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gemmasianpowellphotography · 4 years

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Preparation and Planning - Self Portrait Photographer Research

Historical

Robert Cornelius

In 2013, the Oxford Dictionaries announced their word of the year to be “selfie”, which they define as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” Although the rampant proliferation of the technique is quite recent, the "selfie" itself (if defined as being a photograph one takes of oneself) is far from being a strictly modern phenomenon. Indeed, the photographic self-portrait is surprisingly common in the very early days of photography exploration and invention, when it was often more convenient for the experimenting photographer to act as model as well. In fact, the picture considered by many to be the first photographic portrait ever taken was a "selfie". The image in question was taken in 1839 by an amateur chemist and photography enthusiast from Philadelphia named Robert Cornelius. Setting up his camera at the back of the family store in Philadelphia, Cornelius took the image by removing the lens cap and then running into frame where he sat for a minute before covering up the lens again. On the back of the image he wrote "The first light Picture ever taken. 1839."

Lee Friedlander

Lee Friedlander is a seminal American photographer known for his innovative images of city streets. Often featuring candid portraits of people, signs, and reflections of himself in store front windows, Friedlander’s street photography captures the unexpected overlaps of light and content in urban landscapes. “I’m not a premeditative photographer,” he has said. “You don’t have to go looking for pictures. The material is generous. You go out and the pictures are staring at you.” Born on July 14, 1934 in Aberdeen, WA, he studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena before moving to New York in 1956. Influenced by the work of Eugène Atget and Walker Evans, he attempted to see things as if a step removed, spontaneously reacting to all the potential images in front of him. Along with Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, Friedlander was represented in the historic “New Documents” exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1967, curated by John Szarkowski. He went on to publish his acclaimed photobook The American Monument in 1976. More recently, in 2010, Friedlander published America by Car, a book which was accompanied by an exhibition at the Whitney Museum and featured a series of photos that were taken on road trips from behind the wheel of rental cars. The artist continues to live and work in New York, NY. Today, his photographs are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others.

Vivian Maier

“Well, I suppose nothing is meant to last forever. We have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel. You get on, you have to go to the end. And then somebody has the same opportunity to go to the end and so on.” – Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was an American street photographer born in New York City. Although born in the U.S., it was in France that Maier spent most of her youth. Maier returned to the U.S. in 1951 where she took up work as a nanny and care-giver for the rest of her life. In her leisure however, Maier had begun to venture into the art of photography. Consistently taking photos over the course of five decades, she would ultimately leave over 100,000 negatives, most of them shot in Chicago and New York City. Vivian would further indulge in her passionate devotion to documenting the world around her through homemade films, recordings and collections, assembling one of the most fascinating windows into American life in the second half of the twentieth century.

Contemporary

Laura Zalenga

Laura Zalenga belongs with the self portrait photographers who want to show their deep inner world by means of photography. Her photos always look awesome thanks to natural lightning and the unbelievable scenery she prefers. It is hard not to notice that she adores herself. She has an architectural education, but only photography became her passion. With the help of self photography and Photoshop, she tries to understand herself better and become happier.

Kyle Thompson

Kyle Thompson is a famous surreal self portrait photographer, though he doesn’t have an education in this sphere. He has a passion for deserted locations, such as macabre forests or abandoned buildings. Kyle is a true nature lover, who, at the same time, is disgusted with the outskirts, where he spent his youth. He believes that suburbs are nothing but artificially made reality. He likes emphasizing his belonging to surrealism, and often uses effects which are typical for this style: smoke, water, mirrors and balloons help him show abstract concepts.

Rosie Hardy

Rosie Hardy is a professional photographer from Manchester who is well-known all over the world. She is not just a self portrait photographer. Rosie also takes portrait and wedding photos and all of them are amazing. Her works are mysterious in some way and we may notice the theme of unity with nature. You may find a selection of portraits from the 365 Day collection on her website.

