Disturb the peace

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disturb.the.peace [angry women]

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Can anger be beautiful? Can rage be aesthetic?
The collaborative net-based installation site D/tP disturb the peace [angry women] thinks so. What after all is more powerful than an angry woman but a group of angry women doing art?
The infamous ‘angry young man’ epitomized by the likes of James Dean and Marlon Brando in the cinema of the Fifties hasn’t really been mirrored in a feminine glass.

Polishing a reflection on angry women- young or old is the aim of this site that Hollers back and out into the future with bravado.
Curated by Jess Loseby, submissions to the site are ongoing and the bar has been set high by the founding fems who grace the inaugural page.
Unlike the objects of anger that angry young men became, these women are agents of art. There is no masculine brooding but plenty of powerful insight.
Helen Varley Jameson’s charming line drawings, evolve with a click of the mouse, her graphic question ‘what makes me angry?’ morphs into a symbolic response.
For Maris Bustamante, the brooding male is a hopelessly trapped woman; in a hilarious self-portrait she is dressed up as a polystyrene Tarzan.
Anne Bray’s visceral red rage poetry driving across a black background serves as a grisly counterpart to Bustamante’s humor. Bray’s murderous words are in synch with her fellow furies.
Other Artists modulate the rage through wry imagery and sound.
Annie Abrahams – her finger on the pulse as ever- has put forth a florid soundscape to accompany a scroll down self-portrait of a moment by herself on the toilet. Her pose brings to mind Rodin’s Thinker buttressed-literally by all the toilet paper a girl could ever need piled high behind the loo. From the bathroom to a deconstruction of Barbie, the levity unfolds;
Juliet Davis offers up the anti-Barbie for online playtime; ‘pieces of herself’ allows the user to discover the pieces of a character that ‘needed to find herself’.
Opening doors and activating parts of the herself’s body is eerily delightful. Davis Herself seems to spring into action in Maya Kalogera’s piece Angry? Not at all.
Kalogera ups the humor quotient and then some with a terrific parody of the yawn of video gun games that flood the Internet. All of a sudden Charlie’s Angels are feminist innovators.
Visiting D/tP disturb. the.peace [angry women] more than once pays off. Like poetry the power of these works shifts with the viewers state.
There are several other grimly funny works on the site. However, having returned to look three times of the course of as many weeks, the most striking work has to be the murky, disturbing film by Barbara Agreste. Titled, ‘reptilica/women’ it is sublime in its use of sound, color and violent delicate scratches on the film. A cruel and extremely crisp aesthetic of abstracted rage the film is reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois muffled creatures and massive phallic objects – not to mention the seminal spider. Unlike the objects of anger depicted by the likes of Marlon, there are no coulda been’s here.
These women are ALL contenders. Girl, Woman, or Crone, the artist’s in this collaboration are well past being scorned. Their anger transformed is the edge of a new aesthetic.
D/tP disturb.the.peace [angry women] merits a good long viewing with some Grrrrl music blaring.

Disturb the Peace – Angry Women

Reviewer: Eliza Fernbach – furtherfield.org

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