Birdcalls and Documenta X: A Critique

http://www.stadiumweb.com/Birdcalls/

Birdcalls is a web-specific installation which utilizes humor as a
technique to express the serious issues facing women artists. This is a
piece in which Louise Lawler exchanges the image for sound and the work
of art for the name that created it. In Birdcalls, Lawler uses the names
of contemporary male artists as interactive points, once the mouse rolls
over a name, the viewer hears it called out through the speakers of the
computer. So, the humor of the work is in the intonation of the spoken
word–because it is the way in which each name is heard that becomes so
poignant and obvious. It is a female voice which calls out each male
name; and through the use of simple audio filters, this voice appears as
a parrot and thus evokes a birdcall. "She" becomes an enslaved bird
mimicking the master. It may even appear as though Lawler is poking fun
at her contemporaries, and maybe she is.

What makes this piece explicitly feminist is its pointing to the
conditions of privilege and presence given to male artists in the face
of discrimination against the works created by women. But there is a
paradox here. It is not a male voice calling out these names, it is a
female one. This suggests that women may be just as responsible for
propping up the status of male artists while shunning important work
created by women. Nonetheless, Lawlers decidedly feminist response is a
rarity on the web. And this is not to say that net.art created by women
is in low volume here–because it is not. But feminist art which directs
the viewers eyes (and ears) toward the inequities and inequalities of
the art-world is. Search for yourself.

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/n.paradoxa/dx.htm

And then there is Documenta X: A Critique which reinforces the
complexities of female exclusion in the art-world even further. Created
by Katy Deepwell for N.Paradoxa, this is a text piece which is displayed
in two colors: black and red. Red represents the names of the women
artists and speakers who were included in the Documenta X exhibition and
black represents the names of the men. The statistics are all there:
women artists represent 30 of a total of 107 and women speakers
represent 13 of a total of 100. Once again this equation gets a little
tricky when you realize the curators name is color-coded as red. After
viewing this piece, the Guerrilla Girls may come to mind and a cruise
over to their site will illustrate the differences in producing a
feminist critique specific for the web and one which is not
web-specific.

And so finally the question shifts. Away from whether men are willing to
give up their privilege and toward the question of whether women will
give up the privileges they gain by promoting the works of men while
sacrificing work created by women.