Gendered : Art and Feminist Theory [1 ed.] 9781443865616, 9781443842198

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Gendered: Art and Feminist Theory

Gendered: Art and Feminist Theory

By

Tal Dekel

Gendered: Art and Feminist Theory, by Tal Dekel This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Tal Dekel Cover image by Martha Rosler, U.S. government body measurement protocols, from: Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (color video, 1977) © Martha Rosler, 1977 All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4219-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4219-8

To my mother, Eva Oster

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Introduction ............................................................................................... 1 Part I: First-Generation Feminist Art Chapter One............................................................................................... 10 An Historical View: The Birth of Feminist Art Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 21 A Kaleidoscopic View: The Proliferation of Feminist Art Streams Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 86 Attitudes Towards 1970s’ Feminist Art Part II: Test Case Chapter One............................................................................................... 98 The Post-Partum Document: The Exception that Proves the Rule Chapter Two ............................................................................................ 122 Motherhood and the Feminist Discourse: An On-Going Debate Chapter Three .......................................................................................... 129 The Absence of Maternal Representation in First-Generation Feminist Art Part III: A Re-Reading Chapter One............................................................................................. 136 American Versus European Feminist Art: Does a Dichotomy Really Exist?

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Table of Contents

Chapter Two ............................................................................................ 141 Postmodernism: Early Streams Chapter Three .......................................................................................... 148 The “Death of the Author”—Vive la Femme Auteur Afterword Feminism and Women’s Art in Israel: Influences and Correlation with American Feminist Art .................................................................... 153 Notes........................................................................................................ 181 Bibliography............................................................................................ 185 Index of Names ....................................................................................... 203

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research developed out of my doctoral dissertation, as I began lecturing in the Women and Gender Studies program at Tel Aviv University. Numerous people have accompanied me through these years to whom I am indebted. Firstly, I would like to thank Prof. Nurit KenaanKedar for the trust and deep interest she demonstrated in the work from its conception to its birth and growth. My gratitude also goes to Dr. Ktsia Alon for reading the manuscript and making constructive and insightful suggestions for its improvement; to Dr. Hadara Scheflan-Katzav for her willingness to share her deep and extensive knowledge with respect to motherhood and feminism; and to Dr. Dalit Baum, for her sharpening and refining of processes and principles within the feminist discourse in Israel. I would like to thank Geora Rosen, editor-in-chief of the Red Line series of the Kibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, for his confidence in the importance of publishing the original Hebrew version of this volume. My deep gratitude also goes to Liat Keren for her meticulous and intelligent editing of the English version of the book, and to Shlomit Lola Nehama, editor of the Hebrew version. Special thanks to Liat Daudi for her unwavering support over the course of these years, and to my children, Ran and Paz, for their patience throughout the long hours I devoted to research and writing. Finally, I want to express my deep and enduring appreciation to my parents, Eva and Ariel Oster, for granting me the privilege of experiencing an interpersonal dynamic from which I have learnt and integrated into my own life the importance of feminist ideology and the principles it seeks to inculcate—for me personally and for us as a society.

INTRODUCTION

1. The Scandal: Is This Feminist Art?

FIGURE 1-1: Lynda Benglis, Untitled (ad in the November 1974 Artforum Magazine), 1974. Colour photograph©Lynda Benglis/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. In the specific context of this journal, it [the photo, T.D.] exists as an object of extreme vulgarity. Although we realize that it is by no means the first instance of vulgarity to appear in the magazine, it represents a qualitative leap in that genre, brutalizing ourselves and, we think, our readers. Artforum has, over the past few years, made conscious efforts to support the movement for women’s liberation, and it is therefore doubly shocking to encounter in its pages this gesture that reads as a shabby mockery of the aims of that movement. (Alloway, Kozloff, Krauss, Masheck, and Michelson 1974: 9)

This was the reaction of the editors of the prestigious American journal Artforum to Lynda Benglis’ photograph (FIG. 1), published in the November 1974 issue. The photograph presents an image of a naked woman standing defiantly and holding a double dildo to her pubis. The image is of the artist herself, the photograph forming part of a series entitled Sexual Mockeries. Benglis originally intended the image to serve as an artistic statement accompanying a feature article on her work written

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Introduction

by Robert Pincus for Artforum. Although she hoped that the image would be pulled out like a centrefold, the editorial board refused to publish it in such a form. Ultimately, Benglis found a way around the problem by presenting it as a commercial advertisement spread over two-pages (Richmond 2005: 25). The piece provoked a wave of response—enthusiastic and condemnatory alike—some readers of the journal even cancelling their subscription to the journal in objection to its inclusion. Although the editorial letter— published by leading figures in the art world of the time in the following issue—was one of the fiercest reactions (Richmond 2005: 26), similar views were expressed by numerous critics, some of them associated with feminist criticism. The latter included Cindy Nemser, editor of the Feminist Art Journal, who, in a highly critical op-ed article, described Benglis as an artist uncertain of her artistic and feminist path and prepared to exploit the platform afforded her by the pages of an established journal in order to draw attention to herself in a way which debased the female body (Nemser 1974). The feminist subject matters Benglis sought to raise by means of the photograph—and the profoundly political criticism it represented— escaped the understanding of many (Cottingham 2000: 103). Thus, for example, her assertive posture—as if preparing to perform an act of penetration—was intended to demonstrate an “unnatural” form of behaviour. While appearing as though she was forcing her way into prohibited places and roles, her intention was to draw attention to women’s lack of access to cultural and artistic power. Likewise, the choice to include her own body in the photo symbolised the reclamation of her feminine potency by exercising her human right to act both as a subject and as a woman—a choice exercised by many of her contemporary male artists, at times via extremely provocative images. Her body posture and facial expression similarly imitated degrading advertising and the use of the female body within the pornography industry in order to reveal the ways in which women are exploited and oppressed—physically, psychologically, economically, and socially.1 As reactions to the photograph echoed throughout the art world and feminist and public discourses, it became evident that Benglis had struck a nerve amongst her contemporaries with respect to ethical, aesthetic, and political issues alike. This sensitivity was directly associated with contemporary cultural attitudes towards the body, sexuality, and the status of women. While she published the photograph with the deliberate goal of stimulating a broad political discussion of salient social issues, however,

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she appears not to have anticipated that it would become an iconic symbol for an entire generation—namely, the feminist artists of the 1970s.2 Women artists whose work was informed by a feminist awareness emerged as a distinct artistic movement for the first time in Western history in the 1970s in the United States and Europe, acquiring the label “feminist art”. This was an historic moment, constituting the first encounter between the fields of art, social activism, and intellectual and political thinking under the ideational influence of the feminist movement. The conjunction led to the emergence of an art and theory whose ramifications left their clear stamp on the lives of women throughout the world.3 In the 1970s, American women artists imbued with the spirit of radical feminism used their work to demonstrate the conceptual influence of feminism in its many and varied forms. Engaging with numerous issues relating to the status and rights of women, they established a clear link between their art and their lives as women. Frequently, they depicted the quotidian lives of women—small, seemingly unimportant moments. From their perspective, every subject—including those which, prior to that point, had been deemed trivial, minor, and (thus) “feminine”—were worthy of discussion and museum exhibition: issues related to housekeeping and child raising, the difficulties of making a living, over-friendly bosses with a habit of patting their behinds, or body-image issues manifested in the worried looks they gave to their expanding waistline in the mirror. Art played a significant role in the social process which gave impetus to the American radical feminist movement. Through their artistic activity, this group of artists not only expressed feminist ideas but also helped realize them by questioning traditional conventions. When Lynda Benglis exposed her naked body provocatively attached to a dildo, her message was unequivocally political. Other artists similarly employed their personalities and corporality in the most direct and sensual of manners in order to express political ideas and principles. Innovative and revolutionary in both form and content, this art was regarded as representing one of the peaks of the second wave of feminism. As Kathleen Wentrack points out, feminist artists in Europe were also addressing the status of women in society during this period—although the circumstances on the continent were very different from those in the United States: By the mid-1970s the prevalence of the feminist art movement in the United States contrasted with the less visible movement in many European countries ... In the United States the women’s movement extended readily to the arts, but in Europe politics and art had a more complicated

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Introduction relationship. For many feminists in several European countries art was regarded as a privileged activity and not a place for agitation. (Wentrack 2012: 77-78)

Despite these disparities, European women created important feminist art during this decade. Western historiography contends that three central waves can be discerned in the development of feminism and the feminist discourse: the first, which emerged in the nineteenth century, the second, which arose in the mid-1960s, and the third, which developed in the late 1980s. The first wave was both European and American, women on both sides of the Atlantic beginning to organise themselves collectively with a clear-cut political agenda, protest against the existing patriarchal order, and promote female equality and social status. Like the suffragettes who fought for the right to vote—liberal feminist activists struggled to achieve equality for women in education and the business sector, to help women suffering from poverty or rescue those trapped in prostitution, and to increase awareness of freedom of choice in matters of reproduction, etc. The second wave of feminism—the artistic consequences of which are the subject of this book—also manifested itself in both Europe and the United States, being directly linked to the birth of the Women’s Liberation Movement. The third wave—which is sometimes regarded as extending into the early 1990s—remains prominent today, reflecting clear affinities with postmodernism, undermining traditional disciplines and questions and deconstructing meta-narratives and the notion of a single objective, absolute, transcendent Truth by positing multiple “truth(s)”. Contemporary feminist discourse belonging to the postmodernist third wave, it thus reflects different—and sometimes even contradictory—emphases embodying a complex and heterogeneous reality. While historically the feminist movement was accompanied by a broad set of profound societal changes—whose consequences have improved the lives of many women—issues stemming from the very fact of being a woman in contemporary society still exist. Women today still frequently find themselves dealing with chauvinism and sexism as though the century-old feminist movement had never arisen. Although some opine that the feminist movement is passé because the fight for equality has been fulfilled, every woman being free today to choose her own path—whether as housewife, career-oriented, or other—the vast majority of women still face daunting challenges. Now, rather than having to cope with straightforward choices—such as being a mother or pursuing a career— most must deal with the multiple aspects and facets characteristic of postmodern life.

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Many women feel frustration and disappointment with the achievements of the feminist movement and the general status of women in society. The repression of women overtly persists, at times taking crudely open forms, on other occasions being latent, below the surface, or embodied in inscrutable shapes. Much work evidently still remains before women can act as/for themselves in order to win the battle against repression and the accepted social hierarchy. Feminism continuing to bear a social stigma at times, the mere word “feminist” puts many people off. Even a brief conversation with women who declare that they are not feminists, however, reveals that many of them support and identify with feminist concepts. As feminist psychologist Ariella Friedman notes, “An identification with the material exists alongside an objection to the identity” (Friedman 1999: 20-22). Despite addressing an aesthetic and artistic field, this book seeks to advance the feminist mission of bridging the gap between form and content, substance and identity. In this way, it reflects—and hopefully contributes to—the establishment of feminism both as a way of life and as an academic discipline. The latter trend, manifest in recent years, is closely associated with the growth of Gender Studies programs. The term “sex”— which traditionally signified the “natural”, biological differences between men and women—has now been replaced by the word “gender”, the new terminology reflecting the dismantling of accepted meanings and a probing of the distinction between the two sexes that calls for a (re-)examination of the social-conditioning system and socio-cultural conventions which shape it. The academic feminist discourse practiced in Women’s Studies programs and other branches within the social sciences employs the term “gender” as the essential foundation for analysis and criticism. As critic Hannah Naveh defines the field of gender studies, it constitutes “a base and method of sceptical, challenging thinking, neither dogmatic nor Establishment” (Naveh 2006: 35).

2. The Structure of the Book The current volume seeks to compare the world of the feminist art of the 1970s in the United States with that in Europe with the aim of introducing the feminist spirit and demonstrating its relevance to the contemporary reader. Although its focus lies on the second wave of feminism, it also addresses some aspects of the third wave and the current state of the movement, particularly with respect to the Israeli art scene. The methodology employed herein combines the fields of art history and art criticism with intellectual thought regarding social and political

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Introduction

processes. While art reflects and attests to a social reality, intellectual/political thinking and critical analysis deeply influence artistic activity—which in turn impacts reality, initiating debate and promoting cultural change. The intimate link between theory and artistic practice— and their common ability to draw a full and rich picture of reality—makes this a very fruitful fusion. PART I reviews the historical background and social processes which led to the emergence of the second wave of feminism, highlighting radical feminism and the feminist art movement. In this section, I examine the various streams, techniques, and approaches developed by the first generation of feminist artists in the United States. This section also explores the feminist ideology which guided these artists, together with the creative principles characteristic of each stream, the extent of the change the artists sought to bring about, and the critical discourse revolving around their work in the 1970s and beyond. The latter was marked by a split in the 1970s, some supporting the use of representations of the female body in art and regarding it as a source of strength and power, others arguing that it enhanced neither the creative woman artist nor the viewer; buttressing the traditional representation of the woman as an object exposed to the male gaze, it thereby perpetuated it as a source of male visual pleasure. In the years following this decade, these views changed, the passage of time giving rise to interpretations which facilitated a new perspective. PART II focuses upon an extraordinary case that proves the norm—the work of artist Mary Kelly. Born in the United States in 1941, Kelly moved to England in the mid-1960s, where she won broad recognition. She subsequently returned to the U.S.A., where she is currently one of the most prominent figures in the art and academic worlds alike. During the 1970s, Kelly chose to scrutinise feminist principles via the prism of motherhood—a subject which, up to that point, feminist artists had largely eschewed.4 Abstaining from any representation or image of the female body in her work, she thereby set herself apart from the central stream of the contemporary radical feminist art prevalent in the U.S.A. Herein, I examine one of her most well-known works, the Post-Partum Document, created between 1974 and 1979 in the wake of one of the most personal of experiences—childbirth. This piece is analysed in relation to the influence of feminist and psychoanalytical theoretical sources on Kelly— supplemented by an exploration of the subject of motherhood in relation to the cultural status of mothers in art and artist-mothers within the art world and general culture from the viewpoint of the feminist discourse.

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PART III examines the disparities and correspondences between Kelly’s art—as a representative of continental feminist art—and that of the firstgeneration American artists. Herein, I outline the general characteristics of the artworks of that period, adducing the hegemonic thinking of the period and the postmodern concept of the “death of the author” in order to ground the discussion. The latter notion highlights the difficulties encountered by feminist artists of the period, aiding in the identification of the challenges and objections they faced and the reasons behind the failure of the feminist art movement to gain legitimacy and broad public recognition. Although the feminist art of the 1970s sowed important seeds for future development, the relatively large number of studies of it up to the 1990s have generally been tendentious and/or inadequate, a whole generation of women artists consequently suffering an historical injustice at the hands of scholars and critics. The decades which have now passed warrant a re-assessment of their work from a fresh perspective—as indeed has begun to occur since the end of the twentieth century. *** This volume is based on my doctoral dissertation, written in the Department of Art History at Tel Aviv University. The intensive weeks of writing the initial research proposal were also the final weeks of my first pregnancy. As a young woman in pursuit of my PhD, I was thus “conceiving” two worlds simultaneously. My first child would, I was aware, wonderfully and irreversibly shake up my entire life as I knew it. Following the birth, I pressed on to complete my dissertation. Amongst the feminist artworks I perused during this period, Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1974-1979)—a monumental, complex, conceptual piece that employs objects representing the early years of Kelly’s own son, brought together into a gut-wrenching, heart-breakingly authentic and poignant depiction of the life of a young mother—was especially significant and symbolic to me at that time. The work, which at first glance appears to be minimalist—cold, precise, and imbued with a subtle intellectualism—struck me, despite a distance of twenty years and thousands of kilometres, with full force, Kelly succeeding in plucking the strings tautly stretched inside me: stress and exhaustion, anxiety and contentment, excitement and expectation, disappointment and love. My intimate world blended with the universe outside, thoughts and beliefs about femininity, feminism, and motherhood merging with the artworks I was analysing, the baby who had grown

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Introduction

inside me and then emerged into the world, and the text unfolding on paper. Ten years have passed since then, and the dissertation has matured and developed into a book. In this form, it examines the definitions, boundaries, and genders which shape the world—on the public and individual level alike—through art and theoretical analyses. In my personal life, my academic work, writing, and university teaching have intertwined with motherhood and the rearing of children. As the two areas have interlaced, they have provided me with balance, complemented by new perspectives—including the capacity to address difficult issues and embrace new discoveries related to the female and maternal experience. Like my son, the textual infant also grew, developed, and matured. During its composition, this volume has undergone numerous revisions, the original text being expanded to provide a deeper discussion. At the same time, I can also identify the old-new me in its text. While the feminist art of the 1970s in the United States and Europe appeared to have become a distant, disconnected, academic subject, its value purely aesthetic and therefore irrelevant to our daily lives, today I am able to recognise the strong ties between my own experience and that of many other women—both in the here and now and from the 1970s. I believe this subject to be more intriguing and pertinent now than ever. Despite the lengthy interval of time between conception and birth, I hope that in the pages of this book something remains of the sense and meaning which accompanied its genesis: a deeply personal experience which can never be surpassed.

PART I FIRST-GENERATION FEMINIST ART

CHAPTER ONE AN HISTORICAL VIEW: THE BIRTH OF FEMINIST ART

The second wave of feminism emerged in Europe and the United States in the mid-1960s, its development generally being linked to the birth of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Despite the achievement of many of the latter’s aims, the first half of the twentieth century witnessed not only a substantial decline in feminist activity but also a regression in the status of women in society. Notwithstanding these difficult years, women and feminist organisations continued to be active, even gaining a measure of political success. Many critics now believe that the reluctant activism of feminist women between 1920s and 1950s was a strong contributing factor to the fierce eruption of the 1960s feminist revolution (Rosin 2000: 190-194). The Second World War both prompted and encouraged women—many for the first time in their lives—to leave their homes and seek wage-paying jobs.5 Across Europe and throughout the United States, women became an integral component of the home front—in agricultural, industry, and the munitions industry—as the men were called up to fight. At the end of the war, the men returning from the front and expecting to resume their jobs, it was assumed that these women would similarly “return”—to their “natural” place in the home. In the U.S.A., the craving for normalcy in the 1950s being based—at least in part—on restoring the old order, the status of women waned, women again being expected to find their full contentment in being mothers and housewives. Thus, for example, the budgets previously designed to establish crèches and kindergartens for working mothers during the war were reallocated, seriously hindering women from finding work outside the home. The post-war economic prosperity experienced by North America further reinforced the image of the bourgeois housewife surrounded by electric appliances. For the first time in a number of years, the age at which women married dropped, the birth rate concomitantly rising. The “baby boom” similarly accentuated the model of the happy nuclear family:

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Father as breadwinner and Mother as housewife living happily with their children in a nice house in the suburbs. The publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 was the opening shot in a campaign destined to initiate an uprising and demand for change. In this provocative book, Friedan attempted to articulate what up until that point had remained virtually unspoken, giving voice to the feelings of young women of the 1950s and ’60s who, while financially comfortable, felt repressed. In the opening chapter, famously entitled “The Problem That Has No Name”, Friedan articulated the solitary, silent agony in which middle-class housewives lived in the American suburbs: The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?” (Friedan 1963: 57)

The book was an immediate best-seller, quickly becoming one of the most significant influences on the shaping of the worldview of many women—including women artists—across the United States. A perfect depiction of the “golden cage” in which women were trapped, it described how they had become victims of a false system of values which demanded that they find identity and meaning in their lives solely on the basis of their family.6 The Women’s Liberation Movement formed an integral part of the social protests and revolutions America witnessed in the 1960s: the protest against the Vietnam War, the permissive sexual revolution and emergence of the “flower children”, and the civil rights movements on behalf of African-Americans, American-Indians, and the LGBT community. The protest movement against the repression of women in the preceding decades—in particular their grave situation during the 1950s—also served as a direct source of inspiration to generate change. The second wave of feminism was characterised by a growing body of theory, politics, and activism, its declared aims being the exposure of the repression of women by the medical, governmental, and educational Establishment. Devoting immense activity to raising individual and public awareness regarding the social and political status of women, the feminist discourse began to diversify and multiply, coming to be marked by distinct schools of thought and expression—Marxist feminism, psychoanalytical

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Part I—Chapter One

feminism, radical feminism, black feminism, etc. While many of these groups were complementary, some came into conflict with one another.

A. Radical Feminism in the United States While the first wave of feminism laboured to increase the awareness of the right of women to education, health and welfare services, fair wages, etc. in the spirit of liberal feminism, the second, continuing these efforts, also sought to understand and expose the social structure behind the repression of women and develop new ways to combat it. The latter trend was particularly prevalent amongst radical feminists in the United States. Radical feminism set about changing the definition and place of women in culture, addressing the ways in which the female sex had been assigned a specific gender role. The members of the movement devoted themselves to renewing awareness of sexuality, motherhood, and women’s rights over their own body—contraception, sterilisation, abortion, artificial insemination, etc.—while the feminist discourse discussed pornography, prostitution, sexual harassment, rape, violence, and women’s lives in general. In contrast to other feminist streams—such as psychoanalytical feminism—these theorists endeavoured to make their work accessible and intelligible, their writings being intended to contribute to effecting an immediate, real transformation in the lives of women suffering from diverse forms of repression. Regarding its task as playing a direct role in the daily lives of women rather than engaging in a theoretical analysis of the repressive aspects of visual art, literature, medicine, or economics, the discourse disdained the complex formulations characteristic of the Marxist feminism prevalent in Europe during the same period, for example, in favour of creating a direct link between the female experience—women’s distresses and secret desires, from the powerful to the prosaic moments in their lives—and political activism, art, and feminist expression. One of the principal forms of female political activism in the public sphere in the United States was that of group consciousness-raising, women banding together in order to enable their (exclusively female) members to reveal the personal and intimate elements of their lives. Awareness was stimulated by taking an informed look at their lives, particularly those experiences which reflected their status in the eyes of society—their childhood and adolescence in a patriarchal world, their assumption of motherhood and housewifery, and their sense of the inferiority imposed on the female body both within and without the home. They also sought to analyse and understand how female social identity had been created and shaped by social conventions.

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The women who participated in these groups freely expressed their private thoughts, sharing their reservations, experiences, and secrets with other women on the basis of female solidarity. Being fully persuaded that every woman who gains awareness also acquires strength and influence within the phallocentric world, these groups turned consciousness-raising into a form of political activity. The principle that group consciousnessraising was essential was affirmed time and again towards the end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s in radical feminist manifestos—as, for example, that composed by the radical feminist activist Kathie Sarachild. Published in New York in November 1968, this stated (in part): In our groups, let’s share our feelings and pool them. Let’s let ourselves go and see where our feelings lead us. Our feelings will lead us to ideas and then to actions … This is a consciousness-raising program for those of us who are feeling more and more that women are about the most exciting people around ... It is a program planned on the assumption that a mass liberation movement will develop as more and more women began to perceive their situation correctly. (Sarachild 2000: 273-74)

The idea that women’s personal lives should be understood in relation to phenomena occurring in the public sphere found expression in the slogan “The personal is political”—coined by Carol Hanisch, a “Redstockings” New York group activist, who used it as part of the title of an article on feminist groups working for raised awareness published in March 1969. Herein, Hanisch asserted that women’s daily-life experiences should be regarded as social and political issues rather than as problems to be dealt with in therapy or kept private and personal. This belief encapsulated the essence of the feminist quest to dissolve the impenetrable divide between the private and public spheres. In Hanisch’s view, there is nothing “natural” in defining female existence as “personal”. The social perception from the nineteenth century onwards that had identified femininity with motherhood, relationships, and love, was on the contrary overtly social and political—the latter referring to the broad realm of power relations. In contrast to given, natural facts, political circumstances are amenable to change. In calling for political power for women—and maintaining that they possess the capacity to alter their lives and reality— this slogan became one of the cornerstones of the radical feminist movement.

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Part I—Chapter One

B. Representations of the Female Body and the Male Gaze One of the central subjects addressed by the radical feminist discourse in the 1970s was the attitude to the female body—also a primary concern within feminist art. Many radical feminist thinkers sought to expose the ways in which men exploit the female body against women, others choosing to emphasise the uniqueness of the female body, celebrating and nurturing its singularity and invoking it as a means of expression and a tool with which to enhance a positive sense of femininity. Inspired by these writers, feminist artists also began to look for alternative ways to represent women. Here, too, the female body served as a central element. Viewing their use of it as a direct reflection of the radical feminist perception, these artists attempted to create a counterresponse to the traditional representation of the female body in Western art—a negative stereotypical gender bias which had tendentiously and voyeuristically exploited the female body under the male gaze. One of the first to analyse the history of Western art from this perspective was the American scholar John Berger. Examining female and male representations in art in a volume entitled Ways of Seeing, Berger revealed what he regarded as the hidden mechanism behind the phenomenon: “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” (Berger 1972: 47 [original italics]). As Berger indicates, the man wields visual power over the woman—whose passive-object status derives from their acceptance of the male “view” and thereby effectively accepting an identity determined by the male Other. This attitude not only governed the way women view themselves but also the majority of male-female relationship issues. Female nudity continues to hold a significant place in art even today. In a catalogue for an exhibition entitled Female Nudes she curated in 2009, researcher Ktsia Alon provides a contemporary description of the way in which the female body is represented via a gendered inversion: “Female nudity is often also an inverted ‘self-portrait’ of the male painter, a method whereby the reality of the clothed male is exposed via the naked women standing in front of him. This is an exemplary representation of vulnerability, employed by gender inversion in order to reinforce itself” (Alon 2009: 3). Up until the 1970s, the expression given to power relations between the sexes by Western art had been principally male itself. From antiquity through the Renaissance and up to the modern period, art had unanimously followed this trend, the female nude lying—literally and iconically—at the

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heart of Western art (Nead 1992). Herein, nudity embodies that narcissistic gaze which permits the Western male observer to perceive himself as enlightened and cultured—the male painter likewise experiencing the pleasure of domesticating and converting to high culture what he considers to be a symbol of raw, passionate, bestial nature. One such example is Giorgione’s Venus of Dresden (1509), which portrays a naked woman lying outstretched, sunk in deep sleep and unconscious of the penetrating gazes of the spectators scrutinising her body. One hand rests on her pudenda in a gesture possibly suggesting masturbation, her other arm being raised to accentuate her breasts. Another typical example is Fragonard’s painting The Bathers (1765), in which a large group of voluptuously naked women are depicted performing their ablutions in a variety of revealing and unnatural poses designed to exploit the angles of their bodies: stretched on their backs, splaying their legs, turning their buttocks to the spectators, and embracing one another (FIG. 2).

FIGURE 1-2. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Bathers, 1765. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

The feminist discourse arguing that female nudity serves as one of the most prominent visual means of male dominance—a symbolic act of sexual violation engaged in by artist and spectator alike (Alon 2010: 6)— feminist artists in the 1970s took it upon themselves to shatter this image.

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Part I—Chapter One

Subverting the patriarchal and gender-biased artistic perception, they set out to establish a new feminist artistic language and construct an authentic visual representation of the female body to replace the traditional phallocentric depiction of women. Understanding the exploitative dimension of the gaze upon women’s body, many feminist artists restricted themselves to depicting their own body, while other feminist artists insisted on creating representations of other women’s body, claiming that women’s gaze upon each other is fundamentally different from that of men looking at women, as it is not exploitative but rather empathic and bonding. For the first time in Western history, a feminist art movement thus contrived to create an artistic stream informed by a clear political agenda—one which would present their version of the female body and properly define the female essence. The artistic ad-dressing of the female body was therefore strongly political in nature, imbued with a strong desire to effect social change. This choice of subject—for better or for worse—was what largely defined feminist artists in the United States during the 1970s. The label “first generation” was attributed to feminist art of the 1970s by feminist artists and art critics at the beginning of the 1980s—who defined themselves as the “second generation”. The research literature makes a clear distinction between the first-generation feminist artists— active between 1970 and 1980—and the second generation working in the 1980s and onwards (Gouma-Peterson and Mathews 1987). The intense occupation with the female body exhibited by the first-generation female artists led their successors to regard them as fundamentalists or “essentialists”, the latter term being employed in a derogatory sense. Essentialism indicating a concern for the heart of things and what unites them, its expression amongst the first-generation female artists took the form of direct and explicit engagement with the physical female body and its uniqueness, including its organs—breasts, ovaries, and the womb. Important branches of this art—painting, sculpture, video, and installation art—sought to evince the fundamental essence of women qua women and faithfully represent their world. Seeking to intimate their experiences as women—as distinct from the male experience—in their work, the principal tool of these feminist artists lay in their own bodies, which they depicted in various and diverse circumstances as active creators—rather than in positions (again, both literal and symbolic) imposed on them by the male (gaze).

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Retrospectively, second-generation women artists and critics pronounced the art produced by the first generation to be “overly essentialist”, their exclusive preoccupation with the physical female body being mundane, simplistic, lowbrow, and anti-intellectual. Seeking the broadest common denominator, its exposure of the female body remained trapped under the voyeuristic and exploitative male gaze. In reaction, the second generation tended to proscribe literal and intimate depictions of the female body altogether—not to speak of refraining from placing it at the centre of their works. The majority of studies of first-generation art carried out up until the 1990s contend that the feminist artists of the 1970s in the United States were in fact important political pioneers and fervent activists. By stressing the fact that they were not all intellectuals, however, these scholars once again raised the spectre of essentialism, insinuating that the firstgeneration artists were not sophisticated—and were in fact inferior to the subsequent generation of feminist artists in the U.S.A. (Jones 1996: 2037). This charge was also made by contemporary feminist artists and critics working in Europe in the 1970s who identified primarily with Marxist and psychoanalytical feminism—these being perceived by the majority as more sophisticated and progressive than their American counterparts. One of the principal grounds for this distinction lay in the fact that the majority of European women artists strictly distanced themselves from depictions of the physical female body, focusing instead on philosophical or social and financial perceptions and developing theoretical positions. The ideological discussion concerning essentialism continued to develop, the contemporary perspective clearly indicating that the issues involved are neither absolute nor clear-cut in favour of one orientation or another.7

C. Power Play in the Art Field—Alternative Routes The feminist artists who aspired to implement changes in the structure and modes of operation in the field of art—to use the terms of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu—sought to find ways to reveal the power play prevalent within it. Raising awareness of the imperative for change in critical and commercial art institutions, they drew attention to the urgent need to overthrow the supremacy of a small and largely biased white male elite. In endeavouring to reformulate modes of action, exhibition, and creativity, they also initiated projects such as the establishment of alternative publishing houses and art magazines and the holding of art conferences and festivals—thereby developing new forms of art

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production and consumption—while simultaneously promoting a unique and influential linkage between theoretical studies and their creative work. Significantly, while the new suggestions proposed by feminist critical thought were initially intended to advocate women’s art within the hegemonic, primarily masculine, art field, time has demonstrated that this approach expanded to include other minority phenomena—such as indigenous art—which subsequently won increased visibility within the artistic and cultural fields. The feminism which emerged during the 1970s raised awareness amongst many women artists. Up until to this period, few women creators had received recognition by the Establishment or exposure in exhibitions, the art world being almost exclusively controlled by businessmen and male artists or curators. Activist feminism introduced past and present women artists into the artistic canon—without whose presence the latter would have fallen into oblivion. It likewise raised the issue of why so many art works had been deliberately forgotten or considered insignificant simply because they were created by women. A prominent example of this criticism is the art historian Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (Nochlin 1971). Women gradually began to establish themselves in alternative frameworks, the majority of which were exclusively-female ventures (Fields 2012b: 2; Moravec 2012; Gardner-Huggett 2012). These included exhibition sites and galleries, events, workshops and collective work spaces, and the publication of journals and books. By calling into question the aesthetic and ideological criteria which had guided art criticism, feminism challenged the official Establishment art hierarchy governed by the dominant male culture. One of the central issues feminist artists addressed was the question of who determines what and how art is defined—including the implications of this for the structure(s) and ideology of Western art history. The re-examination of these values and the models which they reflect transformed the way in which art, art criticism, and the creation of art was viewed. In retrospect, the feminist avant-garde art of the 1970s introduced a completely new perception and practice, sowing the early seeds of postmodernism in art.8 Various manifestations of feminisms and feminist art also emerged concurrently during the same decade—not only in the United States but also in many other parts of the world (Meskimmon 2007). As remarked above, a further feature unique to the first-generation artists lay in the close link they developed between theory and practice. Drawing increasing inspiration from textual sources, many of them

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returned to study and academia, immersing themselves in the humanities and social sciences. Some groups of women artists met and studied together, others enrolling in the Women’s and Gender Studies programs established for the first time in the United States in the 1970s—a step which profoundly influenced their interests and art works. The principal subjects they examined were—as already noted—the status of women through history, the social construction of the female image, and the institutionalised idealisation of the female body within Western culture. They also endeavoured to analyse the female image in the modern world as portrayed in their own close environment—especially in the fields of advertising and the mass media—with the aim of revealing the hidden motivation behind the ruling male hegemony and the roots of the Establishment idealisation of the female body. These images, they contended, reflected the desires and passions of male-dominated Western culture regarding female beauty and sexuality, demonstrating and determining the inferior social place and status of women within the patriarchal world. Feminist art of the 1970s in the United States also frequently addressed subjects viewed at the time as scandalous or taboo—rape and sexual assault, menstruation, abortion, motherhood, and domesticity. These themes were drawn from actual-life material which arose in the groups established to raise awareness, as well as from the increasing number of theoretical texts published during those years inspired by the “female experience”—which, for the first time, they began to candidly and openly express. One of the most central and significant texts which influenced the political perceptions of feminist artists during the 1970s, gradually permeating their visual artworks, was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Published in 1949 in France—followed by an American edition in 1953—this formed the theoretical basis for the development of much contemporary feminist thinking. By 1968, ten editions of this seminal book had been printed in the United States. Another significant contribution was Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), considered by many to be the match that kindled the feminist flames in the U.S.A. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) was also an influential feminist publication. A daring and pioneering book, herein Greer alleged that women had been separated from their libido and repressed into a sexual passivity resembling castration. While this “position” had been forced upon them, they had also unconsciously acquiesced and accepted it. Calling for immediate political action whose influence would also be felt

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in the private sphere—the home—Greer urged women to free themselves from the burden of the nuclear family, leave their husbands (either temporarily or permanently), and ignore all representatives of the Establishment. To assist women in rehabilitating their self-image and ability to enjoy their body, Greer offered women rather extreme suggestions—such as tasting their menstrual blood, exercising sexual abstinence, and abandoning monogamy. Her book aroused a wave of interest and endorsement, alongside angry protest from both women and men throughout the U.S.A. and abroad. A landmark in the history of the women’s movement, it has been translated into more than twelve languages and reprinted numerous times. Another figure who influenced the radical feminist assertion that the roots of female repression lay deep within patriarchal system was Kate Millett. In her celebrated book Sexual Politics (1970), Millett claimed that sex is political primarily because male/female relations constitute the paradigm of all human relationships: ... the situation between the sexes now, and throughout history, is a case of that phenomenon Max Weber defined as herrschaft, a relationship of dominance and subordinance. What goes largely unexamined, often even unacknowledged (yet is institutionalized nonetheless) in our social order, is the birthright priority whereby males rule females. (Millett 1970: 24-25).

Claiming that the social class system promotes racial, political, and economical inequality, Millett argued that if men—and women—do not abandon the notion of male superiority as a birthright, these systems of oppression will continue to exist simply due to the logical and emotional mandate inherent in basic human existence. In other words, Millett believed that men and women must eliminate the sexual roles and behaviour constructed by patriarchal culture. Other influential books included Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970) and Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born (1976). I shall discuss further examples below.

