Heresies’ Heresies: Collaboration and Dispute in a Feminist Publication on Art and Politics

Abstract

In the 1970s magazines, journals and periodicals constituted an alternative public sphere for second wave feminism. These publications provide an index-and at times the only documentation-of the activities of the women's art movement as well as its many iterations and divisions. This article addresses this imbalance, arguing that Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (1977-1992) was exemplar of the radical political challenge feminism posed to the art world and culture more broadly. Launched in 1977 by the Heresies mother collective, which included Joan Braderman, Mary Beth Edelson, Lucy R. Lippard, Harmony Hammond and May Stevens among others, the magazine had thematic issues edited by different collectives and comprised of material from an open call. Content ranged from poetry, to academic essays, to artworks both original and reproduced. This article considers the collaborative process of producing the magazine, which attempted to be inclusive, but in fact came to mirror the divisions-as well as political investments-of the broader women's movement, alongside the dissensus the publication provoked and attempted to confront. The activist Ti-Grace Atkinson is once reported to have said that 'every revolution', including the Women's Liberation Movement, 'needed a mimeo machine'. (Brownmiller 1999: 67) The ability to make ad-hoc publications was a revolutionary leap in technology, and politically revolutionary in breaking open the limits of public discourse and print culture. The step into print, was a step into the distribution and control of information, dangerous, only its challenge to hegemony. (Fraser 1990) Newly-politicised women exploited this copier technology, circulating information about women and women's organising beyond the purview of the small group meetings that characterised the decentralised structure of the movement. Information sheets and newsletters, published fortnightly or monthly, were a practical means of organising by letting women know what was happening when, and what had already happened. These sheets soon began to include evaluations of events, then opinion pieces, then editors' remarks, then letters to the editor, features and quickly their page numbers mushroomed. For artists and artworks these ad hoc publications were a means of circulating information and reproductions of artworks that otherwise remained underexhibited and little-seen. Print provided a channel for connection and dialogue, and now looking back, this print provides an index of activism, of sisterhood and of conflict.