THE BODY IN WOMEN'S ART

Interview By Paul Carey Kent

   See exhibition listing here

ROLLO Contemporary Art in Cleveland Street, London, shows.The Body in Women’s Art 2: Flux from 8 Sept - 5 Nov. The exhibition, which will then travel to New Hall, Cambridge, features work by Tracey Emin, Cecily Brown, Natalie Djurberg, Tiina Heiska, Sarah Lederman and Helen Carmel Benigson.

It forms part of a wide-ranging three-part survey with accompanying catalogues. I talked to its curator, Philippa Found, about the thinking behind the project and the artists featured.

PCK: This is the second part of three. What are the themes across the exhibitions?

PF: The idea of the project was to review the women’s art of the last decade that focuses on the body, and suggest three themes that seemed characteristic of this period.
Part 1: Embodied examined the resurgence of political performance-based art in the last decade, investigating this use of the physical body as a vehicle to explore cultural identity. The exhibition featured four international women artists: Sigalit Landau, Regina José Galindo, Jessica Lagunas, and Lydia Maria Julien. investigates the representation of the body, and specifically the presentation of the body as a site of instability. The exhibition considers how the assertion of the uncontrollable nature of the female body might be seen to reinterpret and disrupt its traditional representations to present a contemporary body of flux, freedom and sexuality.Part 3 will look at more abstract definitions of the body, the evocation of the body without the physical presence of a body, and the changing relationship between the body and its outside environment.PCK: Why does it seem particularly relevant to return now to the subject of the body in women’s art which was notably well explored in the 1960’s - 70s and again in the 1980’s – 90’s?

PF: The end of the decade offers a good opportunity to review its defining themes and movements, and I felt there had been little analysis of the body in women’s art as a subject since the ‘Bad Girls’ in the 1990s. There seemed to be a lot of strong, theoretically engaged work being made by women artists focusing on the body, which warranted updating with critical attention.

I was also inspired by the book ,The Artist’s Body (edited by Tracey Warr: Phaidon, 2000), which reviewed the relationship between the artist and the body from 1960–2000, approaching the topic thematically through such subjects as ‘Body Boundaries’ and ‘Performing Identity’. My exhibition series is asking: if The Artist’s Body continued to date with three more chapters, what would those chapters focus on? So it is fantastic that Tracey has worked with me and contributed an essay to the book of the exhibition*.

PCK: Compared with, say, the 1970’s, how do you see the relationship of women to their bodies having changed in society as a whole?

PF: I think the impact of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and the Bad Girls culture of the 90s has had profound effect on changing attitudes to the body . I also think there is far more sexual liberation now: women can be much more open with their sexuality and in expressing their desires, which is positive.

Yet there seems be a flip side; in that the sexualisation of women is more overt in mainstream culture – in the lads mag, the normalisation of strip clubs, pole dancing classes etc. There’s a danger that society might just be repositioning women as sexual objects for male consumption rather than supporting female empowerment. There is a very interesting recent book, written by Natasha Walter, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, which addresses this idea.

The normalisation of plastic surgery has also had a huge effect. There is an ever-increasing pressure on women to attain the ‘ideal’ body – which leads to increased body anxiety – caused and perpetuated by an increasing bombardment of these unobtainable ideals in advertising, fashion and beauty magazines. Anxiety around aging, dieting and body aesthetics seems to have escalated. A culture of insecurity is rife. Women have ever more freedom and yet conversely there’s an increasingly narrowed ideal being targeted at them. The position of women in society as a whole – as well as the relationship women have with their bodies – is becoming ever more complex.

PCK: And how are those changes reflected in the art being made now compared with that in the 1970’s?

PF: In the high gloss aesthetic of a lot of body art. Generally the performance and video art being made today isn’t the grainy documentary style that it was in the 60’s and 70’s. It’s much more evocative of MTV, pop videos and advertising – suggesting that these are very real forces in defining women’s attitudes to the body, which artists are appropriating in order to tackle.

This idea of the changing ideal and its relationship to capitalism was addressed through Jessica Lagunas’ videos in Part 1: Embodied. The artist applied make up continually for an hour in repeated and exaggerated gesture to reflect the pressures imposed on women in society to modify the body to reach ‘perfection’. The video mimicked the high gloss aesthetic of advertising and its tendency to crop the female body to one part, so that to start with it’s almost as if it’s an advert for a make up brand – yet as it continues it becomes clear that this is a parody of the representation of the female body as presented in contemporary visual culture, and one which undermines its authority by re-presenting it in terms of insecurity and obsession.