CHAPTER TWO A KALEIDOSCOPIC VIEW: THE PROLIFERATION OF FEMINIST ART STREAMS

The feminist creativity in which virtually all the first-generation American women artists engaged was influenced and motivated by the political feminist movement of the 1960s and ’70s. All the various streams and types of this art were based on the philosophical principles espoused by radical feminism—which contended that, in order for the true experiences of women to be expressed, a system of signs and language must be found to replace the existing male structure. Believing this to be the only way whereby women could gain full and proper representation in society, the first-generation artists worked tirelessly to present an alternative to the existing order and to define a new female—biological or cultural—essence. As the French feminist writer Julia Kristeva asserted in an essay entitled “Women’s Time” (1979), the feminists of the 1970s attempted to “break the code, to shatter language, to find a discourse closer to the body and emotions” (Kristeva 1986: 200). The young women who joined the feminists at the ends of the 1960s directed their focus towards explicating the uniqueness of female experience and its symbolic applications, devoting their efforts to finding a language that would express their physical and inter-subjective experiences: … another attitude is more lucid from the beginning, more self-analytical which … consists in [sic] trying to explore the constitution and functioning of this [symbolic] contract, starting less from the knowledge accumulated about it (anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics) than from the very personal affect experienced when facing it as subject and as a woman. This leads to the active research, still rare, undoubtedly hesitant but always dissident, being carried out by women in the human sciences; particularly those attempts, in the wake of contemporary art … to find a specific discourse closer … to the unnameable repressed by the social contract. (Kristeva 1986: 200)

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From the outset, the path of these feminists was more open and labile, Kristeva noted, because they sought to experience phenomena, dedicating themselves to acting from personal experience—as both women and subjects. The unique dynamics created by women’s consciousness-raising groups and their search for a new language constituted a symbolic realisation of female psychology and the articulation of what, up until that point, had remained unspoken and unexpressed: In a second phase, linked on the one hand to the younger women who came to feminism after May 1968 and, on the other, to women who had an aesthetic or psychoanalytic experience … this more recent current of feminism refers to its predecessors and … seems to think of itself as belonging to another generation – qualitatively different from the first one – in its conception of its own identity … Essentially interested in the specificity of female psychology and its symbolic realizations, these women seek to give a language to the intra-subjective and corporeal experiences left mute by culture in the past. (Kristeva 1986: 194)

Feminist artists of the 1970s in the U.S.A. made their voice heard in many fashions. Some adopted traditional media, such as sculpture or oil on canvas, others developed new types—video art employing sophisticated modern technologies, Great Goddess art drawing its inspiration from the ancient goddesses, or feminist collaborative art which generated cooperative and egalitarian art, at times within a communal framework. All these media served the purposes of artists imbued with the values of the new movement, providing them with ways to express its urgent message. New literature documenting and interpreting the feminist art of the turbulent 1970s beginning to flourish from the end of the 1990s, scholars debate the criteria according to which these works should be categorised, each writer classifying them according to her own considerations and assumptions.9 The discussion in this chapter divides feminist art into nine types: A. Performance art B. Representations of the female body C. Cunt art D. Video art E. Great Goddess art F. Pattern and Decoration (P&D) art G. Collaborative community art H. Protest art I. Lesbian art

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I shall define and analyze each of these streams, adducing the philosophy which links them and presenting some critical responses. Methodologically speaking, the categories are flexible, drawn from both the thematic and media fields. No approach represents a single, monolithic aspect, works of art not being amenable to labelling without overlap and artistic techniques, subjects, and sub-categories frequently being interwoven in such a way that they cannot be clearly separated. Thus, for example, an artist belonging to the Great Goddess tradition might also be defined as a performance artist, while a lesbian artist whose work reflects her sexuality—and who could ostensibly be included in the class of lesbian art—might also be classified as a video artist. So, too, if her works are created within a communal framework, a protest artist might be grouped with the collaborative artists. The purpose of the above division is to facilitate as broad a discussion as possible. The analysis—which also examines theoretical texts—is intended to construct a mosaic illustrating the complexity of the feminist art movement and demonstrate its cultural significance. Discussion of the feminist artists in the U.S.A. in the 1970s frequently having been conducted to date in isolation from the philosophical and intellectual feminist discourse of the same period, this analysis of the works in relation to philosophy presents an alternative inclusive approach, the dialogue between the two fields being one of reflexivity and reciprocity alike.

A. Performance Art Performance art reflects the pursuit of new ways of evaluating the “art experience” in daily life, the performer most frequently being the creative artist herself, professional acting skills not being necessary. It may be performed by a single artist or a group, frequently being accompanied by such props as lighting and music. Performances are staged in a variety of locations—from galleries and museums to cafes, restaurants, and street corners (Goldberg 1988: 9). They do not follow a plot in the accepted sense, rather comprising a series of gestures and events which may follow a prepared script, constitute a piece of spontaneous improvisation, or be the product of lengthy rehearsals. They can last minutes, hours, or even days and be staged once, several times, or repeatedly. Anarchistic in nature, they are open ended and amenable to integration within such disciplines and forms of expression as literature, song, theatre, music, dance, architecture, painting, cinema, and photography. Although the first—avant-garde—appearance of performance art was in the early twentieth century, being most prominent amongst the Italian

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and Russian Futurist streams, Constructivists, and—most strikingly— Dadaists (Goldberg 1988: 8), it became a widely-accepted artistic medium in the 1960s and ’70s. From its inception, performance art enabled direct contact with a large audience, its goal being to encourage those watching to contemplate various subjects and—in consequence—to re-evaluate their worldview and attitude towards art and life. The first-generation artists were attracted to performance art primarily because of its ground-breaking role in the history of art, being a form the male hegemony had never appropriated. In the words of New York artist Cheri Gaulke, one of its pioneers, “... we found an art form that was young, without the tradition of painting or sculpture. Without the traditions governed by men” (Withers 1994: 160). Feminist artists also regarded performance art as a subversive tool with which to challenge the accepted—masculine—formalist streams of art of the period, Conceptualism and Minimalism. Via performances, artists could eradicate the gap between art and real life, investigate the relationship and dynamics between artist and audience, and examine the art field as a social tool. Above all, however, performance enabled feminist artists to impart new content to the female body and present this to their audiences. In distinction to the past, through performance they could become the sole “directors” of their body, deciding precisely how to represent it and what meaning to confer upon it. This intense engagement with the female body and its experiences was a prominent characteristic of feminist performance art of the 1970s. Wishing to distance themselves from conventional theatre, its proponents sometimes supplemented the traditional forms of acting, song, music, and dance with ancient ritual texts and happenings. Being closely associated with the American socio-political agenda, performance art drew from the materials of daily life and contemporary political events, as well as from the developing discourse within feminist theory. The same qualities that led to their profound influence upon the spectators were also those that hindered the documentation of these performances, however. What remains today of these works are primarily the testimonies of the artists and their audiences, together with documentary material—such as photographs, video recordings, some 8mm films, and a small number of written scripts. One of the early feminist performances was the “Cock and Cunt Play” (1970), a script originating as a pedagogical tool employed by Judy Chicago as part of the first feminist art program at Cal State, Fresno. Initially designed to help her students break through some of the limitations imposed by the social construct of femininity, it was later

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performed within the framework of the Womanhouse performance workshop in 1972 by Faith Wilding and Janice Lester. A skit in three short acts, these two women—dressed identically in black leotards with oversized, pink vinyl genitalia—enacted scenes symbolising traditional sex roles, such as washing dishes. Slowly, “Cunt” began rebelling against her traditional functions, drawing a violent response from “Cock”—who finally furiously tore off his organ to strike “Cunt” with it, thereby in fact castrating himself. This performance represented the internalisation of the new theories and politics advocated by the Women’s Liberation Movement and the strategies developed in the new Women’s Studies programmes opening across the country. Harshly critical of the biological stereotypes and division of labour characteristic of patriarchal society, the message these conveyed was basic and cardinal: women must resist male repression and take a stronger stand against men by no longer agreeing to their every whim or recognising male superiority as a given or birthright. One of those to develop and articulate this stance was the feminist philosopher Kate Millett who, in her book Sexual Politics (1970), argued that patriarchal ideology deliberately exaggerates and magnifies the biological differences between the two sexes in order to preserve the existing balance of power. Men possessing the dominant, so-called “masculine” roles and women being confined to inferior, male-defined, “feminine” functions, when women comply with the “feminine” behaviour expected of them they simultaneously reinforce male superiority and internalise their own second-class status (Millett 1970: 43-46, 176-177). In 1972, the artists Karen LeCocq and Nancy Youdelman—two of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s first students in the Women’s Studies Program at Fresno—presented a performance piece called Leah’s Room (FIG. 3) at the Womanhouse in Los Angeles, LeCocq “acting” the part of a woman sitting in front of a mirror at her dressing table applying layers of make-up to her face. Based on the book Chéri by the French author Colette, the performance was designed to expose the “vain” efforts of an aging courtesan—in effect a high-class whore—to keep her much-younger lover, whom she finally loses to a younger woman. Stating that the work was intended to express female submission, the pain of aging, grief over the loss of beauty, and the threat of female competition, the artists sought to create awareness of the ways in which Western culture compels women to hide the effects of age and growing older, senescence causing them to lose their legitimacy as sexual beings in male eyes. The performance thus highlighted the despair and depression

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into which innumerable women are driven when pursuing the fruitless attempt to retain their youthful looks (Raven 1994: 60).

FIGURE 1-3. Karen LeCocq and Nancy Youdelman, Leah’s Room, 1972. Courtesy of the artists.

Leah’s Room may be linked to a celebrated event—which subsequently acquired mythical status and the title “The Bra-Burning”. In September 1968, around three hundred women identified with the radical feminist movement demonstrated outside the auditorium in which the finale of the Miss American pageant was being held in Atlantic City. Holding placards carrying such slogans as “Can make-up hide the wounds of repression?”, the participants brought their protest to a climax by throwing objects symbolising female repression into the “freedom trash can”—cosmetics, high-heeled shoes, Playboy magazines, dusters, nylon stockings, and bras.

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Both LeCocq and Youdelman’s performance and the anti-Miss America demonstration constituted part of the struggle against the phallocentric tradition that determines how women are supposed to dress, look, feel, behave, and act. The issue of the female body image as presented by the hegemonic male environment was also addressed by many feminist theoreticians. One of the first to devote her attention this subject was Simone de Beauvoir, who set out to expose the hidden mechanism behind the evolvement of female myths. In de Beauvoir’s view, women had come to be perceived in the cultural imagination as corresponding and belonging to “nature”, men having transcended this state and risen to the heights of “culture”. As they observe women, men are constantly reminded that they, too, are subject to disease, degeneration, and death—thus seeking to make the female body “artificial”, encouraging women to wear make-up and perfume and cover themselves up in fur and rich fabric (de Beauvoir 1953: 158). This notion was developed further by feminist philosophers in the 1970s, primarily from within the radical stream—who began investigating the covert impulses behind the idealisation of the female body by the male hegemony. One of the prominent figures in this circle was the American philosopher/theologian Mary Daly. In her book Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, Daly called upon women to effect a radical change in their social status, arguing that femininity as a maledefined social construct has nothing to do with true femininity (Daly 1978: 59). Adopting Jerzy KosiĔski’s image of the Painted Bird, she likened made-up woman to trained, domesticated birds who have permitted the Father-figure to rob them of their natural beauty and true glory by demanding they adorn themselves with the “aid” of cosmetic aids and perfumes (Morey-Gaines 1982: 347-48). “Natural” women not seeking beauty treatments, smearing their faces with make-up, dyeing their hair, forcing themselves into restrictive corsets, or submitting to the dictates of fashion, are free from patriarchal views of female beauty and live in their bodies and minds according to their true female feelings (Daly 1978: 337). Another performance artist who made use of these ideas to protest the forces operating upon the female body was the Yugoslavian-born Marina Abramoviü. In 1974, she presented a performance entitled Rhythm 0 (FIG. 4), in which she sought to examine human conduct towards the female body in general and the passive-aggressive behaviour which characterises male-female relationships in particular.10

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FIGURE 1-4. Marina Abramoviü, Rhythm 0, 1974. Performance, Studio Morra, Naples, 6 hours. ©Courtesy of Marina Abramoviü and the Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

In this performance, Abramoviü stretched the usage of the female body to breaking point. Standing in the gallery space, she placed her body at the disposal of the spectators, to do with as they wished—providing them with a variety of items on a nearby table: a saw, axe, loaded gun, whip, fork, knives, matches, candle, chains, nails, needles, scissors, comb, lipstick, perfume bottle, feather, rose, paint, water, honey, grapes, olive oil, sticking plaster, disinfectant, etc. On the adjacent wall she hung the following caption: “There are 72 items on the table that can be used on me as desired: I am the object”. Standing silently for the entire six-hour performance, Abramoviü was decorated in different colours, undressed piece by piece, fed and given to drink, inscribed on her naked stomach, decorated with a crown of thorns, cut by razor blades, and even threatened with the loaded gun to her head. Another prominent feminist performance artist, Carolee Schneemann, also chose to use a provocative means of expression to convey her message.

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FIGURE 1-5. Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975. Photo collage with text (beet juice, urine, and coffee on photographic prints), 48 x 72 inches. Photo: Anthony McCall.

Entitled Interior Scroll and staged in 1975 in New York, this two-part ritual commenced with the artist—wrapped in a sheet—announcing that she was going to read aloud from her book Cezanne: She Was a Great Painter (FIG. 5). She then let the sheet drop, and—clad only in an apron— began to smear herself with black paint as she read. In the second part, she removed the apron and began gradually withdrawing a paper scroll from her vagina. Inter alia, this contained a description of her relationship with her current partner, a film director—his macho attitude and conduct in general and his behaviour towards her in particular. His obsession with minimalist art, the rational processes of creativity, and experimental cinema, charged Schneemann, prevented him from engaging in a professional dialogue with her own art work, precluding any possibility of affording her time or space as an individual or accessing her feelings and internal world. Schneemann’s painful and critical reading of the text was both ceremonious and humourous, the artist exhibiting no fear of using comedy to put her point across. Seeking to express her experiences as woman and artist alike in a patriarchal world, she did so from a position of power, voluntarily choosing her naked body as the platform and directing her own performance to recount her own story (Tannenbaum 2006: 30). In insisting on reading her own text as a first-person narrative, she set out to subvert the patriarchal view which stereotypes women by accumulating knowledge about them through writing, explaining, and understanding them from the time-honoured exclusively-male perspective (Phelan 2001: 30).

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Schneemann perceived her work as representing a reappropriation of her body from the poisonous and paralysing control of patriarchalism—a way of returning to the time before men took possession of women’s bodies (Frueh 1994: 192). Her decision to place the scroll in her vagina was a declaration that the “vaginal space” is not merely a physical but also a mental space. Belonging to the woman alone, it comprises a site of female knowledge which must be read according to the standards and conditions set by women themselves—not according to the medical, sexual, or aesthetic values dictated by male knowledge. Hereby, Schneemann protested the subjugation of the female body and its symbols to male needs, seeking to alter the distaste with which society relates to the female body, its intimate organs and passions. By placing her naked body and secret female parts in full and frank view, she endeavoured to express her affection—as a representative of all women—for her true and authentic female body (Frueh 1994: 194). Bold and provocative, this usage of the woman’s body serves as a good introduction to the next stream I shall examine—namely, feminist representations of the female body.

B. Representations of the Female Body One of the foci of early feminist art streams was the visual representation of the female body—generally nude—in painting, sculpture, and photography. In similar fashion to feminist performance art, the artists who addressed this issue presented their own bodies in unprecedented forms—being immersed, wrapped, submitted to mystical rituals, and photographed in various experiential poses—to convey their message from an intensely personal perspective, this physical corporeality serving them as both creative material and canvas. Like the feminist philosophers of the 1970s, these feminist artists set out to change the prevalent image of the female body, protesting its idealisation by patriarchal society and the distortion of its true beauty, sensuality, desires, and passions. In the wake of the new feminist perspectives, they sought to authentic female images of the female body, believing that they could generate their own aesthetic pleasures independently of the male gaze by producing realistic, positive, and sympathetic images of women and their bodies. Hereby, they became active creators of meanings and messages and ceasing to function merely as passive tools for patriarchal male ideas. As the American artist Harmony Hammond remarked in an article entitled “A Sense of Touch: Woman Identified Sexuality in Art” (1981):

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If we look at woman-centered work, we can see recurring characteristics, themes, and approaches ... Woman-centered sexuality is not portrayed through S & M, violent, pornographic, or victim images ... In this work, women are not shown as weak, sick, or passive. They are not objectified or exploited. Nor are they shown in conflict with each other. Instead, they appear strong, healthy, active, and comfortable with their bodies. (Hammond 1984: 78)

This period witnessed the rise of a body of feminist theoretical literature in the U.S.A. and Europe that engaged with the construction of identity and body—such writers as Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, Angela Carter and others presenting a new, independent conception of female identity/the female body whereby women could begin to repossess their own image of it. Addressing the subject of the maternal body, Adrienne Rich outlined the ramifications of this re/vision in Of Woman Born (1976), arguing that women must posit a world in which every woman owns her own body: ... the institution [of motherhood] … aims at ensuring that that potential [of any woman to her powers of reproduction and childbearing] shall remain under male control. This institution has been a keystone of the most diverse social and political systems. It has withheld over one-half the human species from the decisions affecting their lives ... In the most fundamental and bewildering of contradictions, it has alienated women from our bodies by incarcerating us in them. (Rich 1995: 13)

Within this context, feminist artists began to scrutinise various facets of female representation—such as the image of the female body in the eyes of men as well as women, its use(s) by men and women, its outward appearance in the public sphere and media, etc. Seeking to highlight its idealisation, Eleanor Antin, for example, protested against the image of the female body as expressed in the world of modelling and similar fields, presenting a series of photographs entitled Carving: A Traditional Sculpture in 1972. Documenting a five-week diet during which she lost almost twelve pounds, the work was composed of 148 images of her naked body shot from front, back, right, and left in a type of dry scientific report. Hereby, Antin refused to portray her struggle against weight gain as “heroic” but protested against the tyranny of slimness and the fashion for twig-like women, thereby endeavouring to validate her own body and the bodies and self-image of innumerable full-bodied women. Women, she asserted, are entitled to live a full and sensual life and enjoy a natural regime accompanied by tasty and nourishing food without being “reduced” to the counting of calories/an ostensibly-appropriate weight.

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Amongst other sources, Antin’s work appears to have drawn inspiration from philosophers such as Mary Daly. In both Beyond God the Father (1973) and Pure Lust (1984), Daly levelled scathing criticism against oppressive male values, maintaining that, in seeking to impose their superiority, men had become increasingly power hungry over time and thus compelled women to grow weaker, thinner, and more fragile. Denunciating the idealisation of the female image as bedecked, bedolled, and anorexic-model-thin, she called upon women to empower themselves and adopt a new form of femininity in order to become free, natural, and capable of expressing their full potential. She herself sought to establish an exclusively female domain in which women could be natural and true to themselves without the presence of repressive male dominance (Daly 1984: 35). In her staged performances—commemorated in photographs—Hannah Wilke also repeatedly accentuated her sometimes fully, sometimes partially, naked body, deliberately presenting it in grotesque and ugly form—spoiling and maiming it—so that it would no longer be an object of attraction to the male eye. Thus, for example, in her S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974-1982), while she adopts the typical fashion-model posture, her face, chest, back, and hands are marred by chewing gum “wounds” or “scars” resembling tiny, distorted vulvas. As in many of the works she created in the 1970s, she sought to examine and challenge stereotypic concepts of femininity and female beauty by manipulating her body, presenting it ironically in order to subvert the sanctification of the modelling world and the conventional image of the model/“classic beauty” (Solomon-Godeau 2007: 340; Betterton 1996: 212, n. 13). Ever anxious to engage with and explode myths, these artists frequently addressed controversial subjects—such as the menstrual cycle, female auto-eroticism, and conventional gender roles. One of the prominent figures in this regard was Lynda Benglis. In the (in)famous photograph which appeared in the journal Artforum in November 1974 (FIG. 1), wherein the naked artist holds a double dildo against her pudenda as if about to perform penetration expresses, Benglis expresses—perhaps in even more biting and blunt terms than those employed by Hannah Wilke—that she was not prepared to play by male-dictated rules of behaviour and act as a shrinking/blushing violet (Frueh 1994: 194). Part of the series Sexual Mockeries, the ad/work was dedicated to dismantling the traditional visual image linking female beauty with seductive sexuality. Exposing her naked, obviously female, body, smeared with oil in the manner of the naked, seductive women of pornographic magazines—the embodiment of beauty in the eyes of the hegemonic

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culture—Benglis proceeded to take all the scopophilic enjoyment out of the male gaze, preventing it from converting visual pleasure into sexual gratification by giving herself a giant phallus. The provocative integration of female and male sex symbols into a single “body” demolished the basic social conventions regarding normality, norms, sexuality—and even morality. In one move, she became an existential paradox—a beautiful and desirable woman with an active, procreative phallus. As Amelia Jones notes, “Displaying the sexual excess of the threateningly active female subject in wild abandon [Benglis] becomes that which should not be seen: woman as desirable body, woman with penis, woman with phallus, woman as self-producer, woman in control of the critical gaze” (Jones 1994: 34 [original italics]). With more than a touch of subversive humour, Benglis placed the caption “Lynda Benglis. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery. ©1974. Photo: Arthur Gordon” at the top left corner of the work. Reflecting the custom employed on invitations to exhibitions, she withheld any information regarding the date of the event or sale of the works, thereby advertising for sale the only thing actually featured on the card—her own body (Richmond 2005: 7). Another facet of the comportment of the female body—concealed and wrapped in misconceptions—also drew the attention of feminist artists during this decade, namely, menstruation. One of Judy Chicago’s early works, entitled Red Flag (1971) (FIG. 6), sought to generate public discussion of this great subject, traditionally taboo in Western culture (Guterman, Mehta, and Gibbs 2008). A close-up of the spread legs of a woman with a hand pulling a blood-soaked tampon from her vagina, the effect this image creates is due to the artistic device employed—the tampon standing out in bright red against the shaded body and background. Although the title of the work gives literal expression to the blood-soaked tampon, it also recalls the act of bull fighting, thereby reflecting Chicago’s intent of creating a provocative and disturbing work in order to stimulate a serious and fruitful public debate of the subject.

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FIGURE 1-6. Judy Chicago, Red Flag. ©Judy Chicago, 1971. Photo-lithograph, 20 x 24 inches. Photo ©Donald Woodman.

Several feminist writers discussed the taboos related to the female body, asserting that patriarchal mythology, theology, and language maintains that the woman’s body is impure, corrupted, a place of secretions and bleeding, and dangerous to men as a source of physical and moral infection. Such an argument was made by the American feminist psychologist and theoretician Dorothy Dinnerstein in her 1978 book The Rocking of the Cradle and the Ruling of the World. Herein, she noted that, despite the fact that the male body also produces odorous secretions— seminal fluid, saliva, pus, and sweat—only women have been historically perceived as filthy and untouchable and thus an inferior species (Dinnerstein 1978: 150-151). Dinnerstein attributed this fact to the association of women with nature, men regarding themselves as part of civilising culture: Many have documented the tendency, expressed by people under a wide range of cultural conditions, to see in woman a mystic continuity with nonhuman processes like rain and the fertility of plants … the superstitious awe, often loathing, that surrounds menstruation and parturition, and links them to wider natural events, expresses the human male’s ambivalent response to otherness, a response that connects what is not male (woman) with what is not human (nature). (Dinnerstein 1987: 105)

The representation of the female body in the 1970s also took the form of theories concerning female sexuality and the woman’s ability to enjoy a

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healthy and natural sexual life. This subject arose as a direct consequence of the contemporary radical feminist theoretical discourse regarding women’s sexuality and its true meaning for women. Heavily influenced by the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s in the U.S.A.—one of whose most important achievements was the introduction of the contraceptive pill—this discourse constituted one of the primary catalysts and hallmarks of the study of women’s sexuality and research into female desire undertaken by scores of women (Frueh 1994: 192). The radical feminists believed that, as long as women were being sexually exploited by men, serving as the passive component within the relationship and sexual intercourse, patriarchal repression would continue—sexual relations between men and women constituting the prototype of every other type of relationship between the sexes. Women could never be full and equal partners with men—politically, financially, or socially—as long as they conformed to the norm of submissive female sexual behaviour; and while men continued to engage in repressive sexual behaviour, oppression and subordination would never be abolished. The American feminist theoretician Catharine MacKinnon—a lawyer by training—argued that, a person’s sexuality expressing their personality and essence, negating female sexual liberation prevents women from selfrealisation at every level of life: A woman is a being who identifies and is identified as one whose sexuality exists for someone else, who is socially male. Women’s sexuality is the capacity to arouse desire in that someone. If what is sexual about a woman is what the male point of view requires for excitement, have male requirements so usurped its terms as to have become them? Considering women’s sexuality in this way forces confrontation with whether there is any such thing. (MacKinnon 1982: 533)

Many first-generation feminist artists chose to address this crucial issue. Significantly, most of them presented themselves and their sexual activity not by staging the male-female relationship but by focusing on its link with sexual self-pleasure—i.e., masturbation. Thus, for example, many of the paintings of the artist Joan Semmel depict hands and fingers performing the auto-erotic act. Characteristic of her work is the piece entitled Touch (1975)—which portrays a naked woman lying comfortably beside her partner, her hand outstretched between her thighs about to pleasure herself. The painting Hand Down (1977) possesses a similar intent (FIG. 7).

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FIGURE 1-7. Joan Semmel, Hand Down, 1977. Collection of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX.

The auto-erotic also featured in the sketches and lithographs of the French artist Maria Sol Escobar (Marisol)—who studied and worked in the U.S.A. In a series of works from the 1970s, hands sprout and float on the page and fingers leave their trace on the thighs and torso of the pleasured body—although these images are less explicit than Semmel’s, the fingers and hands being connected to the activity of the body and only hinting at the act of masturbation. Writing on female auto-eroticism during this period, Luce Irigaray contended that female anatomy presumes a different sexual and physical experience for women than that undergone by men: Woman lives her own desire only as the expectation that she may at least come to possess an equivalent of the male organ. Yet all this appears quite foreign to her own pleasure, unless it remains within the dominant phallic economy. Thus, for example, woman’s autoeroticism is very different from man’s. In order to touch himself, man needs an instrument: his hand, a woman’s body, language.… [original ellipsis] And this self-caressing requires at least a minimum of activity. As for woman, she touches herself in and of herself without any need for mediation, and before there is any way to distinguish activity from passivity. Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time, and moreover no one can forbid herself to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, with herself, she is already two—but divisible into one(s)—that caress each other ... that pleasure is denied by a civilization that privileges phallomorphism. The value granted to the only definable form excludes the one that is in play in female

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autoeroticism ... Whence the mystery that woman represents in a culture claiming to count everything, to number everything by units, to inventory everything as individualities. She is neither one nor two. Rigorously speaking, she cannot be identified either as one person, or as two. She resists all adequate definition. (Irigaray 1985: 24, 26 [original italics])

The highlighting of female sexual pleasure in general and clitoral as opposed to vaginal pleasure in particular was heavily influenced by the new writings and feminist activism of the period. One of the most influential figures in this respect was Anne Kodet, one of the founders of radical feminism in New York. In an article entitled “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” (1970), Kodet provided scientific evidence for the need to reengage with female sexuality. Maintaining that female repression stems from male control based on the use of physical and psychological violence—and on occasion even from the romantic myth—she adduced supporting evidence for contemporary feminist claims. Thus, for example, she cited Masters and Johnson’s (1966) research on female clitoral orgasm, which suggested that it was this orgasm—rather than the vaginal orgasm Freud claimed to constitute the correct and mature one—that was necessary for a woman to achieve sexual pleasure. Only when the “myth of the vaginal orgasm”—according to which women require male penetration in order to reach orgasm—had finally been vanquished would women be sexually liberated from men: All this leads to some interesting questions about conventional sex and our role in it … women have thus been defined sexually in terms of what pleases men … vaginal orgasm—an orgasm which in fact does not exist. What we must do is redefine our sexuality. We must discard the “normal” concepts of sex and create new guidelines which take into account mutual sexual enjoyment … new techniques must be used or devised which transform this particular aspect of our current sexual exploitation. (Kodet 1970)

This statement leads us to a further stream in art—cunt art. While this form derived from the representation of the female body, it focused on a very specific body part, namely the vagina.

C. Cunt Art This group of artwork includes pieces depicting the female sexual organs (rather than the singular) in numerous shapes and situations— reflecting the fact that the new feminist perception had engendered an awareness which expanded the geography of the sexual body. Many areas

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of the woman’s body having come to be perceived as sexual, the female sex organ began to be presented as a multi-faceted rather than a monolithic organ. The aim of these artists was to shatter the prejudices regarding the female sexual organs—traditionally represented as sinister, odorous, ugly, and repulsive. Setting out to change the prevailing patriarchal opinion of the vagina and to transform women’s loathing of their own sexual organs into an intimate affection conducive of enjoyment and pleasure, the members of this group called their art “Cunt-Positivism Art”. Choosing a derogatory term customarily employed in humiliating circumstances to dehumanise and insult women, they protested the view that women are no more than a “hole”—a being devoid of cognition or personality, a vagina, a mere fuck, a stupid object for the sole use and enjoyment of men. The deliberate adoption of this pejorative embodied their desire to alter its significance and associate it with women’s power and pleasure. In explaining the lack of depiction of female sexual organs in the plastic arts since the dawn of history, Luce Irigaray wrote: ... her sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see. A defect in this systematic of representation and desire. A “hole” in its scoptophilic lens. It is already evident in Greek statuary that this nothing-to-see has to be excluded, rejected, from such a scene of representation. Woman’s genitals are simply absent, masked, sewn back up inside their “crack”. (Irigaray 1985: 26)

Cunt art was, in fact, the first political attempt to create a broad body of work concerning a previously-untreated subject—a subversive move intended to undermine the traditional theories of passive female sexuality and challenge the phallocentric notion of the woman as an empty internal space to be filled by the male. In representing the female sex organs in a positive light, the artists who engaged in it produced a new lexicon of visual images which portrayed women and their sexual organs as full of life, passion, and pleasure—thereby declaring female sexuality to be active and vibrant. From the very beginning, the first-generation American feminist artists regarded cunt art as a central motif within their work. Practiced in art and Gender Studies programmes across the country, these turbulent days were later described by the artist Faith Wilding: After these discussions we brainstormed about how we could represent our sexuality in different, more assertive ways. In her efforts to explore female imagery [Judy] Chicago was now working with us in the studio, making a cut paper “cunt alphabet.” This inspired the idea of doing images of

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“cunts”—defiantly recuperating a term that traditionally had been used derogatorily and thereby opposing the phallic imagery developed by men. We vied with each other to come up with images of female sexual organs ... Making “cunt art” was exciting, subversive, and fun, because “cunt” signified to us an awakened consciousness about our bodies and our sexual selves. (Wilding 1994: 35)

During the 1970s, cunt art flourished in an abundance of styles, its creators adopting a variety of materials, forms, and images to depict the female sex organ: a butterfly on the wing, a ripe and juicy fruit, a futuristic domestic space, a pleasure garden, a colourful flowery china plate, an ornate jewellery box, an exploding energy circle, a burning bush. The organ appeared in photographs, paintings, wood and marble sculptures, casts, collages, sewing, and embroidery—and even moulded in latex on a real body. Perceived by those producing it as a female form of liberation, this stream was profoundly political. An artist who espoused its values was Suzanne Santoro, who joined a feminist consciousness-awareness raising group in which women engaged with female sexuality and sex organs and became very involved in the subject during the 1970s. In 1974, she published a piece entitled Towards New Expression which features a series of images of female body parts— including sex organs—cross-matched with photos of flowers and other flora (FIG. 8).

FIGURE 1-8. Suzanne Santoro, Towards New Expression, 1974. Courtesy of the artist.

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In drawing this comparison, Santoro sought to demonstrate that women need to free themselves from preconceived negative notions in regard to their sex organs. She stressed that her work was not intended to perpetuate the ancient identification of woman with nature but to shatter idées fixes and biased stereotypes (Parker 1977: 44). The ambivalent attitude toward the female sex organs exhibited by women was noted as early as 1953 by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex: ... the female sex organ is mysterious even to the woman herself, concealed, mucous, and humid as it is; it bleeds every month, it is often sullied with body fluids, it has a secret and perilous life of its own. Woman does not recognize herself in it, and this explains in large part why she does not recognize its desires as hers. (de Beauvoir 1953: 386).

Like de Beauvoir, Santoro maintained that changing the attitude of women to their sexual organs called for a process of demystification. Comparing the sex organs to items considered beautiful, such as flowers, her work invited women to adopt a positive attitude towards their bodily organs—reflecting her belief that artistic representations illustrating the female sex organs in an attractive light would lead to the creation of a large body of female knowledge which could go beyond conventional medical and scientific knowledge regarding these—or indeed other— bodily organs. The very title of the book—Towards New Expression— reflected her attempt to encourage women to pursue a creative and artistic form of expression unbound by the prejudices and patriarchal tenets which had repressed their bodies and souls throughout history. Engaging with the images traditionally prevalent in art and deriving from male conceptions— the vagina and breasts in particular—she propounded that the portrayal of the naked female body as passive and de-sexed prevented women from seeing and perceiving themselves as creative beings. The book thus expressed her hope that feminist art would liberate and release women from the fixed image in which they were trapped by the male gaze (Parker 1977: 44). Several cunt works were also created by the artist Karen LeCocq—one of the most prominent being a sculpture entitled Feather Cunt (1971) (FIG. 9). Consisting of a plump, soft, deep Bordeaux velvet cushion with a pair of fleshy vaginal lips surrounded by synthetic pink fur representing pubic hair at its centre, this transformed the allegedly sinister, dark, disgusting female sex organ into a soft, appealing, and aesthetic object that invites observers to pick it up and bury their faces in it.

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FIGURE 1-9. Karen LeCocq, Feather Cunt, 1971. Courtesy of the artist.

Another important example of cunt art was Judy Chicago’s seminal work The Dinner Party, one of the most well-known feminist artworks of the decade. The focal image in this installation is a vagina—represented in virtually all the thirty-nine place settings laid out on the table. Individually designed and hand-painted, at the centre of the plates lies an explicit depiction of a cunt and its various parts: the external labia, the internal labia, and internal space. The plate dedicated to the seventh-century-B.C.E. Greek poetess Sappho of Lesbos, for example, portrays the sex organs as wide open, enticing the viewer to look into that secret place which for generations had been perceived as threatening and forbidden (FIG. 10)— Chicago employing a variety of bright colours and shapes resembling blossoming flowers at the height of their bloom. Created as part of a collaborative workshop, we shall discuss The Dinner Party in our analysis of collaborative community art below.

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FIGURE 1-10. Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party. Detail featuring the Sappho place setting. ©Judy Chicago, 1979. Gift of the Elisabeth A. Sackler Foundation. Collection: The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York. Photo ©Donald Woodman.

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In 1975, the American artist Tee Corinne published an illustrated book entitled Cunt Coloring Book (FIG. 11), whose appearance created waves both within the feminist community and beyond its confines.

FIGURE 1-11. Tee Corinne, Cunt Coloring Book, 1975 (detail). Drawing. Coll. 263, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene, Oregon.

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In great anatomical precision, the booklet depicts a series of female sex organs—some in the act of masturbation—the graphic illustrations leaving little to the imagination. While Corinne produced the work for the members of the lesbian community to which she belonged, it spoke to many others as well. Believing the works of the majority of the artists of the cunt art stream—such as Chicago’s dinner plates, for example—to be overly abstract, unfaithful, and unfair depictions of reality, and thus missing the feminist mark, she was convinced that the exposure of diverse and variously-shaped cunts—large, small, fleshy, thin, asymmetrical, purple, pink, or black—would empower women. She thus set out to enable them to look at and compare their own organ with a precisely-drawn anatomical sketch, thereby leading them to understand that their own was not abnormal. Art critic Laura Cottingham affirmed this view in an article entitled “Eating from the Dinner Party Plates and Other Myths, Metaphors, and Moments of Lesbian Enunciation in Feminism and its Art Movement”, published in 1996: … Chicago’s Dinner Party plates and the other cunt forms made by her students are abstracted … Although Chicago and Schapiro were known for their advocacy of cunt-derived forms, the imagery they championed … and encouraged their students to produce, was always more imagistic and metaphorical than explicit. (Cottingham 2003: 149)

In contrast to Chicago and other members of that group, Corinne’s drawings were based on models taken from her friends. While the majority of feminist artists regarded such realistic drawings, paintings, and sculptures of the female sexual organ—some of which possessed an almost photographic quality—as crossing a boundary they chose not to break, Corinne exhibited no such qualms. Many of her lesbian friends were equally willing to model for her, sharing her sense of mission. The art of the cunt developed as part of the first-generation artists’ attempt to deal with, examine, and express their experience(s) in a social setting—making no boast that study of the female sex organs was the way to redemption. Neither the anatomy nor the morphology of the cunt truly interesting them, their principal motivation derived from the belief that, by engaging with these shapes, women could come to value themselves qua women and regard their bodies in a positive and affirmative light. Cunt art was thus a significant personal, psychological art form as well as a social stance, as artist Faith Wilding expressed:

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“Cunt art” therefore originated from an attempt to analyze, confront, and articulate our common social experiences; it was not a set of predetermined images based on essentialist notions about women’s sexuality. Soon, however, it became codified and theorized ... as “central core imagery”— the supposed tendency of women artists to structure images around a central (sexual) core. But because there was no understanding of how and why this imagery emerged, and of the historic place it occupied in the interrogation of the representations of female sexuality and identity, many 1970s feminists artists were falsely categorized as “essentialists” by 1980s feminist theorists. (Wilding 1994: 35)

The depictions of the cunt therefore served as a means to an end rather than as its own goal—i.e., the profoundly political discovery of the inner power innate in every woman.