#who #selfportrait #research #inspiration #preproduction

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artesano12-blog · 5 years

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The Famous Rocky Scene Was in Philadelphia, PA 19127

An Interesting art museum in the city

Are you a Rocky Balboa fan? If you are, then you probably remember the scene when he's running up the stairs in front of a museum. Well, this was actually in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This is one of the most interesting places to visit in Philadelphia where you will see different pieces of art that you must see. Of course, before going into the museum, you must take a picture and appreciate the Mr. Balboa statue resembling that moment from the movie.

This is one of the most visited art museums in America because it has several exhibitions of works by Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, and many other famous painters. It has a guided tour called around the world where you will learn about different cultures such as Indian Chinese Greek Etc. If you are more interested in photography, there is also an area called Ruth and Raymond building which has an impressive collection of photography, costumes, and objects from different parts of the world. If you are an art lover, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is the perfect place for you.

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

Artesano Gallery 109 Green Ln Philadelphia, PA 19127 (215) 483-3298 https://artesanogallery.com/

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chocolateheal · 5 years

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kennethherrerablog · 6 years

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These 5 Art Majors Found Fulfilling Work in Creative Fields. You Can Too

The image of a struggling artist is one we’re all familiar with — and while it can be challenging for artists to find steady work, many artists enjoy job stability in a role in which they can express their creativity.

People who get a degree in fine arts go on to fill a wide range of professional roles, from illustrators and video game artists to interior decorators and graphic designers. We spoke with several creative graduates to learn what unique roles they’ve achieved with their art degrees.

Pet Photographer

Grace Chon earned her Master of Fine Art in advertising and design from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. For several years, Chon worked in advertising. And while the business can be a rewarding and lucrative career for art majors, Chon wasn’t feeling it. She was frequently stressed by her job, so she turned to photography as a creative outlet.

“I started taking headshots of homeless dogs to help get them adopted, and it quickly evolved into a side-hustle pet-photography business,” Chon says. “I worked nights and weekends until nine months later, I quit my day job to be an animal photographer.”

Chon has been running her pet photography business for 10 years now. She has shot ad campaigns, been featured in magazines, photographed celebs and their pets and published two books, including her recently published “Puppy Styled: Japanese Dog Grooming — Before & After.”

Chon loves that she gets to use her degree every day to make art with animals, and it’s been quite rewarding for her financially. “With my income (and my husband’s combined), we’ve been able to purchase a home in Los Angeles and renovate it.”

Wedding Photographer

Art majors can take photos of more than just pets. Lexia Frank, for example, has made a living from her role as a luxury and destination wedding photographer after earning her degree in fine art from the University of Wisconsin. “Much to my father’s dismay,” she added.

Frank’s father hoped she would pursue a career in medicine or science, but her passion for art motivated her to ignore her father’s wishes, earn a degree and launch a successful photography business.

“Now, 11 years in, I have built this business I’m incredibly proud of,” Frank says. “I am part art director, part photographer, part stylist, part social media expert, part marketer and advertiser. I do all my own design for marketing materials, website and any printed collateral. I utilize my art-history background as well as my dance background to pose my clients and models. I utilize everything I learned with my art degree in my day-to-day operations even though there was never a class that was on how to run a photography business.”

And sure, she might not make a doctor’s salary as her father had wished, but according to Frank, she does quite well. “The pay is good, and the perks are great: I’ve traveled to Egypt (twice!), Jamaica, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Italy, you name it.”

Frank has also expanded her business to teach photographers through mentorships and internships.

Art Therapist

Rachel Brandoff’s art degree took her on a route much different from photography. While she originally pursued careers in web design, teaching and mural painting and did her own painting on the side, Brandoff eventually discovered the career of art therapy.

Art therapists encourage clients to create art to express their feelings, improve social skills, resolve conflict and foster self-esteem. “I love working with clients and helping them to discover and engage their creativity in the service of problem-solving, personal expression, facilitating communication and raising self-awareness and esteem,” Brandoff says.

