Rumours & Recognition
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Home Publications: Frieze Magazine Art Fairs Not For Profit Account Saved Log Out GO Home Archive Blog Shows Listings Subscribe Classifieds Digital About Contact Press Advertise Issue 158 Rumours & Recognition About this article First published in Issue 158 THINK PIECE Issue 158, cover A number of!"long-overdue exhibitions have recently by Kaelen Wilson- Goldie celebrated the achievements of overlooked women artists. What’s driving this wave of rediscoveries? Save this Article Print this article Share this article: Other Articles in Think Piece View all The Further Adventures of Parlando, Melisma and the Cookie Monster Issue 158 Blurred Visions Issue 155 Mascots & Muses Issue 155 Studio Spaces Issue 155 On Rupture Issue 154 All for One Issue 153 Costume Drama Issue 151 Energy & Rue Issue 151 Life Models Issue 148 Other Articles by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie Trials & Tribulations Issue 156 On Rupture Issue 154 In Focus: Marwa Arsanios Issue 153 Everything & Nothing Issue 152 Ramallah Syndrome Issue 150 Get Together Issue 149 Stand Up Issue 148 Focus: Bouchra Khalili Issue 143 Lilla Cabot Perry, The Black Hat, 1914, oil on canvas, 128"!"92 cm. Courtesy: On Bandwagons Issue 142 Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire To the Streets Issue 139 Early on a mild Sunday evening in the middle of January, the American artist Anna Plesset’s first New York solo show opened at RSS Feeds Untitled. Inside the glass-fronted gallery on Orchard Street, Get the Universal feed, or the Magazine Plesset installed a selection of works, including pencil drawings, Issues feed to be updated of new articles paintings on rectangular chunks of plasterboard, a self-portrait in this section. the size of a thumbtack, book-like stacks of plywood sculptures, and scattered clay objects that looked like the fragments of a broken ceramic jug. Experienced slowly and in sequence, these 1 of 9 pieces pulled viewers through the artist’s carefully paced evocations of time, space, illusion, translation and the tangled knot of a long-lost art-historical thread. The show, titled ‘A Still Life’, stemmed from a residency Plesset did two summers ago in Giverny, a village in northern France made famous by Claude Monet, who lived, worked and tended to his ponds and gardens there. Plesset’s fellowship, supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, had its roots in an earlier colony of Impressionist-loving painters, who were drawn to the light of Monet’s landscapes like pilgrims to the Holy Land. Soon after arriving, however, Plesset discovered something different. Her studio had once belonged to an enigmatic and anomalous figure, an American woman who had taken her place among a painterly movement consisting primarily of French men. Advertise with frieze So began two years of work in which Plesset choreographed a delicate dance between herself and the forgotten painter, Lilla Cabot Perry. Anna Plesset, Portrait of Lilla Painting a Portrait, 2011–12, oil on linen, handmade frame, 15"!"13 cm. Courtesy: Untitled, New York Using the sparest of means, expending hours of labour, and turning trompe l’oeil into a rarefied conceptual act, Plesset’s project took the restaging of Perry’s studio as an occasion to consider how power and gender politics have served to both shape and deform the transmission of art history. On the face of it, her exhibition traced a quiet tableau: how the light fell across the walls in Giverny, how reading materials piled up through the summer months, and how research became the intellectual triggers and visual cues of future work. But embedded in her 2 of 9 studies were more agitating questions about how the ambitions of art-making, curatorial practice and academic methodology combine to create narratives of encounter and erasure, rediscovery and revival. Although she is not well known today, Perry was quite successful in her lifetime. In many ways, she was an important precursor to her better-known colleague, Mary Cassatt. She came from a notable Boston family and rose to prominence on the strength of her society portraits. From there, Perry travelled the world. She apprenticed herself to painters in Germany and France. She toured the museums of Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands. She lived in Japan. The time she spent with Monet in Giverny transformed her work, and she was responsible, in part, for introducing Impressionism to America. Perry was still painting well into her 70s, but after she died in 1933, aged 85, her legacy all but disappeared and her name dropped out of circulation in the standard texts. She’s barely a footnote in a book about Monet’s years at Giverny. Walking through Plesset’s exhibition, however, one couldn’t help but wonder if the rediscovered painter was, in fact, a fiction