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Postmodern workshops by Olivia Gude

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1960s to Present

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List of Works:

Joan E. Biren (JEB), Priscilla and Regina, Brooklyn, NY, 1979, photograph, 1979

Catherine Opie, Papa Bear, Chief, Jake, and Chicken from "Being and Having" series, 1991

Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Pervert, chromogenic print, 1994.

Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Nursing, chromogenic print, 31 inches, 2004

Gran Fury, Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do, printed on postcards and displayed as billboards and bus posters, 1989

Fierce Pussy, Political Greeting Card Campaign, mailing, 1992

GANG, Read My Lips, xerox poster, 1992.

Zoe Leonard, Untitled (detail), installation at Documenta IX, Kassel, 1992

Mary Ellen Strom, Nude No. 5, Eleanor Dubinsky and Melanie Maar, video installation, 2004

Robert Mapplethorpe, Man in Polyester Suit, gelatin silver print, 1981

Glenn Ligon, Notes on the Margin of the Black Book, offset prints (91) and text (78), 1991-1993

Harmony Hammond, Hunkertime, wood, cloth, gesso, acrylic, rubber, rhoplex, 1979-1980

Sheila Pepe, Mr. Slit, industrial rubber bands, crocheted yarn with hardware, 2007

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, 1991, billboard, dimensions vary. Installation view at Van Dam Street near Queens Boulevard, Queens (February 20 - March 18, 2012) as part of Print/Out exhibition, The Museum of Modern Art, NY

Tammy Rae Carland, Untitled (Lesbian Bed #7) C-print, 2002.

Sharon Hayes, Revolutionary Love 2: I am Your Best Fantasy, documentation of performance, Republican National Convention, St. Paul, MN, 2008

Juliana Huxtable, Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Catalclysm) from "Universal Crop Tops for All the Self Canonized Saints of Becoming" series, digital photograph, 2015

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, Instructions for a Home Team, gouache, watercolor, tea, marker, and acrylic on paper, 2014

Glossary:

Heternormative (via dictionary.com) - denoting or relating to a worldview that promotes heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation.

Queer (via urbandictionary.com) - originally pejorative for gay, now being reclaimed by some gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered persons as a self-affirming umbrella term. Caution, still extremely offensive when used as an epithet.

Transgender (via dictionary.com) - denoting or relating to a person whose self-identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender.

Intersectionality (via dictionary.com) - the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.

Questions to address as a class:
Think about the semester thus far. You may have covered feminist issues such as female objectification and "why have there been no great women artists?" As feminists have taught us, the canon of western art history has been shaped by their exclusion. This is true as well for queer artists, for whom censorship has been an enduring issue. While searching for women artists is a great starting point for a feminist art history lesson, it is slightly more complicated to look for queer artists in art history. A great place to start, then, is asking how does the concept of heterosexuality impact how we understand the history of art? Where are the queer artists, subjects, and patrons in the history of art?

Before beginning the lecture, one important note of clarification is that the notion of sexual identity is a relatively recent invention, which dates to the late nineteenth century and is tied to the formation of modern science and medicine (see Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality Vol. 1 for more information). While individuals have had same-sex relations throughout history, they may not have thought of themselves as "gay" or "straight" until fairly recently. Therefore, it is anachronistic to impose our modern notions of queer identity on the past. We can however "queer" art history by focusing on issues of sexuality, desire, and representation in art and how they relate to broader social constructions regarding sex, race, and gender in any given period.

For example, how and in what ways is heterosexuality depicted and naturalized in the history of art? Has the class encountered and engaged with homoerotic content in art? Can students name a queer artist if prompted? What is queer subject matter? What does the sexual identity of the artist matter? In other words - what makes a work of art "queer"?

Today, if your students were asked to name an LGBTQ artist or two, it is likely they could. In the past year, queer artists such as Kehinde Wiley and Zanele Muholi have had mid-career surveys at major museums. Yet, while it is not unusual for an institution to acknowledge an artist's identity, gender and race are more commonly discussed than sexuality. For example, Wiley's sexuality was not highlighted in his Brooklyn Museum retrospective. In 2010 the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC hosted the exhibition "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," the first museum show to overtly explore such issues. The exhibition included a thirty minute video by the gay artist David Wojnarowicz, A Fire in My Belly (1987), which featured an eleven second clip of ants crawling over a crucifix. After conservatives from the Catholic League protested that this imagery insulted Christians, the institution removed the artwork from the exhibition. This confluence of homosexuality and religion revived the "culture wars" of the 1980s-1990s, ideological battles over controversial social issues that shifted the ways in which American art is federally funded. Richard Meyer has argued that such conflicts regarding homosexuality and the creative arts are central to the history of modern art in America. In his influential book Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, Meyer demonstrates that "outlaw representations" of homosexuality are a direct response to the constant threat of censorship that gay artists face. Some central examples of "outlaw representation" occur within the context of the culture wars of the 1980s-1990s, including the artist Robert Mapplethorpe and the activist art collective Gran Fury, discussed below.

JEB aka Joan E. Biren (1944-) is a documentary photographer and filmmaker who may be thought of as a "movement artist" for whom art is a political exercise. Biren was a member of the lesbian separatist generation of women who came out in the context of the feminist liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and a cofounder of the influential yet short-lived Furies Collective. The concept of "visibility" informs JEB's art and politics, as she has stated: "without a visual identity, we have no community, no support network, no movement. Making ourselves visible is a political act, making ourselves visible is a continual process" ("Lesbian Photography - Seeing through Our Eyes," in The Blatant Image: A Magazine of Feminist Photography, no. 1, 1981) JEB began photographing lesbians because she could not find any images of them elsewhere, such as in Priscilla and Regina, Brooklyn, NY. She said, "My thing was to take pictures of people that other people weren't taking pictures of, to make visible what was invisible ... I always try to present the entire diversity of our communities. That's very much on my mind in all of my work" (Joan Biren oral history in the Rainbow History Project Digital Collections). Her work was published in two photo books: Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (1979) and Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front (1987). She also published her work in lesbian separatist and feminist periodicals such as Dyke: A Quarterly and Off Our Backs. Biren's conception of art was to promote affirming and positive images of lesbians outside of patriarchal contexts-including the mainstream art world. Towards this end, she spent many years traveling across the country presenting slideshows of her work and conducting photography workshops.

Catherine Opie (b. 1961) is a photographer who lives and works in LA. Her identity as an out lesbian shapes her artistic practice yet it doesn't define it. Opie has said "I am queer and I have represented my own community in the work but I don't think that necessarily defines my ideas. I don't think that defines them whatsoever. I think what defines my work actually us more in relationship to underage American identity than being queer." (Art21). Suitably, her mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 2008 was entitled "Catherine Opie: American Photographer" and was divided into two categories: portraits and landscapes. She has used these two modes to explore concepts of community and identity, organized around sexuality and other lines.

Opie's 1991 series " Being and Having" consisted of her friends in frontal portraits with assertive gazes against egg-drop yellow backgrounds. These people were chosen from Opie's group of friends, all of whom exist on a gender spectrum rather than abide neatly by categories of male or female. Visible spirit gum, the adhesive used to attach hair to faces to make mustaches on female bodied people, calls attention to the performance of gender. This theme relates to Judith Butler's contemporaneous book Gender Trouble (1990), which became a landmark book for the emergence of queer studies. Opie's "Portraits" series (1993-7) depicted her friends in Los Angeles and San Francisco, many of whom were performance artists or else members of radical sex communities. Their frontal poses recall the work of German photographer August Sanders and their assertive gazes and confident posture are significant images of queer empowerment. Later related series by Opie include "Domestic," depicting lesbians in their homes across the US, and "Girlfriends," portraits of butch women. Throughout her career, Opie has focused on queer, specifically lesbian, communities. She has also explored community formation in portraits of surfers and high school football players. Perhaps her most powerful queer works have been her own self-portraits: , , and . Opie's queer portraits emerged during a time of unprecedented queer activism in the public sphere, in the context of the AIDS crisis. The ways in which Opie presents non-normative subjects on their own terms, against brilliant planes of color, is an example of visibility that complements the brash cultural activism of that historical moment.

In New York, many AIDS graphics were developed in explicitly activist terms, mostly in association with the organization ACT-UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, "a diverse, non-partisan group united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis." ACT-UP was founded in New York in March 1987 and chapters quickly developed in cities and towns across the US as well as abroad. ACT-UP met weekly, marched in demonstrations, and organized acts of civil disobedience to bring attention to the crisis of HIV/AIDS. Often graphics were attached to bodies-held as placards at demonstrations, and worn as T-shirts or stickers. Some ACT-UP members in 1988 formed Gran Fury, self-described as "a band of individuals united in anger and dedicated to exploiting the power of art to end the AIDS crisis." For a time, Gran Fury became ACT-UP's unofficial propaganda ministry of guerrilla graphic designers. They made public artworks that seemed at first to be commercial advertisements; upon closer inspection one realizes that there is an important political message at hand. This cultural activism took the visibility politics of gay liberation and combined them with the appropriation strategies of the 1980s art world. Their graphics helped to alleviate the AIDS crisis by disseminating safe sex information into the public sphere, holding elected officials accountable for their inadequate responses to the AIDS crisis, and by recruiting new activists to the movement.

In a number of early posters, for example, Gran Fury adopted Barbara Kruger's seductive graphic style, which was subsequently, and perhaps less knowingly, taken up by other ACT-UP graphic producers. Gran Fury's best-known appropriation is undoubtedly the public service announcement for San Francisco (and later New York) city buses produced for "Art Against AIDS on the Road," under the auspices of the American Foundation for AIDS Research. Imitating the look of an United Colors of Benetton advertising campaign, Gran Fury photographed three stylish young interracial couples kissing and topped their images with the caption: KISSING DOESN'T KILL: GREED AND INDIFFERENCE DO. The caption referenced and subverted the misperceived risk of HIV transmission and compared to the Benetton ad, only one pair of the three kissing couples was of a man and a woman. If Gran Fury's sophisticated postmodern style gained art world attention, the collective accepted it only hesitatingly, determined to aim their efforts to the public at large, rather than appease art critics.

In the 1990s, visibility was a key strategy for activists who reclaimed the term "queer." One tactic was the promotion of flagrant obscenity via vulvic iconography, drawn from cultural feminists of the 1970s. fierce pussy is an activist art collective comprised of queer women that formed in New York in 1991. For its 1992 Political Greeting Cards Campaign, fierce pussy distributed a mailing card pre-addressed (in two versions) to Catholic Cardinal of NYC (John O'Connor) and NY Senator Alfonse D'Amato that featured a large black-and-white photographic reproduction of a woman's genitalia, accompanied by text "You can't legislate it. You can't lick it. You can't beat it." The vulvic image used in the Greeting Cards campaign is one of several photographs taken by Zoe Leonard of women in her circle, on the condition of their anonymity. While the images mine pornographic tropes, they also expose the extent to which such tropes are dependent on context. For example, the photograph recalls Gustave Courbet's painting Origin of the World (1866) yet Leonard's image is more direct, since it is taken from a straight-on angle. While such a graphic image would seemingly reinforce female objectification, in effect it became personified and empowered when paired with the bold, declarative text. It literally became a fierce pussy.

Leonard's image provided the source for several projects in 1992: besides its feminist deployment in fierce pussy's Political Greeting Cards Campaign, the image was used in an abortion rights poster by the art activist collective GANG that paired it with the all-caps phrase " READ MY LIPS " (a decidedly feminist appropriation of the slogan used by Gran Fury and President George H.W. Bush in 1988). Leonard also used it in her 1992 installation at Documenta IX in Kassel, where she juxtaposed different versions of it with seventeenth-century portraits of bourgeoise and aristocratic women in the Neue Galerie. The viewer who encountered at Documenta with an awareness of feminist art history might have understood its vaginal imagery as distinct from both the central-core aesthetics of the 1970s and the photo-and-text conceptualism of the 1980s. Leonard's confrontational deployment of sexuality was a decidedly "queer" gesture; playful, yet intent on reconfiguring the means by which marginalized populations are represented in mainstream contexts.

