Themes of Rape and Sexual Assault in Feminist Art of the 1970s

In the age of the selfie, women are all too familiar with what photographs of themselves silently propose. Who are you? Where is your natural habitat? Which circles do you run with? Are you lot glamorous? Natural? Spontaneous? Professional? Sexual?

In that location is much to critique about the contemporary relationship between women and their photographic image, whether information technology's taken by themselves or past another. On the upside, though, there is a growing sensation of the constructed nature of these photos ― how they represent playful performance more than fixed truth. Rewind twoscore years or and then and this was not the case.

A new London exhibition titled "Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s" revisits a time when most women were regarded as passive muses instead of authoritative subjects and makers, in control of their bodies, identities and work. The stunning bear witness celebrates 48 radical women artists who used their artwork to shatter the condition quo, disrupt the male gaze, question assumptions of feminine identity and forever destroy the myth that fine art-making is a human being's game.

The exhibit is divided into 4 sections ― focusing on domestic infinite, sexual objectification, masquerade and operation of identity, and beauty norms ― and features a whopping display of over 200 artworks. Beneath, nosotros delve into the stories behind 8 bright, bold and utterly badass feminist artists who changed the rules for women in the art world forever.

one. Hannah Wilke

New York, New York (1940–1993)

Hannah Wilke, "S.O.S. Starification Object Series. One of 36 playing cards from mastication box," 1975 Post card — Hannah Wilke, "South.O.South. Starification Object Serial. One of 36 playing cards from mastication box," 1975 Post card

The nearly unfair critique conceptual lensman, performance artist and sculptor Hannah Wilke encountered throughout her life was that she was besides beautiful. Because the conventionally stunning artist incorporated her own body into her work, often nude, she was constantly defendant of being egotistic and flaunting her appearance.

"People give me this bullshit of, 'What would y'all have done if you weren't then gorgeous?'" Wilke once noted. "What deviation does information technology make? [...] Gorgeous people dice as do the stereotypical 'ugly.' Everybody dies." When Wilke herself was diagnosed with cancer, she documented her degenerating body in the series "Intra-Venus," at which indicate many of her detractors accepted the undeniable fact that Wilke was making challenging and critical artwork all along.

Wilke is perhaps most well-known for her serial "S.O.S. - Starification Object Serial (1974–82)," in which she covered her body with wads of mucilage folded into abstract origamis reminiscent of female genitalia. Wilke and then photographed herself covered in the pinkish lumps, alluding to the objectifying nature of the male gaze ― while simultaneously disrupting it.

2. Cindy Sherman

Glen Ridge, New Bailiwick of jersey (b. 1954)

Cindy Sherman, "Untitled (Lucy)," 1975/2001

"If yous don't like me this way, how virtually you like me this manner?" Cindy Sherman told The Guardian when discussing her predilection for playing wearing apparel upwardly, a passion that's remained at the cadre of her conceptual photography practise for over xxx years.

Using makeup, prosthetics, wigs, ornate costumes and elaborate sets, Sherman transforms herself before the camera, masquerading as a variety of female stereotypes culled from art history, advertising, cinema and Telly. In one photo she's a Hitchcock-era femme fatale; in another, a Botox-happy suburban housewife. In her roles both in front of and behind the camera, Sherman indulges and unsettles the roles women play.

"I'chiliad not almost revealing myself," Sherman has repeatedly said of her work, despite their being, in a fashion, self-portraits. Instead, the photographs toy with the ways women teeter between artificiality and actuality, oftentimes becoming actresses in their own lives. Because after years of civilisation and society flattening women's existences to stereotypes and images, women themselves tin can follow suit.

iii. Renate Eisenegger

Gelsenkirchen, Germany (b. 1949)

Renate Eisenegger, "Hochhaus (Nr.1)," 1974

Renate Eisenegger's most iconic gesture was painting her face, covering it first in a layer of pure white pigment, then calculation black lines to create a geometric grid. In doing so, she broke from the stock-still identity she had come to know, freeing her to create in new and radical ways. "In a certain manner, my self seemed conflicting to me, as though I were shedding a previous existence," she said of the uncanny experience.

The multidisciplinary artist was born in Gelsenkirchen in Westward Germany, iv years after the end of Globe War II. As stated in the London exhibition's itemize, when in art school, Eisenegger noticed "how women artists tended to downplay their ambitions and achievements." She has since excelled, without amends, in her drawing, photographic, written and performance piece of work.

In the epitome above, Eisenegger, in her signature white face up pigment, irons the flooring of a loftier-rise building's hallways, knowing perfectly well the floor is already quite level. The image speaks to the conformity and monotony that prevails in domestic spaces. Additionally, the ironing represents a larger kind of flattening that many women are familiar with ― a flattening of desire, dissent, and individuality.

4. Lynn Hershman Leeson

Cleveland, Ohio (b. 1941)

Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Roberta Construction Chart #1," 1975

Between the years of 1974 and 1976, creative person Lynn Hershman Leeson abandoned her identity and adopted some other: her new proper name was Roberta Breitmore. Leeson accomplished this feat past donning a blonde, Marilyn Monroe-style wig, a confront full of makeup, and a different, learned mode of moving virtually the world. She likewise acquired a commuter's license, opened a banking concern account and got a credit bill of fare.

Over the course of these two years, Leeson attended fine art openings, dated men, visited a psychiatrist, all under the guise of being another. "If you go back to that time in the 1970s, she had more relevance and more actuality than I did," the creative person said, as quoted in the itemize. "Through fiction you can sometimes go to a deeper truth." Through her work, Leeson explored the synthetic nature of feminine identity, molding her own hybrid being through the costumes, technologies and borrowed behaviors all women adopt.

