Women, Work and Power: Carey Young’s recent videos

Dr. Catherine Grant

Lecture presented at “Carey Young: Vision and Justice” symposium, Modern Art Oxford, Friday 19th May 2023

Today I am going to look at Carey Young’s trio of videos: Palais de Justice (2017), The Vision Machine (2020) and Appearance (2023). I am going to explore her choice to focus on women in each of these: variously showing women at work, women thinking, women in charge, women who have become the personification of the law.

Despite this being a few decades into the twenty-first century, the law is still normally associated with masculine power, and patriarchy. Active agents, and professional people are still conceptualised as men, and often white men, in the minds of many. This has been a concern within feminism for many decades, mulling over the questions of how to reframe institutional power and the associations with male identity and masculinity. This has been formulated as questions such as:

How can women take power and agency?
Will they wield power differently from men?

Is there something distinct about a gendered relationship to power, and how do intersectional concerns around class, race, and other forms of privilege also impact on what it means to be in charge?

There are very different answers to these questions, often dependent on the historical moment, the experience of men and women at a particular time, the expectations of a community and how far they have moved away from what Virginia Woolf framed as “the procession of sons of educated men” in her landmark book Three Guineas from 1938. When I saw Young’s film Palais de Justice, I thought about Three Guineas, and her procession of professional men going to work, walking towards Westminster and the Houses of Parliament, over the bridges of the Thames:

“There they go, our brothers who have been educated at public schools and universities, mounting those steps, passing in and out of those doors, ascending those pulpits, preaching, teaching, administering justice, practising medicine, transacting business, making money.”[1]

Woolf then explains that as of the late 1930s, women had been admitted to the professions for the last twenty years, picturing how: “Trapesing along at the tail end of the procession, we go ourselves. And that makes a difference.”[2] I will explore how Woolf thinks through the pagentry of professions and the implications of women’s involvement in a short while.

For now, I will simply add, that still, in 2023, when I think of a judge, I think of an older, white man. When I think of the Law, I still think of something that will be imposed on me, rather than something I participate in. These are deep feelings, ones that are no longer based completely in reality but in a historical sense of what judgment and law represents for us. I know there are women in positions of power, albeit in much smaller numbers. I know that there are reviews and calls for accountability within the police force, our government and law givers, but that these are calling for justice in ways that have been demanded for many decades. Watching Young’s films brings these different realities together. There is a sense of seriousness as we watch these women at work, the courthouse in Palais de Justice and the laboratory or factory in The Vision Machine. As someone who has been working in one of Woolf’s professions for many years – the university – I have been thinking about how these institutions have changed during the period in which women have been allowed to participate, and how that might relate to Young’s concerns around justice, the law, and depictions of women at work.

In this lecture I will look at the relationships between women, work and power in each video. To do this I will frame them in relation to Virginia Woolf’s comments in Three Guineas, and how she explores women’s exclusions from institutions and professions, as well as exploring how to take part in them can be a paradoxical undertaking, as they need to be critiqued, but also require women’s involvement for them to be changed. Leading on from this, I will explore the use of speculative fiction that Young has blended with forms of documentary in Palais de Justice and The Vision Machine, as she edits her footage to create women-only, or women-dominated work environments. In relation to what Young has called a “thought proposition” to “insert a certain idea of female judicial power into the public imagination”[3] I will look at an essay by the feminist theorist and science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin as she thinks through her ground-breaking novel The Left Hand of Darkness and its own thought experiments around gender. Finally I will look at Young’s most recent series of video portraits of women judges, and explore them in relation to reflections by Patricia J Williams on being a black woman lawyer, and how she puts together lived experience, theoretical legal understanding and social justice. I will also contextualise this new series with some film and photographic precedents, in particular Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests and Catherine Opie’s portraits of queer communities.

Professions for Women (Palais de Justice)
In her diary, Virginia Woolf records that on Tuesday 20th January 1931: “I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived an entirely new book – a sequel to A Room of One’s Own – about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps – Lord how exciting!”[4] This new book, initially called The Pargiters, would go onto become two books: Three Guineas and the novel The Years.[5] In the first versions of this book, the form was what Woolf described as a ‘novel-essay’. It included much factual research on the status of women during the first decades of the twentieth century, tracking the impact of their increased access to education and work. In the end the format was too unwieldy, and much of the factual information was moved over into Three Guineas, which is now known as a very famous essay that tries to answer the question “how are we to prevent war?”. It also continues Woolf’s play with forms of writing that you can see across her fiction and non-fiction writing.