Like the brash strategy of fierce pussy et al, Mary Ellen Strom's , Eleanor Dubinsky and Melanie Maar (2004) also uses sexually explicit imagery in order to reclaim the representation of women's bodies from heterosexist historical contexts. The work is a video installation that references Gustave Courbet's The Sleepers, an erotic painting of 1866, but with a new version of women's eroticism. The Sleepers depicts two women entwined in bed asleep, presumably after sexual intercourse. Storm's work is not static, but a meticulously staged video projected at the size of Courbet's painting. In the video projection, the image transforms into a moving tableau in which the figures caress each other. The piece debuted in a 2005 LGBTQ art exhibition entitled "Homomuseum: Heroes and Monuments" that highlighted works by queer artists referencing the artists who have inspired them. Many of the artists referenced were queers themselves-Jack Smith, Quentin Crisp, but Courbet's inclusion marks a particular challenge faced by lesbian women. The majority of images of lesbians, including Courbet's The Sleepers, has been created historically by males for male titillation. It is not until the lesbian feminist art movement of the 1970s that sex positive images of lesbians by lesbians begins to emerge. In Nude No. 5, Eleanor Dubinsky and Melanie Maar, Strom achieves a "lesbian gaze" that reflects how lesbians see each other (regardless of men). While Courbet's sleepers remain anonymous, Strom names her models: Eleanor Dubinsky and Melanie Maar, two artists who are Strom's peers. This is not a depiction of lesbian sexuality for the benefit of a heterosexual male viewer (the purported patron of Courbet's piece was a male Turkish diplomat). Not only are Strom's models named, but "they [also] collaborate with Strom in making lesbian pleasures available to lesbians, among other viewers," as Catherine Lord put it in Queer Art and Culture.

Kehinde Wiley is another artist who has mined art history to create new, empowering images of gender, race and sexuality. Born in 1977 in Los Angeles, Wiley is known for his naturalistic and heroic portraits of people of color, many of which are sourced from Old Master paintings. Wiley uses a "street casting" process; he approaches young men on the street, invites them to his studio to look through art history books, lets them choose an image, then paints their picture in a powerful pose while the models remain in their street clothes. The result is larger-than-life paintings with highly patterned backgrounds that ask us to rethink our assumptions about masculinity and art history. The models remain anonymous, and the titles are derived from their art historical source. For his exhibit "Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic" at the Brooklyn Museum of Art he began to replace white women with women of color in art historical masterpieces to add to his overall critique of representation and race in art. Beyond the racial critique there is also a homoerotic twist-Wiley has called male beauty "the elephant in the room" (in 429 Magazine (http://dot429.com/articles/1436-kehinde-wiley-gay-artist-shattering-concepts-of-normalcy); some of his subjects are gay men and Wiley depicts them as bold, regal, and powerful.

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) was a gay American photographer who worked primarily in black-and-white and in a studio. He created still lives of flowers, celebrity portraits, and self-portraits, as well as portraits of people involved in BDSM and homoerotic portraits of black nude men, such as Man in Polyester Suit-with a very rigorous and unique formal aesthetic. Rather than a distanced and purportedly objective stance of traditional documentary photography, Mapplethorpe was a participant-observer. That is, he took photographs of people who were part of the subculture he belonged to and of himself. By foregrounding explicit queer sadomasochistic acts, Mapplethorpe was a controversial figure. Yet, his work dealt with a variety of subjects.

Mapplethorpe's retrospective "The Perfect Moment" was organized into three categories: portraits, interracial figure studies, and flower arrangements. In 1988 it opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia where it was favorably received. The show, scheduled to travel to five other museums across the US, was cancelled by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC over the explicit sexual imagery, sparking a debate about what taxpayers' dollars should and should not fund. In Cincinnati, a conservative citizens group campaigned for the Contemporary Arts Center to cancel "The Perfect Moment," which led to the unprecedented prosecution of a museum and its director (Dennis Barrie of the CAC) for displaying art considered obscene (Barrie and the CAC were acquitted). These debates, known as the culture wars as mentioned above, brought discussions about censorship and artistic freedom into national discourse, and continued well into the 1990s through a series of well-publicized event including the trial of the so-called NEA Four (Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes). The NEA Four were performance artists who successfully sued the government after the National Endowment for the Arts revoked individual funding after peer review, due to the controversial themes of each artists' work. Some important outcomes of the culture wars include the increased circulation of controversial works of art, the influence of such art on new generations of artists, and cultural conversations about the artistic merit of controversial themes such as queer sexuality.

Glenn Ligon is an artist who was influenced by Mapplethorpe, and created a work that simultaneously critiqued the conservative climate of national culture wars and the problematic manner in which Mapplethorpe, a white artist, created homoerotic photographs of black men. In Mapplethorpe's publication The Black Book (1988), a selection of his homoerotic nude photographs of black men, he failed to contextualize his subjects within a broader history of racialized tropes of violence and sexuality. Like the photos themselves, the book prompted a range of negative and positive responses. Ligon, a black gay artist, responded to Black Book by "scrawling his reactions to each image on the pages of his copy" (Guggenheim.org) which resulted in the artwork, Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991-1993). Ligon conceived of the work as a retort to Mapplethorpe and a piece on black masculinity more broadly. He installed the framed pages of the book in its original order, on a wall in two rows, and between them, inserted around seventy framed texts by diverse sources including philosophers, activists, curators, historians, and religious evangelists. Some are specific responses to Mapplethorpe's text, but some are not. All have to do with race in some capacity. In conjunction with Mapplethorpe's photographs, these texts chart the discourse that suggests the various fears and fantasies that are projected onto black male nudes. For Ligon, this work demonstrates that sex, race, and desire are entangled, which relates to his larger artistic practice of investigating the construction of black identity through words and images.

In the 1970s, Harmony Hammond was a central figure in the development of the feminist art movement in New York City, where she co-founded A.I.R. (Artists in Residence) Gallery and the magazine Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. Hammond came out as a lesbian in the context of the women's movement and has championed lesbian art, artists, and activism, for example writing Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History in 2000 Along with other feminist artists, Hammond utilized craft materials to reference women's traditional artistic practices and to rethink the material hierarchy of contemporary art, which traditionally elevates painting and sculpture as fine arts and relegates craft to a lesser realm. For example, in her work, Hunkertime 1979-1980, sculptures are made from cloth, wood, acrylic, gesso, latex rubber, rhoplex and metal. The sculptures in Hunkertime are made from layers of fabric-old rags and clothes-covering underlying wooden armatures. The materials were collected from her friends ("It meant I was literally putting all these women in the work") (broadstrokes.org, National Museum of Women in the Arts) and the use of fabric also references women garment workers in Lower Manhattan, where Hammond lived and worked at the time.

In the late 1970s, Hammond utilized abstraction in works such as this and others to expand the field of feminist cultural production. She did this at a time when feminist art was, in some camps, becoming consolidated toward a regime of politically correct content and suitable styles. Alongside more legibly political work, including activism in teaching and writing, Hammond explored abstraction in her art, and today she is well regarded for her queering of this penultimate modernist style. Whereas abstraction in the dominant narrative of modernist art is usually understood in terms of universalism, queer artists and art historians have probed the ways in which abstraction can be a queer mode of representation. One appeal of abstract art is its capaciousness; artists can engage with "identity" without making specific statements regarding race or gender.

In her art, Sheila Pepe (born 1959) also references the work of women artists, especially those involved in the women's liberation generation of the 1970s. She utilizes feminist tropes to promote feminist art and to build intergenerational bridges. is made from industrial rubber bands and crocheted yarn with hardware, a response to Faith Wilding's Crocheted Environment (Womb Room), an influential installation made in 1972. Pepe has said, "Wilding's crochet work has long been the historical ground on which much of my own work rests. Mr. Slit takes my own crocheting back to its 1980s lesbian feminist roots. It's a nod to Wilding as well as an overtly sexualized update; I don't really care about your womb; it's the other parts that I like" (Brooklyn Museum of Art). Although lesbians were central contributors to the feminist art movement, they sometimes endured homophobia and marginalization from straight women artists. Lesbians were sometimes alienated by feminist content fixated on tropes of femininity such as makeup, childbirth, and domesticity. Both Hammond and Pepe ask us to rethink feminist art history with a particular attention to lesbian issues.

Queer art that references the body by underscoring its absence has a particular resonance in the context of the AIDS crisis. Gonzalez-Torres' Untitled (Beds) combines an intensely personal point-of-view with universal associations of comfort and intimacy. Six black-and-white enlarged photographs of the artist's empty double bed were posted as billboards throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens in the winter of 1991. This project subverted expectations of billboards in bustling public spaces: no text, no caption, and no explanation, and so instead the works invoke viewers to pause and to look. The introspective, contemplative quality is at odds with how one typically consumes media in the urban public sphere. In the early 1990s, as AIDS was ravaging the gay community, and this juxtaposition of public and private was especially poignant. These were on display at the time Gonzalez-Torres' lover Ross Laycock died from complications due to AIDS, in January 1991. The series also refers obliquely to the 1986 United States Supreme Court ruling Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld the criminality of sodomy even between consenting adults in private homes. In this series, absence connotes loss and the bed becomes a contested site that symbolized both love and death, as well as the public right to sexual privacy. Gonzalez-Torres' used art to address social concerns but did so in a way that also questioned the idea of the unique art object and necessitated the participation of viewers in the public sphere.

Like Gonzalez-Torres, Tammy Rae Carland also created artwork depicting empty, recently inhabited beds. Carland started her " Lesbian Beds" series in 2000, before she had gallery representation. She photographed her friends' beds, all either single women or couples, all lesbians in their twenties and thirties. Each color photograph is an aerial view of an unmade bed utilizing natural light, taken during the day. The beds are un-staged and mismatched; these are portraits of people "not fully arrived to assimilated adulthood," as Carland described it. Looking closer, we learn about the bed's inhabitants from the objects contained within it. In one example, one notices a baseball hat that says "Black Workers for Justice" and the book Women in Cuba, leading us to gather that this bed belongs to a lesbian who is an activist, or at least politically minded. A central issue of lesbian representation is circumventing the male gaze that traditionally creates images of lesbians for male titillation. These photographs reroute visual expectations of lesbian sex by using absence to create a portrait. It's one approach to the vexing issue of lesbian representation, as outlined above in the discussion of Strom's video. Carland's strategy also has the effect of making the images applicable to all viewers regardless of their sexuality.

In class, do a comparison of the Carland and Gonzalez- Torres works. What does the concept of "presence through absence" have to do with queer art? Are these portraits? What does refusing to image do? Possible functions include an allusion to AIDS crisis, circumventing culture wars, rerouting the male gaze, and making the work universally relevant. How are the aesthetics different? Carland underscores tactility-light, textures, color, while Gonzalez-Torres' images are stark and cold in terms of their constrained palette.

Themes of personal-political and public-private are common in queer art, and the following performance by Sharon Hayes could also work as a comparison with Gonzalez-Torres' Untitled billboards.

Hayes is a multimedia artist who came of age in the New York art scene and the AIDS crisis of the early 1990s. Her practice is thus deeply informed by the identity politics and gay activist concerns that shaped that period. For her 2008 performance Revolutionary Love: I am Your Worst Fear, I am Your Best Fantasy, she invited one-hundred LGBTQ people to read in unison an open letter addressed to an absent lover at the sites of the Republican and Democratic national conventions (in St. Paul and Denver, respectively). These ten to twenty minute texts were read three times over the course of two hours, and addressed political desire and romantic love from a first-person voice. It began "Test, test, test. My sweet love, I know it's been a long time since we've seen each other and this isn't the best time to reconnect." The effect was a personal address to the power structures of national political conventions that drew upon the deep relationship between sex and politics that characterized the gay liberation movement. In fact, the subtitle is drawn from a slogan created for the first pride parade-the Christopher Street Liberation Day parade in 1970, following the Stonewall riots of 1969- "I am your worst fear, I am your best fantasy." Bringing up love and queerness in the context of these events, which were focused on the economy and warfare, Hayes encourages us to critique our contemporary moment and question the extent to which our personal lives intersect with political issues.

