Belkin turns back page on women’s lit
Kevin Griffin, on how writing and reading by women influenced art
While it may be true you can’t judge a book by its cover, many of the covers in the Rereading Room are at least visually interesting enough to persuade you to pick them up.
Some will probably even trigger memories of having read them before.
One of the most recognizable is the objectified torso of a woman hanging from a bar on the front of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, a standard book in many university political science and sociology classes in the 1970s.
There are paperback versions of The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. In the practical area, there’s It’s Easy to Fix Your Bike by a male author but featuring a woman behind a bike wheel. Then there’s the declarative title: STOP RAPE.
Others have interesting titles that might make you want to pick them up just to see what’s inside such as Mrs. Satan and Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution. Plus, there’s the notoriety of celebrity such as the S.C.U.M. Manifesto by Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol.
The books are the kinds of titles that would have been in the Vancouver Women’s Bookstore, a legendary meeting place and centre that opened downtown in the summer of 1973. From 400 books listed in the inaugural typewritten catalogue compiled by Jeannine Mitchell, one of the bookstore’s founders, about 100 have been brought together for its recreation at the Belkin Gallery. It’s one of the works in GLUT, the first of four exhibitions called Beginning with the Seventies.
Artist Alexandra Bischoff said the books in the Rereading Room are displayed with their covers facing out for a reason.
“I wanted the viewer to have a face-to-face relationship with the books,” she said in an interview in the gallery. “I wanted you to be able to come to them and have a conversation with them. I wanted them to be approachable and immediately recognizable.”
Not too many years ago, places such as the Vancouver Women’s Bookstore were among the few places where women, many of whom were working class, could come together to find out more about the women’s movement.
In Vancouver and Toronto, women’s bookstores opened the same year; by the 1980s, most of the big cities had feminist bookstores. In Edmonton, where Bischoff grew up, there was Common Woman Books.
“If you were new to town and you were a feminist, the first place you went was the feminist bookstore to feel the pulse of the city — even find a place to sleep at night,” Bischoff said.
Then, one by one, they all closed. Vancouver Women’s Bookstore, which opened in what was described as an old Victorian house on Richards, survived three break-ins, a firebombing and a couple moves before it, too, closed in 1996.
(An outlier to bookstore closures is L’Euguelionne, a feminist cooperative bookstore that opened in Montreal in 2016.)
The books in the Rereading Room aren’t meant just to be looked at. Bischoff hopes people pick up a book and start reading. To make that easy, readers can sit on chairs and use a table to lay
books on.
For a longer read, there’s a comfortable sofa or oversized chair to choose from.
If you find the gallery a little cool, you’ll be able to wrap yourself in one of the Kathy Slade blankets with patterns based on selected books in the exhibition. Her textbased weavings are also hanging on the walls along with drawings by Judith Copithorne.
GLUT includes work by several other artists such as Gathie Falk, Laiwan, Divya Mehra, Evelyn Roth and Elizabeth Zvonar.
Bischoff sees the books as markers of a space where a community could physically gather together.
“I also love that it can be called Rereading Room even if you’ve never read the books before because it implies people have read before you,” she said.
Lorna Brown, exhibition curator, said the subtitle GLUT was picked to indicate the excessive amounts of material found in various archives, some of which aren’t the easiest to access. The title was also meant to suggest the pleasure of discovery and consuming the kind of information found in an archive.
Future exhibitions in the series will look at archives of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, choreographer and dancer Helen Goodwin, and the Muckamuck Restaurant whose Indigenous workers organized into an independent feminist union and went on strike in 1978.
Commissioned works for GLUT include Slade’s blankets and Lisa Robertson’s Proverbs of a She Dandy, a limited-edition translation of two poems by Baudelaire along with proverbs about the flaneur as an old woman.
“A lot of young artists are interested in this area because of the activism and the desire to engage socially and politically,” Brown said.
GLUT foregrounds language as an important part of artmaking. The books in the Rereading Room, Brown said, hearken back to the genre of women shown reading in pre-modern paintings, as a challenge to existing social structures around women’s education.
“The idea of reading as the beginning of the series is a kind of response to other feminist exhibitions where the first impulse is performativity,” she said.
“But let’s enter it from the perspective of the reflective, the textual, and the way in which text is so important to the interdisciplinary aspect of feminism.”