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Feminist Avant–Garde of the 1970s is an expansive exhibition currently on show at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. Curated by Gabriele Schor from the Verbund Collection (from where the work is loaned) in association with Anna Dannemann (The Photographers’ Gallery), the exhibition highlights over 150 photographs, collages, performances, films and videos produced throughout the 1970s, from forty-eight international female artists. These artistic pioneers were united in their resolve to appropriate, deconstruct and subvert the misogynistic and patriarchal representation of women in both art and society – as wife, homemaker and mother. The overt use of the naked body (over half the artists in the exhibition appear nude, or expose their breasts or genitals) was not employed as a sexual act, but instead as the basis of an artistic material necessary in initiating radical performative acts. During the decade of the 1970s, the pre-eminence of painting was waning in favour of new media: innovative forms of expression in photography, film, video and performance art. These mediums were free from complicated male-dominated canonical histories, and harnessing these formats provided an unchartered territory for female artists to experiment and express themselves.
The exhibition is divided into four themes – ‘Domestic Agenda’; ‘The Seductive Body: Sexuality and Objectification’; ‘In My Skin: Normative Beauty and the Limits of the Body’; ‘Alter Ego: Masquerade, Parody and Self-Representation’. These groups create a loose compendium and allow for nuanced parallels to be drawn between individual artists and ways of working.
Two artworks explicitly associated with the first theme – ‘Domestic Agenda’ – are Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen and Birgit Jürgenssen’s Küchenschürze [Apron], created two months apart in 1975. Rosler’s video is constructed as a set of symbolic signs and codes – brandishing kitchen tools that correspond with the letters of the alphabet. Starting with ‘Apron’ and ending with ‘Tenderizer’, her gestures become increasingly aggressive and eccentric. The repression latent within the kitchen is made unequivocal in Jürgenssen’s photography, where her cooking apron is reconfigured as the oven. Hung like an anchor weight around her neck; the stove is carefully positioned in order to signify the phrase of having a ‘bun in the oven’. The labour of the housewife is married with the reproductive labour of the wife and mother. Penny Slinger’s surrealist-inspired performance and photographic series, Wedding Invitation 2 (Art is Just a Piece of Cake) (1973) can be perceived to take this idea further: conflating the woman’s body with something to be consumed, something edible. Akin to Jürgenssen’s work, the adoption of parody serves to undermine and destabilise the fetishistic visualising practises inherent in the male gaze. Legs spread, and wearing her own wedding cake, Slinger equates the cutting of the cake with the ‘deflowering’ of the wedding night.
In her 1969 performance Aktionshose: Genitalpanik [Action Pants: Genital Panic], Valie EXPORT strikes a similarly provocative pose; legs astride in crotch-less jeans. EXPORT’s images appear in relation to the second theme of the exhibition, ‘The Seductive Body: Sexuality and Objectification’. Unlike the softness of the bride in Slinger’s subversive series, EXPORT counters the female stereotype by harnessing aggression, gripping a machine gun in a constructed image of challenge and defiance. Hannah Wilke’s entire oeuvre interrogated the relationship between feminism, sexuality and representation. Using her own naked body as material, Wilke asserted a specific and individual iconography, which ended up being the target of multiple feminist critiques. As a retort to accusations of narcissism, Wilke created the Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism (1977) poster. Wilke also created vagina sculptures using wads of semi-masticated chewing gum, which she stuck over her body in the S.O.S. Series (Starification Object Series) (1974-82). The lewd and erotic nature of Wilke’s material compliments Renate Bertlmann’s use of latex condoms in her 1975 Tender Touches films. An important political work that is also exhibited in this part of the show is the documentation from Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz’s In Mourning and Rage (1977-78). Spurred by news of the ‘Hillside Strangler’, a serial killer who raped and murdered a number of women in Los Angeles between 1977-79, Lacy and Labowitz staged several large-scale public actions related to violence against women.
