British novelist Jeanette Winterson in Conversation with Patricia Allmer

Participants

JW = Jeanette Winterson
PA = Patricia Allmer

Recording starts

PA: My name’s Patricia Allmer. I’m the Curator of Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism at Manchester Art Gallery and the exhibition will open on 26th September and I’m here with Jeanette Winterson. How did you like the exhibition?

JW: It’s a fantastic exhibition and completely unexpected. I didn’t know what I’d find. I knew about Lee Miller, I knew about Frida Kahlo, I knew about Leonora Carrington, and I think lots of people will recognise the Meret Oppenheim furry cup and saucer because it’s an iconic image from surrealism. But I had no idea that so many women had been working within the surrealist movement over so many decades and, indeed, been really entirely lost to us. And it’s only really feminism in the seventies, isn’t it, that’s brought those women back in and we can now see the quality and the range of their work, which is extraordinary. It’s not that we don’t know about these women because they’re no good. It’s because, as usual, the male history of this period in art has written them out.

PA: Yeah, I think it’s really important to show that these are great twentieth century artists and it’s really important to bring them back into the public mind. It’s also important because a lot of the artworks, they start to disintegrate and we are really on the verge of losing this history.

JW: That’s been a problem hasn’t it with a lot of women’s work, that it’s almost self disappearing in the way that women get excised from the history books but their work also disappears.

PA: So there is a real danger here to lose the history and it’s our history as a society but it’s also a history of us as women and this is really important.

JW: And I think there’s still a common myth isn’t there, that while women are now accepted more as writers, as visual artists, as sculptors, as installation artists, it’s still seen as a little bit more unusual and it’s as though women aren’t quite good enough to break into these male spheres where the real creative work is going on.

PA: Do you think it has changed in recent years or in recent times that women artists and writers, it’s easier for them?

JW: I think it’s getting better. When you look at Tracey Emin, the bed or the tent or you look at Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture House, which was demolished on the day it won the Turner Prize (extraordinary story), you think these women Tracey and Rachel do; they’re coming out of this space. These women here, the surrealist women working here, have made it possible for the women artists that we know now of our generation really to get the kind of recognition, the kind of true status that they ought to have.

But even there, people still say ‘Tracey Emin, maybe she’s such a showman, is she the real thing?’ Which is extraordinary and I think there’s a lot of misogyny and gender within those kinds of comments, which is certainly what the women surrealists had to put up with, didn’t they? That they were somehow not as creative, that their work was much less important and didn’t deserve to be written about. I think it’s not until the seventies, is it, that we really do discover these women again. I was looking at all these fantastic images of women’s bodies, of women photographing themselves and other women – so beautiful and also so subversive and so provocative. And now we’re in a world where the average girl, 16 year old girl, will go on the street and she’ll see thousands of images every day of distorted and airbrushed and transformed images of herself and how she’s supposed to be. So an exhibition like this cuts right back into those questions of how do we see ourselves, how are we viewed and how do we represent ourselves in the larger world?

PA: I find it very interesting, for example, in this gallery where women artists represent other women artists, how different it is to the representation of these iconic twentieth century muses. So we really get women being shown with their artworks. Strong women like, for example, with the Frida Kahlo representation, Kahlo is so often represented as the suffering victim, always in love with Diego who she lost.

JW: Who was the real artist.

PA: And who was the real artist, yeah, and when you look at Lola Alvarez’s photographs of Frida Kahlo, this woman is not suffering, this women is a very strong woman. I think, again, how the women realists are representing each other very much shows this strong side and a strong woman’s side.

JW: Yes, you’re right, it does. They’re seen as co-creators and they respect one another.

PA: Yeah, a lot of respect is there for each other’s artworks and, again, they knew about each other’s artworks. We don’t much at all how much these artists knew about each other. Why not? Why haven’t we researched this until now? It’s really, really important.

JW: Yes.

PA: Why are we always so fixated on whether Carrington was Max Ernst’s girlfriend. These relationship things always come into the foreground, how the women artists relate to male artists. You just have to look at the biographies of women artists, there’s always this ‘oh, she was in a relationship with somebody else’, whereas if you look at male artists’ biographies, they are about the art and which periods they went through.

JW: And, sadly, that hasn’t changed and you still find the whole interest when women who are doing creative work now are interviewed or written about, it’s always who they’re having sex with, who’s the male in the picture? I love it here also that we’ve got so many images of angels. We’ve got the Angel of Anarchy as we walk in through the door and we’ve got the Angel of Mercy, who doesn’t look very merciful to me, to end the exhibition. We’ve got the Celestial Prison, the angel in the bird cage and then there are other angels in the photographs.

I think this is fascinating because I was thinking about Virginia Woolf’s essay, the Angel in the House at the beginning of the twentieth century, coming from the whole representational male idea of the angel as the presiding deity. And that’s really a very constricted, confined sugary angel and here you’ve got angels who are exploding out in their true form, what you call them as angels as messengers moving between two worlds. And that seems to me what these women surrealists are doing. They’re moving so deftly and swiftly and lightly, cleverly, playfully, wittily between two worlds – the world of the male gaze and also their own sense of themselves as women and as creators. So it’s a questioning exhibition because I think as women, not just as individuals but as a gender, we are still in transition. We don’t know how to see ourselves.

PA: No, we don’t.

JW: We don’t really know how to represent ourselves. We don’t really even know who we are. It’s not finished by a long way.

PA: And that’s good.

JW: Yeah.

PA: I think it’s brilliant that we don’t know and that we explore.

JW: I think it is.

PA: And that we have to explore.

JW: So I think the destabilised self, which has always been a problem for women, can also be a strength because in that destabilisation, there comes many other possibilities, providing we’re not immediately locked in by male or societal ideas of who we should be and how we are. So what I find here is not so much a life philosophy, but a series of questions which allow me to question further where we are now in 2009 in our world as women.

PA: And what do you think? Where are we in 2009 as women?

JW: This is the moment when we have to fight again. This isn’t the moment to rest. There’s a lot of rubbish talked about how feminism is finished and we don’t need it any more. And you look at an exhibition like this, then you go out and you look at the bombarding of images of women everywhere and in the women’s magazines, at the endless distortion and airbrushing and women still struggling to make their mark as creators, and you think, no, a hundred years is really not enough. We’re going to need the thousands of years that male artists have enjoyed before we can really be sure who we are and what we want to say about ourselves.

Recording ends 8:02