Conversation with Mary Beth Edelson, New York, 2003

In her studio in New York, Mary Beth Edelson starts the conversation by showing her recent work, a portable traveling altar providing solace for those on the move. She highlights another work relating to the aesthetics of geopolitical conflicts. The interview further delves into the installation Forgiving, which invites an audience to express what troubles them in relation to the theme of forgiveness. Thinking especially of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she explains, she was interested in face-to-face meetings in public spaces “because that's where the real changes occur.” Edelson notes that she works with a number of artistic strategies such as humor and perversity to subvert discourses otherwise co-opted by patriarchy. Her recent monograph features conversations with Nancy Spiro, Miriam Schapiro, Yvette Brackman, Janet Henry, and Carolee Schneemann, all artists she worked with at A.I.R. Gallery and within the Women's Action Coalition and the body art movement. Grappling with questions of intergenerational feminist solidarity, she reflects on the unfinished business of the feminist movement. A particularly difficult issue is the discussion of the anti-essentialism argument that emerged in the 80s. According to Edelson, this argument “really demonized and stigmatized a number of feminist artists who were activists and who were the early pioneers.” Edelson speaks about her own awakening as a political subject among the immigrants of East Chicago, and how she learned from the civil rights movement. “The feminist movement owes a great deal to the civil rights movement,” she explains, “because I'm not the only person who took that experience and then was able to apply it to the feminist movement.” From this starting point, she recounts, “I began to focus, strategically, as we would now say, on how I could get the message across … I began dealing with my own body.” She describes her first exhibition, 22 Others, as a breakthrough in this context.