November 1, 2019 – March 22, 2020
1109 5th Ave, at 92nd Street
New York City, thejewishmuseum.org

To experience Rachel Feinstein’s survey, “Mother, Maiden, Crone,” at the Jewish Museum through March 22, is to walk through crowds of women and sometimes spot yourself. Feinstein, through her sculptural works, explores dualities and extremes, and the binaries of fantasy versus reality, maximalism versus minimalism, and community versus isolation, all through archetypes feminists have historically been eager to both reclaim and resist.

Much of Feinstein’s work refers to fairy tales targeted at little girls, and at first glance seems like an indictment of those fantastical stories. From menstruating shepherdesses to castles that rape, there is something perverse about all of Feinstein’s works that reference fairy tales. Upon closer inspection, however, this distorted nature demonstrates not fantasies dashed, but nightmarish realities realized. In the case of Sleeping Beauty (the focus of Feinstein’s film Spring and Winter, 1994/96), Feinstein is most interested in the story’s parallels in reality. The original tale of Sleeping Beauty is one of rape at the hands of her rescuer, a fictional account that mirrors real cases of sexual assaults.

Feinstein’s mirror is more than an allusion; reflective surfaces appear throughout her work, further critiquing the idea that fantasy exists outside of reality. In her works of enamel paint on mirror, such as her portraits of elderly women, the viewer is forced to examine their own reflection as they consider the fantasy before them—a fantasy that teeters on the brink of collapse. Feinstein’s elderly women are styled as 18th century grande dames, but the faux expressive paint style is more mid-20th century pulp fiction cover than Fragonard or Gainsborough portrait. Similarly, Feinstein’s costuming of her muses does not disguise their age or emotions, or the viewer’s own projections about women over 50. It’s impossible not to see the women as variations on the ever-familiar crone, from Shakespeare’s witches to Bette Davis’ Baby Jane. Physically, the mirrored negative space of each of these portraits provides a literal reflection of the person viewing the work, and the textural application of paint on mirror links the concept of creative artifice with the act of applying make-up.

Feinstein’s Goldstein (2019), a 40-foot long, monochromatic white wall relief, pairs a similar set of extremes, this time juxtaposing maximalism and minimalism, pleasure and shame. Like Louise Nevelson’s work, which infuses monochromatic wall sculpture with baroque intensity, Feinstein’s Goldstein is a shrine to pleasure, despite its monochromaticity. It depicts the opulence of a lively and tropical landscape – perhaps the drug-fueled, materialistic Miami of the 1980s, where Feinstein grew up. The style is both cartoonish and joyful, almost daring the viewer to feel ashamed at its tawdriness. For Feinstein, her Jewish Museum show is intertwined with the idea of shame – her shame at being a woman, at being Jewish, and her desire to reclaim those identities by displaying them in their most extreme forms. Naming her fresco “Goldstein,” she argues in an interview with Phong Bui in the Brooklyn Rail, is one way of doing this.

Feinstein’s other “room-encompassing work,” as the Jewish Museum describes it, is by definition maximalist and baroque, but also serves to highlight one of Feinstein’s most puritan pieces in contrast. Panorama of Rome (2012) wallpapers the entire second room of Feinstein’s show, reflecting the works within, as well as the viewers themselves. The mural is meant to mimic decorative 19th century wallpapers, and depicts aging Roman ruins alongside shining statues of heroes on horses, contrasting the aging glory of Rome and the mythological figures of that time with vibrant depictions of joyous everyday life. Like Goldstein, the energy of Panorama of Rome is grand and extravagant, reminiscent of a baroque 18th century depiction of a Dionysian feast or marketplace.

In contrast to this revelry, Puritan’s Delight (2008) sits surrounded by the panorama, but is a sobering ode to minimalism and the Puritan message and aesthetic. Puritan’s Delight depicts a monochromatic black, deformed carriage, symbolizing increasing Westward expansion and urbanization taking place in the “New World” in the 19th century. The vehicle’s wheels have come off, and some are warped, bending like a surrealist’s melting clock. Christian crosses jut out from the base of the statue, perhaps commemorating lost passengers. Puritan’s Delight is literally reflected in the mirrors of Panorama of Rome, but the panorama itself also depicts a nearly identical mirror image – another black carriage (this time intact), sits in the Roman plaza.

Like Panorama of Rome, Puritan’s Delight deals in mythology, or, we might say, fantasy. The fact that the passengers of the carriage are absent forces the viewer to construct their own narrative of what occurred, perhaps drawing on nationalistic understandings of American history and the extreme archetypes perpetuated in those tales. Implicit in the broken carriage and the memorial crosses is the myth of Manifest Destiny, and the idea that European settlers who lost their lives taking land from indigenous people were victims, themselves. Puritanism and the act of purification requires the existence first of people, ideas, or objects that are initially dirty, savage, sensual, or corrupt. Thus, the Puritan’s “delight” comes from the tragedy of the carriage disaster, itself, because without such a tragedy, the myth of American nationalism cannot exist. Feinstein’s use of the word “delight” – which calls to mind pleasure over shame – is again a contrast, forcing the viewer to contend with the opposing pieces in the room, sculptures that depict rainbow women in sexually provocative stances, as well as the grand panorama. In this way, Feinstein demonstrates one extreme giving life to another, calling to mind other Puritanical dichotomies like the slut and the innocent, or the witch and the saint.

If the room wallpapered in Panorama of Rome is Feinstein’s depiction of society and the warring ideologies that command conformity, the room that houses Feinstein’s video depicts the alternative: complete isolation. In Spring and Winter, Feinstein plays both a young slumbering seductress and an old woman emerging from hibernation. The connection between these two characters mirrors the link between the slut and the witch, two feminine archetypes that have historically been punished for their nonconformism. Seen through the lens of Spring and Winter, this storied tale takes on another dimension. The punishment of isolation becomes a gift – the freedom to embrace one’s sluttiness or witchiness without prying eyes.

The ovoid room that houses the film Spring and Winters serves as a meditation on isolation and its effect on women and artists, but also as a sort of love nest. Because Feinstein’s video, which deals so powerfully with the theme of isolation, is surrounded by sculptures of couples, it’s impossible not to draw a parallel between the strong influence Feinstein attributes to being alone and her understanding of romance, sex, and partnership. In Alice (2008), two flattened, biomorphic, stained-wood figures engage in sex. The visibly feminine figure, presumably Alice, sits with legs spread, atop her lover. Her face is bent, as if folded in half, creating both a profile and a frontal view. Alice’s hands are carved from negative space, and rather than reaching for her partner, they reach for her own body. Thus, Alice’s pleasure is fleeting – existing only for the viewer who sees her hands in the negative space. Because the sculptures in this room are the only depictions of consensual sex in the show, together they present the idea that romance, and perhaps the heterosexual romance in particular, can only thrive in isolation from, and in resistance to, sexist society.

