New York New Wave

The Legacy of Feminist Art in Emerging Practice

Kathy Battista

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786724823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte contemporanea

New York is a centre of creative production for an exciting, emerging generation of women artists. Their work investigates themes such as the body as medium and subject matter; the deconstruction of the existing patriarchal order of the art world; the appropriation of earlier art historical references; and the use of so-called abject and everyday materials. New York New Wave investigates the relevance of earlier feminist practice for this 'new' generation, asking: Does gender difference still play a role in today's practice? How can younger women artists embrace a radical political ideology and yet remain market friendly? How far have these artists diverged from the established feminist "tradition"? Artists discussed include: Firelei Baez, EV Day, Ruby LaToya Fraser, Diana Al-Hadid, K8 Hardy, Valerie Hegarty, Cindy Hinant, Dawn Kasper, Anya Kielar, Liz Magic Laser, Narcissister, Alix Pearlstein, Aurel Schmidt, AL Steiner and W.A.G.E.

1

Feminism: The New Wave

Feminism has played a pivotal role in the historical trajectory of art in the twentieth century, irrevocably changing how the representation of gender is perceived and discussed. Feminist art was created by a generation of women who engaged with central debates around the women’s movement in their art practice. Prior to this movement, the female body in the history of art was often limited to the idealized representation of the female nude, the Madonna, aristocratic portraiture, or the immoral or victimized fallen woman. These Venuses and Madonnas, primarily painted by male artists, make up the canon of Western art history. Feminist artists challenged many of these accepted norms of depicting the female within art.¹ Judy Chicago championed vaginal imagery, previously a taboo subject in the history of art, in an oeuvre that moves effortlessly across media, from paintings, ceramics, and large-scale sculpture to firework displays. As Germaine Greer wrote in her groundbreaking book The Female Eunuch: “The vagina is obliterated from the imagery of femininity in the same way that signs of independence and vigor in the rest of her body are suppressed.”² Indeed, the vagina was deemed out-of-bounds as acceptable subject matter for centuries.³

Chicago, her colleague Miriam Schapiro, and 25 of their students – Karen LeCoq, Nancy Youdelman, Faith Wilding, Suzanne Lacy, and Janice Lester, among others – challenged the patriarchal role and male domination of art practice and pedagogy through their Womanhouse project, which ran from January 30 to February 28, 1972.⁴ Womanhouse was a project in which Chicago and Schapiro worked collaboratively with their students on the second feminist art program at the California Institute of the Arts to create installations and performances in a transformed abandoned mansion.⁵ It is a landmark achievement in the history of feminist art that was influential and even replicated in London.⁶ In this project artists challenged the notion of acceptable themes for art practice by including subjects such as rape, menstruation, marriage and childbirth. On the East Coast Martha Rosler, Joan Jonas, Mary Beth Edelson, Adrian Piper, et al. used their bodies in performance and video art that rejected the traditional means of art-making as espoused by the legacy of centuries of male painters and sculptors that came before them. Similar to the diversity of practice was the plurality of approaches to feminism, from the grassroots radical to the psychoanalytic or Marxist. Women artists and scholars questioned the male canon and whether inclusion within such was a feminist goal. In essence, I argue that scholars such as Nochlin, Pollock and Parker, Greer, and others created a feminist canon during this rich and fertile era of the 1970s, when feminist ideas were developed en masse in popular as well as academic circles.

The feminist art of the so-called “second wave” is understood to be the work associated with the popular rise of the women’s movement, which had its initial stirrings in the late 1960s and came into its own by the middle of the 1970s. It is well documented that in the United States and Europe the impetus grew out of a popular movement where women campaigned for equal division of labor, both within the home as well as the workplace.⁷ The Equal Pay Act (1963) in the United States and soon afterward in the UK, made it illegal to pay a woman a different salary than a man for the same position; however, we know that income distribution across genders is still not equivalent today. There is a dearth of female executives and those that exist, like women artists, are paid less than their male counterparts.⁸ A Fortune 1998 ranking of the 500 most powerful companies in the US only contained two women CEOs; in 2013 the same list featured 28 females at the helm of the most powerful companies. While there has been progress, the inequity is by no means resolved.⁹ This is not a dilemma that can be rectified overnight and a quota system would be flawed from the outset. Reverse discrimination favoring the female gender repeats the same tactics that feminism opposed: using a biological imperative to make policy decisions. While well-intentioned, positive discrimination is not a feasible solution; women still struggle to be recognized for their managerial and leadership skills. How can society ameliorate this imbalance?

