Taschen is an art book publisher founded in 1980 by Benedikt Taschen in Cologne, Germany. Taschen specialises in publishing art books about less well-covered topics including queer, fetish and erotic art. This relatively small-format (15.3 x 20 cm), high-gloss art book does what it says on the tin and features four-page spreads on 46 women artists of the 20th and 21st centuries – each artist gets two pages of text about them, facing two pages of selected images, whether paintings, sculptures, photos of installations or performances etc.

German

The text is sourced from a range of experts on the various artists, but they and the introduction by Ute Grosenick, are all translated from the German. The resulting prose often feels heavy, in fact is sometimes incomprehensible – and is not helped by the liberal use of the kind of artspeak jargon which is required to explain and make sense of most of the artists from the 1960s onwards.

Wordy yet uninformative

Here’s the opening of the article about Andrea Zittel.

An inundation of stimuli and pressure to consume are two of the operative terms continually used with regard to the influence of mass culture on the individual. The former supposedly leads to distraction and nervous overloading, the latter to an awakening of futile needs, prestige thinking, and meaningless superficiality. Andreas Zittel’s blithe ‘applied art’, at first glance ascetic but in fact quite sensuous, can be interpreted against the background of this discussion. She stands, as it were, on the other shore and her mundane ‘art world’ lacks every form of moralising attack, overhasty critique, or complaining cultural pessimism. Rather, the lifestyle she offers is rife with both pragmatic and utopian aspects, and upholds the dignity of the individual within mass culture without losing sight of the factor of desire. (p.186)

On the basis of this passage what do you think Zittel’s art consists of or looks like? Would you expect to see paintings, installations, sculptures, film or video?

For me the key word in this verbose, pseudo-intellectual but strangely prim (‘with regard to’) and ultimately uninformative style, is ‘supposedly’. The use of this word in the second sentence undermines the whole of the remainder of the paragraph. It indicates that the writer (Raimar Stange) is hedging their bets. Mass culture and consumer culture ‘supposedly’ lead to nervous overload and superficiality.

Stange invokes these concepts (which are key to understanding Zittel’s resistance to them) but is anxious to emphasise that she is not so naive as to actually ‘believe’ in them. No, she is far too sophisticated to believe in anything. The use of ‘supposedly’ indicates that Stange is dealing with ideas which may satisfy the mainstream media and uneducated plebs, but that she and the reader – who have all read their Foucault and Lacan and Barthes and Derrida and Deleuze (all authors who are heavily referenced in her text) – are way above that level.

Stange wants to use pretty banal truisms of our time to explain Zittel’s work but she is painfully aware that the ideas she’s invoking are, well, pretty commonplace, and so writes supposedly just to let us know that she’s cleverer than that. She’s having her cake and eating it.

(If you want to understand what Zittel’s very distinctive ‘art’ is like and how it ‘lacks every form of moralising attack, overhasty critique, or complaining cultural pessimism [but ] rather …. offers a lifestyle rife with both pragmatic and utopian aspects, and upholds the dignity of the individual within mass culture without losing sight of the factor of desire’ – check out her Wikipedia page, where you will discover that some of those descriptions are actually very accurate – once her aims and intentions have actually been explained by someone who wants to convey information and not a sense of their own intellectual superiority.)

Clichés

And then sometimes the writers resort to clichés and truisms. Admittedly, writing about art is difficult. Having read all the introductions and all the wall labels for over 400 exhibitions over the past ten years I am all-too-aware of how the curators have to say something about their selection and about each individual work, and it’s getting on for impossible to come up with new descriptive and informative phrases for every one, and so there is a terrible temptation to fill up the space with endless permutations of the stock artspeak phrases – ‘desire’, ‘identity’, ‘gender’, ‘situate’, ‘interrogate’, ‘practice’ and so on.

But still, there’s no excuse for just writing empty clichés. Which artist would you say this is describing?

This is an art on a continual search for the meaning and possibility of personal identity, which both emotionally appeals to and intellectually challenges the viewer. (p.44)

It could be quite literally about any artist, ever.

Alphabetical order

The artists are arranged in alphabetical order, which is one way to do it. But an unintended consequence of this approach is that the first 40 or 50 pages just happen to be entirely about modern artists, whose work, dating from the 1960s and afterwards, tends to be highly experimental, with lots of installations, photos of performances, film and video and so on.