Feinstein has said, in an interview for Gagosian Quarterly, that she believes in “a world of dualities,” and “Mother, Maiden, Crone” celebrates this universe. But, her show also questions the concept of the binary, embracing the slippery matter within overlapping opposites, and interrogating the ideological polarity within popular feminism that the feminist must choose between reclamation or resistance. Instead, Feinstein’s work manages to view feminine archetypes through the lenses of resistance, reclamation, and acceptance – sometimes simultaneously all within one work.

The post Fairy Tales and Feminism: Rachel Feinstein at the Jewish Museum appeared first on artcritical.

November 15 – December 22, 2018
535 West 22nd Street, 3rd Floor (between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, ppowgallery.com

In her second solo exhibition at P.P.O.W., “Will She Ever Shut Up?”, Betty Tompkins, ever the bold tinkerer and experimenter, finds ingenious new ways to speak her mind. The formal link between three rooms of stylistically diverse, modestly scaled artworks is Tompkins’ strategy of placing socially charged phrases – handwritten, stencil-lettered or directly painted – on top of a separate visual field. These pointed juxtapositions poke us to puzzle out the connections, to think through the implications.

In the first room Tompkins unfurls the latest chapter of “Women Words”, a series she began in 2002. These incorporate phrases by and about women the artist solicits from the public. Interspersed here are companion works derived from the #MeToo movement in a separate series she titles “Apologia,” directly quoting public statements made by prominent men accused of assaulting women. Both categories of text are cleverly applied onto book page reproductions of canonical images by the likes of Titian, Raphael, Gainsborough, Cassatt, Rembrandt, Ingres and Artemisia Gentileschi. For the acrylic paintings in the second gallery, all from this year, selected “Women Words” expressions and accounts overlay her signature monochrome airbrushed, gracefully cropped close ups of genitalia.

As a suffused, solemn backdrop for these timely new works, the third gallery presents her text-only paintings and drawings on paper from the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Bringing to mind their on-going significance, Tompkins hand-copied fragments of our country’s founding legal documents painted in warm colonial hues over a subtle background grid of painted and penciled words. This group from the artist’s considerable archive is a reminder that her earliest, monumental paintings from 1969 through 1974, based on pornographic photographs her first husband had ordered illegally through the mail, were not shown for over 30 years. Since “discovered” in 2003, these and others Tompkins has since created have been shown virtually non-stop in museums and galleries around the world.

Perusing Tompkins’ word-image juxtaposition it is impossible not to think of Marcel Duchamp’s infamous “L.H.O.O.Q,” (1919) created by doctoring a post-card reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee. Duchamp’s sly pencil marks succinctly highlight gender ambiguity in Leonardo’s oeuvre. Likewise, Tompkins’ satiric defacement of historical masterworks allows us to scrutinize her repurposed works for lessons in identity formation and gender role definition. Her clustered expressions of scorn, praise, pride and contrition loosely hand lettered in opaque pink paint completely cover single figures in the reproductions of well-known paintings and photographs. The resulting frozen pastel silhouettes also call to mind another historic reference, the ancient catastrophic volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. As with this end-of-days event, Tompkins’  verbal flows have seemingly stopped the solitary men and women in their tracks ensnaring them for our analysis. Notably, the artist reverses her formula in an outlier work installed on the gallery’s smaller foyer wall, Women Words (Anon #11) (2017). On this vintage photograph, rather than the figure it’s the rural background that is filled with hand painted crude expressions such as, “Bean flicker,” “flesh wallet,” “Hagia Sophia,” “Love Socket”, ”put a bag over her head and fuck her for old glory.”  The young woman is fully dressed but seated in a way that modestly displays her underclothing. Unlike the other 50 plus readymades in the show, this woman is fully visible. She appears protected from the insults by her self-esteem and safe within her self-knowledge—indeed, wearing a quiet Mona Lisa smile.

Naomi Wolf’s landmark book, “Vagina” (2012) explores the implications of new research on the neuroscience of women’s reproductive organs. We now know there are multiple direct nerve connections between these organs and the brain. Wolf discusses how the impact of physical and verbal abuse on women’s psyches can now be more precisely measured. She also presents important correlations between erotic pleasure and personal agency. Tompkins’ seven pale pink and blue-grey paintings in the second gallery combine two contrasting techniques. Her signature soft airbrushed compositions of the swooning folds and creases of a woman’s labia and clitoris are counterposed with hard-edged stencil letters that have been removed to reveal the artwork’s under painting. Despite having its origin in exploitative pornography, Tompkins’ gentle yet emphatically clinical presentation of women’s genitalia tells of the importance for women of having a full understanding of the workings of their own sexuality. Being aware of the profound positive power of full female sexual expression for both men and women is the best defense against the attitudes expressed in the crowd-sourced phrases and narratives “pressed” into the genitalia in Tompkins’ paintings. My ex’s favorite…(2018) perfectly portrays this dynamic by hypnotically balancing the work’s two compositional elements within its floating painted space.

Let me suggest one way to consider the show’s composite truth that listening to each other with mutual respect is vital to the survival of our country. Imagine a vocal performance based on all the artworks in this show, simultaneously read aloud by their original authors. Men’s and women’s voices would create a calibrated cacophony merging insults, confessions, revelations and apologies pertaining to the opposite sex. Next, the phrases from Tompkins’ history works with key fragments from our Constitution and Bill of Rights would be recited by male voices. In these works, there is an underlying grid of the single word, “law,” repeated in rows. This would become a chant demanding “Law, law, law, law…” performed in a long, slow crescendo by an all-female chorus in the tens of thousands echoing the recent women’s marches. This multilayered vocal performance would reply to the question in Tompkins’ title with a resounding and hope filled “No!”

The post Speaking Her Mind: Betty Tompkins at P.P.O.W. appeared first on artcritical.

On Friday, September 28 the two artists are set to dialogue in Elsamanoudi’s show at Amos Eno Gallery in Bushwick (56 Bogart Street), kicking off the final weekend of Nancy’s show and the immensely popular annual Bushwick Open Studios festival. artcritical will post extracts of this conversation on Saturday. The previous weekend had seen a pop-up exhibition of Natasha Wright, curated by Jeffrey Morabito and Martin Dull, which forms the basis of the conversation here.

Coincidentally, both Wright and Elsamanoudi were featured by Harpers Bazaar online – along with three other figurative painters – in “The Best Female Art Exhibitions to See This Fall.”

NANCY ELSAMANOUDI: I’ve been following your work for some time and I noticed a shift in the paintings in your last show “Les Biches”. In this body of work, the palette seems to be more restrained, the female figure emerges in a more abstract and less narrative way. 