I have long been interested in this need to create new forms, or hybrid forms to give shape to feminist argument and ideas. In Three Guineas Woolf eventually settles on the letter form, replying to three requests for money. In it she reflects on war, power, institutions and work, thinking about women’s relationship to all. The book begins by contemplating the difficulty in replying to the question: “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” The majority of Woolf’s reply to this question is to explore the difference of status between herself and the man writing the letter, who happens to be a barrister, and to query his suggestions of how she can help: to sign a letter to the newspapers; to join a certain society; and subscribe to its funds.[6]

She instead works through the implications of two other requests for support that she has received: one for the rebuilding of a women’s college and one for an organisation that supports women to work in the professions. In answering how to prevent war, she contends that it is necessary to explore the position of women in society, and the advent of them being allowed into the professions and the university. To do this she embarks on a devasting critique of the pomp and ceremony of masculine professions, linking their traditions and dress to a military sensibility that contributes to war. It is here that I find echoes of Young’s project filming in the nineteenth-century courthouse in Brussels, the Palais de Justice.

Young’s video begins with shots of the grand interior of the courthouse, with huge classical columns and vast staircases. The soundscape fills the room with the muted bustle of bodies and voices, a quiet background thrum that is processed through the large spaces and polished floors. Young has described the soundscape as a crucial element of the work, as is its installation as a very large image. Talking about the experience of being in the courthouse, she says: “At the Palais, one is struck by the very particular, somewhat hallucinatory auditory experience of the building’s boundless acoustic textures, eddies and reflections. The lengthy stairwells and marble-clad corridors, which open on to the main hall, funnel in layers of footsteps from different bodies at varied distances: the faraway guards and police with their heavy rubber-soled gait and jangling keys, the hurrying female lawyers in stilettos, the confident tip-tap-tip of the male lawyers in their fine leather soles.”[7] Both the soundscape and installation contribute to the viewers experience of being immersed in the world of the courthouse, what Young describes (in relation to the audio) “an abstraction of the Palais’ unique auditory personality.”[8]

As the video begins we see a few people beginning to take their places in courtrooms, as well as people finding time to relax in the austere interiors – a woman’s feet and phone are just visible as she sits just out of site, a young woman draws the architectural interior, a figure that Young has related to herself: “(the young girl sketching the building a kind of stand-in for myself, and the idea of ‘accuracy’, which this film does not attempt.)”[9] We see through round windows into the courtrooms, through doors help slightly ajar, through glass that is often smudged or reflective, a patchwork of impressions as the building comes to life. We see women judges, barristers, and clerks, all intent on whatever the task is in hand, starting with a woman talking seriously to an unseen listener, to a range of shots in which these professional women are contemplating, listening, writing, thinking. Men are present, but are not the centre of the legal process, they are pictured as clerks, passersbys, administrators. This flips the usual gender dynamics in courtrooms, and indeed it was one of the elements that Young says led to her deciding to create a woman-centred portrait of the courthouse:

“The concept of filming only female judges in dialectical relationship to the building’s innate patriarchal symbolism, and then editing it into a sequence that would convey a kind of speculative-fictional proposition about women controlling the administration of ‘justice’ – came quickly, and was based on real events: the preponderance of female judges repeatedly on view at the Palais.”[10]

The experience of watching the video gives a sense of the work being done by the women, and also I was struck at how unusual it was to watch women quietly absorbed in their thinking, listening or reading. At times Young’s camera catches a judge’s eye, who then coolly appraise the camera’s lens but then returns to whatever she is doing. No smiles. No change of expression. It might have been that on occasion the person being filmed is actually looking at themselves in reflection, as Young did much filming through windows. However, it was striking that these women are used to being looked at, used to being in a position of power which involves them being a visual representation of the law.

This quality of quiet confidence and position made me think about what Woolf had written about the dress and pageantry of professions in Three Guineas. Within it she mocks the need for medals, uniforms, rituals and splendour. She links these dress codes with military uniform, and with an impulse to war. Addressing women, she says: “Think – one of these days, you may wear a judge’s wig on your head, an ermine cape on your shoulders; sit under the lion and the unicorn; draw a salary of five thousand a year with a pension on retiring.”[11] She continues: “we have to ask ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that procession, or don’t we? On what terms shall we join that profession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men?”[12]

I’m showing here one of the five photographs that were used alongside the text of Three Guineas, in this case a General. The art historian Siona Wilson has explored this element of the book, a photobook that often had these photographs removed in later editions, which Wilson convincingly argues reveals gives an extra dimension to the metaphors of vision, veiling and photography that Woolf sets out (and can be seen in Young’s work too).[13] In the recent 1992 edition of Three Guineas, the five photographs are squeezed together in an insert, so there the rhythm of pictures and text is lost from the original layout. Earlier in the book, Woolf reflects on the ceremonial costumes worn by various professions: “Obviously the connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.” She continues: “… in courts and universities, we find the same love of dress. There, too are velvet and silk, fur and ermine. We can say that for educated men to emphasize their superiority over other people, either in birth or intellect, by dressing differently, or by adding titles before, or letters after their names are acts that rouse competition and jealousy – emotions which, as we need scarcely draw upon biography to prove, nor ask psychology to show, have their share in encouraging a disposition towards war.”[14] For Woolf, the rituals and dress of the professions can be connected with a masculinity that privileges competition and dominance. For her, the only way to reimagine society in an attempt to stop war is to turn to the different forms of learning that have been open to women, and as women enter the professions she says: “we can refuse all such distinctions and all such uniforms for ourselves.”[15]

When thinking about Young’s portrait of women in the Brussels courthouse, I connected back to these photographs and Woolf’s comments, to think through some of the differences between them. Here we have women who have joined the legal profession, and are comfortable within it. Young discusses how the preponderance of women in the courthouse led to her editing the film with a focus on them as the lawmakers. Contrasting their images with Woolf’s photographs, they do wear the robes of judges, barristers, clerks. But there is a sense of everydayness in their depiction. There is a shot of robes hanging on pegs, beneath images of white men, presumably important judges or lawyers. Here the robes hang without the power ascribed to them by Woolf, instead a working outfit ready to be thrown on. I’ll return to this question of dress and power when I look at Young’s series Appearance.

Young has also talked about the ruined quality of the courthouse itself. This is less obvious in the film, but Young discusses how the courthouse is in a bad state of repair, a symbol of patriarchal, colonial, imperial power, but one that is no longer gleaming and solid. Instead Young identifies a sense of anarchy within the place:

“It also seemed to me so disorientingly extensive in scale, and so riddled with signs of decay (holes in courtroom carpets, graffiti on interior walls, broken panes of glass) - perhaps a victim of Belgium’s political and linguistic divisions - that it was somehow in a zone of neutrality, beyond anyone’s full control. Such a sense of possible anarchy was palpable, and undeniably inspiring. I felt that I could take a risk to film there repeatedly, and in what turned out to be a rather brazen way: a method that could perhaps never be possible anywhere else.”[16]

Here I find a connection with Woolf’s ruminations, as she thinks about how women might inhabit the professions differently. Part of her thesis is that rather than learning from the traditions of pomp and ceremony, we should turn to what Woolf calls the un-paid education of women, which would now be called “lived experience”. She defines this unpaid education as covering “poverty, chastity, derision” and “freedom from unreal loyalties”.[17] I will return to this idea when looking at Young’s series Appearance. But for now, let’s leave the courthouse, this liminal space ruled by women, and explore Young’s film The Vision Machine, as women work with machines as they manufacture lens for cameras.

 The Vision Machine
At first, the topic of this video might seem rather different from Palais de Justice. However, Young connects the two, with both creating a world of women working, and the focus on looking – through windows, through doors, creating an encounter between the videomaker and subjects, as well as the space that they inhabit – is common to both. In The Vision Machine Young highlights a piece of technology used in photography and filmmaking: the lens used to see through and produce the images, with variations in depth, focal range, quality of image.

She tells how she became interested in photography and video again after a long break, learning the techniques for filming video in order to undertake Palais de Justice. This intimacy with the technology, often assumed for photographers, but less so for film and video makers, meant that she received information from various manufacturers, including a video of a lens factory tour.[18] Like the Belgian courthouse, this factory in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, appealed to Young as a possible space to film in, and she embarked on the lengthy process of getting permission to work there.

When viewing the video, the conditions of production for the workers: white hooded overalls and masks – produce a sense of science fiction that is underlined by the style of shooting. There are many close-up, macro shots that focus on machines and reflections, as well as low lighting that give a sense of nonplace and concentrated activity. Before I explore some of the possible readings of this video, I will narrate my experience of watching:

The first shot could be a view through the window of an aeroplane, but I slowly realise that I am looking through a window into a machine. Lenses glow and rotate inside. The first glimpse of workers is refracted through the lenses themselves, a reflection that multiplies and distorts the image of someone working with a brush, finally placing the lenses that we are looking through into a machine. When we get to a close up of the worker, we can see that it is a woman. She looks at each lens briefly, intently, assessing its quality and purity. Her white uniform is pristine, her index and middle figures covered by plastic sheaths. We realise she is part of a line of workers checking lenses, undertaking repetitive, precise tasks in their assembly. Each worker is lit by their own light, a tiny stage at each station of the room.

The sound is a thrum overlaid with the workers’ small movements. Similar to Palais de Justice, it is a soundscape that evokes a quiet intensity, a background that draws the viewer into an embodied experience of the world depicted.

The film plays out through a sequence of shots that picture workers and equipment in a quiet ballet, a sense of concentration that pictures the building and space as much as its human inhabitants. There is footage of a woman testing lenses looking at a monitor as she puts each one on a camera. We see her focusing on a colour image of a Japanese woman holdng a red carnation, a stark, humorous counterpoint to the serious workers in their androgynous, futuristic garb. As in Palais de Justice, the framing devices of windows, screens, doors make the viewer aware of the camera taking the footage. Woman at work behind the camera, with the same precision, the same attention to detail. The close ups of the camera, tripod and images being used to test the lenses layers with the documentary format of the film: documentary but not realist, creating a space of women working that feels out of time and out of history.

Here conversations about the male gaze are transferred to a contemplation of woman-made lenses: how does this impact what is seen through them? I take this as a side provocation of the piece, as for me, the artist is included in this set of women working, and wants us to partake in this world without any reference to the heroic masculine viewpoint that was theorised in relation to golden Hollywood cinema by Laura Mulvey in the mid 1970s. Rather than think about a female gaze, I want to think about Young’s use of the term speculative fiction in relation to this film and Palais de Justice. An element that Young picks up on, but I hadn’t properly articulated in my description of the work, is the way the lenses themselves become a subject of the film, “the lenses started to feel like an alien presence, a kind of AI, watching the humans…”[19] Young also discusses how her use of close-ups creates a haptic quality to the film, a sense of touch and an embodied experience of the environment. This is paralleled by the soundscape, and in both of her videos that I have discussed, they seem to be portraits of the workspaces as much as the workers. There is a tangible experience of place that is otherworldly, a speculative fiction that is not just about a woman only space, or a woman-controlled space, but also the space of work, thought, industry.

When I watched The Vision Machine, and spoke to Young about her interest in speculative fiction, I thought of Ursula Le Guin, and her experiments in science fiction, and her reflections on her practice within her essays. She is most well known for her 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, in which she imagines an androgynous race, living in relative harmony, on a planet called Gethen. This became a touchstone for many in the Women’s Liberation Movement, as it tried to imagine a world where gender was not an organising principle, and communities lived peacefully alongside each other. In this book, she imagined a race of people who were androgynous and sexually inactive unless they were in kemmer, in which partners would experience hormonal changes that would make them either male or female for the duration of the sexual phase. This meant that all the people could experience both genders, both were able to get pregnant. Similar to Woolf’s assertions that to prevent war one must first re-imagine women’s role in society, as well as asking women to re-imagine society’s structures, Le Guin asks the reader (and herself) what might be the outcome of removing gender as an oppressive power dynamic.  

In her essay “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” Le Guin asks: “Why did I invent these peculiar people? Not just so that the book could contain, halfway through it, the sentence “The king was pregnant” – thought I admit I am fond of that sentence.”[20] “The king was pregnant” also connected to Young’s comments that she had been drawn to thinking about feminism after becoming a parent. When I had emailed Young about this, she clarified that all of her work has a feminist perspective, but after experiencing pregnancy and parenthood she began to think about both the extraordinary capacity to be pregnant, which is also very everyday. The experience of giving birth, and the continuing medicalisation of this process, which often results in trauma for many, was something that she saw as not having progressed very much from her own mothers MA research into midwivery and “how sexist womens’ birth experiences were”.[21] This sense of looping temporality in women’s lives – that whilst some areas have progressed, whilst others still carry legacies of traditional, patriarchal thinking – is often exacerbated at times when trying to either exceed gender norms, or when realising that activities (such as parenthood) are still heavily gendered.

Before I received this answer from Young, I had wondered about her foregrounding of parenthood in relation to feminism, and what this shift represented. For many people, pregnancy, parenthood, and particularly motherhood constitutes a profound change in the way that you are perceived by others. Suddenly the conventions around gender solidify, and it can be experienced, for women, that you have finally achieved your calling – when it may not be central to your identity. The historical imaginary around motherhood still exerts a huge pull in the way in which motherhood is both experienced and perceived. I know that I felt myself to be gendered by others in a much more powerful, and often intrusive way, whilst pregnant. What might have been ignored at most times of my life – my social presentation as a white woman, and the expectations that this carries – was pulled into dramatic focus once a pregnant belly takes centre stage in pretty much all interactions, continuing to the experience of being a parent of a tiny child, and the way in which a buggy, or the overflowing accoutrements of childcare, became to stand in for myself, and my former singular being was fractured and cascaded through various stereotypes around the tired, struggling mother.

