Feminist Genealogies in Spanish Art: 1960-2010
MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y León
24 June 2012 - 24 February 2013
Artists: Pilar Albarracín, Xoán Anleo/Uqui Permui, Pilar Aymerich, Eugènia Balcells, Cecilia Barriga, María José Belbel, Miguel Benlloch, Itziar Bilbao Urrutia, Esther Boix, Cabello/Carceller, Mónica Cabo, Mar Caldas, Carmen Calvo, Nuria Canal, Anxela Caramés/Carme Nogueira/Uqui Permui, Ana Casas Broda, Castorina, Mari Chordà, Montse Clavé, María Antonia Dans, Lucía Egaña Rojas, Itziar Elejalde, Equipo Butifarra, Erreakzioa-Reacción, Eulàlia (Eulàlia Grau), Esther Ferrer, Alicia Framis, Carmela García, Ángela García Codoñer, María Gómez, Miguel Gómez/Javier Utray, Marisa González, Gabriela and Sally Gutiérrez Dewar, Yolanda Herranz, Juan Hidalgo, ideadestroyingmuros, María Llopis/Girlswholikeporno, Eva Lootz, LSD, Cristina Lucas, Jesús Martínez Oliva, Chelo Matesanz, Medeak, Miralda, Fina Miralles, Mau Monleón, Begoña Montalbán, Paz Muro, Paloma Navares, Ana Navarrete, Carmen Navarrete, Marina Núñez, Itziar Okariz, Isabel Oliver, O.R.G.I.A., Carlos Pazos, Uqui Permui, Ana Peters, Olga Pijoan, Núria Pompeia, Post-Op, Precarias a la deriva, Joan Rabascall , Amèlia Riera , Elena del Rivero, María Ruido, Estíbaliz Sádaba, Simeón Saiz Ruiz, Dorothée Selz, Carmen F. Sigler, Diana J. Torres AKA Pornoterrorista, Laura Torrado, Eulàlia Valldosera, Video-Nou/José Pérez Ocaña, Azucena Vieites, Virginia Villaplana, Isabel Villar.
Musac presents Feminist Genealogies in Spanish Art: 1960-2010, a show conceived to emphasize the importance that the discourses on gender and sexual identity have had in Spanish art production since the 1960s. Through more than 150 works by 80 artists, the exhibition curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga and Patricia Mayayo proposes a rereading of our country’s recent art history from new perspectives.
The exhibition stems from the need to restore the erased memory of feminist knowledge, practices and genealogies in our country: it is important to recover and make visible the work of artists (some men, but especially women) who were unfairly shunned or forgotten; but it is even more important to reread the recent history of Spanish art from a different stance, with other keys and viewpoints. Not only has the legacy of feminisms been underestimated in the most traditional historiography, but also in many of the accounts of art creation in Spain that are supposed to be more ground-breaking or renovating.
The term “genealogies” alludes to the diversity of ideological sensitivities and positions that traverse the feminist, transfeminist, transgender and queer universe. It also refers to the peculiarities and singularities of the development of feminist policies in the Spanish state, which cannot be interpreted by mechanically extrapolating Anglo-Saxon models. While the emergence of the so-called “feminist art” in the United States and Great Britain is customarily situated in the late 1960s, in Spain it was not until the 90s that the gender discourses began to get mainstream attention in art galleries and institutions (which does not mean that they did not exist, but that they had been neglected or overlooked). In addition, as opposed to their contemporaries in Britain and the U.S., the feminist artists “of the 90s” in Spain were fundamentally influenced by foreign references: their artistic and theoretical models mainly came from French and Anglo spheres and they rarely had the opportunity to engage in a dialogue (whether intellectually or personally) with their Spanish predecessors. How can this generation gap be explained? Why do we face a history riddled with omissions, faults and discontinuities?
Some hypotheses can be suggested to explain why the artists who emerged in the decade of the 90s were unaware of the work of the pioneers from the sixties and seventies. With the arrival of democracy in Spain artistic discourses were increasingly depoliticized: the official culture promoted the oblivion of artistic practices that had, toward the end of Franco’s regime and the beginning of the Transition, articulated a criticism of the social and sexual norms of the dictatorship, particularly those that questioned machismo and patriarchy. Throughout the 80s, the incipient art institution’s need to equate itself with the European and international context facilitated the surge of formalist and commercial manifestations adapted to market demands, in detriment to a more critical art in which the feminist viewpoint could have been inserted.
The exhibition structure arises from the will to facilitate that dialogue between generations that could not be; to weave a network of convergences and dissidences; to provoke a conversation between works by artists of different ages and contexts, who may nonetheless be united by a mutual discontent in the face of (hetero) patriarchal structures and codes. The exhibits are not arranged in chronological order, because there is not a single story to tell: there are many interwoven voices and experiences here. Nevertheless, the presence of a wide array of magazines, pamphlets, photographs and documents from the era enables us to understand the works in their contexts, reflecting the historical and social changes that have taken place over time.
Through all that wealth and diversity, there is a series of themes and core reflections that reappear over the years and that give rise to the show’s 11 thematic sections: the production of feminine and feminist genealogies; the sexual division of work and the work conditions of women; maternity and caretaking attributed to the female sex; the oppression exerted by aesthetic models and standardized cannons of beauty that, even in our day, are still relentlessly transmitted through advertising, film, television and the Internet; bodily experiences and sexual diversity; militancy and collective struggles; the masquerade and performativity of gender; sexist violence; the role of women in history; the relationship between popular culture and the construction of sexual identities. The last section of the exhibition is devoted to the recent emergence of a set of artistic and activist practices known as “transfeminisms” or “new feminisms”: based on a rejection of the binary concept of sexuality and the essentialist approaches, the “transfeminisms” propose an imaginary and provocative use of performance and new technologies, which challenges the more domesticated discourses of institutional feminism.
Brief Biographies of artists in the exhibition
Pilar Albarracín (Seville, 1968) began her career as a multidisciplinary artist in the early 1990s. Covering video, performance, photography and installation, her work is grounded in the deconstruction of hegemonic narratives and more particularly the clichés on the perceived Andalusian identity. Since her early actions, like Untitled (Sangre en la calle), 1992, featuring blood-splattered women spread-eagled on the streets of Seville, Albarracín has focused on women as repositories of mandates of submission and cultural constrictions.
Pilar Aymerich (Barcelona, 1943) is a professional photographer since 1968. Her photoreports have been featured in Triunfo, Destino, Cambio 16, El País and Fotogramas, among others. Aymerich is one of the most incisive chroniclers of the feminist movement and citizen protests in Catalonia. She has immortalised events with her camera including the lock-in at the church of Sant Andreu del Palomar, in Barcelona, of the wives of the workers at the Motor Ibérica factory; the first Catalan Women Conferences; the demonstrations in favour of the derogation of the laws penalising female adultery; or the massively attended celebrations of Catalonia’s National Day in 1976 and 1977.
Eugènia Balcells (Barcelona, 1942). Straddling the completely disparate Spanish and US realities of the 1970s, Balcells explored the collective imaginary conveyed by cinema, mass culture and the mass media as pertaining to the roles and stereotypes ascribed to women and men. Stand out moments in her career are installations and videos such as Re-prise (1976-1977) and Boy meets Girl (1978) which, in hindsight, can be acknowledged as truly pioneering works in Spain. Balcells later championed the use of different visual technologies within art.
Cecilia Barriga (Concepción, Chile, 1957) came to Madrid at the age of 19, and graduated with a degree in Audiovisual Communication from Universidad Complutense in 1984. Ten years later she moved to New York to study scriptwriting and video art at Columbia University. In 1991 she filmed her short Encuentro entre dos reinas, one of the first works with lesbian content ever seen in Spain. Barriga is behind a large number of documentaries, TV reports and works of fiction in which women are featured prominently. Her feminist engagement led her to create, in 2010, 5000 feminismos on Spain’s national feminist conference held in Granada the previous year.
María José Belbel (Granada, 1954) has a hybrid practice working across writing, research, cultural production and feminist activism. Starting out initially in literature and English studies, in the 1970s she became actively involved in the Communist Movement and several feminist organisations. Her work was featured in the group show 100%, curated by Mar Villaespesa in 1993. In the 1990s she was a member of the LSD collective and contributed to issues 2 and 3 of the magazine Non grata. Belbel has also written many essays on music by women and popular culture from a queer perspective.
Miguel Benlloch (Loja, Granada, 1954) was active in the anti-Franco resistance and in the gay liberation movements of the 1980s. Co-founder of the BNV cultural platform in Seville in 1988 and member of the editorial board of UNIA arteypensamiento, his work was exhibited at Transgenéric@s. Representaciones y experiencias sobre la sociedad, la sexualidad y los géneros en el arte español contemporáneo, at Koldo Mitxelena in San Sebastián, 1998. His actions and performances are focused on breaking down gender barriers and constraints. Suffused with a sense of humour, his work advocates a dismantling of sexual prejudices, as clearly visible in his performance 51 genders (2005).
Itziar Bilbao Urrutia (Bilbao, 1966). After graduating in Fine Arts in London in 1996, Bilbao Urrutia has been carrying out her practice there on the sidelines of the conventional art circuit. Her work engages with BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism). Producer of the fetishist and porn project The Urban Chick Supremacy Cell since 2010. One can trace the influence of Valerie Solanas and of Judith Butler’s queer feminism in her practice as a blogger, writer, activist and artist.
Esther Boix (Llers, Girona, 1927) is a painter and engraver who began her career in the 1950s. Between 1965 and 1966, she was a member of Estampa Popular Catalana, a group of anti-Franco engravers who defended a form of art engaged with the people. Against the backdrop of the disintegration of Franco’s regime in the 1970s, the critical and political discourse of her painting became more pronounced. Many of her works (Planxadora III, 1963; Dona que frega, 1965) showed an early (and pioneering) concern with denouncing women’s oppression in society and the workplace.
Cabello/Carceller is a collaborative duo comprising Helena Cabello (Paris, 1963) and Ana Carceller (Madrid, 1964). Working together since the early 1990s their work dissects the dislocation of the contemporary subject and questions the politics of representation, especially those defining and coding gender identities. Their trilogy of films Casting: James Dean (Rebelde sin causa) (2004), Ejercicios de poder (2005) and After Apocalypse Now: Martin Sheen (The Soldier) (2007) was the beginning of a profound examination of contradictory aspects of masculinity which helps to deconstruct models of beauty and behaviour exported by Hollywood.
Mónica Cabo (Oviedo, 1978) graduated with a degree from the School of Fines Arts of Pontevedra. Developed primarily in Galicia, her work critiques the imitation and conditioning underlying gender binarism. In her exhibition Ridy tu pley (Sala Alterarte, Ourense campus), 2006, she plays with elements of the drag-king aesthetic and takes it into the public domain by means of street posters. In 2010 she took part in the show Marxes y mapas. A creación de xénero en galicia at Auditorio de Galicia in Santiago.
Mar Caldas (Vigo, 1964) teaches in the painting department at the School of Fines Arts of Pontevedra. Her work was exhibited at MACUF (Museo de arte contemoráneo Unión Fenosa) in La Coruña in 2002. Her practice explores concepts of self-representation, of body space and the relationship between the private and the public. In 1995 she created Diálogo con un hijo ausente, a non-idealised vision of motherhood.
