Preface to an Exhibition

We’d be so lost in our mouths, the best,
I feel it everyday (every way)
—Prince, “Soft and Wet,” 1978

Thirty nine years separate us from the historical moment of the seminal exhibition, Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States (1980), co-curated by Ana Mendieta, Kazuko Miyamoto and Zarina at A.I.R. Gallery. This distance allows and demands that we reconsider the exhibition in a broader perspective than its reception and its utilization as a 1980s “multicultural” alibi. What is often lost in returning to Dialectics of Isolation is that it was institutional critique, not just that it was a rare show of and by Third World women. ¹ Although the Dialectics of Isolation show, and Mendieta herself, are often used retrospectively as evidence to prove the organization’s multiculturalism, the show is in fact evidence of the inverse, of tokenization. ² A.I.R. Gallery, like other feminist arts organizations, was willing to allow Third World to modify “woman” and “artist” in one show but not to modify the mission of the organization nor who was considered for membership or sat on its board. ³ In this way it is not very different from where we are today, despite the increasing prevalence of “decolonization” discourse and the foregrounding of Black/ Indigenous/People of Color (BIPOC) in exhibitions. These shows are either lauded or abhorred by critics who are themselves stuck in a recursive white identitarian loop in which they only refer to Euro-American art history, and, along with many curators, can not hear decolonization’s call to dismantle hegemonic structures. ⁴ New exhibitions are organized around ever more tightly articulated categories of subjectivity, stringing up the Third World and other radical leftist movements of the previous era in their identitarian noose. This disappearance of the previous era’s solidarity movements in artistic discourse and exhibition frameworks is particularly egregious as it is in tandem and complicit with the rise of American empire.

In the introductory text of the Dialectics of Isolation catalogue, Mendieta unequivocally states that feminism in the United States was “basically a white middle class movement” that, to put it kindly, “failed to remember” Third World women. In doing so, Mendieta does something remarkable—she turns away from the white gaze. She and the other curators were not asking in any way for inclusion but insisting on a dialectical method for articulating a politics that would necessitate isolation from some but affiliation with others. ⁵ “This exhibition,” writes Mendieta “points not necessarily to the injustice or incapacity of a society that has not been willing to include us, but more towards a personal will to continue being ‘other.’” The exhibition points to a third way. ⁶

In the 1970s through the 80s “Third World” meant many things. The term emerged in the wake of World War II, out of the Afro-Asian Bandung Conference. It denoted a geographic territory as well as a temporality of capitalist development, in which the Third World was belated, in a teleological development narrative led by the “First World.” In the United States, it was used as a term to describe non-whites, akin to the term “Black” in Britain which was, in the 1970s and 80s, an identity which then referred broadly to postcolonial migrants. According to Mendieta, in the introduction to the Exhibtion Dialectics of Isolation, the artists in the show shared the concerns of the Non-aligned nations, by which she meant the movement which was founded at the Belgrade Conference (1961).⁷ In the United States, Third World was a broad category used for a range of non-national identities and sexual orientations, including Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Latin American, Asian, Gay and Lesbian, amongst others. Beyond these definitions and usages, Third World also denoted a “third way”—of other futures and political imaginaries. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak bemoaned the fact that the third way “was not accompanied by a commensurate intellectual effort” in the “cultural field” beyond the simple binary of nationalism or anti-imperialism.⁸ The history of Third World women is largely ignored in analyses of the failure of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and it is here that Dialectics of Isolation should be situated, propelling us elsewhere, beyond the limits of these old binaries as well as newer forms of nationalism, towards the creation of “other” collectivities. The exhibition was a gesture of refusal, an experiment, following Édouard Glissant “to refuse to consent to be a single being.”⁹ How can we be minoritized, they seemed to ask, when we are in fact the entire world?

