MUSIC: Women Is Losers by Janis Joplin
It's true that the 1960s had been a time of incredible change.
But by 1970,
the height of female achievement still looked a bit like this.
The lure of a crown,
60 countries from all over the globe
have sent a beautiful girls to London
tonight in search of a title.
Miss World was supposed to be every girl's dream,
a parade of perfection,
what you could achieve if you
clucked and pummelled your body into submission.
And being sized up like a piece of meat was so completely
normal for women, it was broadcast live on television
and watched by millions.
And her measurements are 36, 24, 36.
Girls, would you please turn...
Urgh!
But 1970 was also the year that women around the world rose up...
..and used their bodies to fight back...
through art.
In one explosive decade,
feminist artists revolutionised the way women were seen...
..and shook the establishment to its core
with experimental new art forms...
..and provocative political statements.
And their art is just as shocking today.
It still upsets people.
Explicit, revolutionary, and unashamedly female.
Together, they broke down barriers and changed
the definition of what art could be.
It's incredible art
by incredible women
who were making incredible art against the odds.
Be warned, this film contains provocative female imagery.
Shame on you all!
You're degrading yourselves!
Back at the Miss World competition,
an angry crowd had gathered outside the Royal Albert Hall.
It was the perfect occasion for us to make a protest.
Margaret Harrison wasn't yet a feminist art legend,
but she was a member of the newly-formed
Women's Liberation Movement of Great Britain.
Shame on you all!
I went with my friend, Alison Fell.
I had this black plastic chest with fur nipples and a smile on a stick.
And she had these light bulbs strapped to her chest.
And in her sleeve, she had this thing that she pressed
and every now and again, they would flash on and off.
We demand the right to enter Bessie in
the world's largest cattle market.
How you could succeed was by being beautiful or judged to be beautiful.
So, there were all these reporters and they were saying,
"You are only jealous because you're ugly."
Miss Africa, South.
But inside, not everyone was there for the lovely girls.
Bob Hope was the compere for the year.
And he just couldn't stop these awful jokes
about cow's udders and comparing it to female anatomy.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
I am very, very happy to be here at this cattle market tonight.
LAUGHTER
Moo!
APPLAUSE
Feminists erupted with football rattles,
flour bombs, and shouts of,
"We are not beautiful, we are not ugly!
"We're angry!"
SCREAMING AND SHOUTING
The proceedings have been temporarily suspended.
The interruption to the organisers isn't altogether unexpected.
And after that, he said that was the worst experience of his whole
professional life.
# You don't own me
# Don't tie me down. #
The publicity surrounding the Miss World protest ignited a feminist
revolution across Britain.
This is International Women's Day today,
and you send a male to interview me and a male cameraman.
Where are your women cameramen at the BBC?
The whole thing became very creative.
It gave us a kind of confidence to actually go on and do other things.
So, this is the piece, Homeworkers.
For Margaret, Miss World was just the beginning.
She decided to put feminist issues at the heart of her work.
One pound to two pounds. £71 is quite a lot of money.
47 years on, almost to the day,
Margaret is here in Bilbao,
opening a huge retrospective,
and it starts with a landmark moment for feminist art.
This room is mostly from 1971.
It was the first feminist solo show.
Feminist artists were responding to centuries
of a particular kind of portrayal of women.
From page three girls, through Miss World, to the kind of
advertising that routinely portrayed
naked women lying over the bonnets of cars.
Having given birth only a few months before the show,
Margaret left the private view early.
Well, I went in the next day to have a look, see how it looked,
because the reception had been quite crowded.
And when I got there, the woman who was looking after the gallery,
she sort of looked a bit pale.
I looked round, there's no work on the wall.
She said, "We've had to take it all down."
I said, "Why?" She said, "The police came and said
"if we didn't take it down, they were going to take us to court."
And so, she was very frightened. She took it down.
The police had closed the show on the grounds of obscenity.
But of course, it wasn't the images of women that had offended them.
So, this was one of the images that the police didn't like.
This is an image of Captain America and as you can see,
he's not in his usual garb.
He's wearing stockings, suspenders...
..and high heel shoes, which he can hardly walk in.
And he has stars on his genitals.
And he has a nice sort of basque on.
The gallery person said it was these kind of images they didn't like.
# She was everybody's darling
# But she never lost her head Even when she was giving head
# She said, Hey, babe. #
They just felt it was insulting.
Well, if it's insulting to a male, it's also insulting to a female.
So, I guess I objectified them
in the same way that they had objectified women.
This combination of brilliant artistic skills
with a kind of inversion,
when it's done to men, it makes you laugh.
