international feminist art: a learning environment

Feminist politics in art

Let’s have a different kind of art by women, for new audiences, for new possibilities!

The first two manifestos discussed in this lesson are closely related to the organisation of early feminist exhibitions in Europe in the 1970s. Both manifestos argue that the potential of women artists is neither known nor understood and is at odds with the status quo of other contemporary modernist art as this art is “male-defined”. Instead of art or culture (from all human beings), what is currently offered as art today is “men’s art” and “male culture”.

Both manifestos are in the ebook and reproduced in different places:-

Valie EXPORT ‘Woman’s Art: A Manifesto’ (1972) reproduced in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds) Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (1996) and in Helena Reckitt (ed) Feminism and Art (Phaidon).

Monica Sjoo and Anne Berg ‘Towards a Revolutionary Art’ (1971-2). A copy of this rare pamphlet is in the British Library. It is republished in n.paradoxa volume 28 pp.64-67. Available in print only.

VALIE EXPORT ‘Woman’s Art: A Manifesto’ (1972)

VALIE EXPORT’s manifesto was written in 1972 and first published in Neues Forum, (Vienna), no. 228, Jan 1973. It was not reproduced in the catalogue of MAGNA. Feminismus: Kunst und Kreativität (MAGNA. Feminism: Art and Creativity) 7 March- 5 April, 1975, Galerie Nächst St-Stephan, Vienna, Austria, where she published ‘On the History of [the] Woman in Art History’.
This exhibition is widely regarded as the first international women artists’ exhibition in Europe, many other exhibitions had been organised on a national basis up until that point. The catalogue for this exhibition also contained essays by Lucy Lippard, Maria Lassnig and Valie Export’s interview with Meret Oppenheim, presented as answers to 40 questions. The same catalogue also contained another manifesto from the Feminist Art Manifesto’s ebook: Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Women in the Year 2000’ (in German, 1975) which considers what the impact of a feminist education will be in transforming the future studies of women artists. This manifesto also contains ideas about a projected future for women, 25 years ahead. (N.B. the date given for the English version is 1977, but it is reproduced in the catalogue, published in 1975).

MAGNA, as an exhibition, was very important in foregrounding 29 women artists, European and American, who worked across performance, video, photography and inter-media and was widely seen as a rejection of traditional media, particularly painting and sculpture.

EXPORT describes the exhibition as:

‘A survey on the female sensibility, imagination, projection and problematics, suggested through a tableaux of pictures, objects, photographs, lectures, discussions, readings, films and video screenings and actions.’

Translation in: Sabine Breitweiser ‘From Female Creativity to Practices of Feminism: Women’s Initiatives in Austria’. http://www.pac.org.mx/uploads/sitac/pdf/48-ing-Blind-Spots-VIII-pdf.pdf

Her [EXPORT’s] curatorial project attests to her manifesto’s goal of defining the future (of) art history through art produced by women. The curatorial strategy employed for MAGNA relied on finding an institution ready to host an independently conceived of and curated international feminist group show.

Elke Krasny ‘Curatorial Materialism. A Feminist Perspective on Independent and Co-Dependent Curating’ in OnCurating Issue 29.

The relationship between feminism and non-traditional media, (also known as new media, performance, video and photography, installation and photo-text works) was more pronounced in another exhibition, Frauen-Kunst-Neue Tendenzen (Innsbruck: Galerie Krinzinger, 1975). This exhibition was in the same year as MAGNA and it included some of the same artists, not least VALIE EXPORT. The artists in Frauen-Kunst-Neue Tendenzen were interviewed for Gislind Nabakowki’s article “Neue Tendenzen” in the journal, heute Kunst: Internationale Kunstzeitschrift Vol 9 (Feb-March, 1975), pp.6-11. It was this issue of a journal which first drew attention to women’s use of media, other than painting and sculpture, and it is here that the idea of feminist artists’ “rejection” of conventional media is cultivated as an argument. Lynda Benglis whose Artforum ad in November 1974 had stirred such consternation was also reproduced in heute Kunst, alongside works by Iole de Freitas, Annette Messager and Tania Mouraud (with special pages given to each artist).

