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拍品專文
Women made it so Wacky
by Lynda Morris
Curator of the Norwich Gallery 1980 - 2009 and EASTinternational 1991-2009
I worked at the ICA from 1969 to 1971 and saw Germaine Greer lecture and a nude performance by Carolee Schneemann cause a stir my colleagues included the Canadian curator Judith Masti. As a student at the Royal College of Art in 1971, I walked past the Royal Albert Hall on the night of a Miss World Contest, and I was confronted by three women flashers, opening their coats to show the fairy lights on their nipples and between their legs.
Women were around in the art world at that time. Bridget Riley appeared in a Sunday Times Colour Supplement looking so cool in tight black trousers, a black polo neck and short black hair. She was the key figure of the artist's warehouse studios at St Katherine's Dock and I worked there at the Artists Information Registry (AIR) on an art student project. When I worked for Nigel Greenwood, his high society backers included Patricia, now Baroness, Rawlings and Princess Sylvia (Obolensky) Guirey. Janine de Rosa, known as Zee, took me under her wing and finished my education, she had been the wife of the Californian collector, Baron Rene de Rosa.
On a three-week visit to New York in 1973 I was invited to several Women's Group but never found the time to go to any of them. There was a fuss around Hannah Wilke appearing nude in Artforum. She was tall and beautiful and I met her at Richard Hamilton's Guggenheim opening on the arm of Claes Oldenburg. The Collectors Herbie and Dorothy Vogel pulled their Lynda Bengalis coloured rubber piece out from under their bed, and laid it on top of the copper satin bedspread in their little flat.
Lucy Lippard sent a large exhibition of small works by U.S. women artists to London in early 1974. It was shown by Vera Russell at The Art Meeting Place in Earlham Street, Covent Garden. It was next door to Kasmin and Conran's Garage and the Robert Self Gallery. Norman Rosenthal, now Sir Norman, was Vera's assistant. We did not see much women's art from Europe, unless we travelled to Documenta 1972 to see the work of Katharina Sieverding and 1977 to see VALIE EXPORT's use of their own bodies as the subject of their work. Export placed her own body at risk, she rolled naked on shards of broken glass. Post 1968 and the Baader Meinhof and Italian terror she literally took up arms and civil disobedience as her subject. Her body, her breasts were made available on the streets of Vienna to be felt.
I heard Kay Hunt, Mary Kelly and Margaret Harrison talk about Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry shown at the South London Gallery in 1974. This major work of Women's Art, was finally purchased by the Tate, from the exhibition at the Norwich Gallery in 2000, curated by my friend Judith Mastai.
In 1975 Alexis Hunter showed at New Zealand House, she had taken snap-shots of working class men with tattoos on the streets of London. She became 'aware of a sensuality in the images'. I admired the sexiness of her photo sequence. Her work admitted that girls fancy men. Sexual Rapport: Yes/No/Maybe 1973-75 continued this work. For years Alexis and I talked of doing an exhibition at the Norwich Gallery NUA and it finally took place in 2006 and toured to Bunkier Sztuki Krakow.
The Women's Workshop of the Artist's Union organised Hang Up Put Down Stand Up in 1974 calling for 'art colleges to hire female staff in proportion to the number of female students'. The political theme of women's work continued with Diane Olson showed her series of photographs of Loo Ladies. John Tagg re-introduced me to the work of political women artists in the 1970s when he included Jo Spence, alongside the work of Jeff Wall, in the exhibition Re-Negotiation: Class Modernity and Photography. Spence's work from the 1970s dealt with her own working class mother daughter relationship. Her Class Shame Project recorded: 'Her confrontations with the cancer industry and the NHS in the early 1980s served to underline further the fact that that Shame plays a key role in the function of all institutions in contemporary society.' Her work was shown in Tip of the Iceberg, a TV documentary on the cultural and ideological meanings of female breasts.
Going back through my women's art files there is Sally Gallop's Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife at the ICA, and the Women's Press post cards of billboard graffiti. One advises women to dye their hair to - 'Renew his interest in carpentry'. On it is sprayed 'Saw his head off.' Su Braden's Workshop at the Royal College of Art with female artists discussing the personal and the political, behind a screen relayed by 'four industrial cameras working in rotation to a monitor in the 'public' half of the gallery.'
There was always an affinity between women artists and film technology. Annabel Nicholson made a beautiful silent performance for me at the Slade 1975. She fed a 16mm film through a treadle sewing machine with the music of the whirr of the projector and clatter of the sewing machine. She was one of the women artists prominent at the Filmmakers Co-op in Camden Town including Tina Keane, Alexis Hunter, Bobby Baker and Night Cleaners by the Berwick Street Co-op. The list of film and video work by women artists of the time is long, and also includes: Lis Rhodes, Rose Garrard, Elsa Stanfield, Helen Chadwick and Susan Hiller.
Bridget Riley's St Katherine's Dock led to other artists' initiatives for studios and housing, in which women played a significant role, including SPACE and ACME. The ACME Gallery in Covent Garden and the SPACE Gallery near the junctions of Rosebery Avenue and Clerkenwell were the galleries where I remember the work of Rose English and Rose Finn-Kelcey, as well as a performances by Marc Camile Chaimowicz. In the early 1970s they appeared in Rosetta Brookes programme at the Goethe Institute's Gallery House and Roselee Goldberg's programme at the RCA's Gulbenkian Gallery 1972-75.
In 1977 the newly appointed David Eliot showed Rose English, Jacky Lansley and Sally Potter at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. The catalogue has a spectacular image by Rose English of a bare-back lady rider on a palomino horse, jumping from a diving board into a tank of water.
I was invited to talk at the Women's Art Conference Glasgow at the Third Eye Centre around 1983 and I shocked everyone by suggesting women tutor's in Art Schools could get their own back by fancying male students! I was trying to point out that Feminist Art was competing with U.S. and French theory and it had lost the ironic political humour of the artists like Jo Spence, Carolee Schneemann, Rose English and Alexis Hunter and writers such as Lucy Lippard, who made it so wacky in the 1970s.
Women artists are by definition, half the art world. There was one Hayward Annual in Summer 1978 selected by Tess Jaray and Rita Donagh. It took a long time, but in 2007 Alexis Hunter joined Rose English, Valie Export and Carolee Schneemann in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at MoCA in Los Angeles, the most thorough account, so far, of Feminist Art.
by Lynda Morris
Curator of the Norwich Gallery 1980 - 2009 and EASTinternational 1991-2009
I worked at the ICA from 1969 to 1971 and saw Germaine Greer lecture and a nude performance by Carolee Schneemann cause a stir my colleagues included the Canadian curator Judith Masti. As a student at the Royal College of Art in 1971, I walked past the Royal Albert Hall on the night of a Miss World Contest, and I was confronted by three women flashers, opening their coats to show the fairy lights on their nipples and between their legs.
Women were around in the art world at that time. Bridget Riley appeared in a Sunday Times Colour Supplement looking so cool in tight black trousers, a black polo neck and short black hair. She was the key figure of the artist's warehouse studios at St Katherine's Dock and I worked there at the Artists Information Registry (AIR) on an art student project. When I worked for Nigel Greenwood, his high society backers included Patricia, now Baroness, Rawlings and Princess Sylvia (Obolensky) Guirey. Janine de Rosa, known as Zee, took me under her wing and finished my education, she had been the wife of the Californian collector, Baron Rene de Rosa.
On a three-week visit to New York in 1973 I was invited to several Women's Group but never found the time to go to any of them. There was a fuss around Hannah Wilke appearing nude in Artforum. She was tall and beautiful and I met her at Richard Hamilton's Guggenheim opening on the arm of Claes Oldenburg. The Collectors Herbie and Dorothy Vogel pulled their Lynda Bengalis coloured rubber piece out from under their bed, and laid it on top of the copper satin bedspread in their little flat.
Lucy Lippard sent a large exhibition of small works by U.S. women artists to London in early 1974. It was shown by Vera Russell at The Art Meeting Place in Earlham Street, Covent Garden. It was next door to Kasmin and Conran's Garage and the Robert Self Gallery. Norman Rosenthal, now Sir Norman, was Vera's assistant. We did not see much women's art from Europe, unless we travelled to Documenta 1972 to see the work of Katharina Sieverding and 1977 to see VALIE EXPORT's use of their own bodies as the subject of their work. Export placed her own body at risk, she rolled naked on shards of broken glass. Post 1968 and the Baader Meinhof and Italian terror she literally took up arms and civil disobedience as her subject. Her body, her breasts were made available on the streets of Vienna to be felt.
