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Feminism and art
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Feminism and art.


Feminist art is work that is rooted in the analyses and commitments of contemporary feminism and that contributes to a critique of
the political, economic and ideological power relations of contemporary society. It is not a stylistic category nor simply any art
produced by women.

1. The woman question and women artists in the 19th century.


Feminism (Lat. femina: woman) referred originally to the qualities of women. It did not come into use as a term denoting
advocacy of the claims and rights of women (OED) until 1895, after a century of debate on the woman question or womens
rights. It cannot be coincidence that a flurry of books devoted to women artists, the first exhibitions that grouped them together as
women and the first opportunities for their serious education and employment all accompanied the rise and influence of the
Victorian womens movement. Both as professionals and as amateurs, women became artists in large numbers for the first time in
the 19th century: what Virginia Woolf called the battle of the Royal Academy was one among many: the battle of Westminster, the
battle of Whitehall, the battle of Harley Street. Art was open to women in a way that the institutionalized professions of politics,
religion, law and (until the 1870s) medicine were not. The idea of the woman artist, if increasingly familiar, was, however, still
deeply uncomfortable. The serious pursuit of art was understood to be incompatible with the demands of femininity, just as the
attributes of femininity were incompatible with the production of good art.

A keen awareness of these contradictions made many women artists feminists, and feminists were interested in the woman artist,
not only because she was a type of the skilled and independent woman but because womens supposed lack of cultural creativity
was often given as a reason for denying them the vote. In 1897 the Central Committee of the National Society for Womens
Suffrage published a list of suffrage supporters that included the names of 76 women painters, among them Lady Butler, Henrietta
Rae, Annie Louisa Swynnerton and Lucy Madox Rossetti. From 1907, after the foundation of the Artists Suffrage League (followed
in 1909 by the Suffrage Atelier), women lent their artistic skills to the propaganda of an elaborate political campaign, seen, for
example, in a poster of 19089 (London, Guildhall U., Fawcett Lib.) by Emily J. Harding Andrews. This was the most polemical
feminist work produced before the Womens Movement of the late 1960s. Until then women, in flight from the newly insistent and
inferior category of the female artist, tended to concede the conventional wisdom that art has no sex.

2. The Womens Liberation Movement and art institutions.


Feminisms second wave emerged in the USA at the end of the 1960s. Women were fed up with drudgery and isolation at home,
inferior pay and conditions at work and secondary status in the Civil Rights Movement and anti-war campaigns. The first British
womens groups were formed in 1968, and the first Womens Liberation Movement (W.L.M.) National Conference took place in
Oxford in 1970. The seven demands of the W.L.M. were formulated between 1970 (at Oxford) and 1978 and included equal pay
for equal work; equal education and job opportunities; legal and financial independence for women; the right to a self-defined
sexuality and an end to discrimination against lesbians; freedom from intimidation by male violence and an end to the laws and
institutions that help to perpetuate male dominance and mens aggression towards women. The emphasis on equal opportunity led
women artists to organize against institutional discrimination (see INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE). The emphasis on a self-defined
sexuality encouraged feminists to challenge the images of femininity then current in advertising, pornography and the mass media;
it also led to exploration of alternative representations of and for women, and ultimately into an analysis of how representation itself
produces social definitions of femininity and determines the way experiences are perceived.

In 1969 women from the Art Workers Coalition in New York formed Women Artists in Revolution or WAR. This was followed by a
second breakaway group in 1970, the Ad Hoc Committee (of women artists), which was organized to fight institutional
discrimination, beginning with the picketing of the Whitney Museum of American Art. At the Whitney Annual of 1969 less than 6%
of the work had been by women; the exhibition of 1970 included 22% of work by women. Further demonstrations took place at the
County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (1970), the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1971), and the Museum of Modern Art,
New York (1972). In 1971 WAR and Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (W.S.A.B.A.L.) observed in a letter to the
Human Rights Commission that women constituted 52.5% of the American population, 6075% of the art students, but only 5% of
the artist population in galleries and 3% of that in museums. The early editions of H. W. Jansons standard text-book A History of
Art (1962 and 1977) ignored women, and Arnold Hausers multi-volume Social History of Art (1951) included only one in a list of
450 names.

