Career Woman and Material Girl: Staged Femininity in the
Works of Contemporary Women Artists
Rosemarie Trockel's stove paintings unite a housewife's idyll and Kasimir
Malevich's Black Square; in the works of Katharina Sieverding,
femininity becomes an abstract image: when female artists begin
investigating images of women, they often take their own experiences in
role-playing as their subject matter. In the process, feminist definitions
and the much-cited solidarity among women become clichés every bit as
dubious as their chauvinist fantasy counterparts. Harald Fricke on
media ruptures, constructed genders, gaps, and self-portraits.
Louise Bourgeois, The Woven Child (cover and page 1), 2003
Fabric and color lithograph book, 6 pages
Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
Photo: Christopher Burke
The "Art Compass" of
the German magazine Capital
has been an institution for decades. Whoever wants to know which artists
are doing the best business can quickly find information here on the price
range and latest art market trends. The upper echelon, however, offers few
surprises: while Andy Warhol
and Joseph Beuys
were the favorites throughout the seventies and eighties,
Bruce Nauman,
Gerhard Richter,
Sigmar Polke, and
Georg Baselitz now head the list. Yet in the nineties, women artists also
made it into this men's world: suddenly,
Louise Bourgeois and
Cindy Sherman were steadily climbing the list,
Jenny Holzer was rapidly catching up, and the newcomer
Pippilotti Rist also made it into the upper reaches. Yet none of these
women are as successful as
Rosemarie Trockel, who has been occupying fourth place on the list for
several years. This makes the situation precarious, however: should her
success be taken as a victory for
feminism? Or is the "eternal" fourth place additional proof that women
don't really have a shot at the top spots in the art establishment?
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Rosemarie Trockel: Continental
Divide", 1994
©Galerie Monika Sprüth, Köln; VG Bild-Kunst
2004
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Rosemarie Trockel: Schizo- Pullover
1988 Wolle, 60 x 66 cm, Ed. 3
©Galerie Monika Sprüth, Köln; VG
Bild-Kunst 2004
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Rosemarie Trockel: from the poster series
"Beauties"
for the
project museum in progress, 1995
Whatever the
case may be, Trockel's1994 video work Continental Divide provided a
commentary on the question of who the best artist is. In it, Trockel
appears with a double; both of them are stuffed into a "Schizo Sweater"
out of which two identical heads protrude. Throughout the film, Trockel
and her alter ego
discuss the ranking and fight over which of the two has a right to the
laurels. Eventually, the visitor can hardly tell what's going on anymore,
partly because the game's contenders, dressed in costumes and wigs, are
shot diagonally from above, half-submerged in shadow; after a while, it's
no longer possible to make out which of the two is the real Trockel.
The confusion is deliberate, and the tribunal-like situation doesn't seek to
clarify who in fact deserves the title. In her film, Trockel demonstrates
how art and life separate when it comes to a career: Continental Divide
is a meditation on how women are constantly pinned down by the
gender-specific roles assigned to them in their artistic production. Men
are expected to possess a healthy competitive instinct, yet it's
solidarity we expect to find among women - a thing Trockel refuses here in
an exemplary manner. In the process, she breaks with the notion that the
success of women artists stands for social emancipation: Trockel's success
is not merely representative of a feminist strategy, but a result of her
artistic individuality. This ambiguity carries throughout many of her
works, such as the Oven Burners (1992) mounted on the wall as a
relief that, on the one hand, picks up on the traditional role of women in
the kitchen, and on the other locates itself in the iconographic tradition
of Kasimir
Malevich's black squares. It's no accident that Trockel's early "knit"
images took the handicraft of the knitting machine ordinarily reserved to
women and translated it into large-scale art historical quotes.
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Rosemarie Trockel, Untitled, 1986
Deutsche Bank Collection
©Courtesy Galerie Monika Sprüth, Köln;
VG Bild-Kunst 2004
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Rosemarie Trockel, Der Maskenmann
©Courtesy Galerie Monika Sprüth, Köln;
VG
Bild-Kunst 2004
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