Feminist avant-garde – International
The importance of the means of communication, their ever-increasing speed and their effects through social networks, often lead us to believe, usually out of ignorance, that many movements are recent inventions. It happens, for example, with the feminist struggles, which despite a well-documented history – from the suffragette’s efforts to obtain the right to vote to the great mobilizations of half a century ago for the legalization of abortion – remain little known in some countries.
In the 1970s, feminism created an aesthetic worth dwelling on. This is what an important exhibition of the 2022 edition of the Le rencontres de la photographie festival in Arles, France does. The exhibition is both a confirmation and a happy discovery. The project comes from Austria, a country that at the time had given birth to the radical movement of Viennese actionism, inventing performance, using sometimes extreme violence and making use of photography – now collectible – as a trace and memory of moments of great physical intensity. The rich material of the Verbund collection presented by its collection director Gabriele Schor includes about four sixty artists of this feminist avant-garde of the seventies. Some are famous like Cindy Sherman, whose early works as a young man are forgotten a little too easily, others are well known, like Annette Messager, Orlan, Francesca Woodman, Valie Export or Helena Almeida, and some are almost unknown and their discovery is undoubtedly one of the beautiful surprises of the exhibition and of the rich catalog that accompanies it.
For anyone who thinks that important artists are those who have been able to find the right form to ask relevant questions at the right time, this set of photos is a perfect demonstration of what commitment can mean in artistic terms as well. It is also a confirmation of the fact that there is a tendency to underestimate the importance and role of women in art as in other sectors of society. We have been aware of this for years, as evidenced by the many exhibitions that try to rebalance this situation.
Housewife / mother / wife; Closure / emancipation; Imposition of beauty / female body; Female sexuality; Identity / role play. The sections are clear and explicit, and contain precise questions, those that, through different modalities, the artists pose throughout the exhibition. The staging is always present and the self-portraits very frequent. The authors are directly involved and fully claim their positions. Camouflage, sequences, simulations of mutilations, parodic ugliness: the proposals are very different and the intent is to talk about the woman and her representations, which obviously reflect her social status.
At the center of the project is the female body, the way it is represented and the meaning it assumes from a social and political point of view. While the female nude in both photography and painting has been used mainly by men, here the point of view on the body and its status is of women. “What characterizes the avant-garde? Well, for the first time in history, these artists have developed an image of women based on a female perspective ”, says the curator of the exhibition.
In the exhibition, the portrait occupies a central place, and asks questions about identity, the concept of beauty and the conventions that are connected to it, or denounces the impossibility of word, expression and existence in symbolic photographic series. itself. Between anger and provocation, shout and challenge, these faces claim a presence of the woman that did not exist before.
As we know these struggles do not arise today, but have a history that began half a century ago, from which works were born that have paved the way for many other proposals. Reconsidering contemporary projects in the light of the work of the artists of the seventies relativizes some positions, and allows us to better understand and appreciate many creations of today. It is always stronger when we know and claim history, both ours and that of the proposals that have formed us. In this case, the originality of the exhibition derives from the fact that it is not a history of feminism in the seventies, but an analysis of the importance of the avant-garde in the development of the feminist movement and its contribution to social struggles, to the aesthetics and methods of expression.
A sign of the times, the exhibition is not only characterized by painful and sometimes shocking testimonies, but also by a provocative streak and an often bitter and pungent humor, perfectly in tune with an era that had developed – as Marcel Duchamp had indicated – a decline of the artist’s sacralization and a vindication of the right to insolence. As can be seen in the hilarious and sometimes sarcastic scenes about cooking, motherhood and all housework. But there are also tense, provocative and painful sequences in which the body is from time to time dismembered, cut, threatened or even erased.
Today we may perhaps regret this period of profound freedom which, although engaged in fundamental struggles, rarely fell into that form of neo-conventionalism that sometimes afflicts us today. But perhaps, indeed certainly, we no longer live in avant-garde times.
We conclude with the words of Lucy R. Lippard quoted in the introduction of the book: “It is evident that art has no sex. But artists, women or men, have one “. Impeccable, clear and always up-to-date words. ◆lawyer
◆ The show Une avant-garde féministe – Photographies et performance des années 1970 from the Verbund collection is exhibited as part of the Rencontres de la photographie in Arles, France, at the Mécanique générale, from 4 July to 25 September 2022. The photos are collected in a book with the same title published by Delpire & Co (495 photos, 472 pages). This year the Festival of Arles offers more than forty exhibitions with the works of 160 artists.