Feminist art

Feminist art is a category of art associated with the late 1960s and 1970s feminist movement. Feminist art highlights the societal and political differences women experience within their lives. The hopeful gain from this form of art is to bring a positive and understanding change to the world, in hope to lead to equality or liberation.[1] Media used range from traditional art forms such as painting to more unorthodox methods such as performance art, conceptual art, body art, craftivism, video, film, and fiber art. Feminist art has served as an innovative driving force towards expanding the definition of art through the incorporation of new media and a new perspective.[2][3]

Mary Schepisi, Beauty Interrupted, 2011
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History
Main articles: Feminist art movement and Feminist art movement in the United States

Historically speaking, women artists, when they existed, have largely faded into obscurity: there is no female Michelangelo or Da Vinci equivalent.[4][5] In Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists Linda Nochlin wrote, "The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education".[4] Because of women's historical role as caregiver, most women were unable to devote time to creating art. In addition, women were rarely allowed entry into schools of art, and almost never allowed into live nude drawings classes for fear of impropriety.[4] Therefore, women who were artists were largely wealthy women with leisure time who were trained by their fathers or uncles and produced still lives, landscapes, or portrait work. Examples include Anna Claypoole Peale and Mary Cassatt.

Feminist art can be contentious to define as it holds different personal and political elements, different to each individual. Is all art made by a feminist then feminist art? Can art that is not made by a feminist be feminist art? Lucy R. Lippard stated in 1980 that feminist art was "neither a style nor a movement but instead a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life."[6] Emerging at the end of the 1960s, the feminist art movement was inspired by the 1960s student protests, the civil rights movement, and Second-wave feminism. By critiquing institutions that promote sexism and racism students, people of color, and women were able to identify and attempt to fix inequity. Women artists used their artwork, protests, collectives, and women's art registries to shed light on inequities in the art-world. The first wave of feminist art was established in the mid 19th century. In the early 1920s, with woman gaining the right to vote in America, liberalization wave spreading through the world. The slow and gradual change in feminist art started gaining momentum in 1960's.[7]

1960s

Before the 1960s the majority of woman-made artwork did not portray feminist content, in the sense that it neither addressed nor criticized the conditions that women have historically faced. Women were more often the subjects of art, rather than artists themselves. Historically, the female body was regarded as an object of desire existing for the pleasure of men. In the early 20th century, works that flaunted female sexuality – the pin-up girl being a prime example – began to be produced. By the late 1960s there was a plethora of feminine artwork that broke away from the tradition of depicting women in an exclusively sexualized fashion.

In order to gain recognition, many female artists struggled to "de-gender" their work in order to compete in a dominantly male art world. If a work did not "look" like it was made by a woman, then the stigma associated with women would not cling to the work itself, thus giving the work its own integrity. In 1963 Yayoi Kusama created Oven-Pan – part of a larger collection of works she referred to as the aggregation sculptures. As with other works from that collection, Oven-Pan takes an object associated with women's work – in this case a metal pan – and completely covers it with bulbous lumps of the same material. This is an early feminist example of female artists finding ways to break from the traditional role of women in society. Having the lumps made from the same color and material as the metal pan completely takes away the pan's functionality, and – in a metaphorical sense – its association with women. The protrusions remove the item's gender by not only removing its function of being a metal pan women would use in the kitchen, but by also making it ugly. Before this era, common female work consisted of pretty and decorative things like landscapes and quilts, whereas more contemporary artwork by women was becoming bold or even rebellious.

Towards the end of the decade, progressive ideas criticizing social values began to appear in which the mainstream ideology that had come to be accepted was denounced as not being neutral. It was also suggested that the art world as a whole had managed to institutionalize within itself the notion of sexism. During this time there was a rebirth of various media that had been placed at the bottom of the aesthetic hierarchy by art history, such as quilting.[8] To put it simply, this rebellion against the socially constructed ideology of a woman's role in art sparked the birth of a new standard of the female subject. Where once the female body was seen as an object for the male gaze, it then became regarded as a weapon against socially constructed ideologies of gender.

With Yoko Ono's 1964 work, Cut Piece, performance art began to gain popularity in feminist artwork as a form of critical analysis on societal values on gender. In this work, Yoko Ono is seen kneeling on the ground with a pair of scissors in front of her. One by one, she invited the audience to cut a piece of her clothing off until she was eventually left kneeling in the tattered remains of her clothing and her underwear. This intimate relationship created between the subject (Ono) and the audience addressed the notion of gender in the sense that Ono has become the sexual object. By remaining motionless as more and more pieces of her clothing are cut away, she reveals a woman's social standing where she is regarded as an object as the audience escalates to the point where her bra is being cut away.

