At the beginning of the semester, we were asked to name five women artists. Unfortunately, I could only name two or three. Through various levels of exposure–from Chadwick’s text, to exhibitions, to random research–I have gained a much stronger knowledge of female artists leaving their mark in art history. Aside from a biological or gendered connection, female artists cannot easily be clumped into a single theme or dialogue. This is a complex issue when it comes to cataloguing knowledge of women artists: how is one to contextualize their work? To date their work is to take a boring approach. Connecting them to comparable male artists does an injustice to their uniquity. The strongest commonality I’ve established was inspired by Wangechi Mutu’s work in the Brooklyn Museum. As I walked through her elaborate collage/painting hybrids, I had a distinct feeling that I was not supposed to be seeing this work. Maybe it was the highly textured surfaces that made my skin crawl or the humanoid forms made from magazine image clippings, but it all felt distinctly off-limits. As female artists, by their very existence, subvert sexist norms, their work is, in part, defined by the taboos they disrupt.
The first artist I’ve chosen is contemporary sculpture artist Elena Dahn. I had the pleasure of seeing her work live at the Pinta NYC exhibition of Latin American and Hispanic artists. To call her a sculpture artist is a loose and imprecise term. Specifically, she works with various pourable mediums mixed with pigments to achieve the organic, amorphous forms you see below. The works are like moments frozen in time; the plaster has dried in the motion of cascading down the wall. The works invoke a sense of both gravity and weightlessness. The works are crafted directly on the surface provided to the artist. This video, posted by Rea One Day Gallery, is a brief look at the process of her making a plaster for the Pinta NYC exhibition. This second video shows the artist at work, making a sculpture from smelted metal.
Dahn’s work is as visually striking as it is disturbing. She breaks several taboos of what it means to be a woman artist. She dons a pink utility suit under the welder’s mask and heatproof protective gear. Her curly hair pokes out rebelliously as she risks the safety of herself and her assistants to create a single sculpture. She’s doing work that very few classical art histories deem appropriate for a woman. This is the way she communicates as an artist; indeed, she rebukes every norm that outlines sculpture as a men’s profession. On top of that, the pure technical form of her work subverts everything about traditional sculpture. Her work is almost as abstract as work can get. It’s definable only by the most abstract terms. Even the modulation of color within the work is indistinct. As one plaster touches another, Dahn controls the mixture of the pigments and plasters in a way that looks completely accidental. Her work is definitely reminiscent of Lynda Benglis, who worked in similarly formless mediums in her work “For Carl Andre” (Chadwick, 346). Elena Dahn ignores the rules of more conventional art, and in doing so creates work that cannot be forgotten or ignored.
The next artist is a woman whose work I had the privilege of seeing in Boston, Massachusetts a few years ago. Kara Walker, born in 1969, is a contemporary artist whose fame came from a series of white paper silhouettes against black backgrounds (Chadwick 492). Her history, despite its contemporary context, follows a familiar historical trend: her father is an artist, and Walker decided to pursue her own artistic profession at a young age (“The Art of Kara Walker”). Walker focuses on themes of identity and Black American History in a slave historical context. (“The Art of Kara Walker”). As Walker states herself, “Most pieces have to do with exchanges of power, attempts to steal power away from others” (“The Art of Kara Walker”).
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| "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" by Kara Walker |
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| "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" by Kara Walker |
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My experience with Walker’s “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” was definitely marked by a sense of inescapable discomfort. The silhouettes are striking in their contrast, as well as their content. Figures of various ages, from children to adults, engage in acts that were typical of Americans during the age of slavery. I distinctly remember how shocked I was when I saw what looked like a silhouette of a girl child touching the private parts of another figure, definitely of an older age. As I sought relief in another part of the composition, I ran only into more disturbing imagery: figures defecating, figures striking other figures, figures serving other figures, etc. Another quote from the artist summarizes the effectiveness of this viewer experience:
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| "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" by Kara Walker |
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| "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" by Kara Walker |
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“I don’t know how much I believe in redemptive stories, even though people want them and strive for them. They’re satisfied with stories of triumph over evil, but then triumph is a dead end. Triumph never sits still. Life goes on. People forget and make mistakes. Heroes are not completely pure, and villains aren’t purely evil. I’m interested in the continuity of conflict, the creation of racist narratives, or nationalist narratives, or whatever narratives people use to construct a group identity and to keep themselves whole—such activity has a darker side to it, since it allows people to lash out at whoever’s not in the group. That’s a contact thread that flummoxes me” (D’Arcy).
