Figure 12.1 Sanja Iveković, Un Jour Violente, Bologna, 1976.
Courtesy: Sanja Iveković.
The topic of gender, not to mention feminism, in communist Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe remains a complicated and complex one. Prior to 1989 in the region, the women’s question, at least on an official level, was considered largely to have been resolved (Pejić 2010a), with gender equality a priority of socialist governments. Across the East, women benefited from equal access to jobs, child care, and often equal pay. Women’s reproductive health, too, was on the agenda, and in many countries, abortion was legal. Of course, the approach to gender equality was not uniform across the East – as a case in point, in Romania, in an effort to increase the birth rate to build the socialist state, abortion was made illegal, and contraception difficult to come by. Furthermore, across the East, quota systems were in place to insure that women advanced in their positions and were represented at all levels. However, much of this was superficial, as women were placed in positions before they had enough experience, training or skills to make them capable of succeeding in them, and it was really the men who maintained the power. As Piotr Piotrowski has stated, “the practice of selecting the delegates to the Party Congress from among various seamstresses, the practice of holding meetings between the First Secretary of the Communist Party and the representatives of the Polish League of Women … could not fully obscure the reality of the situation for women during this period” (2009, p. 253). The reality of the situation was that while some things had changed for women, gender equality had not, in fact, been achieved, especially in the domestic sphere, where traditional gender roles were maintained.
Piotrowski’s statement regarding life in the People’s Republic of Poland rings true for the situation across the East. Speaking about the Soviet Republic of Latvia, Mark Allen Svede commented that
one risks accusations of sophistry to propose that gender parity existed in a society in which washing machines were luxury items and food shopping required standing in queues, yet women were expected to perform these domestic chores even after working all day as a gallery director, all-Union legislator, or Artist Laureate of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. At best, a pyrrhic victory might be claimed.
(Svede 2001, p. 241)
While Western feminist artists may have looked to the socialist countries of Eastern Europe as a model of egalitarian society, women artists in the East knew better. Following her correspondence with feminist art critic Lucy Lippard, in 1971, Polish artist Natalia LL was asked by Lippard to be the Polish or Eastern European representative of the feminist movement. Lippard also sent her a feminist manifesto by Giselda Kaplan, which Natalia LL recalls,
was banal and not very innovative. It postulated that the woman should achieve what the women of the real socialist 1970s Poland had already achieved. Apart from the hardships of maternity, women in our reality had already received the right of suffering, hard work and superhuman responsibility. So these feminists were a bit funny for me. I was irritated by the faith of feminists who wanted to create their own feminist theory and history of art. But since they chose me as their representative, I restrained from criticizing their ideals.
(Natalia LL 2004, p. 484)
This is a statement that has echoed with those made by others who lived through the so-called socialist experience in Central and Eastern Europe. And indeed, the sphere of everyday life and the sphere of the art world were not that different, with traditional patriarchal structures being maintained in each, not to mention the fact that the lack of recognition, acknowledgement and exposure of women artists was a pattern that was repeated in both the East and the West, demonstrating a point of continuity between the capitalist West and the supposedly egalitarian socialist East.
Performance and experimental art practices under communism developed, for the most part, within the unofficial or second public sphere. In many instances, performance art was presented in unofficial or private spaces, and attended by a small group of like-minded individuals – trusted colleagues and friends of the artists themselves. If for Habermas the public sphere was based on a domain of common concern and inclusivity, then the second public sphere in the East only included the former. That said, the common concern of the second public sphere was primarily human rights, with the counter-culture opposing the hegemony of the socialist governments. In places where the state exercised control over much of everyday life, the common “enemy” for all was the totalitarian regime, and, as Martina Pachmanová explained, was what “women and men in the counterculture fought against” (2010, p. 39). It was not, however, an inclusive domain, but rather a closed one, its exclusivity a necessity of the sociopolitical circumstances. Even though artists tried to maintain a closed space, it was sometimes infiltrated by informants – such was the case in the German Democratic Republic.1 Furthermore, dissident circles usually maintained the phallocentric structures of the regime. According to Edit András, the “political opposition and the counterculture mirrored the way official power worked; they were equally militant, arrogant and intolerant. Their soldiers stood in close formation on this side of the trench and soldiers were obliged to surrender gender, racial and ethnic identity. Deviation and difference were tolerated neither by the opposition, nor by the state ideology” (1999, pp. 4–5). Thus if performance art practices were part of the second public sphere in Eastern Europe, then art that addressed gender, or claimed a feminist position, was a footnote of that second public sphere. Feminism was considered by many to be superfluous in the East, it was often viewed as not only unnecessary, but also an “import” from the West by activists and artists, especially given the close alignment with the feminist movement in the West and the feminist art movement.
