Does a feminist avantgarde exist? What does it mean to position feminism as an avantgarde in terms of art history?
How should we write the history of contemporary women artists – as a history of the women’s art movement from post-1968 (often referred to as the 1970s)?
As a story of pioneers and innovators?
As an adventure of heroines?
As a story about radicals and rebels?
As the outcome of a revolution in art and culture?
‘The feminist art movement’s historical and pioneering achievements in the art of the past four decades is not in dispute. The protagonists of the feminist avant-garde wrote manifestos and pamphlets, established numerous women artists’ associations and journals, articulated a critique of art institutions, organized their own exhibitions, created groundbreaking work in terms of form as well as content, and sought to fuse art with life. In short, their activities manifest all characteristics of the avant-garde predominantly associated with male artists.’
Gabriele Schor Feminist Avant-Garde: Art of the 1970s: The Sammlung Verbund Collection, Vienna (Prestel, 2016) This part of the Sammlung Verbund collection has 600 works by 48 women artists (in 2016).
The presentation of a historical view of feminist art from the 1970s has been realised in several major museum shows and touring retrospectives in the last decade – but there have been much earlier exhibitions and many different approaches tried in presenting the contribution of women artists to the history of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
It is not hard to identify many of the features of a historical avant-garde in the activities of the many small groups of women artists who formed the “feminist movement” and in the works of individual women artists where some of the key features of avant-gardism are present.
The features of the avant-garde include:-
- Production of manifestos and artist’s statements which outline political and cultural ambitions, utopian thinking, arguments for social change and aesthetic revolutions, arguments for a break with the past and an embrace or vision of a different future.
- Collective presentations of work and ideas by a group of artists – often developed over a series of exhibitions, public events and publications.
- An identification on the part of different groups with “the marginal”, “the peripheral” in society and attention to issues or values which question the status quo/dominant belief systems (and as a result, are seen as sub-cultural or counter-cultural).
However, feminism has never offered a singular aesthetic “style” as other modernist avant-garde movements have done.
Feminist artists have rarely identified themselves with the “romantic” tradition amongst artists, which has celebrated individual subjectivity and ideas of genius (until recently, largely attributed to men).
In fact, the majority of feminist thought has sought to critique these notions for their male bias and romantic illusions, and questioned how these ideas are actually supported largely by hagiographies (hack and sycophantic biographies) and excessive forms of cultural promotion centred on ideas of “originality”.
‘The general alienation of contemporary avant-garde art from any broad audience has been crystallized in the women’s movement. From the beginning, both liberal feminists concerned with changing women’s personal lives and socialist feminists concerned with overthrowing the classist/racist/sexist foundations of society have agreed that “fine” art is more or less irrelevant, though holding out the hope that feminist art could and should be different. The American women artists’ movement has concentrated its efforts on gaining power within its own interest group – the art world, in itself an incestuous network of relationships between artists and art on the one hand and dealers, publishers, and buyers on the other. The public or the “masses,” or audience is hardly considered.’
Lucy R. Lippard ‘The Pink Glass Swan: Upward and Downward Mobility in the Art World’ Heresies no.1 (Jan 1977)
Another thesis about the Avantgarde is the “Shock of the New”
Some feminist exhibitions or events or artworks have been received as if they were aiming, like other avant-garde groups, to “shock” or “disturb” the status quo and because of this have been associated with “scandal”.
There are “cause celebres” regarding the reception of certain feminist artworks at different times and in different countries.
It has also been the case that some feminist artworks have been censored or withdrawn from exhibition and often this is under-reported or not reported.
Avant-gardism and the Culture Industry
While all avant-gardes rage against the forces of stagnation or conformism, are they also subject to an erosion of this polemical potential, when their anti-social ideas become “socialised” (ie accepted); when their anti-cultural ideas become “culture”; and when their subversive intent becomes “legitimized”.
What happens when this initial and subversive potential of the avant-garde becomes contained, commodified and marketed by museums/exhibitions/publications today?
Can we separate the accumulated “historical reputation” of an artist from the contemporary reception and an ahistorical view of them as “of interest” because they were a “member of the avantgarde” at one time in their career? A much more critical look at why certain artists are selected as “of interest” and not “others” would be needed.
Is there really only one type of avant-garde, one theory of the avant-garde?
While many of the features of the historical avant-garde can be found in a collective examination of the activities of the early feminist movement from the 1970s across Europe and America, are we confining these activities to history if we only look at the 1960s-1970s as an “historical” avant-garde?