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| "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" by Kara Walker |
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Walker’s work is not intended to resolve her own feelings about the truths of slavery, or even the viewer’s feelings about history. She creates this work instead as a means of sparking a conversation. She takes one of America’s most taboo subjects, its own atrocities, and shoves it to the front of the viewer’s perspective. She’s disruptive in service of promoting dialogue.
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| "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" by Kara Walker |
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Artist Jessica Lagunas also creates work that inspires conversation and self reflection. Lagunas is an artist born in 1971 in Nicaragua. (“Bio.”) I heard Lagunas speak in the Paul Robeson Gallery on campus, and she remembered beginning at first as a graphic designer. When asked why she switched to the fine arts, she replied that she enjoyed having herself as her customer, as opposed to working for others. For Lagunas, having herself as her customer means an exploration in several different media of what it means to in fact be Jessica Lagunas. Her work centers around “the condition of woman in contemporary society, questioning her obsessions with body image, beauty, sexuality and aging” (“Artist Statement”). Lagunas works in several different media, some are more traditional while others are definitely more contemporary. Her series “Por Siempre Joven” (Forever Young) is an embroidery series based on the theme of her own aging. It’s also the work she spoke about when I saw her in the gallery. The work is a reflective ritual of using her own grey hairs to embroider black silk with her age, every year, around her birthday. In her spoken portion at the gallery, she recounted her experience viewing her mother pluck grey hairs from her scalp and returning regularly to the salon to have the hairs covered. As Lagunas began plucking her own grey hairs, she began to consider why she was doing it and what it was meant to accomplish. Soon, she began collecting the hairs to embroider. She records her age on the embroidery hoop as a way to honor her aging process and growth as a woman. The work is a beautiful confrontation of some of a woman's worst fears.
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| "Abuela, Madre, Hija" (Grandmother, Mother, Daughter) by Jessica Lagunas is a 13" braid made up of hair from Lagunas' grandmother, mother, and herself. It's meant to honor the legacy of the women in her family. (credit Jessica Lagunas) |
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| "Por Siempre Joven" (Forever Young) by Jessica Lagunas (credit Jessica Lagunas) |
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| "Por Siempre Joven" (Forever Young) by Jessica Lagunas (credit Jessica Lagunas) |
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| "Por Siempre Joven" (Forever Young) by Jessica Lagunas (credit Jessica Lagunas) |
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| "Retorno a la pubertad" by Jessica Lagunas. These stills come from a performance where she confronts the obsession with prepubescent sexual aesthetics in mainstream media. Using tweezers, she plucks each individual hair from her mons pubis. (credit Jessica Lagunas) |
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Another series by Lagunas features performance art as the medium to examine the beauty rituals women participate in to be accepted by society. In “Para verte mejor” (The Better to See You With), Jessica Lagunas applies mascara continuously in layers for sixty minutes straight. Below is a 3 minute express preview of the performance. The obsession with beauty so characteristic of humanity takes a physical form as she repetitively applies the makeup. The layers go from enhancing her beauty to becoming a disturbing, gross spectacle. In layering this mascara in such an extreme way, she exposes the vulnerability of women to sexist beauty standards. To confront and perverse these norms is offensive to many, and wildly interesting.
