Introduction
The feminist art movement emerged in the 1960s and from that time the women had taken much interest in what causes them to be different from the male gender and particularly, what causes the art produced by the female artists to be different from the art produced by the male artists. According to Napikoski (2010), the Feminist art movement started at the point when there was the coming up of the idea that the experiences of females should be expressed through art. This idea had been earlier on not taken seriously and it had often been ignored. This movement has been quite famous in such countries as the United States of America, Germany, and Britain. The feminist movement has spread all over various cultures in the world beginning from the 1970s (Delahunt, 1996).
The feminists have indicated that all through the history that has been recorded, men have imposed the social structures that are father-centered and through such systems, the male has acquired domination over the females. By the mid-1960s, many of the women artists who struggled to take part in the art world that was dominated by the male artists had devastating discouragements to incorporate their meanings of feminism into their work and looked for de-gendering their work of art. In most cases, basing on the way it looked alone, the work of art they produced could not be seen as the work that was made by women. Men have stuck on a studio system that has not enabled women to engage in training as artists, a gallery system which has kept women from exhibiting and selling their work, as well as being collected by museums, although this has been to a lower level in the times that have just passed (Delahunt, 1996).
Performance art, video, and installation turned out to be the primary mode for the artists that engaged in the feminist movement in the course of the 1970s and even today. This paper is going to establish why these modes turned out to be the basic modes for these artists.
The feminist movement and the Video, Installation, and performance art modes
The feminist movement had a very intense effect on the work of art produced by women in the 1970s. This effect came about through this movement’s drive to validate the personal history, problematize female subjectivity as well as its drive to bring alteration on the position women held within the society. Female artists came up with production and exhibitions that were carried out collectively after getting themselves in a position where they were being excluded from the traditional art circles (Troy, N.d).
The exhibition and production organizations included festivals, galleries, workshops, and publications. As these artists carried out their activities in all mediums, video arts, as well as performance art, were possibly fascinating since these fresh mediums did not hold any record of carrying out the exclusion of women.
More so, the performance arts in the course of the 1970s were quite important and of great significance to the female artists as defiance to formalism. It carried out the presence of a way to counteract the divide that was there between life and art, to carry out the discovery of rational dynamics that was there between the audience and art, and to enhance the understanding of art as being experiential and social. This carried a significance that was special on the part of the female artists who had been playing a part in the history of art as not being masters but muses, and as not being makers but models (Troy, N.d).
Conceptualizing once again the role of the female artists through offering control and presenting their bodies on the stage, the body art of women had specific prospects to make unstable the modern history of art and criticism structure. Among the female artists, there were those who refused to accept the feminist readings that talked about their work. These artists may have wished to be looked at just on the similar terms of those artists who had come before them. It is probable that this criticism aimed at these artists would just be another style of marginalizing them.
Among those people who disapproved of feminist art, there were those who had a thought that everything each woman had gone through was claimed to be a general experience, even when their artist did not indicate this. There came up divisions at the time when there were claims by the ant-feminist 1that the feminists hated men and they were lesbians. This caused women not to accept feminism for the reason of having the thought feminism was attempting to impose one person’s experience on to other people (Bee and Schor, 2000).
Another issue was in regard to the question about utilizing biology in art as a means of limiting the females to a biological identity or a means to set women free from the unfavorable definition of women’s biology by men (Bee and Schor, 2000).
However, the impact of performance was intensified by video, bringing in extra possibility of distant audience as well as the audience in time to come for a presentation that could be carried out on one occasion. Through the aid of the video, there could always be the performance for a time that had no end. There was as well the alteration of the nature of the performance, making it possible to have an intimacy through which the artists carried out their activities before a camera that they could not be able to be carry out before a live audience. At the time when the video apparatus was included as a feature in live performance, it changed the dramatic space practice through interruption of spatial eternalness and carrying out the addition of the response and presence that is intervened in technological conditions (Troy, N.d).
Women depended on video as a means to carry out the advancement of their own liberatory plan. Of most significance to the female performance artist was the capability by aid of video to generate space and time which in turn is controlled.