Women were also poorly represented in contemporary reviews. This led feminist artists to organize
independent exhibitions and womens cooperatives and galleries such as the feminist A.I.R.
(founded in 1972 and housing the Womens Art Registry) and SoHo 20 (opened in 1973).
Redstocking Artists produced the first issue of Women and Art in December 1971, but political
Guerrilla Girls: Get Naked, disagreements led to a splinter group publishing the Feminist Art Journal (19727). The Feminist Art
poster, 1989, 1995 by
Guerrilla Journal, Chrysalis (197780), HERESIES (from 1977) and the Womans Art Journal (from 1980),
together with the dedicated efforts of Lucy Lippard in the art press, provided a critical context for the public discussion of feminist
work. The Guerrilla Girls, unidentified activists who constituted themselves as the feminist conscience of the New York art world,
nevertheless claimed that the mainstream coverage of womens art was little improved (see their advertisements in A. Mag., xi/5,
1987, pp. 104, 128; for further discussion of feminist literature see WOMEN AND ART HISTORY).

Artists in New York emphasized equal representation and economic parity, but during the 1970s there was also an active womens
art movement in California, which placed greater emphasis on what it perceived as specifically female content (related to womens
bodies and female experiences) and feminine sensibility. In 1970 JUDY CHICAGO established a female art class at Fresno State
College, which used consciousness-raising techniques from the womens movement to help students make art out of the things
with which they were really involved. With MIRIAM SCHAPIRO, she established the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of
the Arts (1971). Their principal project was WOMANHOUSE, a mansion in Los Angeles, restored and transformed in a series of
environments and performances that opened to the public in January 1972. Womanspace, a gallery in Los Angeles, run by women
and exhibiting women artists work, opened in January 1973.

In London the first Womens Liberation Art Group exhibition was held at the Woodstock Gallery in 1971; the first to make a public
impact, howeverand bring upon Monica Sjoo the threat of obscenity and blasphemy charges for her painting God Giving Birth
was the Womanpower exhibition held at Swiss Cottage Library in April 1973. The London Womens Liberation Art Group had
formed in 1970, the Womens Workshop of the Artists Union in 1972, and a splinter-group of the Womens Workshop became the
Women Artists Collective in 1975. The Womens Free Arts Alliance was planned in 1972 and registered as a charity in 1974. In
1976 the Women Artists Slide Library was founded. The Womens Art History Collective, which began meeting in 1972, joined
women artists groups to picket the Hayward Gallery Condition of Sculpture exhibition in 1975, after the model of the Whitney
demonstrations, demanding 50% representation in state-housed and subsidized exhibitions and on Arts Council selection panels;
in 1978 the Hayward Annual was selected, controversially, by an all-woman panel and reviewed in the press, as The Girls Own
Annual and Ladies Night at the Hayward, in terms that reiterated the 19th-century category of feminine creativity. Thereafter it
was tacitly recognized that women should be represented on major grant-awarding bodies and selection committees, although a
level of institutional discrimination remained.

Special issues of Art and Artists (Oct 1973), Studio International (cxciii/987, 1977) and the Oxford Art Journal (iii/1, 1980) were
devoted to women artists, and feminist work was covered regularly in Spare Rib (from 1972). The quarterly Feminist Art News was
published from 1979. Parallel developments took place in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, France and Italy; from 1976 Lip was
published in Australia. From the mid-1970s groups, exhibitions and publications proliferated beyond the point of tidy summary.
Among the most significant in Britain were the exhibitions Womens Images of Men, About Time and Issue (all 1980; London, ICA);
Sense and Sensibility in Feminist Art Practice (1982; Nottingham, Midland Group); Beyond the Purloined Image (1983; London,
Riverside Gal.); Pandoras Box (1984; Bristol, Arnolfini Gal.); Difference: On Representation and Sexuality (1985; London, ICA);
and The Thin Black Line (1985; London, ICA).

Much feminist work was exhibited in libraries, womens centres or other non-gallery spaces, sometimes from necessity but often as
a matter of principle. For some, art was primarily a form of expression and communication between women rather than something
to put in a gallery. The Feministo Postal Event (1975), which developed from an exchange of objects through the post between a
network of women, both professional and amateur artists, was characteristic of collaborative work only later exhibited as Portrait of
the Artist as a Housewife (19767). Jo Spences photo-therapy was based on a refusal to acknowledge traditional distinctions
between photography, communication, therapy and art. For others, the point was to reach an audience in the overlap between
avant-garde interests and those of the womens movement, to address feminist and art-world constituencies at the same time. May
Stevens suggested that where their political intent is unrealized, feminist works in museums and galleries hang like unopened
letters, unanswered invitations (Robinson, p. 181).

