Commemorating Stonewall, politely

Posted Wed, 08/19/2009 - 10:18am by Matt Itelson

Assistant Professor of Art Danielle Mysliwiec and her Brainstormers collective are making waves—politely—in a New York City exhibition commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, regarded as the birth of the gay rights movement.

A sound installation titled “May I Please Have A Sip of Your Power?” is on display at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Center through Sept. 4. In the piece, an ever-polite computer-generated voice sounds a broken record of questions such as “Do you think you could scoot over so that I can access some health care?” and “Would you please donate some of your control? It’s tax deductible.”

An article in the July 29 edition of NYFA Current magazine lauds the installation. ”Both courteous and insistent, the intentional pauses between questions are unsettling,” Yona Zeldis McDonough writes. ”One is caught off-guard by the provocative queries framed in a tone of normalcy.”

Mysliwiec, who teaches painting, was quoted in the article about the meaning of the Brainstormers’ installation. ”We wanted to couch subversive, confrontational questions in the kind of super-polite language that you would find in an etiquette book,” she says, ”in order to contrast and critique the way feminists have historically been portrayed as bitchy, aggressive and whiny.”