Juliana Huxtable (born 1987) is an artist who lives and works in New York and also deals with themes of personal versus public identity. Her name is a reference to the television program The Cosby Show and to her house (non-biological queer family), House of LaDosha, the queer arts collective she belongs to. As one critic put it, "the group saw it as a proper nod to her longing to experience in her trans body, the kind of black normality that the Huxtable family portrayed in the eighties" (Antwaun Sargent, "Artist Juliana Huxtable's Bold, Defiant Vision" Vice Magazine March 25, 2015). Huxtable is also affiliated with the multi-disciplinary queer feminist art collective Witches of Bushwick. She is a DJ, a poet, a painter and a photographer. In her photography she utilizes digital manipulation, fantastical colors, and editing effects to make her look like an internet avatar with an otherworldly green hue.

Huxtable exhibited photographs alongside her poems in the 2015 New Museum Triennial, including Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm) from her "Universal Crop Tops for All the Self Canonized Saints of Becoming" series. Herein she depicts herself as, in her words, a "cyborg, cunt, priestess, witch, Nuwaubian princess." This is a futuristic world in which Huxtable reimagines herself apart from the trauma of her childhood wherein she was assigned the male gender and raised in a conservative Baptist home in Texas. Huxtable's photographs and poetry offer new ways to think about sexuality and gender in terms of fluidity, rather than fixity. They were displayed in proximity to a sculpture of her by the artist Frank Benson, a reference to the sculpture Sleeping Hermaphroditus, an ancient Roman marble sculpture likely copied from an earlier bronze Hellenistic work. Discovered in the early seventeenth century, the sculpture rests on a marble bed created by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1620 and is now on display at The Louvre. Benson's Juliana (2014) has a prismatic finish that imparts a molten, digital sensibility well suited to the artist's presentation of femininity in terms of the fluidity of gender and beauty.

Amaryllis Dejesus Moleski investigates femme identity as it pertains to QPOC (queer people of color) communities. In her artist statement, she describes that she wants to "create culturally recognizable images which depict marginalized people in positions of power without referencing the canon of European Art History" and apply the "'voice of authority' typically used to catalog history in favor the of male European perspective, and apply it to an imagined futuristic mythology of ourselves." She works on a monumental scale and uses unconventional symbols of power, such as dinosaurs, pugs, and staffs. Rather than portraiture or single-figure compositions, her images contain multiple corpulent and strong bodies, thus creating an empowering vision of collectivity, such as in Instructions for a Home Team. She also draws upon science fiction and feminist theory, explaining in her artist statement: "I am interested in using the future as a site of experimentation, as well as a space to gain freedom and visibility around the conversations of race, gender, sexuality, and class."

Both Moleski and Huxtable do not reference the art historical past, but look towards the future and create an archive of queer and color femininity that offers a different interpretation of "visibility." In general, queer can be loosely defined as a norm-challenging aesthetic. For many, especially for these two artists, queer art can not be thought of apart from the concept of intersectionality: looking at sexuality in art entails a consideration of race and gender as well.

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List of Works: Joan E. Biren (JEB), Priscilla and Regina, Brooklyn, NY, 1979, photograph, 1979 Catherine Opie, Papa Bear, Chief, Jake, and Chicken from "Being and Having" series, 1991 Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Pervert, chromogenic print, 1994.

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Glossary:

Deconstruction: a method of critical analysis of philosophical and literary language that emphasizes the internal workings of language and conceptual systems, the relational quality of meaning, and the assumptions implicit in forms of expression. (via Merriam-Webster)

Feminist art: work that is rooted in the analyses and commitments of contemporary feminism and that contributes to a critique of the political, economic and ideological power relations of contemporary society. It is not a stylistic category nor simply any art produced by women. (via Grove Art Online)

Historical revisionism: the reinterpretation of orthodox views on evidence, motivations, and decision-making processes surrounding a historical event. Though the word "revisionism" is sometimes used in a negative way, constant revision of history is part of the normal scholarly process of writing history. (via Wikipedia)

Performativity: an interdisciplinary term often used to name the capacity of speech and gestures to act or consummate an action, or to construct and perform an identity. Performativity reverses the idea that an identity is the source of more secondary actions (speech, gestures). Instead, it inquires into the construction of identities as they are caused by performative actions, behaviors, and gestures. Performativity problematizes notions of intention and agency; it complicates the constitution of gender and subjects. (via Wikipedia)

Postmodernism: a host of late-twentieth century movements, many in art, music, and literature, that react against Modernist tendencies and are typically marked by revival of historical elements and techniques. Postmodernism is often associated with deconstruction and post-structuralism because its usage as a term gained significant popularity at the same time as twentieth-century post-structural thought. (via Wikipedia)
Feminism first manifested in the arts as a sudden eruption of questions and criticism-an awakening among women artists, writers, and thinkers who believed they had serious grounds upon which to challenge the notion that women were naturally less talented, less motivated, or less interested/interesting than men. Instead they argued that women had been systematically and structurally kept from paths of achievement, but also that even when they overcame those limitations, their achievements were in other ways co-opted, ignored, or erased; and finally, that the notion of achievement was itself relative and defined by male values.

Over the course of this class, we'll look at how this thinking impacted the arts-not just art made by women, but the entire field-as it was forced to rethink some of its basic tenets and most cherished beliefs about itself. Instead of being seen as simply tracing, preserving, and celebrating the great cultural achievements of humankind, feminism forced art theory and history to consider the roles they might have played, by separating art as a special, elevated category of human production predominated by male artists, critics, and patrons, in creating the impression that women were inferior, not just in the arts, but in all elevated aspects of human achievement.

The key ideas of this lecture can be explored in an hour and fifteen minutes through a variety of examples listed below by theme, including:
Constructs and Performances of Masculinity and Femininity
To understand the disruption that feminism caused, it is helpful to think about the context of American culture just before feminism gained momentum. On one hand, the 1950s and 60s in America had perhaps some of the most rigid ideas of what was appropriate and acceptable behavior for each gender since the Victorian era, and in post-war America, the rise of TV and mass media culture allowed those ideals to be naturalized and widely disseminated, regardless of how attainable or true they might be to people's actual experience. For example, the idea that all women could or should be happy housewives was a powerful message across the nation, despite the fact that women had proved capable of working in a variety of fields during WWII, and that poor women and women of color were never really factored into this fantasy of femininity.

At the same time that people's expectations and experiences were being highly policed according to gender, the values of high art were focused on the universal, transcendent potential of abstraction-the idea, as we talked about in relation to Abstract Expressionism, that art was meant to be a purely visual medium, only about itself and its own potential for innovation, and as such an expression of human creativity, freedom, and existence in abstract and universal terms. Art "about" something specific was seen as trivial and the implication was clear that those who weren't moved by abstract art were just not culturally evolved enough to appreciate it, rather than that it might not be as relevant for some people's experiences as for others'.

Jackson Pollock at work in his studio, 1950. Photograph by Hans Namuth

Carolee Schneeman, Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions, 1963, Paint, glue, fur, feathers, garden snakes, glass, and plastic with the studio installation "Big Boards." Photograph by Erró

(For further discussion of these works, see this interview.)

Depending on your preference, perhaps present these two images side by side without identifying captions at first, and invite the class to respond to what they see on screen. Begin with a compare and contrast discussion of Schneeman's image in relation to Pollock's, which will presumably be familiar and recently covered material.

What are we looking at in Schneeman's image? Multi-panel collaged paintings, with elements of the real world (á la Rauschenberg) included in the structure. In each of the series of photos, the artist's naked painted body is presented as part of the tableaux. Schneeman's artwork becomes unstable, an evolving set of potential images activated by her performance, and her body and its difference refuses to be transcended-her body is embedded, encrusted in the surface of the work just as Pollock's masculinity had been read into his paintings, but without ever having to make itself visible.

You may remember that we talked about the way Pollock drip paintings were interpreted as ultimate modernist paintings all about painting and flatness, as psychological deposits of artistic angst or quasi-spiritual existential pourings of his inner being, but also as Action Paintings: the canvas as an "arena on which to act." In Pollock's context all of these interpretations were cast in the most masculine terms-bravery, facing the abyss, attacking an opponent (notice it isn't a stage for dancing, but an arena, like a boxing match). The next generation of artists would be inspired by the idea of the body itself becoming part of the work, or the medium of art itself, but feminist artists in particular would focus on the performance of the body as not just any body, but always a gendered body that is read differently, expected to have certain qualities and behaviors, and therefore bound to interact, perform in, and experience the world differently. This fact that the artist's body plays a part in his/her work, as well as the idea of art as a performance rather than an object, are taken to their literal culmination in the series of photographs directed by artist Carolee Schneeman called Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions (1963).

Carolee Schneeman, Interior Scroll, 1977, Performance

(See here for further information.)

Carolee Schneeman, who trained and thinks about herself primarily as a painter, has continued to work in ways that blur the boundaries between static and durational formats. She was at the forefront of Happenings and performance art in the early 1960s, performing in works such as Claes Oldenburg's Store Days (1962), Robert Morris's Site (1964), and directing and performing in her own exuberant Meat Joy (1964). She then began making experimental films that were hand-colored, highly textured, and mixed abstract and very specific, highly personal imagery (most famously, Fuses, 1965). While her work is now considered groundbreaking, during the early part of her career she faced a lot of discrimination from the avant-garde film world, which was even more of a boys' club than painting. Like painting under the influence of Clement Greenberg, art films had taken the idea of medium-specificity to its extreme, so that the most highly praised films were about technical aspects of filmmaking, like the zoom or editing, or about the conditions of projecting film, like light and darkness, or dirt accumulating on the surface of the film strip.

Schneeman's most widely reproduced work, Interior Scroll (1977), is a performance during which she unravels and reads a text from her vagina. Through the images alone, this piece seems to be very rooted in the experience of the body, about nature and fertility from the womb, but the text Schneeman reads has nothing to do with vaginas, wombs, or fertility, as you can see from the excerpt on the screen [perhaps ask students to read aloud, or the instructor can read aloud and ask for an interpretation/summary in response]. The text is really a snarky, pointed response to the gendered value systems of the art world, which may pose as neutral but were set up to privilege male voices and only allow women to speak if they agree to speak like men. Schneeman is challenging what seemed to her (and others) as the suspicious side-effect of Greenbergian Modernism and the minimalism and linguistic conceptualism that followed. That is, the time when it was first possible for women and minorities to find voices in the larger culture and access the refined halls of high art conveniently coincided with a push for art to have no narrative, to be something purely aesthetic or conceptual about the nature of art, rather than the story of the artist; or to be entirely about the viewer<'s interpretation of an abstract, analytic proposition instead of reflecting the artist's personal experience.

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964, Performance

(Extended discussion here, artist's reflections here)

Vito Acconci, Following Piece, 1969, Performance

(Smarthistory essay here)

Performance became a favored medium for feminist artists because it was both new, without a long history that excluded them, like painting's, but also because it always foregrounded the degree to which experience is based in bodies that are differentiated by gender, as well as race, class, and other such socially divisive categories. These two powerful performance pieces emerged at almost the same moment from what we might say was a gender-neutral interest in Conceptual Art, that is in making work using instructions as a way of relinquishing or limiting the artist's control over the work. Yoko Ono's instructions for her piece read: "Performer sits on stage with a pair of scissors in front of him. It is announced that members of the audience may come on stage-one at a time-to cut a small piece of the performer's clothing to take with them. Performer remains motionless throughout the piece. Piece ends at the performer's option." Vito Acconci's piece is based on the self-determined rule that he would pick a stranger walking along a public street and follow them until they went into a non-public place, an activity that could last anywhere from a few minutes to eight hours.

How would you interpret each of these pieces separately-what kinds of metaphors and philosophical ideas do each mobilize? How does that giving up of control signify differently? How do the artists' gendered bodies affect how we read these pieces? How are their symbolisms and affects different?

