For an introduction to this post see introduction to entry 64.
For a while I felt myself identifying very strongly with my femaleness in relation to the work. I got interested in thinking again about the work of the Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann, whose incredible writing and ability to articulate the experience of being on the receiving end of oppression as a woman, made her into something of a heroine to feminists. She is also (furthermore) one of the (few) women whose name Hirschhorn cites amongst his roll call of writers and philosophers whom he admires. Specifically, I made a new piece of work which was a scanned image of the front of her novel, Malina, which incorporates a smiling photo of Bachmann herself on it, transferred onto a white pocket handkerchief. This is currently on show hanging on the wall outside my studio at APEC as part of our Open Studios exhibition for the Brighton Photo Biennial Photofringe. I also wrote some entries for my blog which were suggestive of the link between masculinity and violence, as evidenced, for example, in some observations I had made about the behaviour of young boys in the streets around where I live. Even whilst indulging in this position alongside some kind of female imaginary victim, I knew I was sidestepping my own complicity in the perpetration of the violence for which we are all responsible, by the very fact of us belonging to a nation that wages illegal wars using dishonest reasons as excuses for them. Somehow making the handkerchief/Bachmann piece, which I called I.B. (for Ingeborg Bachmann, but which also co-incidentally stands for ‘Incommensurable Banner’) freed me from the need to take up the victim role. Not that Bachmann was a victim, you understand, rather that the main, female, character in the novel ‘Malina’ disappears at the end of the novel into a crack in the wall and leaves you, the reader, not knowing whether she has ever existed at all or whether she has perhaps been murdered.
