Bound By Repetition: Jackie Winsor’s Early Work

In the late 1960s, Jackie Winsor began to produce densely constructed, unitary forms out of prosaic materials and repetitive, labor-intensive processes. An early admirer, the feminist art critic Lucy Lippard claimed that a salient feature of these works entails “the kinesthetic sense of how long it took” to make them. In other words, we feel the protraction of time in their construction. This paper asks what value the temporal deceleration, repetitive processes, and quotidian materials held for Winsor and her audiences. Although her recourse to the task time of work reflects a wider period preoccupation with temporality, Winsor’s art does not easily square with either the minimalist or process-oriented strategies favored by many of her peers in New York’s experimental downtown scene. I demonstrate how her sculptures require a different set of terms with which to account for the labor embedded in their material configurations. Instead of a model premised on de-aestheticizing or deskilling, Winsor’s practice hews closer to the aesthetics of the “homemade.” In this respect, her works are bound by a time sense and working modality conducive to extended moments of relationality, intimacy, and care.