“I feel fairly confident that I know how to write an essay as a feminist,
less sure I know how to install art as one.”[1]

Is there a space for doubt within the institutions of art and its histories? The above quotation is taken from the essay “How to Install Art as a Feminist” included in the catalogue for MoMA’s 2010 exhibition, Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art. Here, US-American curator Helen Molesworth acknowledged the question many committed to feminist approaches to art history, myself included, are often too anxious to admit asking: do I know what I am doing? She understands which theories to work from as a feminist curator and which practices she does not wish to replicate. However, she is still unsure of what exactly installing art as a feminist looks like. What form should this practice take? Molesworth did not offer a roadmap of best practices, but made some suggestions for curators, in particular the potential for a feminist narration of histories that emerged from notions of horizontality and alliance, rather than traditional vertical formats that highlighted progression and the concept of singular genius. But what might these interventions look like when they transition from the conceptual realm of scholarship into the concrete physical space of the museum? How do curators put the world of critical theoretical discourse into practice in actually curating artwork, writing interpretation, engaging an audience, exhibiting an artist into history? What is a feminist curatorial praxis?[2]

In 2007, British art historian Griselda Pollock proposed the “virtual feminist museum,” a counter-museum that allowed for a space of encounter between artworks free from the constraints of tradition, hierarchy, and commodification inherent to contemporary art institutions. A centerpiece of this virtual feminist museum, however, was that it could never be actual. She argued the “dominant social and economic power relations that govern the museum make feminist analysis impossible.”[3] Is it possible to institute feminisms, or is this only ever a virtual potentiality? Opportunities for centering feminist histories in the museum continue to present themselves and continue to raise these ongoing questions and uncertainties. This has perhaps been most visible within the surge of major international retrospective exhibitions of feminist creativity and women’s artistic practices over the past fifteen years.[4] This current moment of visibility makes the imperatives outlined by Helena Reckitt and Dorothee Richter in this issue so timely. How do we move beyond critique and towards transformation, structural change, and practical strategies of instituting feminisms? The majority of these recent exhibitions have been group shows that sought to narrate a wide span of international histories of feminist creativity using the works of a variety of producers.[5] A distinct feature of the works assembled in these exhibitions has been the presence of collective and collaborative forms of art practice. Certain artists included in these historical overviews have arguably become more visible than others despite the importance of collaboration within their work. For example, US-American artists Judy Chicago and Suzanne Lacy, and Mexican artist Mónica Mayer have since become synonymous with “feminist art,” itself a contested term, in their respective locations.[6] Each of these artists has also been officially acknowledged by major institutions in the last five years with an overdue career retrospective.[7] While there is a real need and desire to celebrate the achievements of these makers as individuals, the format of the career retrospective presents a unique set of problems for feminist curating not present within group exhibitions.

The format of the career retrospective replicates key mechanisms, power structures, and discourses of art history that feminists have worked to deconstruct and upend.[8] A retrospective is rooted in the notion of the artist as a singular genius whose career can be understood through a linear chronology of their life and works. Retrospectives are gestures of surveying the past and as such seek to outline the trajectory of a career that is ending in ways that establish its significance in a larger art historical narrative. The creation of a canon of “great” feminist artists is an obvious issue for those interested in implementing feminist strategies. These issues become all the more complex when considering the centrality of collective forms of artmaking to the careers of these artists. Pollock argued that critical feminist studies must operate “outside of the museal categories of nation, style, period, movement, master, oeuvre, so that artworks can speak of something more than either the abstract principles of form and style or the individualism of the creative author.”[9]

What concrete shape would such a critical feminist approach to curating a career retrospective take? Is the concept of a retrospective in all its linearity, singularity, and progression simply antithetical to feminist histories? Or can certain strategies be undertaken that effectively account for the achievements of an artist whose practices were indelibly interwoven with collective creativity? I offer here the exhibition, Si tiene dudas… pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica Mayer (When in Doubt… Ask: a Retrocollective Exhibition of Mónica Mayer, 2016), as a case study in feminist curators and artists taking on the museum retrospective within an institutional environment. The exhibition, its planning, staging, and programming, provides useful examples of strategies for disrupting certain aspects of the retrospective format that stand in opposition to feminist imperatives for art history.

