Fake it till you make it with artist Martha Wilson

This episode features an interview from Oriana's archive - a 2016 discussion with feminist art foremother Martha Wilson whose audacious work explores appearance and subjectivity through self-representation, both live and to camera. Wilson's important work provocatively teases out the relationship between the personal, the institutional and the political to question gendered double standards. Making art in the context of the 1970s when Wilson first started, entailed acting as if she had the confidence to take on the identity of artist, despite creativity being misunderstood to be a male-only pursuit. Galvanised by her detractors instead of discouraged, Wilson's method of faking it to make it, as Oriana points out, is similar to a therapeutic tactic called 'shame attacking'. Therefore, the two discuss the potential for critical, feminist performance art to breed confidence, that is, if artists commit, as Wilson has done, to being anything but pleasant. 

Martha Wilson is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, who over the past five decades created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformations, and “invasions” of other people’s personae. As Founding Director Emerita of Franklin Furnace in New York, she continues to help run the artist-run organization whose stated mission is to make the world a safe place for avant-garde art. 

Oriana Fox is a London-based, New York-born artist with a PhD in self-disclosure. She puts her expertise to work as the host of the talk show performance piece The O Show.

Credits:
Produced, edited and hosted by Oriana Fox
Original theme song written and performed by Paulette Humanbeing
Background music loop by Teddybeast6
Special Thanks to Lara Perry, Sven Van Damme, Katie Beeson and Janak Patel
Photo of Martha Wilson by Sara Kaplan

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