This exhibition is a look at the notion of the feminine, through the works of fifteen international artists. This proposal does not focus on the narrower subject of feminism and, even less, on a problematic centered on the body. Rather, it attempts to evoke the different ways in which women artists play with the modes of representation of themselves in the plastic and socio-cultural sense. It is a question of giving to see the way in which they cancel certain borders and confront the stereotypes to remake the criteria of the Feminine, by rubbing itself in particular with the psychoanalysis. They can thus illuminate the zones of ambiguity that this notion conveys and shake up the limits between masculine and feminine. They flirt, sometimes even, with a relative duality of the being, subtended by a will of re-appropriation of their attributes and of preemption of others, traditionally masculine. They assume here a taking of risks being able to lead to a possible schizophrenia between the desire to magnify the "not all" feminine, and a provocative approach, even iconoclastic, of the relation between the image and its power of seduction or repulsion. As if, at the present time, a woman had not only to "consecrate" her Feminine, but moreover to reactivate it with the help of codes which tend to repress it.
In preamble, it is important to look at the representation of the feminine through the history of art, by underlining that those who built it confused for a long time the femininity and its attributes. One apprehends then the heavy symbolism conveyed under a mythological or religious pretext. This one aims, obviously, to build a morality and to contain the Western woman narrowly enchased between "good mother and prostitute", between demon and virtue, between Lilith, Venus and Mary.
The status of women in art is of recent recognition, barely four decades, which naturally leads to re-readings of history. Several artists have thus analyzed it and give us, each in their own way, an ironic interpretation of the subject. Among them, Karen Knorr proposes a feminine version of the myth of Butades. In this work, the grieving fiancée, embodied by the artist herself, draws not an outline of a male profile but that of a muse, the scene taking place at the foot of a plaster model of the Doryphorus of which only the bottom is visible. In her series Vertues and the Delights the artist provokes gently with her androgynous gentlemen, in the XVIIIth century style; photographs whose captions speak to us of the vindication of the rights of women and men. In a different way, Paloma Navares stages the historical Venuses of the great masters - notably all male - in fallacious and somewhat mournful photomontages where Ingres' Venus palaver with Titian's in front of a smoked black window. Orlan's Venus (Orlan en grande Odalisque d'Ingres) is more alive, since it is the artist's body that is on the base. At the same time, Orlan establishes a direct link between the ecstasy of Saint Theresa and the exhibition, or even the "auction", of her own person as a Virgin or Saint Orlan (Le Drapé - Le Baroque series) - "Anti-ravings", which the artist will push much further, a few years later, in what she gives to see in her flesh. Her series Strip tease occasionnel à l'aide des draps du trousseau sums up, in itself, the look of these artists because, through a set of a dozen photographs, the artist passes, as the images go along, from the status of the veiled virgin to that of the woman who reveals herself until she becomes Eve again.
This rereading of the symbolic is thus eminently critical and voluntarily grating. One can find links with other works which put it in scene, even in danger, by using emblematic accessories still of topicality, like the dress of bride or princess; such the photos full sky (series Bullet proof glass) of Rosemary Laing in which the artist projects herself as a bride in the space vacuum, surrounded of birds very
"Hitchcockian". However, this bride deviates from the virginal apotheosis because she is bloodied, wounded by bullets and symbolically stopped in mid-flight.
We also find, in the series Death of Florence Chevallier, the evocation of a mournful sacralization of the bride and the dreamlike universe of Ophelia's suicide. We can also mention here the films of Françoise Quardon who, as a princess or as a she-devil, re-enacts the myth of sacrificial love in a neo-baroque version where the literary en-robe psychoanalysis and fairy tale mythology. The strange and baroque world of Janaina Tschäpe also casts a spell on a whole phantasmagorical imagery such as that of the vampire woman or the bird woman. The artist takes on ex-crusts for her films and photographs (Batwoman, Devil and Angel series) which suggest, differently from Karen Knorr, the eternal ambiguity of the muse between holy terror and inspiration. But hers is more solitary, as she is positioned from behind looking at the cold walls of a strangely empty city, where she wanders, like a wandering soul, in the endless corridors of a castle.
In parallel, and especially in the current context of universalization of Western culture, it seems essential to observe how women from different geographical areas position themselves. Indeed, we do not believe that an individual can escape his socio-cultural framework and we can see how the themes overlap: Rosemary Laing's Australian bride responds to Cirenaica Moreira's Cuban, while Ingrid Mwangi's films metaphorize the identity of the African woman through the vision of a woman who wears her hair down and silently screams. All three speak to us, each in their own way, of liberation and affirmation. They are joined by Colombian Adriana Arenas in a parody version where she shows herself ridiculously and deliciously seductive when, all in rhinestones and nail polish, she dances in front of the camera to a nostalgic Latin melody.
These attributes of the female seduction are also put in scene by Susy Gomez who confronts the image of the contemporary woman by obliterating images of fashion with painting, giving them a new plastic dignity in monumental photographs. Here the artist tends to exalt the woman by cutting it from the usual vulgarity of its representations. This new pantheon can dialogue directly with the films of Sylvie Fleury who fetishizes and sacralizes the stereotyped accessories of the female fashion. In this last work, the Warholian laughter faces the cult of the woman-object. It flushes out the worm in the fruit of an over-consumption that tends to build a superficial image of the New Eve by confusing her with Marylin.
Finally, the make-up scene that the Martin sisters have shot in front of the dual mirror of their semi-similarity ends up disturbing the spectator and puts him in front of his prejudices and his own stereotypes by giving an almost schizophrenic vision of the female. And, as if to summarize the whole, Mireille Loup makes us see and hear through her slide show, during which a narrator tells us his book: Une Femme de 30 ans (A 30 year old woman), all the facets of the Woman - at the same time mother, daughter, muse and men's woman - in all her fragility, her fears and her desires until the moment of the end when she mysteriously disappears. This disappearance reveals, perhaps here, the ultimate incapacity of the artistic gesture to resolve the philosophical impossibility of the "not all" feminine.
Christine Ollier