Introduction:  Let me say straight away- this is a retro show, a re-play. Why this urge to repeat?
An obsession to revise and rewrite, to get it right? Yes, in part, and along with that the realization that the impulse is utopian in the sense of being both hopeful and infinite - the work being produced is far in excess of what can be included in any one exhibition. A commemoration: something important has happened in the past decade, and this is an occasion for celebration. A chance to take stock: the way we look at the past often determines the way we go into the future. A feeling of solidarity: the ideological self-realization that a number of women- without being part of a group, working in different media and in different countries, addressing disparate concerns - are nevertheless able to speak surprisingly clearly of our collective agenda. Even if we have never met, we have become confident of the shared aims of our collective, and we have come to realize how one woman's work or words leads onto or enables the next woman to work or speak. A sense of loss: the realization that women's history is faintly written and must be continually re-inscribed before it is forgotten again. And then of course, as Gertrude Stein knew, one always needs to repeat because, 'Every time it is so, it is so, it is so."

In 1982 I organized an exhibition entitled "The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter" in an attempt to locate art within the arena of contemporary theoretical discussions. The fundamental discoveries of modern linguistics and psychoanalysis had radically affected the understanding of how all signifying systems operate. There was growing awareness that a great deal was at stake for women in these new assessments of how meaning is produced and organized in all areas of cultural practice. The death of the author leveled the playing field for women - and play in the new, authority-free zone they did. Over the past decade there has erupted a riot of women artists exploringthe potential of laughter, hysteria, the grotesque and the carnivalesque.

To gather a group of women artists together under any rubric is to be forced into an essentialist position. Group shows of exclusively male artists, by contrast, are allowed to address whatever organizing principle the curator has in mind: a geographical location the artists may have in common, a period of time in which they worked, a particular style or medium. Women artists, writers, and curators have never been able to masquerade in the Emperor's clothes of universal humanity. Even if only two women artists are exhibited together, the issue of gender inevitably arises. But to engage in a strategic, rather than a predetermined, essentialism is to push the issue of gender past the point where it can be used to ghettoize women.

I am not attempting in this exhibition to present The Most Important contemporary women artists. The artists in the exhibition may or may not be part of what has been mythologized as the mainstream. I am not interested in valorizing a mainstream nor in exploring, validating, and enforcing hegemony, which, as Raymond Williams points out, is a process that relies upon the mechanisms of tradition and the canons of Old Masters in order to waylay the utopian desires that are potentially embodied in cultural production. The Waylaid utopian desires are what I'm interested in

These artists are women who did not cede their desire. They began by dismantling "the prison house of language" through play, or laughter, or, to use the term the French have reintroduced into English, jouissance: enjoyment, pleasure, particularly sexual pleasure or pleasure derived from the body. They explored Bakhitin's theory of laughter and the carnivalesque as potential sites for social insurgency; Barthes's and Kristeva's notion of laughter as libidinal license, the jouissance of the polymorphic, orgasmic body; Freud's analysis of the liberation of laughter in the workings of a witticism or a play upon language. They reveled in their primary narcissism -- the one characteristic some women have that men lack. They exposed the viewer to the terror of hteir irreparable difference. They donned the masks of the masquerade, or they went too far and took them all off. They enlisted the hysterics gesture of resistance, or they became grotesques. They put on gorilla masks and marched on the musuems. If, in the process, they have established reputations in the mainstream, they have done so by undermining the very characteristics upon which it is established. Their success is important for the way it has changed contemporary thinking about value systems that extend far beyond the art world. Using the subversive strategy of humor, they have readically reformulated contemporary art and called into question art history's long-held verities concerning creativity, genius, mastery and originality. Their critiques of art history and theoretical reflections on gender, sexuality, politics, and representations have shattered central assumptions about art and its relation to society.

Laughter, as it is invoked in this exhibition, is meant to be thought of as a metaphor for transformation, a catalyst for cultural change. In providing libidinal gratification, laughter can also provide an analytic for understanding the relationships between the social and the symbolic while allowing us to imagine these relationships differently. In asking for the response of laughter, these artists are engaging in a difficult operation. The viewer must want, at least briefly, to emancipate himself from "normal" representation; in order to laugh, he must recognize that he shares the same repressions. What is requested is not a private, depoliticized jouissance but sensuous solidarity. Laughter is first and foremost a communal response and at the same time an acknowledgement of liberation.

Throughout the time I have been working on this project I have felt I was working on a collective. I am grateful for all the artists who contributed their work to the exhibition and to Jeanne Silverthorne and Marcia Tucker for their essays. I want to express my deep sense of gratitude to Marcia for her years of work and commitment to projects like these. Many people worked on this exhibition. I am particularly grateful to Avis Lang, Susan Utenberg, Klaus Ottman, and Hank McNeil for their help and for the reassurance of their commitment to this project; like laughter, confidence is moang the highly infectious expressions of physical states.

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