Showing posts with label feminist art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feminist art. Show all posts

8 Oct 2017

Black Wonder Women 2: Raje

Renee Cox: Chillin' with Liberty (1998)


In her 1998 photomontage series, Renee Cox created an Amazonian alter-ego named Raje, a superhero who fights racism and teaches children African American history. The character, she said, was the granddaughter of Wonder Woman's black twin sister, Nubia. 

Whilst I admire many of the dozen or more large-scale images in this series, like Camille Paglia I have a special fondness for the picture above - Chillin' with Liberty - with its iridescent Pop-art colours and playful deconstruction of American culture and iconography. 

This is Raje in a reflective mood. Although it's hard to tell what she's thinking - and difficult also knowing whether this picture shows her before or after an adventure; is she resting and enjoying a moment's peace, or preparing once more to enter into battle? The title suggests she's relaxing, but titles can be misleading and do warriors ever really let down their guard enough to chill? 

Further, her eyes maintain a smouldering intensity; she's a woman who burns with a sense of injustice, not one who looks on the world with cool indifference. And Raje, like Nubia, looks hot in the erotic sense of the term too; she's a powerfully beautiful woman, as well as a beautifully powerful one who, whilst wishing to combat sexism, doesn't want to deny her own sexiness; she's as strong and dignified as Superman, but more alluring.

Paglia nails it when she argues that Raje's "elegant manner exudes the grace and glamour" of a fashion magazine, whilst her skintight, off-the-shoulder bodysuit and thigh-length patent leather boots exemplify the fetishistic, pro-sex feminism of the period. Her hair, make-up, and jewellery complete the look; uncompromising, but not unflattering.

A certain punk icon is fond of saying that anger is an energy. Which, perhaps, it is - and there's obviously anger in this piece. But anger is ultimately insufficient fuel for the production of significant works of art; these, as Ms Cox knows, also require intelligence, humour, imagination and style - qualities that she has in abundance (and which Rotten had, but Lydon lost).   


Notes

See: Camille Paglia, Glittering Images, (Vintage Books, 2013), ch. 28 'Blue Dawn: Renée Cox, Chillin' with Liberty', pp. 173-79.  

To read part one of this post on Nubia, click here. 


6 Oct 2017

Happy Birthday Carolee Schneemann

Carolee Schneemann: 
Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions (1963)
Photo by Icelandic artist Erró, on 35mm black and white film


Next week - October 12th to be precise - is Carolee Schneemann's birthday and I'd like to take this opportunity to wish her many happy returns ...

Her phenomenal work, Eye Body (1963), composed of 36 photographic but still essentially painterly self-portraits - or what she termed transformative-actions - staged in a constructed loft environment in which she'd assembled objects associated with bad luck and the stuff of nightmares, from broken mirrors and open umbrellas to serpents, remains one of my favourite pieces from this period.   

In order to slide herself into this environment and become a living work of art, Schneemann covered her naked body in heterogeneous materials, including grease, glue, fur and feathers. One of the most powerful and most memorable of the images is a frontal nude, featuring two snakes crawling on her torso and in which her cunt is clearly visible and seems to be offered to us as a gift - which, of course, is also to say as a challenge and a provocation: I'll show you mine, if you show me yours.

Commenting on Eye Body, Schneemann has written:

"I wanted my actual body to be combined with the work as an integral material - a further dimension of the construction ... [so that] I am both image maker and image. The body may remain erotic, sexual, desired, desiring, but it is as well votive: marked, written over in a text of stroke and gesture discovered by my creative female will."

Unsurprisingly, the work caused great controversy at the time for its perceived porno-paganism. Critics accused Schneemann of narcissism and self-indulgence and described Eye Body as lewd, a word of Old English origin that has come to mean not only vulgar, but vile; immoral as well as obscene.

However, whilst it may contain elements of these things, ultimately it remains a portrait of a beautiful woman who, in her beauty and in her womanhood, transcends all such labels, all such judgements, without denying the fact that what is best in Woman is also what is most evil ...


Note: readers interested in more about Carolee Schneemann and her work can visit her webite by clicking here.