In contrast to North America, which led the way in feminist art, there were only a small number of artists working in the socialist period whose work even addressed gender issues, let alone claimed to be feminist. Artists such as Natalia LL, Sanja Iveković, Jana Želibská, Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Ewa Partum, and Orshi Drozdik explore gender, femininity and sexuality in their work, yet each has a different, and sometimes complicated, relationship with feminism. For example, Natalia LL distanced herself from the feminist movement, although she was also responsible for bringing many ideas of feminist art into Poland, and even organized and participated in feminist art exhibitions. While the Oxford English Dictionary defines feminism as the “advocacy of equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex” as well as “the movement associated with this,” in this article I shall nuance this term slightly to account for the fact that, in socialist Eastern Europe, there was no active feminist movement, for reasons outlined above. Given that equality of the sexes was already being “advocated” as the official party line, a feminist movement appeared unnecessary. However, the perception and recognition of the disparity between rhetoric and reality can be witnessed in examples of art from the period, thus constituting a form of feminist art, without the label. Consequently the definition of feminism outlined by Kumari Jayawardena will be utilized in this chapter: “a consciousness of injustices based on gender hierarchy” (1995, p. 9, italics mine). It is also important to note that this work was not designated as feminist at the time of creation because of the awareness that there would not be a receptive audience for such work. Because of its marginal status within the marginal second public, it lacked visibility. In this sense, Ivana Bago’s and Antonia Majaca’s notion of the “delayed audience” (Bago 2012) can perhaps provide a remedy to the question of what to call this art. It may have been feminist art for a delayed audience.
Insofar as gender inequality did exist in socialist Eastern Europe, it makes sense, then, to examine work that deals with representations of women, female sexuality, the reification of woman, and gender roles in the context of a feminist approach. Various terms have been used to qualify the approach by artists working on gender-related issues in the region, outside of the context of a feminist movement. Zora Rusinová, referring to Slovak artist Jana Želibská’s work, has described it as “latent feminism” (Büngerová 2012), implying the unconscious use of feminist strategies in the artist’s work. Romanian artist Lia Perjovschi described herself as a feminist who worked instinctively, rather than in relation to feminist theory or examples of feminist art. In her words, “I was a feminist without knowing the history of the movement. Information on feminism came too late for me, this is why I am a feminist with a small ‘f’” (Perjovschi 2014, p. 97).
Writing about the work of Croatian/Yugoslav artist Vlasta Delimar, Lilijana Kolesnik has used the term “intuitive feminism,” although the artist would no doubt have been aware of feminist strategies and debates. Svede has referred to Latvian painter Ilze Zemzare’s work as “proto-feminist,” given that she was working in the 1960s, in an environment that would have had less exposure to feminist art and debates than Yugoslavia. And Bulgarian artist Adelina Popnedeleva has described herself as a “soft feminist” (Popnedeleva 2014, n.p.).
What I believe all of these different labels indicate is a general and genuine concern with the principles of feminism, namely, the awareness of the lack of equality of women, both in the region and globally, and a motivation to change that, regardless of the term that the artists themselves identify with. Finally, given that many of the artists working on gender issues during the socialist period were doing so independently of one another, Jana Geržová has referred to their work as “islands of interest in feminism” (2010, p. 32) in the region. One of the aims of this contribution, then, is to connect these “islands” utilizing the bridge of performance art. While all of the artists in this chapter were working in different sociopolitical contexts within the overall context of state-sponsored socialism in Eastern Europe, and its presumption of gender equality, what they share is the use of performance art – not necessarily as their prime practice, but certainly in individual works – to address issues such as gender inequality, the reification of women, and the rigidity of traditional gender roles.
