SHE/HER by shannaembery

SHE/HER SHE/HER SHE/HER SHE/HER SHE/HER

“I wanted a lot simultaneously: to leave art outside for the public, to be a painter of mysterious yet ordered works, to be explicit but not didactic, to find the right subjects, to transform spaces, to disorient and transfix people, to offer up beauty, to be funny and never lie.”

JENNY HOLZER CONCEPTUAL ARTIST & FEMINIST

Now what can I say about Jenny Holzer… The American neoconceptual artist, based in New-York, uses public spaces and society to showcase her ideas and work. Focusing on the delivery of words with the use of large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projections on buildings and illuminated electronic displays. Not only is she a contemporary and conceptual artist, she’s also an advocate for feminism and has played a huge role in the ‘Save The Children’ campaign and Human Rights Watch; supporting and helping women, children and even defectors from the Syrian military.

“A great feature of the electronic signs is their capacity to move content. I love that because motion is much like the spoken word: you can emphasize phrases; you can roll and pause, the kinetic equivalent to inflection ... I write my text by saying the words out loud, or I write and then say words, to test them. Having text move is an extension of that process.”

The specific piece of work is projected by a Cameleon Teleprojecteur into the large space and features poems by Wislawa Szymborska with titles such as “The End and the Beginning”, “The Joy of Writing”, “Children of Our Age” and “The Terrorist, He’s Watching”. Slowly scrolling through, similar to the Star Wars opening credits; causing a dramatic and intense effect on the audience, from the bottom upwards into the darkened space.

Everything in this piece is in capital letters to emphasis to the audience the importance of these words; almost shouting at the viewers and making the point and overall meaning as clear as possible- metaphorically screaming in your face with her concerns. Holzer’s text works often address difficult subjects such as injustice, political and sexual violence, death, grief and rage. As well as exploring these broad and political themes her works also express the intimate and personal. The sense of being surrounded and contained by these words gave a slight glimpse of the overwhelming pressure and fear of the Syrian citizens involved in the war.

AMERICAN, B. 1950

“I draw from everything – from the National Security Archives collection to old material from the FBI’s website to postings by the ACLU. I concentrate on the content. It tends to be very rough material about what’s happened to soldiers in the field, about the good and bad choices they’ve been forced to make, and what has happened to detainees and civilians. I also go to material that’s almost completely gone, either whited out or blacked out, because that represents the issue. You don’t have to spill words when the page is completely black.”

TRUISM

A statement that is obviously true and says nothing new or interesting.

Jenny Holzer’s work first began with a series of posters focusing on the idea of ‘truism’, including lists of typed statements, in alphabetical order; placed at night on buildings in Manhattan. Designing these loud and aggressive statements to start a conversation within society, in the hopes to stir people and attempt to engage others.

NAME TO FACE

JENNY HOLZER JENNY HOLZER

“You are not a source of energy for others to take. This is your table, you set the standards and you choose who gets a seat. Start turning away people who have the audacity to show up in your life with crumbs, because crumbs can’t feed you. Find someone who brings you a whole cake.”

FLORENCE GIVEN BRITISH ILLUSTRATOR & SOCIAL ACTIVIST

Florence Given… Feminist. Social activist. Writer. Influencer. British illustrator. Not only has she graced all social media platforms with her powerful quotes and amazing illustrations but has also empowered thousands of young women across the world to be stronger and more confident in themselves and each other. She has taken a stand from the sexist comments she received when she was younger and rebelled by taken ownership of these ‘remarks’; embracing others with the same confidence.

With just over 265k followers on Instagram, Florence Given has made a name for herself through her art and writing. She has designed her work for women to feel empowered by their sexuality and speak out against misogynistic language. Her slogan, “Dump Him”, is based on a revelation she made after breaking up with her own boyfriend at the time. Florence claims that she realised she was putting more into the relationship than she was getting back. She found it to be unhealthy and decided to focus on herself instead of giving out her energy when it wasn’t being given back.

WOMEN DON’T OWE YOU PRETTY A MANIFESTO EXPLORING ISSUES OF CONTEMPORARY FEMINISM

Why did you decide to call your book “Women Don’t Owe You Pretty”?

Why are women so prone to neglecting their own needs?

