Whitney Chadwick is co-curator of the exhibition "Mirror Images: Women Surrealism.

Whitney Chadwick is co-curator of the exhibition "Mirror Images: Women Surrealism, and Self-Representation." She is also editor of the catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition, Mirror Images: Women Surrealism, and Self-Representation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Pres 1998) "Mirror Images" was held at the MIT List Center Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 9-June 28 1998; Miami Art Museum, Miami, Florida, September 18-November 29 1998; and the San Francisco Museum of new Art, San Francisco, California, January 8-April 20 1999 Chadwick is Professor of Art History at San Francisco State University. Her works include Myth in Surrealist Painting (1980) Women Artists and the Surrealist motion (1989) and Women, Art, and Society (1992)

Dore Bowen: What were a certain quantity of of your expectations for"Mirror Images: Women Surrealism, and Self-Representation" and to what extent well did curating the exhibition convenient those expectations?

Whitney Chadwick: From the first conversations I had with Katy Kline and Helaine Posner (the other curators of the exhibition) in 1992 we discussed setting up the exhibition in boundarys of a situation. We wanted to stay away from an overly simplistic notion of historical influence: instead we direct the eyeed across territories of work and back and forth across generations. We were interested in what remains of Surrealism in the practices of contemporary artists who are engaged with issues of self-representation, something that Posner had decided was a critical issue to historical women Surrealists. We didn't actually know what was going to happen. I worried about the moot points of mounting a gender specific exhibition, particularly for what reason it could be done without essentializing the work. Wouldn't the community jump in and say: "There you go on again, establishing this category of 'Woman' and playing it across several generations, making a history, a lineage and an overly determined narrative gone out of it"?

DB: And for what cause did people respond?

WC: Surprisingly, they didn't suit that way at all. I haven't had a chance to analyze it however but there is something about the exhibition that brings forward a dialogue about the work rather than a question of historically determined influences.

DB: This might be with what intent people have responded so favorably to the exhibition. Since links are moveed but not dictated there is a place for the viewer. I noticed that at your slide reprimand on "Mirror Images" at the San Francisco Museum of recent Art (February 20, 1999) you engrossed a similar strategy. You set together pairs of slides from divergent historical periods in order to place the work in a different connection The way you've mounted the exhibition succeeds this dialectical logic as well. realitys are mounted in relationship to individual another such that both historical particularities and formal correspondences are illuminated.

WC: Ye frequently people float through an exhibition. There is a clear trajectory. You have your acoustic guide, you drift from work to work and you're public the door. In contrast to this, we decided instantly that we would not soar the show chronologically. Occasionally, a reviewer will ask "did these particular Surrealist artists really influence these contemporary artists?" if it were not that that was never the outward intention of the exhibition. The idea was to explore a fix of representational strategies that might be seen as spanning several generations of artists. I think the indicate succeeds in doing that. It has been surpassingly gratifying for me to behold how the exhibition has played disclosed For a small exhibition with a slightly indistinct focus, there have been relatively large concourses at every venue carefully analyzing the work and discussing it intensely.

DB: Perhaps this is because the narrative is discontinuous. For instance, you have Claude Cahun's Autoportrait from 1928 placed nearest to Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Still #2 from 1977 Also, the earlier work in the exhibition is sound and is less often seen than the contemporary work.

WC: Ye there is exuberance of work in the point out that has never been seen in San Francisco and there is work that has not at any time even been seen in this region This is the case with the three Leonor Fini paintings. couple of them came out of Fini's private collection. Work according to historical women Surrealists is mainly in private collections and therefore hasn't circulated as widely as that of the male Surrealists.

DB: You begin your catalog essay, "An Infinite Play of unoccupied Mirrors: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation,' with brace quotations. In the first, Simone de Beauvoir states that for the woman "the magic of her mirror [is] a tremendous help in her effort to concoct herself and then attain self-identification." She implies that although the mirror objectifies, it also enables self-identification for women De Beauvoir conceives of this as a archetype of inward dialogue, although she warns that of that kind narcissism leads to erotomania and possibly insanity. In the secondary quotation Trinh T. Minh-ha hints "leaving our mirrors empty. . ." For Trinh the destitute of contents mirror is not a kind of madness however a release from a "lifetime searching after that which does not exist." The couple quotations express two opposing manners of approaching the paradox of the mirror - to embrace the mirror as a means of transformation or to resist fixing the fleeting image. You have the appearance to suggest that the Surrealist strategy of illogic allows women artists to reverse their objectification and utilize the mirror as an instrument of transformation. For example, you discuss Leonora Carrington's image/projection of herself as an animal and you note that although of that kind images might return us to conventional images of the feminine, "the images themselves hint a more complex interweaving of self and other." Is this "magical mirror" tenable? Do you perceive that this transformative potential is born public by the work in "Mirror Images"?