In other words the alphabetical approach (unlike, say, a chronological ordering) gives the misleading impression that most women artists are modern and/or that there aren’t many women artists from earlier eras – which is, of course, completely wrong and, I would imagine, directly contrary to the author’s intentions.

Women’s bodies / sex

Also, contemporary women artists tend to be obsessed with gender, desire, the female body and how it is subject to the well-known male gaze. So a lot of modern women artists set out to subvert or interrogate or somehow avoid this gaze, and fair enough. But the unintended consequence is that the early part of the book seems to be made up entirely of chaotic, male-gaze-avoiding, modern compositions, or of naked women posed in canny ways which are meant to subvert the male gaze.

Again, the actual visual result is to open the book and come across a lot of pictures of naked women which,I strongly suspect, was also not the original aim of the author.

Take, for example, the entry on Vanessa Beecroft. This features 16 colour photographs of extremely attractive naked or scantily clad woman. The book has only got up to ‘B’ in its alphabetical progression, and these sorts of images of naked women set the tone for the way we read about the women artists we encounter in the rest of the book.

Here are examples of the kind of thing I’m talking about, arranged, like the book, in alphabetical order:

• Imponderabilia (1977) by Marina Abramovic
• VB 36.048 by Vanessa Beecroft
• Teenage girls on a beach by Rineke Dijkstra
• Caressing the Pole (2000) by Marlene Dumas
• Blinding (2000) by Tracey Emin
• Genital panic (1969) by VALIE EXPORT

Genital Panic by VALIE EXPORT

This latter work is entertaining. In 1968 Waltraud Lehner (who had renamed herself VALIE EXPORT) cut a hole in the crotch of some trousers and walked through a cinema with her naked crotch at viewers’ head height.

Her action was intended to confront and communicate the cliché of women’s cinematic representation as passive objects. This was aimed to change people’s seeing and thinking.

In fact the most striking thing for me was how hairy her crotch is (as are the crotches of most of the naked women in these photos). Modern pornography, fashion shoots, pop videos, and the more explicit Hollywood movies, have accustomed us to images of women who are completely hairless at crotch and armpits. Looking at many of these old photos reminds me of the notoriously hairy illustrations of the ‘scandalous’ book of the period, The Joy of Sex (1972), whose male figure was full bearded and about as hairy as a man could be. Illustration from The Joy of Sex. So, for me, these kinds of images don’t subvert or change anything, they are just hairily nostalgic.

Satisfaction by Elke Krystufek

Or take, as another example, the work of Viennese artist Elke Krystufek (b.1970). Her entry begins by describing  how, at a 1994 group exhibition JETZTZEIT, she bared her breasts and masturbated in a mock-up of a comfortable bathroom in front of the gallery visitors, starting by using her hand and  then progressing to using a dildo and a vibrator. After she climaxed in front of everyone, she got into the bathwater and relaxed.

As in many of Krystufek’s works, the performance addressed the interrelationship between (male) gaze and (auto)erotic pleasure, as well as the interplay between artistically staged identity, feminist emancipation, and the female body. What at first sight may seem like a crude and narcissistic provocation, brusquely ignoring the distinction between the public and private spheres, turns out in the end to be a deliberate game in which social orders and their unconscious normative ascription – intent on authoritatively determining all expressions of sexuality – are consciously subverted. (p.116)

Stanger’s paragraph-long explanation hinges on the final word, ‘subverted’. If you believe that a woman masturbating in a gallery is subverting gender stereotypes and the male gaze and ‘social orders and their unconscious normative ascription’, then the rest of her explanation stands.

But if, like me, you think that something like this reinforces the stereotype that women artists are obsessed with their bodies and sex and identity – then the rationale for the performance disappears and it becomes just what it indeed appears to be – a woman masturbating for a packed audience of (mostly) men.

It is, in other words, a form of sexual exhibitionism (with, in this context, a complex multi-levelled pun on the world ‘exhibition’) and you don’t have to be Freud to spend more time wondering why this young woman wants to masturbate in front of a gallery full of strangers, and also ponder the motivation and feelings of the people watching. I can’t imagine a lot of the men were not aroused at the sight. And I wonder what the women in the audience felt? Liberated from social convention? Or embarrassed? Or, given that Krystufek is obviously (like so many women artists who do this sort of thing) young, fit and slender, did none of the middle-aged women audience not feel a little bit shamed and humiliated?

