### Are there still themes in contemporary art?
And if so, which are of interest to women artists today?
Thoughts of the Swiss art critic Annelise Zwez
English Translation by Frances Deepwell

##### ISSN 1462-0426

#### Theme of the preamble: the Internet

Online texts have yet to find their own specific form. The Internet is neither a written nor a spoken medium. The form of a letter seems to me to be one possibility since the message it conveys is considered and at the same time direct.

Dear Katy,

You showed immediate enthusiasm for the idea I had for N.Paradoxa to look at the themes which concern women artists today. We both felt that this would reveal something much more fundamental about women’s art than all the statistics and grievances about how women’s art is overlooked, un-bought and underrepresented. And at the same time, we agreed that the topic should primarily be about how these themes are handled rather than a comparison with similar themes which concern men artists.

The more research I did, the more I became excited by this question."But the world is the theme of art," was the bemused response from a Swiss museum director as I began my investigations. Certainly this is true, but perspectives are always affected by stories: historical, geographical, social, generational, gender-specific stories. The latter type are the most contentious since they make gender a category, on a par with sexuality and traditionally "second class" roles. Women are more than this. Nonetheless I rue the day when women (and also men) do not have their own conscious view on life, since then we would all be neuter.

#### A gap at the Venice Biennale

Stories change. Had I written this article in 1980 I would certainly be trying to delve into female themes and set them against male ones. Black and white. Women’s art of the time would have provided a rich source of artwork to support this approach. Valie Export, Ulrike Rosenbach, Friederike Pezold, Marina Abramovic, Louise Bourgeois, Miriam Cahn. The general theme would be the body. The ego of the female body as a symbol for the collective woman. The issue here cannot be a reworking of this historical theme, even though this is urgently needed. For I can still feel rage at the fact that Jean Clair conceived the Venice Bienniale exhibition Body - Identity - Age without showing women artists' viewpoints on this theme at that time.

#### The four levels of self consciousness

Stories change. Up until the late 1980s there were really only three groups of women artists. Firstly, those rooted in the spirit pre-1968 who cannot free themselves from the idea that works of art are good if they "could have been done just as well by a man". Perhaps this is precisely why such works are often no more than mediocre.
Secondly, those rooted in traditional female techniques (textiles, paper, ceramics and other materials) who suffer discrimination against their work as inferior "craft work" but who are unable to free themselves from the protection of this ghetto of "women’s art" and do not risk experimenting with new materials, motifs or techniques.
Thirdly, those shaped by 1968 (for Americans it is probably better to say the 1960s) for whom the development and application of one’s consciousness as a women is the fundamental driving force behind their artistic expression and presence on the art scene. Moreover, this is unrelated to whether or not their motifs, techniques and working methods thematicize the force “woman” either directly or indirectly. This largest group has produced the most important works of art by women from the mid 1960s to the late 1980s.
A fourth group emerged in the second half of the 1980s. Women who either because of their young age or their path of development possess a consciousness independent of their gender. They have discarded the role of martyr and fight uncompromisingly for their perspective of the world, maintaining a delicate and individual balance between their female and male selves; setbacks and all. It is no surprise that their themes often encompass a range of material and intellectual levels, emphasising the equality of one or the other or resorting to irony in order to handle ad absurdum the perpetual battle of the sexes. These are part and parcel of the women’s art scene today. Just as the grouping is not always clear, the groups are not restricted to a particular generation. In the 1970s there were numerous women artists who quasi skipped a generation and as older women, became "young" artists or only then were seen as being of any significance. On the other hand, there are still women artists today who are sitting in their ivory towers, waiting for the prince to come and kiss them and who are offended if he will not.

#### Born of need, rage, lust - what binds Louise Bourgeois to the Bad Girls and where they differ

Assuming that women artists practising today had their formative experiences between 1940 and 1990, one can see that all four groups are still present. For a thematic investigation, this means that the themes which are addressed by women artists show very different temporal perspectives which frequently intertwine in a curious fashion. Look at the difference between Louise Bourgeois and the Bad Girls.
The work of Louise Bourgeois (born 1911) displays the emotions of her childhood growing up in a family of mother, father and father’s mistress. The gender-motivated identification with her mother (see also Carol Gilligan) has given her a trauma about the explosive force of male sexuality. Her knife-penises, her many-breasted objects, her loaded memento mori - "Torture Chambers" rooted in the oppressive, sometimes sadistic, sometimes also seductive analysis of the destructive gender of her father.