3. Feminism and representation, the 1970s.


At the same time that feminist artists struggled for equal rights in existing institutions and set up
alternatives of their own, they worked at developing a political culture that would intervene in the
interlocking network of images, values, identities which saturate our daily living (Parker and Pollock,
1987, p. 79). This has involved transformations or role reversals at the level of content (e.g. SYLVIA
SLEIGHs male nudes and other images by women of men); cultural heroinism, exemplified by Judy
Chicagos The Dinner Party (installation, 19749; see fig.); and great goddess and matriarchal
imagery (Mary Beth Edelson, MONICA SJOO). The Red Poster Workshop produced overtly
propagandist graphics, while the social position of working-class women was treated in works by
Kay Hunt, Mary Kelly and Margaret Harrison from the Womens Workshop of the Artists Union and
the Hackney Flashers. The subject of womens health was tackled by Peter Dunn and Lorraine
Judy Chicago: The First Woman
Burned at the Stake for Leeson, and particularly explicitly in Jo Spences photographs. Womens relation to the unconscious
and the unspoken was treated by SUSAN HILLER. An emphasis on such uniquely female experiences as menstruation and
motherhood and on domesticity was made in work by Judy Chicago, VIVIENNE BINNS and Kate Walker. Artists such as LYNDA
BENGLIS, HANNAH WILKE (see fig.) and Suzanne Santoro celebrated the female body in its difference, often using parodied
glamour imagery, or what the American critic Barbara Rose termed vaginal iconology. Through performance and video VALIE
EXPORT, Carolee Schneemann, Ulrike Rosenbach, JANA STERBAK, ELEANOR ANTIN and ADRIAN PIPER attempted to analyse or
manipulate gendered identities and to confront or critique the male gaze; Marianne Wex and ANNETTE MESSAGER treated similar
themes using photographs and texts. Work by Kate Walker and Joyce Weiland exploited an alternative sub-cultural tradition of
domestic production in quilting and needlework. Lippard referred to a recognizable expression of a (controversial) feminine
sensibility in central-core imagery, or in circles, domes, eggs, spheres, boxes, biomorphic shapesmaybe a certain striation or
layering (Lippard, 1976, p. 81). Artists such as Mary Kelly, VICTOR BURGIN and Marie Yates deconstructed femininity as
something fixed and essential rather than as something precarious and fluid, the product of psycho-social representations. Among
artists, as in the Womens Movement itself, there existed a plurality of feminist positions and strategies. Feminist art drew on the
possibilities of conceptual, environmental, scripto-visual, film, video and performance work, or on more traditional techniques of
painting and sculpture. In certain circumstances it may not be the intention of the producer but the eye of the beholder and the
context in which the work appears that secures its political reading: Georgia OKeeffes flower paintings were, to her dismay,
perceived as celebratory sexual images by feminists (see fig.); in the context of the Womens Images of Men exhibition,
ELISABETH FRINKs bronze heads lost their generalized humanism and became pointedly masculine. Feminism is not necessarily
a consciously determined ingredient of the work but a product of the relation between the work and the representations of a
dominant culture, a particular audience, and the uses to which it is put. It has also been argued (Partington in Robinson, p. 228)
that there is no feminist art but only art that can be read as feminist.

Judy Chicago claimed that she had wanted to speak out of my femaleness, to make art out of the very thing that made me the
other in male society (Chicago, 1975, p. 203). Much feminist art began with the search for a female subject-matter and form.
Form could be interpreted as a matter of feminine sensibility, medium or style; a tendency to centralized, veiled or grid-like
compositions was often interpreted as specific to womens art. If femaleness was the repressed other of male society, feminism
had to locate it (in the body or the kitchen) as the basis for a shared womens culture. Different textual strategies in feminist art of
the 1970s articulated the feminine for different audiences in different ways. Work based on the rhythms, pleasures and
reproductive capacities of the female body, like matriarchal and goddess imagery, implied an essential feminine power that could
be released into creativity. Work on the alienation and pain of womens physical experience invited identification in the experience
of oppression and expanded the category of legitimate sexual subject-matter to include menstruation, rape and abortion. The
exploitation of a sub-cultural and domestic tradition led to the celebration of womens nurturing capacities or, alternatively, to the
denigration of their drudgery depicted by Alexis Hunters The Marxists Wife (Still Does the Housework) (1978; Auckland, C.A.G.).
These are not exclusive categories, and Chicagos The Dinner Party, a collaborative installation, joined matriarchal celebration to
vaginal iconography and the use of needlework and china-painting as domestic techniques. The power of these strategies lay in
their revaluation of despised or neglected feminine attributes. They were accessible (Chicago said of her work, you didnt have to
read Artforum to appreciate it). They offered a sense of identity and community to their audiences and unsettled the criteria for
orthodox art. To the extent that they dealt in the fixed signs of femininity, however, they produced a reverse-discourse that
accepted the terms on which difference had already been laid down. The paradox for feminism has always been that it speaks
from a feminine position that it is simultaneously trying to transform.