Mónica Mayer has been a central figure in Mexico City’s art world since the 1970s. Heralded as a pioneer in performance art, she has worked throughout her career to bring feminist issues to the forefront of the art world and public discourse. Her projects have continually forged local and transnational connections with artists and activists that cross generations. Working collectively and collaboratively is at the forefront of her practice. She notably formed the first feminist art collective in Mexico, Polvo de Gallina Negra, with the artist Maris Bustamante in 1983, and continues to work collectively with her husband, the artist Victor Lerma, as the collective Pinto mi Raya, formed in 1989. Her individual practice flourished alongside these collective strategies, and she amassed an immense amount of work, primarily drawing and collage, and also published extensively on topics of feminism and performance art in Mexico.[10]

Si tiene dudas… pregunte was curated by Karen Cordero Reiman, who, in addition to being a notable art historian, writer, and curator in Mexico, is also Mayer’s friend and long-time feminist collaborator. Mayer herself was central to the curatorial process, and their established working relationship, built around shared feminist goals, formed a productive platform for executing the exhibition. Cordero Reiman and Mayer made conscious decisions to disrupt traditional hierarchies within the curatorial process from planning to implementation: “We wanted there to be difference in a feminist exhibition, not just in terms of the content but in terms of power relations, dynamics and space. In making curatorial decisions, we thought about what the exhibition does, as opposed to what it says.”[11] When Cordero Reiman speaks as “we,” she is not only referring to herself and Mayer, but also to a number of collaborators from outside the institution, interns, community members, activists, and early career researchers such as myself, who were invited to be involved in the curatorial process.[12]

The title of the exhibition refers to two central organizing principals in the curatorial process: doubt and collectivity. The phrase “Si tiene dudas… pregunte” (When in doubt… ask) was drawn from a work entitled Performance parásito (Parasite Performance, 2005–ongoing) by Pinto mi Raya. This work involved Mayer and Lerma attending other artists’ performances in public spaces and “parasitically” creating their own performance alongside (fig. 1). They held signs that read “when in doubt… ask” in order to start conversations with already present members of the audience.

Fig. 1 Mónica Mayer, Performance parásito (Parasite Performance), IV Encuentro de Arte Corporal, Venezuela, 2008. Photo courtesy of Consuelo Méndez.

 

The work was generated from what Mayer identified as the confusion audiences often feel when attending a performance or attempting to understand works of contemporary art. Their goal was not to exploit or overshadow the other performers, but to engage their audience in dialogue about what they were seeing in an effort to build deeper and collaborative understanding. She explained:

I am interested in the relationship between performance art and its audience. I obviously never tell people what they are seeing or interpret it for them, but I invite them to express their ideas, even if they have no idea what performance is, which is usually the case. This piece has taught me a lot. To begin with, not to be condescending towards non-art audiences, whose opinions are often right on the spot.[13]

With this performance, Mayer and Lerma created a critical space for uncertainty, a key aspect of Mayer’s practice overall. Mayer recognizes that she, as an artist and presumed “insider” in the contemporary art world, does not have all the answers. Instead, through the medium of performance, she empowers the public to form their own interpretations in dialogue with each other, the artists, and the work itself.

This simple phrase tugs at a thread of collaborative, contingent, and accessible discourse that runs through Mayer’s career. Cordero Reiman stated the exhibition’s title framed Si tiene dudas… pregunte as an “invitation for active participation of the public in the exhibition as an opportunity for dialogue and collective construction of knowledge and experience; for questioning ideas about art, gender and society; and for imagining other models in this respect–which is also a lot of what Mónica's, Polvo Gallina Negra’s and Pinto mi Raya's work proposes.”[14] Centering on doubt released the potential for these works to speak a number of meanings into the world and foregrounded an open investigation that encouraged others to continue to question and made space for uncertainty as a valid platform for the production of collective forms of knowledge.

The secondary aspect of the title, the concept of the “retrocollective,” signaled a more direct intervention into traditional curatorial approaches to the retrospective format. This term was coined by Argentinean feminist art historian María Laura Rosa, in conversation with Mayer. Rosa questioned how it was possible for Mayer to have a retrospective because her practices, since the beginning of her career, were so deeply intertwined with and indebted to many different producers.[15] The history of Mayer’s life has always been the history of many lives and, indeed, of the women’s movement in Mexico. This simple discursive shift to a “retrocollective” allowed space for the exhibition to be a retrospective of Mayer’s career that also told a history of the feminist movement in Mexico and its many producers, without whom Mayer’s work would not exist. Mayer’s approaches to artmaking make applying this concept quite easy, however, the term has broader implications in conceptualizing the histories of artists’ lives. A retrocollective might effectively detach an exhibition from the primacy placed on singular artistic genius and allow for a greater consideration of horizontality in historiography, as artists’ lives are always collectively built of interwoven actions, influences, and affinities with others.