D. Video Art Although various artists adopted the use of video cameras as early as the beginning of the 1960s, the first-generation feminist artists were particularly known for turning this medium into one of their most prominent tools. As many scholars have noted, feminist artists burst the boundaries of this field, making a significant contribution not only to feminist art but also to the development of video art in general (Tannenbaum 2006: 28). In contrast to the rare inclusion of women’s works in exhibitions of traditional media—such as painting and sculpture—video art was well represented by women (Hanley 1993: 10). Perceived as novel and emancipated territory, this form was regarded as the perfect medium for women artists, free from the control of the male-dominated television and film industries. Video cameras were also relative cheap in comparison to movie cameras, requiring no great expense or training for use. Feminist artists discovered that combining video with performance art constituted a particularly effective art form. Neither media being part of the hegemonic artistic tradition and history from which women had been excluded, video also freed performance from being a “one-off” phenomenon, making it accessible to audiences further afield. It likewise enabled both greater intimacy and new directorial choices, making it possible to select close-ups of facial expressions or body parts—an unachievable attainment in live performance, wherein the spectators’ gaze lies outside the artist’s control. Video artists thereby entered the world of psychological and visual audience “manipulation” through the employment of photographic and editorial devices—reducing or enlarging the size of the images to

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make them tiny or gigantic, for example, or creating a sense of intimacy or alienation. Altering the awareness of the artistic space in which the performance was taking place, the final product was an autonomous work not necessarily linked to the eyes of the beholder. While these new possibilities were very appealing, the fact that video art was a new, relatively untried and tested technological field disturbed some critics—quite frequently also unsettling the audiences to which it was shown. According to art critic Maria Troy, the videotapes of the feminist performances which have survived from the 1970s demonstrate the technological deficiencies linked to the new medium: long “takes”, inadequate editing, camera immobility, and direct address of the audience. Their distinct, sometimes non-refined character, she argued, clearly separated them from mainstream art history and the cinematic tradition alike, their slow, private, and demanding nature making them very difficult to watch. In distinction to the television industry of the period— that was moving inexorably towards colour broadcasting and greater realism, reliability, and objectivity—the feminist videos were of an intensely personal and subjective nature, deliberately electing to address prosaic and mundane subjects. The evident lack of technical experience further contributed to the allegedly unprofessional character of these works, leading to their labelling as “expressionistic”. One of the feminist artists to adopt the medium of video was Julie Gustafson. In her work The Politics of Intimacy (1974), she filmed a group of women of various ages, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status discussing some of the subjects lying at the centre of the radical feminist discourse of the 1970s—sex roles, inter-sexual relationships, and the power play within them—and unspoken topics such as masturbation and orgasm. The film being edited so that the spectators felt that the women were part of an awareness-raising meeting, Gustafson intended it to provide a platform for subjects previously considered taboo. Despite its limitations, video art developed into a form in which the new feminist expression was given full voice. Lying on the borderline between modernism and postmodernism, it played a decisive role in the feminist protest against modern art at the end of the 1960s and ’70s. In complete contrast to the minimalist plastic art prevalent during this period—the domain of the male artistic hegemony prominently represented by such artists as Donald Judd and Dan Slavin—feminist video films were unpolished, replete with indistinct images, and, on occasion, “dirty” and “gossipy” in nature. As art critic Ann-Sargent Wooster notes, their clear intention was to break down the distinction between high elitist and low art and mass

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communication (Wooster 1993: 22). In this sense, feminist video art formed an extension of the contemporary art movements in Europe and the United States—conceptual, performance, ecological, and earth art. According to Wooster, the acceptance of video as an approved type of artwork formed part of the attempt to “dematerialise” the art object—an endeavour adopted by entire art movements in their efforts to create noncommercial artworks. The focus of many feminist video works lay not on public events but on the artists’ closest and most familiar environment. In the wake of the new understanding of the “home” as a highly-charged site for women that arose in the wake of the Women’s Liberation Movement, those video films primarily addressed issues related to the female responsibility for the preparation and consumption of food, female authority within the family, family relationships, female sexuality, and death. One of the most prominent artists in this regard was Martha Rosler, an outspoken political artist. Many of her works looked at the experiences of women in the domestic space, the seven-minute video entitled Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) (FIG. 12) took the form of a television cookery class, presenting a parodic inventory of the culinary arsenal of bourgeois suburban housewives. Navigating through a grammatology of sound and gesture, Rosler presented her kitchen utensils, letter by letter in alphabetical order, employing each of them for unproductive—sometimes violent—uses. The overt-covert motif behind the video was the unrealised power of women confined to the kitchen and thus prevented from engaging in other areas of interest or developing careers—and the anger generated by this repression. One of the sharpest descriptions of this frustration was given by Betty Friedan in her seminal book The Feminine Mystique (1963): I talked to women who had spent years on the analyst’s couch, working out their “adjustment to the feminine role,” their blocks to “fulfilment as a wife and mother.” But the desperate tone in these women’s voices, and the look in their eyes, was the same as the tone and the look of other women, who were sure they had no problem, even though they did have a strange feeling of desperation. (Friedan 1997: 64)

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FIGURE 1-12. Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975. Stills from videotape, black and white and sound, 7 minutes. Photograph still by the artist. Courtesy of the artist.

Within feminist thought, food—in particular its preparation—became a prominent gender issue, being regarded as a tool of female repression. Women from diverse populations cook and consume different types of food: while middle- and upper-class housewives with time on their hands can concoct expensive, complicated gourmet meals every day, the working-class woman rushes home from work to produce a quick meal out of basic, cheap ingredients. By illustrating the process of buying and preparing food—and the social convention that expects women to feed their families—Rosler sought to draw attention to the various forms in which women are repressed. Artist Suzanne Lacy also chose the same subject for her film entitled Learn Where the Meat Comes From (1978), in which she equated the cooking of meat bought at the butcher’s with the consumption of female flesh. Assuming the pose of a cookery instructor, she presented a map of the various parts of the animal, pointing to each “cut” on her own body— the metaphor being intended to expose the predatory gaze of a male audience upon the female body, as though turning it into a desirable object for consumption. Lacy’s work may be associated with the feminist theory proposed by Laura Mulvey. In an article entitled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative

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Cinema” published in 1975, Mulvey examined the gender perceptions stemming from the physical place in which the spectators of a film are located. Analysing the ways in which the male gaze is constructed, Mulvey contended that it constitutes a control mechanism in the service of a scopophilic urge which leads a person to observe another as an erotic object—and thus as a source of pleasure. The spectator’s look being represented in/through the eye of the camera, the actress is thereby turned into a stereotypic object through an essentially voyeuristic gaze: In a world ordered by sexual imbalance pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly. (Mulvey 1989: 19)

Mulvey’s influence on feminist videos such as Lacy’s Learn Where the Meat Comes From is visible in the exposure of the female body as an object or piece of meat on view to the penetrating, controlling, and repressing male gaze. Lacy’s fierce criticism of the fetishisation of the female body similarly reflects Mulvey’s identification of this process as characteristic of cinema and Western art in general. In Lacy’s work, this act approaches cannibalism in its linkage between food, sex, and death. Food also features in works by the video artist Nina Sobell. In a piece entitled Hey Baby Chickie (1978), Sobell confronted an ancient taboo embodied in the myth of Medea—who slaughtered and devoured her own children. In the video, the artist cradles the corpse of a plucked chicken, dancing with it in her arms as she kisses, strokes, and “dresses” it as though it were a real baby. Art historian Maria Troy suggests that the work is based upon the inconceivably grotesque image of a woman driven to madness: if the woman is playing with the chicken as though it were her baby, she might also treat her child as a dead chicken, cooking and eating her own offspring. One of the criticisms levelled at this medium and its use by feminist artists was its intensely narcissistic nature. In an essay entitled “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism”, the influential critic Rosalind Krauss cast aspersions on the reflexive self-observation real-time video enabled: The body is therefore as it were centered between two machines that are the opening and closing of a parenthesis. The first of these is the camera; the second is the monitor, which re-projects the performer’s image with the immediacy of a mirror. (Krauss 1976: 52)

Arguing that the video medium is a closed circuit, in which the range of the image lies between the camera and the screen, Krauss highlighted

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the fact that the artist is preoccupied with herself, shutting out the outside world. Feminist artists who engaged in video art were attracted to the novel medium not because of narcissistic tendencies but because of the new possibilities it offered them—affording them the opportunity of observing themselves at work in “real time” and thereby enhancing their efforts to consolidate their personal identity. For the first time ever, women could serve as producers, directors, and actresses in a film in which they could present their own world, express their own perspectives and political outlook—and thus begin to challenge and redefine their representation and actual place in society.

E. Great Goddess Art One of the prominent sources from which first-generation American feminist artists drew was ancient mythology—including written and oral myths and visual culture—whose images provided them with role models of strong, accomplished women. The Great Goddess art which flourished in the United States in the 1970s formed part of an interest in historical, sociological, and archaeological research into the symbolism of ancient female figures and their significance for human civilisation. This movement was complemented by the rise of Jungian psychological theory of archetypes as inner images which exist in the collective unconscious and act upon the human mind across time and space—a view which became popular both within academia and the lay world. Thus, for example, the Jungian psychologist Eric Neumann published The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype in 1955, wherein he argued that the archetype of the Great Mother represents the feminine aspect of the human mind. The widespread acceptance of these psychological studies in the 1950s and ’60s paved the way for feminists to begin engaging with the idea of archetypes, one of the fundamental tenets they adopted being the view that that of the Great Mother had been dormant in the collective unconscious—and directly repressed in the modern period. One of the texts which raised awareness of this subject in the 1970s was Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman, which, on its publication in the United States in 1976, promptly succeeded in shaping the feminist concepts of many within the movement. Stone—an American sculptress and art researcher—addressed the matriarchal period during which goddesses were worshipped, summarising archaeological and sociological research based on excavations and original interpretations of ancient

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stories of dominant female figures during the pre-patriarchal period. The volume quickly became part of a broad feminist trend seeking to connect modern women with the glorious tradition of ancient women erased by patriarchal society and to empower them via the image of the strong woman and her bond with the forces of nature. Forming part of the feminist movement’s endeavour to examine human history from a new perspective, Great Goddess art enabled women to repossess their own past—“her-story” rather than “his-tory”. As scholar Gloria Orenstein argues, these artists sought to reproduce the spiritual and physical experiences of the ancient goddesses, regarding themselves as a link between modern, contemporary femininity and the women of the ancient world. Rather than basing itself on Western stereotypical patriarchal images—such as mothers in a domestic setting or seductive, loose women—Great Goddess art focused upon strong female figures aligned with the forces of nature and in control of its effects. They thus presented images of high priestesses and brave, athletic women warriors (Orenstein 1994: 184). Many of them also integrated ancient fertility symbols into their work—such as the spiral, labyrinth, egg, circle, snake, and horns— suggestive of sexuality and flora and fauna. Perceiving these as universal symbols representing divine female culture, many resumed the practice of depicting the ancient goddesses as creatrices and the source of all living things. Prevalent amongst their themes were the Mother Goddess, the fertility goddess, the moon goddess, and the vegetation goddess—images derived not only from such Western traditions as ancient Greece but also from non-European cultures such as the Inca. Although these artists worked in various media—including painting and sculpture—they were principally known for their performance art. Some of this taking place in their homes and work environments, on other occasions it involved a long journey to an ancient holy site at which a goddess had once been worshipped. Many artists also chose to incorporate rituals connected to the ancient goddesses into their work, giving them new forms. One such example was the humourous and ironic work of Jane Gilmore. In Eclecticism and Stress Series: The Great Goddess at the Temple of Olympian Zeus (1978), for example, each of her six collaborators stood on the base of an ancient column dressed in cat masks and curly tails—a comic performance of ritualistic acts intended to expose the disparity between the celebration of the feminine strength and wisdom of the ancient goddesses and the modern representation of the women as “sex kittens”.

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Artist Ana Mendieta’s works also evince a fascination with the image of Mother Earth—especially as an expatriate Cuban in the United States yearning for her homeland. Her solitary ritual performances, carried out in the bosom of nature, were documented on film—as, for example, those in which she drew her silhouette on the ground as a daughter-image of the Great Goddess. On occasion she lit gunpowder around these outlines, on others she marked them with branches, water, mud, ice, or flowers. Many of the pieces deliberately highlighting the absence of a concrete body, she thereby stressed the dissolution and negation of the female subject in cultures characterised by male gods and patriarchal dominance. In Alma Silueta en Fuego (FIG. 13), performed in 1975, Mendieta created the silhouette—marked on the earth and lit by fire—of a human body, arms spread apart like a crucifix. Reversing the conventional narrative of the crucifixion of Christ, the burning effigy was intended to symbolise the sacrifice of the female historical tradition on the patriarchal cross. The remaining ashes, mixed with the soil, further signified reunification with Mother Earth (Orenstein 1994: 184).

FIGURE 1-13. Ana Mendieta, Alma Silueta en Fuego, 1975. Film still. ©The Estate of the Ana Mendieta Collection. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York.

Mendieta’s work evokes the writings of theoretician and poet Susan Griffin, who voiced the need for a renewed bond between women and nature. According to Griffin, women’s repression by patriarchy derives from the cultural tendency to associate femininity with nature and masculinity with culture and intellectual activity. Turning this convention

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into a positive phenomenon by arguing that women understand nature more profoundly than men—whose sense of intimacy with flora and fauna is constricted by societal norms—she maintained that women should seek to promote their special relationship with nature and their unique feminine powers: And my grandmother’s body is now part of the soil, she said … We know this earth is made from our bodies. For we see ourselves. And we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. (Griffin 1978: 77)

The link drawn by Griffin—and other feminist critics—between the cycle of nature and life and fresh thinking regarding female identity and agency paved the way for the ecofeminism developed by the second generation of feminist artists. This movement championed the notion that the control and repression of women parallels the human domination and exploitation of nature. One of the most prominent theoreticians and leaders of this approach was Francoise d’Eaubonne. Coining the term in her book Le féminisme ou la mort published in 1974, d’Eaubonne pointed to the huge potential women possess for effecting an ecological revolution. Some of the projects to which the ecofeminists devoted themselves were the rehabilitation and healing of mistreated environments, identification with the damaged inflicted on nature, and the attempt to alter the bond between community and place. New York artist Mary Beth Edelson was also heavily influenced by the Great Goddess movement, documenting ancient goddesses rituals via her own body. One of her pieces, entitled Goddess Head (1975) (FIG. 14), formed part of a group named Calling Series. In this work, Edelson exposed her naked body to the camera in the midst of nature, subsequently employing photomontage to add a shell image to her head in affirmation of the link between the woman’s body and nature. Her high-held, wide- hand gesture suggested the embrace of women seeking to imbibe the divine goddess’s cosmic energy. Derived from ancient figurines of goddesses— such as the Minoan snake goddess and Egyptian bird-headed snake goddess—this image became one of the most popular feminist symbols during the 1970s, representing a blessing and the charging of female spiritual powers (Orenstein 1994: 181). Edelson’s works also engaged with female cosmic energy and the cycle of life, death, and resurrection. Her performance piece entitled Memorial to the 9,000,000 Women Burned as Witches in the Christian Era (1977), exhibited in a New York gallery, commemorates the women accused throughout history of worshipping goddesses—for which “crime” they were tortured and crucified. Employing ladders and fire circles,

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Edelson sought simultaneously to create rituals to atone for the pain and tribulation suffered by these women at the hands of patriarchal repression and to rescue and restore forgotten circles of female power from civilisations in which the ancient goddesses had been worshipped—her hope being that her female audiences would draw power and become stronger from these rituals.

FIGURE 1-14. Mary Beth Edelson, Goddess Head (from Calling Series), 1975. Documentation of a private ritual, Long Island. Artist’s collection.

For her performance work entitled See for Yourself (1977), Edelson organised a more ambitious project, travelling to the Neolithic cave of Grapceva on the island of Hvar in Yugoslavia to visit the relics of an ancient goddess site (FIG. 15). The performance depicted the artist in meditation, seeking to identify with the feelings and experiences of the people who had worshipped the ancient Neolithic goddesses by reenacting their sacred rituals. During the years to which Edelson devoted her art to the subject of the Great Goddesses, she performed private rituals in caves and on remote shores in the United States and beyond, creating additional performances and permanent works on several continents in both public and private locations.

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FIGURE 1-15. Mary Beth Edelson, See for Yourself: Pilgrimage to a Neolithic Cave, 1977. Performance/private ritual in Grapceva Cave, Hvar Island, Yugoslavia. Artist’s collection.

The famous image of the ancient multi-breasted goddess Artemis formed one of the sources of inspiration from which the New York artist Betsy Damon drew. In 1977, she gave a performance in a defined urban space—Wall Street in New York—entitled The 7,000 Year-old Woman (FIG. 16). Damon was inspired by figurines of Artemis, discovered in archaeological digs—especially those found in Turkey. Spending part of her childhood (1944-1948) in Anatolia close to the site of an ancient culture and ritual, she acknowledged the influence the myth of this goddess exerted upon her (Orenstein 1994: 185). For her performance, she covered her body with over 400 different-coloured flour bags representing Artemis, the multi-breasted goddess of hunting and abundance, commencing to slowly puncture and cut them as she walked in a circular

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pattern in a lengthy ritual—their gradual emptying recalling the draining of an hour-glass representing the unique manner in which women experience the passing of time.

FIGURE 1-16. Betsy Damon, The 7,000 Year-old Woman, 1977. Performance #2. Photograph by Su Friedrich.

The issue of time in relation to gender has been discussed by various philosophers. Particularly relevant in this regard was Julia Kristeva’s essay “Women’s Time” (1979), which defines how Kristeva regards this phenomenon: “As for time, female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time known through the history of civilizations” (Kristeva 1986: 191 [original italics]). In contrast to the Western experience—which is essentially male and linear, measured in

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seconds, minutes, hours and days—“women’s time” is cyclical and eternal, all-encompassing and infinite. Several of the Great Goddess artists drew their inspiration from local Native-American myths. One such figure was Donna Henes, who identified herself as an “urban shaman” (Withers 1994: 163). Creating several environmental projects in the 1970s—primarily sculptures—based on the Native-American myth of the creation of the Navajo tribe by the spider-woman, one piece is entitled Pocono Web. A traditional indigenous female figure who repeatedly featured in Henes’ dreams and stories, this ancient woman found form as an environmental sculpture in 1976—woven as a spider-web net among trees, the web forming part of a system of universal spiritual symbols intended to replace hegemonic male symbols such as the Christian cross. Over the years, Henes dedicated herself to creating collaborative works together with her audiences, perceiving this activity to constitute an important and integral part of the shamanist ritual in which the spiritual leader and his/her community jointly participate. Although the shaman is not solely identified with femininity, Henes frequently used this image in transmitting her feminist messages. Another of her projects drew its inspiration from the ancient northernhemisphere winter celebrations, held on the shortest day of the year—21 December—in celebration of the return of light after a lengthy period of darkness. The first performance in Henes’ series on this theme was conducted on Long Island beach and entitled Reverence to Her: A Chant to Invoke the Female Force of the Universe Present in all People. In the early morning hours of December 22, 1974, Henes arrived at the beach together with a group of women, where—in accordance with ancient custom—they began drumming and chanting ancient hymns in celebration of the return of light, Henes leading the ritual as shaman. Continuing to publicly celebrate the times appointed for the changing of the seasons, Henes’ performances became colourful events which drew increasing numbers of celebrants. The feminist assertion of the need to renew the bond between modern women and nature in the spirit of the ancient world was also expounded by the theoretician Marilyn French. In Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals (1985), French examined the gendered perceptions in the period before the evolution of patriarchalism, during which the ancients lived in harmony with nature. Adducing evidence for the matriarchal nature of the earliest cultures, she argued that, despite their power, the women who dominated them promoted social collaboration as part of an attempt to create communal support, thus refusing to repress the men. This period

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was thus characterised by the establishment of social networks and a female bond with the universe—while placing particular emphasis upon the tie between women/mothers and nature and their natural interaction with the universe. Nature being conceived in prehistoric times as a friend of humanity and the creator of life, the woman—who possessed a special connection with nature and thereby also acquired a unique place amongst humankind—was perceived as a companion of nature, collaborating fully and equally with it (French 1985: 25-66). Grieving over the fact that, with the development of agriculture and technological inventions, (wo)men began to distance themselves from nature and exercise control over it, French called upon women to renew their bond with nature and therein find their true experience(s). This principle reappeared in various works created by Great Goddess artists during the 1970s, who regarded it as a powerful tool in the service of ending female repression and opening up new horizons of equal opportunity between the sexes.

F. Pattern and Decoration Art Although the decorative arts and handicrafts have been considered part of the feminine realm throughout the history of art, such a (dis)regard has been particularly pronounced during the modern era, the Western artistic hegemony claiming to be superior to visual forms created in cultures that view decoration as a central artistic value (Broude 1994: 208). In an influential article entitled “Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture” published in the feminist journal Heresies in 1978, Joyce Kozloff and Valerie Jaudon cited statements made by prominent figures exemplifying this stance—such as Adolf Loos’ linkage between “Ornament and Crime” (1908) and Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant’s comment that “There is a hierarchy in the arts: decorative art is at the bottom and the human form at the top” (1918) (Jaudon and Kozloff 1978: 38-42). Highlighting the ways in which decorative art had consistently been defined as feminine by the gender politics of Western cultural tradition, this article helped expose the power play at work within the contemporary art discourse—by means of which the decorative was defined as both “other” (non-European) and inferior (non-masculine) to abstract modern art (Broude 1994: 208). While the women working within the P&D stream did not follow the first-generation feminist artists in representing the female body as a central element in their pieces, they did argue that their art expressed internal feminine rhythms and experiences derived from female physicality. As

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French feminist philosopher Helene Cixous noted, the characteristics of feminine creativity—exemplified in such fields as writing and the arts— are discernible not only through themes and genres but also through the structure, rhythm, texture, and tonality of the feminine artistic product. This viewpoint was also elaborated by Luce Irigaray, in her call to women to create from within their body. By listening to its voice and heeding its sensations, she believed that non-hierarchical feminine images could emerge. As art historian Norma Broude points out, the feminist P&D movement first emerged in California between 1969 and 1970, thence spreading across the United States. One of the key figures in its birth was the artist and art lecturer Amy Goldin, who introduced her students to nonEurocentric forms of art—such as oriental carpets and woven textiles from Africa and South America (Broude 1994: 211). This exposure and appreciation encouraged others to challenge the hierarchical attitude of Western art, which maintained that ethnicity and gender determine quality and beauty. The consequence was an eruption of collages, textiles, sewing, and embroidery pieces in patterns and employing materials not previously included in canonical art. A leading proponent of this stream was Miriam Schapiro, who regarded herself as an intermediary between the two worlds rigidly ordered by patriarchalism—i.e., the private vs. the public, domestic art vs. high art, the feminist art movement vs. the mainstream art world. In 1972, together with artist Sherry Brody, Schapiro created a piece consisting of six miniature rooms entitled The Dollhouse, shown in the Womanhouse exhibition in Los Angeles. One of the rooms—called The Seraglio— featured boldly-coloured embroidered and decorated textiles, representative of a Persian interior which, while considered exotic by the West, here stressed the long tradition of a culture of rich and symbolic decoration (FIG. 17). Educated in the modernist tradition in whose eyes the decorative was anathema, Schapiro recognised this work as constituting a significant breakthrough in her life—a rebellion against the fetters of tradition which had bound her up until that point, the liberation enabling her to devote herself solely to this new style.

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FIGURE 1-17. Miriam Schapiro in collaboration with Sherry Brody, The Seraglio (detail from The Dollhouse), 1972. Mixed media, 48 x 41.5 x 8 inches. Collection of the National Museum of American Art.

Throughout the 1970s, her works featured motifs some claimed still to be “feminine”—highly-decorated fans, hearts, and houses incorporating collages in brightly-coloured and deliberately kitschy square or circular patterns on cloth handkerchiefs, muslin, and other ostensibly “inferior” materials glued onto an acrylic base. One such piece was Connection (1976) (FIG. 18). During a period when mainstream modernist art, such as minimalist art, was dominated by clean, calculated, and cold geometric grids—as exemplified in the works of artists such as Karl Andre—Schapiro’s works made a political-feminist statement not only on a personal level but also on the broader political plane. As she stated in an interview, I wanted to validate the traditional activities of women, to connect myself to the unknown women artists who made quilts, who had done the invisible “women’s work” of civilization. I wanted to acknowledge them, to honor them. (Schapiro 1977: 296)

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FIGURE 1-18. Miriam Schapiro, Connection, 1976. Acrylic and handkerchiefs, 72 x 72 inches. Collection of the University of Iowa Museum of Art.

Although preceding artists had combined pieces of fabric or gauze in their collages—such as American artist Robert Rauschenberg in his work Bed (1955)—none of these pieces represented a directly political, and certainly not a feminist, statement. As art historian Judith Stein suggests, prior to the 1970s, no single Western artist—male or female—had bestowed such artistic strength and deep political and gendered meanings upon the use of textiles as Schapiro (Stein 1994: 228). Under the influence of her work, feminist artists increasingly began to incorporate embroidery, sewing, and knitting into their works in order to restore crafts traditionally regarded by the Western hegemony as feminine to their rightful place in the artistic field. One of these was Harmony Hammond, whose work Floorpiece VI (1973) comprised a round, hand-woven rug composed of remnants of fabric and rags, smeared with acrylic paint (FIG. 19).

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FIGURE 1-19. Harmony Hammond, Floorpiece VI, 1973. Cloth and acrylic, 65 inches diameter. Courtesy Dwight Hackett projects, Santa Fe, NM. ©Harmony Hammond/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Exhibited on the floor of the gallery, this work challenged accepted artistic principles and conventional ways of viewing and consuming art. Not only was it made of material traditionally considered inferior—rags and woollen yarn—but it also failed to grace the walls, confused visitors finding it difficult to decide whether or not it actually formed part of the exhibition. Even those who determined that it did, deliberated over whether it was permissible to use it (walk over it) or whether it must be treated with the respect customarily reserved for artwork. Many P&D artists looked outside the Western cultural tradition to such sources as Islamic, Mexican, and Hispano-Moresque art created in societies whose decorative-art culture had not been subjected to gender politics and was thus not regarded as devoid of content. One of the most prominent of these was Joyce Kozloff. Like Schapiro, Kozloff began her artistic career within mainstream Western art, her early works being characterised by a geometric abstract style. In 1973, however, she visited Mexico, where she was introduced to Pre-Columbian folk art. Embarking on a study of the cultural significance of this art, Kozloff began sketching local rug and fabric patterns, ceramic tiles, decorated woven baskets, and local architecture. When she returned home, these formed the basis for a series of acrylic paintings, also incorporating the repetitive patterns adorning the walls of churches she had visited and other motifs she had seen. Seeking to immerse herself further in the field, she travelled to Morocco in 1975, following this trip three years later with one

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to Turkey in order to study the beauty and complexity of Islamic ornamentation. Throughout this period, she worked on increasingly largescale textiles, exhibited in prominent galleries (Broude 1994: 221). These gigantic installations were exhibited in several rooms—such as An Interior Decorated (1979) presented at the Whitney Biennial. This incorporated dozens of hand-decorated, glazed ceramic tiles and printed silk textiles hung from ceiling to floor. When they were divided into sections and sold separately to collectors, Kozloff was prompted to stop exhibiting her work in galleries and museums. Recoiling from works by male artists and streams of art considered masculine—such as Conceptualism and Minimalism—she preferred to forego commercial success in favour of displaying her work in the public sphere, in order to help make the principles of the socio-feminist vision accessible to a larger and more varied audience. The venues she chose included the San Francisco Airport and the Humboldt Hospital subway station in Buffalo.

FIGURE 1-20. Joyce Kozloff, Three Facades, 1973. Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 59 inches. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. Courtesy of the DC Moore Gallery, New York City.

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Kozloff’s ideology and vision influenced other American artists— female, male, and those who were not expressed feminists—who followed in her footsteps (literally and metaphorically) by creating art intended for exhibition in public spaces and broad audiences.11 These works united Kozloff’s vision with the collaborative community stream of art, which sought to detach art from the mechanisms of power and centralisation.12 One of the artists prominent in the decorative stream of art influenced by ideas similar to those of Kozloff was Valerie Jaudon. Jaudon became enamoured with feminism at the beginning of the 1970s, her pieces—large textiles covered with strips of fabric, some straight, others twisted and interwoven, with no focal point or centre, and all drawing their inspiration from Celtic and Islamic ornamentation—being created throughout that decade. Significantly, the 1970s saw male and female artists across the United States organising themselves into a united front whose platform challenged the dominant streams of Minimalist and Conceptual art. Although the members of this group—represented by such artists as Lucas Samara and Frank Stella—also called themselves “Pattern and Decoration” artists, their work closely resembling that of the feminist decorative art movement, they were not part of the feminist movement. By the end of the 1970s, the non-feminist P&D movement had grown to the point where it had become accepted within mainstream art on both sides of the Atlantic—as indicated in an article entitled “Decorative is not Dirty Word” published in the Village Voice (1976) (Bourdon 1976) and the fact that the works of these artists were enthusiastically purchased by galleries and private collectors alike. Although some art historians regard the feminist P&D movement as forming part of the general, non-feminist, American P&D stream active during the 1970s—simply being another modernist “ism”—the feminist P&D movement was in fact profoundly different from the latter, being characterised by a radical social vision absent from the work of nonfeminist (female and male) P&D artists. One of the feminist P&D artists’ specific goals was to challenge the hierarchical ideology of the contemporary art world and reveal the gender bias behind the power relations typical of the Western art world. Surviving the onslaught of this tradition, the movement grew into an art form independent of the patriarchal elite, stressing the importance of public art, which, open and accessible to all, promotes an egalitarian world and cultural order— specifically between the sexes. In the words of Joyce Kozloff in an interview given in 1979:

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Decoration humanizes our living and working spaces ... It enables artists from different fields to collaborate on public projects ... Decoration abolishes hierarchical distinctions between “high” and “low” art. It is not elitist and does not condescend: it will expand our notion of “the artist” and the “art audience.” (Rickey 1979: 23)

G. Collaborative Community Art Feminist collaborative community art constitutes the antithesis of the Western glamorous myth of the reclusive, solitary, artist cloistered in his studio. Although visual artists throughout the centuries had frequently joined forces with other artists—such as musicians and choreographers— in order to create joint art projects, these acts only acquired an expressly gender-political tone with the emergence of feminist activism in the United States. As part of the general political feminist movement, artists following a feminist agenda gradually withdrew themselves from exhibitions organised on the basis of a fixed hierarchy in favour of working within democratic groups in which each member had an equal say and role. As Julia Kristeva described this phenomenon: ... the more radical feminist currents ... make of the second sex a countersociety. A “female society” is then constituted as a sort of alter ego of the official society, in which all real or fantasized possibilities for jouissance take refuge. Against the socio-symbolic contract, both sacrificial and frustrating, this counter-society is imagined as harmonious, without prohibitions, free and fulfilling. (Kristeva 1986: 202 [original italics])

During this period, feminist collaboration took numerous forms. For some artists, cooperation constituted a long-term process in which all the participants were equally responsible for the creative project undertaken— from the initial idea through the work process and up to and including the final work of art—as well as the decision regarding how and where to display it. To achieve this goal, they banded together, sometimes even forming a commune. Others joined projects arranged and directed by a leading artist, or worked individually but exhibited their works together as a collaborative creation. Some groups were characterised by a particularly strong activist awareness. Their goal being to create accessible public art, the artists in these collaborated with engineers and/or landscape architects in order to create broad-based art projects involving numerous participants. Others established collaborative painting and embroidery workshops in which they worked together on one large-scale creation intended for an open space, painted giant murals, or staged protest performances in public spaces.

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Several of these collaborative groups fell into the ecofeminist category, being responsible for the creation of vast art works in open fields, canyons, caves, and rivers—into which natural materials, vegetation, and soil were incorporated. Many of the pioneering collaborative feminist works were created at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. Established by feminist artists at the beginning of the decade, this served as a meeting place and source of mutual inspiration for feminist artists—many of whom were also performance artists—throughout the 1970s (Withers 1994: 168). According to theorist Mary Daly, female collaboration constituted one of the basic forms via which the feminist revolution strove to abolish the patriarchal repression of women. Arguing in Beyond God the Father that in order to achieve this goal the conventional gender division must be discarded, she also emphasised that this did not mean the jettisoning of “feminine” attributes—love, sharing, cooperation, nurturing, and compassion—which constitute important values for all human societies (Tong 1989: 102-103). While patriarchal society made women who focused all their attention on caring for and rearing their children appear to be devoting themselves naturally to the family unit, Daly believed that this should not demand a sacrifice from such caregivers. A nurturing femininity could in fact become a vital and reinforcing factor capable— without adducing any “macho” connotations—of permeating society as a whole, eventually becoming the heritage of all humankind, women and men alike. One of the most well-known feminist collaborative art works was Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974-1979)—a piece which became emblematic of the movement as a whole (FIG. 21). Believing her works to comprise a link in a long chain of creativity within the historical continuity of women’s art, Chicago located herself firmly within the collaborative art tradition. As she herself stated, I have recognized that my work could only be accurately understood against the background of female history, and I wanted to find a way to incorporate that history into my work so that the viewer would be forced to confront my work in the context of other women’s work. (Chicago 1993: 178)

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FIGURE 1-21. Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party. Installation view. ©Judy Chicago, 1979. Mixed media, 48 x 42 x 3 inches. Gift of the Elisabeth A. Sackler Foundation. Collection of the Brooklyn Museum, New York. Photo ©Donald Woodman.

Regarding the broad body of knowledge belonging to the feminine heritage as a source in and of itself, she invited a group of women to research it with her, the data-processing and decision-making processes also being collaborative. Over four hundred women participated in this enormous piece, working together from the initial research stage to its implementation—sewing, embroidering, moulding, and painting the objects. The work took the form of a large triangular table whose sides were around fourteen metres long, laid with 2,300 triangular porcelain tiles labelled in gold and inscribed with the names of 999 famous women whom the artists wished to honour. Along each side lay thirteen sets of dishes—thirty-nine in total—each representing a mythological or historical female figure: the ancient Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Italian Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi, and the modern-day poet Emily Dickenson and writer Virginia Woolf, for example. Laid in chronological order, each place setting consisted of a china plate uniquely painted or sculpted with images of the female sexual organ, cutlery, a golden goblet, a linen napkin, and an embroidered tablecloth woven with the name of the woman and images linked to her life and activities.

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According to Chicago, the work comprises a new interpretation of the Last Supper. The three sides of the table being set for thirteen diners—the traditional recliners being the twelve disciples and Jesus—here the guests were all women who, rather than being the cooks and servers, take on an “apostolic” role (Stein 1994:228). The choice of decorative china and embroidery as the two central techniques was intended to challenge the prevalent modernist perception regarding the preferred type of media. Rather than the marble sculpture or oil painting on canvas characteristic of male artwork, the piece modelled traditions associated with female work— lifting them out of obscurity and dignifying them (Jones 1996: 89). Like many other feminist pieces, The Dinner Party exemplifies the methodological difficulties attendant upon categorising feminist art works. In addition to being a collaborative work—the class in which it is customarily placed in published research—it is also linked to cunt art. Its use of handicrafts (pottery, sewing, and embroidery) being deliberately intended to blur the distinction between lowbrow, domestic, and feminine art and “sublime” and museum-exhibition-worthy, it also lies within the tradition of P&D art. Another American feminist artist whose works reflected the principles of collaborative community art was Suzanne Lacy, a prominent artist and lecturer at the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles (the precursor of the Woman’s Building)—a forum responsible for producing some of the most well-known and important pieces of the period. In her works from the 1970s, Lacy sought to consolidate the link between small groups of artists and society at large, promoting political aims and enhancing awareness of feminist issues—in particular, violence against women. In partnership with the artist Leslie Labowitz, she established a social network of women from fields such as mass communication, the arts, and government—in conjunction with whom the two initiated collaborative projects addressing pressing contemporary social issues. Three of these works—Three Weeks in May, In Mourning and in Rage, and Record Companies Drag Their Feet—came to constitute landmarks in the history of performance art. Simultaneously collaborative, performance, and protest art, all three were staged in 1977 across Los Angeles. The first was a broad-based and multi-locational work created by LA women from an array of fields whose aim was to arouse awareness among the area’s residents of the violence against women it had witnessed in the space of a single month (May). One of the performances was staged in the city-hall square and included a detailed map of the rapes which had taken place in the city in that same month, accompanied by other day-long performances highlighting the frequency of sexual attacks against women.

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In Mourning and in Rage engaged a similar subject, likewise being created in the wake of a serial woman killer on the rampage. Representing an attempt to influence media reports—especially television coverage—of such events, it sought to shift the focus away from sensationalist and voyeuristic media stories featuring the victims onto the male offenders, thereby initiating a discussion of male violence—including murder, wife battering, and incest—towards women as a social phenomenon. Ten women draped in black and wearing large black headscarves stood on the city-hall steps flanked by a banner inscribed with the words “Women Fight Back”. Another woman in a purple cloak drew the spectators’ attention to the need to increase awareness of the problem and alter media coverage of the subject, broadcasting wielding such an enormous influence upon viewers’ cultural conceptions. Record Companies Drag Their Feet was staged by Lacy and Labowitz and a group of other women holding signboards and record covers underneath gigantic Hollywood record company billboards. Herein, they sought to protest the public use of female images—including photographs on record covers and billboards, as well as in the lyrics of pop songs, some of which evinced verbal violence towards women—as humiliating and commercially exploitative (Withers 1994: 171). As they waved aloft these images as protest signboards, the latter were seen to contain additional “scripts” expressing such sentiments as “This is a crime against women”. Some of the participants covered their faces with masks or absurd items of clothing in order to subvert the image of female beauty portrayed by the advertising world. Inviting media journalists to cover the event in the hope of disseminating their message and drawing attention to the subject, they sought to expose the repressive patriarchal processes whereby women’s bodies are stagemanaged for male pleasures and purposes. Their success in arousing public awareness of the issue was principally due to their skill in manipulating the media, the reporting of the special multi-participant event effectively becoming “part of the performance” and conveying its message (Stein 1994: 233). The female image as reflected in public spaces and advertising— billboards, television, newspaper adverts, etc.—formed part of the broad radical-feminist agenda of the 1970s addressing the patriarchal stereotyping of female sexuality. The feminists of this period maintained that the ways in which women were represented in advertising distorted their reality. Serving male needs and encouraging such evils as violence and rape, the objectification of the woman’s body led women to become potential victims of men taught to perceive them as objects.

