Counterpractice: Psychoanalysis, politics and the art of French feminism 9781526125170

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Counterpractice

S E R I E S E D I TO R S 

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Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic structures by foregrounding work that challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of traditional art history, and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present. These books will acknowledge the impact of recent scholarship on our understanding of the complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged through centuries of world-wide trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas across national and continental borders. To buy or to find out more about the books currently available in this series, please go to: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/rethinking-arts-histories/

Counterpractice

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Psychoanalysis, politics and the art of French feminism Rakhee Balaram

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Rakhee Balaram 2021 The right of Rakhee Balaram to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 2516 3  hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover: Colette, Homage to Delacroix, 1970, photograph of private performance in New York © Colette the Artist Cover design: Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press Typeset by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

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Contents

List of illustrations page vi Acknowledgments xxiii Foreword by Griselda Pollock xxv Preface: the glissade xxx Introduction 1 On the streets: from May ’68 to the MLF

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The MLF 1970s

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1 2 3

Libération-création: MLF, women artists and the militant body

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4

Instase: Psychanalyse et Politique and the spaces of women’s art

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5 6

Women’s groups and collective art practices

275

Hard politics, soft art: subversive practices from écriture féminine to soft art

354

Conclusion: La révolution accomplie? Some legacies of women’s art in 1970s France

419





Index 426

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Illustrations

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions. Plates 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10

R. Brahimi, ‘des identités plurielles pour une société plurielle’ (1988), produced by the group Expressions Maghrébines au féminin for a conference in 1991. Sonia Delaunay, UNESCO poster, 1975. Featured Delaunay’s Grande icône, c. 1970. Lithograph. Cover of UNESCO magazine Le courrier, 1975. Featured Mithila painting. Hermine Freed, Art Herstory, 1974. (Image courtesy of Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, www.vdb.org. © 2020 Hermine Freed.) Nil Yalter, La Femme sans tête ou la Danse du ventre, 1974. Video. (© 2020 Nil Yalter.) Nous sommes le pouvoir, May ’68 poster. Atelier Populaire de l’Ex-Atelier des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Michèle Katz (attributed), Vigilance: Indicateurs: ‘Civiques’ May ’68 poster. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Gina Pane, Pierres déplacées, July 1968. Performance. Valley of Orco, Italy. (Image courtesy of Max Pescio and Osart Gallery, Milano. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Hélène de Beauvoir, Bons pavés, 1968. Oil on canvas. (Image courtesy of Galerie Hammer, Regensburg.) Charlotte Calmis, Mai 1968. c. 1970. Mixed media collage. (Image courtesy of Marie-Jo Bonnet. Collection Association Charlotte Calmis.)

List of illustrations

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14 15 16 17 18 19 20

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22 23 24 25

Simone Lacour, Brûlant velum, 1969. Shaped canvas. Paris. 116 × 89 cm. (Image courtesy of Guy Obijn. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / SABAM, Brussels.) Simone Lacour, Le Bilingue, 1969. Aluminum on canvas. Paris. 116 × 70 cm. (Image courtesy of Guy Obijn. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / SABAM, Brussels.) Juliet Berto, still from Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, 1967. Henri Cueco, La rue, 1968. From the series ‘Les hommes rouges’. Glycerophthalic paint on canvas. (Image courtesy of Le MASC Les Sables d’Olonne. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) ‘Le pouvoir du con’, Le Torchon brûle, no. 2, 1972. Hélène de Beauvoir, ‘S.O.S Femmes Alternative Alsace’, 1979. (Image courtesy of Galerie Hammer, Regensburg.) Michèle Katz, Duo de femmes, Chronique d’une femme mariée, 1974. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Michèle Katz, Mâle désir d’un enfant, Chronique d’une femme mariée, 1974. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Cover of Le Torchon brûle, 1971. Emma Santos, La femme rupture, 1979. Collage. (Image courtesy of Collection Art Brut, Lausanne. Reproduced by permission of Armelle Le Goff.) Lea Lublin, Espace perspectif et désirs interdits d’Artemisia G., 1979. Drawing with china ink, acrylic paint, 4 panels, 100 × 80 cm. (Image courtesy of Nicolas Lublin and Gallery 1 Mira Madrid.) Alina Szapocznikow, Tumeurs, 1971–1972. Polyester resin, fiberglass, paper, gauze. (Photo: Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, and Agencja Medium Sp. Z.O.O. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Raymonde Arcier, Héritage, les tricots de ma mère, 1972–1973. Knitted wool. 3 meters. (Courtesy of the artist. © 2020 Raymonde Arcier.) Raymonde Arcier, Ar(t)mure pour art(r)iste, 1981 (detail). Crocheted brass. Weight 45 kilograms. (Photo: Rakhee Balaram. © 2020 Raymonde Arcier.) Galerie des femmes, exhibition catalogue cover, 1982. (© 1982 Éditions des femmes-Antoinette Fouque.) Geneviève Asse, Ouverture de la nuit, 1973. Oil on canvas. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.)

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28 29 30 31

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34 35 36 37 38 39

Geneviève Claisse, Invariant rouge, 1973. Acrylic on canvas. 47.2 × 47.2 in. (Galerie Denise René, Paris. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Liliane Lijn, Tilt, 1969. Glass fiber and polyester resin, fluorescent blue and green Perspex, motorized turntable, fluorescent light tube. Height 33 cm × diameter 23 cm. (Photo courtesy of Richard Wilding. © 2020 Liliane Lijn. All rights reserved. DACS, London / Artists Rights Society, New York.) Sara Holt, Cône oblique, 1970. Polyester resin. 19 × 13 × 17 in. (Artist’s collection. Photo courtesy Sara Holt. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Sara Holt, Trainée d’étoiles, 1978. Lubéron. Argentique. (Photo courtesy Sara Holt. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Pierrette Bloch, Sans titre, 1972. China ink and paper. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Bibliothèque en feu, 1974. Oil on canvas. (Image courtesy of Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum – Modern Collection. Photo: Paulo Costa. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Marie Raymond, J’ai tendu les cordes et je danse (Rimbaud), 1979. Oil on canvas, 130 × 97 cm. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Anna-Eva Bergman, N°48–1971 Mur de glace, 1971. Acrylic, modeling paste and metal leaves on canvas. 150 × 200 cm. (Photo: Fondation Hans Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman, Antibes. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Colette Bréger, Cover drawing of Sorcières, ‘Le sang’, no. 9, 1977. (© Colette Bréger.) Anne Saussois, Sans titre, 1978. Colored pencil on paper. 30 × 40 cm. (© 2020 Anne Saussois.) Sabine Monirys, La traversée des apparences, c. 1976. Oil on canvas. (Reproduced with the permission of Association Sabine Monirys.) Charlotte Calmis, Blessures de la lumière, 1970. Mixed media. (Image courtesy of Marie-Jo Bonnet.) Charlotte Calmis, La femme dans la cité, 1976. Collage. (Image courtesy of Marie-Jo Bonnet. Collection Association Charlotte Calmis.) Lea Lublin, Fluvio Subtunal, 1969. Inflatable tunnel installation, transparent plastic. Participatory art. Sorcières, no. 10, 1977, p. 48.

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List of illustrations

(Image courtesy of ISLAA FUNDATION. © Nicolas Lublin / Estate Lea Lublin.) 40 Tania Mouraud, Seeing Alone, Art Space No. 2, 1976. Installation. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 41 Geneviève Zondervan, Untitled, from Face à la mer series, c. 1981. Oil on canvas. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 42 Colette Levine, Untitled, n.d. Pastel. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 43 Bernadette Kelly, Dimanche, 1968. Oil on canvas. 150 × 200 cm. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 44 Thérèse Boucraut, L’Insomnie, 1968. Oil on canvas. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 45 Marianne Fayol, Portrait-de-l’oiseau-qui-n’existe-pas (Portrait-of -the-bird-that-doesn’t-exist), 1980. Charcoal, oil on cardboard, pastel. 24 × 32 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. Donation Claude Aveline. (© CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.) 46a & b Agnès Varda, stills from Réponse de femmes, 1975. Ciné-tract. 8 min. 47 Hessie, Trous [Masculin-Féminin], 1973. Embroidery on cloth under Plexiglass. 118 × 175 cm. (Musée de Grenoble. Image courtesy of Amarante Szidon. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 48 Bernadette Bour, Untitled, 1974. Oil, tissue paper and thread on unfixed canvas. 93 × 74 cm. (© 2020 Bernadette Bour. Reproduced with the permission of Galerie Françoise Livinec.) 49a & b Françoise Janicot, J’aime ta binette – I like your face, 1978. (Archives Françoise Janicot. © 2020 Françoise Janicot.) 50(a–g) Lea Lublin, Dissolution dans l’eau – Pont Marie, 1978. Performance. (Courtesy of Nicolas Lublin and Gallery 1 Mira Madrid. Archives Françoise Janicot. © 2020 Nathalie Heidsieck.) 51 Le Lieu-Dit, Archival photos from albums of Gloria Feman Orenstein. (Courtesy of Gloria Orenstein.) 52 Irène Laksine, Untitled, c. 1978. Acrylic on PVC. Painting included with the catalogue Écritures de femmes/Polyfèmes at the Abbey in Saint-Maximin, October–November 1978. (Gift and courtesy of Gloria Orenstein. © 2020 Irène Laksine.) 53 Kate Millett at a lecture by Marie-José Mondzain-Baudinet presented by Art et Regard des Femmes on 6 May 1980. (Photo courtesy Ody Saban.)

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Nicola L., Red Coat – Same Skin for Everybody, 1969–2015. Vinyl. (Photo courtesy of Galerie Patricia Dorfmann. Reproduced by permission of Christophe and David Lanzenberg.) 55 Simon Hantaï, Meun, 1967. Oil on canvas. 247.5 × 211 cm. (Photo courtesy of Timothy Taylor Gallery. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 56 Installation Supports-Surfaces, Exposition Travaux de l’été 70 (Daniel Dezeuze, Patrick Saytour, André Valensi, Claude Viallat) at the Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, April 1971. (Photo Jacqueline Hyde, Paris. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 57 Françoise Janicot, Encoconnage, 1972. Performance. (© 2020 Françoise Janicot.) 58 Lygia Clark, Architectures biologiques: naissance / Biological Architectures II – ‘1969’, 1969. Sewn nylon sacs. (Courtesy of ‘The World of Lygia Clark’ Cultural Association.) 59 Jacques Monory, Jungle de velours no. 13, 1971. Oil on canvas. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 60 Emma Santos, Les 4 yeux de la mort, dessin sous perfusion, 1979. Colored pencil and wax crayon on paper, 18 × 20 cm. (Photo Claudine Garcia. Image courtesy of Collection Art Brut, Lausanne. Reproduced by permission of Armelle Le Goff.) 61 Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo and Antonio Recalcati, Vivre et laisser mourir, ou la fin tragique de Marcel Duchamp, 1965. Oil on canvas. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 62a Sheila Hicks, Os, 1965. Made in Paris, 1965. Cotton and synthetic fiber. 8½ × 1 in. each. (Collection of the artist. © 2020 Sheila Hicks. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.) 62b Sheila Hicks, He and She, 1965. Handspun and industrially spun wool. 8⅞ × 5½ in. and 9 × 5 in. (© 2020 Sheila Hicks. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.) 63 Sheila Hicks, Couverture du lingam, 1966–1967. Silk and wool. 7 × 6 in. (© 2020 Sheila Hicks. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.) 64 Annette Messager, Boarders at Rest (Le repos des pensionnaires), 1971–1972. Taxidermized birds and wool, each approximately 4¾ × 4 × 1¼ in. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 65 Hessie, Écriture, 1973. Green thread embroidery on cotton fabric. 190 × 175 cm. (Courtesy of Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, Paris and Amarante Szidon. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.)

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List of illustrations

Hortense Damiron, Nappe sur fond rose, 1972. Oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm. Included in the 8th Biennale de Paris. (Photo: Rakhee Balaram. © 2020 Hortense Damiron.) 67 Liliane Camier, Tablier, 1977. Canvases with clear pockets and diverse objects. (Atelier Liliane Camier. Photo: Rakhee Balaram. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 68 Marinette Cueco, Convolvulus Soldanella, Convolvulus Soldanella, Cerasus, Briza Media, Ginestea Cinerea, Convolvulus Soldanella & Juncus Anceps, Ginestea Cinerea, Convolvulus, Ginestea Cinerea, Convolvulus, Convolvulus, Juncus Tenuis, 1980–1983. Knotted, knitted, entwined and woven plants. (Image: © Serge Vaignant. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 69 Hannah Höch, Dada/Puppen, 1916/1918. Textile, cardboard, pearls. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.) 70 Bona, La coquille et le clergyman, 1970. Sewn fabrics. (© 2020 Bona de Mandiargues.) 71 Gisèle Prassinos, Frère, sœur et prix d’excellence, 1978. Felt wall hanging, 103 × 79 cm. (© 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 72 Agnès Varda, still from L’Une chante et l’autre pas, 1976. 73 Dorothée Selz, Gâteau arc-en-ciel, 1974. Cake and food coloring by the artist. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.)

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Figures P.1

P.2

P.3 P.4 0.1

MLF demonstration, Des milliers de femmes par an victimes de l’avortemement [sic] clandestin en France, 20 November 1971, Paris. (Photo: Catherine Deudon. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / SAIF, Paris.) xxxi Gina Pane, Action nourriture / Actualités télévisées / Feu (detail). Performance. Chez Monsieur et Madame Frégnac, Paris, 24 November 1971. (Photo: Françoise Masson. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.) xxxi Plaster cast of the Gradiva, from the collection of Sigmund Freud. (© 2020 Freud Museum, London, UK.)xxxiii Oscar Roty, La semeuse, 5 franc coin, 1970. xxxv Jean Clair’s pie chart of trends on the cover of Art en France, 1972. (© John Clair.) 14

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0.2 Hessie, Oui/Non, le droit de vote de la femme, March 1975. Perforations on a photograph of embroidery on cloth (likely Trous). Lost work. Photo from artist’s archive. (Photo courtesy: Arnaud Lefevbre © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 19 1.1 Jean-Pierre Rey, ‘La Marianne de Mai 68’, May 1968. Photograph. (© Jean-Pierre Rey/Fond Photographique Jean-Pierre Rey). 44 1.2 Situationist comic reprinted in Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations, René Viénet (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). (Image courtesy of Mehdi El Hajoui, https://situationnisteblog.com.) 45 1.3 Fédération des Comités Ouvriers-Étudiants. Ah!… Comme elles savent bien y faire / La Révolution continue! n.p. [Paris?], n.d. [c. 1968]. 4 p.; ill.; 18 × 26 cm.; black ink on white stock. Detourned comic in the Situationist tradition. (Image courtesy of Mehdi El Hajoui, https://situationnisteblog.com.) 46 1.4 René Viénet, Misère de la sexologie. n.p. (France), n.d. [March–April 1967]. 3 p.; ill.; 20 × 30 cm.; black ink on thick white stock. (Image courtesy of Mehdi El Hajoui, https://situationnisteblog.com.)48 1.5 Bernadette Kelly, Mai 68, 1968. Paris. Unpublished photograph. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 48 1.6 Bernadette Kelly, Mai 68, 1968. Paris. Unpublished photograph. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 49 1.7 ORLAN, Grande Odalisque, d’après Ingres, 1977. Performance/Photograph with trousseau sheets. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 50 1.8 Lourdes Castro, Ombres portées couchées, 1968. White cotton sheet, green lines embroidered by hand. 300 × 220 cm. (© 2020 Lourdes Castro.) 50 1.9 Sois jeune et tais–toi, May ’68 poster, Paris. 57 1.10 La beauté est dans la rue, May ’68 poster, Montpellier. 59 1.11 Lea Lublin, Mon fils, 1968. Installation view from the Salon de Mai. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. (Image courtesy of Nicolas Lublin.) 61 1.12 Niki de Saint Phalle, Accouchement blanc ou GHEA, 1964. Paint, toys, various objects, wire mesh on wood panel. 180 × 110 × 40 cm. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 68

List of illustrations

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1.15 2.1

2.2 2.3

2.4 2.5

2.6

2.7

2.8 2.9

2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13

Gina Pane, Presque cercle, 1968. Action. Ury, France. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Gina Pane, Installation pour un corps – Lunairepénétrable, 1966. Galvanized iron, painted white and red. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Sophie Calle, Filatures parisiennes, 1978–1979. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Ruth Francken, Lilith, 1972. 150  × 120 cm. Black and white photograph. (Private Collection, Netherlands. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Brigitte Bardot as Marianne. Town hall statue sculpted by Aslan (Alain Gourdon), 1969/1970. Laying of the Wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, 26 August 1970. (Uncredited photo, 12 ans de femmes au quotidien, 1970–1981, Supplément à l’Agenda Femmes (Paris: La Griffonne, 1982), p. 5.) Cover of l’Idiot International. May 1970. MLF Demonstration, 20 November 1971. (Photo: Catherine Deudon. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / SAIF, Paris.) Events at La Mutualité, 13–14 May 1972. (Uncredited photo, 12 ans de femmes au quotidien, 1970–1981, Supplément à l’Agenda Femmes (Paris: La Griffonne, 1982), p. 9.) Film poster for Histoires d’A, 1973. Figure drawings by Monique Frydman. (© 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.) La foire des femmes, 1973. (Photo: Cathy Bernheim.) Grêve des femmes, graffiti on advertisement, 1974. (Photo: Catherine Deudon. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / SAIF, Paris.) Cover of L’Express with excerpts of Histoire d’O, 1 September 1975. Cover of Art Press, no. 5, March 1977. Femmes d’un jour, Centre Georges Pompidou, L’Express, 31 January–6 February 1977. Leonard Freed, Visitor to the Pompidou Center Looking at Art Installation, Paris, France, 1977. Exhibition: Femmes d’un Jour. (Scripps College, Claremont, California, gift of Sally Strauss and Andrew E. Tomback. © 2020 Leonard Freed/Magnum Photos.)

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88 90

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106 109 113 114

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2.14 2.15 2.16

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2.17 2.18 3.1 3.2 3.3

3.4 3.5 3.6

3.7 3.8

3.9a & b 3.10

Sempé, MLF cartoon, c. 1972. (© 2020 Jean-Jacques Sempé.)116 Sempé, MLF cartoon, Charlie Hebdo, May 1977. (© 2020 Jean-Jacques Sempé.) 116 Manifestation, La journée des femmes, March 1977. (Photo: Didier Maillac.) 117 ‘Festival de la femme’, Centre International de la Porte Maillot, 12–15 October 1977. 118 ‘Amicale des machistes, interdits aux connes’, Anti-MLF demonstration, offices of La Semaine de Charlie, July 1981. 127 Statue of Liberty in an International Women’s March poster, 20 November 1971. 147 Ruth Francken, La berceuse, 1973. Metallic photo relief. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.)149 Catherine Deudon, photograph of MLF demonstration against the Fête des Mères (which originated during Pétain’s government and was linked to anti-abortion) on the Champs-Elysées in front of Federico Fellini’s Roma, 28 May 1972. Paris. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / SAIF, Paris.) 150 Salon d’arts ménagers, Flyer, 1975. 151 Nil Yalter, La yourte, 1973. Installation at l’ARC, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. (© 2020 Nil Yalter.) 154 Myriam Bat-Yosef, La grotte (d’après André Pieyre de Mandiargues), 1979. Performance with painted wood cube. 123 × 141 × 85 cm. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 154 Christiane de Casteras and Andrée Marquet, La vie, 1974–1975, ‘Sculpture souple’ / Soft sculpture. (© 2020 Christiane de Casteras and Andrée Marquet.) 155 Paula Rego, La petite princesse enceinte, 1978. Object in cloth and kapok, h. 52 cm. (© 2020 Paula Rego. Reproduced with the permission of the artist and the Marlborough Gallery, London.) 155 ‘Images d’une oppression, images d’une libération’, La nouvelle critique: Politique, marxisme, culture, no. 53 (234) nouvelle série, May 1972. 162 Annette Messager, Mes jalousies, 1972. Album Collection, no. 25. Black and white photographs. (Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Aquitaine

List of illustrations

3.11

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3.12

3.13

3.14 3.15

3.16

3.17 3.18 3.19a & b

3.20 3.21

Collection. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 164 Annette Messager, Les tortures volontaires, 1972. Album Collection, no. 18. Black and white photographs. Overall dimensions 200 × 400 cm. (Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Rhône-Alpes Collection. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 164 Ruth Francken, Quelques unes d’entre elles, c. 1977. (Photomontage. ‘Enquête de la prise de parole à la création’, Les nouvelles littéraires, 1–8 December 1977, pp. 18–19, p. 19. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 166 Still from Monique – LIP I, 1973. Directed by Carole Roussopoulos – Vidéo Out. Black and white video, sound, 25 min. (Reproduced with the permission of Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir.) 166 Portrait d’une femme fidèle, Portrait fidèle d’une femme. Sorcières, ‘Fidélités’, no. 8, 1977, p. 46. 168 Gretta Grzywacz, Auto-Photos IV, 1976. Ink jet print on archival paper. 33 × 48 cm. Photograph. (© 2020 Gretta Sarfaty. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.)171 Nicole Métayer, Lien, 1974. Black and white photocopy self-portrait made with a photocopier. (© 2020 Nicole Métayer. Photo: Philippe Migeat. © CNAC/MNAM/ Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.) 171 Jeanne Socquet, Untitled painting with text by Marguerite Duras, Sorcières, ‘La voix’, no. 2, 1976, p. 7. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 173 Gretta Grzywacz, Transformaçoes, 1976. Photograph. (© 2020 Gretta Sarfaty. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.) 175 Eva Klasson, Untitled, black and white photographs, Sorcières, ‘Fidélités’, no. 8, 1977, p. 54. (© 2020 Eva Klasson. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.)176 Nil Yalter, Le sexisme dans la cuisine turque ou la volupté culinaire d’un empire, Sorcières, ‘Mouvements’, no. 15, 1978, pp. 26–27. (© 2020 Nil Yalter.) 177 Still from Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975. Directed by Chantal Akerman, 201 minutes.178

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3.22

Judy Blum, Nicole Croiset and Nil Yalter [Originally: ‘Groupe de Cinq’ (Martine Aballéa, Judy Blum, Nicole Croiset, Mimi and Nil Yalter)], still from La Roquette, 1974. (Image courtesy of Nil Yalter; © 2020 The Artists) 179 3.23 Maya Anderson, Aucun de mes gestes ne m’est simple, photographs. Text by Frédérique Touratier de Goeje, Sorcières, ‘Mouvements’, no. 15, 1978, pp. 10–12. (© 2019 Arists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 180 3.24a–d Ketty La Rocca, Le mie parole, e tu?, 1971. 4 parts (60 × 50 cm each). Black and white photographs and written. (Courtesy of the estate of Ketty La Rocca.)181 3.25 Marie Orensanz, Fragmentismo, 1978. Vintage print. (© 2020 Marie Orensanz. Reproduced with permission of the artist.) 182 3.26 Claude Batho, Very Simple Moments: The Sofa, 1972. Gelatin silver print. 25.5 cm × 30 cm. (© 2020 Claude Batho. Photo: Audrey Laurans. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.) 185 3.27 MLF Libération des femmes, poster, Vincennes, 1970. 185 3.28 Gina Pane, Blessures théoriques, February 1970. Action. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.)186 3.29 Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt and Mary Kelly, Double Seamer, Hopper Feeder, Neck Swagger, and Fork Picker. From Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry 1973–1975, 1975. Photo. (© 2020 Tate. Reproduced by Courtesy of Margaret Harrison. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / IVARO, Dublin.) 187 3.30 Stand for the Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement et de la contraception, 20 April 1974. Jussieu Faculty, Paris. (Photo: Rosette Coryell.) 188 3.31 MLF placard, Mon corps est à moi, undated photograph, c. early 1970s. Paris. 189 3.32 Gina Pane, Action Laure, 1977 (detail). Performance at Galerie Isy Brachot, Brussels, 28 April 1977. (Guggenheim Museum Collection. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 193 3.33 Tania Mouraud, Can I be anything which I say I possess?, 1971. Heliographic film and black letters.

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List of illustrations

(© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.)194 3.34 Colette, Let them eat cake! 1977. Installation. Biennale de Paris, 1977. (© 2020 Collettetheartist. Reproduced with permission of the artist.) 196 3.35 Colette, Homage to Delacroix, 1970/1972. Performance. (© 2020 Collettetheartist. Reproduced with permission of the artist.) 197 3.36 Veuve Angine, Le manteau du jardinier, 1980. Performance. Rubber raincoat covered with multicolored plastic flower petals, flexible plastic insects, spiders and other bugs sewn on with needle and thick thread. (Image courtesy of the artist [Martine Neddam].) 197 3.37 Ipoustéguy, L’agonie de la mère, 1970–1971. Marble. 117 × 225 × 165 cm. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 199 4.1 Des femmes exhibition at Avignon, 1981. (© 2020 Éditions des femmes-Antoinette Fouque.) 221 4.2 Aurélie Nemours, Le rythme du millimètre, 1976. Oil on canvas. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 228 4.3 Vera Molnar, Transformations of 160 Rectangles, 1976. Plotter drawing, ink on paper, each 21 × 21 cm, part of a series of 6. (Image courtesy of DAM, Berlin. Photo: Karen Blindow, Bremen. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 234 4.4 Jacqueline Dauriac, Le con de Carole, 1974. Mixed media. (© 2020 Jacqueline Dauriac, all rights reserved. Photo: Olivier Buhagiar.) 237 4.5 Jacqueline Dauriac, Dessin sur calque, 1974. Mixed media. (© 2020 Jacqueline Dauriac, all rights reserved.) 237 4.6 Ipoustéguy, La Naissance, 1968. Marble. 84 × 95 × 75 cm. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 238 4.7 Virginia Tentindo, Le chat d’octobre, 1977. Porphyry marble and Etruscan black patinated bronze. 34 × 22 cm. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 240 4.8 Virginia Tentindo, Ci-gît le verbe, 1977. Porphyry marble and Etruscan black patinated bronze. 55 × 42 cm. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 240 4.9 Françoise Janicot, Encoconnage, 1972. Île Saint Louis, Paris. Performance. (© Françoise Janicot.) 244

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4.10 ORLAN, Strip-tease occasionnel à l’aide des draps du trousseau, 1974–1975. Photograph. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 245 4.11 Michel Journiac, 24 heures de la vie d’une femme ordinaire, 1974. Photograph. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 247 4.12 Sophie Calle, Strip-tease, c. 1978–1981. Photograph. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.)247 4.13 Jacqueline Delaunay, Cover of Sorcières, ‘Se prostituer’, no. 3, 1976. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 250 4.14a & b Claudette Brun, Colette Deblé, Françoise Eliet, Monique Frydman, Christine Maurice, Michèle Herry, ‘Enfermement/Rupture’, L’Humidité, no. 24, 1977, pp. 40–41. 254 4.15 Françoise Janicot, Plancher, Sorcières, ‘Art des femmes’, no. 10, 1977, p. 51. (© 2020 Françoise Janicot.) 255 4.16 Tania Mouraud, Initiation Room No. 2, 1971. Installation. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 258 5.1 ORLAN, Le Baiser de l’artiste, 1977. Performance at FIAC, Paris. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 276 5.2 Dorothée Selz, Palais de Justice, c. 1977. Black and white photograph base with grey-colored sugar and sound recording. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 279 5.3 La Spirale, Gaia, 1975. Charcoal on cloth. Collective drawing by La Spirale. (Image courtesy of Marie-Jo Bonnet.)290 5.4 La Spirale, group photo, 1977. Pictured: Françoise Basch, Charlotte Calmis, Jann Matlock, Maj Skadegård, Catherine Valabrègue and other artists. (Image courtesy of Marie-Jo Bonnet.) 295 5.5 La Spirale, Utopie et féminisme, 3–19 February 1977. Centre International de Séjour de Paris. 295 5.6 La Spirale, discussion at Utopie et féminisme, 1977. Paris. 296 5.7 Femmes en Lutte, De l’utilisation de la femme dans la publicité, 1975. 299 5.8 Femmes en Lutte, Mise en Question de la Fonction de L’UNESCO à travers le dossier: 75 Année Internationale de la Femme, 1975. 301

List of illustrations

5.9a & b

5.10

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5.11 5.12 5.13 5.14 5.15

5.16 5.17

5.18 5.19

5.20

5.21

Les Insoumuses [Carole Roussopoulos, Ioana Wieder, Delphine Seyrig, Nadja Ringart], stills from Maso et Miso Vont en bateau, 1976. (Reproduced with the courtesy of Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir.) 302 Femmes en Lutte, Saint-Médard. Quand on prévoit d’être heureux très longtemps, 1975. 303 Femmes en Lutte, De l’utilisation de la famille ou la vraie valeur des choses, 1975. 304 Yolande Brunet-Noury from Plasticiennes en Lutte. Image and statement from the exhibition catalogue of the 28th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, 1977. 306 Colette Deblé, Fenêtre-en-boîte, 1976–1977. Drawing. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.)314 Najia Mehadji, Untitled, 1977. Charcoal drawing. Reproduced in Sorcières, no. 15, ‘Mouvements’ (1978), p. 52. (Reproduced with the permission of the artist.) 314 Jacqueline Delaunay, XXe No Man’s Land, c. 1977. Sorcières, no. 11, January 1978. Photograph and ink. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.)315 Nil Yalter, L’Architecture du harem du Grand Sultan, 11 March 1978. Installation. (Atelier Françoise Janicot. © 2020 Françoise Janicot.) 315 Kate Millett, The Maja Rediscovered, 1968. Small Mysteries installation, NOHO Gallery, New York, 1976. W 1.6 meters × L 2.3 meters × H 2.6 meters. (Photo: Kate Millett. Installation published in Des femmes en mouvements, no. 5, May 1978, p. 16. © 2020 Kate Millett.)316 Françoise Janicot, Gare de Lyon, 1975. Photograph. (Courtesy: Archives Françoise Janicot. © 2020 Françoise Janicot.) 320 Milvia Maglione, Many Hours of Work, 1975. Textile and objects. (Photograph Françoise Janicot. Archives Françoise Janicot. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 320 Judy Blum, Nicole Croiset and Nil Yalter [Originally: ‘Groupe de 5’ (Martine Aballéa, Judy Blum, Nicole Croiset, Mimi and Nil Yalter)], stills from La Roquette, 1974. (Image courtesy of Nil Yalter. © 2020 The Artists.) 321 Rencontres Internationales de Caldas da Rainha au Portugal, 1–12 August 1977. Seated in stripes, Françoise

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5.22

5.23 5.24 5.25

5.26a & b 5.27 5.28

5.29

5.30a–c 5.31a & b

Eliet. Standing with headband, Lea Lublin. (Photograph by Françoise Janicot, Archives Françoise Janicot. © 2020 Françoise Janicot.) 323 Rencontres Internationales de Caldas da Rainha au Portugal, 1–12 August 1977. Left to right: Claudette Brun, Lea Lublin, Françoise Janicot, Françoise Eliet and unknown. (Archives Françoise Janicot. © 2020 Françoise Janicot.) 323 ORLAN, Rencontres Internationales de Caldas da Rainha au Portugal, 1–12 August 1977. (Archives Françoise Janicot. © 2020 Françoise Janicot.) 324 Atelier discussions. Françoise Janicot. Seated center Vera Molnar, Aline Dallier with back turned. (Archives Françoise Janicot. © 2020 Françoise Janicot.) 325 Atelier activities. Outside atelier of Françoise Janicot, March 1978. Left to right: Claude Torey, Lea Lublin, Françoise Janicot, Elisa Tan and Nil Yalter. (Archives Françoise Janicot. © 2020 Françoise Janicot.) 325 Elisa Tan, Conjugation of the verb: to work, 1978. Performance. (Archives Françoise Janicot. © 2020 Elisa Tan.) 326 Collectif Femmes/Art, Journées de travail, poster. Centre Culturel du Marais. 329 Monique Frydman’s body sketches in Écritures de femmes/Polyfèmes at the Abbey in Saint-Maximin, October–November 1978. (Archives Françoise Janicot. © 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.)330 Irène Laksine, Pablo Picasso, Paloma Picasso, Jacqueline Roque Picasso, and Laksine’s father Gorgious and her sisters Danielle and Nadia, Cadavre exquis, 12 August 1961 at Irène Laksine’s family home in Cannes. (Image courtesy of Danielle Baudot Laksine, Irène Laksine and Sally Perigo. © 2020 Irène Laksine.)331 Ody Saban, L’Écriture de 1977 dans Le cahier No. 1, 1977. Ink on paper. (© 2020 Ody Saban. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.) 333 Art et Regard des Femmes events: a. Ody Saban’s Déroulements avec les rouleaux with Calck Hook Dance and photography by Vivianne Simane, 4 May 1980. b. Ody Saban during Déroulements de rouleaux

List of illustrations

5.32

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6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

6.6 6.7 6.8

6.9 6.10

6.11

with poems read by Annie Vasseur and music and singing by Neige Haye, 17 May 1980. (Images courtesy of Ody Saban.) Ody Saban with her 10-meter roll of watercolor painting on the street in 1980. Art et Regard des Femmes. (© 2020 Ody Saban. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.) Judit Reigl, Drap/Décodage, 1973. Tempera imprint on canvas, 140 × 96 in. each. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) ORLAN, Performance, Embroidery of trousseau sheets, c. 1968. Performance. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Michèle Katz, ‘Peindre’, from Sorcières, no. 10, 1977, pp. 42–43. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Françoise Eliet, ‘Peindre / combattre’, from Sorcières, no. 10, 1977, pp. 20–21. ‘Envie de respirer, envie de faire de grandes gestes’, Mensuelle des femmes en mouvements n° 8–9, numéro double, août–septembre 1978. (© Archives du MLFPsychanalyse et politique.) Maya Anderson, Untitled performance, Sorcières, ‘Mouvements’, no. 15, 1978, p. 25. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Françoise Janicot and Claude Torey, Sound drawings, Premier Festival de la Performance de Paris, 19 March 1982. (Archives of Françoise Janicot.) Peru textile chosen by Sheila Hicks, Opus International. Jean-Louis Pradel, ‘La stratégie de supports-surfaces,’ Opus International, no. 61–62 (January–February 1977), pp. 63–67, p. 67. Annette Messager, Mon guide du tricot/My Knitting Manual, 1973. Album Collection, no. 42. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Annette Messager, Les femmes sont instruites par la nature, les hommes par les livres (Ma collection des proverbes, 1974). Embroidery. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) Milvia Maglione, La leçon de broderie, 1976. Cloth, graphite and embroidery. 1.95 × 1.00 m. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.)

334

335 358 359 367 368

370 371 372

378 381

383 387

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Christiane de Casteras and Andrée Marquet, Au fil des jours, 1976. Sewn quilt with soft sculptures. FéminieDialogue exhibition. Espace cousu.388 6.13 Andrée Marquet, Torchons, 1976. Drawing. 95 × 75 cm. (© 2020 Andrée Marquet.) 389 6.14 Liliane Camier, Dessin tissé – Au fil des mots, 1977. From the series Dessins tissés. Encre de Chine – sur Canson 180 gr., 45 cm × 57 cm. (© 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 391 6.15 Lourdes Castro, Geraniaceae and Solanaceae, grand herbier d’ombre, 1972. Heliographic paper. (© 2020 Lourdes Castro.) 392 6.16 Aube Elléouët, Le témoin ou la caverne d’Ali Baba, c. 1979. Collage. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 396 6.17 MLF, Des femmes en mouvements hebdo, no. 44, du 5 au 12 juin 1981, p. 12. (© Archives du MLF-Psychanalyse et politique.) 399 7.1 Charlotte Calmis, Histoire de l’art, c. 1980. Collage from Pénélope no. 3, 1980. Back cover. (Image courtesy of Marie-Jo Bonnet.) 420 7.2 Tania Mouraud, Ah! Paris, Rue Lepic [Vitrines], 1981. Black and white photograph. (© 2020 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.) 422

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6.12

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Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the wonderful editors and production team at MUP: Emma Brennan, Alun Richards, Jen Mellor, Caroline Richards and the series editors Amelia Jones and Marsha Meskimmon. The book would not be what it is today without the careful reading of Céline Druilhe and the peerless skills of Jocelyn Probert. My thanks to Sean Corcoran for the images and photography and my faculty colleagues – Rachel, Danny, Sarah, Amy, Melissa, Kianja, Mike, Shira, Leona, Adam, Roger, Phyllis, JoAnne, Ed and David – for their support. My enormous gratitude to Sarah Wilson (a stellar guide), Griselda Pollock and Susie Tharu for their readings of earlier drafts, luminous scholarship and encouragement. I would like to thank Mira Bernabeu, Joël Boutteville, Martina Cioni and Michelangelo Vasta, the Lygia Clark Foundation, Patricia Dorfmann, Ludwig Hammer, Mehdi El Hajoui, the late Serge Fayol, Margaret Harrison, Emmanuelle Heidsieck and Nathalie Heidsieck de Saint Phalle, Sophie Keir, Christophe and David Lanzenberg, the Le Goff family, Arnaud Lefebvre, Françoise Livinec, Nicolas Lublin, Vincent Monod, Sally Perigo, Jean-Christophe Rey and Philippe Rey, Robinson Savary, Amarante Szidon, as well as Isabelle Ville, for sharing her work on women’s medical histories. I must also mention Peter Collier and Emma Wilson at Cambridge. Further words of appreciation go to the scholars and friends who contributed to this project: Francesco Guzzetti, Laura Iamurri, Diana Quinby, Aurore Decourcelle, Tom McDonough, Gül Kale, Katy Deepwell, Georgiana Colvile, Jyotindra Jain and Natalie (Tally) Kampen. I also wish to acknowledge and deeply thank Ody Saban who wrote an original text for this book. There were a number of librarians and archivists who worked beyond their regular hours and went out of their way to help me access materials for this book. They deserve special recognition. They include the very dedicated staff at the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Florence Pustienne at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the staff at Éditions des femmes, Laurence Le Poupon at the Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes, the staff at the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, Paris, the Musée d’art moderne et d’art

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Counterpractice

contemporain, Nice, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Libraries to be noted include the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, New York City Public Library, and the university and department libraries of Columbia University, Princeton University and the Courtauld Institute of Art. I must also acknowledge the efforts of Angela Persico, the research librarian at SUNY-Albany, as well as Marissa Barnes, Hayley Blomquist at ARS and Joyce Faust at Art Resource for their help with numerous image rights. Several opportunities arose to present work from this book: at the WIF Conference in Leeds in 2015, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry in Berlin in 2015 and the Wounded Galaxies Conference on May ’68 in Bloomington in 2018. I would also like to mention King’s College, London, where I introduced part of this book in a keynote address in 2018, and the University of Cairo, where I was invited to share more of the research from it in 2019. This book was directly supported by research grants which include the Nuala M. Drescher Award in Fall 2019 and the SUNY FRAP Grant in Spring 2020. Finally, my profound thanks to the many artists, art historians, filmmakers and writers for so generously speaking to me about their work and lives from the early 2000s onwards: Raymonde Arcier, Myriam Bat-Yosef, Lucienne Berthon, Marie-Jo Bonnet, Thérèse Boucraut, Christine Duchiron Brachot, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Liliane Camier, Christiane de Casteras, Lourdes Castro, Georgiana Colvile, Aline Dallier-Popper, Hortense Damiron, Jacqueline Dauriac, Colette Deblé, Anne Delfieu, Marie-Hélène Dumas, Fabienne Dumont, Aube Elléouët, Monique Frydman, Angelica Garnett, Xavière Gauthier, Catherine Gonnard, Sheila Hicks, Sara Holt, Françoise Janicot, Michèle Katz, Bernadette Kelly, Eva Klasson, Simone Lacour, Irène Laksine, Elisabeth Lebovici, Colette Levine, Liliane Lijn, Colette Lumière, Giovanna Madione, Milvia Maglione, Anne Marchand, Andrée Marquet, Jann Matlock, Najia Mehadji, Mireille Miailhe, Sabine Monirys, Tania Mouraud, Laura Mulvey, Martine Neddam, Marie Orensanz, Gloria Orenstein, ORLAN, Evelyne Ortleib, Nicole Pierre, Gisèle Prassinos, Diana Quinby, Judy Blum Reddy, Judit Reigl, Annie Richard, Anne Rivière, Ody Saban, Gretta Sarfaty, Anne Saussois, Dorothée Selz, Jeanne Socquet, Gerda Sutton, Virginia Tentindo, Agnès Varda, Nil Yalter and Geneviève Zondervan. This book is dedicated to the spirits of the many friends who believed in it and to my family.

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Foreword

In 2014, I attended a conference at the Université de Paris VIII (Vincennes-St Denis) to mark the fortieth anniversary of the founding in 1974 of the first centre for women’s studies – Centre d’Études Féminines – at the then newly founded and very radical Université de Paris: Vincennes, by the writer Hélène Cixous. Folded first into a Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies (Centre d’Études Féminines et d’Études du Genre) directed by the academic, Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, and now Départment d’Études du Genre/Department of Gender Studies at Paris VIII, in 2014 this long-lived research centre was contemplating the dramatically changed landscape of both topics still enshrined in its title: feminism and gender. Indeed, Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, who had spent much of her academic life teaching in the United States of America, mused on the paradox of arriving in North America in the 1980s as the academy there embraced ‘French theory’, represented by Hélène Cixous’s texts amongst others, and returning in the twenty-first century to Paris to find her own field now dominated by a North American import, ‘gender theory’, commonly associated with the substantial intervention after 1990 by American philosopher Judith Butler. What does this transatlantic import–export of ideas about feminism and gender tell us about our present situation, about the historical geographies of feminism, and the function of their varied trajectories? My own contribution to this event in Paris in 2014 was the exploration of a question that troubles me: ‘Is Feminism a Bad Memory?’ The ambiguity in the title intentionally speaks to both my sense that feminism as a phenomenon is being gladly cast into the dustbin of history (Thank goodness that nightmare is over now!) and my conviction that the full complexity of the historical moment and meanings of feminism as it erupted in the 1960s to 1980s has succumbed to impoverished and under-researched stories and metaphors – waves and generations – that disable our present by the fixity of what are becoming repeated myths. Who is creating and telling the stories of the recent past, to what purpose, at what cost? What then is historical understanding once we recognize that it is not the same as these stories?

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Foreword

It is in the light of both the celebration of forty years of feminist studies in Paris and the unease felt about both the ‘story’ and the missing history of feminism and the directions being now charted for discussions based on gender, not women, as the key political and theoretical category, that I welcome this book. One of its most compelling aspects is that Rakhee Balaram has both collected an archive of historical materials and listened to many singular voices and revealed complex memories. Some of these could be tracked down through culling public archives, but, in general, feminist histories become ephemeral, unarchived and dispersed. So, this is a major monument of reconnection. This book is also based on over eighty interviews with participants, who have both been brought into relation with each other to enable a complex, multifaceted picture of the Parisian moment of post-1968 feminism and been used as resources for a fascinating study of the political and theoretical complexity of feminism in its diverse ‘national-political-cultural’ contexts. This serves above all to disrupt the dangerous tendency for ‘feminism’ to be identified with its North American form, or with English-language publications. In 1975, in one of two brief polemical outbursts, the writer Hélène Cixous had formulated the untranslatable but haunting concept of l’écriture féminine that plays a pivotal role in this book. In her richly poetic essay, ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ (The Laugh of the Medusa), Hélène Cixous had called to women to ‘write themselves’, that is to say, to deliver into literature what had not yet been written from and by the embodied, desiring, complex and infinite plurality of women whose singular voices would each weave the multi-threaded tapestry of diverse insights into the question of sexual difference in phallocentric culture. For forty years, readers in and beyond literature have been thrilled and puzzled in equal measure by Cixous’s rousing cry to ‘Let the priests tremble. Let us show them our sexts!’ This is the emblematic text of the exhilarating moment in Parisian politics and culture out of which Cixous’s manifesto burst. It resonated beyond literature. The value of this book, Counterpractice, is its rich and original exploration of the ramifications of this call for women to research, question, speak, represent, reflect, share, invent and intervene in the field of visual arts. What did and does it mean for women to make their ‘being/becoming women’ a question to be explored at the most profound levels of every area of thought and creativity and at the point at which the visual arts themselves were experiencing the convulsion that would open onto performance, moving image, installation and conceptual art while continuing unfinished questions of Surrealism, abstraction and materialism? Silenced by repression in and disfigured by the lens of millennia of patriarchal culture, feminists argued that women do not yet know themselves. They are, in effect, internal exiles from their own bodies and from language. They

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Foreword

have been told not only what they are but what they must be, should be, cannot be as well as what they cannot do. The feminist revolt post-1968, one of a whole series of revolts and movements that characterized the creative turmoil of the 1960s, and inheritor of many other historical feminist moments, addressed, however, the majority of the world’s population, the majority of world’s poor, the majority of the world’s violated, the majority of the world’s illiterate, the majority of the world’s labourers as well as the minority of the world’s political leaders and the world’s owners of wealth. Women are not a marginal subset. They are also a heterogeneous and agonistically divided constituency where class, ethnicity, sexuality, able-bodiedness, geography, religion, location, literacy and sexual vulnerability fracture any simple alliance between those designated women. Yet, historically, that designation became with post-1968 feminism a critical, political, theoretical and psychological site of investigation into real complexity and urgency in terms of life and death, both real and at the level of imagination and mental well-being. It is this context that we must grasp that the feminist moment of 1968 introduced into the world new conceptions of the political, new ideas about the relations between the political and the imaginative, the creative and the theoretical, the image and lived, differentially embodied experience. Yet, there is a general tendency to place a label, feminist, upon ideas, practices, events, movements as if the adjective was so crystal clear in its self-evident meaning that it requires no further examination. This flattening of the complex history of feminism and feminisms radically distorts that moment and prevents us from understanding what was brought into being, offered to the world through the creative relay of thought and art, activism and reflection. This is why we specifically need this book, and I am so happy to preface this work of deep research and careful analysis of the general shape and the specific activities that emerged in that moment when art met feminism and feminism met art in Paris in the 1970s. Paris, 1968 is more than a place name and a date. The history of feminism in general and feminism and art in particular has often been defined by nation: American, British, French, German, Italian; or, for non-Western cultures, by continent: Asian, Latin American. Not only does this recreate the hegemony of Western Europe and obliterate the rich and complex histories of both feminism as a movement and feminism as a cultural force which spread across all continents and has a still incomplete historical record, it misses the locatedness of the project in cities. Even considering American art and feminism, we would have to acknowledge how radically different are New York and Los Angeles, key centres on the North American continent, and as different politically and culturally as London, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin, Seoul, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Sydney or Mexico City.

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Foreword

Counterpractice is a detailed, deeply researched study of the meeting of art and feminism in Paris after 1968, and France more broadly, until the early 1980s. Its specific focus on the decade of the 1970s provides a depth of close analysis of a very complex story of different initiatives, conflicting feminist theories and political ideologies, the role of both informal groupings and established organizations and all in relation to the drama of French political history after 1968. The city of Paris is forever associated with a revolutionary moment whose repercussions resonated across an entire generation on a world scale and which became iconic by the date: 1968. That such an event, 1968, occurred as a temporary alliance of university students and factory workers is embedded in France’s long and recurring series of revolutions since its founding revolt in 1789. This tradition of uprising as well as profound discontent with the postwar settlement in France shaped a specific space for the Parisian moment of a worldwide movement, the women’s movement. France, a colonial power that had, in the 1950s, waged a brutal and traumatic war against decolonization with continuing effects on both sides, would witness, from the 1970s to the 1980s, radical shifts in political orientation from right to left. The complexity and intensity of French political formation forms the specific ground for the picture this book slowly paints of the forms of feminist activism, theory and culture centred in Paris in the aftermath of 1968 and throughout the 1970s. Finally, this book, in English, reminds us of the barriers of language that have prevented the emergence of a truly international picture of the moment art met feminism and feminism met art. I have written elsewhere that such an encounter was not to be expected. Post-1968, the crossing of the political and the aesthetic in terms of the long histories of art and of feminism was unique and radicalized both partners: art and feminism. Packaging some art as ‘feminist art’ by style, subject matter or key names again misses the dynamic moment of the meeting of artistic practice as it released itself from the hegemonies of painting and sculpture to devise new languages for art making through conceptual practice, performance, new materials, new sites and expanded media. This is a richly illustrated book offering an anglophone readership a temporary exhibition of an extraordinary community of artists working in Paris in the 1970s, often with knowledge of each other, and bringing the complexity of artistic practice to the dynamic of debate created by proliferating groupings, formalized movements such as the MLF (Mouvement de libération des femmes that was trademarked by one group), informal groups, presses, exhibitions, magazines. For many of us in the world of feminist thought and its literature and philosophy, French writers are already well known. For those of us in art history, the iconic artists are not French. Some have crossed the language barrier through recent survey exhibitions. It is striking and shocking

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Foreword

that so rich a field of later twentieth-century art has not become part of the wider field. I was struck, on reading this book, when artists I have written about in seeming isolation, such as Colette Deblé, Alina Szapocznikow, Niki de Saint Phalle, ORLAN, Annette Messager, Lea Lublin, Nil Yalter, were placed in such a rich field of so many Paris-based artists, French and international, who were in creative dialogue throughout the 1970s, formulating in conversation and practice questions for themselves about the body, about subjectivity, about difference, and posing them through cutting-edge creative inventiveness. One of the most significant revelations of Rakhee Balaram’s research and analysis is that art was such an urgent site for the debates that animated French culture and society during the 1970s. At the same time, what generated intense debate and thus brought the women as feminists into dialogue and activism with each other in Paris resonates with what we already know from more widely disseminated studies of the worldwide feminist-inflected aesthetic revolution in art. This close, detailed, original and revelatory study of the debates, groups and art practices of that revolution in Paris, and France more generally, expands our understanding of its international scale that was built on these intense, local, located projects and intensely debated priorities. Rakhee Balaram has thus not only enlarged the art historical understanding of later twentiethcentury art inflected by feminism. She has also made visible the specificity of its formation in Paris in particular and in a French context that was politically and aesthetically agitated, inspired, excited and transformed, post-1968, by women as artists, curators and writers, creatively engaged in the women’s movement. Griselda Pollock

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Preface: the glissade

On 20 November 1971, motivated by a stunning declaration appearing earlier that year in Le Nouvel Observateur magazine, women in France made public their most private of actions. In a signed statement, 343 women claimed to have undergone an illegal abortion (whether or not they had actually done so), including the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, actress Catherine Deneuve, writer Françoise d’Eaubonne and filmmaker Agnès Varda. Their purpose was to draw attention to the risks of the procedure as well as to highlight class inequality: those who could afford abortions often went abroad for them.1 On a Saturday afternoon, in the first mass public demonstration by a nascent group the press had dubbed the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) after the American women’s rights movement, women bearing banners, megaphones and colored balloons gathered at the Place de la République in Paris to protest and demonstrate their solidarity.2 Four thousand people, of whom 800 were believed to be men, are estimated to have taken part as helicopters whirred overhead and anti-riot troops lined the streets.3 Three years after May ’68, the MLF had arrived. At the heart of the protest was a coffin bearing a wreath inscribed with the words ‘Des milliers de femmes par an victimes de l’avortemement [sic] clandestin en France’ (Thousands of women, each year, victims of clandestine abortions in France), which was subsequently set alight. As one participant put it, ‘on brûlera leur cerceuil dans un spectaculaire feu de joie’ (we will burn their coffin in a spectacular bonfire) (Figure P.1).4 At once symbolic of the burning of an old order, the fire also calls to mind the mythical militant women of the 1871 Paris Commune, les pétroleuses, who were widely believed to have set fires that burned people in their beds.5 Four days later, on 24 November 1971, artist Gina Pane carried out the third and final phase of her ‘action’, Feu, chez Monsieur and Madame Frégnac in Paris, stepping into the flames of a fire before eventually stooping to extinguish it with her bare hands (Figure P.2). The photographs taken by Françoise Masson reveal the heightened sense of time and tension as Pane paces forward to take an exquisite step and arches her foot over the flame. The relative silence of the action and the delicate personal nature of the work, orchestrating

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MLF demonstration, 20 November 1971, Paris.

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Gina Pane, Action nourriture / Actualités télévisées / Feu (detail). Performance. Chez Monsieur et Madame Frégnac, Paris, 24 November 1971.

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suffering and pain in the cause of progress, create the sense of a moment entirely different from the public nature of the MLF ‘spectacle’, and yet it was no less militant.6 Pane’s insistence on the personal body as the space of ‘brute transformation’ for the social body makes fire one of the key elements of that transformation: ‘Feu – Focus Foyer – dégagement simultané de lumière et de chaleur. Ardeur violence / Imagination vive / Soutenir une chose avec une entière conviction / Communication par la chaleur réelle et lumière dégagée simultanément par le feu – Acte. Le feu, c’est un élément’ (Fire – Focus Hearth/Home – simultaneous giving of light and heat. Violent ardor / Live imagination / To support something with entire conviction / Communication by the real heat and light given at the same time from the fire. Action. The fire is an element).7 The confrontation of the personal and the political highlighted by the contrast between Gina Pane’s action and the women’s demonstration nevertheless reveals a shared perspective between women artists and the diverse groups that formed the MLF. Although American critic Lucy Lippard clearly places Pane in a feminist context in her book From the Center (1976), she wrote elsewhere that, despite beliefs to the contrary, artists are slow to respond to social change.8 An artist like Pane, who often meticulously prepared her notes and research in advance of an action, played the part of a fil conducteur (conducting wire) for the wider social body and so could not be immune to outside events. Without the evidence of statements of adherence, signed manifestos and participation in manifs (demonstrations), it would be difficult to place women’s art in France in the early 1970s into the sort of ideological context of feminism that developed in the United States through Womanhouse in California, for example. Yet the very spaces, ruptures and contradictions emerging during this period allow for a wider appraisal of the impact of women’s art on French social and artistic spheres. Taking the argument one step further, Pane’s foot extended over the fire resembles that of the Gradiva bas-relief, whose foot is the focus of erotic fixation in Freud’s analysis of Jensen’s novella Gradiva. It symbolizes the meeting point of the unconscious and conscious mind by triggering a repressed memory in the hero Hanold as he falls in love with the figure on the relief. Hanold’s obsession with the distinctive stride of Gradiva, whom he dreamily imagines walking the ‘slippery’ streets of Pompeii, leads him to search longingly for women in his university town who have the same gait (Figure P.3).9 Freud writes: He [Hanold] convinced himself, rather, that she [Gradiva] must be transported to Pompeii, and that somewhere there she was stepping across the curious stepping-stones which have been dug up and which made it possible to cross dry-foot from one side of the street to the other in rainy weather [...].10

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Preface: the glissade

Plaster cast of the Gradiva, from the collection of Sigmund Freud. xxxiii

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The name Gradiva (‘the one who advances’) references ‘Mars Gradivus’, the ‘war god striding into battle’, thus signifying militancy.11 Analogously, we can recognize Gradiva’s uneven gait in the volatile terrain of the French art scene in the 1970s, with its scattered and divisive factions of artistic representation and the battle for women’s place within it.12 (There is a context to the study of terrain: artists such as Judit Reigl in her late 1950s–early 1960s Guano series and Françoise Janicot and Françoise Eliet in the mid-1970s all painted or used floorboards in their work – see Chapter 4.) This concept of glissade (from glisser, meaning to slip/slide) due to an uneven terrain shows how we can confront women’s art as a gendered category and read it against other male-dominated groups or the institutional privileges of the 1970s. Current attempts to reclaim individual female artists or groups do not change the power struggles that many then experienced. The activities of the MLF, the gradual awareness in France of the American and European feminist scenes via journals, expatriate artists, biennales, visits and exhibitions abroad, and art criticism add to the complications of the scene. In other words, there was no single ideological context for women artists in France in the first few years of the 1970s. Artists belonged to different factions with adherence to – or legacies of – Surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme, Nouvelle Figuration, geometric and lyric abstraction, conceptual art, experiments with video, film and other forms of technology, performance and body art, influences of the École de Paris or the École des Beaux-Arts and the École des Arts Décoratifs, the Ateliers d’Art Sacré or whichever institution or atelier in which they trained (if at all), or to forms of painting, sculpture, drawing, textile arts and so forth. This book takes into account the diversity and plurality of production in the context of the theories, activism and political events of the period. Counterpractice In a French context, the image of La semeuse (the sower), designed by Oscar Roty in 1897 and based on his childhood memories of a girl in the Cantal, has been used as the emblematic figure of Marianne on both stamps and coins throughout the twentieth century, with earlier historical origins.13 I place her as a foil to the image of Gradiva seen above (Figure P.4). La semeuse appeared on the one-franc coin from 1960 onwards and on the five-franc coin in 1970.14 The Gradiva image shares a certain similarity of stride with La semeuse (although La semeuse is famously sowing against the wind), which suggests a confrontation between the social symbols circulating widely in France and the more nuanced and intellectually driven symbols that reflect a reading of women’s art in the times of the MLF. I do not want to dwell too long on these two images, but I do see them as a ‘call’ to tread carefully along the slippery surfaces of ideological and artistic terrain. As we move further through this work, I draw attention to the delicate

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Preface: the glissade

Oscar Roty, La semeuse, 5 franc coin, 1970.

position of their feet on a complex artistic, historical and ideological terrain in France. This book reflects the reclamation in the 1970s of women artists by critics such as Linda Nochlin in her 1971 groundbreaking essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, while also putting into perspective the historiography of the women artists themselves and the scholarship they generated.15 Its title, Counterpractice, refers to the art of women in this period as circumscribed by gender politics and placed vis-à-vis ‘men’s art’, or art made by men. At the same time, the book includes where appropriate the work of male artists as a means of shedding further light on the art of women and putting them into deeper contextual relation (rather than in a predetermined oppositional one). Males could also be alienated from the power of institutions and galleries and thus share similar outsider status.16 Or, as Viviane Forrester expresses it, concerning writers, ‘L’oubli, c’est exactement là que tout écrivain, homme ou femme, doit se faire femme pour opérer.’ (Forgotten? It is exactly in this space that every writer, whether man or woman, must become a woman to operate).17 This ambiguity of status creates a certain ‘slip’ or ‘slippage’ (glissade/glissement) in reading practices that places women (broadly defined) against, inside or outside the canon of male artists and even vis-à-vis one another.18 More difficult to control, these slips/slippages not only reveal the instability of the terrain and reading, but also the force and commitment in our consciousness to a renewed and reimagined feminist practice for the future.19 This book recognizes and validates the diversity of approaches of the women involved. Rather than demand a single focus or perspective in which some women’s work would be privileged over others’, this book’s approach starts out from the plural and builds up throughout the book to illuminate a

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range of works from various angles and perpectives on women’s art. Similar to Catherine de Zegher’s project, which aimed to create an ‘elliptical traverse … in, of and from’ the feminine in the 1930s–1940s and 1960s–1970s, this work concentrates on the 1970s with historical reference to predecessors. It is not an ‘elliptical’ traverse through history, but one which slips, or slides across, within and over time to consider women from the greatest number of positions possible as a reflection of their own experiences within a given period.20 While critics such as Lucy Lippard feared the overdetermination of the plural with regard to the understanding of women’s art in the 1970s, the plural in a French context signifies many strata: not only the model of governance proposed by President Giscard d’Estaing in this decade; the ‘rewriting’ of the body by a generation of writers and philosophers who underscored the dimension of the (female) body epitomized by écriture féminine; the internationalism of artists in Paris in the 1970s; the multiculturalist objectives of social organizations in the 1980s and 1990s; and the range and diversity of artistic practices; but also the terrain onto which the ‘feminine’ self-consciously inscribed itself.21 Notes 1 ‘Je me suis fait avorter’, dossier établi par Jean Moureau (enquête de Michèle Manceaux, Nicole Muchnik, Mariella Righini, François-Paul Boncour). Le Nouvel Observateur, 5 April 1971, p. 5, pp. 40–44. Hélène de Beauvoir, Iris Clert and Bona de Mandiargues also signed. 2 Françoise Picq, Libération des femmes: les années mouvement (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993), p. 70. 3 Ibid., p. 72. 4 Ibid., p. 71. 5 Georges Bell, Paris incendié: histoire de la Commune de 1871 (Paris: Imprimerie de Martinet, Paris, 1872) and Edith Thomas, Les pétroleuses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). 6 Anne Tronche, Gina Pane: Actions (Paris: Fall Éditions, 1997), p. 69. Also see Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art and the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 7 Gina Pane, Lettre à un(e) inconnu(e) (Paris: ENSBA, 2003), pp. 30, 158. Italics in the original. 8 Lucy Lippard, ‘Hot Potatoes: Art and Politics in 1980’, Block 4, 1981, pp. 2–9, reprinted in Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968–2000, ed. Hilary Robinson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), pp. 107–118, p. 108. Also From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: Dutton & Co, 1976). In the latter, Lippard writes of Pane’s work: ‘Her [Pane’s] self-mutilation is no less repellent than the men’s, but it does exist within a framework that is curiously feminine’, p. 135; my emphasis. 9 Sigmund Freud, ‘Jensen’s Gradiva’ [1907], The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. IX (1906–1908) (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1959), pp. 7–93.

