"Turning a corner on the fourth floor at the Museum of Modern Art, it appeared: Dogs of Cythera by Dorothea Tanning. Suddenly, the tempo of my visit collapsed not into calm, but into excited consequence. I had moved through the museum at a near run heels striking the floor, senses thrown open still electrified by Wilfredo Lam, but unsatisfied. It was that familiar MoMA condition: the body outrunning thought, the eye consuming faster than meaning can form."
"One must admit, it is quietly astonishing to recognize how recently a woman's autonomy was conditional: permission threaded through the most ordinary gestures of adulthood. To accept employment. To travel unaccompanied. To spend one's own money without justification or intermediary. Even a credit card could not be issued to a woman until 1974, a date proximate enough to disturb any belief that such constraints belong to a sealed past."
Turning a corner on the Museum of Modern Art's fourth floor, exposure to Dorothea Tanning's Dogs of Cythera arrested movement and altered the visitor's tempo. The museum itinerary had been a rush of sensation and incomplete meaning until certain works mandated attention through impact and stillness before authorship. Those works that halted attention were all by women artists. The recognition of that pattern underscores how recently women’s autonomy remained heavily constrained in everyday acts: employment, travel, and financial independence were contingent, with a credit card not issuable to a woman until 1974. Obedience once served as social infrastructure.
Read at www.amny.com
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