A feminist revolution in art

Elaine Shemilt was a young stu­dent when she pho­tographed her nude body tied up from head to toe with tape, lead­ing a teacher at the art school in Lon­don where she was study­ing to de­clare: “A woman can­not be a woman and an artist at the same time.” De­spite this being the men­tal­ity that held sway in the 1970s, it was a way of think­ing whose days were num­bered. Shemilt was not alone. Women from all cor­ners of the globe began bom­bard­ing the world with the same mes­sage: it was time to chal­lenge the male dom­i­na­tion of art and, clearly, of women in gen­eral. It was no empty threat, and it was one they fully car­ried out.

Art his­to­rian, Gabriele Schor, calls this move­ment “the fem­i­nist avant-garde”, and it broke an es­tab­lished order that had ex­isted for cen­turies. Art his­tory had rel­e­gated women to ob­jects, as muses for male in­spi­ra­tion, but never as cre­ators (the sys­tem had many mech­a­nisms for si­lenc­ing the few that dared to try).

There had al­ways been fe­male artists, but it was not until the chal­lenge to the es­tab­lished order rep­re­sented by the un­rest sur­round­ing the May 1968 up­ris­ings that they be­came more vis­i­ble in art and fe­male artists began to break free from the stereo­types male artists had sub­jected them to. Fem­i­nist art was not just art made for women, it was art that chal­lenged the so­cial con­ven­tions that re­stricted women to a do­mes­tic role and sub­jected them to strict ideals of beauty.

Schor is the founder and di­rec­tor of the Ver­bund Col­lec­tion in Vi­enna, which brings to­gether works by the pi­o­neers of fem­i­nist artis­tic ac­tivism, such as Martha Rosler, He­lena Almeida, Ana Mendi­eta, Francesca Wood­man, and Cindy Sher­man, among many oth­ers. To set up the col­lec­tion, Schor had to res­cue a great many works that were well-hid­den in store­rooms.

Now, some 200 of these “provoca­tive, rad­i­cal, po­etic and ironic” pieces are on show until De­cem­ber 1 at the ex­hi­bi­tion, Fem­i­nismes!, at Barcelona’s cen­tre of con­tem­po­rary cul­ture, the CCCB. They are not on dis­play by them­selves, how­ever. Rather, they are ac­com­pa­nied by ex­am­ples of today’s mil­i­tant fem­i­nist art, which has gained a new lease of life in re­cent times, but is also very much the in­her­i­tor of that rev­o­lu­tion in art that opened up the way.

“That is why we talk about ’fem­i­nisms’ in the plural, and why we have put an ex­cla­ma­tion mark in the ex­hi­bi­tion’s title, as a cel­e­bra­tion of fem­i­nist cre­ativ­ity but also as a cry of alarm,” says CCCB head, Judit Car­rera, who adds that while much has been achieved there is still much to be done.

The Ver­bund Col­lec­tion has also been en­riched by its visit to Barcelona, as it will be ex­panded by the work of two great Cata­lan artists from the era: Eulàlia Grau and Àngels Ribé. The work of six oth­ers have also been in­cluded in the ex­hi­bi­tion that fea­tures work by 73 artists from Eu­rope, Amer­ica and Asia: Pilar Aymerich, Mari Chordà, Fina Mi­ralles, Eugènia Bal­cells, Marisa González and Dorothée Selz (born in Paris but who joined the Barcelona scene at that time).

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