Andrea Bowers

Andrea Bowers
Motivated by a clash of situationist, punk-rock, and populist notions, Andrea Bowers’ work straddles activist, political, and feminist art. Her artist’s talk began with her most recent works, dealing with a combination of video and drawing presentational mediums. She is interested in both historical and contemporary issues which is apparent in her work “An Eloquent Woman,” a piece centered on the life and letters of a feminist activist named Emma Goldman. This work is exemplary of Bowers’ fascination with the personal in tandem with the political and “working with problematic, crazy, social lives.” Through a woman named Candice, Emma’s “archivist,” she creates a work anchored around interactions between women that have never met and yet are connected through these very intangible and yet intimate relationships. The love letters written by Emma Goldman and her homeless activist lover, Ben, serve as the source materials behind this multimedia work. Slightly salacious missives are filled with codes and exchanged between the lovers over the course of nine years. They unearth Emma’s belief in two things that cannot seem to coexist peacefully: non-possessive love and violence. Bowers’ transforms her letters through audio narration paired with a series of minimalist drawings taken from Emma’s letters. Here, Bowers’ is examining the history of “gesture” and is inserting her own feminist “gesture[s]” into Emma’s letters.
Bowers’ moved on to show a video of footage of the Haymarket Square riot that took place here in Chicago in the late 1900s. A riot led by the working class that resulted in a couple martyred deaths, the Haymarket Square incident provides insight into Emma’s thoughts and perhaps a little about Bowers’ own fascination with political activism. Bowers’ created photo-realist renderings of Goldman radical lecturing about birth control to both men and upper-class women in N.Y.C. before it became a legalized substance for distribution. This daring, bold, and in-your-face tactic employed by Goldman seems to be what Bowers’ is trying to capture, study, and admire in her drawings.
Her practice jumps to less photo-realist work in an installation of political posters she spray-painted on gift-wrapping paper. Donning a rotation of twenty-six or twenty-seven different slogans, each poster is uniquely made with stencils and is mounted along a wall. For Bowers, she was formally trying to examine the transformation of the book format to the wall, and “how [it] becomes a painting,” and how the sculptural aspect changes. In the corner of the same installation, she exhibited a flowery, wreath-like sculpture coupled with wire and pro-choice feminist pins, in an attempt to “undermine [the idea of] the woman and flowers.” On the table, was a letter stating “we want more than bread and roses.” Another facet of the exhibition included a weekly delivery of brioche to workers unions in France. At first, the gesture was met and turned away with skepticism, but after building a closer relationship through conversation, her “public practice project” came to be more accepted.
With “Free Store,” Bowers’ moved further into public art projects when she collaborated with another artist to set up a free store to benefit Laton, a destitute town in California. In order to enter the exhibition, participants were required to bring in clothes and other objects for donation. The exhibit included stations for cleaning, sewing, organization and was ever-changing as objects accumulated and were refurbished.
In “An Act of Radical Hospitality,” Bowers’ entertains the question, “what if hospitality was the way we handled our borders?” The work is derived from the experience had by a woman Elvira Arellano, who was escaping deportation by maintaining holy sanctuary at her local church. Through a series of video where a painstakingly slow zoom focuses in on the gazes held by Elvira and her son, the work all descends into a mess of questions about the gaze, power, immigration, nationality, and sanctuary. Bower’s presentation Elvira’s act of desperation dissolves into this long, monotonous, and silent work that mirrors Elvira’s year of entrapment and solitude.
Bowers’ also took an interest in the AIDS memorial quilt and documented the women on the staff responsible for its assembly, repair, and curation. Like some of her other practice, this video installation following these staffers caters to her interest in stories that are told over a long period of time. Though Andrea Bowers’ talk itself was not difficult to follow (in fact, she was quite dynamic), I found her work to be a bit disjointed. Because her interests are very diverse, I found myself I wanting more of an in depth study or a stronger follow-through with her subjects. I also wanted to know more about her investment in photo-realist drawings and to better understand their relevance in their appearance in her work. Of course I am not saying that engaging in a lot of different subject matters is incorrect, only that I wish that I would have left with a more concrete grasp on her position as an artist concerned with both the past and the present and her possible role as the in between.