Feminist Art
Feminist art – also referred to as art feminism – is art consciously presented in the context of the development of feminist theory. It originated in the early 1970s.
In 1971, the North American art historian, professor, and writer Linda Nochlin, one of the leading scholars in the study of the history of feminist art, published her groundbreaking essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In this essay, she traced the economic and social factors that prevented talented women from achieving the same status as their male colleagues.
Art historians Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, examining the language of art loaded with gendered terms such as “classical drawing” and “masterpiece,” questioned the central place of the nude female body in the Western tradition, asking why men and women are represented so differently.
In 1972, in Ways of Seeing, the writer and critic John Berger concluded: “Men act, and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women, but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male; the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight” (Berger, 2012, pp. 55–56).
Feminist art followed the same trajectory as feminism. In the “first wave” of feminist art, women artists took pleasure in representing female experience, ranging from images of female genitalia to embroidery as an example of “women’s work.” A well-known example of this “first wave” of feminist art is Judy Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party (1974).
Later, feminist artists rejected this approach and focused their research on the origins of femininity and female essence. For the most part, they concluded that femininity is a masquerade, a set of poses adopted by women in order to conform to social expectations of femininity.
The main representatives of feminist art include Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, Rozsika Parker, Judy Chicago, Lucy Lippard, Nan Goldin, Shirin Neshat, Barbara Kruger, and others.
Reference:
Berger, J. (2012). Iskusstvo videt [Ways of seeing] (E. Shragi, Trans.). Saint Petersburg: Kaudberri. [in Russian].
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