Nonetheless it would be one-sided to view her work from this perspective alone, for the quality of artistic expression is necessarily coupled with the strength of the interpretation of the predominent theme. And quality lies in diversity of meaning, in translating the individual, the private into generally applicable levels. Louise Bourgeois is a great artist. She, possibly as the first ever, developed the theme of sexuality from her own subjective view. But in some sense she is bound to her generation because the phenomenon of her father’s adultery goes beyond the specific response of the artist to become one of her time and because the art was born from deepest necessity.

#### Phalluses and vaginas

Quite different from this are the Bad Girls, mostly born in the 1960s, and the women artists who relate closely to them who approach female sexuality, identity and gender interchangeability with humour, wit and an undercurrent of irony and entirely without taboos. Their works make direct reference to that of Louise Bougeois in form and content, rarely in technique. But they have come from an entirely different position. They make play of the erotic female body, hang wax breasts on the walls, blow up buttocks and decorate them with velvet ribbons, draw the stirrings of desire under their skirts, show masturbation as performance art, transform penises into candlesticks, castrate young men with brush and pen, crochet phalluses and vaginas, transform into flower-beds the holes burnt with urine in the snow. They work with video and photography, using the possibilities of computer manipulation, wallowing in the bloody tones of digital red, adding breasts and sex organs of varying size and potency or removing them, making babies into sex objects with adult male mouths....

They perpetuate the old phenomenon that men represent their sexual feelings as a projection on womens’ bodies, whereas women show their sexuality with their own bodies carried to the extreme, leading men (and themselves) astray with humour - but sometimes a great deal of banality.

Left : Keith Boadwee (USA): "Jasmine Swami" - Die "Bad Girls" als Trendsetter. Fotoarbeit.
Right : Bessie Nager Brste als Lust-Objekte aus Gips Beton und Leder (Foto: Kunsthaus: Glarus,Switzerland)

#### Out: woman as sex object for men

Completing this theme, we must also mention the middle generation, the classic feminist generation who out of sheer rebellion have cast down from its the role of woman in the image of man, thereby setting something fundamental in motion:
The significance and the recognition that Louise Bourgeois enjoys today came at first from women who saw the gender specific dimension of her work. The radical and aggressive way with which Louise Bourgeois presents this theme soon gained the attention of men, too, who perhaps for the first time saw themselves in their (much suppressed) physical presence as a theme in art.
It is Louise Bourgeois’ strength - as in the work of Jenny Holzer - that she does not formulate the theme in condemnation, but lets the theme develop in itself and thereby becomes an open vessel. Very different from the first generation of feminism who exposed their suffering at the hands of man in clear and accusing terms, thereby meeting with little compassion (understandably) from men and being largely ignored by the patriarchal art scene. Nonetheless their presence and their strength had the effect that men found it harder and harder to bring their sexual fantasies about the female body into their work. And this had two results:

#### Are the Bad Girls working into the hands of men?
What is specific to gender and what is specific to roles?

"Body" as a theme became a general theme again in the 1990s because artists finally had nothing left to explore but themselves. This can be dull for the women of 1968 who have already covered this ground a long time before - albeit in a different form as pertains to their history; however, amongst the young women artists, particularly in the USA, there is a new impetus - mainly in film and video. But it also brings with it the Bad Girls who focus on sexuality, not from a sense of inner need but rather in order to pursue their own desires with no limit to their imagination. In this they are playing into the hands of those men who have always been turned on by female sexuality and who now find themselves confronted with a lecherousness they have known previously only in their own imagination (this probably explains why Bad Girlism has been so successful all over the world).

This paradoxical phenomenon is not exactly new; on the contrary it has long been in existence. The fact that women have never objected to their naked presence in art is why - in the search for eroticism in their own body - they ignore the history of the “nude” and identify with these male projections of themselves. Just think, as an example, of the erotic drawings of Gustav Klimt and of the poses which his models had to assume in order to feed his artistic desire for satisfaction, a sexist story par excellence. However, as can be seen at every exhibition of these pictures, women unashamedly and with much sexual pleasure enjoy looking at the erotic contortions.