1970s

During the 1970s, feminist art continued to provide a means of challenging women's position in the social hierarchy. The aim was for women to reach a state of equilibrium with their male counterparts. Judy Chicago's work, The Dinner Party (1979), widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork, emphasizes this idea of a newfound female empowerment through the use of turning a dinner table – an association to the traditional female role – into an equilateral triangle. Each side has an equal number of plate settings dedicated to a specific woman in history. Each plate contains a dish. This served as a way of breaking the idea of women being subjugated by society. Looking at the historical context, the 1960s and 1970s served as a prominent era where women began to celebrate new forms of freedom. More women joining the work force, legalization of birth control, fight towards equal pay, civil rights, and the Roe v. Wade (1973) decision to legalize abortion, were reflected in artwork. Such freedoms, however, were not limited to politics.[9]

Traditionally, being able to expertly capture the nude on canvas or in a sculpture reflected a high level of achievement in the arts. In order to reach that level, access to nude models was required. While male artists were given this privilege, it was considered improper for a woman to see a naked body. As a result, women were forced to focus their attention to the less professionally acclaimed "decorative" art. With the 1970s, however, the fight towards equality extended to the arts. Eventually more and more women began to enroll in art academies. For most of these artists, the goal was not to paint like the traditional male masters, but instead to learn their techniques and manipulate them in a way that challenged traditional views of women.[10]

Mary Beth Edelson's Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper (1972) appropriated Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, with the heads of notable women artists collaged over the heads of Christ and his apostles. This image, addressing the role of religious and art historical iconography in the subordination of women, became "one of the most iconic images of the feminist art movement."[11][12]

Photography became a common medium used by feminist artists. It was used, in many ways, to show the "real" woman. For instance, in 1979 Judith Black took a self-portrait depicting her body in such a light. It showed the artist's aging body and all her flaws in an attempt to portray herself as a human being rather than an idealized sex symbol. Hannah Wilke also used photography as her way of expressing a non-traditional representation of the female body. In her 1974 collection called S.O.S - Stratification Object Series, Wilke used herself as the subject. She portrayed herself topless with various pieces of chewed gum in the shape of vulvas arranged throughout her body, metaphorically demonstrating how women in society are chewed up and then spit out. In 1975 in Hungary, Budapest Orshi Drozdik under her birth name Drozdik Orsolya as a student at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, was examining the historic 19th and early 20th century academic document photos of nude model-settings in the academy's library. She rephotographed them and exhibited the photos as her own work. Latter that year she projected the images of nude-model-settings, to her own naked body, photographed them and made performances titled NudeModel in which she exhibited herself as a woman artist drawing a female nude model.

At this time, there was a large focus on rebelling against the "traditional woman". With this came the backlash of both men and women who felt their tradition was being threatened. To go from showing women as glamorous icons to showing the disturbing silhouettes of women (an artistic demonstration of the 'imprint' left behind by the victims of rape) in the case of Ana Mendieta, underscored certain forms of degradation that popular culture failed to fully acknowledge.

While Ana Mendieta's work focused on a serious issue, other artists, like Lynda Benglis, took a more satirical stance in the fight towards equality. In one of her photographs published in Artforum, she is depicted naked with a short haircut, sunglasses, and a dildo positioned in her pubic region. Some saw this radical photo as "vulgar" and "disturbing". Others, however, saw an expression of the uneven balance between the genders in the sense that her photo was critiqued more harshly than a male counterpart, Robert Morris, who posed shirtless with chains around his neck as a sign of submission. At this time, the depiction of a dominant woman was highly criticized and in some cases, any female art depicting sexuality was perceived as pornographic.[13]

Unlike Benglis' depiction of dominance to expose inequality in gender, Marina Abramovic used subjugation as a form of exposing the position of women in society that horrified rather than disturbed the audience. In her performance work Rhythm 0 (1974), Ambramovic pushes not only her limits, but her audience's limits as well, by presenting the public with 72 different objects ranging from a feathers and perfume to a rifle and a bullet. Her instructions are simple; She is the object and the audience may do whatever they want with her body for the next six hours. Her audience has complete control while she lays motionless. Eventually they become wilder and begin violating her body – at one point a man threatens her with a rifle – yet when the piece ends the audience gets into a frenzy and run away in fear, as if they cannot come to terms with what just happened. In this emotional performance piece, Ambramovic depicts the powerful message of the objectification of the female body while at the same time unraveling the complexity of human nature.[14]

In 1975, Barbara Deming founded The Money for Women Fund to support the work of feminist artists. Deming helped administer the Fund, with support from artist Mary Meigs. After Deming's death in 1984, the organization was renamed as The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.[15] Today, the foundation is the "oldest ongoing feminist granting agency" which "gives encouragement and grants to individual feminists in the arts (writers, and visual artists)".[16][17]