That exhibition also included Regina Jose Galindo’s Cut Through the Line, in which the artist hired a top plastic surgeon to mark her (beautifully proportioned and slim) naked body with all the lines of surgery that would be required to transform her into the ‘ideal’ as dictated in western society. This marking up continues for over 38 minutes – making overt the bizarre, extreme and brutal scrutiny projected onto women and their bodies.

Looking at the artists in Part 2 and the presentations of the body as a sexual entity, it seems overall today that women are proudly proclaiming their femininity and sexuality rather than rallying against attitudes to it or campaigning for gender equality. The artists acknowledge and explore the complex dynamics of being sexual objects – the degrees of complicity, nonchalance and empowerment – rather than simply rejecting it or trying to subvert it.

I feel that women’s art today is also more overt in assuming a female subjectivity, so that a female rather than male viewer can be assumed. That moves beyond the art historical tradition in which the feminine is seen as an artificial construct derived from the primary ‘male gaze’ of men taking pleasure in looking at a passive female object. Consistent with that, criticism has moved on: today’s women artists can present the female body as a site of sexual pleasure without being accused - as they would have been in the 1970’s - of ‘essentialism’, that is of displaying their body/sexuality in a way which reinforces the idea that women are defined by their sexual parts.

Sarah Lederman: Ascending in Tights I, 2009

The Body in Women’s Art Now: Part 2 deals with flux. What types of flux are the artists concerned with?

PF: The ephemerality of the body (which is another concern more prominent than in the 70’s) – its aging, changing and degradation (Djurberg/Lederman/Heiska). Also the body’s potential to experience and express desire, passion and sensuality; an erotic state of flux (Brown/Emin). Three of the artists focus on adolescence (Heiska, Lederman, Benigson) – a period when the body is in physical flux, and identity is in flux as a sense of self is defined. All the artists conjure ambiguous and complex positions – Lederman’s female nudes could be seen to be vulnerable or provocative, Benigson overtly displays hyper-femininity as parody or celebration – and so the works teeter on the edge of opposite interpretations which in itself is a ‘flux’.

PCK: Can both Cecily Brown and Sarah Lederman’s work be seen as critiques of male attitudes and the art which expresses them?

PF: They can, yes. Brown’s work is often read as a ‘feminisation’ of male abstract expressionism – as Brown’s paintings of erotic subject matter go against the art history tradition of painting as a product of the male sexual drive . And Sarah Lederman’s paintings of the female body as a drippy, fluid and messy undermine traditional male depictions of the female body as neat, pretty and contained.

PCK: Is there, then, a danger of them having their agenda defined by the male through how they react to it?

I don’t think either artist’s work is limited to that one interpretation. Far from their work being defined by men, I see them as engaging with and articulating a female subjectivity. As Tracey Warr says in her catalogue essay,The Hysterical Sense of Leaking, Brown’s work articulates the sensation of sex from a women’s point of view. Speaking of New Louboutin Pumps, 2005, Warr says ‘This painting depicts a female experience and a female space: part artist’s studio and part boudoir. This is a different site of desire from the female body exposed and displayed for the male gaze. In this female version all is focused on the sensation of the entered vagina.’

Meanwhile, Lederman talks of her work as being strongly influenced by her childhood fantasies and fairytales, and presenting her memories of the loss of innocence and of adolescent desire and awkwardness. Brown and Lederman’s work – like any in the present – can of course be read in relation to what has preceded it, which in the case of art is a history which is predominantly male. But both go beyond that to make women’s art for a female audience – the men don’t need to come into it.

PCK: Tracey Emin’s work is often seen as neurotic, but you present it in more celebratory terms?

PF: Yes - in the way they unashamedly describe women’s sexuality. I remember at the time of the Suffer Love exhibition at White Cube in 2009 there was an article prompted by Emin’s mono-prints and video animation of her masturbating , which asked whether female masturbation was the last taboo. I don’t necessarily think it is, but the fact that Emin’s work can be seen to break a taboo – and one which is about denying or suppressing women’s sexuality – surely has to be celebratory.

