle," and as a "repeated periodic celebration of the grotesque body, fattening food, intoxicating drink, sexual promiscuity, altered ego-identity, the inverse and heteroglot" (p. 22). For the reader/viewer who might have difficulty visualizing a bad girl (from the margins of artistic practice, of course), a prototype is provided. A bad girl heroine is "a lesbian cross-dresser who pumps iron, looks like Chiquita Banana, thinks like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, talks like Dorothy Parker, has the courage of Anita Hill, the political acumen of Hillary Clinton and is as pissed off as Valerie Solanas, and you really have something to worry about" (p. 28). This Wonder Woman and others like her are to be put to work to eradicate the divisions within the Women's Movement, which have been "multiplying with the energy and persistence of fruit flies" (p. 16). The fruit fly - this most transgressive of metaphors for material differentiation - comes from Tucker's idyllic description of early feminism as a train which "has rolled relentlessly across America's fruited plains, picking up passengers from the fields of critical theory, psychoanalysis, film and literary studies, only to arrive at a place that alas, looks a lot like the one we just left" (p. 16). The Bad Girls exhibit attempts to "bridge these and other great divides, not by papering over them, but by finding a place where we can all talk" (p. 16). Without having seen either exhibit but having carefully read the essays and looked at the pictures included in Bad Girls, I find that a "papering over" is all that has happened - the book is a successful collage of blurred genres, a bricolage of the most fully commodified artists, art practices, consumer fads, and "persons" of the week. The avant-gardist transgressions Tucker talks about are just what avant-gardes have always been: intellectual transgressions, acted out with ironic wit - that is the postmodern twist - but which remain silent to the political transgressions required by persons in their everyday life. To effect change, it is not enough simply to mock the society matrons who have taken up - presumably in their false consciousness - the habit of wearing black leather motorcycle jackets, intimating that they are members in radical subcultures. It is not enough to proclaim coyly that "it will take a real challenge to the places that institutionalize transgression (including museums!) to effect any transformation" (p. 24), while accepting generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Director's Council of the New Museum of Contemporary Art. It is not enough to flaunt the museum's political liberatory aspirations while actively disseminating hegemonic culture based entirely on private exchange. This book is nothing more than the "black leather motorcycle jacket" of transgressors like Marcia Tucker; it is an affirmation of the museum's values - however "new" and "improved" - a commodity for circulation within the culture of which it is part and parcel. Avant-gardist transgressions have been good for business. Dadaists of all sorts have been testing the resilience and elasticity of the art world's institutional walls, which they have been found to be limitless. Why then pretend that another try at symbolic inversion would bring down the Walls of Jericho? One might conclude about the state of the bad girls revolution that invoking Bakhtin's notion of the "carnivalesque" while failing to encounter "otherness" in its everyday forms, failing to recognize competing voices without making any one of them normative, will never be enough to reinvent a shared politics within intersecting worlds and identities. The monologic speech of modernism is neither resisted nor subverted with the inclusion of metaphors like "fruited plains" and "fruit flies," or of nostalgic comparisons between "then" and "now." Properly applied, Bakhtin's dialogism invites new possibilities for activism and change to bring about the inversion that ultimately counts: structural.

The inclusion in this volume of Linda Goode Bryant's essay "'All That She Wants': Transgressions, Appropriations, and Art" without any critical dialogue connecting it to the other essays is another demonstration of the ahistorical totallizing and thoroughly modernist biases of the legitimators of avant-gardist transgression in the institutional sites of New York's postmodern art world. If Goode Bryant's essay is held up as a "dialogical" mirror to the sort of feminism that surfaces in the other pages of this text, its politics - despite the rhetoric - is, alas, another case of business as usual. Linda Goode Bryant speaks clearly and eloquently of the strange bedfellows art, politics, and the public make, and how art has managed to be seen, somehow, as the "pure" arbiter of the three in times of crises. She raises the questions that need to be raised above all and that the curators/editors of Bad Girls managed to miss: "What does it take to be a bad girl today, when so much of contemporary western imagery and language is appropriated from the cultures of others? Is it possible to construct valid personal or political identities from cultural fragments or from an affinity to another's experience? And if so, what are the political and social ramifications of such a construction?" (p. 97). Goode Bryant then answers these questions with historically specific and critically grounded examples. Suffice it to say that hers is the only essay that makes transparent - even for the novice in practices of contemporary art works - the insularity and inbreeding of New York's art establishment, which sees itself as "transgressive."[4] She is the only author who explicitly incorporates into her argument the political ramifications of ahistorical art. In the side-bars of her essay she speaks about appropriation not as the innocent happy-go-lucky "fruit fly" of the "fruited plains of America," but as an act of deliberate silencing of "others," of their histories, contributions, and memories of lived experience. She cautions the reader about the supposedly innocent practices of postmodernism's quotation, juxtaposition, and bricolage, practices which only mask the indiscriminate "picking" in the name of a feminist avant-garde - as if any avant-garde could ever be truly feminist! - and its negative effects on the lives of artists from the racial, ethnic, and sexual margins. Goode Bryant defines appropriation thus: "in its most fundamental application, appropriation provides the appropriator with the means to claim something which s/he has not done, to experience something which s/he has not experienced, to assume responsibility for which s/he has no charge. Appropriation provides the appearance of something without the action or event. Through its lens it is the spectacle of leadership and not its evidence, the idea of culture and not its experience that shapes and informs the art" (p. 107). Bad Girls is all image and style, floating free from its institutional moorings - New York transgressive art at its best. But, we all know that appearances can be very deceiving. The transgressive work that needs to be done, for this sort of appropriation to come to an end and for a truly politically transformative project to begin, has to take on different questions - for example, those raised by Irit Rogoff in her article "From Ruins to Debris: The Feminization of Fascism in German-History Museums," in which she asks, "[What] of the historical episodes for which no historical narrative structure exists? What of the inconceivable, the unspeakable, the denied and the repressed, the strategies of representation that intend one thing but actually achieve something completely different?"[5] Museums, despite their rhetoric, have remained factories producing panoptical narratives which cannot articulate that which is outside the languages of modern western societies. Any inclusions - when they happen - are hierarchally located.

