Victoria

Victoria Woodhull the first female presidential candidate in 1872.

Like Everyday

Images by Shadi Ghadirian.

Sphinx

Leonor Fini.

Birthday

Works by Dorothea Tanning, read an interview with the artist here.

Violet

The Company of Wolves

Trailer for Neil Jordan's 1984 film The Company of Wolves, based on a story by Angela Carter.

Man-Size

Barbe Blue

Trailer for Barbe Blue (2009) Catherine Breillat's version of the Charles Perrault fairy tale.

A Woman Like That

a woman like that from Ellen Weissbrod on Vimeo.

Filmmaker Ellen Weissbrod merges her own coming of middle-age story with her pursuit of the truths behind the legends of 17th century female painter Artemisia Gentileschi’s dramatic art and life. This unconventional but heartfelt hunt upends typical artist biographies and delivers instead a funny, engaging and all together different kind of documentary.

"a woman like that" is a freewheeling tribute to an artist whose own bold life and inspiring message leaps across centuries to speak to us all. The enduring power of storytelling – in paintings, in films and in our lives is revealed, as the filmmaker learns that who gets to tell the story matters, and that maybe she too, can be “a woman like that.”

-from the filmmaker's website

Beauty Talk + Monsters

Masha Tupitsyn's debut collection of short stories is itself a kind of monster; a hybrid constructed from fiction, personal narrative, film criticism, and feminist theory. Tupitsyn seamlessly melds intellectual thought with poignant private experience as she develops solemn and striking female voices. In her first story Diegesis, (World of Fiction) the narrator's body and the camera become one,

It's attached to me, or in me, or behind me, and I know I'm being

watched, but by whom? I am half seer/half seen.

Throughout the book there is this sense of inside and outside at once and Tupitsyn likens films to dreams, as both are steeped in our subconscious fears and desires.

Hear Tupitsyn read her story Kleptomania; a tale that exposes the grotesque misogyny of Hollywood, through the fantasy meeting of three leading ladies.

Womanhouse

Janine Antoni, Inhabit, 2009, Digital C-print

Janine Antoni's new photographic series explores the complex experience of contemporary motherhood and domestic life. As in much of her previous work, Antoni inserts her own body and private experience into the series of images. In Inhabit she is suspended in the center of her daughter's room, hovering above the floor with her legs embedded in a furnished doll house. In the press release for a recent exhibit, Antoni discusses the image by stating, "the substitution of house for skirt allows the mother to wear the family drama."

Frida Kahlo, Broken Column, 1944

It's unclear why Antoni seems to neutralize the home by referring to it as fashion. The artist is confined more than dressed by her circumstances, and the image is evocative of Frida Kahlo's pained self-portrait Broken Column. Both artists are immobilized by restrictive corsets which hold them in place. For Kahlo the point of entrapment was physical suffering due to her own damaged body. Antoni's "cage" is motherhood and domestic life. She is harnessed and suspended within the space and cannot escape her fate. She hangs like a giant martyred doll amidst the colorful furnishings of the room.

Sandy Orgel, Linen Closet, 1972

Through time, artists and writers have used the house as potent metaphor of both safety and entrapment. Sandy Orgel's, 1972 work Linen Closet featured a naked female mannequin emerging from the wall of a linen closet. The "woman" was literally merged with her home, the body repeatedly severed like an assistant trapped in the magician's box. The image is distressing, the only hope is her forward momentum; perhaps through sheer will, she can walk straight out of the wall. Over thirty years later, it's hard to believe that the woman in linen closet is fully free. Like the "woman in the attic", she lingers still too close to the surface of reality.

Orgel's installation was part of the seminal feminist exhibition, Womanhouse. The project, lead by teachers Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro featured site-specific installations and performances inspired by private female experience. The artists explored issues ranging from menstruation, childbirth, inter-personal relationships, and housework to expose deeply rooted cultural expectations for women. They struggled to establish their legitimacy as artists as they mined personal experience to generate content.

Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison, 1947, ink on paper

While women are no longer defined purely by the role of "housewife," the burdens of domestic life, such as child rearing and house work are still predominately female centered activities. It's also true that female bodily issues like menstruation, are still culturally taboo. Janine Antoni has discussed her role in the image Inhabit as a spider in her web, in a position of protective power. While Antoni, the mother, may be central, she is also immobilized and trapped within the web/house structure.

Janine Antoni, Inhabit, 2009

Faith Wilding's Womanhouse performance, Waiting, was a woeful homage to female passivity in the domestic realm as she sat rocking back and forth in a chair reciting a poetic life line from birth, to adulthood, and though death. In the passage centered on mothering, Wilding expresses how deeply the mother's identity is entwined with her offspring:

Waiting for my baby to come
Waiting for my belly to swell
Waiting for my breasts to fill with milk
Waiting to feel my baby move
Waiting for my legs to stop swelling
Waiting for the first contractions
Waiting for the contractions to end
Waiting for the head to emerge
Waiting for the first scream, the afterbirth
Waiting to hold my baby
Waiting for my baby to suck my milk
Waiting for my baby to stop crying
Waiting for my baby to sleep through the night
Waiting for my breasts to dry up
Waiting to get my figure back, for the stretch marks to go away
Waiting for some time to myself
Waiting to be beautiful again
Waiting for my child to go to school
Waiting for life to begin again Waiting . . .

Faith Wilding, Waiting, 1972

The woman in Wilding's narrative is like a puppet who is activated only by exterior stimuli. She is waiting for things to happen to her and has no personal velocity. While women today have greater mobility and freedom, they are still more defined by their domestic roles than their male counterparts. There is little private or public debate over a man's ability to have a career and be a father. For women, however, the battle between work and motherhood has become increasingly contentious, demonstrating that women are still deeply tied to the home.

Daises

Sedmikrasky (Daises) Vera Chytilová, 1966

I'll be your mirror

 

I am my own screen as well as the environment’s projection surface. Other people are my mirror, and I am their mirror. - Manon

I recently had the good fortune to come upon a copy of the catalog for Manon-A Person, which documents the first comprehensive exhibit on the Swiss artist, Manon. While little known in US, Manon has been a pioneer in performance, installation, and photography since the 1970s. Her practice parallels feminist works by artists like Hannah Wilke and Carolee Schneemann and explores sexuality, identity and gender construction through the use of her own body.

In 1966, the young artist rejected her civil name and became Manon, after the title character of a Henri-Georges Clouzot film. Critic Thomas Wynn has described Clouzot’s heroine as a “disembodied and mythical seductress.” It seems this is an apt description of the artist too, as she lures us to her through a constant state of disappearance. Much like Cindy Sherman, Manon hides herself through the act of disguise and display.

Both Manon and Sherman play roles and use masquerade to critique identity construction. In the series Ball of Loneliness, Manon photographs herself as a series of characters waiting alone on a dark couch. She plays countless roles including a housewife, a sex kitten, a proper lady, a femme fatale, and street urchin. Who or what are these women waiting for? Are they a group of women united through their mutual loneliness or are they a manifestation of a single psyche? Her 1977, work The Artist Is Present would point to the later. In this performance, the artist employed a group of young women to become Manon impersonators.

Manon, Ball of Loneliness, 1980

Cindy Sherman, Bus Riders, 1977

Manon, The Artist Is Present, 1977

Manon understands the power of self-construction when she says “I wanted to be my own product in the form of space, in the form of photograph, a picture, a performance.” She produces herself over and over again through a highly stylized replication that is predicated on duality. Like a movie star, Manon is ephemeral; she exists only as a series of images, gestures, costumes, and objects.

The exhibit, Manon- A Person originated in Helmhaus Zurich and will be on view at the Swiss Institute in New York April 29- June 20, 2009. An archive of works and biographical information can be viewed on the artist’s website (English version still under construction.)