It’s not the focal point of my book, but I decided to talk about the male gaze, niceness and making myself small because I had spent a lifetime trying to please others (especially men) and becoming a version of myself that I thought would be approved by them. I had struggled with an eating disorder throughout high school and beyond, and coming out of that I realised how much of my life was dedicated to looking pretty instead of enjoying my life and being present.

Capitalist patriarchy requires us to be submissive and insecure in this way, so that we will continue to buy into the lie that we need men, their validation and the products they sell to us to make us look ‘better’ — to feel whole.

That my body, under capitalist patriarchy, was used as a breeding ground to plant insecurities and directly profit from me trying to fix them, because it would also supply the solution (for a price). It also caused me to reflect on how if I valued my prettiness so much, that had to mean I treated other pretty women better, and that meant I treated women who don’t conform to societies standard of beauty as less than!

The reason I wrote my book is to hopefully poke some holes in this façade. I want women to step out of fear, and into themselves. Angry women inspire me. Full stop. Women who won’t shut up about the things they care about, I love them and I surround myself with them.

(https://www.wonderlandmagazine. com/2020/06/24/florence-givensummer-2020-issue/)

A key theme of Given’s book is the idea of rejecting the pressure to perform femininity and heteronormative desirability.

Given uses bold, colourful illustrations with a 70’s aesthetic and loopy text, which give her audience an impression of bright, hopeful excitement. Her use of bright, bubbly colours and decorative elements is traditionally quite feminine, and seeks to reclaim these elements to a more inclusive female identity. Many of her pieces create discomfort in the viewer, as the visuals are both blunt but contrast her message. Given’s art is a form of cathartic release for the artist - as it allows her to process how she feels about herself and society’s conditioning. “Society rewards women who don’t have to be told to stay in their lane. It loves women who just readily accept their gender roles and conform. However, as feminity is associated with ‘weakness,’ it can also be the thing that people mistreat us for.” Her prints clearly display her personality and characteristics, and her personal views on feminism and society. She’s empowering women and enlightening them with pure confidence and glow; embracing feminine power!

HTTPS://WWW.FLORENCEGIVEN.COM

“No more watching your subconscious drive your life around for you while you sit in the passenger seat as it unfolds. You’re going to take the wheel and drive it your damn self. Because silence and complacency in situations of injustice make you complicit in the violence. Speak up. Say something. Your words have the power to change the fucking world.”

“We’re told that if we shave our legs, put on more makeup, curl our hair and do all this stuff, we’ll receive the illusion of basic human respect. But the respect we’re met with as women when we perform these standards is usually objectification, which also increases our chances of sexual assault and sexual harassment on the street. It’s a double-edged sword.”

NAME TO FACE

FLORENCE GIVEN FLORENCE GIVEN

“You deserve the best, the very best, because you are one of the few people in this lousy world who are honest to themselves, and that is the only thing that really counts.”

FRIDA KAHLO MEXICAN SURREALIST & FEMINIST

Frida Kahlo… the Mexican surrealist who broke all conventions and shaped feminism for the better; rebelling against society and defying traditional social norms by not feeling the need to fit in. Embracing her natural looks and refusing to alter her features, keeping her signature mono-brow and slightly noticeable moustache, which were labelled as inappropriately “masculine”. She even pushed further and triggered society even more by exaggerating them more in her self-portraits; constantly reminding her audience that she was not afraid to be herself - a woman.

Also known for her brightly coloured visual appearance in person and within her self- portraits, including flowers and ribbons by embracing the stereotypes of being ‘feminine’. Kahlo’s works have been described as surrealism at its finest. She experimented with many varied styles and motifs – often shocking the art world with paintings filled with sexual references. Her subject matters were symbolic. The themes she focused on proved to be deeply personal in nature too. Her heritage for instance, or her long struggles with childlessness and femininity.

When looking at the progress women have had through the years it makes me so happy but still a little overwhelmed as (and I think we can all agree on this) we still have a long way to go; women are still suffering from the hands of men and politicians who take pride in controlling and restraining women and young girls. Even to this day, it is still frowned upon by many people to talk about ‘sensitive subjects’ like abortions, the ‘unconventional’ thought of not wanting children, equal rights and sexuality.

