MAYDAY

BOOK OF WOMEN by Tao Aimin

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BOOK OF WOMEN NO. 1 (2006)

Chinese calligraphy on used wooden washboards, jute cord
The artist has collected thousands of washboards over the years, recording the stories and faces of the rural women whose hands wore these boards down through the recursive repetition of monotonous labor. Each board is distinct. The patterns of wear on the boards over decades of daily use are testimonies to the passage of time, the passage of the lives spent, day in and day out serving hearth and home. For many of the women who used these boards, they are among the only records left of their lives. There are often no photographs, and without literacy, there can be no diaries or letters to attest to the lives of these women. Relegated to what Hannah Arendt followed ancient Greeks in calling the oikos — the household sphere of private, bodily necessity, which they contrasted with public life, thought, action and freedom — it might seem as if these women were as invisible as their life stories. Yet the material culture of manual labor has endured for millennia, and these washboards bear witness to the infinitesimal, and yet, profound and sustaining ways in which this mundane, quotidian labor that occupied most of their existences, inscribed their beings into the world.
BOOK OF WOMEN NO. 2 (2006)

Chinese calligraphy on used wooden washboards, jute cord

Return to table of contents for PRACTICES, POWER & THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Return to table of contents for Issue 2 Winter 2010

Filed Under: Art

Further Reading

R. Clifton Spargo interviewed by Okla Elliott: The Lost Chapter

Okla Elliott: You chose the end of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald’s relationship as the focus of your novel. What drew you to that particular portion of their lives? And, more broadly speaking, what drew you to that particular literary couple as opposed to, say, Vivian and T.S. Eliot or Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, etc.? R. […]

Christopher Spranger interviewed by Randall Radic: SPRINGING INTO SPRANGER

Christopher Spranger aphorizes. And he does it quite well. A few of the more famous dead aphorists are E.M. Cioran, Joseph Joubert and Karl Krauss. Christopher is their equal, and, in my humble opinion, their better. Cioran can be depressingly morbid, Joubert often verges on the flighty and Krauss gets bitterly snarky.  On his part, Christopher […]

Fishers of Men by Paul Crenshaw

for Paul Between the ridges mirrored on water, in the cold aspect of an October dawn with the quick wind in our faces, my great uncle and I watch the kingfishers lifting off the river we have come to know in the silent places of our hearts. An eagle scans us as we pass, sentinel […]