When it's done to women, you do not notice.
I'd been drawing these things for ages, for a whole year.
And my partner had taken on this awful job to support me.
And then it gets closed down.
You know, you go,
"Oh, for God's sake!"
You know, "I can't win, whatever way I do it."
But then you would have to pick yourself up and say,
"OK, that's how it is.
"If this doesn't work, I'm going to try a different way of working."
Margaret put these works in a drawer,
and didn't show them again for over 25 years.
Truly revolutionary art is always ahead of its time,
but after decades in the wilderness...
Here I am. I'm not dead yet.
..feminism is the hot ticket for contemporary art,
packing out galleries around the world.
I think it's very difficult now to understand just how pioneering this
generation was. They were breaking through
all sorts of conventions that had... and hierarchies,
that had absolutely governed the visual arts for centuries.
And the number one hierarchy that
feminist artists had in their sights was the patriarchy.
In LA, one of the most explosive names in feminist art
was about to throw down the gauntlet to the male-dominated art scene.
I knew what I was experiencing in the LA art scene was sexism.
There wasn't even that word then.
But you couldn't talk about it. There was no language for it.
Nobody talked about gender discrimination.
Nobody talked about sexual harassment.
Nobody talked about sexism.
That was all ahead of us.
And so, being an artist was a tough career choice.
Judy had been trying to blend in with the boys, making macho,
minimalist art.
But it just didn't feel right.
I decided to make this radical change in my art practice
and I wanted to symbolise the fact that
I was saying bye-bye to being a boy.
Judy legally changed her surname from Gerowitz to Chicago,
ditching the name of her first husband.
Well, we have to get hold of our own image.
Take it over. That's why I changed my name.
Because I took hold of my own identity and I said, "Henceforth,
"I shall determine who I am.
"I reject the definition society has given me."
Now all she needed was some publicity.
Now, this was a spoof on the male artists who all did these posters
and advertisements for their show, the studs.
Billy Al with his motorcycle.
And Larry Bell with his cigar and Kenny Price on a surfboard.
So, you know, I hung out with the guys.
I thought I was going to be hilarious.
I was going to be in a boxing ring.
I mean, anybody who knew me knew I was tough but I wasn't a boxer.
The poster was printed in Art Forum and spread like wildfire.
It caused this huge sensation
because it was right around the time
that women artists were just starting
to organise around the country.
There were a lot of women getting really fed up
with what was happening.
In 1970,
only 3% of the exhibitions held in New York were by women artists,
a pretty good indication of what was happening around the world.
If anyone called your work feminine, you were finished.
We used to trail along with our paintings
and get rejected all the time.
Let's face it, as far as most people were concerned, artists were men.
I mean, I had started looking back in history at the end of the '60s
to see if any women before me had encountered what I was encountering.
There was no information about women.
There was only absence.
If we don't have a whole history of women in politics,
and you don't have a history of women in art,
you don't have a history of women writers,
you continue to consider that,
that women have done nothing worth remembering
in the history of the world.
Of course, this was a moment where
Kenneth Clarke's Civilisation was broadcasting
and it was celebrating the many centuries of the creativity of men.
So, this was a generation who were
absolutely marginalised and disempowered.
And it was their moment.
I thought maybe it would be good if I tried to help some young women
overcome whatever it was that stopped
the women of my generation, and I helped them do something
I couldn't do which was to build their art making
on the basis of their experiences as women.
I, I...
Need, need, need...
I need...
In California, Judy started the very first feminist art course.
How many 'I's?
A lot. Nancy. Nancy, has anybody ever used you sexually?
I went up to Fresno without realising
that for a lot of young women,
saying, "Oh, I want to be an artist"
was like, "Oh, I want to go to the moon."
They had absolutely no idea what that meant or entailed.
In essence, she freed herself from her own fear
that she'd be seen that way.
I got my students to stop reading anything
or looking at anything by men.
I figured they knew enough about men's history already.
So, for the entire year, they focused on women.
The impact was immediate.
It was a heady year.
I mean, it was incredible.
I taught my students how to present themselves.
I mean, this is how they present themselves.
"Hello. My name is Susie."
And I'd say, excuse me, stand up tall,
and say, "My name is Susan Brown. How do you do?"
When I first came to this class,
well, you know, we had our first sessions...
I had a real kind of foggy idea of myself...
My God, I mean it was like I had taken
the lid off of a boiling pot with this energy
that boiled up with these young girls.
I mean, they were incredible.
I mean, like, there's... The classic scene
was when we brought this feminist theorist to the studio,
and the students had made cheerleader outfits
and it says C-U-N-T on the sweatshirts.