Another more deconstructive practice refuses to oppose a masculine culture with a (largely domestic) feminine one. It assumes,
first, that the patriarchal culture inhabited by men and women is riven with contradictions that feminists can expose and explore;
and, second, that masculinity and femininity are not fixed categories, founded on anatomy, but unstable identities psycho-socially
produced. The contrast between what is sometimes called cultural feminism and feminist work on sexual difference is starkest in
a comparison of Chicagos The Dinner Party and Mary Kellys Post-partum Document (19739; ACEng). The feminine is not a
problem for the The Dinner Party, which produces and celebrates a coherent sexual identity; the Post-partum Document takes as
its subject-matter the processes by which, in the early years of motherhood, an unstable femininity is provisionally secured.
Arguments have been advanced for each strategy at the expense of the other. A political reading of either depends on the relative
weight accorded to textual strategies on the one hand, or to accessibility through an appeal to the reading competences of a large
audience on the other (see Partington in Robinson).

4. (?)Post-feminism, the 1980s and the 1990s.


The three exhibitions at the ICA in 1980 represented a turning-point in the institutional visibility of
feminist art in Britain. The influence of theories of ideology and the subject (in particular the impact of
Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis) encouraged a shift away from cultural feminism towards a
recognition of the processes of sexual differentiation and of the hopelessness of excavating a free or
original femininity beneath the layers of patriarchal oppression. The vexed question of whether men
could make feminist work was answered in the 1980s by an increase in the number of men making
work about masculinity (e.g. Victor Burgin and Sunil Gupta). A younger generation of women came
to take the insights of feminism for granted, dealing with gender and identity through parody and
masquerade: Laurie Anderson used a voice coder to heighten her sexual ambiguity; CINDY SHERMAN
presented herself as the object of the look while refusing, in a mobility of self-constructed identities,
Barbara Kruger: Untitled (We Will
No Longer Be Seen and to be discovered in it; BARBARA KRUGERs montages offered women the pleasure of answering back
(see fig.). Despite a use of neutral pronouns, the posited spectator is invariably male (We Wont Play Nature to Your Culture).

Feminism is no longer (necessarily) marginal. JENNY HOLZER and REBECCA HORN (in 1989 and 1993
respectively) have had solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum; Jenny Holzer was selected for
the American Pavilion at the Venice Bienniale (1990); RACHEL WHITEREAD became the first woman
to win the Turner Prize (1993) at the Tate Gallery. At the same time, and perhaps significantly, the
visceral strand in 1970s feminist art has re-emerged in work by such artists as Annie Sprinkle, Karen
Finlay, SUE WILLIAMS and KIKI SMITH, and in publications including Angry Women (1991) and Bad
Girls (1993). The foreword in Bad Girls claims to chart a reaction against the puritanism and hard-
edged didactic work of the 1980s in favour of a return to the surrealist traditions of LOUISE
BOURGEOIS (see fig.) and MERET OPPENHEIM and the aggressive camp of Judy Chicagos Dinner
Party. It is now almost impossible to generalize about feminist art, a term uncomfortably stretched to
Louise Bourgeois: Cumul I,
marble, 12705101220 mm, cover the work of rigorous but marketable New Yorkers, a collective of peace campaigners like
1968 (Paris, Pompidou,
Sister Seven, and black artists organizing and exhibiting at a critical distance to the white-dominated
feminist movement (Chila Burman in Robinson, p. 195). Artists such as LUBAINA HIMID, MAUD SULTER, Sutapa Biswas, Chila
Burman and SONIA BOYCE are concerned with positive images of black women reclaiming history, linking national economics
with colonialism and racism, with slavery, starvation and lynchings the challenging of racial stereotypes, and breaking through
tokenism and sexism (Himid in Betterton, p. 261). New and challenging work on race and identity has also emerged in the USA
(Adrian Piper, LORNA SIMPSON, CARRIE MAE WEEMS).

