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The title picture is misleading. This is not commentary on an article plucked from a beauty rag (however much I may love/read them) but an exploration of women and contemporary art as inspired by the exhibition Elles at the Centre Pompidou, which I had the pleasure of visiting earlier this month in Paris. (The clipped wing above is Prédelle [Rainbow Elbow] (2007) by Agnès Thurnauer. A predella is a painted panel, often the type seen in 13th-16th century Italian religious art. By using traditional oils and this dramatic display is Thurnauer commenting on beauty as religion? Comparing Elle to the bible? Shouldn’t she be using Vogue? I’m not really sure, because I didn’t bother to look up the purported meaning of this piece. Isn’t that the point of art?)

Elles, a retrospective of 20th century women artists across genres, really got me thinking about how women represent, manipulate, and display their bodies as art. I have explored the essential interconnectedness of art and beauty as well as the exploitation of the self for the sake of art. This provocative and comprehensive show made me want to revisit and expand some of the themes I investigated earlier. Luckily, the exhibition was incredibly well curated, chronologically and thematically, that it’s easy to see the emerging ideas.

THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING A WOMAN ARTIST

The exhibition was opened, boldly, with several works of art from the 1980s by the Guerrilla Girls, “feminist masked avengers” who expose sexism, racism, and corruption in the art world, politics, and media. These pieces set the tone for the rest of the exhibition so I have included them in all their glory for you to peruse. Tongue-in-cheek, humorous, and provocative, the reflections of the Guerilla Girls are carefully orchestrated facts which bring to light the inequality of the art world. An à propos opening to the show and will give you some things to ponder as you examine the art below.

BODY SLOGAN

This was one of the most interesting sections of the show for me, with all my concerns about beauty and the body. After centuries of being the subjects of art, women repossessed the image of the female form through the new mediums available. Not too many oils and watercolors here. Instead, artists like performance artist Marina Abramovic (whose retrospective, The Artist Is Present, is showing now at MoMA) and Orlan use video art and photography, which offers minute attention to detail, to show a different side of a woman’s body. Through their art, women can represent the body as fragile or eternal, sensual or remote, poetic or primitive. In the exploration of these corporeal dichotomies, a woman also has a unique advantage, as she is both the creator and subject of the art, and can use the depiction of the body to her ironical advantage.

Much of the commentary regarding this kind of corporeal feminist art (I hate to label it as feminist.. it should just be considered art) argues that women artists are free from the conventions of genre that can trap their male counterparts. I don’t really understand why, since to me art is something that defies boundaries and continually barrels forward, and the most exciting kind of art delightedly ignores stereotypes and protocol. I suppose the point is that I’m from a generation that doesn’t have to suffer convention, and I have these women to thank.

Above, stills from Marina Abramovic’s Art Must Be Beautiful…Artist Must Be Beautiful… (1975), which depicts an overwrought woman frantically coming her hair and face sloppily with two brushes, to the point where she is almost damaging her face. By deliberately creating an un-beautiful, almost perverse work, Abramovic is giving the viewer a glimpse of a fundamental problem that women artists face: not only the desire to produce beautiful work, but the culturally-imposed need for the artist herself to be beautiful as well. Sadly, this is one area in which our society has not made much progress (is biology to blame?). Yet, the recent work of my friend Antonia Dias Leite, Miroir Miroir, which I have reviewed on this site, is an evolved iteration of Abramovic’s work and can provide some insight. It’s another reminder of how far we have come: while Abramovic seems crazed and desperate, the tone of Dias Leite’s video is dark but much more confident: her obsession and disfigurement is her decision.

Orlan’s Le Baiser de l’Artiste (1977), in which the artist (who has used plastic surgery as performance art and currently has oddly alien-like implants in her forehead) created a slot machine out of her body; for 5 francs the user could get a kiss from the artist. Brings a whole new meaning to the idea of the Half-Hooker Economy. Does this mean Real Doll Montag can be considered performance art?

Finally, a selection of photographs from Gina Pane’s amazing series Azione Sentimentale [Romantic Action] (1973). Pane’s methodical documenting of her self-inflicted wounds is surreal and awesome. (Cutting off your ears is gross, anyway. Been there, done that.) Fashion/food blogger Luxirare often blows my mind with her creations, which are documented in a similar style to this piece — one, two, of my favorites — but I don’t want to give her any ideas.