Frida’s paintings touched on female issues such as abortion, miscarriage, birth, breastfeeding and much more. These were things considered to be strictly taboo and never spoken of at all in public back then- pushing the limits of art and feminism. Kahlo was also open about her sexuality. She was never ashamed to admit that she was a bisexual, nor did she ever feel the need to apologise for her choice of sexual partners.

HENRY FORD HOSPITAL, 1932

Frida depicts herself in Henry Ford Hospital, lying on the bed naked with blood and haemorrhage. This painting is a reflection of what Frida felt when she was having a miscarriage at Henry Ford Hospital; alone and in pain. The twisted position she is placed on the bed, depicts her confused and disorientated emotions after this trauma. As well as revealing to the audience the obvious physical effect it had on her body.

TABOO

A social or religious custom prohibiting or restricting a particular practice or forbidding association with a particular person, place, or thing. Prohibited or restricted by social custom.

“You deserve the best, the very best, because you are one of the few people in this lousy world who are honest to themselves, and that is the only thing that really counts.”

PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES OF ART WITH SENSITIVE SUBJECT MATTERS Affairs and adultery was a strange normality for men but to be never spoken about by women- the heartbroken soul who is effected. Frida has spoken and expressed her emotions from her husband, Diego Rivera, cheating on her and has taken pride in this trauma. This self- portrait represents the artist’s vulnerability and emotional turmoil over her husband Diego Rivera’s adultery. Depicting her husband as her third eye which suggests he was covering her sight with lie’s, stopping her from seeing the truth and what he really was as a person and partner. Kahlo once wrote in a notebook: “I suffered two great accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down … the other accident is Diego.” It was a striking comparison between her husband and the bus accident that nearly killed her at 18 and left her with horrific injuries including a broken spinal column.

Kahlo never backed down, and she never apologised for just wanting to survive. As she so succinctly put it, “They thought I was a surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” Embracing her sexuality and gender; breaking stereotypical gender roles of being a ‘slave’ to the male figure. She has had a massive effect on young women and especially feminism; promoting self- love, confidence and promoting that you don’t need to prove yourself to anyone. Be you and be happy. In recent years, Kahlo’s influence has only grown thanks to the comingtogether of social media and a new awareness of female power; in some aspects, she has been reborn as a feminist icon for a new generation. Over half a century after her death, the myth of Kahlo remains as alive as ever—on Instagram, her official account boasts a following of 1.2 million strong. She has been praised for overstepping society’s limits and using her struggle as a strength to keep from being limited by it. She is considered a hero because she never conformed to society’s standards when presenting herself.

HTTPS://WWW.INSTAGRAM.COM/FRIDAKAHLO

“My paintings are well-painted, not nimbly but patiently. My painting contains in it the message of pain. I think that at least a few people are interested in it. It’s not revolutionary. Why keep wishing for it to be belligerent? I can’t. Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all of this. I think work is the best.”

MAGDALENA CARMEN FRIDA KAHLO Y CALDERN

NAME TO FACE

FRIDA KAHLO

BRIDGET RILEY OP ARTIST & FEMINIST

The amazing British artist, Bridget Riley, best known for her optical illusion artwork came famous in 1960’s; and later being the first woman in history to in the painting price at the Venice Biennale in 1968. Due to the abstract geometric nature of much of her work, she has also been cited as an influence for many designers, including the well-known graphic designer. Even if artists aren’t influenced by her abstract style, they cite her intelligence and perseverance in an ever-changing art world as a model. The organisation that she founded in 1968 with friend and fellow Op artist Peter Sedgley, SPACE, which helps artists find studio space and fosters a community of creative individuals, continues today in London. Riley’s name is synonymous with the Op Art movement of the 1960s but the artist sought not to be defined by the term, believing it placed limitations on her work and held associations with the decade’s propensity for psychedelic drugs. Her formal compositions invoke feelings of tension and repose, symmetry and asymmetry, dynamism and stasis and other psychic states, making her paintings less about optical illusions and more about stimulating the viewer’s imagination.

