Week 12

November 14, 2006


Miriam Schapiro, Homage, 1975
Mary Beth Edelson, Some Living American Women Artists, 1972         
Miriam Schapiro, Connection, 1976
Miriam Schapiro, First Fan, 1977 
      
Sonia Delunay, Solar Prism, 1914              
Sonia Delunay, Blanket, 1911
Piet Mondrian, Tableau II, 1921-25   
Eva Hesse, Ennead,  1966
Jackie Winsor, Bound Grid, 1971-72
Harmony Hammond, Floor Piece VI, 1973
Carl Andre, 144 Lead Plates and 144 Magnesium Plates, 1969

Joyce Kozloff, Hidden Chambers, 1975
Miriam Schapiro, Wonderland, 1983        
Miriam Schapiro, Heartland, 1985         

Emily Carr, Forest, British Columbia, 1931
Georgia O'Keeffe, Black Iris, 1926 
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, The Artist and his Model, 1910-26
Barnett Newman, Onement 1, 1948
Louise Bourgeois, Le Regard, 1966
Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison, 1983
Louise Bourgeois, Fillette, 1968 
Hannah Wilke, Centerfold, 1973
Hannah Wilke, SOS Starification Object Series, 1974-1982

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974-79  overall 
    settings for Virginia Wolffe, Emily Dickinson, and Georgia O’Keeffe
Judy Chicago, Primordial Goddess and Fertility Goddess settings from the Dinner Party

Miriam Schapiro:  “Sentimentality for me is a very powerful idea….The grid is there to indicate that this is about order….but the handkerchief is there so you can cry when you remember all the tears which soaked all the handkerchiefs from time gone by.  My curious aesthetic sense counts on the merger of the grid and the handkerchief.”

Mirian Schapiro:  “Women have always collected things and saved and recycled them because leftovers yielded nourishment in new forms.  The decorative functional objects   women made often spoke in a secret language, bore a covert imagery.  When we read these images in needlework, in paintings, in quilts, rugs and scrapbooks, we sometimes fine a cry for help, sometimes an allusion to a secret political alignment, sometimes a moving symbol of the relationships between men and women.  We base our interpretation of the layered meanings in these works on what we know of our own lives—a sort of archaeological reconstruction and deciphering….Collected, saved and combined materials represented for such women acts of pride, desperation, and necessity.  Spiritual survival depended on the harboring of memories.  Each cherished scrap of percale, muslin or chintz, each bead, each letter, each photograph, was a reminder of its place in a woman’s life, similar to an entry in a journal or a diary.  Women’s culture is the framework for femmage….”

Lucy Lippard: “I have no clear picture what, if anything, constitutes women’s art, although I am convinced there is a latent difference in sensibility….I have heard suggestions that the common factor is a vague earthiness, organic images, curved lines, and, most convincingly, a centralized focus.”  ….There is now evidence that many women artists have defined a central orifice whose formal organization is often a metaphor for a woman’s body” 
“A unifying density, an overall texture, often sensuously tactile and often repetitive to the point of obsession, the preponderance of circular forms and central focus, an ubiquitous linear ‘bag’ or parabolic form that turns in on itself, layers or strata, an indefinable looseness or flexibility of handling, a new fondness for the pinks and pastels and ephemeral cloud colors that used to be taboo.” 

Barnett Newman:   “The Kwakiutl artist painting on a hide did not concern himself with the inconsequentials that made up the opulent social rivalries of the Northwest Coast Indian scene; nor did he, in the name of a higher purity, renounce the living world for the meaningless materialism of design.  The abstract shape he used, his entire plastic language, was directed by a ritualistic will toward metaphysical understanding.  The everyday realities he left to the toymakers; the pleasant play of nonobjective pattern, to the women basket-weavers.”

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November 16, 2006

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974-79 
settings for Virginia Wolffe and Emily Dickinson
Judy Chicago, Primordial Goddess and Fertility Goddess settings from the Dinner Party

Louise Bourgeois in costume, 1970
Freestanding sculpture of Artemis at Ephesus, second century AD
Ana Mendieta, untitled silhouette, 1976
Ana Mendieta, Alma/Anima, 1975                         
Ana Mendietta, Rupestrian Sculpture (First Woman), 1981                    
Ana Mendietta, Rupestrian Sculpture (Goddess of the Wind and Old Mother Blood), 1981

Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964
Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, Sandra Orgel, Aviva Rahmani: Ablutions, 1972  *
Camille Grey, Lipstick Bathroom (from Womanhouse), 1972
Susan Frazier, Vicki Hodgetts, and Robin Weltsch, Nurturant Kitchen (from Womanhouse), 1972  *
Eleanor Antin, Carving: a Traditional Sculpture, 1973
Martha Rosler, Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, 1977

Jean-Honore Fragonard, Debut of the Model, 1765
Jean-Leon Gerome, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1882
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Turkish Bath, 1862
Sylvia Sleigh, Turkish Bath, 1973
Joan Semmel, Secret Spaces, 1976
Joan Semmel, Hand Down, 1977

Mary Cassatt, Young Mother Nursing Her Children, 1889
Mary Cassatt, The Mirror, 1905
Mary Kelley, Post Partum Document, 1975-79
Documentation 2: analyzed utterances and related speech events: Gah, 1975
Documentation 3: analyzed markings and diary perspective schema, 1975
Documentation 6: pre-writing alphabet, exergue and diary, 1978

Barbara Kruger, unititled (Your gaze hits the side of my face), 1982
Barbara Kruger, untitled (We have received orders not to move), 1982
Mary Cassatt, Woman in Black at the Opera, 1880
Renoir, Box at the Theater, 1874
Barbara Kruger, untitled (We won't play nature to your culture), 1983
Barbara Kruger, untitled (Your fictions become history), 1983
Barbara Kruger, untitled (Surveillance is your busy work), 1983
Barbara Kruger, untitled (Your Body is a Battleground), 1989

Cindy Sherman, untitled film stills, 1978-1980
Librarian—cigarette
        -tramp
        -on the stairs
Cindy Sherman, untitled film still, 1979 (with mirror)

Sherrie Levine, Presidents #2, 1979
Sherrie Levine, Presidents #3, 1979
Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans, 1981 
Walker Evans, from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1936

Mary Kelly:  “What’s discovered in working through the Post-Partum Document is that there is no preexisting sexuality, no essential femininity; and that to look at the processes of their construction is also to see the possibility of deconstructing the dominant forms of representing difference and justifying subordination in our social order.”  

Kate Linker:  “Looking, Freud tells us, is not indifferent; it is always implicated in a system of control.”

Roland Barthes:  “To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signifier, to close the writing….the text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination….that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted….The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”