1970s FEMINIST ART: ADDRESSING THE WOMAN SPECTATOR

by Emily Blake

Within the feminist approaches to artistic production in the 1970s and 1980s, we see a motivation for artists to directly address a new public and specifically a female audience. For artists like Judy Chicago, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and Jenny Holzer, this pursuit of a feminist alternative to modernism that addresses a new public is illustrated both in the form and content of their work but also the means of distribution. Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger emphasize the need to abandon traditional formats and categories altogether in favor of a public dissemination of art. This is a method in which not only a public, or a female spectator is addressed, but an entirely new and accessible public altogether. Kruger, Holzer, and their peers insist on legibility through the form of flyers, billboards, taking out advertisements in newspapers/magazines, and other forms of publicly distributed/ widely circulated objects and platforms. Kruger’s 1989 work Your Body is a Battleground works to generate political consciousness and action within the spectator, which Kruger’s work makes very clear is a female spectatorial role that can work to deconstruct patriarchal language. Kruger challenges the notion that the analytical and formal language of art and linguistics are completely neutral. Kruger and Holzer both communicate that language is not neutral in neither a visual nor symbolic sense. Jenny Holzer’s 1982 “Truisms Series” 1982 shows a screen/ digital billboard with the phrase “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE.” In this work, the text and form of distribution are the entirety of the work, as there are no additional aesthetic elements beyond the phrase shown on the screen. This communicates both linguistically and visually the impact of the language chosen by Holzer. The sentiment of an abuse of power compounded by the public means of distribution via a digital billboard all signify that this work is meant for the public to disseminate. 

The question of how representation can transcend the predetermined constraints of the visual field is as important as unpacking how the governing forms of visuality, of seeing, of speech can be dismantled within artistic production. Your Body is a Battleground is not necessarily unprecedented in terms of utilizing the formal tactics of photomontage, but Kruger is utilizing photomontage, a Soviet and Weimar artistic production legacy (specifically of John Hearfield and El Lissitzky) in order to formulate a new feminist perspective and complicate conventions. In this work, the reader/ viewer subjects oneself to the meaning of the work in order to empathize with the subject. The viewer has to analyze themselves in order to situate which role they are in the given, gendered situation-- overall prioritizing a female subject. 

In the cases of Kruger and Holzer, the means of distribution and the accessibility of their work is extremely obvious, due to them being showcased on large digital billboards (Truisms), in the form of posters (Your Body is a Battleground), and on bus shelters (Help!). This is a more blatant form of addressing a new public and calling on a female spectator, but this is done using less distribution-related means as well. Kruger inserts specific concepts of feminist, psychoanalytic, and structural linguistic into the visual frame of the work in order to address her spectator as subjected to language, subjected to the male gaze, and subjected to patriarchy at large. In “The Discourse of Others: Feminism and Postmodernism,” Craig Owens references the “myths of photographic objectivity and transparency,” pushing back against the idea that “Seeing is believing” and photographic/non-painterly representations reveal a truth (178-9). In continuing his discussion of sexuality and power on page 179, Owens reinforces how looking has been a privilege for more often men than women. This directly implicates the pursuit by Kruger (and her cohort at large) to address the male gaze and the ways in which language and pictorial representations are not neutral, but actually inherently influenced by gender ideology and patriarchy. Kruger’s approach to engaging with the gendered ideologies within language and conceptual art in the form of Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face is seen through including text that calls for the spectator to establish herself quickly as a subject within language, as being viewed under the male gaze (“your gaze”). Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills engages with the gaze and addresses a female audience as well, utilizing fantasy projections of the self photographed and represented in different stills as means of communicating how women identify themselves in media representation and produce a sense of self as a female subject. Both of these works address a female spectator, and go one step beyond by requiring a contextually and socially generative spectator role, leading the viewer of these works to question where they fall in the discourse of the patriarchy and the male gaze (as the looker or the looked at).

Judy Chicago represents, even within her own identity and name as an artist, her and her cohort’s project of addressing a female spectator and removing themselves from the linguistic and patriarchal impositions and forms of marginalisation in everyday life. In an advertisement Chicago takes out in Artforum in December 1970, she appears as a boxer in a ring. She appears in a shirt with the text “CHICAGO” written on the front includes (in written form) that she was going to renounce the name given to her by her husband and her father and be henceforth known as Judy Chicago. This is important context for Chicago and this particular art-historical moment because it is a representation of an effort to remove the patriarchal naming and linguistic system imposed onto women.

In Mary Kelly’s “Reviewing Modernist Criticism,” Mary Kelly states “the normalisation of a mode of representation always entails the marginalisation of an alternative set of practices and discourse” (42). In the period where a feminist approach to modernism is developed, Holzer, Kruger, and others begin to probe at the linguistic ideologies because of an acknowledgement of the ways in which patriarchy is implicit in society and cultural production. Judy Chicago disputes and deconstructs the patriarchal ideologies within symbols and language as well, but in a different way than Kruger. in her 1974-79 work The Dinner Party, Chicago pursues a project of reclamation, symbolically representing women’s history. She presents the table as a symbol, something inherently culturally significant and now is being politicized. Triangle denies hierarchical seating arrangement and also symbolically depicts female sexual identity. The needle work on the placements as well as the items and imagery on top of the place settings all illustrate the achievement of each woman as well as symbols of women at large. The porcelain floor showcases 999 other women's names who are relatively obscure and exist across time periods other than the contemporary moment, but are celebrated by Chicago nonetheless. In this work, Chicago reclaims symbols of womanhood and amplifies women with largely untold histories with which a female spectator/ a wide array of women (as a public audience) can resonate.