“An artist’s early work is inevitably made up of a mixture of tendencies and interests, some of which are compatible and some of which are in conflict”

OP-ART Riley cites Movement in Squares as the first major step, after Kiss, towards her breakthrough into abstraction. During a difficult time in her art making, and in an attempt to make a new start, she began with the simple square. She said “Everyone knows what a square looks like and how to make one in geometric terms. It is a monumental, highly conceptualised form: stable and symmetrical, equal angles, equal size. I drew the first few squares. No discoveries there. Was there anything to be found in a square? But as I drew, things began to change.” She created the design for Movement in Squares in one sitting without stopping, and then painted each alternate square black to provide contrast. When she stepped back to look, she was “surprised and elated” by what she saw.

Riley establishes the square as the basic unit and then modulates it across the canvas, maintaining its height but changing its width. The square’s width diminishes toward the center of the canvas until it becomes a sliver, and then increases again toward the right edge. It’s as if two planes are coming together and bending into each other, not unlike the pages of a bound book lying open. The progression of shapes intensifies, climaxes, and then de-escalates, provoking the viewer to confront their perceptual senses as well as their ideas of “stabilities and instabilities, certainties and uncertainties.” Riley’s exploration of how we see came to be rooted in her own experience and experimentation, her own intuition, and not on theories of optics.

(HTTPS://WWW.THEARTSTORY.ORG/ARTIST/RILEY-BRIDGET/)

“I work on two levels. I occupy my conscious mind with things to do, lines to draw, movements to organize, rhythms to invent. In fact, I keep myself occupied. But that allows other things to happen which I’m not controlling... the more I exercise my conscious mind, the more open the other things may find that they can come through.”

This iconic painter who is one of the foremost exponents of Op art has played a strong role within the optical illusion art movement and also had a strong view on feminism and made it known to her audience and society. She expressed that being labelled a ‘woman artist’ felt patronising and restrictive. In 1973, Bridget Riley published her essay ‘The Hermaphrodite’, making her thoughts on the matter clear. Riley didn’t want to be categorised by her gender, calling it a ‘red herring’. “I have never been aware of my femininity as such, when in the studio. Nor do I believe that male artists are aware of an exclusive masculinity while they are at work.” In fact, Riley’s comments have even been taken out of context and used to suggest that she is anti-feminist; claiming that she is not a true feminist and ‘disagrees’ with the movement. She asserts her right to be an artist on her own terms- ‘Women as artists,’ she writes, ‘should focus on how to start, lead and sustain a creative life. It’s not a question of style or a break with tradition.’

NAME TO FACE

BRIDGET RILEY

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE ABSTRACT PAINTER & FEMINIST

Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most significant artists of the 20 century, renowned for her contribution to modern art. O’Keeffe was recognised as one of America’s most important and successful artists, known for her paintings of New York skyscrapers—an essentially American symbol of modernity—as well as her equally radical depictions of flowers. She played an important part in the development of modern art in America, becoming the first female painter to gain respect in New York’s art world in the 1920s. Her unique and new way of painting nature, simplifying its shapes and forms meant that she was called a ‘pioneer’. She is also considered by some to be the foremother of the feminist art movement. She worked in a discipline dominated by male artists, critics, gallery owners, and curators, who were critical of women artists; despite her seemingly ‘gendered’ paintings, she resisted sexist stereotypes and expressed this most dominantly through her wardrobe.

These flower paintings, to some, have taken on a sexualised element. It had to do in part with her husband Stieglitz’s photography of her in the 20s, some erotically tinged, casting her as the ingénue under the male gaze. Critics at the time wrote about O’Keeffe’s shameless “nakedness” in her paintings, which caused her personal pain. Eventually as she grew older, she learnt to ignore what was said about her.

“Men put me down as the best woman painter... I think I’m one of the best painters.”

Later, feminist readings revelled in these insinuations of an implied sexuality within O’Keeffe’s work, adding even more to the lore of O’Keeffe as mysterious, erotic and sensual. O’Keeffe resisted at the feminist interpretations and the perceived sexual connotations throughout her career. In fact, she hardly weighed in on conversations about the meaning behind her paintings, preferring to let her work speak for itself.

Believing her abstractions to be the primary source of misreadings of her art, O’Keeffe moreover curtailed her production of such pieces and limited their inclusion in exhibitions of her work that Stieglitz organised after 1923. While she never abandoned Modernist abstraction as the underlying principle in her work, by the mid-1920s she had shifted its emphasis to redefine herself as a painter of recognisable forms, by which she remains best known today.