Tiina Heiska: Untitled from the series Butterfly Caught (no. 5), 2008

PCK: There is something sinister about both Natalie Djurberg’s claymotion videos and Tiina Heiska’s paintings of herself as an adolescent. Could you say something about that, and the empowerment represented in their approaches?

PF: Djurberg’s films are like twisted folk tales: the aesthetic is akin to children’s television but the themes are dark – sadism, bestiality, death – all set against toy chime music by Hans Berg, which makes them even more deliriously dark. The sinister aspect of Djurberg’s work is that her characters don’t have consciences, they act on their wild impulses – but that’s quite liberating!

Heiska’s paintings have a cinematic quality, especially reminiscent of Hitchcock. Her characters always seem laced in latent danger with a sense of voyeurism and tension. I’m fascinated by the ambiguity surrounding the female character in her work: you can’t tell if she is a child or adult – herself or a fictitious character – being stalked or part of a complicit game. Her characters may be seen as vulnerable or as reflections of women’s fantasies – whether that fantasy be a sexual one, or one about reclaiming youth.

Helen Carmel Benigson: still from the video Wet/Wet, 2010

PCK: Helen Carmel Benigson plays complex games with her self-identity, for example by representing herself through others. How does that relate to the themes of the show?

At times the artist is the central character in Helen’s work, at other times it’s her cousin, who looks almost indistinguishable from her. This means you’re never 100% sure whether the woman in her video is Benigson or her cousin. At other times Benigson stars as her alter-ego ‘Princess Belsize Dollar’ - a rapper. Benigson’s indefinable ‘self’ complicates the notion of identity being a fixed entity, suggesting it may be performed or exist in flux. What I think is fascinating are the dichotomies that her works embody – presenting her identity as a religious follower and a rapper, or pivoting between parodying the objectification of women and being an active participant in that.

Benigson assimilates a plethora of seemingly contrasting historic and cultural stereotypes and characteristics, and rather than fighting them, assumes them all as components contributing to her vision of contemporary identity – an identity formed from a multitude of opposing factors. By embodying contradictions and complexities, by complicating and rupturing tradition, by challenging objectification but also proposing the body as a site of pleasure, she shows the complexity of contemporary feminine identity.

PCK: Looking more broadly, is there any evidence that less attention is still given to work by women than to work by men?

PF: Speaking from a British perspective, unfortunately yes – this is evident in the comparative number of museum solo shows, the number of top prize winners, and the auction records for male and female artists. I researched this for Part 1 and found that between 2000–09 approximately 62% of students graduating with degrees in the creative arts in the U.K. were female. Conversely, however, since 2000 only 29% of solo exhibitions at the Tate Modern had been of women artist’s works. Similarly, out of the 116 artists who had been short-listed for the Turner Prize since its origins in 1984, only 35 had been women – and only three women had won the Prize.

PCK: How is that reflected in the market?

PF: Currently the highest auction price for a female artist is £6.6m paid in 2008 for The Flowers by Natalia Gonchavora (1881-1962). The record for a male artist is £65m for Alberto Giacometti’s statue

Tracey Emin made the very interesting documentary What Price Art? (2006) for Channel 4 regarding the disparity between the prices women artists’ works attain and those of men. That sadly but powerfully highlighted similar disparities in the prices of work of contemporary artists who are deemed to be equally significant in terms of exhibition history or critical acclaim.

PCK: Given that imbalance, what would you like to see done?

PF: I’d love to see the history of feminism and women’s art movements adequately reflected in the history of art which is presented in museums. I think there’s a real disjuncture between the history of 20th century art that’s being taught at universities (where feminism is presented as such an integral movement) and the one that’s reflected on our museum walls. We need big museum shows to address women’s art movements - like the Pompidou’s, except here in the UK.

Ultimately I’d love to see some buying committees specifically for women’s art in our museums – as happens very actively based on the nationality of artists And more female directors (currently only six of the 28 members of the The National Museums Directors Conference Association are women). The boys have had their turn defining art history, it’s time for the girls now.


* Exhibition catalogues can be bought from ROLLO Contemporary Art:Part 1: Embodied (with essays by Philippa Found and Dr Harriet Riches) and Part 2:(with essays by Tracey Warr, Philippa Found and Paul Carey-Kent).