Happy Birthday Guerrilla Girls > 1984 MoMa exhibition from The NY Times
The Guerrilla Girls' Reckoning . Anna Chave > Art Journal pdf
Structuralism > mid 20th c. Europe > intellectual claim that all human may be understood by a common structure that is modeled on language - thereby presenting that which is and that which is not = a binary, and thus, ultimately a hierarchy.
Post Structuralism > late 20th c. thought in philosophy and literary criticism. It is a response to Structuralism and is in opposition to Structuralism (1950's & 60's) Postmodernism (1977 is term is first coined)
Post-structuralist authors include the rejection of the a structural model to understand all human culture, one that seems self sufficient. Post - structuralists or Postmodernists interrogate the idea of binary oppositions. Literary writers and Post - Structuralist philosophers = Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Delouse, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard and Julia Kristeva, others.
Derrida-Differance.pdf
Begun in response to a MoMA (NYC) exhibition that included a very small percentage of female artists and people of color in 1984, the Guerrilla Girls formed. They are a group of anonymous feminists female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. Their mission = to bring gender and racial inequality within the fine arts and into the greater community. They are now world wide - with groups be organized in universities and colleges, as well as within the art world.
The Tate . UK on Feminist Art
The Art Story > Feminist Art
Adrian Piper, Self Portrait Exaggerating my Negroid Features, 6. 21. 1981 (b. 1946)
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| Piper, Mythic Being |
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| Adrian Piper, Mythic Being, appeared in the Village Voice, arts section weekly, 1980+ |
Adrian Piper, Calling Card, 1986 - 1990
Adrian Piper Art Review by Holland Cotter
Feminist artists sought to change the world around them through their art, focusing on intervening in the established art world, the art historical canon, as well as everyday social interactions. As artist declared, the goal of Feminist art was to "influence cultural attitudes and transform stereotypes."
Exciting times .....
A plurality of forms / media / ways of making
No single medium > embraced alternative media (these materials, methods and practices did not have the same historically male-dominated precedent that painting and sculpture was loaded with).
Making use of alternative media and methods, Feminist artists expanded the vocabulary of what constituted "fine art" to open a wider scope of media and perspectives.
Body Art >
Conceptual Art >
Film + Video >
"Art" was mixing with everyday life >
An enormous surge of Public Art works sprung in the 1980's, thus providing alternative spaces for art to be seen, while creating a wider audience (instead of museum / gallery / private institutions).
Feminist art created opportunities and spaces that previously did not exist for women and minority artists, as well as paved the path for the identity art and activist art of the 1980s.
Like Adrian Piper, and many before her, Feminist artists were interested in the dialogue between the work of art and the viewer that would educate and share the inclusion of ideas from a women's perspective, as well as under represented artists of color.
Magdalena Abakanowicz (b.1930 Poland)
1989–1991, Poland puts an end to the People's Republic of Poland and becomes a democratic regime, called the Polish Third Republic. Abakanowicz creates these monumental fiber works during the Communist regime. As a university student in 1950–1954, coincided with some of the harshest assaults made on visual art under Soviet leadership.
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| Magdalena Abakanowicz, Abakans, stitched and stuffed burlap, 1960 - 1970's |
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| Abakans, woven forms |
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| Magdalena Abakanowicz, Backs, 1970's - 1980's - figurative works |
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| Magdalena Abakanowicz, Crowd
I touch Sanitation , Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b.1939 US)
1969 Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote a manifesto entitled Maintenance Art—Proposal for an Exhibition, challenging the domestic role of women and proclaiming herself a "maintenance artist."
 
For Ukeles, this meant that the realm of human activities that keep culture moving forward, such as cooking, cleaning and child-rearing. Her earlier performances in the 1970s included the cleaning of art galleries.
Life+Work Mierle Laderman Ukeles |
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| Barbara Kruger (b.1945 US) Studied at SU, went onto Parsons School of Art & Design in NYC. Worked at Conde Nest publications as a graphic designer. Worked as an art editor for Mademoiselle, House & Garden, Aperture and other magazines. She works with found images and places text upon it for her viewers to address feminist ideals, semiotics and language. Visually her works command us to question mass communication, pop culture and gender identity. Her works have been in galleries and museums throughout the world, as well as billboards, installations in public buildings and on the sides of buses, to name a few. |
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| Kruger, 90" by 117" photographic silkscreen/vinyl 1987 |
Jenny Holzer (b. 1950 US)
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| Holzer's Truisms |
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| Holzer in Berlin |
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| Holzer Truisms |
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| Holzer - Guggenheim |
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| Holler - wooden post card |
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| Holzer - marble bench |
Cindy Sherman (US 1954)
In all of her portraits, they are untitled.
Sherman is both the modern and the mirror, reflecting back on culture, art history, film history, and more.
Marina Abramović (b. 1946 Serbia)
with Ulay have made themselves the topic of their performances and actions entitled Relation Work, exploring the limits of physical and psychic endurance and specific gender roles. In 1975, Abramovic and Ulay defined the aspects of this project as follows: “Art Vital – no fixed living-place, permanent movement, direct contact, local relation, self-selection, passing limitations, taking risks, mobile energy, no rehearsal, no predicted end, no repetition.” They blurred the line between art and life, especially considering how often real danger becomes part of their artistic concept.
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| Ulay and Abramovic, Rest Energy, 1980 drew a large bow and arrow, each holding one side. The arrowhead was pointing at Abramovic's heart, creating an overwhelming tension. Microphones on each others clothes picked up quickened heartbeats and irregular breathing. After four minutes, they dropped the bow. Her work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. |
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| Abramović with Ulay, 1977
(Frank Uwe Laysiepen) started collaborating as artists and living together in 1976
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| AAA-AAA (performance RTB, Liege) - freeing the voice 1977 |
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| Their separation was marked by the famous Great Wall Walk performance in China, in 1988 |
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| The Artist is Present - the film |
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| The Artist is Present, originally performed at the MoMA, NYC 2010considered the "Grandmother of Performance Art" Abramović has worked over three decades |
Lynda Barry (b. 1956 US)
Titles by Lynda Barry are: 'Girls and Boys', 'Big Ideas', 'Naked Ladies, Naked Ladies, Naked Ladies', 'Everything in the World', 'The Good Times Are Killing Me', 'The Fun House', 'Down the Street', 'My Perfect Life', 'Ernie Pook's Comeek', 'It's So Magic', 'The Freddie Stories', 'Cruddy' and 'One Hundred Demons'. Her works from mid 1980's onwards, have earned the respect by other cartoonists and readers that often takes decades to build. Her works often reads like the actual diaries of children who question culture poignantly.
Barry's comic 'Ernie Pook's Comeek' is most remarkable because of its voice: lonely, unremarkable children struggling with everything that is awful and overwhelming about the world. In Ernie Pook's best years, in the late '80s.
A Conversation with Lynda Barry
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| Peter Max |
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| R Crumb |
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| Steve Fiorilla RAT Fink |
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| Charles Schultz - Charlie Brown Lynda Barry recalls, "I grew up in the radon panhandle where everybody got cancer, and to me he looked like he'd had chemotherapy. He was a character I didn't understand because mostly of his giving up, his loser-ness" |
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| Dondi inspiration |
Kiki Smith (b. 1954 DE US) Her figurative sculpture, prints, drawings and installations have addressed themes of birth and death. During the late 1980s and early 1990s clashed with cultural taboos surrounding bodily functions, due to the impact of culture's lens on the AIDs and HIV epidemic.
Renee Stout (b. 1958) is a contemporary artist known for assemblage artworks dealing with her personal history and African-American heritage. Much of her sculptural works evoke dreams, surrealism, memories, African cultural objects, and the need of healing. The power of female sexuality and the search for identity are also central themes, as are critiques of social injustice.
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| 19th c. Congo Figure |
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| Stout, Fetish #2 1988 |
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| The Colonel's Cabinet, 1991-1994 |
Sophie Calle (b. 1953, France)
c. 1980's Hotel Series
Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953)
an excellent site to navigate with her projects @ Carrie Mae Weems . net
photographs from her Weems' Ain't Jokin' series 1987-88
... Her award-winning photographs, films, and videos have been displayed in over 50 exhibitions in the United States and abroad and focus on serious issues that face African Americans today, such as racism , gender relations, politics, and personal identity. She has said, "Let me say that my primary concern in art, as in politics, is with the status and place of Afro-Americans in our country." More recently however, she expressed that “Black experience is not really the main point; rather, complex, dimensional, human experience and social inclusion ... is the real point.”
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- LOOKING INTO THE MIRROR, THE BLACK WOMAN ASKED,
- "MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO'S THE FINEST OF THEM ALL?"
- THE MIRROR SAYS, "SNOW WHITE, YOU BLACK BITCH,
- AND DON'T YOU FORGET IT!!!"