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Preface: the glissade

10 Ibid., p. 11. 11 Ibid., p. 50. The story of Gradiva, resurrected again by Whitney Chadwick in 1970, had already undergone a feminist reassessment which examined the Surrealists Masson, Dali and others’ use of the figure. ‘Masson’s Gradiva: The Metamorphosis of a Surrealist Myth’, Art Bulletin, vol. 52, no. 4 (December 1970), pp. 415–422. 12 The slippery surfaces and fractured terrains that characterize the French artistic scene of the 1970s offer themselves up to another foot metaphor – the propositional ‘gambit’, which derives from the Italian ‘gambetto’, or ‘tripping up’ (from the Italian gamba, leg), in contrast to the slide, or slip, of the glissade as a concept offered in this book. 13 See ‘The Goddess and her Two Images: The Year 1848’, in Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789–1880, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 14 Loïc Chauveau, ‘Marianne, Narcisse de la République’, Libération, 18 January 1990, p. 36. 15 Art News, no. 69 (January 1971), pp. 22–39, 67–71. 16 Joint interview with Thérèse Boucraut and her husband Maurice Breschand (1932–2007), who expressed the pressure of working as artists in a style that was considered out of ‘fashion’. Paris, December 2006. 17 Viviane Forrester, ‘Féminin pluriel’, Tel Quel, no. 74 (1977), pp. 68–77, p. 69. 18 Julia Kristeva, for example, pointed out in the 1970s how male art and literature could have ‘feminine’ effects, in her contemporary reading of the ‘semiotic’ in artists such as Giovanni Bellini and writers such as Céline, Artaud, Lautréamont, and so on. This deliberate manipulation of boundaries could be seen, with perhaps less theoretical insight, in the Centre Pompidou’s exhibition Fémininmasculin: Le sexe de l’art (1995–1996), which attempted a confrontation of ‘gendered’ art that in some ways erased the nuances of such an encounter and settled instead for its unpredictable and critically undefined energy. See Julia Kristeva, ‘Maternité selon Giovanni Belli’, Peinture 10/11 (December 1975), pp. 11–37. Reprinted as ‘Maternité selon Giovanni Bellini’, in Polylogue (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977), pp. 409–435, and La révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974). 19 ‘I think this is a critical moment for feminism and women’s place in the art world. Now, more than ever, we need to be aware not only of our achievements but of the dangers and difficulties lying in the future. We will need all our wit and courage to make sure that women’s voices are heard, their work seen and written about. That is our task for the future.’ Linda Nochlin, ‘“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Thirty Years Later’, in Women Artists at the Millennium, ed. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) pp. 21–32, p. 31. 20 Catherine de Zegher, ‘Introduction’, Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth-Century Art, exhibition catalogue (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 19–41. 21 Lucy R. Lippard, ‘Sweeping Exchanges: The Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s’, Art Journal, Fall/Winter 1980, pp. 362–365. She writes: ‘The 1970s

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pluralism, decried for different reasons by both left and right, has at least produced a kind of compost heap where artists can sort out what is fertile and what is sterile’ (p. 363). Elsewhere, Lippard states: ‘The 1970s might not have been “pluralist” at all if women artists had not emerged during that decade to introduce the multicolored threads of female experience into the male fabric of modern art’ (p. 362).

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Introduction

A travers les dérapages, les déviances d’un réel arbitraire, limité, la femme ‘hors les murs’ peut ainsi pénétrer une réalité acceptée plurielle. Pas de clivage ici, d’interdits, mais un affinement de l’intelligence, une dilation de ce lieu de texte où s’inscrivent les différences et surtout une distribution libidinale autre, libérée. La femme, elle-même plurielle, peut y circuler parmi des êtres, des reflets aussi problématiques qu’elle. Viviane Forrester (1977)1 Through the slippages, the deviations from an arbitrary real which is limited, the woman ‘outside the walls’ can thus penetrate a reality accepted as plural. No divisions here, or prohibitions, but a refinement of the intelligence, a dilation of this place of text where the differences are embedded and, above all, a different libidinal distribution, liberated. The woman, herself plural, can circulate there among beings, reflections as problematic as herself. Ce que nous avons besoin de faire, c’est nous rendre compte que la seule manière de combattre le sexisme est de faire valoir nos droits et liguées avec nos sœurs, de faire tout ce qui est nécessaire pour opérer une révolution, une Révolution Féministe, la seule révolution de l’histoire qui traverse classe, race et nationalité pour unir les plus opprimés du monde. Nous ne serons jamais libérées de nos oppresseurs sans une lutte. La Libération des Femmes doit devenir la Révolution des Femmes. Réflexions sur le féminisme (1972)2 What we need to do is to realize that the only way to fight sexism is to assert our rights and, allied with our sisters, to do all that is necessary to bring about a revolution, a Feminist Revolution, the only revolution in history that cuts across class, race and nationality to unite the most oppressed in the world. We will never be liberated from our oppressors without a struggle. Women’s Liberation must become Women’s Revolution. Nous étions embarquées sur les causes marxistes-léninistes-maoïstes mais nous ramions à contre-courant. Antoinette Fouque (2004)3 We had embarked on Marxist-Leninist-Maoist campaigns but we were rowing against the current.

2

Counterpractice

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Reading and writing women’s art in France The experience of discovering women’s art between the covers of books and inside catalogues, in the yellowed pages of revues, beneath heavily stacked works in studios, in rare viewings on walls and through intimate talks with artists, has been essential to the thinking and writing of this book. Essential also, of course, has been the practice of the women who started their careers at the same time but who continue to be publicly successful. There is a practice of discovering (and uncovering) the way words, images and actions strike us now, after some decades of reflection, through the lens of our present circumstances. Writing as an outsider who has been intellectually engaged with various aspects of French culture, my book is in part a result of the ‘plurality’ of these encounters. In the title, ‘counterpractice’ refers specifically to the tactical and timely practice of women artists and writers in France (who by no means all react equally or exclusively to the dimensions of gender oppression flagged up by the MLF, or Mouvement de libération des femmes) and to the wider struggle for women’s rights. Manifested as much in the practice of écriture féminine as in that of women’s art, this book can be read as a discussion of art by women that responds, to some extent, to male practice or to male control of the art world, with the aim of disrupting and calling attention to its binary power structure. The title of the book thus contains an active, performative dimension in its structure, reading and framing that plays on concepts and their social, political and cultural histories. It further pays tribute to a number of French existentialist, poststructuralist and/or feminist thinkers of the period. ‘Counterpractice’ as a title reflects on Simone de Beauvoir’s important critique of practices of écriture féminine or any biological form of essentialism as ‘contre-pénis’ (counter-penis), by ultimately replicating patriarchy, albeit in different terms, and thereby diminishing the imaginative potential of such practices within radical feminism.4 In a 1985 interview, de Beauvoir professed her continued belief in the cause of feminism in France by pointing specifically to the support available to women painters and sculptors.5 (Her sister, the painter Hélène de Beauvoir, is no doubt the inspiration for the reference.) In ‘Le temps des femmes’ (1979), Kristeva backed this belief through her reluctance to position women as oppositional to male power for fear of them ending up a weakened ‘contre-société’ or countersociety.6 The term ‘counterpractice’ also springs loosely from the heresy of the contre-conduite referred to by Michel Foucault, who used the term to describe those who were historically resistant to church, medicine, the state or any form of authoritarianism,7 and statements by Antoinette Fouque, of the publishing house des femmes, who spoke of the creative action of women as a ‘counterweight’ (contrepoids, en contrechamp; in a reverse angle shot) to patriarchal oppression.8 Antagonism

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Introduction

was a method by which the MLF created solidarity amongst women of different class and, in theory, racial backgrounds.9 French art critic Aline Dallier (later Dallier-Popper) labeled women’s art of the 1970s as ‘contre-avant-garde’ for women’s strong participation in three significant trends: ‘art corporel’ (body art), ‘art textile’ (textile, or soft art) and ‘art socio-critique’ (socio-critical art).10 I would add to this list art made by both sexes but positioned and theorized differently, such as the abstract art (supported by the MLF group Psychanalyse et Politique) produced by women during this period and which is examined in Chapter 4.11 The focus of this book also extends to women who were participating in women-only salons and exhibitions as well as the art groups that exclusively promoted women. Irigaray’s claim ‘Parler n’est jamais neutre’ (To speak is never neutral), acknowledging language as a symbolic structure ordered and controlled by men, could be adapted in this light to the historically suppressed act for women creating and interpreting art. Equally, it could be adopted as a manifesto ‘Peindre n’est jamais neutre’ (Painting is never neutral), which could extend to any form of art practice.12 Counterpractice also addresses the charges of ‘derivativeness’ often leveled at the women’s rights movement in France for its perceived dependency on international women’s rights movements (particularly the one in the United States).13 Similarly, women’s art practices in France could be viewed (as they were for many years) as derivative of international feminist practices of the 1970s (again, specifically, those in the United States). Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 of this book demonstrate that there was a shared international terrain of practice fostered by sophisticated and sometimes informal networks of artists, critics and activists who visited other countries, and who came to France from other countries. There were, in addition, other personal and professional opportunities for exchange such as at the Biennale de Paris and national and international venues encompassing exhibitions, residencies, conferences and demonstrations, all informing women’s art of this period. Developments in psychoanalysis during this time were important. Socalled ‘French’ and ‘Anglo-American’ schools of psychoanalytic and/or feminist thought would become typologies that influenced critics of the period and later. British Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) and her defense of Freud would be read in translation by the French women’s group Psychanalyse et Politique (also known as Psych et Po – its publishing house, des femmes, published the French edition of the book in 1975 – who Mitchell had earlier acknowledged in the book’s introduction (see Chapter 4)).14 Meanwhile, Jacques Lacan’s importance for some feminists in France and his seeming incompatibility with materialist concerns was taken to task by Americans.15 From the ‘and’ in Mitchell’s title, which suggests separate domains, let’s shift ground to the more indeterminate ‘between’.16 In her introduction

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4

Counterpractice

to Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Australian psychoanalyst Teresa Brennan makes four critical points: (1) psychoanalysis is thoroughly political; (2) terms such as ‘French’ as much as ‘Anglo-American’ occlude points of difference that exist within and between them; (3) a slippery ground characterizes the point at which psychoanalysis meets the social; (4) ‘essentialism’ (or the critique of a ‘biological’ essence often attributed to ‘French feminists’), derives from critiques of early Marx.17 Counterpractice considers these points. It is important to remember that a number of key players in 1970s and early 1980s women’s art in France were heavily invested in psychoanalysis: art critic Aline Dallier (who later practiced as an analyst), painter and Collectif Femmes/Art cofounder, Françoise Eliet, who attended Lacan’s seminars, Psych et Po leader and des femmes editor Antoinette Fouque, to name a few.18 The desire to confront the Lacanian symbolic order, representative of patriarchy, becomes a recurrent theme through the book, and ‘counterpractice’ a strategy to characterize the varied ways in which women artists and writers could be considered to do so. (As such, the glissade questions the claims to authority of psychoanalysis or related discourses through strategies which slide, glide or otherwise disrupt them in an effort which can be designated ‘feminist’.)19 The glissade, both a terrain and a concept, is a mobile tool understood across several registers in this volume. It becomes an entry point within these strategies to understand the way in which slippages – glissements – undercut the symbolic and momentarily destabilize it.20 This is by way of single or multimedia art practice, image making or criticism. Let’s begin with the shifting grounds of the social. Splintered terrains: decolonization and global movements Some remarks made by art historian Griselda Pollock on 1970s women and art remain pertinent to the study of the decade. In the past, the limited focus on the decade’s studies in race and class has made certain movements, trends and artists relatively invisible.21 The writings on the MLF in France and the women’s art discussed during this period have remained largely white, middleclass narratives. As such, it becomes all the more critical to acknowledge the diversity of France during this period by bringing to light certain groups, temporal activities, demonstrations and cultural productions that characterized the splintered (and sometimes overlapping) factions of the French women’s movement. Such an act may also temper a thrust toward monolithic categories by understanding the moments of exchange and difference between various factions and the questions of shared influence. Unearthing this research, particularly with regard to women’s art in 1970s France, remains an ongoing project. The drive toward inclusivity in terms of race in the visual culture of France’s women’s movements explicitly appears only in the decades to follow. A poster designed by R. Brahimi in 1988 underscores the ideal of a

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Introduction

‘plural’ society with its title ‘des identités plurielles pour une société plurielle’ (plural identities for a plural society), produced by the group Expressions Maghrébines au féminin for a conference in 1991 (Plate 1). It is relevant to note, however, that the war in Algeria in the 1960s had a considerable impact on the formation of the women’s movement in France. Consciousness over women’s (and colonial) rights had already been legitimized by earlier incidents, notably the arrest of Djamila Bouhired on 9 April 1957 and her subsequent death sentence, and the accusation against Djamila Boupacha of having planted a bomb at the Brasserie des Facultés in Algiers. The latter, a virgin, suffered assault and sexual torture by French soldiers, including being raped by a bottle, after her arrest on 10 February 1960. Bouhired famously declared, as she awaited the death penalty, ‘Vous n’empêcherez pas l’Algérie d’être indépendante’ (You will not prevent Algeria from being independent).22 Such incidents highlight how the involvement of women in political events represented for some segments of French society symbols of resistance and plight, momentarily disrupting the ‘binary’ relationship between colony and colonizer by creating a shared political brother/ sisterhood, even if asymmetries of power were still in force. Simone de Beauvoir and lawyer Gisèle Halimi along with Germaine Tillion, a former déportée, came to the defense of Djamila Boupacha.23 De Beauvoir organized a press conference on 24 June 1960 in her defense and presided over a committee for the same purpose that included Françoise Sagan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Édouard Glissant, Michel Leiris and Hélène Parmelin. Their efforts paved the way for the ‘Déclaration sur les droits à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie’, otherwise known as ‘Le Manifeste des 121’, when key intellectuals, lawyers and artists signed a petition supporting the right to aid and uphold the liberation and independence of Algerians (which arguably set the stage for the women’s ‘Le Manifeste des 343’; see Preface). Published in Vérité-Liberté, no. 4 (September 1960), the names of many prominent cultural figures (male and female), including many French Surrealists, appeared on the manifesto.24 The unveiling of women in the public square in Algiers also had reverberations in France in 1958, with images circulating in popular magazines like Paris Match.25 It would take until the 1970s for dedicated movements by Algerian women to mobilize. Groupe femmes algériennes, a collection of Algerian immigrant women, began to organize in France in 1977 and demonstrate their political will through the establishment of Algériennes en Lutte – a journal that produced two issues with different titles in 1978.26 (Algerian President Boumédiène died at the end of that year. The 1976 constitution agreed during his presidency saw reforms for women and a focus on equality, but after his death tensions arose in society between socialism and progressive Islamization).27 Frictions in Algeria reverberated amongst the Algerian immigrants in France who continued to maintain close ties with the homeland. Women militants in prison or those facing political pressures in the Maghreb became causes

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that were taken up in France. While the French press promoted Roger Ikor’s version of ‘La Kahina’, an ‘essay-novel’ about the North African figure Kahina – a legendary heroine resistant to Islam – and drew parallels with Joan of Arc and, by extension, with the women’s movements of the period, the immigrant experience was being more directly expressed by La Kahina, a theater troupe founded in Paris in 1975 by Algerian-born Salika Amara who used the name of the heroine to more political ends.28 Meanwhile, the representation of Algerian women continued to be contested. Novels such as La Chrysalide by Aïcha Lemsine (Éditions des femmes, 1976) and films such as Leïla et les autres (1977) by Sid Ali Mazif were also critiqued in Femmes Algériennes en Lutte.29 Moroccan women during this decade were also were making their presence felt. The student-based Association des femmes marocaines lasted from 1972 to 1978 and met at the Cité Universitaire, while the Groupe femmes marocaines, which lasted three years from 1979 to 1982, also formed primarily of students, focused on political issues in Morocco and sought to collectively resist abuses of power by King Hassan II and his administration.30 Attention would also turn to political prisoners in Morocco after the death in 1977 of Saida Menebhi from a hunger strike in their support.31 Her prison poetry would be published in Algériennes en lutte.32 In May 1976, African and Antillean women workers, students, housewives and the unemployed, in total around thirty people, gathered together to form the Coordination des femmes noires.33 In 1977 the first edition of ‘la journée des femmes noires’ was held at the AGECA (Association pour la Gestion d’un Centre d’Animation sociale et culturelle) on rue de Charonne, centered on black women immigrants. Later, they would say: ‘Nous voulons, déclarent-elles, que les femmes se parlent, s’informent, expriment leurs désirs’ (We want, the group declared, women to speak to each other, inform themselves, express their desires).34 The event focused on racism, oppression, discrimination, polygamy, forced sterilization, female circumcision, colonialism and neocolonialism, and imperialism.35 Roughly 300–350 people were in attendance, and the differences of opinion expressed ultimately led to the formation of a second group, Mouvement des femmes noires, which preferred a ‘réflexion théorique’, or an intellectual, research- and discussion-based approach, rather than the more immediate action-based Coordination group.36 Senegalese writer Awa Thiam’s book La Parole aux négresses, published in 1978, gave voice to black women and examined practices such as polygamy and female circumcision, although her focus on the ‘triple oppression of sex, race and class’ only served to draw attention to the differences between black and white feminists.37 The largely white women’s movement in France did not appear to speak to the concerns of the black women who considered anti-colonialist and antiimperialist concerns to be as important as feminist ones.38 The Marxist Rouge took an interest in the Coordination des femmes noires and began to publish

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a number of articles looking at the lives of black women of African, Antillean and Réunion Islander descent living in France, as well as examining more closely their countries of origin in Africa or the islands, as part of its broader interest in solidarity with the ‘tiers-monde’.39 Demonstrations by women from different parties also gathered at the Place de la République in 1978, in solidarity with the call by black women to join Latin Americans, Maghrébines and European women in the fight against discrimination of sex, race and class.40 Latin American women immigrants also formed their own group in 1972, Groupe latino-américain des femmes, and, in 1977, Groupe femmes latinoaméricaines, in addition to the national equivalents for Brazil, the Cercle des femmes brésiliennes, and for Chile, the Collectif des femmes chiliennes, formed in 1975 and 1979, respectively.41 Some Latin American women wrote about their experiences of exile and their difficulties of assimilation in France.42 The journal Herejías: revue des femmes latino-américaines, started by the Groupe femmes latino-américaines, was also published between 1979 and 1980. In the arts, the 32nd Salon de la Jeune Peinture in Paris in 1981 showcased Latin American women artists under the title ‘5 femmes latino-américaines’.43 By the 1970s, the left’s interest in third world solidarity, or tiers-mondisme, active since its origins in France in the late 1940s, was starting to wane. The movement had grown in strength during the 1960s with the support of revolutionaries in Algeria and Latin America. Abuses by dictatorial regimes in countries like Cuba, Iran and Vietnam led intellectuals to question the movement’s idealism.44 The publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in 1973, on the abuses in forced labor camps and prisons in the Soviet Union, raised serious doubts and further divided the French left.45 The shifting ground of foreign politics during this period disturbed the progress of radical feminist claims for a universalist position and, according to its critics, descended into essentialism as foregrounded in conferences. Nonetheless, internationalism was the currency of UNESCO’s L’Année de la femme (1975) (see Chapter 5), and the Decade of the Woman (1975–1985) that followed spurred debates that would culminate in 1980s and 1990s feminist discourse around the nature of the female subject, definitions of woman, and questions of universalism.46 These discussions had been initiated in 1975 and continued in various UN (United Nations) conferences and non-governmental organization forums.47 The poster for the event featured a colorful abstract lithograph by Hradzyk-born and Paris-based artist Sonia Delaunay, which she produced with the International Association of Art, while the cover art of UNESCO magazine Le Courrier in 1975 featured Mithila folk painting by women from India to highlight the political significance of a women-based tradition of art production (Plates 2 and 3).48 The collection of Mithila paintings came from scholar and collector Yves Véquaud.49 (Such disparate visions of art – contemporary European postmodernist art versus non-Western folk and tribal

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art – would face off spectacularly fourteen years later in Jean-Hubert Martin’s Magiciens de la terre, staged in 1989 at the La Grande Halle–La Villette and at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.) Véquaud contributed originally to this exhibition as well.50 Mithila art presented in the 1970s Paris exhibitions would further impact Charlotte Calmis, founder of the French women’s art group, La Spirale (see Chapter 6); and the women’s journal Sorcières which published a Mithila photograph from Véquaud’s book in an interview with Julia Kristeva in 1977.51 In the field of art, the internationalism of the Biennale de Paris (founded in 1959 by André Malraux) created a global presence in the city, with artists represented from all participating countries. Representation was nevertheless limited, as revealed in 1977 when the Japanese critic Toshiaki Minemura asked, ‘Why are the Japanese and the South Koreans the only Asian artists taking part in the Paris Biennale?’ He also regretted how few women artists from his country were included, with only one Japanese woman being exhibited.52 Meanwhile, art critic Catherine Millet bemoaned the biennale’s decreasing internationalism following a change in format in 1971, and the loss of the heterogeneity that she believed best reflected the post-May ’68 spirit.53 At around the same time, psychoanalyst, ethnologist and painter Françoise Eliet, who was later to play a pivotal role in Collectif Femmes/Art (1976–1980), was attempting to forge gender solidarity across cultures. Writing about peasant women painters in China, Eliet claimed they demonstrated, in their political context, ‘jouissance’ and ‘liberté’, through their choice of colors and forms.54 As a precursor of her own essay, Eliet cited Julia Kristeva’s Des Chinoises, which opened with her visit to an exhibition of male and female peasant painters in Huxian, China; later in the book, Kristeva would single out the talent of the 40-year-old female painter Li Fenglan, who painted individually and collectively with fourteen other women.55 (Li Fenglan would further be among the artists who featured in the ARC 2 exhibition, Images du peuple chinois, in Paris in 1975.) By creating new solidarities across nations, so-called ‘ethnographic’ models of female art practice, and their collective endeavours, helped to deepen, question, critique and bolster support for European women’s movements and the arts. The internationalism and diversity of the Biennale de Paris became an intersection for feminist and decolonial practice alongside forms of pioneering technological innovation in the 1970s. American Hermine Freed’s video Art Herstory (1974) was shown at the 9th Biennale de Paris in 1975, and was later critically highlighted by Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris curator Dany Bloch.56 Freed repositioned women’s role in the history of art through a series of unorthodox interventions that juxtaposed time and space, presenting views of canonical male artists’ paintings of the past into which she inserted herself and, occasionally, her video equipment. She thus brought

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together tradition and technology to create moments of agency in otherwise fixed narratives. Her gaze turned toward the passive, languorous Orientalist nudes of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in Le Bain turc (1852–1859/1862), taking possession of the scene by inserting herself into it with a contemporary video camera (Plate 4). This self-reflexive gaze is harnessed more directly by Turkish-French artist Nil Yalter, born in Cairo, whose first video performance, La Femme sans tête ou la Danse du ventre (1974), also contains actual writing on the body, bringing together the subjectivity implicit in and reminiscent of later practices of écriture féminine: ‘il faut que la femme écrive la femme’, declares Hélène Cixous in ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ in 1975 (Plate 5).57 Yalter does so via the materialization of words on the female body which she writes in a spiral around the navel, across the stomach and along the torso in a gesture of self-possession while the camera observes her through an ‘objective’ eye.58 The title of Yalter’s La femme 100 têtes refers to a work by Max Ernst in 1929 that featured collages of the male and female body, some with replacement heads. The title further evokes Simone de Beauvoir’s guest edited issue of Les Temps modernes, ‘Les femmes s’entêtent’, which focused on the condition of women (published in 1974).59 Rejecting the notorious misogyny of the Surrealists, Yalter pens onto her body an excerpt from historian René Nelli’s Érotique et civilisations (1972), to suggest the power of liberated women and their pleasure in undermining patriarchy, as she sways rhythmically to a piece of ‘fasil’ music usually played in the ‘meyhane’ (tavern). The text begins, ‘Une femme véritable est à la fois convexe et concave … L’homme a rêvé / pendant des millénaires, de femme sans / tête parce que la présence de la pensée /gênait son plaisir …’ (A real woman is both convex and concave … Man has dreamed / for millennia of a woman without / a head because the presence of thought / disrupted his pleasure …). 60 Such performative critiques of Middle Eastern culture via the agency given to the female body through language appeared before Edward Said’s Orientalism was published in 1978. Examples of this work, and others by Yalter, point to the rich and fractured terrain and the diversity of practices that drew attention to social class- and race-based histories, and to a willingness to mix ‘high art’ and popular culture.61 These material investigations intersperse with other forms of cultural narratives in the 1970s and contrast with the sometimes problematic twinning of feminism and/or colonialism in Marguerite Duras’s film India Song (1975), or even the layering of race and gender, class and colonialism, as intersubjective positions presented in Hélène Cixous’s theater plays of the mid-1980s set in an imagined Cambodia and India. Instead, they find some resonance with alternative female economies albeit construed less ethnographically than the goddess worship and matriarchy demonstrated by Catherine Clément’s anthropological accounts from the 1990s.62

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International terrain of ‘French feminisms’ ‘French feminism’ as a brand has often come to designate the writing of three significant French thinkers and philosophers, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva (occasionally with some variation), in large part due to their popularity in US academia and the extent to which their works became widespread after translation (sometimes with a ‘time lag’) from the United States to other countries.63 (This emphasis by no means diminishes the impact of British or other anglophone feminists – whose difference with the Americans was often a basis of critique – and whose scholarly investments in French literature, theory, psychoanalysis and art practice are seen throughout this book.)64 The book New French Feminisms, with its rich examples of speculative essays, published in the United States in 1980, is in part responsible for the designation and prompted critiques in France and internationally.65 Conferences further disseminated ideas through papers and discussion.66 Women writers and philosophers of the period – often with radically different/incommensurable positions and beliefs – were sometimes grouped under the banner of ‘French feminism’, a term used outside of France, mainly in the United States.67 The term, as such, had virtually no meaning in France, as Belgian philosopher Françoise Collin emphasized. She wrote that a number of women associated with the label ‘French feminism’ were intellectually informed by Jacques Derrida’s reading of Martin Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, and were considered either ‘universalist’ or moving between ‘universalism’ and ‘essentialist dualism’ in France.68 Americans read this ‘postmodern or deconstructionist’ tendency as a feature of French feminist thought which distinguished it from American thought, an idea which grew in strength internationally.69 Scholars such as Christine Delphy and Claire Moses attacked the reductivism of the term, which had ‘no meaning in France’, while at the same time postcolonial critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak questioned the relevance of ‘French feminisms’ to ‘third-world’ decolonization movements.70 Judith Butler foregrounded queer identity and challenged Julia Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic via her reading of female homosexuality in relation to the mother’s body.71 Amongst the many other critical views, Domna C. Stanton aligned the three women, noting their privileging of the metaphor of motherhood in key works.72 Nonetheless, the term is still employed outside France and continues to exist as an ‘international brand’.73 This is not without respect to local acculturation of original French texts, even when read in translation. In Japan, the poet Hiromi Itō appears to be deeply influenced by the writings of Cixous and especially of Kristeva, whom she is known to have read.74 In China, the impact on East Asian thought of ‘French feminism’ was apparent in the number of articles on Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva published in the Chinese Wenyi lilun and Taiwanese Zhongwai wenxue journals in the 1990s, leading to the ideas of these writers being adapted and localized.75 In India,

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works of French feminism even in translation provided an alternative ideological viewpoint to those written originally in the English language, which were tied to British imperialism.76 In parts of francophone Africa, the relationship with the potentially recolonizing discourse of ‘French feminism’ was more complex. In particular, the Algerian-born Cixous’s use of binaries did not find critical resonance or traverse the postcolonial reality of francophone Africa but, in an inventive turn, it was recognized that African literature could be used strategically to explicate Cixous rather than vice versa.77 In the 1990s, Cameroon-born novelist and literary critic Frieda Ekotto wrote about African literature in relation to themes raised by Kristeva as well as having her own writing paralleled with écriture féminine, while Nigerian-born Oyèrónkẹ Oyěwùmí’s concept of gender was put in a cross-cultural dialogue with Luce Irigaray by scholars.78 (Both Ekotto and Oyěwùmí teach in the United States.) In Latin America in the 1980s, some critics found links between local writing traditions and ‘l’escritura femenina’ after Cixous, Kristeva and Irigaray found an audience there, yet others claimed that Latin American women writers could subvert their hegemony through their own forms of women’s writing.79 Mexican authors such as Sabina Berman were influenced by the ideas of Cixous, whose elaboration of theories on women’s writing was in turn highly influenced by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector.80 In psychoanalytic terms, the ‘scene’ opened up by the possibility of alternatives to the Lacanian symbolic order – often ascribed as ‘feminine’ – becomes a space to both inscribe and inhabit in the manifestation of actual ‘counter-territories’ as witnessed by the geopolitical diversity of these writers.81 Some similar crosscurrents among women from different countries and regions are also apparent in the art of this period, but they have yet to capture the same attention. ‘French feminism’, as slippery as the term is, and varied as the philosophical and literary strategies that underpin it are, is still different to the diverse production of women’s art of the period (even if, at times, the worlds of women’s literature and art crossed, as they did in shared publications or at women’s group meetings). Aline Dallier tried as early as 1983 to find parallels between some of the findings about the so-called avantgarde character of women’s writing in France and women’s art production, suggesting a certain affinity between their respective, growing popularities. International battle lines for the avant-garde were drawn. Dallier cites Julia Kristeva: Interrogée récemment par le Magazine littéraire à propos de ‘l’écriture des femmes’, Julia Kristeva répondait qu’il y avait eu là un phénomène de masse (une arrivée massive des femmes dans la littérature), mais non pas de déplacement du terrain des avant-gardes, ni de bouleversement sur le plan de la forme. Elle ajoutait toutefois que ce n’était peut-être pas ce qu’il y avait à en attendre …

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Ces remarques peuvent-elles s’appliquer à l’art fait par les femmes ces dernières années?82 Recently interviewed by the Magazine littéraire about ‘women’s writing’, Julia Kristeva replied that there had been a mass phenomenon (a massive influx of women in literature), but not a shift in the ground of the avant-garde, nor any radical change in terms of form. She added, however, that this perhaps was not to be expected of it. Can these remarks apply to the art made by women in recent years?

With no single centralized trend or movement in France for women artists, their artworks nonetheless share vital connections with other feminisms in and outside France and produce and respond to a shared network of influences. Dallier, however, notes the importance of subjectivity after the reign of objectivity in modernism and speaks of an ‘écriture du corps’ (writing of the body), the importance of the MLF and other movements, the ability to work in a direct and politically charged manner or to have the right to completely ignore such content, to use skills deliberately crudely to agitate against expectations of quality, and to work across and in any media to highlight the plurality of practice.83 At the same time, it is important to note that successful women writing in French such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, as well as a number of other women writers and intellectuals in the 1970s (referred to throughout this book), were publishing alongside women artists in France in journals such as Sorcières. These writers were also engaged with the visual arts, as argued in Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6. The book engages with the thought of these three renowned women, but is equally committed to presenting a number of other female and male intellectuals to contextualize the work of this period. French feminism and the practices associated with écriture féminine and other modes of women’s writing which received international attention are not meant to overshadow or occlude women’s art practices, but to see them as intrinsic to the terrain in which we read and consider such practices. Considering these practices in context forces the negotiation of a type of inherent slip/slide, or glissade. Recognizing such overlap widens the terrain in which writing and art practices can be compared and more fully understood for their respective avant-garde characters, as was sometimes acknowledged at the time and later, both within and outside France. The glissade: theory and structure In terms of cultural and political policies of the time, the glissade or slip/ slide with its inherent instability and lack of fixed position reflects simultaneous planes and multiple layers or strata and is a mechanism of plurality: it sustains the (not unproblematic) political language of ‘pluralism’ adopted by

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Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the 1970s84; mirrors the ‘plural I’, or multiple sites of female jouissance of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, for example; reflects psychoanalytic discourse such as the Freudian ‘slip’ and Jacques Lacan’s own use of the term85; puts into play the ‘plural’ Sigmund Freud of the 1970s86; shows the diversity of various artistic groups, movements and trends and the way in which they overlap (e.g. Jean Clair’s pie chart of trends in Art en France (1972)) (Figure 0.1); takes into account the practice of both male and female artists, as some men also struggled to find commercial avenues in the art world; and accounts for the number of groups in the MLF and their conflicting attitudes and divergent branches.87 It also considers psychoanalytic theorization such as the doubling of woman and mother before ‘partition’ rather than castration in the entrance to the symbolic expressed in Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni’s Partage des femmes (1976) as much as Irigaray’s own plural designation of women’s sexual organs which are engendered as multiple sites of discourse in her work from the 1970s (‘Quand nos lèvres se parlent’ in Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (1977)).88 Affirming this ‘plurality’ (with respect to its inherent asymmetries) is an approach I adopt to reading women’s art in 1970s France and is useful for its ability to sustain the following critiques: it reacts to the uneven and changing artistic and political terrain of the 1970s in France; accounts for the diversity of media by women artists; does not privilege more commercially successful women artists over others; acts as a basis for the structure of this book and reflects its implicit critique; considers women and men of different artistic climates and/or nations; reflects the methodology of the book in so far as it draws on a diversity of archives, interviews (over two decades), materials over time; allows for other disciplines such as literature, film, music, theater, fashion and dance to be considered in tandem with the artwork; permits a multiplicity of analyses and approaches into the work; and allows Belgium, Switzerland and other parts of the French-speaking world to be considered in conjunction with France for their shared linguistic partnership, shared publications or geographic proximity. This book explores the terrain of France in terms of its artistic movements and the general trends developing in the 1960s and 1970s: Nouveau Réalisme, Nouvelle Figuration, Supports-Surfaces, body art, abstraction, ‘soft art’, and the general tendencies and movements that women were working within and outside of, in their aim to be part of the artistic culture – with various degrees of commercial ‘success’. An immense amount of care and sensitivity to artistic self-determination and history needs to be taken in terms of grouping individuals under the general heading of ‘women artists’. However, the exercise remains politically urgent if we are to understand both the history and culture of these artists and the representation and visibility of women and their space(s).

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0.1 

Jean Clair’s pie chart of trends on the cover of Art en France, 1972.

The decade of the 1970s is closely examined, with references to the late 1960s, in particular the events of May 1968, and to the early years of the 1980s. This period encompasses the buildup to the political and cultural events of the 1970s, their brief aftermath with the election of François Mitterrand as President in 1981 and the appointment of Yvette Roudy as the Minister of

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Women’s Rights, and the ultimate demise of the MLF. The birth of the Mouvement de libération des femmes in the early 1970s initiated the growth of a political consciousness for women that was radical and influential in supporting legal change, if somewhat limited in societal reach and impact due in part to its contradictory ideology and/or conservative resistance to its goals.89 Women artists who were seeking their own rights of expression and struggled for institutional space in galleries and/or museums were witness to these movements, whether or not they saw themselves as implicated in the wider struggle for women’s rights. I pay close attention to the French voice and those of others who spent time in the country through countless live and read interviews, studio visits, meetings, email exchanges and through private and public archival material such as books, journals, exhibition catalogues, institutional and personal documents, statements, letters, theses, tracts, reports, newspapers and magazines, published and unpublished photographs, pamphlets, posters, press releases, flyers, exhibition guest books, transcribed songs and chants and audiovisual materials such as audio cassettes, videos and other media. All of this underlies the visual work that is essential to understanding some of the contradictions of this period. Women artists in the 1970s demanded an expansion of practice and meanings, bolstered in part by the women’s rights movements of the time. A wealth of books and publications around the movement were being published, including art and literature journals such as Sorcières (1976–1982). Founded by Xavière Gauthier and with Anne Rivière as arts director, Sorcières published texts by names such as Hélène Cixous, Marguerite Duras, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and others, and included images by Colette Deblé, Leonor Fini, Michèle Katz, Eva Klasson, Evelyne Ortleib and Gina Pane, amongst other names. This exchange between artists, writers, critics, philosophers, psychoanalysts and so forth served to shape an emerging field of femalecentered art and discourse whose debt toward one another has yet to be fully acknowledged.90 The rich resource gave women a cultural outlet that focused on their own themes of research – sang, odeurs, désirs, vêtements, etc. – that allowed women to explore the shape, spaces and experiences of their own worlds. The more political vehicles such as Le Torchon brûle (1971–1973) and the Marxist Rouge, as well as special issues of Le Nouvel Observateur, Libération and even the newspaper Le Monde, carried articles dedicated to various issues of women’s rights, including sex, abortion, work, childcare and legal matters. Sociological journals on and about women were also being published, such as Les Cahiers du GRIF (1973–1997) in Brussels on all aspects of Belgian and French society and women. Le petit livre rouge des femmes from 1972 was another important resource for Belgian women. International ideas were arriving in France at great speed with the translation and publication of Anglo-American feminist texts by Kate Millett (who received much publicity in French journals on her visits to France), Shulamith Firestone, Juliet

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Mitchell, Sheila Rowbotham, Gloria Steinem and others. Men also played a role, such as Herbert Marcuse who publicly supported the women’s movement by praising its ‘revolutionary’ nature and the urgent need for it, and discussed it during a series of lectures at Vincennes, in May 1974, on the crisis in American culture.91 The works of these women (and men) informed French culture, but were part of the crosscurrent and did not always mirror what was taking place in similar artistic circles across the Channel and further afield in North America, Australia or in the rest of Europe. This distinctiveness is apparent when we review the artistic output of women whose works were not directly influenced by Anglo-American thought, despite the opportunities that came via critic Aline Dallier, traveling artists and others who brought ideas on ‘feminist art’ directly into France.92 Though the influence of the American’s women’s movement is well documented in archival sources and confirmed by the artists themselves, the multiplicity of European encounters is equally important.93 The circulation of feminist materials and women’s art production, the number of women with an émigré background, as well as travels, exhibitions, workshops and/or exchanges in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, often documented in this book, widen the context of our understanding of women artists in France during this time.94 Women from these countries worked in France as much as French women traveled to these same countries. The rise of feminism in many of these countries was also reported on in France by the mainstream press.95 Demonstrations in other European countries, women-centered and feminist publications, and international conferences for women publishers, such as the one held in Munich in October 1978, were similarly acknowledged.96 Connections between feminists in France and the communist bloc, too, were important for the solidarity created between women. One resulting event organized by the Ligue Trotskyste de France in December 1972 was ‘Marxisme ou Féminisme’, which aimed ‘pour un mouvement Trotskyste de femmes’ (for a women’s Trotskyist movement) and was advertised in French and Russian.97 The Marxist newspaper Rouge and supplements on Marxist thought in L’Humanité fostered links between women and communist countries that went beyond individual commitments. Magazines such as Antoinette Fouque’s Des femmes en mouvements (1977–1979; 1979–1982), a follow-up to her publishing house’s Le Quotidien des femmes (1974–1976), mirrored some of the priorities of the Marxist papers and encouraged connections between women, all the while keeping an eye on potential markets. The magazine focused on the situation of women in former colonies and territories and around the world, including Algeria, Argentina, Bolivia, Corsica, Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Venezuela and Yugoslavia amongst

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others, while the earlier Quotidien included Western countries, as well as Guyana, Mexico, the Sahrawi, Vietnam, and local towns such as Hendaye in France. Des femmes en mouvements further covered activities in regional cities such as Aix-en-Provence, Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Nancy, Marseille, Rouen and Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, to name but a few, in order to decentralize the focus from Paris. Beyond simple binary exchanges between artists and critics in first-world countries, transnational alignments could triangulate and form outside North America and Europe into areas of the Global South, thereby generating new constellations of community and forms of practice. American critic Lucy Lippard, who defined a generation of writing on women’s art, was believed to have been influenced by the events of May ’68 in Paris, albeit indirectly, through her time in Argentina.98 Lippard juried an exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires in the fall of 1968. Her association with co-juror French critic Jean Clay, who took part in the May events in Paris, and her experience of the Argentinian artists who acted in solidarity with the French students and workers, revealed the degree of impact that the events had outside of Paris.99 Through these associations, and her firsthand experiences with mobilized Argentinian artist groups, she later made the claim that it was in Argentina that she was ‘politicized’.100 Lippard was a seminal figure for French art critic and historian Aline Dallier, who became a leading writer on women’s art in France in the 1970s.101 For her part, Dallier credited her initial interest in women artists to a French artist influenced by India, Tania Mouraud, whom she first met shortly before 1968 in Paris. The two went on to later collaborate on Mouraud’s white meditation room, an installation for which Dallier recorded the sound.102 ‘Reviewing’ the feminine: literature and exhibitions Counterpractice details a number of women’s exhibitions (1) to increase individual visibility for women artists, (2) as a means to decenter the art historical canon and (3) to function as political interventions into institutions and their histories. Several past exhibitions of women’s art have privileged a nonhierarchical approach and the metaphor of visibility/invisibility, most notably Inside the Visible: an Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth-Century Art: In, Of and From the Feminine (1996).103 The groundbreaking catalogue of this exhibition, with essays by Benjamin Buchloh, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Laura Cottingham, Serge Guilbaut, Rosalind Krauss, Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Griselda Pollock and Lea Vergine, amongst others, attempts to redefine the space of the feminine by using the geometry of the elliptical traverse to reposition the place of women’s art in relation to the art historical canon. Artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Claude Cahun, Lygia Clark, Hannah Darboven, Mona

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Hatoum, Eva Hesse, Hannah Höch, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Ana Mendieta, Martha Rosler, Nancy Spero, Sophie Tauber-Arp, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and Francesca Woodman are represented. This canon, however, does not represent the full measure of women artists that were active in France, nor does it articulate the important theoretical, abstract or conceptual visions from the perspective of women active during the 1970s that will be seen in greater detail in this book. De Zegher’s ‘elliptical’ approach is useful in that it avoids pinpointing the feminine by placing it in several places/spaces that challenge patriarchal/ hierarchical or linear forms of thinking.104 This is an insightful and evolutionary shift from using women’s art as an ‘alternative’ and dialectical counterpart to art by men. The latter historical stance is recounted by Norma Broude and Mary Garrard’s The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (1994), a well-illustrated study on women artists of this period and their confrontation with patriarchy with many original essays from participants in the movement as well as interviews.105 One of the first exhibitions of ‘feminist’ art in France was held at the Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble in 1997. The ironically titled Vraiment: Féminisme et art was curated by the American Laura Cottingham with a specific interest in presenting Anglo-American feminist artists alongside their French counterparts. Artists included Chantal Akerman, Eleanor Antin, Mary Beth Edelson, Françoise Janicot, Lea Lublin, Gina Pane, Tania Mouraud, Nicola [L.], ORLAN, Adrian Piper, Dorothée Selz and Nil Yalter, along with Nicole Croiset and Judy Blum, Hannah Wilke and others.106 In the autumn of 2005, a group exhibition of mainly French women’s art, Vénus en Périgord, comprised six exhibitions held in Dordogne and was generously represented in terms of women’s art (and some men’s) but lacked a critical overview in which to think about the women artists.107 The accompanying exhibition catalogue, published by AreaRevues, contained rich documents, resources and interviews and several essays on the women artists by various scholars.108 AreaRevues in 2009 continued this tradition by focusing on women artists (ranging from 21 to 82 years in age) and the plural.109 Camille Morineau’s pathbreaking elles@centrepompidou, a major cultural moment in France, brought together works by a number of women artists drawn from the museum’s collection in a significant rehanging at the Centre Pompidou from May 2009 to February 2011 which later traveled.110 Some of the exhibited artists who lived/worked in France included Geneviève Asse, Hessie, Monique Frydman, Annette Messager, Vera Molnar, Najia Mehadji, Aurélie Nemours, Gina Pane, Alicia Penalba, Germaine Richier, Niki de Saint Phalle, ORLAN, Judit Reigl, Nancy Spero, Alina Szapocznikow, Suzanne Valadon, Agnès Varda and Nil Yalter, amongst others. It was the first exhibition in a major museum in France to address the gender imbalance of artists represented in their collection. Some feminist critics in the international press

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expressed reservations, like Australian Germaine Greer in the British newspaper the Guardian, who was disappointed by the overall quality of the work exhibited and was troubled by the category ‘women’s art’.111 Individual artists from the period continue to receive attention and enjoy high-profile careers and show at major institutions and events since the 2000s.112 Significant solo exhibitions of women’s art include Annette Messager who won the Golden Lion for her entry Casino at the 2005 Venice Biennale, and followed the prize with a solo retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2007, and who went on to stage her first exhibition in Japan at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2008 and a later solo exhibition at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico in 2011. Sophie Calle enjoyed a highly successful retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2004 and represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Gina Pane had a large-scale exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 2005. Polish-born Alina Szapocznikow had a Museum of Modern Art retrospective exhibition in New York in 2012–2013. Niki de Saint Phalle had a major retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2014 and exhibited outside France at the National Art Center Tokyo in 2015. Polish-born Argentinian Lea Lublin had a retrospective at the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 2015. Tania Mouraud had a Centre Pompidou-Metz retrospective in 2015. Santiago de Cuba-born, Black Carribean artist Hessie [Carmen Djuric], engaged with the women’s movement and exhibited widely in the 1970s, but only regained visibility with her retrospective exhibitions at the Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre in Paris in 2015, Les Abattoirs in Toulouse in 2017–2018 and at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in Spain in 2018 (Figure 0.2). Nicola L. had a retrospective exhibition at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, New York, in 2017. Nil Yalter had smaller retrospectives at Arter in Istanbul and FRAC Lorraine in Metz in 2016 and a larger retrospective at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2019. These mentioned names and exhibitions single out only a few.

Hessie, Oui/Non, le droit de vote de la femme, March 1975.

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Women’s art in France was represented internationally on a major scale at the 2007–2008 exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Los Angeles County Museum, curated by Cornelia Butler. The show brought together artists from the United States and abroad for a thematic look at feminism in the 1970s and the artistic influence and range exerted by the movement.113 Amongst the artists who were either French or had lived in France during the period were: Lygia Clark, Lea Lublin, Annette Messager, ORLAN, Gina Pane, Niki de Saint Phalle and Nil Yalter, along with Judy Blum and Nicole Croiset.114 The work of international women artists was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2007’s Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art, curated by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin with the intention of demonstrating the political depth and breadth of contemporary feminism; it highlighted the drawing together of feminist artists from the West and non-West.115 Important, too, was Re.Act Feminism, curated by Bettina Knaup and Beatrice E. Stammer, which was held at the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin in 2008–2009 and Ljubljana and Erfurt in 2009 and showed the work of Colette (born in Tunis, lived in Nice and then the USA), Françoise Janicot, Nicola [L.], ORLAN, Nil Yalter, along with other artists from the USA and Europe who were active in the 1960s and 1970s. Since 2010, the Sammlung Verbund, Vienna, has presented an international traveling exhibition, Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s, shown across Europe in cities such as Rome, Madrid, Halmstad, Brussels, Hamburg, London, Vienna and Stavanger, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Brno, and Barcelona. A number of Latin American women living in France were included in the Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 exhibition which included Lygia Clark, Lea Lublin and Marie Orensanz, and others who had shown in the 1970s Biennale de Paris like Iole de Freitas and Liliana Porter, among the many women exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Brooklyn Museum in 2017–2018. Women artists’ gaze on the male body was the theme of the exhibition In the Cut: The Male Body in Feminist Art, at the Stadtgalerie Saarbrucken in Germany in 2018, which included Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, ORLAN and Aude du Pasquier Grall among others from Europe, Russia and the United States. Decentralizing institutions, digital platforms have also sprung up in recent years to archive women artists in France and elsewhere. Notable is www.awarewomenartists.com, available in both French and English languages, which was established by seven women and is based in Paris.116 The group also awards an art prize, the ‘Prix AWARE’, to women artists. Key French publications on women artists of the 1970s include Fabienne Dumont’s Des sorcières comme les autres: artistes et féministes dans la France des années 1970 (2014), a finely researched and comprehensive cataloguing of women artists in France which presents artworks from the 1970s to artists’ more recent work.117 Marie-Jo Bonnet assesses women’s contribution to art in

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the twentieth century in her autobiographical Mon MLF (2018) as well as in her previous Les femmes artistes dans les avant-gardes (2006).118 In particular, she includes a chapter on artists in the 1970s during the MLF in conjunction with brief discussions of artists such as Raymonde Arcier, Charlotte Calmis, Valie Export, Ruth Francken, Lea Lublin, Tania Mouraud, Annette Messager, ORLAN, Gina Pane, Carole Roussopoulos, Jeanne Socquet and others. She also refers to other women who participated in art groups and a number of influential women scholars/intellectuals and details a history of exhibitions during the period.119 Mon MLF discusses her own engagement with feminist movements and continues with analyses of women artists in the 1970s.120 In Femmes artistes, artistes femmes: Paris de 1880 à nos jours, archivist Catherine Gonnard and Elisabeth Lebovici, art critic for Libération, compile a thoughtful compendium of women artists in Paris in the last 130 years, tracing the rise of women artists in the 1880s, their impact before and during the two world wars, and continuing through the period of the Liberation to May 1968 and on to the present day.121 In their chapter on ‘Art and Feminism’, Gonnard and Lebovici look at a handful of artists such as Raymonde Arcier, Lea Lublin, Andrée Marquet, Annette Messager and Nil Yalter, thus blending the names and works of unknown artists with those of more recognizable names in a strategy that is widely and diversely employed in this book.122 In an interview in 2007, Elisabeth Lebovici expressed the view that solely focusing on women artists in 1970s France ran the risk of their being overdetermined in terms of their impact and the true measure of their importance to the cultural scene of the time.123 At the same time, Counterpractice reassesses such a statement in light of the recent #MeToo movement, or in France #BalanceTonPorc, that saw Lebovici and her coauthor turn to a women’s film of the period, Maso et Miso Vont en bateau (1976) (discussed in Chapter 3 and 5) to radically challenge statements by Catherine Deneuve and other signatories made in 2018 to Le Monde that appeared to denounce the movement.124 This book assesses Lebovici’s original statement through an examination of the context of women’s politics, artistic presence and methods of production in France. Events in France present an alternative yet parallel model to those in Belgium, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, the United States and so on, with cross-currents and influences shared between countries. Relationships between major cities should also be emphasized.125 Thus in order to gauge the genuine impact of women artists in 1970s France, a more nuanced portrait must emerge from incisive questioning of the period: How are these women’s sensibilities unique to their time and their culture, if at all? How do they counter or engage the art made by men?126 How does women’s art in France resonate with national political events and struggles without becoming a nationalist project? In what ways can we engage with the works to begin to read and understand this

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period within, for example, the context of the emerging practice of écriture féminine? Situating women artists in 1970s France is not without its challenges: the depth and difference of the œuvres, resistance to the project on the part of some women artists, the initial lack of contemporaneous critical secondary material on the topic, the shifting artistic terrain of the 1970s, the generational differences among the artists, plus the time and effort required to seek out a number of the women working in this period, have all presented certain obstacles. The richness of their work, however, and the critical methodology needed to think about it, demands a book that emphasizes not only the methods engaged in bringing the work to light, but also the way(s) in which the work can be viewed, thought about and felt. Two important, dedicated works on women’s art in 1970s France emerged in the early 2000s: Diana Quinby’s doctoral thesis ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art à Paris dans les années 1970: une contribution à l’étude du mouvement des femmes dans l’art’ (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2003), and Fabienne Dumont’s doctoral thesis ‘Femmes et art dans les années 70: Douze ans d’art contemporain version plasticiennes – une face cachée de l’histoire de l’art – Paris, 1970–1982’ (Université de Picardie Jules Verne, 2004), which lays the foundations of her book Des sorcières comme les autres (2014). Quinby presents an original, rigorous and detailed study of women artists and their involvement in women’s artistic groups that focuses on Collectif Femmes/Art in the 1970s, while Dumont charts new ground by highlighting a range of artists and their involvement in women’s groups, exhibitions and journals of the time whilst uncovering important statistics on the amount of attention paid to women artists in institutions and exhibitions. The most influential ‘feminist’ art historian in France was Aline Dallier, whose ‘Activités et réalisations de femmes dans l’art contemporain: Un premier exemple: les oeuvres dérivées des techniques textiles traditionnelles’ (Université Paris VIII Saint-Denis, 1980) laid the groundwork for the theses of Quinby and Dumont as well as my own research.127 Dallier’s was a highly significant and original undertaking which considered the practices of contemporary women artists in France using ‘textile’ art to suggest a historical canon for women, while more broadly reporting on their current activities. She published a number of articles on women’s art during the 1970s in journals such as Opus International and Les Cahiers du GRIF and in 1977 organized and helped to curate exhibitions in France for Féminie-Dialogue as well as for the A.I.R. Gallery in New York. Although French art critic and curator Camille Morineau once made the case that there was no art theorist in the French women’s movement to shed light on feminist practices, Aline Dallier could arguably be seen to have filled this role.128 Dallier was not a member of the MLF, but nonetheless meaningfully contributed to discourse on women artists and feminism in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 2009, Dallier published Art,

Introduction

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féminisme, post-féminisme, an anthology of her feminist writings with an interview which also took into account her changing positions over time. Meanwhile, new archival materials and documentation on the period are gradually becoming public, such as the planned volumes on the group Psychanalyse et Politique by Antoinette Fouque’s publishing house des femmes, which should bring fresh insight and renewed attention to the period.129 Structure The glissade reveals the theoretical structure in this book, which relies on a series of strata, or layers, of development in a reading encounter that leads to a sustained image of women’s art in the 1970s. I use this concept not only as a way in which to approach the diversity of women’s art at a particular period of time, but also to strengthen its engagement by using it to construct the foundations and chapters of this book. The initial chapters take into account women’s artistic, political and sociological history in the 1960s and 1970s. Together they explore women’s artistic development and heritage and the growing militancy on the part of women artists against the backdrop of the emerging women’s movement. Chapter 1, ‘On the streets: from May ’68 to the MLF’, recounts the position of women in the events of May ’68 by looking closely at ideological debates surrounding those events and the symbolic use of women in politics. The progressive militancy of women artists and their work is also considered. The next three chapters of the book build upon the opening chapter by investigating the history and politics of the Mouvement de libération des femmes in the 1970s and the role of the woman artist and her use of the body and psyche during the period. Chapter 2, ‘The MLF 1970s’, examines through archival documents, tracts and images the trajectory of the MLF and provides the necessary critical background to fully situate and contextualize the work of artists in relation to the wider social and political body. Chapter 3, ‘Libération-création: MLF, women artists and the militant body’, looks at the various political groups of the MLF and its goals and considers how artists (women and men) engaging in performance, body and other forms of art blur and deepen the line between political demonstration and artistic expression through their redefinition of the body. Chapter 4, ‘Instase: Psychanalyse et Politique and the spaces of women’s art’, studies the influence of Psychanalyse et Politique and the relationship between interiority and exterior politics, the role of sexuality and the diverse spaces of women’s artistic production. The final two chapters introduce themes of collectivity and artistic practice(s), drawing upon the earlier chapters to further situate and contextualize women’s art in the 1970s through the formation of groups as well as women’s artistic contributions and innovative practices. Chapter 5, ‘Women’s groups and collective art practices’, confronts the ideologies of different

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women’s artistic groups formed in the 1970s with the lack of exhibition opportunities for women offered by institutions and galleries. Chapter 6, ‘Hard politics, soft art: subversive practices from écriture féminine to soft art’, evaluates the way in which women and some men artists challenged contemporary practices through the body/subjectivity, as seen in portrayals of the body, experimental writing such as écriture féminine, and the employment of ‘soft’ materials such as embroidery, knitting, weaving and so on, in an effort to place women within a larger tradition of anonymous, artisan works and shape the discourse and politics of a period. The book concludes with ‘La révolution accomplie? Some legacies of women’s art in 1970s France’, which assesses the work of women artists in the 1970s from a contemporary standpoint, from the MLF aftermath in the early 1980s to the current practice of favoring specific artists from that time at the expense of unknown practitioners. The ultimate legacy of these women from the 1970s is explored through a consideration of their under- or over-exposure as artists – their relative visibility itself being influenced by contemporary interest in and/or prejudice toward the 1970s – and what this might mean for a feminist future(s). Notes 1 Viviane Forrester, ‘Féminin pluriel’, Tel Quel, no. 74 (1977), p. 69. 2 ‘Réflexions sur le féminisme’, ‘Féministes radicales’ recueil de textes diffusés à la Conférence Nationale du Mouvement anglais, London, 1972, p. 4. Archives Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand [hereafter Archives BMD]. 3 Antoinette Fouque, Il y a deux sexes (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), pp. 31–32. 4 See Alice Schwarzer, Entretiens avec Simone de Beauvoir [1984] (Paris: Gallimard, 2008) and Arlene B. Dallery, ‘Politics of Writing (the) Body: Écriture féminine’, in Gender/Body/ Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan B. Bordo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pp. 52–67. 5 De Beauvoir states: ‘There is a lot of work [on feminism], there are a lot of foundations to help feminist or female painters or sculptors.’ Margaret A. Simons, ‘Two Interviews with Simone de Beauvoir’, in Revaluing French Feminism, ed. Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 25–41, p. 40. 6 Julia Kristeva, ‘Le Temps des femmes’, 34/44: Cahiers de recherche de sciences des textes et documents, no. 5 (Winter 1979), pp. 5–19, p. 11. 7 Often translated as ‘counter-conduct’, Michel Foucault’s concept of contreconduite, or the forms of resistance in the face of governmentality, sprang from his lecture on 1 March 1978, at the Collège de France. Foucault in this lecture speaks briefly about resistances related to women and their status in civil or religious society. See his Sécurité, territoire, population: Cours au Collège de France (1977–1978), ed. Michel Senellart (Paris: Gallimard/ Seuil, 2004), pp. 195–232, p. 200. Also see Arnold I. Davidson, ‘In Praise of

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Counter-Conduct’, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 24, no. 4 (2011), pp. 25–41. 8 Antoinette Fouque, ‘Femmes, sexualité et politique’, automne 1970, tract distribué aux Beaux-Arts, lieu des premières AG du Mouvement des femmes. Depuis 30 ans: Des femmes: 1974–2004 (Paris: des femmes – Antoinette Fouque, 2005), p. 26. To avoid a simple oppositional stance, Fouque emphasizes a counterweight in a reverse angle shot as a change of perspective and tactical reversal. 9 Most persuasive amongst recent scholarship trying to call into question the MLF position on race is Françoise Vergès, Le ventre des femmes: Capitalisme, racialisation, féminisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 2017), which brings to light practices of forced abortions and/or sterilizations in Reunion Island and Overseas France which, according to the author, was ignored by feminists in France’s MLF in the 1970s. Nonetheless Des femmes en mouvements reports that at the events in November 1977 of the Coordination des femmes noires (est. in 1976), an exposé was presented in Paris on forced sterilization in ‘most of the third world countries’, although it is not clear if these included former French colonies or territories; no. 1 (January 1977–December 1978), p. 41. Recent English-language scholarship such as Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1948–2016 (ed. Félix Germain and Silyane Larcher) also aims to redress this imbalance by highlighting the contributions of black women in France and its overseas territories during the colonial and postcolonial periods, although it does not specifically address the 1970s (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2018). 10 Aline Dallier, ‘Le rôle des femmes dans l’éclatement des avant-gardes et l’élargissement du champ de l’art’,  Opus International, no. 88 (Spring 1983), pp. 24–30. 11 Although Dallier, and later Fabienne Dumont in her doctoral thesis (‘Femmes et art dans les années 70: Douze ans d’art contemporain version plasticiennes – une face cachée de l’histoire de l’art – Paris, 1970–1982’, Université de Picardie/ Jules Verne, 2004) and book, Des sorcières comme les autres: Artistes et féministes dans la France des années 1970 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014), make a distinction between sociopolitical art/art influenced by feminism and other ‘non-feminist’ work, I am reluctant here to take measure of political engagement and/or make absolute distinctions about the content of work. Relatedly, though not in reference to these scholars, I attempt to refrain from what could be viewed as mind–body dualism in terms of further separating women’s practices of abstraction and representation according to political legibility (see Chapter 4). 12 Irigaray’s thought has long formed the basis for theories of female aesthetics. Hilary Robinson investigates mucus as an alternative female economy based on concepts written about by Irigaray in ‘Morphology of the Mucous: Irigarayan Possibilities in the Material Practice of Art’, in Differential Aesthetics [2000], ed. Penny Florence and Nicola Foster (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 261–280. Also see her Reading Art, Reading Irigaray (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006).

