El Lugar de la Mujer: A Woman's Place

Alicia D'Amico, born in Buenos Aires (1933-2001), was an Argentinian photographer. Camera in hand, she always preferred her photographs in black and white as well as the format of 35 mm.

Alicia graduated from the National School of Fine Arts as Professor of Drawing and Painting in 1953. In 1955, she was awarded a scholarship by the French government and lived in Paris for a year, which allowed her to improve her knowledge in Visual Arts and purchase her first camera.

Two years later, Alicia made her first photographic work thanks to studying and her father who was also a photographer; later, she become assistant to photographer Annemarie Heinrich. Along with Sara Facio, Alicia opened a studio in the 1960s and taught at the School of Photography in Argentina, where she was called "master" by her students.

Between 1983 and 1999, Argentina witnessed a critical mass of women artists emerge who organized exhibitions and events, and challenged the patriarchal discourse. In 1983, alongside the filmmaker Maria Luisa Bemberg, Alicia became cofounder of A Woman’s Place (Lugar de la Mujer). It was one of the first feminist institutions in Argentina to host interdisciplinary feminist activities. It was open to lesbian feminists too, who, in 1986, together with the photographer Ilse Foscova, organized public interventions in favor of women rights.

Alicia's photographic work focused on teaching and collaboration in books, especially with artists and intellectuals of South America such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar, Oscar Painter, Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Angel Asturias, Pablo Neruda, and Astor Piazzolla -- many of whom were the subject of her black-and-white portraits. 

Julio Cortázar

Her work has been exhibited in many countries as part of group shows with other artists such as Pedro Luis Raota, Osvaldo Salzamendi Francisco Tenllado, Rubén Sotera, and Alicia Sanguinett but her work has held individual exhibitions worldwide as well. On August 30, 2001, Alicia died in her hometown of Bueno Aires but her photographs continue to enlighten.

María Luisa Bemberg

Jorge Luis Borges, 1963

In Conversation with Azar Emdadi

Born in Iran Western Azerbaijan, Azar Emdad now lives and works in South Yorkshire, UK. She obtained her BA in Multi-disciplinary Design specializing in Photography at Staffordshire Polytechnic in 1989. In 1990, she was commissioned to document the war with Armenia in Soviet Azerbaijan. This extremely sensitive and important work was published internationally in many journals. In 1996, Emdad completed a postgraduate course in Gender Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, where she majored in Women in Film.

Azar's engagement is with art-based concerns, with particular emphasis on social, political, and gender issues. Her works have been widely exhibited both in the UK and internationally, including a solo show at the World Cultural House Berlin, the Silk Road Gallery in Tehran, Iran, the Homeland Society in Baku, North Azerbaijan along with UK-based group shows, including Stoke-on-Trent Museum, St. David Hall Cardiff, the Rose Issa Project, and many more. Azar’s work has been collected by many private collectors, including the Salsali Private Museum Dubai.

Dinner in Tehran is a series of 12 images, inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper. These images explore the various paradoxes that exist within Iranian society today; the issue of public and private personas, the fractured identities, censorship, religion and strict social codes, which result in many Iranians living a double life.

All 12 images show the same woman center stage, putting the role of a woman at the heart of Iranian society. In each image, the table is properly set and the food is plentiful as it plays a fundamental role in Iranian society, joining people together on a daily basis. These images are of young actors, professional models, friends and family members. Using the perspective of an Iranian woman living in the West, Azar Emdadi reexamines and questions representations of Islamic identity.

Q: You were born in Iran but you are living in the UK. How much and in which ways do these opposite cultures mark your works?
A: Being an Iranian living in the West, I feel myself curiously ‘bound’ equally to both. It is as if being caught between the divergent cultures of both East and West have somehow re-‘molded’ my perspectives, allowing me to appreciate and understand them in new ways. Because of this, I find myself politically, psychologically and emotionally torn. So much so, that even time spent in either sphere is physically disorienting. This continual conflict within my life has shaped – and continues to – my character and personality. Being centered from within, my principles and values clearly reflect these influential conflictions externally through my work.

