Feminism

Although the female body has been an enduring motif throughout the history of Western art, female artists are very thin on the ground. Ways of redressing this imbalance and allowing women to enter the field as artists were issues that became very important during the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Patchwork

One of Mrs Willard’s regular pastimes was to braid rugs out of her husband’s old suits, only to ruin them straight away after weeks of painstaking work. For instead of hanging her work on the wall to show it off, she used it as a mat so that after a few days it looked like "any mat you could buy for under a dollar in the five and ten".

This reference is taken from Sylvia Plath’s first and last novel from 1963, The Bell Jar, which tells of a woman’s well-nigh impossible struggle between motherhood and creative productivity. In the same year, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (published in 1970 in Germany as Der Weiblichkeitswahn) also explored the issue of why women were being downtrodden (the proverbial "doormats") in the struggle between conflicting demands. This book was to become a seminal work for the second women’s movement in the USA and beyond. The tragedy of Mrs Willard’s artistic creativity – and she is symbolic of many others – is not only that she herself values her rugs so little, but also that it is "only" rugs that she makes. For patchwork and weaving have traditionally had no place in the illustrious halls of the academies or art museums, and such pieces certainly do not feature in the canon of great artists and their works.

Action and liberation

Female artists at the most were an exception in the art world even before that mythical year of 1968, which has since come to symbolise radical change – albeit appreciated in some quarters more than others. Even today the most successful artists and the majority of art professors are male. However, this does not mean that nothing happened that year to re-establish – or indeed to unravel – the connection between womanhood and aesthetics.

As early as January 1968, a group called the “Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen” (Action Council for the Liberation of Women) emerged out of the student movement in Berlin and dedicated itself to issues that were ridiculed by their fellow male students. Helke Sander, filmmaker and later co-founder of the journal Frauen und Film (Women and Film), gave a legendary speech – culminating in a tomato-throwing incident – about childcare being a social responsibility rather than a mother’s task and the need for men and women to share the domestic workload. It quickly became clear that the supposed "sexual liberation", with the mini-skirt as its emblem, did not automatically include the liberation of women.

Art by women or feminist art therefore had to fight on two fronts: women had to step out of the sphere of housework and handicrafts to make their mark as authors and artists, and they also had to overcome the sexualised images of the female body. 1968 also saw the Austrian Valie Export (who, typically, had taken a textiles course) create a sensation with her "Tapp und Tastkino" (touch cinema), where she invited passers-by to touch her naked breasts through a black box that she had strapped around her upper body. It was debatable whether, as Export proclaimed in the spirit of the sexual revolution, this would allow a woman to control and offer her breasts freely. In retrospect, a more likely consequence was the mass media fascination with the subject and the excessive stereotyping of women across the board. Rather than working in vain to live up to male Malerfürsten (painter-princes) in the exalted disciplines of the visual arts, photography, film and later video became more accessible routes for female artists. In these areas, there were no artistic preconceptions for the very reason that they, like weaving, were not perceived as fine art.

Images of the human body and media technology

So for women in the field, it was no longer about being somehow more feminine, more genuine or more natural. Artistic works began to focus far more on the conditions under which images, particularly images of the human body, are made. Katharina Sieverding, for example, became famous in 1969 with her photographic series Life-Death, which not only portrays her in different poses, but more importantly demonstrates the ways in which photographic material could be manipulated. By exposing the aesthetic and scientific workings of technical images, she shows us the origin of the very truths that create the ideas of subjectivity, masculinity and femininity in the first place.

The beginning of the 1970s saw Friederike Pezold develop a "leibhaftige Zeichensprache" (an embodied sign language), in which she used close-up camera work to photograph her own body, and made the almost abstract black-and-white images generated by these close-ups into photographic series, films and sculptures. In 1975 the film critic Frieda Grafe said of Pezold’s work that the body did not incarnate ideas, but that ideas emerged from it. This can be explained as follows: the body is the stage onto which images have previously been projected, but from which new images can also emerge if you look closely enough.

A feminine aesthetic?

All the focus on goddesses in the mid-1970s, whether by Pezold or Ulrike Rosenbach, might appear today to be proof that the days of feminist art are over. Yet it also demonstrates the extent to which people were searching for reference systems to which they could reconnect in such a dense and image-saturated media culture. Although Rosenbach’s earlier works in and around 1970 still revolved around performance art, using bonnets or flowered dresses that she made herself, she later became involved in videos that repeatedly featured Venus, Aphrodite or other mythical female figures. This relates to the fiercely debated question of the mid-1970s – "is there a feminine aesthetic?" – in response to which literary scholar Silvia Bovenschen remarked laconically: "We need to write off the notion of a historically ever-present female counterculture."

Certainly, the greatest legacy of feminist art in the 1960s and 1970s is that it blurred the boundaries between genres and shook up the definitions of art. The catalogues of the internationally-oriented group exhibitions, primarily curated on an own-initiative basis, offer an absolute treasure trove of critiques of both institutions and authorship. If we are looking for historical and current images, symbols, and lifestyles of women rather than seeking something supposedly truly feminine, then the artist Rosemarie Trockel is a good example. These days, this artist can stitch, knit and weave as much as she likes – in the certainty that her work will be exhibited in the world's most important galleries and museums.