Artist Mickalene Thomas shatters taboo in a very different way. Her work is directly confrontational of the viewer, specifically the white male gaze. Thomas is an artist based in New York city who works in large scale with acrylic paint and various other adornments to create her large works (“Bio”). Her vigorous study of art history is evident as cubist influences show beautifully in her work. One of the most interesting aspects of her work, however, are the subjects. She largely paints images of black women. She portrays lesbian lovers reclining together in “Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires” (below) and that simple image is radical. The women are women of color. They’re homosexual. Their bodies are curvaceous and thick. One of them even has natural, or unstraightened, hair. The other wears braids. The painting is absolutely inconsistent with what we have seen in art up to this point, on several levels. What’s most inspiring about Thomas is how well she’s doing in the art world. She’s had several solo exhibitions and is currently represented by Lehmann Maupin. Her difference, and her success, is a positive indicator for the art world.
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| "Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires" by Mickalene Thomas |
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| "Courbet 3 Sleep" by Mickalene Thomas |
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| Qusuquzah Standing Sideways by Mickalene Thomas |
The final artist I’ve chosen to feature is Ellen Gallagher. Gallagher is a Rhode Island native who studied in American colleges and universities until 1993. Ellen Gallagher works in mixed media, but focuses mostly in painting, photography, and film mediums. In the video below, she recounts her childhood fascination with viewfinder toys contrasted with her interaction with racist happenings as she grew up.
Gallagher’s work focuses on her heritage: her father was an Irish boxer and her mother was an African American woman (Artist Rooms - Ellen Gallagher). Gallagher explores what that intersection of culture means to her experience as an African American woman. The image that struck me the most was “Odalisque”, a self portrait. The video below is an excellent explication of the work. It features Gallagher herself reclining, staring at Sigmund Freud as he is postured to analyze her. The image is confrontational and brusque. It’s about the dissection of people, but of women of color specifically, according to these thinkers and theorists who do not understand their experience. She has the audacity to confront the prevailing idea that Freud is this master of thought and declare that maybe larger ideas cannot be contextualized accurately in the context of a racial existence. I love that Gallagher not only respects her race and her otherness; she also finds a power and authorization within it.
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| "Odalisque" by Ellen Gallagher |
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| "Untitled" by Ellen Gallagher |
The language that describes this class “Art and Women” is a deceptive one. It’s both inclusive and focused, saying too much and too little about what there is to know about the topic. Women in the profession and business of art have endured centuries of sexism, exceptionalism, and erasure. As we do return to the histories of art and make an effort to dig these women up, we see that the same challenges they struggled against have shaped, defined, and become the subject of their works. To tackle the task of reviewing art history and reinserting women into the relevant dialogue is huge and scary. It also requires a different approach than surveying men’s art history. To me, it’s most helpful to think of these artist in terms of the dominant dialogues they rebel against. Not because they were all rebels, but because without those norms they would have been in the history books in the first place. Highlighting the ways they undermine these ideas helps to stay true to their identities as both artists and women.
Works Cited:
“Artist Statement." Jessica Lagunas. N.p.. Web. 27 Nov 2013. <http://www.jessicalagunas.com/>.
Artist Rooms- Ellen Gallagher. The Art Fund UK, Film. 27 Nov 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEq7JnAJ4JY>.
"Bio." Jessica Lagunas. N.p.. Web. 27 Nov 2013. <http://www.jessicalagunas.com/>.
"Biography." The Art of Kara Walker. N.p.. Web. 27 Nov 2013. <http://learn.walkerart.org/karawalker/Main/Biography>.
"Bio." Mickalene Thomas. N.p.. Web. 27 Nov 2013. <http://mickalenethomas.com/bio.html>.
"Ellen Gallagher Artist Biography." Gagosian Gallery. N.p.. Web. 27 Nov 2013. <http://www.gagosian.com/artists/ellen-gallagher>.
Kara Walker, from David D’Arcy, “The Eye of the Storm,” Modern Painters (April 2006): 59.
very enlightning
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