{"id":1727,"date":"2021-03-08T16:50:58","date_gmt":"2021-03-08T19:50:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/institutomesa.org\/revistamesa\/edicoes\/6\/caroline-gausden\/"},"modified":"2021-04-16T17:45:19","modified_gmt":"2021-04-16T20:45:19","slug":"caroline-gausden","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/institutomesa.org\/revistamesa\/edicoes\/6\/caroline-gausden\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"Refusals, Resistance and Alternative hosting: Artists, Queer Practices and Glasgow Women\u2019s Library"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Image of the GWL lift shaft, 2019. Credit GWL.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Refusals, Resistance and Alternative hosting: Artists, Queer Practices and Glasgow Women\u2019s Library<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Caroline Gausden<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

There is no unthreatened, unthreatening conceptual home for the concept of gay origins. We have all the more reason, then, to keep our understanding of gay origin, of gay cultural and material reproduction, plural, multi-capillaried, argus-eyed, respectful, and endlessly cherished.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet<\/em>1<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Different Homes<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

When I first began to think about this article, I envisioned I would be writing from Glasgow Women\u2019s Library (GWL) where I am currently a Development Worker responsible for supporting a number of intersecting elements of GWL\u2019s work around programming, curating, partnerships, and participation. Although the GWL building is situated in Glasgow we work all over Scotland delivering events with partners and in a range of rural and urban locations ranging from cultural festivals to schools and prisons. Much more than a library, GWL is the only accredited museum dedicated to women\u2019s history in the whole of the UK, holding museum and archive materials that make it a Recognized Collection of National Significance. These attributes and many other awards and accolades mean that the reach of the library is increasingly international, with people visiting from all over the world to access the collection, alongside exhibitions and events that are open to all interested in learning about women\u2019s history and creativity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    Image from inside the Main library space, 2019.<\/div><\/div><\/li>\n
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    Inside the main library event, 2019.<\/div><\/div><\/li>\n
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    Image of GWL\u2019s front fa\u00e7ade, 2019.<\/div><\/div><\/li>\n
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    View from the archive store.<\/div><\/div><\/li>\n
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    My job in this article will be to give some insight into how GWL, as a hybrid space, answers MESA\u2019s call to examine the hidden in contemporary society.  Presenting it as a new and idiosyncratic home for multiple creative practices, I hope that in exploring GWL as an alternative home, a set of feminist hosting practices comes into view that pivot around honoring, through making visible, the labor of hospitality whilst also acknowledging some of its violent histories. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Instead of writing from within the library space and its exhibitions and collections, I have been doing this thinking in a paused moment away from its physical spaces as we all experience new life conditions in a global pandemic. I\u2019m going to take this pause as a cue to interrupt my writing to first try to briefly acknowledge my own changing relationship to GWL. Before being a member of staff I was a researcher and arts student (working between art institutions, art school, and university) intuitively looking for knowledges that I had not been able to find in institutions where, excepting for those tutors with a feminist outlook that I am indebted to, I could not see myself and did not feel seen. It took a move into the alternative space of GWL for me to notice and reposition this invisibility as something other than an inevitable norm. What GWL offered above all the things that I listed in my opening (events, exhibitions, archive materials, books etc.) was a space with a profound listening practice. It is through this quality that GWL has come to feel more like a home than a workplace. Here, I share a hosting practice with many others who, finding GWL at different moments, have come to feel similarly attached. Through this at home<\/em> feeling I could begin to recognize and articulate the extent to which I had felt uncomfortable and unheard in other institutional settings and to understand that if I felt that as a cis-white woman, privileged enough to have access to higher education, then others felt the same and more acutely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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      Before GWL Women-in- profile<\/i>, 1987.<\/div><\/div><\/li>\n
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      Castlemilk Womanhouse poster by Julie Roberts, 1990.<\/div><\/div><\/li>\n
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      Inside GWL\u2019s Garnethill premises, 1992.<\/div><\/div><\/li>\n
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      Adele Patrick, Sue John and Kate Henderson in Trongate 109, GWL\u2019s second home.<\/div><\/div><\/li>\n
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      GWL\u2019s first home Garnethill, Glasgow 1991.<\/div><\/div><\/li>\n
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      Julie Roberts, 1990.<\/div><\/div><\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

