Tip of Her Tongue
Overview
Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989, is a stark emblem for feminist art practice—if the body is our battleground, it is through language that we fight. Inspired by Kruger's work and by similarly discursive artworks in the Broad collection, The Tip of Her Tongue program series features feminist artists in performance who work with language and embodiment. The artists in this series have intense stories to tell and experiment aggressively with the telling. The artists work with words to explore how the body's relationship to language is mediated by histories large and small. The body may both anchor and disrupt the story. It is a source of desire, grief, shame and laughter. These intimate performances explore the politics of representation—with how gender is produced in, through and as language; and how the stories we tell circulate around, move through, against and with the body.
Jennifer Doyle
Jennifer Doyle is a Professor of English at UC Riverside and a member of Human Resources Los Angeles (HRLA), a collectively-run art space dedicated to supporting performance and interdisciplinary modes of expression. She has programmed diverse performance events as a member of HRLA, and guest curated exhibitions for the Vincent Price Art Museum and LACE. She is the author of Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2013).
