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Ecstasy, slippage and bliss: Blow My Skirt Up

Jo Melvin

The rhetorical possibility to frame the here and now – thinking here and now without sententious alibis – is appealing but awkward when titles become acronyms, BMSU, BUMS¹. The present is not isolated, shadows from recent events, spectres from long gone by hover to inflect nuances or suggest meanings. Desire for the here and now – presentness – is ecstatic, blissful but temporary. Its experience provides the yardstick for the future – thereby paradoxically becoming a shadow in the present. I should come clean and situate the notion of art as 'the sensuous representation of the ideal, rescued from the here and now' as counter to the proposal implicit in the expression 'blow my skirt up.' In other words, counter to my paraphrasing of Hegel, Blow my skirt up is immediate, temporal. The expression informs directly and by default. The shadow of Marilyn in her white dress hovers. She's sexy – let's celebrate. Perhaps there is something alluring about the shadow of masculinity falling across feminism now.

It is a challenge to think of a group without in some way drawing on loose connections to lead to constructions of identity. Common purpose brings these twelve artists together, all are women – they are diverse in age, background, experience, ideological positions and practice. A discussion of alternative titles elicited the retort; 'it doesn't blow my skirt up!' Much has been written about a kind of curatorial practice without the frame – indeed it's a convention to bemoan the convention – there's a position to find in standing against the standing against. The space could become like an open discussion where what happens occurs without first seeking to establish an arbitrary connectivity before the event. This simple intentional act relieves obligations, and responsibilities for participation and engagement are back with the viewer. It's a natural recall of how ideas about art are constantly modified internally as part of a process; I see a work and all the others in my head in some way re-hang themselves.

Matt Higgs recently curated the show Unrelated, at Wilkinson Gallery simultaneously with his show Art is to Enjoy. It is a case in point. He writes: 'Group shows typically seek to homogenise art, to establish points of correspondence between individual artists and discreet art works based on shared formal concerns or common intentions, etc. Unrelated seeks to resist this process, creating instead a space for highly idiosyncratic artists and artworks to simply co-exist, albeit temporarily…'

In situating the discourse Lucy Lippard's strategies of organisation and participation present an exemplary model to reflect on what might occur when parameters are open and closed. Fed up with the presumption there were no women conceptual artists Lippard’s 'exasperated reply' was to present a show just of women whose practices could be loosely defined as conceptually driven. C. 7,500 was a travelling exhibition with twenty-six women artists. 'Art of course has no sex, but artists do.' The catalogue is a card index of the artists, the venues and her essay. It is the fourth of Lippard’s index card shows; the number comes from the city's population at the time. She writes 'all curatorial limitations or whims are equally ridiculous and for the curator equally necessary. One simply hopes that the audience is interested enough in art to pay attention to the art rather than to the superficial framework within which the art is presented…'

¹ The phrase is Dan Flavin's. 'Some other Comments…' Artforum December 1967, Vol. Vi, No. 4.

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