The Feminist History of Collage (Part 2)
“Beware the Woman Behind the Mask” (See more of my collage work here.)
In my last article, I analyzed female collage artists from the 1770’s through the 1930’s, (Part 1, here), and the access to creative spheres the medium gave women in the long 19th century through to the 1930’s. Now, picking back up in the late 1960’s and early 70’s, one of the most iconic eras of protest, counterculture, and civil disobedience throughout the world, we delve into the intersections of collage, second wave feminism, the anti-war movement, and the fight for civil rights & desegregation. The intersection of these events with the medium of collage would solidify the medium as synonymous with rebellion, protest, and social commentary as the world moves into the 21st century.
In the 1970’s the term ‘femmage’ was coined by collage artists Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer, as a way to replace the ‘decorative’ way that women’s art was typically regarded as, contrary to the ‘serious’ and ‘humanist’ art of their male peers. The term was defined as artworks made “by women using traditional women's techniques to achieve their art-sewing, piecing, hooking, cutting, appliquéing, cooking and the like--activities also engaged in by men but assigned in history to women.” These forms of expression, previously seen as ‘crafty’ or ‘kitsch,’ were finally given a real name and space to be practiced and taken seriously, allowing women to engage in, redefine, and appreciate their shared artistic history. Prior to the Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 60’s & 70’s and the artists that were born out of it, these artistic mediums and obvious references to femininity were seen as superficial and undeserving of the same recognition as more ‘masculine’ mediums such as sculpture and oil painting; and were to be avoided by artists to avoid the pigeonhole of being labeled and discarded as ‘feminine arts.’ Femmage would open a space for not only collage artists, but female artists of any medium a space to reflect their creativity and themselves in a more authentic and honest way that wouldn’t force them to exclude symbols of femininity or their individual experiences as a woman in their work.
As the wall between ‘male’ and ‘female’ spaces begins to come down in the art sphere, there is also a breakdown in the division between the external ‘male’ sphere and the internal ‘female’ sphere of the home; this is in part to women gaining more employment and opportunity, as well as the ability of the televised news to bring the Vietnam war into the homes of everyday families. Martha Rosler shows the convergence of the ‘male’ and ‘female’ spheres in her work, Cleaning the Drapes, from her series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (rightmost image.) In this work, we see a woman vacuuming the drapes of her home, as she pulls the drapes aside to clean them, the open window shows us a scene of young American men fighting in Vietnam. This collage shows plainly the effects of both the femmage and the anti-war movements in the way that the woman is portrayed in her expected role as a housewife, engaging in the stereotypical women’s work of cleaning and occupying her ‘female space’ of the home; and how the externalized male sphere of war is encroaching on that space. The experiences of the war, which would in, previous generations, only be revealed through an occasional photo, by volunteer nurses on the front, or their sons/husbands/brothers etc. when they returned home, non-military, everyday women could see in real time the true brutality and violence of war that they had been shielded from when relegated to the home. Not only would women have their spaces invaded by the ‘masculine,’ & be further denied an exterior space in the workforce, they would have to pick up the pieces of their domestic spheres as their sons and husbands came back home wounded and traumatized by the experience.
In her collage, Untitled (Playboy) from her Body Beautiful or Beauty Knows No Pain series (above, right) she removes the ‘feminine’ from the internal sphere she is normally relegated to and depicts her place in society within the external male sphere. We can see that despite being liberated from the confines of the home, once women step outside, they become both an object to consume and the consumer to sell product to. The collage features the portraits of various women as they apply makeup inside of shipping containers destined to be exported as a product; this speaks to the circular pattern in which as women step outside the home to free themselves from the centuries of being confined to the house as an object of domesticity, to only be rebranded as objects to be consumed, having been ripened by their own absorption of contemporary femininity. In other words, if women would not resign themselves to being domestic objects, they would only be accepted in the external male sphere should they conform to, consume and project these new beauty standards on to themselves and other women.