3 Oct 2017

On the Art of Fondling (Towards a Democracy of Touch)

Milo Moiré: Selfie with Mirror Box taken shortly before 
her performance and subsequent arrest in London 
Image posted on Twitter (24 June 2016)


When Swiss conceptual performance artist Milo Moiré was arrested in London last summer for outraging public decency by strapping a so-called Mirror Box about her waist and then inviting onlookers and passers-by to have a 30-second feel of her cunt, I was vaguely aware that she was attempting to make a point about sexual consent and what does and does not constitute appropriate touching in the wake of events in Cologne and elsewhere in Europe; events that she has protested before and which I have written about elsewhere on this blog [click here]. 

What I didn't realise, however, was that her Mirror Box performance was inspired by Valie Export and her (at the time) revolutionary work Tapp und Tastkino (1968) - known in English as 'Tap and Touch Cinema' - a work that has rightly attained iconic status within (feminist) art history:


VALIE EXPORT: Tapp und Tastkino (1968)


Tap and Touch Cinema was performed by Export in ten European cities during the period 1968-71 (seven more than Moiré has so far managed with her Mirror Box). She wore a tiny 'movie theatre' strapped round her naked upper body, covering the latter from view, but exposing it to the touch of anyone - man, woman, or child - who cared to reach through the curtained front and touch her tits.

(Moiré's X-rated event, in contrast, was for over-18s only - but then she was offering rather more than the chance to cop hold of a breast.)  

Predictably, the media responded to Export's provocative work with moral hysteria and horror; one paper even branding her a witch. They seemed to imply that whilst viewing and aesthetically appreciating representations of female nudity on canvas or screen is perfectly legitimate, placing hands on to real bodies and enjoying a sensual-tactile interaction with the naked flesh is not.

In other words, sex must be a visual-mental thing; you can look and you can fantasise in private, but don't physically touch one another with tenderness or make public displays of affection: No Kissing No Cuddling No Kindness - these are the unspoken rules of pornified contemporary culture.

Export's work may be an ironic transgression, but it matters, I think; in the same way and for the same reasons that D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover still matters. For both works are brave and bold attempts to resurrect the body and contribute towards an immanent utopia that Lawrence terms a democracy of touch; a new socio-political order and new cultural arrangement that affirms and celebrates:

"The touch of the feet on the earth, the touch of the fingers on a tree, on a creature, the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love."


Notes

Milo Moiré has performed Mirror Box in Düsseldorf and Amsterdam, as well as London. Charged in the latter with outraging public decency and spreading Genitalpanik, she spent 24-hours in jail before a judge sentenced her to pay a fine of €1300 and ordered her release. Although she has her critics - not least in the art world - I like Ms Moiré and regard her work as an interesting development and re-enactment of Export's. I'm only sorry I didn't get the chance to meet her last summer ... 

Readers interested in knowing more can visit her website by clicking here

To watch a video (censored version) of the Mirror Box performance uploaded to YouTube by the artist, click here

Readers interested in knowing more about Valie Export can visit her website by clicking here

To watch film of the Tapp und Tastkino performance uploaded to YouTube, click here.   

Finally, to read more about the democracy of touch, see: D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999). The lines quoted are on p. 323.


1 Oct 2017

Genitalpanik 2: On Valie Export and Her Action Pants

VALIE EXPORT: Aktionshose: Genitalpanik 
Photo by Peter Hassmann (Vienna, 1969)


The claim made by Deborah de Robertis that her new project, Ma Chatte Mon Copyright, is basically an act of homage to the Austrian artist Valie Export (often written in upper case as VALIE EXPORT), is certainly intriguing - though, I must admit, due to my somewhat limited knowledge of 1960s feminist performance art, I wouldn't have guessed this from her recent appearance at the Louvre where she cheerfully stripped off and displayed her cunt in front of the Mona Lisa.  

This recently tweeted photo, however, makes things explicit (in every sense of the word):


Deborah de Robertis Ma Chatte Mon Copyright
Posted on Twitter 29 Sept 2017:  


In the original image, we see Valie Export sitting on a wooden bench, back against the wall, wearing a tight black leather shirt and a pair of crotchless trousers (or, if you prefer, Aktionshose). Although it's a fairly aggressive and confident pose - and despite the fact she's holding a machine gun - Export's bare feet betray a feral vulnerability.

