{"id":2865,"date":"2022-07-26T22:48:41","date_gmt":"2022-07-26T20:48:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/howtogoon.com\/?page_id=2865"},"modified":"2022-07-26T22:52:02","modified_gmt":"2022-07-26T20:52:02","slug":"up-in-smoke","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/up-in-smoke\/","title":{"rendered":"UP in SMOKE"},"content":{"rendered":"

The installation Up in Smoke<\/strong> can be seen at Artphy<\/a> until October 2nd 2022.<\/p>\n

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The installation links contemporary misogynist \u2018incel\u2019 groups to historical practices of the persecution of women as witches. <\/p>\n

Witch-hunt<\/strong>: witch hunts varied enormously in place and time, but they were united by a common and coherent world view, part of a broader hostility toward, and persecution of, marginalised groups. The visible role played by women expressing dissent may have contributed to the stereotype of the witch as female.<\/em><\/p>\n

Incel<\/strong> (involuntary-celibate): young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually, typically characterised by resentment and hatred, misogyny, racism, a sense of entitlement to sex, and the endorsement of violence against women.<\/em> <\/p>\n

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At the centre of this installation is the bonfire. Hovering above it hangs a cloud of \u2018smoke\u2019 consisting of 365 tiny porcelain items. This plethora of objects represents all that has gone \u2018Up in Smoke\u2019, everything lost to the flames of misogyny \u2013 women\u2019s knowledge, women\u2019s skills, women\u2019s ways of working collectively \u2013 or things which incite male anger or derision. The material itself houses a nice metaphor \u2013 clay, when fired, becomes stronger and more resilient. The objects reference both historical loss as well as more contemporary, metaphoric or personal loss. They have been made in collaboration with my 85-year old mother, the artist Josephine Lewington \u2013 a contemporary witch-figure who lives an unconventional life with her animals and her knowledge of plants, her socialist ideals and her \u2018coven\u2019 of feminist friends. <\/p>\n

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Combined with the porcelain \u2018smoke\u2019 and the symbolic bonfire, representative of witch burning throughout history and ongoing to this day, coming from within the heap of firewood, are men\u2019s voices . Angry, bitter derogatory voices extolling violence against women, quotes taken from various actual incel-group internet-sites \u2013 voices that are fanning the smouldering fires of contemporary misogyny. <\/p>\n

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The theoretical framework is informed by Silvia Federici\u2019s Caliban and the Witch, and Laura Bates\u2019 Men who Hate Women. Federici argues that the witch hunts were not so much about religion or superstition as about suppressing the rebellions of women. As women migrated from countryside to cities as part of the transition to capitalism, they lost rights. If married, their earnings were paid to their husbands. Women\u2019s work, unpaid, and compulsory, was now to produce more workers for the capitalist system. Not carrying a pregnancy to term became a crime. (Terrifying parallels with current developments in the U.S.) Midwives facilitating birth control were witches, as well as older women no longer able to produce children, childless women viewed as unproductive, \u2018loose\u2019 women who refused to become someone\u2019s property, and women who sold sex. Women who protested in rebellions \u2013 against food shortages, or against the enclosure of the common land as private property, destroying fences and hedgerows, burning fields \u2013were persecuted in witch hunts fuelled by a conveniently imagined conspiracy which labelled them in league with the devil. <\/p>\n

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Nowadays, belief in a literal devil has waned, but in the wake of the MeToo movement it is women themselves being blamed by incels. Feminism is deemed responsible for undermining the \u2018natural order\u2019 of male over female supremacy. Some incel groups support the idea of violence as revenge on society, working deliberately to convince other incels that they are justified in raping women if they are rejected sexually. \u2018Women are the ultimate cause of our suffering\u2026 We need to focus more on our hatred of women. Hatred is power.\u2019 Since 2014 eight mass murders committed by men known to be connected to the incel movement, have resulted in a total of 61 deaths.
\n\"\" The significance of many of the objects which make up the smoke cloud is instantly obvious \u2013 the traditional witches\u2019 broomsticks; plants such as the foxglove or feverfew with their medicinal properties; or the just-born babies. Others, such as Artemisia, goddess of childbirth and also of the hunt, transformed into a clay figurine with both multiple breasts and a stag\u2019s head; the angry peasant women protesting the enclosure of common land for private property; or the women half way to transforming, as witches were accused of doing, into hares, are perhaps less well known. Still others are strictly personal, for example the baggy, bobbly knitted trousers, a miniature replica of those worn by my mother, or the closed piano, symbol of her mother who played at concert-pianist level but was expected to stop once she married. <\/p>\n

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We spent an absurd number of weeks of hours making all these detailed clay objects. As we worked, we talked, discussing all the ways misogyny has touched our own lives, how it affects society, and about its relationship to the market economy. Our time-consuming work \u2013 absurdly non-functional within a cost-effective capitalist system \u2013 was the antipathy of profit-making production, the work process itself like an embodiment of dissent toward that ethos of maximum profit, a distant echo of other female dissent in the past. <\/p>\n

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The installation Up in Smoke can be seen at Artphy until October 2nd 2022. The installation links contemporary misogynist \u2018incel\u2019 groups to historical practices of the persecution of women as witches. Witch-hunt: witch hunts varied enormously in place and time, but they were united by a common and coherent world view, part of a broader […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2865","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2865"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2883,"href":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2865\/revisions\/2883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}