“She became labelled as a flower painter when her lifetime was devoted to the very modern idea of abstraction and the very modern idea of creating an identifiable American art.”

O’Keeffe herself often commented that the colour and form of the flowers was more important than the subject matter, suggesting that she was interested in the natural form and capturing its beauty. Several feminist critics have praised O’Keeffe’s work as capturing feminist themes far ahead of their time

Pornography which was becoming more widely available presented female sexuality as ‘anticipatory and passively receptive to masculine desire’ and no wonder that O’Keeffe’s paintings seemed to so many to be a rare, distinctive and erotic counterpoint to such a prevailing view.

Certainly, in the era in which she was working, O’Keeffe was in a maledominated world and was repeatedly reminded of her gender and otherness as she moved through the art world. In the flower paintings for which O’Keeffe became most famous the curves, folds, interiors, layers, darknesses cannot fail to bring to mind female genitalia.

“I remember how I used to argue with my brother about which were best, boys or girls. When I argued that girls were best, and gave as proof the fact that mother was a woman, he said, ‘But father is a man, and God is a man, too!’ I think that has always rankled.”

DEER’S SKULL WITH PEDERNAL

NAME TO FACE

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE GEORGIA O’KEEFFE

BARBARA FRUGER CONCEPTUAL ARTIST & FEMINIST

Barbara Kruger, conceptual artist and feminist, is most known for her combination of type and image that conveys a direct feminist cultural critique. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as “you”, “your”, “I”, “we”, and “they”, addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, consumerism, sexuality and feminism. Kruger’s artistic mediums include photography, sculpture, graphic design, architecture, as well as video and audio installations. Kruger addresses media and politics in their native tongue: sensational, authoritative, and direct. Personal pronouns like “you” and “I” are staples of Kruger’s practice, bringing the viewer into each piece. Kruger’s work prompts us to interrogate our own positions; in the artist’s words, “to question and change the systems that contain us.” She demands that we consider how our identities are formed within culture, through representation in language and image.

In 1979, Kruger developed her signature style using large-scale black-andwhite images overlaid with text. She repurposed found images, juxtaposing them with short, pithy phrases printed in Futura Bold or Helvetica Extra Bold typeface in black, white, or red text bars. In addition to creating text and photographic works, Kruger has produced video and audio works, written criticism, taught classes, curated exhibitions, designed products, such as T-shirts and mugs, and developed public projects, such as billboards, bus wraps, and architectural interventions.

For some, Kruger has had a forbidding aura, which is probably because of the stringent feminist content of some of her more agitprop aphorisms, such as “Your body is a battleground,” which features a woman’s face made into a grotesque-looking mask by slicing it in half and rendering one side as a negative. Notoriously media-averse and aloof from the celebrity trappings of the art world, Kruger has consistently continued to use her artwork to punch upwards and speak back to power; grasping the imperative and the technique of engaging the viewer with arresting visuals.

“I try to make work that joins the seductions of wishful thinking with the criticality of knowing better.”

IMMERSIVE ART “I work with pictures and words because I think they have the ability to tell us and remind us where we’ve come from and where we’re going. They have powers and pleasures and desires and disgusts.”

Kruger started to create environments that would submerge the viewer in language, at times through sound video projections and sound, or, like at the Hirshhorn Museum, through vinyl installations enclosing a whole space with slogans and questions. Creating architecturally enveloping installations has long been a part of Kruger’s practice, beginning with her 1991 exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in New York, which featured a site-specific installation covering all four walls of the gallery with provocative text and images; displaying her characteristic declarations about power, voyeurism, and the horrors of war. Rather than infiltrating mundane spaces through objects, Kruger noted that her installations “construct and contain our experiences” against the overwhelming onslaught of graphics and text.

WWW.INSTAGRAM.COM/FRIDAKAHLO “I believe that who we are, and consequently the work that we make, whether we’re visual artists or writers or journalists or filmmakers, is a projection of where we were born, what’s been withheld or lavished upon us, our color, our sex, our class. And everything we do in life to some degree is a reflection of that context.” “One thing I learned working at magazines was that if you couldn’t get people to look at a page or a cover, then you were fired. It was all about how you create arresting works, and by arresting I mean stop people, even for a nanosecond.”