As on one hand the opportunities for performance in the gallery establishments were often not there for the females, on the other hand the video technology was reached through the schools and the cooperatives that were freshly set up. The women brought about a fresh performance within this technological communication. Quite significantly, the video space as well as the video time enabled the woman artist to make acknowledgement of her own voice with no any disruptions.
The portable video equipment (consumer-grade), was not complex and could be easily operated without one necessarily undergoing technical training and it was not heavy and this made it possible to handle it with a lot of ease by the women (Troy, N.d).
There was the development of performance in to a very significant form of art for the female artists in the course of the 1970s. Taking the case in Southern California, the more significant place of performance art was the Woman’s Building2. The Woman’s Building is a cultural center in which there was the “Feminist Studio Workshop”, the feminist press, Womanspace gallery, and various women’s performance collectives among others.
What had come before was official carrying out of tests in the performance art. If there was no coming of feminist art, this form of art would have had a natural death. The feminist artists oriented performance art towards autobiography, and they did not just stop at the point of taking it and politicizing it. According to Fuller and Salvioni (2002) Suzanne Lacy, the feminist studio workshop instructor set up a performance system that was based on the community to deal with the issue of violence set up against women, bringing out taking part from the media, the government, and the local agencies. According to Fuller and Salvioni (2002), the objective of this project was not just to bring out the awareness of the public to as well to bring in empowerment of women in order to hit back as well as to rise above the sense of privacy and the embarrassment linked to rape. Among the rest of the events in the course of the performance that went for a period of three weeks were a rape speak out, the demonstration of self-protection and the press forum (Fuller and Salvioni, 2002).
This performance resulted in to solid changes in policies triggering the police and the city government to make public the rape hotlines and to have unconcealed speech about violence that was carried out on women. Most of the women artists in the course of the 1970s employed performance art to give challenge to the usual borders of the identity of the female gender by carrying out the elaboration of various personas with distinct professions, sexual identities, as well as separate histories.
According to Mankiller and Smith (1999), the feminist art movement brought in a difference. In the work of art in the current world which is also known as postmodern, art is not just an analysis of aesthetic questions but it is as well an evaluation of the society. The female artists normally make use of their work of art to protest against gender discrimination, racial discrimination, and homosexuality. The means of expression that can be accepted have increased in number greatly. The use of such things as dolls, chocolates, and even lipsticks in performance art and installations among other forms of art is on the rise (Mankiller and Smith, 1999).
Another medium that is well-liked by the female artists today is film and video art. Such mediums enable the women to have a more direct means to carry out the demonstration of the visions, the personal stories they might be having, or be able to give out the prejudices they might have come across in the course of their lives.
According to Wolverton (2002), the feminist art movement in California started in the year 1970. This was the same year during which the women artists protested about “Art and Technology” exhibition that was carried out in Los Angels. In the course of the same year, the artist by the name Judy Chicago3 set up a program at the California State University known as the “Feminist Art Program”. Such events played a role in giving out an illustration of the double concerns of the feminist art movement. One of the concerns is about pushing to obtain an inclusion that is fairer in the mainstream world of art of the females. The other concern is about the clear definition of art and culture in the feminist framework. According to Napikoski (2010), in the year 1972, Judy Chicago set up a Womanhouse together with Miriam Schapiro at the California Institute of Art. This institute was as well a feminist program.
Napikoski (2010) puts it that the Womanhouse was a joint art installation and discovery. The Womanhouse was composed of the students that were carrying out jointly their activities on performance art, exhibits, and raising consciousness in a fated house they had smartened up. This drew multitudes and national exposure for the feminist art movement.
From the “Woman’s Building” the females were able to come across opportunities particularly in such areas as video, visual arts, graphic design, and performance art among other fields. This public center gave significance to the desire by women artists to have a position in the mainstream of art and at the same time the culture of women gave a revelation of the intentions that were more subversive. The assertion that females women did not live in the same culture as males, was not just surrounded by the societal position and chance but it as well brought in concerns that differed in regard to worldviews, apprehensions and values.
At the time when the “Woman’s Building” was founded in the year 1973, those differences were codified. Towards the end of 1970s and at the start of the 1980s there was the foregrounding of the differences that were invasive among the women. Such differences were on the basis of race, sexual orientation, and class.
