Are Remarks History? Gertrude Stein as Conceptual Artist — Page 4:
16 Ultimately, it is in this very tension between confrontational art and its commercial assimilation, critical accolades and public notoriety, that Stein found herself wrapped as an innovator. Robert Bartlett Haas quotes her as saying:
You see it is the people who generally smell of the museums who are accepted, and it is the new who are not accepted [. . .]. [I]t is much easier to have one hand in the past. That is why James Joyce was accepted and I was not. He leaned toward the past, in my work the newness and difference is fundamental. (46)
Denied the stale yet honorific home of the canon, literature's version of the museum, Stein developed an ability her male counterparts never needed to cultivate: what some have termed the art of speaking truth to power. That message still sounds — because it still needs to — in the epigrammatic works of today's conceptual artists and activist artists. Stein's interrogations of language, gender, and history inform these contemporary efforts. When Barbara Kruger writes that "We will not play nature to your culture" (qtd. in Wells 282), and when the Guerrilla Girls ask and answer a corresponding question ["Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female."], it seems clear enough that not all that much has changed.
17 In the face of that knowledge, is it any wonder that Gertrude Stein was a life-long champion of a verb tense located outside temporality and history, something she called the 'continuous present'? As Stein expressed the predicament in "History or Messages from History," "A famous wife is married to a famous poet both beloved. This is what history teaches" (History 33) . Within this formulation, remembrance, whether in art or history, remains reserved for men. Women achieve such recognition only as helpmates to famous men. When viewed within this context, Stein and Kruger's twin humanifestoes — 'When this you see remember me' and 'Remember me' — demand attention for women within the historical record. With their insight, wit, and Stein-like sloganeering, women continue to call for a more accurately told and equitably unfolded history. Remarks may not, as Stein warned, be history, yet backtalk of the kind these women summon — crafted with equal parts impertinence and concision — carries with it the power to redirect history.
18 If these recent campaigns to reinflect history's words and change its ways seems to have taken on a militant — even military — overtone, that may not be coincidence. In one of her last works, "Reflections on the Atomic Bomb" (1946), reprinted in Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman's anthology, Stein anticipated the information revolution and the ways our very immersion in messages might compromise our clarity with its undertones and insinuations. In this short text on a timely subject, Stein juxtaposes the very public accounts of scientific advancement with the notion of a secret weapon. While she professes a lack of interest in "death rays and atomic bombs," her piece nonetheless betrays a fascination with the language surrounding atomic research, and how publics respond to such official accounts of stealthy weapons of mass destruction ("Reflections" 823). She writes: "Everybody gets so much information all day that they lose their common sense" ("Reflections" 823). She foresaw people bombarded more by words than atoms, and at a peril through language that, once discerned, can be more readily resisted than can the deployed force of an A-bomb. Stein enters the fray, armed with powerful phrases and penetrating insight. She marshals an arsenal of words and ideas that contest the usual narratives of human history as a march of progress, with its claims to opportunity, justice, and manifest destiny. Therefore, when Jenny Holzer's online fans beg her for a 'text bomb' or Gran Fury's members describe themselves as involved in 'poster sniping,' it may well be that they have detected what Stein long ago understood: that cultural wars are often waged, and so may best be won, at the level of subtext. May moments shape our memories as forcefully as monuments ever have.