While Martha Rosler’s work dealt with the intersections of femmage, consumerism and the infiltration of the war in feminine domestic spaces, Betye Saar’s assemblages (a form of 3D collage,) deals with the intersection of feminism, spirituality, and race. In Saar’s 1969 autobiographical work, Black Girl’s Window, she encloses her self portrait, represented as a monotone outline of a black girl with her hands pressed against a window, and nine smaller vignettes containing emblems from her life using found objects and materials, inside a repurposed window frame.
Throughout the vignettes, Saar depicts her safe ‘interior’ space through various forms of iconography, and creates her own personal mythology and worldview through these symbols. She references her love and connection to astrology, spirituality, and the occult which would be a defining characteristic of many of her works. In the top three panels, she depicts the night sky, the two halves of the moon on either side of the stars to represent its nightly phases from dawn to dusk, which would be her first introduction to cosmology as a child; in the bottom left panel she illustrates her zodiac animal, the lion for Leo, eating its ruling planet, the sun, and on the girl’s hands she places various tarot and astrological symbols. At the center of the small panels, she depicts death through an illustration of two skeletons, one black and one white, reminding the viewer that while it comes for everything and everyone, even in death, there isn’t equality; this symbolism of racial inequality is further built upon in the vignettes on either side; on it’s right depicting the racist, pseudoscientific phenology chart of a black person, and to its left the illustration of a dancing couple, meant to represent her parents before the death of her father due to being denied timely medical care from white doctors and being forced to go to a segregated hospital further away. The final two frames, the bottom center, which contains a photo of an unknown white woman as a nod to her maternal grandmother’s Irish roots, and in the bottom left, an American bald eagle with the word “love” printed on its chest, show more fleeting aspects of her identity and personal mythology. The Victorian daguerreotype is referencing her mother’s white ancestry, Saar’s own mix of European, African & Native American heritages; and the eagle as a symbol of the fleeing emotions of both American patriotism and general feelings of love and belonging. In the largest panel under the nine vignettes, amongst the halo of stars and moons above her, she combines these various motifs with the mood evoked from her self portrait. With the exception of her eyes, the girl is seen only as a silhouette and is separated from, yet looking out onto the exterior world. This has the dual effect of portraying her being confined to and looking out from her safe interior feminine space, mirroring Rosler’s Cleaning the Drapes, as well as reiterating the social, economic, and political segregation of African Americans, especially African American women, from the ‘exterior’ space of patriarchal white society of mid 20th century America.
Saar would continue to explore and empower these intersections of her identity in her later works. In her most recognizable assemblage, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, which she made for the Berkeley Center for their 1972 exhibition of works inspired by black heroes, she reappropriates the racist caricature of the ‘Mammy,’ which had depicted black women as submissive, asexual, masculinized, self sacrificing caretakers to their white mistresses and their families. Repurposing a thrifted figurine of a mammy that once held pens and paper to take notes on, she transforms the woman from an object of obedience into one of revolution. She first liberates the figurine from her duties of idly holding pens and her broom, representing the attitude that the mammy was only associated with her work in the domestic [female] space, and arms her with a rifle in her right hand and a handgun under the left arm which gives an air of autonomy and that she is no longer uniquely confined to the interior space or uninvolved in her liberation. In the center, where a small notebook once was, Saar places a photo of a lighter skinned woman holding a mixed child, the closed fist of the Black Power movement infused into the shape of her skirt; the juxtaposition between the exploited woman and caretaker imagery with the skirt subtly replaced by the fist reflects the overlooked personal resilience and fight for liberation many black women had participated in from the start. Through this piece, she is able to recast the light and transform not only the mammy caricature but also generations of black women in general who had typically been seen as secondary characters in both black liberation and feminism. The way she simultaneously depicts these stereotypes and injustices and reclaims them as figures of previously ignored activism and self autonomy was so radical and unprecedented that feminist activist and philosopher, Angela Davis would go on to credit the piece with starting the Black Women’s movement.
