HUFFINGTON POST  3 JANUARY 2011
 
 

All too often in the course of human evolution, the ground marked for rebirth is scarred by tragedy. This was certainly the case with feminist art at the dawning of the 21st century.

The opening of the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art on March 23, 2007 provided ground for new hope.

The inaugural exhibition Global Feminisms was curated by Linda Nochlin, whose seminal essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” spearheaded a new room in the ivory tower that would eventually steer the postmodern dialectic, celebrated at a 2001 Princeton conference I attended on the 30th anniversary of the essay’s 1971 publication in ArtNews.

Yet, a year later, I was present at the opening celebration of an exhibition of second wave feminism Kate Millett, when she declared: “Feminism is dead.”

Was this true? Could the black walls surrounding the triangular shaped table of The Dinner Party represent a dead womb, a hermetically sealed timeline that had come to an end? Were the stars of the feminist movement upholding the status quo, thereby preventing the arising of new stars in the feminist galaxy? What hope then lay for the future of women artists?

It seemed that Millett was prophetic, for her proclamation was born out on the eve of the Winter Solstice 2008 by the suicide of the brilliant and beautiful Emma Bee Bernstein, who carried the pedigree, along with the hope for feminist’s future. The tragic death of this prominent third generation feminist daughter sent a chill through the New York feminist/avant-garde establishment.

Where was the meaning in the face of a new feminist generation who wowed the audience at a BMA panel killing herself on the darkest night of the year inside the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice? No one dared ventured a guess.

Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968 signifies a rebirth that delivers us to a place where we can place such a tragedy in the context of shifting paradigms. The exhibition stands as the most timely and groundbreaking in New York City this fall for its excavation of a repressed history that Emma Bee Bernstein was digging into by way of her isolated personal/public examination of the precarious realm between fashion and art.

The exhibition claims for feminism iconic female figures whose Promethean spark brought them brief fame before sinking into the shadows of Pop Art’s slick surfaces.

The Venezuelan native Marisol Escobar (whose given name evokes the marriage of masculine (Sol = sun) and feminine (mar = sea) was prescient of the androgynous spirit of the inspired Pop Princess that lighted the stage for a brief moment, before the men — as usual — took over the movement.

The founder of British Pop was Pauline Boty, the vibrant artist who embodied the mod style of London’s 1965 Youthquake: rebellious, beautiful, brilliant and free-spirited.

Boty’s seductively subversive multimedia (poet, risqué dancer, radio show host, actress) expression exuded the spirit of the androgynous Aquarian archetype that continues to infiltrate the collective consciousness via the antics of tabloid celebrities, even as the authentic rebellion driving this zeitgeist has been institutionally repressed by the art world system.

Far from revealing the full story of these fascinating women — an impossible task to be sure due to the difficulties of locating the work — who often were collaborators with their male partners, the exhibition seduces and entices into a new diverse view of feminism founded in a daring penetration into the gender archetypes controlling human behavior. In leaving a hunger for more, it plants the seeds for a new epoch of feminism marked by a younger generation of artists exploring mythologies of freedom delivering on the feminist promise of an authentic equality of gender.

The lack of a feminist consciousness also meant a lack of self-consciousness. This alone makes the ingredients of Seductive Subversion fresh and new, despite being executed nearly a half century ago. And too, the work reveals that the nature of the feminine is to be fluid, which means not retaining a fixed identity that the still male-dominated art world deems essential for success — the self-branding currently being brandished via reality TV.

How do artists devoted to inner truth get around this obstacle?

Catalog co-editor Kalliopi Minioudaki’s standout essay “Pop Proto-Feminisms: Beyond the Paradox of the Woman Pop Artist” brings to light what may prove to be the most pertinent feminist scholarship of this century. By examining the diverse strategies in what she terms “proto-feminist” art, this new generation of feminist scholar provides a link between the artists of the early sixties she has excavated and such latter day anomalies as Carolee Schneemann, Tracey Emin and Francesca Woodman. The dismissal of such spirited art as narcissistic by second wave feminist scholars (I witnessed this personally at the Princeton Conference when a prominent feminist scholar stated: “I distrust the inward: it smacks of narcissism.”) has effectively censored a younger generation of artists from inner exploration.

