Not just the nudes
Art Gallery of Hamilton gives its female artists an overdue spotlight
“Speaking for Herself ” reads the big blocky text on the wall at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, next to a sickly bright quilt fashioned by the late, great Canadian artist Joyce Wieland, who never had any trouble with such things.
It’s your first clue that, in this moment of #MeToo and gender equity gaps bursting out from the shadows, the gallery has unequivocally entered the ring.
A fuller text nearby makes it more clear: “The long-standing and systemic exclusion or erasure of women artists from art history, exhibitions, collections, the art market and commercial gallery representation is not a debatable issue. It’s a fact.”
It’s a mea culpa for the gallery, after a recent inventory revealed that only 12 per cent of all works in its collection were made by women. Let that number sink in, it seems to say, spelling it out and repeating it like a mantra: “Twelve per cent.” It’s the present looking over its shoulder to its own past in disgusted disbelief.
Fair enough. The art world has ever been a boys’ club, with female exceptions often being of note at least partly for their very existence. Think of Abstract Expressionism, dominated by the robust chutzpah of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, with Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner kept in check as footnotes, or even our own Group of Seven, which adopted Emily Carr — their equal at minimum and in most cases their superior — as though she needed them as a validating gesture.
There’s surely some satisfaction to be taken in the enduring star power of Georgia O’Keeffe, who slipped into the macho world of proto-Modern art in 1920s New York alongside her husband, Alfred Stieglitz. Her reputation now dwarfs all the men she worked alongside, but she’s a notable outlier. According to the Guerrilla Girls, a feminist art activist group, only 4 per cent of artists in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection of Modern art are women, while 76 per cent of the nudes in its holdings are of women.
Canada’s no exception and this is not only a historical phenomenon. Data compiled in 2013 by Joyce Zemans, a former head of the Canada Council for the Arts, showed that the collecting habits of the National Gallery of Canada, far and away the biggest buyer of work by living Canadian artists, skewed heavily male. Nearly 65 per cent of works acquired between 1998 and 2010 were by men.
The art world, for all its apparently liberal leanings, isn’t all that much different from society as a whole (more proof: a 2014 study from the U.S. Association of Art Museum directors showed that female chief museum executives worked, on average, at a 25-per-cent discount to their male counterparts). So the answer to the AGH’s core question to itself — “Why an exhibition of work by women artists? Aren’t we past that?” — barely needs to be answered.
Past the why and on to the what, we see the complaint emerge across material and gesture. Across from Wieland’s quilted The Camera’s Eyes (1967) is Susan Schelle’s Setting (1993), a grid of dinner plates emblazoned with block letters that shrink top to bottom.
It’s a two-hander of gender-role subversion: Wieland, who often used quilting in her practice as a derisive sniff toward reductive ideas of “women’s work,” folds in alongside Schelle in defiant solidarity. With its wilful illegibility fading toward the invisible, Schelle’s is a table laid uncomfortably for disaster — an acid parody
of the housewifely duty of pretty place settings that instead lays bare the disconnects of historical disparity around the table.
Though freely critical, Speaking for Herself is more salubrious than plaintive, an airing-out before a hectoring-over. It breaks down in three distinct portions: “Her Conversations,” pairings of female artists across eras; “Her Materials,” a sculptural interlude; and “Her Public and Private Self,” where the show returns to the fiery political content that Wieland and Schelle introduced.
In its best moments, Speaking for Herself forges key alliances. Suzy Lake and Prudence Heward knit together in surprising kinship: Lake, a pioneering feminist artist now in her 70s, made a recent series she called Extended Breathing, in which she subjected her aging body — once used haphazardly in vigorous performance pieces — to a simple task of endurance. Stand still for as long as possible and breathe, while the camera shutter remains open.
The result — her feet crystal clear, her body a ghostly blur, wavering despite her best efforts — unmoors conventional expectations of perfection around female representation, folding ageism in along with it. More importantly, it tucks neatly alongside Heward’s Girl Under a Tree, in which her nude subject glares at the viewer straight on. Heward, painting in the 1920s, was working against convention simply by being there. But she recasts the historical standard of the female nude — deferential and coy — as frank and declarative, meeting your gaze. You can look, she seems to say, but prepare to be looked at too.
It’s these little moments where the show lives most fully, prompting new readings of old works.
Emily Carr’s ebullient Sunshine and Tumult (1939), a towering pine awash in sunshine and breeze, sits alongside Catherine Gibbons’ Crown Fire (2001), where a similar tree explodes in incandescent flame (a coda to Carr’s abiding idealism? make of that what you will). Across the way, Annie Pootoogook’s coloured pencil drawing Cutting Meat by the Pampers Box (2002) sits next to Annerie van Gemerden’s photo Saturday Morning Ritual, Cleo and Cees (1973), a pair of domestic scenes forging harmony across geographical and cultural divides, and underscoring the universal significance of the intimate and personal in a field that for years derided such things as twee and simplistic.
Men can have that effect. Another overwhelming male effect — the worst of us — is the focal point of the #MeToo movement, and Speaking for Herself makes itself heard on that point, too. In the long sunlit gallery where “Her Materials” lies, a giant pink form rears up in what can only be a defensive stance, its multiple prongs stiffened like a creature under threat.
The piece, by Jaime Angelopoulos, is called Stand Up For Yourself, and it stands apart in her otherwise friendly, candy-coloured oeuvre.
Here it’s less outlier than rallying point: a call-to-arms perfectly fit to a watershed moment.
They’ve heard and they are. Speaking for Herself continues at the Art Gallery of Hamilton to March 17, 2019.