THREAT Focus Show: ZOFIA RYDET (Poland) “Photomontage is by

THREAT
Focus Show:
ZOFIA RYDET (Poland)
“Photomontage is by its nature somewhat surrealist.
A challenge representing not a lie but rather intensified truth, a truth of a higher
suggestivity.”
(Ursula Czartoryska on Zofia Rydet)
Group Show:
EVELYNE AXELL
MARIA BARTUSZOVA
LOUISE BOURGEOISE
AUDREY CAPEL DORAY
RUTH FRANCKEN
CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN
PENNY SLINGER
MARJORIE STRIDER
TOYEN
(Belgium)
(Czech)
(USA/France)
(Canada)
(Czech/USA/France)
(USA)
(UK/USA)
(USA)
(Czech/France)
Exhibition: May 7 – June 22, 2011
This show presents work of women artists which - by no means - can be simply
grouped under one category, - and surely the notion of surrealism has still a mildly
painful association to some as it was a style which even at its dawn in modernism
was never fully accepted among the progressive avant-gardes.
Surrealism is often regarded for holding an alliance with kitsch and the
sentimental, its suspect to introversion, and of building on non-progressive
definitive forms and exaggerated naturalistic images. Thus, the politics of
Surrealism were often obscured, even as its forms border on the confrontational
language of Dada and the protagonists of the pre- and postwar movement were
often politically active, e.g. as members of Communist organizations or as
anarchists.
In the spectrum of its ambivalent reception surrealism could also be regarded as
an inherently effeminate art form. It definitely offered a particular potential of
radical articulation for women artists throughout.
The immediacy and efficiency of surrealist language, the often blunt and daring
eroticism, the realism of ‘objet trouvé’, and its precise expressions of maximum
evocative strengths, provide a genuine terrain for women artists’ (proto)-feminist and in a wider perspective politically engaged language.
This show further juxtaposes works by Eastern European artists next to the work of
Western European and American artists from the same mostly post-war period.
We see works of lesser known, or to date almost entirely overlooked artists next to
works, which are more prominent to the US public’s memory. Despite the political
divisions of the iron curtain and the Cold War, we see astonishing familiarities in
expression and themes, as well as interesting distinctions. The radical
internationalism of the pre-war avant-garde made it easy to espouse a nonnational movement such as surrealism. After the war, surrealism continued to
appear in new updated forms, yet at times socially and geographically
disconnected. Surrealist language lived on in numerous forms and ways, often
leading to new art movements such as Fluxus and Pop Art or fusing with radically
contemporary forms.
Zofia Rydet, Mannequin, 1970s
In a focus show we present 11 works of Polish photographer Zofia Rydet whose
work has not been shown for a long time and was recently rediscovered by the
Warsaw based gallery Asymetria.
Rydet created a fascinating series of photomontages titled “The World of Feelings
and Imagination” from the 1960s-70s advancing surreal and Dadaist motifs, while
she also worked in photo reportage inspired by the meta-national show “The
Family of Man” which came to Warsaw in 1955.
Rydet’s motifs such as the “Mannequins” and “Threat” have an obscure take on the
post-war period in images where a soldier in a uniform more reminiscent of World
War I (and therefore enhancing the stylistic reference to Dada) makes his
appearance in abandoned alleys and ruins, his body de-collaged into a crippled
ghostlike pose.
Zofia Rydet, Threat, 1970s
In other photomontages we see stripped mannequins gathering in desolate postapocalyptic landscapes possibly hinting to the threat of nuclear destruction in the
Cold War time. In other motifs Rydet invented a peculiar travesty by applying
‘masks’ of a woman and a man with eerily deformed faces to the bodies of female
and male protagonists positioned in oppressive domestic milieus and in nostalgic
rural scenes, which seem to be taken from Rydet’s reportage work. In some cases
the stone-faced introvert female mask is attached to a male body creating a
subtext of androgyny in social milieus, which seems too geographically remote and
anachronistic for such manipulations of gender masquerade. These works have a
truly unfamiliar atmosphere where sensations of tenderness, violence and
alienation are kept in an impenetrable balance.
Rydet’s work owns “a certain kind of understatement, an unexpected transition of
vision. Inspired by that naïve iconography and simple minded narration, by
primitive religiousness and atmosphere of folk adages and the memory of war –
we enter the world of her own surreality.” (Ursula Czartoryska)
Evelyne Axell, Cercle vicieux rouge (Vicious red circle), 1968
Belgian artist Evelyne Axell was tutored by Surrealist and friend René Magritte and
developed her own contemporary style of Pop-Surrealism. Her early work “The
Erotic Machine or Concept of Boy Art”(“Mec Art”), 1964, was painted
programmatically ‘in the style of Magritte’ and mocks the Duchampian idea of the
erotic machine.
In “Cercle Vicieux (Rouge)” from 1968 Axell further responds to Duchamp’s
concept of the isolated gender zones and the self-indulged activities of the bride
and bachelors in his seminal work, the “Large Glass”: in her imposing circular relief
painting we see a monolithic female torso of walking legs occupying the pictorial
realm, the figure being encapsulated in a red ‘vicious circle’, self-contained and
undefined in its direction.