In 1985, EXPORT and Silvia Eiblmayr organised another major international exhibition of women’s art, Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn / Art with Self-Will, at the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts (Museum of the 20th Century) in Vienna. This exhibition was important in articulating contemporary women artists’ relation to postmodernist tendencies, including works identified as “anti-aesthetic” alongside many types of paintings, sculptures and installations.

Let’s look in more detail at the text:-

VALIE EXPORT’s manifesto begins:-

THE POSITION OF ART IN THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION MOVEMENT
IS THE POSITION OF WOMAN IN THE ART’S MOVEMENT.

THE HISTORY OF WOMAN IS THE HISTORY OF MAN

And ends with the line:

THE FUTURE OF WOMEN WILL BE THE HISTORY OF WOMAN

Let’s think in more detail about what the argument here is.
First, EXPORT is openly critical of the position that art has in the Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. She is critical because art is marginal to the politics of women’s liberation when she believes it should be central. She is suggesting that art’s role as propaganda in a political movement is not sufficient, art is present but unrecognised by the movement, and marginalised.
In its language, this manifesto’s opening lines have a relation to the Italian feminist movement, Rivolta Femminile, and its Manifesto, Rivolta Femminile (1970) or the tactics of visual protest of Dolle Mina(1970). (To find out more: visit Dolle Mina Archive at Atria.) However, neither explicitly discussed culture and this is EXPORT’s complaint!

She is suggesting that there is an equivalent marginalisation regarding “woman” in art (particularly art’s movement as modernist movements). Woman is not “women”: i.e. the experiences, life, voice of real women. Woman is the idealised, figure of woman as an allegorical form of representation. Woman is ever-present as an image but not regarded as important in the movement of art and women’s creative production is continually overlooked. This argument also carries the meaning that individual women artists are constantly positioned as “woman”, symbolic entities, and it is this “tokenism” and “stereotyping” which renders their work marginal to the movement of art.

The history of what women have done is part of the history of what men have done but our concept of history “has defined the image of woman for both man and woman”. Woman and man in this sentence are equivalent here in the sense that men and women’s action count in how history progresses, but the recognition of the writing about the history of woman is controlled and created by men. The manifesto is a plea for a change to this man-made world and history in order to “let women speak so that they can find themselves”.

“Women must therefore use all media as a means of social struggle and as a means of social progress in order to free culture from male values. In the same fashion she will do this in the arts knowing that men for thousands of years were able to express herein their ideas of eroticism, sex, beauty including their mythology of vigour, energy and austerity…influencing our consciousness.”

‘Moreover, in her manifesto, Woman’s Art, Valie Export points out from the outset that it is the man who colonizes, that is to say develops and controls all fields, family, societal, legal, political, economic, professional, artistic.’ / ‘D’ailleurs dans son manifeste ‘Woman’s Art’, Valie Export précise d’emblée que c’est l’homme qui colonise, c’est-à-dire élabore et contrôle tous les champs, familial, sociétal, juridique, politique, économique, professionnel, artistique.’

Sylvie Freytag ‘Art et politiqueen Autriche:l’impact des oeuvres d’Alfred Hrdlicka, de Friedenreich Hundertwasser, de Günter Bruset deValieExport surl’Autriche de la Seconde République’ Thesis. Université de Strasbourg, 2017. Français. ‌NNT : 2017STRAC007

The line at the end looks at how the future of women – real women, their experiences, images, ideas and reasoning, will need to become the new history of woman. This history of woman will then become part of the history of man. This is not to say that gender will disappear or that history will now automatically include man and woman, but that what women do in the future will change how the history of woman is written.

