Are Remarks History? Gertrude Stein as Conceptual Artist — Page 3:
11 In his brief treatment of "History or Messages from History" in Gertrude Stein in Pieces, critic and Stein scholar Richard Bridgman notes that, "the burden of her critique dealt with what history excluded" (204). Bridgman reads the piece as a response to the selectivity with which traditional historical accounts "filtered out the lyricism of life" (204). While history's exclusions indeed seem the focus within this text, Stein seems at least as concerned with the extent to which the principle of selection favors an androcentric history, presented in such a way as to venerate first, most, or exclusively male-coded expressions and endeavors. The elements Stein suggests have been denied historical status are not merely the lyrical, but more particularly the domestic, the everyday, and the gender-coded terms traditionally associated with female experience: flowers, herbs, baskets, dogs, and the like. Within Stein's formulation, the category status of history has instead usually been reserved for acts of aggression, contest and victory. In short, "[t]here is no history," Stein's text appears to lament, "in gentleness" (History 25). The simultaneous suggestion is that there is no history that records the lived-world experiences of most women, and no documents of their worlds of contribution and influence. What emerges from this discovery is a cautionary tale — a lesson about history's omissions, most especially as pertains to the wishes and will of women as historical agents. Stein writes, "The lesson of history so she says is that he will do it again but will he we hope not" (History 32). While men may be favored in historical accounts, women often enough make history. A male-centered version of history, however, would suggest otherwise. Such a warning still echoes in the gendered valences of image-word texts by Barbara Kruger, in which a female speaker (I/We) addresses a male authority (You): "You make history when you do business" (Love 68). Both for Kruger and for Stein, history is a contested field of meaning and narrative, in which women are readily forgotten or relegated to the realms of "endangered species" or "missing persons" Love 51). The heroic model of history places men at the center of accounts, with women at the periphery ("We decorate your life," [Love 91). History's skew too readily becomes memory's shape ("Memory is your image of perfection" [Love 38]), until women are rendered absent from or silent within its record ["Your comfort is my silence" (Love 45)].
12 If Stein's History or Messages from History stands underexamined within Stein scholarship, still less has been written about its companion writing, Stein's seldom anthologized composition, "We Came. A History." While it does appear in Richard Kostelanetz's Gertrude Stein Reader (2002), there is little context for the piece even in that volume, except the editor's note about the uniqueness of Stein's use of the equal sign within this writing. Where elsewhere Stein makes use of white space to break segments within her text, as would customarily be accomplished with punctuation marks, in the six-page long "We Came. A History," she combines spaces and sentence-end punctuation with some 350 appearances of the equal sign [=], as seen within mathematics. Stein's use of this particular symbol seems both to employ and to ironize its meanings. Stein invokes the equal sign toward varied, and sometimes contradictory, ends: linking otherwise separate lines of the text, visually suggesting or rendering suspect equivalences among the assertions, and, often enough, creating a false line break within a seemingly continuous utterance:
Historically there=Is no disaster because=Those who make history=Cannot be overtaken=As they will make=History which they do=Because it is necessary=That every one will=Begin to know that=They must know that=History is what it is= ("We Came" 121-122)
To the extent that a pattern emerges within the text's commentary on history, it would suggest that Stein wished to lampoon history's inequalities, as evidenced by the elitism and male privilege implied within the recitation of history. To this end, the piece begins by defining history in some rather stark terms:
1. as the product of deliberate action:
"History cannot be an accident." ("We Came" 121);
2. as uncommon acts:
"history is not=Just what every one=Does" ("We Came" 122);
3. as uncommon acts by uncommon people:
"History is made by a very=Few who are important=And history is what that=One says." ("We Came" 122)
4. as an account of triumphs rather than misdeeds:
"History must be distinguished=From mistakes." ("We Came" 121)
5. as something that transpired and concluded in the past:
"History must not be what is=Happening." ("We Came" 121)
6. as a record of events that are well-known and widely-regarded:
"history must be=Something unusual and=Nevertheless famous and=Successful." ("We Came" 121)
7. as evidence from the past about how current events have meaning:
"History must=Be the occasion of having=In every way established a=Precedent" ("We Came" 121)
8. as a rationalization of power asymmetry:
"Those who make history=Cannot be overtaken." ("We Came" 121-122)
Within this calculus, history would seem merely to reinforce and reinscribe itself as a retelling of what matters most from the past, retold by those who most matter. Having defined history in this way early in the piece, Stein's "We Came. A History," proceeds to challenge such a definition or equation, both textually and contextually, such that history becomes recast as moments rather than as monuments. In this way, women's markers once excluded — here described with words from 'necklaces' and 'tube-roses', to 'peppers' and 'blushing pails' — find their way into the historical record, until, as Stein puts it, "All this has=Been a history of pleasantness" ("We Came" 123). Moving beyond History or Messages From History and its declarations that gentleness has no place in history, Stein uses "We Came. A History," to frame a tale in which a history defined by hostility, conquest, and exclusion gets displaced by one depicted in terms of hope, reciprocity, and inclusion.
