In the 1970s, while working in conservative, patriarchal and often authoritarian societies, a new wave of female artists from across Europe started to use and project their own bodies in radical and transformative ways.
Waltraud Lehner was 28 when she took to the streets of Vienna. She was naked from the waist up. She’d built a “movie theatre” around her body, using cardboard and styrofoam.
Her body could not be seen but a curtained front allowed people to reach inside – if invited by Waltraud. She invited men, women and children to reach through the curtain and touch her breasts and body. As they did, she would recite: “This box is the movie theatre, my body is the screen."
It was, she said, a new form of performance art: feminist actionism. She titled the performance "Tapp-und Tast-Kino" (Tap and Touch Cinema).
But Waltraud was no longer called Waltraud. She had become VALIE EXPORT, a moniker stolen from a popular brand of cigarettes and used, she said, to cleave her “of my father’s name, and my husband’s name.”
The year was 1968. They were aware of the swinging sixties in Austro-Germany but this was still a society very much behind the Iron Curtain. The Stasi were operational, the authorities exerting a pervasive control. EXPORT was born into, and could just about remember, Nazi rule. It’s difficult to recall Touch Cinema now without making it sound faintly ludicrous. Why would she do such a thing? What was the point? Equally, it’s difficult to understand the risks EXPORT took, and what the potential costs might be when she stepped outside and took Touch Cinema to the streets.
EXPORT was trying to take control of her body, to treat it like a canvas, to use it as a way of expressing freedom and possibility. She is first among equals in a new group show of 13 female artists, titled Women Look At Women, at London's Richard Saltoun gallery – timed to launch on Valentine’s Day.
The exhibition explores how avant-garde feminist artists, from EXPORT onwards, used and projected their own bodies, bridging performance and photography to make highly progressive social statements. In many cases, the artworks here were met with barely contained fury. Some artists decided to keep the images private as a result. Others were arrested on censorship or indecency charges. Others were denied work, or found no one willing to exhibit them. They were marginalised and isolated, written out of the history books of conventional wisdom.
The Viennese media’s reaction to VALIE EXPORT was one of hysteria, very clearly laced with fear. One newspaper asked whether they might have a witch in their midst. They were witnessing, on their streets, the early genesis of a very potent new force in contemporary art – a form of unencumbered, unapologetic and uninhibited self-portraiture, a projection of identity that spoke of empowerment and self-possession – a trend that has exploded into one of today's global pastimes.
Women Look At Women is at Richard Saltoun, 41 Dover St, London W15 4NS
Private view: 14th February, 6-8pm
Open to the public: 15th February-31st March
Francesca Woodman – Swansong Series, 1978
In the autumn of 1980, at the age of 22, Francesca Woodman moved back to her parents' home in Manhattan. She had just marginally survived a suicide attempt. In the months before, in the midst of depression, she had sent her portfolio of self-portraits to magazines across New York, and been uniformly ignored. Just a few months later, on 19th January 1981, soon after her relationship with her partner had broken down, Woodman jumped to her death from the loft window of a distant acquaintance’s flat on the Lower East Side. A friend wrote: “Things had been bad, there had been therapy, things had gotten better, guard had been let down.”
If Woodman was ignored in life, she is celebrated in death. Her ghostly, monochrome self-portraits, often of her contorted body in moments of intensely private performance, are now revered as icons of feminist art.
Annegret Soltau – Selbst, 1975
While many of the photographers in this exhibition explore uninhibited freedom, Annegret Soltau captures society’s ongoing ability to repress. The German photographer used black thread, the kind you might keep in a sewing kit (and with the echoes of domesticity that accompany such a possession). She would wrap and knot the thread around her face, her ability to control her expression more and more determined by the tightness of the thread. If she’d continued for long enough, the thread would strangle her. She described the series as “a self-harming self-portrait, an effigy that has been prevented, inhibited, forced into silence.”
