In the 1960's, there was a split between art and politics. The cold reductivist styles and modernist approach to art no longer left room for an involvement in a social critique and dialogue between political activism and the art world. "And what were those pinup poses of Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor implying vis-ˆ-vis the nascent women's movement? According to the critical community, absolutely nothing" (pg. 468, Broude). This disjunction between content and technique, and the strong emphasis on the latter, left the politically engaged art makers of the time, such as women and racial minorities in the sidelines of the art movement for years to come.
"Until recently, there was no problem in determining who were the subjects of history" (pg. 82, Schor). Implicit messages about the male as normative were perpetuated in High Modernist art's insistence on form over content, on white male artists above anyone else. Although these ideas were not expressively articulated, they were neatly assumed and greatly implied in American art of the 50's and 60's. Women artists of the modernist era attempted to infiltrate the art world by becoming "men" artists through the degendering of their names. "American women artists active during the decades between World War II and the feminist movement of the seventies utilized a variety of strategies in their attempts to be accepted as artists, not women -- because to be a women was by definition not to be an artist" (pg. 136, Frueh). For example, Lee Krasner and Elaine De Kooning signed their work in their initials only, Grace Hartigan chose "George" as her professional name and Elaine Sturtevant rid herself of her first name all together and worked under the name "Sturtevant" alone.
It wasn't until the 70's that women began to increase their visibility by taking action against the male-centered art world and started demanding they open the gates to women artists. Active protest began with WAR (Women Artists in Revolution) in 1969. WAR was one of a few groups created during this time. Others were the Art Workers Coalition, the Ad Hoc Women Artists' Committee, and the WASBAL (Women Artists and Students for Black Art Liberation) among numerous smaller consciousness-raising groups of women artists (pg. 42, Lippard). On the West Coast, the creation of a space for women artists - a school - was being set in motion by Miriam Schapiro, Nancy Azara, and other women artists in the Feminist Art Institute, at the C.I.A. (California Institute of the Arts) in Valencia, CA. One of the biggest actions taken by women against the art world early on was by the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists when they threatened a civil rights suit against the Los Angeles County Museum with statistics that reflected the situation at large:
Only twenty-nine out of 713 artists whose works appeared in group shows at the museum in the past ten years were women, of fifty-three one-artist shows, only one was devoted to a woman, less than one percent of the work displayed in the month of June 1971, at the Los Angeles County Museum was by women (pg. 43, Lippard).In April of that same year, WEB (West-East Bag) was created to inform women artists' groups from coast to coast of each others actions, techniques, and methodology. Picketing, public interviewing, and harassment were just some of the methods these women used to make their voices heard. A favorite example is of the protest against the Whitney Museum of American Art's Annual opening were an anonymously forged press release announced that the event would be fifty percent female that year and 500 fake tickets to the opening were distributed to women as retaliation. As a result of constant protests against the Whitney, the Museum suddenly raised their number of women artists from 4.5% to 22 percent in one year. Yet in spite of all this activity paved before us, the art world was, and still is, late in coming to terms with its sexism. "It is a male-dominated world despite the few women dealers, critics, and curators whose names always crop up as tokens and more curiously, despite the notion that most collectors are advised by their wives" (pg. 43, Lippard).
In the visual arts, the process of "finding a voice" for women has
manifested itself in the works of Cindy Sherman, Ida Applebroog, Faith
Ringgold, Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, Mary Kelly, and Barbara
Kruger just
to name a few. All these women used their art work as the platform on
which to discuss topics which are of concern to all women such as aging,
racism, reproductive rights, motherhood, physical and sexual abuse,
standards of beauty, and control of language itself. "Like the authors of
feminist utopian novels that proliferated throughout the 1970's when the
Women's Movement in the United States was gathering momentum, [women]
artists used language to disrupt stereotypes" (pg. 18, Bad Girls).
The shift towards a more "Conceptual Art," dealing with behaviorism and the idea of a narrative, which occurred in the early 70's coincided with the entrance of more women into the art world and resembled the questions of identity which were being raised by the feminist movement. This artistic approach, which focused more on concept rather than execution, was generally experimental and tended to be performance-oriented rather than product-oriented. "'How others see me' and 'how I see myself' are two of the basic themes that lend themselves to Conceptual media" (pg. 94, Lippard). This shift in the approach to art making provided women with access to a type of art which allowed them to explore their identity and use themselves as subject matter for their own work. The women artists who were in the forefront of this artistic revolution were at first unaware of the road they were paving for female artist to come. Of this type of art making, two women who deserve to be discussed in more detail are Adrian Piper and Cindy Sherman. Both began in the late seventies to "simultaneously interrupt and reproduce the master narrative on gender and representation" (pg. 97, Lippard). Among other things, Piper was protesting that art was "imprisoned within its own world and did not reach into the real world" (pg. 96, Lippard). Piper, who once was the epitome of professional role-playing and transformation of a woman into an image -- a model -- still in her twenties decided to "expose her body as an object of rebellion through her art" (pg. 96, Lippard). Her performances ranged from monologues to public presentations where she crossed the lines of gender, race, and sanity, appearing in the streets as a Hispanic male or a sensuous and hairy female dancer. Similarly, Cindy Sherman continued this exploration of guise and disguise within imposed gender identities through her photographs. "Nietzsche's complaint that woman is always acting, that every woman is an artist, is the underlying premise of Cindy Sherman's work" (Pg. 195, Isaak). From her early black-and-white film stills to the life-size color self-portraits, Sherman camouflages her physical self through lighting, costumes, and facial expressions in dramatic and drastic ways in an exploration of sex, race, and gender representations.
There was a point in the mid-eighties when everyone seemed to
agree that feminist art was the hottest, most radical, "cutting edge"
thing around. In a decade when cynicism and exhaustion numbed the
survivors of the politically charged sixties and seventies, deconstruction
theories destabilized concepts of identity and action where prevailing in
the academy. Post-modernist interest in gender provoked a wave of
politically charged work from artists driven by the latest controversies
such as AIDS and homophobia. In activism, "Intervention is the buzzword
that defined and prescribed the kind of political act considered effective
and correct during the 1980's" (Pg. 87, Schor). When the
Guerrilla Girls
formed in 1985 to target sexism and racism in the art world, they picked
the SoHo and Tribeca neighborhoods of Manhattan as a primary site for
their ambushes.
Their first posters pointed the finger at twenty major
galleries as actively responsible and placed major museums "under
surveillance" They not only targeted galleries, but male artists such as
Arman, Francisco Clemente, Eric Fischl, and Bill Jensen as "complicit in
the egregious sexism" (pg. 89 Schor). To this day, the Guerrilla Girls
are still active, and their precise identity and numbers are unknown.
"Artists working today, particularly those who have come of age since
1970, belong to the first generation that can claim artistic matrilineage"
(pg. 99, Schor). The efforts by women to claim autonomy and a voice in
their artistic self-expression has drastically changed the course of art
history. Yet, like so many other fields of feminist involvement, much
work still needs to be done. The art world has, for centuries, been the
place for male self-expression on social, religious, political and
personal levels with just a handful of daring women sprinkled in between.
It is only at the brink on a new millennia that things are starting to
change. The accomplishments of women artists are finally undeniable, they
can no longer be ridden off as coincidental or unusual. It is easy to
forget that just a single generation ago, my own chances of achieving
artistic recognition were drastically minimal having no antecedents to
model myself after. This single thought alone makes the achievements of
women artist of previous generations even more exceptional.
Bibliography