Andrea Bowers Lecture

It’s a shame that someone so technically gifted reverts to such clichéd ideas and imagery in her work. Andrea Bowers creates several types of work, relying on drawings, video, and printmaking to further her support of feminism, labor unions, and open immigration.
She first embarked on a description of the work she was constructing around the activist Emma Goldman, a radical feminist at the turn of the century involved in distribution of contraception to women and ‘free love.’ She focuses on a series of love letters collected by the University of California-Berkeley, and painstakingly recreates sections of the letters in graphite, down to the tinting of the paper from age and other damage. Using the same mediums, she redraws photographs of Emma Goldman, presenting them actual size on larger sheets of white or light paper.
While I appreciate her aesthetic, her interest in a revolutionary anarchist feminist seems both outdated and overdone. Bowers speaks with evident passion about the life of this women, whose sexual affairs with a man named Ben Reitman generated a series of letters comprised of sexual themes interspersed with coded violence for their anarchist motives. I just seem to miss the purpose of her project- what is she looking to recreate in her process by piecing together these letters and images in graphite on paper?
Another project she designed was more conceptual; it involved a washing machine that dumped the dirty water it produced into the piping in the men’s room. Bowers seemed practically elated at this project, stating that it was one of her favorites.
Seriously? Lady, come on. We get it. Men suck and represent all of the oppression and torture that women have experienced and continue to experience in contemporary times. And by pointing out this disparage with dirty water, we are opening their eyes to the many injustices in the world. As opposed to say, actually excelling in the workforce or something. Please.
Then, in an a flowering example of artistic ignorance, she discussed a project she created in both the United States and in France where she took wrapping paper and printed existing campaign slogans on the sheets. I’m not going to waste my time outlining the theoretical issues with the piece, since it’s widely acceptable in contemporary artistic circles to critique economics and capitalism without being able to draw a simple supply and demand curve. In this particular project, however, her decision to use a medium other than graphite took away the only interesting element of her work; the technical eloquence she obviously possesses.
Perhaps, not all is lost, however. The last piece she talked about in my presence was based on the notion of ‘radical hospitality.’ She did drawings to accompany a video piece about a woman who spent over a year living in a Chicago church sanctuary in an effort to stall her deportation out of the United States. “What if hospitality was the way we handled our borders?” Bowers asked. The piece was eloquent in its simplicity, questioning the perceptions we have of people and their ability, or inability to move globally based on their political and economic involvement.
Andrea Bowers represents an unusual technical talent whose political obsession is a prime example of focusing on work whose subject matter has predominantly been explored by the art world. Her dedication to her subject matter professed the occasional glimmer of originality, however, which may add sophistication to her later work.