At the same time, I also noticed that the figures are often at times unusually cropped, so that just the torso is visible and the rest of the body is alluded to outside of the picture plane.  

This way of cropping the figure seems to make the image more ambiguous, denying the viewer a certain expected satisfaction that may come from being able to identify the figure as a particular person or with a particular narrative. Does some sort of refusal to please factor in the way you have chosen to crop the image and limit your color palette? And what is the relationship between abstraction and figuration for you? 

NATASHA WRIGHT: My work used to be far more narrative. Over time I’ve become more interested in merging figuration and abstraction. This has allowed for a more ambiguous and slower read of the paintings. Fragments of the figure are excavated out of the gesture and are buried or exposed. In a way the act of painting creates the abstraction.

In this group of work I was thinking about a more emblematic representation of the female experience and ideas of sexuality and power. I wanted the women to be universally read and began the paintings with this in mind.

I think the cropping comes from wanting to highlight a particular moment of heightened sensation or a need to draw attention to an archetypal reading of femininity.

This is the case in “Power Women” which was included in my recent show “Les Biches”. I think a lot about the representation of females throughout history from the Venus of Willendorf, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to depictions of females today.

Over time I evolved the schematic and symbolic structure of the paintings to include a more expressive and painterly approach. Materiality is something I’m increasingly interested in. I go through so much paint that the only option is to make my own….

I like this idea of female power. Can you tell me more about how it is at play in your work?

I like to think my paintings create my own symbol of female power and energy. This doesn’t only involve the subject and composition but also the attitude I bring to my paintings – I think a lot about attitude, to me the attitude is just as important as the subject.

The large scale and fast passages mean I have to feel strong and confident when I approach the canvas. The paintings go through many iterations but in the moment there is absolutely no second-guessing myself.  I often paint with my hands. In some ways the form is just a structure, a container for my own energy, power and confidence. I’m always navigating structure and application.

In my work, the substance of paint becomes an analogy for the body. Paint is used as a metaphor to create a skin of human experience. I use a wide variety of media and processes – pouring, bleeding and dyeing the canvas. I like to think of the unpredictable nature of paint as being a parallel to my life which is alive and questioning.

I can definitely see that in your work-especially in your drawings. There is an energy, directness and power in your drawings that comes out of the way you handle the materials. Is drawing important to your process? 

Drawing is essential to my process. I’ve been drawing the figure and had a fixation on the female form ever since I can remember. My grandmother was an artist. From the age of four I started drawing with her. We would spend the weekends in her studio. She taught me about art history and how to respect my materials. I’d copy the front cover of fashion magazines and make hundreds of cut out dolls. Drawing was what brought me to New York and to study at the New York Studio School.

I can see this understanding in your drawings even when you’re not working from the figure. The drawings seem to have a clear structure that comes from an understanding of anatomy. The linear qualities in your paintings are strong.  How important is drawing to your overall process?

It’s crucial. All my ideas come from my drawings. My studio usually has a rotating wall where I pin up the latest works that are inspiring me. Sometimes I photocopy my drawings and leave them on my studio floor. Naturally they become ripped, tattered and splatted with paint. Occasionally I bring these qualities or incidental marks back into the paintings.

For the last few years I’ve been trying to bring the spontaneity and playfulness of my drawings to my large-scale paintings. That’s something I think you’ve been doing very successfully Nancy. Your paintings reflect the energy of your drawings.

The post Moments of Heightened Sensation: Natasha Wright discusses her work with Nancy Elsamanoudi appeared first on artcritical.

Spence: January 11 to February 17, 2018
210 Eleventh Avenue, Suite 802, between 24th and 25th streets
New York City, searspeyton.com

Morgan: January 5 to 28, 2018
56 Bogart St, between Harrison Place and Grattan Street
Brooklyn, davidandschweitzer.com

A major element of early feminist art criticism came down to detective work. Outing the male gaze in paintings of female subjects was akin to using black light to reveal traces of blood at a crime scene. Form, facture and viewpoint served as evidence in a forensic process – manifestations of objectification, voyeurism and idealization were exposed.

Nowadays, the crime scene is complicated, especially where female authorship is concerned. In paintings of women by women, thanks to a sense of intimate self-knowledge, what has begun to emerge are emphatic – indeed, empathetic – attempts to maneuver the inherent theatricality of being subjected to the gazed. The subject can become complicit and resigned to being a displayed object, or lay out an elaborate performative trap in which the unaware spectator devours the bait. Two current shows present different but equally intriguing examples of such maneuvering: Suzy Spence’s A Night Among the Horses, ongoing at Sears Peyton Gallery in Chelsea, and Heather Morgan’s Heavenly Creatures, at David Schweitzer Gallery, last month, in Bushwick.

In Spence’s fox hunting scenes, equestriennes, clad in flamboyant yet intricate riding apparel, nonchalantly show off their lissome figures. Erotic availability is both sealed and fueled by the apparent practicality and purposefulness of this attire, rendered all the more thorny by the lingering traces of gender and class dynamics that informed the evolution of riding costumes, historically. Spence, who studied under feminist artists like Mira Schor and Maureen Connor, explores fertile conceptual ground with painterly vigor. While some works in the show present intense action, in most of her portraits the women seem caught in a moment of respite, either confronting the gaze directly or microscopically turning to the side in seductive evasion. Complexions range from rude joviality to ghostly pallor, hinting at the simple inscrutability of the characters’ thoughts and desires. In Untitled (Rider),  [above] the thick strokes of black paint writhe around the rider’s sinuous, partly-dishabille body, the commanding painterly bravura delivering her as the archetypal, objectified “feast for the eye”–she, rather than the fox, becomes the quarry.

In Carriage (I), by contrast, the characters show a lugubrious gravitas that seems to acknowledge implicit distress or even lurking fear beneath the immaculately polished grace of the hunt, which is itself a precarious performance of wealth and class. Spence’s painterly execution is consistently nebulous: supple, broad strokes are lushly handled within the relatively constrained area of her typically small compositions. The viewer of Carriage (I) can experience simultaneously the visceral grip of the magnetic gaze of the equestrienne on the left of the composition and the deconstructive awareness that her face is a conglomerate of cogently defined individual marks. Such handling allows the painting to maintain a certain level of ambiguity. When working in conjunction with the potent themes of the foxhunting motif, such ambiguity is able to provoke questions about power discourses that demand deliberation. However, the enigmatic quality can also be at the expense of vulnerability and authenticity. In Carriage (II), the pair of faces juxtaposed with one another on either side of the cuddled fox, one with chiseled clarity and the other obscured in lyrical pentimenti, seem to symbolize a recurring oscillation between concrete affection and insouciant panache.