Marjorie Strider moved from Pop Art’s joyful painterly optimism to intrusive
assemblage work with colored foam as in the site-specific installation “Stair Pour”
(976) at the University Graduate Center, New York. Strider worked with the foam
material in ample ways from sculptural assemblage to relief paintings and
drawings.
Marjorie Strider, Lady Liberty, 1972
The most political variation of the foam series appears in the gouache drawing
“Lady Liberty” (1972), where blue foam is pouring out of the crown of the Statue of
Liberty, a still pre-trauma 1970s Pop vision of national ‘threat’.
Audrey Capel Doray, Armored Lady, 1968
Canadian artist Audrey Capel Doray revisited the Dadaist ‘Automaton’ in a new
Pop-language in her signature piece of the “Armored Lady”(1968). There is a
sound piece of experimental jazz integrated into the iconic piece composed by
Mark Oliver and the artist herself. The bust lights up in a fast rhythm exposing a
text collage with notions such as “True”, “East” and “West”.
Penny Slinger, Golden Triangle, 1976
Penny Slinger, The Red House, 1977
Around the same time British artist Penny Slinger (who today lives in California)
created resin sculptures of body casts such as “Golden Triangle” (1976) and the
eerie dark earlier sculpture “Bride in the Bath” (1969), a real bath tub in which a
life size female figure lies covered in a full body black veil.
Maria Bartuszová, Untitled, 1968
Louise Bourgeois, Untitled (Sleep II), 1968
Parallel to Louise Bourgeois’ abstracted phallic forms such as “Untitled (Sleep II)”
and Alina Szapoznikow’s body casts and semi-abstract corporeal landscapes,
Czech sculptor Maria Bartuszova developed sculptures of “bionical” abstraction.
While her style is more minimal and less corporeal it is nonetheless fetishistic.
Although Bartuszova was one of the widely talked about rediscoveries of the last
Documenta XII, her groundbreaking work remained to date relatively unknown in
the US.
Like the Polish Alina Szapocznikow in the late 1960s and early 70s, the Pragueborn, later American and French resident Ruth Francken, kept her outstanding
style and important aesthetic distance to the ruling Parisian movement of
“Nouveau Realism”. Apart from her design classic of the “Homme, Chaise” (1970)
(for which she took a full body cast of a young man, as Szapocznikow did from the
body of her son Piotr in 1971), her work is hardly known anymore, although she
(as well as her Polish contemporary) received an early solo exhibition in the Musee
d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (both under curator Suzanne Page). She was
prominently associated and courted by the Parisian nobility of intellectuals. Her
work presented a genuine fusion of exaggerated Pop sensibility in black & white
and feminist surreal interventionism such as in the object “Televenus” (1969) and
the photo-relief “Lilith” (1970).
Ruth Francken, Lilith, (1970)
There is a deep involvement and far reach of political expression in the work of
particularly women artists of the classic period of Surrealism and Dadaism, and
one finds an extraordinary richness of expression in women artists’ works in the
1960s, 70s and 80s, revisiting surrealist and Dadaist styles, techniques and tropes
for their contemporary aesthetic, political intentions and urgencies.
Toyen, Cache-toi guerre!, 1944
During the war in 1944 first generation Surrealist Toyen created a series of
etchings titled “Cache-toi guerre!” (“Collapse war!”). The experience of the war
appears in the manner of this “intensified truth” which we later find in the
photomontages of Zofia Rydet and in the work of Carolee Schneemann. The style,
which draws directly on current political atrocities finds at the same time a
language transcending the political into a more general insight in its makings and
inner operations.
Penny Slinger, Tribunal (An Exorcism), 1977
The familiarities in techniques and even themes of these photomontages with
Schneemann’s “Illinois Central” (1968) for example and Penny Slinger’s collages
from the series “An Exorcism” (1977) are striking. In “Illinois Central” we see an
epic panorama of rural American landscape over which a female nude in archaic
rags is floating like a death angel associating once more the nuclear destruction or
the images of Napal bombing in the Vietnam. In her performance “Snows”, 1967,
Schneemann developed a complex “Kinetic Theater” about her outrage about the
Vietnam atrocities.
Carolee Schneemann, War Mop, 1983
In Schneemann’s kinetic video installation “War Mop” (1983) from the Lebanon
Series, we see a mechanized mop hitting a TV monitor. The video shows “news
footage of the skeletal remains of the Lebanese town Damour, panning to a
Palestinian woman in the wreckage of her home. (…) The political information
that’s coming to me – which anyone else might have access to – physicalizes itself
as dreams, hallucinations, sensations of being in a place I have never seen literally
or actually been. With the increasing bombardments of Lebanon after the Israeli
invasion in 1982, I began to see imagery - on the threshold of sleeping - of very
specific buildings blowing up, being bombed: an old stone library blasted by rocket
fire and imploding. I pursue these chimera back into the world where they are
located, to deepen the world might be.”
(Carolee Schneemann)