Both investigate issues of control and ego as well as the relationship between the individual and others in a social/relational field, but in comparison also suggest oppositions such as passivity versus aggression. It is interesting that Acconci's idea of giving up control looks like stalking, and Ono's looks like submission. Is this because of the way they constructed their experiments to circumvent control, or because of the way we read their bodies in action? It could be a little of both. Ono's piece can be performed by a man, and when it is it reads very differently, though never ominously like the photos of Acconci. But when it is Ono on stage, the implications resonate in a variety of directions, and many do relate to a certain kind of body-interpretations related to sexual violence or female objectification are common; evocations of sensitive imagery from World War II of Japanese civilians with their clothes shredded by the atomic blast and from the escalating Vietnam War are also put into play. Yet, Ono also wanted to challenge Western, masculine value systems that see submission as weakness, and she speaks eloquently about being influenced by stories of the Buddha and attempting to "produce work without ego in it...Instead of giving the audience what the artist chooses to give, the artist gives what the audience chooses to take" ( statement by the artist).

The Personal is Political-and Art is Personal and Political (whether it's obvious or ideologically naturalized)

By investigating how different types of bodies have different experiences in the world, and lead to different interpretations and responses to artworks, feminist artists helped make visible the powerful insight of the slogan "The Personal is Political," which was used widely by the Women's Rights Movement. As women around the country came together to talk about what felt like isolated, private experiences-from sexual abuse to dissatisfaction with housework-that society tended to cast as individual failings on the woman's part, they realized their "personal" problems were in fact widely shared, and politically structured aspects of society.

Likewise, women and minority artists started resisting the idea that art would only be valid if it wrestled with concepts that transcended the "personal," especially if speaking of personal, but shared, experiences had the power to unite classes of people who felt isolated by the silence surrounding anything that differentiated their experience from the "universal." For if art was to be important to people's lives, shouldn't it be able to address highly personalized and yet widely-shared experiences such as sexism and racism? If art was always appealing to the universal human, it was bound to ignore the specific challenges and exclusions placed on certain categories of humans. Also, the question was raised whether there was really anything universal and neutral in art related to mathematical logic or formal abstraction, since these were all areas that had been dominated by and played to the (socialized) strengths of upper class, white men. Maybe Minimalist sculpture was just as personal for the men making it-speaking to the industrial towns they came from, their technical training and fondness for engineering, spare aesthetics, and a denigration of emotionality.

Adrian Piper, Mythic Being: Cruising White Women #1 of 3, 1975, Photograph of performance

Adrian Piper, My Calling Card #1, 1986, Lithograph

(For more information on Piper and/or a great opportunity to discuss Wikipedia and how it creates and polices its content, see her removed and reconstructed Wiki-bio.)

As a light-skinned, mixed-race woman working first in the style of Conceptual Art, with artists who were interested in art as logical proposition and art as language, Adrian Piper was uniquely placed to press against the presumed universality of these abstract propositions. While Conceptual artists saw their work as political in its resistance to commodification and easy consumption, Piper started to invoke more personal, what we might call "identity" politics.

Piper started by performing strange actions in public, like Acconci, as a way to investigate social interactions-for example, going out with a rag stuffed in her mouth or covered in wet paint and wearing a wet paint sign. But it quickly became clear to her that there is no neutral body, and so working with one's own body is to work with identity, identity constructions, and social definitions. Piper was at the forefront of turning performance back on itself, as a commentary on the ways in which all identity is performance, and as a tool for considering how we all play roles for each other based on social expectations that exist prior to realizing what we might consider our unique, innate, or self-determined personalities.

In Mythic Being (great article on this here), Piper overidentifies with the role most feared by the art world-instead of being the token, unthreateningly pretty, light-skinned African-American girl, she would show up as a revolutionary-looking, urban black man with an Afro.

Piper did performances dressed as the Mythic Being, going to gallery openings, dancing at the bus stop, and walking the streets muttering lines from her diary to herself over and over. In Cruising White Women (1975), she performs the stereotype at the root of the racist fear of black men on the sexual prowl for white women, and returns it as commentary. Through photos for a gallery-going audience, she showed them their own world-view as caricature and impersonation, a performance she put on to meet their paranoid fantasies. And what could be more personal-both the way people are type-cast and judged by their appearances, and the reactions of the traditional gallery-going audience to the eruption of politics in their pristine white spaces?

In a later work, Piper again used artistic intervention as a tool for combating her real-world experiences with racism and sexism, producing "calling cards" that she would hand out discretely in social situations, which call people out on racist or sexist behavior.

Martha Rosler, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (Giacometti), 1967-72, Photomontage

Martha Rosler, Body Beautiful or Beauty Knows No Pain (Cargo Cult), 1967-72, Photomontage

(Further discussion here; overview/review of artist's retrospective here.)

So "The Personal is Political" can mean that our personal experiences, and the world that shapes them, is inherently and overtly political, and it can be the ground for political movements and the reason for political change (as in the Women's Rights Movement, seeking political responses to women's inequality). But "The Personal is Political" also means that each of us, as an individual, exists in a political nexus, acts as an economic, social, political being, and is part of the body-politic that acts on our behalf-whether in local or international matters. In the context of the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement, the Women's Movement, and the counter-culture, sexual liberation, and leftist politics of the 60s and 70s, "The Personal is Political" also meant that the micro-level choices each of us make on a daily basis are unavoidably political at macro-level, and need to be examined. As feminist art pushed against abstraction to re-introduce subject matter and overt political critique into work, the critique of sexism could be seen in relation to other kinds of political critique.

The late 1960s and early 1970s magazine collages of Martha Rosler center around American capitalism and the degree to which desire, as guided by mass media imagery from magazines, TV, film, and advertising, drives consumption. On the one hand, this system helps create and then profit from our pursuit of restrictive, highly gendered, and generally unattainable social ideals. On the other, it necessitates the aggressive economics of globalization and spurred the politics of the Cold War, in which any country (like Vietnam) that didn't accept American economic imperialism would face American military imperialism.

Rosler's collages about the false promises of advertising use the photomontage technique pioneered by Hannah Hoch and other Dadaists to create uncomfortable juxtapositions. On the left, a luxurious, art-filled, serene interior, sold by magazines such as House Beautiful as the ideal home for which we should all strive, is shown to be surrounded by fields of dead Vietnamese from Life Magazine. What are the details of this living room that carry meaning and how might this carefully selected interior help the artist make her point, or deepen that point? A Giacometti sculpture, often interpreted as an existential cry against WWII, becomes just decoration, a commodity for these art-collectors-or can't they see the relation between European deaths and Vietnamese deaths? A Modernist painting on the wall also problematizes the idea that Modernist painting is the best hope for politically avant-garde or revolutionary potential in art; as it easily becomes beautiful decoration for rich people's homes, its past radicalism dissipates with time.

Rosler's collages also play on the idea of the Vietnam conflict as the "living-room war," so-called because it was the first war widely covered and broadcast by TV news to a growing majority of Americans with TV sets in their home. The question of how one could see such images of carnage, however, from the comfort and safety of the American home and not be moved to action is one that these collages seem to ask but are unable to answer.

On the right, the beauty rituals of perfect white models are pasted onto shipping containers being loaded by dark-skinned men from places far away onto cargo ships, linking capitalism's success in focusing women on the relentless pursuit of physical perfection with the relentless pursuit of cheaper labor markets in the third world.

Through these collages and her video works, Rosler makes clear that the personal couldn't be more political. The stereotypes and ideals society lays out for women and men not only shape us as individuals, but this shaping process is guided by the interests of the larger political and ideological situation. Here you could mention the video Martha Rosler Reads Vogue (1982) as a prompt for a writing assignment responding to and analyzing the video's various critiques and strategies.)
History, Myth, and Narration-Deconstructed and Reconstructed

The ability to analyze, critique, and re-think this shaping process underpins another strategy and segment of feminist art and theory. Feminist artists, other critical postmodern artists, and many artists working today have realized that individuals come to understand themselves and their world in relation to narratives and images that pre-exist them, and that they are shaped by the biases and interests of society. Thus their work came to focus on the narratives that shape us, investigating how these can be updated, diverted, or disrupted. Historical revision, as we talked about at the beginning of class, and as you read about in relation to Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, is one response to the erasures and absences in history that might make women believe in their own inferiority.

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974-9, Ceramic, porcelain, and textile

(Website is here.)

If you had the students read the curatorial overview on the website, use this as an opportunity to stop lecturing and have them explicate the important aspects of this project. To make this more manageable and make them feel more responsibility, you could assign summaries for different sections to different groups in the previous class, i.e., one group shares background on the artist, another shares why the use of textiles and porcelain were important, another explains "central core" imagery, etc. Or, you can guide a discussion broken up into pieces: what are the subjects or issues raised by this work? What are the goals it pursues? How does the form of the work, the mediums and iconography used, and the method of display relate to its subjects and its goals?

To give historical context, remind students that this was before women's studies classes, at a time when one of Chicago's college professors felt comfortable declaring that women had made no important contributions to history, and when the best compliment most art teachers would bestow on their female students was that they "paint so well, [one] can't tell a woman did it."

When Judy Chicago became an art professor, she decided to work with a group of female students to investigate questions such as: what would a woman's art look like if she wasn't trying to make it look like a man's? How do we build a visual language of our own, when the entire history of art, the entire range of visual culture has been defined by and organized around the ideals and achievements of men? Why have women's creative work and the mediums available to them-tapestry and textile, ceramics and pottery, and other crafts-been demeaned, and can we bring them into the high art classification? And why does history only consider individual achievement, focusing always on lone producers and innovative sudden creation, instead of communal, traditional, and evolutionary achievements building on continual progress through the work of many? (This is a more accurate understanding of historical movements, after all.)

So after creating the Feminist Art Program at California State University, Fresno in 1970, Chicago started to work on a project in 1974 that would seek not only to revise the male-centric Western canon, but to challenge many of the values that went along with it. The Dinner Party uses "central core" imagery instead of phallic forms to unify the table and the plates. The work was produced by a community, with many hands and helpers involved, and showcases crafts associated with women's work.

Not only a massive artistic undertaking, it was an intense historical research project that helped uncover and share knowledge about over 1,000 women whose stories had been lost. Remember, this was before Google, so finding each name and information on these women was more than a click away-and yet, in early 2014, the Brooklyn Museum sponsored a special Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon to add many of the women from The Dinner Party to Wikipedia. The most common source for quick knowledge on a subject, Wikipedia is created by volunteer submissions and each article requires easily sourced materials, meaning the site often reproduces the biases of traditional histories and the volunteer-editors, who are predominantly male.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills #7 and #21, 1978, Black and white photographs

(More about this project is here, and a Smarthistory essay is here.)

Instead of trying to correct the record of a biased history, many critical artists, especially in the later 70s and 1980s, became increasingly interested in trying to deconstruct the way stories-historical stories, media stories, news stories-all work to shape how individuals present themselves and conform to or perform as certain roles.

Cindy Sherman's multiyear project Untitled Film Stills consists of almost a hundred photographs, each of which appears to be a still from a movie featuring a lone female protagonist. What information can we gather from each image? What do we think we know about these women? What about the movies they are in? Why do we think we can make these guesses? The clichéd nature of these images remind us that the outward signs we are reading-clothing, poses, lighting, framing-are legible because they are familiar, shared by our social conditioning. Therefore, just as publicity stills can rely on these signs to tell audiences what to expect, we as individuals learn and then position ourselves in relation to these kinds of signs, or performances of personality. This performance, and its flexibility and manipulability, are made clear by the fact that Sherman was the model for all 80+ of the images-doing her makeup and costuming and setting her stages so that she could be thoroughly convincing as each and every one of these women in entirely fictional and unrealized film projects.

By showing the same person, these are "self portraits" of the artist, but without ever showing the "real" Cindy Sherman, they call the idea of a stable, set, "real" individual into question. Andy Warhol, who had his own critique of media culture, famously said in a 1966 interview, "I don't know where the artificial stops and the real starts." Here we see the impossibility of constructing an authentic identity outside of all of the artificial images that we are fed, which provide models of womanhood, American-ness, whiteness, success, seduction, etc. that we use to construct identity.

