Karen Eliot on Luce Irigaray.
In an unannounced public performance in SoHo, New York City in 1995, Karen Eliot distributed over 100 xeroxed-and-bound handmade books of Luce Irigirary's This Sex Which is Not One to spectators who had gathered around her amplified stage, where a friend was playing classical music records on an old Victrola phonograph. Eliot gave a speech on Neoism and art in general. She spoke of genius, of talent, of violation. She spoke of the phallocentrism of art, the male domination of the art world, and, above all, the masculine enslavement of art. This enslavement is typified in the male bodies of the gallery owners and art stars (she referred to the very femininity of Andy Warhol as the art world's refusal to accept a truly feminine artist: "When they want a woman's art, they still demand a man to make it!"). It is also highlighted in the masculinity of the physical economy of the galleries.
Following, she believed, Irigaray's discourse on sexuality, Eliot called for a feminine economy of art, an art that would not be single and original, but multiple and diffuse. An art that would lay men naked before women. An art whose display would not demand the penetration of the doors of a gallery, but instead a spontaneous art that would erupt in ecstacy on every street corner. Eliot closed the speech by reciting a poem, dedicating it to Luce Irigaray. The entire speech and poem was transcribed and printed in a 1995 out-of-print issue of the now-defunct mini-magazine Her Art.
Here is the closing poem:
What a
woman is
is not
what a
woman is
What a man is
is
what a man is
What a woman is
is not
what a woman is