Art therapy does require additional education. Brandoff got her master’s degree in art therapy from Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., after originally getting a bachelor’s degree in studio art from the University of Maryland, College Park. Starting salaries for art therapists in the New York City area, where Brandoff once practiced, range from $45,000 to $75,000 annually.

Brandoff now serves as an assistant professor specializing in art therapy at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and has been featured on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Studio Owner and Teacher

Diana Stelin, who has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and a master’s degree from Boston University, said she spent seven years managing an art gallery chain and bringing home six figures. (Still think pursuing an art degree will lead you nowhere?)

But after starting a family, Stelin looked for something a little less stressful. She now owns her own art studio in Boston offering classes to children and adults.

“I set my own hours, enjoy a balance between a rewarding job where I influence kids and adults alike and have time to develop my art career,” Stelin says. “I earn what any teacher earns”— in the $80,000 range for Boston — “and have lots of plans for online expansion and have been earning a steady supplemental income from my art sales and the talks I give in corporations.”

Even if you don’t have the desire to manage and open your own studio, you can still make money as an art teacher. And as Stelin mentioned, the beauty of having an art background is that you can make good money on the side through your own art sales or through freelance work.

Published Author and Senior Editor

Rain Turner has led an unconventional career for an art major. “In spite of my mother’s advice, I pursued a fine arts degree, with a plan of becoming an art teacher,” she says. “But life has a funny way of working out, and nearly 20 years later I’m a senior editor at The Penny Hoarder and author of two books on creating fashion and art.”

Of course, writing and editing require skills outside of the art realm that Turner had spent years honing, but her knowledge of art and fashion played a pivotal role in her path to authorship and editing.

“My fine-art studies gave me the knowledge of color theory, composition and craftsmanship that I would use to write about art and fashion. During college, I created clothing and sold to local boutiques. I took extensive notes on my creations, which I then shared with About.com in 2007 when I auditioned as freelance host of their DIY Fashion vertical.”

Turner earned that gig with About.com and for eight years, established herself as a DIY fashion expert online. While sharpening her editing, photography and writing skills that the job demanded, Turner published her first book, “The Complete Guide to Customizing Your Clothes,” after Quarto Publishing noticed her work online. Turner went on to work as creative director for a marketing agency, published a second book, “String Art Magic,” and eventually landed a role at The Penny Hoarder.

“Through my writing career, I guess I did end up teaching art after all,” Turner reflected. “My books and articles teach how to make things… My art degree taught me how to fail, change things up, find my skills and push forward. If I hadn’t pursued art, I wouldn’t have a career in media.”

Still not sure what to do with your art degree? There are dozens of careers to explore, from fashion designer to printmaker to advertising specialist to museum curator. The jobs for art majors are incredibly diverse — you simply can’t paint them all with the same brush.

Timothy Moore is a market-research editor and freelance writer covering topics on personal finance, careers, education, pet care and the automotive industry. He has worked in the field since 2012 and has been featured on sites like The Penny Hoarder, Debt.com, Ladders, Glassdoor and The News Wheel.

This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.

The Penny Hoarder Promise: We provide accurate, reliable information. Here’s why you can trust us and how we make money.

These 5 Art Majors Found Fulfilling Work in Creative Fields. You Can Too published first on https://justinbetreviews.tumblr.com/

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maharaniweddings · 6 years

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Philadelphia, PA Stylized Shoot by Noreen Turner Photography

Happy Thursday Maharanis! Noreen Turner Photography has brought Maharani Weddings an astonishing stylized shoot that will inspire all the ladies to be extra dazzling. This styled shoot was a simple yet elegant collaboration between several prominent Philadelphia wedding vendors and most notably, the amazing and premier venue - Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The results are an uber-romantic day paired with beautiful lenghas that symbolized both romance and class. The shoot began under the skies, on a rooftop of the museum that offered amazing views of the city. Style model, Gopi, showcased the historic building of the museum in a stunning cream and gold lehenga. The photographer focused on different areas of the historic building to not only show the potential of this gorgeous venue but also to photograph Gopi's details in her hair and makeup designed by Ariel Katrina and Emily Dimant. Highlighted below are some of my favorite shots and I have a ton more remarkable snaps of the day in our gallery. http://dlvr.it/QfJC10