Carmen Calvo (Valencia, 1950) was one of the first women artists to garner critical attention in Spain, especially in the mid 1970s. Working from Valencia within an expanded painterly practice, she created some pieces that brought light to bear on the violence towards women exercised by a sexist society (1969), though she did not continue in this line of investigation. She has also shown an interest in some forgotten names in the history of art (Rosalba Carriera, 1983, from her Retratos series).
Nuria Canal (Burgos, 1965) lives and works in Barcelona, where she started the OVNI independent video show in 1993. Working primarily with video and video-installation, her practice revolves around the issue of human relationships, especially relationships between women. In Basic Kit (1994), the artist addressed the question of the mediation of feelings by contrasting the offscreen voice of a friend who is telling her about a failed sentimental relationship with images culled from various different TV soap operas, rife with stereotypes on masculine and feminine roles.
Ana Casas Broda (Granada, 1965). With an Austrian mother and Spanish father, she spent her childhood between the two countries. She studied Visual Arts at UNAM and photography at the Activa photography school and at Casa de las Imágenes, in Mexico, where she lives. Between 1990 and 1993 she worked in the Photography Dept at Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, organising workshops and exhibitions. In 2000 the Murciabased publishers Mestizo published her book Álbum. Her work centres on issues of motherhood, and the instrumental role of personal and affective memory in the construction of the subject.
Castorina (Astorga, 1928) studied at the Vocational School in Astorga (León) and then went on to further her training at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts and at the School of Arts and Crafts in Madrid. Since the early 1960s her practice has centred on painting, sculpture and drawing. Her works are a personal reinterpretation of the iconography of motherhood and women at work. Many of her sculptures start our from boulders sourced from the Teleno mountains in León; playing with their material qualities, the artist transforms them into bodies, hands, and mother and child compositions.
Mari Chordà (Amposta, 1942) started working in the mid 1960s on a suite of abstract paintings which would soon transform into vaginal images (Vaginal 1, 1966) and evocations of her own pregnant body in the series Autorretrats embarassada (1966-67). This type of recreations of the female body and sexuality based on personal experience was completely new in Spain at that time and foreshadowed the "vaginal iconology" which some US feminist artists like Judy Chicago were beginning to develop in the early 1970s. Chordà has also penned several books of poetry and is the co-founder of la Sal feminist library-bar and the Barcelona-based publishers laSal, edicions de les dones.
Montse Clavé (Barcelona, 1946) is a comic artist, illustrator, editor and writer. During the transición, the period in Spain of the shift from dictatorship to democracy, she was actively involved in militant feminist and social movements in Catalonia. She is also one of the founding members of Equipo Butifarra, a collective of comic artists in Barcelona in 1975 whose mandate was to contribute, through the magazine of the same name and a series of comic strips-cum-catalogues, to the "organisation of the popular classes". Author of the comic Doble jornada (1978), protesting against the sexual division of labour, she has collaborated in some of the most noteworthy projects by laSal, the feminist publishers, such as Quadern del cos i l'agua, an illustrated book of poems, comic strips and stories published in 1978 together with Mari Chordà.
María Antonia Dans (Oza dos Rios, A Coruña, 1922-Madrid, 1988) studied at the School of Fine Arts of A Coruña before moving to Madrid in the early 1950s, where she earned considerable success as a painter. Sometimes labelled as a naïf or genre painter, her work embraces landscape, still life and seascape, though with a particular slant towards portraying women at work: frequently depicting peasants, market sellers, mothers or embroiderers in her pictures. While she never defined herself as a feminist, she did publically express her opposition to sexual inequality and the exploitation of women on many occasions.
Lucía Egaña Rojas (Münster, 1979). Graduated with a degree in Visual Arts (PUC, Chile 1998-2001), a diploma in Aesthetics and Contemporary Thinking (UDP, Chile 2002), and a Master in Creative Documentary (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 2004-05). Between 2005 and 2008 she was a member of desBASURAment, a Barcelona-based collective examining the processing of material residues and mnemonics. In 2011 she filmed her first documentary “Mi sexualidad es una creación artística” which was screened at various festivals in different countries. In it, through the use of interviews, Egaña weaves an open and dynamic perspective of the transfeminist and TranzMarikaBollo movement and of post-porn, focused particularly on Barcelona.
Itziar Elejalde (Bilbao, 1953). An artist and interior designer, Elejalde was a member of the association of Basque artists which came to public attention after the robbing of a sculpture by Oteiza, subsequently returned to the City Council of Bilbao, in protest against the scant social value of art. The driving force behind the store Tarte and Arsenal, a contemporary art gallery and interior design studio. In 1984 she took part in the first Basque women’s seminars in Leioa. In her work Penélope, 1980, created specifically for the Basque Women’s Assembly, she reworked references from classical myths in order to protest against circumscribing women to the sphere of the home.
Erreakzioa-Reacción. A collective comprising the artists Estíbaliz Sádaba, Azucena Vieites and also at the outset Yolanda de los Bueis, which came into being in 1994 as a space to create contexts conducive to theory, art practice and feminist activism. Their main goal was to challenge the hegemony of dominant sexist representation from the perspective of an interdisciplinary and plural concept of feminism. Noteworthy among their many activities was directing the seminar-workshop Sólo para tus ojos: el factor feminista en relación a las artes visuales (1997) and the seminar La repolitización del espacio sexual en las prácticas artísticas contemporáneas (2004) for Arteleku.
Eulàlia (Eulàlia Grau) (Terrasa, 1946). A seminal exponent of the conceptual art movement in Catalonia in the 1970s. Her work is a prime example of proto-feminism in Spain which was not theorised at the time although it was given visibility in art media as social critique. In Discriminació de la dona (1978) she scrutinised the stereotypes of women in different areas and trades—workers, secretaries, maids, advertising models— taking her source of inspiration from the social conditions transmitted by the mass media.
Esther Ferrer (San Sebastián, 1937) has lived in Paris since 1973 and, as a member of ZAJ, was one of the seminal practitioners in the experimental art scene in Spain during the 1960s and 1970s. Running through her whole body of work, comprising actions, performances, objects and photographs, is an ironic and humorous feminist take. The issue of the body lies at the core of her practice, addressing, among other concerns, the detrimental influence of religion (El libro del sexo, 1981). Another target for her art has been the sexual and phallocratic groundbase of military power and war (Soldados en acción, series Juguetes educativos, 1996-97).
Alicia Framis (Mataró, 1967) has been working since the mid 1990s on multidisciplinary projects combining performance, video, photography, installation, industrial design and public art. A large part of her work revolves around cohabitation in the urban environs, underscoring the (social and sexual) segregation prevailing in contemporary cities. Like in her installation Minibar (2000), a small "women’s-only" room in which the visitor can avail of a masseur’s services, many of her works are parodical inversions of these very same principles of exclusion.
Carmela García (Lanzarote, 1964) has been working since the mid 1990s on a series of photographs and video-projections which explore the span of relationships between women. Both enigmatic and ambiguous, her works compose fictions with no aspiration to any kind of documentary "truth", instead openly unfolding as representations of desire. In several of her projects (for instance, the installation Mentiras), she borrows her inspiration from photographs and representations of relationships between women at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, a key period in the birth of a burgeoning lesbian identity.
Ángela García Codoñer (Valencia, 1947). A professor at the Department of Architectural Graphic Expression at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, she began to receive attention in the 1970s with a Pop-influenced work which cast a critical gaze on the role of women in beauty contests (series Misses, 1974). At the same time, she was also working on the series Composición. Labores (1975) shedding light on degrading “women’s work”. She exhibited above all in the 1970s in various galleries including Val i 30 and Temps, both in Valencia, Artiza from Bilbao, and Cànem from Castellón.
María Gómez (Salamanca, 1953) started her art practice towards the end of the 1970s, in the fields of sculpture, drawing and, above all, painting. Replete with mythical and literary echoes, her work embraces a wide spectrum of themes (shipwrecks, nocturnal visions, constellations, stories speaking of classical mythology, of Penelope, Ulysses or Odysseus), though always lending a special spotlight to women. The image of a woman reading takes on a central role in her work from the 1990s, peopled with female researchers, readers or librarians.
Marisa González (Bilbao, 1945) studied at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid and then moved to Chicago in 1971, where she took a masters degree at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. There she engaged with the Generative Systems department, a pioneering research centre for art and technology. In 1974 she furthered her studies at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC, where she met the feminist artist and professor Mary Beth Edelson. It was during this period when she created a number of different series of photographs on violence against women, transferring photos to thermofax paper with the aid of a photocopier using recycled acetate sheets. Over the years, she has maintained a steadfast feminist commitment, with a particular interest in exploring the world of women’s work, as exemplified in her series of photographs Son de ellas from 2002-2005.
Sally Gutiérrez Dewar (Madrid, 1965) is a visual artist who developed her career between Berlin and New York, where she lived for eleven years. Her works have been exhibited in museums, institutions and galleries both in Spain and worldwide, and have been featured in TV programs like ARTE and Metrópolis TVE, as well as at video and film festivals.
Gabriela Gutiérrez Dewar has worked for twelve years as a television producer and director, and is currently co-director of the production company Estación Central de Contenidos S.L, at which she directs and produces documentaries, docu-series and reports both for the cinema and for television.
They began working together with the short film titled Manola coge el autobús (2005), funded by ICAA and screened at many art centres and international film festivals. The idea behind it was to find a hybrid language between art and documentary by means of fragmentation, repetition and montage. The work narrates the story of an 87 year-old woman who lived during the civil war and the post-war period who takes a bus every morning in Getafe, on the outskirts of Madrid.
Yolanda Herranz (Baracaldo, 1947). An artist and professor of sculpture at the University of Vigo, she started her career in 1981. Her projects combine sculpture, photography and text, tying in with the tradition of the poem-object and the site-specific installation. Playing with a poetic and metaphorical language, her practice reflects on the representation of the female body and the social construction of femininity. Caídas (1997) is an intervention carried out in a monument paying tribute to those who died in the battle of Puente de Sampaio in Pontevedra, which reminds us how women have been completely ignored in this type of heroic narrative.
Juan Hidalgo (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1927). For over thirty years, Juan Hidalgo was, together with Walter Marchetti and Esther Ferrer, a member of ZAJ, the most provocative, disruptive and groundbreaking group of the second half of the 20th century in Spain. During times of blinkered minds and castrating morality, ZAJ’s actions and concerts were misunderstood and often received with virulent rejection. At the time, the 1960s, Juan Hidalgo carried out private photography sessions which pointed to his noncompliance with social and religious norms and also to the presence of homosexual desire.
ideadestroyingmuros. Though this collective was founded in Venice in 2005, its members live in Valencia since 2007 where they are the driving force behind the city’s transfeminist scene and the promoters of the Oxímoron venue. With a mandate to deconstruct gender binarism they have organised all kinds of conferences, workshops, debates and performances on and around the body and its sexual uses, including among others, Interferencias viscerales. Prácticas subversivas de lo monstruoso, 2009, and Pornshot, 2010, both in Valencia.
María Llopis / Girlswholikeporno. Girlswholikeporn came about in Barcelona in 2003 thanks to the collaboration between María Llopis, from Valencia, and Águeda Bañón, from Murcia. The two-woman team worked together until 2007. Since then, María Llopis has continued her creative practice (videos, performances, conferences, interviews… which led to the publication of El post-porn era eso in 2010). For this artist, sexuality is a door to the imagination and post-porn is a critical reflection on the pornographic discourse undertaken from the premises laid down by Annie Sprinkle.
Eva Lootz (Vienna, 1940) studied Fine Arts, Philosophy, Musicology and Cinematography in Vienna before moving to Spain in 1965, where she developed her career as an artist, particularly with work on paper and, above all, sculpture. As exemplified by the series Lenguas made between 1983-87, her sculptural work makes frequent use of ephemeral materials taken from nature. From the 1990s onwards she veered more towards psychoanalysis and an exploration of female subjectivity: tactility and orality are increasingly more to the fore in her recent work, in an endeavour to come up with alternatives to the dominance of the visuality and verbal language so characteristic of logophallocentrism.
LSD. A collective which came together in Madrid in 1993 and remained active until 1998. They organised politico-cultural interventions in the public space and took an active part in demonstrations to raise lesbian visibility from a queer, non-identity optic. They published the Non grata fanzine and created various series of photographs, among others, Es-Cultura lesbiana (1994) and Menstruosidades (1994-95).
Cristina Lucas (Jaén, 1973). At the beginning of her career as an artist, Lucas focused primarily on actions and happenings but soon abandoned this direction in favour of installation, photography, video and drawing. Underpinned by satire and humour, her work articulates a feminist critique of power structures. In La anarquista (2004), from the series of photographs El Viejo Orden, Lucas represents an elderly woman about to throw a Molotov cocktail from her living room. In the video Rousseau and Sophie (2007), Lucas brings light to bear on the sexism and patriarchalism running through the thinking of the Enlightenment.
Jesús Martínez Oliva (Murcia, 1969). Studied at the Polytechnic University of Valencia and now teaches at the School of Fines Arts of Murcia. Since the mid 1990s his area of research has centred on the gay imaginary and the representation of desire and sex between men. While reading Judith Butler’s queer theories, in 1998 he created a series of photographs on the flawed and problematic affiliations of normative gender roles. His work has been seen at Fundació Miró in Barcelona; La Gallera, Valencia; Sala Verónicas, Murcia; and at Pepe Cobo & Cía, in Madrid. His recent output examines the relationship between education and coercion.
Chelo Matesanz (Reinosa, 1964) uses materials and techniques marginalised in the accepted discourse of the history of art—such as chocolate or sugar, cuttings and remnants, lace and clothing—to critically examine the accepted genres and categories in art. In her series of drawings Lo que Lee Krasner podía haber hecho... pero no hizo (2002) she parodies Jackson Pollock’s famous dripping paintings, evoking the glorification of virility on which the discourse of US Abstract Expressionism was based and the fraught role assigned to women artists within the movement, like Krasner.
Medeak. A collective founded at the beginning of the 21st century in the Basque Country, though it has also taken part in various initiatives in the rest of Spain. It defines itself as a radical group with multiple labels such as dykes, transsexuals, feminists, transvestites, rebels, storytellers, queers, degenerates, perverts, activists and militants. The collective is also behind the Transfeminist Insurrection Manifesto.
Miralda (Terrassa, Barcelona, 1942). This multidisciplinary artist travelled to Paris and New York, fleeing from the cultural poverty of Franco’s Spain in the 1960s. In 1972, together with Dorotheé Selz, he entered into a ritualised magical world through works and happenings. In the 1960s and 1970s, as the consumer society arrived to its climax, Miralda brought his incisiveness to bear on an analysis of the representation of women as yet another commercialised object. This can be readily appreciated in his collage Poitrine bien ferme et haute, 1964 in which women’s bodies are depersonalised and divested of all identity. Much of Miralda’s subsequent work was developed in the public space.
Fina Miralles (Sabadell, 1950). After studying in Barcelona between 1968 and 1972, the Catalan artist starting working on a series of what we would now call performative actions where she examined the relationship between nature and culture. Her interest also extended to the effects of power in repressive structures such as Catholicism under Franco’s regime. Her performance Standard, 1976, threw a spotlight on the social control of women under the influence of the male chauvinism of the mass media, tradition, established customs and social rituals. Her video Petjades (1976) proposed a rethinking of women’s occupation of the public space, as a women leaves her footprints on the pavement as she walks. She has been living in Cadaqués since 1999, removed from the professional art world.
Mau Monleón (Valencia, 1965). A teacher at the School of Fines Arts of Valencia, Monleón works across various disciplines, more specifically sculpture, photography, video and installation. In recent years she has centred her feminist-based practice on the concept of globalised motherhood and in the invisibility and harsh conditions of women emigrants in Spain.
Begoña Montalbán (Bilbao, 1958). Since the early 1990s, Montalbán’s work, based on a wide spectrum of techniques and supports including photography, sculpture, light and sound, has revolved around a reflection on the body, pain, illness and therapeutic responses to suffering. The female body is given a key place in her work, though she has her reservations about describing her practice as feminist, instead preferring to speak of an intuitive and experimental feminism removed from theoretical and doctrinaire approaches.
Paz Muro is one of the pioneers of conceptual art in Spain. After taking part in the Encuentros de Pamplona in 1972 (in a joint action with Nacho Criado and Alberto Corazón), she focused her practice on land art and happenings (La prohibición agradece, La burra cargada de medallas...), in which she examined discrimination against women, among other issues. Around the same time, she collaborated closely with Carlos Serrano and Pablo Pérez-Mínguez, the founders of the mythical magazine Nueva lente. Also known for her association with the Movida countercultural movement from Madrid in the 1980s, she made several performances coinciding with various editions of the ARCO art fair in Madrid (Arco 83, Las preciosas and Molino Rojo).
Paloma Navares (Burgos, 1947) started out in the late 1970s. Since then, she has forged her own vocabulary underpinned by new technologies, the use of space, light and multiple techniques. Frequently including tributes to feminist thinkers (like Virginia Woolf, to whom she dedicated her installation Els Banyets) or women poets (Alejandra Pizarnik, Sylvia Plath), her work addresses many issues related with the construction of the feminine identity: illness, the representation of the body, the domestic space or—as in the series Productos Navares—seduction, beauty and artifice.
Ana Navarrete (Valencia, 1965). Dean of the School of Fines Arts of Cuenca, professor, researcher and artist, Navarrete’s production dates back to the 1990s, always grounded in a critical take on conformist and formalist art. One of her seminal works, Imprescindible para las mujeres (1994), addresses the question of iconographic and visual references and their instrumentality in knowledge. She has also worked on gender violence and the memory of women from the time of the Second Republic from a feminist approach.
Carmen Navarrete (Valencia, 1963). Teaches at the School of Fines Arts of Valencia. In the early 1990s she introduced a strong feminist slant into her artistic discourse. Her concerns embrace everything from the power of the male gaze on the woman’s body (prostituted or not), the stigmatisation of hysterical women from psychoanalytical and medical viewpoints (see her installation at Fundació la Caixa, Barcelona titled La bella indiferencia, in 1996), violence in the public space particularly as it pertains to women (Maneras de matar a una mujer, 1998 or Zuekin inoiz ez/Con vosotras nunca, 2006, on the exclusion of women from the Alarde parade in Hondarribia).
Carme Nogueira (Vigo, 1970) began practising as an artist in the mid 1990s. Her work, often in the form of site-specific interventions, rethinks contemporary urban planning and the use of public space. In 2009, together with the designer and director Uqui Permui (Barallobre, Fene, 1964) and the critic and historian Anxela Caramés (Santiago de Compostela, 1977), she started working on the Contenedor de feminismos project, an open archive on feminism in Galicia.
Marina Nuñez (Palencia, 1966) started her work in the mid 1990s with a suite of paintings in which she critically examined the cultural construct of the female body. Her pictures are peopled with “monsters”, “madwomen” and “dead women” inspired by the history of 19th century art and photography, the type of figures that speak to the construction of the feminine as an anomalous and abnormal “other” in contrast with the patriarchal paradigm. The focus of her practice shifted in 1998 with her "science fiction" series, the beginning of an ongoing investigation into the cyborg imaginary.
Itziar Okariz (San Sebastian, 1965). After studying at the School of Fine Arts of Bilbao, Itziar Okariz began to make a name for herself in the mid 1990s within the burgeoning Basque art scene. Her work mostly takes the form of performance, video and photography. Currently living in New York, she works across projects related with the construction of the body, from a gender and feminist perspective. Worth highlighting is Mear en espacios públicos o privados, her ongoing series since 2000, in which the artist breaks the taboo of openly and unabashedly urinating in different spaces.
Isabel Oliver (Valencia, 1946) teaches engraving at the School of Fines Arts, Polytechnic University of Valencia. In the 1960s she worked with Equipo Crónica and in 1971 she created La mujer, an unquestionably pioneering series in Franco’s Spain in which she used a Pop vernacular to wittily question the tyranny of beauty, given roles and the subjugation of women. Years later her practice veered to the study of the idea of time as an integral part of personal experience.
O.R.G.I.A. (Organización reversible de géneros intermedios y artísticos). A collective that came into being in 2001, it likes to define itself as a hour-headed monster (Sabela Dopazo, Beatriz Higón, Carmen Muriana and Tatiana Sentamans). With strong roots in Valencia and the Mediterranean, though not exclusively circumscribed to it, they address artistic research and creation revolving around issues concerning gender, sex, and sexuality from a feminist and queer stance. Among their many projects are Bastos, copas, oros, espadas y dildos. Los reyes de la baraja española, 2004-5, in which they dismantle the sexist and outmoded stereotypes of Spanish film in the 1970s and Follarse la ciudad, 2009, a transfeminist and dyke fantasy on architecture and gender.
Carlos Pazos (Barcelona, 1949). From the mid 1970s onwards Pazos developed a liking for an aesthetic outside conventional male patterns, which he expressed in photography and through collecting postcards and images of singers and actors who might have been deemed suspect in the eyes of macho he-men. Pazos lays bare the most decadent and fragile side of masculinity, invested with allusions to pre-Raphaelism and a highly sentimental brand of Pop, exceptional in Spain at the time, the period of the 1970s when he first made his name on the outer circles of the Catalan conceptual movement.
José Pérez Ocaña (Cantillana, Seville, 1947-1983). A naïf painter of virgins, a performance artist avant la lettre, an activist calling for sexual revolution and a participant in the first LGBT demonstrations, Pérez Ocaña expressed his libertarian worldview in the streets of Barcelona during the second half of the 1970s, a time rife with prudishness. Ventura Pons made a documentary film about him in 1978 called Ocaña, retrato intermitente. Some of his art and musical performances were recorded by the Catalan collective Video-Nou.
Uqui Permui (Barallobre, Fene, 1964) has been working since the beginning of the 1990s in the field of graphic design and multimedia production. As a freelance cultural producer, she has directed various documentaries examining the current situation in Galicia from a critical and feminist perspective. The video Asuntos internos (2007), created in conjunction with the Galician artist Xoan Ánleo (Marín, Pontevedra, 1960), presents the interconnected stories of four women from different generations, mirroring a history of Galicia over the last century diverging from official narratives. In the documentary doli, doli, doli... coas conserveiras. Rexistro de traballo (2010), Permui starts out from a film shot in 1989 about the one hundred women who locked themselves in the Odosa canning factory in Illa de Arousa to protest against its eminent closure.