Performance art was a preferred genre among feminist artists in North America who were working in the 1960s and 1970s – a time when live, body and action art was rapidly gaining currency among both male and female artists, providing a platform that enabled agency in the artwork – especially in an era of political activism. One of the reasons for this is that performance itself encompassed the activist stance of many feminists. As Jayne Wark has stated, “as women artists became politicized by feminism … the potential of performance as an ‘art of action’ coincided with their growing sense of themselves as agents of social and political change”2 (2006, p. 32). Similarly, Amelia Jones outlines the subversive potential of feminist performance art. She suggests that in soliciting, or “literalizing desire,” the artists, and thus body art itself implicates the viewer “in its dispersal and particularization of the subject (as body/self) and open[s] … the art-making and viewing processes to intersubjective desires and identifications” (Jones 1998, p. 26). This, consequently, serves to threaten “Western subjectivity, which insists upon the oppositional staging of an other (who lacks) to legitimate the self (who ostensibly has)” (ibid., p. 180). Of course, this type of phallocentrism was not the exclusive domain of the West, as Piotr Piotrowski has pointed out. As he has argued, the socialist and communist regimes in Eastern Europe depended on the strict maintenance of traditional gender roles. In his words, “any authority system, including the totalitarian system that is its extreme version, can function safely only under conditions that ensure the stability of the hierarchically defined social structure based in phallocentrism” (Piotrowski 2009, p. 385). Although women had equal access to jobs and equal pay, it was the male who remained privileged in these societies.
This characterization of the radical potential, then, of feminist performance and body art coincides with Lucy Lippard’s notion of feminist art as “a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life” (1980, p. 362). Furthermore, Wark has emphasized the plurality of feminist art practice: rather than holding on to polarized essentialist interpretations of feminist art, she proposes that artists were capable of pursuing various strategies and techniques, emanating from different traditions in feminist discourse (2006, p. 181). This is an important point to remember also when considering art from the East that addresses gender issues. Katy Deepwell, among others, has put forth the notion that instead of feminism, we should remember that there is no one “feminism,” but numerous feminisms,3 which comprise different approaches throughout the world (1997, p. 62). This is also a point that Beáta Hock emphasizes in her discussion of gendered artistic practices in Hungary during the socialist period, putting forth a situated feminist perspective, one that does not use Western feminism as a “yardstick” by which to gauge feminist activity. Although she, among others, has noted the fact that the label “feminist” seems “more a social and political liability” (Gal and Kligman 2000, p. 103) for non-Western examples, I feel that this term is relevant and useful in the context of Eastern Europe, given the fact that artists in the region were aware of, connected with, and often responding to Western feminist artists in their work. Furthermore, given the fact that gender inequality and hierarchy was an issue under communist rule, despite the public reticence with regard to it, then these actions and works that draw attention to this issue can be seen as feminist, in the same manner that the suffragette movement of the first wave of feminism was also not necessarily labeled as such. That said, I agree with Hock’s point that “the articulation of feminist concerns in cultural work or in social activism is not always and necessarily tied to a conscious feminist identification” as well as the assertion that “ambiguity towards feminism and reluctance towards feminist identification are not always results of a clear refusal or informed non-choice of feminism” (Hock 2013, p. 34). Indeed, this choice to take such a definitive political stance under communist rule was decidedly complicated.
In lieu of a codified feminist movement in Eastern Europe, during the communist period, artists in the region often used performance art to explore, expose and challenge traditional gender roles, especially by focusing on representations of masculinity, femininity and notions of female beauty, from within their individual “islands.” Because of the limited audiences for experimental art in general during the 1960s and 1970s, it was rare that performance art that addressed gender during the communist period attracted much public attention or discussion. Consequently, it was also rare that these works addressing gender entered the (first) public sphere. Sanja Iveković’s Triangle (Trokut) is one exception: sitting on her balcony during Marshal Tito’s visit to Zagreb in 1979, drinking whisky and pretending to masturbate, the security officers stationed atop a high-rise hotel across the street noticed her and summoned their colleagues on the street below to knock on her door and ask her to leave the balcony (along with removing her things). However, as Mechtild Widrich has noted, all that remains of that performance are the photographs, and we are forced to take the artist at her word that she did the actions, and that the police interrupted her in the manner that has been captured as the narrative of the piece (Widrich 2014). It is my contention that despite a lack of visibility, these explorations of gender in art, discussed in this text, nevertheless exist as evidence of cracks in the monolithic grand narrative of traditional heteronormative gender roles supported by the state. Following from Piotrowski (2009), any challenge posed to those principles also posed a challenge to the regime. In scrutinizing gender, gender equality, and representations of women, the work of the artists discussed in this chapter represent a distinct challenge to the stability of the hierarchically defined social structure in Eastern Europe.