Contemporary art in the last 3 decades has also had many recent avant-gardes with different names and different ambitions in relation to the historical avant-garde. In fact, for many commercially-orientated dealers, a definition of “contemporary art” is precisely the distance that it has from continuing the legacy of the historical avant-garde. Namely, it is “new” because it moves “beyond” what has been done in earlier works. So, while “newness” and “originality” is traded on as a value for contemporary art, it is only of value because it is not a continuation of this legacy. This logic was also used in different attempts to promote a “post-feminist” art from the 1990s to the present.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the discussion in postmodernism was about a post-historical avantgarde i.e. where the avant-garde was situated after the end of the historical avant-garde (generally finishing with late modernist movements, like Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptual Art). Each one of these late movements or tendencies has been subject to extensive historical study, looking at the emergence of these tendencies in different countries and internationally. It is relatively easy to find studies of women pop artists; women artists in minimalism; women conceptual artists.
An extensive argument in art history, following Peter Burger, surrounded the question of whether the protests or revolutionary ideals of the historical avant-garde had resulted in “failure” or simply the lack of any realisation in their social/political ambitions for their aesthetics.
Two approaches were outlined in the many debates about postmodernism (art after modernism). Benito Oliva promoted a trans-avant-garde and Andreas Huyssen a neo-avant-garde in the late 1970s and 1980s. Both concepts centred on a celebrated return to painting and sculpture and they explored how “history” and (the artist’s) “subjectivity” were present in the works produced. By contrast, critics like Hal Foster or Craig Owens, argued that there was an “anti-aesthetic” present in other groups of artists, naming them also as avant-garde, who were working to destabilise meanings in mass culture and politics, using installation, photography, video and employed a collage aesthetic.
In the 2000s, with the rise of increasingly global exchanges in the art market and in major international exhibitions and biennales, art historians like Terry Smith, for example, attempted to redefine the notion of the avant-garde. He argued that there were three kinds of avant-garde: 1) a retro-avant-garde which sought only an identity within the celebrity culture of the art market, often mimicking the historical avant-garde; 2) artists whose practice was a critical reflection upon and an attempt to revive or reconsider strategies present in the avant-garde and 3) an emergent avant-garde from many different countries around the world, particularly in the 2000s, which sought to engage with questions of post-colonialism, history and memory.
Were these avant-garde tendencies also present in feminist art from the 1980s – present? Of course!
What is feminist art history – a history of women artists or a document of the women’s art movement post-1968? Is feminist art history, an extension of women’s studies where women artists as cultural producers are its subject? Or a space where the representation of women and women’s issues (identified by feminism as a politics) are discussed?
Visit n.paradoxa’s timelines page and look for timelines about feminist art.
n.paradoxa has also published a list of feminist art manifestos
and lists of feminist art exhibitions.
Would any of these be useful as evidence for a feminist avantgarde?
FEMINIST AVANT-GARDE OF THE 1970s, WORKS FROM THE VERBUND COLLECTION. Curator Gabriele Schor interviewed at the Photographers Gallery, London (Oct–15 Jan 2017)
Below is the same exhibition, filmed when on display in Spain. Spanish soundtrack.
Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution
Annie Elliott Uploaded on 26 Nov 2007
This is a compilation of online videos, photos, and podcasts for the MOCA exhibit: Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution.
Carey LoveLace ‘Optimism and Rage: The Women’s Movement in Art in New York, 1969–1975’ Woman’s Art Journal (Spring / Summer 2016)
Click on the link to watch a film about German women filmmakers, made by Valie Export. Sound is low quality and in German. Filmmakers featured are: Valie Export, Mara Mattuschka, Bady Minck and Sabine Marte.
Heimische Avantgarde- und Experimentalfilmproduktion. Frauen als Filmemacherinnen
Lecture by Ewa Majewska (Polish language) ‘On Weakness, Solidarity, and Non-Heroic Resistance. The Weak Avant-garde – A Feminist Analysis’
http://artmuseum.pl/en/doc/video-muzeum-otwarte-o-slabosci-solidarnosci-i-nie-heroicznym
This lecture offers an analysis of how in the time of a feminist reconfiguration of the art field (its practices, theories, and history), as well as intense precarization, the definition of the avant-garde is undergoing fundamental changes.
These changes can be described as the creation of a “weak avant-garde,” or at least an “avant-garde of the weak”: aware of its own paradoxes, while also seeing its internal contradictions as a reflection of the more general contradictions of its time.
Ewa Majewska’s lecture, while referring to the work of artists like Ewa Partum, Teresa Murak, Antje Majewski or Zorka Wollny, proposes a theory of a “weak avant-garde” not only as a conceptual intervention, but also as a key to understanding a large portion of both Polish and international contemporary works of art.
