Counter-Landscapes: Performative Actions from the 1970s - Now

by

Jennifer McCabe

A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Approved April 2020 by the Graduate Supervisory Committee:

Betsy Fahlman, Chair Meredith Hoy Dominic Asmall Willsdon

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

May 2020 ABSTRACT

Counter-Landscapes: Performative Actions from the 1970s – Now presents a group of artists working in both natural and urban environments whose work exploits the power of place to address issues of social, environmental, and personal transformation.

Through a focused selection of key works made between 1970 and 2019, which extend beyond traditional categories, Counter-Landscapes illuminates how the methodologies created by women artists in the 1970s and 1980s are employed by artists today, both men and women alike. Developing a practice of performative actions, these artists countered the culture that surrounded and oppressed them by embodying the live elements of performance art in order to push for social change. Looking back to the 1960s and the counter-culture mindset of the times, I approach the histories of land, performance, and conceptual art through feminist studies. Then I apply the same feminist approach to philosophical histories of landscape, place, and space. Through a discussion of an extensive range of works by 25 artists, this research seeks to demonstrate the indelible influence of feminist art practice on contemporary art. It brings the work of an innovative generation of women artists—Marina Abramović, Eleanor Antin, Agnes Denes, VALIE

EXPORT, Rebecca Horn, Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy, Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper,

Lotty Rosenfeld, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Beth Ames Swartz, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles— together with more recent work by artists who have adopted and extended their methods.

These artists, both male and female, include Allora & Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Angela

Ellsworth, Ana Teresa Fernández, Maria Hupfield, Saskia Jordá, Christian Philipp

Müller, Pope.L, Sarah Cameron Sunde, Zhou Tao, and Antonia Wright.

i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people were integral to the success of Counter-Landscapes, and I would like to offer them my heartfelt thanks here. First and foremost, I would like to thank the artists for their inspiring work: Marina Abramović, Allora & Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Eleanor

Antin, Agnes Denes, Angela Ellsworth, VALIE EXPORT, Ana Teresa Fernández,

Rebecca Horn, Maria Hupfield, Saskia Jordá, Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy, Ana

Mendieta, Christian Philipp Müller, Adrian Piper, Pope.L, Lotty Rosenfeld, Bonnie

Ora Sherk, Sarah Cameron Sunde, Beth Ames Swartz, Zhou Tao, Mierle Laderman

Ukeles, and Antonia Wright. Sincere thanks to my committee chair, Betsy Fahlman, who offered encouragement, critical feedback, and inspiration all along the way. Thank you to my other committee members, Meredith Hoy and Dominic Asmall Willsdon, who helped me shape ideas and bring form to the writing. I am grateful to Natasha Boas, who served as an unofficial member of my dissertation committee and continues to be my intellectual co-conspirator and dear friend. Finally, my heartfelt gratitude to my family: my husband,

Julio César Morales, who has been my steadfast supporter, offering unconditional encouragement since I curated my first exhibition at Queens Nails in San Francisco many years ago. Thank you to my children, Prado and Enzo, who have endured years of me juggling motherhood, school, and work. They bring joy, love, and smiles to my life, which would be all work without them. And endless gratitude to my parents for their unconditional love and support through all of life’s twists and turns.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

LIST OF FIGURES ...... iv

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2 A CRACK IN THE ART WORLD’S WALLS: WOMEN ARTISTS IN THE

1960s-1970s ...... 5

3 PLACELESSNESS: POLITICS AND PLACE IN PERFORMANCE ART ... 10

4 EARLY PRACTITIONERS (1970s-1980s) ...... 15

5 NEXT GENERATION (1990s-2000s) ...... 39

6 CONTEMPORARY WORKS NOW (2010-2020) ...... 47

7 CONCLUSION ...... 58

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 60

iii LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1. Agnes Denes, Wheatfield—A Confrontation, Battery Park Landfill, Downtown

Manhattan, with Statue of Liberty Across the Hudson, 1982, 1982, C-

print, Copyright Agnes Denes and Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks +

Projects…………………………………...... 20

2. Bonnie Ora Sherk, Sitting Still I, 1970, Color Photograph, Courtesy of the

Artist………………………………………………………………………..…22

3. Bonnie Ora Sherk, Sitting Still II, 1970, Color Photograph, Courtesy of the

Artist…………………………………………………………………………..22

4. Bonnie Ora Sherk, Sitting Still III, 1970, Color Photograph, Courtesy of the

Artist………………………………………………..…………………………22

5. Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, In Mourning and In Rage, 1977, Performed

at Los Angeles City Hall, Two Photographs, Video, and Ephemera, Courtesy of

the Artists..…………………………………………….……………………...24

6. Adrian Piper, Catalysis III, 1970, Three Black-and-White Photographs,

Generali Foundation Collection—Permanent Loan to the Museum der Moderne

Salzburg……………………………………………………………………….25

7. Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1970, Three Black-and-White Photographs,

Generali Foundation Collection—Permanent Loan to the Museum der Moderne

Salzburg……………………………………………………………………….26

iv Figure Page

8. Rebecca Horn, Moveable Shoulder Extensions (original title:

Bewegliche Schulterstäbe), 1971, Feathers, Wood, Fabric and Metal, Tate:

Purchased with Assistance from Tate Members 2002……...…………………27

9. VALIE EXPORT, Abrundung II (Round Off II), 1976, Black and White

Photograph, Cut Out on Negative, Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel

Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-

Hudson, New York………………...…………………….……………………28

10. Eleanor Antin, The Wonder of It All, from The King of Solano Beach, 1971–73,

Unique Set of Six Black-and-White Photographs, Courtesy of the Artist and

Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York………………………..………………...30

11. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside, 1973,

Twelve Black-and-White Photographs, Courtesy of the Artist and Ronald

Feldman Gallery, New York…………………………………………………..32

12. Ana Mendieta, Volcano, Silueta Series, 1978, Lifetime Color Photograph,

Courtesy of The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC and Galerie Lelong

& Co., New York……………………………………………………………...34

13. Lotty Rosenfeld, Una Milla de Cruces Sobre el Pavimento (A Mile of Crosses

on the Pavement), 1979, Black-and-White Photograph, Collection 49 Nord 6

Est – Frac Lorraine…..………………………………………………………..36

v Figure Page

14. Beth Ames Swartz, The Red Sea #1 (from the Series Israel Revisited, Ten

Sites), 1980, Fire, Earth, Acrylic, Variegated Gold Leaf, and Mixed Media on

Layered Paper, from the Collection of Gary and Diane Tooker, Scottsdale,

AZ………………………………………………………………………….….38

15. Pope.L, The Great White Way: 22 miles, 5 years, 1 street (Segment #1:

December 29, 2001), 2001–2006, Video Installation, 6:35 Minutes, Courtesy of

the Artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York……...……………………..41

16. Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis I, 1997, Video, 5:00 Minutes, Courtesy of the

Artist and David Zwirner, New York...……………………………………….42

17. Christian Philipp Müller, 2562 km, 2005, Video, 9:00 Minutes, Courtesy of the

Artist and Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Wien, Austria...…..……………………....43

18. Allora & Calzadilla, Land Mark (Foot Prints) #10, 2001–2002, Photograph,

Courtesy of the Artists, KADIST Collection, and Galerie Chantal Crousel,

Paris……………………………………………………………………..……44

19. Marina Abramović, Looking at the Mountains, 2010, Color Pigment Print,

Courtesy of the Artist and Lisson Gallery, London……………………45

20. Ana Teresa Fernández, Of Bodies and Borders 3 (Entering the Outcome)

(Performance Documentation), 2018, Oil on Canvas, Courtesy of the Artist and

Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco…………………………………………49

vi Figure Page

21. Sarah Cameron Sunde, 36.5 / North Sea Katwijk Aan Zee, The Netherlands,

2015, Live Performance; Time-Lapse Video, 12:46 Hours, Courtesy of the

Artist………………………………………….……………………………….50

22. Zhou Tao, After Reality, 2013, Single Channel HD Video, 14:21 Minutes,

Courtesy of the Artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Bejing…………..………51

23. Antonia Wright, Under the Water Was Sand, Then Rocks, Miles of Rocks, Then

Fire, 2016, Single-Channel Video, Projection, 2:20 Minutes, Plants and

Fragrance, Courtesy of the Artist and Locust Projects, Miami………………52

24. Angela Ellsworth, Is This the Place, 2006, Twenty-Mile Walk from Downtown

Phoenix to Mesa, Arizona, Photographic Documentation and Costumes,

Props and Costumes Designed by Chequamegon Bollinger, Photo Credits: Val

Valenzuela and Nona Siegel, Courtesy of the Artist…………………...……..53

25. Saskia Jordá, Zona y Cuerpos en Reclamación (Disputed Territories – Disputed

Bodies), 2019, Wood, Felt, Thread, and Cotton Yarn, Courtesy of the Artist...54

26. Maria Hupfield, The One Who Keeps On Giving, 2017, Two-Channel Video

Projection, Sound, 15:00 Minutes (looped), Paul Douglas Cown, Deanne

Hupfield, John Hupfield, Johna Hupfield, and Maria Hupfield, Courtesy of the

Artist and Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montreal, Commissioned by The

Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto…………………………..…56

27. Maria Hupfield, Stones in the Sky, 2019, Industrial Felt and Thread, Courtesy of

the Artist………..…………………………………………………………..…56

vii CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

In opposition to the established idea that land art deals exclusively with artists who work with earth as their medium, Counter-Landscapes: Performative Actions from the 1970s - Now presents a group of important artists working with performance in the landscape, whose work has brought about new ways of seeing and interacting with the environment. Their intentions went beyond confronting ways of making and sites for making, and focused on resistance to unequal systems of power. In this historic moment, when the possibility of political change through actions was activated, women led the way. Investigating urgent issues of identity, labor, and inequity, their influence eventually spread beyond their fellow artists and the art world to influence generations of artists, activists, and citizens to come.

For more than fifty years, women artists have worked tirelessly to gain mainstream attention in the artworld. Due to the circumstances of patriarchy, they were excluded from museum and gallery shows, from collections, and from auction houses.

When their work was reviewed, gendered stereotypes informed the writings of the mostly male critics. Without an art market to support them professionally, women bravely took their creative efforts outside that structure and created work that challenged their exclusion. Over the years, much progress has been accomplished, and women artists in their seventies and eighties are now consistently receiving well-deserved and long overdue solo exhibitions in major museums. Following that type of exposure, what generally results is more accessibility to museum collections, gallery sales, and auctions, or in other words, professional support from the field. What seems to be lacking is the

1 acknowledgement that what these women artists had to overcome was extraordinary and, in the process, they developed inventive artistic strategies which changed the face of the art world. They could be art historically categorized as feminist artists, no doubt, but they could also be just as neatly packaged into the genres of conceptual art, land art, video art or performance art. What Counter-Landscapes sets out to accomplish is to establish the inability of these art historical categories to truly recognize the contributions of a generation of artists, and the foremothers of the women’s movement before, who altered the very landscape of the art world. So much so that when one begins to trace a lineage through to today, it becomes apparent that the influence on artist’s working today is palpable: aesthetically and conceptually present. The work of these early influencers, not only speaks to other women artists, but transcends gender and race to reach any artist who experiences exclusion from the societal mainstream. Rather than a mere trend, the work of the artists considered here encourages a larger scope of inclusion.

