Counter-design to the traditional “image of the woman”
For the first time in art history, female artists in the 1970s collectively create their own “image of the woman”. They emancipate themselves from the role of muse and model, radically asking new questions of society and the art establishment. The passively observed object becomes the actively acting artist.
Against the background of the civil rights movements and the second wave of the women’s movement, women’s concerns are discussed in public; the personal becomes political. Within a very short time, women begin to make themselves heard in public, gather to take action, hold demonstrations and organise their own exhibitions. In their works, the female artists of the “Feminist Avant-Garde” look at the question of how the traditional “image of the woman” determines the constitution of the female identity. The focus is on topics such as one-dimensional role assignments of mother, housewife and wife, female sexuality, one’s own body, beauty, and violence towards women.
Many female artists are united by the rejection of stereotypical role models. In their works, they question historically handed-down images as well as the traditional role of the woman. It is playing with the camera, the masquerade and the costume as a means of self-presentation, the readjustment of social routines, the debate over beauty and flawlessness, with which the female artists question ideas of identity and femininity as a social construct. Numerous female artists turns to new, historically unencumbered media such as photography, film and video, using performance as a means of artistic expression. It is often the artist’s own body that becomes the material of the art. With humour and irony, subtlety and provocation, the female artists of the “Feminist Avant-Garde”, from the VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna, deconstruct the traditional iconography of the female and throw up questions about a feminist aesthetic.
The exhibition is a result of a cooperation with the Hamburger Kunsthalle. In order to emphasise the pioneering work done by the female artists, Gabriele Schor, founding director of the VERBUND COLLECTION, coined the term “Feminist Avant-Garde”.
Photos: © Kay Riechers / Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg
