The polite way to describe Ray Mark Rinaldi‘s piece on Dorothy Tanner would be to say that it’s bizarre. The accurate description is that it is borderline unpublishable sexist drivel. In no universe would a feature on a male artist (or writer, or athlete) be dominated by a description of his spouse’s work. I understand that both artists are featured in the MOA show, but the author’s choice to devote the lion’s share of the article to Tanner’s late husband, then claim that their work is impossible to “judge separately” really begs the question. Mel’s work is described as “dominant” “enigmatic”, a “visual puzzle”, whereas Dorothy’s is “soft” and “flower-like”. This is gender-essentialist nonsense, and does not actually convey the experience of Dorothy Tanner’s work, which is often challenging, hard-edged etc. To add insult to injury, Rinaldi’s prose (which, by the way, is riddled with grammatical and typographical errors) often commits a kind of subtle misogynist condescension. Rinaldi touches on Tanner’s life before she met her husband, noting that “as a young girl, [Tanner] flirted with both classical music and communism”. Can you imagine if this sentence had described her husband? Did he also “flirt” with politics as a young boy? I doubt it, because young children are generally pretty apolitical. Describing an adult woman as a “girl”, as the author does throughout this article, is either infantilizing or objectifying. In either case, it has no place in serious journalism. I hope that next time the editorial staff at the Denver Post receives an article that so obviously demeans the artist it intends to profile, it will exercise more discretion.
Yours Truly,
Moira Cassidy 