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13 The ‘derivativeness’ of the French women’s movement formed part of the 1970s discourse, as Peter Starr points out: ‘Régis Debray, no great admirer of either American oppositional culture or French micropolitics, would nevertheless write in 1978, “The MLF next to Woman’s Lib, the FHAR next to the gay power movement, our communes next to California’s, our Occitans beside the Chicanos, our ‘marginal’ press beside the Free-Press, Larzac next to Woodstock … Fine copies no doubt, but the originals are still better”’, in Modeste contribution aux cérémonies officielles du dixième anniversaire (Paris: Maspero, 1978), p. 49. Cited in English in Peter Starr, The Logic of Failed Revolt: French Theory after May ’68 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 124. 14 Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing and Women (London: Vintage Books, 1974). Mitchell singles out Psychanalyse et Politique in her introduction for the group’s investment in a Lacanian interpretation of Freud and Karl Marx and their break with the bourgeois idealism witnessed in American radical feminism (pp. xxi–xxii). The French edition of Mitchell’s book, Psychanalyse et féminisme (Paris: des femmes, 1975), was translated by Françoise Ducrocq, Françoise Basch and Catherine Lawton. The book was reviewed, among others, by Françoise Collin in Les Cahiers du GRIF, no. 8 (1975), pp. 73–74. 15 Gayle Rubin succinctly framed the relationship for a number of American feminists: ‘Psychoanalysis is a feminist theory manqué.’ See her ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157–210, p. 185. For many materialist/socialist feminists in the 1980s and early 1990s, particularly in the United States, psychoanalysis lacked political praxis – or, in Lacanian terms, the social was glaringly absent from the ‘symbolic’. A number of these feminists questioned the politics of ‘French’ women writers invested in psychoanalysis. An issue of Hypatia on ‘French Feminist Philosophy’, vol. 3, no. 3 (Winter 1989), laid bare these tensions. In the issue, Dorothy Leland in her ‘Lacanian Psychoanalysis and French Feminism: Toward an Adequate Political Psychology’ challenged the Lacanian thought in the work of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, leveling critiques of biological determinism and a lack of cultural and historical specificity concerning women’s internalized oppression. For Leland, finding ground for political change was impossible within Lacanian psychoanalysis (pp. 81–103). Nancy Fraser in her ‘Introduction’ acknowledged generational differences and the criticality of these debates (pp. 1–10). She would ultimately extend Leland’s argument the following year in her ‘The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics’, boundary 2, vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer 1990), pp. 82–101. This essay attacked the discursive construction of gender identity in Lacanian thought. Instead, she turned to the plurality of the meaning of ‘woman’ following some arguments in Denise Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Her challenge to Julia Kristeva’s privileging of the symbolic order at the expense of social context was bolstered

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by arguments in Andrea Nye’s ‘Woman Clothed with the Sun’, Signs, vol. 12, no. 4 (Summer 1987), pp. 664–686. Julia Kristeva’s seeming ‘anti-feminism’, as framed by some American feminists, was addressed by Ann Rosalind Jones in ‘Julia Kristeva on Femininity: The Limits of a Semiotic Politics’, Feminist Review, no. 18 (Winter 1984), pp. 56–73. Meanwhile, Judith Butler saw the subversive potential of ‘semiotic’ impulse, as evinced by Julia Kristeva, as flattened and ultimately subordinate to the ‘symbolic’, in ‘The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva’ in the same issue of Hypatia (1989) (pp. 104–118). Diana Fuss’s contribution to the same issue, ‘Essentially Speaking’, confronted critiques of these French women writers’ ‘essentialism’ by arguing for Luce Irigaray’s strategic deployment of essentialism to counter Lacan’s phallomorphism and women’s archaic designation as ‘non-essence’ (pp. 62–80). Toward the end of the 1990s, French scholar Anne-Emmanuelle Berger (then teaching in the United States) confronted some of Irigaray’s speculations with Islam and the meanings of the veil in order to position French postcolonial politics within the writer’s metaphysics, in ‘The Newly Veiled Women: Irigaray, Specularity, and the Islamic Veil’, Diacritics, vol. 28, no. 1 (Spring 1998), pp. 93–119. In her analysis, Berger, following Frantz Fanon – ‘L’Algérie se devoile’ [1959] – underscored the moment of Algerian women’s unveiling, or their removal of the haik, during the war (see note 25 below). For the ambivalent reception of ‘French feminism’ in the United States among women of color, some of whom viewed race as trumped by theory, and for the postcolonial approaches of Trinh T. Minh-ha and Gayatri Spivak, see Chapter 2 in Katherine A. Costello, ‘Inventing “French Feminism”: A Critical History’, unpublished PhD thesis, Duke University, 2016, pp. 59–88. See also Deborah McDowell, ‘Transferences: Black Feminist Discourse: The “Practice” of “Theory”’, in Feminism Beside Itself, ed. Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 93–118. 16 Jane Gallop critically highlights the conjunction ‘and’ in Mitchell’s title in her Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis: (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 1. 17 Teresa Brennan (ed.), Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1–23. Brennan highlights the shift in Marxist interpretation in the 1970s which saw Marx read through a structuralist lens and criticized for his dependence on ‘human essence’ in his early writings. On essentialist versus non-essentialist categorizations in relationship to Marxist and Lacanian theories, see pp. 6–9. 18 For a history of women’s contributions and the changing role of psychoanalysis in the 1970s, see Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Histoire de la psychanalyse en France (1925–1985), vol. 2 (Paris: Fayard, 1994), especially the chapter, ‘Sunset Boulevard: misères et splendeurs de la contestation’. It is important to bear in mind that psychoanalysis in the 1970s was more largely impacted by the number of women psychoanalysts who trained in the 1920s and 1930s and taught during this decade. See Nancy Chodorow, ‘La psychanalyse et les femmes psychanalystes’, in Les femmes dans l’histoire de la psychanalyse, ed. Sophie Mijolla-Mellor (Paris: L’esprit du temps, 1999). Dallier turned

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increasingly toward psychoanalysis from the mid-1980s onwards, which impacted her art criticism. 19 As Jane Gallop puts it, ‘If one sees the questioning of authority as an essential feminist effort, then the dialogue between psychoanalysis and literature, as [Shoshana] Felman outlines it, may be invaluable for a feminist rethinking of power.’ I would extend Felman’s and Gallop’s arguments to the dialogue between art and psychoanalysis [or any discourse with authoritative claims]. See Jane Gallop and Carolyn Burke, ‘Psychoanalysis and Feminism in France’, in Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (eds), The Future of Difference (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1980), pp. 106–121, p. 118. (Felman’s referred-to text is her introduction to Yale French Studies, 55–56, 1977.) The published conference proceedings were drawn from the The Scholar and the Feminist VI: The Future of Difference conference sponsored by the Barnard College Women’s Center and held in New York City on 29 April 1979. 20 The term glissement recurs with some frequency in writings during the period of the 1970s and early 1980s in a range of contexts which include female sexuality and jouissance as well as discussions about body, language and politics. Belgian periodical Les Cahiers du GRIF is a case in point. ‘Il y a une infinité d’énoncés possibles, et cela, c’est l’espace de la jouissance féminine: l’infinitude au sens du glissement infini’ (There is an infinite number of possible statements, and that is the space of female jouissance: the no-end state in the sense of infinite slipping), Marie-Claire Boons, ‘A propos de l’orgasme’,  Jouir, no. 26 (1983), pp. 95–103, p. 100. ‘D’où vient le langage? S’invente-t-il? Est-ce un glissement qui va du cri au concept?’ (Where does language come from? Does it invent itself? Is it a slip which moves from the cry to the concept?), Marie Denis, ‘Pour parler je ne crains personne’, elles con-sonnent, no. 13 (1976), pp. 21–25, p. 22. ‘De la différence (sexuelle) aux différences (individuelles) il y a glissement et non-rupture’ (From (sexual) difference to (individual) differences there is slippage and no rupture), Françoise Collin, ‘Pour une politique féministe, fragments d’horizon’, les femmes et la politique, no. 6 (1975), pp. 68–74, p. 72. 21 In reflecting upon her groundbreaking anthology and essay-inclusive book with Rozsika Parker, Framing Feminisms: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–1985 (London: Pandora Press, 1987), Pollock argues a year after its publication that ‘Retrospectively we may now see the 1970s history as exclusive – a history of small, mostly metropolitan white women gaining a modicum of visibility. Writing a history of those groups without the sense of the struggle of women who did not even enjoy that small degree of recognition for their cultural activity can rightly be indicted for its unconscious racism.’ Reprinted in Twenty Years of MAKE Magazine: Back to the Future of Women’s Art, ed. Maria Walsh and Mo Throp (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), pp. 100–105, p. 100. 22 Bouhired’s statement is recorded in Florence Montreynaud, Le XXème siècle des femmes (Paris: Nathan, 1989), p. 438. She was freed at the time of Algerian independence. 23 Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi, Djamila Boupacha (Preface by Simone de Beauvoir) (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). Frontispiece by Picasso.

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24 Included among the signatures are: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Louis Bedouin, Robert Benayoun, Maurice Blanchot, Geneviève Bonnefoi, André Breton, Hubert Damisch, Simone Dreyfus, Marguerite Duras, Yves Elléouet, Dominique Eluard, Charles Estienne, Édouard Glissant, Édouard Jaguer, Alain Joubert, Claude Lanzmann, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Leiris, Eric Losfeld, André Masson, Maurice Nadeau, Hélène Parmelin, José Pierre, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Édouard Pignon, J.-B. Pontalis, Denise René, Alain Resnais, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Christiane Rochefort, Claude Roy, Nathalie Sarraute, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone Signoret, René de Solier and Claude Viseux. 25 Paris Match, no. 476 (24 May 1958), p. 44 and Paris Match, no. 477 (31 May 1958), cover and pp. 26–27. 26 Algériennes en lutte, no. 1 (January 1978), Femmes Algériennes en Lutte, no. 2 (December 1978). 27 Zahia Smail Salhi, ‘The Algerian Feminist Movement between Nationalism, Patriarchy and Islamism’, Women’s Studies International Forum, no. 33 (2010), pp. 113–124. 28 Laurent Dispot, ‘“La Kahina” de Roger Ikor: Le Maghreb avant l’Islam: Histoire d’une Jeanne d’Arc berbère…’, Le Matin, 24 June 1979. Archives BMD. 29 Algériennes en lutte, no. 1, pp. 10–12; Femmes Algériennes en Lutte, no. 2, p. 49. 30 Claudie Lesselier, ‘Mouvements de femmes de l’immigration en France du début des années 1970 au début des années 1980’, in Politique et administration du genre en migration: mondes atlantiques, XIXe–XXe siècles, ed. Philippe Rygiel (Saint-Denis: Publibook, 2012), pp. 207–224, p. 209. 31 Ibid., p. 210. 32 For the death of Saida Menebhi and her prison poetry, see Algériennes en lutte, no. 1, pp. 40–41. 33 The group would also include African American women in 1977. For a report on events which included discussions on prostitution, polygamy, forced sterilization, migration, showings of two Nigerian films etc., see ‘femmes noires de tous les pays…’, Des femmes en mouvements, no. 1. (January 1977–December 1978), pp. 40–43. 34 ‘La Journée des femmes noires’, Libération, 28 October 1978. 35 Flyer. ‘La journée des femmes noires: samedi 29 octobre 1977.’ The event was organized by the Coordination des femmes noires (Africaines, Antillaises, Afro-Américaines). Archives BMD. 36 Martine Storti, ‘Deux groupements de femmes noires à Paris’, Libération, 3–4 June 1978. See also her ‘Les femmes noires et leur libération’, Libération, 2 November 1977. 37 Martine Storti, ‘Un livre d’Awa Thiam: La parole aux négresses’, Libération, 3–4 June 1978. 38 Ibid. 39 M.C., ‘Les femmes noires se regroupent’, Rouge, 2 March 1978 and n.a., ‘Enfermées, massacrées, exotisées, les femmes noires se révoltent’, Rouge, 26 July 1978. 40 The demonstration took place on 4 March 1978. Rouge, 2 March 1978. 41 Lesselier, ‘Mouvements de femmes’, pp. 208–209.

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42 See Vasquez A. Araujo A.M., ‘Femmes et exil, vers la recherche de nos identités’, in Exilés latino-américains, la malédiction d’Ulysse (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988), pp. 129–162. Cited in Lesselier, ‘Mouvements de femmes’, p. 210. 43 The artists were Agna Aguadé, Maria Eugenia Arria, Concepción Balmes, Antonia Ferreiro and Nora Iniesta. The salon ran from 29 April to 26 May 1981. 44 See Gérard Chaliand, Mythes révolutionnaires du tiers monde: Guérillas et socialisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1976). 45 Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004). 46 Jocelyn Olcott, International Women’s Year (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 347. 47 Ibid. 48 August–September, 1975, pp. 34–38, p. 3. The feature was in part to celebrate two exhibitions of Mithila art in Paris – one at the Musée de l’Homme in 1973 and the second at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in spring 1975. Indian art historian Jyotindra Jain has identified Yamuna Devi of Jitwarpur village in Madhubani as the likely artist of the cover image. Author discussion with Jyotindra Jain, New Delhi, September 2019. 49 Véquaud’s collection was highlighted in a Musée de l’Homme exhibition in 1973 and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1975. 50 He would later be among those responsible for the Indian art selected for the Magiciens de la terre exhibition which ran from 18 May to 14 August 1989. 51 Mithila art would feature in an interview with Julia Kristeva by Jacqueline Delaunay, ‘L’autre du sexe’, Sorcières, no. 10 (1977), to accompany Kristeva’s discussion on women’s creativity and motherhood, pp. 37–40, p. 39. The photograph by Édouard Boubat, which featured a mother breastfeeding and painting, was taken from Yves Véquaud’s book, L’art du Mithila (Paris: Presses de la Connaissance, 1976). A Mithila painting from the same book by Véquaud was was also included in Sorcières, no. 6 (1976), p. 26, to accompany Irène Schavelzon’s contribution ‘Dehors la nuit’. 52 10th Biennale de Paris, exhibition catalogue, 1977, pp. 32–35. 53 Rather than individual countries being able to make decisions about representation (as in Venice), from 1971 a committee of twelve individuals selected the representatives from around the world. See also Catherine Millet, ‘When an International Exhibition Questions Itself about its Internationalism’, 10th Biennale de Paris, exhibition catalogue, 1977, pp. 20–24. 54 Françoise Eliet, ‘Chine: Travail des peintres ouvriers et paysans’, Art Press, no. 20 (September–October 1975), pp. 10–11, p. 11. Earlier in the spring, ARC 2 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris also featured Chinese painters in Images du peuple chinois, which ran from 20 March to 27 April 1975. 55 Ibid., p. 10. Julia Kristeva, Des Chinoises (Paris: des femmes, 1974), pp. 184–188. 56 Dany Bloch née Kahn, L’Art vidéo, 1960–1980, PhD thesis, p. 154. Fonds Dany Bloch, Les Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes. Revised and later published as Dany Bloch, Art et vidéo, 1960–1980/2 (Locarno: Ed. Flaviana, 1982).

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Introduction

57 Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, L’Arc 61 (1975), pp. 39–54. Eng. trans. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith and Paula Cohen, Signs, vol. 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976), pp. 875–893. 58 Yalter’s partner, Joël Boutteville, filmed the performance. Author discussion with Joël Boutteville, June 2019. (Dany Bloch commissioned this work by Yalter for her curated exhibition Art / Vidéo Confrontation at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1974, as discussed in Chapter 3.) 59 No. 333–334 (April–May 1974). Liliane Kandel credits Cathy Bernheim for choosing the title in her article ‘Simone de Beauvoir, Les Temps Modernes et moi’, Association Sens-Public, vol. 1, no. 27 (2020), pp. 55–75, p. 63. 60 Discussed in Bloch, L’Art vidéo, pp. 144–145. 61 During this period Yalter was also invested in social concerns, photographing the lives and housing of Portuguese immigrants in Paris in Habitations provisoires (1974–1977) and Ris-Orangis (1979), and of Algerian immigrants in Algerian Marriage in France (1977). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, she continued to film and photograph the reality of Turkish immigrants who had become a source of cheap labor in France. Her internationalism extended to visual sources, as when she made collages of Indian gods and goddesses such as Kali from popular Indian calendar art for the works in D’après “Stimmung” (1973). It was created in response to an avant-garde performance she saw by German composer Karl Stockhausen of a sound piece that named gods and goddesses and was inflected by erotic poetry. Author discussion with Nil Yalter, June 2019. 62 Hélène Cixous, L’histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1985). Hélène Cixous, L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1987). Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva, Le féminin et le sacré (Paris: Éditions Stock, 1998). 63 Ya-Chen Chen makes this point in Breaking the Waves: The Many Dimensions of Chinese Feminism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 189–191. For actual problems and pitfalls in translations of these three writers from the French to the American, see Domna Stanton, ‘Language and Revolution: The Franco-American Dis-Connection’, in Eisenstein and Jardine, The Future of Difference, pp. 73–87. Recent scholarship in the United States has also attempted to reframe an understanding of France’s feminisms by foregrounding materialist histories which have been occluded by the intense focus on French ‘theory’, in particular the work of writers and philosophers Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, in literature and philosophy departments from the 1980s, and more visibly, from the early 1990s onwards. See Lisa Greenwald, Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and The Women’s Liberation Movement (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), p. 12. 64 For example, the Scandinavian critic Toril Moi, based at the time in Britain and aligned with the New Left, expressed how ‘“British” readings of recent French theories’ could question ‘“American” readings of the very same material’ in ‘Feminism, Postmodernism, and Style: Recent Feminist Criticism in the United States’, Cultural Critique, no. 9 (Spring 1988), pp. 3–22, p. 4.

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On the debates in British feminism and the socialist interest in Engels and the family which opened the door to psychoanalysis, see Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson, ‘The British Women’s Movement’, New Left Review, no. 148 (November–December 1984), pp. 74–103, pp. 95–98. For Australian and Indian readings of French feminism, see note 73 below. 65 Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980). 66 Alison M. Jaggar primarily credits Suzanne Relyea’s ‘None-of-the-above: Gender Theory and Heterosexual Hegemony’ which was presented in the session ‘New French Feminisms’ by the Society for Women in Philosophy at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division 77th Annual Meeting in Boston on Sunday, 28 December 1980, as being responsible for her characterization of écriture féminine and the writings of Hélène Cixous, Christine Delphy, Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig as ‘French radical feminism’ in her book on socialist feminism, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, NJ: Roman & Allanheld, 1983), pp. 119–120, p. 98, note 34. Jaggar further cites Marks and de Courtivron’s New French Feminisms which was also published in 1980. 67 Some of these writers’ incompatible views did not preclude them from often being spoken or written about together where their differences were acknowledged, particularly in the 1980s to the 1990s. An exhaustive list would be too extensive; see for example, Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), which focuses primarily on an analysis of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, and Susan Rubin Suleiman’s ‘(Re)Writing the Body: The Politics and Poetics of Female Eroticism’, where she considers the work of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig in The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 7–30. Alice Jardine, who theorized the ‘woman’ and ‘feminine’ as an absence in texts written primarily by men, also discussed her initial investment in Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva whose ‘uncritical assimilation’ or ‘depoliticized recuperation’ in the United States led her to France in her Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 260. The ‘theatricality’ of the ‘French feminist’ scene and its performative nature is underscored by Alice Jardine and Anne M. Menke in their Shifting Scenes: Interviews on Women, Writing, and Politics in Post-68 France (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1991), which opens with a quote by artist Nancy Spero and provides interviews with a number of significant women writers in French – including Chantal Chawaf, Catherine Clément, Hélène Cixous, Jeanne Hyvard, Sarah Kofman, Luce Irigaray, Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, Julia Kristeva, Michèle Montrelay, Monique Wittig and others – whose differences are foregrounded. In psychoanalysis, Jane Gallop turned her attention to Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, along with Catherine Clément, Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, Michèle Montrelay and others, in her Daughter’s Seduction. See also note 15 in the Introduction for ‘French Feminism’ as defined and circumscribed by Lacanian psychoanalysis.

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68 Les femmes de Platon à Derrida (Paris: Éditions Plon, 2000), p. 13. 69 Ibid. See Eleni Varikas’s critique in her ‘Féminisme, modernité, postmodernisme: pour un dialogue des deux côtés de l’océan’, in Féminismes au présent, ed. M. Riot-Sarcey, C. Planté, E. Varikas et al. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), pp. 59–84. Varikas emphasizes the ‘selective appropriation’, problematic groupings and American packaging of French intellectuals such as Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard etc., under the banners of ‘French poststructuralism’, ‘French theory’ and/or ‘French feminism’. This last conflated the thought of figures like Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, when, she asserts, they did not claim a feminist position in France and likely did not ‘appreciate’ being allied together. Varikas sees the ‘national’ [French] label serving erroneously to consolidate thinkers and erase differences between them. She is further critical of the categorization of feminism as a form of postmodernism (which overlooks the long history of women’s emancipation and its struggles); American scholars who rely on hermetic theoretical positions at the expense of knowledge of feminisms on the ground in France and Europe; and French intellectuals who avoid defining themselves as feminist in France but who accepted the designation in the United States. 70 Christine Delphy, ‘The Invention of French Feminism: An Essential Move’, Yale French Studies, no. 97 (2000), pp. 166–197. See also her ‘“French Feminism”: An Imperialist Invention’, in Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, ed. Diane Bell and Renate Klein (Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1996), pp. 383–392. Claire Goldberg Moses, ‘Made in America: “French Feminism” in Academia’, Feminist Studies, vol. 24, no. 2 (Summer 1998), pp. 241–274. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’, Yale French Studies, no. 62 (1981), pp. 154–184 and ‘French Feminism Revisited’, in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 141–172. 71 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 79–93. 72 Domna C. Stanton, ‘Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva’, in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 157–182. 73 A few examples include Danielle Haase-Dubosc, Mary E. John, Marcelle Marini, Rama Melkote and Susie Tharu (eds), French Feminisms: An Indian Anthology (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003); Kelly Oliver, ‘French Feminism in an American Context’, French Feminism Reader (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. vii–x; and, for important points on the initial Australian reception of French Feminism, see Anna Gibbs, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Weinstock and Nancy Huston, ‘Round & Round the Looking Glass’, Hecate 6, vol. 2 (1980), pp. 23–45. 74 Tsuboi Hideto, ‘Hiromi ron (jo)’ (On Itō Hiromi [Part I]), Nihon bungaku, vol. 38, no. 12 (December 1989), pp. 24–35; Tsuboi Hideto, ‘Itō Hiromi ron (chu)’ (On Itō Hiromi [Part II]), Nihon bungaku, vol. 39, no. 2 (February

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1990), pp. 48–57; Tsuboi Hideto, ‘Itō Hiromi ron (ge)’ (On Itō Hiromi [Part III]), Nihon bungaku, 39, no. 4 (April 1990), pp. 22–33. Cited in Joanne Quimby, ‘How to Write “Women’s Poetry” without Being a “Woman Poet”: Public Persona in Itō Hiromi’s Early Poetry’, U.S. Japan Women’s Journal, no. 32 (2007), pp. 17–41, see p. 31 and note 41. 75 Chen, Breaking the Waves. See chapter 4, pp. 135–168 and chapter 5, pp. 169–194. 76 Haase-Dubosc, et al. French Feminisms, p. 12. The Indian editors point out that in the nineteenth century the French colonial presence in India was comparatively small and, for the intellectual classes, France was often associated with the French Revolution and with literary figures such as Victor Hugo and Guy de Maupassant. 77 Rhonda Cobham makes this argument in relationship to an essay by Margaret Tucker on South African-born Botswana writer Bessie Head. See ‘Introduction’, Research in African Literatures, vol. 19, no. 2 (Summer 1988), pp. 137–142, p. 140. 78 Frieda Ekotto, ‘Language and Confinement in Francophone Women Writers’, L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 38, no. 3 (Fall 1998), pp. 73–83. Azille Coetzee  and Annemie Halsema, ‘Sexual Difference and Decolonization: Oyĕwùmí and Irigaray in Dialogue about Western Culture’, Hypatia, vol. 33, no. 2 (Spring 2018), pp. 178–194. Azille Coetzee frames Oyĕwùmí within a context of relational subjectivity in African thought, complicating her claim that ‘gender’ is a Western construct that did not exist in some precolonial African societies. She further situates Oyěwùmí’s work against the relative absence of women in African philosophy and responds to ‘feminism’ as a ‘recolonizing’ or ‘AntiAfrican’ discourse, in her ‘Feminism is African and Other Implications of Reading Oyèrónkẹ Oyěwùmí as a Relational Thinker’, Gender and Women’s Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (2018), pp. 1–16. Special thanks to Moses Serubiri for our discussions on African literature and feminism. 79 See Thérèse Courau, ‘La République des lettres au féminin et le différentialisme latino-américain’, in Écritures dans les Amériques au féminin, ed. Dante Barrientos-Tecún and Anne Reynès-Delobel (Aix en Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, 2017). https://books.openedition.org/pup/7556 80 From the 1970s, see Hélène Cixous, Vivre l’orange (Paris: des femmes, 1979) and ‘L’approche de Clarice Lispector: Se laisser lire (par) Clarice Lispector. A Paixao segundo C. L’, Poétique: revue de théorie et d’analyse littéraires, vol. 40 (1979), pp. 408–419. For discussions of Berman’s work in the context of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, see Ana Maria Garcia, ‘La metáfora del cuerpo en la letra: un intento de escritura femenina en la dramaturgia de Sabina Berman’, CELEHIS. Revista del Centro de Letras Hispanoamericanas, vol. 3, no. 6–7–8 (1996), pp. 369–376. 81 I am thinking here of André Green’s use of affect to imply the ‘non-symbolic’, in Discours Vivant (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1973). Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose discuss this alternative and its stakes for feminism: ‘The moment you acknowledge that there might be another scene in relation to the symbolic you open the floodgates … to the dark continent, psychosis,

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Introduction

telepathy etc., which come to be identified with femininity. And that’s where people like Montrelay and Irigaray have moved in saying that not only is there a scene which is not the symbolic but that if the entry to the symbolic is the entry to language, if women are thereby initiated into these power relations rather than into the Oedipus complex and practices of exchange, then what constitutes true femininity is the “before” of that.’ ‘Feminine Sexuality: Interview with Mitchell/Rose’, m/f, September 1982, pp. 3–16, p. 11. 82 Julia Kristeva’s citation comes from Le Magazine littéraire, no. 180 (January 1982), p. 40. Aline Dallier, ‘Le rôle des femmes dans l’éclatement des avantgardes et l’élargissement du champ de l’art’, Opus International, no. 88 (Spring 1983), pp. 24–30, p. 24. 83 Dallier, ‘Le rôle des femmes’, pp. 24–26. Dallier goes on to identify three movements of the avant-garde: ‘art corporel’, ‘art textile’ and ‘art socio-politique’, as discussed earlier in the Introduction. 84 Valéry Giscard d’Estaing promoted a plan of ‘le pluralisme’ (pluralism) as a distinct middle ground situated between the extremes of American capitalism and Soviet-style collectivism, which he believed was the correct position for France. He dedicated a chapter to pluralism in his Démocratie française, highlighting four forms of essential power that must coexist independently but never ‘intermingle’: the power of the state, economic power, the power of mass organizations and the power of mass communications: ‘Notre projet est celui d’une société démocratique moderne, libérale par la structure pluraliste de tous ses pouvoirs, avancée par un haut degré de performance économique, d’unification sociale et de développement culturel’ (What we propose is a modern democratic society, liberal in the sense that all its powers are organized in a pluralist structure, progressive by virtue of its good economic performance, its social unification and its cultural achievements) (Paris: Fayard, 1976), p. 170. Eng. edition: French Democracy, trans. Vincent Cronin (New York: Doubleday, 1977), pp. 122. 85 Jacques Lacan references ‘glissade’ in his Kanzer seminar at Yale University on 24 November 1975. ‘Je ne vous ai même pas dit tout ce que j’ai parcouru avant de m’intéresser aux psychotiques et avant qu’ils me mènent à Freud, ayant simplement souligné que, dans ma thèse, je me trouvais appliquer le freudisme sans le savoir. Je ne vais pas recommencer. Ça a été une sorte de glissade, du fait qu’à la fin de mes études de médecine je fus amené à voir des fous et à en parler, et fus ainsi conduit à Freud qui en parla dans un style qui, à moi aussi, s’est imposé du fait de mon contact avec la maladie mentale.’ ‘Yale University, Kanzer Seminar’, Scilicet, no. 6/7 (1975), pp. 7–31. (I haven’t even told you everything I went through before becoming interested in psychotics, and before they led me to Freud, having simply pointed out that in my thesis I found myself applying Freudianism without knowing it. I’m not going to start over again. It was a kind of slip, because at the end of my medical studies I was brought to see madmen and to talk about them, and thus was led to Freud who spoke about them in a style which, for me too, resulted from my contact with mental illness.) Glissement (with occasional variants, glisser, glissa etc.) appears with relative frequency in Lacan’s Écrits

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(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), referencing Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotic theory and functioning as an operation in language which is constantly moving, fluid – or, for Lacan, ‘La notion d’un glissement incessant du signifié sous le signifiant’ (the concept of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier), p. 502. For Kirsten Campbell, glissement emerges from a language made up of of signifiers resulting in its characterization as synchronic and diachronic. See her ‘The Slide in the Sign: Lacan’s Glissement and the Registers of Meaning’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 4, no. 3 (1999), pp. 135–143, p. 138. On glissement and its theoretical departures, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Le titre de la lettre: Une lecture de Lacan (Paris: Galilée, 1973). Jane Gallop evokes the term in relation to the signifying chain in The Daughter’s Seduction, p. 45. 86 In her joint text written with Carolyn Burke, ‘Psychoanalysis and Feminism in France’, Jane Gallop distinguishes a so-called French Freud (citing the necessity of Jacques Lacan to interpret him) from the American readings of the psychoanalyst in the late 1970s. She declares, ‘Freud is not a tool, not even some revelatory Word, but a dynamic of repression, a plural text like any other.’ Carolyn Burke, in the same text, puts forth the political possibilities that such a plurality enables: ‘Is it possible that acquaintance with the French Freud provides us with a psychoanalysis as a political ally, for Freud’s subversive science becomes truly subversive when used in an attempt to counter its own more conservative aspects. Paradoxically, by abandoning the ideals of ego strength and social adaptation, this psychoanalysis returns us to the powers of the unconscious as potential revolutionary’. Eisenstein and Jardine, The Future of Difference, pp. 106–121, p. 115, p. 110. 87 Joint interview with Thérèse Boucraut and her husband Maurice Breschand (1932–2007), who explained the pressure of working as artists in a style that was considered out of ‘fashion’. Paris, December 2006. 88 Both Éditions de Seuil, Paris. For dissemination of some of Irigaray’s ideas in the mainstream press, see Roger-Pol Droit, ‘Féminin pluriel’, Le Monde, 18 March 1977. 89 Coline Serreau’s documentary Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veulent? (1975–1978) famously shows a scene in which a bourgeois woman ridicules the MLF as misled. 90 I draw here from Jean-Marc Poinsot’s point about the Parisian scene in the late 1960s where he cautions against artists’ work being used to explicate theory when the theorists/philosophers were as much shaped by the art they viewed – even if, one can infer, its influence was not explicitly avowed by them. Une scène parisienne: 1968–1972 (Rennes: Centre d’histoire de l’art contemporain, 1991), p. 11. 91 Herbert Marcuse, ‘Marxisme et féminisme’, Libération, 15 May 1974. Archives BMD. 92 Aline Dallier, ‘Feminist Art aux USA’, ‘Soft Art’ in Opus International, no. 50 (May 1974), pp. 70–75; no. 52 (September 1974), pp. 49–53. Dallier speaks about her mastery of English in an interview in Art, féminisme, post-féminisme (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), p. 10.

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Introduction

93 Nevertheless, it is important not to view American feminism of the 1960s and 1970s as a monolithic entity and to acknowledge the depth and diversity that existed within the movement(s). This included histories and figures unacknowledged by writings of the period, or by the histories available in France. See Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 94 This book complements ongoing research in this area particularly with regard to Eastern Europe. See Agata Jakubowska and Katy Deepwell (eds), AllWomen Art Spaces in Europe in the Long 1970s (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018). Arguably, such a comparative approach to European women’s art (albeit for painting) was a model present from the outset of the twentieth century although viewed through a different political lens. See Walter Shaw Sparrow, Woman Painters of the World (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1905), which focuses almost exclusively on European countries but also the United States. See, in particular, Léonce Bénédite, ‘Of Women Painters in France’, trans. Edgar Preston, in the volume, pp. 167–182. 95 Le Monde also frequently ran articles on the condition of women in neighboring countries. In 1975, International Women’s Year, there was a series entitled ‘L’Europe des Femmes’, which included reports, for example, on Great Britain and Ireland, Denmark and Sweden, and West Germany, 28–30 January 1975. Italy was also extensively covered; to cite just two examples, ‘Italie, Féminisme An I’, Le Monde, 8 January 1972, and later in a series, ‘Européennes du sud’ in Le Monde, 23 March 1977, etc. Reports on European feminism were also routinely published in Libération and the Marxist Rouge. All Archives BMD. 96 ‘Dans plusieurs pays d’Europe des femmes éditent’, Des femmes en mouvements, no. 11 (Februrary 1978), pp. 51–67. Countries included England, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain. Also see Des femmes en mouvements, no. 12–13 (December 1978–January 1979). 97 Publicity flyer in Supplément au Bolchévik, no. 7. Barbara Dampierre of the Ligue Trotskyste de France headlined the event, which ran from 14 to 16 December 1972. Archives BMD. 98 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 132–138, p. 129. 99 Ibid. Lippard would also have undoubtedly heard of the plight of Argentinian artist Julio Le Parc who was arrested on 6 June 1968, along with four other artists of Argentinian and North African origin, on the Pont de Saint-Cloud which was on the route to the Flins Renault factory where there were riots expected. He was later expelled from France, which polarized the art community. See Otto Hahn, ‘Julio Le Parc, indésirable du pont de Saint-Cloud’, L’Express, 17–23 June 1968. Also Anne-Sophie Berisset, ‘L’expulsion contestée de Julio Le Parc, partisan de la “guérilla culturelle”’, in 1968: La critique d’art, la politique et le pouvoir (Université de Rennes / Archives de la critique d’art, 2018), pp. 170–180. Le Parc’s work was featured weeks earlier at the 24th Salon de Mai at the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris which ran (with some

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interruption) from 4 to 26 May 1968. See Chapter 1. For further analysis on Latin American artists’ involvement in the events of May ’68 – a number of whom participated in the Salón de Mayo in Havana the year before – see Paula López, ‘Collectivization, Participation and Dissidence on the Transatlantic Axis during the Cold War: Cultural Guerrilla for Destabilizing the Balance of Power in the 1960s’, Culture & History Digital Journal, vol. 4, no. 1 (June 2015), pp. 1–15. doi: 10.3989/chdj.2015.007 100 Lucy Lippard, preface to Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Objet, 1966–1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 8. Cited in Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, p. 132. 101 Aline Dallier cites the importance of Lucy Lippard, whom she had met on several occasions, in her article ‘Le feminist art aux U.S.A.’, Opus International, no. 50 (May 1974), p. 70. Fabienne Dumont also records Lippard’s From the Center: Feminist Essays in Women’s Art (New York: Dutton, 1976) in Dallier’s personal library which would be bequeathed to the Archives de la critique d’art in Rennes. See ‘Aline Dallier-Popper, pionnière de la critique d’art féministe en France’, Critique d’art, vol. 31 (Spring 2008 [2012]), pp. 1–8, p. 2. 102 Aline Dallier specifically mentions the influence of Tania Mouraud and her stays in India, in her Art, féminisme, post-féminisme, pp. 28–29. The impact of India on Mouraud was discussed in an interview with the author in May 2005. 103 The exhibition Inside the Visible, subtitled Begin the Beguine in Flanders, was held at the Béguinage of Saint-Elisabeth Kortrijk (Flanders, Belgium) and organized by Kanaal Art Foundation (16 April 1994–28 May 1995). Reelaborated and reorganized, the exhibition then continued on to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, in 1996 and 1997. 104 ‘This shifting experience and thought are embodied in the exhibited works by an absence of fixity that attends to the ambiguous, the permuting, the composite, the flexible, the ephemeral …. The image that comes to mind is a web, a network of traces formed not from any a priori image but through the working processes themselves.’ De Zegher, Inside the Visible (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 21. 105 Essays included in the text are by Judy Chicago, Laura Cottingham, Joanna Frueh, Linda Nochlin, Gloria Feman Orenstein, Arlene Raven, Moira Roth, Miriam Schapiro, Faith Wilding and a number of others (New York: Abrams, 1994). 106 Curator Laura Cottingham writes: ‘This exhibition Vraiment asks viewers to reflect on the meaning, intentions and contributions of the Feminist Art Movement; and to consider how this art movement is or is not relevant to current issues confronting contemporary art.’ Vraiment: Féminisme et art (Grenoble: CNAC, 1997), p. 24. 107 Through six ‘impressions’ of emotive characteristics – ‘Affirmer’, ‘Émerveiller’, ‘Observer’, ‘Enflammer’, ‘Fantasmer’, ‘Engendrer’ – the curators presented the work of generations of artists spanning the twentieth century.

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Introduction

108 Artists in the show were Claude Cahun, Sophie Calle, Colette Deblé, Aube Elléouët, Monique Frydman, Aline Gagnaire, Irina Ionesco, Peter Klasen, Jacqueline Lamba, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Aurélie Nemours, Gina Pane, Niki de Saint Phalle, Paula Rego, Jenny Saville and Unica Zürn, amongst others; scholarship was provided by Marie-Jo Bonnet, Antoinette Fouque, Catherine Millet, Evelyne Sullerot and others. AreaRevues, no. 10 (Summer 2005). 109 AreaRevues, no. 19/20, ‘Féminin Pluriel’, 2009 was published in conjunction with the elles@centrepompidou exhibition at Beaubourg. Some of the artists represented were: Ola Abdallah, Sophie Bassouls, Myriam Bat-Yosef, Élodie Boutry, Judy Chicago, Marlène Dumas, Alexandra Duprez, Juliette Greco, Samia A. Halaby, Harlem Renaissance, Mona Hatoum, Elga Heinzen, Françoise Janicot, Christine Jean, Claire-Jeanne Jézéquel, Marie-Danielle Koechlin, Monique Dollé Lacour, Frédérique Lucien, Marie Morel, Christine Nathan, Shirin Neshat, Rasma Noreikyte, Ella Pamula, Cécile Paris, Emmanuelle Perrat, Liliane Phung, Diana Quinby, Cécile Raynal, Alix Cléo Roubaud, Michal Rovner, Sophie Sainrapt, Kiki Smith, Monique Tello, Barbara Thaden, Sylvie Tual, Françoise Vergier, Catherine Viollet, Anne Van der Linden and Nil Yalter. 110 The exhibition was shown at the Centre Pompidou from 27 May 2009 to 21 February 2011 and would travel to Seattle Art Museum where it was on view to the public from 11 October 2012 to 13 January 2013, then seen at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro from 24 May to 14 July 2013 and in Belo Horizonte, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil from 28 August to 21 October 2013. 111 Germaine Greer, ‘Why the World Doesn’t Need an Annie Warhol or a Francine Bacon’, Guardian, 17 January 2010. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/ jan/17/germaine-greer-elles-pompidou 112 The question of a continuing feminist influence is raised in relation to Annette Messager and Sophie Calle in Dallier, Art, féminisme, post-féminisme, p. 72. 113 Cornelia Butler writes her statement of intent for the show: ‘My ambition for “WACK!” is to make the case that feminism’s impact on art of the 1970s constitutes the most influential international “movement” of any during the postwar period – in spite or perhaps because of the fact that it seldom cohered, formally or critically, into a movement the way Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, or even Fluxus did.’ ‘Art and Feminism: An Ideology of Shifting Criteria’, WACK!: Art and the Feminism Revolution, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Museum of Contemporary Art / MIT Press, 2007) pp. 15–23, p. 15. The exhibition would later travel to National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC (September–December 2007); PS.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York (February– May 2008); and the Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia (October 2008–January 2009). 114 Explaining her selection, curator Cornelia Butler writes, ‘Over the course of thinking about this project, I resolved that a survey exhibition that takes to heart feminist strategies of resistance, disrupts canon formation, and supports intentionality, narrative, and biography could contain a wide range of

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practices that each function differently within multiple frames of organization.’ Ibid., p. 21. 115 In their preface, Nochlin and Reilly suggest that Global Feminisms had its origins in two 2002 exhibitions: Gloria: Another Look at Feminist Art in the 1970s (which showcased the work of Eleanor Antin, Joan Jonas, Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper, Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke, for example) at the Galleries at Moore, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia; and Personal and Political: The Women’s Art Movement, 1969–1975 at the Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York, whose catalogue included a preface by Kate Millett. Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art, ed. Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, exhibition catalogue (New York: Brooklyn Museum / Merrell, 2007), pp. 11–13, p. 11. 116 The founders were: Margot Mérimée Dufourcq, Daphné Moreau, Camille Morineau, Elisabeth Pallas, Nathalie Rigal, Alexandra Vernier-Bogaert and Julie Wolkenstein. 117 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014). 118 Bonnet points out that, unlike the Americans who organized and presented a feminist avant-garde critique of ‘male chauvinism’ to seize the attention of institutions with a canny understanding of the ‘market’, the ambivalence of women in France to organize and constitute an ‘avant-garde’ ultimately hindered their visibility: ‘En France, les artistes femmes ont majoritairement refusé de se constituer en avant-garde. Pour garder leur liberté, disent-elles. Pas d’étiquette. Pas d’embrigadement. Grâce à quoi, l’institution art les a généreusement ignorées. Ont-elles eu tort?’ (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006), p. 26. (In France, women artists have mostly refused to constitute themselves as an avant-garde. They said it was to preserve their freedom. No label. No recruitment. Thanks to which, the art institution has generously ignored them. Were they wrong?) However, for Lucy Lippard the origin of the problem might stem from the word ‘feminist’ itself. In 1976 she wrote: ‘One does not call oneself a feminist in polite art society in Europe unless one wants to be ridiculed or ignored. All of this must be partially due to the lack of an organized feminist art movement in Europe and of any alternative galleries or magazines for women artists.’ From the Center, p. 124. 119 Bonnet includes artists in groups such as La Spirale, Femmes en Lutte, Collectif Femmes/Art, Dialogue etc., and discusses the influence of Aline Dallier, Xavière Gauthier, Julia Kristeva, Lucy Lippard, Italian Romana Loda, and others on art in the 1970s. She looks closely at the policies of institutions in the 1970s, 1980s and beyond. However, no significant discussion of individual works by the artists is broached. 120 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2018). 121 Catherine Gonnard and Elisabeth Lebovici, Femmes artistes/artistes femmes: Paris, de 1880 à nos jours (Paris: Hazan, 2007). 122 Marie-Jo Bonnet, as well as Catherine Gonnard and Elisabeth Lebovici, were interviewed and consulted in the course of my research for this project. 123 Phone interview with Elisabeth Lebovici, January 2007, Paris.

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Introduction

124 Elisabeth  Lebovici  and Giovanna Zapperi, ‘Maso  and  Miso  in the Land of Men’s Rights’, e-flux journal, no. 92 (Summer 2018). www.e-flux.com/. In light of the 2011 Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair and the open letter signed by Deneuve and others, Lebovici and Zapperi called into question the ‘French seduction theory’ which they saw as continuing to operate as a challenge to political correctness in the country along with the belief of femininity as a ‘counterpower’, or the use of one’s ‘femininity’ to control men, or patriarchy (expressed by historians like Mona Ozouf), in order to shed historical light on the new political moment. For the open letter signed by Deneuve and others, see www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2018/01/09/nous-defendons-une-liberted-importuner-indispensable-a-la-liberte-sexuelle_5239134_3232.html. Signatories included curators and art critics, notably Catherine Francblin and Catherine Millet. 125 Recent publications that reveal developments across the channel include Kathy Battista’s Renegotiating the Body: Feminist Art in 1970s London (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013) and Jo Applin, Catherine Spencer and Amy Tobin (eds), London Art Worlds, Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks: 1960–1980 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018). 126 Such questions were posed in the 1970s on both sides of the Atlantic. An influential text for Aline Dallier to critically engage with French women’s art of the period was Patricia Mainardi’s ‘Feminine Sensibility: An Analysis’, Feminist Art Journal, vol. 3 (April 1972), pp. 9, 22. Cited in Dallier, ‘Le rôle des femmes’, p. 30. 127 Dallier’s archive is located at the Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes. Fonds Aline Dallier-Popper. Dallier, married briefly to art critic Pierre Restany, and later art historian Frank Popper, moved away from their direct influences and turned toward the work of Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris. She credits their research on women artists spanning from 1550 to 1950 as having impacted her decision to focus on the period 1950 to 1975–1980 in her doctoral thesis. Dallier was later offered an opportunity to publish her doctoral thesis by Marie Dedieu (see Chapter 5) at Éditions des femmes in 1980. As Dedieu wanted her to change the style of narrative for the eventual publication, she let the offer lapse due to the work involved and time constraints. Dallier, Art féminisme, post-féminisme, p. 48, p. 46. 128 Gabriele Schor, Feminist Avant-Garde: Art of the 1970s, The Sammlung Verbund Collection, Vienna (Munich, London and New York: Prestel Verlag, 2016), p. 326. ‘Although the political women’s liberation movement was launched in 1970s, feminist artists labored on the edges of the spotlight or in the shadows; the French women’s movement did not have a single art theorist among its members.’ 129 Des femmes, MLF psychanalyse et politique 1968–2018, vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions des femmes, 2018); MLF psychanalyse et politique 1968–2018, vol. 2 (Paris: Éditions des femmes, 2019). At least one more volume is planned at the time of this writing.

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1

On the streets: from May ’68 to the MLF

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Hannah Arendt, 19721

In 1970, Partisans: L’année zéro became a manifesto of the women’s liberation movement in terms of history, activities, goals, international relations with other movements, and testimonies. Anne Zelensky and Jacqueline Feldman (‘Anne and Jacqueline’) (who a few months earlier had created FMA, or Féminin Masculin Avenir, as a socialist group to discuss the ‘women question’ 2) wrote a history of May ’68, citing their participation in a conference on ‘la femme et la révolution’ at the Sorbonne, fifteen days after other debates had taken place, where it was thought that women (via a discussion on the pill) should be included.3 The journal included the ‘anonymous’ J.K., writing of political militantism: Je dois dire que, au début du moins, je me foutais pas mal de la politique, mais j’étais quasiment obligée de faire semblant de m’y intéresser pour ne pas être considérée comme une cloche par ce type … Ça n’avait vraiment aucun rapport avec ma vie, mon expérience … Ça n’est pas resté toujours à ce point pour moi, mais je pense que la dépendance des femmes à l’égard des hommes est telle, tant sur le plan affectif que sur le plan des idées, qu’il est fréquent de voir une militante changer d’idées politiques parce qu’elle change de mec, ou ne militer que pour vivre avec un tel, et arrêter de militer si elle se sépare de lui … A partir de mai je n’ai plus pu supporter de vivre en contradiction avec mes idées, qui étaient cette fois-ci vraiment devenues les miennes.4 I must say that, at the beginning at least, I did not care much about politics, but I was almost obliged to pretend to be interested in it in order to not be considered an idiot by this guy … It really had nothing to do with my life, my experience … It did not always stay like this for me, but I think that a woman’s dependence on a man exists as much on an emotional level as an intellectual one. So it becomes common to see a female militant change her political ideas because she changes her guy, or to campaign only to be able to live with him, and to stop campaigning if she breaks up with him … After

On the streets: from May ’68 to the MLF

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May I could no longer bear to live in contradiction with my ideas, which at this time really became my own.

This representation of woman as symbol (either passive or ‘faking it’) can be seen as leading to the inception of the MLF, fueled by the passion for subjectivity, or personal voice, as upheld by the women’s movement. Duchen finds that J.K.’s case symbolizes what many women experienced: ‘Accounts of the events tended to represent women activists as the silent wives or girlfriends of the male militants.’ 5 At the same time, however, information was processed and absorbed by the ‘silent’ partner for later action (as seen in J.K.’s comments), and by many women in the MLF who had been involved in the events of May ’68 but had felt excluded by their lack of real mobility, influence and power. This ‘acting as if ’ for women also resonated with Caroline de Bendern’s views as ‘the’ symbol of May ’68. The iconic photograph, by Jean-Pierre Rey, of ‘Marianne’ (Figure 1.1) on the shoulders of artist Jean-Jacques Lebel (cropped from one picture, appearing in another) became one of the most celebrated images of the ‘revolution’ and of liberation. However, the image itself masks the reality of the woman: Caroline de Bendern was immediately disinherited from her English aristocratic family, and, after years of ambivalence toward the photo, she finally sought compensation for use of the image without her permission.6 The image captured a moment that, significantly, she invented: On est en route vers la Bastille, je viens de grimper sur les épaules d’un copain. On demandait quelqu’un pour porter le drapeau et moi, j’avais si mal aux pieds à force de piétiner que j’ai saisi l’aubaine. Je n’aurais voulu ni du drapeau rouge – à cause des communistes qui ont saboté le mouvement – ni du drapeau noir, car je ne connais rien aux anarchistes. Mais le drapeau vietnamien me convient comme symbole d’une guerre que toute la jeunesse dénonce. … Instinctivement, je me redresse, mon visage se fait plus grave, mon geste plus solennel, je voudrais à tout prix être belle et donner du mouvement une représentation à la hauteur de ce moment. Au fond, je prends la pose. Et suis piégée par cette pose. … Je deviens exactement ce que j’essaie de paraître.7 We are on our way to the Bastille, I just got onto a friend’s shoulders. Someone was asked to carry the flag, and my feet hurt so badly from walking that I seized the chance. I would not have wanted the red flag – because of the communists who sabotaged the movement – nor the black flag, since I knew nothing about the anarchists. But the Vietnamese flag suits me as a symbol of a war that all young people condemn … Instinctively, I straighten up, my face becomes serious, my movements more solemn, I would like to be beautiful above all and to give the movement a representation which would live up to this moment. Basically, I posed. And am trapped by this pose … I became exactly what I was trying to appear to be.

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1.1 

Counterpractice

Jean-Pierre Rey, ‘La Marianne de Mai 68’, May 1968.

Although Caroline as ‘Marianne’ was revered as a symbol, it is important to note that women were not always in control of their representation. Women were still being portrayed as objects of deliberate provocation and erotic sexuality in Situationist posters and in their comic strips, which superimposed inflammatory political slogans on the bodies of naked women or used women to challenge political/sexual thought (Figures 1.2 and 1.3). The way in which women were both embodied and disembodied from the events of May ’68 is an important precursor to the way in which women conducted their struggles between appropriated symbol and subjective body during and in the aftermath of May ’68, as we will see below. Sexual politics ‘It began with sex’, is how historian Mark Kurlansky defined the spark that ignited the flame that became May ’68. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a student at

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On the streets: from May ’68 to the MLF

Situationist comic reprinted in Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations, René Viénet (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).

the University of Nanterre, asked François Missoffe, the government youth minister, on a visit to the campus in January 1968, to light his cigarette and then boldly demanded his position on the sexual issues of youth that he had ignored in a recent paper.8 Missoffe retorted sharply and red-headed ‘Dany’ became an instant celebrity on campus.9 The environment of suburban Nanterre, unlike the cafés around the Sorbonne, offered few social spaces where men and women could socialize without restriction. Earlier, in March 1967,

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1.3 

Fédération des Comités Ouvriers-Étudiants. Ah! … Comme elles savent bien y faire / La Révolution continue!, c.1968.

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On the streets: from May ’68 to the MLF

several dozen male students from Nanterre had stormed the women’s dormitories and sat overnight in the hallways.10 Sociologist Christine Delphy cites the lack of sexual contact as fundamental to the subsequent revolt: ‘À Nanterre, tout a commencé parce que les garçons ne peuvent aller dans les dortoirs baiser le plus possible de femmes’ (In Nanterre, everything started because the boys cannot go to the dorms to have sex with as many women as possible).11 Men were forbidden access to women’s dormitory rooms, while women were permitted in men’s rooms only with parental permission unless they were over 21 years old – resulting in many women sneaking under the counter to go to men’s rooms.12 (During the 22 March movement at Nanterre, extracts from Wilhelm Reich’s 1936 polemic on sexual chaos were used to draw attention to this problem.)13 Situationist comics featuring sex highlighted Reich’s thought, such as the detourned ones by René Viénet, which were distributed illicitly in student dormitories on university campuses in Paris and other French cities (Figure 1.4). The separation of the sexes and rigid controls on sexuality amongst the young (not to mention their early signs of rebellion) at the university appears in sharp relief against the visibility and easy intermingling of women and men on the streets in May ’68. Then, the easy friendships and partnerships between men and women in the streets were evident, with both men and women visible on the barricades and in protests. Images such as the unpublished photographs taken by and in the collection of artist Bernadette Kelly show the partnership and communion between male and female friends/lovers in the streets during these events (Figures 1.5 and 1.6). Sexual politics between men and women was becoming more pronounced, and did not always meet with approval from other women – or even from the women who ended up being solicited: ‘Un homme, l’un des futurs leaders de Mai ’68, me demande un jour: Tu es pour la liberté sexuelle? – Oui. – Bon, alors on couche ensemble. Les mecs utilisent cette pression pour faire pression sur les femmes. Pour nous culpabiliser’ (A man, one of the future leaders of May ’68, asked me one day: Are you for sexual freedom? – Yes. – Good, then let’s sleep together. Guys use this pressure to pressure women. To make us feel guilty).14 These responses were not limited to Paris. Changes were taking place in the provinces as well. In Lyon, Leslie Kaplan, a Maoist militant (UJC-ML; Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes), worked at the Brandt factory from 1 April 1968 and participated with the workers during the student uprising in May ’68. She reports: Quelque chose change entre les hommes et les femmes. Pendant l’occupation de l’usine, une petite jeune très très belle couche avec beaucoup de garçons, elle a plein d’aventures. Des gens n’apprécient pas mais ils sont aussi séduits par l’ambiance de libération sexuelle. Le climat est de toute façon à la tolérance.15

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René Viénet, Misère de la sexologie, 1967.

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Bernadette Kelly, Mai 68, 1968.

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Bernadette Kelly, Mai 68, 1968.

Something is changing between men and women. During the occupation of the factory, a very very beautiful young girl was sleeping with many boys, having many affairs. People do not like it, but they are also seduced by the atmosphere of sexual liberation. The climate, in any case, is one of tolerance.

The progressive relaxing and overthrowing of social boundaries appeared intimately tied to the collapse of sexual boundaries. Images and new forms and representations of love and sex abounded internationally in tandem with critical political events, as seen in high-profile exhibitions such as the Documenta 4 show in Kassel (27 June to 6 October 1968) featuring Robert Indiana’s iconic pop graphic LOVE and the white, life-size plaster casting of a sexual position by fellow American George Segal. Women artists also explored this new territory of political art: traditionally ‘demure’ and bourgeois women’s activities such as embroidery were given new critical socio-sexual meaning in their hands. French-born artist ORLAN used the white linen sheets of her traditional trousseau to embroider over the semen stains of her lovers (Figure 6.2). She later posed with trousseau sheets in her Grande Odalisque, d’après Ingres (1977), in which she reprises the position of Ingres’s classical painting in the context of sexual liberation (Figure 1.7). Lourdes Castro was a Portuguese artist who arrived in France in 1958 – where she remained until 1983 – and befriended Pierre Restany and the Nouveaux Réalistes. In her Ombres portées couchées (1968), she exquisitely embroidered green thread on bed sheets to create an outline of the intimate positions of lovers (Figure 1.8). Such acts, albeit not related, show the way in which traditional ‘feminine’ modes of artistic creation and symbols of domesticity (bed sheets) were being re-evaluated through sexual/intimate acts, as part of a larger critique of love/sex versus

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societal rules, structures and powers. (Artists’ utopic visions of sexual liberation and ‘free love’ were tempered, however, by the reality of figures such as Gabrielle Russier, a married high school teacher and mother whose affair with a 17-year-old boy led to her to alienation from society and imprisonment, and ultimately caused the deeply sensitive woman to take her own life.16 (This only

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ORLAN, Grande Odalisque, d’après Ingres, 1977.

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Lourdes Castro, Ombres portées couchées, 1968.

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created more interest in the scandal, and a film, Mourir d’aimer, made about her story in 1971 became one of the highest grossing films of the period. A collective of male artists had earlier paid tribute to Gabrielle Russier at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1970 in the exhibition Qui tue?17) At the same time, it is interesting to note that advertisements for contraception (other than in trade journals) were illegal, and images of ‘union libre’ or free love adopted by both students and artists in the streets and in their work referred to it only obliquely. The sanctity of the ‘couple’ itself was under attack. The new trend of ‘mariage à l’essai’, or couples who live/love together and do not marry, was being tested, as was the equal sharing of household tasks.18 During May ’68, around-the-clock crèches, or nurseries, were spontaneously set up during the occupation of the Sorbonne, since parents had nowhere to leave their children when they came to protest.19 Such a system allowed women to entrust their children to the care of others, breaking with the belief that children must always be the mother’s sole responsibility.20 This gave mothers brief respite from their identity as caretakers. Groups formed, such as Nous sommes en marche, which used spontaneous language and phrase-making during their nightly (8 p.m. to midnight) meetings at Censier to contemplate such diverse themes as sexuality, family and the couple.21 (It is unclear how many women were involved.) New concepts were created through language such as ‘Le couple est un contrat sexuel spontané, résiliable à tout moment entre deux individus. Il n’a d’existence ni juridique, ni économique. Il est sexuel, social et culturel’ (The couple is a spontaneous sexual contract, terminable at any time between two individuals. It has neither a legal nor an economic existence. It is sexual, social, and cultural’).22 The re-evaluation (and to some extent the breakdown) of the couple created new definitions and possibilities that allowed women to determine a more individual identity for themselves. Only two years later, a May 1970 edition of Réalités was asking: ‘Les jeunes croient-ils encore au mariage?’ (Do young people still believe in marriage?)23 Although such titles reflect undercurrents and changes in society, reality was different.24 Marriage was the dream of 87 percent of young women, according to a poll by S.O.F.R.E.S. (1970), while the number of marriages recorded in 1968 was 357,000, rising to 385,000 in 1970.25 This fact, as well as the change in mores (60 percent of young people found it ‘normal’ that young women were not virgins before their marriage [S.O.F.R.E.S. poll], and one in three children was conceived before wedlock), was also reflected in films of the time.26 The dilemma between sexual freedom on the one hand and marriage/ commitment on the other plays out in Jean Aurel’s saucy film Les femmes (1969), which explored the don juanisme of a writer, Jérôme (Maurice Ronet), and his inability to commit to a series of sexually liberated women who always finally demanded marriage. The sole exception, his secretary/lover Clara

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(Brigitte Bardot), sees the truth about his masochism and in a gesture of liberation consciously leaves him. Fantasies underlying the male vision of female sexual liberation and women’s own experience of it were one impetus toward the liberated ‘voice’ of the MLF movement (although we shall see later that often happily married women had to hide or downplay their status to be acceptable to their ‘sisters’). La beauté est dans la rue May ’68, with its radical insurrection at the Sorbonne and Nanterre and the subsequent barricades and student and worker uprisings in factories during May and June 1968, was a male-led movement in both theory and practice.27 From the Situationist ideals of Guy Debord’s La société du spectacle (1967) and Raoul Vaneigem’s Traité du savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (1967), the Marxist philosophies of Henri Lefebvre, the spirited voice of Dany, and the Maoist positioning of the largely male Tel Quel group – the voices of the uprising were male. (Certain women intellectuals engaged in and contributed to the revolutionary discourse, if overshadowed by their more prominent partners. Debord’s wife, Michèle Bernstein, published important foundational articles in Situationist International, Potlatch and other Situationist vehicles in the 1950s and 1960s, and Julia Kristeva, wife of Philippe Sollers, wrote for Tel Quel and would take a more independent intellectual role in the 1970s.)28 Specifically ‘feminist’ voices such as Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan had no real role, and feminists criticized the ‘anti-feminism’ of women in key political positions, who were notorious for turning their back on other women once they were accepted by the male elite.29 This critique is perhaps ancillary to the events of May ’68, which were not specifically about women’s rights but united students, workers and unions for social change. Madeleine Rébérioux, a member of the PCF (Parti communiste français) teaching in the history department at the Sorbonne during the May events, for example, saw the movement not in terms of gender or patriarchy, but historical possibility.30 Feminists (feeling both disorganized and voiceless) believed they received short shrift amid the fracas of ideas, which justified the founding of their movement and exploration of their own ideas. They needed and used the events as a catalyst, if through significantly less violent means. The spontaneous energy on the streets that created the voice of public communication also created the sound of violence. Glass shattering, intermittent gun fire and explosions, barricade building, songs, clapping, chanting voices of young men, sirens blaring, cars overturning, and assaults created an unforgettable barrage of noise that was preserved on tape.31 The violence and escalating level of noise and frenzy (in stark relief to the now more subdued images and posters) gave a physicality and immediacy to the students’ intellectual ideas.

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On the streets: from May ’68 to the MLF

(Gender roles were mostly in place at the barricades, with many women relegated to serving coffee, distributing blankets, handing out makeshift ‘masks’ against tear-gas made of towels, dishcloths or diapers, and administering first aid.)32 Public emotion, however, diminished significantly when on 30 May, at the height of the crisis, the cool, measured paternal voice of Charles de Gaulle calmed the nation with his radio broadcast, thus marking the beginning of the end.33 Although demonstrations continued in June, the government banned all protests by revolutionary student organizations on 12 June (after the barricade activity on 10 and 11 June). The Sorbonne was cleared (and cleaned out) on 16 June, as was the École des Beaux-Arts on 27 June. By August of that year, as one critic put it, people were thinking about their holidays.34 ‘New’ meanings were engendered by May ’68 through the sounds of street violence, the heated political energy of the left-wing cells, and the ideological and complex, rapidly changing and disputatious factions of the many ‘groupuscules’. Among the most prominent were the Trotskyites (JCR: Jeunes communistes révolutionnaires and CLER: Comité de liaison des étudiants révolutionnaires – with a ‘Lambertiste’ streak for Pierre Lambert – later renamed FER: Fédération des étudiants révolutionnaires), the Anarchists (LEA: Liaison des étudiants anarchistes), the pro-Vietnamese (CVN: Comité Vietnam national, controlled by the JCR), the pro-Chinese/Maoists and Leninists (UJC-ML or Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes).35 In addition to these groups were the Socialist ESU (Étudiants socialistes unifiés) and the Christian JUC (La jeunesse universitaire chrétienne) as well as the university-driven unions: the general UNEF (L’union nationale des étudiants de France –which had been responsible in the past for many anti-Algerian war demonstrations at the Sorbonne), and the university-specific AFGAN (Association fédérative des groupes d’études de Nanterre) and ARCUN (Association des résidents de la cité universitaire de Nanterre). Animosity and distrust often arose between the groups. For example, students/artists at the École des Arts Décoratifs labeled the École des Beaux-Arts students ‘Trotskyites’, hence impossible to collaborate with on posters, etc.36 The dissemination of politics through new methods and forms of art making (such as the serigraph) occurred through messages that were voted on in a General Assembly (after hours of discussion), often unifying factions and extending the possibilities of the art forms and language being established. Image making Along with the level of noise and action being generated during the events of May ’68 – ‘les gens parlaient, parlaient, parlaient’ (people were talking, talking, talking) – was a corresponding creative explosion.37 Vaneigem underscored

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the importance of spontaneous and poetic creation in his Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations:

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La spontanéité est le mode d’être de la créativité, non pas un état isolé, mais l’expérience immédiate de la subjectivité. La spontanéité concrétise la passion créatrice, elle amorce sa réalisation pratique, elle rend donc possible la poésie, la volonté de changer le monde selon la subjectivité radicale.38 Spontaneity is the mode of existence of creativity: not an isolated state, but the unmediated experience of subjectivity. Spontaneity concretizes the passion for creation and initiates its practical realization: it is the precondition of poetry, of the impulse to change the world in accordance with the demands of radical subjectivity.

