Susan Harbage Page
Precarity series & goldleaf passport
susan harbage page
We speak of the moon and the double standards present in the lyrics of a current country song. Susan points out the often violent language used when discussing photography and why she chooses to use words such as made and created over shot and took. A delightful hour is spent discussing the roots of the word fuck (Fornicate Under Command of the King) and the criteria necessary in deciding if a word can be reclaimed.
Susan is thoughtful, assertive and deliberate with her words. One can see quickly why her students love her and how she gained her tenure position in the UNC Women’s and Gender Studies Department. One’s respect for her only deepens upon seeing her art.
Through her work as an artist and a teacher, Susan has spent decades pushing back on society’s belief of whose stories deserve telling and whose lives should be archived. Her work draws upon timeless issues of belonging, discrimination, privilege, protection, alienation, and labors of love and kindness. In a human and sometimes haunting way, Harbage Page calls her viewers to acknowledge their own complacencies and to admit the masks they all too often hide behind.
In short… she speaks my language and broadens my thinking.
Elizabeth Mathis Cheatham: I remember the first time I walked into your space, and I saw the “I Ask Too Many Questions” piece. As someone who, as an adult has had to retrain myself so that I don’t apologize before a question, it just really resonated with me. I was hoping you could share the story behind the piece, and what it means to you.
Susan Harbage Page: Well, for me, it’s a very feminist piece, because I think for many years in this patriarchal society, women have not been allowed to ask questions or been shut down when they ask a hard question. Especially in relationships, where you’re really poking at the truth and someone will push back on you really, really hard if you’re asking a question that is pushing towards a hidden truth. So for me there’s that, and it was part of a series of textiles where I wrote phrases on found embroidered textiles. I would gather bits and pieces of old textiles that had been embroidered by women (now anonymous) for $2-3 or whatever, at The Scrap Exchange or old junk stores. I reworked them and added embroidered text, phrases that I heard my friends say.
It was this series of things women had said, that just were very emotional and powerful for me. I’m trying to think of the other ones right this second… And that was the first one I made: “I ask too many questions.” There were other ones, like “You never knew what you would come home to.” “I hid my successes in the dresser drawer.” I had a friend—and those are both things my friends have said—I have a friend who was an artist, and whose husband was an artist. She got a review in Art in America, which is a big deal. Back then it was a bigger deal.
“I asked too many questions.”
susan harbage page
EMC: Absolutely.
SHP: She didn’t tell her husband. She put the magazine in her dresser drawer. Because she was afraid he would be angry or jealous, instead of celebrate her… She put it in the dresser drawer. I think they’re all symbols for the voices of many, many women who have been intellectually repressed or suffered gendered violence in all of its forms.
The other part of this work is the revaluation of the labor that an anonymous woman put into the embroidery. The labor is re-seen and made visible again as it comes together in this collaborative work.
EMC: The last time we were making pictures and were in your studio—correct me if I have the wording wrong and I’ll change it—but we were talking about these pieces on the wall from the old books, and you said something similar to that ‘it felt really important to put a female mark on such a masculine book.’ Am I getting that right, and can you expand on that?
SHP: Yes. Yes. One of the questions I think about and one of the reasons I’m interested in textiles—this is going to be a long answer. One of the reasons I’m interested in textiles is, what did women do before they wrote? They made textiles and they made lots of beautiful things and they made knowledge and they made culture, and they made these beautiful patterns and objects that had meaning. They weren’t always given access to patriarchal knowledge and writing that affords them power within institutional systems. Sometimes they were but not always. These books are mainly, 400, 500 years old from Italy. A lot of them are church texts and a lot of them are scientific texts, but they all are voices of men. And so, for me it is this act of painting, I’m marking over this masculine knowledge, this masculine archive. I’m thinking about who this text was written for, and how it helps a particular person or system maintain power.
