Attanucci Timothy

Beth David

Brenner Summer

Breuning Olaf

Buchina William

Bunnell Dave

Coronato Petra

Dantini Michele

Doutreluingne Pauline

Doy Gen

Ferrante Denise Palma

Foxwell Adam

Fresco Jacque

Gavron Assaf

Glaser Bruno

Goldwyn Mara

Guo-Qiang Cai

Hill Patrick

Horvitz David

Hugo Pieter

Idnert B. Zlatan

Kempenaers Jan

Lin Tao

Maisel David

Maximishin Sergey

Mendoza Connie

Minx Rua

Morrison Rachael

Neutelings Jan

Nielsen Nikolaj

Okón Yoshua

Patt Lise

Petrovszky Konrad

Rameau Max

Rau Milo

Roc Ailen

Shapiro Alan

Situ Studio

Small Gary

Thompson Cosette

van Haarlem Dr. Michiel P.

Vanden Eynde Maarten

Wei Chen

EDITORIAL
Rachel de Joode
Emilie Florenkowsky
Hili Perlson
Anja Wiesinger

DESIGN
Aleksandar Todorović
CODING
Veit Wießner
Anja Wiesinger

META MAGAZINE
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Showing the Opposite Side of the Death Machine By Mara Goldwyn

By Mara Goldwyn

Feminism in the arts has always been tricky. Is it a movement, a theory, a style? Whatever it is, a few things have remained consistent about feminism: the instability of its definition and the reductive perceptions it has had to suffer. There is the caricature version of the feminist artist, with the archetype of a Valerie Solanas-esque bra-burner intent on smashing the “patriarchy.” Then, of course, there is the intriguing but alienating gender and queer studies theorist, confronting aesthetics from a rarefied perspective. Finally, there is the gender-bending “performance” artist whose manipulation of surface is meant to comment on what is deeper below.

Which am I? I think. Somehow engaging feminism always has to take the “I” into consideration. But, uneasy with the thought that as a female living outside of established norms I am pre-cast as a feminist anyway, I’ve been shoving off identifying with feminism for as long as I can remember. Meanwhile, admittedly brief investigations of Post-Structuralist takes on what could constitute a feminist outlook have left me, so to speak, dry. The idea that gender is a construct little assuages the frustrating fact that historically so few of the artists behind work I admire are female.

The life and work of American artist Nancy Spero, however, has allowed me to consider engaging with feminism not as an identity or a theory, but as a tool. Spero herself did not resist the badge of feminism. She took sides, but she never proselytized. Her work was simply a “celebration.” By addressing the female figure as subject—not notably as object—she proposed an alternative vantage point, a “female gaze.”

Spero died recently at the age of 83, not long after the death of her life-long partner and sometime collaborator, Leon Golub. Working for over forty-five years briefly in Europe and then in New York, her career as a political artist coincided with the social turmoil of 1960s America, the conservative turns of the 80s, and the late 20th and 21st century entropy of globalization.

“Human reality is a male reality,” she stated in an interview in 1985. “Looking at human reality as a female reality, looking at female experience as extraordinary as well as the routine, in all the aspects that men usually claim, I want to zero in and investigate our reality.”

Without indulging my own biography too much, I also would like to zero in on my own reality, and explore what it is about Spero’s legacy I find attractive, and ultimately, instructive. What could compel me to face art confidently acknowledging female difference, and maybe even as a feminist?

Let’s start with her life. Although I should evacuate gender and biography from an exploration of Spero’s oeuvre rather than reviewing this woman artist as, well, a woman artist, I’m afraid Spero’s inspiring effect on me has a good deal to do with the fact that we are both women.

Spero began her career at the late age of 40 with two small children in tow, working in the shadow of her husband, already an acknowledged art celebrity. She created through arthritis from the age of 34 and made a decision to return to America in the mid-sixties when she realized that, despite a more receptive political environment in Europe, there was work to be done at home. Not to be left out, she was absolutely stunning, as much at 40 as at 80.

Perhaps what intrigues me most about her is that, as a woman, the obstacles she had to overcome to become worthwhile artistically were rather mundane: She was a married mother, over 40, who lived in one place for the majority of her life and looked feminine, and didn’t need a radical, restless lifestyle or an elaborate twisting of gender roles to make a resonant statement as an artist. At the same time, she never felt the compulsion to exploit her own story to express a feminist viewpoint.

Both Spero and Golub were well aware they were ensconced in an art world that was accused of impotence in the face of real conflict and injustice. But they also understood art as a “touchstone for ideas,” and dealt with concrete issues—notably the war in Vietnam, the torture of innocents in Pinochet’s Chile and the de facto inequality for women worldwide—with the intention of putting positions into motion.

For Spero, injustice was something to be angry about, and that anger was something that needed to be illustrated and explained, not just “expressed.” By making a decision from the outset to produce artwork with content, Spero was confronting the visual language of male-dominated abstract expressionism. In her view, the abstract style said nothing of war or current events, and served even as a distraction, a cover-up.

What irritated Spero (along with a generation of female artists) was that male artists of the time were flinging their emotions onto large canvases and declaring the outcome universal. The response to this, in the case of many women artists, was to themselves employ a radical subjectivity.

In my view, though, this often fell into the trap of taking the Second Wave adage of “the personal is political” too literally. The 60s and especially 70s were rife with content gone awry as feminist artists attempted to find meaning by turning private stories public or by using their own body as subject. While I acknowledge it was important at the time to draw attention to the fact of female subjectivity after it had so long been disregarded, I could argue that this same sort of subjectivity served to narrow the audience and further marginalize female artists.

What I admire about Spero’s approach was her ability to mobilize content in a way that reversed the “personal is political” to great effect. For Nancy Spero, the political was personal. A deft interplay of subjectivity and objectivity gave her work a bite that the mere shock value of personal exposure could not approach. Spero’s genius was to use woman as subject, but in both senses of the word: action was subjected upon her, but she also actively subjected the subject.

Art has a long history of treating the female as a static object to be looked upon, at times with admiration, at others with resentment, but always with distance. Spero nudged the woman, both behind the artwork and within it, to action. Her work rarely exited two dimensions, but a telltale aspect of that journey toward subjectivity, was movement. After 1974, she only used female subjects in her work, and these subjects became increasingly more recognizable, as she employed images that she called “performers” in her “repertoire company.” This “company,” later corresponding to over 300 unique plates for printing, included goddesses and figures from ancient mythology such as Sheela-na-gig and Artemis, who would share the dance with images of women clipped from current media.

“What I’m trying to say, then, in a kind of lyrical, positive way, is that these women are empowered and that they are sexual.” Spero said in 1985. “These women are protagonists and they are subjects. I am doing this in my language and it is not primarily for the male gaze.” Spero favored “devalued” media that eschewed those self-important, “macho” techniques of oil painting on canvas. Form-wise, she was partial to painting, collaging and printing with zinc and polymer plates on rice paper or long, papyrus-like rolls.

The first epic set of works that illustrated her taking the political personally was the War Series, created over several years in the late sixties and early seventies. She created over 150 visually ascetic paintings on paper with simple but disarming depictions of the horrors of war, inspired by the anger she felt toward American involvement in Vietnam. Helicopters mixed in with symbols like eagles and flags, while fountains of menstrual blood buoyed images of dismembered bodies. The prone female form was attached to an actively gasping mouth and licking, serpent like tongues hovered over desperate paint scrabbles of devastation. Though never so literally put, the sense in these works was clear: war is a male phenomenon, and its execution is comparable to violence directly inflicted upon the female body.

The War Series preceded and then overlapped another set of works through the seventies that dealt with the legacy of outcast artist Antonin Artaud. Spero had become acquainted and identified with his story while living in Paris with Golub and their sons in the early sixties. The paintings and collages referred to as The Codex Artaud, 1971-72, revolved around the role of the artist in society, and the realization that the individual could not combat those forces that were larger than herself.” These were her first works to use text, and her combination of Artaud’s words with her hermaphroditic figures created a unique form of hieroglyphics that stretched the confines of language into something more akin to a visual speech-act.

This interplay of word and image on paper, which she would call “manuscripts” would continue to mark her work throughout the seventies. Text printed on paper gave the sense of a broadsheet newspaper or a typed manifesto, spreading the word, while the figures and their easy iconic grace were reminiscent of cave paintings. After the noteworthy series Torture of Women (1976) and Torture in Chile (1974) which had long paper rolls printed in this way circling the gallery, she abandoned text in her work. But the idea of complementing the iconography of current politics with mythology persisted. Spero attempted to somehow mash history by creating—what she called—a “simultaneity of women throughout time.”

From the 80s on, color entered her work, brilliantly. Pieces like Sky Goddess (1981) and Earth and Water (1988) took full advantage of her cast of characters, “a varied cavalcade of historical female role models” with figures as disparate as an ancient Greek “dildo dancer” interacting with a Vietnamese woman that recalled TV images of civilians on the ground in the Vietnam war. The figures were “superimposed,” she said in a statement in 1989, “to increase the tempo of actions of women in narrative/history.”

A character that never really made an appearance, though, was Spero herself. She infused the work by, in a sense, being the “director” of her two-dimensional work of theater, but she kept herself out of the story. This fact maybe alienated her from other women artists in addition to art history’s men’s club. “Feminist” artist Kiki Smith once said in an interview, “When I first saw Nancy Spero’s work, I thought, ‘You are going to get killed making things like that; it’s too vulnerable. You’ll just be dismissed immediately.’”

Spero was dismissed for a long time, but her work gained acknowledgment late in her career when viewers were more prepared to recognize the strength of her approach. Even though she bypassed popular ideas of what feminism was supposed to be, she is now remembered rightly as a feminist artist, and one I admire as such. Spero redefined the woman’s personal to become something universally personal, humanly personal. She, in effect, showed an alternate world inside her work and out, something I can only hope to aspire to as a (woman) artist myself.

“What I’m talking about in my work is jouissance.” Spero said, speaking to the universality of her work. “It’s about the joy and full appreciation of one’s own body. I try to recapture the sense of one’s own body, and the control over it.”

When grilled by feminist interviewers who claimed in her generalized displays of the female figure that she was perhaps propagandizing and oversimplifying situations, she responded “I’m just trying to show the opposite side of the death machine.”