LET'S NOT FORGET TOMMORROW.

The Centre of Contemporary Art's conference in Glasgow -Caledonia, 'Subject in Process', was a very well attended event devoted to the question of whether 'artists could be considered to have an obligation to connect with events in the real world.' It began with a screening of Town Bloody Hall (1969), an explosive film by D.A. Pennebaker in which Norman Mailer debates women's liberation with Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Susan Sontag and others.This was followed by a series of presentations in the morning by Sarah Lowndes on the history of feminism in recent Glasgow art circles and Sam Ainsley's personal account of the trials of being a female artist and art school employee. After lunch and a series of films, Adele Fitzpatrick looked back at the history of the Glasgow Women's Library and Women in Profile (Adele's presentation will be posted on the GWL website later this week).

Kathryn Elkin concluded the presentations with a talk that began with reference to a recent proposal to Transmission Gallery's AGM. Kathryn moved on to place this event and the whole day within the wider context of an essay by Nancy Fraser, 'Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History'. Originally published in New Left Review 56 (2009), the essay looks at second-wave feminism concluding,

The point, of course, is not to drop the struggle against traditional male authority, which remains a necessary moment of feminist critique. It is, rather, to disrupt the easy passage from such critique to its neoliberal double—above all by reconnecting struggles against personalized subjection to the critique of a capitalist system which, while promising liberation, actually replaces one mode of domination by another....

I am suggesting, then, that this is a moment in which feminists should think big. Having watched the neoliberal onslaught instrumentalize our best ideas, we have an opening now in which to reclaim them. In seizing this moment, we might just bend the arc of the impending transformation in the direction of justice—and not only with respect to gender.

A full draft of this essay is available online here.

(stolen from CCA Blog. They do good work. They do it right)