Mendieta and Miyamoto were the only “women of color”¹⁰ in A.I.R. Gallery at the time of Dialectics of Isolation. While both were members of the feminist cooperative (and had mounted shows there)¹¹ Zarina was not—her application had recently been rejected.¹² Zarina had just finished working on the Heresies special issue on “Third World Women: The Politics of Being Other” before joining Mendieta and Miyamoto to curate the show. The artists shared frustrations with the feminist movement’s dismissal of Third World women and their struggles, as well as an art world that invisibilized their histories—Mendieta was a refugee from Cuba and Miyamoto and Zarina were recent immigrants from Japan and India respectively. Working together, these three friends shared the labor of the exhibition and used the platform given them to share space and resources with other Third World women, who, like white women, would never have had the chance to exhibit their work in male dominated museums and galleries, but were also excluded from feminist art spaces, which white women dominated. Howardena Pindell, who was also included in the show, was a foundational figure in the history of A.I.R. gallery as one of the twenty artists who co-founded the cooperative in 1972 and the only non-white woman. Pindell recalled that every time she mentioned race in meetings, she was accused of bringing up something “political” and although she tired of this, it was the fees that ultimately led to her departure three years later.¹³ Mendieta, who joined the gallery in 1979, became frustrated with the meetings and began missing them within a year, and even tried to sell her membership outright to an artist whose application had been rejected.¹⁴ “The white voice was the dominant voice.” Pindell observed of that time “What the white male’s voice was to the white female’s voice, the white female’s voice was to the woman of color’s voice.”¹⁵ Ana Mendieta said it more succinctly: “They were cunts.”¹⁶

Howardena Pindell’s controversial video work Free, White and 21 (1980) was first exhibited in Dialectics of Isolation and played a central role in articulating the show’s critique of white feminism.¹⁷ In it, Pindell plays two characters, herself, a black woman, flatly recounting stories of racial discrimination, and a white feminist who alternates between gaslighting and threatening to erase the black woman. The video is alternately horrifying and funny, with the artist wrapping her head in a white bandage and peeling a material off from her face, like a second skin. Zarina, who was then experimenting with making soft sculptures, exhibited Corners (1980), which brought together her previous work with collaged-wood, relief prints in Delhi with the influence of New York’s minimalist and post-minimalist movements. Although the grey sculpture looked as if it were hewn from stone, it was made from pulped paper mixed with water and tinted with graphite powder, then compressed. Its surface took on a metallic sheen while Buchanan’s sculptures were red tinged. This process of casting a material that bore traces of the process used to make it was also exhibited in Buchanan’s cast concrete installation Wall Column (undated). Four blocks of concrete were arranged directly on the ground, with grooves in them, the sculptures looked somewhere between architectural spolia and sedimented layers of geological strata. Nengudi’s Swing Low (1977) hung off of the ceiling and wall, the nylon mesh (pantyhose) stretching from being pulled, pinned and also weighted with sand, two pendulum like forms evoking the breasts of a human body. Portable segments of a large, social realist mural Uprising of the Mujeres (1979) was also exhibited and Baca’s catalogue text noted the importance of public art’s access to broader segments of the population. Whitefeather exhibited a black and white photograph of a shrub, Webbed Nests at Branch Crotches (undated), that was part of a larger series on plant and animal life and its relationship to the land. The exhibition also included an installation by Lydia Okumura and Janet Olivia Henry’s assortment of small objects (oars, clothing, baseball bat, briefcase) that made up Juju Box for a White Protestant Male (1979-80), in which “each item represents a word, a clump of things together to make a sentence.”

The artists and works in Dialectics of Isolation revealed the multi-faceted nature of the experiences of Third World women as well as a range of aesthetic influences and formal strategies they employed in their practices. The formalism implicit in the artists’ works, such as those by Buchanan and Zarina, for example, are inflected by histories undergirding the artists’ lived experiences, which are not yet adequately theorized or historicized. These minoritarian histories are an inextricable part of the 1970s feminist art movement in New York largely left out of art historical narratives.¹⁸ It is the fleshiness and material accretion, a softness and wetness that I observed in the works of Beverly Buchanan and Zarina in Dialectics of Isolation, as well as the work of Ana Mendieta, that I then drew on as historical precedent for, or as antecedents of, the artists’ works in Soft and Wet (2019).¹⁹