I heard Kay Hunt, Mary Kelly and Margaret Harrison talk about Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry shown at the South London Gallery in 1974. This major work of Women's Art, was finally purchased by the Tate, from the exhibition at the Norwich Gallery in 2000, curated by my friend Judith Mastai.
In 1975 Alexis Hunter showed at New Zealand House, she had taken snap-shots of working class men with tattoos on the streets of London. She became 'aware of a sensuality in the images'. I admired the sexiness of her photo sequence. Her work admitted that girls fancy men. Sexual Rapport: Yes/No/Maybe 1973-75 continued this work. For years Alexis and I talked of doing an exhibition at the Norwich Gallery NUA and it finally took place in 2006 and toured to Bunkier Sztuki Krakow.
The Women's Workshop of the Artist's Union organised Hang Up Put Down Stand Up in 1974 calling for 'art colleges to hire female staff in proportion to the number of female students'. The political theme of women's work continued with Diane Olson showed her series of photographs of Loo Ladies. John Tagg re-introduced me to the work of political women artists in the 1970s when he included Jo Spence, alongside the work of Jeff Wall, in the exhibition Re-Negotiation: Class Modernity and Photography. Spence's work from the 1970s dealt with her own working class mother daughter relationship. Her Class Shame Project recorded: 'Her confrontations with the cancer industry and the NHS in the early 1980s served to underline further the fact that that Shame plays a key role in the function of all institutions in contemporary society.' Her work was shown in Tip of the Iceberg, a TV documentary on the cultural and ideological meanings of female breasts.
Going back through my women's art files there is Sally Gallop's Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife at the ICA, and the Women's Press post cards of billboard graffiti. One advises women to dye their hair to - 'Renew his interest in carpentry'. On it is sprayed 'Saw his head off.' Su Braden's Workshop at the Royal College of Art with female artists discussing the personal and the political, behind a screen relayed by 'four industrial cameras working in rotation to a monitor in the 'public' half of the gallery.'
There was always an affinity between women artists and film technology. Annabel Nicholson made a beautiful silent performance for me at the Slade 1975. She fed a 16mm film through a treadle sewing machine with the music of the whirr of the projector and clatter of the sewing machine. She was one of the women artists prominent at the Filmmakers Co-op in Camden Town including Tina Keane, Alexis Hunter, Bobby Baker and Night Cleaners by the Berwick Street Co-op. The list of film and video work by women artists of the time is long, and also includes: Lis Rhodes, Rose Garrard, Elsa Stanfield, Helen Chadwick and Susan Hiller.
Bridget Riley's St Katherine's Dock led to other artists' initiatives for studios and housing, in which women played a significant role, including SPACE and ACME. The ACME Gallery in Covent Garden and the SPACE Gallery near the junctions of Rosebery Avenue and Clerkenwell were the galleries where I remember the work of Rose English and Rose Finn-Kelcey, as well as a performances by Marc Camile Chaimowicz. In the early 1970s they appeared in Rosetta Brookes programme at the Goethe Institute's Gallery House and Roselee Goldberg's programme at the RCA's Gulbenkian Gallery 1972-75.
In 1977 the newly appointed David Eliot showed Rose English, Jacky Lansley and Sally Potter at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. The catalogue has a spectacular image by Rose English of a bare-back lady rider on a palomino horse, jumping from a diving board into a tank of water.
I was invited to talk at the Women's Art Conference Glasgow at the Third Eye Centre around 1983 and I shocked everyone by suggesting women tutor's in Art Schools could get their own back by fancying male students! I was trying to point out that Feminist Art was competing with U.S. and French theory and it had lost the ironic political humour of the artists like Jo Spence, Carolee Schneemann, Rose English and Alexis Hunter and writers such as Lucy Lippard, who made it so wacky in the 1970s.
Women artists are by definition, half the art world. There was one Hayward Annual in Summer 1978 selected by Tess Jaray and Rita Donagh. It took a long time, but in 2007 Alexis Hunter joined Rose English, Valie Export and Carolee Schneemann in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at MoCA in Los Angeles, the most thorough account, so far, of Feminist Art.