[Optional:] As Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs showed us (if this work has been covered), we can't identify a real chair except in relation to the word "chair," which is an ideal with no equivalent in reality. Similarly, we understand ourselves and others in relation to abstract ideas that can never avoid simplifying or idealizing the thing they refer to.

Sherman's project offers new insights into how we think about ourselves as individuals and as part of a larger society. We dress a certain way to be perceived as X or Y. Women in particular at this time were asked to fulfill incongruous roles-the sexual playmate and the housewife, the secretary and the devoted mother-and would find that even within one's individual life, even if the social restrictions on women lessened, they weren't then free to find some true, authentic self or true essence of womanhood beneath all these clothes and roles. Rather, individuals seemed to be accumulations of roles, of performances, of signs we've learned to give off that tell people what to think about us. And while bodies may be biologically assigned as male or female, the performance of femininity or masculinity is something we learn, like we learn language, as babies mimicking what we hear around us. Therefore, there could be no essential or universal experience of what is it to be a woman, because how women and men are asked to perform changes depending on the context in which these signs are learned.

However, with the rapid expansion of media images in the 20th century-photographs, then movies, then TV, especially in the Western world and America in particular-there became the ability for industry to control and capitalize on this shaping of identities, proliferating available roles but also homogenizing the signs and styles that go with those roles. In many ways, it was this homogenous and oppressive vision of the perfect housewife that had caused so many women in the 50s and 60s to feel suffocated, and ultimately rebel en mass in the Women's Movement. Arguably, Sherman's work suggests that that goal of critical feminist art is not to find an essential, shared characteristic, style, or iconography that speaks truthfully or authentically of womanhood or woman's experience, but to realize how ideas of femininity are constructed and disseminated in the media age, find ways to uncover the mechanisms of control, and in doing so, undermine their effectiveness.

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (We Won't Play Nurture to Your Culture), 1983, and Untitled (We Don't Need Another Hero), 1987, Photostats

(Further discussion is here and a good overview and images are here.)

Similarly, Barbara Kruger's iconic red and white posters use the visual language of marketing and magazine design to counter the very ideas it is usually used to promote-consumerism, power relations, stereotypical gender roles, the cult of individual achievement, autonomy, and upward mobility-which mark the American ethos, especially during the revived conservatism of the Ronald Reagan years. Having worked as head designer for Mademoiselle magazine, Kruger subversively tweaks the combination of familiar (often nostalgic-seeming), found black-and-white images and slogan-style text bars which are typically used to aggressively sell products but also calibrated to subliminally sell ideas about who you are as a reader, audience, consumer, etc. Kruger makes clear the way advertising asks us to position ourselves in relation to the ideas it is selling by always using ambiguous personal pronouns (we, you, they, us) in her texts. This means that the "We" in "We don't need another hero" is determined by the imagination or inclination of the person reading it. Is the "We" spoken by the little girl in pigtails, by women as a category, by all people who read the poster, by all anti-heroes? Who is the "You" in "We won't play nature to your culture"? Whose culture and why is it separate from nature? Who would be asked to play nature and do you include yourself in that group or the other?

Kruger doesn't identify her work as strictly feminist, but about all of the power relations that affect us as subjects and about which we need to think critically. Another way that her work performs this expansive criticality is by not being contained within museums or galleries, but often appearing as billboards, on buses, city streets and in other public places, and on consumer products like t-shirts and matches that can move about and interrupt our daily acceptance of the status quo.

This expansion of feminist critical strategies to encompass an elaborate nexus of power relations affected by a range of identity-formations (gender, race, class, sexual difference) and geopolitical positions, and a desire to intervene in public, non-art spaces and systems, increasingly mark the work of contemporary artists. These artists often are less inclined to call themselves feminist artists, but nonetheless unabashedly work with and build on strategies, subject matter, artistic mediums, and theoretical approaches that blossomed at the intersection of feminism and art in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

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Glossary: Deconstruction: a method of critical analysis of philosophical and literary language that emphasizes the internal workings of language and conceptual systems, the relational quality of meaning, and the assumptions implicit in forms of expression.

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The DAX Centre Collection consists of over 15,000 creative works on paper, paintings, ceramics, and textiles created by people who have experienced mental

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Gallery supporting contemporary artists with intellectual disabilities

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Supporting artists with intellectual disabilities through our studio and gallery, promoting their work and advocating for their inclusion in contemporary art practice.

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TEMPORARY CLOSURE

Over this year, we have been keeping a very close eye on COVID-19 daily cases and government advice. From early June, we were engaging in a very slow return to the studio for a limited number of artists. Since the introduction of stage 3, and now stage 4, restrictions, t he progression of transmission of COVID19 in the community and with the interests and health of both staff and artists in mind, we have made the decision to close the APA premises for the foreseeable future.

If you need to contact APA, please call during regular business hours and we will endeavour to return your call as soon as possible. Website sales will be available for collection or posted once restrictions are lifted: we apologise for any inconvenience. We hope everyone stays safe and healthy, and look forward to seeing you again when the Victorian restrictions ease. Regular updates from our management team will be posted to our website, with more detailed information for artists, families and carers available on our Studio Page.

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Supporting artists with intellectual disabilities through our studio and gallery, promoting their work and advocating for their inclusion in contemporary art practice. Over this year, we have been keeping a very close eye on COVID-19 daily cases and government advice. From early June, we were engaging in a very slow return to the studio for a limited number of artists.

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The Art Assignment

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How to Critique  | The Art Assignment | PBS Digital Studios

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ACCA

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VCE

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21st Century Artists

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Discover the artists of the latest season of Art in the Twenty-First Century

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Contemporary approaches to teaching

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Use themes and big ideas driven by essential questions to frame your investigation.

Integrating contemporary art and themes into teaching requires a shift from predominantly technique-driven instruction to idea-driven instruction. Many artists do not work in a single medium or technique and instead try to explore an idea, event, situation, or question through multiple media and visual strategies. Consider planning curriculum around a big idea, theme, or question first; then, decide what projects, skills, or materials will support meaningful investigation and expression. The big idea or theme should focus the investigation and create a unifying framework, in which you can include multiple resources, artworks, and artists.

Give students options: introduce multiple artists and media sources.

Avoid mimicking the style or working methods of a single artist. Instead, introduce a range of artists who may have divergent ideas or approaches, and can offer multiple perspectives and working methods related to a chosen theme, idea, or question. Select the artists you bring to your classroom to include a combination of historic and contemporary voices, as well as perspectives from diverse cultures and worldviews.

Push beyond a media-driven curriculum.

Increasingly, artists are making works that defy traditional media categories. Rarely referring to themselves as strictly painters or sculptors, artists utilize the most effective media, tools, and contexts for the ideas they want to express. Provide opportunities for students to gain skills in materials that emphasize their thinking about ideas across media. Allow them to gain familiarity with multiple ways of representing and thinking through a specific theme or concept.

Think and talk more; make less.

Encourage students to consider how contemporary artists get ideas, and where their inspiration comes from. Ask them to consider the concept-the ideas, choices or decisions the artist made to create the work (such as the selection of materials, installation decisions, color or image choices). Why do they think the artist made those choices? What visual, literary and/or historical references do they see in the work? How does this work of art tell us something about the world we live in?

Similarly, when students are making their own artwork, instead of rushing to start on artworks, ask them to first consider the idea they are trying to express. Have students brainstorm ideas and questions on paper. Encourage them to find artist role models who are exploring similar ideas with diverse methods. Ask students to share their ideas and possible next steps with classmates and those outside the classroom. Help them think through multiple options before selecting a final idea to pursue. Engage them in discussions that challenge and develop their ideas, in anticipation of realizing a work of art.

Emphasize process over product.

Rather than designing a curriculum with a final product or project in mind, consider different ways you can model how to develop and realize an idea. Plan backwards, to address larger learning goals that nurture critical-thinking and research skills, so that students can make meaningful works informed by well-researched and developed ideas.

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Contemporary Approaches to Teaching - Art21

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Use themes and big ideas driven by essential questions to frame your investigation. Integrating contemporary art and themes into teaching requires a shift from predominantly technique-driven instruction to idea-driven instruction. Many artists do not work in a single medium or technique and instead try to explore an idea, event, situation, or question through multiple media and visual strategies.

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Art21 Introduction to teaching contemporary art

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The resources in this section offer an orientation to visual art being produced today and a gateway for educators to explore some of the larger questions related to contemporary art. In anticipation of teaching with specific artists, themes, or lesson ideas, Art21 provides a rich multimedia experience to help navigate and construct new interpretations about art being made today.

Art21 is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; all donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

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Getting Started: An Introduction to Teaching with Contemporary Art - Art21

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Look for the plus icon next to videos throughout the site to add them here. Save videos to watch later, or make a selection to play back-to-back using the autoplay feature.

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How to create an IG

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John Berger (1974)

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John Berger - Ways of Seeing (Episode 2)

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Painter

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Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is remembered for her self-portraits, pain and passion, and bold, vibrant colors. She is celebrated in Mexico for her attention to Mexican and indigenous culture and by feminists for her depiction of the female experience and form.

Kahlo, who suffered from polio as a child, nearly died in a bus accident as a teenager. She suffered multiple fractures of her spine, collarbone and ribs, a shattered pelvis, broken foot and a dislocated shoulder. She began to focus heavily on painting while recovering in a body cast. In her lifetime, she had 30 operations.

Life experience is a common theme in Kahlo's approximately 200 paintings, sketches and drawings. Her physical and emotional pain are depicted starkly on canvases, as is her turbulent relationship with her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera, who she married twice. Of her 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits.

The devastation to her body from the bus accident is shown in stark detail in The Broken Column. Kahlo is depicted nearly naked, split down the middle, with her spine presented as a broken decorative column. Her skin is dotted with nails. She is also fitted with a surgical brace.

Kahlo's first self-portrait was Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress in 1926. It was painted in the style of 19th Century Mexican portrait painters who themselves were greatly influenced by the European Renaissance masters. She also sometimes drew from the Mexican painters in her use of a background of tied-back drapes. Self-Portrait - Time Flies (1929), Portrait of a Woman in White (1930) and Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky (1937) all bear this background.

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best." - Frida Kahlo

In her second-self portrait, "Time Flies," Kahlo uses a folk style and vibrant colors. She wears peasant clothing, and the red, white and green in the painting are the colors of the Mexican flag.

During her life, self portrait is a subject that Frida Kahlo always returns to, as artists have always returned to their beloved themes - Rembrandt his Self Portrait, Vincent van Gogh his Sunflowers, and Claude Monet his Water Lilies.

Frida and Diego: Love and Pain

Kahlo and Rivera had a tumultuous relationship, marked by multiple affairs on both sides. Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair (1940), Kahlo is depicted in a man's suit, holding a pair of scissors, with her fallen hair around the chair in which she sits. This represents the times she would cut the hair Rivera loved when he had affairs.

The 1937 painting Memory, the Heart, shows Kahlo's pain over her husband's affair with her younger sister Christina. A large broken heart at her feet shows the intensity of Kahlo's anguish. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera divorced in 1939, but reunited a year later and remarried. The Two Fridas (1939) depicts Kahlo twice, shortly after the divorce. One Frida wears a costume from the Tehuana region of Mexico, representing the Frida that Diego loved. The other Frida wears a European dress as the woman who Diego betrayed and rejected. Later, she is back in Tehuana dress in Self-Portrait as a Tehuana (1943) and Self Portrait (1948).

Pre-Columbian artifacts were common both in the Kahlo/Rivera home (Diego collected sculptures and idols, and Frida collected Jewelry) and in Kahlo's paintings. She wore jewelry from this period in Self-Portrait - Time Flies (1926), Self-Portrait With Monkey (1938) and Self-Portrait With Braid (1941), among others. Other Pre-Columbian artifacts are found in The Four Inhabitants of Mexico City (1938), Girl With Death Mask (1938) and Self-Portrait With Small Monkeys (1945).

My painting carries with it the message of pain." - Frida Kahlo

Surreal or Realist?