In socialist Yugoslavia, which succeeded in combining consumer culture with ideology, the situation was ripe for critique of the culture of the spectacle, the reification of the female body and the male gaze. Sanja Iveković (b. 1949), for example, scrutinized these mechanisms at work in the mass media, exposing not only the manner in which femininity and notions of beauty are constructed, but also how patriarchal power structures in both the political and social realms are created and maintained. In her photomontage Diary (Dnevnik), created between 1975–1976, the artist juxtaposed the make-up removal pads and cotton balls that she used over the course of a week with glossy images from a women’s magazine depicting a woman fully made-up. In her 1976 video performance, Make-Up, Make-Down, she fetishizes the application of make-up, by displaying it as a sensual act. The camera focuses on the female subject’s cleavage and hands (her face is not visible), which slowly manipulate and caress various objects containing make-up: tubes of lipstick and mascara, a bottle of lotion, etc. She followed this piece with the performance Un Jour Violente (1976), where she applied make-up and dressed according to an advertisement in Marie Claire, which told women how to live glamorous lives through their style: “One day, violent: today you are dazzling, you don’t yourself know why, you feel irresistible joy, you want sparkling drinks, intensive light, unusual hairstyles, provoking dresses.” In the course of the performance, in three different spaces, she applied three different “looks” provided by the magazine: tender, violent and secret, attempting to become or align with the representation of woman.
In terms of her strategy, Iveković had this to say: “I tried to reflect my own position as a woman in a patriarchal culture, which was, in spite of the officially egalitarian policy, always alive and present in socialism. A recurrent theme in these early works was the politics of the representation of femininity in the mass media. I publicly declared myself as a feminist artist and in this sense my position was really specific” (Iveković and Majaca 2009, p. 9). Furthermore, she stated that because of the absence of the feminist context or feminist criticism her work was usually only interpreted as self-referential. That said, she did mention finding sources for her work in the international feminist conference in Belgrade that took place in 1978 – the first feminist conference in Eastern Europe – along with the Women’s Section of the Sociological Society of the University of Zagreb, “Women and Society,” which was established around that time and presented lectures on feminist theory, which the artist attended. Since their research didn’t include visual art, however, this context did not help with the interpretation of her work along those lines.
Polish artist Ewa Partum used make-up to different ends. In her 1974 performance, Change (Zmiana), she had a professional make-up artist paint half of her face to make it looked aged and wrinkled; in 1978–1979, in Emphatic Portrait (Portret emfatyczny), posters of a photograph of the artist’s face made up that way were posted all over Warsaw with the text below reading: “my problem is the problem of a woman.” In 1979, she used that text for the title of another performance, an expansion on this concept, in which she aged half of her entire body (Change – My Problem Is the Problem of a Woman [Zmiana. Mój problem jest problemem kobiety]). In both pieces, she performed the act of becoming invisible through the use of make-up, highlighting the iconic nature of the youthful female nude. Partum was one of the only women artists in Poland at the time creating work based on gender who defined her position in feminist terms, although she was not necessarily familiar with Western feminist theory. The artist used her work to critique the patriarchal society in which she found herself. In her words, “Feminism became present in my practice later … When I saw that, despite my earlier works, men don’t appreciate me as a conceptual artist. It was an impulse for me to go beyond the art that I had been making so far. To start speaking about something that had to do not only with art but with reality” (Partum cited in Szylak et al. 2013, p. 5).
Partum began writing feminist manifestos in the 1970s, and reading them aloud at exhibitions, standing before her audience naked, which, she maintained, was a form of protest against social discrimination against women. Her definition of feminist art was as follows:
Women can function in a social structure that is alien to her if she masters the discipline of camouflage and omits her own personality … At the moment of discovering her own awareness, possibly having little in common with the realities of her current life, a social and cultural problem arises. Not fitting in the social structure created for her, she will create a new one. The possibility of discovering the self and the authenticity of her own experiences, work on her own problems and awareness through the very specific experience of being a woman in a patriarchal society in a world that is alien to the self, is the problem of what is called “feminist art.” It is the motivation for creating art for a woman artist. The phenomenon of a feminist art reveals to a woman her new role, the possibility of self-realisation.
