How does art shape the political? Is it really true that art is ‘for art’s sake’? The way in which art and artists engage with the revolutionary is something that has been under study and debate for centuries, forming a key part of our understanding of art's value in political involvement and activism. This relationship between the artistic and the political proved central to the female liberation movement in the UK, in which art took on a far greater status than simply a medium for aesthetic appreciation. Becoming a core part of the feminist movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, this legacy perpetuates into the modern artistic world.
“WE SAY NO TO EMPTY ABSTRACTIONS, to the 'art for art's sake' philosophy of the privileged white middle-class male artworld. WE THE OPPRESSED cannot afford this empty play with works and forms, for us the important task is to convey to people, to WOMEN - their dignity and strength and beauty.”
- Anne Berg and Monica Sjöö
From the 8th of November 2023 to the 7th of April 2024, the Tate Britain held one of the most fascinating art exhibitions in recent years: Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK from 1970-1990. It presented two decades of art and how they played a key role in the provocation, protest, and progress of female rights in the UK. The exhibition explored many fascinating points of historical progression for the rights of different female intersectional groups, and how art has impacted this development. Spanning from the 1970 National Women’s Liberation Conference to the growing influence of the commercial art market of the 1990s, it offered a celebration of the work and achievements of over 100 female artists. Addressing the social and political contexts that influenced women in the art world during this time period, the exhibition proved to be an intriguing and enlightening depiction of the importance of art outside a merely creative, but also a political and revolutionary domain.
The exhibition was born out the work of art historians Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, who published the text ‘Framing Feminism’ in 1985. This introduced art into the developing women’s movement in the UK, in the midst of the second wave of feminism.
In the preface to this political and artistic text, Parker and Pollock declare that “we are neither critics nor historians claiming superior knowledge of events and issue. We cannot be detached. We are evidently partisan – in ways that may be more visible to our readers than to ourselves." The need for art in order to take a political stance, during a period of rapidly changing rights for and perceptions of women, is articulated more eloquently and urgently than ever.
Women in Revolt! was crucial in following in the legacy of Parker and Pollock. Countless female artists, marginalised in the artistic world of their time, were offered a platform for their works, addressing the imbalance of access to the history of wholly-female art compared to the access to male-created art. A space was created for the viewer to explore the relationship between the artistic and political.
The exhibition began with a narrative of the ways in which female artists responded to and revolted against the inequalities they faced in the early 1970s. There existed no statutory maternity rights or sex-discrimination protection in law, and married women were seen as subjugates of their husbands. The National Women’s Liberation Conference of 1970 was a landmark event in the beginnings of the second wave of feminism in the UK. 600 women attended Ruskin College in Oxford to engage in political discussion and debate, with the aim of achieving a unified political outlook on female liberation. 20-year-old photographer Chandan Fraser felt compelled to partake in such an act of activism and was able to depict this feeling of political engagement through her artistic vision.
“I was the only photographer allowed in to the plenary sessions of first Women’s Liberation Conference. It was so exciting. All the photographs I took at that time were as a participant rather than an observer. I was a supporter first and a photographer second.”
- Chandan Fraser
As the exhibition progressed, the art followed the change in women's lives over the next two decades, portraying the struggle they faced in defying and challenging the stereotypes they were bound to – one of a subjugated, obedient, domestic, and patriarchally controlled woman. For these female artists, it was not about just engaging with artistic activism in the public, but also the private sphere. The ‘personal became the political’ as women began to question their role within the domestic sphere which many mothers, wives and daughters were bound to. Female artists in turn began to explore this theme of the idealised female archetype of a ‘selfless mother’ and ‘obedient housewife’ so repeatedly portrayed in the media and society as a whole. The Hackney Flashers, a female photography collective interested in the promoting a socialist-feminist political agenda, produced a series of photographs and art pieces deconstructing the reality of the lives of aspiring working mothers under a failing childcare system.
But the liberation for women through art didn’t end with the challenging of societal norms of marriage in the '70s and '80s. It took on the wider focus of the emerging intersectional feminist movement, redefining a woman’s role not just from a heterosexual, white perspective but for women of colour and the LGBTQ+ community, unifying the female experience across intersectional groups. The exhibition showcased a range of work from female artists advocating for the intersectional feminist movement in the wake of the second wave of feminism, seeking to explore the way in which different identities of the individual intersected and intermingled to create a unique female experience.
The British Black Arts movement, founded in the early 1980s, portrayed the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, sharing a diverse aesthetic vision but the same experiences of discrimination at the hands of a patriarchal society. They were particularly interested in exploring the term ‘political blackness’, which came to describe and acknowledge the solidarity between those who faced mistreatment at the hands of the media, government and institutions based on their skin colour. Many artists drew on this as a collective vision. British Indian conceptual artist Sutapa Biswas and Black-British Artist Marlene Smith claimed in 1988 that:
“We have to work simultaneously on many different fronts. We must make our images, organise exhibitions, be art critics, historians, administrators, and speakers. We must be the watchdogs of art establishment bureaucracies; sitting as individuals on various panels, as a means of ensuring that Black people are not overlooked. The list is endless."
The See Red Women’s Workshop, a collective screen-printing studio operating from 1974 to 1990 and run by a feminist collective, was another key example of the importance that art and media played in the popularity of the intersectional feminist and Women’s Liberation movement. From posters to pamphlets to magazines, the group were interested in utilising the media in alignment with their political agenda – namely, to redefine how the topics of reproductive rights, women’s liberation, racism, socialist feminism, and lesbian rights were portrayed in the published media, thus working to deconstruct the individual’s perception of the woman in society.
However, in the opening years of the 1980s female artists and those part of the Women’s Liberation Movement felt undermined in their political message after Margaret Thatcher came to power as Prime Minister. In reaction to Thatcher’s idealisation of the nuclear family, where a woman was bound to the domestic role that many were beginning to look beyond, and that there exists "no such thing as society", art became not just a challenge to wider societal views of women, but also to those dominant narratives that came directly from authority.
It was the free-market agenda of Thatcher’s Conservative government that sparked a shift in the art world. The rapid commercialisation of the art market meant that for artists seeking to be successful in their focus on individualism and profitability, finding funding and space for their work was hard. Yet female artists persisted through this turmoil in the industry, continuing to make art that questioned the government and the misogynistic narrative it had created, and the See Red Women’s Workshop utilised the media and public art to further deconstruct and challenge this.
With the developments in the political landscape of the 1990s, along with the growing power of the commercial art market away from the independent art these female artists produced, art's revolutionary nature was harnessed to further convey a resounding, perseverant, tireless message. The art of these women speaks to feminists across generations, and their relentless work to meet their political agenda and create a more equal and open society for women has inspired the foundations for a future of feminist art.
And to leave you with the legacy that these women created for the art world, the artist Katie Walker speaks to the future of the feminist movement through art, for, ‘In the absence of a feminist art we must invent it as we go along. Here is a start, please carry on.’
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