And so we went to meet the theorist at the airport,
and there were these Shriners coming off the plane.
And there they are...
"C-U, C-U, C-U-N, C-U-N-T"
in the Fresno airport, and I'm like... "Oh, my God!"
C, C, C-U-N.
U, U, U-N-T.
C-U, C-U, U-N-T.
C-U-N-T. Yay! Cunt!
Judy's students weren't the only ones causing a ruckus.
In Britain, Rose English was running into
some serious resistance at art school.
Basically, art was either painting or it was sculpture.
It couldn't actually even be both those things concurrently.
It had to be one or the other.
I was already making things that just didn't fit into either of those
categories, really.
Rose was dragged in for a stern talking to.
They just had me up in front of a panel,
all men, and just laid into me. It was really shocking.
They were saying that the work I was making was not art.
And in the end, I just thought at the point I was going to cry,
I just left the room and I never went back.
It could have really destroyed me.
In a way, perhaps it was a good learning curve for later,
when you sort of realise that actually you're not going to...
Nobody is going to give you permission to do this.
Nobody is necessarily going to support you to do it.
But you just have to do it.
Really, what I was wanting and I didn't really know it,
was a milieu in which I could start
to make what were at the time
weren't even given a name, particularly,
were performances.
At that moment when these women were graduating and making their first
experimental practices,
you could define art as something
you hung on a wall or you put it on a plinth.
And it was made by a man.
And in the decades since then,
art has got off the plinth and it's come off the wall,
and I think that has been a very profound and significant shift
over the last few years and it's very exciting.
In 1970, there was one school breaking down boundaries.
Leeds College of Art was pioneering a new style of art education.
One without any rules at all.
When I eventually found a niche for myself inside this extraordinary
freedom that was quite intimidating at first, I discovered that on
I think it was the fifth floor there was a ceramics department.
And I sort of gravitated up there and I just started
modelling with porcelain clay.
These fragile ceramics became part of Rose's early performances.
This is one of the few ceramic breasts I've got left.
You would wear as a piece of jewellery on your nipple,
which then became my degree show when I was at Leeds.
I presented an exhibition and a performance in parallel.
Rose's graduation show was an erotic tableau
performed by three female art students.
There was a fellow student who played the piano,
she played Satie Gymnopedies,
that was the music we used.
The performance reached its climax
when two of the women kissed and a lace curtain made of porcelain
crashed to the floor.
This is a smaller porcelain cunt piece, or yoni,
that had little tiny perforations in it.
I enjoyed the idea that somebody might thread their own pubic hairs
through them.
So it was like a sort of merkin.
The sexual revolution had lifted the lid on explicit imagery.
But as usual, it was all from the male perspective.
I think I just wanted it to be completely,
overwhelmingly immersively erotic.
It was full of very heavily scented flowers.
Baroque in its intensity.
And sort of mirroring all those 18th-century
sort of erotic paintings by Fragonard and Boucher.
But actually reclaiming them for a female sexuality,
rather than just about a male gaze.
I was questioning my own desire as well.
What I found desirable, or what could be desirable.
It was almost sort of an announcement perhaps.
Very extravagant and...
..announcement or invitation.
The function of feminist art is investigation and an exploration,
not an affirmation of this is what it is.
We didn't know.
We had to find out.
Rose continued to cross boundaries,
learning taxidermy to make shoes and tails
for her iconic work of 1975, Quadrille,
exploring the fetishizing of women's bodies.
You sort of really see the shoes here
mirroring the front feet of the horse.
Rose staged a performance in the middle
of the Southampton Horse Show.
Landing provocative feminist art
in the heart of conservative upper-class society.
As you can see, when they start to trot,
you can see how the tails move.
Of course, the male gaze was never far away.
The photographer who keeps getting in shot was nothing to do with us.
He was a bit annoying. But he was part of it.
Public performances were one thing,
but as far as commercial galleries were concerned,
women's art didn't sell
so they had no interest in exhibiting it.
In New York, Barbara Zucker and Susan Williams
had hit upon a radical idea.
In my mind, it feels like, if I can be so bold to say,
sort of a historical event -
the fact that this is the first woman's gallery.
We want to dispel the onus that a bunch of women showing together
don't make a strong showing,
which we knew was a lot of crap.
The Air Gallery founders began to make studio visits
to artists who might be interested in joining the new collective.
My work at that time was very organic,
very feminine.
And dealers would walk into my studio
and practically run out the door.
I mean, they were shocked.
And there was no interest in pursuing it.
And when Barbara and Susan came to my studio
and looked at work and said,
"This is what we want to do", I was very interested.
I thought, "Wonderful."
