Say No! at the Wardlaw Museum

By Thomas Gibbs

Say No!, the Wardlaw Museum’s new exhibition on feminist refusal in art brings together some really interesting works, but the interpretation fails to connect these works to their histories of protest and struggle as well as it clearly wants to.

On the way out of the Wardlaw museum, I walked past a protest in Sallies’ Quad and suddenly it clicked for me what the exhibition was lacking: concrete next steps. There were no photos of protests in the exhibition, no calls to action. The connection between feminist refusal and art seemed almost unidirectional. I know that wasn’t the curators’ intent, and the wealth of events and additional resources in the library (and in the exhibition’s admirable collection of feminist literature) point to a desire for community engagement with feminist causes, I just wish this had come across more in the text of the exhibition itself, which often felt too safe or surface level.

Domestic Dusters, installation at the Wardlaw Museum curated by Vanessa Marr. @domesticdusters on Instagram

The theme of the exhibition is drawn from a body of work including Bonnie Honig’s 2021 A Feminist Theory of Refusal and Anne Boyer’s No. These works argue that women must withdraw from the unjust economic and political systems that oppress them as the first step towards self-governance. The exhibition is therefore themed around various things that we can refuse.

Before that, though, we begin with Mercedes Azpilicueta’s tapestry Potatoes, Riots, and Other Imaginaries (a rather chaotic attempt) which draws on imagery from the Amsterdam potato riots and other women-led protests throughout history to demonstrate the transformative power of female protest. Behind a collage of images ranging from the photo-realistic to the absurd, a speaker plays extracts from protests chopped up and remixed until they lose all sense. This sets the tone of the exhibition nicely, it is the act, not the content, of the protest that Azpilicueta is praising here.

The first act of refusal the gallery identifies is ‘refusing… exploitation.’ This pairs very nicely with the ongoing Domestic Dusters project curated by Vanessa Marr and on display in the permanent exhibition space at the Wardlaw. Outside of the initial sign, however, Say No! moves on from feminised labour in the home to focus specifically on sex work and the work of Glasgow-based charity SCOT PEP. Unfortunately, the lack of context here made this section rather disappointing. My first test of any exhibition is whether I can understand it just from the wall cards and (failing that) catalogue, but several times I found myself reaching for Google to understand basic context about who SCOT PEP were (nowhere for example was it mentioned that PEP originally stood for Prostitution Education Programme) or how recently (2007) curb-crawling had been outlawed in Scotland. Most disappointingly, Petra Bauers, research dossier Workers! isn’t shared with viewers but is locked in a glass cabinet whose reflections make it impossible to read even the page it is open to. A digitisation of the folder or enlargement of some key extracts would have made Bauers’ presence in the exhibition more understandable.

Petra Bauer, SCOT PEP, and Fiona Jardine, WORKERS! Banner (Phase 2), 2017, printed banner. Shown here in the 2018 Glasgow May Day March campaigning for equal pay (image courtesy of the BBC), currently on display in the Wardlaw Museum.

Nonetheless, Bauer’s SCOT PEP banner is proudly displayed and creates a nice continuity between the different waves of feminism evidenced in the gallery. Bauers’ work appropriates the aesthetics of 1970s feminist protest in service of 21st century feminist goals and this seems to have been adopted overall in the catalogue, postcards and exhibition design for Say No!, which makes for a striking and very cohesive overall effect.

The most powerful section, ‘refusing… violence’ showcases Franki Raffles’ brilliant 1990s posters for Zero Tolerance which contrast comfortable domestic scenes with text describing unseen violence against women. These posters were displayed around Edinburgh at bus stops and on billboards like fashion posters, and Raffles’ striking black and white imagery and simple text reinforces this effect. The link to domestic violence only becomes apparent over half-way down the page, by which point the viewer is already engaged and therefore even more shocked by the words’ impact. Unfortunately, there are no photos in the gallery itself of the posters in situ (although they do appear in a monograph on Raffles’ work on the table nearby). This slightly undermines their effect to my mind. Like Oliviero Toscani’s controversial United Colors of Benetton adverts in the 1990s, Raffles’ posters’ impact came as much from their setting in the public sphere as their isolated imagery. Here the exhibitions lack of engagement with the world outside art seems at its most blatant.

The exhibition presented Franki Raffles’ posters as art objects rather than protest posters.
Franki Raffles, Zero Tolerance Posters, 1991-2, installed in the Wardlaw Museum (top) and in an Edinburgh bus stop (bottom, courtesy of Edinburgh Napier)

However, as soon as I was reflecting critically on this there appeared in the corner a film featuring ‘Pissed Off Trannies’ protesting outside the European Court of Human Rights by pouring urine over the street and themselves. This startling footage, and the second film of protests for gender inclusive fashion do represent an important engagement with ongoing direct-action efforts to affect politics. However, they feel a little shunted to the side in a corner, and could have been better integrated. Likewise, Ellen Lesperance’s knitting-pattern-esque gouache paintings in the section ‘refusing violent futures’ would have benefited from juxtaposition against the peace camp imagery they were based on.

Sweatmother & Pissed Off Trannies, Pissed Off Trannies Zap1, 2022, single stream video with audio, 2 minutes 24 seconds.

I was very impressed, however, with the excellent presentation of Alberta Whittle’s film A Black Footprint is a Beautiful Thing which took over the entire right-hand side of the exhibition. Addressing colonial violence and slavery from the point of view of a ship’s worm, this challenging video work spoke to the need to view injustice in the long durée and keep an awareness of past violence in the face of those telling us that these things are past. Whittle’s repeated call, ‘Find resistance at the bottom. How many are suffering under the rot of plaster and eugenics? Resist.’ provided the rallying cry I felt sorely lacking in the rest of the exhibition.

Nonetheless, the challenging works in this exhibition speak for themselves, and I am sure that you will be able to get a lot out of them, it just takes more effort than I fear many visitors are going to be willing to put in.

Bibliography

Boyer, Anne. ‘No’, 2017. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/featured-blogger/77342/no

Honig, Bonnie. A Feminist Theory of Refusal. Harvard University Press, 2021.

Horne, Victoria. ‘Petra Bauer and SCOT-PEP’s ‘Workers!’: renewing the aesthetics and politics of 1970s feminism.’ Burlington Magazine, 2019. https://contemporary.burlington.org.uk/journal/journal/petra-bauer-and-scot-peps-workers-renewing-the-aesthetics-and-politics-of-1970s-feminism