The possibility that spontaneity could lead to a new social order through individual and collective acts of creation was a guiding force behind the events of May ’68. This was evident in the verbal slogans and visual images that defined the period. The student strike at the École des Beaux-Arts on 8 May, and its subsequent takeover and transformation into the Atelier Populaire on 14 May, was a serious attempt to break with the conception of an ‘elitist’ and bourgeois art and return art to the hands and will of the people (students and workers). A series of affiches created by the group was later produced as a book about the period, citing its revolutionary goals, organization and potential.39 This freedom to engage in spontaneous and free art making must be placed in the context of strong resentments felt against the threat of cultural repression, perceived ‘censorship’ and government control over the arts. A battle erupted between police and students/demonstrators protesting the dismissal of director and curator Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque Française on 18 March 1968. Although his dismissal was in fact due to accounting errors, many fans, strongly attached to Langlois and the cinema, arrived at the Palais de Chaillot to protest against a governmental action that they perceived as unjust. Influential public figures such as filmmaker François Truffaut and actor JeanPierre Léaud were amongst the protestors, with Truffaut famously being clubbed on the head by the police.40 Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who was amongst the students at the subsequent demonstration on the neighboring rue de Courcelles, whipped up the crowd with his words under the sharp eye of the CRS riot police – and succeeded in freeing a student they had captured. Truffaut writes that, when the government backed down over Langlois, ‘On peut dire que cela nous a prouvé qu’il faut demander dans la rue ce que l’on n’obtient pas dans les bureaux’ (One could say that it proved to us that we have to ask in the street for what we do not get in the offices).41 However, Cohn-Bendit himself downplayed the importance of the events at the Cinémathèque,

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claiming that many participants were star-struck and had only gone out of ‘curiosity’ to see the famous French cinéastes.42 Images, imagery and image making were a fundamental component of May ’68. If the Langlois affair symbolized the perceived ‘suppression’ or control of imagery (via Langlois) through governmental interference, awakening the support of both cinéastes and the public, the reaction against elitist forms via the student takeover and the personal creation of imagery at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts and École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs symbolized another. The Atelier Populaire was established on 14 May when the École des Beaux-Arts was seized by students, with a poster later being produced in the lithograph workshop. (The École des Arts Décoratifs had been taken over the previous night, but protestors did not begin producing images until the end of May.)43 Rallying under such slogans as ‘Atelier Populaire: Oui, Atelier Bourgeois: Non’, the school became a symbol of both protest and production.44 A General Assembly hashed out politics and decided on the general statutes and aims of the students and artists, who were in close alignment with workers in creating a new wave of imagery.45 (Some artists, such as Gérard Fromanger, were familiar with the style of the General Assembly, which also functioned at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture).46 With UUU (Usine, Université, Union) as its symbol, the Atelier became a serious enterprise with the addition of the serigraph which artist Guy de Rougemont contributed within days. At the height of production they were generating up to 2,000 images per day, working in shifts both day and night.47 This new imagery, composed of both images and text (many were uniquely text), created a new propaganda method for the students, who insisted on anonymity (although with time and habit certain artists’ work was recognized). Fromanger remembers that the identity of the makers of the posters was a preciously guarded ‘secret’.48 Established artists such as [Pierre] Alechinsky and [Asger] Jorn signed their lithographs; [Leonardo] Cremonini, [Jean] Hélion, [Jean-Robert] Ipoustéguy, [Vladimir] Veličković also decided to support the movement; and in June, under the direction of gallery owner and editor Maeght, the artists [Jean] Bazaine, [Alexander] Calder, [Paul] Rebeyrolle and [Karel] Appel created images of May that concentrated on the strike at the ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française).49 Artists such as [Jean] Degottex and Bernard Dufour worked independently, choosing to make works that were signed and not necessarily destined for poster distribution.50 The light, simple and rapid technique of the serigraph (screen printing) contrasted with the seriousness and political urgency of the message, creating a production value whose speed appealed emotionally to the students, artists and workers in the Atelier during May and June ’68.51 Images such as the red poster Nous sommes le pouvoir show the collective action of men and the strength of their power as workers. This

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was communicated through simple shapes and flat dimensions, with faces obscured to further suggest anonymity. The thickness of the paint could be controlled with the serigraph, allowing errors/shadows to be avoided (Plate 6).52 (Later, Moroccan-born French artist Nicola – later known as Nicola L. – would literally translate the concept of joint collectivity into sewn red plastic, where both men and women could wear the same fabric, in Red Coat – Same Skin for Everybody (1969–2015) and thereby ‘perform’ their solidarity. It was performed on a beach in Ibiza in 1969, with different people wearing the coat/skin, as well as in Barcelona, the Isle of Wight (for which it was created), Amsterdam, New York and elsewhere; Plate 54.) The heightened sense of group politics, ‘nous sommes le pouvoir’, at the Atelier included a political spectrum of Trotskyites, JCR, FER and Maoists with the Painters (PC(F)).53 This collectivity included women (not yet politicized as a group) in active, if limited roles. In an interview with Laurent Gervereau, Fromanger noted the presence of women, though a significant lack of women artists: L.G. Et les rapports femmes-hommes? Il y avait beaucoup plus d’hommes que de femmes. G.F. Je crois qu’il y avait plus d’hommes que de femmes. Mais il y avait des femmes aussi … Non, une majorité d’hommes. Je vois des visages de femmes, mais je ne me rappelle plus des noms. Il y avait beaucoup d’étudiantes mais peu de femmes peintres, des étudiantes qui passaient, qui donnaient un coup de main, qui animaient…54 L.G. And the relations between women and men? There were many more men than women. G. F. I think there were more men than women. But there were women too … No, a majority of men. I see women’s faces, but I no longer remember their names. There were a lot of female students, but few women painters, students who passed by, lent a helping hand, kept things going.

Gervereau notes in a separate article the lack of ‘feminist’ and ecological messages in the affiches, in spite of these being cited as the most influential legacies of May ’68.55 Marguerite Duras is credited with the rebellion/utopia-inciting slogan ‘Sous les pavés, la plage’, and artist Michèle Katz claims ‘Sois jeune and tais-toi’ (Figure 1.9) was directly influenced by the patriarchal maxim for women ‘Sois belle et tais-toi’, suggesting an intrinsic connection to repression and the women’s movement that followed.56 Mai 68. Parler à tout le monde? Les murs aussi parlent. Avec un châssis de Nylon et un typon, nous dessinons publiquement ce qui nous enferme … Le regard a changé. Avec notre rire devant les pouvoirs, devant la machine avaleuse d’hommes et de femmes, nous faisons peur à la peur du bourgeois. ‘Sois

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Sois jeune et tais-toi, May ’68 poster, Paris.

jeune et tais-toi’, images oxymores (comme ‘sois belle et tais-toi’) lettrines du futur antérieur, fragments d’amour au-delà du probable! Des femmes aussi créent des affiches en mai–juin 1968.57 May 68. Talk to everyone? The walls also speak. With a nylon frame and a template, we publicly draw what oppresses us … The outlook has changed. With our laughter before the powers that be, before the machines swallowing up men and women, we put fear in bourgeois fear. ‘Be young and shut up’, oxymoronic images (like ‘be beautiful and shut up’) letter headings of the future perfect, fragments of love beyond the probable! Women also create posters in May–June 1968.

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Katz personally created a poster while at the Atelier Populaire de l’ex-École des Beaux-Arts. Her ‘VIGILANCE! Indicateurs civiques’ protested the extremism of the right-wing civic group Comité d’action civique (C.A.C), which was accepted into the Assemblée Générale (Plate 7). Katz’s choice of a large crow in the center of the poster was emblematic of the more creative imagery first produced at the Atelier Populaire of the ex-École; its second phase was distinguished by more well-known symbols such as raised fists.58 Interestingly, artist Annette Messager recently claimed that she had showed up at the Atelier Populaire to make posters, but that she was turned away and to the best of her knowledge no other women participated.59 The effects of May ’68 on the broader women’s movement in terms of organization and groups will be seen in the next chapter, which will also explore art and propaganda production. The latter is influenced as much by the events of May ’68 as by the women’s movements in the United States and Europe, to characterize a uniquely French terrain. Progressive militancy and women artists The poster La beauté est dans la rue (produced in Montpellier) portrays a woman militant throwing a paving stone. It represents not only a symbol of resistance, but also an overriding belief that beauty/art existed in the street (public/commons) rather than amongst the bourgeois elite (Figure 1.10). Creatively, women artists were inspired by and responded to the events and their implications. Gina Pane’s Pierres déplacées suggest a relation to the displaced ‘pavés’ of May ’68, both in concept and in theory (Plate 8). Performed in the valley of Orco, Italy, in July 1968, Pane moved stones lying on the ground hidden from the sunlight into a sunny area.60 Although Pane’s action was situated in nature and not on city streets, and carried out in Italy and not in France, the immobility of a fixed idea (represented by a stone) was overturned, thereby enacting both a personal and a political act and a revolution bridging ‘la matière et la pensée’ (matter and thought).61 Meanwhile, Hélène de Beauvoir, younger sister of Simone, produced one of the few direct representations of the events of May ’68. Her Bons pavés (1968) underscores the events’ violence by depicting a student beaten by the police, while showing sympathy toward the students and dreamers as they overturn the paving stones (to build their better society) (Plate 9). The former Resistance fighter and poet Claude Roy wrote of the ‘literary’ and ‘journalistic’ flavor of de Beauvoir’s canvases in the May series: ‘Elle écrit des tableaux comme on tient un journal’ (She writes paintings the way one keeps a journal).62 The work demonstrates aspects of fantasy typical of de Beauvoir’s paintings – gauzy, vivid colors – contrasted with the stylized icons of the events: trashcan lid shields, gas masks and weapons. Her work on May ’68 – which included

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La beauté est dans la rue, May ’68 poster, Montpellier.

painted slogans from the events – solidified her ‘rupture’ and ‘dissidence’ with the establishment, this series initially having been rejected by her Paris gallery for its ‘revolutionary’ sentiments.63 The series would only collectively be exhibited, through the aid of a friend, at the Moulin Rouge in Montmartre and later in Rome.64 Unlike her sister Simone who was present (if not active) for the events of May ’68, de Beauvoir, who was in Italy during this period for a solo exhibition, expressed her great regret for having missed the crisis.65 Nevertheless, she felt a solidarity with the protesters due to her earlier experience with the student uprisings in Strasbourg, where she had sympathized with the agitators.66 Simone de Beauvoir would later write about her sister’s May ’68 series. She saw the works as a homage to the courage of young students, more than an artistic appropriation of its events.67 The painter later demonstrated alongside MLF groups and created activist posters for women who suffered domestic violence in Strasbourg in the late 1970s (Plate 15). Her commitment to activism was likely a result of the way in which she had internalized experiences she faced as a young artist. In her biography, she describes men feigning interest in her paintings, but who in fact were only interested in her body – an

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experience of powerlessness which led her to feminism even before her more famous sister Simone began to embrace it: Tous ces types qui, soi-disant, s’intéressaient à ma peinture et qui, de moi, voulaient tout autre chose. Ces relations chasseur–proie ne m’ont pas donné une haute idée des hommes et de leur comportement. Laide, vous n’existez pas, jolie, votre moi n’existe pas davantage, seul votre corps a de l’intérêt. Sans en être consciente, j’avais une attitude de féministe devant la vie. Et féministe, je le fus bien avant Simone.  68 All those guys who, supposedly, were interested in my painting and who wanted something entirely different from me. These hunter–prey relationships did not give me a positive impression of men and their behavior. Ugly, you do not exist, pretty, your self no longer exists, only your body is of interest. Without being aware of it, I had a feminist attitude to life. And feminist, I was one well before Simone.

This would only underscore the divergence between the de Beauvoir sisters, which was evident not only in their diverse political commitments but also in the way they were expressed.69 Artists responded to the May events by demonstrating a range of commitments in their practice. Creative activities, a sense of solidarity and social activism helped set the foundation for some artists’ participation in women’s groups in the 1970s. Artist Lea Lublin, a Polish Jewish immigrant, raised in Argentina and living in France, challenged institutional conventions with her intervention Mon fils, a performance installation, which brought her sevenmonth-old son and his crib into the Salon de Mai at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris at a time when childcare posed a central problem for women activists during the May demonstrations (Figure 1.11).70 Next to his crib were portraits she made of him mixed with designs from his blanket which were placed between transparent sheets of Plexiglas. In this installation environment within the museum, Lublin fed, played, changed, talked to and cared for her son, Nicolas, whilst also engaging members of the public in discussion.71 A breakdown of the system of representations of her son – and by extension the idealized motherhood seen in art historical museum depictions of the Madonna and child – into three registers, appeared to roughly correspond with the Lacanian orders: the imaginary, symbolic and ‘real’.72 The act was as much as about the condition and demands of contemporary motherhood and her deconstruction of its representations as a self-reflexive commentary on the artist’s labor, or process of creation.73 The Salon de Mai (est. 1943), planned before the May ’68 crisis, was, like other cultural institutions in Paris, affected by unfolding events in real time.74 At its outset, however, the 24th Salon, still basking in the glow of the Cuban

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Lea Lublin, Mon fils, 1968. Installation view from the Salon de Mai. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

solidarity – so attractive to the New French Left – witnessed the previous year in Havana, claimed a spirit of existing ‘without barriers and limitations’, and featured a number of women.75 Works included Lourdes Castro’s body outlines, Anna-Eva Bergman’s fjord painting, Milvia Maglione’s seascape, Geneviève Asse’s engraving, Ruth Francken’s pyramid sculpture, Joan Mitchell’s abstract painting, as well as art by women engaged with surrealism such as Bona, Leonor Fini, Meret Oppenheim, Dorothea Tanning, Toyen and Isabelle Waldberg. Also included were Daniel Buren’s intervention of striped green and white pasted wallpaper, Julio Le Parc’s kinetic contortions – he had won the prize at the Venice Biennale in 1966 – and works from an earlier generation like Wilfredo Lam (in part responsible along with Carlos Franqui and others for the ‘Salón de Mayo’ in Havana the year before), Pablo Picasso and Man Ray among others.76 Because of the impact of the May ’68 events on the exhibition, on a night of closures on 18 May, some artists included in the Salon de Mai tried to reclaim their works, according to Pierre Cabanne, only to find the doors locked.77 A few of these artists later went to the CGT (Confédération

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générale du travail), a labor trade union in Monceau in order to try to set up an exhibition in a factory to show their solidarity with the workers. Roberto Matta and others would succeed.78 Artist and poet Charlotte Calmis, meanwhile, expressed her marked solidarity with the students of May ’68 by using tracts such as the one from UNEF or Union nationale des étudiants de France and other pro-student and pro-worker, anti-capitalist statements as the basis of a fiery abstract collage. Highlighting words such as ‘La Crise’, ‘les étudiants’ and several key dates of May events – seemingly drawing from lettrism and the affichistes – the collage paid homage to the May rebellion (Plate 10). Calmis was in Paris for some of the events of May ’68 before leaving for Israel later that month. The experiences would clearly haunt her. On 24 May 1968, in a ship on the way to Israel, she reflected on the previous May days in her journal: Tenace, ma dernière vision de Paris, la cour de la Sorbonne, son odeur de poudre lacrymogène, son odeur de jeunesse blessée = les murs de la Sorbonne devenus la chair et la lumière de  la révolte, les slogans, leurs poésies. ‘Soyez réalistes! demandez l’impossible.’ ‘dessous les pavés la plage.’ ‘Quand l’extraordinaire est quotidien, il y a révolution …’ 79 Persistent, my last vision of Paris, the courtyard of the Sorbonne, its smell of tear gas, its smell of wounded youth = the walls of the Sorbonne becoming the flesh and flash point of the revolt, the slogans, their poems. ‘Be realistic! ask for the impossible.’ ‘Under the cobblestones the beach.’ ‘When the extraordinary is everyday, there is revolution …’

On 25 May 1968, she would write: Impossible de me détacher de ce mois de Mai à Paris! de ces explosions, de ces barricades, de ces pavés d’amour fou  ! oui, l’amour de ce temps noir, de ce temps rouge  ! … à faire des taches au blanc muguet des travailleurs; à faire disparaître tous les drapeaux tricolores = ô brûlante réalité inoubliable de ces journées brûlantes !80 Impossible to detach myself from this month of May in Paris! from these explosions, these barricades, these paving stones of mad love! Yes! the love of this black time, this red time! … making stains on the workers’ white lily of the valley; making all the tricolor flags disappear = o burning, unforgettable reality of these blazing days.

The ‘revolution’ of May ’68 in Paris deeply affected Calmis, who equated it to the formation of Israel and to her life as a painter.81 Born in Aleppo, Syria, and raised in Egypt in the Jewish faith, she had arrived in France in the 1930s to study art. The events of May ’68 signaled the possibility of different solidarities for her – as demonstrated by her collage in support of students and

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On the streets: from May ’68 to the MLF

union workers – as it did for other women artists of the period. Lublin would later become an active member of Collectif Femmes/Art and Charlotte Calmis would establish La Spirale, both in the 1970s (see Chapter 5). More artists responded directly to the May events. Painter Bernadette Kelly (one of three women enrolled in André Lhote’s studio and a student at the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs in the 1950s) was inspired by what happened and spontaneously put down her brushes to begin photographing the events. The results (unpublished at the time) showed scenes of daily life as well as the easy friendship and intermingling of the sexes and the way in which politics and ideology infiltrated the streets – leaving them anything but neutral (see Figures 1.5 and 1.6). Artists working outside the central currents or participating in events were also seemingly responding to the energy of ’68. Belgian salon artist Simone Lacour was a former student of Paul Delvaux and subsequently of Fernand Léger, when she arrived in Paris in the 1960s to explore the École de Paris. Rejecting these styles, she worked in a fiercely independent manner influenced by the dark humor of the Surrealists such as fellow compatriot René Magritte, and in the Flemish tradition of ‘outsiders’: Bosch, James Ensor, Reinhoud and others.82 Her use of everyday materials to reshape the canvas surface through ‘rupture’ can be seen in Brûlant velum, made in Paris in 1969, in which she explores the potential of the pictorial surface by literally burning a hole through it (Plate 11a). This focus of contained energy and destruction shows both the visual effects of a break with the two- to three-dimensional surface (i.e. breaking with the limits of the traditional pictorial surface) and the elevation to tradition and consecration of the spontaneous, subversive and radical act. Lacour’s Le Bilingue, also created in Paris in 1969, uses shaped aluminum on canvas to recreate the rupture and division between two (or the same) individuals through a clear, sharp and sinuous break between heads/profiles (Plate 11b). The simple, vivid shapes of imagery, mixed with the descriptive title, recall in some ways the serigraphic affiches coming out of the ateliers in May ’68, as well as the importance of language and dialogue, both political and habitual, used during this period. (Lacour, resident in France, also points in the image to the tension, multiplicity and polyglot identity represented by her homeland Belgium, thus demonstrating the resonances of the imagery at several levels of ‘revolution’.)83 These artists, although not widely known, show how the spirit of May ’68 was beginning to affect a generation of artists, as their work began to shift and reflect its values. As with the diversity of artistic expression, so the mix of political possibilities for women created a type of militancy that inspired and pointed toward – but did not always reach – fulfillment. Godard in his film La Chinoise (1967) uses the character of Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky) to show the rising

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influence of the Maoist movement on a questioning woman who grows progressively more reactionary and is led toward violence (although it is quickly forgotten for her summer holidays). The other woman in the film, Yvonne (Juliet Berto), acts as the subservient girlfriend: housekeeper, prostitute on occasion, who is slow to understand Marxist readings (Plate 12). The symbol of women as passive/reactionary and backward/superficial (along with the two young men in the story) represents the experience of a broader generation or culture as it comes to terms with a new political ideology. (The difficulty for women specifically is witnessed to some extent in J.K.’s account above.) The experience is important for the ways in which ideology is recorded and revolutionized, both in May ’68 and in the women’s movement to follow. Ruptures and new terrains: women on the streets Whether women’s appearance in the public space during the events of May ’68 was a consequence of the years of feminist debate, a heightened perception of sexual and social liberty due in part to the legalization of the pill, or the spontaneous (and, in retrospect, propitious) opportunity for shared youthful fervor and protest alongside men, the terrain that was covered and the territory that was won remained unclear. What was clear, however, was that in the immediate aftermath women’s (political, if not yet artistic) presence on that terrain came to signify not only the events, but also the years of discussion and development that took place leading up to the formation of the MLF. In the aftermath of May ’68, women had to come to terms with their role in the events and the duality of the limitations and possibilities that were afforded them. Françoise Picq speaks of dissatisfaction over the role of May ’68 and women’s ‘inferior’ position vis-à-vis the men, who adopted a hierarchical stance; unhappiness with sexual divisions of labor in the political parties; and the masculine ‘voice’ of political language.84 The Maoist group Vive la Révolution!, founded in 1969, would eventually disband and contribute members to the MLF as well as to FHAR (Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire). Anne (Zelensky) and Jacqueline (Feldman), who formed FMA (or Féminin Masculin Avenir) in 1967, saw that the burgeoning women’s movement, like May ’68, was vulnerable to a pendulum of raised and then curtailed emotions to which women (more than men) could fall victim: On a souvent expliqué pourquoi les femmes participaient avec enthousiasme aux mouvements révolutionnaires, bien qu’elles ne soient pas en temps ordinaires politisées: ce serait à cause de leur plus grande émotivité. Nous pensons plutôt que c’est parce que toute promesse d’un monde nouveau, toute remise en cause des rapports humains traditionnels est pour elles l’espoir qu’on aborde enfin leurs problèmes.

On the streets: from May ’68 to the MLF

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L’émotion des combats tombée, il ne reste plus que les commissions, les partis, toute une structure bureaucratique, qui ne fait guère confiance aux femmes et n’écoute que distraitement leurs revendications. Elles s’en méfient en revanche à juste titre et reviennent à leur apolitisme.85 An explanation frequently put forward as to why women participate enthusiastically in revolutionary movements, although they shy away from ordinary politics, is down to their greater emotivity. Instead, we think that it’s because any promise of a new world, any questioning of traditional human relationships is for them the sign of hope that their problems are finally being discussed. Once the emotion of the fighting has died down, only the commissions, the political parties, a whole bureaucratic structure, which hardly trusts women and listens only distractedly to their demands, are left. Women are wary, however, and justifiably so, as they retreat into their apolitical stand.

Heightened feelings, followed by a period of frustration and disappointment in the lack of real political change for women, led to greater political apathy. If women were to strike after the events of May ’68, they would have to make a sustained and mobilized effort. ’68 aftermath: art and politics May and June ’68 only intensified the feelings and dreams of both sexes, and their subsequent disillusionment over the failure to realize their goals for a new society. De Gaulle’s success in the legislative elections in June 1968 (due in large part to the efforts of Prime Minister Georges Pompidou) seemed to leave the students’ leftist ideals stymied.86 Even when, on 29 April 1969, de Gaulle resigned in favor of Pompidou, the left remained deeply divided and factionalized by the events of May ’68.87 The departure of de Gaulle signaled the end of an era. The reign of France’s father figure, a charismatic leader with a strong, firm hand, had come to a close. Having conceded women’s suffrage at the end of the war, he nevertheless viewed ‘power … to be exercised by hierarchal, indeed military command’.88 This domineering attitude only incited students in the Ateliers de l’ex-École des Beaux-Arts and the Arts Décoratifs during May–June ’68 to equate de Gaulle with Hitler in posters and to make defiant outbursts such as ‘Le chienlit, c’est lui’ as a retort to his cutting remark about rebellious students. Pompidou, with support won from the center, was elected in July 1969 and presented France with a continuation of de Gaulle’s policies (they had collaborated since 1945), although with a notably cooler temperament than his predecessor: ‘De Gaulle était un homme d’intervention rare, mais éclatante. Mon tempérament me pousse à une action continue, moins spectaculaire’ (De

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Gaulle was a rare but brilliant interventionist. My temperament leads me to continuous action, which is less spectacular).89 Pompidou, an economist, relied strongly on economic growth, and supported material and practical reforms to improve individual and collective lives (as opposed to deep Marxist structural changes in society).90 Before his election he used fear of a repeat of the May events to warn the people of further instability. He cautioned universities on the verge of explosion, stating ‘Alors, croyez-moi, nous nous préparerions un mauvais été, un dangereux automne. Mai 1968, il y a à peine un an, ne l’oubliez pas’ (Well, trust me, we would be preparing for a bad summer, a dangerous autumn. May 1968 was barely a year ago, don’t forget).91 Pompidou, with his policy of ‘openness within continuity’, was more appealing to a France unsure about the past year’s events than anyone who represented a clear break and an unknown risk.92 A political lull for those who had participated in and supported May ’68 was evident. Rifts and factions amongst the left and the loss of legislative seats left them without political power. Although still alive intellectually, the ‘action’ of ’68 was over. Critic Gérald Gassiot-Talabot summarized emotions thus: Amertume, résignation, silence. 1969 est l’année de la retombée. Il n’est pas certain qu’elle ait été celle de l’autocritique, de la méditation. Cette dominante crépusculaire se trouve de part et d’autre, jusque dans le référendum-suicide qui conduisit au départ celui que l’échec de mai semblait avoir conforté. Mais, dans sa mélancolie même, cette année nous montrait que rien ne serait désormais semblable et que le vœu de Georges Pompidou (‘que 1969 efface dans tous les domaines les séquelles de 1968’) se révélait heureusement irréalisable. … Il restera toujours en nous une arrière-pensée, quelles que soient les espérances que nous partageons. Mais l’illusion a été longue à mourir, et 1969 a signé interminablement cette agonie.93 Bitterness, resignation, silence. 1969 is the year of the fallout. It is not certain whether it was one of self-criticism or meditation. This prevailing twilight is to be found on both sides, even in the referendum-suicide which led to the departure of the one who the failure of May seemed to have reassured. But, by its very melancholy, this year showed us that nothing would ever be the same again and that the hope of Georges Pompidou (‘that 1969 erases in every sense the effects of 1968’) fortunately proved itself unrealizable … It will always remain a buried intention in the back of our minds, whatever hopes we share. But the illusion took a long time to die, and 1969 interminably marked this slow death.

The events of May ’68 were still present in the minds of the public; for artists, writers and performers, their ideals, failures and legacies had yet to be decided. In January 1969 the Salle Rouge in support of Vietnam was presented at ARC

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On the streets: from May ’68 to the MLF

(Animation, Recherche, Confrontation), which had been inaugurated in 1967 by director Pierre Gaudibert at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.94 Preparations for the exhibition began in 1968 with work by artists (often identified by surname alone) Aillaud, Alleaume, Arroyo, Artozoul, Baratella, Biras, Bodek, Buraglio, Cane, Cueco, Darnaud, Dubigeon, Fanti, Fleury, Leroy, Olivier, Parré, Peraro, Rieti, Schlosser, Spadari, Tisserand, Vilmart and Zeimert, many of whom were active in the Atelier Populaire de l’ex-École des Beaux-Arts.95 The Salle Rouge (a notable wordplay on the ‘insolente’ Salle Verte in January 1965 at the 16th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, at which all the works were ‘green’ and 2 × 2 m in size) tried to oppose the weaknesses in the Parti communiste français stance with the thinking of Mao Tse-tung, Situationists and Anarchists.96 These spaces of political and artistic engagement did not include either the standpoint of women or their perspective on events, thereby necessitating the creation of an alternative space for their political and artistic engagement, either independently or collectively – as is seen being formed throughout this period and into the 1970s. (The era of curator Suzanne Pagé, who was Pierre Gaudibert’s deputy at ARC and later headed ARC 2 in 1973, along with Dany Bloch in 1974, and editor Catherine Millet’s Art Press in the 1970s was yet to come.) The exhibition Une Nouvelle Figuration at the Galerie Mathias Fels in November 1961 had created a label that became more definite when a group at the 15th Salon de la Jeune Peinture at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in January 1964 broke with the dominant streak of ‘bonnardisme’ (Pierre Bonnard intimist-style) then prevalent at the Salon. Thus was launched a group of artists interested in figuration – ‘objective’ reality and space-time – which culminated in the 1964 exhibition Mythologies Quotidiennes at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.97 Niki de Saint Phalle, her reputation secured with the Nouveaux Réalistes, was a rare woman to be included in this show that otherwise featured over thirty men.98 The sensibility of time and its pictorial duration – its seizure and expression – as expressed by the Nouvelle Figuration (NF) group can be viewed against Julia Kristeva’s later conceptualization of time not as linear, but cyclical and monumental – based on ‘repetition’ and ‘eternity’ – in tandem with the biological rhythms of women’s bodies and its capacity for spatiality.99 Saint Phalle’s Accouchement blanc (1964), a heavily decorated white plaster sculpture of a woman pulling out her own baby (plastic doll), which was included in the Mythologies Quotidiennes show, seems to prefigure and point, however obliquely, to an acknowledgment of this possibility (Figure 1.12).100 (Her work in three-dimensional sculpture captures yet another dimension of time, in contrast to the two-dimensional painted surface used by most of the NF group.) Saint Phalle contends with the messy subject of childbirth and motherhood, differentiating herself from the male participants.

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Niki de Saint Phalle, Accouchement blanc ou GHEA, 1964.

The events of 1969 constituted a rethinking of political strategies in art. Yves Klein’s exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs was vehemently protested as ‘Americanism’ by Polycritique at a time when leftist critiques were dominating art.101 Art critic Alain Jouffroy published an article trying to align radical revolutionary politics and empirical artistic work, while Pierre Gaudibert, the director of ARC, was more interested in subversive art.102 The theme was again explored in ‘Police et Culture’ at the 1969 Salon de la Jeune Peinture, which included Henri Cueco, his ‘wife’ (so described by Jean-Francois Lyotard’s daughter) Marinette – an artist seen later in Chapter 6 – Lucien Fleury, Edgard Naccache, Jacky Schnee and Gérard Schlosser working in small groups using the ‘correct politics’ as defined by the General Assembly.103 For women artists who were relatively outside the circle of these critiques, the high-profile exhibition that year was a large Vieira da Silva Retrospective: 1935–1969 at the Musée National d’Art Moderne. By the end of the year Gina Pane also had an action at the Centre culturel américain in Paris, while galleries in Paris and in the provinces occasionally showed the work of international women artists such as Argentine Martha Boto at Denise René in Paris and Hungarian Véra Székely (wife of the sculptor Pierre Székely) in Orléans.104

On the streets: from May ’68 to the MLF

Counter territories of the feminine

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The event that captured the global imagination that year was the lunar landing in July by the space shuttle Apollo 11. The moon walk by the American Neil Armstrong symbolized the height of man’s technological achievement. This inspired lyric is by popular writer and journalist René Barjavel, who cites the moon as a virgin soon to be penetrated: Chère Lune, belle Lune, moi je t’ai regardée à chaque seconde de toi qu’on nous a donnée. Tu es blanche, tu es vierge encore, bientôt des hommes se poseront sur toi. Ce sera la fin de ton mystère. Ou peut-être son commencement. (25 mai 1969)105 Dear Moon, beautiful Moon, I gazed at you every second that you were given to us. You are white, you are still virgin, soon men will land on you. This will be the end of your mystery. Or maybe its beginning. (25 May 1969)

While ‘man’ (represented by the political agendas of government) was aiming through extraordinary feats to conquer space and discover and claim virgin territories as his own, militant (often Marxist) women were working toward an altogether more domestic agenda: to secure bodily freedoms and equal rights. The May ’68 exposure of Situationist ideals, and the sanctity of the ‘everyday’ and/or heightened ordinary experience expressed by Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, encouraged the French women’s movement toward the radicalization of everyday life in the same way as had ‘the personal is political’, the slogan of American women in the 1960s.106 Closer, everyday, mundane experiences could have revolutionary effects: ‘When he [man] can begin the conquest of his own life, rediscovering or creating greatness in everyday life – and when he can begin knowing it and speaking it, then and only then will he be in a new era.’ 107 For women, the new social possibilities expressed by sharing their everyday and/or private life had political consequences. Ephemeral acts in ‘nature’ such as the traces of Gina Pane’s bare footprints recorded on a pale plaster cast of the ground in Presque cercle, made in Ury, France in 1968, became a marker of the time and space of the body’s presence in nature, a move which prefigured Neil Armstrong’s later ‘walk’ on the moon during the ‘space race’ of the Cold War (Figure 1.13). The fossilized steps in Pane’s work can be read as an interrupted narrative of the everyday (an almost ‘circle’) that takes on a heightened sense of importance through the self-conscious preservation of her steps on earth for posterity.108 Armstrong’s high-profile footprint on the lunar surface lacks the relative anonymity of Pane’s action, which in contrast is quieter and shows how territories closer to home, once marked, can have (r)evolutionary potential as art. (Pane had also explored the possibilities of lunar experiences as early as 1966 through her Installation pour un corps – Lunaire pénétrable, an installation consisting of

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Gina Pane, Presque cercle, 1968.

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Gina Pane, Installation pour un corps – Lunaire-pénétrable, 1966.

two large pieces of galvanized iron painted white and red between which the body vibrated; Figure 1.14.) Critics point to Pane’s prescience in interpreting social moments and experiences through her actions while crucially standing politically independent of them.109 Her response to her environment, as well as Cold War and feminist politics, are often occluded due to the controlled poesis of her acts. The overflow of energy in the streets that defined May ’68 was captured in the naked men and women floating over the scene in Henri Cueco’s painting

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On the streets: from May ’68 to the MLF

La Rue (1968) (Plate 13). Its restless energy of ideas, mix of races, and anonymity of spirit, exemplified by the floating and dancing bodies, was reminiscent of Matisse’s La danse (1909–1910). Painted in predominant tones of red, black and white, the image is emblematic of the elation felt on the streets and the bodily freedom later associated with the feminist movement of the 1970s. Commenting on the work of Marxist Henri Cueco, Catherine Masson and Corinne Lyotard note the ‘libidinal economy’ inherent in the work (a book of the same name was published by the latter’s father, Jean-François Lyotard, during the same period110): Or le désordre à l’œuvre dans La Rue, qui agite, frise, empoigne ses composants plastiques, aura lui aussi son revenu: la jouissance intensive. L’espace et le corps sont libérés des contraintes répressives de la géométrie: leur éclatement ponctuel et douleureux les affranchit des règles de l’unité de composition dont le défenseur n’est plus Euclide mais Eros.111 Yet the disorder at work in La Rue, that agitates, grazes, grips its formal components, will also yield its return: intense jouissance. Space and the body are liberated from the repressive limits of geometry: their occasional and painful eruptions free them from the rules of compositional unity whose defender is no longer Euclid but Eros.

The rupture, or break, from the precise, rational lines of the architecture of the public square, with its conflation of ancient and modern buildings, is shown in the cult of the body and internal desires which themselves become political representation. Or, as Masson and Lyotard noted earlier about painting, it becomes ‘une opération de transformation des valeurs plastiques en valeurs politiques’ (an act to transform artistic values into political values).112 Cueco’s work resonates with both the spirit of the MLF to follow the élan on the streets and the focus on jouissance as the pathway to a woman’s sexual liberation. By the end of the decade, however, with the decline of the women’s movement and the loss of the momentum of May ’68, Sophie Calle’s Filatures parisiennes (1978–1979) began to deconstruct these propositions (Figure 1.15). She questions the role of a shared liberation through her hyper-focus on the personal and the use of voyeurism as power, and undertakes a relentless examination of her ‘feelings’ about both herself and the world around her through the tradition of a woman’s ‘diary’. In a similar manner to Annette Messager’s collector’s albums in the early 1970s, Calle uses the space of her intimate journals to tell the story of her surreptitious glances at people on the street and her private musings about them, producing a series of photographs and documented notes. If May ’68 was about solidarity, speaking openly and sharing on the streets, Calle returns to the incessantly personal, with the ‘other’s’ alienation representing that of her own. This shift in gaze, from one of ‘feminine jouissance’ in Cueco’s egalitarian collectivity to Calle’s masquerade

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Sophie Calle, Filatures parisiennes, 1978–1979.

in ‘playing the role’ of the masculine voyeur, transfers a private, scopic power into the realm of the feminine and away from the group politics of the MLF. She retreats into the private and its relentless examination of the ‘personal’ and the ‘shared’ through the transgression/violation of social boundaries, in order to examine the self. This was at a time when group politics were disappearing, as evidenced by the ‘buy-out’ of the MLF by Psych et Po under the guidance of Antoinette Fouque in the autumn of 1979 and in the midst of Giscard d’Estaing’s long domination of the right-wing government. To evoke change, militant women did not have to go as far as the moon. Their aim was a bold and persistent attempt for women to take possession of and lay claim to their bodies and to achieve a measure of control in the communities where they lived and worked. The appearance of women on the streets and in factories during May ’68 and in the following decade created a potent symbol of empowerment and solidarity despite, or in part due to, the domestic difficulties they faced in order to participate in them.113 The way in which these desires were elaborated, debated, confused and translated marked feminist discourse in the 1960s and the groups, actions and politics of the next decade.

On the streets: from May ’68 to the MLF

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Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience on Violence, Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (New York: Harcourt Trade, 1972), p. 206. 2 See Christine Delphi [most commonly found as ‘Delphy’], ‘La révolution sexuelle, c’était un piège pour les femmes’, Libération, 21 May 1998, p. 35. 3 Anne (Zelensky) and Jacqueline (Feldman), ‘On avait donc pensé à la femme, mais par la pilule interposée’, ‘D’un groupe à l’autre’, Partisans: L’année zéro, no. 54–55 (Paris: Maspéro, 1970), pp. 173–205, p. 193. (So we had thought about women but by way of the pill.) 4 J.K., ‘Les militantes…’, in Partisans: L’année zéro, pp. 145–150; pp. 145–146. My emphasis. 5 Claire Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in France, 1944–1968 (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 195. 6 In 1998, Caroline de Bendern came before the civil tribunal at Nanterre and demanded the rights to the photo and a sum of 50,000 francs for each use of the image without her permission. Annick Cojean, ‘Quand la Marianne de 68 entre en rébellion…’, Le Monde, 22 May 1998. 7 Annick Cojean, ‘La Marianne de mai 1968’, Le Monde, 21 August, 1997. My emphasis. 8 Mark Kurlansky, May ’68: The Year that Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine, 2003), p. 218. 9 Ibid., p. 219. 10 Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand, ‘Le syndicalisme étudiant à Nanterre. Entretien avec Jean-François Godchau’, in Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand and Laurent Gervereau (eds), Mai ’68: Les Mouvements Etudiants en France et dans le Monde (Nanterre: Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine, 1988), pp. 105–109, p. 109. 11 Delphi [sic], ‘La révolution sexuelle’, p. 35. 12 Dreyfus-Armand, ‘La grève des cheminots en 1968. Entretien avec Daniel Moreau’, in Mai ’68, pp. 214–221, p. 220. 13 The arrest of five students in front of the American Express office in Paris during an anti-imperialism and anti-Vietnam War rally, and the subsequent protest meeting at Nanterre, took place on 22 March and sparked the creation of the Mouvement du 22 mars. The students arrested were members of the CVN (Comité Vietnam national) and the JCR (Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire). Anne and Jacqueline, ‘D’un groupe à l’autre’, Partisans: L’année zéro, pp. 192–193. Christine Delphy regards Wilhelm Reich’s theories of male ‘discharge’ and women as ‘receptacle’ of the male sperm as repressive toward women. ‘Les femmes ne sont qu’un réceptacle. Et on leur ordonne de laisser le libre accès sexuel aux hommes au nom de cette “liberation sexuelle”. Le mouvement de libération des femmes va se faire contre cette  “révolution sexuelle”.’ Delphi [sic], ‘La révolution sexuelle’, p. 35. (Women are only a receptacle. And they are ordered to allow free sexual access to men in the name of

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this ‘sexual liberation’. The women’s liberation movement is going to happen in opposition to this ‘sexual revolution.’) 14 Delphi [sic], ‘La révolution sexuelle’, p. 35. 15 Leslie Kaplan, ‘On discute de tout! Que veut-on, quelle vie…?’, Libération, 22 May 1998, p. 30. 16 Critics have pointed out Gabrielle Russier’s story as being one that could only have taken place in the anti-authoritarian buildup to May ’68. Her acquaintance Raymond Jean wrote the preface to her published letters from prison. He writes: ‘Il me semble ainsi possible de dire que mai 68 a été à l’origine d’une extraordinaire “accélération” de son aventure avec Christian et doit aider par là à en comprendre les développements (puisque les épisodes les plus marquants ou “scandaleux” ont eu lieu dans les mois qui ont suivi). Inversement, il ne serait pas faux de penser qu’il lui a été donné, d’étrange façon d’être en avance sur l’esprit de mai 68, d’être une enfant prématurée de mai. Une chose est sûre: c’est qu’on lui a fait payer mai très cher.’ Gabrielle Russier, lettres de prison, preface by Raymond Jean (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970), pp. 38–39. (It seems to me that May ’68 was at the origin of the extraordinary “acceleration” of her affair with Christian, which should help us to understand the affair’s evolution (since the most significant or “scandalous” episodes occurred in the months that followed the events). Conversely, it would not be a mistake to think her fate became, strangely enough, to be in advance of May ’68, a premature child of May. One thing is certain: she was made to pay for May, but very dearly.) 17 The collective of artists included [Bernard] Alleaume, [Henri] Cueco, [JeanClaude] Latil, Mikaëloff, [Michel] Parré, [Gérard] Tisserand. See Qui tue, exhibition catalogue, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1970. 18 Laurent Greilsamer, ‘Il est interdit d’interdire: L’esprit de Mai’, Le Monde, 9 November 2004, p. 23. 19 Anne and Jacqueline, ‘D’un groupe à l’autre’, Partisans: L’année zéro, p. 193. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., p. 195. 22 Published in Centre de regroupement des informations universitaires, Quelle université? Quelle société? (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968) and Anne and Jacqueline, ‘D’un groupe à l’autre’, Partisans: L’année zéro, p. 196. 23 Régine Gabbey, ‘Les jeunes croient-ils encore au mariage?’, Réalités, May 1970, pp. 90–97. 24 The article goes on to claim that it was precisely because of the shifts in society and the resulting insecurity that marriage was as popular as ever and a ‘valeur sûre’ (safe bet). However, the fragility of marriage and women’s role in making it successful was also pointed out. In 1963 there were 274 divorces for every 100,000 women, a number that rose to 324 in 1967. Ibid., p. 96. 25 Ibid., p. 90 (S.O.F.R.E.S. – Société française d’enquêtes par sondage). 26 Statistics reported in ibid., pp. 92–93. 27 Although the majority of voices in the recordings of the period are those of men, some women’s voices can be heard. In a historical tape recording of

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some of the events of May ’68, one woman compares the activities on the barricades to ‘1789’ and remarks that her neighbor says it reminds her of the ‘Commune’. Jean-Pierre Farkas, Les journées de mai 68. Enregistrement sonore. Les journalistes de RTL (Polygram: 1998). Women participants are also visible in photographs of demonstrations. 28 See, for example, Michèle Bernstein’s novel Tous les chevaux du roi (1960). The publication of Julia Kristeva’s Semiotike (1969) and her breakthrough thesis (and subsequent book), La révolution du langage politique (1974), would establish her name and position on the intellectual and political scene in Paris. 29 Claire Duchen points out the ‘curious’ omission of Le deuxième sexe both during and in the immediate aftermath of May ’68. See Duchen, Women’s Rights, p. 201 and p. 236 (note). Anne and Jacqueline write, ‘Ainsi les femmes qui participent activement aux divers mouvements politiques sont, souvent, antiféministes. Fières d’avoir réussi à se faire accepter dans un milieu d’hommes, le rappel de l’oppression de la femme les blesse car elles veulent se croire libres.’ ‘D’un groupe à l’autre’, Partisans: L’année zéro, p. 193. (Thus, women who participate actively in various political movements are, often, anti-feminists. Proud of having succeeded in being accepted by male circles, the reminder of women’s oppression piques, because they want to believe themselves to be free.) Elsewhere, Simone de Beauvoir admitted that she and Jean-Paul Sartre had more of an ‘observer’ role during the events of May ’68, though they supported and appreciated the energy of the protesters. See Claudine Monteil, ‘Simone de Beauvoir and the Women’s Movement in France: An Eye-Witness Account’, Simone de Beauvoir Studies, vol. 14 (1997), pp. 6–12, p. 7. 30 When asked what was most striking about the events of the month and a half of occupation of the Sorbonne, Rébérioux replied, ‘D’abord le bonheur, la joie de voir que sous l’œil paternel de Victor Hugo, il y avait Mao, Trotsky, Lénine, Che Guevara, le bonheur de voir présents tous les courants qui se réclamaient d’un changement fondamental; c’était quelque chose d’absolument extraordinaire!’ Dreyfus-Armand, ‘La Sorbonne occupée. Entretien avec Madeleine Rébérioux’, in Mai ’68, pp. 154–159, p. 157. (Firstly, the happiness, the joy of seeing that under the watchful, paternal eye of Victor Hugo, there was Mao, Trotsky, Lenin, Che Guevara, it was deeply gratifying to see present all of the doctrines that claimed a fundamental change; it was something absolutely extraordinary!) Rébérioux was later famously expelled from the PCF in 1969 for her involvement in a far-left publication. 31 May 68: la rue (Sonore). Contient l’enregistrement des manifestations des nuits du 24–25 mai et du 10 au 11 juin 1968 (Valois, 1978). Sound tapes in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. It is interesting to note that on 23 May the government banned live radio broadcasts. 32 Khursheed Wadia, ‘Women and the Events of May 1968’, in Keith A. Reader and Khursheed Wadia, The May 1968 Events in France: Reproductions and Interpretations (London: St. Martins Press, 1993), p. 152.

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33 Farkas, Les journées de mai 68. Recording of Charles de Gaulle’s speech at 4 p.m. on 30 May refusing to step down or change the prime minister (Pompidou) but proposing a ‘referendum’ and ‘profound reform’ for universities, etc. In a move that garnered admiration, de Gaulle refused to be intimidated by the protestors: ‘La seule voix que j’écoute, c’est la démocratie’ (The only voice I listen to is democracy). (On 7 June, de Gaulle admitted in a radio and television interview with a journalist from Le Figaro, Michel Droit, that his intention had been to step down as President on 29 May.) 34 Laurent Gervereau, ‘Les Affiches de Mai 68’, in Mai ’68, pp. 160–171, p. 169. 35 Jean-Pierre Duteuil, ‘Les groupes politiques d’extrême gauche’, in Mai ’68, pp. 110–115, p. 110. 36 Gervereau, ‘L’atelier des Arts-décoratifs: Entretien avec François Miehe et Gérard Paris-Clavel’, in Mai ’68, pp. 192–197, p. 197. 37 Dreyfus-Armand, ‘Le Mouvement du 22 mars: Entretien avec Daniel Cohn Bendit’, in Mai ’68, pp. 124–129, p. 128. 38 Raoul Vaneigem, Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 196. Eng. trans. Raoul Vaneigem, Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), p. 166. 39 Atelier populaire présenté par lui-même, 87 affiches de mai–juin ’68 (Paris: Usines, Universités, Union, 1968). 40 ‘Mai 68’, in Anne Gillain (ed.), Le cinéma selon François Truffaut (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), p. 209. 41 It is worth noting that Cannes shut down with the events of May ’68, unlike during the rebellion in Algeria on 13 May 1958 when, as Truffaut says, Cannes ‘continued as if nothing had happened’. Ibid., pp. 210–211. 42 ‘C’était de la curiosité, on aimait le mouvement et on trouvait cela un peu loufoque de voir les grands cinéastes français manifester, donc nous sommes allés voir.’ ‘Le Mouvement du 22 mars: Entretien avec Daniel Cohn Bendit’, in Mai ’68, pp. 126–127. (It was out of curiosity, we liked the movement and we thought it was wild to see the great French filmmakers demonstrate, so we went to have a look.) 43 See the interview by Gervereau, ‘L’atelier des Arts-décoratifs. Entretien avec François Miehe et Gérard Paris-Clavel’, in Mai ’68, pp. 192–197. 44 See Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (London: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 130–131. 45 Atelier populaire présenté par lui-même, n.p. 46 Gervereau, ‘L’atelier populaire de l’ex-École des Beaux-Arts. Entretien avec Gérard Fromanger’, in Mai ’68, pp. 184–191, p. 184. 47 Gervereau, ‘Entretien avec Gérard Fromanger’, in Mai ’68, and ‘Entretien avec Rougemont’, also in Mai ’68, pp. 184–191; pp. 180–183. 48 ‘Une des grandeurs de ce moment est qu’aucun artiste au sein de l’atelier populaire n’a jamais signé les affiches. C’est resté, avec le temps, un secret d’une heureuse intensité.’ Cited in Alain Jouffroy, ‘Mai 68 et les artistes’, Beaux-Arts Magazine, no. 57 (May 1988), pp. 56–61, p. 61. Jouffroy’s article

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contained statements by male artists: Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo, Pierre Buraglio, Erro, Gérard Fromanger and Alain Jacquet. (One of the remarkable things about this moment is that no artist in the popular workshop had ever signed the posters. It remained, with time, a secret with a charged intensity.) 49 Gervereau, ‘Les affiches de mai 68’, in Mai ’68, p. 166. 50 Gervereau, ‘Entretien avec Rougemont’, in Mai ’68, p. 182. 51 ‘The silk screen process was created from basic materials: 1. A wooden frame and silk for the silk screen (special nylon). 2. The text is drawn to the required scale on paper. This drawing is then traced onto the surface of the screen with a soft pencil. 3. The characters are filled with liquid drawing gum, which when dry forms a plastic skin. Dry well.’ In Atelier populaire présenté par luimême, n.p. The drying process and removal from the image after the screen printing have resonances with the later Supports-Surfaces group. (This will be explored in Chapter 6.) ‘Avec les beaux jours, en juin, nous tirions en continu, le papier descendait dans les jardins du directeur et séchait en descendant … ’, ibid. p. 183. (With the good weather, in June, we were printing continuously; the paper was falling outside into the director’s gardens, drying on its way down …) 52 Gervereau, ‘Les affiches de mai 68’, in Mai ’68, p. 162. 53 Gervereau, ‘Entretien avec Gérard Fromanger’, in Mai ’68, p. 186. 54 Ibid., p. 189. 55 Gervereau, ‘Les affiches de mai 68’, in Mai ’68, p. 169. 56 Margaret Atack, May ’68 in French Fiction and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 2. 57 Merri Jolivet [recueilli par], ‘Atelier Populaire de l’ex-École des Beaux-Arts: Michèle Katz, peintre, raconte’, Libération, 21 May 1998, p. 35. 58 Michèle Katz, ‘Je me souviens de mai 68…’, Verso Arts et Lettres, no. 10 (April 1998), pp. 20–21, p. 20. 59 Pascale de Langautier and Inès de Warren (eds), Femmes et filles: Mai 68 (Paris, L’Herne, 2018), p. 187. Messager’s statement was made to the editors of the volume in autumn 2017. 60 Pierres déplacées, juillet 1968. ‘Au cours d’une promenade dans la vallée de l’Orco (Italie), au pied des montagnes, la vue d’un amas de pierres de petite taille allant de 0,15m à 0,20m exposées au nord, recouvertes de mousse et encastrées dans une terre humide, m’a fait réaliser qu’elles ne percevaient jamais de rayon de soleil, donc de chaleur. C’est alors que j’ai pris la décision de les déplacer en les prenant une à une pour les déposer dans un endroit découvert et au sud. Premier acte in vivo qui consistait à inverser une situation immuable.’ In Anne Tronche, Gina Pane: Actions (Paris: Fall Éditions, 1997), pp. 8–9. (During a walk in the Orco Valley (Italy), at the foot of the mountains, the sight of a pile of small stones ranging from 0.15m to 0.20 north-facing, covered with moss and embedded in a wetland, made me realize that they never received the light of the sun, nor its heat. It was at that moment I made the decision to move them by taking them one by one to leave in an open, south-facing place. First in vivo act of upending a fixed situation.)

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61 Tronche, Gina Pane, pp. 9–10. More recently, Pane has figured as an important artist to emerge from the May ’68 movement. Pane is cited by Catherine Millet for her radicality and for her body art in her reflections on May ’68. See De Langautier and De Warren, Femmes et filles, p. 135. She is also one of three individual women artists included in the 50th anniversary celebration catalogue of May ’68. The other two women highlighted were Annette Messager and Tania Mouraud. See Phillippe Artières et Éric de Chassey (eds), Images en lutte: La culture visuelle de l’extrême-gauche en France (1968–1974) (Paris: Éditions Beaux-Arts de Paris, 2018). Exhibition dates: 21 February–20 May 2018 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris. 62 Claude Roy, ‘Joli mois de mai’, in Hélène de Beauvoir: Le joli mois de mai (mai 68), 13 December 1969–10 January 1970, exhibition catalogue, Hermes Studio d’Arte, Roma, 1970, n.p. 63 See Gloria Orenstein, ‘Exorcism/Protest/Rebirth: Modes of Feminist Expression in France’, Womanart, Winter 1977–1978, pp. 8–11, pp. 9–10. 64 Ibid., pp. 9–10. 65 Hélène de Beauvoir, Souvenirs (Paris: Garamont, 1987), pp. 250–251. 66 Ibid. 67 Simone de Beauvoir, Untitled [MAI 68], in Le joli mois de mai. 68 Hélène de Beauvoir, Souvenirs, p. 259. 69 Although Hélène de Beauvoir would collaborate with her sister by illustrating her novel, La femme rompue (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), on certain key issues they differed. While Simone, for example, would question the impact of a figure like Luce Irigaray on the women’s movement (see Chapter 6; note 16), her sister Hélène would embrace her: ‘Mit Lucy [sic] Irigaray [französische feministische Psychoanalytikerin und Kulturtheoretikerin, geb. 1930] erkennen sie, dass ihr Unterbewusstsein nicht das eines mangelhaften Mannes ist, sondern das eines autonomen Wesens, dessen Reichtümer es noch zu entdecken gilt.’ Lecture by Hélène de Beauvoir presented at Deutsch-Französischen Gesellschaft Regensburg at the time of her exhibition at the Galerie Hammer on 12 March 1992. Republished as ‘Zur Rolle der Frau in der Kunst’, Hélène de Beauvoir: Das Talent liegt in der Familie, ed. Karin Sagner (Munich: Hirmer Verlag GmbH, 2014), pp. 120–123, p. 120. (With Lucy [sic] Irigaray [French feminist psychoanalyst and cultural theorist, b. 1930] they were able to recognize that their subconscious mind is not one of a defective man, but one of an autonomous being whose riches are yet to be discovered.) 70 24th Salon de Mai, exhibition catalogue, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 4–26 May 1968. Mon fils would set the stage for a life-long collaboration with her son Nicolas Lublin, who would later photograph and document her works. Author discussion with Nicolas Lublin, August 2020. 71 Lublin discussed Mon fils in ‘La créativité ou les organes invisibles’, Sorcières, no. 10 (1977), pp. 46–48, p. 47. 72 The framing of Jacques Lacan as a ‘gauchiste’ and his importance during May ’68 in France is discussed by Sherrie Turkle in chapter 3 of her book Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud’s French Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1978). Oscar Masotta, an Argentinian psychoanalyst, began publishing on

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Jacques Lacan around 1964 and increased the dissemination of his ideas in Spanish. Lublin’s interest in structuralism and possible later collaboration with Masotta in Chile in 1971 is discussed by Isabelle Plante in her ‘Between Paris and the “Third World”: Lea Lublin’s Long 1960s’, Artl@s Bulletin, vol. 3, no. 2 (Fall 2014), pp. 48–67, p. 60, p. 62. 73 Le système de la représentation était là confronté au réel, le rapport de l’image à son modèle, du modèle à la constitution d’un langage visuel mais aussi verbal, comportements et réactions du public face “à l’œuvre vivante”… En mai 68, alors que tout le monde était dehors et prônait une liberté nouvelle, je décide de réaliser une œuvre qui confronte le réel à sa représentation en exposant l’événement qui avait bouleversé ma vie, la naissance de mon fils. Mais serait-ce parce que cette naissance fut bouleversante que je me suis intéressée plus précisément au vécu ? Serait-ce parce que je prends conscience de ma condition de femme? Ou serait-ce parce que mai 68 voulait changer la vie? Le vécu, c’est la rencontre des éléments différenciés, celle d’un individu dans un contexte social, celle d’une histoire avec un petit h dans une histoire avec un grand H. (The system of representation was faced with the real, the encounter of the image with its model, of the model to the construction of a visual but also verbal language, behavior and reactions of the public faced with the “living work” … In  May 1968, when everyone was in  the street proclaiming a new freedom, I decided to produce a work which confronted the real with its representation by exhibiting the event which had irreversibly shaken up my life: the birth of my son. But was it the upheaval of this birth that made me focus more closely on experience? Was it because of my newfound awareness of the feminine condition? Or was it because May 1968 wanted to change life? Experience is the encounter of differentiated elements, that of an individual in a social context, that of a history with a small “h” in a  history with a big “H”.) ‘L’écran du réel: Entretien avec Léa Lublin par Jérôme Sans’/‘The Screen to the Real: Léa Lublin interviewed by Jérôme Sans’, in Léa Lublin: Mémoire des lieux, mémoire du corps, bilingual exhibition catalogue, Centre d’art contemporain Quimper, Quimper, 1995, pp. 37–70; p. 58, p. 62 [French]; pp. 61–62 [English]. 74 The May demonstrations would see the Musée National d’Art Moderne’s (MNAM) closure on 18 May. See Pierre Cabanne, Le pouvoir culturel sous la Ve République (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1981), pp. 219–220. Also cited in Rebecca de Roo, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 28, p. 221, note 14. De Roo, following Cabanne, cites art critic Pierre Restany as being behind the closure. 75 See 24th Salon de Mai catalogue. On the historic ties and evolving relationship between the French left and Cuba during this period, see Kepa Artaraz, ‘French Intellectuals and Cuba: A Revolutionary Working Model’, Cuba and Western Intellectuals since 1959 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 105–123. 76 While Michel Leiris penned poetic tributes to the revolutionary spirit of Havana – he had visited the city twice successively, once for the opening of the Salón de Mayo in 1967 – Philippe Comte wrote in a more subdued tone of

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the mixed Salon de Mai in 1968 Paris with its generational differences and its range of quality typical of any large-scale exhibition. Michel Leiris, ‘Ecumes de la Havane’, pp. 20–21 and Philippe Comte, ‘de l’(in)utilité des salons parisiens’, pp. 77–78, p. 77. Both articles in Opus International, no. 7 (June 1968). 77 Cabanne, Le pouvoir culturel sous la Ve République, p. 220. 78 Ibid. The leader of the CGT, Georges Séguy, negotiated the Grenelle Agreements days later on 25–26 May which were rejected by the left for its perceived shortcomings. Although Pierre Cabanne singles out Roberto Matta’s paintings as having been exhibited in the Nord-Aviation assembly plant, fellow Salon de Mai artists Samuel Buri, Édouard Pignon, Argentinian-born Antonio Segui and Claude Viseux would also show in the plant, among other artists, where the art was displayed hanging above machines, on the walls and on wheeled scaffolding. Raoul-Jean Moulin, ‘de châtillon-des-arts à nord-aviation’, Opus International, no. 7 (June 1968), pp. 85–86, p. 85. 79 Charlotte Calmis’s Journals. Archives Charlotte Calmis. Courtesy: Marie-Jo Bonnet. Special thanks to Marie-Jo Bonnet for finding these documents for this book and sharing them with me. 80 Ibid. 81 On 24 May 1968, Calmis wrote: ‘Fait incroyable! l’État d’Israël n’a que vingt ans! Ce mois de Mai 68 est aussi l’anniversaire de cette naissance. (Incredible fact! The State of Israel is only 20 years old. This month of May ’68 is also the anniversary of this birth.) The following day, 25 May 1968, Calmis wrote: ‘Même jour = Je flotte, apaisée, esseulée; incapacité de coller au réel; incorrigible peintre, j’infuse de l’indigo: ma révolution à moi ! … - le présent bleu de ces journées de mer et de mes souvenirs de Paris ! (Same day = I float, peaceful, lonely: inability to stick to reality; incorrigible painter, I am soaked in indigo: my own revolution! … - the blue existing from these days at sea and from my memories of Paris). Ibid. 82 Pierre Brisset in Jan Cools, Simone Lacour (Tielt: Lanoo, 1998), p. 8. 83 Author interview with Simone Lacour, Paris, autumn 2006. 84 Françoise Picq, La Revue d’en face, no. 11 (1981), pp. 11–24. 85 Anne and Jacqueline, ‘D’un groupe à l’autre’, Partisans: L’année zéro, p. 194. 86 In the second round of elections on 30 June 1968, the Gaullists won 97 seats and the Independent Republicans gained 21 seats, while la Fédération de la gauche lost 61 seats and the Parti communiste (PCF) lost 39 seats. 87 Serge Bernstein and Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Pompidou Years: 1969–1974, trans. Christopher Woodall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 8. 88 Bernstein and Rioux, The Pompidou Years, p. 3. 89 ‘Entretien avec M. Edward Behr (Newsweek) 12 February 1970’, in Georges Pompidou, Entretiens et discours 1968–1974 (Paris: Éditions Plon, 1975), p. 28. 90 Bernstein and Rioux, The Pompidou Years, pp. 16–18. 91 ‘Dans l’Université, l’agitation persiste, elle ne demande qu’à exploser. Ici ou là, on amorce des revendications, on prépare des grèves, peut-être du désordre. Et, en tout cas, comment pourrait-on réaliser tout ce qu’il y a à faire s’il fallait se heurter à des difficultés politiques, à un gouvernement composé de bric

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et de broc, aller vers la dissolution, vers de nouvelles secousses, de nouveaux retards?’ ‘Discours prononcé à l’O.R.T.F. 16 mai 1969’, in Pompidou: Entretiens et discours, p. 27. (In the University, the agitation persists, just waiting to explode. Here and there, demands are initiated, strikes are prepared, perhaps even unrest. And, in any case, how could we achieve all that needs to be done if we had to face political difficulties, a motley government, a move toward dissolution, new shocks and delays?) 92 Bernstein and Rioux, The Pompidou Years, p. 16. 93 Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, ‘1969: année grise’, Opus International, no. 50 (May 1974), p. 34. The journal Opus International was founded in 1967 by Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, Alain Jouffroy, Jean-Clarence Lambert, Jean-Jacques Lévêque and Raoul-Jean Moulin, with the aim of introducing a maximum of artistic intentions and diversity of trends. Jean-Louis Pradel, ‘Le renouveau de la figuration: éléments d’une histoire’, in Bernard Ceysson et al., 25 Ans d’art en France: 1960–1985 (Paris: Larousse, 1986), pp. 107–154, p. 120. 94 Established as a ‘museum experiment’, ARC was designed to break radically with conservative institutions and create a vibrant forum of artistic freedom where art could deliberately challenge and provoke existing ideals. Pradel, ‘Le renouveau de la figuration’, ibid. 95 Many of the artists associated with Nouvelle Figuration participated in the Atelier Populaire de l’ex-École des Beaux-Arts: Aillaud, Alleaume, Arroyo, Biras, Fromanger, Jolivet, Le Parc, Merri, Rancillac, Rougemont, Tisserand, Vermès, Zeimert. 96 Seventeen members of the committee and the jury participated in producing ‘green’ works. The significance of the color green was a play on naturalism as well as a deliberate attack on the good taste upheld by the École de Paris. Pradel, ‘Le renouveau de la figuration’, pp. 112–113, p. 130. 97 Ibid., pp. 111–113. 98 Argentinian-born Carmen Gracia was also included in the show. Mythologies Quotidiennes was deliberate in its indefinability and in the methods used by various artists to capture reality. The show was simultaneously dedicated to the striking ‘image-choc’ in the stream of life and to the creation of a sense of ‘duration’ in a pictorial context, etc., at a time in which ‘daily reality became more and more complex and rich’ and the sanctification of goods and objects signaled a consumption that ‘traumatized’ man. Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, Mythologies Quotidiennes, exhibition catalogue, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1964. The show ran from July to October 1964. 99 Julia Kristeva, ‘Le Temps des femmes’, 34/44: Cahiers de recherche de sciences des textes et documents, no. 5 (Winter 1979), pp. 5–19, p. 7. 100 Niki de Saint Phalle’s Accouchement blanc was republished with the title GHEA in an important edition of the journal L’Humidité, no. 24 (Spring 1977), which featured work by a number of women artists, some of whom were: Raymonde Arcier, Colette Deblé, Mary Beth Edelson, Ruth Francken, Nicola [L.], Hannah Höch, and Collectif Femmes/Art whose manifesto was signed by Claudette Brun, Colette Deblé, Françoise Eliet, Monique Fryman

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[sic] Frydman, Christine Maurice and Michèle Herry. Niki de Saint Phalle was written about by Pierre Restany in ‘Bravo, Niki, tu peux continuer à tuer ton papa!,’ pp. 24–25, GHEA featured on p. 24. 101 Gassiot-Talabot, ‘1969: année grise’, p. 35. 102 Ibid. 103 Corinne Lyotard and Catherine Masson, ‘Une peinture ambivalente’, in Figurations 1960/1973, ed. Gérald Gassiot-Talabot et al. (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1973), pp. 239–297, p. 259. 104 A number of women on the French art scene had important exhibitions in Europe, in Paris and in the provinces in preceding years: Marta Pan in Maison de la Culture, Grenoble in 1967; Geneviève Asse at the Musée de Reims in 1968; Niki de Saint Phalle at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1967, and Kunstverein Museum, Düsseldorf in 1968; and German-born French photographer Gisèle Freund at ARC at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1968, to name a few. 105 René Barjavel, Les années de la lune: 1969–1970–1971 (Paris: Presses de la cité, 1972), p. 21. 106 Duchen, Women’s Rights, p. 201. See Linda J. Nicholson on the evolution of the slogan ‘the personal is political’ in ‘“The Personal is Political”: An Analysis in Retrospect’, Social Theory and Practice, vol. 7, no. 1 (Spring 1981), pp. 85–98. 107 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1 (1947/1958), trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1991), p. 129. Italics are Lefebvre’s. 108 Tronche, Gina Pane, pp. 22–23; pp. 33–34. 109 ‘Travaillant au sein d’une société et donc d’une histoire, Gina Pane a produit par les moyens de l’art des réflexions, des commentaires à propos d’événements portés par l’actualité sans pour autant valider le moindre discours politique. Affirmation du sujet, affirmation de la volonté et de la conscience individuelle, les installations qu’elle a ainsi conçues fixent des valeurs dans des énoncés métaphoriques jamais prescriptifs.’ Tronche, Gina Pane, pp. 24–25. (Working within a society and therefore within a history, Gina Pane produced by means of art, reflections, a commentary on news events without allegiance to any political discourse. As affirmations of the subject, affirmations of individual will and consciousness, Pane’s installations thus contain values in metaphorical statements that are never prescriptive.) 110 Jean-François Lyotard, Économie libidinale (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974). 111 Masson and Lyotard, ‘Une peinture ambivalente’, p. 267. 112 Ibid., p. 260. 113 Despite being forced to stay at home and look after their children during strikes that affected transport, for example, and the negative reaction at times of their male colleagues, ‘in certain industrial sectors, female participation rates exceeded those of their male counterparts: for instance, in both the textiles and manufactured electrical goods industries, 53 per cent of strikers were women while in the food industry, women accounted for 51 per cent of the strikeforce’. Wadia, ‘Women and the Events of May 1968’, p. 150.