THE ACTIVIST BODY

Clearly women have broken boundaries by redefining visual and theoretical categories, and many women artists have channeled their energy to social commentary (both intentionally and unwittingly). My favorite example from the exhibition was a piece that hit especially close to home. I won’t bore you with the details (maybe I will another time) but I read Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer just prior to this trip. The book is a philosophical and factual analysis of the factory farming industry, and Safran Foer establishes universal definitions for words like pain, suffering, and animal — arguing that semantics and ignorance is largely what stands in the way of a planet of vegetarians. But I digress. The following work makes use of the artists body as well as the bodies of some of her fellow animals. Of her work below, artist Jana Sterbak said:

“I think [Vanitas] is quite a successful work, if I can put it like that, because it can be interpreted in many different ways, from the respect that we do not accord to animals we raise for our food needs, to our own aging and death, the rituals of possession and absorption, etc. Vanitas could also be about the way time changes our perception of works. On the day of the opening, when the dress is exhibited the flesh is raw. Then the meat dries and starts to look like leather. Then everything is better, it becomes acceptable. This is also true for artists. Some curators prefer to work with dead artists because they’re less troublesome.“

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

With a title borrowed from Virginia Woolf’s book regarding the necessities of artistic production (in fact, I’m in a room of my own at this very moment, working away; and what a luxury it is), this section of the exhibition concerns private and public space, creation, and material arts. We have strayed a little bit away from the body, but we shall return to it. In the meantime, my all-women’s college education will not let me neglect this part of the show.

Above, Pink Diagonal (2002), by Ghada Amer, is a needlepoint work of a most curious sort. Amer sewed images of women taken from a pornographic magazine repeatedly onto a brightly colored canvas. She is, in her own words, “participating to the double submission of the woman, i.e. the woman sewing and the woman sewing her own distorted image!” Curious, indeed. The sewing technique is used to the extreme: in places, the thread almost looks like spilled ink because it has been sewn onto itself many times over. If she had drawn the images, I can imagine her digging her pen deep into the canvas, almost neurotically. My vision of such a neurotic artist contrasted with the smiling, seductive women of the image is sharp. A friend of mine, Olivia Wolfe, is a multi-talented artist, and some of my favorite works of hers are her sewn photographs.

Above, Fig. 8: Abdomen and Fig. 5: Apparatus for Movement in Human Body are just two examples above of sewn photographs, more of which (along with other amazing pieces) can be found on her website, Olivia Wolfe. The clinical titles of the art evoke doctors and surgery and serve to detach the viewer from the carnal elements. In Abdomen, homage is paid to plastic surgery, and it is unclear whether the mysterious hand (to whom does it belong? is it an apparition? an apparatus?) is sewing up the body or ripping out the stitches to reveal the fragile paper belly underneath. In Elles, a commenter remarked that “paper can well stand in for the skin: crumpled, pierced, glazed, or waxed, it evokes its textures and fragility.” Fragility and the question of control feature prominently in both pieces. I especially love that in the bottom picture, the mirror image of the woman is simultaneously the puppeteer and the puppet, dominant and submissive, naked and relaxed and naked on her knees.

IDENTITY

In any work of art representing the body, beauty, and stereotypes, questions of identity arise, and in much of the art in the exhibition the identity of woman is revealed in all its paradoxical glory. Defacements, blurrings, and other effects imbue bodies and faces with the power to repel, seduce, inspire dread, anxiety, or admiration. Yet however ironical a reflection of their conditions, many early contemporary women artists did not have the luxury of searching for answers. Instead, they laid bare their differences, endlessly questioned the work of appearance.

Two modern artists, Amelie Chabannes and Antonia Dias Leite, in their 2007 work My Portrait of Your Identity, evolve this idea by interrogating other subjects and (super)imposing their own art and animation onto these individuals, both men and women. (Click on image for video… do it.)

A question about the subject’s personality turns into a conversation (in which the subject speaks and the artist silently and invisibly renders) about a woman becoming a man becoming a cat. The title gets screwed up, My Portrait of Your Identity becomes Your Portrait of My Identity; an exploration about the subject’s personality becomes a universal exploration of the singularity and commonality of our collective identities. This new strategy of spontaneous narration is made possible, in some ways, by the ground work set forth by earlier artists who introduced the body to new relationships through these innovative mediums. My Portrait of Your Identity engages the collective memory, with all its imperfections and inventions, so that the act of viewing itself is an interactive experience, informed and evolved upon every viewing.