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One of the early feminist philosophers to adduce the link between rape and patriarchal repression of women was Susan Brownmiller, whose fundamental and comprehensive text Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape was published in 1975. Brownmiller contended that sexual violence against women—and in particular rape and the potential threat of rape— facilitates male dominance of/over women. The status of the male rapist and the way in which society fails to apply appropriate punitive measures, she argued, contributed to the perpetuation of the phenomenon—and thus the continuing repression of women in its midst. Throughout the history of humankind, the rape of women has always been facilitated by the fact that society not only endorses but also encourages the view that violence against women is an expression of “masculinity”: Once we accept as basic truth that rape is not a crime of irrational, impulsive, uncontrollable lust, but is a deliberate, hostile, violent act of degradation and possession on the part of a would-be conqueror, designed to intimidate and inspire fear, we must look towards those elements in our culture that promote and propagandize these attitudes, which offer men, and in particular, impressionable, adolescent males, who form the potential raping population, the ideology and psychological encouragement to commit their acts of aggression without awareness, for the most part, that they have committed a punishable crime, let alone a moral wrong. The myth of the heroic rapist that permeates false notions of masculinity, from the successful seducer to the man who “takes what he wants when he wants it,” is inculcated in young boys from the first time they become aware that being a male means access to certain mysterious rites and privileges, including the right to buy a woman’s body. When young men learn that females may be bought for a price, and the acts of sex command set prices, then how should they not also conclude that that which may be bought may also be taken without the civility of a monetary exchange? (Brownmiller 1975: 391)

Another medium the feminist artists adopted in their collaborative efforts was that of murals—an art form which gained popularity at the end of the 1960s in neighbourhoods and suburbs across the United States, particularly in Chicago and San Francisco. Feminist artists working on murals emphasised their collaborative and egalitarian work in order to highlight the centrality of women in society and depict them as wise, creative heroines. Painted on house and other walls and fences, these pieces constituted one of the most prominent forms of protest employed by feminist artists, the majority of collaborative art groups responsible for them being comprised exclusively of women—such as the Chicago Women’s Graphic Collective.

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Although some of these groups allowed men to perform some of the painting and organisational work, all of them were committed to the feminist message and characterised by a revolutionary political enthusiasm. Most of the artists did not sign their names to the collaborative murals— whether out of fear of the authorities or a genuine desire to contribute to the social revolution without public acknowledgement or personal recognition. They were also conspicuous for encouraging local communities to participate in collaborative mural projects, making this stream of art highly successful, most conspicuously in the Los Angeles area. One of the important figures working in this medium was Judith Baca. Decorating many walls in Los Angeles, she too as her subjects indigenous women prior to the white man’s conquest—as well as those from more recent American history. Enlisting the participation of youth gangs from the poor neighbourhoods of the city, Baca used her art to implement a gang truce—drawing most attention, however, through the monumental mural she painted in conjunction with local residents on a Los Angeles wall. Extending over 800 square metres, this was the longest mural in world at the time. The huge painting—which unfortunately has not survived in its entirety—depicted the history of California, relating particularly to the women of the region, including their struggle for the right to vote, the development of Hollywood, and the Great Depression. During work on the mural, Baca consulted with forty ethnologists, 450 youths—male and female—from various neighbourhoods and ethnic groups also participating in the work. She further benefited from the aid of forty artists—again both male and female—and several assistants and maintenance specialists, the work taking eight years (1976-1983) to complete (Stein 1994: 241). The medium of collaborative feminist murals continued to flourish through the 1980s across the United States. Although the trend was particularly prevalent in California, many city councils began to recognise the value of community involvement in enhancing urban quality of life— including the importance of feminist initiatives of this sort. Significantly, such works—which featured gang participation—appeared not to constitute a threat to the macho image of these populations, all those involved in the projects also profiting from them. Thus while local communities enjoyed the visual enhancement of the city, youngsters who would otherwise very likely have become juvenile offenders found a way to gain constructive employment—leading to a drop in the crime level. For their part, the feminist artists took advantage of the opportunity to express themselves and the right to positive public exposure (Stein 1994: 242). In

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the face of an artistic establishment virtually closed to female artists, many muralists found artistic freedom on public walls. As their projects gained recognition, they gradually began to draw the eye of the hegemonic art world and win acclaim.

H. Protest Art Although most of the feminist art of the 1970s was protest art in one way or another, one group in particular gained the title “feminist protest art” on the basis of its high public profile and members’ activism. In the wake of the 1960s’ social revolution in the United States, many artists— both male and female—joined various political protest movements. Not only did many women artists active in the civil rights movement and the protest against the Vietnam war participate in demonstrations, strikes, and protest gatherings but they also established their own feminist movements—wherein they integrated social awareness and the struggle against the repression of women with anti-war activities.

Against Violence and Militarism One of the leading and most prolific figures in this field was the New York artist Nancy Spero, who gave expression to her protest against violence in a series of paintings completed over lengthy periods and supported by in-depth research into written materials, old photographs, and ancient paintings. Spero represented brutal violence via delicate, minimalist brushstrokes on fine rice paper—as exemplified in The War Series (1966-1970). One of the common images in her work was the helicopter—engraved on American consciousness as a symbol of the Vietnam war—which appeared alongside fire and acts of rape. The portrayal of total annihilation—signified by bombs—also featured in many of the works in this series. Addressing the duality of sex and power and the destructive and repressive effect this lethal combination exerts upon women across the globe, Male Bomb (1966), for example, shows a doubleheaded male creature spitting fire from its mouth while the tips of its multiple erect sexual organs sport venomous forked tongues. Spero wrote of the one hundred and fifty drawings on this theme: I imagined these works as manifestoes against our (the US) incursion in Vietnam, a personal attempt at exorcism. The Bombs are phallic and nasty, exaggerated sexual representations of the penis: heads with tongues sticking, violent depictions of the human (mostly male) body. The clouds

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of the Bomb are filled with screaming heads vomiting poison onto the victims below, etc. (Spero 1996: 124)

In the late 1960s, Spero became increasingly active in political circles, joining several political and artistic organisations—including the Art Workers Coalition (1968–69) and Women Artists in Revolution (1969), also being one of the founding members of the first women’s cooperative gallery Artists in Residence in SoHo in 1972. During the subsequent decade, she created the series Torture of Women—also painted on delicate rice paper and interweaving text and images taken from depictions of violence against women throughout history and mythological narratives. The image of a violently-assaulted naked woman appears repeatedly in this series, together with ancient mythological female symbols—outspread wings, multiple breasts, rivers, etc. One of the feminist theorists who addressed the subject of male violence against women, especially during war, was Sarah Ruddick, a prominent feminist philosopher. In an article entitled “Maternal Thinking” published in 1980, she maintained that, masculinity and femininity representing death and life respectively, the male political realm must embrace the sane, life-preserving power represented by motherhood. In books such as Beyond God the Father (1973) and Gyn/Ecology (1978), Mary Daly similarly identified the “triple threat of rape, genocide and war” as being a direct consequence of the patriarchalism which promotes sexist, racist, and class distinctions. Women, she argued, cannot develop and flourish—or even survive—in a world in which they are perceived as victims and remain at the mercy of patriarchalism. Not only do men seek to repress women mentally but they also oppress them physically— hounding witches in medieval Europe, binding girls’ feet in China, demanding the immolation of the Hindu widow on her husband’s funeral pyre, circumcising young girls, and subjecting Western women to male gynaecological practices (Daly 1978: 107-312). As these figures exemplify, radical feminism regarded abuse of the female body as a central—even key—issue to be raised, drawing attention to every type of physical violence experienced by women at the hands of men across the world: sexual discrimination and harassment, battering, rape, and sexual exploitation during war—during which women were literally perceived as an enemy possession, “having them” constituting a symbol of victory (Hagay-Frey 2011: 260).

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Against the Pornographic Industry Feminist protest artists also waged war against pornography, a phenomenon they perceived as constituting a social evil responsible for condemning women to a life of repression and humiliation. One of the artists who addressed this issue and its ramifications for women was the Hull-born Christine Newby, who assumed the name Cosey Fanni Tutti as a play on Mozart’s opera Cosi fan tutti—“They [women] all do the same”. As part of a two-year project—in the course of which she presented herself before porn film producers and publishers as a model and actress—Tutti created a series of photographs. Exhibited in 1976 at a feminist art show entitled “Prostitution”, in addition to the pseudo-pornographic photographs in which she appeared in revealing naked poses, the project also incorporated performances and discussions with the audience concerning sex and prostitution—Tutti specifically inviting women forced into prostitution to attend and speak to the audience. During the exhibition, Tutti handed out her manifesto regarding the complex political and psychological dimensions of the sex industry and its consumption, part of which read: The people who produce it think they are “using” the public. The producers are using the public, but in a way they either do not know or never think or admit that they know. It is basically all a means by which they can explore their own sexual fantasies … presuming the models don’t have the intelligence to see what they are doing. (Reckitt 2001: 103)

As might have been expected, the reactions to the photographs were so vehement that they thwarted any attempt to conduct a debate regarding either pornography or prostitution (Reckitt 2001: 103). Many radical feminist theoreticians continued to address this issue, however, setting out—like Tutti—to expose the true aim of pornography. Many of them arguing that, rather than being sexual in nature, it serves male power play and the enslavement of women to men in heterosexual relationships, they maintained that it cannot be regarded simply as innocent material for arousal but must be recognised as an active contributing factor in male violence against women—starting from sexual harassment, battering, and physical abuse and concluding in rape and murder. According to Andrea Dworkin, one of the American feminist philosophers who engaged the subject in depth, pornography is responsible for causing men—as well as women—to regard females as inferior, second-class citizens, and virtually a sub-human species. In Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature, published in 1981,

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feminist theoretician Susan Griffin similarly asserted that male violence towards the female body represents their fear of losing self-control during sexual intercourse. Believing that, during intercourse, the man is swept away into the realm of “nature”, he thus panics—this causing him to resent the woman who has brought him to this state—she contended that men eventually become aggressive towards women, placing them in the humiliating situations which are typical of pornographic material: But now we are beginning to know why a woman’s body is so hated and feared. And why this body, by inspiring desire in a man, must recall to him his own body ... this lack of control must recall to him that all is in nature and in his own nature that he has chosen to forget . For nature can make him want. Nature can cause him to cry in loneliness, to feel a terrible hunger, or a thirst. Nature can even cause him to die. (Griffin 1981: 28 [original italics])

The radical feminist movement responsible for the emergence of the public discourse regarding pornography was represented in the 1970s by such groups as “Women against Violence in Pornography and the Media” in San Francisco (1976) and “Women against Pornography” in New York (1979). Spreading beyond these groups, this debate paved the way in the United States—and other places—for the introduction of legislation regulating the pornographic industry. In the 1980s, two prominent feminist activists—Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon—sought to introduce legislation defining the harm done to women by pornography as actionable under law, fighting to enable victims to sue for civil damages—either individually or in group actions—over coerced participation in pornography, coercion to watch pornography, assault caused as a result of pornography, and pornographic commerce. The proposed legislation not being passed, the issue unfortunately remains firmly on the feminist agenda (Ziv 2004: 164-165).

Challenging Racism A distinct group within protest art was constituted by women of colour who sought to draw attention to the racist aspects of female repression. Prominent within this group was Betye Saar, whose work at the beginning of the 1970s dealt with a broad spectrum of issues relating to the repression of African-American women and racist discrimination against African-American culture. One of her assemblages was entitled The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972) (FIG. 22)—a reference to the well-known American food company

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whose products, during this period, were purchased primarily by suburban, white middle-class women and whose logo—dating from the end of the nineteenth century—was a smiling black woman dressed in an apron and kerchief and reminiscent of a cook or cleaning lady.13

FIGURE 1-22. Betye Saar (b. 1929), The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972. Mixed media assemblage. 11¾ x 8 x 2¾ inches, signed. Collection of University of California, Berkeley Art Museum; purchased with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts (selected by the committee for the acquisition of Afro-American Art). Photograph courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY. Photograph by Joshua Nefsky.

The “original” Aunt Jemima who served as the model for the logo was in fact Nancy Green, an African-American born in 1834 as a slave. Against the multiple images of this logo, Saar placed a puppet Aunt Jemima, under whose ample bosom was propped another painting of the same figure. The latter carries a white baby while apparently attempting to

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hang up the laundry, recalling the slavery of black women who bore the burden of caring for their white masters’ families—at the same time as being regarded as their property (Lopez and Roth 1994: 146). Saar challenged this image by inserting into the piece an image of a large closed black fist—the familiar symbol of the Black Power movement—the puppet Aunt Jemima similarly being portrayed in the process of turning from slave into a proud free woman of colour by the fact that her right hand grasps not only a broom but also a revolver, her left brandishing a rifle. “Armed” with these features, the work suggests a statement of defiance against such canonical works of art as Andy Warhol’s silk prints of famous women—Aunt Jemima replacing Marilyn Monroe’s face and thereby substituting a proud African-American woman for the “classic” white Hollywood female image (Phelan 2001: 32). This subversive, highly critical work demonstrates the shift towards the awakening of black power, “Aunt Jemima” originally being a vaudeville character and featuring in film and radio sketches as a stereotype of the plump black woman of the advertising and the mass media tradition in the United States. Up until the 1950s, such thick-lipped, squat-nosed black figures had been the face of toothpaste, shoe polish, and liquorice adverts. This stereotyping and discrimination was boldly criticised by Saar and other feminist activists. One of the first American researchers to analyse the connection between female and racist discrimination was the sociologist Calvin Hernton, author of Sex and Racism in America (1965). Winning immediate acclaim amongst both blacks and whites, the book was published when the struggle for equality for blacks was at its height—words such as “nigger” no longer being “politically correct” and Martin Luther King preaching equality with whites and promoting the Black Power protest movement. To these, African-American feminist activists, philosophers, and artists joined their efforts in establishing a country-wide organisation of black feminists (the NBFO) in 1973, a convention of black lesbians gathering a year later to formulate “The Combahee River Collective—A Declaration of Black Feminism”. These groups formed the seeds of black feminism as a critical discourse. The issue of sexist racism formed the focus of a long chapter in Shulamith Firestone’s book The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Firestone being amongst the first feminist philosophers to elaborate the link between these two issues in a clearly feminist context—thereby giving inspiration, it may be presumed, to many minority artists of African-American, Mexican, and Asian origin in the United States. The African-American liberation movement of the 1960s, Firestone contended, was not established in order

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to liberate the black community as a whole but rather to entrench the status of the black male within the social hierarchy, his rise to power coming at the expense of the “passive” and “submissive” black woman: “It was eminently understandable, after all, that black men would eventually want what all men want: to be on top of their women” (Firestone 1971: 104). Lying at the very bottom of the pile—under black men under white women under white men—the black working-class woman suffered from a triple form of discrimination: as a woman, as a black (woman), and as part of the weakest class. A similar socio-economic analysis was conducted by the AfricanAmerican artist Faith Ringgold—who, in addition to being closely associated with political organisations such as the Black Artists Movement and Black Power, was also active within the black feminist movement.

FIGURE 1-23. Faith Ringgold, Mrs. Jones and Family, 1973. Mixed media, 74 x 69 inches. Faith Ringgold ©1973.

One of her works dealing with this subject was entitled Mrs. Jones and Family (1973) (FIG. 23). As its title implies, Mrs. Jones and Family addresses a common American social problem—the proliferation of single-parent African-American families. The play on the common phrase “Mr. Jones and family”—with which family units were customarily introduced—draws attention here to the missing father figure, the family

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unit only including the mother with her three children, all dressed in African masks. With the desertion of their husbands, women of colour such as “Mrs. Jones” were left to bring up the children by working several jobs—suffering from low social status, constant fatigue, and the pressures consequent on being the sole adult and decision-making figure in the household, the State failing to address the problem. Ringgold’s work being made out of cheap and “feminine” materials—scraps of fabric and bits of wool—using traditional feminine handicrafts such as sewing and embroidery, she can also be classified as belonging to the feminist P&D art stream.

Confronting Class Oppression In 1977, a group of Los Angeles collaborative artists took upon themselves the task of protesting a further social issue. Following ten months of intensive meetings and work focusing on the importance of raising awareness, six of their members determined to fix their attention on the generic figure of the “waitress” as a charged social, psychological, economic, and sexual metaphor (Doktorczyk-Donohue 2008: 5).

FIGURE 1-24. Anne Gauldin, Jerri Allyn, Leslie Belt, Patti Nicklaus, Denise Yarfitz Pierre, and Jamie Wildman, Great Goddess Diana (part of Ready to Order?), 1978. Performance. ©Jerri Allyn and Anne Gauldin. Photographer: Maria Karras. Courtesy of the Woman’s Building Image Bank, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, California.

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In 1978, these artists staged the first performance of Great Goddess Diana, numerous repeat performances following in various restaurants in the Los Angeles area between 1978 and 1981 (FIG. 24). During dinner, the group of artists served the surprised “audience” of diners wearing uniforms featuring multiple latex breasts. Taking the opportunity to explain that, despite working long, hard shifts, waitresses did not even earn a minimum wage, they suggested that they embody the modern version of the “source of plenty” which nourishes humankind—the ancient goddess Diana. Rather than resembling the goddess of hunting and provider of bounty and goodness, however, her modern-day avatars had become the hunted—dethroned and shamefully exploited. Pointing out the dangers to which women are exposed when working at inferior jobs without the protection of fair labour laws—including those against sexual harassment and verbal violence—the performers not only demonstrated that the more attractive the waitress, the higher the tip she was likely to receive but also protested the fact that, like clerks and telephone operators, waitressing was identified as an inferior job. The same issue had been addressed by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex as early as 1949: Things are quite otherwise for the woman worker or employee, the secretary, the saleswoman, all of whom go to work outside the home. It is much more difficult for them to combine their employment with household duties, which would seem to require at least three and a half hours a day, with six hours on Sunday—a good deal to add to the hours in the factory or office. As for the learned professions, even if lawyers, doctors, and professors obtain some housekeeping help, the home and children are for them also a burden that is a heavy handicap ... Furthermore, the woman who seeks independence through work has less favourable possibilities than those of men; her tasks are less specialized and therefore not as well paid as those of skilled labourers; and for equal work she does not get equal pay. (de Beauvoir 1953: 135)

Prior to the emergence of the second wave of the active feminist movement at the end of the 1960s, many of the economic aspects of female status had gone ignored in the philosophy and politics prevalent in the United States and Europe. With the rise of Marxist feminism in the 1970s, awareness of the economic bias against women gradually spread from Britain to the American feminists. While classical Marxism neglected to address the discrimination against women in the labour market, feminist Marxism made gender issues one its focal points, challenging the traditional view that housework and raising children are not “jobs”.

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Marxist feminists—as indeed many other feminist streams—studied the way in which being reduced to procreators and housewives precluded female personal development, such as the pursuit of a professional career. The work “opportunities” to which they had access were, in fact, an economic obligation which forced them into part-time, low-paying, menial jobs—with no recognition that this “productivity” had to be fitted around a “full-time job”. This feminist activity laid a firm basis for the introduction of legislation determining equal work conditions for men and women, the fight against unfair dismissal of women—due to pregnancy, absence to care for a sick child, female health-related issues, etc.—and the shattering of the “glass ceiling” preventing the promotion of women and their elevation from the “mud floor”, despite their talents and qualifications.14 One of the few Marxist feminist philosophers active in the United States during the 1970s was the theoretician Heidi Hartmann. In an essay entitled “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex” (1976), Hartmann expounded her hopes for the outcome of the Marxist feminist struggle: The present status of women in the labor market and the current arrangement of sex-segregated jobs is the result of a long process of interaction between patriarchy and capitalism … Men will have to be forced to give up their favored positions in the division of labor—in the labor market and at home—both if women’s subordination is to end and if men are to begin to escape class oppression and exploitation. Capitalists have indeed used women as unskilled, underpaid labor to undercut male workers … the maintenance of job segregation by sex is a key root of women’s status. (Hartmann 1976: 167-68)

I. Lesbian Art The 1970s also witnessed the organisation of lesbian women into feminist political groups—many of whom regarded lesbianism as a political act by which they attained a revolutionary political identity. In the words of American feminist writer Ti-Grace Atkinson, “Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice” (Atkinson 1971). Many texts on this issue were published during this period, including “The Woman who Identifies with Women” (1970) emanating from the “radicalesbians” group and Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Forced Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence”. Prominent lesbian theoreticians in the feminist discourse included Kate Millett, Audre Lorde, Christine Delphy, Marilyn Frye, Jill Johnston, and Monique Wittig.

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The lesbian images which had hitherto appeared in Western art generally reflected a heterosexual erotic perspective—as exemplified by Gustav Courbet’s Le Sommeil (1866), which portrays two naked women asleep in one another’s arms. Such representations generally depicted male fantasies regarding lesbian activity rather than female desire. While many male artists—such as the British painter David Hockney and American photographer Robert Maplethorpe—dealt with homoeroticism in their work, lesbian artists seldom gave expression to lesbian relationships in their art. Betsy Damon, a lesbian feminist artist active since the 1970s, wrote of her experience: “Neither feminism nor lesbianism determine the form and content of my work yet it was only with the security of the former and the coming to terms with the latter (the muse) that my life and art began to be uniquely and overtly me” (Damon 1977: 2). This view was supported by the conclusions drawn by American art-historian Edward Lucie-Smith two decades later in his study of Race, Sex, and Gender in Contemporary Art: Any insistence that there must be a lesbian art to match the gay male art springs in part from the knowledge that there are certainly a number of contemporary lesbian artists. Yet does their sexual orientation play a significant role in their art? Even where the artists is unequivocally “out” and wants her sexual orientation to be known to everyone, it is not necessarily her main subject matter. (Lucie-Smith 1994: 135)

Smith’s view that lesbian artists preferred to address broader social agendas rather than sexuality and sexual practice is reflected in the fact that very few lesbian artists working in the feminist stream of the 1970s engaged with explicitly lesbian subjects (Lord 2007: 443). Many preferring to create within other categories—the Great Goddess tradition, video, or cunt art, for example—even those lesbian artists who explicitly defined themselves as such frequently refrained from describing actual sexual relations in favour of portraying the general experience of being a lesbian in a patriarchal world. One such example is the video work entitled Nun and Deviant (1976) by artists Nancy Angelo and Candace Compton. Dealing with the(ir) lesbian experience and the way in which heterosexual and lesbian women are perceived within Western culture, the film shows the two artists in contrasting apparel—one dressed as a nun, her entire countenance exemplifying modesty and restraint, the other, while an apparently “ordinary” woman, speaking like a slut and behaving like a “pervert”. Based on the familiar binary formula characteristic of phallocentric culture—the “saint vs. the sinner” or the “virtuous mother vs. the

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promiscuous whore”, the work invokes humour to dismantle these repressive antitheses by giving them new content: even if—as in a convent—no men are to be found, women do not need to sentence themselves to celibacy but can enjoy a fulfilling life, practicing sexuality between themselves. One of the artists who focused—like so many of the American firstgeneration feminist artists—on the female sexual organs as part of the feminist-lesbian search for new ways of realising woman’s sexuality was Tee Corinne, whose work I examined above under cunt art. The creation of the Cunt Coloring Book (1975) (FIG. 11) was aided by the assistance of close friends from the lesbian community, who were delighted to serve as her as models. While Corinne did not specifically define the book as lesbian art, it was intended for sharing amongst her lesbian friends and directly reflected her aspiration for personal and lesbian-community enhancement. Some of Corinne’s works do explicitly depict lesbian sexual relationships—one photograph, entitled Sinister Wisdom (1977) (FIG. 25), featuring two naked women embracing, the hand of the one between the legs of the other, pleasuring her lover by penetration—a representation that struck many spectators and critics as over(t)ly crude.

FIGURE 1-25. Tee Corinne, Sinister Wisdom, 1977. Black and white photograph, Coll. 263. Special Collection and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene, OR.

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The atmosphere of love and mutual trust—rather than cold, instrumental pornographic illustration—is created in part by the unusual decision to print the photo as a negative. Black becoming white and white black, this technique also functioned as an “inverted” critique of the hetero-normative attitude that such a “position” is unnatural, dark, and sinister. While lesbians were marginalised solely due to their “perverted” desires, this picture portrays beauty, tenderness, and trust—the epitome of “normal”, heterosexual love. In similar fashion, Corinne also shot a series of photographs of women from a variety of populations and social status not generally the subject of mainstream art—elderly or wheelchairs-bound lesbian couples (Boffin and Fraser 1991: 18). Another artist who produced intense and candid lesbian art was Barbara Hammer. From her earliest films—such as Dyketactics (1974), Superdyke (1975), and Women I love (1976)—her boldness was evident in her enthusiastic and lyrical exploration of sexuality and women’s pleasure. Hammer frequently invented new formal representations in a rich technical syntax: superimposed layering of images, visual collage, film colouring or alteration, de-framing, the use of solarised and negative film, and post-production editing in order to transform the movie into poetic form by manipulating the film. One of the first organised expressions of lesbian feminist art in the United States took place at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles in 1977, initiated by Arlene Raven. Amongst the artistic enterprises the centre sponsored was the “Lesbian Art Project”. A collaboration between local lesbian feminist artists, these performances were staged in front of an exclusively female audience. While not featuring any explicit expression of lesbian sexuality or sexual praxis, they nonetheless presented the lives and experiences of women who had chosen to live as lesbians. Other artists more frequently depicted the experiences of the lesbian community, documenting and incorporating into their work the lives of women from their inner circle who subscribed to feminist ideology. Thus, for example, Cathy Cade, a documentary photographer, documented lesbians of every age, race, and social status with the aim of subverting the conventional stereotyped images of lesbianism prevalent at the time in the United States. Offering an alternative model, she was convinced that this served as the most fruitful way she could contribute to the developing feminist movement. The Women’s Liberation Movement provided Cade with both ideology and documentary material, many of her photographs focusing on social-justice issues and commemorating demonstrations against the repression of women in general and lesbians in particular. Like Cade, lesbian documentary photographers Joan Biren and

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Betty Lane also focused on depicting the public, family, and social experiences of lesbians. Although Tee Corinne’s work was well represented in feministexhibition spaces, the majority of lesbian artists who created art which dealt directly with lesbianism were excluded from these forums. The fact that the alternative spaces established by feminist artists tended to showcase white, heterosexual feminist artists belonging to the established middle classes was also a contributing factor in the dismissal and suppression of the work of lesbian artists (Hammond 2000: 16). Often barred from museum or gallery space, and thus finding it difficult to publish catalogues and brochures, they were forced to settle for posters, postcards, albums, and alternative advertising (Cottingham 2003: 149). Very few succeeded in breaking through the Establishment barriers, the sparse documentation of their works further marginalising their work by precluding its access to researchers and the public.

Summary The various feminist streams of art prevalent during the 1970s are differentiated from one another by the type of medium, size, and message they sought to convey. Some adopted new materials and media—such as video—others sought to challenge and subvert precisely by employing time-honoured media, such as oil paintings and wood sculpture. The diverse movements all shared a common theme, however, namely, the female body, whether portrayed explicitly—as in Carolee Schneemann’s performance Interior Scroll, which presented her intimate organs to the public gaze (FIG. 5)—or merely hinted at, indirectly and delicately—as in Joyce Kozloff’s geometrical and rhythmical patterns reflecting the internal rhythms of the female body (FIG. 20). The choice of this “object” as “subject” was not coincidental, the radical feminist artists regarding the woman’s body as the focal site from which it is both possible and necessary to draw knowledge regarding the female experience—as well as the source from which to gather renewed strength in the struggle for women’s liberation from patriarchal repression. Both political and social awareness of second-wave feminist ideology reaching its height during this decade, the varied ways feminist artists sought to express their individual, collective, and political experience centred around the female body—only “essentialism” being capable of conveying the uniqueness of the alternative female culture they hoped would challenge the patriarchalism of the Western hegemonic world.

CHAPTER THREE ATTITUDES TOWARDS 1970S’ FEMINIST ART

The feminist artists of the 1970s in the United States received mixed reviews. Dealing with female experience in a patriarchal culture via representation of the female body, their art was fiercely criticised not only by men but also by women. Many European feminist artists, especially those in Britain, also objected to contemporary American feminist art due to what they considered to be its essentialism—they themselves taking pains to avoid depictions of the female body—although some European artists, especially Dutch and German, focused on depicting the experiences of the female body, especially by new media such as performance and video (Wentrack 2012: 80). In contrast to the negative reception of American feminist art, the European artists’ focus on the female body was frequently welcomed and celebrated by critics and artists, who acknowledged the important contribution such art made to the feminist struggle. The controversy over the various manifestations of feminist art created on both sides of the Atlantic engendered an intense, critical discourse which—even four decades later—continues to serve as a source of prolific analysis and research.

A. Anti-Essentialist Art: Against Radical Feminism The Voyeuristic Gaze One of the principal criticisms levelled against the first-generation American feminist artists was that representation of the female body as subject led to its identification as a signifier, thereby exposing it—in the traditional manner of Western art—to the exploitative voyeuristic male gaze. Significantly, this criticism was not solely European in origin, Americans such as Andrea Liss also strongly objecting to the essentialist approach adopted by American radical artists. Maintaining that the majority of American feminist artists who portrayed the female body in their art were unable to avoid the trap of becoming the object of the male gaze, Liss argued that they were thus incapable of finding a way to

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undermine or dismantle the idea of femininity as a pre-given and fixed entity. She also drew attention to the debates conducted within the feminist movement over what elements within woman’s identity should be regarded as central, as well as the divergences between the essentialist approach—promoted by such philosophers as Mary Daly, Susan Griffin, and Adrienne Rich—and the more analytical approach prevailing in Europe: The British feminist debates of the 1970s centered around the uneasy status of representing women’s bodies. In along moment when women were reclaiming their bodies for themselves and Laura Mulvey was establishing theoretical and practical links between Freudian looking and the male film spectator, it was a strategic feminine move to eschew easily available mimetic representations of women’s bodies. What I am of course bracketing here are the debates between female essentialism and a more analytic stance that posits bodies and identities as highly constructed and exploited entities. Strategic as these ways of thinking were in the 1970s, crucial now are ways of representing that do not continue to allow the patriarchal scheme that divides women’s minds from our bodies and our desires. (Liss 1994: 87)

The male “gaze” in cinema was first explored by Laura Mulvey in an essay entitled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, in which she argued that: Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. It is these cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged. (Mulvey 1999: 843)

Developing this thesis, British art historian Giselda Pollock maintained in “Screening the 1970s: Sexuality and Representation in Feminist Practice – A Brechtian Perspective” (1988) that: Artistic practices have also been implicated in the manufacture and repetition of sexual positions in the way that they manage desire and pleasure, fuel fantasies and situate the viewer. Feminist practices have insisted upon the recognition of gender specificity in art as elsewhere but selected practices have addressed precisely the way in which the sexing of objects and the production of sexual differences are effected and renegotiated in the ceaseless circulation of visual and other representations. (Pollock 2003: 81)

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Women as Belonging to Nature The American critic Sherry Ortner addressed the issue of the exploitative male gaze from another perspective, joining her anthropological feminist voice to that of Liss, Mulvey, and Pollock by positing a causal relationship between the ascription of women to nature and male interest in control. In an essay entitled “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?”, Ortner claimed that in “reality”, women are no closer to nature than men, the formula merely constituting a cultural construct (Ortner 1974: 67-88). The dichotomy continuing to survive because it serves patriarchal interest to reinforce it, the stranger fact is its acceptance by so many feminists—including the Great Goddess artists who sought to reconnect with the feminine side of fertility rituals and highlighted such ancient forces as Mother Earth. The attempt to restrict these rites exclusively to women, Ortner argued, created a separatist and intolerant ghetto mentality—in the face not only of the male gaze but also of other women holding opinions different to their own.

Fear of the Body A possible source of the extreme criticism and rejection of feminist art’s focus on the female body may have been the deep-seated sociopsychological fear of the human body in general and female physicality in particular prevalent within the West. According to the traditional phallocentric view, the “natural” woman arouses disgust, her bodily hair— armpit, leg, and pubic—being a gross feature which must be concealed, if not totally removed, her bodily odours masked by perfume and deodorant, and her vaginal secretions disowned. Female sexual behaviour celebrating pleasure in natural and legitimate feelings being regarded as “slutty”, immodest, (and) female, voluptuousness and vitality were off-putting and “unattractive” qualities to be shunned in favour of anorexically-thin figures. In contrast to the male, who as he matures, grows wiser and “accumulates life experience”—thereby being represented as a dignified, transcendental figure—the female as she grows older is merely a gross exhibition of wrinkles, loose skin, sagging bosoms, and spreading bottom. Only capable of arousing revulsion, such representations must be banned to the realm of the inappropriate. The female body reminding men of the most frightening thing of all—human mortality—as Simone de Beauvoir claimed, the Western recoil from physical deterioration is directed specifically at the body out of which we all enter this world—the mother:

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“From the day of his birth man begins to die: this is the truth incarnated in the Mother ... Although he endeavors to distinguish mother and wife, he gets from both a witness to one thing only: his mortal state” (de Beauvoir 1953: 165-66). The direct challenge to the perceptions and fears associated with the female body made by bod(il)y art may well thus lie behind the harsh denunciation of feminist art streams such as cunt art, performances involving sexual organs or invoking women’s anatomy and menstrual flow, and other female “outrages” intended to draw the observer’s “gaze” towards his own deepest fears. In an article entitled “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abject” (1986), art critic Barbara Creed noted that: Images of blood, vomit, pus, shit, etc., are central to our culturallyconstructed notions of the horrific. They signify a split between two orders: the maternal authority and the law of the father. On the one hand, these images of bodily wastes threaten a subject that is already constituted, in relation to the symbolic, as “whole and proper”. Consequently, they fill the subject with disgust and loathing. On the other hand, they also point back to a time when a “fusion between mother and nature” existed; when bodily wastes, while set apart from the body, were not seen as objects of embarrassment and shame. (Creed 1986: 51).

The term “abjection” is primarily associated with the philosopher Julia Kristeva. Among other issues in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), she discusses bodily secretions and the response they invoke in Western society, suggesting that it is precisely such items which arouse horror. Constituting a place where meaning collapses—the border between what is human and what is not—the abject threatens to annihilate the subject: “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite ... The border has become an object. How can I be with border?” (Kristeva 1982: 3). Kristeva’s notion of perimeters and liminal sites adduces one of the most significant human boundaries—the skin—which differentiates the body from the outside world, the “I” from the “Other”. Abjection—in the form of the woman’s body—thus being perceived not only as repellent but also as “attractive”, it is linked to a broad spectrum of social and cultural norms and taboos alike. Thus, for example, the preoccupation with food, which enters from the outside to become part of the body itself, and bodily secretions—particularly those of the woman’s body and thus also of sexual activity—symbolically regulates social customs and conduct.

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Significantly, the three further categories Kristeva adduces as eliciting a sense of the abject—food, physical changes, and death—are precisely the subjects which engaged the first generation of American feminist artists, as evidenced by such pieces as Keren LeCocq and Nancy Youdelman’s Leah’s Room (FIG. 3), Judy Chicago’s Menstruation Bathroom, Suzanne Lacy’s Learn Where the Meat Comes From, Nina Sobell’s Hey Baby Chickie, and Martha Rosler’s The Semiotics of the Kitchen (FIG. 12), etc.

Exclusion from Mainstream Art The first-generation American artists also aroused the ire of critics and viewers due to prevailing perceptions within the contemporary mainstream art world. During the 1970s, the hegemonic critique of modern art took its cue from influential cultural figures and the male-created ideational framework. One such personality was the American art critic Clement Greenberg. An aficionado of modern art—its formalist and abstract manifestations in particular—Greenberg preached and promoted his “vision” of art as an exclusively visual form (Greenberg 1966). While the controlling ideology in the art world of the time contended that gender is of no importance with respect to the creation of good art work, most successful artists were in fact men. Ostensibly endorsing a neutral aesthetic, in practice this ideology thus expressed and served the worldview of the patriarchal order. Excluded from what was considered high art because their oeuvre contained explicit images of the female body, narrative foundations, and elements of ostensibly “low” popular art, feminist artists and their work were contemptuously dismissed by the mainstream. The formalist stance exemplified by Greenberg effectively constituted conservative modernism—characterised by the values of white, bourgeois, middle-class male artists and critics (Jones 1996: 87). This stance, crystallised in the 1950s and already predominant by the following decade, made claims to the “purity” and “self-definition” of art, reflecting Greenberg’s ideas as expressed in an earlier essay (1939) regarding “kitsch”—wherein he contrasted the avant-garde (i.e., high modernism) with popular, narratival “low” art linked in public consciousness with female taste and domestic arts (Greenberg 1961: 10). This attitude developed into a hardened and virtually invincible discriminatory male tradition against which feminist art possessed little force to protest during this period.

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B. Essentialist Art: Pro-Radical Feminism Many of those who welcomed the emergence of radical feminist art drew attention to the fact that every political organisation must contain a certain degree of essentialism, the physical body constituting a necessary part of both sexual and radical politics. As a cornerstone of the “politics of identity”, essentialism facilitates the political realisation of the feminist experience. In an attempt to clarify this issue, the cultural critic Diana Fuss raised the question of whether essentialism comprises a political matter or a strategic value, determining that the answer depends on “who practices it” and “the subject-position from which one speaks” (Fuss 1989: 32; cf. 68, 114). Defining essentialism as partnership and shared experience within distinct groups of people, she argued that it must form a component of every type of representative politics—being careful to stress, however, that “‘experience’ is rather shaky ground on which to base the idea of a class of women ... The problem with categories like ‘the female experience’ ... is that, given their generality and seamlessness, they are of limited epistemological usefulness” (1989: 25, 27). The “truth of the experience” is therefore an ideological product which cannot be detached from the political. Despite their efforts to defend first-generation feminist art, theoreticians struggled to define “women’s art”—particularly in relation to the question of essentialism. As feminist researcher Cindy Nemser commented: Regarding the question of a common point of view or style among these women, the only link I found in their work was its essentially affirmative nature … On the other hand, I believe that art is a synthesis of the artist’s multiple characteristics: physical traits, race, class, ethnic background, social circle, philosophical milieu, as well as gender. (Nemser 1995: 6-7)

This ambivalence is even more clearly reflected in an article entitled “Six” by the critic Lucy Lippard, published in 1974. Herein, Lippard dialogued with herself, asking: “Is there a women’s art? ... I don’t know, is there? Well, there should be. Women’s experience—social and biological—in this and every other society, is different from men’s ... Nobody whose consciousness has been raised wants to be seen as just a vagina, a cunt” (Lippard 1995: 90, 92). One of the most prominent writers to affirm and defend the essentialism of radical feminist art was the critic Lisa Tickner. In an article entitled “The Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Women Artists Since 1970”, published in 1978, she argued that the female body constitutes a “colonial territory” which requires urgent liberation from its domination

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by male fantasy. Discussing the quality of art during the 1970s, she further maintained that, female experience differing from male experience, art created by women bears a completely different potential—whose realization demands autonomy and a grounding in female experience and its physical derivatives. American artists Harmony Hammond also alleged that the fact that completely rationalistic, distanced, clean feminist art is a priori unattainable, it should rather celebrate genuine female emotions: For a long time, and in varying degrees, women have been denied the sexual imagery in their work. Too threatening to be taken seriously, woman-centered art that is overtly sexual is still trivialized, ridiculed, or ignored. However, consciousness and claiming of one’s self, sexual, as well as intellectual and spiritual, open a powerful creative source for women. If we are to make art that has meaning, it must be honest, and to make art that is honest, it is essential that we do not cut off any part of ourselves. Sexuality is something we all possess. A sense of touch is necessary. For art. For revolution. For life. (Hammond 1984: 84)

C. Later Criticism Despite the belittling of first-generation feminist art by the majority of second-generation feminist researchers active in the 1980s, some of the latter came to the defence of their predecessors. This trend accelerated towards the end of the 1990s—i.e., during the period of “third-generation” feminist criticism, which witnessed a growing number of researchers willing to view the work of the first generation in a positive and affirmative light. This stance has been further reinforced by a subsequent wave of studies and exhibitions of the work of the first-generation artists.15 Describing the harsh criticism levelled at the first-generation American feminist artists up until 2000, art researcher Michelle Moravec notes that an arbitrary—but virtually total—division existed between the “good” feminist art of the 1990s and the “bad” feminist art of the 1970s: Historians have not been alone in their creation of a mythology about the women’s movement. For their part, art historians have created their own narrative of the concomitant feminist art movement that also obscures the contributions of groups like The Waitresses. In particular, a value-laden juxtaposition of bad 1970s feminist art and good 1990s feminist art has led, until very recent years, to a lack of thorough exploration of 1970s feminist art. What little has been written privileges artists who can been seen as the precursors of post-modern feminism. These efforts distort or flat out evince ignorance of the many endeavours of 1970s feminist artists ... The story of feminist art history largely rests on a teleological narrative ending with

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postmodernism and has created a persistent mythology that all 1970s feminist art relied on essentialism and earnestness. (Moravec 2008: 73) .

Amelia Jones similarly contends that young feminists who declare themselves as “post-feminists” cause an enormous amount of harm to the feminist art of the 1970s: Today there appears to be little understanding of the complexities of the 1970s feminism and its historical context. The results of this loss of history are damaging: younger generations of feminists have little access to the wealth of insight that were painfully developed in the art and theory of this period and waste time reinventing what has already been extensively theorized. (Jones 1996: 86)

This has also been the constant cry of critic Lucy Lippard, who devoted an extensive section to this subject in her seminal book The Pink Glass Swan (1995) (Lippard 1995: 5-28). Contemporary critics and art researchers now suggest that the rejection of the first-generation art of the 1970s was the result of the political strategy adopted by second-generation artists to give their own art a higher and more elevated status. New studies comparing the two periods have also expanded the field of discourse regarding the feminist art of the 1970s and ’80s, it now being increasingly argued that its earlier (d)evaluation as one dimensional, low, tendentious, and “solely essentialist” was both erroneous and prejudicial. One of those who maintains that the first-generation artists have been treated unfairly is the researcher Marlena Doktorczyk-Donohue, who—in an article entitled “The Waitresses in Context” (2008)—argues that the labelling of first-generation American feminist art as essentialist and unsophisticated was retroactive, gaining strength with the passage of time. At the same time, however, she also implicates contemporary (1970s) feminist art critics, whose critical writings formed the basis for the conclusions reached by following generations of researchers. Amongst those she regards as having slighted the first-generation American feminist artists—even if unwittingly—she cites critics such as Arlene Raven, whose white, biological perspective contributed to a distorted, onedimensional image of the first-generation artists as a hegemonic group dedicated to creating exclusively essentialist art. This trend, Doktorczyk-Donohue maintains, was perpetuated during the 1980s and ’90s by engagement with “new” types of criticism—such the “politics of identity”, scholarly espousal of linguistic and Lacanian principles, and interpretative essays drawing upon the fields of transnational, post-colonialist, and queer discourse. Against such a polyphonic,

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multicultural, and pluralistic world view, the art and art criticism of the previous generation—as exemplified by Raven—appeared pale and banal. Analysis of the art works of the 1970s from the new perspectives of the discourse established in the 1990s onwards elicits new insights. The criticism written during the 1970s derived primarily from the pens of welleducated, white, upper-middle-class feminist activists, philosophers, and artists—in relation to whom lesbian or black feminist critics and artists felt disadvantaged. Lesbian artists experienced heterosexual feminists as seeking to make them invisible and cut them out of the discourse in order not to be tarnished by their deviant sexual “brush”. Black feminists pointed to the enormous gaps between their agenda and that of white women while women of colour and lesbians alike felt marginalised both within and without the movement—convinced that their agenda was being eclipsed by the political and preferences of white women. Certain groups within the feminist movement—whose needs were similarly ignored by the power-wielding group of white, educated, economically-established women—ultimately abandoned mainstream feminism to establish their own feminist movements. Current studies likewise demonstrate that other forms of criticism deriving from the 1970s—some very sophisticated and multi-layered, appealing to such discourses as post-colonial thought—remained far less known to the public, the authors—lesbian or black feminists—not always being in possession of the “right connections” to find publication with major publishing houses, thereby precluding the widespread circulation of their texts. Despite the fact that the feminist art movement was ostensibly dissociated from the general art scene of the 1970s, its relevance and intersection with the mainstream art field has become evident retrospectively. As such researchers as Jayne Wark pointed out at the end of the 1990s, many of the varied forms and sub-varieties of 1970s’ American feminist art that had formerly been regarded as a monolithic set of works were in fact divergent, frequently aspiring to a very diverse styles, content, and purpose. Some feminist artists, for example, employed conceptual principles identified with mainstream male modernist art. Amelia Jones makes a similar argument—while also stressing that the emphasis placed on political activism and expressions of female oppression in a patriarchal world did not automatically mean that this form of art was characterised by an unsophisticated, content-less essentialism, 1970s’ feminists themselves maintaining that femininity is not biologicalessentialist but cultural. Taking Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party as an example, Jones maintains that analysing it as a simplistic return to female

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physical characteristics—sexual organs—in order to define “woman” and the female experience, critics wronged first-generation American feminist art. Not only did they put presentation of the female body in the service of promulgating the legitimate right of women to create their own identity and fight discrimination but they also produced a deep, complex, and progressive understanding of the categories “woman” and “feminine experience” as cultural constructs rather than biological facts. Without the foundation of the emergence of first-generation feminist art and philosophy, the theories and discourse of the second generation—or even those of the present day—would not have been able to develop (Jones 1996: 84-118). Art critic Joanna Frueh similarly argues that the feminist artists of the 1970s—particularly those who engaged with bodily art and presented their own naked bodies, such as Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, and Lynda Benglis—in actual fact countered pure essentialism. Seeking to tear off the false “female beauty mask” constructed for them by patriarchy, their performances undermined the prevailing notions of femininity, abrogating the very idea of femininity as natural and inborn (Frueh 1994: 194). This approach paved the way for theories that have become prevalent in contemporary discourse—such as that propounded by the prominent feminist philosopher Judith Butler. Alleging in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) that gender is not an essentialist category but a social construct deriving from the endless imitation and repetition of gendered behaviour, Butler contends that, being formed performatively via external expressions perceived as the consequences of this performance, identity is an unstable and mutable category—and thus constitutes an inadequate basis for understanding gender issues. Re/viewing the feminist art of the 1970s from a distance of over three decades, its themes, strategies, and character can be understood as stemming from a deep and urgent need for social change—combined with a deep understanding of theoretical issues relating to constructed gender identity. Feminist ideology and activism freed the first-generation American feminist artists from the need to convey their message via subtle symbolism in order not to offend their audiences—the pressing need for a revolution in the status of women demanding that they refuse to recoil from employing any form available and take on the battle(s) via direct, radical messages. Seeking to introduce a new language into the traditional system of representation, first-generation artists did not enjoy the luxury of the more subtle and stratified tactics associated with contemporary postmodern feminism.

PART II TEST CASE

CHAPTER ONE THE POST-PARTUM DOCUMENT: THE EXCEPTION THAT PROVES THE RULE

Mary Kelly constitutes a test case for our examination of the firstgeneration feminist artists due to the fact that her choice of art form, content, and theoretical discourse all stand in stark contrast to the firstgeneration American feminist artists. Although born in the United States (1941), Kelly moved to London at the end of the 1960s at the age of twenty-seven—the two decades she spent in England being decisive for her intellectual and artistic development alike. Kelly was part of a group of British artists, critics, and philosophers who shared a common interest in politics and psychoanalytical theories connected with feminism that included such figures as Griselda Pollock, Rozsika Parker, Laura Mulvey, and Juliet Mitchell (Iversen 1997: 35). While influenced by the Marxist feminism prevalent in England at the time, her primary source of inspiration derived from French theories, whose ideas—while permeating Europe in the early 1970s—only took root in feminist circles in the United States a decade later. One of the central pieces of her oeuvre is the vastly influential PostPartum Document, which describes the first six years of her life with her son. Herein, rather than attempting to describe the development of a specific child—her own son—Kelly endeavoured to convey the experiences and desires of a mother as she practices her craft: motherhood. During the 1970s, Kelly was one of a very limited number of American artists who engaged deeply and at length with this complex subject.16 Just as the feminist theoretical discourse in the United States began to debate the subject intensively, the topic gradually disappeared from feminist representational visual art—being perceived within the plastic arts, literature, poetry, and film alike as a charged and extremely problematic issue.17 Mary Kelly’s work being distinctive in this respect, she constitutes the “exception that proves the rule”. Via a psychoanalytically- and politically-informed analysis of motherhood and child-rearing, Kelly set out to challenge the social prejudice against “natural motherhood” and the “maternal instinct”. While

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protesting against the conventional antithesis between creativity and motherhood, she also drew attention to the complex and contradictory emotions inherent in the latter—discussion of which hegemonic male culture dictates to be taboo. In the face of the Western trend towards focusing on child development and favouring the child’s narrative over the emotional world of the mother who has just given birth to him/her, Kelly insisted on providing the woman/mother’s account: In the Post-Partum Document, I am trying to show the reciprocity of the process of socialisation in the first few years of life. It is not only the infant whose future personality is formed at this crucial moment, but also the mother whose “feminine psychology” is sealed by the sexual division of labour in childcare. (Kelly 1983: 1)

A monumental artwork—complex, multifaceted, and broad-based—the Post-Partum Document depicts an intensive period of life by fusing texts and theoretical ideas with visual components, the dual media creating a vast space for interpretation and profound thought. As Kelly herself described its genesis and evolution: Post-Partum Document was conceived as an on-going analysis and visualisation of the mother-child relationship. It was born as an installation in six consecutive sections, comprising in all 135 small units. It grew up as an exhibition, adapted to a variety of genres (some realising my desire for it to be what I wanted it to be, others resisting, transgressing) and finally reproduced itself in the form of a book. (Kelly 1983: xv)

Over the six years (1973-1979) of its conception and growth, Kelly collected artifacts and information relating to the bond established with her son during the first five years of his life. First presented in 1975, in the following years it was shown both in full and part, being presented for the first time in toto in 1984 in an exhibition entitled “The Critical Eye/I” held at the Yale Centre for British Art. The discussion below relates to the text (1983), following its tripartite division: A. Method, examining the structure and method of the piece. B. Contents, depicting its six parts. C. Theory and philosophy, analysing the work’s significance in the light of theoretical studies.

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A. Method: Structure of the Piece and Work Method The Post-Partum Document installation consists of an introduction and six central sections composed of 135 objects exhibited in frames of uniform size and created out of transparent Perspex, the long visual entity exuding a sense of alienation characteristic of the conceptual and minimalist art stream dominant in the contemporary Western art world (FIG. 1).

FIGURE 2-1. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1973-1979. General view of the installation, the Generali Foundation, Vienna.

The six sections establish a consistent, strictly-preserved structure, each containing three parts—an opening segment, a middle section, and a summary—whose structure we shall follow here. The opening and summary parts are primarily textual in form, the middle being figural.

Opening Section: “Documentation” The opening part of each section, entitled “Documentation”, describes and defines the elements which serve as the raw material out of which the objects presented in the middle section are constructed. The latter include verbal-ideational items—thoughts, recorded conversations, survey findings—and physical materials (nappies, drawings, insects, etc.). Kelly

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adduces the reasons for the choice of the pieces and the method which led to the creation of the work—and the psychoanalytic ideas which buttress the textual analysis in the summary section. Throughout, she refers to the theory of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, reflecting his concepts theoretically, substantively, and visually in the form of letters of the alphabet, graphics, and diagrams. Exemplifying the objects that will appear further on, she explains how to read the visual elements—such as the letters or numbers she uses as abbreviations for her various classifications or Lacanian algebra letters. Each opening text is prefaced by a visual element associated with the content of the section. The first consists of a metabolic graph relating to her son’s first year of life taken from a book on children’s medicine, the second being a table depicting infant verbal development. An understanding of the visuals prefacing the third through the sixth sections requires reading the notes at the end of the installation, these constituting a system of coordinates—such as a optical diagram by Leonardo da Vinci or a phonemic diagram of the syllables a child uses when learning to speak.

Middle Section This part presents various treated objects relating to the first six years of Kelly’s son’s life.

Summary: Experimentum Mentis The final section comprises a reflexive text summarising the subject introduced in the “Documentation” section and a prefacing question—such as “Why don’t I understand?” (II). The query is formulated as a mathematical fraction, the upper part (the numerator) constituting the question, the lower part (the denominator) consisting of the letter S—the Lacanian sign for the subject. On the preceding page, Kelly provides a variation of Lacan’s R-scheme (1959) depicting the structure of the object—the three parts of the diagram similarly representing Lacan’s Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic orders. This diagram being repeated in each section, the bottom formula—the matheme—changing each time, Lacan’s theory thus clearly and overtly serves as Kelly’s principal source of reference. The heading which follows on the subsequent page—Weaning from the holophrase (II), for example—presents the intellectual, emotional, or psychological problem with which the section engages, the text providing a psychoanalytical explanation and analysis in a style combining personal experience with scientific terminology.

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B. Contents: Description of the Work Influenced by conceptual and feminist art alike, the texts and objects of the Post-Partum Document form an active part of the interpretation of the work. In addition to the critical articles regarding the piece, Kelly also offered her own analysis, contributing to its understanding—as we shall see below—by presenting relevant theoretical texts alongside her personal thoughts concerning the process of creating the work.

Introduction The opening section of the exhibition—“Introduction”—features a row of four baby vests upon which Lacan’s diagram of intersubjectivity is sequentially constructed. The first objects Kelly created for the project, the vests symbolise the development of the mother-child relationship—the mother’s close bonding with these objects being mediated by an interpretive theory (Scheflan-Katzav 2008: 178).

Documentation I The opening section features a metabolism graph (FIG. 2) whose temporal axis indicates the statistics relating to Kelly’s son’s first months: body weight, muscular activity, basal metabolism, excretal loss, and caloric requirements. In the text on the facing page, Kelly explains her purpose and the manner whereby the items in the section were constructed: The feeding, changing process was recorded over a period of three months, January to March 1974. February, the infant’s sixth month, was presented in this document because it represented the interval of most rapid change. The total amount of solids taken on February 1 was 8 tsps and on February 28 it was 30 tsps. This corresponded to a gain in weight from 16 lbs 10½ ozs to 18 lbs 2½ ozs. In the document on exhibition, the infant’s daily nutritional intake was correlated with his stools, i.e. the stained liners, and these were analysed according to the following key: 01 02 03 04 05

Constipated Normal Not homogeneous Loose Diarrhoeal. (Kelly 1983: 9)

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FIGURE 2-2. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1974. Detail from “Documentation I[:] Analysed faecal stains and feeding charts”. Perspex units, white card, diaper lining, plastic sheeting, paper, ink, 28 x 35.5 cm. Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The middle part comprises 28 items (FIG. 3), one for each day of the month (February). Beneath traces of the faecal stains from the baby’s nappies, Kelly printed a daily feeding report summarising what he had consumed, at what hour, and the overall amount of fluids and solids—each excreta stain being classified according to the key. The question posed being “What have I done wrong?”, the summary section—headed by Lacan’s R-scheme—is entitled Weaning from the breast. Herein, Kelly sought to elucidate for her viewers the psychoanalytical theory—adapted to a unique feminist-psychoanalytical approach—on which she drew:

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Part II—Chapter One Weaning from the breast is a significant discovery of absence not only for the child but also for the mother In so far as it is a real separation, can be specularised, it does not provoke a ‘recognition’ of castration, but it does rupture the symbiosis of the biologically-determined mother–child unit. (Kelly 1983: 40)

FIGURE 2-3. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1974. Detail from “Documentation I[:] Analysed faecal stains and feeding chart”. Perspex units, white card, diaper lining, plastic sheeting, paper, ink, 28 x 35.5 cm. Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Documentation II This section addresses the period in which the infant utters his first words, the middle part containing 23 objects (Fig. 4), each documenting an aspect of the learning-to-talk process. The upper part of the work features a text defining a “single-word utterance”—“the identifiable phonemic content of the child’s utterance” (“mo”, for example), its “gloss” or “the grammatical relation in which the mother thinks the utterance” (“give me

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‘more’ milk”), the “function” it fulfils (“the relations of existence, nonexistence and recurrence which ground the utterance in an intersubjective discourse”: recurrence), the baby’s age, and the date on which the speechevent occurred.

FIGURE 2-4. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1975. Detail from “Documentation II[:] Analysed Utterances and Related Speech Events”. Perspex units, white card, wood, paper, ink, rubber, 20.5 x 25.5 cm. Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

At the head of the page stand printed letters set in mirror-image, underneath which are embedded printed words, the lower part displaying a card-index carrying a description of the circumstances and connection in which the words were uttered. The prefacing question is “Why don’t I understand?”, the summary heading Weaning from the holophrase—a holophrase being a single word which serves as a sentence, the subject and predicate expressing a full idea (“Go!”, for example). As Kelly explains:

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Part II—Chapter One Because the acquisition of language is founded on a discovery of absence which is Imaginary, not Real, it is not only the constitutive instance in the formation of the child’s castration complex but it is also the pivotal moment in the mother’s ‘re-recognition’ of castration and of her own negative entry into language and culture. (Kelly 1983: 72)

Documentation III

FIGURE 2-5. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1975. Detail from “Documentation III[:] Analysed markings and diary-perspective schema”. Perspex units, white card, sugar paper, crayon, 35.5 x 28 cm. Collection of the Tate Gallery, London.

This section is constructed from the infant’s first scribbled drawings on sheets on paper—to which are added a report of his speech events and Kelly’s thoughts on the process (FIG. 5). The middle part contains ten “drawings” which, across the time-period, become increasingly rounded and formed—a fact that Kelly indicates in the opening text, constructing a fourteen-item key to classify the shapes (focused, scattered, vertical, horizontal, etc.), the category appearing at the bottom right of each item (S#). The prefacing question is “Why is he/she like that?”, the heading being Weaning from the dyad:

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For both the mother and the child, the crucial moment of ‘weaning’ is constituted by the intervention of a third term (i.e. the father), thus consolidating the Oedipal triad and undermining the Imaginary dyad which determined the inter-subjectivity of the pre-Oedipal instance. (Kelly 1983: 92)

Documentation IV

FIGURE 2-6. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1976. Detail from “Documentation IV[:] Transitional objects, diary and diagram”. Perspex units, white card, body/hand imprint in clay, plaster of Paris, cotton fabric, string, 28 x 35.5 cm. Collection of the Zurich Museum.

This section depicts the period during which the child reaches the age of around two-and-a half. The middle part contains eight items (FIG. 6), each consisting of a plaster cast of the child’s small fist framed within the Rscheme, underneath which are placed pieces of fabric—part of the child’s

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blanket, an object from his past—inscribed with text. Kelly’s thoughts, printed with a typewriter, acknowledge her ambivalence about “working outside the home”. Not only does she confront the “fear of separation” but she also examines the implications for mother rather than child. The prefacing question is “What do you want?”, the summary heading being On femininity. Herein, Kelly explains: When the mother anxiously poses the question ‘What do you want? (!)’ in response to her child’s whining, aggressive or clinging complaints, she is essentially asking herself ‘What does he/she want of me?’ The child’s demand constitutes the mother as the Other who has the privilege of satisfying his/her needs and at the same time, the whimsical power of depriving him/her of this satisfaction. To a certain extent the mother recognises the unconditional element of demand as a demand for love. It is this recognition which underlies her feelings of ‘ultimate responsibility’ for the child even when the sexual division of labour in childcare is radically altered to include the father. (Kelly 1983: 109)

Documentation V This section documents the child’s reaching the age of three—a stage in which he becomes increasingly curious about his body, prompting him to ask such questions as “What am I?” and “Who am I?” For this part of the art work Kelly collated objects—such as insects—the child gathered on his missions of exploration in the garden and brought to her as an offering. The middle section contains 11 items, each composed of three parts, totalling 33 in all. The first frame of each triptych contains the item the child brought as a gift—such as a butterfly (FIG. 7)—affixed with pins and identified by date, place of collection, and scientific definition. In the second frame, the biological specimen is drawn within a numerical square, beneath which, under the heading “Research”, the conversation between mother and child in which the child expresses his curiosity about his own body and his mother’s is noted (FIG. 8). The third frame contains a sketch of a diagram of a female body in the final stages of pregnancy (FIG. 9), underneath which a list of typical women’s diseases is enumerated. The prefacing question is “What am I?”, the summary heading being entitled On the order of things. This refers to the fact that:

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The mother’s relation to castration, to the Father and the Law, is called into question by the sexual researches of her child. These researches are crucial in structuring the castration complex. The consequences of this moment determine the child’s sexual identity and his future choice of love object. (Kelly 1983: 160)

FIGURE 2-7. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1977. Detail from “Documentation V[:] Classified specimens, proportional diagrams, statistical tables, research and index”. Perspex units, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, 13 x 18 cm. Collection of the Australian National Gallery, Canberra.

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FIGURE 2-8. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1977. Detail from “Documentation V[:] Classified specimens, proportional diagrams, statistical tables, research and index”. Perspex units, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, 13 x 18 cm. Collection of the Australian National Gallery, Canberra.

FIGURE 2-9. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1977. Detail from “Documentation V[:] Classified specimens, proportional diagrams, statistical tables, research and index”. Perspex units, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, 13 x 18 cm. Collection of the Australian National Gallery, Canberra.

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Documentation VI

FIGURE 2-10. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1978. Detail from “Documentation VI[:] Pre-writing alphabet, exergue and diary”. Perspex units, white card, resin and slate, 20 x 25.5 cm. Collection of the Arts Council of Great Britain.

This section documents the child’s development between three-and-ahalf and five-years old, during which he learns to read and write. The middle part is composed of 15 units, Kelly lightly engraving the child’s written texts on dark boards (FIG. 10), thereby creating the impression of an ancient Rosetta stone. In analogy to the latter’s tri-lingual character, Kelly divides her penmanship into three parts: the upper “hieroglyphics” written by the child, her own handwriting in the middle, and the lower

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typewritten text. The prefacing question is “What will I do?”, the heading On the insistence of the letter. As Kelly notes: With the inscription of his proper name, the child is instituted as author of his text. Each purposeful stroke disfigures the anagram, dismembers the body. The mother is dispossessed of the phallic attributes of the preOedipal instance, but only as if re-tracing a vague figure of repletion on a distant screen. Fading, forgetting; she cannot remember although ‘it seems like only yesterday’. This wound to her narcissism is now a caricature: a tearful bliss, a simulated ecstasy, a veritable stigmata in the Name-of-theFather. With the child’s insistent repetition of the Name, he appropriates the status of the Father, the dead Father, the absent Father, the precondition of the ‘word’. The incestuous meaning of the letter is ciphered by the paternal metaphor. (Kelly 1983: 188-89)

C. Theoretical Approaches The Post-Partum Document is a complex work engaging several subjects. As remarked above, Kelly herself offers numerous interpretations to the piece, both in its body and in the accompanying texts, creating a rich wealth of knowledge. Not only are Kelly’s theoretical links with French and Marxist feminism evident but—despite not generally being noted— they also reveal strong links with American radical feminism, as I shall discuss below. In the following, I shall analyse this piece from an interpretive and theoretical perspective in reference to selected works from feminist and general philosophy relating to the subjects dealt with in the artifact or expanding upon them.

Documentation I: Feeding and Weaning This section documents the feeding procedure during the first months of the baby’s life. The mother meticulously monitors the breast-feeding and weaning processes, seeking at every stage to ascertain whether or not the baby’s stools are “normal”—an anxiety-inducing and emotional task. Here, Kelly stresses the lack of correspondence between the mother’s feelings and the social expectations regarding her role: In the early post-partum period what the mother wants the child to be is primarily ‘healthy’. The normal faeces is not only an index of the infant’s health but also within the patriarchy it is appropriated as proof of the female’s natural capacity for maternity and childcare. But the impending absence of plenitude is expressed in her words ‘What have I done wrong?’

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The child is the mother’s symptom in so far as she is judged through him/her. (Kelly 1983: 41)

While Kelly both accepts and promotes the psychoanalytical theories she cites, she simultaneously exposes the tyranny of the Freudian tradition that governs Western thinking. Psychoanalysis representing a body of fundamentally male knowledge and authority, it is essentially alienated from the daily life of the mother, on occasion even stifling and repressing her. This chasm is symbolised in the first section by the metabolism graph, which exemplifies the male medical knowledge attained within phallocentric society—logical thought expressed in the form of axiomatic tables and statistical data. This is contrasted with actual daily life—soiled nappies and daily feeding procedures—in and through which the mother attempts to understand how well she is performing her maternal role. The juxtaposition of the two worlds prompts us to take a fresh, probing look at the Establishment, Kelly questioning the relevance of patriarchal knowledge and the male authority system for female childrearing. This issue was directly addressed by the American philosopher Adrienne Rich, who, in Of Woman Born, sought to locate motherhood within the broader patriarchal social framework. Analysing both its strengths and weaknesses—and endeavouring to remove it from its conventional biological framework and discuss it as a political matter— she differentiated motherhood as an institution in a patriarchal society from its actual experience. Criticising the social perception of the maternal institution, she argued that, as an institution, motherhood had restricted women’s abilities to a defined and delimited field, thereby diminishing their value. The maternal experience has traditionally been shaped not only by husbands but also by male gynaecologists, paediatricians, psychologists, and governments—all of whom tell young mothers how to feel and behave. In Rich’s view, the entire cultural system of concepts and emotions— as well as the economic, legal, and medical establishment—has led to the virtually categorical classification of the woman on the basis of motherhood: either mother or spinster. Women in phallocentric society being perceived primarily in terms of reproduction—and taking that definition upon themselves—they have been denied any opportunity of living and realising additional aspects of their existence, either as women or as human beings. As long as they endeavour to please men and give men the body they desire, they will necessarily remain trapped within feelings of guilt and inferiority—whether they strive to comply with patriarchal norms or struggle to dismantle them. Only when motherhood

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as an institution is completely abolished, Rich contends, can it become an experience women can freely choose. In revealing sections from her diary which contain her own personal account of bringing up small children in the 1960s, Rich describes the real experiences of a mother—alternating between love and hate, sweetness and violence, pity and disgust. One of her most important contributions was thus the legitimisation of an open discussion of the complexity of the mother-child relationship and authentic maternal feelings—while simultaneously exposing the less-pleasant aspects of motherhood. Through this text, motherhood was publicly acknowledged as not necessarily natural or instinctive feminine behaviour.

Documentation II—The Cornerstone of Language This section documents the infant’s first utterances at around eighteen months. The sounds he produces—such as “da-da” and “di-di”—are incomplete grammatical constructions whose significance is apparent only to the mother, thereby bonding mother and child together in a unique system, the mother turning them into meaningful words—fully persuaded that he is communicating with her. Despite comprising his/her first attempts at independent speech and functioning as an important mediator in his effort to connect with his environment, the strong mother-child symbiosis is maintained. The typeset letters—which are also represented by the original letters positioned in mirror-image—reflect the psychological stage the child is now experiencing. This is the Freudian pre-Oedipal or Lacanian mirror stage—the moment when, as he looks in the mirror, the child understands for the first time that the image it contains is his own (Iversen 1981: 81). According to Lacan, this is the phase during which the child acquires language and penetrates the Symbolic order, as he develops his sexual identity. Lacan’s theories were adopted and adapted by Julia Kristeva, who expanded them from a feminist perspective in relation to the archaic and literal territories of language. In her essay “Revolution in Poetic Language” (1974), she replaces Lacan’s concepts of the “Imaginary” and “Symbolic” with the “semiotic” and “symbolic”, the reciprocal relationship between them constituting the signification process. In contrast to the symbolic—an element of meaning within a signifier—the semiotic is linked to the primary processes of the pre-Oedipal stage. Preceding the symbolic and expressing the communication produced between mother and child via the senses, this creates meaning within a

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non-signifier. The dialectical interplay which creates the speaking subject already exists within the maternal body: Setting out to understand the signifying process (signifiance), Kristeva transforms Lacan’s distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic. The interaction between these two terms (which, it must be stressed, are processes, not static entities) then constitutes the signifying process. The semiotic is linked to the pre-Oedipal primary processes, the basic pulsions of which Kristeva sees as predominantly anal and oral, and as simultaneously dichotomous (life/death, expulsion/introjection) and heterogeneous. The endless flow of pulsions is gathered in the chora (from the Greek word for enclosed space, womb). Kristeva appropriates and redefines this Platonic concept and concludes that the chora is neither a sign nor a position, but ‘an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases … [original ellipsis] Neither model nor copy, the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal and kinetic rhythm’ ... (Moi 1986: 12-13)

This section of the Post-Partum Document thus depicts the “almostspeaking” child who engages in his first contact with language, his mother serving to define and interpret his babbling. As the subject who motivates and drives the process, she pulls the child from the semiotic into the symbolic, even the weakest of early signs being given meaning. The question Kelly poses at the end of the section—“Why don’t I understand?”—reflects the way in which the process affects the mother no less than the child.

Documentation III—The Fantasy of a Lost Continent In this section, Kelly documents the changes which occur in the tight mother-child dyadic bond. At the age of two, the child starting kindergarten, a split emerges in this dyadic existence. Herein, the infant begins the process of socialisation outside the family, being exposed to painting, writing, and language, the father also becoming more involved in the child’s life—not only in his physical presence but also in the mother’s verbal interactions with him and her appeal to him as an authority. At this stage, Kelly feels that she is gradually losing her “exclusivity” over her son. Symbolising her sense of being rent, Kelly employs several voices, which become merged on the actual page. The first is the child’s, the second the mother’s internal voice—supplemented by another internal voice of re-examination: thoughts about thoughts. All these are inscribed

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on the same scribbled drawings created by the child. In the child’s speech, the pronoun “I” begins to become more and more prevalent, signalling his developing use of language and increasing separation from his mother. While accepting the psychosexual theory of development championed by the psychoanalytical school—and thus knowing that the child is still in the pre-Oedipal stage—Kelly feels the compromising of the bond to be irreversible, understanding that this symbiosis cannot last forever. Julia Kristeva also addressed the pain felt by the mother during this stage, having experienced it firsthand. As she describes in “Women’s Time”, eternal symbiotic motherhood constitutes a form of utopia—an adult fantasy of a lost continent or ideal type of love: The arrival of the child … leads the mother into the labyrinth of an experience that, without the child, she would only rarely encounter: love for another. Not for herself, nor for an identical being, and still less for another person with whom “I” fuse (love or sexual passion). But the slow, difficult and delightful ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one’s affective, intellectual and professional personality – such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity. (Kristeva 1986: 206)

Documentation IV—A Chronicle of Foreseen Separation This section documents another step in the process of separation as the child reaches the age of two-and-a-half. This is given concrete representation via the plaster casts of his fists and torn pieces of his baby blanket—his “transitional object”. The casts and pieces of cloth being a substitute for the child himself, they function for his mother as a fetishistic replacement for the real infant whom she is gradually losing. Throughout this piece, and especially in this section, Kelly pioneers the concept of “female fetishism” (Kelly 1983: xv)—a move to which several feminist critics drew attention in analysing her work (Apter 1997). According to Freud—in his famous text “On Fetishism”—the person who turns the woman’s body into a fetish is the man, fetishism not necessarily being linked to a particular object but constituting the process of the displacement of an idea, object, or certain part of the body onto something else. Kelly, however, associated the original object of fetishism—the child—with the art objects presented in the exhibition, acknowledging that—to a certain extent, at least—her art in fact displaces the fetishism of the child. Likewise asserting that, in the Post-Partum Document, fetishism is represented by the mother’s memorabilia of her child’s possessions rather than related directly to sex and pornography, she

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exemplified the need to come to terms with the loss of the child and accept the consoling substitutes which take his place. Rather than saving such items as his first shoes as “objects from the past”, she chose to collect nappy stains, plaster casts of his fist, and the insects and bits of vegetation he gave her as gifts, these serving to console her and help her adjust to his growing individuation. Kelly was indeed the first feminist to use the terms “female fetishism” and “maternal fetishism” and thus introduce these concepts into the feminist discourse (Apter 1997: 6). While most people tend to interpret the memorabilia Kelly names “fetishes” nostalgically or anthropologically, Freudian theory regards the child as a penis-substitute for the mother. Kelly developed this idea by proposing that, if the mother perceives no possibility of holding onto the child/penis-substitute, she will grasp its “relics” instead. A number of scholars have suggested that Documentation IV engages with the pleasures of motherhood in relation to the incest taboo (Iversen 1981: 83). This issue was not confined to artistic representation but also formed a subject of theoretical discussion for numerous feminists. Shulamith Firestone, for example, refers in The Dialectic of Sex to the psychosexual drama associated with the Freudian Oedipal complex. Although one of the first feminists to contend that the power relations within the patriarchal nuclear family are responsible for the Oedipus and Electra complexes and “penis envy”, Firestone argued that the feminist revolution demanded the abolishment of “the family, and sexuality as it is now structured” in order to “eliminate the incest taboo” (Firestone 1971: 60). While Kelly may have become acquainted with the idea of the erotic attraction between a mother and her son from such feminist critics as Firestone, she did not offer the radical solutions proposed by the latter. Aware of the psychological problematic aspect of incest arising from the Oedipal transference (which she herself experienced as a mother), she nonetheless bowed to the dictates of contemporary society—including the Lacanian worldview which dictates that, under the prevailing circumstances, no other form or capability of expressing her true experiences as a woman or mother are available to her. Despite not believing there to be any way to fight this situation, she refused to allow her maternal voice to be silenced, rather embracing the option of exposing the oppressive mechanism and making it a part of public discourse. The theoretician Nancy Chodorow also related to the issue of sexual tension between mother and son. In The Reproduction of Motherhood: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, she devoted extensive space

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to the maternal experience and the way in which she perceived her children and their gender—frequently adducing the psychosexual process undergone by the male infant on his way to achieving healthy maturity. This notion formed the launching pad for an even more important subject, one of special interest to Chodorow—namely, the process undergone by the mother. Employing psychoanalysis to demonstrate that a woman desires a baby because of her dissatisfaction with her relationship with her husband, she asserted that mothers create a sexually-tinged relationship with their sons, from which they obtain sexual excitement “like from a little man with a penis”. Kelly’s work appears to exhibit affinities in this regard not only with theories such as those propounded by Chodorow but also those posited by Luce Irigaray. Speaking of the sexual transference from the man-husband onto the baby-boy, the latter claimed: It is true that she still has the child, in relation to whom her appetite for touch, for contact, has free rein, unless it is already lost, alienated by the taboo against touching of a highly obsessive civilization. Otherwise her pleasure will find, in the child, compensations for and diversion from the frustrations that she too often encounters in sexual relations per se. Thus maternity fills the gaps in a repressed female sexuality. Perhaps man and woman can no longer caress each other except through that mediation between them that the child—preferably a boy—represents? Man, identified with his son, rediscovers the pleasure of maternal fondling; woman touches herself again by caressing that part of her body: her babypenis-clitoris. (Irigaray 1985: 27)

Documentation V—The Butterfly Hunt This section documents the child’s life between two-years-and-ninemonths and four—a period during which he increasingly begins to interact with the world around him. In such acts as bringing back presents for his mother from his explorations outside the home, he integrates the wider world into his private relationship with his mother—also learning at this stage to distinguish between the sexes. Here, too, the exhibited objects acquire a fetishist status, substituting for the boy himself—the objectssigns expressing his attempt to deal with his growing sense of the loss of his mother on the one hand and the mother’s endeavour to cope with the diminishment of her physical closeness to him on the other. These moments constitute the central social element in the consolidation of the separation of the sexes—the Oedipal stage—when identity is formed, according to the Freudian view. As feminist psychologist Ariella Friedman comments in relation to Chodorow: “The

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son must act in order to establish his identity: he must prove that he is not a girl, demonstrate that he is a man ... In order to be a son he must act, do, and prove that he does indeed merit this longed-for and favoured definition of being a son” (Friedman 2007: 199). While Kelly thus notes that the child is learning his role as a male, she stresses as well that his process of exploration at this stage also motivates his mother, who begins—subconsciously—to ponder her own experience as a child (including the Oedipal/Electra process). As she observes her child beginning to assume his active male position and become part of the patriarchal order, she thereby re-experiences her immutable inferior female place within society.

Documentation VI—Inscribed in Stone This section documents the period between age three-and-a-half to five, during which the child learns to write. According to classical psychoanalytical theory, this comprises the final stage of the Oedipus complex when the infant completes the process of separating from his mother and becomes socialised. Here, his entry into language through mastering writing constitutes a metaphor for integrating into society— representation, language, and sexual position being perceived via the sexual construction of the speaking human subject. Kelly nonetheless persists in pondering the ways in which the mother is also constructed at this stage. Various feminist theoreticians addressed the diverse stages that form maternal identity, culminating during the child’s early years. One of these was the American feminist philosopher Sarah Ruddick. In an article entitled “Maternal Thinking”, Ruddick related to the tenets and behaviours on which the mother draws in order to construct her identity. Although not employing psychoanalytical theory, she perceives motherhood as characterised by the mother’s deep concern that her children will grow up as accepted members of the society they are about to enter: But in my discussion of maternal practice, I mean by “demands” those requirements that are imposed on anyone doing maternal work, in the way respect for experiment is imposed on scientists and racing past the finish line is imposed on jockeys. In this sense of demand, children “demand” that their lives be preserved and their growth fostered. In addition, the primary social groups with which a mother is identified, whether by force, kinship, or choice, demand that she raise her children in a manner acceptable to them. These three demands—for preservation, growth, and social acceptance—constitute maternal work; to be a mother is to be

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A mother’s reasoning is thus ultimately governed by a close attentiveness to the needs of the Other—to whom, out of the love and respect she has for him, she relinquishes much of her power (Donovan 1994: 175). As Kelly’s son’s letter-learning enables him to write his first name and surname—that of his father—she comes to terms with the fact that she has finally lost her son to the men’s camp: having learnt to acknowledge social norms, he will henceforward conform to the rules governing his gender. In this role, he is likely to distance himself from her or ignore her—or even behave repressively towards women. While regretting this fact, as a mother she knows that she must be prepared to relinquish the bond she has established with him so that he can grow up and become part of society— motherhood, as Ruddick noted, engendering a particular form of selfawareness and consciousness: Maternal work itself demands that mothers think; out of this need for thoughtfulness, a distinctive discipline emerges. I speak about a mother’s thought—the intellectual capacities she develops, the judgments she makes, the metaphysical attitudes she assumes, the values she affirms. (Ruddick 1995: 347)

While Ruddick believes in the mother’s power to influence her children and make an impact on society, however, Kelly is far more pessimistic regarding the impact the mother is capable of wielding on her environment. *** As exemplified in the Post-Partum Document, Kelly’s unique stance lies in her presentation of the complex world of the maternal subject during a period in which it was considered a relatively rare and even illegitimate subject for public or artistic discussion. Despite its disregard, she insisted on shifting the focus from the child’s development onto the interdependent and intersubjective mother-child dyad (Liss 2009: 26). While adopting the psychoanalytical foundations of phallocentric Freudian and Lacanian thinking, she employed them in a dialectic form, shifting between respect and judgment, admiration and ironic criticism. Negotiating through the world of male concepts and theory, she sought a way to confer form, content, and life upon the maternal experience.18

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Engaging with a topic unpopular even amongst contemporary feminist artists—and thereby running the risk of being rejected—she nonetheless found a way to confront both the negative and positive emotions which prevented the majority of feminist artists of her generation from examining these issues from a maternal perspective. In numerous interviews, she attested to the split she had experienced as a mother called upon to fulfil multiple functions in tandem: mother and artist, a private individual within the home and a woman with political views seeking to make her voice heard in public, a wife and a feminist. Neither woman nor mother, she insisted, are one dimensional, biologically- and gendered-determined “roles” but complex subjects informed by feelings, desires, and ambitions. The issues arising from the debate over motherhood still remaining to be fully resolved, in the following sections I shall examine the theoreticalfeminist approach to the subject of motherhood and its representation in the field of visual arts.

CHAPTER TWO MOTHERHOOD AND THE FEMINIST DISCOURSE: AN ON-GOING DEBATE

While we have treated Mary Kelly’s use of psychoanalytical theories as a unique and important case study of innovative twentieth-century feminist discourse regarding motherhood, the latter in fact commenced with the work of Simone de Beauvoir in the 1940s—continuing through to many modernist and postmodernist feminists. During this extended period, the maternal voice underwent numerous vicissitudes. Regarding motherhood as a source of enslavement, early feminist theoreticians negated the mother’s legitimacy by muting her self-expression, preferring to contemplate other facets of femininity. Subsequent feminist writers chose to reclaim the maternal voice, no longer considering it as being imposed upon them by patriarchal logic. Technological advances in female reproduction enabled the feminist discourse to liberate the maternal voice from the private realm and introduce it into the public sphere, thereby turning it into a source of power and strength. Finally, the adoption of innovative strategies of writing that shatter conventional ways of thinking—alongside intense feminist activism—further reinstated the maternal viewpoint, bestowing upon it a unique, feminine voice.

A. Negation In The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir identified the female body as the principal source of the oppression of women. Motherhood being a strictly biological function devoid of any self-expression or transcendence, it constitutes a source of female servitude. Believing mind and culture to be perceived as masculine and femininity to be confined to the flesh, de Beauvoir argued that the woman passively endures the biological processes her body experiences during pregnancy and childbirth: “With her ego surrendered, alienated in her body and in her social dignity, the mother enjoys the comforting illusion of feeling that she is a human being

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in herself, a value” (de Beauvoir 1953: 496 [original italics]). If women wish to become free, creative beings rather than the victims of their anatomy, she asserted, they must make masculinity their ideal: “… the ‘modern’ woman accepts masculine values: she prides herself on thinking, taking action, working, creating, on the same terms as men; instead of seeking to disparage them, she declares herself their equal” (de Beauvoir 1953: 718). It is only by refusing motherhood that women will be able to eradicate the “Otherness” which makes them a “second sex”—and thereby establish themselves as independent, moral subjects. Building upon this conceptual foundation, subsequent feminist writers sought to press technological developments into the service of female advancement. Written twenty-one years following the publication of The Second Sex—and dedicated to de Beauvoir—Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970) proposed an au courant but rather insipid response to de Beauvoir’s theories. The only way to understand why men control women, the American philosopher argued, is on the basis of biology, patriarchalism, and the systematic repression of women grounded in the biological differences between the sexes. The inferior social position of women being predicated on their procreative function, the sole possibility of liberation is by means of a biological evolution equivalent to the Marxist “economic revolution” whose aim was to eradicate class oppression: Just as the proletariat must gain control of the means of production in order to destroy the economic basis of the class system, so women must seize hold of the means of “reproduction” in order to eliminate sexual hierarchy. Such a process would be facilitated, Firestone maintained, by technological progress—in such forms as artificial insemination and frozen embryos. Similarly, the passing of progressive legislation regarding surrogacy and adoption would afford women the possibility of raising children even if unable to conceive them naturally. In thus redefining the concept of motherhood, women could finally be liberated from patriarchal repression.

B. Affirmation and Empowerment The following phase of feminist discourse developed primarily during the second half of the 1970s, as a growing number of feminists increasingly began to view motherhood as a source of strength and power. Many wrote on the subject from a psychoanalytic perspective—including Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow. Others, such as Adrienne Rich and Sarah Ruddick, added new layers, comments, and understandings to the on-going discourse, regarding motherhood as possessing positive and

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powerful properties rather than seeking to negate or dismiss it as an essential element of male repression. In The Rocking of the Cradle and the Ruling of the World (1978), Dorothy Dinnerstein described the unique position mothers assume and the power—both negative and affirmative— they hold: The power on which we were dependent before we could judge, or even wonder, whether or not the one who wielded it knew better and was bossing us for our own good; the power whose protectiveness—although it was steadier and more encompassing than any we are apt to meet again— seemed at that time both oppressive and imperfectly reliable. (Dinnerstein 1987: 188)

Focusing on the pre-Oedipal stage of psychosexual development— when the infant is still symbiotically bound to his mother and unable to distinguish between his self and hers—Dinnerstein argued that the mother’s authority derives from her child’s absolute dependence upon her. Regarding this theory as the key to understanding such questions as how sexuality and gender identity are established and why this leads—virtually inevitably—to male superiority, she posited that their sense of power paradoxically stirs an unconscious fear in mothers. Their dread of exposing this negatively affecting their offspring, they willingly submit themselves to the authority of men in the political and public sphere (Friedman 2007: 194). Nancy Chodorow developed this direction in her book The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and Sociology of Gender (1978)—an investigation of female parenthood. Addressing in depth the diverse ways in which the mother-child relationship and female functioning has been reproduced throughout the generations, she averred that, while men are also parents, cultural convention has dictated that only women are in charge of taking care of children. What makes women into mothers is the imminent bond between mother and child—especially daughters—passed on via a cultural mechanism (Chodorow 1999: vii).19 According to classical psychoanalysis, this mechanism creates an asymmetry within the family, the daughter identifying with the mother— because she is like her—and the son with the father. In Chodorow’s view, however, within the home both sexes are subject to the mother’s control. The former serving as the locus of women’s power, the threat this poses to men leads them to counteract it by endeavouring to enfeeble women in the public space. Rather than the family being a harmonious unit with common interests it is thus redolent with power struggles—motherhood consequently constituting an additional arena of gender conflict. This

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circumstance calls for an alternative form of cooperative parenting, designed to create a sense of equality between men and women—whether fathers or mothers, sons or daughters. Adrienne Rich also aspired to eradicate the oppressive aspects of motherhood in order to ensure that it forms a free choice for all women. In Of Woman Born (1979), she differentiated between the public and private spheres, transferring the discourse regarding motherhood from the biological to the political sphere. Exposing the culturally-established status of motherhood as a public institution controlling the lives of women from the true, personal, and subjective experience, she, too, hoped to promote a more effective discourse concerning motherhood and childrearing. Sarah Ruddick similarly elaborated on the gap between the private and institutional aspects of motherhood, promoting the establishment of maternal political power and the advancement of the maternal agenda. In her seminal text “Maternal Thinking” (1980), she argued that the expression of the ostensibly private voices of mothers in the public sphere could bring about social change, their enhanced morality and concern for others greatly contributing to positive and non-violent social conduct. Like Chodorow, Ruddick contended that contemporary society considers the mother inferior to men economically, politically, and militarily—even while acknowledging her primary and definitive authority over her children. Such a combination of private power and public impotence, she warned, could make mothers into angry, controlling women in the private realm, frustrated by their sense of social impotence. Seeking to blend her social vision with the merits of motherhood and raising children, Ruddick drew attention to the positive aspects of the domestic experiences of women and mothers. The practice of motherhood being guided by the mother’s concern that her children grow up healthy and accepted by society, a mother is prepared to make substantial sacrifices regarding her own needs. This stance forms the basis of a particular form of self-awareness and attentiveness to the needs of others which Ruddick termed “maternal thinking”. In relating to Others—children and adults, women and men—as essentially free subjects in need of care and deserving of recognition (but not necessarily supervision), Ruddick maintained that allowing the woman-mother to contribute in the public sphere would lead to a juster society within which the genders can relate to one another equally and with mutual respect. She thus encouraged women to speak in “a mother’s voice” not only in the home but also in the public realm in order to bring about a change in human behaviour and public values by creating an ethical and non-violent political entity.

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C. Dismantling and Reconstruction The following stage in the debate over motherhood was characterised by tactics drawn from the postmodern discourse, the aspiration being to articulate the maternal voice by turning women/mothers into agents with fluid and labile boundaries and identities. This voice subverting hegemonic knowledge, it contradicted predetermined notions regarding motherhood as part of the general undermining of objectivity/subjectivity and Truth. Amongst the prominent representatives of this school of thought in Europe were the French feminist psychoanalytical philosophers Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva—whom, while being influenced by Freud and Lacan, engaged with their theories in a rather ambivalent manner. Discussing the maternal voice from the critical perspective of poststructuralism, they both called for a verbal revolution and disengagement from the dominating patriarchal terms of speech, making extensive use of the idea of “écriture féminine”. This term, coined by Helene Cixous in “Le Rire de la Meduse” (1975), signifies a type of writing intended to serve as a tool for female expression silenced by patriarchal culture. The new strategies of écriture féminine contain an essentialist core by means of which women can express their authentic experiences. In this context, Cixous adduced the mother’s white breast milk—a central image in feminist discourse: Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—that element is the song: first music from the first voice of love which is alive in every woman. Why this privileged relationship with the voice? Because no woman stockpiles as many defenses for countering the drives as does a man … Even if phallic mystification has generally contaminated good relationships, a woman is never far from “mother” (I mean outside her role functions: the “mother” as nonname and as source of goods). There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink. (Cixous 1981: 251)

Even when society fails to perceive or decipher her thoughts (the white written on white), the woman’s writings are always linked to the maternal voice—to the white breast milk latent in the mother. As the “first voice of love”, this constitutes the source of female power. Also examining the maternal experience, Luce Irigaray devoted extensive thought to the mother-daughter relationship, focusing her attention primarily on the pre-Oedipal stage. In an essay entitled “And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other” (1979), she noted that the mother is

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both daughter and mother, continuity and difference, one and many, “I” and “Other”: You look at yourself in the mirror. And already you see your own mother there. And soon your daughter, a mother. Between the two, what are you? What space is yours alone? In what frame must you contain yourself? And how to let your face show through, beyond all the masks? (Irigaray 1981: 63)

In Speculum de l’autre femme (1974), Irigaray described the mother as a mystery incommensurate with any stereotype—an enigma because an entity necessarily containing an other.20 Neither an open nor a closed being, she is indefinable—a subject with dynamic boundaries exemplified in/by her language: “She” is indefinitely other in herself. This is doubtless why she is said to be whimsical, incomprehensible, agitated, capricious […] [original ellipsis] not to mention her language, in which “she” sets off in all directions leaving “him” unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers are contradictory words … [f]or in what she says, too, at least when she dares, woman is constantly touching herself … What she says is never identical with anything, moreover; rather, it is contiguous. It touches (upon). And when it strays too far from that proximity, she breaks off and starts over at zero: her body-sex. It is useless, then, to trap women in the exact definition of what they mean, to make them repeat (themselves) so that it will be clear; they are already somewhere else in that discursive machinery where you expected to surprise them. They have returned within themselves ... Within themselves means within the intimacy of that silent, multiple, diffuse touch. And if you ask them insistently what they are thinking about, they can only reply: Nothing. Everything. (Irigaray 1985: 29 [original italics])

Julia Kristeva also explored the feminine language of motherhood, relating to the issues involved in the politics of this discourse in “Women’s Time” (1979). Positing that women turn to écriture féminine in order to find a faithful echo of their experiences, she avowed that only by means of writing in a new language—connected to the Chora—can feminist writers protest the coercive male “symbolic order” and confront it with the maternal order: … it is the aspiration towards artistic and, in particular, literary creation that woman’s desire for affirmation now manifests itself. Why literature? Is it because, faced with social norms, literature reveals a certain knowledge and sometimes the truth itself about an otherwise repressed, nocturnal, secret and unconscious universe? Because it thus redoubles the

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Part II—Chapter Two social contract by exposing the unsaid, the uncanny? And because it makes a game, a space of fantasy and pleasure, out of the abstract and frustrating order of signs, the words of everyday communication? … This identification with the potency of the imaginary is not only an identification, an imaginary potency … [it] also bears witness to women’s desire to lift the weight of what is sacrificial in the social contract from their shoulders, to nourish our societies with a more flexible and free discourse, one able to name what thus far has never been an object of circulation in the community: the enigmas of the body, the dreams, secret joys, shames, hatreds of the second sex. (Kristeva 1986: 206-7)

In “Stabat Mater” (1985), Kristeva turned her attention to motherhood in art and culture, seeking—within the framework of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory—to set the non-symbolic maternal experience of childbirth and motherhood against the patriarchal ideal of maternal subjectivity: “Let us call ‘maternal’ the ambivalent principle that is bound to the species, on the one hand, and on the other stems from an identity catastrophe that causes the Name to topple over into the unnameable that one imagines as femininity, non-language or body” (Kristeva 1986: 16162). In other words, real childbirth and motherhood—that which occurs in actuality rather than that idealised by patriarchal language—is not amenable to oral or textual description, being condemned to the nonverbality of the corporeal: And as long as there is language-symbolism-paternity, there will never be any other way to represent, to objectify, and to explain this unsettling of the symbolic stratum, this nature/culture threshold, this instilling the subjectless biological programme into the very body of a symbolizing subject, this event called motherhood. (Kristeva 1980: 242)

Questioning the capacity of conventional language to encompass the full experience of motherhood, Kristeva mirrors this defect in her free, personal, poetic stream-of-consciousness style of writing. Also incorporating short individual texts describing her subjective experiences of motherhood with her first-born son via free association, this article resembles a fragmented and scarred text—thereby signifying maternal pain and pleasure in its own body-text. The vast and multi-layered feminist discourse concerning motherhood is still developing today, constituting an on-going and ever-evolving body of theory and knowledge.

CHAPTER THREE THE ABSENCE OF MATERNAL REPRESENTATION IN FIRST-GENERATION FEMINIST ART

Given the broad feminist theoretical discourse on the subject of motherhood of the 1970s, an equally extensive artistic treatment of the topic—as indeed occurred in other feminist theory and art interfaces, such as artistic feminist manifestos against violence against women, racism against black women, the anti-war discourse, etc.—could well have been anticipated. Rather surprisingly, this was not forthcoming. While the beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a number of artists who, although not being declared feminists, were aware of and sensitive to women’s rights and welfare and referred to the mother-child relationship in their works—including the American Mary Cassatt, the Frenchwoman Berthe Morisot, the Germans Paula Moderson-Becker and Käthe Kollwitz, and the Mexican Frida Kahlo—these all constituted solitary voices. The work of most first-generation artists of the 1970s in the United States—a period during which feminist revolutionary ideas about women's status were first brought together in an abundance of passionate artistic works—was, in fact, conspicuous precisely for its non-representation of motherhood. Why did these artists not seek to create a massive body of feminist art addressing motherhood as a counterpart to the proliferation of literature on the subject? Why did they fail to exploit the renewed legitimacy conferred upon the authentic female voice and employ their declared feminist awareness to express and convey their thoughts and feelings on the subject of motherhood in their art? According to feminist author and activist Esther Eilam, certain groups within the movement favoured other struggles—such as condemning violence against women or issues stemming from gender-related economic injustice.21 The discourse regarding the status and rights of womenmothers frequently being downplayed in public feminist encounters, this attitude also permeated into the field of art, wherein motherhood was

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regarded neither as an urgent topic nor a useful tool for dealing with the burning issues at hand. More often than not, artists who were mothers experienced physical restrictions—imposed as a result of the structure of the artistic establishment and a daily pattern of life which made the concurrent practice of art and motherhood virtually impossible. Many feminist artists being led to believe that they could not be serious artists as mothers, those who already had children also tended to obscure this fact. Although the tenacious patriarchal myth of motherhood was the last frontier to be crossed—a taboo more powerful even than speaking openly about rape or menstruation—the principal reason for the avoidance of this subject within the art field may have derived from the difficulty in confronting the complexity of the maternal image and the possible, legitimate ways of presenting it—both on the personal level and in the public sphere. I shall examine some of these in the following sections.

A. The Representation of Motherhood as an Object of the Male Gaze The first-generation artists found it virtually impossible to fight the traditional representations of motherhood formed under the enduring influence of Christian patriarchal society with its fierce resistance to alternative depictions. Discussing an 1997 exhibition entitled “Oh Mama—Representation of the Mother in Contemporary Israeli Art”, researcher Hadara Scheflan-Katzav points to one of the problems encountered by women artists dealing with maternal images and experiences: The woman who creates art has virtually no possibility of observing her role as a mother and remaining within the respectable realm of artistic, cultural, and spiritual creativity. Motherhood will always be located as an object and a value, serving as an object of the male gaze upon it.

Sharpening the problematic arising from this topic, she addressed the issue of pregnancy: From the perspective of society, the body of the pregnant woman does not belong to her but is a function of the symbolic order, the woman within the mother’s body being held hostage. Hence motherhood is perceived as a social and cultural project rather than as a personal and private experience. (Scheflan-Katzav 1997: 23)

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This claim points to the source of the difficulty feminist women artists faced when endeavouring to relate to the (dis)appropriated and distanced theme of motherhood and attempting to represent it via authentic subjective artistic tools.

B. The Patriarchal Tradition within Western Culture Up until the modern era, the majority of Western artwork representing the mother-child dyad was the product of the male patriarchal and Christian-art tradition, the image of the babe-in-arms showing the clear influence of the Madonna and child (Kenaan-Kedar 1998: 26-36). In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir directly implicated the Virgin Mary in addressing the anomaly of the woman as a female and maternal being alike: It was as Mother that woman was fearsome; it is in maternity that she must be transfigured and enslaved. The virginity of Mary has above all a negative quality: that through which the flesh has been redeemed is not carnal; it has not been touched or possessed … Mary knew not the stain of sexuality. (de Beauvoir 1953: 171)

While Mary’s virginity elevates her woman/maternal facet, she is only glorified as she kneels before her Son and acknowledges him as the Servant of God: “This is the supreme masculine victory, consummated in the cult of the Virgin … the rehabilitation of women through the accomplishment of her defeat” (ibid). In “Stabat Mater” (1985), Julia Kristeva similarly claimed that patriarchal Christian culture represents the Virgin Mary as the ideal mother—a type of asexual fantasy of femininity. How, she asked, can women create art—which draws its vitality from the life energy embodied in Eros—when the perfect mother is deprived of her sexuality: Christianity is doubtless the most refined symbolic construct in which femininity, to the extent that it transpires through it – and does so incessantly – is focused on Maternality ... If it is not possible to say of a woman what she is (without running the risk of abolishing her difference), would it perhaps be different concerning the mother, since that is the only function of the “other sex” to which we can definitely attribute existence? And yet, there too, we are caught in a paradox. First, we live in a civilization where the consecrated (religious or secular) representation of femininity is absorbed by motherhood. If, however, one looks at it more closely, this motherhood is the fantasy that is nurtured by the adult, man or woman. (Kristeva 1986: 161 [original italics])

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Calling for an expansion of the discourse on the maternal beyond the ideal of the Virgin Mary, Kristeva maintained that allowing the mother-assubject to act and be creative according to her own true desires—rather than as an idealised object—would enable women (artists) to find a way to resolve this artificial distinction.

C. Daughters, Not (Yet) Mothers Art historian Anne Kaplan adduced an additional explanation for the absence of maternal representations in feminist art, appealing to psychoanalytic and feminist philosophy to suggest that mothers can only be related to in terms originating from patriarchal needs and based on Oedipal anxieties and male fantasies (Kaplan 1983). According to classical psychoanalytic thought, the mother’s intensive and exclusive care of her offspring etches a permanent sense of anxiety onto the baby’s memory: will s/he receive (good) enough care and attention from her? This threat being so great that it becomes necessary to repress it, it is replaced by the myth of the good, self-sacrificing mother vs. the devouring, sadistic, neglectful mother. Classic patriarchal psychoanalysis consequently relates to the woman either as an omnipotent and castrating figure or as a submissive and exploited emblem fated to silence, disregard, and oblivion. The young feminist artists of the 1970s, Kaplan argued, failed to confront or attempt to transform either of these binary maternal images because they were in a stage of rebellion against their mothers—figures whom they regarded as agents inculcating patriarchal values in their own offspring. Having grown up during a period of profound cultural change, they perceived themselves as daughters who identified with the fatherfigure rather than (yet) as mothers. Thereby perpetuating the patriarchal disregard of the mother, they oriented themselves in line with the child’s perspective in an attempt to reap the benefits of the symbolic order: Unwittingly, we repeated the patriarchal omission of the mother qua mother, speaking only from the child’s place. Psychoanalytically, we remained locked in ambivalence toward the mother, at once deeply tied to her while striving for an unattainable autonomy. On the unconscious level, we were angry with the mother on two counts: first, because she would not give us the independence we needed, or the wherewithal to discover our identities; second; because she failed to protect us adequately against an alien patriarchal culture by which we were psychologically, culturally, and (sometimes) physically harmed. Paradoxically, our Oedipal struggles resulted in our assigning the mother, in her heterosexual, familial setting, to an absence, although our reasons for doing so were different. (Kaplan 1983: 173)

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D. Lack of a Visual Tradition for Emulation Art historian Joanna Frueh argues that one of the reasons for the absence of artistic representations of women as pregnant or mothers in early feminist art was due to the lack of a visual tradition for emulation (Frueh 1994: 195). In contrast to the status of women in literature, for example—in which a change for the better can clearly be seen from the eighteenth century onwards—women working within the plastic arts were consistently denied access to academic programmes and artistic materials (Nochlin 1971). Virtually all the maternal images at their disposal up until the 1970s derived from patriarchal art—which, focusing on the Virgin Mary as the ideal mother, proscribed any representation of the pregnant female and her profane associations. Although figurines of palaeolithic fertility goddesses abounded in antiquity, Christianity’s triumph over paganism turned the pregnant body—particularly in its naked form—into a grotesque object. If they addressed pregnancy at all, most Western artists chose to depict it only symbolically or in abstract form (Clark 1956). One of the exceptions to this rule was the feminist artist Alice Neel, who chose to explicitly portray women in the late stages of pregnancy. As paintings such as Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978) demonstrate, the pregnant woman symbolises an enigmatic paradox traditionally defined as a social transgression: both naked—and thus sexual and an individualised subject—and about to give birth to a baby and therefore involved in a cultural project, her body lying (literally) at society’s service.

E. Mother or Artist Frueh also suggests that the ability to give birth and the range of emotions that accompany motherhood constituted contributing factors behind the feminist artistic aversion to representing the maternal body. Motherhood customarily having been regarded as lying at the root of female inferiority, the avoidance of the subjects of pregnancy and motherhood can be attributed, at least partially, to the “demonic myth”: The widespread belief—prevalent also within the art world—that it is impossible to be both productive artist and mother. The demand to preserve the normative gendered role of the woman sharply contravening the conditions necessary for advancement and success in the art world, Frueh asserts that feminist artists refrained not only from representing motherhood in their work but also frequently from becoming mothers themselves under the pressure obligating women to choose between the two “crafts”. In conjunction with the fear of criticism from their feminist

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colleagues who were not mothers—as well as self-criticism in the face of possible failure—these factors imposed upon them a large measure of personal and professional restraint alike. Art curator Rita Mendes-Flohr raised similar notions in an article printed in the catalogue of an Israeli exhibition entitled “Mother/Artist: Breaking out of the Silence” (1999) featuring art from the end of the twentieth century: Even today, women feel that they have to make a choice between motherhood and artistic creativity … A profound, more archetypal disparity exists between art and motherhood … such a discrepancy may form the source of the woman’s fundamental fear of the dissipation of her creative energies—as though her supply of mother’s milk is limited. (Mendes-Flohr 1999)

Well into the second wave of the feminist revolution, many feminist women artists, she asserts, were convinced that it is impossible to combine the attention demanded by a child with the commitment required by an artistic career.

F. Appropriation of the Birth Metaphor Mendes-Flohr also relates to another idea linked to the source of the dichotomy between motherhood and creativity—namely, the tendency of male artists to appropriate the birth metaphor for their own works (perhaps out of envy), thereby restricting women to actual childbirth and childrearing. As demonstrated by Elaine Showalter’s essay “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” (1981), the notion of artistic motherhood is also common in the literary world: “Certainly metaphors of literary maternity predominated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the process of literary creation is analogically much more similar to gestation, labor, and delivery than it is to insemination” (Showalter 1985: 313). Mendes-Flohr thus suggests that many feminists chose to dissociate themselves from this idea due to its male appropriation. Whether or not these—or other—factors lay behind the early feminist aversion to representing the maternal body, it is clear that the patriarchal culture of that period was largely responsible for preventing the subject of motherhood from emerging onto the public mainstream platform and drawing the attention of those working within the field of feminist art in the United States.

PART III A RE-READING

CHAPTER ONE AMERICAN VERSUS EUROPEAN FEMINIST ART: DOES A DICHOTOMY REALLY EXIST?

Although the art produced by the first generation of American feminists and that of Mary Kelly as representative of European feminist art constitutes part of the general feminist art movement of the 1970s— joining its voice to the overall feminist protest against the repression of women by patriarchal society—many art researchers and critics contend that Mary Kelly should not be considered as belonging to the firstgeneration artists. Resident in Britain during the 1970s, as I have discussed in Part II, Kelly serves as the exception proving the rule—illuminating the work of European feminist artists on the one hand and the first-generation artists in North America on the other. While the latter are generally classified as radical feminists—and therefore essentialist and modernist according to feminist thought and theory—Kelly’s oeuvre is regarded as non-essentialist, postmodernist, and progressive, being heavily influenced by psychoanalysis and Marxist feminism. In this section, I shall examine the evident differences in content, theoretical sources of influence, and style between Kelly’s work and that of the American feminist artists of the same decade. With respect to content, the first divergence relates to the theme of motherhood. In distinction to the first-generation artists in the United States—who, virtually without exception, chose to ignore this motif, seeking rather to represent the female body and engage with a variety of other topics related to the feminist discourse—Kelly made motherhood her primary subject. As noted above, the background to this thematic gap lies in the attitude towards motherhood exhibited by American radical feminism (the prevailing discourse in the U.S.A. in the 1970s) and the deeply-rooted problematic inherent in the nexus between art, images of the female body, and the maternal experience. While many of the American artists under discussion were influenced by written sources within their spheres of activity, working in Europe Mary Kelly’s theory and practice of art was rather informed by neo-

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Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and European feminist philosophers. While the British amongst these were heavily Marxist, the French tradition was exemplified by psychoanalytical feminists of the ilk of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Helene Cixous. Kelly attributed great significance to the Freudian and Lacanian view of the phallus as representing masculinity (and men) in society and culture, seeking to understand the argument that women are signified by their lack of—and desire for—a penis. In contending that this penile absence/longing is responsible for the disadvantaged status of women in society, Kelly directly opposed the firstgeneration radical feminist artists’ avowal that the female experience does not reflect an innate deficiency in women but is the consequence of an historical eclipse. Positing the necessity of an alternative system of expression by means of which women should be given full representation, American feminists engaged in ardent political and legislative activism intended to unite women and lead to change. The social repression of women likewise drew the attention of French psychoanalytical philosophers, whose concern focused on liberating the unique subjectivity innate in every woman: Through questions such as Lacan has described, the sexual difference as constructed in and by language was to influence the development of French feminist theory … they opened up for feminist investigation questions about the relationship between desire and language and about the constructedness of identity … In locating the source—and the solution—of women’s oppression within language, it is argued, French feminist theory, like other forms of feminism which draw on psychoanalysis, undermines a feminist political struggle which must be based on a shared social identity and shared social and political goals. (Thornham 2001: 41)

Placing the body at the centre of their work, first-generation American feminist artists depicted it through a variety of manifestations, they employed types of media novel for the period—such as video, crafts, and performance—mixing high and low styles and traditional and innovative approaches and conspicuously ignoring the prevalent modernist methods such as Minimalism.22 In striking contrast, Mary Kelly’s art—rationalistic, minimalistic, and much closer to the dominant male conceptualist art of the period—dismissed all representation of the concrete female body. The divergence between the American first-generation artists and Mary Kelly as representative of contemporary European feminist art can be exemplified through two works—Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (FIG. 1) and Judy Chicago’s Birth Project (FIG. 2).

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FIGURE 3-1. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1973-1979. General view of the installation in six parts at the Generali Foundation, Vienna.

FIGURE 3-2. Judy Chicago, Creation of the World E1, from the Birth Project, ©Judy Chicago, 1981. Embroidery, 15 x 22.5 inches, drawing for stencil, hand drawing of fabric and colour specifications by Judy Chicago. Stencilling by Eileen Gerstein, San Raphael, CA. Embroidery over Chicago's drawing Pamela Nesbit, Danville, Ca. Collection: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. Photo ©Through the Flower Archives.

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Although both pieces address the experiences of childbirth and motherhood, they bear no other resemblance. Chicago collaborated on The Birth Project with a large group of women, the work belonging thematically, ideationally, and stylistically to the first-generation feminist art of the 1970s despite being produced between 1980 and 1985. Embroidering images on large pieces of fabric, its creators sought to express the spiritual aspect of pregnancy and birth and the universality of the mother. The Birth Project explicitly depicts the act of childbirth, conjoined with the body of a woman splayed on her back with flora and fauna bursting forth from her cloven belly in a simultaneously historical, mythic, and experiential image glorifying all women (Gouma-Peterson and Mathews 1987: 347). Kelly’s work, in distinction, is based on her personal experience as a mother, interwoven with psychological insights carrying political and social ramifications. Theoretically-oriented and presented via diagrams, documents, and small objects, the Post-Partum Document seeks to expose the deep social structures underpinning the notion of motherhood from a psychoanalytical perspective, abjuring all direct or explicit representation of the maternal body. The difficulty art historians and critics have found in justifying their— on occasion—sweeping generalisations and indiscriminate dichotomisation of Kelly and other 1970s’ American feminist artists is exemplified in an article by Lucy Lippard entitled “Making Up: Role-Playing and Transformation in Women’s Art”, first published in 1975. While the wellknown and respected art critic continued to subscribe to the inclusive definition of first-generation art as focusing on the female body, she also acknowledged that some artists deviated from this pattern and/or engaged with the concrete female body on a different basis (Lippard 1995: 89-97). Remaining convinced that all types of American feminist art in the 1970s were essentialist, however, she insisted on classifying even the diverse and divergent works of such feminist American artists as Eleanor Antin and Martha Rosler—whom, as discussed in previous chapters, other writers identify as “conceptual feminists”—as consummately essentialist. While the critical art discourse of the period clung to such onedimensional definitions, this view is clearly untenable—particularly in light of the number of unresolved issues it raises. Thus, for example, despite the close and evident association between the works of contemporary American first-generation artists and feminist theoretical texts—as demonstrated in the first two chapters above—few researchers of that time noted the direct influence of other theoretical literature on this group. Likewise, the impact of French psychoanalytical feminist

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philosophers—such as Luce Irigaray—on the visual field of American feminist artists is also clearly discernible. Despite her ties with European psychoanalytical philosophers, however, Mary Kelly completely proscribed the literal, physical female body. Kelly’s work also displays links with the ideas promoted in theories— most prominently relating to motherhood—presented by American radical feminists and reflecting the 1970s’ American rather than European feminist discourse. As noted above, while American artists chose—rather surprisingly—not to engage with the references to motherhood adduced by American feminist theoreticians, this became one of Kelly’s favourite themes. Given the closer multi-dimensional associations between Kelly and the first generation of American feminists than have previously been acknowledged, neither side can be unequivocally characterised or classified. The conventional view that first-generation art is modernist and speaks with a single voice—in complete antithesis to Kelly’s postmodernist and progressive stance—must be challenged. Just as clearly postmodernist elements exist in the work of the first-generation artists, so Kelly’s oeuvre similarly exhibits modernist aspects.

CHAPTER TWO POSTMODERNISM: EARLY STREAMS

An examination of the works of the first-generation feminist artists reveals the foundational presence of prominent postmodernist principles from the 1970s onwards. The following section examines several themes exemplifying this phenomenon.

A. Rethinking Boundaries and Hierarchies In contrast to modernist discourse—which maintains strict, impermeable borders between art and real life and artistic expression and social protest—postmodernism is characterised by its insistence on dissolving boundaries. The Great Goddess Diana performance (1978) forms an excellent illustration of this orientation (FIG. 1-24). This performance—given in a series of restaurants—set fiction against reality and promoted economic protest by locating art in a “real”, wagepaying work place. As critic Ann-Sargent Wooster notes, the video films made by artists of this period were also intent on eliminating the borders between “high” art and the mass media—the very development of this genre comprising part of the de-materialisation of the artistic object (Wooster 1993: 22). This objective—which reflected the desire to create non-commercial art—was not only warmly adopted within American feminist circles but also has come to be considered as a quintessential postmodern trait. A similar trend is evident in the sewing and embroidery techniques employed by feminist artists of the period, as well as the creation and decoration of pottery and the integration of such ceramic pieces into art works. The hallmark of the work produced by these feminist artists was their egalitarian, democratic images, which challenged the concept of central and marginal perspectives. As Norma Broude (1994) argues, the feminist P&D art of the 1970s was not simply another stream of modernist art but an ideology and praxis rooted in a postmodernist perspective—contributing to a new understanding and definition of the power relations exhibited via the artist’s choice of style. This art subverted the hierarchical approach and

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ideology upon which the art world of the period was based, resisting the notion of the “canon”. Surviving the onslaughts against its existence and legitimacy, and growing into a movement that succeeded in liberating itself from the exclusive control of the artistic, financial, and cultural elite of the art world ensconced in museums and galleries, the feminist P&D art movement found a way to engender a public and democratic form of art occupying open public spaces—railway stations, public auditoriums, etc. (Broude 1994: 224). The success of the first-generation artists in challenging the traditional, male-dominated art world and shattering its long-held values is well exemplified in symbolic fashion by Harmony Hammond’s Floor Piece (1973) (FIG. 1-19). A round rug woven from remnants of fabric and rags and presented, surprisingly, on the floor rather than the gallery wall, it constituted the artist’s attempt to confront conventional modes of presentation and consumption and the rules for the acceptance of artifacts customarily followed in the art world.

B. “The Personal is Political” The motto of the Women’s Liberation Movement—“The personal is political”—coined by Carol Hanisch in 1969 also functioned in the art of the first-generation feminists to undermine the boundaries between the private and public spheres. While such modernist schools as Minimalism championed the principle of universality, these artists boldly integrated personal elements into their innovative art, many electing to tell anecdotes and illustrate scenes from their daily lives, domestic activity, and relationships in their work—on occasion even incorporating ostensibly extraneous material and redundant texts. In this sense, they paralleled the drive by postmodernist artists to replace transcendent, absolute narrative and Truth with individual, mundane, and quotidian experience. One such work is Carolee Schneemann’s performance Interior Scroll (1975) (FIG. 1-5), which addressed her relationship with her partner and the challenges she experienced throughout her artistic career. This art, revolving around professional as much as private, personal issues and resembling an intimate conversation between friends, contrasts strongly with that which takes as its theme sublime and elevated topics—such as morality and war, myths, gods, and heroes, and abstract values.

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C. Humour and Irony Humour, irony, and sarcasm are also typical postmodern strategies. Portraying scenes such as a naked male model lying on a sofa in the classical pose of a reclining Venus was a provocative, defiant, and even mocking gesture. An excellent illustration of this trend is Sylvia Sleigh’s Philip Golub Reclining (1971) (FIG. 3).

FIGURE 3-3. Sylvia Sleigh, Philip Golub Reclining, 1971. Oil on canvas, 42 x 60 inches. Courtesy of an anonymous collector.

While conveying the fact that the male is nude and resembles the “Reclining Venus” pose, Sleigh accentuates the probing scrutiny of the allpowerful artist in an ironic “finger” to the time-honoured penetrating male gaze upon the female body and genitalia. Although both figures appear content in their position—the creative, active female artist, armed with a brush and canvas, standing dressed opposite the naked male object as the subject of her invasive gaze—the political motivation behind the role reversal is clear. The Great Goddess Diana (FIG. 1-24) performance likewise intersperses humour with its harsh criticism and deep pain: the smiling “waitresses” entertain their “customers”, the surprised diners

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frequently bursting into laughter at the artistic disguise embellished with multiple Latex breasts. Combining feminism with a linguistically-based conceptual art, Martha Wilson’s Breast Forms Permutated (1973) (FIG. 4) features nine postcards comprising photographs of pairs of breasts, underneath which a caption describes their peculiar form—oval, conical, flattened, etc. The postcards are arranged in a modernist grid pattern, the “ideal” pair of breasts being placed at the centre—an absurd process designed to take the objectification of the female body to a ludicrous extreme.

FIGURE 3-4: Martha Wilson, Breast Forms Permutated, 1972. Black and white gelatine silver print and text, 20 x 14 inches. Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York.

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D. Intertextuality Intertexuality is a postmodernist facet visible in the work of various feminist artists from the 1970s onwards whose pieces integrate timehonoured images. Thus, for example, the adducing of ancient goddesses and fertility figures such as Venus and Artemis in a contemporary context was a move intended to serve the Great Goddess artists’ current-day goals. Similarly, Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (FIG. 1-22)— whose title refers to the logo of a commercial food brand—features a clenched fist symbolising the African-American struggle for equal rights, the thick-lipped, squat-nosed black woman caricatured during the 1920s and ’30s in adverts for such products as liquorice and toothpaste being placed against the backdrop of an ironic recollection of Andy Warhol’s prints of white American women. In this way, it celebrates AfricanAmerican identity by reinterpreting and subverting the white commercial exploitation and repression of black slaves.

E. Multiculturalism and Black Feminism The development of the black feminist movement—itself associated with the African-American struggle for equality in the 1960s—and the emergence of a multi-cultural discourse also reflect postmodernist principle. Addressing colonialism and the eroticism of the black female body, the first movement was far more progressive than the general philosophical and extra-feminist discourse conducted in the United States during the 1970s. Like Betye Saar, artists such as Faith Ringgold transformed the feminine protest against their gender’s inferior, onedimensional status on the sole basis of being a—white, female, middleclass—female into a multi-dimensional and multi-cultural image. Acknowledging that the “black woman” also possesses various class and sexual inclinations, this admission became one of the foundations of the postmodernist discourse regarding the “politics of identity”.

F. Eradicating Gender Boundaries Reformulating the idea of gender boundaries in such seminal books as Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler contends that, rather than being constant and solid, identity is fluid and labile, ceaselessly in imitative search of an ideal, imagined, unattainable gender identity. Opposing the notions of femininity and masculinity dominant in the 1970s, Butler asserts that the “performative activities” inscribed by the body itself are

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not the product of an a priori or coherent gendered identity but constitute and create identity. This theory, which developed in the early 1990s, was given artistic expression in Lynda Benglis’ early photograph (1974) showing her nude “feminine” body attached to a “masculine” dildo (FIG. 1-1). Herein, the conventional marks of gender identification are subverted, the conjunction of male and female sex organs voiding conventional significations. Benglis’ parodical piece demonstrates that the external signification of gender-indicative body parts—male or female— has nothing to do with true identity, the combination of both gender-parts in one body accentuating the fact that they all constitute performative acts associated with the body’s surface alone (Jones 1994: 36).

G. Collaboration According to the art historian Linda Klinger, the collaborative notion in feminist art also constitutes a postmodernist form. In rejecting the modernist idea of the solitary “great artist” whose singular genius creates unique works, the collaborative feminist efforts exemplify the “death of the author” (Klinger 1991: 45). Prominent examples of this approach are the West Coast alternative organisations initiated—amongst others—by Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago. Such works as the Chicago-directed The Dinner Party (1974-1979) were the product of long-term cooperative processes forming part of collaborative workshops in which the participants were responsible for the initial formulation of the idea, its research, decisions on the type of media employed, the execution of the work, and the place and manner of its exhibition. While the majority of scholars viewed The Dinner Party as emblematic of modernist, essentialist art on the basis of its decorative or sexual-sensual aspect, Klinger’s focus on its collaborative aspect led her to hail it as exemplifying postmodern principles. Applying this alternative reading identifying postmodern elements in the works of the first-generation artists to Mary Kelly—whose oeuvre is customarily regarded as manifestly postmodern—enables us to discern unambiguously modernist aspects in her work. As an analysis of the textual sources lying behind the Post-Partum Document demonstrates, Kelly exhibits clear affinities with American radical feminist philosophy— typically essentialist and modernist in nature. In similar fashion, her art exhibits both formal and ideational modernist influences, the Post-Partum Document being characterised by the minimalist, almost monochromatic, and alienated style of the modernist conceptualist schools dominant during

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the period. While it reflects her personal experiences as a mother, it also seeks to portray these as part of a universal principle. In suggesting that social conclusions be drawn from individual lives, Kelly embodies the modernist view that objective truth—such as the psychodrama all young children experience—exists and functions as a meta-narrative. Nonetheless, like many of the first-generation artists who sought a new, specifically-female semiotic and symbolic language based on subjective truth and individual experience, Kelly declared that her story was recounted from a personal viewpoint designed to generate discussion of the “problem of motherhood”—a modernist debate simultaneously analytical, sociological, psychological, conceptual, and—most significantly—atemporal. She thus chose to ignore some aspects of the postmodernist discourse—including the idea of the “death of the author”— in the same manner as the first generation of American feminist artists chose to do.

CHAPTER THREE THE “DEATH OF THE AUTHOR”— VIVE LA FEMME AUTEUR

The postmodern concept of the “death of the author”—which developed during the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s and became prevalent in various disciplines, including philosophy, literature and the arts—emerged concomitantly with essentialist radical feminism (Bal & Bryson 1991). At a time when the hegemonic critical discourse in art and other cultural disciplines was rejecting subjectivity and the legitimacy of unique experience, proponents of feminist ideology began to reclaim their subjectivity from the hands of the dominant/domineering male hegemony. Many feminists and feminist artists felt that their projects were diametrically opposed to the proscription of subjectivity and the championing of objectivity (Leavy 2006). The principal propagators of the “death of the author”—whether the latter be writer, painter, or photographer—were a group of French poststructuralist philosophers, pre-eminently Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Challenging the sacrosanct role attributed to the author in conservative cultural discourse, these thinkers sought—to the initial bewilderment of their English and American counterparts—to liberate themselves from the mythic burden of authorial identity and annihilate the speaking subject. Faced with the question of how to avoid the modernist discussion of the “author”, proponents of postmodern theory called for the repudiation of such ideas as the “artist as genius” in favour of the preference of patrons over creators—and thence to an examination of the competing interests within patronage itself, simultaneously employing such nonconventional sources as archival documents. Writers like Barthes and Foucault refashioning the canonical text and converting it into a critical account of their own journey from reader to rewriter and thence to writer, the significance of this paradigm shift convinced many poststructuralist philosophers that the critical process itself had become a central issue—perhaps even more important than the artistic work itself. Regarding any separation between criticism and the artistic “text”—any artificial dichotomy between primary and secondary

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discourses or the source and its accompanying product—as impossible, the boundaries between author and critic blurred and dissolved, criticism coming to be intrinsically embedded within the work. In its broader context, the “death of the author” emerged as part of the French philosophic debate regarding the anti-subjective, the “author” no longer possessing a stable, objective identity but materialising through interpretative strategies. Identification of the author’s intention, it was argued, is insufficient for a proper understanding of the text—whether it be literary or visual. Roland Barthes (1977) explicitly averred that the conscious intention of the author in literature or art—as also his/her biography or aesthetic-artistic outlook—is irrelevant, additional parameters, such as historical and biographical facts or social and economic processes, also being necessary. This thesis led to the avowal that an author’s identity is determined by a variety of factors—including market forces and the interest of museums and galleries vs. those of art historians, etc. According to Barthes, the author has no control over his work, the text merely reflecting the residue of the collective unconscious. The true determinant of “meaning” is thus not the beauty of language or an accurate historical or contemporary social portrayal but the rewriting of human history. Foucault similarly maintained that the author is a work of fiction—just as much a character as his creations (1977). Jacques Lacan posited that the speaker is always “split”, the human mind possessing a conscious, accessible aspect and an “unconscious” one. The latter being “structured like a language”, it subverts the circle of certainty which enables a person to know him/herself, meaning that the moment we speak or create, we distance ourselves from the thing itself (Fink 1996). The antithetical trends of essentialist feminism and the contemporary patriarchal hegemonic critique of the “author” placed feminists—a minority group within the general philosophical discourse—in an acute quandary. Actively promoting the subjective, personal, private, and physical experience of every woman, their radical and essentialist political agenda was also based on their own life-history, as reflected in the slogan: “The personal is political”. 1970s’ feminism analysing the gender aspect of both the work and the identity of its creatrix in both critical theory and artistic practice, the feminist struggle of those years was essentially a battle to express the voice of the woman-author.23 The idea of the “canon” in art history being similarly based on the male hierarchical system according to which the woman-author is a lesser being, feminist artists further sought to displace the patriarchal author and establish a counter-canon. The phallocentric notion of unique / genius / author applies to an autonomous experience which neither acknowledges

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the huge variety within the “female experience” nor corresponds to it. While the first-generation artists made it their task to create a new set of criteria—including aesthetic, subjective-female grounds—for the “author/ess”, however, they did so intuitively rather than consciously or analytically. Contemporary feminist research on the subject likewise rarely related to the “authoress” in its interpretations. The issue of the canon was addressed primarily in literary research and analysis rather than the visual arts. In Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), the two critics sought to define the canon of female writing and establish the status of the “authoress” via an analysis of nineteenth-century literary works written by women. As critic Seán Burke noted in an article entitled “Feminism and the Authorial Subject” (1995)—which precedes an excerpt from the former text in his reader of Authorship: From Plato to Postmodernism—a trend emerged which, in contrast to the French postmodernist approach, sought to restore the voice of the “authentic authoress” to mainstream feminist critiques and praxis, many philosophers who, in the 1960s and ’70s, had promoted the concept, subsequently reclaiming a measure of subjectivity by resuscitating him/her (Burke 1992). The “death of the author” can thus serve as a useful tool for analysing and understanding various works from different periods and diverse artists/writers—both male and female—highlighting gender issues. As Bal and Bryson (1991: 183) state, the theory is interpreted differently with respect to men and women in both art and philosophy. Historically, a dialectic trend can be discerned within the notion of the “death of the author” in regard both to its general context terms and its link with the feminist movement. In the 1980s—which saw the emergence of the second generation of American feminist artists and the gradual permeation of French theories—the originally Anglo-American idea of the “authenticity of the female experience” gradually came to be perceived as essentialist and passé. By the 1990s, however, the status of the author/ess had once again gained legitimacy within critical/analytical practice. These critical processes reveal the initial difficulty first-generation feminist art of the 1970s faced as it endeavoured to establish strategies for artistic praxis—as well as the way in which its representatives gradually gained legitimacy within the hegemonic field and discourse of art during the 1990s.

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Closure: Gender, Boundary, and Definition— Defined by Gender? The accomplishments of the first-generation feminist artists were extensive, original, unique, ground-breaking, experimental, varied, rich, and influential, the group successfully initiating an unprecedented discussion regarding the place of women in society. By finding a way to transpose the slogan “The personal is political” from the political to the artistic sphere, the first generation of feminist artists in the United States demonstrated that “art, too, is political”—at the same time as incorporating the ideas and new worldview of the feminist movement into their work. Their ideational and aesthetic influence extended beyond the feminist art movement into the art world as a whole, echoes of their legacy still reverberating today, such artists as Martha Rosler, Marina Abramoviü, Nancy Spero, Judy Chicago, and Mary Kelly—who began their careers in what was considered a marginal art form—today being prominent figures worldwide whose works have gained broad artistic and commercial recognition and acclaim. Several reasons accounted for the lack of appreciation and undervaluation of the first-generation artists when they first began working. Firstly, the contemporary dominant patriarchal discourse—one of whose prominent notions is the “death of the author”—isolated alternative feminist discourse from mainstream thought. Secondly, the second-generation feminist artists of the 1980s assessed the first generation according to a hierarchical system which ranked their essentialist work as inferior and substandard. Likewise, the power relations within the feminist movement led feminist critics of the time— the majority of whom were white, middle-class women—to espouse a solidarity whose critical expression created a partial and biased image of the feminist art movement, one which muted subordinate voices within the movement—such as women of colour and lesbian artists. Finally, in artistic terms the first generation presented avant-garde, innovative works which, being ahead of their time, were difficult to understand and assimilate, exposing the art scene and discourse of the 1970s to postmodern principles which would only become established in the general discourse a decade later. Despite these factors—and the fate imposed on the first-generation American feminist artists by critical and research studies that declared them irrelevant and one-dimensional—the historical injustice done them is now being redressed through the adoption of a fresh and unbiased perspective and appropriate analytic tools. From the perspective of time, a

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new, rich, and complex picture emerges of varied works and approaches which made a far greater contribution and was far more influential than is customarily acknowledged.24 The art of the first-generation American artists reveals a unique quality that integrates a substantial measure of the American experience—reflecting the “realised Utopia” Jean Baudrillard describes in America: America is turning all this into reality and it is going about it in an uncontrolled, empirical way. All we do is dream and, occasionally, try and act out our dreams. America, by contrast, draws the logical, pragmatic consequences from everything that can possibly be thought ... To our Utopian radicalism it counterposes its empirical radicalism, to which it alone gives dramatically concrete form. We philosophize on the end of lots of things, but it is here that they actually come to an end. (Baudrillard 2000: 128)

Translating Baudrillard’s observation into feminist terms, we might say that while in Europe women sit in brasseries and ponder the metaphysical implications of the clitoris, in America they take to the streets and burn their bras in protest. The distinctive era of first-generation feminist art not only made a great contribution to the artistic endeavour in general and the feminist enterprise in particular but continues to have an impact today. The contemporary feminist movement owing much to the activities of the firstgeneration artists, we would do well to learn from them and give their work due recognition. Through their artistic endeavours, these feminist women broke their constraints, redefining the paradigms of gender and liberating gender significations to become symbols of power and strength—thereby constituting a model from which we can still learn today.

AFTERWORD FEMINISM AND WOMEN’S ART IN ISRAEL: INFLUENCES AND CORRELATIONS WITH AMERICAN FEMINIST ART The contemporary feminist movement is conspicuous for its efforts towards helping to achieve a just, reformed society, its current goals being broader than at any time in the past. If it had previously been perceived as a movement of women for women, today it champions—from a female perspective and with specific regard to women—complete social equality, working to abolish all forms of repression and exploitation based on gender, age, race, sexual identity, economic status, or education. Its vision is to create a community in which people will have access to information, possess connections, implement strategies, and raise social and political issues which promote gender and other types of equality. In the spirit of the third wave of feminism, many contemporary women disassociated themselves from the “feminist” label, the younger generations tending to regard the term as militant and old-fashioned. Taking the movement’s accomplishments for granted and considering “equality” to have been obtained on many levels and planes, they tended to view it as irrelevant to their lives. Despite these attitudes—and the leaching effect of postmodernism—feminist principles still remain pertinent and salient, women unfortunately continuing to suffer sexual harassment and rape in the public sphere and physical, emotional, and economic violence in the domestic sphere. Countless women also suffer from eating disorders and ageism, while other forms of repression take the form of lesbophobic and transphobic attitudes. The majority of women who become mothers are likewise constantly forced to make a cruel choice—both physical and emotional—between working within or without the home. This demand not only incurs chronic exhaustion but also a sense of guilt—women being burdened by the knowledge that, in a patriarchal social reality which allocates them the domestic care and maintenance and childrearing, they are regarded as unworthy of financial recompense for this “labour (of love)”. Women also experience far more radical discrimination on the grounds of status and

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ethnicity than do men, regularly suffering from double or triple repression—gender, status, and ethnicity. Economic inferiority is also a primarily female affliction, the majority of poor people in the world being impoverished women—the backs of minimum-wage-earning female workers bearing the weight of the capitalist economy and supporting its “growth”. The tasks facing feminists thus remain many and varied, each— individually and collectively—forming a significant link in the effort to achieve a more equal and just society. While these constitute universal challenges, feminism and feminists face particularly acute challenges in Israel, where they have been largely marginalised in the public discourse due to a specific set of historical reasons. Principal among these has been the myth of the equality of the sexes. The first waves of Jewish settlement in the nineteenth century and early years of statehood—the end of the 1940s and ’50s—were characterised by an explicit striving towards equality promoted by the kibbutz ethos, the pioneering women who founded and established them being permitted to engage in the same work and being regarded as possessing the same status as their male counterparts. Women were given the right to vote immediately upon the establishment of the State, reflecting a very progressive worldview towards women’s rights in comparison to that found in other countries. The imposition of obligatory military service upon Israeli women—a phenomenon known in very few other cases—put Israeli women in uniform and gave them weapons on a par with the male combatants, thereby fuelling the image of the strong, determined, competent woman. Although all these factors combined to create a persuasive myth of equality—a wonderful new world in which the two sexes were perfectly equal—extensive gender studies of the subject conducted over the past two decades reveal it to have been largely rhetoric (Dekel 2011: 152). At a time when the feminist movement was experiencing a period of intense growth in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, radical feminism in Israel was regarded as a luxury belonging to a limited group of political and artistic activists. Its failure to develop into a sweeping social movement was due to the factors noted above, combined with the country’s protracted fight for independence and sovereignty and the insecurity of its borders, a shaky economy based on foreign aid, and waves of immigration and social unrest—all of which accentuated other struggles. The ostensible state of equality on the one hand and the issues which pushed the status of women aside on the other hand led many

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women in Israel to ignore feminism as an important ideology, explicitly disassociating it from their personal lives. The process whereby feminism began to emerge and permeate Israeli consciousness and society was a slow one, being linked to various political and cultural developments. These included the fracturing of the Zionist ethos following the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when human rights came to the fore in the public agenda in connection with the Israeli-Arab conflict and the “occupied territories”, and the public debate of ethnic discrimination and socio-economic inequality—exemplified by the rise of the Israeli “Black Panther” movement, established in 1971 (Fogiel-Bijaoui 2010: 46). Not until the early 1990s, however, did feminism become a truly significant movement in Israel (Dekel 2011). From the establishment of the State, Israeli economy, culture, and politics have always been controlled by a male-dominated hierarchy. As an essentially militaristic State in which social-power relations lie in the hands of patriarchal mechanisms that determine the national, economic, and social agendas alike, women find it virtually impossible to integrate into the various systems and gain positions of power and influence. While some women do hold key positions in public and private institutions today—as well as in places previously considered male strongholds—they not only represent the exception that proves the rule but also the model for feminine dissociation from female solidarity. For every successful female CEO there are hundreds of thousands of economically-weak and careerblocked women struggling against the burdens of life to earn a livelihood. The globalisation trend and economic changes of the past few decades having further widened the economic gender gap, the majority of women in the country have become even more firmly trampled into the “mud floor”. 25 One of the keys to understanding the state of feminism in Israel today lies in the American feminism of the 1970s, from which the contemporary feminist and activist movements in Israel drew many of their fundamental principles. The latter are eminently helpful in analysing the inferior status and unequal power relations experienced by women in Israel today—as well as for evaluating the achievements of activists, philosophers, and artists in Israel and recognising the problems still in need of remedy (Rimalt 2010). The seeds of feminism planted by the American feminists of the 1970s are now sprouting and flourishing in Israel, Israeli women artists—as in the United States—noting the achievements made by feminist politics and seeking to integrate them into their artwork.

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FIGURE 4-1. Ayelet Payento, Sunflowers (Series), 2001.

In 2001, the young Israeli artist Ayelet Payento presented a photographic series entitled Sunflowers. In one of them (FIG. 1), she posed erectly naked on a festal ceremonial satin-covered chair in imitation of a marble statue, holding the “excess” rolls of fat of her stomach in both hands to symbolise her “overweight” size and looking straight at the camera. In another series, entitled Sausages, she photographed her naked body wrapped in layers of

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plastic cling-wrap as though it was a “hominoid”-sausage served up to an audience of consumers. Despite the almost three-decade distance between this work and Lynda Benglis’ bold nude photograph discussed at the beginning of this book, the two works exhibit close similarities—both reflecting the artist’s choice to present her body naked in front of the public eye in a critique of the Western aesthetics of feminine physical appearance. Other American artists in the 1970s—such as Eleanor Antin and Hannah Wilke—also dealt with the same theme. Payento’s work represents a tangible change in direction in Israeli art evident from the 1990s onwards—prior to which no significant group of artists influenced by the feminist discourse was identifiable as producing “Israeli feminist art”. Very few artists influenced by feminism were at work in Israel during the 1970s, those active—such as Miriam Sharon (Dekel 2007b), Pamela Levy (Dekel 2007a), and Yocheved Weinfeld (Ankori 1989, 2001)—being directly associated with their counterparts in the United States (Dekel 2012). While this limited group was augmented in the following decade by a small number of additional artists, the majority of (female) artists in Israel declined to adopt feminist ideology— even the waves of social protest in the wake of the Yom Kippur War (1973) failing to spur them towards engaging with such issues. From the 1990s onwards, however, increasing numbers of artists began developing a feminist awareness, overtly reflecting this stance in their work. Female artists in Israel began exhibiting works featuring gender issues in galleries, collaborative artistic frameworks also being established in the spirit of feminist solidarity.26 This “quantum leap” made a great contribution to the diminishment of the twenty-year lag between the field of feminist art in Israel and the United States (Dekel 2011). Hereafter, art and the socio-feminist processes became inextricably intertwined, transformations in the field of art being symptomatic of alterations in awareness and society and vice versa—social change frequently occurring in consequence of activism or cultural and artistic events. The mutual relationship between art, feminism, and society—which had existed in the feminist field, and beyond it, in the United States during the 1970s—thus became manifest in Israel in the penultimate decade of the previous millennium, persisting until today. The following survey examines selected chapters of the history of feminist art in Israel on the basis of the methodological logic employed throughout the book—including critical theories, milestone moments in Israeli history, and various feminist art works from the 1990s onwards. Constituting a brief introduction to the subject, it does not presume to be exhaustive, merely seeking to exemplify the developments and changes

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which have taken place in Israel under the influence of the ideological, activist, and artistic heritage of the American feminists.

1. Feminist Legislation Pioneering feminist activism per the radical American feminist model began permeating Israeli society in the 1970s under the influence of the liberal Anglo-Saxon women who arrived in the country within the framework of the Ministry of Absorption’s “policy of immigration from developed countries”. Alongside these activists were Israeli-born active feminists—primarily white, upper-middle-class women (Dahan-Kalev 1999: 231). In the early years, the members of this small group focused their efforts on passing legislation—albeit with little results. Their most successful achievement was the gaining of increased assistance given to victims of sexual assault, the Knesset—the Israeli parliament—passing a relatively liberal abortion law in the wake of a protracted feminist struggle in February 1977 (abortion having up until that point been illegal). According to the new law, termination of pregnancy was permissible if performed at a recognised medical institution and authorised by the relevant committee. The law incorporated five clauses justifying the provision of such a permit, clause 5—also known as the social clause— determining financial distress to be a justifiable reason. Three months later, with the election of the Begin government, Ultra-Orthodox pressure led to the rescinding of this clause, prompting furious protest, demonstrations, and petitions—ultimately to no avail. A second drive revolved around changing the law relating to equal rights for women—an ostensibly liberal bill originating in 1950 which in fact left personal status (marriage and divorce) under the control of the patriarchal religious establishment. A proposal to amend the law made in the 1970s passed on first reading, again being rescinded—this time under pressure from the religious Mafdal party which formed part of the Rabin coalition government. In the vehement demonstrations in Tel Aviv which followed, a group of feminist activists marched with a coffin to symbolise the need to bury the law—an act paralleling the feminist protests conducted in the United States some twenty years earlier, such as the protest performances given by artists Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz. While the first demonstration witnessed violent clashes between activists and the police, the second included women—such as academics—who up until that point had not taken any active participation in the movement.27 As this fact indicates, the feminist activity which commenced in the 1970s began to extend to academic circles, the influence of feminist

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lawyers in the late 1980s bringing about a real change in the status of women and public attitudes alike. Scholar Frances Raday—herself a lawyer—calls the period between 1987 and 2000 the era of feminist legislation (Raday 2007: 19-42). The beginning of feminist legislation was signified by the prominent legal battles conducted in the 1980s, which led to the enactment of the Law of Equal Retirement Age for All Workers (1987) and the Law of Equal Work Opportunity (1988). Subsequently, legislation relating to the division of property of divorced couples, tax reforms, and the assurance of jobs to women within the civil service and public services was also passed. Of particular significance was the law regulating violence against women in any and all forms. As Raday notes, the height of the era of legislation was marked by the passing of an amendment to the Women’s Equal Rights Law (2000), which determined equality for women as a basic right: “Any law or legal activity that discriminates against women, whether with intent or not, is invalid”. Despite this move towards improvement, however, personalstatus issues still remained under the original law enacted in 1951. A significant segment of feminist legislation was passed as a result of the campaigns initiated by non-governmental organisations—such as the Women’s Network Legal Center and other women’s organisations. In the 1990s, new State-initiated mechanisms were introduced that made a significant contribution to legislation and public awareness. The first of these was the Knesset Committee for the Advancement of the Status of Women, established in 1992 to protect women in every area of life—the first occasion on which a legislative body was instituted with the specific task of addressing issues relevant to the feminist agenda. In 1998, the Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women—a body with an explicitly feminist agenda—was set up as part of the Prime Minister’s Office, its brief being to deal with such issues as the representation of women, gender and minorities, violence against women, implementation of the law against sexual harassment, the fight against trafficking in women, and rescuing women from prostitution. In 2009, Neta Harari exhibited a painting from a series entitled Vertigo Inbox (FIG. 2). In this piece, a women lies face down on an asphalt road, her body clothed in a rolled-up dress or roughly-wound sheet—possibly the victim of an attack or having fallen out of a vehicle. Like the rest of the paintings in the series, this represents a woman as the victim of sexual violence.

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FIGURE 4-2. Neta Harari, Vertigo Inbox (1) #3 (Series), 2009.

The ideological and activist basis established by American radical feminism in the 1970s to increase awareness of the need to protect women from the violence towards them inherent in the patriarchal social mechanism, bring the subject to public attention, and demand the involvement of social institutions emphasised that these concerns were not linked to the right to privacy. A similar movement began in Israel in the 1970s—feminist MK Marsha Friedman being a prime example—that gained significant momentum in the 1990s. Discussion of harassment of and violence against women having traditionally been virtually taboo in Israeli public discourse, such behaviour being regarded as normal within numerous frameworks—such as the military—and thus in no need of redress, the late 1970s onwards witnessed the rise of bold and intense feminist activity that sought to break this mould. Up until that point, women victims of sexual assault seeking medical assistance had been directed to find their (own) way to the Pathology Institute at Abu Kabir in south Tel Aviv, where they were placed in a room signified as the “Live Room”—in distinction to the morgue. After one such woman committed suicide, action was taken to establish the first rape crisis centre for victims of sexual assault—the “Centre for Immediate Assistance to Victims of Rape” being established in Tel Aviv in 1978. Running a 24-hour help-line staffed by volunteers, its aim was to offer initial care to victims on both the emotional and administrative levels— such as accompanying them when they received medical treatment and filing police complaints. Gradually, the medical emergency system also

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began to grasp the fact that victims of sexual assault needed to receive appropriate treatment.28 Eight more centres were subsequently established—in Haifa in 1979, in Jerusalem in 1981 (by the “Woman to Woman” association), in the Sharon area in 1984, in the Negeb in 1988, for Arab women in Nazareth in 1992, for religious women in Jerusalem in 1993, in the northern town of Kiryat Shmona in 1994, and in the coastalplain area in 1998. All of these run 24-hour help-lines staffed by volunteers, provide emotional assistance, and accompany the victims (both male and female) for medical treatment. In 1990, a central organisation was founded to assist all victims of sexual assault in Israel, serving as a national umbrella organisation to reinforce awareness, disseminate information, promote legislative initiatives, and enlist support.29 Despite the fact that, three decades ago, such developments would have been considered an impossible dream, many Israeli women still encounter difficulty in receiving assistance— particularly with respect to domestic violence. The first shelter for “battered women” was opened in 1977 in Herzliya, an emergency helpline also being set up for the first time for women victims of violence in Haifa.30 To date (2012), thirteen such shelters are being run by ten organisations under the aegis of the Ministry of Welfare—which also funds half-way houses for “battered women” and their children. Although the statistics do not reveal the true extent of the phenomenon, in 2009 748 women and 1,059 children found refuge in the shelters. While no precise figures regarding the number of women who take advantage of them are available—little research having been carried out in this regard— comparison with figures from abroad suggests that around 200,000 women are, or have been, battered in Israel.31 These measures and processes indicate a pattern of growing activity on behalf of women instigated by activist feminist women. Following the initial initiatives by individuals and non-governmental organisations, State institutions have also answered the call and begun participating in various projects. One of the most important achievements in relation to the harassment of and violence against women was the passing of the Prevention of Sexual Harassment Law in 1998, which led to a significant change in social perception. Promoted by MK Yael Dayan and lawyer Orit Kamir, Raday regards this as constituting the most radical legislation in this realm in the international arena (Raday 2007: 33-34). While public awareness and the dissemination of knowledge are unquantifiable factors, their weight cannot be underestimated. Violence against women having long been buried in a thick and heavy silence under which the victims were left to cope with their distress alone, it has now

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become clear that the fact that it affects every sector of society and all genders indicates it to be a problem demanding serious attention. The phenomenon is, indeed, now beginning to be seen and heard in the public space—through media reports, literature, theatre, etc.—victims themselves also gathering the courage to reveal their stories. Young women today thus live in the knowledge that they possess the right to and possibility of being heard, aided, protected, and defended.

2. The Body Regime As a breast cancer survivor who underwent a mastectomy, artist Ariela Shavid decided to create a series of images reflecting the dramatic changes her body had undergone in order to survive. Calendar (1996) (FIG. 3) comprises one photograph out of a series depicting herself on the beach in a seductive pose, in imitation of the innumerable calendar images of women.

FIGURE 4-3. Ariela Shavid, Calendar (Series), 1996.

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Hereby, she sought to challenge traditional conceptions regarding the female body: does a women without breasts lose her femininity? What should a woman’s body look like in order to be “read” as such? In this regard, she was following the well-established tradition introduced by American artists in the 1970s—Martha Wilson, whose work we discussed above, being a prominent example. The medical establishment continues to be mired in male hegemonic thinking, the prevailing opinion remaining that “Both physiologically and pathophysiologically, women are generally viewed as something akin to small men” (Glezerman 2009: 39 [original italics]). The fact they possess “different genitals and the capability to deliver babies” being virtually insignificant, no need exists for medical research specific to the female sex. As Glezerman’s study of “Discrimination by good intention” indicates, two-thirds of the diseases that affect both sexes have been studied only in regard to men. Much of the treatment of women consequently derives from knowledge acquired by means of research into males, for example, or employs drugs whose efficacy has been proven only in regard to men. Women’s medicine is also not immune to erroneous treatment methods grounded upon biased gender-based perceptions. Two studies based on data collected in the United States reveal that 75% of all women suffering from breast cancer who undergo radical mastectomies could have been treated with far less invasive surgery—75% of the hysterectomies being performed on women with myomas (benign growths in the uterus) being similarly unnecessary.32 Data gathered in Israel attests to the fact that the medical establishment frequently prefers radical surgical procedures and invasive treatment of the woman’s body. Thus, for example, a 2010 survey of abortion statistics demonstrated that 90% of women in Israel are not provided with full information regarding the methods available, the majority following the surgical option without being offered any alternative (Weiler-Polak 2011: 5). Similarly, only 9% of the women who seek an abortion before the seventh week of pregnancy are offered termination by pharmacological means—despite the fact that no single method possesses any medical advantage over any other. “My conclusion [in this survey]”, explains Prof. Daniel Seidman, Chair of the Israel Society for Contraception and Sexual Health and Director of the women’s research unit at Sheba Hospital, “is that this is also about the doctor’s personal bias, a sort of habit. If he performs twenty surgical terminations a year, he will tend to continue that practice … despite the official preference to avoid turning to invasive operations and general

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anaesthesia ... and despite our repeated warnings, the data show that women in Israel do not receive full and vital information about abortion, nor are they given the opportunity to choose the way in which it is performed” (Weiler-Polak 2011: 5). Over recent decades, these circumstances have led to the development of a new medical discipline known as Gender Medicine, which recognises the functional and biological differences between male and female systems and the fact that these directly affect both diagnosis and treatment. The fact that drug research is carried out only on men has thus led to the demand to include an equal number of men and women in the relevant studies (Glezerman 2009)—drugs specifically targeted at women also now being developed. In February 2009, the Israel Society for Gendered Medicine was founded. Currently possessing over 120 active members representing 16 medical disciplines from 11 Universities and medical centers in Israel, this has also spawned dozens of research projects—as well as the introduction of the first post-graduate Gender Medicine course at Tel Aviv University. This would appear to constitute the first small step towards integrating novel yet necessary approaches into the Israeli health system.33 The publication of the Israeli version of Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973) by the non-profit organisation “Our Bodies, Ourselves”—originally known as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective—pioneered the study of the bodies and health of women by women for the sake of women, creating a revolutionary change in awareness of the subject. The book was translated into Hebrew and published for the first time by the Second Sex Press in 1982 at the initiation of feminist activists Sarah Sykes and Ilana Golan—being adapted to suit Israeli conditions and dedicated to employing non-repressive words with which to describe female genitalia. In 2005, a decision was taken to translate it again—this time into both Hebrew and Arabic—under the aegis of the “Women and Their Bodies” organisation. Established with the aim of “changing the perception of women’s health, bodies and sexuality in Israel”, this organisation works to “promote comprehensive social change in the health attitudes of Israeli women, Jewish and Arab [… and] to provide accessible, pragmatic, research-based information about women’s health and sexuality in order to raise awareness amongst women, regardless of age, socio-economic status and ethnicity, throughout Israel”—in order to enable them to “protect and promote their own health and wellbeing, for the benefit of themselves, their families, communities and the entire society”.34 The task of translation was undertaken by three hundred women from different fields, women also contributing new knowledge based on their personal

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experience, the volume finally being published in Hebrew in 2011 and in Arabic in the following year.