Q: What does it mean for you to take a tradition and use it – is this just an endorsement or are you doing something else with it – something unexpected?
A: Contemporary art today explores ideas, concepts, questions, and practices that examine the past. This means using tradition as a vehicle, a visual platform to describe the present, and imagine the future. Often this helps to understand the underlying questions one is trying to answer and the ideology, or label it is subject to. Contemporary art can often seem overwhelming, difficult, or so simple that the viewer might wonder if they are missing something. Sometimes to understand where the behavior comes from, it is necessary to study the values and beliefs of the traditions that underpin them. It is an intensely personal undertaking for any artist to look into their own traditions to seek understanding. So, for myself, I see what is happening today in my homeland, and I ask why certain traditions are disappearing and how these experiences have an impact on how Iranians see themselves on the world stage. It is hard to realise that, because of this, many younger Iranians are losing interest in their own culture and heritage.

Ana Mendieta: Traces of Life

Arbol de la Vita (1970).

Whoever is familiar with Hermann Hesse’s book Pictor's Metamorphoses will see immediately the relationship between the human being and the earth, and will quickly relate it to the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), the creator of "earth-body."

Although her career short -- she died at the early age of 37 by falling from the window of the 34^th-floor-apartment in New York where she was living with her husband the artist Carl Andre --  Mendieta left a prolific amount of work.

By joining human features like blood and primary elements such as fire, water, and earth, she creates a unique language which is provocative, impacting, and at the same time intimate and engaging.

Mendieta was born into a politically active Catholic family in Havana under Fidel Castro’s regime. Immediately before her thirteenth birthday, she was sent with her sister to America, where she studied art in Iowa.

The pain and the separation from her country created a cultural displacement and exile inside her that she used and developed in her creative process, which she named "earth-body." She perceived this separation from the family (she rejoined her family in Havana after 18 years) as a sort of orphanhood and used this suffering as a driving force for her art -- opening a dialogue between the landscape and her own body. This dialogue was the main component of her work and is present in all her oeuvre.

Her performances and sculptures are a combination of the Afro-Cuban ritual santería and a metaphor of death, life, rebirth, and spiritual transformation. Always interested in themes such as identity, female violence, displacement, and physical transformation, Mendieta created work such as Rape Scene (1973), a documentation with slides of violent crime, using her own body and her own apartment. Inspired by santería, a Yoruban-Christian religion practiced in Cuba, as well as by her Roman Catholic education, Mendieta used ox blood in her actions and performances to create stains of her body, to trace the contour of her body or create an image of her body, as in the work Untitled (Self-portrait with Blood) (1973). She stated that the blood was not a negative force.

Alongside her interest for the Afro-Cuban spiritual ritual, Mendieta was interested in ancient and indigenous cultures. Witnesses of these interests are works such as Bird Transformation (1972), a performance concerning transmutation in which she is naked and her body is completely covered with feathers.

Regina José Galindo: El mundo mordio mi corazon y me contagio su rabia

Regina José Galindo’s performances reflect the violence that is deteriorating Guatemala.

Born in Guatemala City, her work always makes references to perceived “lower” levels of society, and to women in particular. It also deals with the “other” who has been subjected to violence. Her performances are directly linked to the brutality of the patriarchal society she lives in. Galindo takes the place of the victims, inflicting upon her own body the same violence that she denounces in all of society.

Her works, which are of great visual impact, refer to global issues such as pervasive male violence, marginalization, subordination, and torture. With self-punishing actions, Regina José Galindo transforms a body into a medium that suffers: without losing perception of the reality of the hostile world that surrounds us.
In her work Perra (2005), Regina adopts submission yet desists from the post-modern strategy of seduction, because she carved with a knife "perra, " an insult and slur on her thigh muscle. In this brutal way, she recalls those women that are on the boundaries of submission, abuse, and denigration.

The artist courageously intervenes in the public realm, in order to show what the powers that be would prefer to keep hidden.

In some ways, Regina’s work can be viewed as a kind of “confession.” Her actions show that the subject can be built up only from trauma, revealing the repressions and turning corporeality into a place where the cruelty of power locates.

Yet her work carries significant messages. Regina José Galindo denounces the truth uncovered, as we see in El dolor en un pañuelo (1999), where she is nude, tied to a small bed in a dark room, with newspaper reports about rape and murder, and violence against women projected onto her naked body.