I think a lot about archives too. What’s in our archives? Whose voices are in our archives? There’s one series of paintings I call Regola, which is “rules” in Italian. Who makes the rules? Who breaks the rules? The rules of the game? Who are the rules made for? Exceptions to the rules. Painting on these old book pages is a way of breaking a rule. I just don’t think that you can get away from the fact that this is a gendered act. I am female and I’m painting over this bold, masculine text. It is a kind of unwriting and rewriting of a text. For me, they’re also very musical and can be read as scores. They’re indeterminate in a sense—I’m not telling you exactly what to think about them; I’m giving you some space to figure it out... The colors for me are really important.
conversations
susan harbage page
precarity series
susan harbage page
EMC: You mentioned [during past conversations] about your grandmother making art, making textiles. If I remember correctly, she also worked with porcelain.
SHP: Yeah, my grandma made all these little porcelain women, figurines, with big long dresses on and long braided hair.
EMC: That is something that you have done too—finding older ones and putting them back together in a different story. We are going to show the one that’s in your hallway. Can we—
SHP: I forget. I have to walk over there and look at it… Oh yeah! These are very playful. They are a series I call “Precarity”. The title comes from Judith Butler’s theory of “precarity,” which posits that even as all bodies are vulnerable to suffering or injury, some bodies are more protected politically and socially. My grandmother made all these little porcelain figures of women that were up on the shelves in the kitchen behind glass when I was growing up. They referenced English society of the 1800s.
They represent a particular set of ideals about femininity and roles that women get brought up to embody. Especially 19th century ideas that trained women to learn a little about music, dance, and embroidery. At one point, I just started crashing them and recombining them.
EMC: Finding something that fits for you!
SHP: Yeah! Because they’re so confining, even if you look at the dress and the way they’re standing. Ugh!
Anyways, I just started putting them back together and recombining them with things I found. Here at the bottom are library cards, and it goes back to that archive—whose histories get saved? Whose histories are we building on? If we are only continuing to build out from this masculine patriarchy, we become very precarious on top because we’re standing on all this knowledge that’s only made from one viewpoint, and it’s excluding all these other people and viewpoints.
(Moving On to Next Ceramic Piece)
SHP: This one, this was just really play. I love this funny thing where the woman is bigger than the man. What I realized is when I painted her face gold, when her identity gets painted out by privilege, all you see is her sexuality. There’s her breasts, this bustle which is supposed to make your butt look bigger and your hips bigger, maybe so you have this idea of being more fertile, I don’t know.
EMC: We have had many discussions about travel, from your time in Palestine and Israel, to on the border, to Italy and one of the pieces we’re gonna show is your old passport that has been gold leafed. I know there’s a lot of meaning behind that for you. Can you share what you were thinking when you made that piece?
SHP: I made that piece in January. It was my first piece of the year in January 2018—not this year, a whole year ago! I was thinking about the travel ban and privilege and what it means to travel with a U.S. Passport and how does privilege erase other people. Because I also become a little bit—it’s not about my erasure but I guess it’s more about colonization with money. So I was thinking about this freedom to travel and cross borders and who has it and who does not and who is losing that ability to be mobile. I believe everyone should be mobile. I was at a party and somebody said, “My passport is gold.” I kept thinking about it and that was my inspiration. I have passed so many borders, and I do believe in open borders. I have been questioned and harassed at borders in Palestine and walked the border for so long on the US–Mexico border for so many years. Then, as a kid, you probably know this story too, I was detained going into Romania with my mom in 1969 and that idea of being stuck between these two countries and not belonging to either one. It’s important that everyone get to [travel, move freely] and I believe everyone should have a passport. Maybe we all don’t even need passports—everybody can just move freely. I hope we start thinking more about open borders. It was a reaction to the Trump travel ban. But also, that passport traveled with me so many places and I just think about how many times I put it in my backpack and it made me feel safe. ‘I have my U.S. Passport!’ Passports are really about who has access and who doesn’t; who can have safety and who cannot; who can get a job and who cannot; who can have money and who cannot.
Precarity series & goldleaf passport
susan harbage page
EMC: In thinking about your teaching in Women’s and Gender Studies, I was wondering how the work with your students and in teaching this subject has affected your art.
