September 22, 2006
Running numbers
In this week's Village Voice, Jerry Saltz once again points out the gender disparity in the number of solo shows at contemporary galleries and museums in New York. A quote:
If this summer's Documenta and Venice Biennale were 50-50 men/women, neither would be better or worse than usual. That said, no one is more self-righteous, dogmatic, and moralistic than a quota queen. Art isn't democratic. Shows shouldn't be regulated.It's a pernicious double bind: If only 24 percent of the shows are by women, how can 50 percent of the shows you preview, review, buy, or sell be by women? Art historian Griselda Pollock has written about "women's struggle for meaning"; whatever we call this struggle, it needs to be seen as a failure of the imagination that amounts to apartheid. We all have to feel threatened by the bias. We must see it as a moral emergency.
A very rough count of online archives of my own writing nets me the following figures: 35% of the one- or two-person exhibitions I have reviewed for Artforum.com featured women artists; 31% of the solo exhibitions I have reviewed in Artforum have featured women. (This number is 33% if one takes into account two reviews written but not yet published.) I admit to being conscious of the number of women artists that I write about, though I don't go too far out of my way to redress the systematic imbalance.
In response to a question asked of me last week at Parsons, I counted the number of writers with whom I work, and found that 56 out of 100 are women. This number isn't always reflected accurately on the Artforum website, as some are in touch only occasionally, some write more than others, etc., but there you go.