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Oui, des petites femmes étaient en train de renverser l’ordre des choses. Il y avait dans notre mouvement une force et une joie capables de jeter à bas ce vieux monde agonisant fabriqué par les hommes. Nous étions les nouvelles sorcières. Anne Tristan [Anne Zelensky], 19771 Yes, ordinary women were reversing the order of things. Our movement had a force and a joy capable of throwing down this old dying world made by men. We were the new witches. Au fond pour moi, [la lutte des femmes] c’est la révolution culturelle de notre époque. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, 19782 In truth, I believe that it [the women’s struggle] is the cultural revolution of our times.

Introduction: the end of the Trente Glorieuses Like the steel-pointed silver blade that defines the image of Ruth Francken’s Lilith (1972), in the initial years following the MLF’s formation, the scissors on the naked torso of the woman suggest the militant schism between the societal and the feminine body (Figure 2.1). The feminist connotations are deepened by the Hebrew myth which signals female dissatisfaction with subservience to men that echo the nascent feminist movement in France. An MLF song written in the year of the movement’s birth defines the mood: ‘Le pouvoir est au bout du phallus / Dit celui qui écrit sur les murs / Je fais la révolution / Les femmes lui ont répondu / Ta révolution tu peux t’la foutre au cul / Elle fait pas jouir.’ 3 (The power is at the end of the phallus / Said the one who writes on the walls / I make the revolution / The women answered him / Your revolution you can fuck it in the ass / It does not pleasure us). Such stanzas confirm the MLF campaign of conscious attention-grabbing as a multisensory experience:

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Ruth Francken, Lilith, 1972.

demonstrations, songs, heightened visibility through marching in the streets, role-playing, posters, journals and publications, all created a grass-roots mobilization to effect change. Using photography, metal and canvas, Francken blends the traditional female nude (cropped in the manner of Man Ray’s torso of Lee Miller) with the Freudian ‘castrative’ threat of the scissors, in an ominous signal that ‘cuts’ the possessive male gaze, rendering the image both object and subject. The Czech Francken (living permanently in France since 1952) expressed her feminist sympathies as early as 1962 in comments noted in the margin of a book by critic Herbert Read: ‘Male? The twentieth century was perhaps male in painting. The twentieth century-and-a-half has decided, finally, not to leave space-time in the hands of men. I hope.’ 4 Hence the female body is the object of a subversive attempt to free itself through critique and, if need be, the aggressive action of both the feminist and the female artist. This ‘rupture’, or its latent possibility, signaled so artfully by the vertical descent of Francken’s poised scissors, marks the end of the period of prosperity known as Les trente glorieuses (analyzed in 1979), which commenced under de Gaulle, buckled under Pompidou and reached its conclusion in the middle of the 1970s under Giscard d’Estaing’s leadership.5 Woman, as the symbol of the nation-state of France, is most popularly symbolized by Marianne, who in 1969 (which Serge Gainsbourg labeled the ‘année érotique’) and throughout

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Brigitte Bardot as Marianne. Town hall statue sculpted by Aslan (Alain Gourdon), 1969/1970.

much of the 1970s was represented in town halls across France by the pulpeuse Brigitte Bardot of 1950s and 1960s fame (Figure 2.2).6 This was an irony not lost on the women of the MLF, who rewrote one of Bardot’s pop songs with the refrain, ‘La, la, la, C’est bon, c’est bon, c’est bon / De ne plus avoir un bonhomme sur le dos’ (La la la, it’s good, it’s good, it’s good / to no longer have a guy on your back).7 Even the Parti communiste was against the representation of Bardot as Marianne: ‘De toute façon Bardot n’appartient pas à notre camp, elle est le symbole décadent de la société de consommation’ (Anyway, Bardot does not belong to our camp, she is the decadent symbol of consumer society),8 stated one party member. The bust/breasts of Marianne as a traditional symbol of France’s prosperity and the nourishment of the patriarcat reflect a series of policies that were beginning to sour for women. (The threat of this scission can be seen in Francken’s scissors lying between the figure’s breasts.) The importance given to women’s role in repopulating the nation-state began with de Gaulle after the war, through expressed aims such as 100 million French people and mottos such as ‘Car la France a besoin de berceaux’ (Because France needs cradles).9 The slow push toward industrialization by the French before the war, compared to the Germans and British (who had a correspondingly rising birth rate), convinced the French that security and economic prosperity lay in increasing demographic growth.10 By the early 1970s, however, such family-focused policies were being attacked, including those proposed

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by former Gaullist prime minister and current defense minister Michel Debré, as mocked by the MLF in the aforementioned ‘cover’ of a Bardot hit:

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Debré nous n’te ferons plus d’enfants, non, non, non Pour faire de la chair à canon, non … S’abrutir à la production, oh non Et vive la contraception!11 Debré we will not make more children for you, no, no, no To make cannon fodder, no … To knock oneself out in production, oh no And long live contraception!

For thirty years, the Gaullist policy of expansion paid off in terms of an unprecedented economic growth rate. At the same time, many French people were reluctant to ‘believe’ in that prosperity, in spite of facts and statistics to the contrary. Historian Jean-Pierre Rioux points out that in annual polls between the years 1956 and 1969, a large majority of French claimed not to see any improvement in their standard of living or purchasing power; at best they admitted that it had not fallen.12 Such ‘blindness’ or stubbornness in part reflected a propensity to consume without fully accepting it; and a preference to focus less on things and more on ‘being’.13 In this light the MLF was a riposte to any policies that situated women as an object or a ‘thing’, as witnessed in the object saturation of Georges Perec’s Les choses (1965), and which reached a boiling point by 1970 with Jean Baudrillard’s clear rejection of societal consumerism in his La société de consommation. MLF resistance to the female body as a producer / object – ‘S’abrutir à la production, oh non / Et vive la contraception’ – can be seen as a challenge to the consumerism of the period. The opposition between bodies and/or being and objects recalls the careful juxtaposition of the female body and scissors of Francken’s Lilith produced in the same period. Bande à part: MLF and the feminist body What is perhaps most important to recognize about the radical militants of the Mouvement de libération des femmes is that they were not one sole group, as the name implies, but many diverse groups often ideologically at odds with each other and whose female membership aligned, unaligned or switched groups depending on their beliefs and engagement. The result was a fractured terrain, both on an individual and a group level, characterized at times by intense commitment and/or action leading to influential results followed by fallow periods of confusion, disorganization, wavering emotion and financial insecurity. (It is precisely these latter qualities and varying levels of commitment that lead critics to believe that the contributions of the MLF were

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overestimated, and this will be considered later in this book in terms both of its effects on women’s rights and on art.) This instability could also be due in part to the radical changes of lifestyle and experimentation which the more radical groups demanded: divorce, female-only partners, childlessness, long hours of commitment and so on. Culturally, however, the MLF was mythic. Inspired by the events of May ’68 in a way their male counterparts could not sustain, women militants through acts, discourse, song, words and images began to bombard society (some felt too aggressively) and define their own territories and freedoms by and through their bodies. The second most important fact is that although it was a political movement, members of the MLF were often indifferent to, but not unaware of, what was happening around them politically.14 Against a political landscape that, narrowly at times, failed to bring the left into a dominant position (in the 1974 presidential elections and 1978 legislative elections, effectively ending la vague rose (the pink wave) of the 1977 municipal elections), the women’s movement – though aided by this wave – stood independently by retreating to ‘female only’ concerns and the desire to be in a position of wider influence. Simone de Beauvoir writes of militant radicals Anne Zelensky (born in Morocco, lived in Ivory Coast) and Annie Sugier (partly raised in Argentina and Brazil), who were key founders/writers of the movement(s): On a reproché parfois à Anne et à Annie leur apolitisme, c’est-à-dire leur désintérêt pour la politique des hommes. Mais c’est précisément parce qu’elles n’étaient enfermées dans aucun parti, parce que aucune idéologie ne les aveuglait qu’elles ont pu justement apprécier la valeur subversive d’un engagement féministe.15 Anne and Annie have been criticized sometimes for being apolitical, or rather for their disinterest in the politics of men. But it is precisely because they were not locked into any party, because they were not blinded by any ideology, that they could fully appreciate the subversive value of feminist engagement.

This ‘apolitisme’ often did not sit well with other feminists who had strong communist alliances and believed deeply that class struggle must be included in gender struggle (or even take precedence over them (Elles voient rouge)), or others who felt that members had to be psychoanalyzed before entering the movement (Psychanalyse et Politique group). Believing that it was a virtue to be less engaged with political discourse, some members resisted ‘male’ political movements in favor of trying to find a ‘women’s-only voice’. But this also led to enormous disorganization, revealed obvious disparities in education (which often led to the strongest women always speaking) and caused abrupt ruptures within the movement, leading to fragmentation into ‘groupuscules’.16

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(In fact, some of the biggest names responsible for women’s liberation in the 1970s, Gisèle Halimi and Françoise Giroud, were intensely disliked and seen as sell-outs by the radical MLF. Only the eminent Simone de Beauvoir, author of Le deuxième sexe, seemed to be able to cross both lines.)17 Militant women who ‘lived’ 1968 used the events as a catalyst through which to build their own movement and had little to do with Michel Crozier’s société bloquée since for most women, historically, society was continuously blocked by male authority. What the militant women did possess (when organized) was tremendous energy as well as creative ways in which to unleash it. The rise of the MLF: 1970–1975 On the day of American women’s organized protest march, 26 August 1970, a small group of French women, in a show of solidarity with their US counterparts, met at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris to lay a wreath with a banner that stated: ‘Il y a plus inconnu que le soldat inconnu: sa femme’ (There is someone more unknown than the unknown soldier: his wife) (Figure 2.3).18 Composed of a few key members – variously identified as Cathy Bernheim, Monique Bourroux, Julie Dassin, Christine Delphy, Emmanuelle de Lesseps, Christiane Rochefort, Janine Sert, Margaret Stephenson, Monique Wittig, Anne Zelensky, and others including possibly Frédérique Daber – these women kindled the flame to create the group that journalists the next day labeled the MLF, or the Mouvement de libération des femmes.19 Stealing attention and drawing public visibility to their cause was orchestrated with literary verve, subversive wit and concrete action. (Not all militants were pleased, however. At the General Assembly held at the École des Beaux-Arts that September, other women denounced the act as apolitical, ‘spectaculaire’

Laying of the Wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, 26 August 1970.

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and ‘petite-bourgeoise’.)20 The incident was reported by journalists the following day in newspapers such as the mass market International Herald Tribune, which announced one arrest and described the seven [sic] women as ‘supporters of the U.S. Women’s Liberation Movement’, while the left-wing paper Combat noted the solidarity of the act with American feminists and labeled the women militants the ‘Mouvement de libération de la femme française’.21 Such incidents attest to the fundamental roots the movement shared with the American feminists, whose own activism had grown out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Some French women, who had discovered these movements shortly after May ’68 when they ventured to California and witnessed Vietnam War protests and encountered American feminists, returned to France to seek others with similar political views.22 Protest acts, like the laying of the wreath, were already in evidence in the United States. The enormously popular Miss America pageant in Atlantic City had been disrupted for the last two years, and the Miss World pageant in London was to be bombed in November.23 However, the act at the Arc de Triomphe took on a decidedly French character through its symbolic attack on, and calling into question of, France’s beloved military monuments (and de Gaulle’s recent legacy): the Arc de Triomphe and the ‘soldat inconnu’. Following the events of 1968, the women’s movement drew more energy. Groups such as Féminin Masculin Avenir (FMA) had existed since 1967 as an offshoot of the previous Mouvement démocratique féminin (MDF). Founded by Anne Zelensky and Jacqueline Feldman, it was composed of six regular members: Anne, Jacqueline, Emmanuelle de Lesseps, Christine Delphy and two male partners Roger and Charlie – who were later expelled to make it a women-only group in 1970.24 (Anne had been coerced into attempting to run as a candidate for the socialist party, FGDS, Fédération de la gauche démocrate et socialiste [to which the FMA officially belonged], which ultimately lost the election. Nonetheless in Partisans she interestingly places the roots of women’s movements firmly in a socialist context.)25 What began as fortnightly meetings of the FMA in the École des Beaux-Arts to discuss the evolving movement rapidly faced power struggles between its growing membership over class and gender issues.26 In May, the communist vehicle L’Idiot International pointed out how the capitalist system oppressed women through ‘false’ liberations by new domestic technology – ‘Moulinex libère la femme’ (Moulinex liberates women) – that at the same time kept them isolated in the home away from other men and women: ‘Dans la famille, l’homme est le bourgeois; la femme, le prolétaire’ (In the family, man is the bourgeois; woman, the proletarian).27 The cover of the journal featured a shouting Marianne with a communist insignia on her trademark Phrygian cap and its articles were interspersed with quotations from Friedrich Engels, Friedrich Nietzsche and August Bebel and writing by Monique Wittig and Antoinette Fouque (Figure 2.4).28 The latter two eventually met with the FMA and created a group which then split into

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Cover of l’Idiot International, May 1970.

three factions due to aggressive and incessant infighting between its members, which resulted in ‘clans’ forming around three women, Christine Delphy of the FMA, Antoinette Fouque (later Psychanalyse et Politique) and Monique Wittig (who formed the lesbian Gouines Rouges (1971) and later Féministes Révolutionnaires), along the divides of feminism and/or class struggle.29 États Généraux de la Femme Monique Wittig in the autumn of 1970 created a separate group called Petites Marguerites that intended to stage a disruption of the events at États Généraux de la Femme, which was organized by Elle magazine at the Palais des Congrès à Versailles on 20–22 November 1970.30 Such mainstream attempts as the États Généraux de la Femme to analyze the situation of women through topics such as ‘L’amour’, ‘La beauté/la mode’, ‘Le couple’, ‘L’éducation’, ‘La féminité’, ‘L’instinct maternel’, ‘La santé’, ‘Le travail ménager’ and ‘La vie culturelle’ were rejected outright by the burgeoning MLF movement. In a press release dated November 1970, the MLF women rebelled against the tendency to homogenize ‘women’ or to allow themselves to be controlled by what they considered ‘interrogating bodies’: Nous sommes ici pour dénoncer la campagne des États Généraux de la Femme lancée par le journal ‘Elle’, lequel s’arroge le droit de représenter toutes les

The MLF 1970s

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femmes à travers un questionnaire qui est une manipulation pour canaliser et récupérer la rébellion de toutes les femmes; pour tuer dans l’œuf toute tentative de regroupement et désamorcer l’inévitable révolte collective des femmes. … Ils essayent d’imposer l’idée que ces concepts appartiennent à la ‘nature éternelle de la femme’, ce que nous contestons violemment. LA FEMME n’existe pas, c’est une des créations du patriarcat destinées à écraser les femmes.31 We are here to denounce the campaign of the États Généraux de la Femme initiated by the magazine Elle, which wrongly assumes the right to represent all women through a manipulative questionnaire designed to control and appropriate the rebellion of all women; to nip in the bud any attempt to regroup and defuse the inevitable collective revolt of women. … They try to impose the belief that these concepts belong to the ‘eternal nature of the woman’, which we vehemently contest. THE WOMAN does not exist, it’s one of patriarchy’s creations designed to crush women.

Mainstream events such as Elle’s campaign, which gathered 325 delegates from all regions of France as well as representatives of political parties (including Independent Republicans, PCF, PS [Parti socialiste], Catholic groups, women’s political groups and various unions), made a point of focusing on ‘concrete’ issues, not militant ones. The MLF believed that such compromises were an injustice to women, and resisted all attempts to make them mainstream through radical tactics like disrupting the journalists’ cocktails on the eve of the assembly and disdaining the ‘pseudo-liberté’ proposed by ‘Moulinex, Chaban-Delmas, le parti communiste et consorts’.32 The leftist vehicle Combat also attacked Jacques Chaban-Delmas (who inaugurated the event) and his nouvelle société (New Society) for trying to draw in women as a vote-getting ploy once he realized the growing political importance of the women’s movement in the United States.33 Certain members of the PCF objected to Elle’s program, as much as Chaban-Delmas’s nouvelle société, for fear of losing the movement and its class differentiations (especially for Algerians and other women immigrants) before it was even defined: En France vivent d’autres femmes, étrangères celles-là, et qui ne lisent pas ‘Elle’. Espagnoles, italiennes, algériennes, portugaises, marocaines, polonaises, tunisiennes, belges, noires africaines, yougoslaves, venues avec leurs parents, maris, enfants, elles forment un contingent de plus de 200,000 personnes, sur les trois millions d’étrangers vivant sur notre territoire.34 Other women live in France, foreigners, who do not read Elle. Spanish, Italian, Algerian, Portuguese, Moroccan, Polish, Tunisian, Belgian, black African, Yugoslavian, these women came over with their parents, husbands, children. They form a contingent of more than 200,000 people of the three million foreigners living in our land.

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The Parti communiste reacted publicly to the États Généraux with a highprofile article in Le Monde, strongly urging the party not to divide along gender lines, but to remain true to the support of the as yet unresolved class struggle.35 Georges Marchais, representing the PCF, was amongst those who spoke at the États Généraux and had his remarks published the next day in L’Humanité.36 This voice of dissent was not just evidenced by political parties, but by key women intellectuals, such as Françoise Giroud, who were strongly against the rogue women of the MLF (after their protest at the Arc de Triomphe). Giroud believed the women were too blindly following the US example without looking at the national character, such as the inherently balanced ‘friendship’ of men and women in France: L’insurrection nationale organisée la semaine dernière par des femmes américaines est très généralement accueillie par les Français comme un sujet négligeable. … Nous n’en aurons ici qu’un écho – ou une parodie – très assourdi. Intriguées et rétractées tout à la fois, toujours réservées à l’égard des mouvements féminins quel que soit leur objet, les Françaises ont peu de goût pour la guerre des sexes. Leur répugnance devant les coalitions féminines dirigées contre les hommes a une cause profonde que l’on nous permettra de trouver réjouissante. C’est que dans leur majorité les Français aiment les femmes et les Françaises aiment les hommes.37 The national insurgency organized last week by American women is largely considered by the French to be unimportant. … We will have here only an echo – or a parody – very faint. Intrigued and repelled at the same time, which is always the case for female movements whatever their cause, French women have little appetite for the war of the sexes. Their disgust for women’s coalitions directed against men has a deep-seated reason that we can celebrate. The majority of French men like women and French women like men.

The right-wing newspaper Le Figaro pointed out at the beginning of 1971 that the government opposed any potential feminist movements in France for their tendency to vote ‘to the left’ and that, unlike in America, feminism in France was a ‘cholera’ outbreak that was both limited and contained.38 The French paradox, and de Gaulle’s legacy of anti-Americanism, was not necessarily widely held despite Pompidou’s successful trip to the United States in February during which he insisted on France’s continued influence, or ‘presence’, in regional concerns such as Europe and North Africa and avoided committing to any one model during the Cold War era.39 Popular magazines like MarieClaire also criticized radical French women for blindly subscribing to the American model where the situation was ‘beaucoup plus défavorable que celle

The MLF 1970s

des Françaises et expliquait en partie leur rébellion’ (much more unfavorable than that of French women and partly explained their rebellion).40

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‘Notre ventre nous appartient’ In the spring of 1971, due in part to the efforts of Christine Delphy, Antoinette Fouque, Anne Zelensky and others, abortion was made the central issue for the MLF. (The United Kingdom, with the exception of Northern Ireland, had legalized abortion through the Abortion Act in 1967, which at the time, was amongst the most progressive in Europe.) What must not be overlooked is how France’s prosperity and economic interests competed with women’s sensitivity toward their role in that production, through population growth. The MLF directly attacked the ‘bourgeois state’ for reserving the right to not make contraception affordable for the poor (in order to keep the capitalist system running), while the bourgeois could use contraception and control pregnancies in order to send ‘rare enfants à Polytechnique ou à l’ENA, parce qu’appartement dix pièces seulement’ (rare children to the Polytechnique or ENA, because the apartment’s only got ten rooms).41 This use of feminism to highlight the class struggle and the injustice in values that gave only women who could afford abortions the right to them was a motivating force behind the manifesto published in Le Nouvel Observateur on 5 April 1971, the ‘Manifeste des 343’.42 This was a statement, ‘Je déclare que je suis l’une d’elles. Je déclare avoir avorté’ (I declare that I am one of them. I declare that I had an abortion), signed by 343 women – high-profile actresses, writers, artists, journalists, filmmakers, radicals and everyday women – criticizing the unsafe and unfair conditions for women’s abortions: Un million de femmes se font avorter chaque année en France. Elles le font dans des conditions dangereuses en raison de la clandestinité à laquelle elles sont condamnées, alors que cette opération, pratiquée sous contrôle médical, est des plus simples. On fait le silence sur ces millions de femmes.43 One million women have abortions every year in France. Women have them in dangerous conditions because of the clandestine nature of the procedure to which they are condemned, whereas this operation when performed under medical supervision is very simple. We remain silent about these millions of women.

The manifesto came into existence through the efforts of ‘Jean’ at Le Nouvel Observateur, who suggested an abortion feature with celebrity signatures. The message was conveyed to Anne Zelensky, who at the Assemblée Générale encountered strong reactions against the ‘presse bourgeoise’, etc., but

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eventually appointed Simone de Beauvoir, Christiane Rochefort and Christiane ‘D.’ to collect the signatures.44 Luminaries such as Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène de Beauvoir, Iris Clert, Marie Dedieu, Catherine Deneuve, Marguerite Duras, Françoise d’Eaubonne, Françoise Fabian, Antoinette Fouque, Gisèle Halimi, Bona de Mandiargues, Ariane Mnouchkine, Jeanne Moreau, Françoise Sagan, Delphine Seyrig and Agnès Varda signed the document, and came under intense scrutiny by the more radical members of the MLF who vehemently protested the use of ‘stars’ or ‘sales vedettes’ (seedy stars) to draw attention to their cause.45 The article garnered significant attention for the nascent movement as well as for the newly formed Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement (MLA), and received coverage in the international press. The American Newsweek, for example, signaled the mounting pressures unique to France: combined government and church criminalization of abortion; the beheading of Marie-Louise Giraud on 30 July 1943; neighbors such as the UK and Switzerland with legal procedures; and the number of illegal abortions performed each year in France, which Le Nouvel Observateur claimed was 1,000,000 but Newsweek suggested was more likely to be 250,000 or more.46 Abortion was the unifying issue for a women’s movement still deeply factionalized and divided between the politics of class, race and action. The groups continued to meet at the Assemblé Générale at the École des BeauxArts every Thursday evening at 6.30 and received record numbers of both women and men who wanted to sign the document in support of abortion rights.47 With power in the movement shifting as the momentum increased, the groups began to splinter. Tunisian-born lawyer Gisèle Halimi immediately formed the group Choisir, which was an idea that came from Christiane Rochefort, with Simone de Beauvoir as president in order to focus on the legalization of abortion and allow women to publicly ‘testify’ about their abortion experiences.48 There was no love lost between Halimi and the wider MLF movement, however.49 She lamented the disorganization of the group in general and the time wasted in allowing everyone a point of view, and she publicly criticized them in her book, La cause des femmes (1973): Au cours des réunions dominicales de Choisir, des clivages se sont rapidement fait jour … Je ne veux pas sottement schématiser … Mais il est vrai que beaucoup d’heures ont été consacrées au plaisir ‘vaginal’ opposé – politiquement! – au plaisir ‘clitoridien’, tandis que les ‘révolutionnaires’ remettaient, à tout instant, en cause le principe même d’un siège social, d’une ‘direction nationale’, d’une ‘hiérarchie discriminatoire’ et, confortablement installées dans les fauteuils de mon salon d’attente, exigeaient à chaque phrase, que ‘la parole soit rendue aux masses’.50 During Choisir’s Sunday meetings, divisions quickly emerged … I don’t want to stupidly generalize … But it is true that many hours were devoted

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to ‘vaginal’ pleasure in opposition – politically! – to ‘clitoral’ pleasure, while the ‘revolutionaries’ questioned, at all times, the very principle of a head office, of a ‘National Directorate’, of a ‘discriminatory hierarchy’ and, comfortably installed in the armchairs of my waiting room, demanded with each sentence, that ‘speech be given back to the masses’.

The dynamic events of 1971 led to a number of partisan groups being formed around the three main trends, or courants, of the MLF movement: the courant féministe radical, the courant psychanalyse et politique and the courant lutte de classes (radical feminist trend, psychoanalysis and politics trend and class struggle trend). Some of the main developments in 1971 were in the radical feminist category: the creation of the lesbian Gouines Rouges (Red Dykes) in March and the Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement (MLA) in April, along with the FHAR or Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire which was composed of both men and women and had formed earlier in February. Choisir was also established for women and men in 1971, and the movement of the ‘lutte de classes’ was created around the Marxist Cercle Elisabeth Dimitriev in the same year. Laissez-les-vivre versus MLF The Catholic Church also formed a group in January 1971: Laissez-les-vivre (founded by Paul Chauchard, François Delibes, Jean-Bernard Grenouilleau and Geneviève Poullot) was the first organization in France to protect the life of the unborn child. Faced with a progressive decline in church attendance since May ’68 and increasing secularization, for the Church the battle against abortion was important in terms of its presence in the political arena as well as to secure the life of the child, as decreed by the Vatican. Since May ’68 the Church’s values had been called into question by anti-authoritarian and antipatriarchal elements in society. In a flyer during the events of May ’68 the priests defended themselves: Solidaires de la population de nos quartiers, et acceptant d’être remis en question par elle, nous estimons, nous, prêtres, qu’à une heure où un souffle nouveau passe sur notre pays, nous ne pouvons pas nous taire. C’est toute une conception paternaliste et autoritaire de la politique, de l’Économie, de l’Université, qui est remise en cause. Nous savons que l’Église n’échappe pas à cette critique. Nous contestons aujourd’hui, dans tous les domaines, la façon dont on pense et décide pour nous.51 In solidarity with the population of our neighborhoods, and by our acceptance to be challenged by them, we, priests, believe that at a time when a new wave passes through our country, we cannot remain silent.

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It’s the very paternalistic and authoritarian conception of politics, economics and university that is being questioned. We know that the Church does not escape this criticism. Today, we contest, in every area, the way in which our thoughts and decisions are made for us.

For the Church, women played an important role. The priests were reluctant to lose more women supporters and needed to be agile; at once sensitive to their needs, yet faithful to the dictates of religion. The radical women of the MLF, on the other hand, were notorious for disrupting marriage ceremonies in churches around Paris by shouting for the liberation of the bride – Libérez la mariée! – from her domestic servitude and domination by the male partner.52 Françoise Picq records one of the exchanges that took place between a curate and the MLF at the Église Saint-Ambroise during the protests to legalize abortion on 20 November 1971 in Paris: –Vous n’avez rien à dire, vous L’Église, vous avez toujours rejeté et méprisé les femmes! –C’est vrai, mais ça va changer. –Alors, on pourra être pape? –Voyons – ça non … ce n’est pas possible. –Alors tant pis! Adieu.53 –You have nothing to say, you the Church, you who have always rejected and despised women! –That’s true, but it will change. – Then can we be pope? – Let’s see – that no … that’s not possible. –Then too bad! Goodbye.

Organized by the MLF, Choisir and the MLA, the abortion rally at 2 p.m. on Saturday, 20 November in the Place de la République, was the largest of its kind, with approximately 4,000 people in attendance (see Preface).54 Designed to be a public ‘spectacle’ to legitimate the presence of the MLF, brightly colored balloons, banners, as well as women dressed as priests, judges, bosses and doctors and (desired) children filled the public square. The non-televised events focused on spontaneous, joyful action in the streets and a series of visual and aural tactics: colorful dress, slogans, songs and actions. A wooden coffin marked with the slogan ‘Des milliers de femmes par an victimes de l’avortemement [sic] clandestin en France’ (Thousands of women, each year, victims of clandestine abortions in France) was burned, to the delight of the spectators (Figure 2.5).55 The ‘spontaneous’ nature of the events on 20 November gained visibility (and notoriety) for the MLF but did not confront specific issues. After eight months of preparation and difficulties with location fees, the events organized at La Mutualité on 13 and 14 May 1972, under the title ‘Journées

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MLF Demonstration, 20 November 1971.

2.5

Events at La Mutualité, 13–14 May 1972.

2.6

de Dénonciation des Crimes Contre les Femmes’, attempted to tackle politically such diverse issues facing women as ‘Le travail’, ‘La vie sexuelle’, ‘La maternité’, ‘Le viol’ and ‘Le conditionnement’ (des femmes depuis l’enfance) (Work, Sexual Life, Motherhood, Rape, and Conditioning (of women since childhood)).56 The speeches were envisaged as spontaneously ‘prepared’ testimony, although conflicts between the MLF and Gisèle Halimi (representing Choisir) ultimately led to her withdrawal.57 Open to women of all ages and backgrounds, participants were invited to speak about their life experiences through any means of expression they chose – films, slides, records, drawings, sketches, diaries – in an attempt to free their experience and expression (Figure 2.6).58 Only men, who made up only a small percentage of the 4,000

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attendees, had to pay an entry fee and were denied a ‘voice’ in the proceedings.59 The well-organized events included a crèche (run by men and women) for children, the sale of MLF records and books, copies of Le Torchon brûle and Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères. The surrounding walls were filled with collages, banners and scenes from daily life, and in a projection room films on women were shown, including an ‘eight-minute abortion’ video from New York (based on the Karman method, a simple aspiration method named for a California doctor that had been invented twelve years earlier in China). This created an atmosphere of solidarity, celebration, information and consumerism that complemented the incessant debates in the main hall.60 Dedicated to exposing the ‘crimes’ against women – thus presenting them as ‘victims’ – the international proceedings gave voice to many women of different classes and ages. Such was the success of the event that plans were made for a Centre des Femmes to be constructed in the future.61 Politics: domestic and foreign While the MLF was trying to reorganize and decide how to proceed in the future, after the progress made at La Mutualité, on 27 June 1972 the PCF and PS published their Programme commun de gouvernement du parti communiste français et du parti socialiste. For the MLF, the revolutionary question of their movement was at stake: ‘En fait, à travers le Centre, se posait pour la première fois, la difficulté de mettre sur pied une organisation “révolutionnaire” dans un contexte et avec des mentalités qui ne l’étaient pas’ (In fact, it was with the Centre that the difficulty of setting up a ‘revolutionary’ organization within a context and with mindsets that were not so, first emerged).62 As far as the Communist Party was concerned it had addressed the lives of women, if briefly, in the outline of its new policies. The platform Changer de Cap: programme pour un gouvernement démocratique d’union populaire adopted by the PCF on 9 October 1971, had only two out of 242 pages dedicated to women.63 Women were made more ‘comfortable’ by certain measures, but only in terms of the mother’s role: ‘Le travail, la promotion d’accord, mais les enfants d’abord. Nous voulons nos 100 millions de petits Français’ (Work, promotion ok, but children first. We want our 100 million French kids).64 The Programme commun published in June addressed legalized abortion (but not as a form of birth control) in the section on the family, and included in Chapter IX, ‘La promotion de la femme’, the promotion of women in economic, social, cultural and political life through new laws, concrete measures and material means in order for women to attain equality in work, society and the family.65 This included the right to divorce by mutual consent, equal pay, a sixteen-week maternity leave, financial aid for childcare, special leave for a parent with a sick child, and so forth. In terms of the family, priority was given to building

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1,000 crèches and providing widespread information on contraception and responsible abortion, amongst other things.66 The Maoists, however, looked to other political models. The condition of women under Mao in China was brought to notice a year earlier with the publication of Maria Antonietta Macciocchi’s Daily Life in Revolutionary China (1971), which studied the role of women and the impact of their ideological influence.67 Women expressed the desire for revolution (and for their children to continue the revolution) while admitting tensions between the ‘old and the new’ within the family.68 Mao took an interest in the US and European women’s liberation movements and was staunch in his defense of women’s rights in China as ‘revolutionary’ – for women were the most ‘exploited’ of all of those exploited, he claimed – but he also recognized on other occasions that the situation was slow to change. In rural areas, for example, where boys were still more desired than girls, Mao admitted that attitudes would take time to evolve: ‘Mao has expressed very strongly his wish that women achieve total, not merely legal, equality, an equality born of a revolution in the condition of humankind.’ 69 The differences in women’s societal role, culture and rights in Chinese society were discussed a few years later by Julia Kristeva (a member of the pro-Maoist Tel Quel group) in her book Des Chinoises, based on her experiences in China in April and May 1974. Kristeva nonetheless recognized the pitfalls of trying to relate the condition of Chinese women to that of women in the Western world: Souvent me domine l’impression que leurs problèmes, aux Chinoises, sortant du confucianisme et du féodalisme, n’ont rien à voir avec les nôtres, coincés dans le monothéisme et le capitalisme. … Quels rapports entre nos saintes ou nos révolutionnaires et ces femmes aux pieds bandés, ces concubines ou ces taoïstes guerrières?70 Often I have the impression that the problems of Chinese women, arising as they do from feudalism and Confucianism, have nothing to do with ours, which are stuck between monotheism and capitalism … What relation is there between our saints and revolutionaries and these women with bound feet, these concubines, these Taoist warriors?

The book examined the historically central role of the mother in China; Confucianism; the roots of socialism and feminism; women’s role within the Communist Party; and marriage law, as well as including individual interviews. It was published amid some controversy, however, as Antoinette Fouque demanded a stronger ‘feminist’ political agenda for the book to be brought out by her publishing house des femmes.71 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak would later challenge Kristeva’s book and the focus on rural women and traditional culture in China as reinforcing first world hegemonies and biases.72 The Maoist Tel Quel group during this period was strongly at odds with the PCF.

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Feminist politics were also spreading in Western Europe. The first woman political appointee in Western Germany, Hildegard Bartels, made headlines for being named president of the Federal Office of Statistics in March 1972.73 Later that year, Annemarie Renger was elected president of the Bundestag in Bonn and Katharina Focke became minister of health.74 In Belgium, the popular and influential Le petit livre rouge des femmes was published in Brussels. In Italy the historical women’s movement UDI (Unione Donne Italiane), composed of mainly communist adherents, took a radical feminist turn with the development of the MLD, or the Movimento di Liberazione della Donna, which was created in 1970 and held its first congress for the legalization of abortion in 1971.75 In October and November 1972 France experienced, with Gisèle Halimi at the helm, its first and only ‘political’ (as opposed to ‘criminal’) trial for abortion at Bobigny, at which the intention was to present for public debate facts on contraception, sexual education, clandestine abortions, legislation, single motherhood, and scientific, political, judicial and social aspects of abortion.76 Bobigny The trial revolved around Marie-Claire Chevalier, a 16-year-old who was raped and made pregnant by an acquaintance, Daniel. Marie-Claire decided that she wanted to terminate the pregnancy. With the price of abortions too costly at the gynecologist, Marie-Claire was forced to undergo a clandestine abortion (at a fraction of the price) at her home. The procedure was botched and she spent three days in hospital at further expense. When Daniel learned of the abortion he told the police, who then arrested both a bedridden Marie-Claire and her mother. The trial was held in public, and the mass media attention alerted France to the fact that previously shameful ‘clandestine abortions’ and abortion procedures could be made open, public knowledge. (At one point the president even asked if a speculum was something that was put in the mouth.77) The verdict was a small fine to be paid by the mother and MarieClaire, and the abortionist was acquitted. The larger result was the overturning of the 1920 law criminalizing abortion (enacted in part due to the loss of life during World War I) which had brought the death by guillotine of abortionist Marie-Louise Giraud under the Pétain government in 1943; and others who had been arrested over the years for complicity in illegal abortions. This outcome created what appeared to be a clear victory for Halimi and the women’s movement. However, the MLF was deeply critical of Halimi’s role in the trial and her privileging of a ‘lutte de classe’ over a ‘lutte des femmes’, by suppressing the testimony of a bourgeoise who claimed she had abortions ‘without drama’ since they had money to pay for them.78 The division created deep resentment

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within the movement. Simone de Beauvoir publicly sided with the MLF and resigned as President of Choisir because of the suppression of the bourgeois woman’s testimony, questioning Halimi’s ‘convictions’ vis-à-vis the organization.79 (In a rebuttal, Halimi tried to defend herself by pointing out that the political nature of her personal beliefs had led to her arrest in May 1958 as a lawyer to the FLN (Front de libération nationale), and that it had always been part of her daily life and practice to fight oppression in all forms.)80 The tension between feminism based on class politics versus feminism based on shared women’s struggle remained at the forefront of the movement. One way in which to align women to the movement was through their shared experience in the legalization of abortion (which the MLF feared Halimi was trying to undermine).81 In December 1973 these issues came to the fore, when the government launched an official inquiry at the Assemblée Nationale in an attempt to delay Pompidou’s constitutional reforms, as reported by articles in the mainstream press.82 (Pompidou personally declared himself ‘repulsed’ by the abortion question during the Bobigny trial, although Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Jacques Duhamel were more politically open to the issue.)83 Earlier, on 5 February 1973, the ‘Manifeste des 331’ was published in Le Nouvel Observateur which included the name of 331 people who had performed or aided in abortions.84 (See Chapter 3.) (This was only a few weeks after the 22 January decision in the United States on Roe v. Wade which legalized abortion during the first three months of pregnancy.) A new group, the Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement et de la contraception, or MLAC, was also formed in April 1973, with the aim of legalizing abortion. It was composed of men and women belonging to a number of groups such as family planning, health care, the signatories of the ‘Manifeste des 331’, student associations, as well as groups on the extreme left such as Lutte ouvrière, la Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, l’Alliance marxiste révolutionnaire, Révolution, and family and union associations of the PSU (Parti socialiste unifié).85 This mixed alliance created momentum in the spring by illegally screening a film banned by the government, Histoires d’A (1973) by directors Charles Belmont and Marielle Issartel, in university departments and in various quartiers in Paris and thus drawing more attention to it. The film’s poster had art by Monique Frydman (see Chapter 5) (Figure 2.7).86 Attitudes were beginning to change and support was growing for the legalization of abortion. In May 1973, when Dr Annie Ferrey-Martin, an abortionist, was arrested by the police in Grenoble, 10,000 people poured into the streets to support her, declaring: ‘Nous sommes tous des avorteurs’ (We are all abortionists).87 However, not all militants were happy with this development. The allfemale, subversive MLF resented the arrival on the scene of the mixed gender (and, relatively speaking, more conservative) MLAC. The latter group subtly changed the emphasis in abortion away from women and toward social and class problems, thus negating the ‘female’ element. For the MLF, the abortion

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Film poster for Histoires d’A.

question was critical to a woman’s identity, or ‘une clef à partir de laquelle entrevoir l’ensemble de la question des femmes, de leur rôle dans la société, dans le système de reproduction, dans la sexualité, dans le rapport entre hommes et femmes’ (a lens through which one could view the whole question of women, their role in society, reproductive system, sexuality, and the relationship between men and women).88 Foire des femmes Aside from the abortion issue, the MLF was still creating its own mythology. Earlier, in March 1973, it had decided to organize a ‘foire des femmes’ in place of the Centre des femmes envisaged at La Mutualité, for which there was no money.89 Women would be able to use all their creative energies to express their identity at the Foire. A preliminary event was held at the Centre Protestant de la villa Montsouris in Paris.90 About 100 women between the ages of 19 and 30 were involved in the preparation of the space with poems, sketches, plays and songs, and with large blank sheets of white paper for spontaneous writing or drawing.91 A reporter for L’Express noted that ‘C’est aujourd’hui la première fois qu’elles osent proclamer qu’il leur est impossible de créer en tant que femmes’ 92 (Today is the first time they have dared to declare that it is impossible for them to create as women). The larger event was later held at la Cartoucherie de Vincennes in June of that year (Figure 2.8).

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La foire des femmes, 1973.

In a tract the MLF expressed the significance of women’s ‘creativity’, which the MLF felt was key to their identity and one of the hallmarks of liberation: [La Foire pourquoi?] Parce que la foire c’est foutre en l’air les produits finis, bien léchés, cloisonnés, consommables de l’art bourgeois. Ce sera une prise de parole collective, où l’art n’est plus coupé de notre réalité de femmes en lutte!93 [Why the fair?] Because the fair is to screw up the finished, overly polished, precious, consumable products of bourgeois art. It will be a collective way of speaking up, where art is no longer cut off from our reality of the women’s struggle!

In a critique, another militant woman wrote that one of the successes of the event was the liberation of this ‘creative’ spark by women as proof of their revolt: Nous avons également fait la preuve que la création n’est pas réservée à des spécialistes solitaires et ‘illuminés’. Il a fallu qu’on se retrouve, qu’on se reconnaisse pour oser s’exprimer à partir de ce qui nous motive, c’est-à-dire notre réalité de femmes en lutte.94 We have also demonstrated that creation is not reserved for solitary and ‘enlightened’ experts. It was necessary to find ourselves, to recognize in ourselves a daring for self-expression coming from what motivates us, by that I mean, our reality of women’s struggle.

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This creative space established an imaginative way in which to battle the centralized power of an elite art world, through liberated expression that also formed a radical basis of (female) identity. This identity – which resisted the pull toward class struggle into which women were, some felt, too easily led – was created through the use of the body.95 In 1972 Le Torchon brûle had published an article called Le pouvoir du con, covering topics such as ‘Le con est beau’, ‘Les arts et réflexes du plaisir’, and ‘La médecine orientée par des mâles’ (Plate 14). Explicitly detailed, it had resulted in charges of pornography being brought against the authors (see Chapter 4).96 Written by two women from Psychanalyse et Politique, the issue created severe disagreement between the general MLF and Antoinette Fouque and Psych et Po – the latter of whom maintained an absolute silence over it.97 Annie Sugier and others wanted to use the opportunity to publicly clarify ‘the confusions that were voluntarily assumed between pornography and liberation’.98 However, as Le Torchon brûle was written collectively – without signatures or specific authorship for the articles – the pornography charge was dropped.99 (Both issues, creation and the sexual body, as forms of women’s artistic and political identity will be explored in Chapters 3 and 4.) Body politics The agenda for women was set early in 1974, with the announcement in January of the United Nations’ international L’Année de la femme in 1975. Dedicated to ‘L’égalité, le développement et la paix’ (Equality, development and peace) the program was designed to ‘promouvoir une meilleure intégration des femmes dans la vie économique et sociale’ (promote better integration of women into economic and social life).100 For women, this international focus underlined the policies that were beginning to gain political attention domestically. With the death of Georges Pompidou on 2 April, the year was dominated by the presidential campaign and election, which the conservative party candidate, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, won in an extremely tight race with socialist François Mitterrand. The female electorate supported Giscard d’Estaing in his bid for presidency with his promises of both ‘respect for life’ and ‘the liberty of conscience for every woman’ that helped to elect him on 19 May.101 Giscard d’Estaing’s appeal to centrist voters (and his later attempts to ease the political tensions in the country) also hinged on reforms for women (as promised), which ranged from the nomination of several women to posts in his government, to the creation of the post of Secretary of State for ‘la condition féminine’ (Françoise Giroud), and the serious pursual of abortion rights legislation under the leadership of the Minister of Health, Simone Veil.102 Due to budget limitations in the newly created ‘condition féminine’, Simone Veil took charge and began to consult with all sides, ranging from the

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pro-life Laissez-les vivre and the Catholic Church, in addition to demographic specialists, and a number of pro-choice groups like CFDT, CGT and Choisir, MLAC, Planning familial, l’ANEA and the L’Union des femmes françaises.103 One striking and deliberate omission was the MLF, which put forward no representatives and declared itself beyond legal matters on the grounds that women had the right to their own bodies in any circumstance.104 Anne Zelensky ignored Veil’s contribution to abortion legislation (preferring to focus on the Ligue des droits des femmes created that March), but underlined the MLF contribution thus in Histoires du MLF (1977): Oui, je suis toujours frappée de constater, au hasard d’un discours entendu, d’un article lu, d’une mesure gouvernementale énoncée – timidement le plus souvent – le tangible resultat de notre action. Sans doute, ce que le plus souvent, on accorde aux femmes, on le chipote au M.L.F. et les mêmes bons apôtres qui naguère plaidaient la conservation de l’éternel féminin, prétendent aujourd’hui que les nécessaires réformes de la condition féminine ne doivent rien à l’agitation de quelques féministes hystériques. Qu’importe! Nous savons qu’aucun de ces changements ne se serait fait, sans nous.105 Yes, I am always struck by the fact that by the chance of a speech heard, or an article read, or of a governmental measure stated – most often timidly – [it is] the tangible result of our action. Without doubt, whatever women are granted, in most cases, they quibble about it with the M.L.F., and the same good apostles who once advocated the preservation of the eternal feminine, now claim that the necessary reforms of the feminine condition owe nothing to the agitation of a few hysterical feminists. Never mind! We know that not one of these changes would have happened without us.

Veil faced the Assemblée Nationale on 26 November 1974 in a live televised debate. In an assembly full of men (while the women waited in the public section), Veil alone courageously fielded questions and attacks.106 (As a result, she became extremely well respected in France, and was called the ‘Grand vainqueur’ (great victor) in the press for her ‘popularity’ and her ‘efficiency’ during the long hours of the debate. One public poll even suggested she take more responsibility in the government than the prime minister.)107 In the vote taken on 28 and 29 of November, 284 voted in favor of the legalization of abortion and 189 voted against. Without the votes of the socialists and radical left (105) and the communists (74 votes), the measure would not have passed and abortion would not have been legalized.108 Restrictive measures forbade abortions for foreigners (unless resident in France at least three months) and minors (unless with parental permission); did not grant social security coverage for the procedure thereby favoring the middle and upper classes; and limited its statute to five years.109 The law also had the effect of removing, as

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Picq implies, the subversive edge from the MLF, which had drawn political and cultural strength from the campaign for legalization.110

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Fading?

2.9 

Was the MLF beginning to fade? In June, a series of events were set up by two radical branches of the MLF: the grrêve des femmes (or Les femmes s’entêtent) on 9–10 June, organized by the Féministes Révolutionnaires focusing on oppression in all its forms; and on 15–16 June a grève by another radical left group, Les Pétroleuses, to exchange experiences of women’s role in society in all its guises (Figure 2.9)111 The ‘grrêve’ (‘grève and rêve’; strike and dream) emphasized political aims to liberate women’s labor (or the lack of distinction between domestic and salaried labor). Rather than simply demanding ‘equal salaries’, it instead sought a revolution that opposed the women’s proletariat to the capitalist system: ‘notre lutte s’inscrit dans la lutte globale pour renverser le système d’exploitation d’une majorité de prolétaires par une minorité de capitalistes’ (Our struggle is part of the global struggle to overthrow a system in which a minority of capitalists exploits a majority of proletarians).112 Claude Alzon later addressed the question in Le Monde: Il n’est guère douteux, en effet, que le radical-féminisme, tel que l’incarne notamment le M.L.F., piétine. Il existe à cela plusieurs raisons, dont la plus sérieuse est peut-être l’insuffisance d’analyse. Les meilleurs travaux écrits par des femmes s’en sont surtout pris au freudisme et au marxisme, qui imprègnent l’idéologie de la gauche. Ils ont montré que ce n’est pas la psychanalyse qui est antiféministe, mais Freud lui-même et que, à l’inverse, la politique du P.C. est une trahison du féminisme de ses fondateurs.113

Grêve des femmes, graffiti on advertisement, 1974.

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There is hardly any doubt, in short, that radical-feminism, as embodied notably by the M.L.F., falters. There are several reasons for this, the most serious, perhaps, is insufficient analysis. The best works written by women have criticized Freudianism and Marxism which pervade leftist ideology. They have shown that it’s not psychoanalysis that is anti-feminist, but Freud himself, and that, conversely, the politics of the P.C. [Parti communiste] is a betrayal of the feminism of its founders.

With abortion legalized, women turned to other issues facing their lives. Politically, some women feared that the granting of abortion rights had ended the issue of women’s liberation as far as men were concerned.114 Françoise Giroud set the agenda early in 1975, deciding to focus on women and the family to continue to improve women’s lives, while the MLF also continued its struggles from within an increasingly vulnerable movement.115 Staying radical: MLF and feminist politics: 1975–1981 Having been shut out of the consultation on the legalization of abortion the previous year, the MLF was now trying to revive itself politically, despite rifts within the group the previous spring, when Femmes Révolutionnaires split from the Ligue des droits des femmes. It now faced a situation where ‘feminism’, through the United Nations’ L’Année de la femme, appeared to be entering the mainstream of social thought (Plate 2). A small faction turned to objectionable tactics as they tried to address the problem in which they increasingly found themselves: J’ai la pratique qui flanche / Je n’me sens plus très bien A force de me faire agresser / Sur ma passivité Les analystes/ Les féministes Et toutes les trotskystes / Qui me réduisent Qui me divisent / Et qui me socialisent ... Toutes les théories qu’elles tiennent / J’passe souvent à côté De leur boutique / D’leur polémique Et de leur politique / Si j’suis débile J’suis pas docile / J’veux pas faire c’qui m’fait chier J’ai le pour qui est contre / Le contre qui est pour Je suis en pleine contradiction / Mais qu’est-ce que je trouve ça bon D’être anarchiste / D’être terroriste D’être exhibitionniste / De m’défoncer Dans les AG / D’êt’ pas disciplinée.116 My activity falters / I don’t feel very well From being constantly attacked / about my passivity

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Analysts / Feminists And all Trotskyists / Who diminish me Who divide me / And who socialize me ... All theories that they hold / Go over my head From their boutiques / to their polemics And their politics / If I’m dumb I’m not docile / I do not want to do what is a drag I am for who is against / Against who is for I am in full contradiction / But how good it can be To be an anarchist / To be a terrorist To be an exhibitionist In the AG / To be a brat.

Trying to align themselves with individuals who were marginalized, a fringe group of the MLF identified as ‘mongolienne’, to place themselves in a direct, adversarial position against the ‘intellos’ or ‘intellectuals’ of the MLF.117 The terminology was deliberately offensive in order to create friction within the MLF and set apart a group who demanded less ‘theoretical’ forms of engagement. The faction drew on the language of the ‘outsider’, while denying the voice of the same.118 Subsequent analysis has revealed that the position of people with disabilities in French society in the 1970s was particularly fragile, as they found themselves placed in direct opposition to the self-satisfaction made possible by May ’68, or the ability to be ‘bien dans sa peau’ (confident in one’s own skin).119 As such, these women overlooked genuine solidarities as they searched desperately to achieve their goals through political provocation while appearing to underscore their ‘subordinate position’ within the MLF and in society at large.120 Through oppositional politics (‘pour qui est contre’ and ‘contre qui est pour’), the MLF, more largely, attempted to maintain their radical, contradictory and belligerent spirit in the face of more divisive politics. Abortion was finally legalized on 17 January 1975 for a trial period of five years (after a delay caused by Jean Foyer and seventy-seven other députés winning an amendment for a ten-week limitation on pregnancies).121 The MLF feared being appropriated by a society that was looking to their increasingly popular two female ministers for action.122 As one writer put it: ‘Faut-il exiger tout et tout de suite selon le programme du M.L.F., ou procéder par mesures partielles mais concrètes, comme le croient nos deux ministres femmes? En somme, réforme ou révolution: le débat n’est pas neuf ’ (Must we demand everything and now according to the MLF’s agenda, or instead proceed by partial yet concrete measures, such as our two women ministers believe? In short, reform or revolution: the debate is not new).123 The problem was in part due to the

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fact that the MLF (disorganized from the beginning) had retreated into individual groups whose politics were often hard to define, leading to a mismanagement of ideas that, some argued, prevented unity within the movement.124 This led directly to arguments over how to take action, which only served to underline inherent rifts. For example, on 5 October 1975, Psychanalyse et Politique decided to demonstrate on the France/Spain border at Hendaye in support of the fight against fascism and the liberation of political prisoners. The result was discord between, on the one hand, Pétroleuses and Nantesoriginating Femmes en Lutte (FL), who wanted a ‘classic’ demonstration with slogans released in advance by political organizations and unions, and, on the other hand, groups who wanted a ‘silent’ march ‘punctuated by Basque revolutionary chants’.125 However, various events reignited MLF action even as they themselves doubted they still existed.126 The release of the film of Histoire d’O in September 1975 and, before that, the three Marias scandal for ‘pornographic writing’ in Portugal (see Chapter 4) stimulated debates about woman’s role in pornography and her ‘asservissement’ (subjugation). This created further animosity toward Françoise Giroud for allowing the publication of Histoire d’O in L’Express, which she had cofounded with Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. He removed Giroud’s name from the magazine to avoid any political repercussions for her, but this only annoyed the MLF further (Figure 2.10).127 The polemic created a stir amongst the various MLF groups, who staged guerrilla protests

Cover of L’Express with excerpts of Histoire d’O, 1 September 1975.

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at movie theaters showing the film and produced an incendiary tract, ‘Histoire d’O ou le Fascisme sexuel’, which was signed by the Ligue du Droit des Femmes, Les Pétroleuses, Politique et Psychanalyse [sic], Librairie des femmes, and Tribunal international des crimes contre les femmes (comité français).128 Under the banner of the high-profile international L’Année de la femme, officially inaugurated on 1–3 March 1975 by Giscard d’Estaing in the presence of thirty-two women ministers from across the world, Françoise Giroud and Simone Veil achieved some measure of success in addressing various issues.129 The adoption law was reconsidered in the spring at the instigation of Simone Veil; there was also significant divorce reform passed under Giroud’s initiative to allow divorce by ‘mutual consent’; and the representation of women in school textbooks was examined, as were more liberal working hours for women, free contraception for minors as of January, etc.130 Giroud was working on a number of legislative proposals, such as equality in university competitive examinations, dual signatures on tax revenues, etc., with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s political blessing. The latter, recognizing the political benefit, promised to appoint more women to his government and urged more women to engage in political life (especially at the municipal level).131 When Giroud was criticized by feminists, Simone de Beauvoir stepped in to defend her in an interview with Jean-Jacques Servan Schreiber, citing the limitations of Giroud’s budget, the political necessity of her modest proposals, and the creation of the department itself – which, as de Beauvoir claimed, only had the political appearance of addressing women’s needs.132 Giroud also publicly admitted finding herself often stymied between Jacques Chirac and Giscard d’Estaing in making more significant change.133 It was not just the radical spirit of the MLF that had cultural resonance with women. L’Année de la femme inspired Giroud to organize a women’s photography exhibition that initially lasted three days in Paris in March, before being picked up by the FNAC (Fédération Nationale d’Achats des Cadres) for two months that summer. Despite the theme, relatively few women were among the thirty-two exhibited photographers: Monique Duriez, Martine Frank, Abigail Heyman, Irina Ionesco, Catherine Leroy, Sarah Moon, Janine Niepce, Deidi von Schaewen, Agnès Varda and ‘Les Archives Ringart’ (likely images of women from the collection of sociologist and militant Nadja Ringart).134 (Hence it was not only the MLF’s subversive wit that impacted women’s cultural life, as ‘mainstream’ political events such as L’Année de la femme also inspired exhibitions – and these will be looked at more closely in Chapter 5.) Although a single event, the exhibition marks a transition for Françoise Giroud and women in France that would become a reality the following year: in August 1976, Giroud was moved by Giscard d’Estaing from the Department of the ‘condition féminine’ (without a named replacement) and appointed Minister of Culture.135 While the move may have symbolically signaled the

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possibility that ‘feminism’ or women’s political rights were being more generally accepted as a part of ‘culture’ (thus either making the movement more widespread or taking significant wind from its sails), it might have also shown impatience on the part of Giscard d’Estaing regarding the liberality of some of the reforms (as discussed below). It is important to remember that in November 1975, only 19 percent of French women described themselves as ‘feminists’, and those who did were between the ages of 18 and 35. But as a journalist emphasized, although 81 percent of (non-feminist) women were silent, it was the 19 percent ‘qui font beaucoup plus de bruit’ (who make a lot more noise).136 The question was how much longer that ‘noise’ would have any effect. Making changes: Françoise Giroud Françoise Giroud presented a dossier in January 1976 to L’Express that revealed a number of important facts about how French women saw themselves, based on interviews and polls conducted in every region in France under the guidance of her department.137 Significant facts about French women were laid bare: 37 percent of French women over the age of 18 would prefer to be a man, for example, and while 90 percent of men could place themselves on the political spectrum, 41 percent of women declared themselves unable to do so.138 While the number of active male workers had risen by 150,000 since 1968, the number of women joining the work force had exploded to 1,400,000; the number of women desiring significant change in society was 20 percent (but only 10 percent were activists); and a deep division in responses to family, work, marriage, children and women’s role was revealed between women who were younger than 35 and those older than 35.139 Giroud also noted the decline of the power of the Catholic Church in women’s lives (only 16 percent regularly attended, of whom half were farmers or over 55). The generation gap accentuated the strength of women’s desire for change (‘after changing the law of God to change the law of man’), leading Giroud to propose a series of amendments that she presented publicly in May.140 The ‘101 propositions’ or ‘Projet pour les femmes 1976–1981’ covered 250 pages and comprised a number of articles that addressed the lives of women according to their ages and stages of life: les petites filles (up to 12), adolescentes et jeunes filles (13–18), la jeune femme (19–34), le second souffle (35 to 54) and après 55.141 The proposals were met with immediate resistance by many male government ministers, both for the threat to the notion of their own ‘comfortable’ families, and for changes that they found too liberal in character, most notably for maternal or paternal leave of up to two years (unpaid but with no loss of contract) after the birth of a baby.142 The suggestion of paternal childrearing, as well as the proposal to have children bear the name of the mother rather than the father, were seen by both the government and the media as too radical a change in male and

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female ‘roles’.143 The proposals were further criticized by the PCF and PS for their ‘marginal’ nature, the economic limitations (no provisions for them were made in the 1977 budget) and the right-wing government’s ‘manipulation’ of female voters instead of examining economics and reforming sociopolitical structures.144 By August 1976 the department of the condition féminine was removed, but not before the Ligue du droit des femmes met Giroud for serious discussions on rape, violence against women, prostitution, etc. and reached agreement for an SOS call center for battered women to be set up in Paris, with more regional information on these issues to be available later that year.145 (An activist poster from 1979 created by painter Hélène de Beauvoir, ‘S.O.S Femmes Alternative Alsace’, for victims of domestic violence in Strasbourg and its vicinity, exemplified the efforts to raise awareness in regions outside Paris (Plate 15). De Beauvoir reported that up to 10,000 women living in Alsace were victims of this abuse.)146 The MLF was still struggling with the form of their activism although there was some regional action in December, as in Marseille when up to 5,000 women from various women’s feminist groups attended a ‘fête des femmes’ to express themselves individually and collectively, and in Lyon when 150 people protested against rape.147 However, the same month saw publication of articles such as ‘Quel mouvement des femmes?’, which criticized the practice of labeling women ‘revolutionaries’ since it had the effect of ultimately freezing or blocking real action.148 An English-language article in the Paris Metro simply asked, ‘Whatever happened to the French women’s movement?’ with the subtitle: ‘Like so much that grew out of May ’68, the women’s movement now seems to have whimpered to a halt.’ 149 It cited France’s ‘anti-group’ tendency, greater dependence on the government than on themselves, France’s ‘better’ relationship between men and women, and women’s greater responsibility in the workforce which did not ‘limit’ them to secretaries, as might be the case in the United States. However, the article went on to break those myths by pointing out that while ‘body issues’ such as abortion and contraception transcended ‘class’, domestic chores and job promotions split along class lines that ultimately ‘weakened’ the movement.150 (One interviewee, Danièle Granet, simply stated that France was a ‘very conservative country’ and that militants did not exist, adding that nobody was more ‘bourgeois’ than the communists and socialists in her country.)151 Moving France from shared ‘bodily’ rights to action on salary and work issues seemed to be both the goal and the difficulty for feminists divided by their class, or ‘castes’. Inequality with men was still widespread among France’s 8 million working women, who represented 38.4 percent of the total workforce; female ‘cadres supérieurs’ – who numbered only 5.7 percent of the total – earned 33 percent less than their male counterparts despite the ratification of equal pay in 1972; and most

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women stuck somewhere in the middle of the career ladder masked their feminist sentiments (if any) for fear of repercussions at work.152

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La vague rose What the feminist movement was beginning to lack in terms of political vigor (after the securing of abortion rights), was made up for culturally for women in 1977. The year saw the publication (and historicization) of the MLF by Annie de Pisan and Anne Tristan in their Histoires du MLF, Simone de Beauvoir set up the journal Questions féministes, women artists and intellectuals made the March cover of Art Press (Figure 2.11), Suzanne Pagé considered planning an exhibition of women’s art at ARC 2 (later canceled), artist Monique Frydman started welcoming the women’s art group Femmes/Art into her Paris studio,

Cover of Art Press, no. 5, March 1977.

