Women's Work

"New World Order," 5 x 7 hand collage, Laura Tringali Holmes, 2010.
Transfer techniques, vintage fairy-tale book, old photo,
old magazines, lace, dye inks

The danger in merchandising is that one must invariably compartmentalize things in order for buyers to understand them and...well...buy into the selling. We all start dancing around the narrow end of the funnel because it becomes what we understand. It becomes safe. Everybody starts doing it. Something that may have started out as an extraordinarily artistic risk, published by a far-seeing editor, over time self-neutralizes to reach the widest audience. Sadly, the path of least resistance can easily send us scurrying away from “other” because at the large mouth of the funnel, things are far less defined, far more uncomfortable, and even a little scary, especially if you've got a five-year book-publishing plan to structure or a year's worth of magazine content to get into the pipeline.

Not so long ago publishers adopted the genre of “women's fiction” (as distinguished from “women writers”) to market products that could easily be targeted to a specific set of buyers. As an interesting aside, you don't have to be a woman to write “women's fiction.” I wonder if "women's art” can be far behind “women's fiction.” More likely, I suspect it's already among us, the elephant in the middle of the living room, swallowed up under the catch-all heading of “mixed-media art.”

Certainly the majority of magazines and books dealing with mixed-media artwork exist in the maelstrom at the small end of the funnel—predictable, repetitious, focused in directions that seem to overvalue the heartfelt (even if slipshod) and the acquisition of technique for technique's sake. Design pops up now and then but hardly ever does it share a refreshing cup of tea and have an interesting tete-a-tete-a-tete with content and context. Oh the magic that can happen when these three get chatting! Creativity can veer off into a thousand million directions! And all of a sudden nothing looks exactly alike!

But that would put us at the large end of the funnel, wouldn't it, and that's not a place where people who sell stuff typically like to go.

As always, thanks for listening.