      The history of the listening space that is Glasgow Women\u2019s Library can be traced back to 1990 at a moment when Glasgow was receiving recognition as European City of Culture.  A group of artists including Adele Patrick, co-founder of the library, were concerned that this vision of a creative city would, without significant intervention, be a story of Glasgow boys, \u201cstale, male, and pale.\u201d2<\/sup> Out of this concern came the initiative Women in Profile that aimed to tell other stories, championing a more multifaceted vision of culture. Women in Profile included the ground-breaking art project Castlemilk Womanhouse, which set about creating a space apart for local women to explore their creativity collaboratively, inviting women artists to take up residencies alongside them in an empty house away from the city centre in Castlemilk, then the largest housing estate in Europe and an area of high deprivation. Artists were invited through an open call and selected by local women in Castlemilk. This trust in the ability of communities on the margins to be at the heart of decisions around culture (rather than simply included afterwards) is important. It is one of several qualities expressed in the project still fundamental to GWL, along with a commitment to providing a safe space, set apart from domestic duties and care work, for women to explore their creativity and connect with each other. This commitment involves an understanding of the often invisible support structures needed for people to feel empowered and find their voices. Alongside this was an understanding that a diversity of perspectives is vital (and to trust in what diversity has to say). Castlemilk was a heterogeneous meeting space for women from different walks of life. Over the years this initial cry for diversity that first looked to work beyond class and gender divisions has expanded, forming into a core value alongside equality that shapes not only GWL\u2019s immediate space but the streets in its host city (that have been imaginatively remapped through a number of women\u2019s history tours) and beyond in the form of a national engagement program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      For me this particular detail in a history of innovations is significant as it points to the artist-led nature of GWL\u2019s beginnings. Founding artists in the Castlemilk project Rachel Harris, Julie Roberts, and Cathy Wilkes asserted that creativity could be found beyond a small canon of artists and city centre venues. They did work to demystify the creative process by revealing its hidden support structures. Initiating an open conversation around creative process, the work was an act of bravery by the artists who took part and also inhabited an art world not ready to consider art as a social act. One of the founding artists, Rachel Harris, put her career on the line by asking her tutors to consider Castlemilk as part of her degree show. Their response was to say this was not art but social work. Actions by artists like Harris, Roberts, and Wilkes as well as the many others that joined them paved the way for the more expansive understanding of art that flourishes in Glasgow\u2019s art scene today and for its links with activist practices. In addition to this groundbreaking project, I would like to consider one more courageous act in relation to GWL\u2019s history. These two moments will help structure a consideration of our work now, 30 years on, with a focus on a recent exhibition that considered the barely visible gestures that make new hosting practices possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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        Dyke Manifesto poster from the Lesbian archive.<\/div><\/div><\/li>\n
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        Lesbian archive material.<\/div><\/div><\/li>\n
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        Section 28 activism.<\/div><\/div><\/li>\n
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        Lesbian archive toolkit.<\/div><\/div><\/li>\n
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        Section 28 activist T-Shirts in the collection.<\/div><\/div><\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

        Coming Out Against the Odds<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

        In 1995, whilst still an entirely volunteer run organization, GWL became custodian of a significant collection of lesbian history, making the decision to offer a home to the London-based national Lesbian Archive and Information Centre (LAIC) when it was threatened with closure. For LAIC it was important that the collection remained within a community of peers so that future users would be able to access and draw strength from its materials without facing many of the barriers that other institutional settings present. Sue John, in the senior management team alongside Patrick, describes a process of convincing LAIC organizers that there were lesbians in Glasgow and Patrick also remembers lesbian volunteers moved to tears unpacking the materials when they arrived. Patrick has gone on to describe the action as \u201can institutional coming out\u201d and \u201cact of bravery\u201d3<\/sup> in a moment when debates over Section 28, the law that made the promotion of homosexual materials illegal in the UK, raged. Section 28, part of the Local Government Act of 1988, only repealed by the Scottish Parliament in 2000 and in 2003 by the rest of the UK, caused many LGBTQI groups to close or limit their activities and generated much hostility towards these marginalized voices in the public and press. Despite these hostilities GWL persisted in not only providing a home for this important collection, which still makes up over a third of the archive today, but also centering it in their first funded project, Lips (Lesbians in Peer Support), with the understanding that, as Adele Patrick noted: \u201cthere was work to be done in ensuring that this nationally significant resource became owned, used and a source of pride by young women and that the empowering stories to be found in every facet of the collection should be unleashed.\u201d4<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

        LAIC had options to house their collection in an academic context, often perceived as the safest choice, yet the decision to go with GWL reflected a desire for the archive to be continually activated rather than withdrawn to become history in a linear sense; distant and separate from the concerns of the present. The difference then is between being in the closet or out of it in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