Spence’s masterful handling of media, which in this show includes Flashe, oil paint and acrylic, sometimes serves an expressive purpose beyond the tough luxuriance of her mark making. The diaphanous mottled quality that describes the riding veils worn in many portraits constitutes a terrifying presence: beyond the functionality and decorativeness of the accessory itself, it transforms into a symbolic form in which femininity is a veiled, mystical presence and the theatricality of seduction is complex and disguised. Inquiries into gender and class are, like the gaze piercing through those veils, a haunting queasiness beneath the forceful hush. But such concealment is self-imposed, the veils voluntarily worn. In Heavenly Creatures, Heather Morgan offers another theater of femininity. Her sensuous portraits of women deliver unfettered and unclouded erotic shockwaves. Some of these figures are self-portraits, others Morgan’s friends. In either case, they emanate the glare of intimate disclosure. Her brush marks register bravura, but compared to Spence’s graceful jetés they are generally more angular, staccato, and filled with rapid, nervous energy. The female figure is often accentuated by an array of items: clothing, makeup, tattoos, jewelry, cigarettes. Instead of serving as socio-cultural signifiers, as in Spence, Morgan’s costumes are entryways into an individual’s personality and predicament, their symbolic associations woven into a backdrop to each character’s emotional state.

In Heavenly Creature, the title painting of the show, the naked upper body thrusts forcefully forward, rhyming with the curve of the assertively raised arm. The all-knowing intransigence of the complexion, anchored at the painfully scarlet lips, reads more like a challenge than an invitation. Most works in this show follow a similar construction: singular, sexually strong female figures in pulsating spaces. In a way that, tellingly, recalls Michael Fried’s description of Gericault, a problematic veneer of theatricality in these paintings is simply shattered at first contact by the monstrous proportions of overt, inundating sensual energy. Such energy finds another, even more tactile outlet in Morgan’s drawings. These relatively small pieces, skin-like (they are executed on Yupo paper), recall Klimt’s nude drawings with their highly sexualized posture and melodic, flowing lines. The nuanced tonal washes congeal into corals and fire (in the top part of Lay, for example). The drawings seem to almost tremble under the intense private pleasure they are obliged to bear. The headstrong vulnerability embedded in all this sensationalized sexuality, which can at times verge on vulgarity, evokes a sense of authentic emotional connection in the viewer. But the intense personal nature of these emotionally repetitive “illicit” depictions might actually prevent her work from taking part in wider discussions of gender and sexuality. Indeed, the unabashed pursuit of “sexiness” has resulted in criticism for Morgan in the past, as it alludes – so the argument goes – to auto-sexualization and anti-feminism. In a dialogue with Jennifer Samet that took place on the closing day of this exhibition, Morgan asserted that she doesn’t identify as a feminist painter. There is, however, a curious side effect of this apparently apolitical stance. For in these paintings of luscious revelry and exquisite vulnerability, largely guided by the painter’s emotional instinct and searching sense of conviction, Morgan achieves a concreteness of female experience that is possibly stronger and more complete than a labyrinth constructed with intellectual tenets. The voyeuristic gaze is given the opportunity to transform itself into a vicarious one.

It is clear that Spence and Morgan have taken remarkably different routes in scripting a theatrical habitat for their subjects. A large part of this difference springs from a peculiar contemporary division between the provocative and the empathetic as painting attaches itself to an exterior cause (in this case feminism). The enigmatic urgency in Spence situates the viewer at a probing distance, in a spectatorial role, luxuriating in social glamour and drama when all of a sudden confronted by the characters’ haunting gaze and demand for a fair hearing. In Morgan, visceral torrents of solitary emotion forcefully absorbs the viewer who is then obliged to decide how to handle this gratuitous entry into an intensely private world.

In either event, theatricality is today more than ever implicated in paintings of women by women as both the gazed upon and the spectator have become equally active players. The multiplicity and subtlety of treatments, of which we had a glimpse through these two shows, sparkles hopeful excitement for the continual evolution of painting’s capacity to give voice to a muted presentness: to comply, to masquerade, to entice, or to attack.

The post Hunters and Hustlers: Feminism and Theatricality in Suzy Spence and Heather Morgan appeared first on artcritical.

October 19 to November 22, 2017
534 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, miandn.com

For several decades now, a notion has been advanced that history is a subcategory of literature– not the other way around. Like storytelling, history, in this reckoning, is invested in interpreting accounts of events focused to a purpose.

In her deservedly celebrated Post-partum Document (1973-79) Mary Kelly put her son’s linguistic and cognitive socialization, and her reactions to it, within the frame of a discourse and rendered it the object of a six-year study.  For her current exhibition, Kelly herself is the object of self-study, framed loosely as she once understood herself in the world.

“The Practical Past” is a memoir from the artist’s current perspective on her life in the collective spheres she inhabited in the 1960s and ‘70s and their relation to events before and since. Much of this is writing made visual through letters from that time reflecting concerns and worries about how to live the engaged feminist life, These are transposed in digital projections that nonetheless reflect Kelly’s decision to do a kind of cottage-industry piecework.  In a slightly mismatched gridded array, the overall text of handwritten correspondence renders originals as multiple iterations. What appears to shade and fade into historicism is also stuff.

In days of yore—i.e. before digital technologies became the lingua franca of art schools—protest literature was much seen on newsprint, in an affinity with posters of the avant-garde and their cheap card stock. In the current show, Kelly’s homage to the journal “7 Days” has the look of such protest technology, although it isn’t print at all (we are told), but rather an assemblage of vinyl templates and lint.

At the other end of craft are framed notes, written on letterpress luxury stock, , authored in a diarist’s voice that allows Kelly to lay down her thoughts about her identity with respect to the engaged life without rehearsing the latter’s ideological endgames. The largest evident arc of the story establishes world historical events through photography—or that it how it initially appears to the viewer. Specific images, celebrated for capturing cultural eventfulness in modern history, are seen projected large on gallery walls as if to situate personal practice within collective memory. The perennially profound steadfastness of booklovers standing amid ruins of Holland House Library during the London blitz in 1940 is an eloquent argument for literacy and its necessary purposes in reading to understand. Also in universal collective memory is the raising of the French flag on the eve of the general strike in Paris, 1968. These images of European consciousness to be held in universal experience establish the scale of history in the mind of the individual activist, writing letters and essays in ephemera substantial to herself.