When VALIE EXPORT argues that we do not know what women artists can do now and in the future, it is to the possibilities of intermedia, video/performance and expanded cinema that she is pointing: ‘The new values that we add to the arts will bring about new values for women in the course of the civilizing process. The arts can be of importance to the women’s liberation in so far as we derive significance – our significance from it: this spark can ignite the process of our self-determination’

The changes brought by women will ‘set up signs and signals’ of new artistic expression and ‘change retrospectively the situation of women’. EXPORT sees the relationship between changes brought forward by new forms of expression in art and changes to women’s lives in a dialogue with eachother.

Bojana Pejic summarises her position in terms of how it is different from dominant forms of interpretation offered on performance art by many scholars including feminist ones, like Lucy Lippard, Amelia Jones or Peggy Phelan, where the live body is contrasted with the body as a form of representation for woman (controlled by male values).

‘In talking about women’s strategic usage of media, EXPORT maintains somehow militant tones that otherwise characterized feminist assessments of the early 1970s, which called for “social struggle”. In her later art and teaching practice, and in both her theoretical and curatorial work, she will always encourage women to use media freely, and – something I find extremely important – she does not let herself get caught in the “dualism” constructed between the body-in-performance (live body) and body-in-representation (as her statement at the beginning of this text indicates).’

Bojana Pejic ‘On Pants, Panics and Origins’ in Hedwig Saxenhuber (ed) VALIE EXPORT (Vienna: Folio Verlag, 2007)

In 1985, EXPORT revised her assessment, but retained the emphasis on women making their own futures as the future of art history:

Present-day society is no longer one where women are isolated without rejoinder in the scope of discourse. The subversive strategies and provocations of the 1960s and 1970s have transformed the profile of this society, have made its face more humane. Through its fissures a new sense of meaning has risen to the surface like a periscope…The viewpoint according to which social unity is considered to be founded upon family sacrifice is losing its pathos…The home no longer remains the place of socialization, and parents no longer remain the facilitators of self-realization…The stratification of social processes as a cause of inequality cannot be quantitatively suspended, but must suspend itself….Kunst mit Eigensinn/Art with Self-Will represents such an implosion of the stratification, of contention with the other quality…Through historical exposure, the woman experiences history as skin, as a form of coalescence. In the perception of this disparity, she grapples from the future a new history which will become a medium of her self-realization.

Translation in: Sabine Breitweiser ‘From Female Creativity to Practices of Feminism: Women’s Initiatives in Austria’. http://www.pac.org.mx/uploads/sitac/pdf/48-ing-Blind-Spots-VIII-pdf.pdf

What do you think of this politics for the future?

How will women’s lives change if their history is written differently and their contribution to the arts recognised?

How do you consider this question of all media in relation to feminism?

About the artist and her work.

VALIE EXPORT (spelt in capitals) is the professional name of the Austrian-born filmmaker, media and performance artist, who used her professional name as her artistic concept and logo since 1967.

The artist explains her own reasons for the choice of name to create her own identity and voice in this Bloomsberg short video for Tate Modern.

There are many interviews online with Valie Export, in English and in German. https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/valie-export

VALIE EXPORT’s work is archived online at
https://www.valieexport.at/
and
VALIE EXPORT Center in Linz, Austria.
https://www.valieexportcenter.at/en/valie-export

Take a look at the first exhibition which toured organised by Sabine Folie, VALIE EXPORT. Research – Archive – Œuvre (VOX, Canada, 2015).
http://centrevox.ca/en/exposition/valie-export-research-archive-oeuvre/

Valie Export’s early experimental works sought to develop an expanded concept for cinema, using both film, video and photography. Some of the key works she made attempted to use her own body to communicate through actions, situations, gestures and poses in relation to the city, particular spaces and settings. Her performance work staged actions for audiences to interact with: e.g. two of her most well-known works, TAPP und TASTKINO [TAP and TOUCH Cinema], 1968 or Aktionshose Genitalpanik [Action Pants: Genital Panic], 1969. In 1968 VALIE EXPORT co-founded the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative, today named Austria Film Coop, in order to establish a distribution of Austrian, independently produced films at home and abroad. Several key concepts in her work are: body-communication-action; use of intermedia; and concepts for an expanded cinema. In 1979, she declared her work using her body as “feminist actionism” (“Feministischer Aktionismus” in Zur Definition eines neuen Kunstbegriffes, catalogue, Innsbruck: Galerie Krinzinger, 1979)