(Partum cited in Szylak et al. 2013, pp. 136, 140)
Consequently, the artist found in her art the possibility of emancipation not offered to her by the state or official structures surrounding her. She used her work as a platform to express these ideas, although they would have reached somewhat limited audiences.
One could draw parallels between these works by Iveković and Partum with that of North American artists such as Eleanor Antin or Martha Wilson, both of whom interrogated the category of beauty and its perpetuation by the mass media. Throughout her work, Wilson used make-up to alter her appearance and take on different appearances. For example, in her 1974 performance I Make Up the Image of My Perfection/I Make Up the Image of My Deformity, two photographic documents of the action show the artist as feminine and made-up in one, and with bags under her eyes and bad skin in the other, the juxtaposition of the two revealing the fact that appearance is merely a façade. While Partum arrived at her feminist views independently, as the 1970s progressed, Poland became more connected with the Western feminist movement through the work of Natalia LL, who traveled to the US in 1977 and met with artists such as Carolee Schneemann. Iveković traveled outside of Yugoslavia often, to places such as Italy and Canada, and was aware of developments in contemporary performance and feminist art. While in Poland, the feminist context of Partum’s work was not widely understood, Yugoslavia was perhaps the only place in the Eastern Bloc where the “women’s question” was even on the agenda – for example, the first international feminist conference to be held in a socialist country took place at the Student Culture Center (SKC) in Belgrade, in 1978. Entitled Comrade Woman: The Women’s Question – A New Approach?, the conference was criticized by the official Yugoslav women’s organizations. According to Pejić, “their criticism was based on their claim that a feminist stance was superfluous in our society, which had already ‘overcome’ gender difference in the Revolution. Moreover, they saw the ‘new approach’ as an ‘import’ from the (capitalist) West” (2010b, p. 107). She goes on to describe a definite need for feminism particularly at that time, as by the late 1970s Yugoslavia had pornography, and women in films were either represented as “‘liberated’ or whores” (ibid., p. 108). That said, the works of Iveković and Partum remain unique examples of the examination of the representations of women in mass media through performance, during the socialist period.
As early as 1966, Slovak artist (at that time, Czechoslovakian) Jana Želibská (b. 1941) was creating objects, images, installations and performances that referred overtly to female sexuality. Female sexuality was a subject that was rarely touched upon by artists in Eastern Europe during the communist era, and Želibská’s work particularly stands out when one considers that Carolee Schneeman’s orgiastic performance Meat Joy had only taken place in 1964, first in Paris. At the time, the Slovak art world was not only progressive, but well connected with the Western art world, particularly Paris.4 Despite the content of her work, which focuses on the female body, female sexuality, female virginity and the passage from girl into womanhood, Vladimira Büngerová feels that her work “cannot be classified as part of the radical wave of feminism; it rather carries traces of influences of psychoanalysis and a wave of liberal feminism and eco-feminism – a so-called second wave which sounded in our milieu [Czechoslovakia – AB] only through this author’s voice, where Marxists and the socialist feminism wave based on political ideology ruled.” She further comments that Želibská remained a singular figure in that context because of the fact that the paradigm she was working with was “understood as alien in our environment, as ‘an import from the West’” (Büngerová 2012, p. 27). Whereas 1967 was designated the “Summer of Love” throughout North America and Western Europe, following from events in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, no such sexual revolution occurred in Eastern Europe, where the hippie counterculture was frowned upon by the government, who viewed it as yet another example of dissident activity. Thus Želibská’s explorations of female sexuality cannot be connected to these external impulses. In Rusinová’s words, her work “had no support in Slovak theory …” let alone the Slovak social context, “… and was created rather intuitively, and yet ultimately was aligned with the feminist discourse of the era” (Rusinová cited in Büngerová 2012, p. 6).
