Looking Back to Move Forward:

Feminist Art of the 1970s

 

By Petunia L. Waddle

 

“Art can be understood as a specific kind of action and feminism a specific form of language.  The promise of feminist art is the performative creation of new realities.  Successful feminist art beckons us towards possibilities in thought and in practice still to be created, still to be lived[1]

 

   The feminist art movement of the 1970s brought fundamental, and some would say radical, changes to the art world. The feelings of isolation and powerlessness that plagued many women of the time led some artists to move toward a more collaborative model of art making.  Some of these artists emerged from the second-wave of feminism, which focused on sexuality, the family, and the home. Others were artists that were attracted to the idea of discovering a new, more essentially feminine artistic language.  

 

  As in all great art movements, collaboration and group support were critical components of the feminist art movement.  Looking back, we tend to see the work of the solo, individual genius, “The romantic image of the artist as striving and starving alone.”[2]  Yet it is the coffee houses, the clubs, and the meeting halls that have been the nexus of so many great movements throughout history.   It is through interactions with other artists that ideas have been born and been incubated, discussed, experimented with, and eventually developed.

The feminist art movement of the 1970s sought to use collaboration as both a political act and a “creative first choice”.  Its goals were not simply to acquire equal status, education, and opportunity for women, but to fundamentally alter both society and the wider art world.  Lucy Lippard argued that this feminism was “a value system, a revolutionary strategy, and a way of life.”[3] By making their personal experiences visible through art, feminist artists of the sixties and seventies fundamentally challenged the assumption that some human experiences are more valid than others.

 

 Womanhouse was a collective started by Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro, and the students of the Cal Arts Feminist Arts Program.  Together, the women converted a rundown mansion into a working art and performance space.   They did all of the rebuilding themselves, and in the process taught themselves the essential skills of perseverance and hard work—skills that would serve them well in their future lives as artists.  Womanhouse operated on a model of collective, collaborative, rotating leadership.  Its efforts grew from consciousness raising; extensive discussions about the personal experiences of women that were socially taboo to discuss in public. By removing the cloak of invisibility from the lives of women and creating art from their own experiences, the personal was elevated to the political. The women of Womanhouse created a vast amount of sculpture, artwork, and live performance art, which attempted to illuminate the common experiences of the women of the program. Although there were eventually ideological rifts in the community, the idea sharing and collaboration that took place during the evolution of Womanhouse was an incubator for generations of great feminists and feminist artists.

 

 Like all movements, the feminist art movement of the 1970s was not without its difficulties.  The women of Womanhouse were overwhelmingly young, white, middle class, and educated, and very few had actually experienced marriage or motherhood; two of the primary subjects of their creative work. Without the participation of a truly diverse population of women, the collaborative model of consciousness-raising was not enough to remedy the inevitably biased perceptions of its participants.  Though the women were dedicated to creating art from their own experiences, their experiences were limited, and so too was the art that subsequently emerged.

   

   As the 70s passed, much of the feminist art that emerged from this fertile period of creative exploration began to pass into obscurity.   Some of this can be attributed to the artists’ lack of documentation and the transient nature of their performances, but largely its disappearance can be attributed to the art world’s dismissal of it as “essentialist.” This accusation materialized in the 1980s, and challenged the notion that there could be a universal female visual language, and, secondarily, a universal female experience.[4] This backlash against second-wave feminist art came from its failure to adequately reflect the experiences of women of different classes, races, and sexual orientations.  Jill Dolan argued that this work, and subsequent work like it, “insist(s) that our commonalities as women override our racial and class differences.”[5]

 

   Feminist artists of later generations are generally ambivalent about identifying themselves with these pioneers in feminist art, and the postmodern movement’s stress on “femininity” as a social construction, on plurality, and on deconstructionism has strengthened the resistance to the idea of a common “feminine aesthetic”.[6]  While the idea of a universal feminine language seems naive today, the idea of identifying and naming common female experiences seems less so. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard argue in The Power of Feminism that the art of the feminist artists of the seventies was much more concerned with uncovering and exposing women’s shared experiences, rather than in finding an “essential” women’s visual language.  Some of these artists’ radical work, such as Suzanne Lacy’s Ablutions, which addressed the taboo subject of rape, focused on subjects that are almost never openly or transparently addressed in the contemporary art world.[7] Does blanketing early works of feminist art as essentialist shut down the art world’s ability to directly criticize oppressive institutions or to reaffirm women’s shared experiences?  Broude and Garrard ask what would happen if we replaced the notion of biological essentialism (an obviously problematic category) with cultural/political essentialism.[8] Certainly, it seems that in order to transcend the gendered roles of a patriarchal culture, we must be able to identify and acknowledging the cultural and political conditioning of women.[9]

 

   It’s been decades since the explosive experimentations of the early feminist artists challenged the definitions of art, but the established Art world is still smitten with the notion of individual genius and still a slave to market hierarchy.  We have yet to create the “lasting institutions and monuments” to female achievement that Judy Chicago advocated for, and so much of the work women have done from generation to generation has been forgotten.  Miriam Shapiro shared her concerns writing,  “Each generation opens wounds, which close in the night behind them.”  In 1981, not ten years after the tremendous accomplishments of the Feminist Art Program, Cal Arts put on a 10th anniversary show of alumni in which only two of the sixteen artists were women.(10) 

 Certainly, the idea of finding a common “woman’s visual language” is no longer taken seriously in the art world.  However, it seems that the real tragedy may be the loss of the collaborative consciousness raising groups that were responsible for seeding so much early feminist work and, secondarily, of their utopian visions of a fundamentally altered society.  Though ideas about art, gender, and culture have fundamentally changed, women are still a long way from equality, and even further from transforming the hierarchical culture of patriarchy.   Women still earn about seventy-nine cents for every dollar men earn, and domestic violence has been identified as the leading cause of injury to women.(11) In a world where the word “feminism” is often perceived as a dirty word,  it is essential that we awaken to the cultural misogyny that has been so normalized that most of us can no longer see it. Forty years ago, the women of Womanhouse and the Feminist Art Program were attempting to facilitate this critical cultural awakening. It would serve us well to embrace this piece of our artistic heritage and re-examine the groundbreaking work of those early feminist artists.  Perhaps then we can reconsider the ways in which their revolutionary strategies might be used to move contemporary feminism into the future. 

 

 

 

[1] Peggy Phelan, Art and Feminism, pg. 20  

[2](one of the received myths of Western history), Stein, Judith E., 'Collaboration', The Power of Feminist Art, pg. 226

[3]The Power of Feminist Art, pg. 10

[4] Art and Feminism, pg. 37

[5] Dolan, Jill, 'Cultural Feminism and the Feminine Aesthetic', speaking about Cultural Feminist Theater

[6] The Power of Feminist Art, pg. 10 and 28

[7] Suzanne Lacy, 1972

[8] The Power of Feminist Art, pg. 28

[9] An idea discussed in an interview with Miriam Shapiro,The Power of Feminist Art, pg. 8

(10) Miriam Schapiro, The Power of Feminist Art, pg. 83

(11) Tong, Rosemarie, Feminist Thought, a More Comprehensive Introduction, pg. 296