This digression hopefully shows why Le Guin’s gesture “The king is pregnant” is so important. In the rest of the essay she explores her thinking in creating the world of Gethen in the context of the early women’s movement. She says “I eliminated gender, to find out what was left.”[22] Like Young’s “thought proposition” in making Palais de Justice a woman-controlled space, Le Guin discusses how her novel follows what she sees as one of the essential functions of science fiction: “question-asking: reversals of a habitual way of thinking, metaphors for what our language has no words for as yet, experiments in imagination.”[23] She describes the novel’s premise as follows:

“The subject of my experiment, then, was something like this: Because of our lifelong social conditioning, it is hard for us to see clearly what, besides purely physiological form and function, truly differentiates men and women. Are there real differences in temperament, capacity, talent, psychic process, etc? If so, what are they?”[24]

In many ways, these questions are similar to the ones that Woolf asks in Three Guineas: rather than seeing women as being innately qualified to prevent war, or create a more peaceful society, she asks how women can help re-imagine education and work to make the conditions for war less likely. Connecting Woolf, Le Guin and Young is the idea of an anarchic spirit that needs to be unleashed to counter the oppressive structures of patriarchy and Empire. Le Guin explores what she calls a female principle which at “least historically has been, basically anarchic.”[25] This is very much like the description Young gives of the Belgian courthouse as having “a sense of possible anarchy.”[26] In Le Guin’s imaginary universe, rule is by custom rather than force, and ritual and parade take the place of armies and police.

Le Guin pictures a world where gender has been side-lined, but at the time she wrote her novel, she used the masculine pronoun to describe the inhabitants of her world, as she had not wanted to invent a gender free pronoun. Le Guin produced two version of the essay “Is Gender Necessary?” with the first being published in 1976, and then a version subtitled “Redux” coming out in 1987. In the Redux version of her essay she queries her earlier justifications for certain elements in The Left Hand of Darkness, and one of the extended passages is about her use of the masculine pronoun. As she moves into the 1980s, she starts to think that she had made the wrong choice with the use of ‘he/him’ for the Gethens, and gives a beautiful bit of history to the use of the pronoun they/them:

“I still dislike invented pronouns, but now dislike them less than the so-called generic pronoun he/him/his, which does in fact exclude women from discourse; and which was an invention of male grammaticians, for until the sixteenth century the English generic singular pronoun was they/them/their, as it still is in English and American colloquial speech. It should be restored to the written language, and let the pedants and pundits squeak and gibber in the streets.”[27]

In our historical moment of the twenty-first century, the use of they/them has now been accepted, and the spectrum of gender has taken shape way beyond legal definitions. I go through Le Guin’s reflections on her creation of an androgynous world, because it demonstrates the difficulty of thinking beyond gender, and also the difficulty of creating a world dominated by women that is not simply a replication of our current world. It is in this spirit that I watched Young’s video The Vision Machine, with the image of the passive, feminine woman feeling like the historical material for a present that also feels like a future, a factory full of concentrating, androgynous women who join Young’s cast of women imagined beyond twentieth century binaries.

Appearance
So to return from this androgynous future as present, I will now turn to Young’s latest work, Appearance, which has been a commission for this exhibition. Appearance continues some of the concerns seen in Palais de Justice, but in a very different setting. Here we are taken to a studio, viewing video portraits of a series of women judges. Young explained that she wanted to pick up on the moments in Palais de Justice, “in which the judges seem to spot the camera”.[28] She talks about how she would feel guilty when she thought she had been spotted, although oftentimes she had not been seen, but was simply catching a moment of contemplation.

In Appearance the chair, camera, and studio set up takes their place as actors in the scene along with the sitters themselves. Like the spaces of Palais de Justice and The Vision Machine, we are taken into a place where objects and settings are crucial. In Appearance, this scene setting then cuts to a frontal shot of the sitter, shown staring into the camera, with the shot ending just below the knees. This is a conventional portrait format, with Young referring to Velazquez’s painting of Pope Innocent X.

The still shot soon moves into a series of close-ups, which cover jewellery, robes, hair, as well as medium shots of the judges’ head and shoulders. These women return the camera’s stare coolly, before getting up and leaving the set. The lighting fades, and then the video moves into the next portrait. The gowns of some of the judges speak to previous eras, and centuries, with white lace ruffs and huge swathes of golden embroidery. Some wear rather simple robes, and the close ups then focus on skin, glasses, a controlled expression. The historical garb contrasts with modern haircuts and tasteful, often expensive looking jewellery worn, markers of women who are used to being seen in public, and as Young puts it “public intellectuals”.

