Feminist Avantegarde: Art of the 1970s

Exhibition (past): https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/feminist-avant-garde

-this exhibition consisted of 48 artists (including names such as Martha Rosler and Francesca Woodman) and over 150 works from the Verbund collection, which is responsible for this international touring of said body of work. Lesser-known artists included in the show include the poet, actress, and performance artists Katalin Ladik and the Austrian artist Birgitta Jürgenssen. 

This “exhibition highlights groundbreaking practices that shaped the feminist art movement and provides a timely reminder of the wide impact of a generation of artists.” The art exhibited as part of Feminist Avante-garde of the 1970s: Works from the Verbund collection consisted of photographs, performances, video art, and collage, and “reflects a moment during which practices of emancipation, gender equality, and civil rights protest movements became part of public discourse. [The exhibition] operates across public and personal realms - as well as used [the artists body] as central motifs - [through which] these artists sought to address broad political issues and confront patriarchy and sexism in art. In doing so they created new, positively assertive female identities.”

The publication:https://www.amazon.ca/Feminist-Avant-Garde-Sammlung-Verbund-Collection/dp/3791354469

-The art present in this book is “provocative, radical, poetic, ironic, angry, cynical, and heartfelt.”

Francesca Woodman, Several Cloudy Days, Rome, Italy. Silver gelatin print, 1977.

Martha Rosler, Cleaning the Drapes from the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful. Photomontage, c. 1967-72.

Photo book Proposal

 For my photo book/final project I want to focus on the transitional space between girlhood and womanhood by exploring but also intersecting traditionally contrasting themes such as innocence and sexuality. The project will employ my own feminist perspective on sexualization of young girls through worryingly youthful beauty trends amongst women. The book in a way will pull from and challenge themes of the lolita (for example, Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita and the (far more troubling) film adaption and various book covers.. while using a rather “coquette” aesthetic in the books execution - that being hyper-feminine. I think this said space itself between girlhood and womanhood can be extremely uncomfortable and unsure, but is something that obviously a number of go through (not exclusive of course to cis-gender individuals). 

The book itself will be more of a collage work of sorts, with lots of inclusions other than traditional print styles, such as photograms, scans of writing, and maybe even painting/drawing. In short, there will be a contrast between the innocence of girlhood and self-empowerment in one’s sexuality as a woman. I think that this contrast may be difficult to pull off correctly (that is without leaning into something that unintentionally may come off as exploitative), but I think it will be a really interesting challenge and is something I am very interesting in exploring. The girl and the grown woman coexist inside of many of us.

Photographers that I will be referencing:

Karin Mack

- The feminist avant-garde of the 1970s

-Austrian post-war artist

-First explored woman’s role as housewife, then moved to work more centered around her own feelings as a woman.

Karin Mack, Zerstörung einer Illusion, 1977.

Sally Mann

-contemporary American photographer

- I will be referring to her series At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women in the creation of my own photobook:

           This series “capture[s] the confusing emotions and developing identities of young girls [and the] expressive printing style lent a dramatic and brooding mood to all of her images”

                       -Museum of Contemporary Photography

-lots of photographs of her children (Immediate Family series) … although I understand the artistic merit behind this work, I will not be including any nude photographs of myself as a child in this work as it is something I am not personally comfortable with. I will however be reusing some film from old family photo albums of my two sisters and I as children.

Sally Mann. Untitled from the “At Twelve” Series, 1983-1985.

my photo wall from Open Studio

prints are all darkroom, 11x14 and smaller.

 

Assignment 4 - Making a scene

 

3AM Laundry Machine, digital photo file

Aperture: Nan Goldin - The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

 

Nan Goldin, Trixie on the cot, New York City, 1979

“I grew up in a period in which the glue of suburbia was denial. It maintained the culture, the mentality, the outer face. I didn’t accept the myths that families tell themselves and present to the world. I saw very early that my experience could be negated. That I never said that, I never did that, that never happened. I needed to get away. 

I took the pictures in this book so that nostalgia could never color my past. I wanted to make a record of my life that nobody could revise: not a safe, clean version, but instead, an account of what things really looked like and felt like and smelled like. I don’t think I could, at this age and in this body now, live the life that I lived then. It took a certain level of fearlessness, a wildness, quick changes—of clothes, of friends, of lovers, of cities.

When I wonder what people are talking about when they say that the Ballad helped them, I guess that it showed young people there was another way to live, that they didn’t have to swallow the version of the norm that hurt them, that they didn’t feel part of, that was destroying them. The book gave a mirror to kids who had no reflection of themselves in the world around them. They knew that they weren’t alone.”

-Nan Goldin

Coloured Film!

 

Coloured film I have shot recently. The bottom middle preserve sheet isn’t pictures I took myself but from a roll I found inside a thrifted camera that I got developed! I found this ‘mystery’ film roll really exciting. 

   The left most preserve sheets are lomography purple pétillant film, and the top two that appear orange are fujifilm 400.

Assignment 5 - AtoZ

 

Above/Below/Closeup/Depthoffield/Exposure/Forcedperspective/Gradient/Hyperfocal/ISO1600/Jumping/Keepingstill/Longexposure/Macro/Noise/Overexposed/‘P’mode/Questionable/Refraction/Shaky/TopsyTurvy/Underexposed/Vignette/Whiteout/Xtheimage/Yawn/Zoom

8.5 x 11 print, digital collage and digital camera

To familiarize myself with digital cameras and photography terminology, I chose to relate each letter of the alphabet to a particular camera setting, movement, or editing. Some of the letters are a bit sillier than others as it was hard to find terminology for some of them. As each letter is completed I colour it in.

Assignment 4 - Planning and Mood Board

Screenshots taken from pinterest with unknown photographers + movie screenshots:

Screenshot from Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001)

Photos by Augustin Doublet from his series They Are Gone Now

My Initial Sketch:

Photo will be taken in a basement laundry room. Key elements are the person doing laundry (thinks everything is perfect as in nothing is wrong), the bloodied mattress (bed), the light source indicating an open door, and the masks - one being worn by a figure sitting in the corner and the other alluding to the presence of a third figure (coupled with the blood stain). The gnome statue is the object out of place, but this will likely change or be removed all together, depending what I feel is necessary for the scene, 

    

Assignment 3.2 - 4x5 photo and enlargement

A 4x5 film enlargement on 11x14 paper in the style of Richard Avedon of Kort Woycheshin. I was inspired by the framing of Avedon (both film borders and subject in relation to negative space of the background) and the Western look of many of his portraits. I asked Kort to wear clothes that he felt comfortable in/wanted to be photographed in for the portrait. 
 

Photo II - Enlargements and contact sheets (as of semester midpoint)

 contact sheets made for assignments and for myself, and enlargement made outside of project work. 

Contact Sheets:

Enlargements: