Feminist avant-garde

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Feminist avant-garde. Art of the 1970s from the Verbund Collection is an international series of exhibitions and a comprehensive publication by the Austrian art critic Gabriele Schor on feminist art of the second half of the 20th century.

Term "feminist avant-garde"

In established art history, the feminist art movement of the second half of the 20th century has not yet been counted among the “ avant-garde ” of the post-war period , such as Pop Art , Fluxus or Viennese Actionism . According to Gabriele Schor, Lawrence Alloway took an exceptional position , who wrote in his 1976 article Womens 'Art in the' 70s : “The women's movement in art can be described as the avant-garde because its protagonists in their urge for a change in the existing social Order in the art world are united. ”Even in the 1990s, feminist art of the 1970s was sometimes ridiculed as a“ housewife complaint ”. It was granted a rank in art history only late. The WACK! Art and Feminist Revolution documented the connection between art and feminism for the first time in 2007 with 120 international female artists and took place in renowned houses such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art . A New York Times reviewer wrote: “Curators and critics have increasingly recognized that feminism was the most influential impetus in the art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. There are almost no new works that would not be influenced by it […] ”Although its historical achievement as a pioneer of art is undisputed, feminist art does not find any in relevant German-language lexicons such as those of Metzler-Verlag under the keyword“ Avantgarde ” Mention. With the term “feminist avant-garde”, which gave the exhibition its title, Schor combines the claim to highlight the pioneering achievements of feminist artists of the 1970s and to expand the male connotation of “avant-garde” and anchor it in art history.

Features of 1970s feminist art

Central themes of the feminist artists in Europe and on both American continents were: denouncing the familial, social and political situation of women, self-portrayal of women, liberation of the female body from aesthetic idealization, expansion of the private into the public. Feminist artists can be seen as pioneers of artistic expression and visual reflection on these issues. Feminist art of the 1970s deconstructed the centuries, if not millennia, versions of the image of women formulated almost exclusively by men and created new representations of women in the visual arts. Feminist artists acted according to the motto of the women's movement at the same time: the supposedly private and personal becomes public and is politically relevant.

Feminist artists primarily used new media such as photography, film and video, as well as ( spatial ) installations , actions and performances . These media appeared to them less influenced by male-dominated art history than painting and sculpture. At a time when photography - and even more so video - were not yet widely recognized as art forms, these media enabled women artists to express themselves independently of the art-historical tradition. With new media, they were able to translate their current social issues, such as body politics and gender roles , into artistic work faster and in a more contemporary way.

Exhibition series

The exhibitions include more than 600 works by international artists born between 1915 and 1958. The compilation of the works is based on the research work established in 2004 by Gabriele Schor for the Verbund collection in Vienna. In addition to the works and photographs of actions by renowned female artists, the exhibition series also shows works by well-known and unknown artists that have been forgotten for decades. The exhibition was shown for the first time in 2010 in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome. She immigrated to Madrid, Brussels, Halmstad (Sweden), Hamburg, London, Vienna, Karlsruhe, Stavanger (Norway), Brno and Barcelona.

Many of the works shown aim to discard roles assigned to women, to transcend them. Feminist artists viewed traditional roles such as housewife, wife and mother as restrictive, which made them objects or even victims of patriarchal social conditions. Using their art and actions, they wanted to achieve more self-determination by creating new images of women themselves and also living their sexuality more freely. In their art, the participating artists used everyday household chores, family life, motherhood and “making yourself beautiful (for the man)” in order to distance and free themselves from them, in order to grow beyond that, to reinterpret the activities and to participate to play them. Some artists found drastic images for their rebellion against the reduction of the role of women to housewives and mothers: In 1975 Birgit Jürgenssen put on a kitchen apron in the shape of an oven; Renate Eisenegger ironed a hallway; Karin Mack put herself on an ironing board; Annegret Soltau tied herself in with threads, other artists with ropes. Whether with clothespins or adhesive tape - some artists practiced bondage with everyday objects to the point of pain.

Feminist art of the 1970s for the first time comprehensively addressed female eroticism from the perspective of women - often far removed from the standardized concept of beauty, or deliberately counteracting it. Some artists (including Penny Slinger, Renate Bertlmann , VALIE EXPORT ) found original, sometimes humorous, happy, sometimes (auto) aggressive productions for their bodies and vulva . Judy Chicago's " Dinner Party " was a table full of vulva symbols in the form of painted ceramics - reliefs or painted on plate. As a rebellion against the compulsion to be beautiful, Ana Mendieta pressed her face against a pane of glass in 1972 in order to disfigure it. A few years later, Katalin Ladik did the same in Yugoslavia (without knowing Ana Mendieta's work). Other women artists related to allegorical statues and paintings. These female figures, created by men for centuries, were either beautiful allegories for e.g. B. “Justice” or “Wisdom”, or they portrayed saints or goddesses . In her video performances, Ulrike Rosenbach interacted using cross-fades and the like. a. with Botticelli's painting The Birth of Venus . In “Do not believe that I am an Amazon ” Rosenbach shot arrows at a reproduction of Stefan Lochner's Madonna in Rosenhag and thus at himself, as her face was projected over that of the Madonna. The image of the pure, asexual Maria mixed with that of an Amazon , with which the artist intended to deconstruct the clichés of both images of women. The role-play with traditional female stereotypes took the photographer Cindy Sherman particularly far .

In addition, feminist artists took up a central idea of ​​French poststructuralism for the first time in their works, which were created in the 1970s : They questioned the western concept of the subject, which a person (especially a white, heterosexual man) as a unified, his self-conscious being with a clear identity imagined. The feminist works and actions thus not only criticized the image of women determined by men, but also understood human subjectivity to be fundamentally more permeable and changeable. Typical of feminist art of the 1970s was e.g. B. the ironic appropriation and display of “masculine”, macho poses - by means of their own, feminine, sometimes bare bodies. In doing so, they exceeded the concept of individuals and society, which are strictly divided into two sexes.

subjects

The exhibition is divided into five themes:

  • Wife, housewife and mother
  • Locked up - breakout
  • Beauty compulsions and body
  • Female sexuality
  • Role play

Stations

  • DONNA. Avanguardia femminista negli anni '70 , Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna , Rome , Italy, February 19 - May 16, 2010
  • MUJER. La vanguardia feminista de los anos 70, PHotoEspana, Círculo de Bellas Artes , Madrid, Spain, June 3rd - Sep 1st. 2013
  • WOMAN. The Feminist Avant-garde from the 1970s. Works from the SAMMLUNG VERBUND collection, Vienna. Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles , Belgium, June 18 - August 31, 2014
  • Woman - Internationally feminist avantgarde från 1970-talet Works. Photo & video från VERBUND COLLECTION . Mjellby konstmuseum - Halmstadgroups museum, Halmstad , Sweden, September 20, 2014 - January 11, 2015
  • Feminist avant-garde of the 1970s. Works from the VERBUND SAMMLUNG, Vienna. Hamburger Kunsthalle , Hamburg, Germany, March 13 - May 31, 2015
  • Feminist avant-garde of the 1970s. Works from the SAMMLUNG VERBUND Collection, Vienna , The Photographers' Gallery, London, UK, 6 Oct 2016 - 8 January 2017
  • WOMAN. Feminist avant-garde of the 1970s. Works from the SAMMLUNG VERBUND, Vienna , Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna , Austria, May 4 - Sep 10. 2017
  • Feminist avant-garde of the 1970s from the Verbund collection, Vienna , ZKM Center for Art and Media , Karlsruhe, Germany, November 18, 2017 - April 1, 2018
  • WOMAN. The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s. Works from the SAMMLUNG VERBUND collection, Vienna , MUST Stavanger Art Museum, Stavanger, Norway, June 15 - October 14, 2018
  • Feminist Avant-garde / Art of the 1970s, SAMMLUNG VERBUND Collection, Vienna , Dům umění města Brna (House of Art of the City of Brno), Czech Republic, Dec. 12, 2018 - Feb. 24, 2019
  • FEMINISMS! CCCB - Center de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, ​​Spain, July 19 - January 6, 2020.

Participating artists

publication

  • Gabriele Schor (Ed.) Avantguardia Feminista Negli Anni '70, dalla Collection Verbund di Vienna . Electa , Rome 2010, ISBN 978-88-370-7414-2
  • Gabriele Schor (ed.): Feminist avant-garde. 1970s art. Works from the Verbund collection, Vienna. (Accompanying the exhibition.) Extended edition. Prestel, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-7913-5627-3 . The book, which is published in German and English, includes texts and images on all the artists on display, as well as four artistic contributions by Gabriele Schor, Mechtild Widrich, Merle Radtke and Brigitte Borchhardt-Birbaumer.
  • An extended edition of the book will be published in English in summer 2020: Feminist Avant-Garde. Art of the 1970s in the VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna , bound, 672 pages, 23 × 28 cm, 200 color illustrations, 500 b / w illustrations. ISBN 978-3-7913-5971-7

Awards

  • Vienna Art Award 2013
  • ACCA Award (L'Associació Catalana de Crítics d'Art Award), Barcelona 2019

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Tabea Grzeszyk: Feminist avant-garde. The ironic appropriation of male poses. In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur. May 14, 2015. (deutschlandfunkkultur.de)
  2. ↑ In: Art in America . 64, May-June 1976, pp. 64-72. Translated and quoted by Gabriele Schor: Feminist Avantgarde. Art from the 1970s from the Verbund collection, Vienna. P. 18.
  3. ^ Holland Cotter: Feminist Art Finally takes Center Stage. Translated and quoted by Gabriele Schor. In: The New York Times. January 29, 2007, p. 19. (nytimes.com)
  4. ^ Gabriele Schor: Feminist avant-garde. Art from the 1970s from the Verbund collection, Vienna . Prestel Verlag, Munich / London / New York 2015, ISBN 978-3-7913-5445-3 , pp. 17-19.
  5. ^ Feminist avant-garde of the 1970s from the VERBUND collection, Vienna. In: Art and Film. March 16, 2018.
  6. ^ Hamburger Kunsthalle. Feminist avant-garde of the 1970s , Deutschlandfunk, March 14, 2015 .
  7. ^ New exhibition at the ZKM Karlsruhe. Never be a victim again! taz Die Tageszeitung, December 3, 2017 .
  8. ↑ Feminist avant-garde of the 1970s from the VERBUND SAMMLUNG. Exhibition "Woman" at mumok , ARTinWORDS, May 1st, 2017 .
  9. ^ Feminism and the avant-garde. Gabriele Schor in conversation with Heinz Schütz. In: Kunstforum international . Volume 262/219, p. 326 f.
  10. ↑ The private remains political: From Merkel's diamond to the vagina. In Barcelona, ​​the “Verbund” shows the breadth of its feminist collection - and meets Almuth Spiegler's zeitgeist. In: Die Presse , 23 July 2019.
  11. ^ The exhibition "Feminist Avant-garde" at the Karlsruhe ZKM. In the prison of marriage. In: Stuttgarter Nachrichten. December 8, 2017.
  12. ^ Feminist avant-garde of the 1970s from the VERBUND collection, Vienna In: Art and Film. March 16, 2018.
  13. ↑ Feminist Avant-Garde Art: The Wild Years of the Uprising. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine. February 14, 2018.
  14. ^ "Donna". The Verbund collection shows feminist art in Rome. In: The Standard. February 16, 2010.
  15. ↑ Sean O'Hagan: PhotoEspaña 2013: the 1970s feminist avant garde. In: The Guardian. 14th of June 2013.
  16. ↑ BOZAR Center for Fine Arts, Brussels, 2014 .
  17. ^ Female Power in Halmstad. Konst i Halmstad, November 25, 2014.
  18. ^ Feminist avant-garde of the 1970s. Works from the VERBUND SAMMLUNG. , Hamburger Kunsthalle , 2015.
  19. ^ Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s: Works from the Verbund Collection. Photographers' Gallery, London, 2016–2017.
  20. ↑ WOMAN. Feminist avant-garde of the 1970s from the Verbund collection , Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna , 2017.
  21. ^ Exhibition and symposium: Feminist Avant-garde. In: Camera Austria. Retrieved July 30, 2019 (German).
  22. ↑ The Feminist Avant-Garde, Now More than Ever , Thomas Micchelli in Hyperallergic, May 20, 2017
  23. ^ Feminist avant-garde of the 1970s from SAMMLUNG VERBUND Vienna , Center for Art and Media , Karlsruhe, 2018.
  24. ^ The exhibition "Feminist Avant-garde" in the Karlsruhe ZKM: In the Prison of Marriage. In: Stuttgarter Nachrichten. Retrieved July 30, 2019 .
  25. ^ Rose-Maria Gropp: Feminist avant-garde art: The wild years of the uprising . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed July 30, 2019]).
  26. ↑ WOMAN. The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s, MUST Stavanger Art Museum, 2018 .
  27. ↑ Discover the Feminist Avant-Garde! Interview by Heather Jones with Gabriele Schoor, Contemporary Art Stavanger, Journal, 3rd Sep. 2018
  28. ^ Feminist Avant-garde / Art of the 1970s / SAMMLUNG VERBUND Collection, The Brno House of Arts, Brno, 2019 .
  29. ↑ FEMINISMS! CCCB - Center de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, ​​2019
  30. ^ Nicole Scheyerer: Austrian Feminism Art Collection visits Spain. In: The Standard. 23rd July 2019.
  31. ^ Feminist avant-garde. Art of the 1970s in the VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna , extended edition, 2020
  32. ↑ The Verbund collection wins OscART on its own homepage
  33. ↑ Guanyadors Premis ACCA 2019