Before moving onto another topic, I must make one more comment: Let us briefly consider how women respond to exhibitions of expressly male sexuality, such as we find in the expressionism of the 1980s. Aggressive as they are, such exhibitions do not arouse desire - more often than not, in fact, the opposite. On the other hand, the transformed or rediscovered male body of the 1990s, addressing the topic destructively in part, but also tenderly, can change the response. This means that the observations made above are not in essence gender specific, but are associated with the roles played by men and women.

#### Why do (one’s own) children not feature in the art of women?

Another theme which is making its appearance in the art of women today - from a European perspective - is "children" and "the family". In the history of male, European art, the theme of the family reappears constantly as an idyll. And "Mother and Child", the "Pietà", is one of the most common motifs in the history of painting. But it is rare to find this theme in the more recent art of European women. All the more surprising since in America this theme in art raises the debate on social structures. So much so that often not even one’s own identity, one’s own gender can be taken for granted. Role-specific "traumas" come to the fore here, more so than with the theme "sexuality". To have children or not is an existential theme in the life of every woman and yet it barely features in European art (at least not in any way that is relevant to art) or is transferred into a virtual fantasy world. There is obviously some suppression of feeling here. The career of a woman artist is in itself so strongly bound up with the relinquishing of a family - or even a long-term relationship - that survival is only possible if the theme of children is excluded. Achievement in the art scene demands freedom of movement, a family generally implies that one is fixed to one place. This reveals an area of art which has yet to be emancipated, an area which has grown larger than ever with the strong internationalisation of art in recent years (where it frequently comes to the crunch anyway).

It is interesting that only a few women artists with children tackle the theme. In terms of role-specific themes, this has such a negative aspect to it, is linked so closely to the traditional image of woman which they have shaken off, that the artists do not want to adopt it either negatively or positively. But this does not imply that women artists do not like children any less than other women, it is just that the theme remains unaddressed psychologically and is therefore a vacuum. Furthermore, artist mothers have to expend so much energy in order to fulfill their two conflicting obligations that once they finally reach the studio they understandably shut out the other aspect of their life completely. This really is not the only theme in the world.

#### Proud mothers, babies clinging to their apron-strings

It is fascinating to see how that motif appears, where it appears in the female world of painting and philosophy in spite of everything. For instance the 46 year old American Jenny Holzer, mother to a daughter aged around 10. She has tackled the theme of "Mother and child" in her suggestive cycle of writings in a most woman conscious way and without any inhibitions with phrases such as: "A man can’t know what it is like to be a mother."

The 43 year old Dutch artist Marlène Dumas, brought up in South Africa, is mother to a seven year old daughter and similarly deals with the theme with that mixture of love and pride that all mothers know. Marlène Dumas presents the battle of the sexes, the urge to be loved, her sexuality and pregnancy directly and unfiltered according to her own impulses and not convention. And in this way she has tackled the birth, nursing and development of her baby in her drawing-like painting style.

Somewhat more discerning in her presentation of the intermingling of her artistic and her domestic duties is the 38 year old Swiss artist Maja Rikli, who also throws in a smattering of Basel wit. Amongst other things, she has created a scissor-cut "wedding dress" the lace of which on closer inspection turns out to be made of baby photographs. Dreams and apron-string realities. Made more radical in another of her works: On a sofa lie cushions embroidered with words reporting murders of husbands by their wives under the title "Home Sweet Home".

Maya Rikli 'Ablendkleid' Collage mit Baby Korpen aus Zeitschriften. foto : Kunsthaus Glarus,Switzerland

Children are just one theme within the family. There is also the family unit and communal living, etc. Rare examples of this is the family chronicle in photographs by Annelies Strbä, the uncompromising view of everyday life shown in the photographic sequences which Nan Goldwin has created or the satirical "families" by Ida Applebroog.