Jo Spence – Fat Project, 1978-1979
Spence, the working class Londoner whose pubescent years coincided with the Blitz, was a founding member of the East End-based collective of women photographers, The Hackney Flashers. Starting out as a commercial wedding photographer, Jo Spence gained national attention when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1982, an event that stimulated the ongoing self-portraiture series "A Picture of Health". But her photography had, at this point, already taken a more introspective, self-exploratory turn with works like "Fat Project". She described her purpose as exploring “the question of who represents who in society, how they do it and for what purpose.” In 1992, cancer returned again, this time in the shape of leukaemia, which took her life.
Eleanor Antin – Men from The King of Solana Beach, 1974
Antin, a Jewish girl from the Bronx who would spend most of her life as a professor in visual arts at San Diego University, didn’t use photography and video until later in her career. Throughout the 1970s, she created video works in which she performed as invented personae, the best known of which was The King of Solana Beach, for which Antin pasted a beard onto her face, wore a cape and wide-brimmed hat, and capered round San Diego. Followed by intrigued passersby, she visits the grocers and post office and sits on an old, abandoned sofa left in public view. Antin described these not as impersonations, but as transformations – characters that enabled her to feel unshackled by the things that weighed on her own life. She said: ”I was interested in defining the limits of myself. I consider the usual aids to self-definition — sex, age, talent, time and space — as tyrannical limitations upon my freedom of choice."
Helen Chadwick – Ruin, 1986
In 2001, Sam Taylor-Johnson made waves with her video work "Still Life". Calling it “a simple meditation on mortality and beauty,” she filmed a bowl of fruit left until it rots and melts into the table.
But in 1986, London-born photographer Helen Chadwick had already had the idea with "Carcass" – a tower of vegetables left to rot at the ICA. In her photograph "Ruin", Chadwick poses naked in front of an image of the tower. Her hand rests on a skull, asking us to compare the tautness of her flesh to the decaying, fetid matter: beauty and mortality, hand in hand. Less than 10 years later, she died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 42.
Friedl Kubelka – Pin-up, 1973
Friedl Kubelka would rent a Parisian hotel by the hour. There, in front of the mirror, she would dress in lingerie and pose. She was 26, and she was doing this for nobody but her camera. The images are brave and assertive, yet Kubelka is so vulnerable she might break into pieces. They were the first portraits of Kubelka’s 40-year-long "Jahreportraits" (Year Portraits) project, in which she photographed herself daily over the period of a year – repeating the process every five years since. Kubelka grew up in East Berlin, and was only able to leave for the West as a student. Yet despite her newfound freedom, these images came amid a period of unrest and unhappiness, a time in which she tried to work out her own needs and desires by exposing them on film. “I wanted to be the object of desire,” she said. “I wanted somebody. But I wanted to also be the person that renders the object of desire.”
Alexis Hunter – The Marxist’s Wife (Still Does the Housework), 1978
Born in rural New Zealand, Hunter spent her early 20s living in a commune in Cairns before moving to London and immersing herself in the Camden arts scene.
As a way of twisting men’s willingness to reduce women to visuals, she took to the streets of Hoxton to photograph men in her "Sexual Rapport" series. Once published, she would mark the images with ‘Yes’, ‘No’ or ‘Maybe’.
Remembering the time, she said: “We were ridiculed in the press. We couldn't get work [but] we felt empowered to change society, and thought we could do so by making art. People now don't feel that, and they want to learn how we did it.”
Images in the series "The Marxist Housewife (Still Does the Housework)" show a manicured hand cleaning a poster of Karl Marx – a reminder for Marxists of the philosopher’s lack of recognition of women, so often denied the opportunity to work.
Renate Bertlmann – Transformations, 1969/2013
Renate Bertlmann has spent a career exploring the co-dependence of the feminine and masculine relationship – the way ideas of sex and gender and desire can often cross over, interchange and overlap, with her work often employing phallic imagery amid more classically feminist signage. From the 1980s, she would often incorporate commercial pornography into her work, using it as a way of interrogating gender and sexual relations in a world orientated around work and money.
In this series of staged photographs, the artist ‘transforms’ herself by dressing in her mother’s clothes. The clothes are often faintly masculine in tone, with their emphasis on practicality and their suitability for domestic labour. Posing as such, she helps us reflect on what our parents pass on to us, and how their notions of gender differ from our own.
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