The 1970s in Czechoslovakia witnessed a number of happenings and actions in the countryside, in part a consequence of the period of Normalization following the failed Prague Spring, which resulted in increased restrictions on freedom and expression, which forced artists into alternative spaces. Rusinová points out that this was also a time when artists (not only female) throughout the world sought a return to nature, stating that “apart from ecological motifs, performance and ritual became a favorite form of a search for the ‘new sensibility’ for its ability to deny secular time, duration and history in an exemplary attempt to transfer into mythical, archetypal space, ‘out of time’” (ibid., p. 11). In Želibská’s collective event or action entitled Betrothal of Spring (Snúbenie jari, 1970), the sexual act was depicted metaphorically through the meeting of spring and summer, or the passage from spring into summer, from virgin to woman. A group of artists met in the village Dolné Orešany, and guests were given flowers; then, white ribbons (symbolizing innocence) were dropped on the crowd from an airplane (organized by Alex Mlynárčik), and they subsequently tied them to the trees; finally, girls wove wreaths and wore them on their heads. This exploration of the transformation from virgin to bride can also be seen in Želibská’s event from 1982, Metamorphosis II (Girls), in which a group of girls of varying ages, all dressed in white flowing dresses, enter a peaceful countryside setting, where they spent the afternoon laughing, running, dancing, collecting flowers, making wreaths and adorning themselves with them; eventually they slowly leave at the end of the day, when the sun begins to set.5 Both of these events were documented in a series of photographs.
A contemporary of Želibská’s in neighboring Poland, Natalia LL’s (Lach-Lachowicz) (b. 1937) Consumer Art series (1972, 1974, 1975) of photographic performances and video performances foregrounds female sexuality quite overtly, while connecting it to the act of consumption, a sensitive issue in a socialist society that opposed itself to the consumer-oriented West. In the photographs and videos, the artist captured models eating sexually suggestive objects, such as bananas, sausages, bread sticks, as well as pudding, cream and jelly. They do not simply consume these objects, however, they explore them with their mouths and tongues as if for the first time, licking and thrusting the phallic shapes in their mouths, and putting the jelly and cream in their mouths so that it bubbles over and streams out, suggesting other fluids and familiar scenes from porn films – with ejaculate running out of the models’ mouths. Although the artist is not present here, in directing the models, she creates performative photographs that highlight the consumption of the reified female.
Consumer Art appeared in Poland in the 1970s, a decade when citizens often encountered food shortages. Foods like sausages and bananas could only be found in the shops on holidays or special occasions, for example May Day, consequently the artist recalls being very busy around those dates. Thus the piece enjoys a different reading than one might expect in the context of late-socialist Poland. Western feminists interpreted this as a critique of the deficit of materials in socialist Poland. However, Piotr Piotrowski has highlighted issues with reading the work as either feminist or critical of consumerism. In his words, “consumption was only expected and hoped for by society and the authorities” (Piotrowski 2009, p. 352). The models’ fetishization of these objects reflected the real desire on the part of everyday citizens to have what were then and there considered luxury items – bananas and hot dogs.
Unlike her colleague Ewa Partum, Natalia LL distanced herself from feminism, not to mention a feminist reading of her work, and she has a complicated relationship with Western feminism and Western feminist art. Nevertheless, in 1971, at her exhibition in Warsaw, the artist asserted her independence from patriarchal structures when she disconnected herself from both her father’s (Lach) and her husband’s (Lachowitz) surnames, by taking the name “Natalia LL” Furthermore, because of her subject matter and unique treatment thereof, Western feminists declared Natalia LL as the Polish, or even Eastern European representative of their movement. Natalia LL herself, however, does not consider herself a feminist; when an image from Consumer Art was used as a poster for the Women’s Art – New Tendencies (Frauen Kunst – Neue Tendenzen) exhibition in Innsbruck in 1975, as an icon of feminism, the artist commented that “For me, it [the work – AB] was rather a manifestation of the meaningfulness of life, of vitality” (Natalia LL 2004, p. 485). Indeed, an examination of her later work, which continues to focus on the phallus as the giver of life – for example, the banana, which is both phallic and food, and the wang peony, suggesting fertility – could support that argument. The artist found herself in a perplexing situation, living in a country that was idolized by Western feminists as having achieved women’s equality, yet not experiencing that herself. In a recent interview, when asked whether she thought that Western feminists might have anything to learn from women artists in the East, she stated that: “Artists from the West should constantly thank God that they were spared the experience that artists from former socialist countries had” (Natalia LL 2015, n.p.).
Courtesy: Natalia L.L. and lokal_30 Gallery, Warsaw.