During an era of unrest and countercultural actions in the 1960s, people across the globe were standing up to repressive systems of power. By the 1970s women artists had joined in the movement and were conceiving new art practices that would later become dominant modes of production in following decades. The moving force of much of this work centered on collaborations, community, audience, and perhaps most importantly, social change. Pioneering a practice of performative interventions, women artists countered the culture that surrounded and oppressed them. Since then artists have continued to use these methodologies to address issues around power, labor, and gender.

Through a focused survey of historical and contemporary works and documentation,

Counter-Landscapes: Performative Actions from the 1970s- Now illuminates how early

2 feminist artists’ strategies are being employed by contemporary artists, especially those working for social, environmental, and personal transformation.

The dissertation is accompanied by an exhibition of the same name, which premiered at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art from October 26, 2019 – January

19, 2020, and a catalogue published in April 2020. Counter-Landscapes: Performative

Actions from the 1970s – Now presents a group of artists working in both natural and urban environments whose work exploits the power of place to address issues of social, environmental, and personal transformation. Through a focused selection of key works made between 1970 and 2019, which extend beyond traditional categories, the exhibition illuminates how the strategies created by women artists in the 1970s and 1980s are employed by artists today. Developing a practice of performative actions, these artists countered the culture that surrounded and oppressed them by embodying the live elements of performance art in order to push for social change.

Featuring photography, video, sculpture, painting, drawing, performance, and installation centered on performance in the landscape, the exhibition initiates a dialogue across generations, locations, and genders. It brings the work of an innovative generation of women artists—Marina Abramović, Eleanor Antin, Agnes Denes, VALIE EXPORT,

Rebecca Horn, Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy, Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper, Lotty

Rosenfeld, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Beth Ames Swartz, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles— together with more recent work by artists who have adopted and extended their methods.

These artists, both male and female, include Allora & Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Angela

Ellsworth, Ana Teresa Fernández, Maria Hupfield, Saskia Jordá, Christian Philipp

Müller, Pope.L, Sarah Cameron Sunde, Zhou Tao, and Antonia Wright. Counter-

3 Landscapes shows how, in the process of overcoming the extraordinary obstacles they faced as women, artists working in the landscape in the late 20th century developed inventive methodologies that have profoundly influenced younger artists and changed the face of the art world. Ultimately, the works underline and emphasize the pervasiveness of the feminist legacy, which is too often neglected, marginalized, and undervalued.

4 CHAPTER 2

A CRACK IN THE ART WORLD’S WALLS:

WOMEN ARTISTS IN THE 1960s-1970s

Looking back to the 1960s, there were a number of art world influencers in development; conceptual art was on the rise as artists challenged where art could be viewed and any necessity for object-based practices. The work of critic and curator, Lucy

Lippard (b. 1937), has extensively explored conceptual art and feminism. Her book, Six

Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, focused on some of the driving forces of the time: “The frame was there to be broken out of. Anti- establishment fervor in the 1960s focused on the de-mythologization and de- commodification of art, on the need for an independent (or ‘alternative’) art that could not be bought and sold by the greedy sector that owned everything that was exploiting the world and promoting the Vietnam War.”1 Lippard went on to observe that the ephemeral and inexpensive character of conceptual mediums, such as video, performance, photography, narrative, text, and actions, encouraged women to participate, “to move through this crack in the art world’s walls.”2 Curator Cornelia Butler looks at Lippard’s work at this very moment in From Conceptualism to Feminism, which traces the years

1969-74 when Lippard produced four exhibitions of conceptual art in various cities, each titled after the city’s population. The final exhibition c.7,500, in Valencia, California, was

1 Lucy R. Lippard. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xiv. 2 Ibid., xiii. 5 the first in which she included only women and began to articulate what feminist art constituted and its connection to conceptual art.

From this movement of conceptual art, of anti-establishment, anti-object, in which the idea is paramount and the material secondary, comes another influencer, land art.

Similar to historical trends of the avant-garde, land art remained self-referential, with economic and aesthetic ties to the art world. Artists questioned what genres and styles were established—to push the boundaries of the medium at hand. So, while well-known land artist Michael Heizer exclaimed that “art had to be radical. It had to become

American,”3 he was able to do so with institutional support. Working outside the physical infrastructure, going into the landscape to make works with the earth, Heizer, along with

Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria, and others, produced work that was well documented and, despite any early criticism, was quickly absorbed into the art world it criticized.

Represented by galleries and collected by museums, many of the famous earthworks are cared for to this day by well-known institutions. For example, Walter di Maria The

Lightning Field (1977) is a work commissioned and maintained by the Dia Art

Foundation. Double Negative (1969-70) by Michael Heizer has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles since 1985. Robert

Smithson’s famous Spiral Jetty (1970) was donated to the Dia Art Foundation in 1999 through the generosity of the artist’s wife Nancy Holt. One exception in these works is, not surprisingly, by a woman: Nancy Holt’s, Sun Tunnels (1973-6), which was owned

3 Michael Heizer quoted in John Beardsley, Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2006), 13. 6 and cared for by her until she died in 2014.4 Following her death, the Dia Art Foundation purchased the work in 2018, some forty-five years after its completion.

With the most well-known land art works existing in the Western United States, and the majority—if not entirety—of artists being male, a “cowboy” persona, of the lone radical, was born and still persists today. While both men and women stepped outside the museum and gallery walls and used the land as their canvas and their platform, only male artists were recognized by the existing structure of the commercial artworld. Ends of the

Earth: Land Art to 1974, a 2012 survey curated by Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon for

MOCA Los Angeles, looked to move beyond land art’s well-known works to illuminate other contexts, approaches, and practices. This expansion of the field included, most notably, artists working outside the United States, art that engaged with urban grounds, and viewing land art as a media practice as much as sculptural one. The curators approached land art both as a discourse and a cultural construction born of a particular moment in time. While this broader understanding of what constitutes land art is an important contribution to the field, Ends of the Earth as an exhibition makes a common error of negation by including only eighteen women, or 19% of the total artists. Counter-

Landscapes seeks to build on this more inclusive approach to land art by looking to women artists working in the 1970s and 1980s as pioneers in this expansion to such a degree that artists working since then have incorporated their strategies.

Perhaps the most important opening in the artworld of the 1960s was the increased prevalence of performance art. Defined as a medium, performance art is artwork created

4 Nel Noddings. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 7 through action performed by the artist or other participants. Or, as Roselee Goldberg states in History of Performance Art: from Futurism to the Present, “a permissive, open- ended medium with endless variables, executed by artists impatient with the limitations of more established art forms, and determined to take their art directly to the public.”5

Incorporating both land art and performance, some artists took their practice out into the landscape. An iconic example of this is Richard Long’s A Line Made By Walking (1969), which resulted from the artist walking a continuous path, back and forth, until a line appeared in the grass. The work focused attention on ideas of impermanence and motion, while only suggesting his bodily presence. Another key historical land art work by

Charles Simonds’, Body-Earth (1974), confronts a legacy of object-making and, like so many of these known works, forefronts the artist’s physical strength.

Women artists, on the other hand, who did not identify as land artists, or performance artists, sought to interrupt and subvert how viewers perceived art, power, gender, and place. Working outside the structures that constrained them both in public and private realms, women challenged how patriarchal systems were established and set out to change them. Exclusivity in the art world forced women to take a stand outside the structure and the mainstream—this was not a choice, like their male artist counterparts whose work was supported by the system even when they were going out of bounds, but a necessity. Women found creative ways to circumvent the establishment and found and fostered communities to support their work. Away from the pressures of a market system that rarely included them in gallery shows or sales, women enmeshed themselves into the

5 RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 9. 8 educational systems and when possible, opened organizations that fostered new models, new directions for dialogue away from established categories—work that questioned the institution and strove to push the boundaries of what was defined as art and what it might accomplish.

Using their bodies, women artists were able to assert themselves in the artwork, upending centuries of female representation through the eyes of men. While there were women working within the dominant male establishment, using normative modes of communications (for instance, minimalism and Eva Hesse), the women working in performance overtly challenged the male gaze that had persisted for so long by depicting themselves. For women looking for ways to enter the established and exclusionary art world, performance would therefore be a logical place to start.

While many of these actions have slowly found their way into the recent and slowly evolving revised canons of art history, the groundbreaking nature of the work is still too often marginalized. Yet, many contemporary artists working today are informed by these earlier philosophies and tactics, incorporating them into their own practices and addressing the many ways people are subjected to discrimination and injustice. Early feminists built the theoretical and practical groundwork for today’s practitioners, yet have not been sufficiently studied and recognized for their contributions.

9 CHAPTER 3

PLACELESSNESS: POLITICS AND PLACE IN PERFORMANCE ART

The power of place will be remarkable. –Aristotle, Physics

And in the case of a restless, multi-traditional people, even as the power of place is diminished and often lost, it continues—as an absence—to define culture and identity. It also continues—as a presence—to change the way we live. – Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local6

In art, landscape painting is as old a genre as any, understood as a form framed by the viewpoint from which it is seen. Malcolm Andrews, in Landscape and Western Art, traces a grand history of landscape in painting and photography, in which “a landscape, cultivated or wild, is already an artifice before it has become the subject of a work of art.

Even when we simply look we are already shaping and interpreting.”7 In other words to insist on one absolute vantage point in looking at landscape—the very definition of the word—is to essentially miss that what we see is determined by who we are. Since the history of art has been defined by history of the work of male artists, the viewing vantage point has been defined through those eyes, and what we have been allowed to see has been pre-determined by those who have held the power to look.

Central to this idea of landscape and power is the writing of W.J.T. Mitchell, who is interested in not just what landscape is or means, but what it does; how it works as a cultural practice. According to him, landscape painting can be an instrument of cultural power. In his text Landscape and Power, Mitchell critically assesses landscape painting

6 Lucy R. Lippard. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997), 20. 7 Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1. 10 within European art history. He argues that the genre gave form to imperialist impulses, asserting “landscape is not a genre of art but a medium.”8 By this he means that landscape painting is a medium of cultural expression, encoded with cultural values.

Whether the genre gave form to imperialist impulses or was simply a result of those who dominated the world through colonialism is rather irrelevant. To counter this, a more interesting question would be, what would it look like to use land, untransformed (yet) into landscape, as a medium itself?