        Closeted Knowledges<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

        This coming out resonates with recent reflections by feminist scholar Claire Hemmings on what a queer approach might mean, not only to lesbian histories, but also, more broadly to the current social and political circumstances we find ourselves in. In a reading delivered to Manchester University\u2019s online Sexuality Summer School, Hemmings reflects on how queer community care and education practices offered in response to the HIV crisis should be reconsidered in light of the new viral threats that are shaping the present.5<\/sup> In her reading Hemmings evokes the different families set up by queer people on the margins to deal with the HIV virus in communities of care rather than constraint, challenging the association of risk with people and identities rather than behavior. These different families are considered in relation to the evocation of the conservative household as a place to shelter within. Hemmings deconstructs the, universally called for, retreat to the household as a solution that can only work for a minority of people, excluding many along race, class and gendered lines. A short list of some of those excluded makes the inequalities that structure life very clear: queer people who might have received hostility in traditional households; migrant and refugee communities; and women and ethnic minorities whose underpaid and undervalued labor keeps them in the world and the world turning. In response to this situation Hemmings evokes writer and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who explores the metaphor of the closet as a kind of open secret of inequality played out in plain sight. Through the closet, imbalances of power are denied by a studied ignorance that allows for the persistence of homophobic and racist assumptions. In opposition to this Sedgwick encourages us to call out these denials, refusing to put knowledge on inequalities back in the closet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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        Lesbian Avengers new library protest, in thePink Papers, 1995. Photo Credit GWL.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

        Section 28 is one example of how this studied ignorance was enforced through public policy. As can be seen from the history of the Lesbian Archive it is also an example of where GWL acted to cultivate many refusals to this closeting of knowledge, not only through prioritizing supported access to the collection but by activist work, including setting up a Glasgow chapter of the Lesbian Avengers adding their own voices to this important archive and going against the idea that a museum should or could be neutral.6<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

        Alongside refusals, Sedgwick also celebrates the ways excluded communities have created alternative \u201cviral knowledges\u201d and \u201ccircuits of intimacy\u201d through the cultivation of shared histories that are touching in different ways (Hemmings after Sedgwick, 2020).7 <\/sup>It is not simply that GWL\u2019s LAIC collection is objectively valuable (which it is) but that it doesn\u2019t keep its distance. Against the grain of western traditions of thought that champion objectivity, Patrick asserts that feeling palpably affected by history, being moved to tears by its touch is perhaps the most valuable quality of an archive. In being close to the heart, history starts to feel collectively owned, taking on a cherished quality. It also moves away from a sense of singular authority that other collections sometimes have. Like the early work in Castlemilk, that was co-curated with the community, the collection is a continually evolving collaboration, based entirely on donations from many, many different individuals and interest groups. In this way it does not claim to be definitive but instead, being multi-voiced, has a radically open quality. Gaps in representation are freely acknowledged and those that bring experiential knowledge of those gaps are valued and supported to develop new facets of the collection. This approach is not only generative but something that resonates with Sedgwick\u2019s ideas around the sense of threat. Strong feelings towards a collection and cultivating many voices within it are two hugely productive ways to ward off existential threat.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

        Sedgwick\u2019s work on queer approaches to knowledge is also hugely useful in that it gives notions like the closet a wider significance beyond reference to sexuality. It reveals the complexity, relatedness, and lack of equality that often hide behind binary categories. GWL employs this queer approach beyond its work as custodians to important parts of LGBTQI history. Patrick\u2019s perspective on inclusion brings this home. Taking the mainstream narrative on inclusion, that there are hard to<\/em> reach <\/em>communities, GWL turns this round to suggest that communities on the so-called margins are not hard to reach \u2013 but easy to ignore<\/em>. Furthermore, when the mainstream looks for them it is as discrete categories of people, single mums, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities but not as individuals that bring complex intersecting needs and a wealth of experience that could be unleashed. From its beginnings GWL has been designed and built around harnessing these different and diverse voices. This easy ignorance is the open secret of inequality in the museum and cultural sector, where supposedly universal cultural offerings only resonate for a minority of people. There has been a failure to do the hard work of listening and making space for different voices to contribute to cultural spaces from a position of equality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

        Interdependencies<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

        Hopefully, from this brief history it is evident that GWL has been designed in a counter-cultural way around a mission to bring different, easy-to-ignore perspectives out of the closet and that the innovative nature of GWL\u2019s curatorial and collecting approaches is tied to its history as a queer, artist-led space. In this case GWL\u2019s queer stance can be found not only in championing lesbian sexuality in a repressive moment but going against the grain of received wisdom on who culture is for and who is hard to reach in a way that reveals the hidden inequalities these assumptions rest on. Following Sedgwick and Hemmings I would like to look at how this queer approach is a useful lens through which to consider continued artistic experiments in the library space and with the collection. By looking in this way at GWL\u2019s origins and contemporary practices alongside each other I\u2019m also replicating a methodology at the heart of GWL. This comprises firstly seeing history as having a continued relevance and impact in the present moment and secondly being resolved to shape what the impact of that history could be through iterative and evolving collective practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

        I want to look at this idea of different homes, so resonant in the current moment, and relational modes practiced at GWL through a consideration of a recent exhibition called a Spoon is the Safest Vessel<\/em>, which invited three artists, Juliane Foronda, Kirsty Russell, and Tako Taal to make new works in response to their exploration of the collection. As can be seen in descriptions of Castlemilk, this invitation, issued in an open way from an artist-led space to other artists, is a practice that is integral to GWL, being one of the ways that its iterative, evolving, and collective nature plays out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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