When we started, it had this aspect of freedom.
There was no feminist ideology.
The work just had to be good.
We were a motley crew and I don't think
that we always understood each other.
That said, we overcame them because we had a goal.
The goal was to show that work and that was overarching and superseded
everything else. We'd look at the work and our eyes would light up,
certain people were so fabulous.
You could hardly contain yourself.
And then we'd talk after over a cup of coffee and we'd say, "OK,
"let's invite her, let's invite her."
I think because possibly we were outsiders from the art world,
we were not accepted in the art world,
we could do anything we wanted and we did.
And we would each voice our opinion,
and we tried to be respectful of each other and we were on the whole.
The meetings took a very long time.
Long time.
I think materials were radical.
Yes. What women were making things out of was radical.
It was a tremendously creative group of women.
You put it all together, it was extraordinary.
It was. And once we opened and the reviews were fabulous, people,
we got this little article in New York magazine saying finally,
some women have gotten it together.
AIR. Art News. We were being covered.
We were hot. It was quite remarkable
that this little gallery that had just opened got attention.
We had permission.
We gave ourselves permission and no-one said no.
Dave? Yes. Dave?
Here's your tea. All right, love.
Leave it. I'll see you later on.
Women were finding new ways to work and to live.
Everything was being questioned.
The 1960s and early '70s was the decade
where artists became politicised.
And they were politicised for very good reasons.
It was a... It was a very, very turbulent era.
And women were at the centre of that change.
And one of the great transformations of consciousness raising was that we
discovered what were felt to be private difficulties
of each individual were actually structural.
We have to talk with each other to find out who we are.
Women were looking to each other for inspiration.
I'm meant to compete with that sexless object, supposedly...
In London, pioneering conceptual artist Mary Kelly
was discovering the power of collective action.
It was just like a lightning bolt.
You know, like something just hit you.
Wow! A women's group.
A women's anything...
Once the women's movement started, it was actually
a recognition that it was about us.
But at the same time, as it was about your personal life,
it was about something bigger than you.
We didn't know anything. It was all happening at once.
Communes had been a part of the new agey lifestyles of the 1960s.
But feminism took the social experiment in a bold new direction.
Because this is a commune, we share our tasks.
And that's why the men put the children to bed sometimes
and the women do things like cutting wood.
By living communally,
women were able to explore what equality really felt like.
And these new non-sexist ways of living
became the creative engine of the feminist art movement.
Three women setting up the commune and it was like
whoever we were living with at the time got to be there
but they had to follow the rules of cooking, cleaning and childcare.
So that drove a lot of men out in a hurry.
It was the idea of actually sharing our lives and our work.
Childcare and the division of labour in the home
was one of the key issues for the early feminist movement.
Inspired, Mary joined a film collective
documenting the lives of working mothers.
In those interviews, the women would just describe what they did at home,
then they went to work, then they came back home,
and they would describe everything.
The investment that the women had with children
was way beyond anything we could think
just simply in terms of division of labour.
So, I said, when I had a child myself,
"I'm going to look at this very closely.
"I'm going to document it."
Mary's film, Antepartum, is a minimalist masterpiece.
And it marked the beginning of a six-year body of work.
To speak as an artist who is a mother
absolutely goes to the heart of the silencing
of women's experience in the model of the history of art.
In classic art history,
the central mythology is about the heroic artist.
And the heroic artist is the son,
for whom the mother is just the vessel.
The radicalness of Mary Kelly's work lay in saying,
"I am an artist and I am a mother."
I had my son, while I was living in the commune.
And it gave me such an insight into, you know, what was really invested
emotionally in that relationship because I remember
everyone saying, "Well, if you don't stop breast-feeding,
"we won't be able to help you, we can't feed him."
So, I kind of agreed that I would...
I would do that and then I discovered, of course,
I didn't want to and I cried and cried.
It was like... I wanted to be the only one, you know,
who was able to supply that.
And so that became the first section of Post-Partum Document.
The artwork recorded in detail Mary's experience
of raising her child.
Fragments of cloth and stained nappy liners
were overlaid with data and
Mary's personal thoughts and feelings as her son grew.
Post-Partum Document was exhibited at the ICA in 1976
as part of a group show of conceptual art.
I was the only woman showing.
The entire programme was men.
I thought what I was doing was very much following the logic of what the
conceptual artists who were men at the time had undertaken,
you know, to sort of interrogate the object,
and then interrogate the interrogation.
Predictably, the press had a field day.
I always said that I managed to make everyone unhappy,
because there were mothers who said,
"I can identify with that experience but why do you have
"to have the theory?"
