C92 Reviews
Zona F
Marina Núñez: Science Fiction Series, 1999
Zona F is a dynamic group show which explores the underplayed influence of feminist theories on contemporary art. Jane and Louise Wilson, Sarah Lucas, Eija Liisa Ahtila, Nicole Eisenman, Alicia Framis, Jim Hodges, Jac Leirner, Yasumasa Morimura and Marina Núñez set up unexpected resonances and effects which mess with the stereotypes of 70s women’s art as naïve, essentialist, didactic and utopian. Play and parody, also the hallmarks of postmodernism, are key to this works’ success.
Perhaps the most obvious inheritor of a feminist discourse is British artist Sarah Lucas, who excels in disrupting borders between public and private discourse by saying things women are not supposed to. If female genitalia are perceived as a hole, then Lucas presents it as crudely and as literally as possible, as in her notorious pieces Fucked and Bitch. She’s not interested in layers of ironic wit. Some of her installations perform hard-hitting one-liners and yet the laugh lasts longer because of the whole-hearted way in which Lucas leaps into the abject, achieving a weird, unlikely release, becoming untouchable, unable to be hurt.
Lucas often uses cheap, discarded materials. In this regard, there are surprising parallels between Lucas and Brazilian artist Jac Leirner, even though Leirner’s found objects are tidier and void of kitsch. In Blue Phase, Leirner collected 126 defaced Brazilian currency notes which are displayed in three long lines and comment on ideas of classification and the originality of the artist. In Corpus Delicti she inserts stolen airline cutlery into strips of plastic tubing, evoking at once the international travel she undertakes as an artist and the drip effect of airplane food–tasteless and ingested whether you feel like it or not.
The feminist aim to have crafts recognised as valid sites of art is referenced by American artist Jim Hodges in When We Stay, a fragile silk flower curtain which suggests a woman’s dress, lace-making–a traditionally female occupation–and the domestic sphere, conventionally the domain of women. In A Far Away Corner thin silver necklaces, woven into intricate glittering webs, are positioned across one corner of the gallery. Reproductions fail to convey the mournful persuasive power of Hodges’ work in which the play of light creates moments of touching beauty.
Whether posing as Sylvia Kristel or Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, Japanese photographer Yasumasa Morimura holds constructions of Western femininity up to scrutiny. However, since cross-dressing has become an everyday media reference, Morimura’s images have lost their forcefulness. Their place in this show seems safe, especially when situated next to New York artist Nicole Eisenman whose drawings teem with robustly sexual bodies. In Come on My Thumb a nude female figure masturbates, surrounded by a profusion of women in various stages of arousal and having sex, as if to parody the countless nude portraits of passive, supine women of art history. If lesbians are primarily defined by the sexual act, she presents it as hyperbole. She mimes what has been construed as masculine desire: ravenous, rude, active, initiating, purely physical sex. Like the swirling landscapes of Reginald Marsh, Eisenman’s work expresses explosive emotional states like jealousy, competitiveness, desire and rage–emotions ‘women loving women’ were not supposed to experience!
In her Cinema Solo series Alicia Framis, who was born in Spain and lives in Amsterdam, interrogates gender and body as commodity. She placed a male mannequin in the window of her apartment in a rough neighbourhood to give the illusion that she didn’t live alone. In parodies of intimate poses, she photographed herself with her manipulated ‘lover’ and constructed the narrative of an imagined affair in which the female subject has complete control.
Marina Núñez, a Spanish painter, explores a postgender, postrelationship virtual space populated by cyborgs with swollen, weblike eyes and shaved bodies, robbed of gender signifiers. They have evolved beyond alienation, or are completely at home within it. They exist beyond pain, beyond illness, like post-chemo survivors, striving towards an androgynous space where genitalia do not determine salary, lifestyle, health treatment, ambition and career. Invulnerable, self-contained, imminent, are they a warning or a promise? Like Nuñez, Jane and Louise Wilson and Eija-Liisa Ahtila operate in a space of post-irony, interrupting the seamless flow of images and language of TV, advertising and cinema, which so pervasively feeds and forms how we see ourselves. Their formal risks recall avant-garde film in which women like Maya Deren and Chantal Akerman have always been prominent.
Anti-climax is used to great effect in the work of Finnish artist Ahtila. In her video and film installations she detachs sound and image and foregrounds the indeterminacy of self within a relationship. Delivered with rapid-fire speed and editing, the woman in Okay who paces her claustrophobic apartment speaks lines in a female and dubbed male voice. "I strike him so I feel something," she says. Then, "He punishes me for not making love." Comments normally attributed to men are voiced by a woman, inverting conventional power dynamics. The discontent that must be submerged in the happy, aspirational caricature of TV selling is highlighted. Finally, both voices overlap, repeating, "It’s okay, it’s okay." It clearly isn’t, but hey, let’s watch telly and forget all about it.
Zona F shows the vital and complex impact feminism has had on contemporary practices and how hard it can often be to distinguish feminist from postmodernist strategies.
Cherry Smyth is a critic, curator and author of Damn Fine Art by New Lesbian Artists, Cassell, 1996.