The use of the term landscape in Counter-Landscapes refers to the long histories of landscape painting, yet when paired with the word “counter,” one can see that the idea lies in contradicting these established norms. What better way to problematize landscape than through introducing the body, which has an ability to mark place. Artists have understood and embraced the idea that through the use of the body in a particular space, or in a site, the place is foregrounded, becoming a medium in itself. And when this body has already occupied a position of displacement, an even stronger statement can be made—it is able to reclaim this doubly displaced position.

Additionally, the use of land in performance is a reference to the art historical term of land art. Sometimes known as earthworks, this particular artform certainly used landscape as its centrifugal force, but without the presence of a person, the place matters less. That it is an open, uninhabited, and distinguishable place matters, but the body is not considered, and, in that way, land art could be understood to operate much like a

8 W.J.T. Mitchell ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5. 11 landscape painting, a descriptive object or representation of the real. It is the view of a place from one perspective.

Conversely, the intention of performance, of using one’s body in an art work aims to multiply and complicate possible viewpoints, to make the artwork more expansive rather than descriptive. Performance, an umbrella term encapsulating a wide range of approaches, can be used strategically to challenge and dislocate the dominant cultural narratives and discourses.9 And the location, the “where” of where performance took place became—for some artists—an integral aspect of the work.

Edward S. Casey rearticulates the importance of place in Getting Back into Place, asserting that time and space had taken precedence for the past three centuries, becoming the “cosmic power that towers over modernity.”10 Yet as displacement becomes more of a reality, place becomes more important. Without our bodies, he argues, we would have no sense of place. In this way, the body marks the place. In the works selected for

Counter-Landscapes, the place is the medium as much as the body.

Not surprisingly, the notion of place in philosophical history has been written by men, for men. Not until Luce Irigaray did a woman contest the neutrality of place, showing how place is informed by sex and gender. In her 1984 book, An Ethics of Sexual

Difference, she looks back to Aristotle’s definition, and expands the reading of place from a stationary site to an open, moving, and inclusive environment. Edward S. Casey’s

The Fate of Place, investigates several of Irigaray’s texts as they pertain to place and

9 See Jayne Wark, Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006). 10 Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), xiv. 12 gender and points out that never in traditional Western thinking have these issues been discussed. Furthermore, he states, “The irony is that men would like to deny any significant implacement to women, social and political as well as organic and erotic, by positing a female ‘placelessness.’”11 Casey summarizes the main thesis of Irigaray as “the

(sexually differentiated) body and (its) place are so intimately linked as to be virtually interchangeable. The point is not just that there is no place without body, or vice versa, but that body itself is place and that place is as body-bound as the body itself is sexually specific.”12

Casey further explores the origins of place in philosophy, its recession as space and time took center stage, and finally its return to a much different form from its origins.

“Never having vanished into Space (or Time) altogether, place is abounding: this is so even when it is called by various names, and itself names different events and experiences. The newly grasped inclusiveness of place subtends this profusion and makes it possible.”13 When we consider place from a feminist perspective by examining the historic exclusion of women, it is their very difference, their particular locus in an alternative space, that may be one of the most fundamental aspects that led to the liberation of creative freedom for them. This counter-space, this outsider positioning was the place from which they were able to produce and cultivate attention.

More specifically, it is through performance-based interventions that women were able to find a place that was open and available—without restrictions or expectations or

11 Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xiii. 12 Ibid., 322. 13 Ibid., 339. 13 rules—a place where their gender could be explored, articulated and celebrated. In this way, the claiming of new space allowed for their personal inquiries to in turn become political. As Judith Butler has explored in Gender Trouble, traditional categories of male or female are much more fluid than either Casey or Irigaray had proposed. The performative abilities of individuals show that, “genders can be neither true nor false, neither real or apparent, neither original nor derived.”14 Women were able to find space for experimenting and performing that existed outside the paradigms of modernism and male-dominated art worlds. In these early interventions, they asserted their right to belong in place.

14 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 179. 14 CHAPTER 4

EARLY PRACTITIONERS (1970s-1980s)

“I came to look at art as an integrator of disciplines and the role of the artist as developing a new vision for humanity.” – Agnes Denes15

Looking at the work of female artists created in the 1970s and 1980s reveals why and how place and politics are relevant to their performative actions. Counter-

Landscapes brings into the foreground that which is often relegated to the background when discussing performance, land art, conceptual art, etc – which is the pioneering work of women that once defied categorization. Their work broke free from the constraints of the existing system, that had left so many practitioners on the peripheries, or the outside.

The 1970s was the beginning of the movement to gain recognition, equal participation and access to the art world. In the social context of the 1960s—civil rights movement, Black Panthers, Vietnam and anti-war movement, and the Women’s

Liberation Movement—the feminist art movement gained speed. In 1969, Marcia Tucker was named the first woman curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The following year, the first feminist art class, led by visiting artist Judy Chicago, was held at

Fresno State University. Linda Nochlin published her seminal essay in 1971, “Why Have

There Been No Great Women Artists?,” which looked at the historical lack of education provided for women and the inaccessibility to the support structures of the art world that kept them on the outside. Nochlin asserts, “the fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our

15 Agnes Denes, “Living Murals in the Land: Crossing Boundaries of Time and Space.” Public Art Review (Fall/Winter 2005): 42. 15 education—education understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs, and signals.”16 In 1986, the third edition of Janson’s “comprehensive” History of Art was published—and for the very first time, it included a handful of women artists: this was only thirty-three years ago.

Of course, in recent years, exceptions to the rule have been recovered and revealed in revisionist exhibitions and catalogs of numerous important women artists.

Most recently there has been a strong surge in exhibitions of women artists, including the groundbreaking exhibitions Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 at the

Hammer Museum (2017) and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007), at the

Museum of Contemporary Art, but also solo exhibitions of Adrian Piper at Museum of

Modern Art (2018); Lynn Hershman Leeson at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2017); and Mierle Laderman Ukeles at the Queens Museum (2016), to name a few.

Today, women are included in more museum collections, albeit still amounting to under 15% of acquisitions and collections. For example, the Guerrilla Girls’ humorous but critical documentation of the Metropolitan Museum’s statistics from 1989-2012 in a work titled Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? The text states: less than 4% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 76% of the nudes are female (1989); less than 3% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 83% of the nudes are female (2005); and less than 4% of the artists in the Modern Art sections

16 Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Maura Reilly, ed. Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015): 42-68. 16 are women, but 76% of the nudes are female (2012). Or consider Jerry Saltz of the

Village Voice, who suggested in 2005, that the public boycott the Museum of Modern Art until it’s “arrogantly parochial misrepresentation” of women artists was corrected. He reported that of 410 works on the fourth and fifth floor galleries only sixteen women were represented.17

In politics the same issues of equality were coming into finer focus in the 1970s.

While women’s right to vote was won in 1920, it did not begin to end gender discrimination. As the 1960s approached the public became increasingly more vocal about the fight for equality. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a proposed amendment to the United States constitution, was to guarantee equal rights to all citizens regardless of sex, and was first introduced in 1923. With the rise of the women’s movement it gained traction and support. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy created a

“Commission on the Status of Women,” which found that, despite having won the right to vote, women were still discriminated against in virtually every aspect of life. The ERA focused on pay equity, maternity leave, quality affordable childcare, equality in education, and reproductive freedom. Although the bill passed both houses of Congress in 1972, it failed state ratification, gaining thirty-five of thirty-eight needed states and eventually timing out. It was never passed into law.

Well before the ERA, women had to fight for the right to own land. Early property rights—by mid-19th century most states had passed “Married Women’s Property

Act”—gave only married women the right to own property. Not until the 14th amendment

17 Jerry Salz quoted in Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, eds., Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art (London: Merrell, 2007), 19. 17 was ratified in 1868 were women guaranteed—in all states—the rights of citizenship, which prevented the states from discriminating against women by denying them legal rights because of their gender. As the amendment states, “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of the law.” Therefore, the idea of place has always been political, as it has been tied up with women’s own “spatial,” as in economic and physical, lack of rights. The relatively short history of a woman’s right to own land is significant in the context of women artists working in the landscape. Through the law’s eyes, and thereby society’s, a woman’s place was in the home, the domestic, and not the public, realm. One could say that the “outside” remained forbidden to women and the idea of space and land, prohibitive.

Without any assistance or advocacy, women had no choice but to work where they made room for themselves. Women-initiated art organizations proliferated as a response to the fact that museums were not showing women artists. Some spaces, like

A.I.R. Gallery, established in 1972, represented and endorsed women artists only, while other institutions aimed to promote artists in the public sphere, such as Creative Time, established in 1974 by three women and Public Art Fund, founded in 1977 by Doris C.

Freedman. Several publications were launched at the same time, notably High

Performance (founder, publisher, and editor Linda Frye Burnham’s quarterly publication devoted exclusively to performance art ran from 1978-1997), Heresies (a collective feminist journal on art and politics, published from 1977-1993), and Chrysalis: A

Magazine of Women’s Culture (a feminist publication produced from the Woman’s

Building in Los Angeles from 1977-1980).

In contrast to the categorization of art practices—conceptualism, performance,

18 minimalism, land art, feminism—Counter-Landscapes seeks to expose and celebrate the working process of artists whose work transcends divisions and genres, instead arching across broad categories and establishing new ways of making that reverberate in today’s contemporary cultural production. From the margins, these artists experimented and explored the issues that resonated most closely to them. In turn, the “personal was the political” and a feminist consciousness and practice formed. As the social practice and feminist artist Suzanne Lacy (b. 1945) has reflected, “Our analysis was not limited to women. It was extended to other areas of oppression. So, the democratization of art, making the creative process itself along with the fruits of artists’ labors available to a broader audience, was very important.”18

Emerging from the era of conceptual art, the artistic practice of Agnes Denes (b.

1931) arises from in-depth investigations in science, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, poetry, history, and music. Lauded as an “unconventional land artist and environmental visionary,”19 her 1968 work Rice/Tree/Burial was likely the first site-specific land work with ecological concerns. She is also known for her innovative use of metallic inks and other non-traditional materials in creating a prodigious body of exquisitely rendered drawings and prints that delineate her explorations in mathematics, philosophy, geography, science and other disciplines.