‘This vivid visceral imagery makes one aspect of EXPORT’s body work very clear, namely the externalisation of inner states, so to speak as a transfer of deep-lying psychological aspects onto the bodily tissues’
Roswith Mueller in Mueller and Kaja Silverman (eds) VALIE EXPORT, Fragments of the Imagination (Indiana University Press, 1994), p.47

This manifesto has inspired several other more recent art projects and social media platforms:-

Valie Export Society (Kadi Estland, Mari Laanemets, Killu Sukmit) was founded in 1999 an attempt to fill gap in feminist art in Estonia. Their youtube channel: feminismiehitaja, documents their work.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEij-kASChWrPdNjEOmjxHQ

Or http://www.reactfeminism.org/entry.php?l=lb&id=159&e=t

‘Intended to counter such pervasive mythology, EXPORT’s feminist evaluation created waves that would add to the growing tempest of the Women’s Liberation Movement. The artist highlighted male dominance in the arts as entrenching gendered norms in wider society, while stating that a lack of autonomy for women in representation was simultaneously insidious and normalised. For centuries notions of womanhood were presented to the world by artists who had no knowledge of what it is to be female. Linking the lack of autonomic women’s representation to more general female oppression, EXPORT argued that this has enabled ‘woman’ to become a vessel for male fantasy and control.’

PL Henderson’s https://womensartblog.wordpress.com/about/ #womensart

Further Reading: VALIE EXPORT ‘Women’s Art. Die Stellung der Kunst in der Frauenbewegung ist die Stellung der Frau in der Kunstbewegung. Maifest zur Ausstellung MAGNA, März 1972’ In Margit Niederhuber, Katharina Pewny, Birgit Sauer (eds.) Performance, Politik, Gender. Materialband zum internationalen Künstlerinnenfestival „her position in transition“, Wien: Löcker Verlag, 2008. Pp. 59 – 61.

In the video below: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac present the exhibition VALIE EXPORT, ‘Body Configurations’, 1972-76 (2018) curated by Caroline Bourgeois, chief curator of the Pinault Collection.

Monica Sjoo and Anne Berg ‘Towards a Revolutionary Art’ (1971-2).

Monica Sjoo and Anne Berg produced this manifesto when the group WOMANPOWER formed in 1971 and it was first published in Towards a Revolutionary Feminist Art (Bristol, 1972). The group WOMANPOWER included Liz Moore, Beverley Skinner, Anne Berg, Rosalyn Smythe and Monica Sjöö. They exhibited together in WOMANPOWER: 5 Women Artists at Swiss Cottage Library, London in April 1973.

Monica Sjöö published several editions of Towards a Revolutionary Feminist Art in 1971-1972 as a low-cost photostat and stapled magazine. In 1974, the publication became Some Thoughts on Feminist Art. The articles were widely circulated and some, like this manifesto (but in a shorter form), were reproduced in the Mama Collective’s publication: Mama! Women Artists Together (Birmingham, 1977). This 42-page publication brought together many different women artists’/film and art history collectives working in Britain at the time, some of whom were involved in the Women’s Postal Art Event shown as Feministo! Portrait of an Artist as Housewife (ICA, 1977).

Further documentation on the Women’s Art Movement in the UK in the early 1970s can be found in Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock’s book: Framing Feminism: The Women’s Art Movement, 1970-1985 (Pandora/RKP:1987).

About Monica Sjoo

Monica Sjoo’s work is documented on two websites: https://www.monicasjoo.net/
and
https://monicasjoo.weebly.com/

and in the Feminist Archive South collection, Bristol, UK
on her work which contains her papers:
http://feministarchivesouth.org.uk/collections/monica-sjoo-collection

A significant collection of her work is in
Museum Anna Nordlander (Skellefteå, Sweden), a collection of feminist/ women artists work from Sweden.