SHP: That’s a good question. I always say my students teach me how to think, because I learn so much from them and their willingness to be vulnerable about things, and to discuss what’s going on in their lives. It’s an honor to teach them every day. I’m in Women’s and Gender Studies because all of my work is feminist, and you know, it’s interdisciplinary, it’s really about socially lived theorizing. It’s this idea that came out of the ’60s and ’70s of sort of consciousness-raising where you gather a group of people and that lived reality is the basis of knowledge, it’s not this knowledge that’s coming from someplace else. So I really believe in experiential learning and I believe in trusting what you know and trusting what you see and your own experiences… My students teach me stuff all the time.
EMC: That’s interesting when you say that, and I think it goes back to that idea around your work, like “I ask too many questions.” I find this in art all the time, that I question the questions I want to ask, like, am I looking at this wrong? I don’t trust how it resonates with me sometimes, if that makes sense.
SHP: Yeah, right. But those are the questions you have to ask. If I’m giving a talk about my work and somebody asks me a question, I listen really closely because I know that’s where I need to go; I know that’s the next space. But you just said something different, which is that you check yourself, like, should I ask this? Yeah, that’s because women have been silenced. I really believe we’ve all been silenced in so many ways. How we say, “I’m sorry.” “I didn’t mean to ask that, I’m sorry.” “I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry.” I know I’m much more aware of language, and how power structures support each other, and colonization and power and the subjugation of others and how multiple oppressions really do affect people in powerful and difficult ways. I also think it’s just about asking questions from a new way, right?
EMC: You mentioned—and then I’ll stop, I promise—you mentioned language. That is something that we’ve talked about from day one; it’s something that we both have so much interest in. It was fascinating because you’re so mindful with your language, especially one thing that’s really stayed with me is your language around making pictures. In writing about your exhibit at the Gregg, I found myself again, really having to rethink how I spoke about your art. I was going to say “captures the spirit” but I was like, ‘Wait! That is not the right word!’ I’m so grateful that you make me think around language even more. I wonder why, especially with photography, it feels more violent, and with art.
SHP: I’m really glad you brought up language, because I believe language is really important, and language creates realities. It really does create realities. So the language of photography—Photography was a tool of Colonialism. Photography was developed in the 19th century when we were really just moving out and colonizing the world. It was invented by men and scientists and doctors… right? So it is embedded and imbued with this language of power and patriarchy. If you think of the history, it’s been used to subjugate other people and create a certain kind of knowledge and perspective of ownership and colonialism… People from England going to Africa, North Africa and making pictures of people—this is like oh! There’s so many ways in which it’s been used to dominate and own other cultures… The visual rape of other cultures, in fact. That’s a pretty violent term, but just think who owned that tool, who had the power to use it…who got to send the images of others around the world through the media of newspapers, and tv, etc. And who is still doing that now? If you look at colonialist photography, it’s like, whoa! …Do you want me to talk about some of the language?
EMC: Sure!
SHP: I always give my students a talk about photography and language, but it’s really actually a beautiful word, photography. In Greek it comes from “drawing with light.” So that’s—
EMC: That’s beautiful.
SHP: Beautiful. But then there’s the language of capturing a photo, taking a photo. I think if you go into the world and you have a camera and you decide you’re going to make a photo, I think that’s going to be a very different way of being in the world.
EMC: I love that. In looking forward, what is it that you’re really excited about or that’s keeping you up at night, from either wanting to do something or feeling led in a certain way with your art?
SHP: Oh, that’s really interesting. Well, there’s so many things. I just talked to a curator yesterday. I want to make this “border booth” that’s similar to a photo booth, but people walk into it and tell stories of borders that they’ve crossed. It could be a national border, a physical border, an emotional border, because we all cross borders in so many ways. That’s one thing I’m interested in doing. But mostly, the thing that I’ve been talking about now as I’m finishing up this period of work on the border is I want to write “A Guide to Your Studio.” I’ve already written it, one summer in my studio I wrote as I went into my studio every day. I had this studio from scratch, right at the beginning of the summer, and I just wrote what I did every day and these thoughts about how to make new work every day and how to be creative. So I want to publish this little guide, “Guide to Your Studio,” guide to creativity.
EMC: I think we all need that. Yes!
SHP: Yes. The things that I do, can help you make work every day. I really want to do that. And it’ll just be little one-liners, like, “Take everything down from your studio today,” or “Make one mark today.” Make one mark every day— that’s my theory about making art; just do one thing every day.