Contemporary female art

First, we would have to make a distinction between female art and Feminist art. Whereas the first is a label for art made by women, the latter addresses very specific socio-political issues regarding the exploitation of women by men. Feminism is right about the suppression and dislocation of women from the public sphere (since the Renaissance until the end of the Twentieth Century; just look at the disproportion of male and female artists in Modern art history). 1- An important alert to feminist issues came in the 1970’s, with artist Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, a work that used several traditionally “feminine” art-mediums to teach women’s history (Chicago’s work represents the ways in which feminists began to explore their oppression through art). Why is it that the early avant-garde (Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Futurism, De Stijl, etc) were essentially male-driven movements? I don’t want to dwell in the causes of this phenomenon, which has been well-documented by Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectics of Sex and Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (among many others). 2- Since the 1960’s female art has brought forth a new attention to materials: ceramics, latex, rubber, fiberglass and yarn. There is a return to fiber media: weaving, quilt-making, etc. Formally, female art is generally characterized by a biomorphic, more fluid focus. In performance/art, video and photography, women have explored gestures of objectification and exploitation from a different perspective than those found in male performances (which tend to be more heroic). 3- Although art is universal, the claim that art is genderless is not true (See post-feminism). Can you think of any particular female art themes? Go ahead.

Sylvie Fleury's "YES TO ALL" and "Pleasure" (2000's). Fleury displays stylish items of fashion and design in order to compare and clash them with the everyday world. In a way, fashion is dissected from its aura and made banal.

Frances Trombly's "Four Balloons" and "Paper Stack" (2005). "Frances Trombly's current show It Makes Me Happy, comprised of intricate representations of the mundane objects on the periphery of celebration, focuses on the act of gift giving. Trombly infuses the ordinarily mass-produced items with value by knitting or weaving the recreations in order to remind the viewer of the thoughtfulness that should symbolize gift giving. In transferring the emphasis from the gift to the human contact, Trombly nudges us away from the powers of the consumer society to a more emotional approach to celebration."-- Mocoloco.com

Sarah Lucas' "Aunty Jam" (1990's). Lucas often employs metaphors that symbolise sexual body parts. These metaphors are frequently food or furniture which she utilises as ready-mades, attributing new meanings to them. "The message of these works is clearly autobiographical. Lucas's breast-chair has predictable things to say about the role of domestic woman as apiece of furniture, a thing to be sat on; by covering the chair in a layer of cigarettes, the artist presumably means to explain the link between the eternal drudgery of women and their desire to kill themselves slowly with fags. Her life vest, which doubles as a pair of breasts, says much the same kind of thing about the effect on women as sexualised objects. Given the artist's pungent frame of reference, it is probably not going too far to suggest that the covert message of Lucas: life sucks."-- Charles Darwent, The New Statesman (2000).

Ana Mendieta's "Silueta" (1970's). Ana Mendieta envisioned the female body as a primal source of life and sexuality, as a symbol of the ancient paleolithic goddesses. In her siluetas, Mendieta used her body or images of her body in combination with natural materials. "Mendieta was both of her time and, more importantly, beyond her time. Although the styles she embraced could be labeled performance art, body art and earthworks, she was an artist who defied stereotyping and whose obsession with overturning new ground brought forth an aesthetic force of infinite magnitude. "--Heidi Rauch & Federico Suro, Americas Magazine, October 1992.

Valie Export's "Made in Austria" and "Action Pants: Genital Panic" (1970's). Austrian artist Valie Export has worked in film, video, photography, text and performance. Initially expanding the Viennese Actionist project to confront a complex Feminist critique of the social and political body, her works achieve a compelling fusion of the visceral and the conceptual. As Valie Export contends, society has defined femininity in terms of a grammar of body - lips, breasts, legs - parts that are so interchangeable and genetic that woman herself become interchangeable and in this sense no longer exit.

Pipilotti Rist's "Fourth Wall" (2000's). "Having fantasised as a teenager that she was the Swiss John Lennon, Rist played drums, flute and bass for several years in the band Les Reines Prochaines and she has long been fascinated by the power and potential of pop. Her video soundtracks are often familiar-unfamiliar renditions of classic pop ballads with a raw bass guitar edge, devoid of pop promo gloss. Many of her songs are written with Anders Guggisberg, and they often collapse into hysterical disintegration by the end, quickly dispelling any candy-pop fantasies of easy gratification. In the past, Rist's installations have explored the signifiers of femininity and co-opted them into a new political aesthetic that critically celebrates femininity without attacking masculinity. A startling reworking of 1970s feminist political film, video and performance, as well as the sexual cliché of contemporary 'porno-pop', Rist's work is close to the celebratory, no-hostage wit of artists like Sarah Lucas. Rist's flow of imagery seduces and unnerves, exploring mutability, transformation and visual pleasure experienced through all the senses. Her installations present ideas that offer a space to think - or rather, to un-think our assumptions and perceptions."-- Taken from http://www.padt.org.uk/

Eva Hesse's "Nets" (1960's). Hesse was sent with her sister to Holland to flee the Nazis in 1938. Their parents joined them and they moved to New York in 1939. When Eva was nine, her parents separated and her father remarried. A few months later her mother, who had a history of depression, committed suicide by throwing herself from a window. Hesse used to say that she aimed to create ‘nothings’. One can create a ‘nothing’ by making things that aren’t things (in the sense fixed representative objects). And Hesse’s objects always do more than merely represent. If art is always made to mean things and to represent, the only way out is to make what Hesse called "non-art."