And the women in the movement that said, "Theory is male dominated.
"So, you can't have that."
And then the conceptual artists, the men, saying,
"That theory is great but why do you have to have this stuff for?"
She too, you know, broke with a taboo,
the presentation of soiled nappies in the gallery space was
profoundly disturbing,
the elevation of something, you know,
the kind of excremental,
to the status of a work of art, was a really, really radical act.
In California, Judy's course was in full swing.
And one particular student was about to take
feminist art in a whole new direction.
You never can tell who is actually going to succeed.
Like, there was one young woman who
I really didn't want to let into the class
because she had no art background,
she couldn't draw,
she had no skills.
She came from psychology.
And she said to me,
"I want to be creative", which is like...
"Oh, my God, like, go take a hobby class."
I was definitely going to be in that programme, right?
Because I was a feminist and that was the only feminist thing going.
But she turned out to be Suzanne Lacy,
who is an internationally known performance artist,
and the student I'm proudest of.
Judy was the first really strong role model that I had,
and we all admired her deeply.
Will you help me do the dishes?
Judy had been encouraging role play
as a consciousness-raising exercise in class.
Performance became the way in which women could deeply explore their
identity and be inescapably themselves.
But you don't have a cock. What's that got to do with it?
A cock means you don't wash dishes.
It raises a lot of questions about why you're alive,
why you're making art,
and that's a perfect platform for politics and art,
particularly for feminist politics and art.
The work of art as a work of protest was something that was quite new,
and I think it was incredibly exciting
for a whole generation of young women coming of age
at a period which was still very, very male-dominated.
More and more women were joining the feminist art movement,
and much of the activity centred around a building downtown.
So, the Woman's Building was a couple of miles that way.
Founded by Judy Chicago, Sheila de Bretteville
and Arlene Raven in 1973,
it was described by the LA Times as a feminist mecca.
One of the things that the
consciousness-raising practice of feminism did
was it unearthed issues that hadn't been spoken about.
And one of the ones that was most, I think,
resonant and fundamental to the feminist movement
was the issue of violence against women.
If you can imagine LA in the early '70s when rape was...
It was not a crime to rape your wife.
So, at the Woman's Building,
there was a lot of women interested in this topic,
and a lot of women who had experienced rape.
When you would get ten women together,
and a woman who had never said in her life that she had been
raped at the age of 16 said that and found out that the woman next to her
had been raped going home at night.
So the idea that a woman was not alone in her experience
began to emerge.
We say "Yes" when we mean yes, and "No" when we mean no!
It's hard to believe now,
but rape was not seen as a serious issue at the time.
This woman went dashing into the police station, she said,
"I've just been graped."
The copper said, "You mean raped?"
She said, "No, there was a bunch of them."
Until feminists took up the issue,
there wasn't a single support line
for victims of rape
in either the US or the UK.
I wanted to show the kind of ubiquitousness of rape
and make it very public. So I decided it would be very interesting
to go to the police department and get actual rape reports.
Interestingly, it was not hard to get rape reports from the police
department at that time.
In the '70s, I simply went across the street every day
and met with a cop, who gave me short description of the rape.
Male, 38, female, 22,
place, what happened, how it occurred.
And then I would take them into a public space.
I think it's this way.
First, I thought it should be a gallery.
That was sort of the convention of performance art at the time.
And then Sheila de Bretteville said to me, "You know,
"why would you do this in a gallery,
"why don't you do it in a public space?"
And so I started thinking,
"That's very interesting",
and looked at a variety of malls in the downtown area.
And the only mall that would allow me to do anything was the City Hall
because this place was quite defunct.
There was nobody coming, there were very few stores.
This is where the maps were, all along this area.
Two maps of the city.
And they were each about 25 feet long.
And on one, we marked daily rape reports
that we had gotten from the police department.
I think in three weeks,
there was something like 98 or so rapes that were reported.
Now, this is in a moment where people, feminists,
speculated that for every one reported,
there were ten that were unreported.
And so, I put a red mark on the map for the one report,
and then fainter outlines, nine, for the ones
that were theorised to go unreported.
The maps very quickly became quite red.
Three Weeks in May started a public conversation about rape.
But it also offered women practical ways to fight back.
We created the second map and that was showing
where women were actively working against violence.
This was part of a feminist discourse
around showing victimisation versus showing empowerment.
So, it would have been the first rape hotline centre,
the sheriff's department had a sex crimes unit.
And all kinds of self defence activities.
So, there were about 30 organisations.
There was a lot of publicity.
And that was part of the strategy of the entire project.
If you're going to make something part of a public discourse,
you had to use major media.