NAME TO FACE

BARBARA KRUGER

GUERRILLA GIRLS ACTIVISTS & FEMINISTS Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City in 1985 with the mission of bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community. The group employs culture jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards, and public appearances to expose discrimination and corruption. They also often use humour in their work to make their serious messages engaging. They are known for their “Guerilla” tactics, hence their name, such as hanging up posters or staging surprise exhibitions. To maintain their anonymity, group members wear gorilla masks in public and adopt the names of historic women artists, such as Käthe Kollwitz and Frida Kahlo, as pseudonyms. Guerrilla Girls posters first appeared in 1985, pasted onto structures in lower Manhattan. Combining bold advertising-style graphics with eye-opening facts and figures, the posters detailed discrimination by the city’s art galleries and museums against women artists and artists of colour.

Humour is also a vital part of the Guerrilla Girls’s art, making their serious messages accessible and engaging. The group continues to address sexism and racism in the art world, but also targets Hollywood, mass media, art censorship, government corruption and apathy, and the battle for reproductive rights. The Guerrilla Girls first operated through poster campaigns and protests in New York; they now maintain an online presence and present public lectures and performances around the world. The collective continues to embrace a populist approach to art, producing their artwork in quantity to reach a broad audience.

As their reputation has grown, they have encompassed targets beyond the art sphere, like Hollywood, right wing politicians, and same-sex marriage. They have collaborated with institutions that once shunned them, including the Tate Modern and MoMA, and yet their tactics remain as radical as ever.

In a 2012 interview they revealed, “We’ve been working on a weapon, an estrogen bomb...If you drop it, the men will drop their guns and start hugging each other. They’ll say, ‘Why don’t we clean this place up?’ In the end, we encourage people to send their extra estrogen pills to Karl Rove; he needs a little more estrogen.”

THE UNKNOWN GIRLS The Guerrilla Girls made feminism seem like a glamorous club one could join. As New York Times art critic Roberta Smith has written, they took “feminist theory, gave it a populist twist and some Madison Avenue pizazz and set it loose in the streets.” In admitting women only, and exclusively by invitation, the group mirrored power circles in the male-dominated art world.

Until 1989 there was no imagery in the Guerrilla Girls’ work, just text. Then “One Sunday morning we conducted a ‘weenie count’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art comparing the number of nude males to nude females in the artworks on display,” they recalled. On the side of a bus, where one expects to see announcements for upcoming exhibitions, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” was an image intended to embarrass one of the art world’s most hallowed institutions. PAF rejected the poster. The Guerrilla Girls took the project forward on their own, renting advertising space on New York City buses “until the bus company canceled our lease, saying that the image, based on Ingres’s famous Odalisque, was too suggestive and that the figure appeared to have more than a fan in her hand.” With its bold type face reminiscent of advertising, and use of humour and statistics, it is the iconic Guerrilla Girls’ work.

“Bitch is a stereotype in transition. A developing culture of unrepentant Bitches can be found everywhere! There’s Bitch magazine; there’s a growing industry of Bitch-empowerment books. If the world is going to call you a Bitch for being ambitious, outspoken, and in control of your on sexuality, why not accept it and be proud? If we use it to describe ourselves, it can’t be used against us. We say, “Bitches of the world unite”. Be tough, get what you want, be a real Bitch. But don’t let anyone else call you one!”

NAME TO FACE

GURILLA GIRL’S

LOUISE BOURGEOIS VISUAL ARTIST & FEMINIST

Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement. Early on, Bourgeois focused on painting and printmaking, turning to sculpture only in the later 1940s. However, by the 1950s and early 1960s, there are gaps in her production as she became immersed in psychoanalysis. Then, in 1964, for an exhibition after a long hiatus, Bourgeois presented strange, organically shaped plaster sculptures that contrasted dramatically with the totemic wood pieces she had exhibited earlier. But alternating between forms, materials, and scale, and veering between figuration and abstraction became a basic part of Bourgeois’s vision, even while she continually probed the same themes: loneliness, jealousy, anger, and fear.

In a 2008 film made about her life, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine, Bourgeois described these spider sculptures as her ‘most successful subject’. Bourgeois uses the spider, both predator (a sinister threat) and protector (an industrious repairer), to symbolise the mother figure. The spinning and weaving of the spider’s web links to Bourgeois’s own mother, who worked in the family’s tapestry restoration business, and who encouraged Louise to participate. Whatever materials and processes Louise Bourgeois used to create her powerful artworks, the main force behind her art was to work through her troubled childhood memories.

