Feminism and art, 9 views

How might we assess feminism’ s initial impacts on art, its subsequent historicization, and its continuing influence? Catherine de Zegher, an independent curator and former executor director of the Drawing center in New York, states, “Today, younger artists are clearly inspired by the legacy of feminist practice and theory, and that at the core of their work is the intersection of gender, class, race, and ethnicity.” It is this legacy of “feminine” that has been at the heart of de Zegher’s directorial and curatorial practice. Under de Zegher’s directorship, “the Drawing Center was a space for art and programming with guts, vision, and imagination, a space to air contrary opinions and ideas, to present alternative structures of thought and feeling, and to embrace the differences that human beings, as cultural creatures, share.”
Catherine de Zegher suggests that feminism challenged the phallic paradigm of binary thinking, rejection or assimilation, aggression or identification that shapes everything from how art is viewed to how societies treat immigrants. Many artist of the second half of the twentieth century went against the restrictive modernist axis; making art imbued with thoughtful reciprocity between artist and viewer, opening up new possibilities for connections in the shared exhibition space between work, maker, and beholder. De Zegher states, “through the use of semiotics and psychoanalysis feminism in art enabled us to see what formerly was (or still is) eclipsed; what does not align with that which is considered important of the moment, or which has different conditions of perceptibility.” Artists such as Ellen Gallagher, Carol Rama, and Nancy Spero, including many other feminist women and men, recognized the potential for notions of relation and connectivity to provide a larger understanding of what art could be.
Ellen Gallagher is an African American painter whose work explores issues of race, identity, and transformation. De Zegher states, “Gallegher’s work resists the intelligible invocation of identity as it operates through the stylized repetition of bodily gestures and movement, the possibility for transformation is found in the interruption of such repetition. Gallagher series DeLuxe 2004/2005 is comprised of a suite of 60 framed multiples that that join together to form a large-scale work that is deceivingly abstract. Each individual unit of the grid-like structure contains altered archival images from black photo magazines. 
Gallagher is not only inspired by the aesthetic of the advertisements, but her re-working of these images is also prompted by the text within them that includes names for synthetic wig materials such as “afrilon”, “afrilic” and “Nu-Nile”. The divergence of the grid-like structure and the elaborate wigs reference the tension between individuality and conformity, as well as authenticity and artifice. DeLuxe conveys the potential of freedom through transformation and the universal desire for an unrestrained identity.
Carol Rama is a self taught Italian feminist artist whose unconventional painting includes an erotic, and often sexually aggressive universe populated by characters that present themes of sexual identity with specific references to female sensuality. Her water-colors depict erotic scenes replete with often fragmented, injured bodies of mainly women, or objects charged with sexual symbolism such as shoes, prostheses or even animals, suggesting that all types of bodies, animate and inanimate, embrace a paradoxical blend of the mechanical, the dangerous, and the pleasurable. Nancy Spero is an artist who works in many media, from installation to object based art to printmaking, both traditional and experimental. The depiction of the female form is prevalent in her work, particularly the idea of the female form being depicted by a male artist. Spero creates art that is freed from this “male gaze”, art that is done by a woman for other women. We Are Pro-Choice is a combination of images of women from the ages that are removed from their historical context and are placed on a blank page, almost delighting in their freedom. The women in We Are Pro-Choice have been given an ideal world, a blank page literally, in which to define themselves; as opposed to a world that defines them. Their existence on the page and the vibrancy that comes from it is “symbolic of the way the world could be.”
After considering these artists’ practice, Catherine de Zegher asserts “ I am hopeful that it will be possible to “degender” and “deracialize” difference and to think of it in positive, nonreifying terms. If modernism’s radical and inventive strategies were dependent on alienation, separation, negativity, violence, and de(con)struction, the twenty-first century may develop an aesthetics of relation and reciprocity defined by reconstruction, inclusion, and connectivity, binding impulses, and even by healing attitudes.” As a young artist I agree that feminist practice and theory has had a large impact on my work and that of my contemporaries. Contemporary art reflects feminist notions in its attempt to transgress the racial, ethnic, and gender dictates of society, and questions modernist notions of alienation and separation. De Zegher uses contemporary artists who “ask us to consider the ambiguous boundary between the self and otherness not as an occasion for horror and fear but as an opening into a new form of identity construction,” to exemplify