The original mental picture of the founders of the Woman’s Building was to set up a substitute program for the schooling of females in art and the “Feminist Studio Workshop” (Wolverton, 2002). This was a community center in which the school could be set up together with other institutions which were specifically feminist. At the time it was opened in the year 1973, this building accommodated galleries, three in number, which were committed to the art of women.
According to Wolverton, (2002), the theater groups formed by women which encompassed the “Woman’s performance project, the L.A feminist Theater and the Women’s Improvisational Theater”, carried out the productions in the auditorium. Others that were accommodated included NOW4, a feminist tour organization called the Womantours, and a coffeehouse.
However, the basic program was the “Feminist Studio Workshop”. When the primary concern of the mainstream art was on the forms and surfaces, at that particular time there was offering by the Feminist Studio Workshop of totally different questions. These questions revolved around the issues concerning the message an artist wished to pass across and also around the issues concerning who the audience such messages passed over by the artist was to be. Those people who took part were given support to produce the work of art that was motivated by their personal experiences they had had in their lives.
Taking the case in California, Fuller and Salvioni (2002) emphasizes that, not all the female artists in California that were active in the course of the 1970s carried out their activities under the sponsorship of feminist institutions. There were those who did not work within the political apparatus as well as the educational apparatus set up by the program known as the “Feminist Art Program” and the “Woman’s Building”. The strategy of these women in art, however, together with the success that they had, which was critical, can not be completely acknowledged within the framework of the feminist art movement. According to Fuller and Salvioni (2002) the work of Carson and Smith in the cause of the 1970s carried out the exploitation of the feminine media that acquired expressive authority by the aid of the relationship they had with modern feminist theory (Fuller and Salvioni, 2002).
Conclusion
As it has been seen in this paper, the feminist art movement has played a major role beginning from the 1970s in enabling the female artists to gain entry in to the mainstream art world that was originally so much dominated by the men. This has been made possible by use of such mediums as video, performance art and installation.
The feminist artists dealt with issues of form, gender, and identity through the use of artistic expressions such as video, performance art, and installation among others which would turn out to be of great importance in the course of postmodernism. Earlier on, this had not been taken to be high art but was rather seen as individual against society. Feminist art made connectivity real and considered the artist as being a portion of the society and not operating independently or separately.
Women depended on video as a means to carry out the advancement of their own liberatory plan through video. Of most significance to the female performance artist was the capability by the aid of video to generate space and time which in turn is controlled.
As on one hand the opportunities for performance in the gallery establishments were often not there for the females, on the other hand the video technology was reached through the schools and the cooperatives that were freshly set up. The women brought about a fresh performance within this technological communication. Quite significantly, the video space as well as the video time enabled the woman artist to make acknowledgement of her own voice with no any from of interference from any person or from a particular section of people.
Despite the criticisms targeted towards the feminist art, through the Feminist Art Movement, the women have been able to rise up in order to gain a position in the mainstream art world. This could not have been very much possible had there been no mediums such as the video, performance art, and installation which were used as primary tools in the Feminist Art Movement. These are still very important modes through which the female artists present their work of art.
Reference
Bee S. and Schor M., M/E/A/N/I/N/G: an anthology of artists’ writings, theory, and criticism. Duke University Press, 2000. ISBN: 0822325667, 9780822325666
Delahunt M., Feminism and feminist art, 1996. Web.
Fuller D. B., and Salvioni D., Art, women, California, 1950-2000: parallels and intersections. University of California Press, 2002. ISBN: 0520230663, 9780520230668
Mankiller and Smith B., The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999. ISBN: 0618001824, 9780618001828
Napikoski L. The Feminist Movement in Art. 2010, Web.
Troy M., Women’s performance video from the 1970s. Web.
Wolverton T., Insurgent muse: life and art at the Woman’s Building. City Lights Books, 2002. ISBN: 0872864030, 9780872864030
Footnotes
1 – Those who protested against the Feminist Art Movement
2 – A major center of activity in the world of art by women set up in Los Angeles in the 1970s
3 – One of the most prominent early activists in the Feminist Art Movement
4 – the National Organization for Women