#### Men: barely a theme

In all of this there is barely a mention of partnership, or more concretely the issue of common sexuality in whatever form this may take. The most beautiful images of men are not created by women, but by homosexual men who are not presenting their own bodies as the theme so much as projecting onto the same gender. There are very few women artists who analyse men physically, emotionally and intellectually - and not from the perspective of woman as victim. There was once an exhibition entitled "Women showing men", but most of what was on show there is not worth a mention. The collective past must be too deeply entrenched in most women artists. Admittedly, there was a wonderful book of intimate pictures of male bodies by a woman photographer and the impressive video installation "Les larmes d’acier" by Marie-Jo Lafontaine which questions male power, translating it with rhythmic music into "steel" movements. The paintings of Swiss artist Chantal Wicki are a further attempt to show the male body without embellishment. But the fact remains that men are barely a theme for women today, at least not in Europe.

#### Of wolves and horses

Of course this is not correct in terms of our feelings are concerned and so the male principle does appear in women’s art, but in the form of animals, thereby shifting it into the sphere of dreams. The Swiss artist Annette Barcelo, for instance, portrays a woman bathing naked in a bathtub surrounded by mysterious, threatening and, at the same time, protective wolves. In a comparable painting, Marlène Dumas’ gnomes perform the same function. More frequently, however, horses or deer are used to represent the male principle, for example in the work of the American Susan Rothenberg; or, as regards the battle of the sexes, that of the German Christa Näher; or, as an archaic love ritual, the drawings of the Swiss artist Stéphanie Grob. A subversive approach to the theme comes from Katharina Fritsch in the "Rat Kings" whose tails are joined together. I could name more.

However, animals also embody the desire to being close to nature, at one with plants and animals in your wishes or knowledge. In the unique watercolours of Maria Lassnig, for instance, in the large cycle "Reading in the dust" of Miriam Cahn, in the tender encounters with dinosaurs of the Tessin artist Simonetta Martini, in the jungle paintings of the French artist Helène Délprat, in the female and animal ceramic forms of the Japanese artist Leiko Ikemira, in the small animal and reptile features in the work of the Swiss sculptor Klaudia Schifferle, the tiny, sculptural insect collection of the Viennese artist Olivia Etter, and so on.

#### Beauty and the Beast

Animals (in contrast to people) also symbolize something close to authenticity in the works of women; such as in the video works of the Brussels artist Marie José Burki. By setting up a video conference between a living owl and a stuffed one, she subversively raises the question of human behaviour towards animals. However, it is astonishing that the theme of the environment rarely appears any longer as an independent theme in the art of even though it 'ambushed' art in the sense of criticism, accusation, threat, destruction particularly after 1975, with the publication of the theses of the "Club of Rome".

Perhaps this is connected to the fact that women artists rarely love anything which is directly ugly. Although there are some exceptions: Cindy Sherman’s disgusting apocalyptic scenes, Kiki Smith’s 'skinned' female forms, the hopelessness portrayed in the work of the American Nancy Spero, the video of the Basel artist Gabriela Gerosa which shows plucked hens flying around in the air and crashing to the floor. But on the whole, women artists prefer a visual harmony in their themes, even when this is revealed to be a seduction and belies the message. In the work of Katharina Fritsch or Jenny Holzer, for instance, when the flashing red, green and amber lights spell out the word for sex murder: Lustmord, Helen Chadwick’s flowers are really the result of urine in the snow, Louise Bourgeois’ alabaster penises are sharp knives, Astrid Klein’s garden ornaments are endless corridors for the mentally ill, and so forth.

#### Order as a survival strategy

Very often the serious or subversive search for harmony in a picture is the search for a sense of order which goes beyond what is material. This tendency to make the world immaterial, which often characterises women artists, can doubtlessly be interpreted as a survival strategy in a world occupied by men. But not only. The dimensions of these phenomena which extend beyond our understanding are too fascinating, too powerful and too long-lasting and they are, with technical aids, also the nucleus of pure scientific research (an area which is still largely dominated by men). Numerous women artists have been captivated by empirical, non-Euclidean systems.

The Basel artist Miriam Beerli finds her inner pattern for growth in animal antlers. Andrea Wolfensberger gains inspiration for her channels and structures from bird formations in the sky. Hanne Darboven searches for her eternal rhythms in the tangible patterns of time. Rebecca Horn shows interference between energy impulses and forms. Ingeborg Lüscher examines, amongst other things, psychic energies (orders) between random and meaningful experiences. Barbara Hee demonstrates the development of form and volume as the result of body movements and rhythms in a meditative concentration. Works which are constructive and have a strong emphasis on intuitive colour and rhythms also belong in this context.

Left : Andrea Wolfensberger (CH): Zufall und Ordnung: Schwalben ber Rom. Foto- und Filmarbeit.
Right: Ingeborg Luscher (CH) Jenseits der Ratio. Okimuij-Orakel in Japan. Fotoarbeit.

#### Material and Non-material

The super-sensory theme also embraces the intense analysis women artists have undertaken of the contrast and the similarity between the material and the non-material, the tangible and the transparent, earth and light; the quest for formal rhythms which reach beyond themselves into silent, so-called mystic spheres. Many women artists assume the existence of a world behind our world which they seek to portray in the interplay between earth, fire, water and light. It appears mostly in abstract form and very often related to something material. The choice of materials is very often symbolic. Materials are rarely seen as a means to an end, but rather as an expressive medium in their own right (Eva Hesse, Lili Fischer, Nancy Graves, Magdelena Abakanovic to mention just a few of many examples of this).

Analogous to this, their room-based works are often not reactions to a spatial situation but make space itself the theme. Louise Bourgeois illustrates with her body-houses a structure which many women artists take far beyond their organic body. Space - also sky and earth - as skin, space which restricts movement, architecture as an open field of interactive energies. Agnes Martin, Heidi Bucher, Maria Nordmann, Christina Iglesias, Susan Solano, Rachel Whiteread, Isa Genzken, Carmen Perrin, Catrin Luthi K. Marina Abramovic, Magdalena Jetelova, Marisa Merz, Ingeborg Lüscher, Gillian White, Anne and Patrick Poirier, Alice Aycock, Karin Sanders and many others could be set in this context. There is no great distinction between space as an architectural sculpture and installation, placing objects or named 'things', all of which pertain to volume.

#### The magic of things

Whilst space as a theme in its broadest sense, through the relative closeness of body and skin, expresses an artistic power and individuality which interests women greatly (with their heightened understanding of the body), artworks of “things” have impulses which are easier to name and relevant to gender. It is noticeable that - despite the traditional gender divide -housework, the home or things from our immediate environment find their way exceedingly often into art - even if there is frequently an ironic or subversive undertone (and precisely for this reason they can be unwelcome or marginalised).

Muda Mathis for example is one of the most outstanding Swiss video artists technically, artistically, musically and content-wise. Nonetheless, the presence of decidedly female forces in her 'Portraits' (Babette is almost a witches’ sabbath) has limited her international acclaim. Monika Rutishauser 'furnishes' complete apartments as tableaux of the 'ideal home', the beautiful surface image. Rosmarie Trockel, on the other hand, transforms female patterns such as 'knitting' into a mechanical procedure and thereby transposes them into the world of men, playing on the contrasts on a conceptual level. Moreover, her exceptional drawings very clearly show how women artists make conceptual statements on distance from the intimacy of tangible images (one further example is Ilona Rüegg).

#### From the inside out and the outside in

An opposite direction is taken by the American artist Sturtevant who copies sculptures which she considers significant in art history in order to internalise her emotional relationship to external form. The body is on occasion treated in the same way as 'things', being viewed in fragments and seen as a part, either in sculpture or in the drawings which women artists often declare as the main work.
An example of this is the Swiss artist Silvia Bächli who teaches in Germany; she allows a physical presence to emerge in items of clothing, body parts and furniture-like shapes in such a way that the external perception of form and the wearing, touching, feeling of the same is manifest. Her desire to show the drawings as a wall installation (energy fields) is in keeping with a strong need by women artists to join several parts to a whole - be they different themes, techniques, standpoints or materials (something which has been seen as a weakness in women artists, as a failure to display a definite character in their work until, that is, it has been embraced as a method of working by young artists), be they different thoughts, objects, partial images linked in a work of associative frames.
Classic examples of this are the installations of numerous sheets of paper by the German artist Anna Oppermann before her premature death, or the 'apartments' (room installations) of the American Jessica Stockholder.

There are many aspects and thousands more women artists but, just as we can comprehend the world only in parts and can understand when these individual 'patterns' with their individual characteristics belong together, this text also remains a partial work, open for further extensions and supplements or, from an American standpoint, perhaps even for being proved wrong in places.

To contact the author zweza@box.echo.ch

Copyright : © Annelise Zwez, December 1996.
N.Paradoxa, December 1996