This exhibit, and the one down the block, were gravy for me, having come to
New York primarily to see the major exhibition of feminist art, WACK! But it was a lovely Saturday afternoon in spring, and there we were a short walk from
Chelsea, so it seemed natural to participate in the
New York gallery hopping scene, one of the real delights of living in a major city with an active, vibrant, art world. I remember my first experience with Saturday gallery going, when I was a student at
Queens College, and about ten uptown galleries put together a mini-exhibit surveying major contemporary art movements. Were there NY gallery venues in other parts of the city at that time? Maybe -- but I think
Chelsea has gained in importance in a big way since then.
Merry had already seen the exhibit of Martha Wilson’s work from 1971- 74, and along with her brother had declared it inscrutable. On the other hand, from the moment we walked in, I was in hog heaven. Since I’ve been teaching a seminar on Contemporary Women Artists this past semester, the issues Wilson deals with were in the forefront of my mind, and similarly it was so very obvious to me that, on the basis of her work here, she was one of the people who had helped to define these issues.
Identity – its construction and fluidity – was the most important theme expressed in the collection of photographs and texts. The only work included that I consciously remember having seen before, two paired photos, “I make up the image of my perfection/ I make up the image of my deformity (1974) is a great example of her strategy. In the photograph on the left she presents a close-up image of her face made-up to look acceptable – smooth skin, puckered lip-sticked lips, tastefully mascara-d eyes, all framed by a cap of puffy curls. In the other, her face appears blemished, bruised, puffy, oily – and her hair is in a butch “do”. Which is the “real” Martha Wilson -- if either?
Wilson further explores the idea that identity is performance in “Posturing: Age Transformation” (1973) where she presents a “25 year old trying to look like a 50 year old being 25” and “Posturing: Drag” (1972) where she presents a “woman who is trying to be a man being a woman.” That last put me in my mind of the English panto conceit, where female roles are played by men, and sometimes women perform as males playing women. Like panto – Wilson’s images are both funny and outrageous, as well as (unlike panto) being provocative politically.
Merry commented that these seemed imitative of Cindy Sherman. It is important to realize that, in fact, they predate Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” although they are of a similar intent (albeit in a less polished form) of the idea that “we” women put on and take off a variety of “faces,” evocative of the phrase “putting on one’s face,” used by women of a certain age to describe the process of putting on makeup. The seven photographs in “A Portfolio of Models” explore through image and text, different roles available to woman, including homemaker, earth mother, lesbian, office worker (who compensates for her frustrating life by having wild sex). The idea of “models” is also interesting – i.e. that models are artificial presentations of particular “looks.”
A cognate concern expressed in the images discussed above, along with role playing, is the whole issue of The Body – not surprisingly one of the major themes of women artists of the past thirty years or so. No surprise, because of the role played by women in post-Renaissance art history as the subject of The Gaze. Tickner talks about strategies for reclaiming the colonized territory of the female body, and certainly images that explore the fluidity of appearance work to accomplish that end by highlighting the body’s elusivity, in terms of both its appearance and perception. My favorite of this group was “Breast Forms Permutated,” (1972) nine close-up images of breasts with accompanying text, beginning with too small in the upper left hand corner and ending with too big in the lower right. According to the text the “perfect” pair is the set in the middle.
And – the prodigious use of text. As I came to understand during the weekend – Feminism and Post-Modernism are more intrinsically linked than I’d previously believed or understood. Or maybe – soooo many feminist artists who made important interventions also used conceptual means. For example, Wilson’s “Chauvinistic Pieces”—a series of scenarios talking about scripts of unusual pairings for the purposes of producing offspring. No images. Just ideas, such as, “Determined Piece: A woman selects a couple on the basis of I.Q. test scores (high or low) and raises their baby” or “Color Piece: A dark-skinned couple and a light-skinned couple permutate. The resultant nine children are distributed in the most emotionally comfortable manner for the couples involved.”
Oh. And also. The artist herself walked into the gallery with her hair strikingly red, and wearing a fancy striped taffeta party dress (did I see this dress in a picture in some book?) She was involved in intense conversation with another visitor to the exhibit – but at least, before we left, I told her how much I liked her work.
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