or a feint, an art work in and of herself. Because the thing is, Plesset’s work isn’t really about Perry. It isn’t a restitution effort or an attempt to restore a name. Rather, it’s an attempt to capture the fullness and complexity of an artist asserting herself in the world through her work. It is about presence more than absence, and about making the present visible above and beyond the past. It is about grappling with the strange temporal simultaneity of being a contemporary artist enamoured with history but burdened by it all the same. It is about the seductions and limitations of research, where the traces of past experiences can be gathered into stories, which in turn can be learned and told but never relived. Anna Boghiguian, Leper, 2008, oil on canvas, 1"!"1m. Courtesy: the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg As it happened, Plesset’s exhibition was also symptomatic of a broader trend, coming as it did midway through the year-long stretch between Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s documenta(13) and Massimiliano Gioni’s 55th Venice Biennale. Among its several hundred participants, the former featured the octogenarian painter, novelist and playwright Etel Adnan; the wild Alexandrian 3 of 9 artist Anna Boghiguian, whose most meaningful work is in dialogue with the poet C.P. Cavafy; and Charlotte Salomon, who made one major body of work in her lifetime before she was put to death at Auschwitz in 1943. In Venice, the Golden Lions for lifetime achievement were awarded to Marisa Merz – the 82-year-old Italian sculptor said to have been the only women ever officially embraced by the boys club that was Arte Povera – and Maria Lassnig, the 93-year-old Austrian painter of shockingly emotive, deeply vulnerable self-portraits. Around the same time, the first major museum show – and also the first proper retrospective – of the work of 76-year-old Zarina Hashmi opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the second stop in a three-city tour that began in Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum and ended at the Art Institute of Chicago. (Although she has lived in New York for 30 years, Hashmi remains known as an artist from India.) The Moderna Museet in Stockholm unveiled an incredible exhibition of work by Hilma af Klint, the Swedish visionary who may have beaten Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich in the break from figuration to abstraction. London’s Tate Modern introduced an unsuspecting audience to the uncommonly consistent and wholly intact oeuvre of 97-year-old Saloua Raouda Choucair, a pioneer of abstract paintings and sculptures from Lebanon. Virtually unknown outside of her country, Choucair has spent the best part of the last seven decades creating a visual language from the terms of Modernism, Sufism and Islamic art, working in near-total isolation. After disappearing for decades, the 84-year-old Yayoi Kusama is back and everywhere, as is her autobiography, Infinity Net, which was published a decade ago in Japan but only translated into English last year. Insightful vis-à-vis her mental health, her affair with Joseph Cornell, her rivalry with Andy Warhol and her friendship with the famously unfriendly Georgia O’Keeffe, it is indeed a strange and riveting read. Sturtevant’s summer show at the Serpentine Gallery was her first major exhibition at an arts institution in the UK. She hasn’t had a museum show in her native us for 40 years, but that’s set to change next year with a solid retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In November, Semiotext(e) will publish her first substantial monograph, titled Under the Sign of [sic] and penned by Bruce Hainley. Sturtevant is 83, but among the tight circles of artists, curators and critics who adore her, she’s been a legend forever. The curator Bill Arning once said that, alongside Kusama and Lee Lozano, Sturtevant was one of the three great ‘rumours artists’ of the international art world, figures known only by a handful of colleagues, protégés and historians.1 With the possible exception of Lozano, who is probably the most exceptional of them all, these rumour artists have become very real, substantiated by exhibitions and books alongside media hype and market buzz. What brings the work of these women to the world’s attention? It would be wonderful, probably foolish and perhaps even misguided, to assume that it’s driven by a feminist agenda, with an army of magnanimous activists toiling behind the scenes to correct decades and centuries of men dominating the histories of art. It would be equally wrong to imagine that the gender of artists is no longer relevant, that it doesn’t matter and belongs, as Sturtevant has remarked, to the vestiges of ‘medieval thinking’.2 Clearly, male chauvinism persists. The reasons why women have been overlooked as artists are fairly easy to identity.