Female Sensibility: Feminist Avant-Garde from the VERBUND COLLECTION in the Lentos Art Museum

The exhibition at the Lentos is dedicated to an artistic movement that has thus far received little attention in art history. For the first time in the history of art, these artists created a new 'image of the woman' from a female perspective in various countries. For this movement, Gabriele Schor, founding director of the VERBUND COLLECTION, coined the term "Feminist Avant-Garde", with the intention that this collective pioneering achievement would be appropriately included in art history.

The Lentos show "Female Sensibility. Feminist Avant-Garde from the VERBUND COLLECTION" lets visitors engage in three new focal points. Afro-American artists are exposed to frequent discrimination pertaining to gender, racism and social position, with the current Black Lives Matter movement highlighting their precarious situation. This intersectional discrimination is impressively expressed in the works of Afro-American female artists. Alongside works by Howardena Pindell and Lorraine O'Grady, works by Elizabeth Catlett can also be seen; she shows how mothers are afraid for their children because of the increasing levels of violence they are exposed to on the streets.

Communist systems propagated the social equality of men and women. Nevertheless, artists like Gabriele Stötzer vehemently represented their feminist art despite years of Stasi checks in the former GDR. Amazingly, although the was separated from western feminist discourse, she created similarly staged photographs to artists from "over there". For example, Stötzer pressed her naked boy against a glass pane or wrapped herself in bandages like a mummy from head to toe in order to express the feeling of being restricted.

Surprisingly, years of research turned up works by 17 Austrian female artists that show a strong feminist leaning in an international comparison and makes clear that there is more than just feminist-orientated art. The public performances of VALIE EXPORT, such as her "Tapp- und Tastkino" (Tap and Touch Cinema) of 1968, were strong and necessary provocations in the sense of "actionist feminism". Less attention was paid to the fact that poetic -performative works were also created at the same time, e.g. by Renate Bertlmann, Linda Christanell, Birgit Jürgenssen, Karin Mack, or Friederike Pezold. Margot Pilz, whose biography was recently published, processes her social criticism from a sociological perspective, while Auguste Kronheim adopts a literary point of view.

 

Against the backdrop of the 1968 student's movement, the civil rights and anti-war movement as well as the "sexual revolution", a second women's movement formed in western countries. Women recognised that their so-called "private" problems are not down to nature, but arise out of social power and dominance relations. They rebelled against institutional discrimination, whereby the man was the head of the family and was alone able to decide, for example, whether the woman could be economically active outside the family, where the children went to school or whether they were allowed to travel abroad. The conviction grew: The personal is political!

The exhibition at the Lentos Museum shows that the female artists dealt with similar topics. Thus, the international show is arranged into five sections: the rebellion against the one-dimensional perception of being only "mother, housewife and spouse", the resulting feeling of "being locked in" and wanting to break out, the rebellion against the "diktat of beauty" and the focus on the female, exploring what "female sexuality" can be, and finally the design of manifold female identities through "role-play". "It is exciting to observe that many female artists did not know one another and yet created similar image strategies," explains Gabriele Schor, curator of the exhibition and head of the VERBUND COLLECTION.

The female artists deliberately turned to new, historically unencumbered media such as photography, film and video, and used performance as a means of artistic expression. It was often their own body that became the material, the code or cipher for the art. With humour and irony, subtlety and provocation, they deconstructed the traditional iconography of the female. "For the Lentos, it is a matter of concern to make revolutionary approaches of female artists known to a wider public and to give weight to the associated political demands," declares Hemma Schmutz, artistic director of the Lentos.

As female artists were not taken seriously due to their gender, they began to organise themselves. The demonstrated in front of museums that did not include any works by female artists in group exhibitions, they wrote manifestos, founded periodicals, collective and galleries. In 1972, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro founded the feminist exhibition venue Womanhouse in California, and Mary Beth Edelson initiated the first major women's conference for the visual arts in Washington. At the same time, the women's group "Aktion Unabhängiger Frauen" (AUF - Action by Independent Women) was founded in Vienna. In 1975, the international year of the woman, the A.I.R. Gallery was established in New York. In the same year, VALIE EXPORT curated the legendary exhibition "MAGNA. Feminism: Art and Creativity" at the Galerie nächst St. Stephan. The network "International Action Community of Women Artists" (IntAkt) was founded in Vienna in 1977 and still exists today.

Since the show "Woman" (2017) at the mumok in Vienna, which was also implemented in cooperation with the VERBUND COLLECTION, the number of female artists exhibited has almost doubled. The Lentos now offers the possibility to see works by all 82 female artists from Latin America, North America, Asia and Western and Eastern Europe for the first time. In addition to prominent positions, less well-known female artists can also be discovered at the Lentos.

About the VERBUND COLLECTION