The irresistible seduction of these “proto-feminist” pioneers on view in Brooklyn through January 9 (though the exhibit will be going on tour) not only succeeds in making the underpinnings of a historical movement come alive again, but inspires a new erotically charged Pop movement liberated from the feminist straightjacket and devoted to the mythology of an authentic liberation of gender equality, within and without.

Isn’t the public ready and waiting for the flowering of an archetype which poked through in the sixties cultural revolution only to burrow underground for the next half-century? This time, the promise is a full liberation, an authentic merging of public/private revealed by the archival documents in this exhibition into a new view of the feminine: pro-active in all her androgynous power.

From this viewpoint, we can address the question about women artists and greatness not by comparing woman artists in this exhibition to the male giants of Pop, but by revisiting the word “greatness” from the viewpoint of a holistic paradigm.

Let us not forget here that women are the authentic image-makers for a culture. So if the art of Seductive Subversion seems to be echoing that of much more prominent male artists, you can bet that these women got there first!

 
— Lisa Paul Streitfeld, Huffington Post

 
 
“Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968” at the Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Parkway at Washington Avenue in Prospect Heights, 718-638-5000), October 15, 2010 – January 9, 2011. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.
 

 
Photo 1: Niki de Saint Phalle’s Black Rosy is an iconic work representing the shadow of Eros that would be repressed by feminist criticism in the years to come.

Niki de Saint Phalle, “Black Rosy, or My Heart Belongs to Rosy” (1965)
(Niki Charitable Art Foundation)

 
Photo 2: Niki de Saint Phalle’s My Heart Belongs to Marcel Duchamp (1963) reveals the complex inner feminine emotions that would soon be repressed by feminist dogma.

Niki de Saint Phalle, “My Heart Belongs to Marcel Duchamp” (1963)
(Niki Charitable Art Foundation)

 
Photo 3: Kalliopi Minioudaki with her Cretan ancestry on the timeline in the Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

ARTDAILY  29 DECEMBER 2010
 
 

VIENNA — Rediscovering outstanding women Pop artists, POWER UP fulfills Dorothy Iannone’s combative promise after fifty years. Currently on display until March 6, 2011 at Kunsthalle wien, the show aims at the reinterpretation of an art movement that until today has primarily been associated with male protagonists. Plastic, loud colors, reduced forms, and graphic contours – the nine women artists’ works on display resemble those of their male colleagues in many respects.

Whereas their works appeal to the taste of the masses, these artists, as pioneers of Feminism, have remained belligerent and critical. They reveal the consumer culture’s superficiality, exposing the commodity myth as an empty shell like Christa Dichgans, ironically transforming everyday objects to oversized kitsch objects like Jann Haworth, or exploring mass media clichés and superstar constructions like Rosalyn Drexler. Like Sister Corita, a committed peace activist, they took a clear stand on the sixties’ social and political events such as the Vietnam War.

The exhibition pursues its political perspective in those instances where the era’s current notions of what a woman is are revised by different views: Kiki Kogelnik and Marisol describe the corset in which the representation of women by themselves and by others is caught, while Evelyne Axell or Dorothy Iannone provocatively display the nude body, love, and sexuality, and, like Niki de Saint Phalle, attract the viewer’s attention with sophisticated modes of self-presentation.

The next great moment in history is ours! — Dorothy Iannone

“We choose to LOOK at LIFE all the TIME, and though we realize that they are in one sense adult comic books, they are also full of things that speak…” For Sister Corita, the world of signs, advertising slogans, and the culture of logos was not just some vast wasteland, but a sphere that supplied her with input for an art nourished by everyday life. Her work, like that of Evelyne Axell, Christa Dichgans, Rosalyn Drechsler, Jann Haworth, Dorothy Iannone, Kiki Kogelnik, Marisol, and Niki de Saint Phalle, stands for feminine strategies of artistic self empowerment during the Pop Art era, particularly in the 1960s. While from an art historical point of view Pop Art is mainly associated with male protagonists, POWER UP – Female Pop Art intends to undertake a revision of this understanding through the presentation of outstanding women artists’ positions.

Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, commodity cult and critique of capitalism, high and low art, the women artists’ works on display in many aspects resemble those by their male colleagues in terms of material, subject matter, style, and working method. Documenting and hypostatizing the prosperity of the postwar era and reflecting upon the superficiality of consumerism, the artists unmask the commodity myth as an empty civilizational achievement like Christa Dichgans or affirm certain items by turning them into oversized kitsch objects like Jann Haworth with her Soft Sculptures. Through the graphic character of their simple language of forms, their use of new materials like plastic, and their choice of garish colors, women pop artists, as feminist pioneers attracting maximum attention with their self presentations like Evelyne Axell, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Kiki Kogelnik, satisfied the taste of the mass and yet remained militant, critical, and exceptional. The exhibition does not postulate some genuinely feminine art, but strives to focus on a number of outstanding women artists’ oeuvres in the field of Pop Art and to shed light on their identity creating practice and their view of women’s role in society which was very much determined by patriarchal notions in the 1960s.

These artists’ approaches have revised the male regime of viewing and such representations of women as Tom Wesselmann’s deindividualized matrices of the female body, Mel Ramos’s picturesque fusion of advertisements with lasciviously rendered nudes featuring as objects of desire, and Allen Jones’s sadomasochistically arranged female sexual companions. Instead, they describe the corset in which women’s self representation and representation by others seemed to be caught in those years like Jann Haworth, Kiki Kogelnik, and Marisol, highlight the attempt to shake off the fetters of domestic life and become visible in public by means of art like Christa Dichgans, and provocatively expose the female body, love, and sexuality like Evelyne Axell and Dorothy Iannone. Painting over newspapers in an iconoclastic gesture, Rosalyn Drexler explores the creation of clichés and gender typifications in Hollywood films as well as the construction of superstars. Open toward the popular culture surrounding her, Sister Corita, in an early act of culture jamming, relied on advertising propaganda for creating new messages which were democratically and serigraphically produced and sold at a low price. Her works, like Kiki Kogelnik’s, Marisol’s, or Niki de Saint Phalle’s, comprise critical commentaries on contemporary events and political contexts such as the Vietnam War.

The ladies of the “Années Pop” present strategies of self empowerment, celebrate female sexuality and lust, draw on pin ups, excerpts from consumer culture, and fragments of an occasionally very banal everyday world in a bad girl manner, comment upon social changes, and translate personal issues into political ones in their clearly autobiographically tinted oeuvres. Their proto feminist works counter the affective death of classical Pop Art and its cool and anonymous style. By also employing a traditional female language of forms, using textiles and ornamental elements, and relying on a naïve imagery, their approach idiosyncratically extends the established canon of art. What they share with this style is the humor and lightness of an attitude toward life whose facets and variations are still unfolding in today’s art.

 
Image: Christa Dichgans, Stilleben mit Frosch, 1969 (© Christa Dichgans, Privatsammlung, Berlin)

THE RIVIERA TIMES  17 DECEMBER 2010
 
 

A moment captured in black and white. Four men, four pairs of eyes fixated on a fifth figure. Her heavy fringe is brushed to one side, her tiny frame swims in a Breton top and men’s slacks; she is the only one staring at the lens, the only one posing. Hands on hips in an exaggerated manner, she puffs out her chest and tries to maintain a faux serious expression under the strain of a half smile.

The woman is Niki de Saint Phalle. It’s 1962, and the French-American is the art world’s new darling thanks to her shooting paintings, for which she set up public galleries and shot at bags of paint strung to canvases with a rifle. She and her partner, the sculptor Jean Tinguely, would soon be known as the “Bonnie and Clyde” of art.

When I stumbled across this photograph in Nice’s Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMAC) three years ago, I stopped still and looked at it for a long time, imagining what it might have been like to be Niki de Saint Phalle. A few months later, I was so inspired I followed her to France. It sounds ridiculous but it’s the truth: I moved to another country because of a photograph. Why? Because in that image, in her art in general, there was something that stirred the romantic in me, because I thought that if I came here maybe my life could be as creative as hers had been.

In retrospect, I see it was both hopeful and hopeless. But living in Nice has at least given me the opportunity to continue the love affair. I get a quick fix walking past her statue of Miles Davis outside the Negresco Hotel, or when I pop into MAMAC, on which she bestowed a number of important works.