Feminism was one of the forces that threw modernism into crisis, and feminist work of the 1970s was part of a broad rejection of
modernist aesthetics. French feminists such as Hlne Cixous and Luce Irigaray emphasized the disruptive potential of the
feminine as the enemy of authority and fixity; they also argued for lcriture fminine as a form of writing that erupts from the
pulsions of a female sexual body, recasting the link between body and culture in a way that has been taken up by NANCY SPERO.
Attempts to bring feminism under the umbrella of 1980s Post-modernist pluralism are, however, strained and ambiguous. Neo-
expressionist painting reinstated the male artisthero. Feminist politics concern with the emancipation of women and the
transformation of society meant that feminist cultural activities were not to be reduced to a single aspect of Post-modern diversity
(even to what has been designated a postmodernism of resistance). There is no perfect marriage between feminism (as a political
ideology) and art (as a cultural activity). Feminism promises at the same time to enrich the products of art, to expose the
pretensions and vested interests in art and to break open the category of art altogether.

Bibliography
E. Baker and T. Hess: Art and Sexual Politics (New York, 1973)

J. Chicago: Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (New York, 1975)

L. Lippard: From the Center: Feminist Essays on Womens Art (New York, 1976)

J. Chicago: The Dinner Party: A Symbol of our Heritage (New York, 1979)

J. Chicago and S. Hill: Embroidering our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework (New York, 1980)

L. Lippard: Sweeping Exchanges: The Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s, A. J., xl/12 (1980), pp. 3625

G. Nobakowski, H. Sander and P. Gorsen: Frauen in der Kunst, 2 vols (Frankfurt, 1980)

About Time (exh. cat., London, ICA, 1980)

Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists (exh. cat., London, ICA, 1980)

Womens Images of Men (exh. cat., London, ICA, 1980)

I. de Courtivon and E. Marks, eds: New French Feminisms (Brighton, 1981)

R. Parker and G. Pollock: Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London, 1981)

M. Barrett: Feminism and the Definition of Cultural Politics, Feminism, Culture and Politics, eds R. Brunt and C. Rowan (London, 1982)

N. Broude and M. D. Garrard: Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (New York, 1982)

Sense and Sensibility in Feminist Art Practice (exh. cat., Nottingham, Midland Group, 1982)

M. Kelly: Post-partum Document (London, 1983)

C. Owens: The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Others, The Anti-aesthetic, ed. H. Foster (Washington, DC, 1983)

M. Roth, ed.: The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, 19701980 (Los Angeles, 1983)

C. Lyle, S. Moore and C. Navaretta: Women Artists of the World (New York, 1984)

Difference: On Representation and Sexuality (exh. cat., New York, New Mus. Contemp. A.; London, ICA, 19845)

S. Kent and J. Moreau, eds: Womens Images of Men (London, 1985)

Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn: Aktuelle Kunst von Frauen (exh. cat. by S. Eiblmayer, V. Export and M. Prischl-Maier, Vienna, Mus. 20. Jhts, 1985)

The Thin Black Line (exh. cat., London, ICA, 1985)

R. Betterton, ed.: Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media (London, 1987)

T. Gouma-Peterson and P. Mathews: The Feminist Critique of Art History, A. Bull., lxix/3 (1987), pp. 32657

S. Nairne: Sexuality, Image and Identity, State of the Art: Ideas and Images in the 1980s (London, 1987)

R. Parker and G. Pollock, eds: Framing Feminism: Art and the Womens Movement, 19701985 (London, 1987)

H. Robinson, ed.: Visibly Female: Feminism and Art (London, 1987) [valuable anthology]
L. Tickner: Nancy Spero: Images of Women and la peinture fminine, Nancy Spero (exh. cat., London, ICA, 1987)

L. Tickner: The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 19071914 (London, 1987)

G. Pollock: Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London, 1988)

A. Raven: Crossing Over: Feminism and the Art of Social Concern (Ann Arbor, 1988)

W. Chadwick: Women, Art and Society (London, 1990)

A. Juno and V. Vale, eds: Angry Women (San Francisco, 1991)

Bad Girls (exh. cat., London, ICA, 1993; New York, New Mus. Contemp. A., 1994)

N. Broude and M. D. Garrard, eds: The Power of Feminist Art: Emergence, Impact and Triumph of the American Feminist Art Movement
(London, 1994)

Global Feminisms (exh. cat., ed. M. Reilly and L. Nochlin; New York, Brooklyn Mus., 2007)

WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution (exh. cat., ed. C. H. Butler; Los Angeles, CA, Mus. Contemp. A.2007)

Lisa Tickner

Copyright Oxford University Press 2007 2016.

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