In the image above, "Roberta Structure Nautical chart #1," Leeson shows viewers the transformation that she underwent to get her character. Her face up becomes its own topography, illuminating the work that went into the making of her femininity and herself. Somewhere betwixt a scientific chart and a plastic surgery sketch, the epitome reflects on what women go through only to get "themselves."

five. VALIE EXPORT

Linz, Austria (b. 1940)

Valie Export, " Tapp und Tastkino [Tap and Touch Cinema]," 1968 — Valie Export, " Tapp und Tastkino [Tap and Impact Picture palace]," 1968

Until the age of xiv, Waltraud Lehner was educated in a Vienna convent. As she grew up, she became immersed in the flick industry, got married and became a female parent. It wasn't until 1967 when she adopted the pseudonym VALIE Export, both an artistic identity and a personal make, 1 that simultaneously rejected the command of the men in her life and challenged the Nazi ideology of her parents' generation. Her last proper noun was, in office, a tribute to a make of cigarettes.

"I did non want to have the proper name of my father [Lehner] any longer, nor that of my former husband Hollinger," EXPORT explained in a Bomb interview, "My thought was to export from my 'outside' and besides export, from that port. The cigarette package was from a pattern and mode that I could use, but it was not the inspiration."

Consign's work in video, performance, photography, sculpture, and computer animation, frequently critiqued the way commercial motion picture and the mainstream media objectified the female body. "In lodge to attain a cocky-divers prototype of ourselves and thus a unlike view of the social office of women, we women must participate in the construction of reality via the edifice blocks of media-communication," she said. "This will not happen spontaneously or without resistance, therefore we must fight!"

For the piece featured above, 1968's "Tapp und Tastkino [Tap and Touch Movie theatre]," EXPORT crafted a wearable theatrical stage and wore it on the street. She then invited passersby to stick their hands inside the stage and feel, without looking, her breasts. The piece examined the underlying relationship between violence and eroticism, seeing and feeling, private and public.

half dozen. Karin Mack

Vienna, Austria (b. 1940)

Karin Mack, "Zerstörung einer Illusion [Demolition of an Illusion]," 1977 — Karin Mack, "Zerstörung einer Illusion [Sabotage of an Illusion]," 1977

Karin Mack's surreal and conceptual photography revolves around a unmarried question: where does our performance of selves end and true identity begin? The inquiry is especially relevant to women who are conspicuously and forcefully told what qualities they should and should not nowadays to the public.

The Austrian artist uses self-portraiture to investigate the upshot of the self, a woman'southward photographic image serving as the illusory perfect synthesis of harmonious parts. Many of her photographs take a dreamy detour from traditional forms of feminine representation, shattering the faux hope that women are equally cohesive and pleasant as their pictures would atomic number 82 ane to believe.

In the series "Demolition of an Illusion," featured higher up, Mack literally pierces the surface of a lovely portrait, depicting Mack leaning against floral wallpaper property a jar of homemade jam. As explained in the exhibition itemize: "The expiry of the image, the devastation of the photograph, is at once the end of an illusion and an act of liberation."

vii. Mary Beth Edelson

Eastward Chicago, Ind. (b. 1933)

Mary Beth Edelson, "Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper," 1972

Mary Beth Edelson's piece of work often revisits and revamps the past, reimagining a history where femininity is privileged instead of penalized. In her "Goddess Art" series, Edelson used red china marker and oil paint to transform photographs into universal symbols of ritual feminine ability. The photos incorporated aboriginal figures like Baubo and Sheela na gig ― both of whom warded off evil by showing their genitalia.

Perhaps Edelson's most famous work, featured above, is 1972's "Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper." The creative person edits Leonardo da Vinci'south iconic portrait of Christ and his disciples enjoying a family meal, replacing the men with the images of 69 female artists including Georgia O'Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Louise Bourgeois. The piece challenged religion's tradition of oppressing women while acknowledging the feminine forces whose names and faces are too often excluded from history.

"This is what information technology feels like to have been edited [and] cutting out of art history for centuries," the artist said. The paradigm was afterwards made into a affiche, which was circulated widely amongst women artists and feminist activists, eventually becoming one of the defining pictures of the movement.

8. Ewa Partum

Grodzisk Mazowiecki, Poland (b. 1945)

Ewa Partum, "Change," 1974 — Ewa Partum, "Modify," 1974

Fed upwards with the discrimination she felt every bit a adult female performance artist, Ewa Partum began to comprise her naked trunk into her work. Although many critics were quick to label this a maneuver of egocentrism rather than thoughtfulness, Partum expressed vehemently her want to transform her self and body into a work of art in club to dismantle the perception that a woman'south body was a sexual object or a thing of nature. She was a signifier, a field of study, in control of her torso, work and life.

Partum'southward work often revolved effectually language, poetry, women'south bodies, and the intersections between them. For her first feminist slice, 1971'southward "Lipstick Pictures," Partum took prints of her lips while mouthing particular letters, then combined the images to spell out words similar "fine art" and "honey." The piece laid blank the physicality of language, non to mention the femininity, relishing the similarity between women'southward lips and their ballocks.

In "Modify," featured higher up, Partum enlisted a makeup artist to, in front of an audience and on camera, apply makeup to historic period half of her face. Past artificially aging a portion of her face, Partum addressed the standards of beauty established and perpetuated by men, that deem women undesirable as they abound older. She eventually plastered the image on posters which were spread effectually socialist Poland along with the words "My problem is the problem of a adult female."

"Feminist Advanced of the 1970s" runs until Jan. 15, 2017 at The Photographer'due south Gallery in London.

bongiornoinct1938.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/feminist-artists-1970s_n_5800dfc1e4b06e0475943918