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Jo Anna Isaak is a writer, curator, and art historian
living in New York City. Her publications include The Ruin of
Representation in Modernist Art and Texts (Ann Arbor and London:
UMI Research Press, 1986, reprinted 1988), Nancy Spero, with
Jon Bird and Sylvere Lotringer (London: Phaidon, 1996), and
Feminism and  Contemporary
Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter (London and
New York: Routledge, 1996), as well as numerous articles and catalog
essays on contemporary art and cultural theory. She received her
doctorate from the University of Toronto in 1982 and has organized
several exhibitions, most notably The Revolutionary Power of
Women's Laughter (1982), Laughter Ten Years After (1996),
and Looking Forward, Looking Black (now on tour in the United
States). She is currently working on a book about black humor in
contemporary African American art and on an exhibition about water
and the body, which will open in Linz, Austria, in January 2002.
She teaches art history at Hobart & William Smith Colleges in
Geneva, New York.
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 We
are all active participants in the production of waste. Social anthropologist
Mary Douglas argues that dirt is out-of-place matter, that garbage
is a relative idea, and that our ideas of dirt express symbolic
systems. I am interested in examining women's relationships with
these symbolic systems - what draws so many women to this field
and what role women play in it. Specifically, I'm interested in
the connection between the production of waste, the production of
art, and the feminist intervention in those productions.
Among the preeminent "garbage girls" are Mierle
Laderman Ukeles, whose imaginative documentations, installations,
and performances show all of us - the producers of waste - every
part of the waste production process; Christie Rupp, whose sculptures
of endangered fish and wildlife species are created from the very
same discarded objects that are destroying them; Nancy Rubin, whose
installations portray the pathos of thousands of rejected consumer
items; and Nancy Holt, whose work Sky Mound will transform an entire
57-acre landfill into an
astronomical observatory.
—
Jo Anna Isaak
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