What Suzanne Lacy did in the initial performances
is not performances on a stage,
but to choreograph an event that could be picked up by the media,
so they would have to report the event in such a way that the media's
normal presentation of rape, which is always slightly violent
and slightly voyeuristic, is interrupted.
The urgency of the campaign was made clear in the December of that year,
when California was rocked by the rape and murder of ten women by the
Hillside Strangler.
Suzanne, together with Leslie Labowitz,
created a performance on the steps of City Hall,
called In Mourning And In Rage.
The memorial began with a processional,
it started at the Woman's Building on Spring Street and weaved its way
through the centre of the city.
On the steps of City Hall, the memorial became a symbolic drama.
Ten actresses dressed in black
to symbolise the grief for the ten women
who have recently been found raped and strangled.
We are here today in memory of the ten women
who were recently slain in Los Angeles.
And we are here in memory of all women who have been
and are being battered,
raped and killed throughout this country. A result...
We formed a camaraderie with each other in order to support
each other's voice.
I am here for the 4,033 women who have been raped in LA last year.
In memory of our sisters, we fight back!
For the hundreds of women who are portrayed as victims of assault
in films, television and magazines.
In memory of our sisters, we fight back.
We looked at each other and saw power
when we looked at each other.
If we looked a man, we didn't see power reflected back.
We saw all kinds of other things.
Desire, sexuality, you know, the need to protect, whatever.
But when you looked at a woman who was a strong woman,
you saw your own empowerment reflected back.
The event in itself was fabulous.
A thing that I really have learned
and I am gaining more confidence in is the potential of artists
as image-makers to really make a change in society,
in terms of the images that they project of women and that is
just as important as a political organisation
and the things that they make.
So the idea that actually art could be born out of a discussion or
consensual collaborative project
between different artists
was extremely radical, and I think for many people in the 1970s,
particularly those people involved in the commercial side of the
art world simply did not recognise it as art.
And of course now we see it as the lifeblood of the art world.
And it's what gives access to people
is the sense that you can become involved. You can have voice.
Encounters with audiences had previously
been the preserve of theatre,
which also had a long tradition of radical voices.
The thing about theatre design for me was that it was a way of being
political without being a politician.
I had no intention or desire to be a painter, to be a fine artist.
I wanted to, I suppose, change the world,
and I think I saw theatre design as the way to do it.
Lubaina Himid was studying at Wimbledon College of Art
but discovered there was nothing revolutionary
about the division of labour backstage.
The culture of the art school was very much
a kind of nurturing of the genius. In the theatre courses,
there were maybe six or seven men,
and the rest of the students were women.
It was clearly our place to service that cohort of men.
And so we ended up building scenery,
and the men were doing the thinking
and doing the important things.
It was reflective of the...
..of the whole attitude of the '70s.
Using her set-building skills,
Lubaina decided to target the male art elite.
The first works that I made that had that idea of myself being a
feminist were the cut-out men.
If you're making work that's political,
you have to use some ways of getting an audience to engage with it.
And humour is one of the best ways, if you can do it, of doing that.
The first cut-out man was a pastiche.
It was a cut-out of Michelangelo's David
with paint brushes instead of a penis
that were four foot long.
So, it was an art world fury -
a fury against special genius men
and white men in particular.
And I think it was absolutely an act of feminist bravado
to laugh at men,
to laugh at what they thought they'd achieved,
to laugh at what they thought they were,
to laugh at their power,
and to laugh at their success.
Fired up, Lubaina submitted her work to a feminist exhibition being
organised at the ICA.
I made the first cut-out man and I tried to get that painting or that
cut-out into a show called Women's Images Of Men,
which was on at the ICA,
and they didn't want it in the show.
And that made me shift...
That was a very kind of particular moment,
where I understood that I wasn't having
the same conversations, perhaps,
as those women in that feminist art circle.
I carried on making that series of works,
and showed them at the Africa Centre
and the reaction there was hilarity.
I mean, I think, the African men thought they were very funny.
All the women that I knew thought they were very funny.
And I didn't care what anyone else thought.
I think the reviews again were in
things like City Limits and Time Out,
and centred on the anger,
so I think that was the beginning of
people talking about me as an artist that was angry.
There is a rage in Lubaina Himid and a justified rage.
She recognised that the institutions were multiply
hostile or multiply closed in their imaginations to women,
but absolutely to the question of black women.
Yes, I was angry.
I could see that things were not equal and I could see that...
..it was going to take an awfully long time to redress the balance.
Little did I know how long it was going to take.
..is Lubaina Himid.
Lubaina won the Turner Prize in 2017.
The first black woman to do so.