The layout of the exhibition also supported these interconnected issues of collaborative, contingent, and accessible discourses in ways that sought to disrupt the chronological staging often inherent in retrospective formats. In addition to its official gallery space, the exhibition also made use of the hallway outside its main entrance (fig. 2). Audiences were introduced to Mayer through El Tendedero (The Clothesline, 1978–ongoing), a project from early in Mayer’s career that has followed her throughout. El Tendedero marked Mayer’s entry onto the public stage of the Mexican art world after its first installation as part of the Museo de Arte Moderno’s Salon 77/78: Nuevas Tendencias (Salon 77/78: New Tendencies) where it was notably praised in the press. The original 1978 version resulted from a month’s worth of conversations Mayer had with women on the streets of Mexico City. She asked women to write down what they disliked most about the city onto small pink cards, and many wrote about issues of sexism, harassment, and assault. Mayer hung their responses on a pink clothesline she constructed in the gallery, a symbolic airing out the city’s dirty laundry in the institution. During the exhibition, women added more responses to the installation, creating an organic and ongoing dialogue surrounding this often unspoken issue (fig. 3).

Fig. 2. Mónica Mayer, Reactivation of El Tendedero (The Clothesline) in the exhibition Si tiene dudas… pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica Mayer, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, 2016. Photo courtesy of Mónica Mayer.

Fig. 3. Mónica Mayer, El Tendedero (The Clothesline) in the exhibition Salón 77-78. Nuevas tendencias, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, 1978. Photo courtesy of Victor Lerma.

 

Mayer has installed a number of versions of El Tendedero, what she calls “reactivations,” around the world in the forty years since this initial version. For each iteration, Mayer puts in preliminary work, holding workshops with community members at each location in order to collaboratively develop the appropriate questions to ask the public. One side of the hallway outside Si tiene dudas… pregunte was devoted to the history of El Tendedero, while the other featured a reactivation for MUAC. Mayer put together a workshop ahead of the exhibition where community members, many of whom were young women activists interested in stopping gender-based violence, helped to develop the questions for the installation and assisted Mayer in collecting responses from the community (fig. 4).[16] El Tendedero was always an object centered in doubt, as Mayer never has an idea of what the outcome will be until the process is undertaken with the community around her. The group developed questions that focused on the issue of sexual assault and added a virtual aspect to the installation so that responses entered online could be printed out and put onto the clothesline throughout the exhibition’s duration.

Positioning El Tendedero in the hallway was strategic in that it both introduced audiences to the collaborative and open-ended nature of Mayer’s work and also allowed the feminist content held within the retrospective to spill out into common areas. Over 5,000 responses were included to the installation, and, a month before the end of the exhibition, two extensions had to be added to the structure to hold them all (fig. 5). The work took up space, conceptually and physically, in the institution. The hallway installation also disturbed the chronological format of a traditional retrospective by collapsing the temporal boundaries often placed on works of art. The juxtapositions of multiple Tendederos, old and new, revealed the inherent nature of this work as both past and present. As multiple histories layered on top of one another, they asserted the relevance of the work to today, and its potential for the future.

Fig. 4. Mónica Mayer and members of the workshop collecting responses for the reactivation of El Tendedero (The Clothesline), January 9, 2016, Mexico City. Photo courtesy of Yuruen Lerma.

Fig. 5. Mónica Mayer, Detail of reactivation of El Tendedero (The Clothes­-line) in the exhibition Si tiene dudas… pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica Mayer, Museo Universitario de Art Contemporáneo, Mexico City, 2016. Photo courtesy of Karen Cordero Reiman.

 

This disturbance to a traditional chronological format was carried into the interior gallery spaces. The overall layout moved through works from 1970s to the 1990s; however, there were various installations, interventions, and reactivations that brought the present into consideration alongside the past. For example, the original version of Mayer’s 1978 conceptual work, Lo Normal (On Normality), was displayed next to artist María Rodríguez Cruz’s 2015 reinterpretation of the work. In her original, Mayer parodied the format of surveys found in women’s magazines to pose questions about sexuality, desire, and taboos (fig. 6). Cruz replaced Mayer’s face in her version with that of President Enrique Peña Nieto in order to ask questions related to the lack of attention given to issues of femicide and gender-based violence in Mexico. A section devoted to works created by Mayer and Bustamante working as Polvo de Gallina Negra dealt with the topic of motherhood; however, a large installation of ephemera related to Mayer’s collaborative work No a las maternidades secuestradas (No to kidnapped motherhood) from 2012 was also included, along with a reactivation of the work made for the exhibition and more specifically addressed issues of motherhood central to working artists and cultural workers (fig. 7).