Young talks about the feeling of guilt watching the footage, as she also felt when filming clandestinely in the Belgian courthouse. She contends that we imaginatively perceive ourselves to be ‘in the dock’, and that the eyes of a judge are nearly always experienced as a gaze that will be passing judgement. Some of the judges have a gaze that is benevolent, others appear to tolerate the camera. In nearly all of the portraits it is hard to hold the gaze of the sitter, even with the full knowledge that what is being viewed is a video.

An important reference point for Young in making these video portraits was Andy Warhol’s series Screen Tests, made between 1964-1966.[29] In these film portraits, Warhol’s sitters were asked to pose motionless for the duration of a single reel of film: 100 feet, or approximately 3 minutes. He made over 500 of these Screen Tests, (472 survive) with the sitters’ performances ranging from an increasing discomfort as the time in front of the camera lengthens, to an insolent disregard to the instructions to remain still, with cigarettes being lit or a range of poses and expressions being tried out. These structural portraits play with the interface between photography and film, so that the overall impression when watching a selection of the Screen Tests is that they operate as minimally changing photographs, heightening the viewer’s sensation of being in front of an image for a duration that is dictated not by his or her own desire, but by the filmmaker’s.

Discussing this series Warhol said:

I made my earliest films using for several hours just one actor on the screen doing the same thing: eating or sleeping or smoking: I did this because people usually just go to the movies to see only the star, to eat him up, so here at last is a chance to look only at the star for as long as you like no matter what he does and to eat him up all you want to. It was also easier to make.[30]

As explained in Warhol’s comment above, the structure of the Screen Tests can be read as trying to assign time to the viewer’s desire, discarding narrative and action for the sake of contemplation. David E James describes the Screen Tests in rather different terms from that of Warhol, describing how “The situation is that of psychoanalysis; the camera is the silent analyst who has abandoned the subject to the necessity of his fantastic self-projection.”[31] Warhol focuses on a moment of engagement between the viewer and model that is emphasised by the films being played at 16 or 18 frames per second, the speed of silent rather than sound film, stretching the duration of these non-narrative dramas from 3 mins to around 4 mintes.

In Young’s series, this exchange between sitter and viewer seems to explore the dynamic between judge and their public, one which wants to reset the cultural imaginary of judges being older, white men. As Young describes, this work is still a form of speculative fiction “because although these judges are working today, the real statistics are privileged white men are still by far the dominant presence in terms of who make up the judiciary.”[32] This desire to picture women and underrepresented groups in various industries and professions is not new. I’m sure many of you work in places were images of students or workers are framed as a counterpoint to historical portraits of powerful white men. Over the last few months in the London underground, there has been a series celebrating women who work for Transport for London, with multiple portraits of smiling groups of workers of different ages and ethnicities, affirmative statements, and historical images. Young’s video portrait, however, operates on a different register I would argue. The durational quality of the videos, whilst referencing photography and painting, produce an encounter for the viewer which cannot be easily sped past.

In the contemplation and dialogue they request from the viewer, they reminded me of Catherine Opie’s famous series Being and Having, which picture her queer community in the early 1990s. These butch and masculine presenting figures engage the viewer and refuse to be a token presence or an oddity. There is a playfulness to the group’s names and facial hair, a queer version of masculinity that opens up the normative. Opie thought that this series might end her career, as her public work from the 1980s had been in a more conventional documentary mode, an area she is still well known for. Alongside her subsequent portraits that, like Young, take on the conventions of the painted portrait, Opie created a now very famous reimaging of queer communities that overturned the stereotypes of queer lives in mainstream photography. These images feature on the front of books and are part of a queer art canon, one that has shifted the terms from the objectifying gaze and was part of a wider embrace of staged forms of photography that in size and colour took on historical modes of painted portraiture in the 1990s. Like Warhol’s portrait practice, Opie’s work produces a set of portraits that open up the conventions of who is powerful, who is objectified, who can look back.

Young’s work can be seen within this tradition – very aware of the conventions that often continue stereotypes and power dynamics in image making, foregrounding or exaggerating historical forms and conventions to remake them for the present.