Frida Kahlo participated in the "International Exhibition of Surrealism" in 1940 at the Galeria de Arte, Mexicano. There, she exhibited her two largest paintings: The Two Fridas and The Wounded Table (1940). Surrealist Andrew Breton considered Kahlo a surrealistic, a label Kahlo rejected, saying she just painted her reality. However, In 1945, when Don Jose Domingo Lavin asked Frida Kahlo to read the book Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud - whose psychoanalysis works Surrealism is based on - and paint her understanding and interpretation of this book. Frida Kahlo painted Moses, and this painting was recognized as second prize at the annual art exhibition in the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

Kahlo did not sell many paintings in her lifetime, although she painted occasional portraits on commission. She had only one solo exhibition in Mexico in her lifetime, in 1953, just a year before her death at the age of 47.

Today, her works sell for very high prices. In May 2006, Frida Kahlo self-portrait, Roots, was sold for $5.62 million at a Sotheby's auction in New York, sets a record as the most expensive Latin American work ever purchased at auction, and also makes Frida Kahlo one of the highest-selling woman in art.

Widely known for her Marxist leanings, Frida, along with Marxism Revolutionary Che Guevara and a small band of contemporary figures, has become a countercultural symbol of the 20th century, and created a legacy in art history that continues to inspire the imagination and mind. Born in 1907, dead at 47, Frida Kahlo achieved celebrity even in her brief lifetime that extended far beyond Mexico's borders, although nothing like the cult status that would eventually make her the mother of the selfie, her indelible image recognizable everywhere.

At the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City, her personal belongings are on display throughout the house, as if she still lived there. Kahlo was born and grew up in this building, whose cobalt walls gave way to the nickname of the Blue House. She lived there with her husband for some years, and she died there. The facility is the most popular museum in the Coyoacan neighborhood and among the most visited in Mexico City.

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Frida Kahlo: 100 Paintings Analysis, Biography, Quotes, & Art

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Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is remembered for her self-portraits, pain and passion, and bold, vibrant colors. She is celebrated in Mexico for her attention to Mexican and indigenous culture and by feminists for her depiction of the female experience and form. Kahlo, who suffered from polio as a child, nearly died in a bus accident as a teenager.

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Photographer, sculptor

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"Under this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces."

Synopsis

Claude Cahun's photographic self-portraits present a dizzying kaleidoscopic mix of mystery, exuberance, and sobriety. Born in France, she lived most of her life on the island of Jersey with her stepsister and long-term love, Marcel Moore. Also known as Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, both women adopted their preferred gender-neutral pseudonyms during early adulthood. Moore, although often invisible, was always present - typically taking the photographs and also authoring collages - and in this sense was as much artist collaborator as she was Cahun's personal support. Described in her own words as a "hunt", through a combination of text and imagery, Cahun's exploration of self is relentless and at times unsettling. From circus performer, clothed in layers of artifice, to a stripped-down Buddhist monk grounded by integrity, Cahun is engaged in an ongoing dialogue with multiplicity. Tragically in line with the fragmentary nature of her outlook, much of the artist's work was destroyed following her arrest and subsequent imprisonment for resistance against the Nazis. What remains bares interesting parallel to the title of Cahun's diaristic publication Aveux Non Avenus, translated as Disavowels, which enigmatically suggests that for all that is revealed and given, much is still hidden or has been lost.

Key Ideas

Themes of melancholy, futility, and uncertainty run deep through Cahun's career. She does not make 'complete' artworks but rather all of her photographs and writings combine to become part of a bigger and yet still unfinished whole. She says herself that she does not have the answers to her questions, and as such unusually makes visible the rawness, torment, and distress of not knowing.

The introductory question of André Breton's novel Nadja (1928), 'Who Am I?' repeats with intense scrutiny, whilst collages made with Moore reveal the same love of symmetry and prismatic vision found in the book's illustrations. In general, Cahun shares an interest in certain motifs such as hair, hands, and animal familiars (for instance, her cat) with other female Surrealists, and similarly uses techniques of doubling and reflection to call into question fixed notions of gender and identity.

Cahun's work looks forward to that of Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, and Gillian Wearing. Influenced by Cahun's theatrical works, Sherman and Wearing both later explore the assumption of multiple 'masked' personas, recalling together Joan Rivière's classic paper on women who employ "womanliness as masquerade" (1929). Woodman however, followed on from Cahun's later, more organic, outdoor photographs. Entwined by seaweed, enveloped in vegetation, and submerged in water, both artists exquisitely combine eros and thanatos in the grand setting of nature.

There is an obscurity surrounding Cahun that has made her an isolated figure. In character she was an obsessive loner, and yet she was also inextricable from Moore. From 1937 onwards, moving away from the artistic circles of Paris to the remote island of Jersey, the couple became somewhat awkward, ostracized, and inaccessible. Furthermore, with much of Cahun's work destroyed in 1944, the overall body of her production became relatively small further heightening her mystery. The original works that survive are very small, as though they have been left as clues for a much bigger treasure hunt.

Biography

Childhood

Claude Cahun was born as Lucy Schwob in Nantes, France, to a middle-class Jewish family in 1894. She later became Claude Cahun to appear gender neutral as an artist and as a writer. She had a brother, George, and her uncle, Marcel Schwob, was a well-known writer who was part of the Symbolist movement. Marcel Schwob was famous throughout Paris and became a good friend of Oscar Wilde. Cahun's grandfather, David Leon Cahun, was also an important intellectual figure from the Orientalist movement, and thus already in childhood the artist was immersed in a creative and intellectual environment.

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Claude Cahun Biography Continues

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Claude Cahun's photographic, gender-bending self-portraits present a dizzying mix of mystery, exuberance, and sobriety.

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Contemporary art resource

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Discover the artists of the latest season of Art in the Twenty-First Century

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In 1985, Cuban-born, Mexico-based artist Marta María Pérez held a knife to her naked, pregnant stomach and took a picture. The resulting black-and-white photo shows the knife-wielding mother-to-be, her face cropped out, her individuality erased. It's a jarring representation of motherhood, a far cry from the sunny, idealized images that flood social media and lifestyle magazines. Images that suggest mothers are ― and should be ― docile, domestic, faultless and, more often, white.

"I immediately thought of the movie 'Psycho' when I saw this photo," writer NeKelia Henderson wrote in 2010 of Pérez's work. "Well, the maternity version anyway."

Pérez's photo is part of " Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985," an expansive survey of work by Latinx women now on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Together, the women paint a picture that diverges from the endorsed model of motherhood, blissful and devoid of complications or conflict. Instead, their moms are political, angry, salacious, outspoken, spiritual and experimental. Their images of motherhood welcome pain as well as love, truth as well as fantasy, horror as well as tranquility.

As Hammer guest curator Andrea Giunta, who organized the exhibition along with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, put it: "They propose more realistic maternities, crossed by different cultural, social and political registers."

Pérez's menacing nude photo is called "Do not kill animals or watch them be killed." The title, the artist explained to HuffPost, refers to the Afro-Cuban superstition that a pregnant woman who either kills an animal or witnesses a killing will give birth to a child with violent or criminal instincts. The myth echoes the 17th- and 18th-century conviction, upheld by some male philosophers and medical professionals of the time, that a pregnant woman's unknown imagination could affect ― and potentially infect ― the unborn child forming inside her.

If a mother experienced shock, hunger or lust, her child might arrive with physical deformities, leading experts thought. So when children were born with disabilities or afflictions, the mother's "monstrous imagination" was up for blame. According to Princeton professor Marie-Hélène Huet, male scientists and philosophers would respond to a childbirth gone somehow awry by asking: "What woeful maternal fancy produced such a monster?"

A version of this misogynistic anxiety lingers today thanks to a variety of persistent spiritual beliefs and superstitions, including those belonging to the Santeria religion Pérez ascribes to and interrogates. Her "Do not kill" image, in particular, is part of a larger series called "The Conceived," for which she documented her experience carrying twins. She processed her pregnancy through the lens of her religion and its superstitions and taboos. The photos are "omens," Marcela Guerrero writes in a catalogue essay, offering "an unromanticized view of maternity that transgresses Western notions of motherhood."

The series' titles are inspired by anthropologist Lydia Cabrera's El Monte, an in-depth description of the major Afro-Cuban religions, which include Santeria, Yoruba and Palo Monte. Another of Pérez's photos, titled "Born to you strangled by the cord," depicts the artist topless, from just below her lips to just above her nipples, wearing only pearls. The title nods to the unsubstantiated belief that wearing a necklace while pregnant can result in a child being strangled by his or her umbilical cord.

Over the years, as medical technologies have evolved, the scientific community has debunked many of these beliefs, relegating them to the domain of spiritual superstition. However, a laundry list of still-potentially dangerous activities for mothers-to-be has taken their place: no smoking, no drinking, no caffeine, no high heels, deli meat or soft cheese. The list goes on. From policing thoughts to policing actions, the cultural desire to regulate and control pregnant mothers continues. Women are still expected to be impeccable parents ― even before their child arrives.

Ultimately, it can be difficult to draw a line between responsibly protecting a child and unnecessarily policing a mother. As Lynn M. Paltrow, author of When Becoming Pregnant Is a Crime, wrote: "Recognizing 'fetal abuse' moves us toward criminalizing pregnancy itself because no woman can provide the perfect womb."

Pérez isn't the only artist at the Hammer to skewer conventional representations of "baby bumps."Johanna Hamann's plaster-cast "Bellies" ― representations of pregnant stomachs that dangle from metal hooks, their contents spilling down like diaphanous fabric or human entrails ― recall both dresses lined up in a closet and carcasses dangling in a butcher's display. As curator Giunta put it, "They refer to the relationship between maternity and trauma in at least two senses: a subjective one, visualizing aspects of motherhood that social stereotypes eliminate, and, on the other hand, referring to violence in Peruvian society of those years, to which the police and military forces of the state were linked."

Idealized images of pregnancy might suggest that miraculous transformations into motherhood occur in a vacuum, but in reality, some women approach this phase of their life under a variety of external pressures, including political oppression and social unrest. In 1979, the year Hamann began work on "Bellies," Peru was transitioning from military to civilian rule under President Francisco Morales Bermúdez. Her mother-shaped casts pay tribute to the pain inside a woman's body, as well as the world beyond it.

While Hamann and Pérez visualize pregnancy, another artist, Louise Grobet, explores what happens post-birth. In her 1981 photograph "La Briosa," a woman in a lucha libre mask feeds a bottle to an infant. As Giunta explained, mothers and homemakers in Mexico serve as both spectators and players of the carnivalesque and sometimes brutal sport of amateur, freestyle wrestling. In her photo, Grobet collapses the distinction between gentle mother and campy fighter. Both test the body's limits and urge a woman to perform a designated role that has deep-rooted history in pre-Hispanic culture. "In this sense," Giunta added, "maternity is linked to a form of festive and symbolic violence."

Violence is also palpable in Chilean artist Gloria Camiruaga's 1984 film "Popsicles." In it, her daughters eat popsicles with little plastic soldiers in them, chanting "Hail Mary" in between licks as the residue of their sweets stains their lips and teeth. Camiruaga described the work as a " rosary of alarm, eternal and circular." Her daughters engage in outwardly innocent childhood activities ― making devotions, eating sweets ― all the while cognizant of the threat of violence beneath the surface; the toy soldier is meant as a reference to dictator Augusto Pinochet, who ruled Chile with an authoritarian military government between 1973 and 1990.

"With this performance she refers to the dictatorship of Pinochet, but also puts in a critical place her own motherhood, using her own daughters." Giunta said, "We have to think that dictatorships, and social and police violence in general, generate violence that specifically targets the female body [...] even caesareans practiced without anesthesia on women in prisons."

The physical experiences of pregnancy, birth and motherhood are far from the pristine, ethereal events that some mainstream representations would suggest. In the United States, the maternal mortality rate is rising, with 28 maternal deaths occurring per 100,000 births in 2013. Non-fatal injuries are far more prevalent. According to Mother Jones, between 50 to 80 percent of women who give birth experience tearing of the pelvic skin and muscles, and around half experience urinary incontinence. Three quarters report residual back pain.