There were also physical interventions in the gallery space by a number of individuals. Chilean artist and art historian Julia Antivilo led a tour/performance dressed in key texts from the Pinto mi Raya archive (fig. 8). Antivilo guided visitors through the space and invited them to read from selected archival texts at various locations accompanied by music and song.[17] Other tours were given by Mayer’s husband, artist Víctor Lerma, and actor Marisol Gassé performing as Madame Pedie Curie. Mayer reflected this aspect of the exhibition, stating, “What I like most about these tours with special guests is that they are commentaries on the work of one artist, from that of another. There is symbiosis.”[18] The ongoing and prominent inclusion of works and collaborations with other, often younger, artists disrupted the generational divides often asserted by exhibitions of feminist histories, instead suggesting the ongoing relevance of the forms and proposals instigated by Mayer. The space was continuously activated by voices other than Mayer’s own, which itself was a demonstration of her practice.

Fig. 6. Mónica Mayer, Lo Normal (On Normality), 1978. Photo courtesy of Mónica Mayer.

Fig. 7. Activation of Una maternidad secuestrada es... in the exhibition Si tiene dudas… pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica Mayer, 2016. Photo courtesy of Karen Cordero Reiman.

Fig. 8. Julia Antivilo performs with documents from Mayer’s archive during a tour of the exhibition, 30 June 2016. Photo courtesy of Karen Cordero Reiman.

 

Mayer’s body was also integrated into the space through her overwhelming physical presence in the museum. She and Cordero Reiman put together a rich parallel program that ran throughout the six-month duration of the show. The program included the aforementioned guided tours, lectures, and conferences, but also actions and interventions that invited corporeal engagement with Mayer, her work, and the space itself.[19] Mayer personally gave forty tours of the show, which she titled Si tiene dudas… El Tour (When in Doubt… the Tour), a reactivation of her and Lerma’s Performance parásito that allowed her to converse with a diverse range of visitors (fig. 9).

The parallel program invited collaborations with different collectives that drew tenderness together with activist and artistic issues. El Apapacho Estético (Esthetic Caress) was a performance with Las Brigadas de Belleza Itinerante (Itinerant Beauty Brigades), a collective of stylists and make-up artists who volunteer their time and services to economically and socially vulnerable citizens of Mexico City, led by Diego Sexto.[20] The event took over multiple spaces of the museum: art historian Alejandra Gorráez Puga invited open conversation on the issue of precarity in the arts in the courtyard, and Mayer and members of the Brigadas transformed the interior of the museum into a full-scale beauty salon, offering make-overs to those in attendance (fig. 10). Participants took before and after photos where they were encouraged to reflect on their experience with precarity and what could be done to combat it in the art world. Throughout the day, the event also invited a larger dialogue surrounding aesthetics that dissolved disciplinary and class barriers and engaged many of the questions raised in Mayer’s work in terms of constructions of femininity, the social role of artists, and the potential for art to create community and healing.

The final action of the parallel program had been scheduled in advance; however, Mayer did not know what she was going to do until the final weeks of the exhibition. She decided to bring the focus to El Tendedero to honor the incredible participation of the public in the work. She originally had the idea that she and workshop members would read the responses to the questions asked by El Tendedero aloud as a finale to the piece. Mayer tested this out a week before the final day and, after ten minutes of reading responses, was overcome by the violence, and overwhelmed with wanting to comfort those who had written their stories. This caused her to propose the performance, El Jornada final (The Last Day), be centered on actions of healing. She invited the groups Tejiendo Cómplices and Lana Desastre, two activist collectives that use textiles as a means to combat gender-based violence, to stay in the gallery space for the final day of the show (fig. 11).[21] They invited the public, which included strangers but also key feminist activist and artistic accomplices, to discuss these the issues at the forefront of El Tendedero, and thus contemporary society, while collectively weaving small patches that covered the wounds represented in the stories attached to El Tendedero (fig. 12). Mayer said of this action of care, “And there we stayed all day. Weaving or learning to weave. Talking. Sharing stories. Reading answers. Interacting with the public. Laughing. Hugging.”[22] Mayer’s efforts to detail her experiences on the internet, via Si tiene dudas… pregunte. El blog, which she diligently updated with eighty-two texts and photographic documentation spanning 2015–2017, are the main source of documentation for these events. Despite their centrality to the exhibition, they were unable to be included in the catalogue because they did not exist beforehand.

Fig. 9. A guided tour of Si tiene dudas... pregunte with Mónica Mayer and María Laura Rosa, 2016. Photo courtesy of Karen Cordero Reiman.

Fig. 10. El Apapacho estêtico, 2016. Photo courtesy of Karen Cordero Reiman.

Fig. 11. Knitting circle as part of the activations for El Jornada final (The Final Day) of Si tiene dudas… pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica Mayer with the participation of the collective Lana Desastre, July 31, 2016. Photo courtesy of Karen Cordero Reiman.

Fig. 12. Activations for El Jornada final (The Final Day) of Si tiene dudas… pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica Mayer with the participation of the collective Lana Desastre, July 31, 2016. Photo courtesy of Karen Cordero Reiman.

 

These multifaceted interventions marked the exhibition as a continuously active and activist space. The juxtapositions made on the walls of the exhibition disturbed any traditional understanding of meaning as static or caged within a particular category in space, time, or medium to instead assert their continued ability to communicate new and different messages to viewers. Mayer and the number of actors who were invited into the space allowed for deeper and durational engagement with the local community in ways that broke down hierarchies often inherent in the museum audience’s experience. This subsequently asserted that Mayer herself was not simply a subject of study, but an active producer of new work, even in the midst of the exhibition itself. This was a conscious effort made by Mayer and Cordero Reiman to fight against the potential for the museum to become a “mausoleum,” which did not “happen naturally” but came about “because we are feminists.”[23] Mayer explained further that, “Karen and I conceived of the exhibition as a means, not an end. In other words, it is an action, in terms of Hannah Arendt, whose goal is to kick-start processes. It is a political act.”[24] The retrocollective was not a backward look, but instead an example of reimagining works that are emblematic of a feminist life in art as a means to look forward to unforeseen futures. Curator Sol Henaro, who was involved in bringing the exhibition to life at MUAC, asserted the show had an impact on the institution, its staff, researchers, and curators. She considered the exhibition as part of a series of events that brought gendered perspectives into the institution, helping to build trust in MUAC’s place in visibilizing these issues.[25]

In relation to her proposals for a virtual feminist museum, Pollock argued that “if we approach artworks as propositions, as representations and as texts, that is as sites for the production of meanings and of affects by means of their visual and plastic operations between each other and for viewer/readers, they cease to be mere objects to be classified by aesthetic evaluation or idealized authorship.”[26] Pollock’s words here cohere with Cordero Reiman’s approach to curatorial practice, which she explains is related to her “ideas about writing and textuality, conceiving the exhibition as a kind of multisensorial text in space.”[27] Cordero Reiman, drawing from German literary theorist Wolfgang Iser, understands the text as “actualization in the process of reading, in which there are ‘hiatuses’ that allow the readers (or public in this case) to participate on the basis of their own imagination and experiences that they bring to the process (similar to the idea of co-creation by the public in conceptual art).”[28] She also links this approach to writing/curating with Cuban anthropologist Ruth Behar, who suggested, “If one writes vulnerably, the readers respond vulnerably; this unsettles authoritarian, hierarchical ideas and habits of discourse, making room for other modes of affective and corporeal expression and involvement.”[29] This exhibition provided a situated encounter with Mayer’s life and works understood as cultural practices, rather than historicized objects, and, rather than offering definitive answers, used the works to propose questions and produce new, co-constructed meanings in the present. In doing so, the institution was transformed into a space for durational, embodied, and often vulnerable engagement in ways that fostered community and encouraged collaborative action beyond the institution.

Perhaps it is the very nature of feminist artistic practices, their often collaborative, performative, intimate, and activist qualities, that inherently provide feminist curators with the tools to transform institutions from the inside. The works are already asserting a critical space for intimacy, vulnerability, and doubt into art historical discourses. Feminist theoretical and activist practices supply us with the courage to name our uncertainties, to collaboratively work with and through our doubts, to harness that vulnerability as a central component of feminist praxis. I struggled with my own doubts while writing this article, in the midst of a global pandemic, social and political crises, and the demands of my own institution. When I discussed this with Cordero Reiman, she suggested, drawing from US-American writer and activist Adrienne Maree Brown, to “think of writing for someone you love, rather than for an abstract or hierarchical entity (journal, institution).”[30] This reminded me that the act of writing, researching, teaching, and curating from a space of vulnerability and collaborative conversation is itself a feminist action, a working towards building feminist institutions. It reminded me to always, when in doubt… ask.

Erin L. McCutcheon is an art historian of postmodern and contemporary art whose research and writing focus on the histories of Latin American art and feminist artistic practices. She received a PhD in art history from Tulane University in 2021 and is currently an Assistant Professor of Art History at Lycoming College. Her research has appeared in H-ART, Nierika, Artelogie, ERRATA, The Journal of Curatorial Studies, and the catalogue for Si tiene dudas… pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica Mayer (Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, 2016), for which she served as a curatorial research assistant. Her current book project examines the intersections between art, the women’s movement, and motherhood in post-1968 Mexico City and has been supported by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.