Aruna D’Souza
The problem for feminist artists of the past few decades isn’t that their work is absent from museums. It’s that their art isn’t usually where one hopes or expects to find it: in the main galleries of major institutions. However, archives, libraries, and artists’ files richly document art by women—a by-product of these artists’ marginalization from the halls of Great Art, which caused many feminist artists to adopt ephemeral, mass-distributed forms. As testimony to this process, the Martha Wilson Sourcebook, a collection of texts selected by Wilson and reproduced from her archives, performs a double task: It illuminates a chapter Jonathan Miles dedicates The Wreck of the Medusa, his feverish account of the sinking of the French frigate off the coast of Senegal in the early nineteenth century— which resulted in the death of scores of passengers and crew—to “all those misled by their leaders.” Indeed, it is impossible to read about the incompetence of the ship’s captain, who was awarded his post as political payback, and about the cynicism of the Restoration government, which exploited the tragedy to consolidate power in an era of political instability but gave not a whit for the actual victims, and then commuted the