The story Kelly tells in visual terms is dispersed. The several modes of discourse each in composite techniques, some not at all apparent, render the elaborate exhibition hermetic within an allegorical postmodern historicism. That almost all images are comprised of screens of lint is a fact of manufacture to be discovered in reading matter of the checklist and press release, and otherwise so understated as to be unsaid. The TV “snow” projected is aptly present and clearly so, a device for placing the archival images of eventful history in the transmission of information. Interesting to debate, then, is how the sequence of observed encounters with Kelly’s images affects the sense and meaning of them. If one starts by identifying larger pictorially realized political events and progresses through her personal letters, a framework of activist initiatives in history unfolds. But if one starts, instead, with the read information of the lint, this changes the terms of engagement: the frame is now women’s work, with the artist subject to the initiatives of others.  What is up for debate is whether understated complicated crafts articulate the theory-in-practice more adroitly than brutally overstated, spectacular room-size installations dedicated to the polis and its grievances. After all, in what other modes of praxis can history conjoined to literature be effectively visualized?

One thing is certain: “The Practical Past” is a refreshing study. It is also an antidote to the super-sized party-favors in the art world—meant to divert the adult daycare center and its caretakers who are the enablers of dangerous behaviors.

The post Visualizing Historicism: Mary Kelly’s Personal Reckoning appeared first on artcritical.

“Why Not Judy Chicago?” at CAPC/Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (March 10 through September 4, 2016)

Most people, when they see smoke, run in the opposite direction. Not so Judy Chicago. This Olympian of feminist art sprints toward fire–that is if she didn’t ignite it herself (literally, in her pyrotechnic works). With hair the color of smoldering embers and a razor-sharp wit, Judy Chicago is entering her 77th year with as much determination to combat prejudice and redress the deficit of women’s work in the art world as when she appeared in boxing drag in a Los Angeles gym. That was back in 1970, when women were still barred by law from the ring.

“Why Not Judy Chicago?” at CAPC in Bordeaux, France examines the artist’s career from her graduate student years in California in the mid-1960s, through her Resolutions series of early 2000. Organized in collaboration with Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao and curated by Xabier Arakistain, the exhibition traces her multifaceted contributions as an artist, teacher, writer and activist. Arakistain, a longtime advocate for gender parity within museums and cultural institutions, has foregrounded two lines of Chicago’s work: her creation of a feminist iconography that denounces the oppression of women, and her efforts to invest the teaching of art and history with their contributions. It is particularly instructive to see this exhibition in France where the seeds of feminism were sown nearly two hundred years earlier than in the United States.

Presented in the Entrepôt Lainé, a vast warehouse built in 1824 for colonial goods (a story of dominance in itself), the exhibition unfolds through a sequence of arches and stone passageways. The diverse media and historic themes of Chicago’s oeuvre are well served by this cloistering, resonant architecture.

Mother Superette (1963), a work on paper made when Chicago was a graduate student, contains abstract figures that could be Cycladic female bench-pressers, but they also resemble Byzantine patterns from The Grammar of Ornament, Owen Jones’s monumental survey of international decorative design, published in England in 1856. Though situated securely within a tradition of architectural and design history, her work was criticized by male professors at UCLA for imagery that was “too-feminine.” Conflicted by her desire for acceptance while repeatedly being told that “you couldn’t be a woman and an artist too,” she switched gears and began to employ abstraction in a more subversive way. Her goal was to use color, surface texture, and form to develop a vocabulary of embedded meanings relating to women’s knowledge, sexual independence, and agency. She had by then changed her name (matching the city she grew up in) and enrolled in an auto body painting class — the only woman out of 250 students. There, she mastered lacquer and spray-painting techniques — de rigueur in LA’s car and surfboard culture — that became an aesthetic foundation for her work for the next several decades.

Pasadena Life Savers Yellow Series #2 (1969-70), rendered in airbrushed mists of blue/green, yellow, and violet on reflective acrylic panels, represents a crucial turn in Chicago’s investigation of the perceptual and emotional impact of color, geometric diagrams, and spatial systems. But these are not just intellectual Op-Art exercises. The iconography of the Life Savers paintings is a visual code that plays out on all quadrants of a complicated field. Circles and hexagons stood for the cunt in both word and image, challenging its socially constructed, demeaning connotation. At the same time, Chicago employed her brand of abstraction in the macho arena of Finish Fetish, the West Coast version of Minimalism. Finish Fetish artists were inspired by California’s surf culture, light, air, and smog, making slickly perfect sculpture in glass, polished metal, plastic, and resin. Chicago’s art reflected these prevailing ideas yet denounced the phallocentrism of a culture in which women artists were essentially absent from major gallery exhibitions, museum collections, and university professorships. Only recently have the women who worked in this milieu, such as Helen Pashgian and Mary Corse, been “rediscovered” in important museum exhibitions.

Chicago’s pyrotechnic works addressed another set of concerns about war, the environment, and women’s rituals. In Immolation IV (1971) Faith Wilding is engulfed by orange smoke from burning flares that encircle her grey-tinted seated figure. This was one of Chicago’s Atmospheres (Duration Performances with Fireworks) of 1968-74, staged throughout California, sometimes with her students as participants. Utilizing colored smoke to soften and feminize the landscape, these ephemeral performances also called attention to the bombing campaigns in Vietnam, and the self-immolation of monks in protest of the war. Haunting documentary footage of the Atmospheres (accompanied by the music of Miriam Cutler) combines Impressionist fascination with the obscuring effects of smoke and fog and a contemporary artist’s outcry against violence in its many forms.

The revolutionary, pedagogical experiment of the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts is displayed in a series of documents from Womanhouse (1972) and never-before exhibited works by students of Chicago and co-founder Miriam Schapiro. Their inclusion in the exhibition is important in signaling the impact of the other women students who were part of the program. Collaborators Dori Atlantis, Nancy Youdelman and Karen LeCocq, for instance, were staging cheeky photographs that skewered gender stereotypes several years before Cindy Sherman began making photographs of constructed feminine identities in her Untitled Film Stills.

Rarely seen test plates portraying the physician Elizabeth Blackwell and the astronomer Caroline Herschel represent Chicago’s best known work, The Dinner Party (1974-79), her epic tribute to 1038 women who shaped the history of Western civilization. Vintage exhibition posters tell the story of the artwork’s international impact, the hundreds of volunteers and skilled artisans who contributed to its production, and its reverberating power as a cultural monument, now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum.

But beyond The Dinner Party, Chicago has yet to be fully assessed in relation to the socio-political history of narrative and mural painting in America. In Cartoon for the Fall (1987) images of labor, violence, and religion are delineated in the model for a monumental tapestry (woven by Audrey Cowan) for The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1985-93). The project was the outcome of extensive research into Chicago’s Jewish heritage and created in collaboration with her husband, the photographer Donald Woodman, together with skilled artisans. I see the Cartoon as philosophically and visually linked to Thomas Hart Benton’s mural America Today (1930-31), and Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1940-41). Benton’s mural represents the utopian dream of a new society but it also warns of the dangers of overconsumption. Lawrence’s narrative cycle (although more intimate in scale) confronts the harrowing journey of African Americans seeking economic and social equality during the interwar years.