18 Suzanne Lacy, “Affinities: Thoughts on An Incomplete History” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, eds. Norma Broude, and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 264. 19 Nick Stillman, “Agnes Denes,” Artforum International 51, no. 5 (January 2013): 203. 19 Born in Budapest, raised in Sweden, and educated in the United States, Denes began as poet, but as she “lost her language”20 moving across countries and cultures she turned toward visual art. Soon after she also gave up painting as it didn’t allow her to translate complex ideas. Her first large-scale earthworks she collectively calls Philosophy in the Land explored ecological, cultural, and social issues: “I came to look at art as an integrator of disciplines and the role of the artist as developing a new vision for humanity.”21

For Wheatfield—A Confrontation, Battery Park Landfill, downtown Manhattan,

1.8 acres of wheat planted and harvested, Sumner 1982, Denes chose a two-acre parcel of landfill in lower Manhattan to plant, grow, and harvest wheat (fig. 1). The small land parcel filled with garbage and construction debris, on the edge of Manhattan, was worth a staggering $4.5 billion dollars. With support from Public Art Fund and countless volunteers over the course of four months, the land was cleaned up, tilled, planted, and harvested: the resulting wheat was sold for under two hundred dollars. According to

Denes, “The living mural represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, and economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger, and ecological concerns.”22

As an early example of environmental art, Denes’ pioneering project also exemplifies how women looked to unwanted and marginalized public sites for

20 Agnes Denes, “Living Murals in the Land: Crossing Boundaries of Time and Space.” Public Art Review Vol. 17, issue 33 (Fall/Winter 2005): 42-47. 21 Ibid., 203. 22 Jill Hartz, ed. Agnes Denes (Ithaca: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1992), 118. 20 transformational opportunities. Although short-lived, the success the artist had of inserting herself into the real-estate of money and power stands as a reminder of what is possible when an artist’s agency rewrites the rules. As Miwon Kwon notes in One Place

After Another it is possible to reframe site specificity as the cultural mediation of broader social, economic, and political processes that organize urban life and urban space.23 For

Denes, the site, in conjunction with the action, made a stronger statement and her intervention, the scale of the project, and the visual and environmental impact—was bolder than other works before it.

Expanding the concepts of space and place are central to the feminist strategies of practice. As philosopher and theorist of social space Henri Lefebvre wrote, “Inasmuch as abstract space [of modernism and capital] tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born

[produced] unless it accentuates differences.”24 Not choosing to assimilate, but to celebrate these differences, is exactly what early feminists used to their advantage. This difference of identity and gender generated new forms.

Bonnie Ora Sherk (b. 1945) is an artist based in New York and San Francisco who works across the fields of performance, sculpture, and public art with a particular interest in natural systems, ecology, and community. In her large-scale work Crossroads

Community (the Farm) (1974–80), Sherk connected disparate land fragments into seven acres of community space that included a preschool, performance sites, gardens, and a

23 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 3. 24 Henri Lefebvre, Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 34. 21 home for domestic animals. By intervening in the unwanted spaces of San Francisco, she manifested a communal living space that encouraged people to learn about natural systems. It has been a groundbreaking model of land transformation for other artists and activists.

In 1970, Sherk began the Sitting Still series, a number of interventions around San

Francisco that investigated fragile and threatened environments and the capacity of performance and challenged the notion of audience. In Sitting Still I, Sherk, in an evening gown, sat on an overstuffed armchair in the midst of a garbage- and water-filled field near a recently constructed freeway in San Francisco to call attention to the neglect of natural resources, such as the watershed where she was sitting (fig. 2). This was the first performance site for the series, which she later enacted in other settings, and it established two major components of her future work: watersheds would become an important and lifelong subject of interest and the performance site would become the community center Crossroads Community (the Farm). The choice of place was both contested but politicized by her presence. As Miwon Kwon suggests, site-specificity is not exclusively an artistic genre but is a problem-idea, as a peculiar cipher of art and spatial politics.25 For Sherk, the sites she chose for the Sitting Still series deepened and complicated the meaning of her performances, from unwanted land in the first performance to the highly valued sidewalk of the city’s financial district in the third of the series (fig. 3). The placement of her body in these specific spaces called attention to the multiple vantage points and ideas that a location can generate (fig. 4).

25 Kwon, One Place After Another, 2. 22 Suzanne Lacy’s prolific career as a visual artist includes works in performance, video, installation, critical writing, and public practice in communities. Engaged with social themes and urban issues, Lacy has addressed topics such as rape, violence, aging, and incarceration through works that range from intimate to large-scale public performances involving hundreds of performers and thousands of audience members.

While studying psychology at California State University, Fresno, in 1969, the first feminist art program was begun by Judy Chicago. Instituted as a “safe place,” outside the framework of a male-dominated society, the program encouraged women to experience themselves more authentically as women, to raise consciousness, and to use those realities to make art. It was here that Suzanne Lacy made a transition from her studies in psychology to art. One year later, Chicago joined Miriam Shapiro at the

California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) to found the Feminist Art Program. Soon after,

Shapiro, Chicago, and their students established Womanhouse, a site for a series of performances and installations in a deserted residential building in Hollywood. At the time there was a palpable proliferation of feminist art projects taking place, but also another influence on Lacy was Allan Kaprow, the famous 1950s originator of

“Happenings.” As artworks that acted as scripted performances, these happenings involved actions, sounds, smells, and random events that usually required audience participation.

In 1978 Lacy and fellow artist Leslie Labowitz (b. 1946) formed Ariadne: A

Social Art Network, an exchange between women in the arts, governmental politics, women’s politics, and media. The focus was sex-violent images in popular culture.

Through Ariadne they developed a media strategy for performance artists, one applicable

23 to a wide range of experiences, expertise and needs. Over three years, Lacy and Labowitz produced seven major public performances that combined performance with ideas of feminist theory, community organizing, media analysis, and activist strategies.

As Jeff Kelley notes in “The Body Politics of Suzanne Lacy” the body was an early medium for Lacy who extended these investigations into moral, social, and political arenas.26 The most famous work made under the auspices of Ariadne was In Mourning and In Rage (1977), a public media event staged for the press on the steps of Los Angeles

City Hall (fig. 5). The event was in response to the sensationalist news coverage of the

Hillside Strangler murder case in which ten women were found raped and murdered along hillsides in suburban Los Angeles in 1977.

Rejecting the approach of the media to inflict fear and hysteria, Lacy and

Labowitz attempted to counter those tactics and present strong women ready to fight back. As recounted in the artist-authored essay “Feminist Media Strategies for Political

Performance,” “Ten seven-foot-tall, heavily veiled women stepped silently from a hearse.

As reporters announced to cameras, ‘We are at City Hall to witness a dramatic commemoration for the ten victims of the Hillside Strangler,’ the women in black delivered an unexpected message. They did not simply grieve but attacked the sensationalized media coverage that contributes to the climate of violence against women. One at a time, the actresses broke their ominous silence to link these murders

26 Jeff Kelley, “Common Work” in Suzanne Lacy. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 226. 24 with all forms of sexual violence (an analysis missing from the media) and to demand concrete solutions.”27

Adrian Piper (b. 1948) is a conceptual artist and analytic philosopher. Piper uses a wide variety of media in her work, including photo-text collage, drawing on pre-printed paper, video installation, site-specific sculptural installation, digital imagery, performance and sound works. Her work actively addresses the viewer and explores the nature of subjecthood and agency, the limits of self, and the continuities and discontinuities of individual identity. Piper is now a highly regarded artist: her seventh traveling retrospective, Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions 1965-2016, originated at the

Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2018 and prior to that she received the Golden

Lion Award for the Best Artist in the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

In 1970 Piper chose to use her body to “become an art object.”28 Deeply affected by the political crisis at the time—noting the bombings in Cambodia, student killings at

Kent State, and the surfacing of the Women’s Movement—she decided to change her work in a significant way. In the Catalysis series (1970-71) she performed a variety of unannounced actions across Manhattan. In Catalysis III, she painted her clothes with sticky white paint, attached a sign saying “WET PAINT,” and went shopping at Macy’s

(fig. 6). In Catalysis IV, Piper dressed conservatively, but stuffed her mouth with a towel,

27 Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, “Feminist Media Strategies for Political Performance,” Cultures in Contention, eds. Douglas Kahn and Diane Neumaier (Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1985), 123-33. 28 John P. Bowles, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011): 192. 25 making her cheeks bulge as the towel hung out of her mouth while she rode the bus, the subway, and the Empire State Building elevator (fig. 7).

The catalysis—or the chemical reaction caused in a given substance by a catalytic agent that is not changed by the encounter itself—in these works is the viewer’s reaction to the artist. With the artist herself becoming the art object, the artwork and its reception are created simultaneously. These performances took place in sites that were not sanctioned by the artworld and for an audience who did not even know they were watching and participating in “art.” Piper’s actions, contrary to objectifying herself as anything stereotypical, announced her refusal to go unnoticed—both as a person of color and as a woman.

Born in Germany, artist Rebecca Horn (b. 1944) has been working for over fifty years in drawing, sculpture, film, writing, and installation. An art student in Hamburg in the late 1960s, Horn made sculptures in polyester and fiberglass and inadvertently poisoned her lungs. For months she stayed in the hospital and then a sanitorium as she healed. The work that came after was, in part, a response to that experience. In that light the perception of the body works morph from something useful (an extension of the body into space) to absolutely hindering (making movement difficult). No matter the purpose, the works create a spatial dynamic between body, space, and object. These explorations are what the artist refers to as, “extended forms of self-perception.”29

Horn’s early work invites the participant to experience and understand space in new ways through body extensions, sculptures to be worn. Moveable Shoulder

29 Carl Haenlein, ed. Rebecca Horn: The Glance of Infinity (Zurich: Scalo Verlag, 1997), 49. 26 Extensions (1971) is constructed with fabric, wood, metal, and feathers and is intended to be worn by one performer; two long black fabric rods are attached to the performer with multiple straps that cross the chest and extend down to the thighs (fig. 8). When the performer moves, the shoulder extensions mirror the movements of the. legs, like scissors in the sky. With a new sense of self, operating in this apparatus, how might she operate differently in the world? Perhaps the artist is questioning power—power of the body over itself, and of one body over another’s.

Many of Horn’s works were worn and documented outside due to their unwieldy scale. Often the size of the performer was more than doubled. Horn’s precision in process leads one to believe that the landscape is intentional, unlike the aim of other performance-based works at the time, such as Bruce Nauman’s performative studio work in which he investigated forms using his body. Horn’s works are announcing themselves through a larger than life presence that connects them to the surrounding environment.

Growing in multiple directions, the series takes on an almost mythical status due to the sheer amount of space that is consumed.

Valie Export (b. 1940) was born in the industrial city of Linz, Austria, where she lived in a convent until the age of fourteen. Later, she rejected her birth and married names, combining a nickname, Valie, with the name from a cheap brand of cigarettes,

Smart Export. She began working in performative actions and films in the late 1960s amidst an avant-garde art scene dominated by Viennese Actionists. She was overt in her opposition to the machismo and misogyny of the Actionists, and in one performance in

1968 she walked her accomplice, Peter Weibel on a leash, like a dog.

27 Over a ten-year period from 1972-1982, Export photographed herself in the urban landscape of Vienna, in a series named Body Configurations. Individual photographs have titles such as, Bent Up, Closed In, Curved Up, Encircle, Elongate, Fill Out, Fit On,

Give In, Laid Over, Pressed Upon, Shut in, Squat Within, and Squat In (fig. 9). Although taken on urban streets, Export is the sole person in these photographs, and she is isolated against the city landscape. A vulnerable female body rendered in opposition to often male-connoted public spaces. As Rebecca Solnit articulated years later in Storming the

Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, public spaces have historically been hostile toward women: unsafe and aggressive. Squatting on corners, lying along curved street gutters or on stairways, Export’s sometimes contorted body seems at once out of place and also a perfectly situated-part of the architecture.