The hair on her head, backcombed in proto-punk fashion, is almost as wild and bushy as that displayed between her legs. There's nothing Summer of Love about this picture; Export looks more fleur du mal than hippie flower child and you can imagine her in The Slits, but not The Mamas and the Papas.

I like the reimagining of it by De Robertis - in particular I approve of her decision to replace the machine gun with a camera - but, visually, it's not as powerful, not as provocative, not as strangely disturbing; the fact that it has been taken within the safety of a studio and the bench replaced with a simple wooden chair that might have come from Ikea, robs it of menace and dirtiness. 

The set of identical poster prints that Export produced in 1969 commemorate an action she carried out a year earlier in Munich. Entering an art-house cinema where experimental film-makers liked to show their works alongside European porn movies, 28-year-old Export paced between the rows of seated viewers wearing her action pants, her exposed cunt at face-level.

(Reports that she also carried her machine gun and put it to the heads of several men threatening to shoot them if they didn't agree they'd like to fuck her, are, alas, apparently untrue).

Export was challenging the representation and, in particular, the sexual objectification of women in art and film, forcing male spectators to acknowledge her agency and flesh and blood reality by staging a public encounter with that part of the female body usually kept under wraps and only seen or experienced in a private space.   

Genius: an inspirational act of guerrilla art and genital activism.

And it's conceivable that her crotchless action pants influenced Malcolm McLaren's thinking when he designed his bondage trousers with a revolutionary zip that didn't come to a stop in its usual position, but, rather, went all the way round and half-way up the arse, thereby allowing full exposure of and convenient access to the sex organs, perineum and anus.


Notes

Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969), by Valie Export, a series of six identical screenprints on paper, is on display at the Tate Modern (London), in the Feminism and Media Room (Level 4).

Now aged 77, Valie Export lives and works in Vienna and is internationally recognised as one of the most important pioneers in conceptual performance art, photography and film, influencing many younger artists, including Deborah de Robertis and Milo Moiré. Those interested in knowing more can visit her website, valieexport.at 

Those who would also like to listen to McLaren explain how to make a pair of subversive trousers, can click here for an episode of the French TV show Being Malcolm (2000), uploaded to YouTube by the Malcolm McLaren Estate, 30 Sept 2015. 

Finally, those interested in reading part one of this post on Deborah de Robertis and her Ma Chatte Mon Copyright project, should click here.


Genitalpanik 1: My Pussy My Copyright

Deborah de Robertis 


Some readers may remember that I expressed my admiration for the performance artist and vulva activist Deborah de Robertis after she initially came to public attention in 2014, by exposing her cunt at the Musée d'Orsay in front of Courbet's obscene masterpiece, L'Origine du monde: click here to read, or re-read, the post. 

It was, I thought, a courageous and amusing attempt to expose the hypocrisy of a phallocentric art world happy to stare into the abyss of a gaping vagina on a canvas or a screen, i.e., when framed by culture and offered as an image to be consumed, but uncomfortable with seeing such in the real world made of actual living flesh.   

Anyway, I'm pleased to report that Ms de Robertis is still continuing with her one-woman attempt to change the world by spreading her legs and declaring ownership of her own body: my pussy, my copyright; this time round obliging visitors to the Louvre to contrast the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa with the explicit display of her sex.

What Leonardo would have made of this, I don't know: for whilst he loved to paint beautiful women and possessed a detailed anatomical knowledge of their bodies, including their reproductive organs, his erotic fascination was clearly for young men and he drew many highly intimate studies of the male anus.

Nor do I know what the mostly bemused tourists who witnessed the event made of it; press reports that they were stunned and outraged seem exaggerated to me. What I do know is that the authorities weren't amused and the artist was held in custody for two days before appearing before a beak who ordered her to face trial on October 18 on charges of sexual exhibitionism and assault (she allegedly bit a security guard during her arrest).

Her defence, of course, will be that her goal was not to exhibit her genitals in a sexually aggressive manner, but to make people think about the role of women within art and, in this case, to remind them of the work of the Austrian artist Valie Export; the stunt at the Louvre being essentially an act of homage to the latter and her 1968 performance Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, which I'll discuss in part two of this post ...


Notes

To watch Ma Chatte Mon Copyright (2017), by Deborah de Robertis, uploaded to YouTube on 29 Sept 2017, click here

To read part two of this post on Valie Export and her Action Pants, click here