Installation view of Anna Mavromatis’ ” Romancing the Myth,” at Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston. Photo: Carolina Rios Robles Kelleher
Delicately constructed paper and cloth dresses are suspended from the ceiling and surrounded by vinyl wall text that offers a slew of sexist turns-of-phrase so often directed toward women: “Stay still. Smile,” “Pretend you are happy,” “Do as you are told!” The genteel dresses are handmade and the phrases are selected by Anna Mavromatis for her current exhibition, Romancing the Myth, at Barbara Davis Gallery. The two groupings of things (dresses and text) might indeed suggest two sides of the same repressive coin that constructs a normative or mythic “woman” — the subject is, from the one side, cultivated through fashion as a demonstration of civility and, from the other, repressed through shaming as a rejection of incivility. By presenting these two elements, Mavromatis challenges the vicissitudes of patriarchal repression, and more than that her work highlights two important tactics of feminist resistance: satire and coalition building.
In fact, satire is signaled early in the exhibition: upon entering the gallery, one sees a grouping of sculptures displayed on decorative shelves on the wall. Each are an amalgamation of found materials (a root stem, a devil’s claw seed pod), paper folded structures (voluminous geometric forms), and antique books (one authored by Peter Pindar, another by Madame de Rémusat). Pindar’s book is particularly noteworthy here, as the 18th century English author was himself a satirist (this was the pen name of John Wolcot). In fact, just opposite this sculptural work, another piece of — this time a page of — Pindar’s writing is used in a dress titled open book. The text is extracted from Pindar’s 1778 A Supplicating Epistle to the Reviewers and satirically begs for recognition so that he may eat as well as the literary critics reading his work. Mavromatis manipulates the cutout page to form part of the waistline bustle of a handmade dress, and as a result Pindar’s text is transformed into a less sensical version of itself; it becomes decorative rather than textual. There is a turn here where the distanced criticality of satire, at least of Pindar’s satire, starts to be undermined by the decorative demands of Mavromatis’s design. Yet, this transformation of the man author’s words into the woman artist’s decoration is itself a satire of the ways women’s work — and here Mavromatis highlights decoration in general and sewing in particular — is so often subordinated. More than that the collision of these two forms of satire might provoke one to ask why satire has been less recognized as a broad tactic of feminist literary form.
Anna Mavromatis, “open book.” Photo: Carolina Rios Robles Kelleher
In these and other works, including the wall vinyl, satire challenges the ways “woman” is constructed and how these normative constructions continue to have impact. In several dresses the artist uses magazine advertisements — Moncler and others or an interior decorating advertisement for a “Luxe Heathered Wool Rug by Ben Soleimani” — to signal the ways media discursively builds the idea of woman through the institution of beauty standards and the emphasis on domesticity. That is to say, the literal transformation of advertisements into clothing parodies the ways desire and subjectivity are produced in gendered terms throughout mass media.
Something distinct happens when Mavromatis replaces Pindar and advertising images with a collection of important feminist figures in another dress, titled reading list. In this artwork Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, and Zadie Smith, among others form part of the garment’s bodice. Do these diminutive unlabeled portraits jump out of the dress and direct a viewer/reader to their writing (as the title seems to suggest), or do they fade into the overall form of the garment to serve as decoration (as Pindar’s text does)? Of course this is a false opposition: Mavromatis’s reading list does something different — it does not so much turn away from satire, as it merges satire with coalition building. In fact, the artist’s choice to include Smith’s portrait in the dress points to this very tension: in the author’s groundbreaking novel White Teeth, for instance, Smith constructs fundamentalist characters, such as Millat Iqbal and Hortense Bowden, who are subjected to satirical derision in the novel. By including Smith, then, Mavromatis highlights a fellow feminist satirist and thus emphasizes the importance of this critical tactic; at the same time, the artist also builds a larger group of influential feminists with whom one might build solidarity.
Anna Mavromatis, “reading list.” Photo: Carolina Rios Robles Kelleher
Indeed, Mavromatis’s work is part satire and part communal insofar as both struggle against a restrictive idea of woman. In another dress, banned!, Mavromatis similarly includes a range of important figures via book covers — Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, and many more – and in in good company she uses cyanotype to reproduce several images of feminist organizing — the National Woman’s Party and the Woman’s Journal and Suffrage News, for instance. Taken together, these collections push towards a collaborative and positive mode of constructing subjectivity.
Detail of a work by Anna Mavromatis. Photo: Carolina Rios Robles Kelleher
Mavromatis makes the dresses out of a range of materials that further evoke the interpersonal. Much of the artist’s work derives from her own impressive technical skills — especially in cyanotype and monotype — but these are sometimes combined with materials culled from her mother’s linen heirlooms. Relatedly Mavromatis uses coffee filters throughout the exhibition (and indeed her entire oeuvre), which as with the heirlooms provoke a sense of familial connection that derives from her experiences listening to storytelling, secret sharing, and communing in general that took place so often around a pot of coffee in her family. The visceral feelings of friends, family, and memory called up by the coffee filters and heirlooms provoke something not opposite to satire — a distanced critique — but perhaps its necessary ally — a bodily sense of connection.
Romancing the Myth is on view until October 19 at Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston.
Philip Kelleher
Further reading: Elizabeth Hedrick, “Robin Morgan, Jane Alpert, and Feminist Satire,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 33, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 123-150.
Zadie Smith, White Teeth: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2000).
