MAYDAY

BOOK OF WOMEN by Tao Aimin

Contributed By:

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

 Eve and Insomnia Barbie Tour the Dream House
by Carolyn Oliver

You wanted at least three showers, two oceans— and a pool to watch anemones devour jellyfish. Listen, I’d love to stay, but I’ve disremembered my accessories. Here’s a mermaid’s purse, for when you find them. Turkey-lettuce wrap, eye mask, Kant?  Hegel. I was thinking, in the living room: Everything goes wrong at the water’s surface. […]

*
by Simon Perchik

wobbling from some near-by breeze / reaching down as the hillside / where her shadow should be

Skip to content