Asked why she chose streets and urban spaces for performances, she replied, “I wanted to be provocative, to provoke, but also aggression was part of my intention. I wanted to provoke, because I sought to change the people’s way of seeing and thinking.”30 Her work was a political act in which she challenged ideas around women and public space, a topic with historical weight, and contemporary relevance. Feminist thought has sought to address these issues, from early thinkers such as Mary

Wollstonecraft in her “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792) that accused men of enslaving women, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who set out to demonstrate that the responsibilities of life weigh equally on men as they do on women in “Solitude of Self”

(1892) to Janet Wolff’s essay “Gender and the Haunting of Cities (Or, the Retirement of

30 Valie Export. Valie Export. Montreuil: Editions de l'oeil, 2003: 148. 28 the Flâneur)” looking at the nineteenth century role of the flâneur, as gendered male, and thereby resulting in the marginalization of women in public spaces. Even events such as

Take Back the Night, begun in the 1960s and continuing to today, inspired by the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin aim to re-negotiate public and private space for women.

Throughout the 1960s, Eleanor Antin (b. 1935) and her husband, David Antin, were deeply involved in the literary and avant-garde circles in New York. In 1968 Antin moved with her husband and their one-year old son when David was appointed to a professorship in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California San Diego

(UCSD). In Southern California, Antin soon became involved with the feminist movement through Suzanne Lacy and Arlene Raven, and began doing performances at the Woman’s Building in 1973. She taught at University of California Irvine for two years before earning a tenured position at the University of California San Diego, where she remained for thirty years.

For her 1999 retrospective, curator Howard Fox positions Antin as an artist who came of age during the Fluxus movement, which he claims had a great and lasting impression on her and her work. The intellectual underpinnings of the artists in the movement, which Antin, shared, included an anarchic, innocent, giddy open-mindedness to any artistic strategy, form, or content. After explorations in acting, poetry, painting, sculpture, and photography, Antin turned her attention to a transformation of self through multiple personae. She developed a series of characters she enacted through a lens of cross-dressing and gender bending, the first persona being the King, the archetypal male.

Her transformation began by adding a beard, documented in one of her earliest performances in 1972 as she applies the beard bit by bit. From these performances she

29 created an hour-long monologue titled Battle of the Bluffs, which she presented around the United States and at the Venice Biennale in 1976.

The story of the Battle of the Bluffs arose from a real-life situation in which rapacious developers clear cut a stretch of beach where the rare Torrey pines grew in order to build a housing complex. The King, played by Antin, rallies support from other concerned citizens in order to protect the land and the trees from ecological disaster. The citizen militia takes on the developers, but in the end are defeated and exiled. As Fox noted, “The King’s monologue is a rumination on power, the responsibilities and burdens of ethical leadership, the loss of personal power, and the onset of ecological destruction.”31 The Wonder of It All, from The King of Solano Beach documents the artist engaging in everyday activities around town (fig. 10). The strength of Antin’s performance lies in the story of the King, but also in the notion that she could change her gender through her outward appearance and actions. Gender fluidity was not as common a term at the time, but the idea that sex and gender were different was beginning to be explored. Her actions epitomized the notion that gender is a cultural construct, and that the individual has the freedom to imagine who and how they engage with the world: to shed the limits of self.

Working for over fifty years, Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939) is recognized as a significant artist whose work is focused on feminism, labor, and ecological issues. The catalyst for a career investigating these issues was her Manifesto for Maintenance Art

1969! Proposal for an exhibition “Care,” which was published by Artforum in 1971, as

31 Howard N. Fox, Eleanor Antin (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1999), 61. 30 part of writer Jack Burnham’s essay on art and systems theory.32 Early on, Burnham understood Ukeles’ feminist strategies and the challenge they presented to the structured art world. In an essay for her recent monograph, Patricia C. Phillips describes the publication of her manifesto as a “major threshold for the artist.”33

The ideas of maintaining and caring likely originate from a variety of sources: most notably her childhood, and her experiences with motherhood. Born in Colorado in

1939 her parents were both displaced refugees from Europe in the early 20th century. Her father was a civic leader, a Talmudic and secular scholar, a professor at the University of

Colorado, Denver, and a rabbi for almost five decades. Her mother was a civic and community builder, and Ukeles grew up studying Hebrew, with the traditions and rituals of Judaism. As a young adult she moved to New York and later married Jacob Ukeles, who worked in the New York City Department of City Planning.

Lucy Lippard, critic and early collaborator, has noted that, “In a reversal (or confirmation) of the feminist credo ‘the personal is political,’ women artists in the early

1970s were not considered serious if they also had lives. Mothers were not contenders.

Some hid all evidence of domestic life when curators, collectors, or critics came to call; others defiantly flaunted our offspring as proof that women could “do it all.” Ukeles calmly celebrated her three children, born between 1968 and 1972.”34

32 Jack Burnham, “Problems of Criticism, IX,” Artforum 9, no. 5 (January 1971): 40-45. 33 Patricia C. Phillips, “Making Necessity Art: Collisions of Maintenance and Freedom,” in Patricia C. Phillips, Tom Finkelpearl, Larissa Harris, and Lucy R. Lippard. Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art (Queens: Queens Museum of Art, 2016), 40. 34 Lucy Lippard, “Never Done: Women’s Work by Mierle Laderman Ukeles,” in Patricia C. Phillips, Tom Finkelpearl, Larissa Harris, and Lucy R. Lippard. Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art (Queens: Queens Museum of Art, 2016), 17. 31 Beginning in 1969, Lippard organized three exhibitions about conceptual art in cities along the West Coast of the United States and Canada, as well as in Buenos Aires.

The titles derived from the current population or census of the venue city. At Seattle Art

Museum she curated 557,087 in 1969, followed in 1970 by 995,000 in Vancouver, and

2,972,453 in Buenos Aires. Her final exhibition, c.7500, originated in Valencia,

California, in 1973, and focused exclusively on women artists. It was the site of West

Coast Conceptual art and home of California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where Judy

Chicago and Miriam Shapiro led the Feminist Art Program, and where Womanhouse was created.

For, c.7,500, Ukeles reached out to Lippard to propose performances at various venues on the tour and six of the ten institutions agreed to host a “live” intervention.

Most notably, Ukeles performed four times over a long weekend at the Wadsworth

Atheneum in July 1973 with a performance project that was the act of cleaning both inside and outside the museum (fig. 11).

From her personal position as a working artist and mother faced with coping with massive amounts of cleaning, Ukeles’ manifesto outlines a bigger picture—a maintenance of the species and survival systems that more often than not, falls upon the woman or the less powerful (often the same). For Ukeles, if avant-garde art (conceptual, process-based works) was to continue, she suggested that the meaning behind the process would be most impactful. Maintenance is an everyday required task, whether by individuals, paid laborers, or city employees and her manifesto proposes an exhibition

32 titled “Care,” which would highlight the labor, or as she states, “my working will be the work.”35

Ukeles has worked as the official, unsalaried Artist-in-Residence at the New York

City Department of Sanitation since 1977. One of her most visible projects, Touch

Sanitation Performance (1979-1980), consisted of her thanking and shaking hands with every member of the Sanitation department, totaling 8,500 workers over the course of eleven months. Like most her work, Touch Sanitation brought visibility to the invisible, or generally unacknowledged, work of collecting trash: a chance for maintenance labor and artistic labor to gain equal ground. Ukeles challenges the distinction between the public and private spheres and allows space for dialogue about how we might design better structures to support sustainability and equality.

The work of Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) spans across performance, photography, installation, and sculpture, while intersecting with issues of race, gender, and nationality.

As an adolescent, Mendieta was sent into exile by her parents—from Castro’s Cuba to the United States, where she lived in orphanages and foster homes. In her art, she returned time and again to this traumatic experience.

In 1972, having just received a M.A. degree in painting from the University of

Iowa, she re-enrolled to pursue an M.F.A. in the brand-new Multimedia and Video Art program, established by Hans Breder. During this time, she developed a personal vocabulary in which her own body became the medium for performances. In 1977,

Mendieta began tracing the silhouette of her five-foot-tall body on earth, sand, tree

35 Ibid., 210. 33 trunks, and fields, in the environs of Iowa City and near Oaxaca, Mexico. She actively removed herself from the finished work and described them as “earth-body sculptures.”36

This was a prolific period and two hundred individual pieces are documented in the

Silueta series (fig. 12). At the same time, she began using film and photography to document the pieces, developing a personal vocabulary in which her own body became the medium for performances and the traces the final product:

I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re- establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source. Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth…I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body. This obsessive act of reasserting my ties with the earth is really the reactivation of primal beliefs…[in] an omnipresent female force, the after-image of being encompassed within the womb, is a manifestation of my thirst for being.37

In the mid-seventies, Mendieta routinely traveled to Mexico and actively engaged with the art scene, which she felt a strong connection to. After graduation in 1977 she moved to New York and immediately gained recognition in the alternative and flourishing arts scene. She received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts

(1978, 1980) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980), as well as joined the A.I.R. Gallery, the first and most prestigious cooperative gallery of women artists. While she had gained entry into the art world, her work was not understood as distinctly performance, earthwork, sculpture, or conceptual. In the exhibition catalog of the large-scale

36 Petra Barreras del Rio and John Perreault, eds. Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987), 13. 37 Ibid., 10. 34 retrospective, Traces: Ana Mendieta (2013), art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson examines the multiple ways Mendieta’s work eschews any neat categorization as “feminist art,” If any category fits, Bryan-Wilson states, it would be “Third World feminism”—one powerfully connected to intersectionality, which as a trope views, “anti-racism, anti- capitalism and anti-sexism as interwoven, one that addresses questions of economic exploitation, access to health care, homophobia, poverty, workplace organising, immigrant justice, environmental racism, the feminisation of labor, overconsumption, intimacy, cultural obliteration, decolonisation, etc.”38 Whereas intersectionality continues the ideas of justice that began with the women’s movement but through a broader lens of inequalities that is more inclusive to the multiple forms of discrimination. Understanding

Mendieta’s work in this context opens up a much larger critical field to investigate.

Similar to other artists who worked outside of the frame, Mendieta did not receive adequate credit for her contributions to the field, even after her untimely death in 1985.

Her and her contemporaries worked to break open the field, in order to gain access, and sometimes that expansive practice, difficult to name, was left unidentified.

The Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld (b. 1943) is known primarily for her work in printmaking, video art, and socially engaged art practice. She founded the artists’ collective CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Art/Collective of Art Actions) in 1979 with the poet Raúl Zurita, the sociologist Fernando Bolcells, the writer and artist Diamela

Eltit, and the artist Juan Castillo. In 1983, the group designed the political symbol “No +”

(No more), which was soon employed by other artists, activists, politicians, and others to

38 Adrian Heathfield, Stephanie Rosenthal, and Julia Bryan-Wilson, eds. Traces: Ana Mendieta (London: Hayward Publications, 2013), 34. 35 denounce social injustices. Since then, Rosenfeld has been the recipient of the highest honors given in Chile and represented Chile in the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

In 1979, Rosenfeld first presented Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (A mile of crosses on the pavement) on Avenue Manquehue in Santiago, Chile (fig. 13). From the accompanying video, she is seen measuring and taping the dividing line of the road, turning dashes into white crosses. She works alone, a woman in the street, repeating the action over and over. While the symbol of a plus may be the forerunner to the No + political symbol developed later, most theorists suggest it represents a cross, or a disruption of an existing symbol. Turning minus signs into plus signs subverted the official road signs and called into the question the designated order of things.

As Andrea Giunta notes in Poetics of Resistance, the 1970s was a time in Chile, and in many cities around Latin America, that citizens were, “taking to the streets to demand greater representations, more rights, and justice.”39 On September 11, 1973, a

United States-backed coup d’état overthrew the democratically elected socialist government, Unidad Popular, and brought notorious dictator Augusto Pinochet to power for the next seventeen years. The government’s suppression of opposition led artists to create practices of minimal notice so as to produce what Giunta describes as a

“palimpsestic language.”40

Rosenfeld did not work alone; there were many women in Chile in the 1970s and

80s that produced works that challenged the existing systems and structures, both

39 Andrea Giunta, “Poetics of Resistance,” in Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960- 1985 (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2017), 251. 40 Ibid., 251. 36 patriarchal and repressive. As Nelly Richard has written, women activists from the generation that emerged during Pinochet’s military dictatorship, worked to explore themes of politics, domination and subordination, representation, power, culture and citizenship from the perspective of gender.41

Between 1979 and 1984 Rosenfeld performed this action in several locations: (in

Chile) Santiago, Valparaíso, the northern desert highways, the Easter Island airport runways, and (in the United States), the mall in front of the White House in Washington,

D.C. In Chile, her actions went under the radar of censorship due to the metaphoric nature of the work. Additionally, she was working outside the mainstream art world, as

Jaqueline Barnitz notes how artists involved with body, performance, and video art worked largely outside the mainstream circuits.42

Beth Ames Swartz (b. 1936) was born in New York City, where she was raised by the guiding principles of mitzvah (Hebrew world for good deed) and culture. After attending a high school for music and art, she went on to earn a Bachelor of Science degree from Cornell University in Ithaca and a Master of Arts from New York University in 1959. That same year she moved with her then-husband to Arizona, where she has remained on and off ever since. Over her sixty-year career her art practice has embodied the belief that by healing ourselves, we can heal the world. She is, as art historian and critic Donald Kuspit has observed, a “postmodern spiritualist.”43

41 Nelly Richard, Poetics of Dissent: Paz Errázuriz - Lotty Rosenfeld. Pavilion of Chile, Venice Biennale 2015 (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2015), 21. 42 Jacqueline Barnitz, Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 296. 43 Donald B. Kuspit, John D. Rothschild, Beckian Goldberg, Fritz Beckian, Fu Du, Bai Li, and Arizona State University. Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. The 37 In fact, Swartz is an ardent reader, practices meditation, and is a student of

Kabbalah, philosophy, and Eastern religions. The series titled Israel Revisited is a culmination of her exploration into the four elements, as well as a reflection of the influence of feminism, environmentalism, and Jewish history. The works were created in

1980 as Swartz traveled to ten historical sites throughout Israel and attributed each to an important biblical and lesser known female figure. In Red Sea #1, she honors Miriam, who, like her brother Moses, was a prophet and leader of the Israelites (fig. 14).

According to legend Miriam’s courage supported the Hebrews when they crossed the Red

Sea.

Using heavy rag paper, Swartz painted and pierced the surface, then covered in soil and set fire to. The documentation shows the artist dressed in white, performing her own ritual to honor the women in history who have been brave and whose stories are not prominent narratives. The tattered pieces are then reconstructed in her studio, intending to complete the cycle of life, death, and re-birth. While there is reference to the action painting and physicality and process of a Jackson Pollock, there is clearly more emphasis placed on the site, as if the act of painting can connect the artist to the landscape. In the artist’s mind, the resulting work is the manifestation of the fire and rebirth necessary for transformation and healing rather than destruction and obliteration, both male tropes.

Word in Paint = Hui Hua Zhong De Zhe Xue (Tempe, AZ: Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Global Studies Initiative, College of Public Programs at the ASU Downtown Phoenix Campus, 2008), 12. 38 CHAPTER 5

NEXT GENERATION (1990s-2000s)

“Understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonized people.” – bell hooks44

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the emergence of postcolonial studies, which originated in 1978 with the publication of Edward Said’s highly influential book,

Orientalism. His text questioned Western constructs of “the Orient,” thereby initiating a dialogue that explored how the “the Occident” set itself against the “the Orient” in order to gain strength and identity. Subsequently, postcolonial thinkers such as Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha have problematized the encounter between Europe and the cultures it colonized. Vanguard feminist issues and other unresolved social concerns including racism, the growing AIDS crisis, homophobia, and economic inequalities were being urgently addressed by critics, intellectuals, policy makers and artists alike. Many were featured in the landmark 1993 Whitney Biennial, the first major exhibition survey of contemporary art where white male artists were in the minority, giving priority to artists then seen as outside the mainstream. Curated by Thelma Golden, John G. Hanhardt, Lisa

Phillips, and Elisabeth Sussman, it is now known as the multi-cultural, identity-politics, political, or watershed biennial. The museum tags designed by the artist Daniel Joseph

Martinez famously read "I can't imagine ever wanting to be white."

The influence of the early women practitioners transcends gender and race as the next generation of artists emerges to push against the societal mainstream. Pope.L (b.

44 bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 36 (January 1989): 21. 39 1955) began his career in the 1970s, and his multidisciplinary practice challenges preconceived notions embedded in contemporary culture to create works in performance, installation, video, sculpture, painting, and writing. Through endurance, provocation, and absurdity he explores interests in language, systems, gender, race, and community. He has a long history of street performances, such as Thunderbird Immolation (1978), where he sat on the sidewalk outside high end galleries on Broadway in New York with alcohol and matches in apparent attempt to do himself harm or Roach Motel Black (1978), where he walked and crawled the streets with a roach motel atop his head.

Both himself as a black man, and through the use of performance, he exposes and counters the oppressive and separatist conditions of artistic and social cultures. As

Kristine Stiles has noted, “Aesthetic actions, realized within such eruptive contexts, characterize the social criticality of Performance Art and establish its efficacy at the juncture between culture and real-time politics.”45 While at first glance Pope.L’s actions may seem absurd, there is an important social criticality that points to the gap between prosperity and the dispossessed. In Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000) he sat on a toilet while eating a symbol of capitalism in a “voodoo” ritual.

Well known for his “crawls,” or physically punishing street performances that date back to the 1970s, not only does Pope.L make his audience feel discomfort, but he puts his own body under heightened duress. As C. Carr notes, “Pope.L’s endurance pieces are about the vulnerable black male body and what he describes as “lack,” a sense

45 Kristine Stiles, “Thunderbird Immolation: Burning Racism,” quoted in Mark H.C. Bessire, ed. William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America© (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 38. 40 of insufficiency and damage.46 In the crawl works, the artist assumes a horizontal position, one associated with the homeless on the city streets, and makes visible what most people would prefer to keep invisible. For the Great White Way (2001-2009)

Pope.L crawled down numerous blocks of New York’s Broadway while dressed in a superman costume with, in lieu of a cape, a skateboard attached to his back (fig. 15).

Much of Pope.L’s work has looked to the history of the United States relationship to difference in economics and race. Originally, he took to the streets in a crawl and asked others to join him in “giving up their verticality” to address homelessness and

“have-not-ness.”47 Yet as the crawls continued they became more about the black male body and issues of race and struggle in America. Each time a performance is enacted it lasts as long as Pope.L can physically withstand it. The duration of the overall project alludes to the depth of the issues and the strain and work required to find resolution to the race and class issue in the United States. The contested notions of race and public space are an ongoing debate as seen through the necessity of the recent Black Lives Matter movement that campaigns against violence and systemic racism towards black people.

Originally trained as an architect, Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. 1959) moved to

Mexico City in 1986, where he continues to live and work. Issues of social unrest and urbanization in Mexico inspired his artistic pursuit and his multifaceted projects have included public actions, installations, video, paintings and drawings. From commissioning sign painters to copy his paintings or filming his efforts to enter the center of a tornado to carrying a leaking can of paint along the contested Israel/Palestine border

46 C. Carr quoted in Ibid., 48. 47 Ibid., 49. 41 and equipping hundreds of volunteers to move a colossal sand dune ten centimeters,

Alÿs’ practice is marked by innovation and provocation. In part because of his position as outsider in Mexico, but also partly due to his artistic nomadism, Alÿs chooses contentious and political locations that he activates through his own presence early on, or later, through the presence of hundreds of people.

In the seminal durational performance, Paradox of Praxis I (1997), Alÿs pushes a block of ice around Mexico City for nine hours, until it melts entirely (fig. 16). This is a simple and seemingly innocuous, yet laborious action that personifies the expression

“sometimes doing something leads to nothing.” Formally, the work is a critical reflection on Minimalism; taking the ubiquitous cube from the gallery to the street, but also affecting its complete dissolution. Along with several other durational works of his at the time, this could be understood as a precursor to Alÿs’ most famous work When Faith

Moves Mountains (2000). Five hundred volunteers with shovels worked together on the outskirts of Lima, Peru to move a sand dune several inches. Similar to the dissolving block of ice, the movement of sand that can easily be displaced by wind appears at first glance to be an exercise in futility. And yet can be read as a powerful allegory of the political moment Alÿs experienced when visiting Lima in the final months of the

Fujimori dictatorship as tensions rose between the government and the resistance. As a representation of the circular politics of promise and the principle of “maximum effort, minimum result,” Alÿs describes the work as “Land art for the landless.”48 This is an obvious reference to the place of privilege held by male land artists who had always

48 Mark Godfrey, Klaus Biesenbach and Kerryn Greenberg, eds. Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 19. 42 garnered ample institutional support on vast scale. Alÿs was working as an outsider in

Latin America, which meant he was working from a place of in-between belonging, not unlike the 70s women artists who were marginalized by their own artworlds.

Christian Philipp Müller (b. 1957) is a Berlin-based Swiss conceptual artist and leading figure in institutional critique and social practice. Through collaborative, interdisciplinary and site-specific works, he examines issues from social and aesthetic concerns to design, national histories, and the institutional framing of culture. For his first solo exhibition in Brussels, 1991, he presented an auction of his own works–inspired by an auction house annexed by the hosting museum.

