Cutting and Making Gendered Art in the Affect Flows of an Education Yet to Come

• In Event: Affective Cunning: Curriculum With/in Relational Networks of Gender, Knowledge, and Violence

Abstract

Fashioning “opportunities for research to inform remedies; and ultimately, be a part of holistic repair for those who have suffered harm, loss, and trauma” (AERA, 2025, n. p.) are noble causes. In and of art, a means developed to remedy and repair issues pertaining to inequities—gross underrepresentation of minorities and women (Author, 2022)—has been the formation of exclusive education spaces, such as the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), “a museum of their own” (a phrase adapted by NMWA from Virginia Woolf’s, 1929/2020, critical essay)—the site from which the current part of the AERA symposium is created.

The present research penetrates boundaries and embraces an idea well known to artists and philosophers: creation is derived, in part, through ongoing processes of destruction. In this vein, the current work is about viral proliferation and annihilation, functions by way of assemblage and erasures, and a plan involving complementarity between a double pincer of percepts as forces and becomings as affects (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994)—sensations. It is fueled by desire (Author, 2015, 2017; Phillips, 2006) and inspired by Foucault’s (2021) final volume of his history of sexuality series, Confessions of the Flesh, moving with an intent to inject discontinuities in the content and expressions of NMWA during its recent re-opening following the pandemic. Further, this part of the symposium is carried along with the notion that “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting” (Foucault, 1984, p. 88), queering (Sullivan & Middleton, 2019), and remixing (Navas & Gallagher, 2021).

NMWA space is composed of various themed areas, such as “‘Objectified’ [which] presents historical and contemporary still lifes and related objects by women who push boundaries and preserve traditions [and] ‘Home, Maker’ [that explores] women’s shifting roles in domestic life and celebrates their ever-growing agency as makers” (NWMA, 2024, n.p.). The cutting, queering, and remixing of this part of the symposium draws on such constructive practices by deploying a moving, multimedia presentation intended to produce affects, the aim of art (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994). It begins with NMWA space, what its founder described as a “temple of women artists” (Holladay, 2008, p. 59) that was once a Masonic temple, steps away from the White House. From there, the presentation moves along with spoken narrative accompanied by cuts of different intensities through the museum’s “grand acquisitions” (p. 99), such as a serene self portrait of Frida Kahlo (1937), through undulating movements of her other paintings, and picks up speed with Lee Krasner’s (1964) penetrating lines (1964) from The Springs and whips through pieces such as Elaine De Kooning’s (1978) Bacchus. Accompanying the spoken narrative and moving art images will be New Music (Ning Yu, 2024), as well as other sound effects. “Remedies” and methods for education research purposes will be shown through these creative products and processes, which are part and parcel of pure immanence, a life (Deleuze, 1990/2001).

Author

• Jonathan Eakle, The George Washington University