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Our Bodies Our Selves or Notre corps, nous-mêmes was translated from the American, and Annie Le Brun published Lâchez tout which declared the feminist movement a fraud. The year began with the opening at the end of January 1977 of the Centre Georges Pompidou, which attracted 6 million visitors and included a display, Femmes d’un jour, which revolved around the life of women on an anonymous day – 3 November. The exhibition included thirty mannequins, of which one was tied up with string like a parcel and labeled ‘Fragile’, another was carved like a side of beef at the butcher’s, and another had her head as a target (Figures 2.12 and 2.13).153 The mannequins were placed on the first floor above the escalator to greet the public, while articles and images about women from ninety-nine magazines (both Parisian and regional) were cut and pasted on posters held by the mannequins to create a ‘curious portrait

Femmes d’un jour, Centre Georges Pompidou, L’Express, 31 January–6 February 1977.

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Leonard Freed, Visitor to the Pompidou Center at the exhibition Femmes d’un Jour, Paris, France, 1977.

of women in France’.154 Other journalists would see the contradiction between the May ’68-type banners and women’s so-called ‘militant’ portrayal in the museum space – ‘Le MLF vu par Neuilly’.155 Although cartoon images by Sempé were portraying the MLF as ‘over’, with very few women doing the tasks of many in an empty assembly hall (in contrast to his early images of the MLF), the movement was still active in 1977 due in part to domestic and international agendas and the legislative elections the following year (Figures 2.14 and 2.15). While women were being encouraged in February to present themselves in the municipal elections (Françoise Giroud was running for the mairie of the 15th arrondissement), other women in the MLF were arguing (and sometimes squatting) for a ‘centre’, or an ‘espace des femmes’ dedicated to women’s issues in Paris – as were already available in Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse and other places.156 The year before, in 1976, Spain had established a women’s liberation movement, Italy had widened its movement, and France, Germany, Belgium and Holland had begun to create new initiatives after a brief loss of momentum.157 One feminist stated that if 1975 was the ‘year of the woman’, then 1976 was the year of the attack on the woman.158 The conciliatory planning of the events of 1977 reflected to some extent a backlash against the ‘virulent’ tone of the year before. If feminist action until 1975 was focused on abortion and contraception as a unifying issue that crossed class boundaries, violence against women, rape and prostitution were women’s body issues that gained attention in the years after the abortion law was passed.159 The events on 8 March, International Women’s Day, again focused on the theme of ‘avortement-contraception-maternité-sexualité’

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2.14 

Sempé, MLF cartoon, c. 1972.

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Sempé, MLF cartoon, Charlie Hebdo, May 1977.

in order to ‘preserve’ the rights that had been won two years previously, but it was also a subject of previously successful solidarity amongst women (Figure 2.16).160 On 1 May, women dressed up in order to draw attention to the unfair policies of the CGT (Confédération générale du travail), highlighting their femininity with light dresses, loose hair, make-up, sequins, and scarves ‘floating in the wind’, proclaiming ‘Les femmes dans la rue, pas dans les cuisines’ (Women in the street, not in kitchens) and ‘Dans les usines, dans les cuisines, c’est toutes ensemble qu’il faut lutter’ (In factories, in kitchens, it is together that we must fight).161 Four thousand (others said 6,000) women participated in the event, which was led by ‘les majorettes de Blanc-Mesnil’ or baton

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Manifestation, La journée des femmes, March 1977.

twirlers between the ages of 10 and 12 years old; portraying an ‘innocence’ that later belied the militant spirit shown by a few women who broke away from the demonstration and attacked the Bastille cinema showing the pornographic film Les monteuses (Elles se donnent sans pudeur), tearing down the poster, breaking windows and starting a fire in the theater.162 Saving the MLF One of the most prominent events that year for women was the international rally on 28–30 May at the faculty of Vincennes (in preparation since 1975), in which over 6,000 women from various countries participated to discuss issues such as working conditions, salaries, unemployment, abortion, contraception, maisons des femmes, housework, children and homosexuality, along with committees on rape and battered women.163 Among the participants were women representing Africa, Algeria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Greece, Holland, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United States.164 Convened to discuss how to explore the ‘lutte de femmes’ within the ‘lutte de classes’, the ‘grand discovery’ of the three days was a plurality that defined the unity: [s]ous le ‘continent noir’ de la condition féminine, gisent quantité de sous-continents correspondant à des cultures spécifiques, où les femmes sont toujours subordonnées, mais où leur émancipation doit aussi prendre des formes spécifiques. Et puis, si le mouvement des femmes est aujourd’hui présent dans la plupart des pays, les revendications sont, quoique souvent voisines, parfois différentes.165

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Under the ‘dark continent’ of the feminine condition lies a number of subcontinents corresponding to specific cultures, where women are always subordinated, but where their emancipation must also take on specific forms. And if the women’s movement is present in most countries today, the demands, though often neighboring, are sometimes different.

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By September 1977, the PCF and PS union de la gauche had collapsed and the left was again in tatters, with many women’s votes for the upcoming election in spring 1978 attractive to the centrists and right-wing government. In October 1977, the first ‘salon’ or ‘Festival de la femme’ was inaugurated in the Centre International at Porte Maillot, Paris (12–15 October), with 300,000 visitors, according to the organizers (5,000 or more according to others). On the last day, around 100 feminists, unhappy with the portrayal of women, disrupted the events.166 With speakers such as Florence d’Harcourt of the right-wing RPR, who spoke about her life as a député, a talk by Jeanne Fontaine, the first stewardess of Air France, and scheduled discussions such as ‘woman and love’, the Festival took a decidedly lighter tone than feminist events (Figure 2.17).167 The event was deliberately ‘anti-austere’, with the advertising poster showing a semi-nude woman enveloped by bonbons and a red ribbon (‘la femme bonbon’), which infuriated the delegate for the ‘condition féminine’, Nicole Pasquier. She wondered to the press whether women’s rights were not beginning to regress.168 (During the same period women in Toulouse were debating how to appropriately change the image of the MLF.)169 With exhibitions at the festival such as ‘beauty and makeup’ and ‘fashion’, events also included literature, music and works of art by women artists such as Leonor Fini, Vieira da Silva, Québécoise painter and singer Guylaine Guy, as well as the work of amateur artist and dancer Ludmilla Tchérina who inaugurated the event along with the prime minister’s wife, Eva Barre. Tchérina claimed her work aimed to inspire – ‘C’est pour encourager l’artisanat et d’une

‘Festival de la femme’, Centre International de la Porte Maillot, 12–15 October 1977.

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façon générale tout ce qui touche à l’art féminin que j’ai accepté d’exposer mes tableaux’ (It is for encouraging crafts and, more broadly, everything related to women’s arts, that I accepted to show my paintings) – and André Malraux expressed strongly biased approval of it: ‘C’est la force du tracé viril et le dynamisme cosmique de son œuvre qui marquent la différence avec celle de la peinture féminine’ (The strength of the virile line and the cosmic dynamism of her work distinguish it from female painting).170 Stronger right wing The legislative elections in the spring of 1978 provided an opportunity for the left, which had experienced a strong surge in the municipal elections the year before; however, the ultimate win for the legislative right would sustain the power of the conservative government in the remaining years of Giscard d’Estaing’s term. For feminists, the terrain remained not altogether clear. A ‘Programme commun des femmes’ published by Gisèle Halimi in February 1978 attempted to reignite in feminists a sense of unity through common values, as a means of achieving electoral power, rather than attempting to merge the feminist movement into a single group.171 Divided into sections on politics, family, work, justice, sexuality, media, education, creativity, war or peace, and proposals for specific laws such as equality of spouses, abortion, parental authority, pension reform, patrimony, parental leave, etc., the book had already been condemned in advance by some feminists for trying to speak without a clear political position: Ainsi, encore une fois, Choisir prétend par sa démarche représenter toutes les femmes et ne prend pas position clairement entre les partis de gauche et de droite. Or, s’il est effectivement déterminant que les femmes interrogent ces derniers et posent leurs revendications, le fait que jamais le terme de socialisme ne soit évoqué, dans ces pages, est tout de même assez inquiétant.172 Thus, once again, Choisir claims by its approach to represent all women and does not take a clear stance between left and right-wing parties. Yet if it is indeed a decisive factor that women ask questions of these and make demands of them, the fact that the term socialism is never mentioned in these pages is, all the same, pretty disturbing.

At the same time Giscard d’Estaing was trying to mobilize the female vote. (A poll taken in the previous December had suggested that the women’s vote could decide the legislative elections in favor of the left.)173 He organized an event with Nicole Pasquier, secrétaire d’État à l’Emploi des femmes, his sister, and a PR (Parti républicain) candidate from Orléans to show the film ‘Question des femmes: Valéry Giscard d’Estaing répond’.174 The film presented

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women discussing family, work, legislation and politics with Giscard d’Estaing (with the writer Marie Cardinal seated next to him) who answered policy questions put to him in the film – with unemployment being the issue for which he had no policy/law as remedy.175 After the film Nicole Pasquier also spoke with young women about ‘un choix d’amour’ (a choice of love), or choosing to be a mother with many children in order to focus again on motherhood; she also discussed the government’s decision not to reimburse abortion (so as to ‘control’ but not favor it), while also stating that the question of a ‘salary’ for motherhood was economically unfeasible for any government.176 Such statements set the agenda for the conservative party, with many feminists fearing a ‘politique nataliste’ (natalist policy) that would encourage women (facing high levels of unemployment during the economic crisis) to return home and have children.177 Facing a prolonged battle with inflation, Giscard d’Estaing’s government indeed promoted such a possibility for women.178 Giscard d’Estaing’s appointment of Hélène Missoffe, deputy of the RPR (Rassemblement pour la République) party (who had eight children), as secrétaire d’État de la Santé et de la Sécurité sociale, and his promise of free social insurance for older mothers, were interpreted by feminists as a sign of his neo-conservative intention to return women to the home – thus undermining the progressive policies he had earlier championed to win ‘the women’s vote’.179 As one feminist wrote: ‘Dans la période économique que nous traversons n’est-il pas indispensable pour la bourgeoisie que les femmes retournent à leur “mission naturelle”, l’éducation des enfants et l’entretien de la maison?’ (Given the current economic climate is it not essential for the uppermiddle class that women return to their ‘natural duty’, education of children and maintenance of the home?)180 With the 1 May demonstrations the year before having included an outbreak of fire in a cinema in Bastille for showing a pornographic film, the women’s movements were asked to join the ‘cortège officiel’ to mark the day in 1978. The unemployment rate of women and the policies of Michel Debré and others were on the agenda for criticism, as was a defense of the rights of Florence, a 15-year-old who had committed suicide because she did not have the money to pay for an abortion.181 Feminists were also trying to unite in May to overcome the trend among groups in the MLF to join political parties such as the ‘commissions-femmes du PC et PS’, as the MLF became ‘de plus en plus assimilé à ses parties les plus visibles’ (increasingly subsumed into its most visible parts).182 One possibility to unite feminist groups that were feeling ‘isolated’ and ‘discouraged’ was to link the women’s movement to global struggles for women, while examining the ‘retrieval and institutionalization’ of feminism and the ‘marginalization’ of their own struggles.183 This was also a legacy of tiers-mondisme, or third world movements, which would have served to widen the scope and reignite commitment within the movement.184 The

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PCF admitted the problems posed for the cohesion of its own party (not just in France, but also in Italy and Spain) by the question of women’s rights (which it had traditionally upheld via early women’s rights organizations such as the UFF in France, MDM in Spain and UDI in Italy), as women’s liberation movements took over the position of women’s rights and as agent of societal change.185 Women’s groups inside the PS felt it was easy to organize amongst themselves (all women), even though there were questions around ‘militantism’, but had more difficulty finding their place amongst the men and the party’s goals, with only one woman (the first) in the PS winning a seat in the legislative elections that spring.186 Some critics were already pointing to a ‘second phase’ in the feminist movement that would eventually lead to the creation of a feminism ‘of the left’ and ‘of the right’.187 The battle against rape (which was receiving much popular support in opinion polls) reflected a diversity of positions, with some feminists focusing on education as a remedy and others advocating more severe punishment.188 Meanwhile the Catholic Church sought higher moral ground to protect the ‘souls’ of both men and women, opposing women’s attacks against men about ‘rape’ (such as labeling them ‘cochons’ [pigs] in the streets) by comparing the women’s emancipation movement to an excess of alcohol and opposing not only the ‘rape of the body’, but also the ‘rape of the soul’.189 A strong right-wing government in the second half of 1978 attacked feminism by floating the possibility of a return to ‘femininity’ along with more unified male and female relations as published in Le Monde.190 The left, meanwhile, faced with defeat in the parliamentary elections, were examining their failures, specifically with regard to feminism and how better to integrate and address the needs of women in the political process.191 The tendency to divide women politically and in the press between ‘féministe’ versus ‘femme-femme’ (or ‘feminine’) was deeply criticized by feminists for its divisiveness amongst women which weakened any potential action to be taken on their behalf; while others argued that the basis of these actions, or ‘luttes,’ were unfounded reactions lacking any critical analysis.192 These tensions within feminism were also apparent in the government. Jacqueline Nonon, head of ‘la délégation de la condition féminine’ (created after the abolition of Françoise Giroud’s post, and based in Lyon since 1976), resigned, citing lack of funds, the distance from Paris and inequality in discussions amongst ministers.193 Monique Pelletier was appointed in her place in September, but not before Giscard d’Estaing had been criticized by Françoise Giroud in the press for his apparent ‘indifference’ to women.194 Hopes for future governmental reforms for women included a minimum quota for female candidates in the next elections (Christiane Papon of Femme-Avenir [Gaullist, but non-partisan group]), an end to distinctions between working and non-working women (Monique Pelletier, secrétaire d’État auprès du garde

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des Sceaux), and equal employment rights and equal pay for women (Yvette Roudy, secrétaire national du PS; her views were shared by Mireille Bertrand, membre du bureau politique du PCF).195 At the same time, as their political power weakened, some women in militant groups were considering how to work between the political left and right (using their unique position of feminism) rather than being systematically dismissed.196 Returning home? Home versus work Divisions between both political and feminist groups in 1979 accelerated the trends of the previous year. In February 1979, a group of Jeunes communistes (of the PCF) were advised to distance themselves from feminist groups that were ‘linked to the left or the socialist party’, which were regarded as a ‘dangerous influence’ that fed off anger, turned against men, political parties and often the Parti communiste (who did not want to lose more support).197 Meanwhile, the question of whether women should stay at home or go out to work continued to provoke widespread controversy in France.198 (The debate gained strength with the publication of Christiane Collanges’s Je veux rentrer à la maison [I want to return home], in which, after women’s liberalization through work, ‘elle avoue aujourd’hui ses doutes à ce sujet. Il y a bien des joies aussi à materner et à rester au foyer’ [she confesses her doubts about it today. There are also many joys to being a mother and staying at home].)199 Women privately and publicly were asking themselves what they ‘truly wanted’ given the choice, and their opinions, according to polls, remained divided; many compromised by wanting to work part-time.200 In the midst of economic crisis, the belief lingered that if women were to give up their jobs and return to the home, unemployed men could occupy their posts (38 percent of jobs were occupied by women201); and that the number of births would increase if women were to receive a ‘salaire maternel’.202 According to an IFOP (Institut français d’opinion publique) poll for Marie-Claire conducted in June 1979, 76 percent of women in France considered their family as ‘la plus belle réussite’ (the greatest success) of their life with only 4 percent counting professional life or their career as their most important success.203 Only 2 percent of women polled counted having a ‘militant activity’ in their life, such as in an association, committee, union or political party, as being important to their lives.204 With the focus for women returning once again to the home, Françoise Giroud posed the symbolic question, ‘Alors, finie la révolte?’ (So, is the revolt over?)205 She comments: Parenthèse fermée. Soulèvement dilué dans des conduites individuelles de libération de soi par soi, qui ne s’inscriront plus dans un mouvement collectif?

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Comme M.-A. Macciocchi, Françoise Colin [sic] est près de le penser. Mais elle observe aussi que les anciennes gratifications, réelles ou imaginaires, qui garantissaient la soumission des femmes, n’ont cessé de s’amenuiser. Sécurité et protection, qu’elles croyaient assurées par le mariage, ont disparu. Le sentiment d’être unique lorsqu’elles étaient objet d’amour s’est révélé illusoire: au marché de la libération sexuelle, elles sont échangeables et interchangeables. La royauté de la femme a été jetée au rebut avant qu’elles ne la vivent comme duperie. Pour reconstituer aujourd’hui le nouveau filet de soumission où elles viendront se prendre, il faudra bien de l’astuce et de l’imagination aux hommes. Nul ne niera qu’ils en soient largement pourvus.206 Closed parenthesis. An uprising diluted into individual forms of selfliberation that will no longer subscribe to a collective movement? Like M.-A. Macciocchi, Françoise Colin [sic] is close to believing in it. But she also observes that the old gratifications, real or imaginary, which guaranteed the submission of women, have continued to diminish. Security and protection, which they believed to be ensured by marriage, have disappeared. The feeling of being unique while they were a love object turned out to be an illusion: in the market of sexual liberation, women are exchangeable and interchangeable. The ‘queen in her castle’ was thrown onto the scrap heap before they experienced its deception. To recreate a new net of submission today in which women will be caught will take a lot ingenuity and imagination on the part of men. No one will deny that they are amply equipped for it.

Giroud claimed that the women’s movement had changed the landscape of what women could expect from marriage and the family, despite the return to ‘traditional’ values. The remaining MLF groups (which signed a tract as des femmes du M.L.F) were meanwhile trying to defeat the conservative discourse and the ‘retour au foyer’ through demonstrations on 7 June 1979 with violet banners, confetti and dancing between Cirque d’Hiver and the Centre Georges Pompidou, to draw attention toward the marches of women and away from the political focus of a common market in Europe.207 One militant explained: ‘Dans un contexte de crise économique, d’atteinte aux libertés dans l’Europe entière, les femmes sont les premières touchées. On veut nous faire rentrer à la maison pour résorber le chômage, nous faire faire des enfants pour résoudre les problèmes démographiques. Assez de l’ode au foetus!’ (In a context of economic crisis and infringement of freedoms throughout Europe, women are the first to be affected. They want us back in the home to reduce unemployment, making us have children to solve demographic problems. Enough of the ode to the fetus!)208 With abortion rights being debated once more in October 1979 (approaching the end of the five-year temporary agreement),

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militants were arguing for fewer restrictions around abortions, including reimbursement by Social Security and for abortion to be available to minors and immigrants.209 In spite of its legalization, abortion was still outlawed in more than twenty departments in France, and feminists feared that papal influence and natalist policies might overturn the abortion law during parliamentary sessions in October.210 (Although the bill would ultimately pass, three quarters of the conservative majority party RI (Républicains Indépendants) and RPR members eventually voted against it.)211 At the same time, feminist groups were continuing to battle with internal problems in Italy and France, including difficulty in maintaining an ‘avant-garde’ at the center of their groups that could ensure continuity in future actions.212 On 30 October 1979, Antoinette Fouque and des femmes registered the MLF as a ‘limited company’ at the Paris Police Authority, which subsequently gave them the right to use the trademark MLF; this forced a permanent split in the groups into an MLF ‘déposé’ (official) and the others as MLF ‘non-déposé’ (unofficial).213 (See below and Chapter 4.) Mieux valait les envoyer au lit! In September, motherhood received a measure of financial security through a number of proposals from the government (instigated by Monique Pelletier), including incentives for mothers with three or more children, and the extension of benefits to widows, divorcees and single women looking after children.214 The government’s policy of supporting mothers took a misogynistic turn, however, when Senator Jacques Henriet (Républicain Indépendant, Doubs) openly stated that in order to curb unemployment, women should be sent to bed: ‘plutôt d’envoyer les femmes au travail, mieux valait les envoyer au lit! Pour enrichissant qu’il soit pour le pays, le travail des femmes n’en est pas moins facteur de chômage et de dénatalité’ (rather than sending women to work, better to send them to bed! However rewarding it may be for the country, women’s employment is nevertheless a factor in unemployment and lowbirth rates).215 Although Monique Pelletier tried to curb the reaction by stating, ‘Il a dit ça pour rire, c’était une boutade’ (He said that as a joke, for a laugh), Nicole Pasquier claimed the opposite: ‘décourager les femmes de travailler serait aussi les décourager de faire des enfants’ (to discourage women from working would also discourage them from having children).216 The ‘MLF’ or one of its groups also reacted, sending a letter to all the senators in the relevant committee, signed ‘Toutes les femmes’ (All women) and including the retort: ‘Vous êtes nos ayatollahs et nous allons nous mettre à pondre pendant que vous ferez la loi’ (You are our ayatollahs and we are going to pop them out while you make the law).217

The MLF 1970s

What’s in a name? The MLF in 1980

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For the MLF (as it was known until this point) the future remained uncertain as the group fell deeper into confusion over its identity both within the movement and in the collective face presented to the world. With Psychanalyse et Politique granted rights to the MLF trademark in October 1979, as well as the right of ‘association’ under the law of 1901 with juridical power, women (outside of Fouque’s circle) protested in a written tract: Si Psych & Po est le MLF Je ne suis pas au MLF Or je ne suis au Mouvement de Libération des Femmes Donc, Psych & Po n’est pas le Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (ni le MLF)218 If Psych & Po is the MLF I am not with the MLF Nor am I with the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes Thus Psych & Po is neither the Women’s Liberation Movement (nor the MLF)

The ‘coup’ by Psych et Po in buying the trademark for the MLF (which Fouque called a ‘coup de réalité’ while other feminists labeled it a ‘coup de force’) was justified by their fear of appropriation of the movement by groups on both the left and the right unless the name was properly protected: Il y avait danger de récupération du mouvement par les partis, le Parti communiste surtout. D’où la nécessité, en 1979, de s’écarter du gauchisme et du féminisme mascarade qui “effacent” le mouvement. F-Magazine, par exemple, a publié une publicité sur le MLF – Mouvement de libération de la foto. C’est une récupération de droite.219 There was a danger of appropriation of the movement by the parties, especially the Parti communiste. Hence the need, in 1979, to move away from leftism and sham feminism which ‘erased’ the movement. F-Magazine [Figaro Magazine], for example, published an advertisement about the MLF – Mouvement de libération de la foto (photo). It is an appropriation by the right.

In essence, every Psych et Po vehicle was protected by the MLF trademark including the group itself, the publishing house, Éditions des femmes (founded in 1973), the Librairie des femmes (founded in Paris in 1974), the monthly journal Quotidien des femmes, as well as Éditions SARL and the magazine Des femmes en mouvements.220 In addition, Psych et Po could retroactively claim right to any of the MLF activities in the previous ten years, the right to legal action against anyone outside the group who used the name, and the right to

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use the trademark to support a candidate in the elections.221 Militants who did not belong to this group were left to define themselves, but were strictly against Fouque. Many groups (including Elles voient rouge, Histoires d’Elles, MLAC, Les femmes s’emmêlent, the group Lesbiennes banlieue nord, etc.) signed a petition on 6 October 1979 protesting that MLF was a term used by the media and did not belong to any fixed organization or association.222 Psych et Po faced international criticism from other women’s movements who feared the appropriation of their group name and activities: the British Spare Rib published a criticism by Simone de Beauvoir of the practices of Fouque and the group, whom she labeled both ‘anti-feminist and anti-capitalist capitalists’.223 But many women’s groups turned their attention instead to the elections of 1981. Antoinette Fouque and the new ‘MLF’ publicly supported François Mitterrand and she helped to organize an event for his candidacy, inviting such luminaries as Hélène Cixous, Elizabeth Huppert, Kate Millett, George Pau-Langevin, Edith Cresson, Catherine Lalumière, Véronique Neiertz, Éliane Perasso, and Yvette Roudy of the Parti socialiste.224 The MLF, under the control of Psych et Po, continued to plan events for women such as the Journées internationales des femmes in March 1981. This was dedicated to fighting misogyny in all its forms (including sexist advertisements and comments, accusations against rape victims, difficulty in finding employment or a hospital for an abortion, etc.), and emphasized that ‘Le mouvement de libération des femmes n’a pas “vécu, il vit”’ 225 (The women’s liberation movement has not ‘lived, it lives’). On 1 May, Fouque’s MLF organized another event to inspire female voters to be demanding and ‘unmask’ misogyny at home, at work, in the media and in politics by encouraging an independent erotic, economic and political life for women, and claimed that men’s hatred of women stemmed from a fear of their bodies and power.226 In July 1981 the MLF déposé attempted to organize a protest against the use of ‘misogynistic’ imagery in La Semaine de Charlie (an offshoot of the magazine Charlie Hebdo), which included the names of eighteen women ministers, deputies and socialistes with eighteen anonymous images of ‘their’ sex.227 Many journalists, photographers and the police attended a planned demonstration by the MLF at the appointed hour, only to find that no militants showed up.228 The Charlie team had made advance preparations, including designated areas for the women to spit or marked areas they could bomb or ‘break’, and a sign on the door that read ‘Amicale des machistes, interdit aux connes’ (Club for machos, forbidden to bitches) (Figure 2.18).229 Finally, three women showed up and declared, ‘nous nous réservons d’agir ailleurs et autrement’ (we reserve the right to act elsewhere and differently), and a representative of the journal claimed, ‘C’est une excellente publicité pour nous’

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‘Amicale des machistes, interdits aux connes’, Anti-MLF demonstration, offices of La Semaine de Charlie, July 1981.

(This is an excellent advertisement for us).230 The days of the radical MLF of the 1970s were all but over. A new system in place predicted their subversive ways and retaliated in advance, effectively shutting them down. Changes now came through the Mitterrand government which, via the work of Yvette Roudy and the creation of the Ministry for Women’s Rights, began to institutionalize the reforms that the MLF had been working for through the 1970s. Feminists in the now fractured women’s movements either worked independently or joined the ministry and similar political bodies to assist in institutionalizing these rights, leading some women eventually to declare: ‘La révolution est accomplie’ (The revolution is accomplished).231 Concluding the revolt This comprehensive chapter has been sensitive to the trends of the MLF and the way in which feminist politics engaged with more popular politics to create a dynamic, living movement shaped by the discourses, tracts, articles and trends of the 1970s. The purpose of the chapter is to underscore the importance of the vagaries of the movement to women artists in the 1970s as they lived and worked through these debates, and to emphasize the way in which the issues directly or indirectly inform our readings of their work by situating them within the larger social, political and economic climate. Issues such as domesticity, women’s work, cultural contributions, group and independent politics, and beliefs about ‘women’ have been explored in depth to serve as a resource through which to understand the larger context of women’s artistic work in the year of its production.

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Notes 1 Anne Tristan [Anne Zelensky] and Annie de Pisan [Annie Sugier], Histoires du MLF, Preface by Simone de Beauvoir (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1977), p. 76. 2 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, cited in ‘Le féminisme en question’: Un débat organisé à Montreuil par la municipalité communiste.’ December 16, 1978. Des femmes en mouvements, no. 12–13 (December 1978–January 1979), pp. 20–25, p. 21. 3 ‘Première chanson du MLF composée par une “petite fille du siècle” après la première réunion du MLF “Libération des femmes années Zéro” tenue à Vincennes fin 1970, non mixte, sous les insultes des “camarades révolutionnaires”… Ce n’était qu’un début.’ In Mouvement de libération des femmes en chansons. Histoire subjective 1970–1980, ed. Marie-Jo Bonnet, Jocelyne Lamblin and Catherine Deudon (Paris: Éditions Tierce, 1981), n.p. 4 Jean-François Lyotard, L’histoire de Ruth (Talence: Le Castor astral, 1983), p. 33. Translation of ‘The Story of Ruth’ in A. Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 256. 5 See Jean Fourastié’s Les trente glorieuses: Ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1979) as well as Serge Bernstein and Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Pompidou Years: 1969–1974, trans. Christopher Woodall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 6 See ‘Des Mariannes au secours de Laetitia’ in Le Figaro, 4 April 2000. The presence of Bardot’s Marianne bust in the salle du conseil municipal (city council chamber) stirred controversy among women who felt that her libertine values, as portrayed in the personas and morality of her films, conflicted with the traditional notion of marriage. François d’Argent, Marianne, Dossier du mois (c. early-mid 1970s), n.p./n.d. Archives BMD. In the 1990s she received negative attention for her support of the Front National and in particular of the mayor of Toulon, Jean-Marie Le Chevallier, which led to the removal of her Marianne bust from the salle du conseil municipal in Quimper by Bernard Poignant of the Parti Socialiste. Referring to Bardot’s Marianne in the late 1960s, Poignant stated: ‘A cette époque, je me souviens, on vivait sous la chape de plomb du gaullisme. Et à travers son corps et sa sensualité, Brigitte Bardot incarnait la liberté, l’oxygène, l’insolence, l’énergie joyeuse et la beauté. Mais la beauté n’a rien à voir avec une décision politique. Il y avait de très beaux fascistes …’ Alexandrine Bouilhet, ‘BB au piquet’, Le Figaro, November 1996, Archives BMD. (At that time, I remember, we lived under the lead weight of Gaullism. And through her body and sensuality, Brigitte Bardot embodied freedom, oxygen, insolence, joyful energy and beauty. But beauty has nothing to do with a political decision. There were very beautiful fascists …) 7 Debré nous n’te ferons plus d’enfants. (Reference to Michel Debré, former Gaullist prime minister and the then current Minister of Defense who envisioned a France of 100 million French citizens.) In Bonnet, Lamblin and Deudon, Mouvement de libération des femmes en chansons, n.p.

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8 François d’Argent, Marianne, Dossier du mois (c. early-mid 1970s), n.p./n.d. Archives BMD. 9 ‘Sainte Catherine 45: Symbole de liberté et d’espérance’, Femmes Françaises, 15 November 1945. Archives BMD. 10 France was ‘conscious’ that in the previous 130 years its population had grown by 48 percent compared with Germany’s 250 percent and Great Britain’s 400 percent. Henri Peyre, ‘The French Situation: A French View’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 3 (September 1944), pp. 363–387, p. 367, pp. 382–383. 11 ‘Origine temporairement oubliée. Chantée en 1971, sur l’air de Brigitte Bardot Avec les femmes je ne sais pas.’ In Bonnet, Lamblin and Deudon, Mouvement de libération des femmes en chansons, n.p. 12 Bernstein and Rioux, The Pompidou Years, p. 163. 13 Ibid. 14 At its roots, the MLF aligned with ‘spontaneity’ rather than formal political organization: ‘Tel qu’il fonctionne actuellement le mouvement se caractérise par une volonté d’éviter le dirigisme et la bureaucratie. Des groupes se créent indépendamment les uns des autres à Paris et dans les grandes villes de province à partir d’initiatives spontanées.’ ‘Le mouvement de libération des femmes en France’, Partisans: L’année zéro, no. 54–55 (July–October 1970), p. 5. (As it presently runs, the movement is characterized by a desire to avoid interventionism and bureaucracy. Groups are created independently of each other in Paris and in other big cities around France out of spontaneous initiatives.) 15 Tristan and de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, p. 9. 16 Ibid., pp. 72–76. 17 Anne Tristan and Annie de Pisan speak of their intense dislike of Gisèle Halimi and Françoise Giroud in their memoirs Histoires du MLF. For Simone de Beauvoir’s impact on the women’s movement, see Claudine Monteil, ‘Simone de Beauvoir and the Women’s Movement in France: An Eye-witness Account’, Simone de Beauvoir Studies, vol. 14 (1997), pp. 6–12. 18 26 August was the date chosen by the American women to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. The march on Fifth Avenue in New York (attracting a crowd estimated at 50,000) was organized to echo the same action taken by suffragettes in 1920, who marched on Fifth Avenue to celebrate their victory. Women in cities across America joined their local march during their lunch hour. Writers, Photographers, Editors of the Associated Press, The World in 1970: History as We Lived It (New York: Associated Press, 1971), p. 191. 19 ‘Nous étions très peu nombreuses, c’était l’été, et les filles étaient en vacances. Des journalistes étaient convoqués pour récupérer l’affaire. En somme, nous devions être une dizaine. Mais à peine avions-nous eu le temps de sortir de voiture et de nous diriger vers la flamme que des flics surgirent et nous enlevèrement rudement gerbes et banderoles. Avant que nous ayons réalisé quoi que ce soit, ils emmenaient sans ménagement quelques-unes d’entre nous.’ Tristan and de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, p. 55. (We were very few, it was

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summer, and the girls were on vacation. Journalists were called to cover the story. In total, there were around ten of us. But even before we had time to get out of the car and head toward the flame, the cops sprang up and stripped away the wreathes and streamers from us. Before we realized what happened, they unceremoniously took away some of us.) The exact names present at the event has varied with time and according to different lists. For this point, see Audrey Lasserre, ‘Histoire d’une littérature en mouvement: Textes, écrivaines et collectifs éditoriaux du Mouvement de libération des femmes en France (1970–1981)’, PhD thesis, Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle – Paris III, 2014, p. 67, note 162. Françoise Picq names Frédérique Daber, in Libération des femmes: Les années mouvement (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993), p. 17, as does Catherine Deudon in her Un mouvement à soi, 1970–2001 (Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2002), but there has been some question about the exact nature of her participation. See Lasserre, Histoire d’une littérature en mouvement, p. 71, note 181. 20 ‘L’Arc de Triomphe n’était pas une action politique! …’ à l’autre bout de la salle. Je m’approchais … ‘Pas de sens. Qui ça peut toucher? … spectaculaire, petite bourgeoise …’ J’étais indignée. Je ne pouvais pas expliquer pourquoi, mais je sentais que notre action de l’Arc de Triomphe était féministe, donc révolutionnaire. Qu’est-ce qu’elles voulaient dire par “pas politique?” Je ne comprenais pas. En déposant cette gerbe, nous dénoncions de façon spectaculaire et à la fois humoristique notre oppression …Tout cela me paraissait profondément politique. Il est vrai que ce n’était pas conforme à la “politique”, celle des hommes.’ ’ Tristan and de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, p. 58. (‘The Arc de Triomphe was not a political action!’… at the other end of the hall. I approached … ‘Nonsense. Who can it affect? … spectacular, petty bourgeois …’. I was indignant. I could not explain why, but I felt that our action at the Arc de Triomphe was feminist, thus revolutionary. What did they mean by “not political?” I did not understand. By laying down the wreath, we were denouncing our oppression in a spectacular and humoristic way … All of this seemed to me profoundly political. It is true that it did not conform to the “politics” of men.’) 21 ‘Arrest Follows Tribute to Wife and Unknown Soldier’, International Herald Tribune, 27 August 1970 and ‘Un homme sur deux est une femme…’, Combat, 27 August 1970. 22 Françoise Picq, Libération des femmes: Les années mouvement (Paris: Éditions du Seuil: 1993), p. 37. 23 On 20 November 1970, a bomb exploded in front of the Albert Hall, London, where Miss World was to be crowned; later protests challenged American presenter Bob Hope. L’Express, 30 November–6 December, 1970. 24 Tristan and de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, pp. 45–49. 25 ‘Ce nouveau féminisme est de tendance résolument socialiste et de caractère radical. Ses militantes viennent des mouvements de jeunes révolutionnaires et socialistes où elles ont constaté qu’une fois de plus elles ne servaient que de force d’appoint. Elles ne se bornent pas à demander l’égalité dans le cadre actuel, mais remettent en question ce cadre, et s’attaquent aux problèmes

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spécifiques de l’oppression féminine: la famille et la sexualité. C’est grâce à cette contestation globale de la société que la contradiction entre bourgeoises et ouvrières peut cette fois être dépassée.’ Anne and Jacqueline, ‘D’un groupe à l’autre’, Partisans: L’année zéro (Paris: Maspéro, 1970), p. 203. (This new feminism is resolutely socialist and radical in character. Its activists come from youth revolutionary and socialist movements where they recognized that once more, they only served a back-up role. They do not just ask for equality in the current structure, but call into question the structure, and tackle the specific problems of women’s oppression: family and sexuality. It is thanks to this global criticism of society that the contradiction between bourgeois women and working women can finally be overcome.) 26 Tristan and de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, pp. 58–59. The group did also mobilize, for example, in demonstrations outside La Roquette prison (for women) where teenage girls handed out flyers marked ‘Imprimerie spéciale des BeauxArts’ and proclaimed solidarity with their ‘sisters’ in prison: ‘Nous sommes toutes des hors-la-loi’ (We are all outlaws). J. B., ‘La contestation au féminin pluriel’, Le Monde, 21 September 1970. Archives BMD. The Groupe de Cinq (Group of Five) would later make a video about La Roquette prisoners (see Chapter 3). 27 Idiot International, May 1970, pp. 14–15. The citation on the family is adapted from a statement by Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, first published in German in 1884. 28 The writers of Idiot International were listed as Monique Wittig, Gille Wittig, Marcia Rothenburg, Margaret Stephenson. Anne Zelensky also credits Antoinette (Fouque) as being part of the group of writers for Idiot International. Tristan and de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, p. 49. 29 Ibid., pp. 48–53. 30 ‘Le lendemain on lisait dans Le Figaro que “d’inquiétantes amazones à la nuque rasée et aux larges feutres” avaient envahi le cocktail des États Généraux. Nous avions toutes les cheveux longs et la tête nue! Le mythe du M.L.F.: inquiétant, hystérique, lesbien commençait à naître.’ Ibid., p. 62. (The next day we read in Le Figaro that “disturbing amazons with shaved napes of the neck and wearing felt hats” had invaded the cocktail of the États Généraux. We all had long hair and our heads were bare! The myth of the M.L.F.: disturbing, hysterical, lesbian was starting to be born.) 31 MLF, ‘Communiqué de Presse’, November 1970. Archives BMD. 32 About 30 MLF members demonstrated in front of the journalists and read a statement of protest against the event and against Elle’s questionnaire as a ‘manipulation pour canaliser et récupérer la rébellion de toutes les femmes’ (manipulation to channel and reclaim the rebellion of all women). ‘Des membres du Mouvement de libération des femmes perturbent une conférence de presse de “Elle”’, Le Monde, 19 November 1970, p. 14. 33 ‘Que M. Chaban-Delmas, soi-disant “alerté” par les manifestations féministes aux États-Unis, se soit soudain rappelé l’importance du vote féminin, par exemple aux municipales, et ait tenté d’intégrer ce mouvement encore vague à la nébuleuse “Nouvelle société”, c’est son travail.’ Dominique Durand,

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‘D’autres femmes, aussi’, Combat, 23 December 1970, p. 8. (The fact that Mr. Chaban-Delmas was supposedly ‘alerted’ by the feminist demonstrations in the United States and that he suddenly recalled the importance of the female vote, for example, in the municipal elections and attempted to integrate this still vague movement into his nebulous “Nouvelle société” [New Society], is his matter.) 34 Durand, ‘D’autres femmes, aussi’, p. 8. 35 ‘Le parti communiste estime qu’avant de “décoloniser la femme” il importe de “décoloniser la société”’, Le Monde, 21 November 1970, p. 9. 36 George Marchais, ‘Aux États Généraux de la femme – Un constat lucide – Des voeux judicieux – Mais comment “changer la vie?”’, L’Humanité, 23 November 1970. 37 Françoise Giroud, ‘Fragile comme un homme’, L’Express, 31 August–6 September 1970, p. 43. 38 Françoise Parturier, ‘Naissance d’un nouveau féminisme’, Le Figaro, 2–3 January 1971. ‘Bien sûr, les problèmes ne sont pas les mêmes qu’aux ÉtatsUnis. Comme pour le choléra, nous n’avons que des cas isolés et douteux de féminisme.’ (Of course, the problems are not the same as in the United States. As with cholera, we have only isolated and suspect cases of feminism.) 39 In April 1970, he commented on the importance of France preserving its own identity under pressure: ‘[i]l n’y aurait pas une guerre entre la Russie et les États-Unis où la France ne serait pas impliquée; elle le serait qu’elle le veuille ou non, stratégiquement.’ ‘Entretien accordé à la revue Réalités’, Georges Pompidou, Entretiens et discours, 1968–1974 (Paris: Éditions Plon, 1975), p. 90. (There would not be a war between Russia and the United States, where France would not be strategically implicated; it would be whether the country liked it or not.) 40 ‘Ce qui est juste et ce qui est absurde dans le nouveau féminisme’, MarieClaire, September 1971, pp. 10–12, p. 12. 41 ‘Notre ventre nous appartient’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 5 April 1971. See Picq, Libération des femmes, p. 65. 42 Le Nouvel Observateur, 5 April 1971. 43 Ibid. 44 Tristan and de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, pp. 64–65. 45 Ibid., pp. 65–67. 46 ‘France: Free Abortions Now’, Newsweek, 19 April 1971, p. 19. 47 Picq, Libération des femmes, p. 66. 48 Halimi remarks that while it was not public knowledge, a number of ordinary women who signed the manifesto feared for their jobs or the renewal of their employment contract. She founded Choisir with the aim of defending each of the 343 women should legal proceedings be brought against them. Gisèle Halimi, La cause des femmes, Propos recueillis par Marie Cardinal (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1973), p. 54. 49 ‘Le M.L.F. n’est ni une association, ni un mouvement homogène. C’est l’auberge espagnole. Chaque femme y trouve ce qu’elle y apporte. Entre les “freudiennes” et les “marxistes”, tout un éventail de nuances – et de groupuscules

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– s’ouvre, se referme, change d’axes, selon la personnalité de telle ou telle fille et, aussi, selon le contexte politique. Parfois, une idée “géniale”, “extra”, fuse de l’une ou de l’autre de ces tendances: ces fulgurances M.L.F., nul n’a jamais songé à le nier … Elles contribuent, à coup sûr, à mettre le doigt dans une plaie, à secouer le train-train d’une bataille dite traditionnelle.’ Halimi, La cause des femmes, p. 56. (The MLF is neither an association nor a homogeneous movement. This is a potluck. Every woman finds there what she brings to it. Between the ‘Freudians’ and the ‘Marxists’, a whole range of nuances – and micro-groups – opens up, closes, and changes axes, according to the personality of one or another girl, and also according to the political context. Sometimes, a ‘brilliant’ idea, ‘charged’, fuses from one or the other of these groups: these MLF flashes, no one would ever dream of denying them … They surely contribute to putting your finger in a wound, to shaking the everyday routine of a so-called traditional battle.) 50 Tristan and de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, pp. 86–87 and Halimi, La cause des femmes, pp. 56–57. 51 ‘100 prêtres déclarent: Dieu n’est pas conservateur’, Tract, 24 May 1968. Archives BMD. 52 Author interview with Raymonde Arcier, Paris, November 2006. 53 Picq, Libération des femmes, p. 72. 54 Monique Remy, Histoire des mouvements de femmes: De l’utopie à l’intégration (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990), p. 56. 55 Picq, Libération des femmes, p. 71. 56 ‘Pour la première fois, après le manifeste des 343 (je déclare avoir avorté), la marche du 20 novembre, entre autres actions, les femmes vont dénoncer publiquement les crimes commis contre elles.’ Flyer, ‘Journées de dénonciation des crimes contre les femmes’, La Mutualité, 1972. Archives BMD. (For the first time, after the manifesto of 343 [I declare that I had an abortion], the November 20th march, amongst other actions, women are going to publicly denounce the crimes committed against them.) 57 Picq, Libération des femmes, p. 135. 58 ‘Nous, les femmes de tous âges et de toute condition, viendrons témoigner sur notre vie. Nous nous servirons de tous les moyens d’expression, films, dia-po, disques, dessins, sketches, journaux … Nous pourrons toutes nous exprimer.’ Flyer, ‘Journées de dénonciation des crimes contre les femmes’, La Mutualité, 1972. Archives BMD. (We, women of all ages and from all backgrounds, will give accounts of our lives. We will use every means of expression, films, slides, records, drawings, sketches, newspapers …We will all express ourselves.) 59 Picq, Libération des femmes, p. 137. 60 Ibid., pp. 137–139. In a tract, the MLF describes the theme thus: ‘DES CRIMES! QUELS CRIMES! Crimes légaux, crimes quotidiens, crimes invisibles, crimes parfaits, si parfaits que les victimes en sont inconscientes ou s’en croient coupables.’ ‘Les 13 et 14 mai 1972: Dénonciation des crimes contre les femmes.’ Archives BMD. (CRIMES! WHAT CRIMES! Legal crimes, daily crimes, invisible crimes, perfect crimes, so perfect that the victims are unconscious or believe themselves to be guilty.)

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61 Tristan and de Pisan, Histoire du MLF, p. 106 and Marianne Lohse, ‘Aux journées de la libération de la femme ce sont les hommes qui tiendront la crèche’, France Soir, 13 May 1972. 62 Tristan and de Pisan, Histoire du MLF, pp. 106–107. 63 Evelyne Le Garrec, ‘Luttes de Femmes, Luttes de Classe’, politique-hebdo, 11 May 1972, p. 16. 64 Ibid. The reference is to Michel Debré’s dream of a French nation with 100 million French citizens. 65 Programme commun de gouvernement du parti communiste français et du parti socialiste, Introduction by Georges Marchais, 27 June 1972 (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1972), pp. 95–96. 66 Ibid., pp. 95–98. 67 Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, Daily Life in Revolutionary China (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 351. Originally published in Italian as Dalla Cina. Dopo la rivoluzione culturale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971) and in French as De la Chine (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971). 68 ‘But within the families there’s a struggle between the old and the new. Not everyone in a family has the same ideas … Chairman Mao teaches us that when all is said and done there are only two conceptions of the world, the proletarian and the bourgeois. It’s the same in the family. The discussions we have help to change the conception of the family so that the proletarian approach will be victorious.’ Macciocchi, Daily Life in Revolutionary China, p. 365. 69 Ibid., pp. 376–377. 70 Julia Kristeva, Des Chinoises (Paris: des femmes, 1974), p. 223. English: About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows (London: Marion Boyars, 1977), p. 196. 71 Ibid. Also see Chapter 4, note 20. 72 ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’, Yale French Studies, no. 62 (1981), pp. 154–184, pp. 157–164. 73 ‘L’Office fédéral des Statistiques est maintenant dirigé par une femme’, Bulletin de l’Office du gouvernement allemand, no. 8, 13 March 1972. 74 ‘Les femmes in 1972’, L’Express, 1–7 January 1973, p. 22. 75 ‘Italie, féminisme An I’, Le Monde, 8 January 1972. 76 Halimi, La cause des femmes, pp. 61–62. 77 Ibid., pp. 85, 87. 78 Annie Cohen was severely critical of Halimi: ‘Que Me Halimi se veuille, la vedette de Bobigny – ce qu’elle n’est pas – passe encore. Mais qu’elle se présente comme le héraut de la cause des femmes, c’est un abus que nous ne saurions admettre.’ Annie Cohen and Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Polémique: L’autre bataille de Bobigny’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 November 1973, pp. 50–51, p. 50. Archives BMD. (What Gisèle Halimi wants to be, the star of Bobigny – which she is not – may happen. But the fact that she presents herself as the herald of the women’s cause, that’s an abuse that we will not consciously accept.) 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., p. 51.

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81 Evelyne Le Garrec, ‘Finies les bonnes sœurs rouges!’, Politique Hebdo, 21 November 1973, p. 16. Archives BMD. 82 Bernstein and Rioux, The Pompidou Years, p. 87. A number of critical articles by Claude Servan-Schreiber about women’s rights were also published in Le Monde, under the title ‘Le Statut des Françaises’, during the Assembly’s inquiries on abortion. They included subjects such as crèches, equal pay, women working versus staying at home, the division of labor, etc.: 1. Le Mythe du libre choix (12 December 1973); II. Des crèches pour quoi faire (13 December 1973); and III. Un choix (14 December 1973). A rebuttal by Evelyne Sullerot, ‘A propos du “Statut des Françaises”’, appeared on 22 December 1973. Archives BMD. 83 Halimi, La cause des femmes, p. 88. 84 Le Nouvel Observateur, 5 February 1973, pp. 4–5, p. 55. 85 Picq, Libération des femmes, p. 155. 86 Ibid., pp. 156–157. 87 Ibid, p. 157. 88 Ibid., p. 159. 89 Tristan and de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, p. 109. 90 Beatrix Andrade, ‘La foire des femmes’, L’Express, 19–25 March 1973. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 MLF tract, ‘La foire des femmes’. Archives BMD. 94 MLF tract, ‘Autocritique après la Foire des Femmes’. Archives BMD. 95 ‘Le fait que les femmes ne soient pas toutes opprimées par l’homme de la même manière ne facilite pas leurs efforts pour leur commune libération. Il est tentant pour la midinette de rêver à un riche mariage, censé lui apporter la délivrance, alors qu’en réalité elle ne fera que changer la forme de sa propre aliénation.’ Claude Alazon, ‘Les femmes forment-elles une classe?’, Le Monde, 29–30 April 1973. (The fact that women are not all oppressed by men in the same way does not make their effort for shared liberation any easier. It is tempting for the shopgirl to dream of a rich marriage, which is meant to be her salvation, when in reality she will only change the form of her alienation.) 96 ‘Le pouvoir du con’, Le Torchon brûle, no. 2 (1972). 97 Tristan and de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, p. 177. 98 Ibid. 99 Evelyne Le Garrec, ‘On ne brûlera pas “Le Torchon”’, Politique Hebdo, 6 November 1973. 100 ‘“Programme commun” international pour l’Année de la femme en 1975’, Le Figaro, 15 January 1974. 101 Picq, Libération des femmes, p. 162. 102 Although she supported and voted for François Mitterrand, Françoise Giroud decided to accept Giscard d’Estaing’s offer to appoint her to the new position. ‘La seule chose qu’on puisse dire avec certitude, c’est qu’il [Giscard d’Estaing] ne se comporte pas comme un homme de droite. Je ne vois rien dans son attitude, dans ses décisions ou dans ses déclarations qui, personnellement, m’empêche de travailler avec lui’ (The only thing that can be

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said with certainty is that he [Giscard d’Estaing] does not behave like a man on the right. I do not see anything in his attitude, decisions or statements which, personally, would stop me from working with him). Françoise Giroud, ‘Je ne suis pas féministe, je ne suis pas sexiste … Françoise Parturier … Vous répétez là un slogan, une formule masculine.’ Propos recueillis par Janine Frossard, Le Figaro, 20 November 1974. The Figaro article was a harbinger of the MLF attitude toward Giroud. Françoise Parturier was also extremely critical of Giroud’s commitment and intentions vis-à-vis women, and at the end of the article Giroud complained of her ‘agressivité’ (aggressiveness). 103 Picq, Libération des femmes, p. 163. CFDT (Confédération française démocratique du travail), CGT (Confédération générale du travail), L’ANEA (Association nationale pour l’étude de l’avortement). 104 Ibid. 105 Tristan and de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, pp. 123–124. 106 Picq, Libération des femmes, p. 165. 107 L’Express, 30 December 1974–5 January 1975, p. 43. 108 Picq, Libération des femmes, p. 165. 109 Ibid., pp. 166–167. 110 Ibid., pp. 170–175. 111 Politique Hebdo, 6 June 1974. 112 ‘Des femmes en grève “Grrêve des femmes”: Travail, capitalisme, patrie-arcat: même combat’, Libération, 4 June 1974. 113 Claude Alzon, ‘Féminisme ou sexisme’, Le Monde, 24–25 November 1974. 114 ‘En fait, il faudrait travailler dans tous les domaines. Il y a un risque pour le féminisme en France, c’est de se laisser absorber par la question de l’avortement. J’ai été au débat du mois de décembre à l’Assemblée nationale, et on avait l’impression, dans les discours des députés favorables à la libération, que si on nous “donnait” l’avortement, tous les problèmes des femmes allaient être résolus. Or c’est faux: ça n’est vraiment qu’un début. Ça ne résout pas tous les autres problèmes des femmes.’ ‘Dialogue avec une féministe’, Femme pratique, June 1974, pp. 29–35, p. 35. (In fact, we ought to work in all areas. If there is a risk for feminism in France, it’s to let itself be absorbed by the question of abortion. I was at the December debate at the National Assembly, and one had the feeling from the parliament members in favor of women’s liberation, that if we were ‘given’ abortion, all the problems of women were going to be resolved. This, however, is not true: it is only a beginning. It does not solve all the other problems of women.) 115 L’Express, 30 December 1974–5 January 1975, p. 43. 116 ‘La mongolienne’, essai d’analyse de la situation intérieure du mouvement au début 1975 par Ariel, Catherine et Josy. Sur l’air de ‘J’ai la mémoire qui flanche’. [Edited]. ‘La mongolienne’ fut publiée dans Les femmes s’entêtent, no. 2 (May 1975). In Chansons féministes, 1981, n.p. 117 Margaret Maruani and Nicole Mosconi, ‘Liliane Kandel, Génération MLF’, Travail, genre et sociétés, no. 24 (2010), pp. 5–24. Or, in Liliane Kandel’s words: ‘Ou du groupe auto-intitulé “mongoliennes” opposé aux “intellos” du

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mouvement, contre qui nous soutenions mordicus que si l’Histoire ne marchait pas sur la tête, elle ne pensait pas non plus avec son utérus, et que nous étions entêtées et non étêtées’ (Or the self-titled group ‘mongoloids’ opposed to the ‘intellos’ of the movement, against whom we stubbornly maintained that if History did not walk on its head, it did not think from the uterus either, and that we were ‘determined’ but not ‘decapitated’), p. 16. 118 Jérôme Lejeune, a French geneticist, had identified the chromosome abnormality responsible for trisomy 21 in 1959. Some degree of political sensitivity to the terminology used for trisomy 21 was already in practice in the 1970s though the term ‘mongoliens’ was still frequently employed. See, for example, Claude Lévy, Les jeunes handicapés mentaux: Résultats d’une enquête statistique sur leurs caractéristiques et leurs besoins (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1970) and the Belgian title by Jean-Luc Lambert and Jean-Adolphe Rondal, Le mongolisme (Brussels: Pierre Mardaga, 1979). However, there were already signs of a popular change in terminology, as evidenced by Le Figaro magazine in 1979: ‘les trisomiques 21, ceux qu’on appelait autrefois les mongoliens’ (those who have trisomy-21, who used to be called ‘mongoloids’), 23 June 1979, p. 57. 119 Henri Paicheler et al. ‘Personnalisation et stigmatisations sociales’, in Perspectives cognitives et conduites sociales, vol. 1: Théories implicites et conflits cognitifs, ed. J. L. Beauvois, R. V. Joule and J. M. Monteil (Cousset: DelVal, 1987), pp. 45–61. Cited in Isabelle Ville, ‘Traitement social des déficiences et expérience du handicap en France’, Santé, Société et Solidarité, no. 2 (2005), pp. 135–143, p. 138. 120 The group also appeared to use the name to signal abortion rights. For considerations of trisomy 21 in France in the 1960s and 1970s, see Lynda Lotte and Isabelle Ville, ‘Les politiques de prévention des handicaps à la naissance en France: regards historiques’, Recherches Familiales, 12 (2015), pp. 27–42, pp. 32–34. Initially unregulated, prenatal diagnosis was offered in France from the early 1970s onward, though the scientific community took some pains to remain aloof from the abortion debates then raging in French society. Isabelle Ville, ‘Prenatal Diagnosis in France: Between Regulation of Practices and Professional Autonomy’, Medical History,  vol. 63 no. 2 (2019), pp. 209–229, pp. 212–213. Special thanks to Isabelle Ville for her communication with the author. 121 Article L. 162–1 du Code Pénal. Beyond ten weeks the Law of 1920 stayed in effect, except in cases of malformations and health risks to the mother, in which case the procedure was reimbursable by Social Security. Picq, Libération des femmes, p. 166, note 8. 122 ‘Ici, Simone Veil et Françoise Giroud sont depuis plus de trois mois les deux ministres les plus populaires du gouvernement.’ ‘Femmes: ce qui a changé’, L’Express, 3–9 March 1975. Archives BMD. (Here, Simone Veil and Françoise Giroud have been the two most popular ministers of the government for more than three months.) 123 Albert Memmi, ‘Les femmes, la puissance et la gloire’, Le Figaro, 28 February 1975.