Orsolya (Orshi) Drozdik (b. 1946) began making work exploring gender and the female body in the 1970s, in Hungary. One of her earlier performances took not only society, but also art history, and the art world, to task. In Nude/Model (Akt/Modell, 1977), a live exhibition at the Young Artist’s Club, the artist sat in front of an easel and proceeded to draw a live (female) model over the course of one week. Each day the exhibition was opened by a male artist (four) or art historian (one). Viewers could not enter the room where the performance took place, they could only view it from the doorway. Looking into the room, they saw only the back of the model, not the front, and they saw the artist at work, from the front, but not her easel. The doorway was also covered with a sheer curtain made of gauze, which further hindered viewing. While the artist took on the male role of the active artist, casting the gaze on the nude model, the audience was only able to see the artist as active – at work, yet could not reify the nude model through their gaze. Drozdik had turned the tables on the art system, while also commenting on its absurdity.
In 2007, Emese Süvecz interviewed some of the participants from that live event, to gather their recollections. At that time, Drozdik stated that “the intention was to show the grotesque nature of the situation – that a woman artist has to draw a naked woman” (Süvecz 2007, n.p.). The model was well-known, employed at the art academy, drawn by many, and was even the lover of some. Therefore, she was not only the object of desire in the eyes of art history, which dictates that women be depicted as nudes in paintings and not paint themselves, but she was also literally the object of desire of many of the men in the academy. However, the audience was denied the opportunity to cast their desiring gaze on her nude body. Instead, that gaze was taken over by the artist, but it was not the same type of gaze. As Drozdik stated:
I did not look at the nude model with desire. To be frank, my nude model was the mistress of those friends of mine whom I had invited. She was the object of their sexual desire. And I inherited an academic method, which is totally ambiguous: for women to depict naked women is an ambiguous procedure. It was a normative condition that women painted female nude models, and no one had changed this.
(Süvecz 2007, n.p.)
Indeed, women on both sides of the Atlantic were attempting to change this, but Drozdik was one of a few lone voices in her native Hungary at the time. She left the country in 1978, and eventually settled in the U.S. in 1980, by way of Canada.
According to Hock, Drozdik began working on pieces that interrogated female subjectivity and corporeality without an awareness of feminist discourse or feminist art practices in the West. The source of her “‘inspiration’ was rather the masculinist atmosphere of the neo-avant-garde in which she started her creative practice” (Hock 2013, p. 190). However, her work was received with indifference, which prompted her to emigrate to the West. Since 1989, she works between New York and Budapest.
Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay “A Room of One’s Own” argued for both a literal and figurative space for woman: a physical space in which to create and be rebellious, in order to create a figurative space for herself, her work, and womankind in a patriarchal society. In the male dominated art world, both concepts of space are relevant. It is known that American Abstract Expressionist painter Lee Krasner, for example, initially created smaller works of art because she confined herself to a smaller room of the house, leaving the larger studio space for her husband, Jackson Pollock. In communist Eastern Europe, where private space was at a premium, due to urban planning that allocated minimal shared living spaces, a woman finding a space of her own – almost her own alternate, or “second public” sphere – was that much more challenging.
Polish artist Maria Pinińska-Bereś (1931–1999) was a sculptor who also worked in performance and installation. Her art was often overshadowed, however, by that of her husband – the sculptor and performance artist Jerzy Bereś. While their home was equipped with a studio, it was filled with Bereś’s large wooden sculptures. When visitors would come to the studio, they would look away if they spotted her work: pink and white soft sculptural pillows, for example. They expected her to make tea while the men spoke about art, and some even referred to her as “Bereś’s wife” (Tatar 2011, p. 15). Consequently, instead of ascribing to a strong political platform in her work, the artist often addressed her subjective experience in relation to gender and oppression. According to Ewa Małgorzata Tatar, Pinińska-Bereś analyzed the patriarchal order, “deconstructing it and trying to revitalize the feminine in the space assigned to it” (ibid., p. 16). She often utilized humor and irony to address these issues, objects that referred to a feminine sensibility (soft forms, usually pink), but these expressions were not self-referential. According to Agata Jakubowska, “she adopted a ‘feminine’ position but did not identify with it, if only because in this dichotomous pair the woman is silent, a fact that she did not accept” (2011, p. 27). Her work also often focused on space, as in her 1980 performance Annexation of the Landscape (Aneksja krajobrazu), in which she erected a private and feminine space outdoors, in the landscape, by fencing off an area with white stakes and rope, complete with a pink flag and a sign, in curly, feminine script, that read “(temporarily) annexed area.” The artist also hung sheets of cloth from the rope, as if hanging out the laundry, further demarcating this as a domestic space. The message is clear: a woman can only have a space that is temporary, makeshift, improvised. However, in utilizing the genres of performance and land art, the artist is able to shape the space according to her own design, and accesses a space with a much larger footprint than that of her own apartment – the earth.