1980s

Although feminist art is fundamentally any field that strives towards equality among the genders, it is not static. It is a constantly changing project that "is itself constantly shaped and remodeled in relation to the living processes of women's struggles". It is not a platform but rather a "dynamic and self-critical response".[18] The feminist spark from the 1960s and 1970s helped to carve a path for the activist and identity art of the 1980s. In fact, The meaning of feminist art evolved so quickly that by 1980 Lucy Lippard curated a show where "all the participants exhibited work that belonged to 'the full panorama of social-change art,' though in a variety of ways that undercut any sense that 'feminism' meant either a single political message or a single kind of artwork. This openness was a key element to the future creative social development of feminism as political and cultural intervention."[19]

In 1985, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened a gallery that claimed to exhibit the most-renowned works of contemporary art of the time. Of the 169 artists chosen, only 13 were women. As a result of this, an anonymous group of women investigated the most influential museums of art only to find out that they barely exhibited women's art. With that came the birth of the Guerrilla Girls who devoted their time to fighting sexism and racism in the art world through the use of protest, posters, artwork and public speaking. Unlike the feminist art prior the 1980s, the Guerrilla Girls introduced a bolder more in-your-face identity and both captured attention and exposed sexism. Their posters aim to strip the role that women played in the art world prior to the feminist movement. In one case, the painting La Grande Odalisque by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was used in one of their posters where the female nude portrayed was given a gorilla mask. Beside it was written "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female". By taking a famous work and remodeling it to remove its intended purpose for the male gaze, the female nude is seen as something other than a desirable object.[20][21]

The critique of the male gaze and the objectification of women can also be seen in Barbara Kruger's Your gaze Hits the side of my face. In this work we see a marble bust of a woman turned to its side. The lighting is harsh, creating sharp edges and shadows to emphasize the words "your gaze hits the side of my face" written in bold letters of black red and white down the left side of the work. In that one sentence, Kruger is able to communicate her protest on gender, society, and culture through language designed in a way that can be associated with a contemporary magazine, thus capturing the viewer's attention.[22]

1990s

Building on earlier examples of feminist art that had incorporated technologies such as video and digital photography, feminist artists in the 1990s experimented with digital media, such as the World Wide Web, hypertext and coding, interactive art, and streaming media. Some works, such as Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back From The War (1996), utilized hypertext and digital images to create a non-linear narrative experience about gender, war, and trauma.[23] Other works, such as Prema Murthy's Bindigirl (1999), combined performance art with streaming video, live chat, and a website to interrogate gender, colonialism, and online consumerism.[24] Works such as Victoria Vesna's Bodies© INCorporated (1997) used virtual reality media such as 3D modeling and VRML to satirize the commodification of the body in digital culture.[25]

These are other works of the 1990s have been discussed alongside cyberfeminism and cyberfeminist collectives such as VNS Matrix, OBN/Old Boys Network, and subRosa.[26]

Promoting feminist art

In the 1970s, society started to become open to change and people started to realize that there was a problem with the stereotypes of each gender. Feminist art became a popular way of addressing the social concerns of feminism that surfaced in the late 1960s to 1970s. The creation and publication of the first feminist magazine was published in 1972. Ms. Magazine was the first national magazine to make feminist voices prominent, make feminist ideas and beliefs available to the public, and support the works of feminist artists. Like the art world, the magazine used the media to spread the messages of feminism and draw attention to the lack of total gender equality in society. The co-founder of the magazine, Gloria Steinem, coined the famous quote, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle", which demonstrates the power of independent women; this slogan was frequently used by activists.[6]

Effect of feminist art on society

Lucy R. Lippard argued in 1980 that feminist art was "neither a style nor a movement but instead a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life." This quote supports that feminist art affected all aspects of life. The women of the nation were determined to have their voices heard above the din of discontent, and equality would enable them to obtain jobs equal to men and gain rights and agency to their own bodies.[27] Art was a form of media that was used to get the message across; this was their platform. Feminist art supports this claim because the art began to challenge previously conceived notions of the roles of women. The message of gender equality in feminist artworks resonates with the viewers because the challenging of the social norms made people question, should it be socially acceptable for women to wear men's clothing?[27]

Example of feminist art

The magazine and the rise of feminism occurred during the same time feminist artists became more popular, and an example of a feminist artist is Judy Dater. Starting her artistic career in San Francisco, a cultural hub of different kinds of art and creative works, Dater displayed feminist photographs in museums and gained a fair amount of publicity for her work.[27] Dater displayed art that focused on women challenging stereotypical gender roles, such as the expected way women would dress or pose for a photograph. To see a woman dressed in men's clothing was rare and made the statement of supporting the feminist movement, and many people knew of Dater's passionate belief of equal rights. Dater also photographed nude women, which was intended to show women's bodies as strong, powerful, and as a celebration. The photographs grabbed the viewers attention because of the unusualness and never-before-seen images that do not necessarily fit into society.[28]

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See also

Notes
  1. On Saturday, October 19, 2013, Creative Time and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum presented Between the Door and the Street, a major work by the internationally celebrated artist Suzanne Lacy, perhaps the most important socially-engaged artist working today. Some 400 women and a few men–all selected to represent a cross-section of ages, backgrounds, and perspectives–gathered on the stoops along Park Place, a residential block in Brooklyn, where they engaged in unscripted conversations about a variety of issues related to gender politics today. Thousands of members of the public came out to wander among the groups, listen to what they were saying, and form their own opinions.