One extreme form of violence is nudity, which is a paradoxical state of communication, or rather a laceration of being, a pathetic ceremony in which the shift from humanity to animality takes place. Bataille considers that the dialectic of transgression and prohibition is the very essence and condition of eroticism. [1]

A New Kind of Comic Book, a New Kind of Superhero

Image from Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis

The other day I took a friend's 14 year-old daughter, who I was looking after for the day, to a book shop. She was an exceptionally smart kid from DC, adopted from India at a young age. She was looking for origami paper for her newest obsession, while I was looking for new graphic novels. I managed to drag her over to the section and ask, "So, do you like comics?" She scoffed, rolled her eyes with an expression of theatrical disgust only a teenager can pull off. "No," she said.

"But they're great," I said, suddenly feeling the urgency of reeling her back in. "I don't mean, like, superhero stuff...have you seen this?" I reached for Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. "They made this one into a movie. It's about a girl about your age living in Iran during the Islamic Revolution." I flipped through the stark black and white illustrations, all lined up in their artfully codified panels. "The girl wants to be a punk rocker, but around that time, you could be thrown in prison for acting too Western--like buying a Michael Jackson album." She was intrigued, but not enough. She beelined it to the arts and crafts section. I had failed.

Comic books, or, their more mature, highfalutin label, "graphic novels," or, their more alt/indie title, "comix," seem to have become more rich; more emotionally complex and fascinating over the years, giving rise to a number of stories grounded in drama and gritty realism. Yet somehow, the world of Marvel and DC Comics still eclipses their very existence, with major blockbuster films reaffirming the notion that comic books are a medium for larger than life superheros and action sequences jammed with omonomopoeias. Still meant for teenaged boys who stay up late with a flashlight in bed to devour them at night, or slip them into their English lit books at school during study hall.

But a markedly different type of comic book began to surge in popularity as far back as 1991, with Art Spiegleman's Pulitzer Prize-winning book Maus, a gripping re-imagining of the Holocaust with Jews drawn as mice and Germans drawn as cats. And somewhere along the way, female-driven narratives began to open the genre up to an emotionally complex world that no words could describe.

Clio Talks Back: A Tribute to Adrienne Rich and Of Woman Born

Adrienne Rich

 Clio has learned of the death of Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), one of America’s greatest poets and author Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). In this book she brought her poetic skills to bear on enhancing our understanding of motherhood. Mother of three sons, she subsequently divorced their father and lived the rest of her life among women.

As Rich points out, “All human life on the planet is born of woman. . . [and yet] we know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.”

She insists on the difference between the experiences of sons born of woman and of daughters, and of the way in which, “because women have not been makers and sayers of patriarchal culture,” women have been categorized as either mothers or as “barren” or “childless.” And the powerful physical and emotional experience women enjoy as mothers has been institutionalized in such a way that “that potential – and all women – shall remain under male control” in such a way that it has “ghettoized and degraded female potentialities.”

“The ancient, continuing envy, awe, and dread of the male for the female capacity to create life has repeatedly taken the form of hatred for every other female aspect of creativity.” Perhaps the word “hatred” is too strong, but Clio knows that women’s history offers centuries of examples of antifeminist men disparaging and belittling women’s “genius” or even talent – in art, music, literature, and every other field of endeavor in which they might potentially compete with men.

“Motherhood,” writes Adrienne Rich, “ – unmentioned in the histories of conquest and serfdom, wars and treaties, exploration and imperialism – has a history, it has an ideology, it is more fundamental than tribalism or nationalism.” Clio would add that since 1976 the findings of women’s historians have underscored the significance of Rich’s observations over and over.

Adrienne Rich admits that “I did not understand this when I started to write the book. I only knew that I had lived through something which was considered central to the lives of women, fulfilling even in its sorrows, a key to the meaning of life; and that I could remember little except anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom, and division within myself: a division made more acute by the moments of passionate love, delight in my children’s spirited bodies and minds, amazement at how they went on loving me in spite of my failures to love them wholly and selflessly.”

Clio salutes the life and works of Adrienne Rich and urges all of you to read this precious, insightful book – a timeless classic and still so “right on” even today.

From Cassatt to Woodman: Ideal Space

This week, I led a discussion in class about the feminine ideal, the American-born artist, Mary Cassatt, and the use of space as a metaphor for sexuality/gender roles. It was a rich conversation but I was surprised at how accepting the class was about the assigned role of domesticity to a specific gender (feminine). While considering the prevailing concepts of what feminine beauty looked like--and what it promised the viewer--we compared two images, Cassatt's Mother and Child and Kenyon Cox's Eclogue:

Mary Cassatt.  Mother and Child.  1905.  Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art Collection online.