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124 ‘Mais il est nécessaire que la question des relations entre les groupes de femmes et les groupes politiques ne soit pas éludée – ce qui laisserait soupçonner des manipulations. Qu’elle soit clairement posée au contraire: ne serait-ce que pour permettre aux trois groupes existants de réaliser l’unité qu’ils souhaitent.’ Evelyne Le Garrec, ‘Le mouvement des femmes, un et divers’, Politique Hebdo, 18–23 December 1975, no. 202, pp. 15–17, p. 16. (But it is necessary that the question of the relationship between women’s groups and political groups not be avoided – which would leave it open to the suspicion of manipulation. On the contrary, it needs to be clearly brought forward if only to allow the three existing groups to achieve the unity they desire.) 125 Le Garrec, ‘Le mouvement des femmes’, p. 16. Also see [Mina-DominiqueSophie], ‘Hendaye: Femmes contre le fascisme’, Les Pétroleuses, no. 4 (1975), p. 23. 126 ‘Le M.L.F. ne réagit pas. Mais le M.L.F. existe-il encore?’ in Tristan and de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, p. 184. (The MLF does not react. But does the MLF still exist?) 127 Ibid., p. 185. 128 Tract. Histoire d’O ou le fascisme sexuel. Archives BMD. 129 L’Express, 11 May 1975. 130 ‘1975: L’année de la femme française.’ n.p., n.d. Dossier MLF, Archives BMD. 131 ‘Giscard d’Estaing: Il y aura d’autres femmes dans le gouvernement’, Le Figaro, 21 February 1975. 132 ‘Simone de Beauvoir: Le deuxième sexe toujours second’, Le Figaro, 5–6 April 1975. 133 ‘Je suis coincée entre le chef de l’Etat et le premier ministre … il y a une partie de la majorité qui ne m’aime pas parce qu’elle sait bien que je ne suis pas pour autant devenue quelqu’un qui va se rallier à un certain nombre de positions qui n’ont jamais été les miennes.’ ‘Un secrétariat d’État à “L’éternel féminin”?’, Le Monde, 14 August 1975. (I am stuck between the head of state and the prime minister … there is a part of the governing majority that does not like me because they know, in any case, that I have not become someone who will endorse a number of positions that have never been mine.) 134 ‘32 grands photographes rendent hommage à la Femme’ L’Express, 28 July–3 August 1975. The other photographers included Daniel Arnault, Bruno Barbey, Jean-François Bauret, Édouard Boubat (who also photographed Mithila painting), Thierry Boulley, Eric Brissaud, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Elliot Erwitt, Jean Grob, Tömas Höpker, Jean-François Jonvelle, Richard Kalvar, André Martin, Alain Muriot, Helmut Newton, JeanPaul Paireault, Claude Raimond-Dityvon, Marc Riboud and Jean-Loup Sieff. 135 Anne Trisan and Annie de Pisan on behalf of the Le Ligue du droit des femmes division of the MLF commented, ‘Le gouvernement a créé le secrétariat d’État à la Condition féminine sans l’avis des femmes; il l’a supprimé sans l’avis des femmes; il montre ainsi le mépris dans lequel il les tient.’ Histoires du MLF, p. 195. (The government has created ‘le secrétariat d’État à la Condition féminine’ without the advice of women and eliminated it without

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the advice of women; thus revealing the contempt which the government holds for them.) 136 ‘Les Françaises ne sont pas féministes’, Marie-France, November 1975, p. 8. Archives BMD. 137 Françoise Giroud, ‘Comment les Françaises se voient’, L’Express, 19–25 January 1976, pp. 38–41. 138 Ibid., p. 38. 139 Ibid., p. 39. 140 Ibid., pp. 38–39. 141 Michèle Cotta, ‘Un programme pour la moitié des Français’, L’Express, 31 May–6 June 1976, pp. 72–74. Bruno Frappat, ‘Le gouvernement examine un “projet pour les femmes: 1976–1981”’, Le Monde, 27 May 1976, p. 11. 142 Bruno Frappat, ‘Le “Projet pour les femmes” de Madame Giroud: Résistances masculines’, Le Monde, 28 May 1976. 143 Jean-Francis Held, ‘La bombe Giroud’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 7–13 June 1976. ‘Les trois quarts des mesures proposées ont obtenu l’approbation du gouvernement, c’est-à-dire qu’à plus ou moins long terme elles pourraient devenir réalité. Mais ce qu’il y avait de plus dérangeant et parfois de plus discutable dans le projet s’est heurté au scepticisme, voire à l’ironie des ministres mâles’. (Three quarters of the measures proposed have been endorsed by the government which means that, in the long run, they could become reality. But what was more disruptive and sometimes more debatable in the project faced skepticism, even irony from the male ministers). 144 ‘Le projet pour les femmes est mal accueilli par les partis de gauche’, Le Monde, 3 June 1976. 145 Tristan and de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, p. 210. 146 See Hélène de Beauvoir, Souvenirs (Paris: Garamont, 1987), p. 260. The association which started in Paris had extended to Strasbourg in 1979; see Karin Sanger, ‘Die Zeit im Elsass: Der dritte Abschnitt meines Lebens’, in Hélène de Beauvoir: Das Talent liegt in der Familie, ed. Karin Sagner (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2014), pp. 127–133, p. 132. 147 Alice Soledad, ‘Ce week-end à Marseille: 5,000 personnes à la fête des femmes’, Rouge, 8 December 1976. Estimates of attendance ranged from between 2,000–3,000 and 5,000. 148 ‘Alice Soledad, ‘Quel mouvement des femmes?’ Réponse à ‘l’Étincelle’, organe de l’Organisation Communiste des Travailleurs’, Rouge, 31 December 1976. 149 Jane Friedman, ‘Whatever Happened to the French Women’s Movement?’, Paris Metro, 8 December 1976. 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid. 152 Ibid. 153 ‘Beaubourg’, L’Express, 31 January–6 February 1977, p. 109. 154 Ibid. 155 ‘Femmes d’un jour, des mannequins de vitrine, peints, maquillés ou habillés très mode portent des articles de journaux ou des banderoles façon mai 68,

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dénonçant la condition de la femme: le MLF vu par Neuilly.’ Alain Pacadis, ‘Quelle soirée bien parisienne!: L’inauguration officielle du Centre Georges Pompidou par Valéry Giscard D’Estaing’, Libération, 2 February 1977, p. 15. (The exhibition, Femmes d’un jour, features window mannequins that are painted, made-up or dressed very fashionably wearing newspaper articles or Mai ’68 style banners which denounce the condition of women: the MLF as imagined by Neuilly [an affluent suburb of Paris].) 156 ‘Occupation pour un “Centre des Femmes”: 6,000 maisons vides dans le XVème arrondissement de Paris’, Rouge, 1 March 1977. 157 ‘1976: Année des attaques contre les femmes’, Rouge, no. 292, 8 March 1977, p. 10. 158 ‘Si 1975 fut soi-disant “l’année de la femme”, 1976 fut sans aucun doute l’année des plus virulentes attaques contre les femmes.’ Allie, ‘1976: Année des attaques contre les femmes’, Rouge, no. 292, 8 March 1977, p. 10. 159 Alice Soledad-Volia, ‘Femmes 8 mars: L’ascension du mouvement des femmes’, Rouge, no. 292, 8 March 1977, p. 8. 160 Ibid. 161 ‘Françoise’, ‘Quatre mille femmes dans la rue: “Oui papa, oui chéri, oui patron, y’en a marre”: L’événement du 1er mai à Paris’, Rouge, 2 May 1977. 162 ‘Les majorettes et les monteuses’, Libération, 2 May 1977. Rouge, 3 May 1977, reported in ‘Laissons torchons et cuisinières! Rejoignons le combat commun!’ that there were 6,000 women at the event and up to 10,000 behind the cortège, and criticized mainstream papers like L’Humanité for underreporting the numbers at the event. Many women also gathered to defend abortion rights in the rally. 163 ‘Rencontre Internationale des femmes’, Supplément, L’Information des femmes, no. 18. Paris. ‘Une rencontre internationale des femmes’, Libération, 25 May 1977. 164 Suzanne Triton, ‘6,000 femmes de tous les pays’, Rouge, 31 May 1977. 165 Michèle Solat, ‘Sous le “continent noir” de la condition féminine’, Le Monde, 1 June 1977, p. 19. 166 ‘Le Festival de la femme s’est achevé sous les huées’, Le Monde, 18 October 1977, p. 14. 167 ‘Au bonheur des dames’, Le Figaro, 7 October 1977. ‘Le festival de la femme ouvre aujourd’hui’, Le Quotidien de Paris, 12 October 1977. ‘Le palais de la femme’, Le Figaro, 10 October 1977. 168 ‘Il y a quelques jours encore, j’aurais dit que l’image de la femme s’était améliorée … Aujourd’hui je ne sais pas si l’on n’est pas en train de reculer.’ ‘Mme Pasquier contre la “Femme-Bonbon”’, Le Monde, 16–17 October 1977. ‘Le festival de la femme ouvre aujourd’hui’, Le Quotidien de Paris, 12 October 1977. (A few days ago, I would have said that the image of women had improved … Today I do not know if we are not now going in reverse.) 169 ‘Quelle image donnons-nous en effet de nous-mêmes à travers les groupes? Souvent celle de femmes jeunes, soi-disant libérées, sans enfants, image qui nous confine dans un rôle dans lequel nous ne nous retrouvons pas, que nous désirions ou non avoir des enfants. Comment parler de nous, pour nous,

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à partir de nous et en même temps parler avec l’ensemble des femmes? C’est cette contradiction que le mouvement doit aujourd’hui dépasser pour exister véritablement.’ ‘Une image du mouvement qu’il faudrait changer’, Rouge, 15–16 October 1977. (What image do we give of ourselves through groups? Often that of young women, supposedly liberated, without children, an image that confines us to a role in which we do not find ourselves, whether we want to have children or not. How do we speak about ourselves, for ourselves, from within ourselves and at the same time speak to all women? Today, this is the contradiction the movement must move beyond to truly exist.) 170 ‘Cuisine et musique au premier festival de la femme’, France Soir, 14 October 1977. 171 ‘Gisèle Halimi (ed.), Choisir: La cause des femmes, Le programme commun des femmes (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1978). Also see ‘Le programme commun des femmes va sortir’, Rouge, no. 559, 25 January 1978, p. 3. 172 ‘Le programme commun des femmes va sortir’, Rouge, no. 559, 25 January 1978, p. 3. 173 ‘“Les femmes peuvent faire gagner la gauche” tirait le Matin le 5 décembre dernier constatant d’après un sondage Louis-Harris qu’une proportion croissante d’entre elles se détournait de la majorité: l’écart entre les pourcentages d’hommes et de femmes favorables à l’opposition est passé de 19 points en 1964 à 5 points en 1977 (soit 55% d’hommes et 50% de femmes).’ ‘Deux mesures pour les femmes: Le Conseil des ministres les a annoncées hier: Versement à la mère des allocations familiales, Réforme des régimes matrimoniaux’, Le Matin, 2 March 1978. (‘Women Can Help the Left to Win’, published in Le Matin on 5 December, is the latest finding according to a Louis-Harris survey that reveals a growing proportion of them turning away from the governing majority: the difference between the percentages of men and women who are opposition-friendly decreased from 19 points in 1964 to 5 points in 1977 (55% men and 50% women).) 174 ‘Françoise’, ‘À Orléans, les femmes du monde répondaient’, Rouge, 2 February 1978. 175 Ibid. 176 Pasquier is quoted as saying, ‘Une mère peut continuer à se cultiver même avec sept enfants et 2,000 F par mois et être plus disponible que des femmes écartelées entre travail et enfants.’ Françoise, ‘A Orléans, les femmes du monde répondaient’, Rouge, 10 February, 1978. (A mother can continue to cultivate herself even with seven children and 2,000 F per month and be more present than women torn between work and children.) The apparent ‘pro-birth policy’ of Giscard d’Estaing’s government in economic crisis was for some a negative reminder of policies (such as the anti-abortion law of 1920) whose aim was to raise the demographic numbers in France after the loss of lives in the war of 1914–1918.) ‘“Quel est le grand dessein de la femme? Enfanter, encore enfanter, toujours enfanter.” Docteur Doléris de l’Académie de médecine. 1918.’ ‘Du féminisme au conformisme’, Le Monde, 10 April 1979. (What is the great purpose of women? To give birth, to again give birth, to always give birth.)

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177 Claire Bataille, ‘Le “féminisme” version “majorité”: De la libération au programme de Blois’, Rouge, no. 495, 8 March 1978, p. 11. 178 Giscard d’Estaing, ‘Le travail et les loisirs des femmes’, Le Monde, 21 February 1978. 179 Bataille, ‘Le “féminisme” version “majorité”’, p. 11. 180 Ibid. 181 ‘Les femmes aussi’, Rouge, 29–30 April 1978. 182 ‘Pour une nouvelle coordination féministe: Paris: une rencontre à l’AGECA: Dimanche 14 mai (14–24h)’, Libération, 11 May 1978. 183 ‘Tous ces divers groupes et femmes isolées de Paris et la région parisienne essentiellement, ont donc décidé de confronter dès maintenant leurs pratiques, leurs idées, de débattre le 14, entre autres choses de la question de l’autonomie, des problèmes de récupération, d’institutionnalisation du féminisme et de marginalisation de nos luttes … Ces débats peuvent éventuellement déboucher sur des initiatives, des possibilités d’action.’ Ibid. (All these various groups and individual women – from Paris and the region around Paris primarily – have decided from now on to evaluate their practices, their ideas, to discuss on the 14th, among other things, the question of autonomy, problems of appropriation, the institutionalization of feminism and marginalization of our struggles … These debates may eventually lead to initiatives and possibilities for action.) 184 See Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left (New York: Berghan Books, 2004), p. 41. 185 ‘Les Doigts dans la tête’, ‘Parti communiste et féminisme’, Rouge, no. 675, 17–18 June 1978. UFF = Union des femmes françaises, MDM = Movimiento Democrático de Mujeres, UDI = Unione Donne Italiane. 186 ‘Les Doigts dans la tête’, ‘Féminisme’, Rouge, no. 676, 19 June 1978. The PS in January had already laid out a program to address the needs of women during a national convention for women’s rights concerning employment, work, family, abortion, rape, etc. In June, Alain Touraine wrote: ‘Les femmes doivent bien constater que le PS ne leur fait presque aucune place et ne semble pas avoir pris conscience de leur mouvement.’ Alain Touraine, ‘Mouvements des femmes’, Le Matin, 8 June 1978. (Women must realize that the PS has not given them any place and does not seem to have woken up to their movement.) 187 Touraine, ‘Mouvements des femmes.’ 188 ‘La campagne contre le viol a reçu un fort soutien de l’opinion publique. Beaucoup d’hommes, en même temps que toutes les femmes, veulent être libérés de cette violence, présentée parfois comme le suprême triomphe de la virilité.’ Ibid. (The campaign against rape has received strong support from the public. Many men, together with all women, want to be freed from this violence, sometimes presented as the supreme triumph of virility.) 189 Pierre Limagne, ‘Viol des âmes’, La Croix, 24 June 1978. ‘Une “émancipation” de la femme aboutissant à gâcher sa vie, voire à l’abréger après excès d’alcool, de tabac et de dérèglements divers, n’aurait aucun sens. Souhaitons qu’après les campagnes contre le viol des corps en viennent d’autres contre le viol des

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âmes’. (An ‘emancipation’ of the woman which results in the ruin of her life, or even shortens it after excesses of alcohol, tobacco and other dissipations, would make no sense. Let us hope that after the campaigns against the rape of their bodies others follow against the rape of their souls.) 190 Laurence Cossé, ‘Du féminisme à la féminité’, Le Monde, 4 October 1978. 191 ‘Changer le rapport à la politique revient donc pour le projet socialiste à intégrer les aspirations de millions de femmes pour accélérer les mutations en cours. Jusque dans leur recherche de langage et de comportements nouveaux pour faire éclater le code conservateur et masculin de la politique.’ Gisèle Charzat, ‘Féminisme et changement social’, Le Monde, 30 June 1978. (Changing the relationship with politics returns us thus to the socialist project which must integrate the aspirations of millions of women to hasten the transformations taking place. Even as far as their search for language and new behaviors to blow up the conservative and masculine code of politics.) 192 Catherine Valabrègue, ‘Une image fausse’, Le Monde, 7 November 1978; Elisabeth Guibert-Sledziewski, ‘La servante et la maîtresse’, Le Monde, 21 September 1978. 193 Bruno Frappat, ‘Une délégation “embarrassante”: La condition féminine après la démission de Mme Nonon’, Le Monde, 1 August 1978. 194 Françoise Giroud, ‘Un pas en arrière’, Le Monde, 11 September 1978. 195 Christiane Caron, ‘Quelle réforme prioritaire pour les femmes?: 4 “politiciennes” répondent à “France Soir”’, France Soir, 1 August 1978. Archives BMD. 196 Sangomar, ‘Le mouvement des femmes peut-il renvoyer dos-à-dos la droite et la gauche?’, Rouge, 28 December 1978. ‘Bien évidemment, les féministes en question peuvent continuer à rejeter bourgeoisie et mouvement ouvrier: en cela, elles sont libres. Mais en aucun cas, elles ne peuvent valablement expliquer à propos de ces deux forces, que c’est du pareil au même’. (Of course, the feminists in question can continue to reject the bourgeoisie and the workers’ movement: they are free to do so. Regardless, what feminists cannot legitimately explain about the two powers are that they are cut from the same cloth.) 197 Bertrand Le Gendre, ‘Les jeunes communistes dénoncent l’action des groupes féministes “liés aux gauchistes ou au parti socialiste”’, Le Monde, 6 February 1979. 198 ‘La femme au foyer ou la femme au boulot’, Le Journal du Dimanche, 20 January 1979. 199 Odile Douroux, ‘Je veux rentrer à la maison’, Le Pélerin, 11 February 1979. 200 Hélène Vuischard, ‘Les femmes veulent-elles vraiment rentrer à la maison?’, Nice Matin, 2 March 1979. Hélène Vuischard, ‘Les femmes veulent-elles vraiment rentrer à la maison’, Nice Matin, 3 March 1979. 201 Ibid. 202 ‘Donner la possibilité de choisir’, Le Monde, 14 March 1979. 203 ‘Femmes: la réussite familiale objectif no. 1’, Le Matin, 27 August 1979. 2 04 Ibid. 205 Françoise Giroud, ‘Les voiles flasques du féminisme’, Le Monde, 7 April 1979.

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2 06 Ibid. 207 ‘Une Manifestation du M.L.F.: Pour une Europe moindre mâle’, Le Monde, 9 June 1979. 2 08 Ibid. 2 09 Ibid. 210 ‘Requiem pour la loi Veil?’ in ‘Où en est le mouvement des femmes?’, La Gueule Ouverte, 7 March 1979, p. 11. Archives BMD. 211 Maïte Pinero, ‘La muflerie au pouvoir’, L’Humanité, 11 December 1979. 212 ‘La Crise du mouvement féministe: Entretien avec Daniela, militante des gcr’, Rouge, 1–7 June 1979, p. 31. 213 The groups that were allowed to use MLF were the following: Psychanalyse et Politique, Des femmes en mouvements (mensuelle et hebdo), SARL Éditions and Librairie des femmes. ‘“M.L.F.”: Propriété privée, défense d’afficher sans autorisation?’ Libération, 8 January 1980. 214 Laurence Beurdeley, ‘Une rentrée pas comme les autres: Celle des mères de famille’, France Soir, 14 September 1979. Archives BMD. 215 ‘Les femmes au lit’, L’Est Républicain, 10 December 1979. Archives BMD. 216 ‘L’homme qui veut envoyer les femmes de France au lit: Phallocrate? Mais non, nataliste’, Le Quotidien de Paris, 12 December 1979; ‘Le Sénateur Henriet veut renvoyer les femmes au lit!’, Quotidien du médecin, 11 December 1979. Archives BMD. 217 ‘Le M.L.F s’en mêle’, France Soir 16 December 1979. Archives BMD. 218 Tract. ‘Le Mouvement de Libération des femmes restera-t-il la propriété privée d’un groupe?’ Archives BMD. 219 Pierre Sambre, ‘A qui appartiennent les femmes libérées?: MLF: quand la révolte devient institution…’, Le Quotidien de Paris, 17 January 1980. Archives BMD. 220 Tract. ‘Le Mouvement de Libération des femmes restera-t-il la propriété privée d’un groupe?’ Archives BMD. 221 Tract. ‘Aux termes de la réglementation des associations 1901, le groupe “Psychanalyse et Politique” a désormais le droit.’ Archives BMD. 222 Sambre, ‘A qui appartiennent les femmes libérées’. 223 ‘“Women’s Liberation LTD”: The French Controversy’, Spare Rib, 1981, p. 21. Also see Simone de Beauvoir’s dialogue with Hélène V. Wenzel where she states: They [Antoinette Fouque and group] were women who wanted to have a certain kind of power, and because they were very rich, they wanted to have the copyright to all the books, they wanted the trademark “MLF” all for themselves. Other women were against this. Really, I wasn’t very involved in any of this […]’, ‘Interview with Simone de Beauvoir’, Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century, Yale French Studies, no. 72 (1986), pp. 5–34, pp. 13. The running series of everyday accounts of sexism, ‘Le sexisme ordinaire’, in Les Temps modernes, first introduced by Simone de Beauvoir in December 1973, lasted until 1984. In February 1981, the chronicles of ‘sexisme ordinaire’ took a critical look at ‘L’affaire Psychépo’ and addressed the MLF buyout and subsequent fallout in Les Temps modernes, no. 415, pp. 1492–1505. Simone de

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Beauvoir penned a preface about the episode in Chroniques d’une imposture: Du mouvement de libération des femmes à une marque commerciale (Paris: Association du mouvement pour les luttes féministes, 1981). 224 Invitation card. ‘Pourquoi nous, femmes, votons F. Mitterrand dès le 1er tour’. Le mercredi 22 avril 1981 au Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin. Archives BMD. 225 Tract. ‘Le Mouvement de Libération des femmes n’a pas “vécu, il vit”.’ Archives BMD. 226 Tract. ‘Assemblées des femmes contre la misogynie, Mouvement de Libération des Femmes’, 1 May 1981. Archives BMD. 227 ‘MLF contre Charlie’, Libération, 20 July 1981. 228 Valérie Lejeune, ‘Les “machos” ont attendu le MLF en vain’, Le Quotidien de Paris, 22 July 1981. 229 Ibid. 230 ‘Le MLF-déposé – n’a pas manifesté devant les locaux de Charlie’, Libération, 21 July 1981. 231 Khursheed Wadia, ‘Women and the Events of May 1968’, in The May 1968 Events in France: Reproductions and Interpretations, ed. Keith A. Reader and Khursheed Wadia (London: St. Martin’s Press: 1993), p. 163, p. 165. ‘La révolution est accomplie’ is a reference to an article by the same name published by Françoise Giroud in Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 1361, 6–12 December 1990, pp. 6–13.

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3

Libération-création: MLF, women artists and the militant body

Lutter pour la liberté de l’avortement, c’est bien. Mais la femme n’est pas qu’une pondeuse. Claude Alzon (November 1974)1 Fighting for the freedom of abortion is good. But a woman is not merely an egg-laying hen. Contrairement à ce que disait Freud, il me semble que la femme est un homme avec quelque chose en plus. Et ce quelque chose est son pouvoir procréateur. Françoise Giroud et Benoîte Groult (March 1975)2 Contrary to what Freud said, it seems to me that a woman is a man with something more. And that something is her procreative power.

Le corps féminin The image of a pregnant Statue of Liberty with a protruding belly, to advertise an international women’s march for contraception and abortion in November 1971, was symbolic of the relationship between women, (pro)creation and the state, and the urgent need to redefine ‘liberté’ (Figure 3.1). Moved by both a political situation as well as their own private circumstances, women militants were interested in spreading a rhetoric that supported abortion and contraception as forms of a ‘bodily’ liberation that would in part allow women to use their (creative) energies differently, rather than solely to suit the economics of the state.3 Although fiercely divided amongst themselves in terms of ‘luttes des classes’ and ‘luttes des femmes’, three strong currents of feminism emerged: awareness-raising in the tradition of the suffragettes, feminists who looked to psychoanalysis (Psych et Po), and radical feminists who advocated separatism and militant action. The female body transcended these divisions and acted as a shared ‘corpus’ which crossed class, politics and ideology (if not always religion) and created a unifying tendency not only amongst feminists, but also non-feminists.

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MLF, women artists and the militant body

Statue of Liberty in an International Women’s March poster, 20 November 1971.

The image of the body – subject to the tensions of decolonization, consumerism and sexual liberation inherited from the 1960s – was emerging as a vehicle of contestation, transformation and exploration.4 Militant women as well as non-militants used the materiality of its flesh and contours to begin to explore the ideological, aesthetical and political. For women artists and creators of body imagery, this meant a constant duality of identity between the private and public self; between individual identity and a more universal sense of womanhood; between bondage and ‘liberty’ as articulated by the 1970s feminists; as well as its application as a larger creative metaphor.5 In this chapter we will look at the political climate as a way in which to interpret the corps féminin in the 1970s art world within the framework of the social and political body set out in the previous chapter. Création-procréation The economic and private necessity of having a ‘room of one’s own’ was set out in Virginia Woolf ’s essay of the same name with regard to women writers.6

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With women responsible both for daily life at home and also, at times, their working life, creativity was an impulse that largely went ignored. The women of the MLF were quick to seize on this fact and echoed it politically in their schedule for the days planned at La Mutualité in 1972: ‘Dans leur programme, les militantes du M.L.F. n’ont réservé qu’un quart d’heure à la “créativité de la femme”: parce que, disent-elles, on nous la permet si peu dans la vie’ (The militants of the MLF only reserved a quarter of an hour for ‘women’s creativity’ in their programming, since, they claimed, women are allowed so little of it in life).7 Recognizing the lack and the need to bolster women’s creative life, artists Jeanne Socquet and Suzanne Horer published La création étouffée one year later as a vehicle in which to explore the different aspects of women’s creativity. In it they included statements and interviews with artists, writers and filmmakers such as Colette Audry, Marie Cardinal, Josée Dayan, Marguerite Duras, Martine Duruze, Leonor Fini, Betsy Jolas, Marta Pan, Alicia Penalba, Geneviève Serreau and Agnès Varda.8 Although the authors did not aim to recreate ‘Le deuxième sexe for creativity’, the perceived inequalities for women and their strategies for rebellion were clear: Le pouvoir créateur est essentiellement subversif, quelles que soient les formes prises, parce qu’il est jeu et plaisir. … L’exercice fondamental de la création rejoint l’exercice fondamental des libertés humaines. … Pourquoi le dernier carré des privilèges auquel les mâles se cramponnent est-il celui de la création?9 Creative power is essentially subversive, whatever form it takes, because it is about play and pleasure. …The fundamental act of creating aligns with the fundamental act of human freedom. … Why is the last bastion of privilege that males cling to creative rights?

While pleasure and the subversive aspects of creativity were upheld, revolutionary politics were dismissed as untenable, with hope focused instead on individual change.10 The move from state-centered politics to a change, or ‘revolution’, within the individual (or individual relations) signaled a shift in battleground for some feminists (such as Horer and Socquet) from ideology and policy to creativity. If the state favored a larger population (as indicated in Michel Debré’s 100 million French citizens), then women were the guardians of that dream and creativity became a potential source of conflict. The MLF opposed the belief that having reproductive rights was the only source of female liberation: ‘La contraception nous libère effectivement de la peur des grossesses non désirées, de la peur de l’avortement, mais elle ne nous libère pas en tant que femmes, elle ne libère pas notre corps’ (Contraception indeed liberates us from fear of unwanted pregnancies as well as the fear of abortion, but it does not liberate us as women, nor does it liberate our bodies).11 But

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more than sexuality, debates surrounding contraception and abortion threw into relief other modes of production by women (specifically those generated by artists) in a way that defined a generation more than in any subsequent decade. Women artists had to justify their family-life decisions at a time of both governmental pressure and women’s movements. Artist Ruth Francken, for example, emphasized her views on the necessary separation between family and creative production: ‘je pense que la femme doit aussi savoir renoncer, même à une vie familiale, pour créer’ (I think that women must also know how to sacrifice, even a family life, in order to create).12 Francken’s collagephotograph, La berceuse, exhibited in Féminie in 1975, shows a baby carriage parked next to a shop window full of scissors hostilely angled directly at the ‘baby’, their sharp blades thrusting toward the open carriage (Figure 3.2). The inherent tension between women’s reproductive, or ‘procreative’, ability and their ‘creative’ life was discussed and vindicated by feminists: … les femmes se sont vu dénier la possibilité d’être des créatrices. Ne parlons que pour mémoire, et pour rire, des arguments du genre: ‘les femmes font des enfants, elles sont donc créatrices de vie et quoi de plus beau que de donner la vie …’ De qui se moque-t-on? Les animaux aussi font des petits et ils n’en sont pas considérés comme créateurs pour autant.13

Ruth Francken, La berceuse, 1973.

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… women have seen themselves denied the opportunity to be artistic creators. For a laugh, let’s remember the type of argument like: ‘women give birth to children, therefore they create life and what is more beautiful than the act of giving life …’ Who are we kidding? Animals, for that matter, also give birth to little ones and they are not considered artistic creators.

3.3 

The physical parallel drawn between women and animals in terms of reproduction was one that MLF women actively fought against. In particular they protested against the ‘demeaning’ depiction of a woman on all fours and with three breasts in the publicity poster for Federico Fellini’s Roma (as a play on the she-wolf of Romulus and Remus lore) which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in France in spring 1972 (Figure 3.3). The image, which appeared on the walls of the city, sparked controversy and protests in various journals by the MLF, for equating women with animals. The Portuguese writer Isabel Barreno (one of the three ‘Marias’ arrested in Portugal for ‘pornographic’ literature in 1972) cited women’s need to break with demands of biology through spirit and intelligence: ‘L’être humain est le seul animal qui “invente sa nature”. Pourquoi cette “nature” a-t-elle été inventée de façon à démunir les femelles de survivre sans les mâles?’ (Human beings

Catherine Deudon, photograph of MLF demonstration against the Fête des Mères (which originated during Pétain’s government and was linked to anti-abortion) on the Champs-Elysées in front of Federico Fellini’s Roma, 28 May 1972.

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are the only animal that ‘invent their own nature’. Why was this ‘nature’ invented in such a way as to deprive females a survival without males?).14 This was echoed intellectually at this time with the publication of Sherry B. Ortner’s essay challenging the concepts of Lévi-Strauss in ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ (1972/1974): In other words, woman’s body seems to doom her to mere reproduction of life; the male, in contrast, lacking natural creative functions, must (or has the opportunity to) assert his creativity externally, ‘artificially’, through the medium of technology and symbols. In so doing, he creates relatively lasting, eternal, transcendent objects, while the woman creates only perishables – human beings.15

This vision of women as reproductive animals contrasted with that of women as ‘machines’ of production, or with their being engulfed by the technology available in the home that only locked them further into their role as homemakers. In an MLF flyer for the Salon d’arts ménagers, feminists retaliated with an image of a woman with a washing machine-womb complaining that women have not only the responsibility of doing housework, but also the ‘art’ of choosing the right products as well (Figure 3.4). The image challenges the Moulinex advertisement from 1962 (as well as advertisements in the 1950s for household technology, such as Tornado and Bendix) that promised women more free time due to product advances: ‘Moulinex ne libère pas la femme, Libéronsnous par nos luttes’ (Moulinex does not liberate the woman. Let’s liberate ourselves through our struggles).16 The parallel with animals and/or machines was something that women could consciously escape through artistic and creative, rather than ‘procreative’, production.

Salon d’arts ménagers, Flyer, 1975.

3.4 

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In spite of the fact that all women were encouraged to ‘create’ by Horer and Socquet, a nagging doubt for many – similar to the women’s movement which also struggled with class – was that an ‘artist’ needed an educational and/or elitist background. In a roundtable discussion of art and creativity with five women artists – a drawing specialist, a painter, a photographer/journalist, a sculptor and an actor – one remarked: Françoise: Dans la société telle qu’elle existe, on a fait de la créativité un domaine privilégié, la créativité, c’est un exemple auquel on accède ou on n’accède pas. Et je vois la créativité comme quelque chose qui existe encore, qui n’a pas disparu, au contraire, mais qui demande à naître d’une façon différente. Et pour qu’elle naisse d’une façon différente, il faut que la société change, que les rapports entre les gens changent.17 Françoise: In today’s society we have made creativity a privileged domain, creativity is a realm that we can or cannot access. And I see creativity as something that still exists, which has not disappeared; on the contrary, it needs to arise in a different way. And for it to arise differently, society needs to change, relationships between people need to change.

One expression of creativity for women in society is seen through the women’s artistic ‘groups’ that formed in the mid- to late 1970s in France (see Chapter 5). Meanwhile radical left groups in the MLF such as Les Pétroleuses, the ‘Tendance lutte de classe du mouvement de libération des femmes’, issued a statement claiming that rising birth rates were a sign of the exploitation of women who could have been using their ‘energies’ for a different kind of labor in the economic market. A statement by the group in February 1975 (a month after the abortion law had been passed to be in effect for five years) claimed: Cette exploitation des femmes dans la famille inclut la maternité elle-même; faire des enfants, c’est produire de la force de travail en puissance. Il y a continuité entre notre exploitation dans le travail ménager et l’exploitation de notre ventre. … Dans le capitalisme naissant et montant, les exigences du développement capitaliste ont signifié la répression globale de la jouissance (restreindre la consommation pour dégager une épargne et réinvestir). La répression sexuelle en centrant la sexualité sur la procréation et non sur le plaisir favorisait l’économie des énergies et leur réinvestissement sur le travail.18 This exploitation of women in the family includes maternity itself; to have children is to produce potential labor power. There is continuity between our exploitation in housework and the exploitation of our belly. … In emerging and rising capitalism, the demands of capitalist development have meant the global repression of jouissance (restricting consumption to bring about savings and reinvesting). Sexual repression, through means of focusing one’s sexuality on procreation and not on pleasure, privileged the saving of energies and their reinvestment into work.

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The tensions between creativity and creation and the pressure from the society and the state to produce children at the expense of ‘unproductive’ jouissance were expressed in various media by artists who explored this conflict in their work. Whereas Mary Kelly in her Post-Partum Document (1973–1979) charted the daily life and progress of a woman’s life with her child in painstaking detail, using journal entries and photographs as a social critique of motherhood, other women used the womb itself as a political metaphor. This ‘womb’ art had various and complex forms of expression, ranging from the portrayal of pregnant women to metaphorical uses such as the soft tent in Nil Yalter’s La yourte (1973) (Figure 3.5) and the performance art of Myriam Bat-Yosef ’s La grotte (1979) (Figure 3.6). Former UFPS president (1974–1975) Christiane de Casteras and artist friend Andrée Marquet produced a soft sculpture, La vie, that presented a pregnant woman with a womb and organs embroidered on the outside of her body (Figure 3.7). This ‘externalization’ of the internal condition of pregnancy revealed the hidden and unseen aspect of womanhood, like the lives and inner workings of creation. The sculpture/mannequin was included in the FéminieDialogue UNESCO show in Paris in 1979 dedicated to the child, along with Portuguese-born artist Paula Rego’s soft sculpture called La petite princesse enceinte (1978), depicting a young woman with a distorted face holding her womb made from cloth (Figure 3.8). In the same exhibition, Israeli artist Myriam Bat-Yosef produced La grotte (inspired by a work of André Pieyre de Mandiargues), which was a mixture of the internal and external forms of a vibrantly colored cube that she entered and exited in a performance.19 BatYosef commented that the work was a performance that allows the public to re-enter the womb, reprising the concept behind Niki de Saint Phalle’s Hon (1967), which had its entrance through the ‘vagina’.20 Bat-Yosef writes, ‘Les personnes qui s’associent, et se couchent dans la grotte, en regardant le plafond, déclenchent en elles des images qui les ramènent à leurs toutes petites enfances, au ventre de leurs mères’ (People who connect to the cave and lie down in it, look at the ceiling and trigger the images from within themselves that take them back to their childhoods and their mothers’ womb).21 If women were confronted with economic and social pressures in their daily lives, theorist Julia Kristeva – who received strong criticism from feminists for her work ‘Héréthique de l’amour’ (1977)22 with its positive presentation of motherhood – had earlier suggested that the ‘unconscious’ and its images (which Bat-Yosef implies) were one way in which to counter the (re)production that was demanded of women: En effet la femme y est le plus souvent réduite à une force de production à qui il s’agit de donner une conscience de classe. Le problème est en effet de première importance, mais il est irréalisable à la manière du XIXe siècle: des interventions analytiques (psychanalytiques) sont à faire pour répondre à des

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3.5 

Nil Yalter, La yourte, 1973.

3.6 

Myriam Bat-Yosef, La grotte (d’après André Pieyre de Mandiargues), 1979.

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Christiane de Casteras and Andrée Marquet, La vie, 1974–1975.

3.7 

Paula Rego, La petite princesse enceinte, 1978.

3.8 

besoins de type libidinal qui recoupent les rapports de reproduction et les rapports de production et qui sont une réalité sociale brûlante, sans quoi le discours de la gauche reste en porte-à-faux devant des phénomènes nouveaux (femmes, jeunes, drogue, média).

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Women are often reduced to being a force of production that need only be granted class-consciousness. Although this goal is extremely important, it cannot be accomplished using means from the nineteenth century. We should use psychoanalytic interventions to respond to libidinal needs rooted in relationships of reproduction and production, needs that have become a glaring social reality. If not, leftist discourse will be unable to account for new phenomena – women, young people, drugs, the media.

Earlier, in the same interview, she stresses: La preuve est ainsi faite qu’avec des problèmes comme celui des femmes, de leur identité, un autre axe de la cohésion et de l’évolution sociales est touché, un axe qui n’est pas la conscience de classes, mais les rapports de reproduction et, avec ces rapports, quelque chose qu’on peut appeler l’inconscient.23 Thus, the problems facing women and their identity bear on another axis of cohesion and social development: not one of class-consciousness but one of relationships involving reproduction as well as something that could be termed the unconscious.

Like Bat-Yosef ’s La grotte, Nil Yalter suggested a new economy for women through La yourte, a tent representing a nomad’s home, in her first exhibition in France at ARC 2 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in November 1973. Drawing on symbolism from her native Turkey, Yalter created a tent with a wooden structure covered with felt (which recalled the persecution of nomadic tribes by the Turkish government) to parallel the plight of women who were often relegated to these interior spaces that they prepared and ornamented themselves from their adolescence. A critic writes: La yourte est en elle-même un monde, un cosmos en miniature. Le toit en coupole figure le ciel, rond d’un horizon à l’autre. Les murs sont les poteaux qui soutiennent le ciel, jusqu’au foyer où se tient la femme. Transportable par deux dromadaires, elle est mobile, permet d’emmener son univers avec soi. Mais dans ce monde en miniature, protégée, inondée de bienfaits, la femme, être précieux, source de richesse, est aussi enfermée. Elle n’a plus à sortir dans le monde car elle y est, dedans. Protégée du vrai monde – où les hommes ne lui permettent plus d’aller – elle est cachée dans ce monde en réduction, simulacre, prison.24 The yurt is in itself a world, a cosmos in miniature. The domed roof echoes the sky, curved between the horizons. The walls are poles which support the sky down to the hearth where the woman stands. Transportable by two dromedaries, it is mobile, allowing this universe to be carried with you. Yet in this world in miniature, protected, overflowing with worth, the woman, a precious being, a source of richness, is also confined. She no longer has to go out in the world because she is there, inside. Protected from the real

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world – where men no longer allow her to go – she is hidden in this shrunken world, a simulacre, a prison.

The struggle for women to define their own creativity against the pressures of procreation was partly anticipated by the militancy of women fighting to take possession of their bodies and psyches during the 1970s. Artist Michèle Katz wrote anonymously along with a group of women simply identifying themselves as ‘Un Groupe de Femmes’ in Simone de Beauvoir’s edited ‘Les femmes s’entêtent’ for the journal Les Temps modernes.25 The title derived from Max Ernst’s enigmatic series of surrealist collages portraying headless bodies in La femme 100 têtes of 1929. (De Beauvoir had previously critiqued the male surrealist portrayals of women in Le deuxième sexe.)26 Katz, writing collectively with a group of women in the pages of de Beauvoir’s journal, expressed a range of emotions regarding childbirth, from the joy of wanted pregnancies to the unwanted, the psychological challenges of pregnancy and childbirth and the impact of children upon both erotic and ordinary relationships.27 In a similar visceral manner, Katz explores the inner world of women, pregnancy and relationships in her remarkable Chronique d’une femme mariée (1974), a series of drawings that directly confronts patriarchal society and its contradictions by producing a counter narrative of the everyday lives of women. Women’s experiences of menstrual bleeding, childbirth, abortion, struggles with creativity, attack on ‘phallocratic society’, and the alienation of daily life produced by capitalism and consumer culture are presented with alternating blistering violence and tenderness. In Duo de femmes (1974), Katz reimagines this world in terms of the female solidarity and the struggles with pregnancy and childbirth by highlighting the masks that women wear in society (Plate 16), while in another work from the series, Mâle désir d’un enfant (1974), she depicts the repressed male wish to give birth as a catalyst provoking irresolvable anxiety (and even violence) between the sexes (Plate 17). Economic difficulties for women artists were only augmented by the decline in the art market during this period – as one artist put it, the money ‘dried up’, thereby limiting the opportunities for personal exhibitions and the production of catalogues in the early 1970s.28 At the same time, passage of the abortion law in 1975 technically allowed women more freedom to define themselves and their choices. How was the female body (re)defined through art during the period of the MLF’s creative influence over women’s lives, as witnessed in the tension between the materiality of the body and the militancy of the movement? How do we see women develop within the strictures of Marxism and the inner ‘pleasures’ of psychoanalysis, both of which the movement promised? These themes are developed further below and in the following chapter.

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Militant bodies: 1970s women’s art and the corps féminin As French women in the 1970s grappled with questions of contraception and abortion rights on the one hand, and higher birth rates in order to soothe and stimulate the economy on the other, women’s bodies (or those of childbearing years) were highly visible and being politicized in society. The ‘liberation of the body’ was being championed by the MLF, who used visual means such as simple imagery and symbolic measures to cut across the class and economic barriers within the women’s movement caught and stymied between the ‘lutte des femmes’ and the ‘lutte des classes’. The body may have been the answer. The use of the body by a generation of visual artists touches upon the militancy of the MLF and other worldwide women’s movements. Their irony, radical questioning, drive for power, theoretical speculation, use of ‘spectacle’ and need for attention underlined their political motives, and finds resonance in the work of some male and female artists in the 1970s. The trajectories of the different factions of the MLF, and their varied and often situational responses, mirrored to a degree the strategies of women’s art groups. Briefly inspired by MLF tactics such as gathering together in spite of differences to directly confront the ‘patriarchy’ (their rallying point) in society and politics, various women’s art groups aimed to challenge and reclaim some of the elite male power in the art world by forming collectively and taking action through art (see Chapter 5). The look of the MLF: politicizing culture What did ‘revolution’ mean for women artists coming of age during the 1970s? How did the MLF inspire or influence them (or vice versa)? Responses to these questions are difficult to gauge, in part because of the rareness of women artists directly crediting the MLF (which had no specific interest in women’s art) but also because of the difficulty in determining the impact on women artists of the MLF’s saturation of the politically aware culture that grew up around the movement in terms of demonstrations, journals, fairs and exhibitions. However, the MLF did appear to motivate artists on several levels. First, the all-women MLF groups with their varying political agendas spurred forward female-centered art groups such as Collectif Femmes/Art, La Spirale, Femmes en Lutte, Art et Regard des Femmes etc., in the 1970s (as will be discussed in Chapter 5). Second, the MLF’s orchestrated and/or spontaneous actions and subversive behavior for political gain did inspire a generation of women artists both directly and indirectly, as discussed below. Third, the MLF drew political attention to the body – initially to call for the liberalization of contraception and abortion, and later with regard to rape, prostitution and violence – while also exploring sexuality on its own terms, including homosexuality and jouissance (see Chapter 4). This

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is in spite of third world women’s rejection of their first world counterparts’ focus on sexuality and other social and bodily rights as they sought to change the more pressing material conditions of their lives. These tensions often came to a head at international conferences.29 The political impact of UNESCO’s L’Année de la femme and other state-sponsored events by the Giscard government (in part to secure the women’s vote) called not only the body, but also female identity into question. Artists, writers, filmmakers, philosophers, intellectuals and psychoanalysts all responded to this new political and social wave. The women of the MLF had a distinctive ‘look’ not only in action, but in ‘being’. Historian and former MLF member Naty Garcia Guadilla reports that the nascent feminist movement was typified by the young, many of whom were students, who had broken with the political left and who shared similar levels of education as well as commitment to the movement.30 Dressed in blue jeans, tunics or long skirts, MLF women were identified by their distinctive clothes that became an unofficial uniform for their meetings.31 Other women dressed in ‘bourgeois’ style – masculine jackets, long skirts and high heels or whatever was the ‘latest’ fashion – which drew criticism from some newcomers for the obvious consumerism of the women ‘si bien fringuées’ (such great threads), drawing the rejoinder: ‘On ne se fait pas belles seulement pour les hommes’ (We do not make ourselves beautiful only for men).32 The women of Psychanalyse et Politique also appeared at meetings bearing symbols of their holidays in Algeria or Morocco: new tunics, purses and matching hair color.33 The conformity of women in the MLF was so marked that Garcia Guadilla remarks that a woman would avoid wearing overtly feminine makeup, pantyhose or short skirts to a meeting in order to not be seen as ‘petitebourgeoise’ or ‘féminine’.34 These rules created a strict look and style to the movement, which newcomers quickly conformed to after a few meetings by growing their hair long and curly and often hennaed bright red during vacations in North Africa; light makeup (if any); and a lack of deodorant or perfume except for natural plants and the strong smell of tobacco from heavy smoking during meetings, mixed with the smell of hashish that ‘circulated’ amongst the women.35 The carefully constructed persona of the MLF contrasted with the spontaneous nature of the movement, which was often reflected in the more ‘interesting’ discussions that took place during their ritual ‘pot’ (or drink) after meetings in the closest café: a sign for newcomers – if invited – that they had ‘arrived’.36 For the MLF, their ‘look’ was not their only trademark. The group(s) spectacularly employed shock tactics and attention-seeking antics to draw awareness to their cause, often disrupting institutional events such as verbally abusing bridal couples in church ceremonies or breaking up a serious antiabortion discussion by throwing raw meat (symbolizing a fetus) at the scientist speaking.37 These rebellious women, despite limited resources, had a serious

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political agenda that they used the media to effectively communicate. The ‘symbolic’ nature of their demonstrations – such as dressing up as children, burning coffins, leaving a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Solider, setting a fire in a theater playing a pornographic movie, invading theaters to protest Histoire d’O, and spray-painting advertising they found offensive – was based on ‘visual’ actions that could be mass-media transmitted from Paris to rural France.38 In an interview, Anne Zelensky admits that their actions were both spontaneous and calculated in their symbolic weight in order to visibly affect the imagination and consciously effect political change while relying essentially on ‘guts’: Le moment était propice, mais on ne le savait pas: on l’a su quand ça a marché. Comme on était peu nombreuses, une poignée, et qu’on voulait intervenir de façon spectaculaire, je crois que, intuitivement, nous avons choisi ce mode d’expression qu’est le symbolisme. En somme, c’était le seul moyen à notre portée. Ce n’était pas un travail lent mais spectaculaire. Et tout ce qui est spectaculaire se doit de frapper l’imaginaire. Mais tout cela a été spontané, est venu des tripes.39 The hour was upon us, but we did not know it: we only knew when it all somehow came together. As there were only a few of us, a handful, and as we wanted to intervene in a spectacular fashion, I think that we had intuitively chosen symbolism to express ourselves. In short, it was the only means within our reach. It was not a considered action, but a spectacular one. And all that is spectacular must strike the imagination. But all this was spontaneous, it came from the gut.

It is precisely this mix of symbolic calculation, spontaneity and deep emotion that has echoes and resonances in the larger culture of the 1970s, specifically in the visual work of women artists, filmmakers and photographers explored further below. Despite these stated positions, including the ambivalence of many artists toward a stridently political context, MLF practices – inspired in part by the events of May ’68 as well as feminist activities in the United States, Europe and elsewhere – were seen as part of a radical spirit that influenced a wider culture and that was directly reflected and/or anticipated by the work of women artists (and some male artists) during this period. In essence, the shared female body was often the only link for women across the seemingly unbridgeable class or ‘caste’ divide that Marxism could not resolve: La notion de classe sociale peut-elle être appliquée aux femmes? Certains ont opposé un argument convainquant: entre une ouvrière et la femme d’un chef d’une grande entreprise, il n’y a ni mode de vie, ni intérêt, ni culture commune, et encore moins conscience d’appartenir à une même classe …. Souvent elles

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se sentent aussi plus d’affinités avec les hommes de leur milieu qu’avec des femmes d’un milieu différent.40 Can the notion of social class be applied to women? Some have tried to oppose a convincing argument: between a woman laborer and the wife of a head of a large company, there is very little ground in common – their lifestyles, interests, and culture are all different, let alone their feeling of belonging to the same class …. Often these women also feel more in common with men from the same background than with women from a different one.

In what ways did the work produced in the 1970s by women confirm or contradict the messages of the MLF, or did it point elsewhere to an independence of thought outside any political context, thus creating a new ‘feminine’ body? If the ‘personal is political’, as the feminist dictum declares, then does the use of the woman’s body in the 1970s stand outside all political motivation, or does it widen and deepen it by appropriation? The MLF, at heart, was built on power, emotion and prejudice: ‘Nos manifestations impressionnaient si fort parce qu’elles étaient le signe du pouvoir des femmes. Les mythes qui sont nés alors à notre propos, M.L.F. “hystérique, lesbien, excité”, sont précisément la preuve de cette peur’ (Our demonstrations had such strong impact because they were a sign of women’s power. The myths that emerged about us, M.L.F. ‘hysterical, lesbian, aroused’, are precisely the proof of this fear).41 How does this myth and energy translate into the visual work of women artists working during this period of the MLF and feminism in France? Was there an attempt to harness the personal for political gain via strategies of representation; to make the political personal, familiar, intimate and less estranged? In the following three sections, ‘The intimate close-up’, ‘The intimate cut-up’ and ‘Inside out: shared skin’, we will consider how the body could be politicized in an era of ‘personal as political’ militancy, with the body seen as a vehicle sensitive to emotion, the forces of technology and violence in the work of artists, as was reflected in theories of the period (see below). As the MLF movement was also working in tandem with other international movements in the United States, Britain, Italy, Spain, Germany and elsewhere (as discussed in Chapter 2), women’s art across these international borders (as shown in international venues such as the Biennale de Paris) will be considered in relation to the French model to both deepen and contrast the French context. Posters, demonstration and protest iconography, as well as the art produced for journals and tracts created for the MLF and other women’s movements, became important iconological references for women of this period. The individual as an expression of Cartesian dualism is challenged by women artists through a series of subversive strategies and artistic processes. This is seen in the hyper-focus on the face or body parts to encourage ‘strangeness’ through intimacy or alienation; the cutting of the ‘body’ to confront the mind/body divide through isolated body parts or fragments; and

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the use of skin, as liminal surface, to signify political solidarity and resistance through the point at which inner body meets outer world. (These strategies, used across artistic media by artists, include, but are not limited to, actual body, or performance art.)42 The French word ‘intime’ derives from the Latin intimus or ‘le plus en dedans, le plus intérieur’ (most within/inside, most internal), while ‘militant’ or ‘qui lutte, qui combat’ (who fights or battles) comes from militer from the Latin militaris, ‘militaire’, or ‘servir dans l’armée’ (to serve in the army).43 This dual projection between the interior and the exterior body, or the line between intimacy and activism, will be explored below. The project is not without some reflexive political awareness, as women such as Annette Messager, Gina Pane, Tania Mouraud, ORLAN, Françoise Janicot and others were working in the first flush of self-discovery and of self-identity with regard to the body, which was made visible as both a conscious and self-conscious act. The intimate close-up Is ‘proximity’ political? In an article from the Marxist journal La nouvelle critique (1972), a series of photographs of a woman’s face (mouth, teeth, nose, eyes, glossy lips) in various expressions came to signify the relationship between the intimacy and mobility of a woman’s face and the articulation of the women’s movement (Figure 3.9).44 The closer the proximity of the face, the

‘Images d’une oppression, images d’une libération’, La nouvelle critique: Politique, marxisme, culture, no. 53 (234) nouvelle série, May 1972.

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images suggest, the more revelatory the truth: repeated mouths act as a metaphor or representation of women’s ‘voice’ or discourse. These representations were not limited to photographs, thus challenging proximity and an ‘indexical’ relation to truth through the camera’s lens. Rather the face, and other body parts such as women’s eyes, lips, mouth, hands, arms and vagina, came to symbolize parts of the women’s movement, or became representative of their ‘hidden’ lives and motivations as well as their politically ‘invisible’ existence. These substitutes, or the deconstruction of woman and her body during an era of poststructuralist thought, were not used to enact the fetish, rather to be able to make clearer sense of the material (and psychological) conditions of her existence through the materiality of her body. Le visage morcelé / le visage en morceaux: the face in pieces The faces in La nouvelle critique and elsewhere in MLF usage are notable for an ‘anonymity’ that designates the face of one woman (white, likely middle class) as representative of the face of ‘all’ women. Such images were staples of the women’s movement and were frequently used by the MLF in posters and imagery, such as on the cover of Le Torchon brûle (Plate 18). The latter image portrays a woman’s face in the right-hand corner with her hair forming part of a psychedelic and curvy, utopian terrain featuring signs labeled with female stereotypes pointing in several directions at once. In the following year, Annette Messager, in her images Mes jalousies (1972) and Les tortures volontaires (1972), complicates the implicit relationship between the woman’s face and the ‘truth’ of her condition by using a pen in the former and beauty rituals in the latter to distort the face, suggesting an even more private and personal ‘truth’ in envy and vanity. This reconsiders the notion of individual emotion and of a ‘private’ and hidden versus universal and shared identity (Figures 3.10 and 3.11). (Both images were included in Messager’s solo exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1974.) This focus on the face, as well as on other body parts (such as mouth, lips and hands), is shared by women artists in their paintings, drawings, photographs, films, and mixed media images in the 1970s. Such images can be read in two registers: the social and the psychoanalytic. Historical precedents exist amongst the representations of exaggerated features on the faces/heads of nineteenth-century women agitators during the 1871 Paris commune, and, for example, the photographs of British suffragettes from 1914 which show close-ups of women’s faces, some with open mouths symbolizing their radicalization, or even hysteria.45 Both are testaments to the backlash against women’s increasingly visible place in the public sphere. Alongside the materiality of the body is the psychoanalytic equivalent of what these images of the fragmented body suggested. Representations in the public sphere also

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3.10 

Annette Messager, Mes jalousies, 1972.

3.11 

Annette Messager, Les tortures volontaires, 1972.

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encompass the private and subjective, giving renewed meaning to ‘the personal is political’. The representation of the fragmented body recalls the Lacanian corps morcelé (the body in pieces) or the moment when the subject or infant confronts the psychic distortion of his/her body in the mirror and hence his/her fragmentary identity.46 The ‘personal’ as signified by the body is disjointed and dismembered, and, moving from psychoanalytic terms to the political, foregrounds the impossibility of its unified representation in the field of the political. Images such as the cut-up presentation of women’s faces and limbs in the collage by writer and playwright Emma Santos (see Chapter 6) appear to reflect Lacanian principles as much as they do the mind/body divide (discussed at the end of this chapter) represented in her selection of the anatomical brain and fragmented body parts of La femme rupture (1979) (Plate 19). In Lacanian terms, the image of the ‘cut-up’ face and/or other body parts can be deemed ‘hysteric’ since the subject neither can resolve the schism between their own body and the fractured image of it nor see themself beyond the language – which ‘carves up the body’ – that society has constructed of the subject’s being.47 In this realm of 1970s political representation, the fragmented body connotes the (impossible) ‘searching’ for a pre-oedipal unified identity through the fragment – made impossible in the symbolic order controlled by men – which is here suggested by the face, or pieces of the face. Drawings by Belgian writer and artist Sophie Podolski, championed by Julia Kristeva, also feature deconstructed body parts or floating facial fragments – specifically lips. (Excerpts from Podolski’s visionary manuscript, Le pays où tout est permis, and later her art, were published in Tel Quel (1973/1977).) This inability to locate the fragment – via technology – is at the core of Catherine Ikam’s video, Identité III (1980), which also explores the cut-up face and limbs to question the identity of an individual. Ikam divides and reconstitutes the face of the viewer spatially, by projecting individual fragments onto separate screens that focus on eyes, mouths, hands and thus question space-time through the ‘physical, optical and electronic’ versions of the face. Her Fragments d’un archétype (1980) did the same by creating a spectral version of the body to rethink a ‘pictorial tradition’ found in the history of art.48 Ikam’s videos, admired by Nam June Paik – who connected them to time manipulation, a history of espionage and to the writing traditions of Madame de Sévigné and Charles Baudelaire – were considered groundbreaking, when shown at the Centre Pompidou in 1980, for the dissolution and resurfacing of the body in time and space.49 The face as the key between the private and the public realm is seen explicitly in Ruth Francken’s Quelques unes d’entre elles (c. 1977), which juxtaposes the faces of famous females in history such as Kate Millett and Virginia Woolf with their apparent contradiction: an anonymous fingerprint (Figure 3.12). The juxtaposition disrupts elitist categories even amongst women by

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3.12 

Ruth Francken, Quelques unes d’entre elles, c. 1977.

3.13 

Still from Monique – LIP I, 1973.

relegating a famous face to an individual mark of identity that still shares a solidarity (through sex if not ‘class’) with ‘unknown’ women through history, and thus one ‘famous’ woman becomes representative of the untold numbers of anonymous women in feminist discourse. The facial close-up is used for social action and seen in films by Carole Roussopoulos such as Monique – LIP I (1973), with its tight framing shots of Monique Piton’s face expressing the anxiety and vulnerability of workers (in particular women) over their future during the factory’s closure and the subsequent strike and takeover by workers (Figure 3.13). In Maso and Miso Vont en bateau (1975), Roussopoulos’s and Wieder’s stinging polemic against patriarchy uses the ‘honesty’ of women’s faces as a subversion of male power. In the documentary, Secrétaire d’État à la condition féminine, Françoise Giroud, the

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masochist (Maso), confronts various misogynists (Miso) in a television talk show with Bernard Pivot to mark L’Année de la femme in 1975, employing a cut-out of a woman’s blank face in the middle of the discourse to disrupt the flow of a chief executive’s misogynistic comments about women employees.50 The use of women’s faces as sites of emotion, articulation and expression is heightened and disrupted in American Carolee Schneemann’s Portrait Partials (1970), which uses a collage of close-ups of women’s eyes, nostrils, navels, mouths and nipples, as well as men’s mouths and penises, as sites of anonymous individual and sexual identity. These ‘pure’ sites of identity are ‘corrupted’ in Messager’s Les tortures volontaires (1972), which shows women going through various beauty procedures to make themselves a more valuable commodity. The conflict between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ is expressed through women’s use of cosmetics as a means of (immorally) altering their ‘natural’ or spiritual beauty. In the 1960s, the equation between the condition of women’s skin and their morality was linked in debates with clear religious overtones. Françoise Giroud strongly fought such attitudes during the 1967 debate over the legalization of the pill: Cette histoire de pilule devient indécente. Indécente. Il n’y a pas d’autre mot. … La pilule enlaidit! … Les peaux ravagées? Des milliers de femmes en sont affligées parce qu’elles absorbent non pas la pilule mais trop de crème fraîche, de saucisson ou de chocolat. Ou parce qu’elles n’aiment pas leur mari. Ou parce qu’elles l’aiment trop. … Et des milliers de femmes prennent la pilule, mangent n’importe quoi, sont tiraillées par leurs problèmes psychologiques … et ont une peau superbe.51 This story of pill has become obscene. Obscene. There is no other word. … The pill makes you ugly! … Bad skin? Thousands of women are afflicted by it not because they ingest the pill, but because they eat too much cream, dry-cured sausage or chocolate. Or they face it because they do not love their husbands. Or because they love them too much. … And thousands of women take the pill, eat whatever they want, remain torn up by their psychological problems … and have superb skin.

The belief that Catholics should abstain from the vote for contraception to preserve their morality (and maintain their beauty) was implicit: ‘Les hautes instances gouvernementales auraient été prévenues que l’électorat féminin catholique pourrait s’en offusquer. Au nom de la morale’ (High-ranking government officials had been warned that it could offend the Catholic female electorate. For reasons of morality).52 The use of proximity and identity and the bodily fragment become hallmarks for women in a different way than Messager’s partner Christian Boltanski’s use of the photographic close-up in the same period in his collective

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Portrait d’une femme fidèle, Portrait fidèle d’une femme, Sorcières, ‘Fidélités’, no. 8, 1977, p. 46.

family albums.53 Rather, individual identity as put forward by women artists enacted the implicit relation between the close-up of the woman and ‘what type of woman “morally” she was: virgin or whore?’ An issue of Sorcières captured the idea succinctly by using two close-up images of the same woman: Portrait d’une femme fidèle and Portrait fidèle d’une femme (Figure 3.14). The moralistic judgment involved becomes clear as soon as we recognize that it is the same photograph. Beauty, however, was implicit to rebellion and revolt in the 1970s, and in the campaign for women’s power.54 Anne Zelensky writes that what shocked men about the MLF (to their advantage) was that the women in the movement were so attractive: ‘C’est pourquoi, entre autres, le MLF fait si peur; il est rempli de “jolies filles”’ (It is why, among other reasons, the MLF creates so much fear; it is filled with ‘pretty girls’).55 This was a direct response to the belief that the only thing about women that interested men was their appearance, which only ‘reduced and manipulated their rich, complex reality’.56 Messager undermines this myth (within feminism as well) by showing the difficulties of maintaining that illusion while also commenting on the morality/immorality involved in

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this self-torture while the Vietnam War and Buddhist women’s immolations were taking place. She also anticipated the acts of proximity and latent violence of Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 from 1974 (the work featured at the Biennale de Paris in 1975). While Messager used instruments of ‘torture’ on herself, Abramović, in her performance, laid out seventy-two objects and allowed members of the audience to approach and touch her with them. The performance was called off when one member of the public came ‘too close’ to danger by putting a gun to the artist’s head. Sacrifice, specifically female sacrifice, was central to the work. In her notes on the creation of Les tortures volontaires (Figure 3.11) Messager writes: 6 p.m. I am flipping through this week’s newspapers. All of the women in magazines seem beautiful, unattainable and without a care in the world. Thousands of remedies are suggested to make me as attractive and desirable as they are; there are quite a few truly punishing and expensive means, which women find acceptable. I tremble while looking at these women making martyrs of themselves.57

Messager writes of her ambivalent relationship with the MLF movement, which she did not try to emulate but to subvert and thus transcend the category of ‘ideological art’. In an interview with Aline Dallier published in 1975–1976, she states: A.M.: You know my collection of make-up tools: drawings or photographs of tweezers, pore extractors, breast massagers, etc … I call them ‘Voluntary Tortures’. All make-up is torture, but on the other hand … I get a little scared when the MLF declares that you shouldn’t wear make-up anymore and that you must find your identity. A. D.: I think that’s an overly simplistic idea of the MLF, but never mind. When (struggling) women refer to a quest for identity, I think they mean through the identification with other women; this does not imply strictness, on the contrary. It leaves us all with the freedom we need to change our look everyday, even several times a day, with or without make-up. That said, feminist or not (that’s not the question), do you have the impression that you are doing something for the women’s cause with your scissors, glue and pencils? A.M. One would already have to be persuaded of the artist’s significance. We have our place for acting in society, but no more than that. However, I have the mild impression that my work, which moves from me to other women and back, and which also explores our gestures and objects, helps us to see a little more clearly. In particular, I think it shows that these are at once gestures and objects with which we construct an identity. If we want to change, we will have to break with these specific gestures and objects.

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A.D. Perhaps with these specific men and this specific society too? Don’t you agree? In any case, I don’t think this constructed identity you refer to is one. In the end, that’s what you show.