In 1993, he represented the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, presenting an intervention at the pavilion that included removing the exterior garden wall and replanting the untended underbrush. The move functioned as a representation of transgressing national borders, a concept he enacted through a series of performances in which he illegally crossed Austria’s “green” borders (fig. 17). In the months leading up to the exhibition Müller, along with a photographer, set out to cross the eight nation-states bordering Austria. Müller disguised himself as a hiker, but also adapted his dress to conform to national clichés and folkloric customs about each place. His work plays with the ideas around territorial borders but also the performance of identity. Although his interventions went unnoticed by officials, his work lived on in the artistic realm. At a time when acute nationalism is on the rise, his work remains relevant as it questions the integrity of fixed ideals and fixed locations.

Through a complex research-oriented practice, Jennifer Allora (b. 1974) &

Guillermo Calzadilla (b. 1971) have been working at the intersections of culture, history,

43 and geopolitics for over twenty years. Incorporating performance, sculpture, sound, video, and photography, they find humor and irony as a way to transform the way we see and understand the world. One of their early collaborations, Chalk, was made for the

Biennial de Lima, Peru and investigated the ephemeral nature of collective drawing with monumental sticks of white chalk placed in a public square.

Another early work, Land Mark (Foot Prints), uses as its point of reference a disputed landscape in Puerto Rico, the island of Vieques, which was used by the United

States military for bombing practice over the course of sixty years (fig. 18). After a native civilian was unintentionally killed by a bomb in 1999 the island became a site of protests.

The artists collaborated with the activist groups to design the sole of shoes to be used in these civil disobedience actions.

In addition to the critical importance of the site for this artwork, language is an important component. The word “landmark” refers to a prominent place that serves as a guide, or a marker of the boundary of land, a historical preservation site, or even an iconic moment in time. The artists split the word in half so “mark” becomes a verb, something that marks the land. The word then invokes the idea of land marked by colonization, land marked by war, or any number of injustices that can be “marked.”

The resulting work is a series of photographs of the footprints of individuals who participated in the civil obedience actions—people who stamped the terrain and marked their presence. The image designs reflect disputed territories: geopolitical, corporeal, and linguistic. One of the only legible slogans reads, “La Marina es Muerte,” or “the Navy is

Death.” As in other performance work, the actions are ephemeral, but the documentation and the ideas are lasting—the mark-making lives on.

44 Marina Abramović (b. 1946) has pioneered performance as a visual art over the long arc of her career, which began in Yugoslavia in the 1970s. Born in Belgrade in

1943, she studied Fine Arts before moving to Amsterdam where she met her partner of thirteen years, Ulay. With the body as both the subject and the medium, her work has combined concept with physicality, endurance, empathy, complicity, control, and even danger. Such early works include Rest Energy (1980), in which a taut bow and arrow, aimed at the heart of Abramović, is held by her partner Ulay for four tension filled- minutes and ten seconds; or Rhythm 0 (1974), where she offered herself as an object for audience to inflict either pleasure or pain through a number of objects, the most dangerous a pistol with one bullet.

Speaking about her most well-known performance Artist is Present at the

Museum of Modern Art, New York, atrium in 2010, she declared, “I have to be like a mountain.”49 For three months, eight hours a day she sat motionless, in silent eye-contact with strangers one by one. The photograph Looking at the Mountains (2010), from a series titled Back to Simplicity, eludes to that moment (fig. 19). Abramović stands in the foreground of the image, dressed in white, facing away from the viewer and looking toward an expansive mountain range. With the dramatic lighting from the cloudy sky and the stance of the artist, the photograph recalls the quintessential Romantic painting of the concept of the sublime by Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c.

1818). Harnessing the awe, terror, and danger with which artists approached nature

49 James Westcott, “Interview: Artist Marina Abramović: ‘I have to be like a mountain,” The Guardian, Friday March 19, 2010, accessed July 27, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/mar/19/art-marina-abramovic-moma. 45 through the sublime, Abramović recasts herself, the woman artist, at the center of the frame.

In her 2015 Ted talk she describes the importance of taking time to disconnect from technology and to connect on the individual level.50 Through slow walking, drinking water, and doing any number of mundane daily movements with intention,

Abramović believes one can begin to experience first-hand the connection with nature and with people. Additionally, she opened the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) that aims to expand the accessibility of time-based work and create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields. Both the MAI and her photographic series, conjure the hopes of the artist to return to a simpler life, especially in our current time.

50 Marina Abramović, “An Art Made of Trust, Vulnerability, and Connection.” TED2015 (March 2015), https://www.ted.com/talks/marina_abramovic_an_art_made_of_trust_vulnerability_and_ connection?language=en, accessed July 27, 2019. 46 CHAPTER 6

CONTEMPORARY WORKS NOW (2010-2020)

“While feminism is a broader initiative encompassing all levels of cultural experience, its insights have become so central to our understanding of the world that it informs most modes of visual culture analysis at this point, whether its dependence is acknowledged or not.” – Amelia Jones51

“This larger vision of feminist art—embracing art as an agent in social transformation—is a radical legacy that must be reclaimed, since the questions asked today by younger artists are so similar to those upon which our work was built.” – Suzanne Lacy 52

How far have we progressed in the nearly fifty years since women artists took their practice outside, asserted their place, and drew our attention to matters of inequality and inequity in labor, commerce, and community? At times it feels like the feminist movement did not happen at all, as change comes with painful slowness. To this day, art critics cite the number of white, male solo exhibitions in major United States museums and the disparity women artists and women in the workplace still face. While women and artists of color may indeed not experience anything near equality, progress is slowly being made. Recently African American artist Carrie Mae Weems had a mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, (Carrie Mae Weems: Three

Decades of Photography and Video, 2014) and Nigerian-born curator and writer Owkui

Enwezor directed the 56th Venice Biennale (All the World’s Future, 2015). The 2017

51 Amelia Jones, “Introduction,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, (New York: Routledge, 2003): 1. 52 Suzanne Lacy, “Affinities: Thoughts on an Incomplete History,” in Norma Broude, and Mary D. Garrard, eds. The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 264. 47 Whitney Biennial was the first (of its 78 installments) that featured a majority of artists from traditionally marginalized backgrounds.

However, feminist activism, theory, and new platforms for discourse and convening are absolutely still needed today. There seems to be a default setting for the white male perspective and without challenge and visible protests challenging the status quo, there will continue to be regression. Artists may not need feminist tactics in their work but everyone needs to maintain these strategies to keep their voices heard— intersectionality is key. The notion that this can be packaged as a movement, or that there are “waves” of thought, is misplaced. “Feminist practice” is stronger terminology referring to the necessity that we must incorporate these strategies in a habitual, continual and organic way, requiring constant tending and realigning.

The work of Ana Teresa Fernández (b. 1980) is a dynamic reminder of the power of place and the potency in messaging that the female body contributes. Through her unique art practice, Fernández traces a narrative over multiple mediums: performance, drawing, painting, and video. The stories she tells are of the disappeared and displaced— those without voice—but also from her singular perspective as a woman and a bi-national citizen that has lived always between cultures, languages, and places.

Water has been a constant feature in the work of Fernández, especially in her performative actions. For one, she is an avid swimmer and surfer and completely at home in the water. But according to her, she was once called a “wetback,” a derogatory term for Latin American migrants in the United States, and the sting and humiliation stuck with her. Combined with the many myths of women and water over time—the siren in

Greek mythology, and La Llorona in Mexican folklore to name two—Fernández chose

48 water to symbolize the act of ablution. In early works she adorned a little black dress, stilettos, and threw herself into pools to swim, used her hair to mop the water on the beach, and painted the United States/Mexico border fence, that rises out of the ocean, the color of the sky so it disappeared if only for a moment.

In the series Of Bodies and Borders (2017), Fernández returns to the common theme of water in her work (fig. 20). In her gender specific outfit of a Little Black Dress she sets out to pay homage to the thousands of migrants who have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean as they escape war, poverty, and persecution. Beginning from a performance off the coast of Greece, the artist shrouded herself in a white sheet and submerged herself under the sea. The result is an ethereal and disorientating picture of darkness and light. Like a chiaroscuro painting, the video returns dignity and grace to those who lost their lives. Following the performance, Fernández takes stills and translates them into large-scale, hyper-realistic oil paintings and graphite drawings. The artist’s haunting enactment of struggle acts as a reminder of the beauty and the preciousness of life, and our own responsibility to overcome obstacles for ourselves and for others. The specificity of place is of utmost importance in Fernández’s work. Her gendered body reminds the viewer of the vulnerability of some.

Sarah Cameron Sunde (b. 1977) is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist and director working at the intersection of performance, video, and public art. While theorists and writers often connect socially engaged practices to lineages of radical democratic politics, evolutionary economics, and human cooperation they fail to highlight in any

49 significant way the deeply invested practices of women artists from the 1970s through today.53 Women continue to question our human relationship with the environment.

Standing alone in the midst of a tidal bay in Katwijk aan Zee on the west coast of the Netherlands, Sunde withstood a twelve-hour tidal cycle (fig. 21). Part of a series of works titled 36.5 / a durational performance with the sea, begun in 2013, the artist stood for twelve hours and forty-six minutes as the sea level rose to her neck and back down again. According to a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (released in 2014), tidal flooding, driven by sea level rise, will dramatically increase in United States East and Gulf Coast communities over the next thirty years. Many communities already experience frequent flooding during high tides, and as sea level rises over the next fifteen to thirty years, tidal flooding is expected to increase.

Using her body as well as her endurance, Sunde calls attention to rising sea levels by performing in locations in places already experiencing tidal shifts. She has performed in Bass Harbor, Maine; Akumal Bay, Mexico; San Francisco Bay, California; the North

Sea, The Netherlands; Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh; and Bay of All Saints, Salvador,

Brazil; and has plans to perform in Africa, New Zealand, and New York by the end of

2020. The quiet, contemplative tone of the performance is paired with the incredible duration of an event that enthralls on-lookers attention and often inspires them to join her in the water. The captivating images of her lone body withstanding the elements certainly

53 See for example, writings by Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2011); Tom Finkelpearl, What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2012); and Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013 [2004]). 50 make viewers aware of the dramatic shifts in the tide and the effects that climate change will soon have on each of us.

Early training as a painter lends to Zhou Tao’s (b. 1976) use of color and composition in video works that create a distinct and poetic visual language. Much of his work has been performance-based, with an interest in human bodies navigating unique environments. The video 1234 (2007-8) depicts corporate staff in China’s newly urbanized cities, Shanghai and Shenzhen, performing a communal morning activity intended to promote productivity. The editing allows for a visually engaging work that critically looks at the modern state of working. Or Blue and Red (2014) that looks to the contaminated landscapes of industrial zones in Shaoguan, Guangdong to scenes of a military coup during a smoke-filled riot in Bangkok. The contrast of scenes may appear different but the videos remind us that they are simultaneous- not able to be easily categorized.

