Ulrike Müller
What does it mean to make feminist history a little silly? For her contribution to the Brooklyn Museum’s “Raw/Cooked” series (a yearlong string of exhibitions dedicated to Brooklyn-based artists), Ulrike Müller handled her personal and political affinities with a refreshingly light touch. Born in Austria and living in New York since 2002, Müller often works collaboratively, coediting the queer journal LTTR, for instance. This exhibition marked the latest in her series of “Herstory Inventory” installations, for which she bands together with like-minded artists to reimagine entries in a droll stock list she found at the Lesbian Herstory Archives: one-line descriptions of images appearing on the hundreds of T-shirts in the collection produced from the 1970s onward. (To wit: “abstract design with clitoris in the center,” “mermaid with wings holding a labrys,” “prancing unicorn,” “A naked woman riding a spiral graphic of some kind.”) For the project’s first iteration, in 2009, she enlisted the help of Nancy Brooks Brody, Emma Hedditch, Zoe Leonard, and MPA to produce a five-channel audio installation based on the list. Then, for “Herstory Inventory: 100 Feminist Drawings by 100 Artists,” realized first at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, and again here, she distributed one hundred of the list’s entries to more artists and asked them to create drawings.
In case you didn’t know, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, housed since 1993 in a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, collects books, journals, photos, films, posters, and other materials “relevant to the lives and experiences of Lesbians.” In the various manifestations of Müller’s project, the list serves to outline a history of the lesbian-rights movement and form a visual imaginary of its publics. For this incarnation, Müller also included twenty-four historic objects from the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection based on one of five motifs—rainbows, triangles, axes, hands, and flowers—and these, in turn, produced another level of dialogue and exchange. Müller installed the drawings and objects in the elevator lobbies on the second through fifth floors of the beaux arts building, allowing the works to permeate the entire institution like a strong perfume.
This rhizomatic, horizontal schema of “Herstory Inventory” not only updated the visual imaginary depicted on the T-shirts but also extended that reenvisioning to the museum itself. By juxtaposing objects from the institution’s collection with the Herstory drawings, the show prompted visitors to view the collection and, by extension, the museum itself in a different light. A multitude of latent subjectivities suddenly presented themselves, as a familiar space took on new sensibilities. This, in turn, aided viewers in elucidating abstract notions about the ways in which official and unofficial histories are written, or about the fact that dominant viewpoints are usually taken for granted. (As Müller stated in a recent interview, one of the aims of the project is to spatialize “problems and questions as something that can be related to or talked about.”) Ultimately, the show’s success hinged upon two factors: a reimagining of a previous generation’s visual culture, and the transformation of the museum into a common realm, a space that brings hegemonic and non-hegemonic views into contact without fully endorsing either one.
Indeed, one of the most touching aspects of the show was the specific interactions between the historic objects and the drawings, summoning affective links across time. (The installation of Zoe Leonard’s An Iris, 2012, a dead iris taped to a sheet of paper, near an austere 1875 watercolor of a calla lily by Fidelia Bridges was but one resonant example of a new work bringing questions about subjectivity and sexuality to an older work.) And let’s not forget the numerous renderings of labryses and labia, which kept reminding us of the 1970s milieu on which this project is based, of the shapes and forms that once denoted political ideas but that today may feel stale. “Herstory Inventory” showed us how such images and icons are mutable, how they flourish and perish just as movements do, and how without a little humor a movement is already dead.