Artists associated with the third grouping, ‘In My Skin: Normative Beauty and the Limits of the Body’, closely excavated and fragmented the cultural ideals surrounding beauty and body image. In Change (1974), Ewa Partum used make-up techniques to depict a split portrait, where one half of her face is aged. Similarly, in Leticia Parentes’ Preparation I (1975), she covered her eyes and mouth with masking tape onto which was drawn surrogate features. The measured and self-reflexive nature of make-up is interrogated in Eleanor Antin’s silent video Representational Painting (1971). For the duration of the film, Antin applies a number of cosmetic products (eye shadow, lipstick, mascara), pondering her reflection as it builds up. In contrast, women such as ORLAN and Gina Pane were more engaged with undermining normative ideas of female representation by pushing the body to its physical limits. Although earlier work by ORLAN is exhibited here, such as the scandalous La Baiser de l’Artiste [The Kiss of the Artist] (1977), it is important to note that from 1986-93 she underwent multiple plastic surgeries to visualise the cultural forces that determine how women are perceived. Gina Pane’s Le Lait Chaud [The Hot Milk] documents a performance from 1972 in which, dressed in white, she began to cut her back and her face with a razor blade. According to Pane, the audience only began to protest when she started to cut her face, commenting, “it is the core of human aesthetics, the only place which retains a narcissistic power”. Ana Mendieta also explores the subversion of the visage in her Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints) of the same year, violently distorting her face by pressing a piece of plexiglass against it.
The final sub-section in the exhibition is devoted to the ‘Alter Ego’, looking at ‘Masquerade, Parody and Self-Representation’. The theory that underscored this period argued that identity was something formed through social conventions, something nurtured rather than being ‘naturally’ intrinsic. Artists associated with the feminist project analysed and deconstructed stereotypes of women through costumes, performance and role-playing. Lynda Benglis’ series Self (1970-76) sees the artist adopting various ‘art world’ personas, significantly as the artist-as-action-painter in Fling, Dribble and Drip (1970). This fantastic image has also been blown up and reproduced on the stairway in The Photographers’ Gallery. In Martha Wilson’s Portfolio of Models (1974), female archetypes are variously posed as ‘Goddess’, ‘Housewife’, ‘Working Girl’, ‘Earth Mother’ and ‘Lesbian’, with concise tongue-in-cheek captions. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Roberta Breitmore project, which she undertook from 1974-79 is the most significant work to engage with the ‘alter ego’. Disguised by make-up and a long blonde wig, Hershman Leeson attended exhibition openings, went to work, consulted a psychiatrist, placed personal ads and dated men. Through setting up a bank account and applying for a driving license, Roberta Breitmore was also legitimised by the public domain. Similarly, in Lorraine O’Grady’s Mlle Bourgeoise Noire [Miss Black Middle Class] (1980-83), O’Grady developed the persona of an imaginary Caribbean beauty queen who had previously won an obscure beauty contest. The photographs document her intervention at the ‘Just Above Midtown’ avant-garde gallery in 1980. Although arriving in character, she began to slowly lose her faux-gracious airs and start delivering a protest poem that explored the intersections between race, gender and power.
It must be said that this cross-section of the Verbund Collection is significantly Western, white and heterosexual. O’Grady’s Mlle Bourgeoise Noire is the only work in the exhibition that explicitly explores racial politics. Adrian Piper’s work would be crucial here, along with Camille Billops, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha or Yoko Ono. These omissions combined with the inclusion of Cindy Sherman’s blackface photographs in Untitled (Bus Riders) (1976) without any criticality also makes for uncomfortable viewing.
Despite these problems, the exhibition provides a timely and motivating tour-de-force for feminist politics and means of artistic production today, challenging the notion that men have been at the forefront of every radical movement. The avant-garde is reclaimed.
– reviewed for Photomonitor by Philomena Epps
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Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s: Works from the Verbund Collection continues at The Photographers’ Gallery until 29 January 2017