To the arts and cultural historians
who cared enough to write essays
about my work for decades, thank you.
You gave me sustenance in the wilderness years.
Feminist artists are finally being recognised and celebrated,
even if it has taken over 40 flippin' years.
Carolee Schneemann has had to wait even longer.
Now, rightfully seen as one of the first wave of feminist artists,
she suffered criticism and censorship her entire career.
Now 78, she's opening the very first
retrospective of her work in America.
This huge, wonderful exhibit that is such a complete
revelation of all the different realms of my work opens tomorrow.
It's incredible.
The exhibition features 300 works,
with the earliest dating back to 1955.
Being a young woman painter was to
live on the margins of masculine culture.
So, people are so astonished by these early works.
They've never seen them before.
They've never seen them before
because no-one had any interest whatsoever in showing them,
or in giving me any authority as a visual artist.
So, I've lived through all these years with
my major sense of creative work remaining invisible.
That's how I began to be an activist,
and called a performance artist.
A woman in the culture of privileged Europeans
is first and foremost a sight to be looked at.
In the nudes of European painting,
we can discover some of the criteria
and conventions by which women were judged.
We can see how women were seen.
What then is a nude?
I was very concerned with the question,
"Could I be both the subject,
"a nude, and the artist
"transforming the positions and proportions of that nude?"
In 1963, frustrated by the lack of opportunities
to exhibit her paintings,
Carolee began to use her naked body
to create a series of images called I Body.
Could I just combine my body as a form of collage,
as I took these photographs to different curators, and they said,
"This is crap, if you want to paint, paint, put your clothes back on."
But I didn't think that the body was
going to dominate my materials the way it did.
Having a vibrant, lively, sexualised body was considered unnatural.
And obscene. And confusing.
Disheartened, Carolee began to make films
exploring female sexuality and physical pleasure.
Her 1964 work, Meat Joy, is an erotic rite.
I want to give a location, a space,
a place between desire and experience.
It's a very, very profoundly disturbing work and, you know,
presents very stark questions about nudity and the body and animality.
But then, also, using the body to ask interesting questions about the
relationship between pornography and the nude.
But the work Carolee is most famous,
or perhaps infamous for,
is a 1975 performance called Interior Scroll,
a landmark moment in feminist art.
Interior Scroll, which has made so much trouble in my life
and probably prevented me from having a lot
of nice teaching jobs, was simply a dream.
It was a dream out of which I made a simple little drawing of a figure
that looked like, um, you know, sort of a tampon configuration.
Pulling a scroll out of her vagina,
which had writing on it that was about interior knowledge.
The source of forgotten or suppressed power
within the woman's body,
sending information as a text.
It was very simple.
So, I put the little drawing away
and then quite a few years later,
there was a feminist festival
at which I was asked to do something,
and I remembered the little scroll and I
started writing out the text,
and folding it up in these little narrow pieces of paper.
And I thought, "Well, I could insert the text and read it as part of the
"woman's performance event."
I met a happy man
A structuralist film-maker
But don't call me that, it's something else I do
He said we are fond of you
You are charming
But don't ask us to look at your films
We cannot
There are certain films we cannot look at:
The personal clutter
The persistence of feelings
The hand-touch sensibility
The diaristic indulgence
The painterly mess
The dense gestalt
The primitive techniques
I had no idea it would make so much controversy and...
..that it would continue to have a life of its own,
dominating so many other aspects of the work.
The idea that the body can be the source of creativity,
that women are both procreative,
they have babies that come out of their vaginas,
and they also can be creative.
So opening up a huge area that was both tantalising for women,
feeling proud of their own agency, but also, you know,
enormously threatening to a male elite.
There are so many ways that my work was censored or vilified,
but the most painful rejections for me
came from feminist theoreticians,
particularly in London,
but often in the States, feminist theoreticians,
who felt my work was narcissistic, indulgent...
..stupid, close to pornography, and playing into male fantasies,
when they couldn't see that my work was actually challenging the
suppressive conventions that we were all struggling against.
Judy Chicago also faced public outrage
and fierce vitriol in 1979 for the Dinner Party,
a monumental sculpture celebrating great women in history.
One critic described it as, "Mainly cliche,
"with the colours of a Taiwanese souvenir factory."
It was absolutely derided,
particularly by many of the male critics,
because it had shocking vaginal imagery, and included all sorts of
techniques like ceramics and embroidery
that were not regarded as fine art practices.
And it was also collectively achieved
by hundreds of female artists.
So, it broke so many moulds and it set out to be an icon and indeed,
you know, 50 years later,
it still is one of the most important iconic works
within the history of women's art practice.