After Reality (2013) is non-narrative, nor presented as fact, but instead a series of movements of bodies through space (fig. 22). The environment begins in the lush landscape outside Guangzhou, China, where numerous men in swim suits navigate the wetlands in an activity unknown to the viewer. The movements are at once calculated and senseless, in an area that is between the urban and the rural. Quickly the work cuts to a different scene, from day to night and from summer to winter. Its counterpart is an artificial environment, in Paris, where plants grow amidst a surreal architecture. No matter the scene, the artist labors at unknown and often mundane activities—collecting leaves, moving earth, adjusting vines, walking, or moving an island of plants

51 downstream. Together the actions form a calming visual order out of an otherwise confusing set of events.

The power of nature and the thin veil between life and death are constant themes in the work of Antonia Wright (b. 1979). Both pleasure and pain come together in the video installation Under the Water Was Sand, Then Rocks, Miles of Rocks, Then Fire

(2016) (fig. 23). The video component produces suspense, as the artist, dressed in a vibrantly colorful and billowy costume, walks uncertainly over an icy lake through wind and the sound of creaking ice. As she gets closer to the camera, she suddenly breaks through the surface and begins to sink. Although briefly buoyant from the thick layers of silk, she quickly sinks completely underwater and out of sight. Accompanying the video is an installation of night-blooming jasmine emitting a pleasant fragrance, that while in contrast to the action, brings the work together through smell, video, light, color, and sound. In the darkened video space, day becomes night as the plants release their fragrance, and every day at 5:30 P.M. the transition to day happens as the lights come on and the flowers close.

The work is a re-enactment from a childhood event, in which Wright fell into a frozen lake while exploring an off-limits reservoir. While she took a week to recover from the effects of hypothermia, she also experienced a kind of elation from surviving a near death scenario. The notion of the sublime is at play, like the Turner landscape painting that inspired the costume, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons

(1835). The artist is set against the backdrop of a pristine natural environment, in which the landscape prevails.

52 Angela Ellsworth is an interdisciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance. Early on in her career, Ellsworth painted figurative works, and her interest in the body has been a constant no matter the medium: from intricately beaded sculptures of clothing and bonnets to gestural drawings made while walking. A series titled The Plural Wife Project boasts some of her most well- known works that draw inspiration from her own upbringing in the Mormon faith. As a fourth-generation Mormon, her ancestors were some of the earliest to pioneer the West, where they spoke in tongues, practiced polygamy, and mysticism. No longer part of the religion, Ellsworth relates her own identity as a queer woman to the non-normative inter- relationships of her lineage.

From a series of performances titled Love Circles, Is This the Place I (2006) brings together notions of mapping, place, and counterculture views (fig. 24). The performance consisted of a walk from an art center in Phoenix to the enormous Church of

Latter-Day Saints’ Temple in Mesa. Ellsworth walked alongside her partner (same sex marriage was not legalized in Arizona until 2014), Tania Katan, in matching red and black-fringed outfits until they reached the Temple to exchange marriage vows. The walk was mapped out in a half-circle formation and documented through photography. For

Counter-Landscapes, Ellsworth and Katan completed the second half of the circle in a performative walk, which is represented in the exhibition through a new painting, accompanied by ephemera from the original. Additionally, the organization Museum of

Walking (MoW), co-founded by Ellsworth, hosts two public programs over the duration of the exhibition. As an artist-led educational resource committed to the advancement of

53 walking as an art practice, MoW connects people, land, action, and site through the everyday act of walking.

Saskia Jordá is an interdisciplinary artist working on site-specific installations, soft sculptures, performance, and drawings. Her work references the relationship between body, space, cultural identity, and mapping a sense of place. Through an exploration of line, she has often merged craft and its relationship to the body, with the language of cartography. Disputed Territories–Disputed Bodies (2019) is a new project that incorporates a multifaceted installation of drawings, sculptures, and soft extensions for the body (fig. 25). The visual vocabulary of a hatched pattern of alternating colored lines – the customary graphic representation of a disputed territory on a map – begins on the wall and flows into the gallery. Drawings and sculptures with map- like qualities lead to larger soft sculptures of yarn intended to be worn by a performer.

Here Jordá eludes to the ways in which both landscape and bodies can be contested sites.

Mapping and cartography are a familiar subject in the work of Jordá. For

Disputed Territories–Disputed Bodies, she begins from a memory of the map of her home country, Venezuela. As a child she memorized the shape of the country, but later realized that part of that form was disputed territory between Venezuela and Uruguay.

The idea that maps can convey complicated histories through a series of lines is a fascinating concept and one that relates to her own story of living in and between two distinct countries.

In a book of contemporary artists who incorporate mapping in their practice,

Mapping It Out (edited by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist), writer Tom McCarthy refers to the well-known fact that maps, which are flat, cannot accurately represent the Earth,

54 which is spherical. He claims, “Maps are often an abstraction of the physical or conceptual world—a symbolic depiction of a space or idea that allows one to understand and navigate an unfamiliar topography or complex topology.”54 In this we are reminded of how inaccurate maps truly are. The symbolic idea of a map, of a memory, provides creative space for Jordá to explore their relationship to shifting borders and shifting identities.

Maria Hupfield (b. 1975) is Anishinaabe-kwe and a member of Wasauksing First

Nation (Canada) and her practice includes performances, sculptures, and installations that reflect and resist “the Western tendency to essentialize Native artists and treat them as interchangeable producers of exotic cultural experiences.”55 Her work is often, a performance of place. Rather than relying on the embedded political nature of a site, or her gendered position upon it, she is able to articulate the specifics of a precise location from nearly anywhere, thereby expanding notions of place. Through her use of felt- crafted objects and video she makes this connection palpable, as Vanessa Watts suggests,

“in Indigenous ontology-epistomology place is not a passive backdrop for human activity but an active force.”56 Hupfield’s work carries this idea and usurps the question of who has the power to articulate place.

Counter-Landscapes premieres the first United States installation of The One Who

Keeps on Giving (2017), a project that centers around an oil painting of the sea by the

54 Hans Ulrich Obrist, ed. Mapping It Out (London: Thames & Hudson, 2014), 21. 55 Vanessa Fletcher, "The Strength of Water." Art in America 105, no. 9 (2017): 82-85. 56 As quoted in Crystal Migwans’ essay, “Felt Ground. Maria Hupfield’s Place-Making Practice in Performance,” in Carolin Köchling. Maria Hupfield: The One Who Keeps on Giving (Toronto: The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, 2017), 68. 55 artist’s late mother as a young woman and signed “Peggy Miller” (fig. 26). The title of the work is the translation of her mother’s Anishinaabe name. The scene of the small painting is Parry Sound, Ontario on Georgian Bay, as seen from their home territory of

Wasauksing. For both performances of the two-channel video, Hupfield invited her siblings to join her. The first takes place on stage at a community center in their homeland – one fraught with colonial histories and memory. The second performance took place in a closed gallery in Toronto. In both, Hupfield holds the painting, while one sister dances with a spiral jingle garment, one sister plays a drum and sings, and her brother performs the traditional role of the grass dancer – all in a well-choreographed scene. This personal narrative operates to expand our understanding of place by activating a landscape and memory far from their origins.

Stones in the Sky (2019) consists of a set of ten sculptural body-objects, made of hand-sewn industrial felt (fig. 27). Informed by the writing of Karyn Recollet, Indigenous

Scholar in the Faculty of Women & Gender Studies at the University of

Toronto, Hupfield uses stones to consider interconnection and recall the permeable relationship between land and sky where humans and the environment are interdependent. Rather than make replicas of found stones, she uses memory, and each stone carries its own story, which are ever-changing. As Recollet articulates, “Drawing upon Afrofuturist and Indigifuturist writing, this ongoing thought experiment sees land vocabularies as motion based, demonstrating that land is comprised of gestures, provocations, relationships, and ceremonies that are ongoing and sustaining.”57

57 Karyn Recollet, “Choreographies of the Fall: Futurity Bundles & Land-ing When Future Falls Are Immanent,” unpublished essay shared by the artist, July 2019. 56 Hupfield’s work creates form to these ideas and reverberates early feminist performance while further expanding the possibilities of not only how to approach landscape, but also how it is represented in art.

57 CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSION

While the significance of the woman’s movement and feminist art of the 1970s has been acknowledged, documented, and exhibited, somehow the work remains compartmentalized and frozen in an historic positioning. The goal of Counter-

Landscapes is to bring some of the early seminal works to the surface and exhibit them with contemporary works that use similar strategies in order to underline and emphasize the pervasiveness of the feminist legacy, which is too often neglected, marginalized, and under-valued. The exhibition exposes and celebrates the working process of artists who were central in establishing new ways of making that reverberate today and even more so than ever as nationalism, overpopulation, the threat to female reproductive rights, economic disparity and climate change increase at an alarming pace.

Instead of being engaged in changing the system from within, the women working in the 1970s created their own systems from “without” that were compelling, innovative, and trail blazing. They countered the culture they were born into with their work. Women positioned themselves into artworks--their bodies, their experiences, in unparalleled ways. By operating outside the domestic realm, in a place that had existed for men and was owned by men, by activating the landscape with their counter-landscape feminist practices, these women artists become political agitators and disruptors. As Judith Butler has theorized, “to problematize the matter of bodies may entail an initial loss of epistemological certainty, but a loss of certainty is not the same as political nihilism. On the contrary, such a loss may well indicate a significant and promising shift in political thinking. This unsettling of ‘matter’ can be understood as initiating new possibilities, new

58 ways for bodies to matter.”58 Through this optic and in new narrations of the histories of these pioneering women artists, (as opposed to male-centric art movements and histories) we can begin to look at the production by a multitude of artists practicing today as being influenced by this early counter-landscape narrative—a narrative that this writing deems central to understanding art today.

58 Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993), 6. 59 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Allora & Calzadilla

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Francis Alÿs

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Eleanor Antin

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Agnes Denes

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Valie Export

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Husslein-Arco, Agnes, Angelia Nollert, and Stella Rollig, eds. Valie Export: Time and Countertime. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2010.

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Rebecca Horn

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Horn, Rebecca. Rebecca Horn. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1993.

Maria Hupfield

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Recollet, Karyn, “Choreographies of the Fall: Futurity Bundles & Land-ing When Future Falls Are Immanent,” unpublished essay shared by the artist, July 2019.

Scott, Emily Eliza, “Decentering Land Art from the Borderlands: A Review of Through the Repellent Fence.” Art Journal Open, a publication of College Art Association, March 27, 2018, https://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=9819, accessed July 13, 2019.

Watts, Vanessa, “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency Amongst Humans and Non- humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go On a European World Tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2013: 20-34.

Saskia Jordá

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Suzanne Lacy

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______. Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974-2007. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

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