Vanessa Beecroft's "Untitled" (2000's). Beecroft has become famous for her human installations featuring armies of vaguely similar women (and lately men) wearing identical underwear, high heels, wigs, and not much else. Their nudity becomes almost like a uniform. She explores the intrusion of the public, Pop, fashion, conceptual art, and the body as object. "Beecroft delves into culture's maelstrom, searching for female types found throughout the history of art, cinema, and the theater, and whose characteristics she has largely assimilated. Directing and changing the bodies of others, she tries to reconcile the representation of ideal womanhood with the physical and psychological experience of her own body. Beecroft exploits the processes of perception and identification, often dissolving genders and mixing genres, in order to pinpoint the conflict between image and self-image in a way both provocative and healing."-- Elizabeth Janus, Art Forum International, May 1995.

Adrian Piper's "You" (1990's). Piper is a conceptual artist (and philosophy professor) whose work, in a variety of media, has focused on racism, racial stereotyping and xenophobia. "I recall the New Museum's experience hosting the Adrian Piper retrospective a couple of years ago: Having thought of Piper as a bit of a cult figure, we were unprepared for the hoards of twenty-somethings who, filling our galleries, seemed entirely comfortable with what they were experiencing. At the time, I reflected that most art skips a generation before finding its audience and that a generation raised on the Internet no longer questions the precepts of Conceptual art. This generation, facing a previously unimagined set of challenges, assumptions, and possibilities, can now experience Feminism as something its founders never could: a historical continuity, flowing from one generation to the next, always adaptable to the needs anti strengths of a new wave of the curious and the bold."-- Dan Cameron, Art Forum International, October 2003.

Louise Bourgeois' "Untitled" and "Hanging Janus with Jacket" (1960-80's). Bourgeois' sculptures exhale the sweat of erotic work. They may not be immediate figures of desire, but they position themselves clearly as “operations” where desire becomes manifest. "Rising like a proud, pristine phoenix in a Pasolini opera from the ashes of th past, overcoming obstacles as mighty as deconstruction and as petty as simulation, Bourgeois reigns supreme, and her subjects do not (and cannot) hide their worship, for her stamp is all over their works as brazenly as so often their politics are written on their black crepe Comme des Garcons sleeves."-- Christian Leigh, The Earrings of Madame B.

Rosemarie Trockel's "Untitled" (2000's). Trockel is one of the most important figures in the contemporary art movement in Germany. Trockel challenges established theories about sexuality, culture, and artistic production. "First encounters with Rosemarie Trockel have often left American viewers puzzled. The many narrative routes into her work, plus the specificity of her German-language references, can appear unfathomable. Yet this didn't prevent a favorable critical consensus from emerging here in the 1990s. Indeed, the very notion of missed signals is at the heart of her practice, as demonstrated by a sub-installation in her latest appearance in New York. "--Gregory Williams, Art Forum International, February 2003.

Marlene Dumas' "Euro" and "Lucy" (2000's). Racism, sexuality, religion, motherhood and childhood are all presented with chilling honesty in Dumas' paintings. "Dumas's obsessive return to the human face and figure make her a sort of anti-Richter. She understands that to the model, the camera's indifference is no more absolute than a psychoanalyst's silence is to the patient: Both are flagrant invitations to the melodrama of transference. And we are all models, sooner or later. Or as Dumas describes our yearning relationship with the mechanical eye in the title of a 1997 painting, a group portrait of eight haughty demoiselles stripped down to their frilly white underwear, We Were All in Love with the Cyclops."-- Barry Schwabsky, Art Forum International, January 2000.

Barbara Kruger's "Seeing Through You" (1980's). Kruger really knows how to capture our attention with her bold socio-political photomurals, displayed on billboards, bus stops and public transportation as well as in major museums and galleries wordwide. "Kruger herself has explained her work in terms of critique, one that finds its ally in words and its target in pictures; her aim, she says, is to "interrupt the stunned silences of the image with the uncouth impertinences and uncool embarrassments of language." The idea that visual imagery is inherently pernicious is played up not only by the bygone McCarthy-era look of most of her black-and-white photos, but also by their often violent subject matter, a violence aestheticized through noir lighting or other abstracting effects."--Lane Relyea, Art Forum International, February 2000.

Catherine Opie's "Portrait" (2000's). Catherine Opie gained national attention for her large format portraits of dyke daddies, gay male performance transvestites, FTM transexuals, tattooed and scarified gay men and lesbians and other members of a social milieu where sexual identity is most dramatically thrown into question. Opie places her subjects clearly and calmly in the center of focus.

Barbara Hepworth's "Oval" (1950's). British Hepworth’s adherence to abstraction was lifelong and drew on geometric as well as organic shapes. She introduced into England the idea of piercing the solid mass of sculpture with a "hole," making the object more transparent. This concept influenced the future work of Henry Moore, among others. Hepworth’s hollow interiors become more important than the enveloping material. As the viewer's eye is drawn inside the sculpture, the openings invite the surrounding landscape to become part of the artwork.

Nan Goldin's "Untitled" (1990's). Goldin is an example of an artist who works at the most intimate level: her life is her work and viceversa. Her "snapshot"-esque images of her friends --drag queens, drug addicts, lovers and family-- are intense, searing portraits which, together make a document of Goldin's life.