"Crazy Lady" Exhibition
Schroeder Romero & Shredder
This event has ended.
Societies do not succeed in offering everyone the same way of fitting into the symbolic order; those who are, if one may say so, between symbolic systems, in the interstices, offside, are the ones who are afflicted with what we call madness.
--Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement
Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
--Virginia Wolff
I know older men in comedy who can barely feed and clean themselves, and they still work. The women, though, they're all 'crazy.' I have a suspicion-and hear me out, because this is a rough one-that the definition of 'crazy' in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to f--k her anymore.
--Tina Fey
I should come with a consumer warning, like the labels that say "Handle with care" or "May be hazardous to your health." I am unfit for human consumption. I struggle to articulate how awful and isolating this feels, but I can't find the words.
--Martha Manning
I began to think that melancholy was a dialect that only some people knew-or could even hear-and in my conversations, I sought these people out.
--Virginia Heffernan
Like the quotes gathered here, the seven artists featured in "Crazy Lady" reflect many perspectives on the trope of the madwoman in western culture. Humorous, painful, reflexive, historical, the diversity of their voices is intentionally cacophonic, conveying the pathology of the stereotype itself, and its impact on women in all its endless derivations-hysteric, nympho, spinster, harpy, cat lady, witch, bag lady, wannarexic, etc. In an age of therapy and meds where on one hand, mental illness has become less stigmatized and on the other, disorders are manufactured to sell pills, notions of what's crazy and what's not, are even more complicated for women who don't "fit in"-especially artists. The work in Crazy Lady is by no means exhaustive, hoping only to open a dialogue well-mined in literature, film, and music, but rarely tackled in the visual arts.
[Image: Breyer P-Orridge Video still from "Weird Woman" (2003/2010)]
Media
Schedule
from September 08, 2011 to October 08, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-09-08 from 18:00 to 20:00