Cassatt's work is an Impressionist version of a popular theme of mother and child. While the usual religious symbolism was omitted, the implicit piety of motherhood still resonates. As a matter of formal analysis, we discussed the "feminine" distinction of inhabiting predominantly domestic spaces. In addition, we considered the use of contemporary, "real" women as a means of subtly challenging the historical infrastructure of the feminine ideal.  Consider this while looking at Cox's Neoclassical version of his subjects.

Pacific Standard Time: Women and Art in Los Angeles

This fall the art world buzz is centered on Los Angeles, California. The city is the focus of Pacific Standard Time, a collaboration between more than 60 cultural institutions across Southern California telling the story of the birth of L.A.'s art scene. West Coast art and artists broadened the landscape of contemporary art. New York had a more established modern art scene, and set the pace for much of what went on in the art world.For many years, Los Angeles was considered an artistic underdog (the area was more known for its sunny weather and movie stars than for fine art), and the contributions of its artists weren't taken seriously. But L.A. artists rebelled against the arts establishment, introducing new materials and work methods, and truly enriched American art. There were many women artists at the forefront of art making in the "wild west," and they made important contributions.

Betye Saar's The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972. Photo via Netropolitan.org

One woman who played a prominent role in the postwar Los Angeles art scene was Betye Saar, an artist who is best known for her assemblage pieces depicting themes of racial pride, spirituality, and ancestral history. Saar created her works with objects she collected in her travels to places such as Mexico, Europe, and Haiti as well as flea markets around Los Angeles. The artist is one of several featured in Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, an exhibition currently on view at UCLA's Hammer Museum as part of Pacific Standard Time.  Saar seamlessly wove found objects with those of significance to her own family, thus placing her personal legacy within a larger historical context. She also collected racist memorabilia, giving figures and images trapped in stereotypical roles new and more empowering meaning, thus "liberating" the characters, and in turn the hearts and minds of African Americans. Her repurpose of this memorabilia reflected a new consciousness that was beginning to take hold in Black America, which was in a state of great change from the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

Corinne Martin: Empowering Change Through Art

Courtesy of Corinne Martin

Truly a multicultural by-product--having been born in Paris, raised in Beirut, educated in Houston, and now living in Riyadh--Corinne Martin interprets iconography of contemporary Arab pop culture derived from television, music, food, and fashion through her mixed media and paintings. She’s also very interested in the notion of the region being a meeting point between Western and Eastern sensibilities and the role globalization plays amidst that. “After returning to the Middle East, I was able to experience my roots both as an adult and as an artist from a fresh perspective,” she says. “The region is experiencing immense cultural growth and has a new, rejuvenating energy that inspires and infuses my work.”

Courtesy of Corinne Martin

I could not help but gravitate towards her retro-esque paintings of popular and iconic symbols of Arab pop culture. Having grown up and currently based in the Arabian Gulf myself, Martin's work depicts an intensely, immediately familiar world of images, an integral part of my particular visual universe – for example, the imagery of Miranda or popular washing detergent, Tide [above] conveyed in Arabic script. “I’ve always drawn inspiration from those iconic images as they reflect the experiences of a younger generation of Arabs who came of age between the East and West,” Corinne says. “They have shaped our visual culture, which is why [my] kind of art resonates with so many people as it has an emotional connection to their past.”

The colors of her works are undeniably mint fresh – and yet, they also possess the feel of vintage posters and labels, the colors possessing a hyper-real bleached quality. The works’ effect is to render you nostalgic – while simultaneously able to re-live that past in the present.

Voice in Higher Education: The Struggle is Far From Over

Miss Chicago and the California Girls poster produced by the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College, 1970-71

For centuries, women have overcome great adversity to enter institutions of higher learning. They have also broadened the scope of discussions held within, and changed the landscape of the university system.

I have been reading with delight an account of Judy Chicago’s groundbreaking Feminist Art Program founded at Fresno State College in 1970. “In 1970 [Chicago] accepted a teaching position at Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno) with the proviso that she be allowed to develop a women’s program in the art department…Chicago chose Fresno State College because of its isolation from the art world. It served as an experimental ground where she could try to answer the question of what women students needed in order to become artists.”