There was, however, one major piece missing from my de Saint Phalle repertoire.

The Tarot Garden

Inspired by Gaudí’s Parc Güell in Barcelona, the Giardino dei Tarocchi was the artist’s “garden of joy,” a monumental sculpture park in Garavicchio, 100 km northwest of Rome. Starting in 1979, the Tarot Garden, with its 22 Major Arcana-inspired statues, was her masterwork. It opened in 1998, four years before its creator died of a lung condition caused by inhaling chemicals she had used in her art.

Last month, de Saint Phalle would have turned 80 and at the start of this year I made my resolution: to finally make my pilgrimage to her holy land. In the autumn, together with friends, I boarded a flight to Rome full of anticipation. The garden is around two hours by car from the capital and we set off down small lanes that cut across vast, rusty-green fields; occasionally, we passed through a catatonic village.

After following a trail of signposts, it came into view: a glinting rainbow in the foliage on the hillside. The four of us skipped to the entrance, the official child in our party, 11-year-old Natasha, bounding ahead. “It’s magical,” she called back over her shoulder, having reached a fountain representing three cards: Magician, High Priestess and Wheel of Fortune.

All of us were bedazzled, and bewitched; we had fallen into a real-life wonderland.

Celebrating the child within

De Saint Phalle was obsessed with fairy tales and figures of fantasy, a preoccupation with nature, monsters and animals being a way for her to keep in touch with feelings she had as an infant. “I feel,” she once said, “that the part of me that stayed a child is the artist in me.”

So it’s little wonder that the Tarot Garden renders one in a dreamlike state and makes adults instantly feel like children again. “It’s almost as if the child in me is playing with the child in Niki,” mused my friend. “It’s not childish but child-like, beautiful and pure. Alternatively, you could describe it as a mirror ball from a gay disco put through a blender.”

Mirrors, mirrors on the wall

This mirror ball effect is created by thousands of shards of reflective glass in red, blue, green, silver… on a sunny day, you’ll be blinded by the light bouncing from the walls. In her memoir, the artist described a glass and mirrored piece of 1930s furniture of her mother’s filled with crystal decanters containing coloured rose water. She was so “intoxicated by these pure magic colours” that she later evoked a similar effect in her garden.

Nowhere did she create a stronger feeling of intoxication than in the Empress. The soft, womanly creature, a shimmering sphinx-shaped goddess, is at the very heart of the giardino. De Saint Phalle lived in this “protective mother” whilst working on the project and the inside resembles an ice palace, decorated ceiling to floor in mirror, and with a kitchen and bathroom to boot.

Both sets of the artist’s grandparents owned chateaus in France and she credited the “castles” she saw as a girl for inspiring her to make fairy tale dwellings as an adult.

Watching Natasha run from the Sun to the Star, clambering over dragons in the woods and squeezing into cubbyholes, I remember a favourite de Saint Phalle quote: “In this world of so much pain, if a sculpture of mine can give a moment of joy, a moment of life to a passerby, I feel rewarded.” “Come quick, you have to see this,” Natasha shouts at me, “now this really is magical.” She pulls me into the sugar-plum interior of the Emperor, her eyes wide. And still, I’m not sure who is happier, the real child holding my hand or the eternal one trapped inside of me.

The history

In 1955, 25-year-old Niki de Saint Phalle saw Gaudí’s Parc Güell in Barcelona. It was a moment that changed her life. “I met my master,” she said later, “and my destiny.” She was determined to create a garden of her own. 24 years later, she started work, on the property of her friends, Marella Carlo and Nicola Caracciolo, in Garavicchio, southern Tuscany.

The project became much bigger than intended and with no deadline and creative freedom she went on, despite being struck with crippling rheumatoid arthritis and financing everything herself. Believing in total immersion, she moved into the Empress. Her partner, Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, was her “biggest fan” and welded over 50 percent of the garden’s iron chassis.

In 1998, the 22 sculptures of the Major Arcana, made in cement and covered in mosaic, mirrors, glass and ceramic, were ready. In the garden’s guide, its creator reflected it had been made with “difficulties, love, wild enthusiasm, obsession and most of all faith. Nothing could have stopped me.”

 
— Hannah Marshall, The Riviera Times