Today, my installation, 4 Years in 40 Postcards, comes down. On the day of the instal, I wrote about my feelings going into the exhibition. Today I write about my feelings on the other side of the exhibition. This, weirdly, is a lot harder. Mostly because I am happy.
The installation is composed of 40 postcards with real messages I received from a colleague, which means that in this work I exposed messages that make me feel embarrassed, guilty, powerless, bad. The messages imply, subtly but persistently, that I am unreasonable, controlling, not a team player. Right up until the exhibition, I still wondered if they were right. So, by making them visible to the world, I exposed a certain assessment of my character, a judgement that came from a person but that still also came from inside me.
Right up until the opening, I felt afraid that viewers would see me this way too. Perhaps I was simply exposing myself as a bitch: not only controlling and unreasonable, but vengeful, someone who airs dirty laundry. The exchanges that I envisioned involved more of the same kind of stabs-under-the-table that characterised the messages themselves, and that characterised my experience of institutional complaint. I didn’t expect anyone to say anything openly, but I expected to be questioned. I expected pointed silences.
But none of that happened. No one made me feel bad. No one. People got it. Colleagues told me they had no idea things were this bad, that they would never write an email like this. Viewers felt things: sadness, rage, familiarity. I was repeatedly told with a kind of pointed emphasis that the messages have a tone. I was told that if you read one, it doesn’t sound so bad, but then you start to read more and they take on a different meaning in the context of the whole.
One viewer was hit with rage when, after reading the messages designed to make me feel bad, she came to one of the chronologically earliest cards: “more than anything else I want to go on a walk with you today.” Another told me a conversation she overhead between two women in which one turned to the other and asked if she was the artist. She replied
“On the one hand, I wish I was. On the other hand, thank God, no.”
I joke that the piece is an exorcism. The assessment of me that works on me because I am afraid it is true was expelled into the world and the truth that took its place is the fact that I was manipulated, and that I am part of a community of others who have also been manipulated.
The day after the opening, I sat by myself at a cafe in the sunshine. I felt euphoric: some combination of shock that it had worked and gratitude to these humans for engaging my work and a sense of having rejoined the world somehow. I had exposed the things in the darkness, behind closed doors, to the world, and I received support instead of judgement, connection instead of isolation. By tapping into the misogyny in her mind, a man can isolate a woman and trap her in the shadows. It’s in seeing our mutual isolation that we pull each other out into the sunshine.
Happiness is difficult to write about, especially when it comes unexpectedly through pain and rage and hardship that needs to be acknowledged. We’re trained through subtle guilting and withholding in the face of joy and enthusiasm to look away from happiness, to always pursue it but never accept it. If you’re happy, there’s no work to do. Nothing to buy. Nothing to fix. You’re not appropriately beating yourself for your sin, or sufficiently attentive to the feelings of those for whom you are responsible for some reason.
There’s nothing more threatening than a happy woman, at least outside of very specific contexts: weddings, babies. But I was not happy the day after my wedding. I was happy the day after my exhibition. Which makes me wonder about the dangerous clues in happiness about what we really want outside of the cultural norms that script happiness for us: “something about this feels right.” “This is who you are.” “This is what you’ve been looking for.” “The world is safe.” “These people are safe.” “The bad things you expect don’t always happen.” “You can trust yourself.” “You are capable of connecting.” “More of this please.”
It sucks that this is so foreign, this experience of exposing something intimate, being seen, and having no one make me feel bad. But it provides some clues to where there might be more of it. For one thing, maybe happiness happens where we’re trying to figure it out together instead of each of us trapped behind a closed door of shame and guilt where we make ourselves presentable for public approval but simultaneously vulnerable to exploitation. Maybe there is joy where we risk exposure.1
Thanks to Ben for help expressing this.
Thanks for reading! If you have a story to tell about misogyny, sexism, or gendered manipulation, I am committed to listening. Please feel free to leave a comment or send me a message. Otherwise, consider sharing or clicking the little heart. Public acts of support communicate to others that something is worth attention.