| No, Virginia, Cindy Sherman’s art did not come to us from outer space; it was yet another art practice formed in and by feminist thought and affiliated, both directly and indirectly, with the work of many women artists active in the 70s. If this is a newsworthy observation, it represents one positive consequence of the recent spate of exhibitions focused on women artists of which “Role Play” is one. That this is itself a notable occurrence suggests that women artists are still far from obtaining parity with their male cohort, either in museum and private collections, museum and gallery exhibitions or within art criticism in our nominally post-feminist age. |  |
Role Play: Feminist Art Revisited 1960-1980 at Galerie Lelong – Abigail Solomon-Godeau
No, Virginia, Cindy Sherman’s art did not come to us from outer space; it was yet another art practice formed in and by feminist thought and affiliated, both directly and indirectly, with the work of many women artists active in the 70s. If this is a newsworthy observation, it represents one positive consequence of the recent spate of exhibitions focused on women artists of which “Role Play” is one. That this is itself a notable occurrence suggests that women artists are still far from obtaining parity with their male cohort, either in museum and private collections, museum and gallery exhibitions or within art criticism in our nominally post-feminist age. If artists such as Suzy Lake, Friedl Kubelka, Sanja Ivekovic, Maria Lassnig, Lee Lozano, Yayoi Kusama, Anna Maria Maiolino, Birgit Jürgenssen, Helena Almeida and Senga Nengudi (the latter four included in “Role Play”) are largely unknown, there is reason to ask why this is so. Certainly, the relative lack of attention paid to their work has something to do with disparities other than those of gender; for example, the consequences of working in the center or the periphery (and until recently, all artists not based or showing in New York City were by definition occupants of the periphery).
While the opportunity of rediscovering so many extraordinary artists from Europe, the UK and the Americas is exciting, it is also somewhat poignant. Not a few of them have already died, and it does seem as though a disproportionate number of women artists active in the 70s have had early, even tragic deaths (eg. Chadwick, Hesse, Jürgenssen, Lozano, Mendieta, Wilke, Woodman). Coming upon these works now is something of a surprise, not merely because of their unfamiliarity, but equally for their quality, suffused as so much of it is with intelligence, wit, inventiveness and a sharp critical edge. Sometimes, in its most fearless and challenging incarnations (for example, Marina Abramovic’s Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful, 1975/6 (included in “Role Play”); Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, 1965 or Valie Export’s Genital Panic and Touch Cinema, 1969) it is also deeply disturbing. In these latter instances (all of which were originally performance pieces given second artistic lives as visual documents), women artists used their physical selves as screens upon which private and individual gestures or desires—all unpredictable—could be inscribed. In two of the most notorious performances by women artists, one in 1965, one in 1975 (I refer to Shigeko Kubota’s Vagina Painting and Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll), the recesses of the female body produces not babies, but writing or other markings. Thus, the physical (as opposed to psychic) locus of fetishism (“Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital,” wrote Freud) was, from the outset, specified as such, and reconfigured as a challenge. (“Let the priests tremble,” wrote Hélène Cixous in 1975, “we’re going to show them our sexts!”). Like the women in Freud’s audience to whom Freud redirected his question about the enigma of femininity, “you are yourselves the problem,” the woman artist working with the imagery of an always-already fetishized femininity occupies a position both inside and outside the psychosexual and cultural staging of fetishism. In this respect, it is possibly of some relevance to note that certain of those artists who most directly used themselves and their bodies to explore the imbrication of fetishism with femininity—Benglis, Jürgenssen, Mendieta, Ono, Wilke, Woodman—were all themselves quite beautiful women and thus lived their femininity in a particular way.
Breaching taboos of various kinds, many of them linked to the representation of the physical body, women artists individually and collectively can be said to have worked to desublimate, de-fetishize and resignify the notion of “the feminine”; to have contested mass cultural fantasies of femininity; the status or identity of the artwork; the role of the artist and, hardly least, the meaning of the aesthetic tout court. But no less significant in the work of women artists of this period is the coincidence of themes, motifs and preoccupations, overarching their nationalities, professional formations or cultural milieus. That Senga Nengudi encased herself with masking tape for her performance Masked Taping, just as other artists such as Francesca Woodman photographed themselves bound or trussed, that Chadwick, Mendieta, Ono, Jürgenssen, Wilke and dozens of performance artists made their bodies the material signifiers—the literal mediums—of their work, signals the ways by which the critical insights of feminism prompted comparable metaphors and symbolic articulations.