• Satisfaction by Elke Krystufek
• Satisfaction by Elke Krystufek
• Satisfaction by Elke Krystufek

Fingers by Marlene Dumas

• Fingers (1999)

According to the text:

Because the images [she bases her paintings on] are culled from porn magazines, sex in Dumas’ paintings is stripped of its erotic charge.

Two points:

1. So we are meant to believe this image has no erotic charge. I wonder if the author has ever met any men.

2. And are you beginning to see what I meant when I said the alphabetical arrangement led to all the opening images being of naked women? And how this, ironically, begins to build up the sense in the read, perusing through the pages, that sex and pornography is all modern women artists can do. Which is, of course, a scandalous travesty of the truth.

Phallocentrism and the castrated woman

In  a 1973 essay titled ‘Visual pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, the film director, scholar and feminist Laura Mulvey examined the relationship between the patriarchal unconscious, the pleasure derived from looking, and the conventional image of woman in cinema and society. Male phallocentrism, Mulvey observed, has defined woman’s role in society as ‘an image of the castrated woman.’ In order to ‘arrive at a new language of desire’, this definition must first be analysed, after which the (visual) pleasure derived from perceiving these images should be destroyed. (p.116)

Forty-four years later I wonder how the project to destroy the visual pleasure to be derived from viewing ‘the conventional image of woman in cinema and society’ is getting on. Maybe it will take a few years more. Or decades. Or centuries.

Traditional art

Away from hard core sexual imagery, ‘traditional’ art – in the form of oil painting – is relatively rare in this book. The names which stand out in terms of old-fashioned art are Sonia Delaunay, Natalia Goncharova, Frida Kahlo, Lee Krasner, Tamara de Lempicka, Georgia O’Keeffe and Bridget Riley, with Barbara Hepworth as a ‘traditional’ Modernist sculptor. Reading their entries is a welcome break from the blizzard of masturbation, sex, vaginas, gender and identity which most of the other entries are about.

I suppose, from a radicals’ point of view, the old-fashioned paintings of these artists is, being so traditional and restricted to traditional formats such as painting and sculpture, has been thoroughly assimilated and so is easy to process and a ‘pleasure’ to read. One kind of pleasure. The pleasure of the familiar and reassuring.

Middle way

But there is another group, a sort of middle way between the two extremes of pornography and old-fashioned convention. As you read on into the book you discover there are plenty of women artists who don’t feel the need to masturbate in public, photograph themselves naked or taking their clothes off or covering their named bodies in paint, or go on and on about female sexuality. There are plenty of strange and interesting women artists, doing strange and interesting things. For example:

Hanne Darboven’s obsession with numbers seems to have led to walls covered with sheets of papers with various mathematical formulae or combinations of numbers all over them – Wunschkonzert (1984)

Isa Genzken’s abstract sculptures – Guardini (1987)

Mona Hatoum’s cool detached sculptural objects – Kapan (2012). Hatoum is now widely acknowledged as one of the leading living artists in the world.

Eva Hesse’s minimalist sculptures – Right After (1969)

Rebecca Horn – admittedly more naked women, but in a genuinely beautiful, aesthetic way – Unicorn (1969), and the later work seems entirely abstract – High Noon (1991)

Kiki Smith – disturbing installations featuring animals and birds – Jersey Crows (1995)

America, as usual

I’ve read criticism of this book saying there’s a bias in the artists selected towards German and European artists. In fact I thought that, if there’s any bias it was, as in 100% in the modern art world, towards American artists.

A third of the artists mentioned are or were based in just one city, New York, testimony to the centrality of that city – centre of global capitalism and awash with bankers’ money – to the post-war art world.

Full list

Here’s the full list of women artists covered in this book. I give their name; country of origin and country where they’ve ended up working; then link to a representative work:

1. Marina Abramovic – b. 1946 birthplace Yugoslavia, Workplace Amsterdam – Performances
2. Eija-Liisa Ahtila – b.1959 Finland, Finland – The House (2002) 14 min DVD
3. Laurie Anderson – b.1947 Chicago, New York – Home of the brave
4. Vanessa Beecroft – b.1969 Italy, New York – VB45 (2001)
5. Louise Bourgeois – b.1911 Paris, New York – Cell
6. Lygia Clark – b.1920 Brazil, Brazil – A Morte do Plano (1960)
7. Hanne Darboven – b.1941 Germany, New York
8. Sonia Delaunay – b.1885 Ukraine, Paris
9. Rineke Dijkstra – b.1959 Netherlands, Netherlands
10. Marlene Dumas – b.1953 South Africa, Amsterdam
11. Tracey Emin – b.1963 England, London
12. VALIE EXPORT – b.1940 Austria, Cologne – Action Pants, Genital Panic (1969)
13. Sylvie Fleury – b. 1961 Geneva, Geneva
14. Isa Genzken – b.1948 Germany, Germany
15. Nan Goldin – b.1953 Washington, New York
16. Natalia Goncharova – b.1881 Russia, Paris
17. Guerilla Girls –
18. Mona Hatoum – b.1952 Beirut, London
19. Barbara Hepworth – b.1903 Yorkshire, St Ives
20. Eva Hesse – b.1936 Hamburg, New York
21. Hannah Höch – b.1889 Germany, Berlin
22. Candida Höfer – b.1944 Germany, Germany
23. Jenny Holzer – b.1950 Ohio, New York
24. Rebecca Horn – b.1944 Germany, Germany
25. Frida Kahlo – b.1907 Mexico, Mexico
26. Lee Krasner – b. 1908 New York, New York
27. Barbara Kruger – b.1945 New Jersey, New York
28. Elke Krystufek – b.1970 Vienna, Vienna
29. Tamara de Lempicka – b.1898 Warsaw, Mexico
30. Sarah Lucas – b.1962 London, London
31. Annette Messager – b.1943 France, Paris
32. Mariko Mori – b.1967 Tokyo, New York
33. Shirin Neshat – b.1957 Iran, New York
34. Louise Nevelson – b.1899 Kiev, New York
35. Georgia O’Keeffe – b.1887 Wisconsin, Santa Fe
36. Meret Oppenheim – b.1913 Berlin, Basle
37. Elizabeth Peyton – b.1965 Connecticut, New York
38. Adrian Piper – b.1948 New York, Cape Cod
39. Bridget Riley – b.1931 London, London
40. Pipilotti Rist – b.1962 Switzerland, Switzerland
41. Niki de Saint Phalle – b.1930 France, California
42. Cindy Sherman – b.1954 New Jersey, New York
43. Kiki Smith – b.1954 Nuremberg, New York
44. Rosemarie Trockel – b.1952 Germany, Germany
45. Rachel Whiteread – b.1963 London, London – House (1993)
46. Andrea Zittel – b. 1965 California, New York – A-Z

Insights from Ute Grosenick’s introduction

It’s interesting to learn that the first women-only exhibition was held in Amsterdam in 1884. Women-only exhibitions were held in Paris in 1908 and 1918. But there were few female art teachers, women members of national art academies, women art dealers networking among women artists until after the Second World War. Up until the 1950s there were often bans on women attending some or all classes in most art schools.

Grosenick gives the impression that there were two great boom periods in 20th century art:

• 1910 to 1920: the decade from just before to just after the Great War saw Art Nouveau, Expressionism, Fauvism, Futurism, Cubism, Vorticism, Constructivism, Dada, Abstract Art, Neue Sachlichkeit and Surrealism.
• 1965 to 1975: the decade from the mid-60s to the mid-70s saw an explosion in the possibilities and definitions of art, exemplified by Pop Art, Op Art, Conceptual Art, Land Art, Fluxus, Arte Povera, Happenings, Performance Art, Body Art and Minimalism.

She says the 1980s were ‘a decade of disillusionment for most women artists’.

She says that the rise of Gender Studies in universities reflects the way ‘the critical examination of the significance of one’s own and other people’s gender… is becoming ever more central to art’.

In my experience of recent exhibitions, I would say that gender and identity are becoming almost the only way in which gallerists and curators can now relate to art. A deep and nuanced understanding of history or a broad and class-based sense of ‘politics’, are both being submerged by an increasingly narrow and militant focus on gender and ethnicity as the only vectors for considering modern or any other kind of art.

Related book reviews

• 50 Women artists you should know
• Women, Art and Society by Whitney Chadwick (2012)

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