The 18th-century French playwright Olympia de Gouze was a self-educated butcher’s daughter who in 1791 wrote The Declaration of the Rights of Women. “The purpose of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of woman and man,” she argued. “These rights are liberty, property, security, and especially resistance to oppression.” Judy Chicago, the daughter of a medical secretary and post office employee who embraced civil rights, still runs with a torch that illuminates the achievements of women, and resists oppression in all its forms. If only there were a way to bring this exhibition to America.

The post The Boxer: Judy Chicago Retrospective in Bordeaux, France appeared first on artcritical.

June 30 to July 29, 2016
535 West 22nd Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 647 1044

“The Woman Destroyed,” a group exhibition at P.P.O.W, titled after Simone de Beauvoir’s work of fiction, is a latently hostile display of frustration aimed toward overused, female-unfriendly tropes. Picking up where De Beauvoir leaves off in her book, which focuses on the lives of middle-aged women and their unsexy encounters with betrayal, failure, and various crises, these six artists each embody a unique and complicated experience that emerges from such a disadvantage.

Perhaps the poster image for this exhibition is Bag Lady (2016) by Robin F. Williams. According to urban slang, a Bag Lady is a homeless and/or crazy woman who carries all her possessions in an assortment of bags. Another colloquialism explains that if a man wishes to have sex with an ugly woman that he may better his experience by putting a bag over her head. In this painting, the insulting act of hooding her subject with a bag is muffled by the trippy palette, the stormy, gray atmosphere blooming in the distance, and by the subject’s relaxed attitude, which lets the viewer know that she’s been through this sort of thing at least a thousand times. She’s a self-proclaimed Bag Lady that put the bag on her own damn head. Maybe it’s her way of saying that her mind is her only true possession — and that men finding her sexually attractive is not her main occupation. Williams’s other painting in the show, In the Gutter (2015), is a similar display of bad-assery. The model in this picture looks as though she walked off a billboard of naked women selling watches or shoes, and assumed a squat right over a gutter, as if to say “Sell this.” The crass gesture, coupled with her beautiful form adorned in golden shoes and matching belt, reinforce the simultaneously sad and unapologetic situation: a strong, capable woman stuck playing one of the most intellectually underwhelming roles of her life.

Elizabeth Glaessner’s 20 small paintings (all 2016) slip into a deeper, psychological realm. The space is internal, slow, and sludgy; each picture resembles a snapshot from a psychedelic vision or nightmare. Circling, for instance, reads like a creepy transcription of the Three Fates. The color emits a curious internal light and is often applied with direct, gestural mark-making. Helping a Friend has raised, red iron oxide hands in the immediate foreground, which suggest that the dreamer is falling away from, or calling out to, the two figures struggling in the mid ground. De Beauvoir wrote, in The Second Sex (1949), that, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” These images feel as though they move from the emergence to dissimilation of a woman — that a lifetime of memories and experience produce a psyche that is irreconcilable with reality perceived at face value. Glaessner’s figures appear to be forgetting their womanhood.

A similar disparate culling of inner thought and outer being can be found in David Mramor’s work. Mramor, who sometimes goes by his feminine pseudonym, Enid Ellen, features photographs of his late mother. The images, printed on canvas are embellished with smudges and lines of acrylic to create a juxtaposition of reality and painted marks. Ambiguous yet provoking, the pictures seem to point to an inability to access his mother, his inner womanhood, or even a comfortable synthesis of his his male and female attributes. The blatant clashing of language in his work corresponds to a dichotomous sensibility weighted by melancholy.

Moving from male-female to female-animal, Centaurette in Forest (2015), by Alison Schulnik, is a visceral, chunky rendering of a lady centaur. Not a bull in a china shop, but a centaurette in a cake shop, the frantic creature grasping at the sides of her head appears as though she herself is an amalgamation of frosting, wading through the surrounding flora, which is equally goopy. Historically, female centaurs rarely appear in mythology but are occasionally found in Greek and Roman mosaics. Conceivably, this work speaks to the nature of existing without the power to communicate — of being trapped. Similar in both form and content, Lauren Kelly’s digital print, Wall Flower (2011), depicts a constructed mini dancehall. A doll, whose face is cropped out of the shot, sits amid a cluster of empty chairs, wearing a billowing dress literally made of cake frosting. What was made to be tasted and enjoyed by others goes unsampled, either because her choice to withhold it, or by rejection of others.

Looking at Jessica Stoller’s sculpture, Slip (2016), we see again the persistent theme of dessert. The subject of a porcelain bust rears her head, smiling as she balances various pastries, sweets, and plates that have been plopped on top. But unlike Schulnik or Kelly’s females, who are either frantic or lonely, and different even from Williams’s cool and collected women, the figure here appears content — as though she’s merely wearing an extravagant hat to a Surrealist costume ball. Ultimately, what the various dispositions portrayed have in common is a post-angry dissatisfaction with the onslaught of slangs and expectations that women remarkably deal with.

The post De Beauvouir’s Inheritors: “The Woman Destroyed” at PPOW appeared first on artcritical.

41 Franklin Street (between Broad and North streets)
April 9 to July 10, 2016
Stamford, CT, 203 595 5211

Intersectionality, an interpretive social and critical hermeneutic, insists that not one, but many identities (including gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality/citizenship) interact and overlap to shape one’s experiences. “All Byte: Feminist Intersections in Video Art,” at Franklin Street Works, takes this feminist framework seriously, demonstrating how patriarchy and feminism shape art making and history while addressing colonialism, queerness, and masculinity. Solicited through an open call invitation, the videos in the exhibition, by nine artists and artist collectives, were curated in collaboration with the University of Connecticut Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and the Film and Television Program at Sacred Heart University. This unique and smart collaboration is especially fitting for considering collective and interdisciplinary analysis.

Texas-based collective Kegels for Hegel, whose music videos are featured throughout the show, practice their feminism through intellectual cheek, deflating the straight, white, male canon of philosophy with satirical works such as Bite Me (Love Song to Friedrich Nietzsche) (2013), and Thing (Love Song to Karl Marx and Friends) (2016). Lyrics about Marx include “Your material conception of history/ taught me about commodities/ explained that my alienation/ was a form of object subjugation.” Their punk DIY mode and production builds on some of the legacy of third-wave feminists and Riot Grrrls (1990s–present), such as Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, who unapologetically reflect feminist concerns and analyses in their music.

