On the heels of the Second Wave feminist movement fermenting on the West Coast, and just ahead of New York’s Guerrilla Girls, the five women took the “Third Coast”—meaning Texas—as their target to “poke at.” Despite coming from different backgrounds and distinctive approaches to their artistic practice, when the group came together it was a “truly organic amalgamation” of the identities of each individual artist. Throughout the 1980s, the group produced art in a variety of media—sculpture, photography, video, bookmaking, sound, and installation—with examples that are self-referential and reflect Gestalt principles wherein individual parts become a unified, meaningful whole. Examples include Equipoise (1981), a six-piece, interlocking wooden floor sculpture inspired by the Pegasus constellation and mythology; the relief sculpture Face Crimes: Two Jews, A Lesbian, and Other Famous People at the 500X Gallery’s exhibition, Left/Right: The Political Show, which coincided with the 1984 Republican National Convention; Pre-Madonnas (1985), a handmade book with photographs of each member overlaid with the names of ancient and contemporary goddesses; and Fractions (1986), a series of plaster-cast fragments of various of the collective’s body parts displayed in a constructed cube within the now-destroyed Art Barn building on the campus of the University of Texas at Dallas.
Their Nasher Public installation, titled Too Soon to be Too Late, demonstrates how the collective’s evolving perspectives are impacted by the insights and perils of experience, the passage of time, and inescapable aging. Larger-than-life photographic cutouts of the four living members of the collective, now all past 70, are pressed against a wall of reflective gold. Their bodies and faces are distorted by emotion, and they appear to be caught in suspension, frozen in place. Juxtaposing these black-and-white cutouts of individual members of Toxic Shock is a color photograph of the group taken in 1980, which captures younger versions of the members as fresh-faced, relaxed, and smiling at the camera. Installed on the adjacent wall, it acts as both a warning and a reminder to visitors. As Frances Bagley has said of the 1980 photograph, “These women had it all.” By “all,” Bagley is referring to the kinds of political, social, and economic circumstances the members of Toxic Shock had access to by 1980: Roe v. Wade had established the constitutional right to abortion in 1973; as of 1974, women had gained legal rights around their finances via the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and were increasingly holding positions of power in government agencies and politics. The erosion of many of the advances of the First- and Second-Wave feminist movements, and the current social and political climates in general, occupies the space between the Toxic Shock’s 1980 image and the depictions of their current selves backed against a wall.
Ten wooden figures of varying size are positioned in the open space in front of the flattened members of Toxic Shock. These generic statues are envisaged by the artists as the “citizen bystanders”: limbless and anonymous, devoid of external markers of identity, together they form a crowd. The reflective gold wall doubles both the number of figures in the room and the spatial area of the gallery. While visitors can change their perspective as they mill about, the wooden figures remain frozen in place.
Overlaying the sculptural and photographic installation is the soundscape titled The Whisper Chorus, written and performed by Toxic Shock in collaboration with sound designer Tom Cook. The chorus features the members of the collective whispering well-known quotes and aphorisms by writers, philosophers, musicians, and poets from across cultures and throughout time. The resonance of the voices sculpts the space as it pervades the room. Behind the whispers, ambient noise filters through—the sound of a dog barking, the crunch of leaves and gravel underfoot, a phone alarm—all the mundane noises that make up the everyday. Toxic Shock added these sounds into the final version of their chorus to highlight their perception of the increase of benign indifference among people today, the chilling ability to compartmentalize or simply ignore the ominous activity happening right next to them. The chorus becomes a series of warnings, reflections, and insights into today’s incredibly polarized political environment.
On Sunday, November 22 at 11:30 a.m., the Nasher will host a public Artist Talk with the members of Toxic Shock.