Often I feel its really heartening to find my work and themes line up with other women artists' practices, and gives me the opportunity to compare my ideas and making to the things that have happened and are happening in the art-world via women creatives. Here I'm making a compilation of such women artists and their works wherein i find relationships to my own ideas, especially from a video/performance perspective. Thus i can have a list of such thinkers and makers on hand that i can refer back to time after time.
Yoko Ono
Image: Cut Piece, 1964 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Yoko-Ono
"Drawing partly from the interdisciplinary Zen-inspired work of John Cage, himself a habitué of the loft events, Ono presented simple conceptual art pieces that imaginatively encouraged, and often required, interactive participation.
Painting to Be Stepped On (1960), for instance, was a canvas upon which audiences were invited to tread. Many of the works she created during this time existed primarily as written instructions for others to carry out or, in some cases, merely to muse upon. Ono later compiled these epigrammatic texts—Lighting Piece (1955) offered the direction “Light a match and watch till it goes out”—in the book Grapefruit (1964). Interested in the integration of art with everyday life, Ono became associated with the Fluxus collective, and in 1961 the group’s founder, George Maciunas, provided her with her first solo gallery show." https://www.britannica.com/biography/Yoko-Ono
My notes:
- Conducting performance within a gallery space as well as continuing outside into the world via audience eg. her instructional book, 'Grapefruit.' Imagination and considering possibilities of things out of the norm happening. Experimental focus, nonsensical practice, looking at the everyday.
- Audience engagement and absurdity in her work. Such works are conducted through multiple medias, and not restricted to any one form.
- The strive of attempting to break barriers between the artist, audience and the artwork. Ono has explored how one might engage in art past the walls of the gallery which is really interesting in relation to my own work. My work is somewhat opposite to Ono's performance works such as Cut Piece, 1964 in formulation, as it is made outside of the gallery to be bought in and exhibited. But I am interested in how my ideas can still be presented to an audience, or be given to people to engage with via a certain method of sharing.
Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman. Untitled #153. 1985. Chromogenic color print, 67 1/4 × 49 1/2″ (170.8 × 125.7 cm). Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Fund
"While she sometimes portrays glamorous characters, Sherman has always been more interested in the grotesque. In the 1980s and 1990s, series such as the disasters (1986–89) and the sex pictures (1992) confronted viewers with the strange and ugly aspects of humanity in explicit, visceral images."
“I’m disgusted with how people get themselves to look beautiful; I’m much more fascinated with the other side” - Cindy Sherman
Marina Abramović
Shirin Neshat
"Shirin Neshat is a contemporary Iranian visual artist best known for her work in photography, video, and film (such as her 1999 film Rapture),which explore the relationship between women and the religious and cultural value systems of Islam. She has said that she hopes the viewers of her work “take away with them not some heavy political statement, but something that really touches them on the most emotional level.” Born on March 26, 1957 in Qazin, Iran, she left to study in the United States at the University of California at Berkeley before her the Iranian Revolution in 1979. While her early photographs were overtly political, her film narratives tend to be more abstract, focusing around themes of gender, identity, and society. Her Women of Allah series, created in the mid-1990s, introduced themes of the discrepancies of public and private identities in both Iranian and Western cultures. The split-screened video Turbulent (1998) won Neshat the First International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999."
Wangechi Mu
"Wangechi Mutu observes: “Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body.” Piecing together magazine imagery with painted surfaces and found materials, Mutu’s collages explore the split nature of cultural identity, referencing colonial history, fashion and contemporary African politics. In Adult Female Sexual Organs, Mutu uses a Victorian medical diagram as a base: an archetype of biased anthropology and sexual repression. The head is a caricatured mask – made of packing tape, its material makes reference to bandages, migration, and cheap ‘quick-fix’ solutions. Mutu portrays the inner and outer ideals of self with physical attributes clipped from lifestyle magazines: the woman’s face being a racial distortion, her mind occupied by a prototypical white model. Drawing from the aesthetics of traditional African crafts, Mutu engages in her own form of story telling; her works document the contemporary myth-making of endangered cultural heritage. "
Sarah Sze
Art is a timekeeper; it endows breath into materials. It is a traveling message between humans across centuries. —Sarah Sze
"Sarah Sze gleans objects and images from worlds both physical and digital, assembling them into complex multimedia works that shift scale between microscopic observation and macroscopic perspective on the infinite. A peerless bricoleur, Sze moves with a light touch across proliferating media. Her dynamic, generative body of work spans sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, video, and installation while always addressing the precarious nature of materiality and grappling with matters of entropy and temporality."