For women of color and women in marginalized communities, pregnancy invites additional hurdles. In 2008, a large-scale federal immigration raid in Iowa led to the arrest of 389 predominately Hispanic workers at a meat-processing plant. Babies born 37 weeks after the raid had a 24 percent higher risk of lower birth weight than those born the year before, a study at University of Michigan showed. Mothers also had an increased risk of preterm birth following the raid. For many Latinx women in America right now, particularly undocumented immigrants threatened by the policies of President Donald Trump's administration, a euphoric pregnancy is not an option.

The artists of "Radical Women" unflinchingly confront the realities of birth and motherhood, no matter how painful, ugly, confusing or taboo. Western culture asks women to prescribe to the myth of motherhood as something immaculate and miraculous ― with any deviation from the norm perceived as weakness or insubordination on the part of the mother. Artists like Pérez, Hamann, Grobet and Camiruaga refute these expectations, complicating the idea of motherhood and illuminating the work, trauma and alarm that go into creating and raising a child.
"Radical Women" runs at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles until Dec. 31, 2017.

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Radical Latinx Artists Reveal The Violent Side Of Motherhood

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For many women, blissful maternity isn't an option.

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What does it mean to be butch in 2018

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Still from Nanette

"If you hate men so much why do you try so fucking hard to look like one?" Comedian Hannah Gadsby grunts in her impression of a straight bloke mocking her. She pauses, grins, and in her own Tasmanian drawl, says: "Cause you need a good role model right now, fellas."

Nanette, her Netflix comedy-polemic on the myriad ways in which art can be sexism's largest amplifier, is being heralded by many as a watershed moment for the industry. It's also been decreed by certain people, not entirely unlike those Gadsby aims for in her upward jabs, as little more than a hyped-up TED Talk. Truly, it's not the acerbic/filthy comedy of Sarah Silverman, Whitney Cummings or Tiffany Haddish. But it deserves its place in our hearts and minds and so too does Gadsby. Because right now, it's not only straight men who need good role models: we all need a butch icon.

To rescue us from the toxic masculinity that forms our gloomy geopolitical backdrop, we tend to seek out the men who do manliness differently. We worship the England team and Gareth Southgate's cuddly camaraderie until the football comes home. We coo when New Jack on Love Island talks candidly about the time he, heartbroken, cried over a can of soup. We sob when the Queer Eye guys upgrade bad dressers into serial emoters. But for all of these celebrations of brave new men venturing into apparently new sensitive lands, let's hear it for the women who, destined to toil forever on these weepy plains, have taken the bolder step of poaching the best bits of masculinity for themselves.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "butch" as: "Having an appearance or other qualities of a type traditionally seen as masculine". And looks-wise, Gadsby certainly fits one rendition of butchness. In Nanette she has short-cropped hair, thick-framed glasses, a tux-style blue-black blazer and jeans. She's fresh-faced, but still formal.

Yet the rules around contemporary butchness are as elastic as the waistband on a Superdry tracksuit. A butch can be flamboyant, like Cate Blanchett's Lou in Ocean's 8 , a Harley-riding velvet-suit-clad update of The L Word's Shane McCutcheon . A butch can even wear dresses and dangly earrings -- as Orange Is the New Black and The Handmaid's Tale actor Samira Wiley tends to at red carpet events -- and still retain her butch swagger.

Butchness can also be relative: Cynthia Nixon, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate for New York State, appears less butch when she's next to her butch wife Christine Marinoni, but more butch when compared to most of the US's women politicians. I say "most" because, well, Hillary Clinton is a butch icon, and some even argue that the anti-same-sex-marriage Angela Merkel is butch, because such is the lot of straight women trying to fit into the macho world of politics.

"Gadsby, just like all butch women, selectively borrows from traditional masculinity, while protecting the people from the more toxic elements of masculinity. She's assertive without aggression, protective without paternalism."

While we're on politics, though the UK's political system is as misogynistic as the next, butches pop up everywhere. Some wilt: Angela Eagle, the first Corbyn critic with the cojones to run against him in a bid for leadership, failed after trying to harness the feminine imagery of hot pink in her campaign material. Others flourish, like Ruth Davidson, a grinning multi-contradiction: jolly, butch, Conservative and Scottish, she's undoing the notion that butches perform the role of the man in the relationship, by carrying her and her wife's first child.

Mhairi Black, the Baby of the House, has a strident delivery that belies her years. She also confounds expectations, with her slicked-back low-slung ponytail. Because, even though all the aforementioned butches have short hair, is a cropped 'do the ultimate decider of a butch? Certainly, Heloise Letissier of Christine and the Queens, who consistently wears masculine tailoring, looks far more butch with her hair shorter. As does Kristen Stewart, the sometime-Chanel model who, arguably, only properly convinced straight people of her attraction to women when she got a buzzcut. Conversely, is Ruby Rose, who wears lip gloss and is one weave away from being Love Island material, only butch because of her short back 'n' sides? Is that enough? Could Eliot Sumner, whose signature look comprises a smoulder, tailored suits and monochrome streetwear really be any butcher? Plus, the short hair criterion excludes butch black women like Young M.A. and Lena Waithe, who have dreadlocks or braids dangling past their shoulders. As I told myself when I went through the torment of growing my hair out from a crew-cut, if butchness is about doing masculinity better than men, there's some Samsonite power in growing a thick lustrous mane that many men, with all their follicle-depleting testosterone, cannot manage.

If the butch look isn't quite defined, the "qualities of a type traditionally seen as masculine" are more certain. Let's take the butches of entertainment and comedy, Gadsby's peers and maybe your ideal dinner party line-up: Tig Notaro, Sue Perkins, Claire Balding, Rachel Maddow, Ellen DeGeneres and Sandi Toksvig. They're all over 40, all butches, all ascribed a gentle wisdom that their straight/femme cohort of women aren't. What sets them apart from their straight male equivalents -- Zack Galifianakis, Giles Coren, Gary Lineker, Trevor Noah, Ryan Seacrest and Stephen Fry -- though, is that audiences, especially female ones, expect and receive kindness from them. This butch chivalry leaves straight men snookered -- incidentally, the stereotypical butch's favoured bar-game -- because if dependability and attraction to women are meant to be preserves of masculinity, how come we can always rely on butches to be nicer to women than any guy ever could be?

Gadsby doesn't only speak to lesbians, butches, or "gender non-normal" people out there, but every woman or non-straight-white-cis-male out there.

Gadsby, just like all butch women, selectively borrows from traditional masculinity, while protecting the people from the more toxic elements of masculinity. She's assertive without aggression, protective without paternalism. In Nanette, after demanding: "Straight, white men. Pull your socks up", then joking: "how humiliating, fashion advice from a lesbian!", Gadsby promises to stop self-deprecating because "that isn't humility, it's humiliation" for her community. That empathy, felt throughout a comedy act in defence of the women and minorities who have traditionally formed the punchlines of the genre, is enough to cement her status as a butch icon.

Women like Gadsby might seem like they're everywhere in popular culture and our halls of power, now I've listed them, but it's because they still stand out -- even the white middle-class ones -- and the price they pay for standing out is, so often, punishment. There are countless examples of these aggressions. Balding being called a "dyke on a bike" by the late AA Gill; Sandi Toksvig getting death threats after coming out publicly; Angela Eagle being referred to as "the lesser of two Eagles" (her straight sister, Maria Eagle, is also an MP); Orange Is the New Black's Lea DeLaria having to shout down a homophobic preacher on the subway. Younger butches get it too: Radio 1's Ashley "Dotty" Charles wrote in 2018 that the world has "at times seemed intent on undermining and eroding my deviations from 'the norm'". So many butch icons rise above the negative misogyny and homophobia thrown at them, and we must commend them for that.

While I, a lesbian, can comfortably sit here in my cargo pants decreeing who is butch or not, the femininity it evades is regularly defined by oppressors, who decide its ever-mutating but consistently strict parameters. When recalling how badly she's fallen foul of the rules, Gadsby doesn't only speak to lesbians, butches, or "gender non-normal" people out there, but every woman or non-straight-white-cis-male out there. When detailing the assault she survived aged 17, Gadsby explains: "That was not homophobia pure and simple. That was gendered. If I had been feminine, that would have not happened. I'm incorrectly female. I am incorrect. And that is punishable."

While that specific incident's intense lesbophobia must not be negated, this principle of punishment is truly relatable: can any woman truly say she hasn't been denigrated, in some small and seemingly justifiable way, for failing to fit within the narrow confines that patriarchy built for us to live and die within? To have the strength to escape femininity on the daily, to wake up and not think about, or unthink, all of the ways in which femininity must be performed and adhered to -- while still considering the needs of those who do still conform -- is why butches must be treasured. And given worthy role models to show them the path forward. Butches prop-up lesbian dating scenes, from our biggest cities to our smallest provincial gay bars. They're the lynchpin of families, the object of femme fantasies, the reliable, handsome women who simply don't feel like femininity works for them. And Hannah Gadsby, well, right now, she's our butch queen.

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With comedian Hannah Gadsby's 'Nanette' being heralded by many as a watershed moment for the industry, let's hear it for the women who have taken the bold step of poaching the best bits of masculinity for themselves.

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Printmaker, collage, photographer

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Mary Beth Edelson. Death of Patriarchy / A.I.R. Anatomy Lesson. 1976 | MoMA

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All requests to license audio or video footage produced by MoMA should be addressed to Scala Archives at firenze@scalarchives.com. Motion picture film stills or motion picture footage from films in MoMA's Film Collection cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For licensing motion picture film footage it is advised to apply directly to the copyright holders.

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Collage, photomontage

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Video, installation, photomedia

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Hand-weaver

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june 6 - january 8 - 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT
july 9 - december 30 - Where Words Falter: Art and Empathy, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY
september 14 - december 31 - Manifesto of Fragility : Biennale de Lyon 2022, Lyon, France
october 1 - march 5 - The Kingdom of the Ill, Museion, Bolzano, Italy
december 1 - 3 - Art Basel Miami Beach: Meridians, Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami Beach, FL

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june 6 - january 8 - 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT july 9 - december 30 - Where Words Falter: Art and Empathy, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY september 14 - december 31 - Manifesto of Fragility : Biennale de Lyon 2022, Lyon, France october 1 - march 5 - The Kingdom of the Ill, Museion, Bolzano, Italy december 1 - 3 - Art Basel Miami Beach: Meridians, Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami Beach, FL

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The black female artists you should be following

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Black Blossoms: The black female artists you should be following

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It's statistics like these that led Bolanle Tajudeen and Cynthia Silveira to found Black Blossoms, an organisation working to curate exhibitions that provide opportunities for the public to engage with female artists, and specifically female artists of colour. Here, they have named a few of their favourite emerging black women artists living and working in the UK to watch and invest in...

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Painter

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SOLA OLULODE︎ @solaolulode 'sOLa olULOde/ Pronouns: She/Her 1. Practice: Painter 2. Location: Brighton/London "My work explores Black...

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Analysing strategy

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Art history and pop culture

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Senior NY mag art critic

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Jerry Saltz (@jerrysaltz) * Instagram photos and videos

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317.6k Followers, 1,359 Following, 5,737 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Jerry Saltz (@jerrysaltz)

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Two young art critics

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THE WHITE PUBE (@thewhitepube) * Instagram photos and videos

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Sculptor, performance

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untitled: silueta series (figure with hay burned)

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gunpowder silueta (fundamento palo monte)

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Works by Ana Mendieta: Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants), 1972 , Untitled (Grass on Woman), 1972 , Dainzú, 1973 , Sweating Blood, 1973 , Untitled, 1973 , Dog, 1974 , Ocean Bird (Washup), 1974 , Butterfly, 1975 , On Giving Life, 1975 , Flower Person, Flower Body, 1975 , Untitled (Black...

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Worksheet example

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i-D magazine

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Laura Rokas, Erin M. Riley

Relegated to "women's work" or "domestic handicrafts," sewing, weaving, and quilting have long been excluded from the Western art canon. But in the 1960s, artists such as Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago sought to reclaim and re-contextualize the mediums. "It is crucial to understand that one of the ways in which the importance of male experience is conveyed is through the art objects that are exhibited and preserved in our museums," Chicago wrote in the book Women and Art: Contested Territory. Today, contemporary artists are increasingly turning to weaving to express and record their own experiences: Kayla Mattes creates brightly colored tapestries of remnants from the early internet; Erin M. Riley explores her sexuality through woven naked selfies; and Laura Rokas weaves empowered portraits with glaring eyes and dagger-like nails. i-D talks to six such artists about their work, how it challenges what weaving has traditionally looked like, and if they still consider it "women's work."

Laura Rokas
"My work tends to bounce from medium to medium, [and] is currently comprised of painting, drawing, photography, ceramics, quilting, and embroidery. There is an idealistic quality suggested through my use of a wide variety of materials and their juxtaposition. The hierarchies and histories of these materials become compressed in a way that ditches concepts of 'craft' and 'women's work.' First and foremost a painter, my approach to weaving is based on aspects of painting, rather than the functional and pattern-based characteristics of weaving on a loom.

"Textile arts are painstaking by nature. I slipped easily into the role of a weaver as my work often has masochistic tendencies in both process and imagery. To create a tapestry, a single piece of thread is wrapped around a frame and hours upon hours are spent weaving through the warp with a needle. My weavings are overtly non-functional and I prefer them stretched taught on their frames. The imagery that I use is just as dramatic as the method: flowing jet black hair, blood red nails with points like daggers, glaring eyes, blood, dark skies, tears... My work focuses on both moments of pain and pleasure, reducing them to graphic images and imbuing them with an operatic gravitas."

Erin M. Riley
"My work is a continued and evolving reflection on my daily life. I collect images I send to lovers, images from the news, arrests, politics, and through submissions. I try to talk about the complicated truths that most people live with, be that trauma, death, addiction, pleasures, or the mundane... I'm not totally sure why [weaving] got [characterized as 'women's work'] in the United States, but typically, it has been supported, maintained, and taught by women. Possibly, this is because so many things were considered 'men's work' and exclusionary, that women jumped on the opportunity to excel at the totally useful, challenging, and satisfying task of weaving. Many spaces were off limits to women, minorities, and [certain] classes, and therefore, they did with what they had. That doesn't mean these practices were their first choices, but the ones they had and thrived with... We have to be more malleable with our ideas of what is possible. The value of a process is not contingent on the amount of cis men practicing it, and thus 'women's work,' in an equal society, is not derogatory."

Samantha Bittman
"I was intuitively drawn to weaving, and as I learned more about the complexities of weave structures, the more I became fascinated with the idea that I could build a picture out of the threads themselves. The image and the object are one and the same with weaving, and this really resonates with me... Weaving has looked - in the literal sense - a lot different throughout its history and across cultures. However, in the past 60 years, and particularly in the past 10 years, it is becoming common within mainstream contemporary art. Many galleries show artists that weave, there have been numerous museum shows focusing on fiber art, and nearly all major art fairs include some weaving... I think that it is still a signifier of women's work, but it's less commonly an actual domestic practice done by women. [Because] more and more artists are weaving in their studios and in schools, [it] is pushing the medium forward. People are becoming accustomed to and thinking more deeply about weaving, the conversation is expanding and diversifying, and yet the history of women's work is part of that."

Kayla Mattes
"My recent work employs humor, text, naiveté, and urgency to craft sly political messages through the interconnected threads of tapestry. I'm interested in using weaving to make sense of the chaos of the present day, often through the lens of digital culture. In many ways my work follows tradition. For centuries, tapestry has been used across cultures as a medium to archive history through woven symbols and as a political tool for women to express dissent. At the same time, I'm interested in subverting tradition, whether it's by simply dismantling the rectangle, or through the contemporary imagery and language that I depict within the weave.

"There's a lot of historical baggage regarding the separation of art and craft, a split that's definitely tied to gender. Weaving is typically lumped into the craft category and therefore overlooked as void of conceptual rigor. Soft materials are disregarded as feminine or cute. In reality, weaving is a complex mathematical process that influenced the development of computing... I'm interested in making work that blurs the binary lines of art versus craft. I believe that craft and art are interchangeable. Weavers are artists and artists can weave."

Arna Óttarsdóttir
"My approach to weaving is, I suppose, a little naive. I'm self-taught and have 'only' been working with it for the last eight years or so. Learning the technique, and everything that goes with it, has been a slow process (maybe because the method itself is slow), and I can't say I'm that knowledgeable either about the technique itself or about its long history. First and foremost, the practical aspects of it interest me, the method and the slowness of it, and also the material itself. I do like that weaving is connected to women and craft, but those things aren't a driving force behind my work.

"One of the many things that interests me about weaving is how it's very monumental and mundane at the same time. The subjects for my woven work are often sourced from everyday life or things that seem unimportant: small and crappy sketches and all kind of doodles are blown up and used in large tapestries. And it can also be the other way around: a handwoven dishcloth inspired by the works of Agnes Martin. I'm interested in the tension between what is considered precious and the insignificant, both in relation to subject and materials."

"For the last three weeks, I have managed to renovate my grandmothers old loom - it hasn't been active for over 50 years! And it was my grandmother's old rag rugs that were my starting point five years ago. [For her rugs], clothes were cut-up and [separated] from their function, and then weaved back together into a new format and thereby archived. With a similar approach, I have conducted a series of tapestries made from varied sources: a luxury wardrobe of a businesswoman, my childhood clothes, the Deutsche Welles archive and my friends' wardrobes.

There is a performative aspect to weaving: who do I become behind the loom and who sat here before me? For the last two years, I have been researching the construction of the loom and learning old techniques in weaving and color-dying wool through historical re-enactment. The author Selma Lagerlöf [best] described the psychological aspect of weaving in The Saga of Gosta Berling: 'If she would only set up a loom, for to weave is a comfort for all sorrow, it absorbs all other interests, and has been the saving of many women.'"

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From selfies and sex to periods and politics, these six artists are changing a tired narrative about tapestries.

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Contemporary art

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Photographer

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Cindy Sherman: Characters | Art21 "Extended Play"

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Photographer

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Photographer Catherine Opie visits her childhood hometown of Sandusky, Ohio, for a series of photos of Lake Erie taken during different seasons for a permanent installation at the Cleveland Clinic, and photographs shopkeepers in the Los Angeles neighborhood near her current home.

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Catherine Opie investigates the ways in which photographs both document and give voice to social phenomena in America today, registering people's attitudes and relationships to themselves and others, and the ways in which they occupy the landscape. At the core of her investigations are perplexing questions about relationships to community, which she explores on multiple levels across all her bodies of work. Whether documenting political movements, queer subcultures, or urban transformation, Opie's images of contemporary life comprise a portrait of our time in America, which she often considers in relation to a discourse of opposition.

In this 2011 interview with artist Catherine Opie at her Los Angeles studio, she discusses her style of documentary photography; influential artists and techniques; her interest in religion; and the idea of America as the great democracy.

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What do you do if you don't understand something?

Keep reading the same sentence over and over again? Maybe that will work. Maybe it won't.

Or you could grab some coloured pens and mind map out the content.

This is what I do when I'm struggling to understand something. And this has worked for me without fail for the past 10 years.

Whilst I'm sold on mind mapping, I realise you may not be. Common barriers to mind mapping are time ("It takes too long") and the perception of a lack of artistic ability ("I can't draw").

But here's the thing: I'm time poor and I can't draw particularly well but I haven't let that stop me.

You see, mind mapping is actually insanely easy to do and if you practice and silence your inner critic you can save a whole heap of time studying.

A student recently said to me -

"I thought mind mapping would take a lot of time to do but actually it saves me time because I don't have to read my notes over and over anymore"

Mind mapping helps you to study less because you understand the information at a deep level as a result of creating mind maps. If you just read your notes over and over chances are you'll only understand the content at a superficial level and you're going to waste a lot of time.

So if you're serious about reclaiming your time and being able to study less and do more of the things you really want to do, then it's worth giving mind mapping a shot.

Below are 5 important things you should keep in mind when you first start mind mapping.
1. Draw Pictures, even if they look rubbish
Draw lots of pictures. When you get sick of drawing, take a deep breathe and continue to draw some more pictures.

The Picture Superiority Effect shows that humans retain more information about an idea when it's conveyed as a picture than just using words on their own (check out this 30 second explanation).

You don't actually have to draw pretty pictures on your mind maps. Pretty, intricate pictures are actually a distraction from doing what you have to do when you mind map: learn information at a deep level.

And if the picture is absurd and exaggerated, that's even better for aiding memory retention and recall.

2. Create your own mind maps

A year 11 student got really annoyed with me a few years ago because I didn't give her a copy of a mind map I'd created before her human biology test.

Here's the thing: it wouldn't have made much difference if I had given it to her.
Why? Because she didn't create it.

You don't learn complex information very well (if at all) by looking at someone elses mind map and absurd images. You get the edge by taking the time to think through the different ideas and map them out.

Sorry, there are no short cuts. You have to put pen to paper.
3. Be proud of your mind maps
People can be patronizing and even down right rude when they see you mind mapping. I experienced this several times in law school. "Isn't that cute!" students would say as they saw me mind map out legal ideas. But looking back, I can't help but think that maybe these people were slightly insecure.

If someone makes a comment like "Cute pictures!" or "That technique doesn't work for me. I need to take notes on my laptop" just smile politely, say something like "You have to do what works best for you" and carry on mind mapping.
4. Pen and paper works best for mind mapping (not a computer or iPad)
Don't get me wrong, I think technology is great but just not for mind mapping. When you mind map you want a sense of freedom to explore ideas. You don't want to be limited in any way and you certainly want all your senses to be engaged.

As Luc Glasbeek offers -

"It [mind mapping by hand] provides more cognitive stimulation than, say, a smart phone which reduces our world to a sterile and odorless screen barely the size of a coaster. This is limiting, whereas creation should be about expansion and freedom and discovery and roaming.

There's something meditative about making a mindmap with a fountain pen, seeing the ink flow and watching it dry as we pause to gather our thoughts from time to time. Paper doesn't crash. Paper is quiet, paper is patient."

That's right, paper doesn't crash. Paper also doesn't beep to notify you that you have a new message or email.

Despite all the amazing technological advancements, when it comes to efficient learning I believe simple methods (e.g. working with pen and paper) are often the best.
5. Use colours on your mind maps
Let's face it, everyone loves a rainbow, especially a double rainbow. All those colours are nice to look at.

Just like your brain appreciates a rainbow, your brain prefers to look at lots of different colours on a page than just one colour (e.g. black or blue).

Using different colours for the branches on your mind map helps to separate out each of the ideas as well as highlight and group together similar ideas.

Above is a mind map on how to mind map. Whilst this mind map looks nicely illustrated and has been touched up on a computer, just remember your mind maps don't have to be. Your mind maps can be as messy as you like. In fact, I recommend that you give yourself permission to create messy mind maps, especially if you're a perfectionist.
Your challenge
So here's a challenge for this week: set aside 20 - 30 minutes to understand some information you've been grappling with by creating a mind map. Grab some coloured pens, a sheet of A3 or A4 paper, a timer and work through the information (follow the tips on the mind map above). When a little negative voice says "That looks like rubbish", keep going. When you get bogged down, create another branch. The key is to keep moving.

Treat it as a fun experiment. Maybe it will work. Maybe it won't. But like anything in life, you won't know unless you try.
Want to learn more about mind mapping?
Pick up your free copy of The Mind Mapper's Toolkit by clicking here.

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Don't understand something? Break it down with mindmaps

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What do you do if you don't understand something? Keep reading the same sentence over

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The World Behind an Artwork - Comparison and Contrast | NGV

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Identify two artworks that have a common theme or subject. Each artwork should be from a different cultural or historical context and/or by a different artist. Research and compare and contrast the two works, using the following questions.