As the struggles for women’s social equality, peace, and civil rights had started to bubble over in the late 60’s, the fight for women’s reproductive rights would come into play with the litigation and ratification of the 1972 Supreme Court case on Roe v. Wade. This is not to say that the right to abortion and contraception was unimportant to activists before second wave feminism, but rather that the issue of reproductive rights and a women’s access to choices were previously dealt within the private home sphere; as women gained more and more social emancipation and mobility, issues that were once regarded as too taboo to speak of and dealt with in silence were now being debated publically.
On July 3rd 1989, the Supreme Court made their ruling on Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, essentially ruling in favor of the state of Missouri’s laws to regulate abortion access (and thereby granting other states that right,) which was thought to be forbidden in the wake of Roe v Wade. Feminists & abortion activists sensed the threat to their rights before the July ruling and responded with the massive April 1989 Women’s March on Washington in which an estimate of 500,000 people (the largest since the Vietnam protests of 1969 & 1971) marched in support of a women’s right to choose.
To get the word out about the march, and use collage as a medium of protest, Barbara Kruger would create her iconic piece, Your Body is a Battleground, as a flier for Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League, (now known as Reproductive Freedom for All.) In this work, she uses her signature bold dualtone lettering to declare the present attack on women’s bodies and as a way to mimic the eye catching consumer and political advertisements from the 80’s. These advertisements often featured similar bold lettering and the second person voice, allowing them to speak directly to the viewer. Using it as apart of this collage calls for viewers to see themselves as the woman, as well as the politicalization of her body. Behind the lettering we see a black and white photo of a woman’s face split down the middle, the right side as a photo negative of the left. While the contrast between the photo positive & negative initially serves as a way to grab the attention of the viewer, it also shows how the topic of abortion has become a ‘black and white’ issue that has split the country in two at the expense of the everyday woman. The simplicity yet pointedness of her message to women proved to be so universal that she has released several versions of the piece in other languages with phrases such as Savoir C’est Pouvoir (knowledge is power,) and Twoje Cialo To Pole Walki (your body is a battlefield.) Especially in light of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org Supreme Court case that would overturn Roe v. Wade after 50 years of precedent in the US, the flier reminds us that a woman’s body and her right to own it in its entirety is an issue that always has been and always will be something to fight for and defend because it will never be truly given or safe guarded without ongoing activism, education, and the willingness to speak out and act.
Similarly to her previous work, her 1987 collage Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am,) would use her signature font and simple vintage black and white photos to make a bold statement on the consumerist society that is Reagan’s America. The slogan she uses is a reimagining of the first principle of Descartes philosophies: “I think therefore I am,” or the idea (explained very simply) that because we can think, we must exist. In replacing ‘think’ with ‘shop,’ she is able to convey the shift in the way in which people have come to situate themselves and their place in the modern world; gone are the days when character, ideas, and being apart of the whole would serve to ‘prove’ or cultivate our existence , now marks the beginning of material ownership, logos, and other luxuries as the markers of existence and contemporary cultural understanding. The brutality of this depressing reality is fully achieved when the viewer recognizes the hand is that of a child, showing how deeply ingrained the need to consume is from a young age. Her signature typefaces would later be appropriated and consummerized by the lifestyle and fashion brand Supreme in the 2010’s, proving, quite ironically, its effectiveness as an advertisement font, her larger critiques regarding the hyper commercialization of modern American culture and how women’s artwork on its own can never truly be regarded as serious until all the value of the messaging has been erased, redrawn & sold in the consumerist reimagining to a paying audience.
In my third and final article covering this topic, I will cover contemporary female collage artists that have been inspired by and added to the the now 254 year old legacy of the medium as they deal with issues pertaining to identity, LGBTQIA+ rights, the rise of an increasingly less social and online existence.
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References & Further Reading:
https://kucdinteractive.com/kmoran/collage_portfolio/index.html
https://www.npr.org/2006/12/28/6688207/life-is-a-collage-for-artist-betye-saar
https://smarthistory.org/betye-saar-liberation-aunt-jemima/
https://hammer.ucla.edu/now-dig-this/art/black-girls-window
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-betye-saars-deeply-spiritual-works-reflect-50-years-lived-black-history
https://www.martharosler.net/
https://www.artbasel.com/news/barbara-kruger-your-body-is-a-battleground?lang=en