The contrast between Young’s sitters and the typical projects creating a set of smiling positive images also remind me of Shulamith Firestone’s call for a smile boycott as a “dream action” for the women’s liberation movement.[33] Sara Ahmed discusses the politics of smiling and being happy in relation to feminism and particularly black feminism, in her work on the figure of the feminist killjoy.[34] She describes smiling colourful faces in institutional diversity work, and how it glosses over structural oppression and violence: “Sometimes we are required to smile in their brochures, almost as if we have to smile in response to the gift of having been included. Smiles become gratitude. We provide smiley colorful faces.”[35]

We are being given a different portrait of power in this series, one which reimagines the procession of men described by Woolf, with the love of ornament and ritual dress being reformed by the women as they integrate it with their own style. I find it uncomfortable to view so many close-ups of these powerful figures. There is something intimate and I feel almost disrespectful as the camera sweeps in to shoot their body. As I review this feeling, I realise that this is due to me not wanting to look at a powerful person too closely, normally figured as a man. Traditionally this kind of looking, close, often critical looking at hair, face, clothes, is usually condoned when it is directed at women, or people seen as without power. A staple of exchanges between women is a compliment about an outfit or style. In these videos though, I feel uncomfortable sharing the inevitable dissection of these judges looks, although I know we all do this privately whenever we are in proximity to someone. It makes me think about how you are all looking at me today, and how I would struggle to achieve the level of polish and poise presented by Young’s sitters, how I have to actively stop fidgeting, swaying and smiling when trying to look professional myself.

I wouldn’t have these thoughts if this were a series of portraits of men (I don’t think so), although Warhol achieves this kind of close, self-conscious looking in his portraits of men, which are also layered with desire. My thoughts instead turn to how these judges feel as they are looked at, and what their lived experience brings to their professional lives. This is something that is explored in detail by the legal scholar Patricia Williams, in her book The Alchemy of Race and Rights, which Young shared with me when I asked her what she had been reading whilst making Palais de Justice. In a chapter entitled “The Brass Ring and the Deep Blue Sea (some parables about learning to think like a lawyer)” she starts off by telling the reader: “Since subject position is everything in my analysis of the law, you deserve to know that it’s a bad morning.”[36]. She discusses reading about enslaved people being considered as merchandise, and how this merchandise can be deemed defective through the “vice of craziness”.[37] These historical black women in the text mirror Williams reality in her present, 1990s America, and start a reflection on how Williams profession is often seen as at odds with being a black woman. Combining her experiences of blackness, womanhood, and her work as a commercial lawyer, an educator and a writer, she explores legal frameworks and how to think about subjectivity in relation to the law. Her work creates critical reflection on the law, with many issues raised still present today, 30 years after she is writing. Rather than then creating her own polished Appearance, she presents a flip side to Young’s video, and tells her readers:

“So you should know that this is one of those mornings when I refuse to compose myself properly; you should know you are dealing with someone who is writing this in an old terry bathrobe with a little fringe of blue and white tassles dangling from the hem, trying to decide if she is stupid or crazy.”[38]

Her work links with Ahmed’s work on the feminist killjoy, and the weight of diversity work for people of colour. She reveals the anger and the confusion that structural racism, histories of slavery, sexism and other forms of oppression have wrought on her. Here, for me, we return to Woolf’s insistence that to re-imagine the world, we have to re-imagine the forms in which we write, analyse, create. Williams brings in the autobiographical so that she can reshape legal conventions, and make her reader aware of these conventions that are often accepted and seen as objective.

Like Woolf getting her reader to picture the ridiculous nature of masculine power through the images and a re-situation of the robes and rituals that surround the professions, Williams draws the reader in to the jarring experience of reading about enslaved people as property, and her own subjectivity in the present, framing this within a huge range of anti-black violence in the news, as well as economic inequality, AIDS, climate change. The last straw for her is hearing that “Harvard Law School cannot find one black woman on the entire planet who is good enough to teach there…”.[39] Similarly to Woolf a little over 60 years earlier, the violence of the world leads her to examine what changes can be made when women, and for Williams, women of colour, are included. I would argue that these are the stakes at play when we watch Young’s video portrait of women judges. Rather than these figures fitting into the existing categories of historically white, masculine power, their presence re-forms it, even if only slightly, but more and more as the range of subjectivities and lived experiences are brought to bear on the law, and feel comfortable to draw on their experiences. Woolf calls these experiences an “unpaid-for education”, the teachers of “poverty, chastity, derision” and “freedom from unreal loyalties”.[40] It is not always the case that being born into a class of people who are structurally oppressed or underrepresented means that you will necessarily want to transform systems of power, and indeed, we often see that there can be the opposite effect – of a deep and binding commitment to power structures. Woolf thus asks for the following:

“If you refuse to be separated from the four great teachers of the daughters of educated men – poverty, chastity, derision and freedom from unreal loyalties – but combine them with some wealth, some knowledge, and some service to real loyalties then you can enter the professions and escape the risks that make them undesirable.”[41]

This is still an aspiration that is incredibly difficult to put into practice (and indeed we could have another hour to discuss its implications), but is an early formulation of current discussions around the need to have a variety of lived experience in all areas of work, and to see structures of power as historical and changeable. At the end of her fictional reply to a fictional barrister, Woolf states that “we can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.”[42] In the videos of Carey Young, there is an attempt to find new worlds within our current realities, and to create new cultural imaginaries that foreground the possibilities of women at work and women in power, without giving into a clichés or shying away from discomfort.