A Woman’s Place in the Art Market

Women’s status in the art world has evolved similarly to the status of women in the corporate world. The National Endowment for the Arts reports that female full-time artists earn 81 cents for every one dollar by male artists and auction data reflects that only two women artists make the list of 100 most expensive artists of all time.¹⁰ While there has been slow progress, the disparity is by no means alleviated. Indeed, the ebb and flow of progress is frustratingly sluggish. Perhaps it is this glacial pace that is a factor in the current resurgence of radical feminist art. While many of the artists in this book, who embrace difficult themes or challenging imagery, are represented by galleries, the stakes are still low for most artists taking a feminist position. The art market surges around them, yet these artists continue to make work that challenges and resists the upper echelons of the commercial system. Their critical and popular success proves that feminism has become more mainstream and even fashionable, but is still considered of lesser value than that of their male colleagues. As Carolee Schneemann has said, “Every smart gallery says ‘Hey, I need a bad-mouthed cunt. Who’s wild and crazy? I need one. Don’t give me two. Just one…’”.¹¹ Her quote is effective for discussing how the market has viewed feminism in the recent decades: they embrace it, but too often only for novelty value and not as an ongoing, abiding focus.¹²

Auction records are not perfect gauges of the market as more than half of the artworks sold globally are exchanged in gallery and private sector deals and therefore are not publicly recorded; however, they can be important indicators of collecting trends. Take, for example, Kara Walker and her contemporaries Chris Ofili and Robert Gober. In a May 2011 auction Kara Walker’s Desire–A Reconstruction (1995) sold for her record price of $350,000. Ofili’s The Virgin Mary, made just one year after Walker’s record-breaking sale, sold for $3,939,250 in 2015. Gober’s The Silent Sink (1984) sold for $3,600,000 in 2014. Ana Mendieta, an established and almost mythological fixture in both academic and institutional contexts, had a record price of only $168,682 in 2008. It signals progress that women artists, especially Walker and Mendieta, whose works challenge male authority and were radical gestures at the time of production, have entered the mainstream auction market. It is notable, though, the disparity in record prices in their works. In short, there is still a long way to climb towards market equality.

A team of economic researchers, including Renee Adams, Marco Navone, Roman Kraussl, and Patrick Werwijmeren, have been studying why artworks of male artists fare better than those of women artists. Limiting their study to artists born after 1850, artists whose works were traded on at least 20 occasions, and ruling out artworks that broke the $1 million tier as that could skew the statistics, their sample found a 17 percent pay gap between male and female artists. The gap was most acute in countries where cultural bias against women, measured by labor participation, tertiary education enrollment, and percentage of women in parliament, was also high. Navone says:

We think, but can’t be certain, that cultural gender bias plays a role in the price gap, but it has been decreasing in the past 40 years in the US and Western Europe. Although on average, the price of artworks by female artists is still lower than male artists’ work, nevertheless prices have been growing closer.

They also determined that investing in women artists therefore brought a higher return, at over 6 percent, than investing in male artists, at just under 5 percent.¹³

1.1 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #6, 1977. Gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 in. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

In the same article the authors quoted Cindy Sherman: “Women artists have to prove themselves exceptional in order to get their foot in the door, to be considered for something, whereas many, many mediocre men artists easily get by.”¹⁴ Sherman has come the closest to bridging the gap on this market disparity. Her Untitled Film Stills (1977) sold for $5,900,000 on 12 November, 2014. Her colleague, both in terms of age as well as gallery representation, Richard Prince, had a high-selling mark in 2016 with Runaway Nurse (2005–6), which sold for $8,500,000. However, most of Sherman’s female colleagues sell for much less. ArtNews ran a feature about the disparity in prices for female artists in December 2014 after a Georgia O’Keefe painting sold for $44 million and a Joan Mitchell sold for $11,900,000 in May that year. The author noted that between 2008 and 2012, the 100 highest-selling lots did not include one female artist. In the same article, the philanthropist and activist Elizabeth Sackler was quoted on this disparity:

Art sale statistics are a symptom, fighting for more money is but a Band-Aid … The disease we face is fundamental disrespect for women and unacceptable attitudes that women’s thinking, observations, and creative output hold little value. I point you to the November 12, 2014 Christie’s Post-War Contemporary Art auction that featured 82 lots: 79 men and three women.¹⁵

Sackler’s words are poignant in that there is often a disconnection between the price of an artwork and the intrinsic value it plays in the history of art and the production of knowledge. While women artists are edging upwards in terms of market status, there are many more aspects to consider when analyzing feminist art practice, including gallery and institutional representation in terms of landmark exhibitions.

Feminist Exhibitions: From Blockbusters to the Local

As the representation of women in the contemporary art world has evolved in tandem with that of the corporate workplace, slowly the gender distribution of artists in galleries and major public collections has improved.¹⁶ In the latter half of the first decade of the new millennium, there was a shift in museum practice and feminist artists transformed from relative obscurity to becoming the subject of major exhibitions. In 2007, the blockbuster WACK! Art and Feminist Revolution, curated by Cornelia Butler, originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and traveled to MoMA/PS1 and the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. WACK! represented an international and comprehensive approach to feminist art and, most importantly, showed a variety of work; the paintings of Miriam Shapiro, Lynda Benglis, and Audrey Flack; sculpture as diverse as Senga Nengundi and Ree Morton; performance documentation from Rose English, Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, and Carolee Schneemann; and video work by Dara Birnbaum, Martha Rosler and Joan Jonas.

Another groundbreaking exhibition, Global Feminisms, also took place in 2007 a...