Similarly, Macho Intellectual (2015), a music video by the Mexican collective INVASORIX, features groups of men and women in drag recreating photographs of (mostly male-dominated) art collectives throughout recent history, including the Bauhaus and the Guerrilla Girls. The song lampoons chauvinists and achieves a historical and structural critique of intellectual circles. Both INVASORIX and Kegels for Hegel simultaneously mock and build from the intellectual and artistic movements they reference, including Dada and Marxism.

Michelle Marie Charles’s Explicit and Deleted (2012) uses the genre of hip-hop music videos to satirize black, heterosexual masculinity in drag. Although silly and exaggerated, the video contains pointed analysis around double standards, sexualization, and commodified bodies. The video creates a jolting moment of unexpected language when it asks, outright, but only half-seriously, “What kind of so-called first-world country would even allow their economy to be structured in such a way where [women performing for men in music videos] might be the best viable financial option for half of the population?” While different in tone, style, and narrative, Virginia Lee Montgomery’s The Alien Has to Learn (2015) also explores masculinity, depicting the gendered performance of corporate professionalism at a Las Vegas technology conference — and ending with an ejaculating fire fountain.

Nicole Maloof’s Funny Street Names (2015) recounts the artist’s childhood through a disjointed narrative bouncing off, among other images, Dunkin Donuts, dinosaurs, and racial slurs. She unpacks her identity through references both biblical and historic, with commercials and home videos — all mediated through description using a computerized voice. The video presents onscreen text and narration in both Korean and English, toggling between the two as much as through the disparate mementos. Funny Street Names utilizes the language of computers — including YouTube clips, panning shots of Google Earth, and typing on Microsoft Word –– to write and visually compose a unique, structured narrative. Its (pop) cultural imagery and text reflect on colonialism and successfully translate the public to the personal.

Like Funny Street Names, Sunita Prasad’s Recitations Not From Memory (2014) also centers reading. It depicts men reading aloud, in the first person, the intimate stories of women: experiencing street harassment, gendered housework, workplace discrimination, and marriage dowries. The men read (often awkwardly) from a teleprompter in everyday settings, mimicking the class position of the women who submitted the stories. Prasad tactfully highlights gendered experiences and interrogates the relationship between the way they are spoken , the way they are read, and their materiality. In both Maloof and Prasad’s videos, acts of reading point to feminist concerns of voice, agency, and identity. Maloof and Prasad disconnect the voice of their narratives, respectively deferring to an impersonal computerized voice and the awkward voice of a speaker whose gender differs from that of the author. These displacements underscore the identities involved and create intimacy with the viewer.

A digital video show still draws attention to spatial, material curation. Curator Terri C. Smith’s skillful configuration of space works to create a number of dynamic viewing experiences — from the communal to the individual. Montgomery’s The Alien Has to Learn requires standing, open air viewing, juxtaposing the sit-down-with-headphones consumption of Maloof’s Funny Street Names. Downstairs, Prasad’s Recitations Not From Memory is shown in the gallery’s black box theater. Display technology is also varied in the show, from wall projections to flat screen monitors and to the especially charming retro CRT television playing Kegels for Hegel’s songs.

The show includes an impressive range of tone and approach, refusing one aesthetic or narrative, and instead providing many entry points to the feminist ideas and issues addressed by the videos. Leveraging contemporary video-making strategies, the videos explore and demand a reflection of the personal and political, of bodies and institutions, of history and possibility. The 15 artworks in “All Byte” were all made within the last five years and all by emerging artists. This timeframe, as well as many of the videos’ close relationship to technology –– seen in Charles and Kegels for Hegel’s editing and in Maloof’s stunning technological intertextual layering –– localizes the show within so-called fourth wave feminism. This emerging construct incorporates the intersectionality, queerness, and punk of third wave feminism and brings new possibilities for feminist thought and practice. “All Byte” thoughtfully shows a range of what feminism can look like in video art, and illustrates some of the ways emerging artists and innovative art spaces like Franklin Street Works will continue to play an important role in highlighting evolving feminist politic and aesthetic.

The post Bytes and Biting Satire: Feminist Video at Franklin Street Works appeared first on artcritical.

February 5 to March 26, 2016
528 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 315 0470

Ana Mendieta’s exhibition of experimental films at Galerie Lelong brings 15 works created by Mendieta from circa 1971 to 1975: nine of them had never been exhibited before, just recently uncovered during a cataloguing process. Besides being new to the audience, these experimental films have been transferred from their originals to digital media, which has added a fresh look to them. As we step into the gallery, our eyes are immediately captivated by an image of Mendieta’s face at the back of the main room. In Sweating Blood (1973), Mendieta’s serene semblance appears to be floating in the surrounding darkness. Her hair vanishes amid both the film’s pitch-black background and the walls. While Sweating Blood and Dripwall (1973) face spectators who enter the gallery, six other films have been distributed around the room on the left and right walls. In an adjacent gallery, we can see five more films, two series of photographs, and ephemera from Mendieta’s Estate, such as film reels, cassette tapes, and a notebook with a sketch for Sweating Blood.

Mendieta produced most of the films in the show during her pre-New York life, when she still lived in Iowa, where she had been exiled from Cuba since the age of 12. When she arrived with her sister, they lived at an orphanage. As a Latina, and outsider, she was ostracized and suffered prejudice. Later on, from 1969 to 1977, Mendieta completed two MFAs at the University of Iowa, the first in painting and the second in multimedia and video. She would move to New York only in 1978. Even though Mendieta participated in many progressive movements of her time, and she was definitely at the forefront of experimentation with the body and performance, it is hard not to feel traces of nostalgia in her work — something that she missed, perhaps due to her arduous life in Midwest, or perhaps as an omen of her tragic passing, her troubled marriage with artist Carl Andre. In the show, death is suggested, repelled and enacted: it begins with her speaking skull in X-Ray (ca. 1975), follows with Sweating Blood and Dripwall, and ends with Moffitt Building Piece (1973).

Sweating Blood, one of the most famous films in the show, is hard to ignore. The work lasts only three minutes, but it feels as if it’s way longer than that. Mendieta’s face, young and beautiful, with her closed eyes, is depicted as a self-portrait: we see her entire face, from the neck up. She does not move onscreen, but we can see when she swallows, or rolls her eyes underneath her eyelids, without opening them. At some point, her skin begins to change: the pores on the top of her forehead, where hair begins to grow, are emphasized, as if she just started to present pox, a rash. A red fluid appears on the top of her mid hairline and soon a drip of “blood” falls from her hair, just to find her left eyebrow. A second drop follows, running towards her left ear. The upper part of her forehead seems to be sweating blood.

