Women speak up

‘If these geopolitical circumstances put artists from other countries at a signal disadvantage in terms of international recognition, it goes without saying that the consequences of cultural hegemony were generally fatal to the careers (in the sense of international visibility) of women artists. Thinking here of artists such as the Viennese Maria Lassnig (1919), Meret Oppenheim (1913), Carol Rama (1918), and Lygia Clark (1920) – Austrian, Swiss, Italian, Brazilian – it is interesting to speculate on what their critical fortunes would have been had they lived in New York City.’

In this text, Maite Garbayo-Maeztu seeks to think some of the first performances taking place in the 1970s in Spain, along with occupations of the street by feminist activism at the time. Artists like Dorothèe Selz, Fina Miralles, Àngels Ribé and Olga L. Pijoan would use veils, occultations and alterations that invited viewers to go beyond visuality.

‘Questioning Documentary Practice? The Sign as a Site of Struggle’ was a keynote paper given at the first National Conference of Photography, organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain, in Salford on 3 April 1987. The text has been previously published at the exhibition catalogue Jo Spence. Beyond the Perfect Image. Photography, Subjectivity, Antagonism. Barcelona: MACBA, 2005.

‘“I wasn’t a social being, I was a living being”, Miralles told us during a conversation in 2012 in relation to her work Imatges del zoo (Zoo Images, 1974), in which over the course of three days at the Sala Vinçon in Barcelona she herself appeared in one of five cages that also contained a frog, a cat, a lamb and a dog. The caged female body raised readings about the female condition in a context of restricted freedoms and biopolitical control.’

‘Castoro rejected any notion that she was a feminist artist, declining to be framed in terms of her gender even when it offered opportunities to show her work. As she wrote in a journal entry dated October 29, 1970, “Last week I was invited to the WLG of artists. I stated that I do not consider myself a woman artist. I am foremost an artist and do not want to be segregated in a quota system.”’

«En ce temps-là, les mots qui viennent sont menés par Non, le Non de Nancy, dans toutes les langues, No, Nein, Nem. C’est le Non de l’artiste rebelle. Non pour Non, dent pour dent. Le Non de Stephen Daedalus : I shall not serve. Je ne plierai pas, je ne prierai pas, je crierai : I do not challenge.»