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lboogie1906 · 2 years

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John W. Mosley (May 19, 1907 – October 1, 1969) was a self-taught photojournalist who documented the everyday activities of the African-American community in Philadelphia for more than 30 years, a period including both WWII and the civil rights movement. His work was published in newspapers and magazines including The Philadelphia Tribune, The Pittsburgh Courier, and Jet magazine. He has been called a "cultural warrior" for preserving a record of African-American life in Pennsylvania, one which combats "negative stereotypes and false interpretations of African-American history and culture". More than 300,000 of his photographs are included in the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University. Exhibitions of his work have been shown at the Philadelphia International Airport and the Woodmere Art Museum. He studied at Johnson C. Smith University. He moved to Philadelphia as part of the Great Migration. He obtained a job as a professional photographer at Barksdale Photography Studio. He had a darkroom and photographic studio at the Christian Street YMCA. He traveled around Philadelphia on public transit, carrying his cameras and other equipment. Proud of his heritage, he chose to portray the Black community positively at family, social, and cultural events that were part of daily life. He photographed individuals and families at weddings, picnics, churches, segregated beaches, sporting events, concerts, galas, and civil rights protests. During a time of racism and segregation, he emphasized the achievements of Black celebrities, athletes, and political leaders. Among those he photographed were Duke Ellington, Cootie Williams, Wilt Chamberlain, Ora Washington, Paul Leroy Robeson, Billy Eckstine, Billie Holiday, Martin Luther King Jr., Cecil B. Moore, Marian Anderson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and President Richard Nixon. He was the official photographer of the First African Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. He was one of the first Black Americans to be a syndicated photographer. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence https://www.instagram.com/p/CdvJhQsrxujWd5ROKNSU3t57pow-ra9KkNMZhU0/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

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johnryanjjstudios · 2 years

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Venue coordinator: Emily Hassinger and Ott Photography/Videography: J&J Studios, LLC @jjstudiosphiladelphia Officiant: Max Linkoff (friend) @mlinkoff Florist: Pennypack Flowers (Lisa Cardinal) @pennypackflowers Band: EBE Paris @ebetalent Brides’ Rin: Meritage Jewelers @meritagejeweler Groom’s Ring: Meritage Jewelers @meritagejeweler Grooms Shoes: Gucci @gucci Wedding Signs, Invitations Wedding Sign (Table Seating Chart): Hillary Carr Calligraphy @hillarycarrcalligraphy Invitations: Zola @zola Bride’s Shoes: Valentino @maisonvalentino Wedding Dress: Enzoani Narine @enzoani and the wedding shop: Love It at Stellas @love.it.at.stellas Tux: Mark of Distinction and the tux shop: Love It at Stellas @love.it.at.stellas Cake: The Master’s Baker @themastersbaker Favors: handmade by Bride’s MOH Lori Sasaki. Make Up Artist: Bethany @nofilterglam Hair Stylist: Lindsay @nofilterglam Photobooth: Oh Snap! Photobooths- Nate Wagner (at Philadelphia Museum of Art) https://www.instagram.com/p/CdrHIxvpW2n/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: The Feminist Avant-Garde, Now More than Ever

Installation view of “WOMAN. FEMINIST AVANT-GARDE of the 1970s” (2017) from the Sammlung Verbund Collection, Mumok, Vienna (photo by Lisa Rasti, © Mumok)

VIENNA — With its array of more than 300 works by 48 artists, the scrupulously researched WOMAN. FEMINIST AVANT-GARDE of the 1970s is a timely and provocative exhibition that argues its points with care, precision, and a magical sense of simultaneity.

Curated by Gabriele Schor, the director of Sammlung Verbund, with Eva Badura-Triska, a curator at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien ( Mumok), where the show opened on May 5th, WOMAN is less a celebration of the varieties of Feminist art than an examination of shared ideas and motivations.

In contrast to WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, presented at MoMA PS1 in 2008 — an exhibition that, as I wrote at the time, elucidated “a mutually supportive network that offered both a sense of purpose and a protected emotional space for experiment and play” — WOMAN emphasizes the position of the individual artist as an actor within a range of international movements, both aesthetic and political.

The presentation at Mumok is the seventh stop of a ten-city European tour, from Rome to Brno (unfortunately, there are no plans to bring the show to the US). Its current iteration, however, can be considered a homecoming, given that it is drawn entirely from the corporate collection of the Vienna-based Verbund AG, the largest electric company in Austria.

Schor, as Verbund’s in-house curator, initiated the collection’s focus on 1970s Feminist art. The stereotypical conception of a risk-free corporate collection, however, is immediately exploded by such graphic and aggressive works as Judy Chicago’s photolithograph “Red Flag” (1971), a crotch shot of a hand yanking a glistening, red, phallic tampon from a shadow-cloaked vagina, and Gina Pane’s “The Hot Milk” (1972), a vertical, double-column grid of mostly color photographs documenting a performance in which the artist slices her own back and face with a double-edged razor blade.

In her essay for the exhibition catalogue, Schor writes that Feminist art is “strikingly […] not usually identified as an ‘avant-garde’” despite its political, social, and aesthetic correspondences to previous movements that were historically based on “the discursive paradigm of male artistic genius”:

The inability to perceive the links between ‘feminism’ and ‘avant-garde’ is thus a conspicuous blind spot in both art history and art criticism. […] Yet the feminist art movement’s historic and pioneering achievements in the art of the past four decades is not in dispute. The protagonists of the feminist avant-garde wrote manifestos and pamphlets, established numerous women artists’ associations and journals, articulated a critique of art institutions, organized their own exhibitions, created groundbreaking work in terms of form as well as content, and sought to fuse art with life.

Renate Bertlmann, “Tender Pantomime” (1976), black and white photograph, from a six-part series (© Renate Bertlmann; Sammlung Verbund, Vienna)

The Feminist focus on photography, performance, film, and video was both a formal choice — a turn toward art forms that decisively “fuse art with life” — and a conscious break with the traditional medium-based hierarchies of Western art.

It was also a practical decision, one that obviated the need for a studio, which had become one of the hoariest clichés of “the discursive paradigm of male artistic genius.” Instead, art-making took to the streets, often via inflammatory encounters with an unsuspecting public, recorded on grainy black-and-white photos, Portapak tape, and Super-8 film.

WOMAN makes no attempt to gin up its frequently spartan schema with colorful graphics or digital displays. Instead, it turns the era’s simple, white-walled asceticism to its advantage through abrupt shifts in scale and visual rhythms; a lively interchange of floor sculptures, table vitrines, and pylons of CRT monitors; and framed photos mounted in rows, columns, clusters, and grids, some slightly asymmetrical to deliver a syncopated kick.

The result is a grisaille purism that feels authentic to the period without pretending to take you back in time: the display is resolutely museological throughout, redolent with parallels and correlations as subtle as they are illuminating.

One of the first works you’ll encounter in “Female Sexuality“ — one of the exhibition’s four sections (the other three are “The Beautiful Body,” Role-Plays,” and “Mother, Housewife, Wife”) — is Hannah Wilke’s “Super-T-Art” (1974), a large grid of 20 black-and-white photographs whose title plays on the words “Super Tart,” which she derived from the title of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar (1970). The series of photographs begins with the artist dressed in a Roman-style toga, which she gradually sheds and rewraps into a billowy loincloth, vamping coquettishly, until she ends with her arms raised in mimicry of the Crucifixion.

Uncannily, the French artist ORLAN, in 1974-75, did a similar photo grid, “Occasional Striptease with Trousseau Sheets,” consisting of 18 self-portraits, at first costumed like Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Saint Teresa, but by the fifteenth shot she’s not dressed at all, with the final image simply the pile of sheets on the floor, as if she had ascended into heaven or melted into the earth.

Both works are intended as comments on Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” (1915-23), one of the most noteworthy of art history’s countless embodiments of the male gaze. (The show also features Wilke’s notorious 1976 video, “Through the Large Glass,” in which she performs another striptease, this time at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, minimally obscured behind the cracked pane of Duchamp’s masterwork.)

Despite the surface resemblance of these two works, Schor and Badura-Triska afford you enough room to draw your own connections. She could have installed the two photo grids side-by-side, but that would have tilted their intent toward the striptease as an action and not as a social construct. Instead, they face each other from opposite sides of the gallery.

ORLAN’s striptease shoots an arrow from the sacred to the profane, a full unmasking of Bernini’s barely disguised eroticism, while Wilke’s performance is more ambiguous: her transformation from a Roman goddess to a transgendered Christ is too pointed to be unadulterated fun and too joyful for a calculated shot at blasphemy; either way, the apparent transition from paganism to Christianity occurs without the artist placing a value judgment on either.

This relatively small corner of the exhibition is a microcosm of its thematic richness, with images and ideas ricocheting around the installation, some intentionally and others through inference. Hanging close by “Super-T-Art,” Wilke portrays herself in a cowboy hat and round sunglasses in a photo from her “S.O.S. Scarification Object Series” of 1975. The image features her bare torso covered in wads of chewing gum, 13 of which are mounted on nine sheets of paper (to a surprisingly sensuous, jewel-like effect) in a neighboring frame.

But she is also wielding two toy pistols that, in the free-associative interplay encouraged by the installation, make a connection with VALIE EXPORT’s armed and dangerous self-portrait, “Action Paints: Genital Panic” (1969), on the other side of the room. In the photo, EXPORT slumps on a bench while gripping an allegedly real machine gun and exposing herself via her jeans’ cut-out crotch. This in turn relates to Penny Slinger’s photo series of self-portraits as a bride dressed in a mock-wedding cake, which is similarly cut away to reveal the artist’s vagina.

Penny Slinger, “Wedding Invitation –2 (Art is just a piece of Cake)” (1973), black and white photograph (© Penny Slinger. Courtesy Gallery Broadway 1602, New York; Sammlung Verbund, Vienna)

Slinger’s bridal imagery then returns your thoughts to the Wilke/ORLAN riffs on Duchamp, a perspective that broadens your reception of the motif when it reappears in scabrous videos by Ewa Partum and Renate Bertlmann. The bride represents not only a link to a key work of phallocentric Modernism, but also the flash point of society’s idealization and subjugation of women — a balling-up of the warring strains of purity, desire, bondage, and freedom that animate the entire exhibition.

It’s telling that Slinger’s self-portraits greet you at the entrance to the exhibition’s second half (WOMAN covers the third and fourth floors of the museum), and that the image described above, “Wedding Invitation — 2 [Art is Just a Piece of Cake]” (1973), is the second full-page reproduction to appear in the exhibition catalogue, after the Portuguese artist Helena Almeida’s haunting photograph of a hand emerging from a darkened interior and resting on a partly opened casement window.

Almeida’s photo is from series of hands draped over gates, bars, and grates called “Study for Two Spaces,” which she made in 1977, a few years after the fall of Portugal’s four-decade-long authoritarian dictatorship. The hands are neither bound nor free, but are literally on a threshold between the two.

This liminality — the balance between the political and the poetic — stands out as an encapsulation of the work made by these women, who were as ready to turn the world upside down as their mostly male avant-garde predecessors, but were halted at the gate by the social status of their sex. Their only solution was to make their revolution their own way, without help and without precedent. As the Detroit-born artist Suzy Lake said in a symposium sponsored by the museum the day after the opening, “We didn’t know who we were, but who we were not.”

Annegret Soltau, “Selbst” (1975), black and white photograph on barit paper, from a 14-part series (© Annegret Soltau; Sammlung Verbund, Vienna)

The artists’ collective sense of having nothing to lose led them to explore areas that had less to do with personal branding and more to do with personal experience — which, in the aggregate, became an individual entry in the ledger book of universal experience, expressed through the common themes and nested meanings spun throughout the show.

In this regard, Schor and Badura-Triska’s light curatorial touch succeeds in bringing viewer and artwork together in active engagement. Although the show overall is grouped into four categories, its recurring images and subsets of meanings, such as those associated with the Wilke/ORLAN striptease, are woven throughout the exhibition with an almost Pynchonian sense of parallelism and coincidence (an impression underscored by the exhibition’s open-plan design, in which one section subtly informs the next). Objects and actions from both sides of the Atlantic may have been created independently of one another, but come together here as intuited agents of rebellion and resistance.

Suzy Lake’s phrase, “who we were not,” is provocatively reified in two of the exhibition’s most powerfully phallocentric artworks, which the curators have paired on the same wall: Judith Bernstein’s “One Panel Vertical” (1978), one of the artist’s lush Screw Drawings in pitch-black charcoal on thick watercolor paper, and Lynda Benglis’s infamous Artforum ad (actually one of nine pigment prints from a portfolio titled “SELF,” 1970-1976/2012), which depicts the artist brandishing a lifelike, extra-long dildo.

Those two works lampooning male aggression are the center of a genitalia cul-de-sac, with the adjacent walls filled with fantasias on the vagina, with Judy Chicago’s above-mentioned “Red Flag” and VALIE EXPORT’s “Action Paints: Genital Panic” on the left-hand wall, and on the right, tenderly abstracted photographs by Friederike Pezold and sculpturally explicit ones by Suzanne Santoro.

Valie Export, “Tap and Touch Cinema” (1968), video, black and white, sound (© Valie Export/ Bildrecht Wien 2016. Courtesy Galerie Charim, Vienna; Sammlung Verbund, Vienna)

These images lead you away from the overt aggression of the male organ to the covert power of female sexuality. Posters from ORLAN’s performance, “The Artist’s Kiss” (1976), in which she sold French kisses during the FIAC art fair outside the Grand Palais in Paris, an action that got her sacked from a job teaching art in a girls’ school, hang near a monitor playing VALIE EXPORT’s “Tap and Touch Cinema” (1968), a video of her encounter with a leering, hostile crowd as she invites people off the street to fondle her breasts (enclosed inside a box she wears like a halter top) while she times them with a stopwatch.

Less explicit but equally intimate is Sanja Ivekovič’s “Opening at Tommaseo” (1977/2012), a photo series in which the artist, her mouth taped, silently greets visitors to her gallery opening by exchanging touches to their face and hands. A hidden microphone on Ivekovič’s body records her heartbeat, and the resulting audio was played the following day in the exhibition space. As uncomfortably close as these performances may seem, a mental comparison with the lunatic performances of the Viennese Actionists, the all-male band of provocateurs who staged pageants of blood, gore, sex, and death at this same time, attests to their warmth, humor, and relative subtlety.

The struggle between the burgeoning power of women and society’s efforts to repress it — the overarching theme of the show — is expressed mainly through staged photography and films. The artists bind their faces in tape (Renate Eisenegger); fabric (Lydia Schouten, in her savage video, “Sexobject,” 1979/2016); and thread, with its echoes of domesticity (Annegret Soltau); or mash them against a pane of glass, as in works by Katalin Ladik, Birgit Jürgenssen, and Ana Mendieta. It continues to be terribly unnerving to see these photographs of Mendieta’s distorted face with the knowledge of her fall from the 34th-story window of her apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village, a death for which her husband, Carl Andre, was charged and acquitted.

Ana Mendieta, “Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints)” (1972/1997), C-print, from a six-part series (© The Estate Ana Mendieta. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York; Sammlung Verbund, Vienna)

For a number of artists — notably Lynda Benglis, Lorraine O’Grady, Eleanor Antin, Marcella Campagnano, Karin Mack, Martha Rosler, Alexis Hunter, Martha Wilson, Suzy Lake, and Cindy Sherman — one way to control their own narrative was to purposefully dissemble, to retain the power of a secret identity while inhabiting the persona of another, in effect playing the Fool to male authority’s senile Lear. These roles are often defined by men’s expectations, such as Martha Wilson’s impersonations of six character types, from the satin-draped ideal of the Hollywood goddess to the more mundane realms of the housewife, the working girl, the professional, the earth-mother, and the lesbian, while a character like Lorraine O’Grady’s “Mlle Bourgeoise Noir” operates on her own racial and sexual plane.

Cindy Sherman has all but owned costumed self-abnegation for decades, but Wilson and Campagnano were doing it while she was still studying at Buffalo State College, where Lake was a direct influence. The works by Sherman in the exhibition date from those student years, when she was dressing up as various campy characters, male and female, white and black, sometimes cutting them out and pasting them into comic vignettes set against a blank backdrop. Also on hand is the crude but imaginative 16mm stop-motion animation, Doll Clothes (1975), in which she depicts herself as an underwear-clad cutout in dozens of poses, trying on and removing different outfits.

Sherman’s self-portraits, aside from the gender politics implied by the roles she plays, are among the most apolitical work on display, which could also be said of the otherworldly self-portraits and interiors of Francesca Woodman, whose photographs have often been scoured for signals of her early death by suicide at the age of 22. The relatively large selection of prints here, however, underscores not the presence of a death wish but the meticulousness, variety, and imagination of her artistry. The work of these artists does not so much depart from the core idea of a Feminist avant-garde, as serve as a complement to the more expressly political statements, a decidedly female focus pulled into reverse angle.

The irony plaguing this show, of course, is the degree of its relevance. While there have been incremental gains since the 1970s in the institutional recognition of women artists — that is, if you take zero as a baseline — the issues of freedom, equal rights, economic parity, social justice, and personal respect are, if anything, in retreat. The president of the United States, a man whose sexual and racial attitudes were retrograde when they were formed in the ’70s, and who remains mentally and emotionally arrested there, seems hellbent on recreating the decade’s rolling scandals, escalating wars, FBI investigations, special counsels, protest marches, and violence in the streets.

In 1972, Richard M. Nixon’s reelection campaign slogan was “President Nixon. Now more than ever.” That same year, Renate Bertlmann made “The Indiscreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” named after the title of Luis Buñuel’s satirical film (also 1972), a work adorned with metal filaments sprouting from the intersection of two linear shapes, a junction implying a hairy rectum.

It’s one of many affronts devised by Bertlmann in a breathtaking array of media: drawing, photography, sculpture, film, installation, and wearable art, including a set of finger gloves made from pacifiers pierced with X-Acto blades — a horrifying concept on every level — transforming her fingers into talons and her hands into lethal weapons (as documented in the 1981 photograph “Knife-Pacifier-Hands”).

Such works were not merely conduits of outrage in the face of repression, injustice, incompetence, and corruption; they were correctives to an aesthetic that referred only to itself, a refocusing of art on the body, and a realignment of concerns from the formal to the social and political. Disdainful of the market, convention, and boundaries, the only goal that really mattered to these insurgent, untamable, experiential artists was to be able to see without filters; everything else followed from there.

WOMAN. FEMINIST AVANT-GARDE of the 1970s continues at Mumok (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Museumsplatz 1, Vienna) through September 3.

Travel to Vienna and hotel accommodations were provided by Mumok in connection to the opening of the exhibition and its related symposium.

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