13 Although it might not seem surprising to trace Stein's influences on later experimental writers such as Griffin, or even on word artists such as Kruger, the Stein impact becomes most noticeable precisely where readers who regard Stein solely as aesthete might least expect it — in the work of a cadre of artist/activists known as the Guerrilla Girls, who use language and word play to protest racism, sexism, and historical disenfranchisement, chiefly in the art world. The group announces itself on the Guerrilla Girls Home Page as:
A group of women artists and art professionals who make posters about discrimination. Dubbing ourselves the conscience of the art world, we declare ourselves feminist counterparts to the mostly male tradition of anonymous do-gooders like Robin Hoods, Batman, and the Lone Ranger. We wear gorilla masks to focus on the issues rather than our personalities. We use humor to convey information, provoke discussion, and show that feminists can be funny.
In the (mock) tradition of fictive male egalitarians, they commence their work. The group had its inception after a 1985 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art bearing the ambitious title "An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture," in which appeared a curator's statement from Kynaston McShine that any artist not included in the show should rethink "his" career. The exhibit featured 169 artists. All were white. All were from the United States or Europe. Only 13 were women. In response to this affront, "the conscience of the art world" was born. Rather than merely picket or boycott (girlcott?), the Guerrilla Girls, attired in gorilla suits, engage in theatrical interventions and use mass-media forms such as posters, buttons, and stickers to showcase their dissenting views.
14 For the purposes of interviews and other situations where it becomes useful to distinguish among guerrilla girls, they adopt the names of dead women artists and writers. One such guerrilla girl, under the name of Gertrude Stein, took the occasion of a group interview, reprinted in Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls, to quip that, "There's a popular misconception that the world of High Art is ahead of mass culture but everything in our research shows that, instead of being avant garde, it's derriere" (26). With their activist zaps, reminiscent in some ways of countercultural happenings, the Guerrilla Girls reclaim Stein, effectively renaming her as a figure whose agency, like that of the Guerrilla Girls, proceeds from a critical rather than judgmental engagement with cultural forms, both pop and serious, that tempers transgression with humor. Their taglines bear serious messages, though, much like the Stein-like mottoes of HIV/AIDS activist collectives Gran Fury ("This is to enrage you") and ACT-UP ("Silence=Death"). For example, in a poster displayed on their website, the Guerrilla Girls make a powerful challenge to the calendar of historical recognition implied within both the art world and the host society when their pop quiz asks, "Q. If February is Black History Month and March is Women's History Month, what happens the rest of the year? A. Discrimination." Just as Stein resisted a history that silenced or marginalized the contributions of women, so now do the Guerrilla Girls expose the tokenism, separatism, racism, and sexism that persist in museums, the keepers of art's history, and, by implication, the public history of creative achievements.
15 When members of the Guerrilla Girls, engaged in direct action for artistic inclusiveness, don fake fur and assume the names of specific women artists, including Gertrude Stein, there can be little doubt that the reference to Stein is strategic and intentional. Does this mean figures such as Kruger are alluding to Stein through their pieces? Chances are, the debt is a somewhat less direct one. Does this mean that Stein, as the writer so frequently accused of repeating herself, in fact persists (finds herself repeated) wherever we find her concepts and contexts recurring in others' work some seventy-five years later? Likely it does. Are artists the only ones profiting from attention to the legacies of effrontery left behind by such precursors as Picasso and Stein? Surely not, when America's rapacious consumer culture co-opts yesterday's outrage to make today's bric-a-brac. An observant tourist in Chicago would now see that souvenir bracelet charms of the Chicago Picasso make Oldenburg's sketched cufflinks a near-reality and a vintage button boutique there named for Stein's "Tender Buttons" presumably stands poised to make of Antoni's brooches something like a logo. That which mass culture cannot make to conform, it seeks to absorb. This same history lesson first reached me as a youngster, when I realized that a television commercial for skin cream had appropriated the rhetoric of civil rights as it proudly proclaimed, "Finally — equal treatment for hands and nails."