What is your most memorable experience of a feminist/ women's art exhibition in the past 10 years and why? Did it challenge or change your understanding of feminism?
(Please name the title of the show, the venue, and the
date.
Please feel free to write about shows you may have curated yourself.)
If any readers would like to contribute a response, please email: k.deepwell@ukonline.co.uk
Answers below from: Gail Bourgeois; Alina Tortosa; Nancy Azara; Anne Marsh and Joanna Frueh
Gail Bourgeois (curator, Montreal)
Earlier memories are often displaced by what is currently relevant to us, therefore I have chosen to speak about a three-woman show presented in a Montreal gallery, La Centrale, in 1996-97. (ce) corps in vulnérable was an exhibition conceived around questions posed by our own ageing female bodies. Janet Logan, the artist/curator, Monique Régimbald-Zeiber and I met a few times after starting to prepare new work for the exhibition. It was in these meetings that we could find comfort and even pleasure in sharing our aches and fears. More importantly for me, contact with these intelligent and sensitive women reinforced the healing elements of my art practice through sharing stories about dwindling energies being replaced with fervent commitments to life’s processes. Thusly, my most memorable experience of a feminist art exhibition was through my piece, I am at that awkward age, which used notions of physical and emotional changes, accepted as normal in adolescents, to speak about equivalent changes in the female bodily experience of menopause. I enjoyed the exhibition’s irreverence for culturally imposed readings of the post-reproductive woman. (ce) corps in vulnérable, La Centrale, November 30, 1996 - January 26, 1997.
Alina Tortosa (curator, Buenos Aires)
I am afraid I have not seen many feminist shows in Buenos Aires, except perhaps for the one I am curating now at the BAC – British Arts Centre, Ana Gallardo’s exhibition INSTRUMENTAL (6-22 September 2000), which is feminist in that it is concerned with the physical and psychological well being of women. Ana Gallardo has always worked with being a woman in mind, a woman as a biological individual who can become pregnant and give birth, later her concerns related to a woman having to fill domestic and erotic roles at the same time. Three years ago she painted a series of canvases reproducing different contraception methods as jewel like objects. In a macho society many men, particularly the older generations, and those that who come from less educated milieus, want to have sex without safety controls, for they feel that anything that comes between their penis and the vagina lessens their pleasure, and some achieve their purposes violently, even within close relationships. The three installations now at the BAC discuss the situation of women who cannot afford to prevent pregnancies through contraception methods and who resort, again through lack of means or ignorance, to domestic abortions or to abortions in non scientific pseudo-hospitals.
Ana Gallardo trabaja desde el sentido de precariedad y de desprotección en el que siente que transcurre la vida de muchas mujeres. Por eso eligió armar su proyecto para el BAC con elementos sencillos, de fácil acceso: agujas de tejer, bolsas de polietileno, cinta de embalar y tubos de ensayo. Elementos modestos que ilustran la carencia como condición instalada en gran parte de la población. Sus trabajos señalan el delicado equilibrio entre la vida y la muerte. Ante la fragilidad de la vida, la muerte acecha inquieta. Está ahí enhebrada en lo precario, en la ignorancia, en la falta de oportunidades reales. Está implícita en los amores violentos, en la falta de ternura, en las relaciones permisivas, en los excesos. Está implícita en la falta de reacción de la misma mujer ante el manipuleo y la injusticia, y en la necesidad de ser querida a cualquier precio.
Nancy Azara (artist, USA)
In order to write about my experience of a feminist/woman's art exhibition in the nineties, a Meret Oppenheim retrospective (Guggenheim, New York, 26 June-10 September 1996), I would like to go back to the seventies when it first became possible to see women’s art, when the door opened and on the other side was fireworks, the kind I had never seen before, a whole new world was open with this art. It became possible to conceive of myself as someone who was following a tradition previously locked away. That tradition flowered in the eighties with exhibitions of works by such artists as Louise Bourgeois, Madelena Abakanowicz, Lenore Tawney, Agnes Martin, among so many others. Meret Oppenheim's fine work slipped through the cracks here in NYC, so it wasn’t until the nineties that there was a definitive exhibition of her art. I had known of her famous tea cup (Le Déjeuner en Fourrure/Luncheon in Fur, 1936); but not her other work. It was unfortunate that a small space was allotted for it and the work was both poorly lit and hung without much creativity. Nevertheless its strong personality held its own: in the illusions and charades, riddles in vision, a female self in drag, and many contradictions expressed in living. Striking and energetic, it is diverse in color and form. There were paintings, sculptures and many mixed media works at the Guggenheim. Some of the titles will give you an idea of the exhibit (in keeping with her fur on a tea cup saucer and spoon theme): The Origin of the Fig Leaf, Star Circled by Twelve Plants, Crowned Animal in Adoration, Man in Fog, and the enigmatic Word Wrapped in Poisonous Letters (become transparent). It is very personal work and as I studied it, I could sense her inner experience and journey into her process. Because her vision spoke to me and I felt such an affinity to it, it inspired and excited me, reinforced my conviction to continue on my own path with my sculpture, so it didn’t challenge or change for me my own perceptions, but rather it encouraged them.