References
  1. "Feminist Art Movement, Artists and Major Works". theartstory.org. Retrieved 4 April 2018.
  2. Cheris Kramarae; Dale Spender (1 December 2000). Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women: Global Women's Issues and Knowledge. Taylor & Francis. pp. 92–93. ISBN 978-0-415-92088-9.
  3. "Feminist art movement". The Art Story Foundation. Retrieved 13 January 2014.
  4. Nochlin, Linda (1973). Hess, Thomas (ed.). Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?. New York: Collier.
  5. "Challenge Accepted: Can You Name Five Women Artists?". National Museum of Women in the Arts. February 27, 2017. Retrieved February 9, 2018.
  6. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (1987). Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement 1970-85. New York: Pandora Press.
  7. "The Other Art History: The Non-Western Women of Feminist Art". Artspace. Retrieved 2019-03-17.
  8. Battersby, Christine (1989). Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetic. Indiana UP: Bloomington.
  9. Newman, Michael; Bird, Jon (1999). "Cleaning Up the 1970s; The Work of Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles." Rewriting Conceptual Art. London.
  10. Hein, Hilde; Korsmeyer, Carolyn (1993). Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
  11. "Mary Beth Edelson". The Frost Art Museum Drawing Project. Retrieved 11 January 2014.
  12. "Mary Beth Adelson". Clara - Database of Women Artists. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of Women in the Arts. Archived from the original on 10 January 2014. Retrieved 10 January 2014.
  13. Betterton, Rosemary (1996). "Body Horor." An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists, and the Body. London: Routledge.
  14. Butler, Cornelia; Gabrielle, Lisa (2007). WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution. Los Angeles.
  15. https://web.archive.org/web/20121206011812/http://demingfund.org/our-founders. Archived from the original on December 6, 2012. Retrieved September 25, 2015. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  16. "Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Inc. : Home". Demingfund.org. Retrieved 2015-09-25.
  17. Dusenbery, Maya. "Quickhit: Calling all Feminist Fiction Writers". Feministing.com. Retrieved 2015-09-25.
  18. Pollock, Griselda (1996). Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings. london: Routledge.
  19. Harris, Jonathan The New Art History: A Critical Introduction Routledge, 2001.
  20. Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls / by the Guerrilla Girls (whoever They Really Are) ; with an Essay by Whitney Chadwick. New York: HarperPerennial. 1995.
  21. Deepwell, Kathy (1995). New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies. Manchester: Manchester UP.
  22. Isaak, Jo Anne (1996). Feminism and Contemporary Art: The revolutionary power of women's laughter. London: Routledge.
  23. Christiane Paul, Digital Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003), pp. 113ff.
  24. See chapter on Bindigirl in Mark Tribe and Reena Jana, New Media Art (Taschen, 2007).
  25. "Bodies© INCorporated | Net Art Anthology". Anthology.rhizome.org. Retrieved 2020-05-30.
  26. Cyberfeminism: Next Protocols, ed. Claudia Reiche and Verena Kuni (Brooklyn: Autonomeida, 2004).
  27. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement 1970-85 (New York Pandora Press 1987).
  28. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art The American Movement of the 1970s: History and Impact (Harry N. Abrams Publishers Inc. New York 1994).

Further reading
  • Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (1994). The Power of Feminist Art The American Movement of the 1970s: History and Impact. New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers Inc.
  • Connie Butler (2007). WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. The MIT Press.
  • Heartney, E., Posner, H., Princenthal, N., & Scott, S. (2013). After the revolution: women who transformed contemporary art. Prestel Verlag.
  • Bettina Papenberg, Marta Zarzycka (eds.) (2017). Carnal Aesthetics: transgressive imagery and feminist politics. I.B.Tauris.
  • Griselda Pollock (ed.) (2013). Visual Politics of Pychoanalysis. I.B.Tauris ISBN 978-1-78076-316-3
  • Griselda Pollock (1996). Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Reading. London and NY: Routledge ISBN 0-415-14128-1
  • Liz Rideal and Katheleen Soriano (2018). (Madame & Eve. Women Portraying Women. ISBN 978-1-78627-156-3
  • Catherine de Zegher (2015). Women's Work is Never Done. Ghent: Mer. Papers Kunsthalle.
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