I think her work has to be seen as one of the greatest minimalist
sculptures, the great triangle of the Dinner Party,
but if we see it as this great formal work of art,
with its layers and layers,
and as well as the stitching, and then we add to it
the fact that she used it as a kind of history lesson,
she created the space in which women were talking to each other,
so the very idea of like a Last Supper
is like the first conversation.
But it's not a them and us of the Last Supper, it's triangular.
There's no hierarchy in a triangle.
So there are so many layers to this, that simply to say,
"She put a whole bunch of vaginas on the table",
misses the power and the evidence of that power is the numbers of women
who trekked in coaches all through the night, all over Canada,
all over the States, just to see it.
About 100,000 people saw the Dinner Party.
It was the most successful show that the museum ever had.
Despite the huge number of visitors,
the Dinner Party endured a 26-year struggle to find a permanent home.
I knew that there was resistance,
but, you know, some bad resistance has been covered up
by the kind of flood of women who have come out into visibility
in the last ten years.
Part of me believes that art can transcend barriers,
art can cross over prejudice.
Art can speak beyond, lead the society forward.
That is the history of art.
And if there is a huge audience for art, and people want to see it,
and museums won't show it, what does that mean?
What does that mean?
It can only mean one thing,
you can't play here.
You know? No entry.
It doesn't matter if you have this big audience,
it doesn't matter if all these people want to see it,
it doesn't matter if there's a hunger.
A new wave of feminism is building.
We are finally, as of 2018, realising
how radical the women's movement has been.
It is the most successful social movement in transforming the lives
of 51% of the population, incompletely but phenomenally.
The appetite for feminist art is now bigger than ever.
Here at Frieze, one of the world's largest contemporary art fairs,
the star exhibit is an area dedicated
to the extreme edges of feminist art.
The public seems to be very hungry to know more and
to expand our own ideas about what is feminism,
or is in fact feminism a plural word, not a monolith?
The common denominator of all these artists,
they all made work that had graphic sexual content, they were all...
most of them censored at one point or another.
They all challenged governmental restrictions of
sexual free speech and obscenity laws in many ways.
You know, in the words of Oscar Wilde, you know,
we need rebellion to move society forward.
And we need to do it looking backwards and forwards.
So I think that's why this feminism,
but understood as a plural,
is so important today.
That the art of these revolutionary women is only now being rediscovered
says a lot about how far we've come and how much still needs to change.
As long as women's history is consigned
to the corners and the margins,
as long as women's art is added on
to the mainstream male narrative,
women are disadvantaged,
women artists are disadvantaged.
The only way that's going to change
is when young women can build on
everything women have done before them.
Back in London, a young artist is doing just that.
Herstory is a project that uses feminist art to engage people of any
gender with the women's history that has been systematically left out.
So, I've been recreating Judy Chicago's Dinner Party
to make us stronger and fuller and feel more present in our worlds.
Where Judy Chicago has ceramic place settings,
I've created these collages.
MUSIC: Hong Kong Garden by Siouxsie And The Banshees
Each participant researches a different artist,
writing their version of her story.
# While the population feeds
# Junk floats on polluted water... #
My name is Carolee Schneemann.
If there is one thing you know about me,
chances are is that in the 1970s
I pulled a scroll out of my vagina and read the text on it aloud.
And so...
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
I want my work to be a bridge that has to be crossed by young feminists
working with their bodies.
And I want to celebrate the vagina.
I think those women felt that they had waited long enough,
that you could do things subtly and gently but,
you know, nothing had happened.
Shock tactics felt like the name of the game.
My name is Mary Kelly and I'm an artist.
For me, art didn't need to be sterile,
and art and life didn't need to be separated.
Because the personal is political.
Talking about our bodies, talking about our life events,
talking about our traumas, talking about our desires,
has to be in the public,
but it already is in the public for men because
that's called culture.
I am Margaret Harrison.
Born in Yorkshire and one of the founders
of the Women's Liberation Art Group.
My work has made headlines and effected change.
For me, art and activism are one.
We have to learn from these women,
and we have to talk to these women and if it doesn't happen,
change starts to get harder.
My name is Judy Chicago.
It took me 26 years to find a permanent home for the Dinner Party.
But unless that happened,
it was in danger of repeating the story it recounted.
By which I mean, the repeated erasure of women from history.
They have had a very profound effect,
not just within the art world,
and changing the way art has functioned,
but actually in surfacing women's voices.
And finally, our voices are being heard.
Time's up!
London, what time is it? Time's up!
London, what time is it? Times's up!
CHEERING
# Just because
# I'm a woman
# I'm a woman. #