In Dripwall (1973), three round holes appear on a white wall, coming from inside, one at a time. Red liquid leaks from them, dripping across the white plane. They reminded me of bullet holes. Moffitt Building Piece shows another of Mendieta’s experiments with blood. It was created in response to the murder of Sarah Ann Ottens, who was beaten, sexually assaulted, and killed in her dorm at the University of Iowa on March 13, 1973. In April of that year, Mendieta staged a violent rape scene in a performance at her apartment, later named Rape Scene, and then started her Moffitt Building Piece, which also responds to Ottens’s murder. Moffitt Building Piece begins with a view of the eponymous storefront in Iowa City. Mendieta is clandestine, filming from inside a car towards the façade of the building. A puddle of blood is seen on the sidewalk, in front of Moffitt’s door. After the camera gives a close-up on the puddle, we notice it’s lumpy, meat-like: Mendieta spilled an animal’s blood and meat on that sidewalk and then filmed the reactions of passersby, who look on the tableau with varying degrees of shock, concern, or disinterest.

While blood in Mendieta’s work has been labeled as “abject,” at Lelong, blood is empowering. Even though she created Moffitt Building Piece in reaction to the pervasive sexual violence against women, blood was not always a negative element for her. Instead, she used it as force, concomitant with her interest in Catholicism and the Afro-Caribbean religion Santería. In Sweating Blood, in Moffitt Building Piece and in Dripwall, blood evokes both presence and absence of a body: the power of blood to induce a trancelike state points to what happens beyond the body, a wall earns its “life” through bleeding like a body, and a woman’s death is exposed through the reminiscence of her corpse. These gestures are far from being abject; blood sanctions Mendieta’s body and creates bounds with our bodies, as spectators.

Magic is everywhere, as if these works were fragments of fairytales, or cautionary tales from a childhood in Latin America. In Dog (1974), filmed during a summer program in Mexico, Mendieta’s small silhouette is seen, moving far afield on an unpaved street in San Felipe, Oaxaca. As the camera focuses on her, we see she is on all fours, wearing a fur skin over her face and possibly naked body. She crawls. A man walks up the street, and ignores “the dog.” A woman and a boy pass next to her, no interaction. She still crawls, vulnerable, as if half-alive, recoiling, hesitant, woman, animal, and outsider.

The post An Outsider’s Tale: Ana Mendieta at Galerie Lelong appeared first on artcritical.

I was only four and yet I had a job already. I’m walking, hand in hand with my mother, down crowded, chaotic New York streets and my job is to provide protection whenever we pass a group of men. Even though we were a mother-daughter duo, they’d be watching her like a hawk. I never forgot the helplessness I felt at that moment, because I knew that the men’s gazes demoralized my mother, yet what could I do?

This distinct memory came to mind the other day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A show of portraits of grand ladies like Marie Antoinette and Russia’s Princess Alexandra Golitsyna created during the late 1700s showed off the artist’s meticulous skill and way with vibrant pigments. The artist who painted these portraits of such esteemed individuals was a woman: Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, who was active as a portrait painter from teenage years until her death. Vigée Le Brun spent her early years in a convent, moving to the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris when her widowed mother remarried a wealthy jeweler. Thereafter she grew up in an influential circle of court artisans. She was accepted to the Royal Academy and was then allowed to show her work in their Salon. Nevertheless, Vigée Le Brun was a fish out of water, since the academy was completely dominated by men. I can only begin to imagine the ridicule and disdain that her fellow male artists showed her, just for being a woman and endeavoring to fulfill her passion. In 1776 she married painter and art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, whose great-great uncle was Charles Le Brun, the first Director of the French Academy under Louis XIV.

As I strolled around the Met, looking at her paintings, I felt a strong sense of pride, respect, and indeed gratification towards Vigée Le Brun for helping to pave the way for female artists and women in general, just through her unconventional success. The painting that had the most drastic impact on me was one of a famous subject in a non-traditional dress: La Reine en gaulle (1783) whose subject is Marie Antoinette. In this painting the doomed queen, unadorned by royal jewels, wears a loose fitting muslin dress with a simple sash around the waist. She delicately holds a rose and wears a straw hat. This painting caused quite a stir when it was first shown, what with the Queen of France in such a relaxed and un-royal pose: It was a major faux pas. Yet to me, even though the painting does not show her in the typical grand style that was the custom with the royalty during that time, I believe that Marie Antoinette exudes a sense of regality—even though, at first glance, one would not recognize the subject as a royal or a wealthy individual, since it has all the bearings of a commoner. When I first laid eyes on this painting, despite the casual aspect of it, I knew that the subject of the painting was someone of great importance, simply through her stature and poise. Even in a simple smock, Marie Antoinette exudes elegance and that is what I find most striking. Marie Antoinette had a reputation for disregarding tradition and etiquette at Versailles, one that this painting confirms. It shows her “wild” side, the individual she might have become if she wasn’t a royal. That’s what attracts me to this painting, the unconventional female artist and her equally unconventional royal subject.

Due to public uproar that greeted this risqué painting, Vigée Le Brun was forced to execute another, this time with Marie Antoinette adorned in a lavish headdress and a heavy corseted blue satin gown. Ironically, the new painting mimicked the old, with the same body position, and Marie Antoinette once again posed holding a rose—a rose that by any other name would smell as sweet. All that differs is the style of dress. The curators have placed these paintings side by side, inviting comparison. I almost feel as if Marie Antoinette and Vigée Le Brun planned it so, as if to say “take a hike” to their harshest critics.

Max Weber once wrote, “Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.” I believe that this applies to Marie Antoinette and Vigée Le Brun. In a time where women had little or no power, art was the outlet in which these women interpreted themselves. That is why I find this work so powerful. Most art is meant to please, but La Reine en Gaulle was meant to provoke.

Since the dawn of time, society has regarded women as incapable, unequal, and subordinate to their male counterparts. The same can be said for the art world. According to a famous poster by the Guerrilla Girls from the 1980s, less than 4% of the artists in the modern section of the Met are women, but 76% of the nudes are female. This is only one statistic that shows how the art world is a man’s game. My mother, who I mentioned earlier, the artist Brenda Zlamany, has always been an inspiration to me, a single parent trying to create art in a field where the odds are set against her. She is a portraitist and has used me as the subject of countless paintings, which might be why I took such a liking to Vigée Le Brun who also created many a painting with her daughter as muse. Both artists show the stages of growth of their daughter, from infant, to tween, to teenager. Vigée Le Brun is not as well known as Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Auguste- Dominique Ingres, but women who are equal to men in every way are often left in the shadows. Even now in the “modern” era, women can still make less money than men for the same job and are often excluded from opportunities, just because of their gender. I hope to use Vigée Le Brun as an example and express my feelings about gender equality through art and the power of words. Art and words can change the world. Maybe I’m an optimist for saying that, but I really believe it.

The post Walks on the Wild Side: Female Empowerment and a Right Royal Faux Pas appeared first on artcritical.