These memories were not specific, but a layering of emotional responses to the complicated relationship she had with her parents and their relationship with each other. Bourgeois’s mother, Joséphine, suffered from ill health and Louise cared for her for long periods of time. Josephine died when Louise was just 22. This, and her father’s unfaithfulness (he had a series of mistresses), led to a fear of abandonment, a key theme in Bourgeois’s work. The backdrop of the First World War, which began when she was three years old, made her traumatic memories of childhood even more intense.

SPIDER

“You learn for yourself not for others, not to show off, not to put the other one down/ learning is your secret, it is all you have, it is the only thing you can call your own. nobody can take it away…”

SUBVERSIVE STITCHING

Bourgeois returned to old ideas and remade them in fabric, exchanging bronze for pink flannel, for example. In doing so, she drew attention to the gendering inherent in our conceptions of materials, where hard bronze and marble are seen as traditionally masculine, whilst soft fabric is seen as feminine and as a ‘lesser’ material.

Artistic materials and categories are subject to a gendered hierarchy, which Bougeois’s fabric works both indicate and forcefully subvert. Fabric speaks directly to the female condition and to the female body. As Rozsika Parker, the definitive expert on women’s craft in art, suggests, ‘Bourgeois’s work brings out the deeper meanings of textiles’ evocation of women’ because ‘in her work fabric is associated directly with female sexuality, the unconscious and the body.’

Fabric’s softness and malleability, along with its tactile similarity to skin (particularly in Bourgeois’s pink fabric), associates it both with sensuality and with childhood recollections of maternity and its material comforts, and therefore with the feminine. Bourgeois is a woman artist making works that are inherently and selfassertively ‘feminine’ in their subject matter, colour and materials.

NAME TO FACE

LOUISE BOURGEOIS LOUISE BOURGEOIS

HANNAH HOCH COLLAGE ARTIST & FEMINIST

Known for her incisively political collages and photomontages, Hannah Höch appropriated and recombined images and text from mass media to critique popular culture, the failings of the Weimar Republic, and the socially constructed roles of women. The technical proficiency and symbolic significance of Höch’s compositions refute any notion that she was an “amateur.” She astutely spliced together photographs or photographic reproductions she cut from popular magazines, illustrated journals, and fashion publications, re-contextualising them in a dynamic and layered style. “There are no limits to the materials available for pictorial collages—above all they can be found in photography, but also in writing and printed matter, even in waste products.” Höch explored gender and identity in her work, and in particular she humorously criticised the concept of the “New Woman” in Weimar Germany, a vision of a woman who was purportedly man’s equal.

According to Mario Haves, in “A Daughter of Dada: Hannah Hoch at MOMA”, Hoch was considered the sole woman associated with the Berlin Dada movement, and she was often referred to as the “good girl” of the group, for being seen as relatively quiet and moderate, and because of her status as a woman. While many of her Dada colleagues treated her condescendingly, Hoch worked to be recognised among them, and fought against the sexism that she experienced.

Other influential works of Hoch’s include the series From an Ethnographic Museum which she created between 1925 and 1930. This series exists of montages of “primitive” sculptures and images of non-Western women juxtaposed with images of white “stereotypically feminine” women in bizarre configurations. Hoch also played with gender roles, and would juxtapose male and female body parts in one piece, thereby critiquing the binaries created by strict gender roles.

Höch’s engagement with the mid-1920s idea of the ‘New Woman’ also emerges strongly. The ‘New Woman’ had bobbed hair, worked, and had sex – a product of getting the vote, and Article 119 of the Weimar constitution stating that marriage was ‘based on equality of the sexes’.

However, many remained in low-status work with unequal pay, and married women were not allowed jobs if ablebodied veterans could take them. Within her circles, Höch was the New Woman, sharing both her style and her frustrations, and her background made her acutely aware of how this figure was a media creation and an advertising target.

“I wish to blur the boundaries around which we self-certain people tend to delineate around all we can achieve”

NAME TO FACE

HANNAH HOCH

PUBLICATION BY SHANNA EMBERY