Regardless of the shortcomings of Bad Girls, I plan to use it in my teaching, as I have previously used the other collaborative publications of NMCA and MIT. The book provides a snapshot of museums' paradoxical sites - that is, it shows that museums are part and parcel, as are other modernist institutions, of the apparatus whose real purpose of existence is to fuel our unconscious desires, which in turn keep the commodity culture going, despite the innocence claimed by museums' gatekeepers. Neither of the two exhibits redressed any structural imbalances in the art world, nor did the essays fill any theoretical/critical gaps. But for me, this apparent failure becomes the book's value, in that it bares the contradictions of contemporary art practices. Ingeniously laid-out pages, provocative photographs, and witty condemnations of traditional art and its patrons do not erase the fact that all differences, multivocalities, and temporal and geographical spatialities are neatly framed within the politically neutralizing synchronicity of the museum spectacle, even if the museum is none other than the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Granted, its exhibits and publications have thrown conventional art practices into relief, and have shown the system's arbitrariness, but time after time they have failed to question - let alone to change - the foundational museological assumptions and practices. To extend the analytical frame is no longer necessarily revolutionary, if the structural frame remains. The museum and its publications are really about the routes/means necessary to achieve celebrity status in the insular contemporary art world. The blurring of transgressive aspirations and fame has become central to the fictions of some feminist postmodernist art practices; somehow, feminists like Marcia Tucker have come to believe that by referring to Lorena Bobbit, Heidi Fleiss, Julia Roberts, Cindi Lauper, and others from the ephemera of popular culture, they truly represent and speak to the heterogeneity of the women "out there." Feminist art of the Bad Girls type may have become spectacular - in a Bakhtinian or other sense - but the structured privileging of the art world is still in place.


Reviewed by Caterina Pizanias
Vancouver, B.C.

  1. In his essay "The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic," Pierre Bourdieu writes: "The experience of the work of art as being immediately endowed with meaning and value is a result of the accord between the two mutually founded aspects of the same historical institution: the cultured habitus and the artistic field. Given that the work of art exists as such, (namely as a symbolic object endowed with meaning and value) only if it is apprehended by spectators possessing the disposition and the aesthetic competence which are tacitly required, one could then say that is the aesthete's eye which constitutes the work of art as a work of art. But, one must remember immediately that this is possible only to the extent that the aesthete himself is the product of a long exposure to artworks" (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46 [1987]: 22).

  2. See Robert Lumley, ed., The Museum Time Machine: Putting Cultures on Display (London: Routledge, 1988; Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Display Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1991); Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds., Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994).

  3. The definition she cites is from Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986): 178-79.

  4. Mary Schmidt Campbell, Ph.D., who has acted as executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem and Dean at the Tisch School of the Arts, and has written extensively on African-American art, said the following about New York's art community: "I think it's true in that New York is very much like the 19th-century institution of the salon. Our art community represents the most traditional and conservative aspect of the art world. People of color play the role of the upstarts like Degas and Cézanne and others who could not get into the salon or who could get in only from time to time" (Schmidt Campbell, interviewed by Maurice Berger for his How Art Becomes History: Essays on Art, Society, and Culture in Post-New Deal America [New York: Icon Editions, 1992]: 173).

  5. Irit Rogoff, "From Ruins to Debris: The Feminization of Fascism in German-History Museums," in Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, ed. Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994; 223-49): 228.