discrimination still rampant in a patriarchal,
money-oriented society.

Most art being shown now has little to do
with any woman’s experience, in part because
women—rich ones as “patrons,” others as
decorators and “home-makers” —are in charge
of the private sphere, while men identify more
easily with public art—art that has become
public through economic validation (the mil-
lion-dollar Rembrandt). Private art is often seen
as mere ornament; public art is associated with
monuments and money, with “high” art and
its containers, including unwelcoming white-
walled galleries and museums with classical
courthouse architecture. Even the graffiti art-
ists, whose work was unsuccessfully transferred
from subways to art galleries, were all men,
concerned with facades, with having their
names in spray paint, in lights, in museums. . . .

Private art is visible only to intimates. | sus-
pect the reason so few women “folk” artists
work outdoors in large scale (like Simon Rodia’s
Watts Towers and other “naives and visionaries”
with their cement and bottles) is not only be-
cause men aspire to erections and know how to
use the necessary tools, but because women
can and must assuage these same creative urges
inside the house, with the pink glass swan as an
element in their own works of art—the living
room or kitchen. In the art world the situation is
doubly paralleled. Women'’s art until recently
was rarely seen in public and all artists are
voluntarily “women” because of the social atti-
tudes mentioned above; the art world is so small
that it is “private.”

Just as the living room is enclosed by the
building it is in, art and artist are firmly im-
prisoned by the culture which supports them.
Artists claiming to work for themselves alone,
and not for any audience at all, are passively
accepting the upper-middle-class audience of
the internal art world. This is compounded by
the fact that to be middle-class is to be passive,
to live with the expectation of being taken care
of and entertained. But art should be a con-
sciousness-raiser; it partakes of and should fuse
the private and the public spheres. It should be
able to reintegrate the personal without being
satisfied by the merely personal. One good test
is whether or not it communicates, and then, of
course, what and how it communicates. If it
doesn’t communicate it may just not be very
good art from anyone’s point of view; or it may
be that the artist is not even aware of the needs
of others, or simply doesn’t care.

For there is a need out there, a need vaguely
satisfied at the moment by “schlock.”> And it
seems that one of the basic tenets of the femin-
ist arts should be a reaching out from the private
sphere to transform that “artificial art” and to
more fully satisfy that need. For the art-world
artist has come to consider her/his private
needs paramount, and has too often forgotten

about those of the audience, any audience.
Work that communicates to a dangerous num-
ber of people is derogatorily called a “crowd
pleaser.” This is a blatantly classist attitude,
taking for granted that most people are by na-
ture incapable of understanding good art (i.e.,
upper-class or quality art). At the same time,
much ado is made about art-educational theo-
ries that claim to “teach people to see” (con-
sider the political implications of this notion)
and muffle all issues by stressing the “universal-
ity” of great art.

It may be that at the moment the possibilities
are slim for a middle-class art world’s under-
standing or criticism of the little art we see that
reflects working-class cultural values. Perhaps
our current responsibility lies in humanizing our
own activities so that they will communicate
more effectively with all women. Hopefully we
will aspire to more than women'’s art flooding
the museum and gallery circuit. Perhaps a femi-
nist art will only emerge when we become whol-
ly responsible for our own work, for what be-
comes of it, who sees it, and who is nourished
by it. For a feminist artist, whatever her style,
the prime audience at this time is other women.
So far, we have tended to be satisfied with com-
municating with those women whose social
experience is close to ours. This is natural
enough, since this is where we will get our
greatest support, and we need support in taking
this risk of trying to please women, knowing
that we are almost certain to displease men in
the process. In addition, it is embarrassing to
talk openly about the class system which divides
us, hard to do so without sounding more bour-
geois than ever in the implications of superiority
and inferiority inherent in such discussions
(where the working class is as often considered
superior as the middle class).

A book of essays called Class and Feminism
written by The Furies, a lesbian feminist collec-
tive, makes clear that from the point of view of
working-class women, class is a definite prob-
lem within the women’s movement. As Nancy
Myron observes, middle-class women:

can intellectualize, politicize, accuse, abuse
and contribute money in order not to deal with
their own classism. Even if they admit that
class exists, they are not likely to admit that
their behavior is a product of it. They will go
through every painful detail of their lives to
prove to me or another working-class woman
that they really didn’t have any privilege, that
their family was exceptional, that they actually
did have an uncle who worked in a factory. To
ease anyone’s guilt is not the point of talking
about class. . . . You don't get rid of oppression
just by talking about it.

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