Let’s Look More Closely at the Text

Like EXPORT, this manifesto uses the language of the women’s liberation movement of the early 1970s, but it is expressed in different radical and socialist feminist terms: describing women as the “first oppressed”, and it uses a collective “we”, to seek identification between author and reader (as women), in the struggle to overcome oppression.

This manifesto shares the language used in the Redstockings Manifesto (1969/1970). ‘The Redstockings Manifesto’ was written by an unknown author, and used by the Women’s Liberation Party in 1969.

In the manifesto, the artists’ role is to be both aligned to and supportive “of the oppressed peoples” – i.e. an identification of art with social struggle and making art which responds to that struggle. Sjoo and Berg argue that it is not possible “with powerful means of communication in our hands to sit around playing with the surface of reality” – this is a direct criticism of the dominance of abstract painting in the early 1970s in Britain.

The authors go on to characterise how art has represented the world (from a male point of view as well as that of the ruling class) and to demonstrate what kinds of art they are prepared to support and what criticisms they have of art today.

They single out “abstract art” (from their immediate peers in the 1970s) arguing it “now serves the ruling classes because it mystifies reality, it has become undangerous, undisturbing – it has become like patterns of the level of interior decoration, the tedious technicalities of advertising”. They raise issues of class because this art represents the interests not just of the ruling class but of “men” and their values, centred in different forms of objectivity (and universality), and they see these claims as only those of men, and as underpinning male bias.

Their work, at this time, was figurative and allegorical painting. As a group, WOMANPOWER had tried to get a show at the Serpentine Gallery and were rejected, which is why they organised at Swiss Cottage Library in 1973. They are reacting to the Director’s response to their proposal for an exhibition of women artists:

“We are told we are not in the mainstream of artistic exploration, that we are not exploring modern forms; that ‘we are out on a limb’ – but we tell you that IT IS YOU WHO ARE OUT ON A LIMB! What you have now is a half-world imagery at the point of stagnation’.

‘But we are women and WE ARE SUBJECTS and will portray ourselves as such and so at last we will end the ages of pornography-vision of women.’

In the last sentence of this quote, claims to women’s subjectivity and the value of their creative production are strongly contrasted with the continued objectification of women’s bodies and the fascination with pornographic images of women as sex objects.

To demonstrate the limits of middle-class European culture, they argue that ancient cultures, as well as art from other parts of the world, represent a different integration of art and life, as well as an alternative spiritual/religious role for art. Sjoo went on to develop her interest in ancient and matriarchal cultures, not only in her art, but in her book (with Barbara Mor): The Great Cosmic Mother: rediscovering the religion of the earth (Harper and Row, 1987).

The possibilities of women artists and what they can achieve is linked not only to a loss of their own history as artists but also to the unknown artists who created in ancient cultures (who may have been women). This is the “missing half” of culture, but culture is affirmed as what is produced by both men and women. Like EXPORT, they link NOW to a future potential yet to be realised.

‘for women our explorations start now – we do not identify creative energy with phallic thrusting aggressiveness. Perhaps women have in fact great artistic traditions in the ancient past. Who created the cave paintings?’… ‘Art must be the expression of the total human world and only art fed by female and male views inter-acting can be vital. The time is NOW and it is overdue!’

In the publication MAMA, Beverly Skinner wrote an open letter to the Arts Council in 1971, because of their refusal to fund or support an exhibition of ‘Artists of Women’s Liberation’ or to consider the contents of ‘our Arts Manifesto’. In it she argues that while male artists are ‘accepted as thinking and accomplished human beings’, female artists are ‘considered as either irrelevant or dispensable’:

‘To regard us as being self-seeking, small-time dabblers would be making a monumental mistake, one which your gallery will one day view with regret and embarrassment’.

‘…Have you not yet observed that Women’s Liberation is one of the most vital issues of the day at this point in Humanity’s highly uncertain future and that any gallery who shows our work is bound to do well because there is an enormous amount of interest in our work, both conscious and unconscious – for both hostile and hopeful reasons’.