Dóra Maurer (b. 1937) is primarily a painter and graphic designer, however she is also known for having created some pioneering works that can be discussed in the context of female body art in Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1967, she moved to Vienna on a scholarship, and one year later, she married Tibor Gáyor, an Austrian citizen, which enabled her to get an Austrian passport and travel between Hungary and Austria freely. She described her time in Austria as “energizing,” and she utilized her position as a dual citizen to disseminate knowledge about contemporary art and the avant-garde, between Austria and Hungary. She organized exhibitions on constructivism both in Hungary and abroad, and even invited the artist Peter Weibel to Budapest; he had his first video exhibition there in 1977 (Maurer 2014). She began creating photographs in 1968–1969, and in the 1970s she made a number of experimental films with the assistance of a film student who acted as her cameraman, while she directed.
One of these films was entitled Proportions (Arányok, 1979). Using her body as a measure, she drew lines on the surface of a piece of paper to create a grid – a grid that was based on the dimensions of her own body. She then performed minimalist actions in the squares, such as placing her hands next to one another, stepping in the squares, lying on the paper – comparing the proportions of her hands, arms, feet and legs. In this piece, she replaced Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, making woman the measure of all things, and placing her, iconoclastically, at the center of the universe. Maurer does not identify herself as a feminist or feminist artist, and most of her work comprises geometric abstract paintings, in bold colors, reminiscent of Frank Stella. While Proportions can no doubt be understood in the context of her two-dimensional work as a study of form and geometry, it is also interesting to consider in the context of female body art. Maurer was not ignorant of the feminist discourse and the feminist art movement going on at the time. For example, the exhibition Woman’s Art – New Tendencies took place at the Krinzinger Gallery, Innsbruck, and Natalia LL and Marina Abramović both took part. In addition to functioning as a conduit of information on the art world between East and West, Budapest and Vienna, she also brought information on feminism and feminist art. She initiated and moderated a radio broadcast on the position of women in the visual arts in 1979, “F”: Women in the arts, in which artist Judit Kele (also known for some performative work dealing with gender) also participated. Retrospectively, however, Maurer commented that her interest in feminism was more intellectual curiosity than necessity, and, according to Hock (2013, p. 191), the feminist discourse didn’t really speak to her, as she did not feel discriminated against because of her gender.
If performance art was positioned within the second public sphere of culture in Central and Eastern Europe, then feminist performance, or performance that addressed issues related to gender, was on the periphery of that second public sphere. Because of feminism’s perceived superfluity in the East, it was not an issue for experimental artists – except, perhaps, those that felt marginalized by the male-dominated sphere of unofficial circles. What’s more, if performance art from the period lacked visibility, then gendered strategies and artistic practices suffered further invisibility – it was a ghost of the experimental art scene. Artists who engaged with these strategies had a range of responses to feminism – either completely denying it, being interested but not defined by it, or, in rare cases, identifying as feminist. Nevertheless, regardless of the intention, the work addressed in this article, all of which confronted issues of gender, gender relations, female sexuality and beauty, can be read as feminist insofar as it was concerned with the place of women within the world. It was not until the collapse of communism across the East, which prompted the dissolution of the second public sphere, that these works were able to gain the visibility that they would need to create change. That said, the issue of gender and feminism in the post-communist period is an issue that merits an entirely separate discussion, which goes beyond the possibilities of this text.
1This was confirmed to be the case with the artistic group Clara Mosch, from Leipzig, whose photographer was eventually revealed to be a Stasi mole, and the artists associated with the Autoperforatsionsartisten, from Dresden, commented that they often suspected infiltration.
2Contrary views, however, were voiced by theorists such as Griselda Pollock, Lucy Lippard and Mary Kelly, questioning whether women’s bodies can function in a political stance without being reified.
3This is quite similar to the phenomenon of the second public sphere, which is, in point of fact, not one, but many diverse second public spheres, a fact to which I believe the articles in the volume will attest.
4In 1964, Slovak artist Alex Mlynárčik, during a trip to Paris, brazenly knocked on the door of French art critic Pierre Restany and introduced himself. The two remained friends, and maintained correspondence throughout their lives.
5This event was part of the Terrain I series of actions.
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