This week in the arts
Even at all-women exhibitions, Ella Nixon says there is no need to pretend men don't exist to promote female artists.
In a special edition of This Week in the Arts, Ella Nixon assesses just how feminist it is to censor male artists from history after her visit to the Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery.
The survey exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70 (9 Feb - 7 May 2023) at the Whitechapel Gallery in London brings together the work of eighty female abstract expressionist artists from around the world. The artworks included in the exhibition were truly excellent: the viscous paint of Gillian Ayres (1930-2018), the chthonic-sandy canvases of Marta Minujin (b. 1943), and the glistening silver of Anna-Eva Bergman (1909-1987). The artists’ skillful manipulation of medium is without doubt, and it was a treat for the Whitechapel to display them in a central venue.
However, I was struck by a bizarre sentence included in the introductory panel:
On occasion, throughout this exhibition, it has felt necessary to include the names of some of the male artists that these women were working alongside as a way of emphasising their exclusion from the most frequently told stories of art.
It is my understanding that this sentence was, in part, added in response to a tweet by the author of The Story of Art Without Men (2022) and host of the Great Women Artists podcast, Katy Hessel. She asked, “HOW in 2023, when attending an all-women painting exhibition, can wall bios reference THIS AMOUNT of male artists in relation to the artist’s life? It’s lazy and demeaning.”
From this post, you may think that the exhibition referred to the artworks primarily in relation to men. In truth, from the 86 labels in the show, just five of them referred to male artists. Hessel acknowledged this in a subsequent (and almost apologetic) article in The Guardian.
Let’s look at the nature of these exhibition texts. In her tweet, Hessel included photographs of two panels that accompanied the paintings of Yvonne Thomas and Lilian Holt. The former is contextualised in terms of the ‘Subject of the Artists’ school, which happens to include male members. Similarly, Holt is described as a founding member of the Borough Group of artists, “a collective of painters” which (surprise surprise) included men, one of whom was David Bomberg who later moved with Holt to southern Spain.
Is it desirable — or, indeed, possible — to present the work of women artists without reference to male counterparts? This conversation has a long precedence in feminist art history. Famously, Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker argued in Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981) that art history is structured by a male concept of creativity. The ramifications of this — as several feminist art historians have argued — is that the work of women artists is measured in terms of ‘male’ standards, which serve both to exclude and disparage historical forms of female creativity (e.g., quilt-making is not valued as highly as oil painting).
To completely omit reference to male artists in an exhibition is a type of censorship, and surely not what these feminist art historians had in mind. The label for a work by Elaine de Kooning, for example, explains how she signed her artworks with the acronym ‘EDK’, “to avoid her paintings ‘being labelled as feminine in a traditionally masculine movement’ as well as to distinguish her work from her husband, Willem de Kooning”. Does this count as a lazy reference?
Although it must certainly be frustrating for artists to constantly have their work explained in regard to a singular facet of identity (especially since de Kooning made a self-conscious attempt to transcend its limitations), curators must consider public accessibility whilst providing an accurate record of history. Upon seeing The Bull (1959), the viewer unfamiliar with Elaine de Kooning — who, let’s face it, is the majority of the population — may question the significance of ‘EDK’ in the bottom right-hand corner. This isn’t a case of discrimination but rather clarity — i.e., of making the art world accessible to those outside of niche knowledge circles, whilst also drawing attention to a feminist decision.
For some women, male companions and artists are unashamedly integral to understanding particular works. For example, The Dance (1988) by Paula Rego (1935-2022) (as explained by her son) depicts the artist’s sorrow as she dances with her recently-deceased husband and fellow artist Vic Willing. Moreover, one of the most significant founding members of the feminist art movement in America, Judy Chicago (b. 1939), produced a whole body of works called ‘The Song of Songs’ (1998) which celebrates the union of men and women. Rather than a history without men, these individual examples illustrate how context and faith in human connection are important to determining artistic practice, suggesting the nuances of male inclusion and omission.
The rather obvious truth remains that men (along with women) have shaped art history. Curators airbrush this fact at their peril. In doing so, they erect a phony history without enough grounding in reality to translate into material change, whilst obscuring the true revelatory contribution of women to art. As Hessel rightfully argued in the subsequent Guardian article, we should respect female artists by not mentioning male artists unnecessarily, nor by reducing women to their male counterparts — neither of which the curators of this exhibition are guilty.
The tweet by Hessel was hyperbolic and took the labels out of context to provide a false impression for social media (only later nuanced in her article). However, the real mistake lies with the Whitechapel Gallery for adding the clumsy and apologetic justification at the beginning of the overall brilliant exhibition. The nervous tone undermines the powerful force of the artists exhibited in the show, artists whose strength precedes wall labels themselves.
Good post/video on AI art! It really does eliminate human autonomy if you just play into the pre-determined, stereotypical images it puts out. I know some people that are able to train the actual AI to a certain extent but the public art generators currently available don't really allow you to do that. Forced to colour inside pre-drawn digital lines