Ana Peters (Bremen, 1932-Dénia, 2012). The German painter left her native country and settled in Valencia at the beginning of the second world war. She studied at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Valencia and at the Royal Academy in Madrid. During the 1960s she moved in a circle of forward-thinking artists and was a member of the Estampa Popular collective in Valencia. In 1966 she exhibited Imágenes de la mujer en la sociedad de consumo at the Edurne gallery in Madrid, a series casting a questioning gaze over the objectification of the female body. This line of work was however cut short when she centred on her family. Years later she returned to her art practice, though now removed from the critical approach of social pop, dedicating herself to lyrical abstraction.
Olga Pijoan (Tàrrega, 1952-San Rafael del Sur, Nicaragua, 1997). Pijoan had a highly interesting, albeit fleeting career within the Catalan conceptual movement, with a particular emphasis on body art. For her the body was not a natural entity but a vehicle for cultural expression by means of clothing or its occupation of space. She carried out actions at the second Granollers art festival in 1972 and in Informació d´art concepte 1973 in Banyoles. In TRA-73, held at the College of Architects of Barcelona, she made a performance in which she was sitting on a chair while slides were projected onto parts of her body, including her genitals. Her audaciousness warrants further merit if one bears in mind the censorship of the time.
Núria Pompeia (Barcelona, 1943) is a writer, drawer, cartoonist and journalist. After studying at the Massana School in Barcelona, she published her first strips in 1969 in the magazine Oriflama. In the 1970s she collaborated in several groundbreaking publications during the transición, the period of transition in Spain from Franco’s regime to democracy, including Triunfo, Cuadernos para el Diálogo and Vindicación feminista. Her output as a drawer and an illustrator directly critiques sexism and bourgeois values while motherhood, the education of women and patriarchal stereotypes of femininity are some of the concerns she tackles in her most noteworthy graphic books: Maternasis (1967), La educación de Pandora (1972) and Mujercitas (1975).
Post-op. A Barcelona-based duo comprising Majo Pulido and Elena Pérez who came together in the wake of the experience of the city’s post-porn marathon in 2003. Taking the form of a series of performances, seminars and workshops they have undertaken various experiments into radical sexuality (fetishism…). They define themselves as a multidisciplinary group rethinking gender and post-porn.
Precarias a la deriva is a women’s collective founded in 2001. Its members met at the La Escalera Karakola, a women’s social centre squatted in a former bakery in the Lavapiés district in Madrid. The group’s founding mission is to map the various contemporary manifestations of feminine precariousness, transforming this experience of instability into a tool for political action and investigation. Their research is compiled in two complementary projects, the book and video "Precarias a la Deriva. A la deriva por los circuitos de la precariedad" (2004).
Joan Rabascall (Barcelona, 1935). After studying at the Massana School of Decorative Arts in Barcelona, he received a scholarship to further his education at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, the city where he now lives. Rabascall is interested in dissecting the banality and perversity that lies beneath the discourse of the all-pervasive mass media. He frequently addressed the issue of women as a consumer object (see Mass Media, 1967 and Atomic Kiss, 1968) in the 1960s but he has also tackled other concerns such as violence in advertising images, the impact of tourism on its environs and the construction of stereotypes.
Amèlia Riera (Barcelona, 1934). After going through an expressionist phase and flirting with an aesthetic verging on art informel, in the 1960s and 70s Riera created Els Encants, mannequins culled from the flea market which she reworked from a surrealist perspective. Her practice also has a political underpinning as one can readily observe in L´hi van portar enganyat, 1971. She had her first solo exhibition in 1963 at Sala Belarte, presented by Juan-Eduardo Cirlot. Riera was the only woman artist selected for the exhibition Informalisme Català, held at Centre d'Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona, 1990. As evidenced in Dona silenciosa, her obsession with death and sadism goes hand in hand with a consciousness of the subordination of women.
Elena del Rivero (Valencia, 1947) has been living in New York since 1991, and has developed the bulk of her career as an artist there. Her work basically comprises series of drawings and installations in which she often uses fragile materials connoted as "feminine"—handmade paper, pearls, oil, fabrics and embroidery—to question the patriarchal gaze behind the minimalist tradition. In 1992 she started a series of drawings called Carta a la madre, in which she explores the mother-daughter relationship. It has gradually expanded ever since into series of letters made up of hundreds of drawings, as seen in her installation Letter to the Mother (Conversations) (1994).
María Ruido (Ourense, 1967) began her art practice in the mid 1990s with a series of video-actions reflecting on the construction of female identity in hegemonic discourses. La voz humana (1997) analyses the violence of language and public access to the word while Cronología (1997) critiques the role assigned to women in the canonical narratives of history. By the end of the decade she abandoned performance in lieu of interdisciplinary projects based on video-art, experimental film and feminist theory which examined, among other issues, the configuration of the imaginary of the working woman in post-Fordist capitalism (Ficciones anfibias, 2005).
Estíbaliz Sádaba (Bilbao, 1963) studied at the School of Fines Arts at the University of the Basque Country in Leioa. In 1994 she founded the Erreakzioa-Reacción platform with Azucena Vieites and Yolanda de los Bueis, with a mission to develop a feminist discourse through publications, seminars and other activities. Her work in the field of video stands out for its biting humour, originality and combativeness.
Simeón Saiz Ruiz (Cuenca, 1956). A teacher at the School of Fines Arts of Cuenca, he lived in the USA between 1979 and 1986. In 1990 he created the Masculino-femenino installation at Fúcares gallery in Madrid in which he explored the different roles which the communication society has assigned to men and women. In addition, through the use of a heterosexual porn video, he reflected on the influence of roles on the level of pleasure and desire, in this case industrialised. From the mid 1990s onwards, and influenced by the Balkan wars, he started working on a series of photographic-based paintings called J´est un Je.