——————-

[1] Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, 1938, in the combined volume with A Room of One’s Own, Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1992, pp. 240-241. I have engaged with Woolf’s writing in detail in Catherine Grant, A Time of One’s Own: histories of feminism in contemporary art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2022.

[2] Woolf, Three Guineas, pp. 240-241.

[3] Carey Young, “Open Justice”, Law and Humanities, 2018, available: http://www.careyyoung.com/open-justice-by-carey-young#_edn1 accessed 21.04.2023.

[4] Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, edited by Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1953).

[5] Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of “The Years,” edited by Mitchell Alexander Leaska (London: Hogarth, 1978).

[6] Woolf, Three Guineas, p. 165.

[7] Young, “Open Justice”.

[8] Young, “Open Justice”.

[9] Young, “Open Justice”.

[10] Young, “Open Justice”.

[11] Woolf, Three Guineas, p. 242.

[12] Woolf, Three Guineas, p. 243.

[13] Siona Wilson, “Empire, State and Documentary: Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Photo-Book”, Paper presented as part of the "Photography and Britishness" conference held at the Yale Center for British Art, 4–5 November 2016. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlAuiOxhCOA&ab_channel=PaulMellonCentreforStudiesinBritishArt accessed 04.05.2023.

[14] Woolf, Three Guineas, p. 181.

[15] Woolf, Three Guineas, p. 181.

[16] Young, “Open Justice”.

[17] Woolf, Three Guineas, p. 267.

[18] Carey Young, email to author, 8 May 2023.

[19] Young, email to author.

[20] Ursula K. Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” (1976/1987), in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove Press, 1989), pp. 7–16; 9.

[21] Young, email to author.

[22] Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux’’, p. 10.

[23] Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux’’, p. 9.

[24] Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux’’, pp. 9-10.

[25] Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux”, p. 11.

[26] Young, “Open Justice”.

[27] Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux”, p. 15.

[28] Young, email to author.

[29] This section on Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests is taken from Catherine Grant, “More Than A Schoolgirl Crush: Amy Adler and the Adolescent Fan”, in Fandom as Methodology: A Sourcebook for Artists and Writers, ed. Catherine Grant and Kate Random Love (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2019), pp. 45–64.

[30] Andy Warhol quoted in Benjamin HD Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1965-1966” (1989), reprinted in Andy Warhol, Annette Michelson ed., October Files 2 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), pp. 1-46; 28. Andy Warhol quote from an interview with Gretchen Berg, “Andy: My True Story”, Los Angeles Free Press (March 17 1967), p. 40.

[31] David E James, “Andy Warhol: The Producer as Author”, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 58-84; 69.

[32] Young, email to author.

[33] “In my own case, I had to train myself out of that phony smile, which is like a nervous tic on every teenage girl. And this meant that I smiled rarely, for in truth, when it came down to real smiling, I had less to smile about. My 'dream' action for the women's liberation movement: a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their 'pleasing' smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them.” Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Revolution, 1970.

[34] “Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex describes her “dream action” for the women’s liberation movement as a smile boycott (Firestone 1970, 90)” Sara Ahmed, “Smile!”, feministkilljoys.com, 2 February 2017, https://feministkilljoys.com/2017/02/02/smile/, accessed 12 May 2023.

[35] Ahmed, “Smile!”.

[36] Patricia J. Williams, “The Brass Ring and the Deep Blue Sea (some parables about learning to think like a lawyer)”, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 3.

[37] Williams, “The Brass Ring and the Deep Blue Sea”, p. 3.

[38] Williams, “The Brass Ring and the Deep Blue Sea”, p. 4.

[39] Williams, “The Brass Ring and the Deep Blue Sea”, p. 5

[40] Woolf, Three Guineas, p. 267.

[41] Woolf, Three Guineas, p. 269. For Woolf, chastity is defined as follows: “when you have made enough to live on by your profession you must refuse to sell your brain for the sake of money.” (p. 270)

[42] Woolf, Three Guineas, p. 366.