Anne Marsh (Lecturer, School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia)
The most memorable and challenging feminist exhibition I saw in the 1990s was a one off performance by the Australian artist Linda Sproul.
Linda Sproul Listen Linden Gallery, St Kilda, Victoria, Australia, 1993. Dressed in a suburban nightgown she appeared before her audience at the top of a staircase in a grand Victorian house. She stripped off the nightgown to reveal a severe beating across her back and buttocks. She put on a pair of high heel shoes and paraded before her spectators who were lined up on either side of the entrance hall. Bending over she handed people a rubber clad torch (a flashlight) and enticed them to touch her wounds, to prove the reality of the scars for themselves. She handed out small cards: on one side a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz of a small child, above which the words “teeth, nails, knife, belt, cane, whip” were written. On the reverse the phrase “love my memory” (a type of funeral card statement). When she got to the end of the queue she put on a cocktail dress, she openned the entrance doors, turned to the audience and thanked them for coming. She went back along the line of spectators shaking their hands, apologizing for the fact that there were not enough chairs. The dramatic change of mood was disruptive and unsettling as she denied her body and her wounds. Provocative, alarming and highly problematic in terms of any “correct” political line the performance stays in the memory as a resounding statement about the plight of women experiencing domestic violence. That’s one side of the story. The other issue for Sproul at the time was the then current fashion of sado-masochism. Sproul argued that the difference between the then-current vogue for s/m fashion, s/m clubs and the real pain of physical abuse was linked with privilege and choice. She said: ‘If you come from a safe place of power, of course it is incredibly thrilling to hand that power away. If you don't come from a safe place, how much is thrilling and how much is enactment?’ Sproul went to The House of Domination to get her beating for the performance and was told by the mistress that her tolerance for pain was better than her regular clients. In interview Sproul pointed out that that was because her body had learnt to tolerate pain. She said: ‘part of me is really fucked off by the current subcultural idea that the next political movement will be s/m rights and leather pride . . . part of me says, well hang on a minute there are people dying like flies all around the world from all sorts of things and they don't have any rights and now you think the next political movement is one which gives you the right to be fucking beaten: it's all about privileges.’
I found the performance challenged my understanding of feminism by presenting a juxtaposition between private and public, pleasure and pain. It complicated, and in some ways undermined, a “politically aware” feminist attitude to domestic violence by linking s/m practices to the home. This connection is a difficult one for feminism. It is as if Sproul is saying that women like being beaten. Yet the artist’s experience of pain is a reality for the audience – her own subjection to physical pain makes her capable of tolerating pain. This opens up a whole other dimension.
Joanna Frueh (writer/lecturer, USA)
On a visit of mine to New York in 1997 my friend Jeff suggested, Let’s see the bunny show! He’d heard from friends about an exhibition at Jessica Fredericks in which the artist featured girls, bunnies, and wry humor. I use “girls” lovingly and with a little embarrassment: I identified with the bodies that artist Marnie Weber had culled from Japanese porno magazines and combined with various landscapes in her small collages. One series featured the heads of rabbit-toothed Miss America types. No identification there. No identification either with the fact that many of the female figures were bound or looked like the victims of brutalities. But I was taken by both the darkness and magic of fairytales and a delicate absurdity that Weber had embedded in her work. Most poignantly, the beautiful nudes formed a community of women. I’ve since written about Marnie’s work and included it in two exhibitions that I’ve curated. It haunts me. So I bought one of her collages and it hangs on my living room wall: in a desert populated with chollas and pink clouds made from balloons, a kneeling nude with a pink bunny head and a book on her lap – her appearance makes some people ask, ‘Is that you?’– becomes a wistful vision of erotic intellect and the intelligence of a sensually compelling body.
Copyright © : n.paradoxa, September 2000
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 13, 2000