Dorothée Selz (Paris, 1946) was part of the circle of the Catalan avant-garde (Miralda, Joan Rabascall, Jaume Xifra) who lived between Barcelona and Paris in the 1960s and 1970s. She was particularly implicated in the organisation of artistic liturgies and ceremonies.
Carmen F. Sigler (Ayamonte, 1960) has been working since the early 1990s in the field of photography and video, exploring its various expressions in video-creation, videoperformance and video-installation. Many of her works revolve around the representation of women’s bodies and cultural stereotypes on the female sex. In Des-medidas (1999), the artist gets fourteen women with highly diverse physical appearances to measure their bodies in front of a camera, demonstrating that women’s real bodies do not respond to the ideals imposed by the mass media.
Laura Torrado (Madrid, 1967) has been working in the field of photography since 1993. Her output is grouped in various series of photographs peopled by enigmatic groups of women who come together, (cross)dress, and entangle their bodies to form unsettling interior scenes frequently set in spaces traditionally associated with women: the kitchen, the bedroom, the home in general. In 2002 she also began working with video, screening theatrical actions combining music and dance.
Diana J. Torres aka Pornoterrorista (Madrid, 1981). A Barcelona-based multidisciplinary artist working primarily with poetry, performance, video and post-pornography, she has undertaken live actions in which the public are questioned and directly involved on an emotional, political and/or sexual level. Her activism is centred on the field of sexuality, post-porn, the queer movement, transfeminism and prostitution. She has also penned the book Pornoterrorismo, 2011. Her defining motto is “for the right to get it on with whoever I like”.
Javier Utray (Madrid, 1945-2008). A painter, writer, architect and musician. Utray is often associated with what was known as the Madrid new figuration movement. A great admirer of Marcel Duchamp, he was interested in creative experimentation with clothing, Dandyism and the confusion of genders. In 1977, the photographer Miguel Gómez portrayed him as Rrose Sélavy, the female alter ego Duchamp devised for himself in 1920 (Javier Utray como Rrose Sélavy).
Eulàlia Valldosera (Vilafranca del Penedès, 1963). After spending a long time in Amsterdam she developed her art practice in Barcelona since the late 1990s, focusing on concerns impinging on interpersonal relationships. She has also explored issues affecting motherhood and the figure of the mother (Mujer-Semilla, 1996) as well as the symbology of power and the working conditions of women emigrants (Dependencia mutua, 2010).
Azucena Vieites (Hernani, 1967). One of the founders of the Erreakzioa-Reacción collective. Lives and works in Madrid. Her work came to public attention in the 1990s, based fundamentally on femzines, or feminist fanzines, with a clear focus on a lesbian and queer component. The artist operates mostly within the field of drawing, strongly influenced by, among other sources, women-only indie and/or underground combos.
Virginia Villaplana (Paris, 1972). An artist, writer and freelance filmmaker, Virginia Villaplana also teaches Communication Sciences at the University of Valencia. A substantial part of her work revolves around the perverse effects which the spectacularisation of the typical images in media societies exercises over women’s bodies. Mujer-Trama (1996) was one of her first incursions into this matter. The video takes its point of departure from an advertising image culled from the press in which gender violence is exploited for commercial purposes.
Isabel Villar (Salamanca, 1934) started her practice as a painter towards the end of the 1950s. Her detailed and ostensibly naïf pictures reinterpret conventional motifs from the history of art or culture popular (angels, gypsies, motherhoods, reclining models), taking them out of their everyday context and introducing odd and unexpected iconographic elements. Her paintings challenge us to rethink the stereotypes of how the feminine figure is represented.
Brief biographies of the curators
Juan Vicente Aliaga (Cheste, Valencia, 1959) is Professor of Theory of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Universitat Politècnica of Valencia. His work has been focused on feminist, gender and queer studies, with special attention to the cultural, artistic and political representations of sexual diversity and singularity. He also teaches about the importance of micro-politics and the contributions of intercultural and postcolonial studies. He is the author of Orden fálico. Androcentrismo y violencia de género en las prácticas artísticas del siglo XX (Madrid, Akal, 2007) and Arte y cuestiones de género (San Sebastián, Nerea, 2004). He has recently curated: Claude Cahun (Jeu de Paume, París, 2011; La Virreina. Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona, 2011; The Art Institute, Chicago, 2012). Akram Zaatari. El molesto asunto, (Musac, Leon, 2011/MUAC, Mexico City, 2012) and Ejercicios de memoria, La Panera, Lleida, 2011.
Patricia Mayayo (Madrid, 1967) is full professor of Art History at the Universidad Autónomo of Madrid. Her research combines several fields of study: the history of women, feminist and queer historiography and the study of contemporary art practice. Among her publications are the books Cuerpos sexuados, cuerpos de (re)producción (Barcelona, UOC, 2011), Frida Kahlo. Contra el mito (Madrid, Cátedra, 2008), Historias de mujeres, historias del arte (Madrid, Cátedra, 2003) and Louise Bourgeois (Hondarribia, Nerea, 2002). In recent years she has concentrated on studying the role of women and feminist discourses in the Spanish art system ("El Imperio de "las señoras". Orígenes de un mito fundacional o el acceso de las mujeres a la institución arte", 2011; “¿Por qué no ha habido (grandes) artistas feministas en España? Apuntes sobre una historia en busca de autor(a)”, 2009; and "Què ha canviat? Ser dona i artista (feminista?) a l'Estat espanyol, 1986-2006", 2008).
MUSAC - MUSEO DE ARTE CONTEMPORANEO DE CASTILLA Y LEON
Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24 - 24008 León