FIGURE 4-4. Chava Raucher, Calendar Girls (Series), 2005.

One of the social issues which incorporate a particularly intense form of proscription is that of aging women. In 2005, in collaboration with the poet Hava Pinchas-Cohen, the artist Chava Raucher hung a series of huge paintings entitled Calendar Girls (FIG. 4)—featuring partially-clothed elderly women in “seductive” poses—on the exterior walls of an art gallery in Alharizi Street in Tel Aviv, Cohen adding some of her poems. Following complaints by neighbours, the Tel Aviv municipal arts committee censored the exhibition—on the grounds that “this is a small street in a residential area and the works are inappropriate to the location”. While we think nothing of the advertisements we see on every street corner exploiting the bodies of young women in a sexist and degrading manner, exposure to those of older women was considered taboo! The elderly are subject to multi-faceted age-related discrimination, frequently suffering economic inferiority and the callous violation of their basic rights—particularly in the areas of health and welfare. The stigma of senescence promoted by a capitalist civilisation which worships youth and beauty typically conceives them as not only physically but also mentally disabled. Elderly women experience a double indignity, the gender

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discrimination they encountered at a younger age increasing as they grow older, their lives “shrinking” until ultimately reduced either to the role of doting grandmother or evil witch—either an asexual and kind-but-weak woman or a demonic and dangerous sorceress. The option of being an active older women—excited and exciting and living her life to its full potential—is systematically denied. The first signs of a critical discourse in respect to this issue now appear to be emerging in Israel. This is evident, for example, in such events as a conference held at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem entitled “Ageism in Israeli Society: Stereotypes and the Social Construction of Old Age in Israel” in November 2009 that discussed the phenomenon in the country, the explanations given of it, and its practical implications and gender aspects. The following year, the Mahut Centre organised a conference entitled “Employment, Gender and Old Age” which examined the sideeffects of ageist discrimination. This issue had been tackled by various American feminist artists in the 1970s—such as Alice Neel in her selfportrait as an old nude woman sitting proudly in an armchair and exposing her loose folds of flabby skin to the viewer’s gaze.

3. Militarism, the Military, and Pacifism

FIGURE 4-5. Yael Bartana, Profile (Still photo from a video), 2001.

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Yael Bartana’s video work Profile (2001) represents a three-minute target practice conducted by female soldiers on the firing range with the aim of addressing issues of regimentation and the relationship of authority and compliance (Azulai 2008). (FIGS. 5 and 6). The camera capturing the actions of the soldiers while performing the rigid daily routine imposed by the military framework, the piece depicts the realities of obedience, authority, stress, and exhaustion—the sentence “weapon dismantled, checked, and locked” being repeatedly reiterated throughout (Etgar 2008: 13). Compelled to function within a repressive male framework, female conscripts are expected to act as equals in a world in which they are otherwise regarded as “just women”—i.e., as Others or the exception to the “rule” of male warriors.35

FIGURE 4-6. Yael Bartana, Profile (Still photo from a video), 2001.

The subject of integrating women into combat units was placed sharply on the public agenda in 1994 when a young woman called Alice Miller petitioned the High Court against the Ministry of Defence and IDF (Israel Defense Forces) for refusing to let her apply to a pilots’ course. An aeronautical engineering student in possession of a South African pilot’s license, Miller objected to the popular proverb that “the good men are for

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flying and the good girls are for the pilots”. In an historic decision, the petition was accepted, thereby paving the way for women to serve in military roles which up until that point had been exclusively male realms. This step—achieved in one of the most masculine, chauvinist, and patriarchal sectors of Israeli society was highly significant. Despite the great achievement accomplished, however, many feminists continue to disapprove of women—or men—joining the army altogether, the IDF (despite its name) not being solely concerned with defence but frequently employing violent, repressive, and destructive means and measures.

FIGURE 4-7. Dina Shenhav, Game Over (Series), 2001.

Dina Shenhav’s series Game Over—presented in 2001—features the conflict between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians, using images documented during the Intifada—the Palestinian uprising—the first Lebanon War, and various press, television, and cinema footage covering violent conflicts (FIG. 7).36 Created in the form of mosaics composed of rubber foam and acrylic paint on cardboard, these works portray the “end game”—when all sides have lost. Expressing a pacifist protest, the multiple, tiny, fragmentary pieces indicate the futility of the ritual of war, highlighting the unremitting friction amongst the various peoples living in the region and the constant divide in which they live. Like American

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feminists in the 1970s—such as Nancy Spero, whose oeuvre was discussed above—Israeli feminists and activists thus accentuate the links between violence, war, and gender issues in their own localities. As Shenhav’s pieces demonstrate, the anti-war protest movement in Israel is intimately linked to the feminist outlook. Becoming an increasingly public agenda towards the end of the 1980s, amongst the bold women who raised their voices and stamped their mark were those in the “Four Mothers” movement. Founded in the wake of the 1997 helicopter disaster to protest the IDF presence in Lebanon and demand the return home of Israeli soldiers, this disbanded in 2000 with the IDF withdrawal —the women playing a significant role in the raising of public opinion regarding the military campaign. 2000 saw the establishment of the “Coalition of Women for Peace”— whose stated aim is to coordinate the numerous feminist organisations working to end the occupation of the territories and reduce militarism in Israeli society, promote the involvement of women in negotiating peace, and help achieve equality and socio-economic justice for all the citizens and inhabitants of the State of Israel. This was followed in 2001 by the formation of the “Checkpoint Watch”—an organisation dedicated to fighting the occupation and advancing human rights. Within its framework, women monitor the behaviour of Israeli soldiers at the checkpoints and report any infringements of human rights they witness. In 2005, feminist theoreticians and activists founded the International Women’s Commission for a Just and Sustainable Israeli-Palestinian Peace (IWC), a body that seeks to introduce “a women’s rights perspective to mainstream political analysis and political actions, which are absent from ongoing peace negotiation efforts. IWC members engage at the highest political level at home and abroad, drawing on the voices and insights of women experiencing the impact of the conflict in their daily lives”.37 Inspired by UN Security Council Resolution 1325—passed in October 2000—this organisation seeks to protect women in war and conflict zones and promote female representation in debates, negotiations, and agreements on both the local and international level (Saragusti 2009: 7). Despite the overwhelmingly number of male military causalities, women are also victims of the violence in the region, the fact that they typically espouse a different worldview and perspective with regard to violent conflicts and wars enabling them—at the same time—to raise alternative proposals for the achievement of peace. The Commission thus unites Israeli, Palestinian, and international women who act in concert to bring an end to the Israeli occupation and achieve a just peace based on human rights, equality, and international law.

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These subjects had been addressed by American artists and theoreticians active in the 1970s—as reflected, for example, in Sarah Ruddick’s essay “Maternal Thinking” and Martha Rosler’s series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful.

4. Representation and the Politics of Identity Artist Shula Keshet has devoted herself to bringing attention to the status of Mizrahi—i.e., Jews from Arab countries—and Arab women in Israel, two groups whose members suffer from a double form of repression: gender and ethnic/national. Her piece entitled Veiled (1999) (FIG. 8) comprises a self-portrait in which her face is entirely covered— except for the eyes—with a veil woven from traditional embroidery. Representing both the aesthetic world of Oriental handicrafts—which Western art has traditionally dismissed as “craft”—and the stereotype of the Arab woman masked by a burqa, Keshet undermines this derogatory image by the piercing gaze she directs at the camera, accentuating her pride in her Persian background and culture. In the 1970s in the United Stated, this tradition was exemplified by many non-white feminist artists—such as artist Betye Saar. The Mizrahi feminist movement in Israel explicitly drew much of its inspiration from the black feminism that emerged in the United States as women of colour began developing an awareness of their three-fold disadvantage: gender, ethnicity, and class. In Israel, this issue became prominent during the first Mizrahi feminist conference, held in 1996— when Mizrahi feminist activists and academics determined that the time had come to separate themselves from the general feminist movement, controlled by white feminists, and organise an independent feminist activity responsible for its own discourse and decisions. The notions of multiculturalism and the politics of identity form an inseparable part of the Mizrahi discourse in Israel—combined with the deep understanding that a Mizrahi woman who works in a factory on the periphery, deprived of the opportunity to acquire high-quality education and removed from any position of power and influence, is in different need of feminist empowerment than academic, well-to-do Ashkenazi (Jews from European countries) female residents of affluent areas of the country, such as Tel Aviv. The needs and interests of women belonging to the weaker sectors of society differing vastly from the white founders of the current feminist movements, Mizrahi feminists thus took on the task of fighting against the three-fold forms of repression—gender, ethnic, and class—under which their fellow women laboured.

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FIGURE 4-8. Shula Keshet, Veiled (Series), 1999.

In 2000, Mizrahi activists founded the “Achoti (My Sister)—For Women in Israel” movement—which set its goal as championing the needs and interests of marginalised women. With the expansion of this approach, Mizrahi feminism regards itself today as relevant to every group of women subject to patriarchal repression—including those within Palestinian and Bedouin societies. The “Achoti” movement has made a great contribution to the understanding that women in the weaker sectors of society face particular difficulties with respect to earning a livelihood, their voices rarely being heard in hegemonic society. It has thus illuminated, for example, the need for particular sensitivity towards providing professional training for Muslim-Arab women or UltraOrthodox Jewish women, the religious restrictions imposed on both these groups that prevent them from studying and working within regular frameworks demanding that they be furnished with their own facilities.

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Coloured women from various countries of origin suffering overt repression in Israeli society, Esti Alamo—from an Ethiopian background—forms an example of an artist whose work addresses the politics of identity. Her piece Untitled (2006) (FIG. 9) portrays a coloured woman wearing long African-like braids dressed in Western clothing and accessories sitting proudly and erectly in the midst of “natural”, “wild”, dark-green vegetation—a combination of Western and non-Western symbols in a unified context representing the power relations between centre and periphery and the exclusion of Ethiopian women on the basis of gender and racist discrimination. In her work, Alamo integrates her personal life story with the performative strategy of being the “Other”—a black woman in a primarily white Israeli society (Dekel 2009). In the 1970s, several African-American artists also engaged with this subject—such as Faith Ringgold in her pieces addressing sexism and racism.

FIGURE 4-9. Esti Alamo, Untitled, 2006.

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FIGURE 4-10. Anisa Ashkar, Agriya Matiya 3, 2006. Colour photograph.

Artist Anisa Ashkar—a Palestinian Muslim born in Acre—employs a similar performative strategy in her work Agriya Matiya (“Wild Eyes” in Greek) (2006). Across her face is inscribed in Arabic the sentence ϥΎΣ ΪϘϟ ΪΣ΍ϭ ΕϮϤϟ΍ϭ ϡϮϨϟ΍ .ϥΎϓ ΎΒϳήϘϟ ΔϴΗ΍ ϲϧ΍ ΪϋϮϤϟ΍—“The time has arrived, I am she, who will soon come. Sleep and death are one” (FIG. 10). Ashkar’s work engages with the status of women and intra-community issues, as well as with Jewish-Arab relations, the subjects she treats being linked to raising feminist awareness within the female sectors of Arab and Palestinian communities. The technique of using her face has formed a prominent motif in her work since her early studies at the Beit Berl College of Art. Serving her as a living canvas—a site for political and artistic declarations—she writes sentences taken from Arabic sources and her own thoughts on it, the caption changing daily. The elaborate calligraphy serves several purposes. Functioning as a tool for a subversive act—the fact that the majority of Jewish Israelis do not read Arabic preventing them from understanding the meaning of the written phrases—it also forms a “disturbance” in the Jewish-Israeli public space in which she moves. Even those viewers who can read the language generally find it difficult to decipher the mirror writing. The captions on her face being an unusual sight in the public space, she is frequently

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haunted by a sense of being a subject suspended between two worlds. The defiance in her work reflects the strength necessary to exist within several different identities that cross gender, nationality, and religion—being not just an “Other” but “Others”. Since the 1980s, Arab-Palestinian feminism in Israel has began to increasingly consolidate, witnessing the establishment of various autonomous organisations promoting broad and varied agendas: the founding of day-care centres, provision of economic support and independence, fighting against violence against women—including the murder of women in the name of “family honour”—assisting victims of sexual assault, changing personal status, promoting feminist readings of religious texts, supplying political reinforcement, and so forth (FogielBijaoui 2010: 50). These associations also hold mutual activities with Jewish feminists—primarily with respect to matrimonial laws, personalstatus issues, human rights, co-existence, and peace. Ashkar’s work is linked to all these developments.

FIGURE 4-11. Sichi Gilad, Yom Kippur, 2003.

The place of the Other in a world of complex identities is also reflected in the work of Sichi Gilad, a lesbian artist. Her piece Yom Kippur (2003) (FIG. 11) features a pair of women leaning against the railing of a deserted main road in Tel Aviv, their arms entwined around each other’s waists.

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The absence of traffic reflects the fact that the photograph was taken on the Day of Atonement—the holiest day in the Jewish calendar—and symbolises the cessation of the natural flow of life. The work may be understood as a critique of the stereotypical view of intimate relations between two women—as opposed to those between the normative male/female couple—as unnatural, an obstruction to normal life. Wet with autumn rain, the road embodies an abandoned and mythical urban space which is in effect “every [possible urban] space”, conferring a universal dimension upon the couple—who could be any Western, lesbian, urban couple. At the same time, the scene is emblematic of the unique JewishIsraeli context. Gilad’s numerous photographs feature a broad variety of women— primarily from within the lesbian community—in diverse situations and atmospheres, stressing their relationships and distinctive feminine characteristics. They frequently highlight the strength of women, whether individually or collectively. Gilad’s work is closely linked to the lesbian feminist movement which has developed in Israel, the 1980s witnessing lesbian efforts to fight for gay identity and rights within various frameworks. One of the most prominent of these—founded in 1987—is “Claf—Community of Lesbian Feminists”. A parallel Palestinian women’s lesbian organisation known as “Aswat” was founded in 2002, “Bat-Kol”— a parallel organisation for religious Jewish lesbian women—being formed in 2005. Through these channels, the lesbian-feminist stream has begun fighting for the right to self-definition on several fronts—principally against their double marginalisation as women and lesbians—and for the recognition of lesbian single-sex families. These issues had been addressed in the 1970s in the United States by many artists—such as Cathy Cade, who empathically depicted numerous lesbian women from different backgrounds. In light of this brief review, it is not surprising to note that the subject of identity occupies a central place within the feminist movement in Israel. From the beginnings of Mizrahi feminism in 1992, members and activists issued—in national conferences and other forums—an impassioned call for equal, appropriate, and vocal representation for Mizrahi speakers. This gave birth to the “thirds principle”—i.e., the equal division of resources amongst Mizrahis, Ashkenazis, and Palestinians. In 1994, this became the “quarters” principle, when lesbians also demanded appropriate representation. Notwithstanding, cultural critic Smadar Lavie notes that: Lesbianism is an identity more difficult to endure as a Mizrahi or a Palestinian than as an Ashkenazi because of the Arab patriarchal structure of taboo in both Mizrahi and Palestinian families. Mizrahi feminists

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Religious feminism also began to emerge as a force within JewishIsraeli society, “Kolech” (Your Voice)—a religious-Zionist feminist movement aimed at promoting gender equality amongst religious communities in Israel—being formed in 1998. The struggle of Orthodox religious feminists lies primarily in the realms of personal (marital) status and established politics, the organisation striving to advance the position of religious women in every area, both within and without their community—from religious councils to local authorities and the Knesset. These women also address issues relating to Jewish law and ritual—such as the right to study, teach, and read from the Torah and to lead prayer (Fogiel-Bijaoui 2010: 51). A formerly secular artist Nechama Golan, who became newly observant, boldly and explicitly raises these issues in her numerous works.

FIGURE 4-12. Nechama Golan, Women’s Book, 2000.

Her work Women’s Book (2000) (FIG. 12) combines images with text, featuring a woman whose face appears as though inscribed, the transparent page appearing to seal her mouth and prevent her from speaking—or, alternatively, portraying her desire to add to it by pouring new meanings into the ancient holy text. Part of the text being legible, part concealed by

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the lines and curves of her face, even when it is hard to read it thus constitutes a tactile canvas. This combination of women’s images and religious text—intended to be viewed in a public space—has recently gained increasing resonance in the works of additional Israeli women artists, such as Ruth Kestenbaum Ben-Dov, Rachel Heller, Jennifer Bar Lev, and many others (Dekel 2007).

5. Academia and Feminism A thriving feminist academia has also developed in Israel. Over the past two decades, Gender Studies programmes have opened across the country within a variety of disciplines—the arts, law, education, psychology, etc. These draw their inspiration from similar courses established in the early 1970s in the United States, the curriculum including theories, critical approaches, and research seeking to explain social and cultural phenomena from a unique, unconventional, and challenging viewpoint. Their goal is to propose a methodological criticism of the existing consensus regarding the truth of canonical perceptions by exposing the gender biases whereby these are created and nurtured. Prominent writers and thinkers such as Vicky Shiran, Daphna Yizraeli, Hanna Herzog, Henriette Dahan-Kalev, Hannah Naveh, Sylvie FogielBijaoui, Ella Shochat, and Ariella Friedman are all products of this burgeoning field. Academic institutions offering Gender Studies courses have also begun to incorporate and encourage the integration of the various forms of theoretical knowledge accumulated by those engaged in activist work in the field. Thus, for example, in 2007 Bar Ilan University established a “Gender in the Field” track in its MA program which—being designed for activists—combines social theory and practice. In 2009, Tel Aviv University established a similar MA programme with the goal of incorporating various kinds of knowledge, both field and theory-based. Additional Gender Studies programmes are likewise expanding their courses, new departments also constantly being established across the country. This link between theory and practice, each area nourishing the other, has been a vital feature throughout the history of feminism. Together with expanding activity in the field, Women’s and Gender Study programmes have deepened the understanding of the inequality between sexes and between various groups and sectors in Israel, these courses promoting research into the ways by which change may be implemented and the power relations of hegemony-subordination in Israeli society overcome.

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6. Motherhood

FIGURE 4-13. Sheffy Bleier, What Remains, 1997, Silver print.

Like American artist Mary Kelly, women artists in Israel have also addressed the complex and charged subject of motherhood. Art works dealing with this issue candidly and boldly began to appear in Israel two decades following their emergence in Europe and the United States. Thus, for example, the Israeli artist Sheffy Bleier produced a series of photographs in 1997 entitled What Remains—in which she presented a

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visual, fetishist study using personal objects linked to her son Jonathan’s early years (FIG. 13). As critic Hadara Scheflan-Katzav notes, the work features “Socks, trousers, clogs, some stained, some threaded, organised in a rhythmical order of black-and-white photography with a raw, anthropological, didactic look” (Scheflan-Katzav 1997: 55). Scattered amongst the objects are words, comments, musings, and erasure marks in the artist’s own hand in a meticulous examination of the bond between herself and her son and the constant conflicts it generates. From the mid-1990s onwards, an increasing number of women artists in Israel have begun creating works on the subject of motherhood that incorporate its wondrous and frustrating aspects alike—relating courageously and openly to such experiences as combining motherhood and sexuality and working outside the home. Some of these were exhibited in the Museum of Art in Ramat Gan in 1997 under the title “Oh Mama—Representation of the Mother in Contemporary Israeli Art”, curated by Yehudit Matzkel and Hadara Scheflan-Katzav. The first time a wide range of works on the subject of motherhood was brought together in Israel, this breaking of the taboo against the authentic artistic articulation of the experiences of motherhood reflected the changes which have occurred in Israel. The development of feminist thinking has also led to greater attention to maternal rights and parental discrimination as reflected in Israeli legislation—although the situation is still far from perfect. The dissemination of knowledge has also expanded, thereby reinforcing awareness of the rights of mothers—coupled with a refreshing and new legitimacy to speak up and talk about all facets of the maternal experience—some of which are not always pleasant. In recent years, the charged discourse regarding the difficulties inherent in parenthood has also been exposed without embarrassment—exemplified, in one form, by internet websites such as “mumjob”—which, in the words of its founder Ricky Cohen, serves as a platform to embody the “never-ending juggling” efforts in which women must engage. As this brief survey of the Israeli feminist field and its links with women artists indicates, significant changes have clearly begun to emerge as it gains deeper insight into the principles it seeks to champion. Its beginnings lay primarily in the inspiration it drew from the work of the members of the second wave of feminism in the United States, Israeli feminist activists and thinkers reading American feminism literature, studying, and applying the political tactics and strategies they learnt to the Israeli scene. Although slow to develop into a substantial movement during the 1970s, this discourse expanded in the 1980s. Receiving greater visibility via heightened academic and legislative activity, it has become a significant

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force since the 1990s. Diversifying and branching out, activists and thinkers are now frequently turning not only to Europe and the United States but also to other countries around the world for strategies and ideas, thereby complementing the unique local feminist literature, activism, and artistic field. Today, subjects such as war, motherhood, body image, wages, and the gaps in status deriving from religion, nationality, sexual preference, etc., are addressed by numerous women artists in Israel. These important social issues affect every person in every sector of the country’s population, continuing to be of explicit relevance in the twenty-first century. We may hope that the feminist discourse will find a way to shatter the stigma which has been attached to it and enable a more accurate and authentic perception. As renowned philosopher bell hooks suggests: Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction ... See how feminism can touch and change your life and all our lives. Come closer and know firsthand what [the] feminist movement is all about. Come closer and you will see: feminism is for everybody. (hooks 2000: x)

NOTES

1

For further discussion of Benglis’ piece and perspective, see p. 32-33. See, for example, Jones (1996), Broude and Garrard (1994), Schor (1997), and Richmond (2005). 3 Feminism and feminist artists were to be found not only in the United States and Europe during the 1970s but also in other places in the world: see, for example, Meskimmon (2007). 4 For more regarding feminist artists of the 1970s whose work dealt with maternal issues, see Liss (2009), Chernick and Klein (2011), and Siegel, Silagi, and Krall (2011). 5 The same phenomenon also occurred during the First World War. 6 This statement refers to women from a specific socio-economic and racial class— namely, white suburban women. 7 For an extensive discussion of essentialist art and the ideological debate which arose around it, see Phelan (2001: 37) and Solomon-Godeau (2007: 337-45). 8 See Part III of this volume. 9 See, for example, Broude and Garrard’s (1994) meticulous and groundbreaking work, Jones’ (1996) seminal reassessment of 1970s’ feminist art, and Butler and Mark’s (2007) recent comprehensive study. 10 While Abramoviü’s work does not follow a feminist agenda in general, virtually all studies of art and feminism include this piece amongst the emblematic creations produced by feminist artists. 11 Although Kozloff was not the first to create art specifically designed (both in intent and form) for public spaces—Diego Rivera being particularly well known both for his huge murals in such formats and his political ideology—she was one of the earliest to do so in the context of an art which sought to promote the politico-feminist vision. 12 A similar influential avant-garde art movement was active in the U.S.A. in the 1970s. Centred in Manhattan, this group stressed the necessity of striving to dismantle the traditional hierarchy governing the field of art and demolish the myth of the artist as hero. While feminist artists appeared to have shared this goal, they were not generally accepted into this elite group, the overwhelming majority of the latter being male—such as the artist Robert Rauschenberg. One of its prominent members, the composer John Cage, claimed that art must comport itself like nature—i.e., as a continuous “field” in which no part is more important than any other. Although voicing views close to those of the feminist artists of the period, Cage’s conclusion was that the ultimate aim of the artist is not to have a goal—a notion that flew in the face of the contemporary feminist movement’s politicallycharged efforts to change the face of society and promote activism on behalf of gender equality. 2

182 13

Notes

While the company still exists, the logo was updated in 1968, the kerchief being replaced by a natural hairdo and pearl earrings. 14 The term—coined as the antithesis of the “glass ceiling”—relates to women from the lower classes generally employed as factory workers at minimum wages and under harsh working conditions without work insurance who therefore find it difficult to sustain themselves in a dignified form. 15 In 1996, Amelia Jones organized an exhibition titled Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, held an exhibition of feminist works from the 1970s entitled WACK! (2007). Other exhibitions of first-generation art were curated across the U.S.A., including A Studio of Their Own: The Legacy of the Fresno Feminist Experiment (2009) and Doin’ It In Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building (2011), and many more. 16 Other American artists to create this type of feminist art included the “Mother Art” group and artist Mierle Laderman Ukele (Liss 2004: 25-26; Liss 2009; Moravec 2011: 152-159). Some women artists in Europe also treated this theme, the most prominent of these being Laura Mulvey, Lea Lublin, and Chantal Akerman. 17 Although a number of European feminist theoreticians also wrote on the subject during the 1970s—such as Julia Kristeva—the majority of work relating to motherhood was penned by Americans. 18 It should be noted that, as a white, middle-class, educated woman, Mary Kelly is not representative of all women—nor even of all feminist women. Each woman who becomes a mother experiences this process in her own distinctive fashion, shaped by her cultural status, ethnic background, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, etc. 19 In the preface to the second edition of the book (1999), Chodorow acknowledged that the original text had in fact been written “from the daughter’s point of view more than that of the mother”, due to the fact that, like many young feminists of her generation, she had not “adequately understood how mothering is actually experienced (in all its particularized individual forms), and many of us were ourselves not prepared for the powerful, transformative claims that motherhood would make upon our identities and senses of self” (p. xvii). 20 The speculum is a medical device used to widen the opening of the vagina during a gynecological examination. 21 Personal communication from Esther Eilam, December 2010. 22 It should be stressed that, although some European feminist artists addressed essentialist subjects—such as Catherine Elwes’ performance Menstruation (1979, London)—it was the American artists who became known for their focus on physical aspects, such as menstruation. Conversely, some American artists were also influenced by aspects of Marxist feminism—such as “The Waitresses” group in Los Angeles. 23 While a limited group of feminist artists did address the notion of “the death of the author” during the 1970s—amongst them Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine—they were the exception to the rule.

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Cornelia Butler addressed this issue in the research catalogue for the WACK! exhibition of 2007, wherein she argued that this period had not yet been sufficiently investigated, the full extent of the influence of feminist art from the 1970s requiring a detailed and thorough analysis on the part of both academics and museum curators. In her opinion, this circle constituted the most authentic and significant art movement in the West to have emerged following the Second World War (Butler 2007: 15). 25 See the studies and analyses regarding the feminisation of poverty in Israel published by the Adva Center, a non-partisan policy-analysis institute whose mandate is “to examine Israeli society from the perspective of equality and social justice”: www.adva@org. 26 Notable amongst the galleries exhibiting such works were the Achoti Gallery in Tel Aviv and the Antea Gallery in Jerusalem. 27 Personal communication from Esther Eilam, March 2010. 28 Personal communication from Esther Eilam, March 2010. 29 All the centres share the same telephone number—1202 for women, 1203 for men—these now being included as a matter of course in the list of emergency phone numbers disseminated. 30 The quotation marks indicate feminist resistance to a term which a priori defines women as passively suffering violence. 31 According to a verbal communication from the Ministry of Welfare, March 2010. 32 According to the Hebrew Wikipedia site, s.v. “Breast cancer.” Retrieved 12 July, 2010. 33 See www.wtb.org.il/english. 34 See www.isogem.com/?CategoryID=171&ArticleID=94. 35 Religious Jewish, Arab, and other minority young women in Israel are exempt from obligatory military service. 36 According to an interview published on the Nana10 website, 10 December, 2005: www.bidur.nana10.co.il/Article/ArticleID=217405. 37 http://jobs.undp.org/cj_view_job.cfm?cur_job_id=19138. Retrieved 20 August, 2012.

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INDEX

Abramoviü, Marina, 27-28, 151 Akerman, Chantal, 182 Alamo, Esti, 172 Allyn, Jerri, 79 Alon, Ktsia, 14 Andre, Karl, 60 Angelo, Nancy, 82 Antin, Eleanor, 31-32, 139, 157 Ashkar, Anisa, 173-174 Atkinson, Ti-Grace, 81 Baca, Judith, 71 Bar Lev, Jennifer, 177 Bartana, Yael, 166 Barthes, Roland, 148-149 Baudrillard, Jean, 152 Beauvoir, Simone de, 19, 27, 40, 80, 88-89, 122-123, 131 Belt, Leslie, 79 Benglis, Linda, 1-3, 32-33, 95, 146, 157 Berger, John, 14 Biren, Joan, 84 Bleier, Sheffy, 178-179 Bourdieu, Pierre, 17 Brody, Sherry, 59-60 Broude, Norma, 59, 141 Brownmiller, Susan, 70 Burke, Seán, 150 Butler, Cornelia, 182 Butler, Judith, 95, 145 Cade, Cathy, 84, 175 Cage, John, 181 Carter, Angela, 31 Cassatt, Mary, 129 Chicago, Judy, 24-25, 33-34, 38, 41, 44, 66-68, 90, 94, 137-138, 146, 151 Chodorow, Nancy, 117-119, 123125, 182

Cixous, Helene, 59, 126, 137 Colette, 25 Compton, Candace, 82 Corinne, Tee, 43-44, 83-85 Cosey Fanni Tutti (Christine Newby), 74 Cottingham, Laura, 2, 44 Courbet, Gustav, 82 Creed, Barbara, 89 d’Eaubonne, Francoise, 53 Daly, Mary, 27, 32, 66, 73, 87 Damon, Betsy, 55, 56, 82 Delphy, Christine, 81 Derrida, Jacques, 148 Dickenson, Emily, 67 Dinnerstein, Dorothy, 34, 123-124 Doktorczyk-Donohue, Marlena, 79, 93 Dworkin, Andrea, 74-75 Edelson, Mary Beth, 53-55 Eilam, Esther, 129 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 67 Elwes, Catherine, 182 Escobar, Maria Sol (Marisol), 36 Firestone, Shulamith, 20, 31, 77-78, 117, 123 Fogiel-Bijaoui, Sylvie, 177 Foucault, Michel, 148-149 French, Marilyn, 57-58 Freud, 37, 87, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 120, 126, 137 Friedan, Betty, 11, 19, 47 Friedman, Ariella, 5, 118-119 Friedman, Marsha, 160 Frueh, Joanna, 95, 133 Frye, Marilyn, 81 Fuss, Diana, 91 Gauldin, Anne, 79 Gaulke, Cheri, 24

204 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 67 Gilad, Sichi, 174-175 Gilmore, Jane, 51 Golan, Ilana, 164 Golan, Nechama, 176 Goldin, Amy, 59 Greenberg, Clement, 90 Greer, Germaine, 19, 31 Griffin, Susan, 52-53, 75, 87 Gubar, Susan, 150 Gustafson, Julie, 46 Hammer, Barbara, 84 Hammond, Harmony, 30-31, 61-62, 92, 142 Hanisch, Carol, 13, 142 Harari, Neta, 159 Hartmann, Heidi, 81 Heller, Rachel, 177 Henes, Donna, 57 Hernton, Calvin, 77 Herzog, Hanna, 177 Hockney, David, 82 Irigaray, Luce, 36-37, 38, 59, 118, 126-127, 137, 140 Jaudon, Valerie, 58, 64 Johnston, Jill, 81 Jones, Amelia, 33, 93, 94-95 Judd, Donald, 46 Kahlo, Frida, 129, 192 Kamir, Orit, 161 Kaplan, Anne, 132 Kelly, Mary, 6, 7, 28, 98-134, 136137, 139-140, 146, 147, 151, 178, 182 Keshet, Shula, 170-171 Kestenbaum Ben-Dov, Ruth, 177 Klinger, Linda, 146 Kodet, Anne, 37 Kollwitz, Käthe, 129 KosiĔski, Jerzy, 27 Kozloff, Joyce, 58, 62-64, 85 Krauss, Rosalind, 1, 49 Kristeva, Julia, 21, 22, 56, 65, 8990, 114-115, 116, 126, 127-128, 131-132, 137 Labowitz, Leslie, 68-69, 158

Index Lacan, 93, 101, 102, 103, 114, 115, 117, 120, 126, 128, 137, 149 Lacy, Suzanne, 48-49, 68-69, 90, 158 Lane, Betty, 85 Lavie, Smadar, 175 LeCocq, Karen, 25-27, 40-41, 90 Leonardo da Vinci, 101 Lester, Janice, 25 Levy, Pamela, 157 Lippard, Lucy, 91, 93, 139 Liss, Andrea, 86-87 Loos, Adolf, 58 Lorde, Audre, 81 Lublin, Lea, 182 Lucie-Smith, Edward, 82 MacKinnon, Catharine, 35, 75 Maplethorpe, Robert, 82 Marisol (Maria Sol Escobar), 36 Matzkel, Yehudit, 179 Mendes-Flohr, Rita, 134 Mendieta, Ana, 52 Millett, Kate, 20, 25, 81 Mitchell, Juliet, 98 Moderson-Becker, Paula, 129 Moravec, Michelle, 92 Morisot, Berthe, 129 Mulvey, Laura, 48-49, 87, 88, 98, 182 Naveh, Hannah, 5, 177 Neel, Alice, 133, 166 Nemser, Cindy, 2, 91 Neumann, Eric, 50 Newby, Christine (Cosey Fanni Tutti), 74 Nicklaus, Patti, 79 Nochlin, Linda, 18, 133 Orenstein, Gloria, 51 Ortner, Sherry, 88 Ozenfant, Amédée, 58 Payento, Ayelet, 156-157 Pinchas-Cohen, Hava, 165 Pincus, Robert, 2 Pollock, Giselda, 87, 88, 98 Raday, Frances, 159, 161 Raucher, Chava, 165

Gendered: Art and Feminist Theory Rauschenberg, Robert, 61, 181 Raven, Arlene, 84, 93 Rich, Adrienne, 20, 31, 81, 87, 113114, 123, 125 Ringgold, Faith, 78-79, 145, 172 Rosler, Martha, 47-48, 90, 139, 151, 170 Ruddick, Sarah, 73, 119, 120, 123, 125, 170 Saar, Betye, 75-77, 145, 170 Samara, Lucas, 64 Santoro, Suzanne, 39-40 Sappho, 41-42, 67 Sarachild, Kathie, 13 Schapiro, Miriam, 25, 44, 59-62, 146 Scheflan-Katzav, Hadara, 130, 179 Schneemann, Carolee, 28-30, 85, 95, 142 Semmel, Joan, 35-36 Sharon, Miriam, 157 Shavid, Ariela, 162 Shenhav, Dina, 168-169 Shiran, Vicky, 177 Shochat, Ella, 177

205

Showalter, Elaine, 134 Slavin, Dan, 46 Sleigh, Sylvia, 143 Sobell, Nina, 49, 90 Spero, Nancy, 72-73, 151, 169 Stein, Judith, 61 Stella, Frank, 64 Stone, Merlin, 50 Sykes, Sarah, 164 Tickner, Lisa, 91 Troy, Maria, 46, 49 Warhol, Andy, 145 Wark, Jayne, 94 Wentrack, Kathleen, 3-4 Weinfeld, Yocheved, 157 Wilding, Faith, 25, 38-39, 44-45 Wildman, Jamie, 79 Wilke, Hannah, 32, 95, 157 Wilson, Martha, 144, 163 Wittig, Monique, 81 Woolf, Virginia, 67 Wooster, Ann-Sargent, 46-47, 141 Yarfitz Pierre, Denise, 79 Yizraeli, Daphna, 177 Youdelman, Nancy, 25-27, 90