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A.M. Maybe, but deep down, I am not convinced that it’s bad to have one … it allows for all kinds of freedom …58

This refusal to be ‘pegged’ by the MLF and/or feminist art historians (in the case of Dallier), is what creates Messager’s ambivalent relationship to the MLF: privileging the (romantic?) notion of (ungendered) artistic freedom over that of gender while using the visual language of femininity and feminism for her own subversive ends allowed the artist or individual to triumph by means of indirect power over the perceived hegemonic or ‘phallocentric’ form of power wielded by the MLF. Or, as she states elsewhere: ‘I prefer underground channels, darks corners, meanders, I like to use all the traditional features of our life, of our culture and history.’ 59 The mechanical reproduction of women’s faces also became critical to reflexive self-awareness and the construction of social and political identity. Using a standard ID card photo format, Gretta Grzywacz – born in Athens and raised in Brazil, later an occasional member of Collectif Femmes/Art (see Chapter 5), created a series of reproductions focusing on the contortions of her face which she generated through manipulations on a single negative in the dark room.60 The series calls to mind Andy Warhol’s performative photos of Edie Sedgwick or the black and white silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe, although Grzywacz’s images take on a more sinister turn through aggressive distortion and erasure of the face and the sharp protrusion of the tongue (Figure 3.15). Reproduction was a central tenet of the ‘Copie-Art’ (copy art) movement which saw occasional experiments in the genre by figures like Nicole Métayer, who participated in Femmes en Lutte (see Chapter 5) and Claude Torey, who was a member of Collectif Femmes/Art (see Chapter 5). Each explores the possibilities of self-representation through the photocopier. By placing her face directly on the document glass in the series Lien (1974), Métayer let the machine compress, deform and copy her face (Figure 3.16). For Métayer, this was a ‘spontaneous’ and ‘immediate’ way to create self-portraits which allowed her to ‘affirm’ herself as a woman.61 This set of work expresses bondage through tight elastic bands around her face and mouth that appear to muffle or repress a cry. Each black and white image captures a specific emotion through the ‘objectivity’ of the machine’s production.62 Meanwhile, Torey multiplies her face using some of the available color combinations in the photocopier – redviolet, blue and green – allowing the light beam to pass in three phases to render the color. (Color copiers were rare and Torey’s work was made on some of the first of its kind in San Francisco in September 1975.)63 The colors’ claim

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Gretta Grzywacz, Auto-Photos IV, 1976.

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Nicole Métayer, Lien, 1974.

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to veracity, suggested Torey, simultaneously created images that were more than real, or hyperreal (thus false), and more enigmatic.64 The artist saw the potential of the photocopier to realize a form of female liberation: Ce serait pourtant drôle de ne plus parler du corps du point de vue de l’art mais de l’art du point du vue du corps. Mes photocopies de 75 sont une approche possible de ce concept libératoire. Je dis libératoire parce qu’étant une femme, je me suis toujours vue couverte de signes et de symboles attenants à l’ordre phallique; mais s’il est difficile de prétendre qu’ils soient totalement à moi, je ne suis pourtant pas identifiable sans eux.65 It would, however, be strange to stop talking about the body from art’s point of view, but to talk about art from the body’s point of view. My photocopies from 75 are one possible approach to this liberating concept. I say liberating because, being a woman, I have always been covered with signs and symbols attached to the phallic order, but while it is difficult to claim that they are completely a part of me, I am nevertheless unidentifiable without them.

Self-reflexive and self-generated, such images created with the photocopier – associated with office bureaucracy and mundane routine – made for an effective tool to put the power of the image back into women’s hands. Torey herself situated her multi-media practice between ‘image and ideology’.66 Women’s copy art self-portraits attacked modernist ideals of individual style as much as they did the stereotyped images of female beauty circulating through film, television and magazines. As such the truth-claims of the photograph and the bureaucratic photocopy were undercut by feminist self-representation that foregrounded ambiguity through blurs, smears and distortions with emphasis on emotion and abstraction.67 The machine production and limitless reproduction (of images) enacted a mechanized version of woman’s maternal role in society, a position that was heavily contested by the MLF (as seen in other conflations of women and machine) with anonymous production in the photocopier ‘detourned’ in a Situationist manner into a highly personal and creative one. Mirroring more contemporary arguments about artists and artificial intelligence, as early as 1981 critic Christian Rigal was questioning the primacy of the artist over the machine’s ‘intelligence’ and raising doubts about the true ‘maker’ of art generated by machines, especially those of the future.68 This uncertainty seems to have been welcomed by some women artists who saw it as potentially liberating for the lines it blurred and the freedom it generated. Le cri The use of the mouth (often open and/or showing teeth) as a metaphor for articulation, expression and emotion is one that recurs in images from the

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Jeanne Socquet, Untitled painting with text by Marguerite Duras, Sorcières, ‘La voix’, no. 2, 1976.

MLF movement. The expression of madness, rage and frustration is evident in the work of Jeanne Socquet, who painted men and women in asylums from the 1960s on (Figure 3.17). Influenced by the work of Swiss outsider artist Aloïse, Socquet spent hours in the asylums observing patients and painting them.69 Marguerite Duras, an admirer of Socquet’s work, wrote in Sorcières: Pourquoi la bouche a-t-elle cette importance dans sa peinture? – C’est pour moi le trait principal du visage. Je ne sais d’où vient cette importance, si c’est parce que c’est par-là qu’on essaie de parler, si c’est par-là qu’on mange, ou si c’est par-là qu’on crie.70 Why does the mouth have such importance in her painting? For me, it’s the main feature of the face. – I do not know from where it gets its importance, whether it’s because we try to talk from there, eat from there, or shout from there.

This frustrated emotion was seen as emblematic of the movement, as was expressed on the cover of Le Torchon brûle. Here a similar cri revealed a center of rage and suppressed emotion repeated in the words printed on both of the eyes (Plate 18). The suppressed cri was one that tried to escape a system that some observers believed affected women most. Hervé Fischer comments: … C’est d’ailleurs mon point de vue – ce qu’on croit être spontané, violent, sorti du langage et de l’ordre social est en général très culturisé. On y échappe

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difficilement. Le cri lui-même – je dirais même le cri d’Antonin Artaud – est au fond quelque chose de très culturisé, et c’est une illusion que de croire que ce n’est pas une réaction à quelque chose de très conditionné.71 … It is my opinion that what is believed to be spontaneous, violent, out of language and social order is often very culturized. It is difficult to escape from it. The cry itself – I would even say the cry of Antonin Artaud – is basically something very culturized, and it is an illusion to believe that it is not a reaction to something very conditioned.

Fischer’s suggestion that the cri reinstated an established power instead of escaping it was challenged to some extent by the self-awareness with which the women artists were employing it. Like the salvaging of sorcières, or witches, by the women of the MLF, artists and writers, the cri was also used as a source of power by appropriating ‘hysteria’. The scream and cry could be used effectively and consciously to overthrow patriarchal power: ‘Ou bien cette femme (subordonnée) peut être une sorte de négativité, de harcèlement qui pousse le pouvoir à bout, qui le conteste. C’est le rôle classique de l’hystérique, qui est susceptible d’éclater, pourquoi pas, en symptôme révolutionnaire au sens positif, structurant’ (Or else this (subordinate) woman could be a kind of negativity, a torment that pushes power to its limit, which challenges it. That is the classic role of the hysteric, who is likely to explode, why not, into a revolutionary symptom in the positive, structuring sense).72 This role was most notably exploited by the women of Psych et Po, who commented in Le Torchon brûle: ‘Si le propre des femmes, c’est les larmes et les cris, pleurons et crions: d’abord, les mecs ont horreur de ça, c’est un terrain qui leur échappe, donc une arme efficace’ (If a characteristic of women is tears and shouts, let’s cry and let’s shout: first, guys hate that, it’s an area which escapes them, thus an effective weapon).73 Women have long been labeled ‘hysterics’, in terms of art as well as in their political goals, even during the Revolution, when the open mouths of women in the streets were crying out in protest, in anger and in hunger. Openmouthed ‘hysterics’ were also photographed yawning at the Hôpital Salpêtrière by Albert Londe (c. 1890).74 Photographs of the mouth and other body parts were used by Surrealist photographers such as May Ray and Jacques-André Boiffard, but in the context of the anonymous sexual fetish with Freudian implications that women then reclaimed in the 1970s as an identifictory image – while not negating any of the sexual content. Gretta Grzywacz produced in her Transformaçoes III (1976) four photographs that focused on a screaming woman’s mouth (Figure 3.18).75 The subtle distortion of the mouth in each photograph progressively enlarges to convey the growing impulse of the cri. The anonymity of each still is underlined by the glossy structure of the open mouth (without eyes or nose) that parallels the sexualized vagina seen a year

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Gretta Grzywacz (Sarfaty), Transformaçoes, 1976.

earlier on screens in Paris in pornographic film successes such as Emmanuelle and Histoire d’O.76 The ‘O’ of the latter recalls the shape of the screaming mouth in Grzywacz’s images as well as the shape of vagina, or void, earlier appropriated by women including Monique Wittig, who used it as the shape of wholeness and utopia for women in her Les Guérillères (1969). (See Chapter 4.) Grzywacz’s image would accompany the publication of Collectif Femmes/ Art’s manifesto, ‘Enfermement / Rupture’ in L’Humidité, a year later. Les mains The ‘double’ vision of intimacy as both lived and experienced is highlighted during this period in the selection of artworks found in the feminist journal Sorcières (1976–1982). Here proximity is used to emphasize both intimacy and the ‘lived’ experience of a woman’s body as an aesthetic object, while showing how the political use of the hand symbolizes women’s experience in daily activities of labor and leisure. Eva Klasson’s photographs, published in the journal, display the grain of her hand in two forms: the topography of a curled fist and the surface of two individual fingers with a view of teeth (Figure 3.19 a & b).77 In an explanation of her work, Klasson uses proximity and the fixity of her camera to explore the tension of an object: J’utilise la caractéristique principale de la photographie: sa fixité, comme rapporteur d’image, j’exploite la rupture harmonique qui existe d’un élément hors de son contexte pour démontrer combien nous pouvons être étrangers et insensibles sans l’élargissement vers une disposition plus globale. Notre émotion est

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3.19a & b  Eva Klasson, Untitled, black and white photographs, Sorcières, ‘Fidélités’, no. 8, 1977.

directement soumise à notre état, nous pouvons être incapables d’entrer en communication avec une image, comme s’il s’agissait de la photo d’une photo et quelque temps après d’être troublés par le besoin de la revoir.78 I use the main characteristic of photography: its fixity, as a record keeper of the image, I exploit the harmonic break that exists when an element is taken out of context to demonstrate how we can be foreign and insensible without using enlargement for a broader view. Our emotion is directly subordinate to our state of mind, we may be unable to communicate with an image, as if it was a question of a photo of a photo, yet sometime later we feel the need to see it again.

The use of proximity as a feature of alienation is consciously exploited by Klasson in her images as she deliberately avoids the ‘successful’ image and chooses instead the ‘failure’ in order to heighten sensibility and emotion.79 This emotion is one that the writer Igrecque (Yolaine Simha) praises, in an accompanying article in Sorcières, as specifically feminine in its intuition and representation of the body: Eva Klasson veut en savoir énormément sur son corps, elle énormise les tendres les aigus les plis de la peau. elle énormise la douceur la paleur du duvet qui court sur le corps, recourbé en autant de cils. J’ai eu envie de toucher, de me toucher, de parcourir cette femme, ma première femme, moi.80

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Eva Klasson wants to know a lot about her body, she magnifies the tender, peaks, folds of the skin. she magnifies the soft and pale down that runs across the body, curled into many eyelashes. I had wanted to touch, to touch myself, to discover this woman, my first woman, me.

The ‘rediscovery’ of the body (here, the female body) through the camera’s close encounter with the flesh creates, as Klasson states, not only the immediate ‘alienation’ of the viewer by the object; but also the possibility of the subsequent rediscovery of the body through a sudden recognition of it. This version of feminine intimacy as an aesthetic phenomenon, presented in Sorcières, contrasts politically with the use of the hand by Nil Yalter who portrays hands in a series of photographs (or video stills) to demonstrate how women’s labor is anonymous and unrecognized across cultures (Figure 3.20). The work calls to mind the way the hand is not only capable of acting, but also is a result of the activities in which it engages, or as Engels puts it, ‘the hand is not only the organ of labor, it is also the product of labor’.81 Her six images in Le sexisme dans la cuisine turque ou la volupté culinaire d’un empire show a woman mixing onions and ground meat and shaping meatballs, which she

Nil Yalter, Le sexisme dans la cuisine turque ou la volupté culinaire d’un empire, Sorcières, ‘Mouvements’, no. 15, 1978.

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politically terms ‘Les cuisses de la femelle’ (The female’s thighs). The recipe’s name evokes the subordination of Turkish women as both sexual objects and producers, not only of children but also as cooks and homemakers. This is a vision that Yalter attempts to subvert through a different form of women’s labor – her own photographs as a female Turkish artist – to highlight the potential of women’s creativity instead. (In a similar way, Denise Aubertin, French writer and artist, emphasized women’s labors in the kitchen from 1974 onwards by focusing on the preparation of food and the written word. Using intricate, imaginative recipes consisting of a dough with herbs, spices, vegetables, dried fruits, wine and other ingredients, she covered books in her series ‘livres cuits’ [cooked books]. Books such as Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe were coated with these ingredients from individualized recipes and then baked in the oven to wryly underscore the disjunction between the repetitiveness [and emptiness] of women’s physical labors and her desire for intellectual nourishment.)82 Yalter’s photographs, published in 1978, three years after American Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) and the kitchen sequence in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975; Figure 3.21), deepen the vocabulary brought out by Rosler and Akerman in portraying women’s lives and repetitive gestures in the kitchen – while adding cross-cultural implications of the universal language through her use of Turkish cuisine as a site of ‘otherness’ in combination with a recipe and text published in French. The portrayal of hands as labor devices is also seen in series such as Nil Yalter’s collaboration in the original Groupe de Cinq’s [Martine Aballéa, Judy Blum, Nicole Croiset, Mimi (the prisoner) and Yalter] video images of women’s hands passing around objects (cigarettes, water jug, etc.) at La Roquette prison (1974), showing women’s solidarity and the exchange value of objects despite imprisonment (itself a larger metaphor for the female condition) (Figure 3.22).

Still from Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975.

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Judy Blum, Nicole Croiset and Nil Yalter [Originally: ‘Groupe de Cinq’ ], still from La Roquette, 1974.

These gestures take on a more intimate context in Swiss artist Maya Anderson’s images for a text by Frédérique Touratier de Goeje in Sorcières, that display the use of hands in women’s daily lives – spanning beauty rituals such as putting on makeup, smoking a cigarette, drinking a cup of coffee, cooking, etc. (Figure 3.23). The ‘alienation’ effect of the body that Klasson describes in her photos is a feature of losing/recognizing identity reflected in the text of Touratier de Goeje: Se sentir bouger, sensation étrangère en ce lieu à toute jubilation. Cette main, ces caresses, ces gestes, ces mouvements, cette chair, cette couleur, cette matière, cette lenteur, cette rapidité, ce volume – autre espace – ce n’est pas moi, sur-prise d’avoir un corps, d’en avoir un. … Aucun de mes gestes ne m’est simple, facile, léger, évident, nécessaire … Mais ‘je’ est une autre, son double, son modèle toujours asymptotique. Étrangère à elle-même –étrangeté des gestes obligés.83 To feel oneself moving is a foreign sensation in this place of complete jubilation. This hand, these caresses, gestures, movements, this flesh, color, matter, slowness, speed, volume – another space – it’s not me, overwhelmed to have a body, to have one of them. … None of my gestures is simple for me, easy, light, obvious, necessary … But ‘I’ is someone else, her double, her always asymptotic example. Stranger to herself – the strangeness of forced gestures.

The hand in women’s imagery in the 1970s not only marks the limits of the relation to the self in terms of identity and foreignness, but also can act as a site of vulnerability and domination: Italian artist Ketty La Rocca’s Le mie

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Maya Anderson, Aucun de mes gestes ne m’est simple, photographs. Text by Frédérique Touratier de Goeje, Sorcières, ‘Mouvements’, no. 15, 1978.

parole, e tu? (1971–1972) uses two hands – male and female – to express different stages of a relationship. In a series of six still photographs, she creates a narrative to show the open hand of a woman being slowly possessed and smothered by a male hand. (La Rocca, who died in 1976 at the age of thirtyeight, was featured the following year at the German Künstlerinnen International 1877–1977; see Chapter 5.) The images use English words written on the hand, such as ‘you’ to mark the territories of the hand, and the ‘self ’, which the male hand appropriates. La Rocca, who began to use the word ‘you’ from 1971 onwards, expressed its rationale to Lucy Lippard as being a ‘minimal measure of language’.84 The same is seen in another work from the series, Le mie parole, e tu? (1971), where a female hand is slowly overtaken by a male hand in a sequence of four images (Figure 3.24). These articulations of the ‘silent’ body, and an accompanying text, appear frequently with hand imagery in women’s art at this time, and underlie the narrative of women’s lives and activities that had previously been ignored or shut out of the system of cultural production. Meanwhile, at the Biennale de Paris in 1975, Brazilian artist Liliana Porter played with concepts of illusion and perception using real and drawn geometrical objects in a pair of hands. Marie Orensanz, an Argentinian-French

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Ketty La Rocca, Le mie parole, e tu?, 1971.

artist who came to Paris in 1975, and a member of Collectif Femmes/Art (see Chapter 5), investigated the line between conceptual art and materiality in Fragmentismo (1978) (Figure 3.25). Her work in delicate marble combined the fractures between writing and image which she held tenderly in her hand. Her manifesto in three languages, ‘Spanish’, ‘French’ and ‘English’, speaks to the slippages, or the limits of language to edify (drawing from its etymology to build and instruct) truth, the integration of the fragment with totality, and the time-space of the past and the future. Hand and technology The media of photography and video that women in the 1970s were beginning to appropriate as methods with which to ‘record’ their lives and experiences – and those of other women – in some ways acted as an extension of their hand. This is evident in the work of Italian artist Valentina Berardinone, The Hand as Phenomenon-Image, from her film Urbana (1973) for which she filmed the hand not as an element of anatomy, but as a translator of outside events and knowledge in its own right, or what she calls a ‘projection of creativity outside myself ’. Seeing the hand as mediator between herself and the outside world, Berardinone likens it to the recording function of the camera, and thus makes it self-referential: ‘the hand – the terminal part of the body, the one intended for contact with the things that surround us – makes gestures which synthesize the event (the hand itself being an event), turning itself into the

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Marie Orensanz, Fragmentismo, 1978.

protagonist and the catalyzer, becoming therefore a permanent reference point for every act of verification’.85 The use of the camera or video camera allowed women a means by which to record the body’s subjectivity in an ‘objective’ way. Video in particular appealed to women in the 1970s, with more women using this medium being included in exhibitions than those in the fields of painting or sculpture.86 In France this was best seen in Dany Bloch’s curated exhibition, Art / Vidéo Confrontation, organized by ARC 2 and C.N.A.A.V. in 1974. Some of the women artists included: Lynda Benglis, Louise [and Bill] Etra, Hermine Freed, Simone Forti, Hessie, Nancy Holt, Rebecca Horn, Françoise Janicot, Nicola [L.], Gina Pane, Frédérike Pezold, Steina [and Woody] Vasulka, Nancy Wilson Kitchell and Nil Yalter. The following year, Dany Bloch was also involved with Photo Film Video: Une expérience d’art socio-écologique at ARC 2, co-sponsored by the French–German Youth council. The mixed exhibition included Lea

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Lublin, Nil Yalter, Anne and Patrick Poirier among the represented artists working in France. On a smaller, more grass-roots level, Antoinette Fouque’s group, seeing the potential offered by video, sought to mobilize women a few years later by presenting a collective video-making workshop in order to ‘learn how to use the camera as a working tool and not as a weapon of power’.87 Critic JoAnn Hanley writes that the features that made video an important choice for women in the 1970s were shared by men, with the difference that the former added subjectivity to their interests in time and space, narrative, abstraction, etc.: The characteristics of video that attracted them [women artists] – immediate feedback, the opportunity to add the elements of time and sound, and the relative flexibility and comparatively low cost – were identical to those that attracted male artists. … But women artists differed significantly from their male counterparts. It was through their interest in content and their embrace of subjectivity that they influenced future video art. Women went beyond the prevailing interest in form as content to infuse their works with personal history and social and cultural criticism.88

Meanwhile, Cairo-born Maria Klonaris and Athens-born Katerina Thomadaki, Greek-origin artists based in Paris, were also producing radical statements about the creation of a new cinema, claiming that ‘la féminité n’est qu’une projection masculine / La culture féminine est à créer’ (Femininity is only a masculine projection / Feminine culture is to be created). The artists turned to metaphors of pregnancy in the creation of this new cinema: Je m’ouvre à vous par mon corps sentant et sensible. Mon corps de femme sujet. Je vous livre les rituels de mon identité. Hémorragie d’identité non médiatisée par quelqu’un d’autre mais assumée par moi-même devant vous. Je vous regarde Je vous interroge J’accouche d’un film AUTRE.89 I open myself to you through my feeling and sensitive body. My body of a female subject I give you the rituals of my identity. Bleeding identity not mediated by someone else but assumed by myself in front of you. I look at you I ask you I give birth to OTHER film

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In the poetic ‘Manifeste pour un cinéma corporel’ the filmmakers focused on deepening the engagement with the body in cinema – ‘Je sens la nécessité de m’engager corporellement de plus en plus dans ma production cinématographique, de me révéler de plus en plus’ (I feel the necessity of involving my body more and more in my cinematographic production, to reveal myself more and more) – as well as privileging the relationship between eye and touch: ‘Car mes images sont peau de regard / Car mon regard est folie de toucher’ (Because my images are the skin of the gaze / For my gaze is madness of touch). They explain, ‘Je suis perpétuellement à la recherche de stratégies de subversion. … Je subvertis un médium technologique en le corporalisant par ma présence. Le tactile ressurgit. Mon sens le plus avide c’est le toucher’ (I am perpetually in search of strategies for subversion. … I subvert a technological medium by corporealizing it by my presence. The tactile rises to the surface. My most avid sense is touch).90 Women’s use of camera, video and film as media to record the body privileged ‘intimacy’ and ‘proximity’, a way of revisiting the body through hypersubjectivity. This use of technology is observed in the radical close-ups of the face in women’s art in the 1970s, which allowed a metaphorical ‘touch’ to challenge the hegemony and dominance of the ‘eye’. In November 1977, Éditions des femmes published a collection of photographs in a book, Le moment des choses, in conjunction with an exhibition on artist Claude Batho at the gallery Agathe Gaillard, leading some critics to question the relationship between the MLF and photography: ‘Existe-t-il une photographie de femme qui se distingue comme dans la littérature, spécifiquement et radicalement du reste de la production courante? Et en quoi, cette photographie – si elle existe – peut-elle s’inscrire dans le projet général de libération des femmes?’ (Is there a woman’s photography that stands out as in literature, specifically and radically from the rest of current production? And how can this photography – if it exists – fit into the overall project of women’s liberation?).91 One method of interpreting the images was to politicize them through ‘intimacy’, which was suggested through ‘tenderly’ photographing women and children: ‘on trouve un regard volontiers intimiste sur un monde dont l’homme est rigoureusement absent’ (we find a willingly intimate look into a world in which man is rigorously absent) (Figure 3.26).92 At the same time, the critic asserted that this perspective was not enough to justify its relation with the women’s struggle, and claimed that more avant-garde women photographers (as in avant-garde women’s literature) who take ‘risks’ would be more worthy of the women’s militant movement that was publishing this book.93 The intimate ‘cut-up’ In 1970 the women’s movement used the graphic of a raised fist framed and linked by the ‘arm’ joined to the symbol of Venus, the gender symbol

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Claude Batho, Very Simple Moments: The Sofa, 1972.

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MLF Libération des femmes, poster, Vincennes, 1970.

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designating ‘female’ used for women’s liberation in the 1960s in the United States (Figure 3.27). Similar to the posters of the raised fists of united workers coming out of the Ex-Atelier des Beaux-Arts in May ’68 and other earlier international uprisings, the image was striking in its simplicity. It unified gender and was effective in its appeal to revolt.94 Earlier in the same year Gina Pane had constructed her Blessures théoriques (1970) in which she used a razor to cut a piece of paper, then a tissue and finally her finger (Figure 3.28). At first glance, these images have little in common other than the symbolic use of the hand, but the use of ‘théorique’ in Pane’s action shows not only the level of reflection in the construction, but

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Gina Pane, Blessures théoriques, February 1970.

also the link between a theory and a practice that was not only a comment on the collective actions of May ’68 and later the women’s movement, but a call to individual (and social) action through the individual experience of cutting three surfaces: paper, tissue and flesh. This designates the hand as a vehicle of both labor and transcendence. Like the poster for the women’s liberation movement, Pane insists there is a social aspect of ‘liberation’ to her work, as revealed in social proximity based on the cut: La BLESSURE/MORT: aspects du même corps, se heurtant à l’intolérance, aux dégoûts, aux répulsions que leur provoque très directement le ‘corps du prolétaire’. … Mes actions relèvent à travers un réseau de signes déterminés une forme de folie atténuée du corps social: la névrose et ses idiosyncrasies, déclenchant auprès du public un processus de libération préalablement inconscient.95 WOUND / DEATH: aspects of the same body, facing intolerance, disgust, the repulsions that the ‘proletarian body’ directly provokes in them … My actions reveal through a network of determined signs a form of attenuated madness of the social body: neurosis and its idiosyncrasies, triggering before the public a process of liberation until now unconscious.

The use of the intimate cut for Pane became a mark of solidarity with the proletariat, disrupting any hierarchy of people and class in a ‘projection d’un espace intra’ (projection of an intra space) which she raised from the level of her female body to all female bodies: between mother/daughter/women, as in her Azione sentimentale (Chapter 4). These themes are reprised once more, in more prosaic terms, in the images of the hand and women’s labor shown in the exhibition Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry 1973–1975, by Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt and Mary Kelly at the South London Art Gallery in 1975.96 The exhibition displayed women’s hands in various gestures and actions, such as Double Seamer, Hopper Feeder, Neck Swagger, and Fork Picker, rooted in a socialist vision, and was reminiscent of images by Mexican photographer Tina

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Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt and Mary Kelly, Double Seamer, Hopper Feeder, Neck Swagger, and Fork Picker. From Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry 1973–1975, 1975.

Modotti in its definition of a space where the sociopolitical and intimate meet (Figure 3.29). (Modotti, who would later be seen alongside Frida Kahlo at the groundbreaking exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1982, was exhibited by Galerie des femmes in Paris in the winter of 1981–1982 with a supporting publication; see Chapter 4.) The depiction of the hand overlaps with and resonates between women’s labor and women’s art in timely sequences. The closer is the proximity to the ‘truth’ of the hand/gesture, the work suggests, the deeper is the relation to the universal. The subtle moves and variances across the ‘surface’ of the images reinstate the sociopolitical context, as seen in the MLF gendered fist and in the portrayal of hands in action at Harrison, Hunt and Kelly’s exhibition, by cutting across boundaries between the political and the personal, the ‘use’ value or commodification of the body (and its resistance), and the transcendence of art. Startling images, such as the body portrayed as a side of beef during French women’s public demonstrations, were borrowed from the American movement. Similar imagery being published in France at the time revealed women’s

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Stand for the Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement et de la contraception, 20 April 1974.

deep fear of being ‘cut up’ by the relentless demands of the state and home life (Figure 3.30). These territories of the female body were marked and equated with animals to be butchered and consumed. Such latent violence was not only evident in MLF imagery but also in their tracts and discourses of the period. A year after the publication of Maria Antonietta Macciocchi’s Daily Life in Revolutionary China, the MLF in Brussels published a condemnation of acts that betrayed the inherent violence of the patriarchy on women’s lives, drawing a ‘global’ parallel: Nous avons pris conscience que cet ordre ‘naturel’ n’est pas dans la ‘nature’. La ‘nature’ n’a pas fait qu’en Chine, les femmes appartenant à des hommes riches sautillaient à petits pas, ou leur avait broyé les pieds. On a ainsi, au cours de l’histoire du patriarcat, mutilé toutes les femmes et ceci pour en faire des femmes.97 We realized that this ‘natural’ order is not in ‘nature’. ‘Nature’ was not responsible for the fact that in China women belonging to rich men were hopping in tiny steps or had their feet crushed. Thus, over the course of patriarchy’s history, all women were mutilated, specifically in order to make them women.

Mutilation is used in a double sense here: the tradition of foot-binding as well as the effect of patriarchy on the lives of women. Resistance to the ‘cut’ is shown

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in images such as Ruth Francken’s Lilith (1972), which provokes male fantasies about the anxiety of castration in her evocation of the Jewish heroine who seduces and kills men in their sleep (Figure 2.1). Her work is also defiantly a totem against female ‘cutting’ or objectification. The scissors deliberately ‘cut’ the gaze along the surface of silver skin to protect the subject/object. In another work from the series, the amulet, reminiscent of those worn by little boys to protect them from Lilith in the fragile stages of infancy, works as a charm to ward off the viewer’s lingering eye. Perhaps most remarkable is the way an MLF placard bearing the slogan Mon corps est à moi and showing a key placed between the breasts with a lock at the navel unwittingly draws out Freudian aspects both heimlich (homey) – due to the parallel between woman and house – and unheimlich (uncanny) by the very association made (Figure 3.31).98 The political implications of Francken’s image also refer back to a moment of French history, just after the liberation of Paris at the end of World War II. The tondues were women whose heads were shaved in village squares as public ‘punishment’ for their collaboration as lovers with Germans during the war. (I am not arguing for a direct influence between Francken’s image and the MLF placard, but for the implications concerning the women’s bodies that are shared between them.) This symbol of the blade is reprised in Surrealist Meret Oppenheim’s Die Messer (1975), which shows a knife and cut hair (like a beard) as well as feminine floral buttons, representing the phallic cutting of female sexual innocence. The flowers, suggesting paradise, contrast sharply with the danger of the knife, recalling the innocence of Eve, loss of virginity, and her knowledge after the

MLF placard, Mon corps est à moi, undated photograph, c. early 1970s. Paris.

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Fall. The work employs elements of masquerade and acts as a ‘masculine’ riposte to the fetishization of her fur-covered cup and saucer, with each meditating on the relationship between food, sexual activity and consumption. In the 1975 Biennale de Paris, Brazilian artist Iole de Freitas presented a series of a photographic stills of aggressively pointed knives. (De Freitas’s practice was placed against a wider backdrop of feminist theory and the work of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Juliet Mitchell by Anne-Marie [Sauzeau] Boetti, who interviewed her and others in 1975.99 Boetti would later participate in les journées de travail with the women of Collectif Femmes/Art from 5 to 9 June 1978 in Paris; see Chapter 5.) Marina Abramović’s performance Rhythm 10 (1973) used the sharp blade of a knife to play the dangerous Russian game of stabbing the space between her fingers. Each time she drew blood from a finger she changed knives and recorded the sounds on a tape. (Interestingly enough, this ‘knife play’ is believed to be the way in which the young artist Dora Maar gained the attention of Picasso when they first met at a café; they shortly thereafter became lovers.) Unlike Pane’s experiential and transcendent work, Abramović focuses on the masochism of women’s lives and the way in which they continually and repetitively ‘hurt’ themselves. In playing back the taped sounds at the end of the performance, and by cutting herself again in the same sequence, she collapsed time and space and designated pain as a site of shared (female) identity. In 1976, Lucy Lippard focused on Abramović as well as French artists Gina Pane, Annette Messager and Tania Mouraud along with Italian Ketty La Rocca, Brazilian Iole de Freitas and American Carolee Schneemann in her article on body art for Art in America in 1976.100 Lippard highlighted the paradox of European body art, claiming that the abundance of women’s body art at the Biennale de Paris in 1975 (for which she had penned a catalogue essay) was in part due to male pressure to limit women to this genre.101 As a consequence, Lippard perceived resistance amongst French female critics such as Catherine Francblin, who considered women’s body art a form of selfexploitation, resulting in the ‘femme objet’ [woman-object]. In the eyes of the French critic, women’s body art amounted to nothing more than artists’ inability to cut ties with the mother’s body, in a case of the ‘return of the repressed’.102 Nevertheless, art critic François Pluchart’s first major exhibition of body art in France, L’art corporel, which took place the same year as the biennale, featured only three women – American-born Joan Jonas, Gina Pane and Czechborn German artist Katharina Sieverding – out of the twenty-one artists shown.103 At the same time, body artists, working with different trends and ideologies with the body as the primary material, such as Gina Pane, Michel Journiac, Vito Acconci and Marina Abramović, could also use the ‘cut’ paradoxically to

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sever themselves from a social body that was ‘too conforming’ and thereby impeded the freedom of the individual artist. Michel Journiac, commenting on Gina Pane’s work, draws the following parallel: D’une certaine manière, la société te récupère en disant: ‘La liberté d’expression est totale; la preuve: Gina Pane peut se lacérer, etc.’ La société tolère ton existence, donc on se trouve dans une société officiellement libérale. Or, en fait, elle n’est pas libérale du tout puisqu’elle piège au niveau du langage et toi tu contredis ce langage. Il y a une contradiction, une ambiguïté. … Dès qu’une société est unanime, qu’elle soit d’extrême gauche, d’extrême droite, peu importe, le résultat est toujours la castration de l’individu mental, psychique, physique.104 In a way, society appropriates you by saying: ‘The freedom of expression is absolute; the proof: Gina Pane can cut herself, etc.’ Society tolerates your existence, which is the proof that we officially live in a liberal society. Whereas in fact it is not liberal at all because it traps one at the level of language and you contradict this language. There is a contradiction, an ambiguity. … As soon as a society is unanimous, whether it is extreme left, extreme right, what have you, the result is always the castration of the individual mentally, psychically, physically.

This discourse, at a time in which the right-wing government was appropriating some of the left’s liberal positions after May ’68 in order to gain votes, further forced the artist to stand radical and independent from the crowd through the conscious use of repulsion, pain and the abject – although it should be said that this is Journiac’s perspective on Pane’s work. (Pane’s practice was often mischaracterized when presented to a mainstream audience such as in Le Monde in 1979; she was also not entirely happy with Journiac’s characterization of her art.)105 Pane herself said that if she ‘cuts herself, it is for you, the other’, in an attempt to foster social connection.106 This points toward the larger (unresolvable) anxiety between castration and anti-castration that the cut implies in 1970s discourse and the way in which women artists, in particular, could fluctuate between the implications of the two positions in their work. (This was also seen in the texts of writers such as Luce Irigaray, who attempted in Speculum de l’autre femme to subvert Freudian ideas of castration that saw girls as deficient ‘little boys’, in order to restructure the female psyche with its own positive imagery and libidinal energy; while Hélène Cixous at once affirmed and denied castration with the jouissance of a ‘laugh’ in ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ (1975).) Cixous’s ‘Le sexe ou la tête’, first published in Belgian Les Cahiers du GRIF in 1976, amplified this crosscurrent and foregrounded the threat of decapitation (real or symbolic) as the female equivalent of castration anxiety, in which the woman loses her head/voice and is

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silenced.107 Artists could be interpreted as seizing and subverting the power of a societal decapitation by reinforcing the head or face (and its voice) (as seen above). They can also be seen to reverse the decapitation through a series of strategic ploys or irruptions, as seen in Lea Lublin’s work below. In 1979, Lea Lublin produced a series of ink and acrylic drawings with a text inspired by Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith décapitant Holopherne (1620) (Plate 20). Using Gentileschi’s portrayal of Judith and a servant taking a knife to the head of Holofernes, Lublin imitated the gesture and position of the knife in the first two canvases, echoing first the position of the servant’s arm and then Judith’s in the second. In the third stage, instead of the decapitation another violent scene emerges, where the head of the knife becomes a penis in an act of forced rape that recalls Judith’s sexual violation by the Holofernes before his decapitation – a revenge killing as suggested in Gentileschi’s canvas. The fluid that spills from the image could represent the blood of a virgin in the breaking of the hymen or the taking of innocence. The fourth canvas shows the emergence of a baby with the two women acting as midwives at its violent birth as the semiotic fluids spill from between the legs. The images contain a series of intricate layers that parallel the levels of meaning in the biblical story and a deconstruction of Gentileschi’s original painting. Lublin’s drawings not only serve as a reinforcement of women’s victimhood and (shared) power, but further act as a metaphor for the creative process and the difficulties for women to possess the phallus (and its ‘dédoublements’: knife and penis) in terms of their individual creative power. In the accompanying text, Lublin writes: Scène de dédoublement, l’art de la peinture n’est fait que de redoublements et de tromperies. Dans cette question du double, l’exploration de la doublure et son revers ne se trouvent pas de l’autre côté de la toile mais de ce côté-ci, dans les traces figées, dans la face peinte qui arrête la prolongation du regard pour le figer dans la fascination de l’énigme de sa vraisemblance. Scene of duplication, the art of painting is only made of reduplications and deceptions. In this question of double, the exploration of the lining and its reverse is not found on the backing of the canvas but on this side, in the frozen traces, in the painted face that stops the reach of the gaze to transfix it in the fascination of the enigma of its vraisemblance.

In this layering of ‘doubles’ (and perspectives through the series of frames) Lublin also investigates the jouissance of one woman artist’s connection to another woman artist through time and space in a ‘copying’, or doubling of her work. The metaphor for Judith and the servant becomes a representation of Gentileschi and Lublin through time, with one woman assisting another through the act of penetration and inspiration and guiding her through the

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Gina Pane, Action Laure, 1977 (detail). Performance at Galerie Isy Brachot, Brussels, 28 April 1977.

messy process of birth or creativity. (A similar form of solidarity is observed in Gina Pane’s performance, Action Laure, which took place at the Galerie Isy Brachot in Brussels on 28 April 1977, near the end of the exhibition L’art corporel which ran from 12 March to 30 April of that year.108 In the performance, or ‘action’, Pane reads the texts of Laure [Colette Peignot (1903–1938)] and uses symbols to reconstruct her world. At the end of her performance Pane slices her hand in order to spill blood over the text, in an intermingling of one artist’s spiritual communion with another woman artist through history and time; Figure 3.32.) Inside out: shared skin The skin’s surface can be thought about in terms of the way in which it was used as a mediator between some women artists as an inscribed (if not neutral) surface where body and politics challenged the contemporary ‘disappearance of the subject’ pervading the avant-garde art space.109 The surface of the skin, at once an inner and outer bodily organ (which Jean-François Lyotard equates to a Möbius strip in Économie libidinale (1974)), creates a dual surface of continuous interiority/exteriority – one that elides individual zones (being neither one nor the other),110 an apt metaphor for ‘La vie privée sur

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la place publique’ or ‘le personnel est politique’, a phrase borrowed directly by the French from the American ‘the personal is political’.111 The private realm, or home, as a domain of material oppression for women was seen as inseparable from the suppression of the women’s body, in particular, her sex. The liberatory politics of one domain, the argument went, was brought to bear by the other too.112 In what way does the duality of the skin surface move beyond psychosocial interdependence and enact a site of mobilization during this period, one of slippages, glissements, rendering it creative, transgressive and volatile for women artists at the threshold of the private and public spheres? A sense of an interiority projected onto the external world is expressed through rupture and discontinuity on the body surface, as examined by French artist Tania Mouraud in her Can I be anything which I say I possess? (1971) (Figure 3.33). The artist, one of the few successful young women in the early 1970s, was exhibited at ARC 2 by Suzanne Pagé in 1973, with write-ups by Catherine Millet in Art Press, before disappearing for a number of years from the art scene. In her 1971 work, the face and body are reconfigured with a flattening out of the five senses into linear time, to pose deeper questions of ‘spirit / soul / individuality / intellect / mind’. The (dis)placement of the feminine is impossible to locate or analyze, and therefore cannot be possessed or controlled. On the streets, images such as the female mannequin marked up like a side of beef were clear signs of MLF protest against the commodification of women’s bodies (Figure 3.30). Mouraud’s work points to a deeper place through the skin but makes no attempt to locate it exactly, preferring to rest on the surface of thought. The English title and phrases in the work demonstrate how Tania Mouraud, who began her career simply as ‘Mouraud’, was aiming for a more receptive international market. As a counterpoint to the rupture of skin and a strategy of the (dis)location of the feminine, the Franco-American artist Louise Bourgeois challenged the patriarchal order some years later in A Banquet / A Fashion Show in Body Parts (1978). Here she creates a ‘second skin’

Tania Mouraud, Can I be anything which I say I possess?, 1971.

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of latex breasts all over her body to multiply and inflate the glands until they are devoid of objective meaning, and returns the body to subjective power through the transformation of the body surface.113 Thus the sacred breasts of motherhood – symbolizing both comfort and nourishment – become those of a disfigured ‘monster’, whose perverted image releases women from their prescribed role in society (evoked by the MLF side of beef). If Bourgeois dislocates the feminine body through the creation of a ‘new’ skin, Messager attempts to transform the skin from ugliness to socially ‘beautiful’. The slow peeling of the surface of the self and the bodily transformations that follow in her Les tortures volontaires (1972) appear also in Mes jalousies (1972), where she scribbled on the faces of women that she envied (Figures 3.10 and 3.11). Both images use emotion to alter the skin of the woman subject/object while commenting on the processes of beautification and the emotion of competition and envy amongst women. Read against the context of the MLF, Messager’s work shows the women subject as alienated (not just from other women, but even from herself) and the volatility and capriciousness of the skin surface that becomes an unstable site of transformation. Tunisian-born Colette, who was partly raised in France before moving to New York in 1968, introduced textile-laden environments – silk, tulle, synthetic parachute – that appeared to hyper-inflate the surface of the skin, juxtaposing body and installation into complex ‘performative environments’ as seen in her Let them Eat Cake! (1977) at the Biennale de Paris that year. Colette slyly evokes and critiques symbolic figures in French history and culture, such as in this case with a phrase mythically attributed to Marie Antoinette at the onset of revolution. As she sleeps in her boudoir, she blurs the lines between private/public and personal/political space (Figure 3.34). Her earlier Homage to Delacroix (1970/1972), was performed privately in the first instance and secondly in the Westbeth Gallery windows in New York.114 The performance saw the artist reprise the figure of the woman holding the flag from Delacroix’s painting La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People) (1830), but the tricolor is replaced with a blank flag on which are written the words ‘red’, ‘white’ and ‘blue’. The artist says that she was inspired by the female symbol of the republic, ‘Marianne’, for the ‘power and freedom’ she represented.115 The photographs from the performance consisted of two sizes: one small, the other life-size. The second faced censorship when used in a retrospective in North Carolina in 1992 for the slippage of the textile robe that revealed her breast to the public – an iconography deeply associated with nourishment and rebellion in the allegories of the Liberty/Republic that were popularly called ‘Marianne’ from the end of the Second Republic onwards (Figure 3.35).116 On the other hand, the performative gestures of the artist, Veuve Angine [Martine Neddam], who continues to change her name/personas, created a cloak of flowers to use as a second skin. In this performance, she appeared to conflate woman with nature using transgressive

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Colette, Let them eat cake! 1977. Biennale de Paris, 1977.

humor, by dressing in a rubber coat to which she had sewn with a needle and thick thread plastic flowers and insects such as spiders. Many of the plastic bugs were objects sourced locally during the fête foraine, ‘Vogue des marrons’, in the Croix Rousse neighborhood in Lyon.117 Although most of the artist’s work from the period focused on morbidity and aspects of death – hence the name ‘Veuve’ (Widow) – she turned to the sources of life in this work using whatever objects came to hand, similar, she claimed, to outsider artist Ferdinand ‘Facteur’ Cheval.118 She briefly modeled the garment in a photograph later highlighted by Aline Dallier who placed this new form of ‘art-vêtement’, or art-clothing/wearable art, at the intersections of art and the everyday and psychodrama and theater (Figure 3.36).119 These works point to a study by women artists of imagery that uses rupture, pain and/or humor as sites of transformation on the body surface, as a form of protest and social commentary. Each rupture signifies not only the measured way in which the personal is becoming political, but also women’s agonistic behaviors and search for identity in a patriarchal culture. The way in which the works fit in or not with the goals of the MLF and other feminist movements attests to the individuality of each artist. This leads to a broader assessment of the cultural implications and limitations that arise from the

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Colette, Homage to Delacroix, 1970/1972.

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Veuve Angine, Le manteau du jardinier, 1980.

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myth of a social ‘unity’ behind the MLF – which, outside the many disputes about its common goals, was also deeply factionalized by the complex feelings women had about themselves and about each other, as referenced in the Messager work discussed above. Body transformation is elaborated in the context of illness in the work of Alina Szapocznikow, a Polish artist working in France who had spent time in the concentration camps where other camp victims had denied themselves food in order to ensure her survival. In the early 1970s she was diagnosed with cancer. Her sculpture Tumeurs, made from crushed newspaper and photos embedded in transparent polyester that often revealed Szapocznikow’s face, reflects the chance and disease in her body as a metaphor for chance and creation in artistic production (Plate 21). In this way, the body itself becomes a producer (or artist) – one that is the source of organic and unpredictable life (and death): Mon œuvre puise ses racines dans le métier de la sculpture … J’ai été vaincue par le héros-miracle de notre époque, la machine … Moi je produis des objets maladroits. Cette manie absurde et convulsive prouve l’existence d’une glande inconnue et secrète, nécessaire à notre vie.120 My work is rooted in the sculpture profession …. I had been conquered by the heroic miracle of our time, the machine … I produce awkward objects. This absurd and convulsive mania proves the existence of an unknown and secret gland which is necessary for our life.

By bringing the ‘interior’ body into the exterior world, Szapocznikow subverts the power of disease and death through art, using the body as a source of invention to investigate the hidden aspects of identity and creation – that are not related to physical birth. These unseen passages of the female body, capable of producing objects at the limit of imagination and mental processes in the ultimate organic form, contrast with machine-like and/or womb productions seen earlier with the MLF: Mon geste s’adresse au corps humain, ‘cette zone érogène totale’, à ses sensations les plus vagues et les plus éphémères. Exalter l’éphémère, dans les replis de notre corps, dans les traces de notre passage. A travers les empreintes du corps j’essaie de fixer dans le polyester transparent les moments fugitifs de la vie, ses paradoxes et son absurde. Mais la sensation éprouvée de façon immédiate est diffuse, étant souvent rebelle à l’identification. Souvent tout est embrouillé, la situation est ambiguë, les limites sensorielles sont effacées. Malgré tout je persiste à tenter de fixer dans la résine les empreintes de notre corps: je suis convaincue que de toutes les manifestations de l’éphémère, le corps humain est la plus vulnérable, l’unique source de toute joie, de toute souffrance et de toute vérité, à cause de son essentiel dénuement, aussi inéluctable qu’inadmissible, au niveau de la conscience.121

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My artistic expression is directed to the human body, ‘this total erogenous zone’, to its most subtle and ephemeral sensations. Exalting the ephemeral qualities in the folds of our body and in the traces of our passage is my aim. Through body imprints made in transparent polyester, I try to capture the fleeting moments of life with its paradoxes and absurdity. But the sensation immediately felt is diffuse; rebellious by nature, it is difficult to identify. Everything is often confused, with the situation ambiguous and sensory limits erased. In spite of it all, I persist in trying to capture the imprints of our body in resin. I am convinced that of all the manifestations of the ephemeral, the human body is the most vulnerable, being the unique source of all joy, suffering and truth, because of its essential nakedness, as inescapable as inadmissible, at the level of consciousness.

Szapocznikow’s intimate sculptures throw into relief the bold exteriority of Ipoustéguy’s L’agonie de la mère, a surreal and abstract sculpture in marble that literally peels off the skin of the ‘(m)other’ to look beneath the surface to her interior body (Figure 3.37). Ipoustéguy comments on how he made the work in memory of his mother, who had recently had a breast removed due to cancer: Mon corps dans ses parties les plus infinitésimales ne cesse de s’intéresser à la bataille pour son intégralité. Pourtant vous voyez ici tranchée une bonne part de mes racines, la mère opérée d’un cancer, une mammectomie, c’est la nourrice tarie, soustraite d’une mamelle têtée.122 My body in its most infinitesimal parts does not cease to struggle for its completeness. Yet here you see a part of my roots cut-up, a mother operated from cancer, a mastectomy; she is the dry nurse, with a sucked teat removed.

Ipoustéguy, L’agonie de la mère, 1970–1971.

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This vision of motherhood and womanhood through the revealing layers of the skin and disease is challenged by Swiss-born Raymonde Arcier’s suit of body armor that creates a new and impenetrable skin for the militant woman (as discussed below). Arcier, an active member of the MLF, turned to art in order to express the newfound sentiments that the group awakened in her after leaving her quiet home in the provinces for Paris.123 She later gained exposure there. (Her work featured both at the 10th Biennale de Paris in 1977 and the Feministische Kunst Internationaal, a traveling show [first at De Appel in Amsterdam in 1978], where her work – Héritage, les tricots de ma mère (1972–1973), a monumental sweater hand-knitted by her and embedding within it clothes knitted by her mother, her mother-in-law and those made by women found in flea markets – sparked critical questions about an orientation that was perceived to be ideological rather than ‘aesthetic’; Plate 22.)124 Her visceral sculpture, Au nom du père (1975–1976), turned to the figural by presenting a monumental crocheted and knitted woman, made of jute fiber, kapok, polyester and cotton. This large-scale soft sculpture could be viewed as the archetypal exploited and sexualized object – she holds a sack of plastic dolls whilst another stitched baby falls from between her thighs (as in Saint Phalle’s Accouchement blanc (1964)); her body armor, on the other hand, evacuates the female body and suggests impenetrability and defense; a torso with no lower part of the body for a child. In Ar(t)mure pour art(r)iste (1981), Arcier painstakingly ‘knitted’ metal wire (wounding her hands in the process), to create the armor, or wall (mur), that acted as a tough ‘second’ skin for the vulnerable woman/artist in society (Plate 23). Conclusion: a second look: intimacy and identity The Cartesian principle of ‘Je pense donc je suis’ is under attack by a series of 1970s women artists who challenge the history of French Enlightenment thinkers and notions of rationalism with their revolution based not on thought, but on immanence and subjectivity. This materialism was captured in its guarded irony in such statements as ‘Je mets un Tampax donc je suis’, whose pointed critique was then appropriated by the women of the journal Sorcières to define their aesthetic: ‘Je mets un Tampax donc je suis’, c’est aussi ce qu’on appelle le style Sorcières. Corps-écriture, textes lisses comme la peau féminine, où le sens serait troué et non pas érigé en système, d’où les coups d’arrêt de la ponctuation seraient absents, où le langage serait pétri comme une pâte, rapiécé comme un patchwork, écoulé comme le lait maternel, que sais-je encore.125 ‘I use a Tampax therefore I am’, can also be called the Sorcières’ [Witches’] style. Body-writing, texts as smooth as feminine skin, where meaning would

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probe holes and not be erected into a system, thus the pauses of punctuation would be absent, where the language would be kneaded like dough, pieced together like a patchwork, flowing like breast milk, and so on.

‘Je mets un Tampax donc je suis’ found a political parallel in the activism and legislative ‘rights’ of contraception and abortion in the late 1960s and 1970s that shows how women were thinking about their bodies both internally (biologically and psychologically) and externally (in society).126 At some point, women’s – or even specifically ‘feminist’ – art had to contend with its ideological status or search for a universal ‘essence’ in order to sustain itself. Such an essentialism coincided with a period of MLF division between class and feminist agendas; thus, it may have been strategically and momentarily evoked to unite the movement. This chapter has helped to introduce not only the historical and sociopolitical context of feminism in France and other countries in the 1970s, but also the self-questioning and the construction of the body during a decade that saw the social, political and legislative transformation of the body through activism alongside theoretical formulations about the body that raised questions of essentialism. In the catalogue for the WACK! exhibition, critic Marsha Meskimmon pointedly writes in 2007: ‘Concepts such as consciousness-raising, the personal as political, and the significance of the body to representation and sexual politics have become clichés rather than rallying cries, unchallenged norms rather than active sites of debate.’ 127 However, the limits of these ‘norms’ have not yet been critically explored in the context of the 1970s in France. The process of the recuperation from this period is still incomplete. The ‘personal is political’ is not limited solely to feminism and the metaphor inherent in the writing of Lyotard on the Möbius strip; nor is the body within its sociopolitical and cultural context fully defined during this turbulent era of social change and economic recession. In addition, the social, technological, cultural and legal ramifications of the ‘personal is political’ and the breadth of its geopolitical implications are now becoming understood.128 These latter forces urge us to take a (second) look at women’s art production from the ‘inside out’ as much as the ‘outside in’, in terms of the body and its representation and what it reveals about women’s politics and experiences of the time. We must reexamine the ways in which the body in such art production has been shaped by its passage through and along material, conceptual and historical terrains. The urge to understand these territories has been the driving force behind this chapter and will be further explored in the next one on psychoanalytic history and developments. Notes 1 Claude Alzon, ‘Féminisme ou sexisme’, Le Monde, 24–25 November 1974.

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2 Dialogue entre Françoise Giroud et Benoîte Groult, ‘Ni trop chatte, ni trop guerrière’, Le Figaro, 15–16 March 1975. Statement is Groult’s. 3 Militants explicitly rejected Michel Debré’s dream of a country of 100 million French citizens that women would have to produce for the state. This period also coincided with the end of the Trente Glorieuses (1945–1975), with France already entering into a period of decline by the early 1970s, partly as a result of the worldwide petrol crises sparked by the Yom Kippur war in October 1973. 4 Nevertheless, Françoise Vergès underscores the limitations of the MLF and criticizes France’s largely white women’s fight for women’s bodies and the struggle for abortion rights during these years. These women often invoked the language of slavery and yet ignored, or overlooked, the race question and women outside the ‘Hexagon’. She presents a deeply troubling chapter in the history of colonization and its aftermath which also concerns women’s bodies in the DOM (départements d’outre mer, France’s overseas territories), where abortion was routinely practiced. This included forced abortions and sterilizations in Réunion Island in the 1970s. See chapter 5, especially, ‘Cécité du féminisme: Race, colonialité, capitalisme’, in Le ventre des femmes: Capitalisme, racialisation, féminisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 2017). 5 Not all of the influential art was made by women or even directly represented the body. Karachi-born Indian artist Nalini Malani, living in Paris between 1970 and 1972, stressed the impact of American artist Edward Keinholz’s The Illegal Operation (1962) on the abortion struggle and her own militancy. The graphic sculpture assemblage that depicted the conditions of an illicit abortion (which implied a body, but did not portray one) was shown at the exhibition Avec le CNAC: Edward Keinholz (13 October–16 November 1970) at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain (with ARC) in Paris. Malani’s later discussion with curator Alfred Pacquement, who was at the CNAC at the time, revealed the controversy surrounding the decision to exhibit the work. https:// lux.org.uk/writing/building-prehistory-artists-film-new-media-india-part-3. 6 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1929] (New York: Harvest HBJ, 1957). 7 Marianne Lohse, ‘Aux journées de la libération de la femme ce sont les hommes qui tiendront la crèche’, France Soir, 13 May 1972. 8 Suzanne Horer and Jeanne Socquet, La création étouffée (Paris: Pierre Horay, 1973). 9 Horer and Socquet, La création étouffée, pp. 13–23. 10 ‘On peut espérer dans les améliorations sociales, mais seulement en ce qu’elles nous rapprochent, expériences contre expériences, du seul changement dans lequel on peut croire: le changement de l’individu. On peut espérer dans des révolutions politiques, mais seulement en ce qu’elles nous mènent vers la seule révolution possible, la révolution anthropologique!’ Horer and Socquet, La création étouffée, p. 19. (We can hope for social reforms, but only so far as they bring us closer – experience for experience – to the only change which we can trust: individual change. We can hope for political revolutions, but only so far as they lead us to the only revolution possible, the anthropological one!) 11 ‘Contraception, Avortement, Sexualité, Performisme’, Le Torchon brûle, no. 5 (1972), pp. 4–5.

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12 Ruth Francken, ‘Enquête: de la prise de parole à la création’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 8 December 1977, pp. 18–19, p. 18. 13 Horer and Socquet, La création étouffée, p. 24. 14 Maria Isabel Barreno, ‘La productrice d’enfants’, Politique Hebdo, 19 July 1974. Barreno together with Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Velho da Costa wrote Novas Cartas Portuguesas (1972) (later published in France as Les nouvelles lettres portugaises [Éditions du Seuil, 1974]) about the lives of women. Written in the form of letters, journal entries, poems, essays and word games, it was denounced by the fascist Portuguese regime for pages containing erotic material deemed pornographic, leading to the arrest of the three women. For a history of the affair and an analysis of the work, refer to Darlene J. Sadlier, ‘Form in “Novas Cartas Portuguesas”’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 19, no. 3 (1986), pp. 246–263. 15 Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ [1972], in Women, Society, and Culture, ed. M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 68–87, p. 75. 16 ‘Or, le partage des tâches progresse très lentement: entre 1975 et 1982, les hommes font en moyenne vingt minutes de travaux ménagers supplémentaires par semaine. Avec ces appareils Moulinex qui les libèrent?’ Florence Montreynaud, ‘Moulinex libère la femme’, Le XXe siècle des femmes, pp. 484–485. (However, job sharing is progressing very slowly: between 1975 and 1982, men do an average of twenty minutes of additional housework per week. Perhaps using these Moulinex appliances liberates them?) 17 ‘Art et créativité’, Discussion entre Katherine Schaillée: dessinatrice; Anne Polsenaere: photographe, journaliste; Anne Thyrion: peintre; Monique Cornil: sculpteur; Françoise Thyrion: comédienne. ‘Dé-pro-ré créer’, Les Cahiers du GRIF, no. 7 (June 1975), pp. 53–56, p. 53. 18 Les Pétroleuses (dossier). Maternité, politique, sexualité, libération, February 1975, Archives BMD. 19 ‘J’ai d’abord perçu ma “grotte” comme un “auto-portrait en forme de cube”: L’extérieur est plus ou moins ordonné, socialisé, et par ces couleurs, discret, la grotte gardienne d’un secret! A l’intérieur par contre, c’est un déchaînement de couleurs, une anarchie plus contenue. Au fond (à double sens) “La Grotte” c’est moi – la femme, mon vagin avec tous ses mystères et passions.’ Les artistes s’expliquent, exhibition catalogue, Féminie-Dialogue, UNESCO, December 1979–January 1980. (I first perceived my ‘cave’ as a ‘cube-shaped self-portrait’: The exterior is more or less ordered, socialized, and by using these colors, discreet; the cave guardian of a secret! Inside, on the other hand, there are wild colors, a more contained anarchy. Deep down (with its double meaning) ‘The Grotto’ is me – the woman, my vagina with all its mysteries and passions.) 20 Niki de Saint Phalle’s Hon (‘She’ in Swedish) was constructed in six weeks, beginning in the spring of 1966. Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely, along with Swedish artist Per Olof Ultvedt, created the giant, reclining Nana with spread legs, using a team of volunteers who constructed an iron base and wire netting support to form the body. Several layers of cloth were glued to the form before Saint Phalle painted the body. Meanwhile Tinguely and Ultvedt

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added the ‘attractions’ to the interior body: a milk bar in the right breast and a planetarium in the left one; in one arm was the first short film starring Greta Garbo; and in one leg was a gallery, a ‘Salon du Faux’, which included ‘fakes’ by Pollock, Klée, etc. It was Pontus Hulten, the director of the Moderna Museet de Stockholm, who first suggested a ‘penetrable’ Nana for the museum’s entrance. The exhibition ran from 4 June to 4 September 1966 and received 100,000 visitors. Niki de Saint Phalle, ‘Lettre à Clarice Rivers’, Niki de Saint Phalle, exhibition catalogue, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1993, pp. 166–169. 21 Les artistes s’expliquent, exhibition catalogue, Féminie-Dialogue, UNESCO, December 1979–January 1980. Meanwhile, the women of Des femmes en mouvements were considering the physical implications of cave exploration, no doubt in perfect cognizance of metaphorical ones. See ‘Yvane fait de la spéléologie’, Des femmes en mouvements, no. 10 (October 1978), pp. 60–63. 22 Published in Tel Quel, 74 (1977), pp. 30–49. In a later interview Kristeva remarks on the hostility she experienced from other women (specifically the MLF) for writing about the positive relationship between a mother and son. ‘J’ai l’impression que le mouvement vit trop – certains groupes du mouvement en tout cas – sur une idée existentialiste de la femme, idée qui culpabilise la fonction maternelle: soit on fait des enfants mais cela veut dire qu’on n’est bonne à rien d’autre, soit on n’en fait pas et alors il devient possible de se consacrer à des choses sérieuses. Pour ma part, la maternité en tant que telle ne m’a jamais semblé contradictoire par rapport à une activité culturelle, et c’est cela que j’essaie de développer devant les mouvements féministes. ‘Julia Kristeva: A quoi servent les intellectuelles?’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 20 June 1977, p. 107. (I have the impression that the movement relies too much – some groups of the movement in any case – on an existentialist idea of woman, an idea that fills the maternal role with guilt: either we have children, which means we are not good for anything else, or we do not and then it becomes possible to devote ourselves to serious things. For my part, motherhood has never seemed in contradiction with cultural activity, and this is what I am trying to develop for feminist movements.) 23 Julia Kristeva, ‘unes femmes’: Interview with Eliane Boucquey, ‘Dé-pro-ré créer’, Les Cahiers du GRIF, no. 7 (June 1975), pp. 22–27, p. 24, p. 22. English trans. ‘“unes femmes”: The Woman Effect’, trans. Ross Mitchell Guberman, in Julia Kristeva: Interviews, ed. R. M. Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 103–112, p. 107, p. 104. 24 Bernard Dupaigne, ‘La yourte: maison des femmes, prison des femmes’, in catalogue Nil Yalter: Habitations provisoires, Maison de la culture de Grenoble, 1977, p. 1. 25 ‘Les femmes s’entêtent’, Les Temps modernes, no. 333–334 (April–May 1974). Liliane Kandel credits Cathy Bernheim for choosing the title in her article ‘Simone de Beauvoir, Les Temps modernes et moi’, Association Sens-Public, vol. 1, no. 27 (2020), pp. 55–75, p. 63. 26 See de Beauvoir’s critique of André Breton’s L’Union libre (1931), Le deuxième sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), vol. 1.

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27 Archives Michèle Katz and author’s discussion with the artist. Katz confirmed one of her texts about the birth of her daughter and corrected the misprint in the text ‘La petite fille est une petite fille qui n’a pas de pénis’, which should have been ‘La petite fille est un petit garçon qui n’a pas de pénis.’ ‘Variations sur le désir d’enfant et le rôle maternel’, ‘Les femmes s’entêtent,’ p. 2002. 28 Interview with Tania Mouraud, May 2005, Paris. 29 Jocelyn Olcott, International Women’s Year (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 30 ‘Les ferments du mouvement en France à la fin des années 1960 ont été des petits groupes de femmes (jeunes), la plupart étudiantes en rupture (plus ou moins complète) du gauchisme. Ces caractéristiques – la jeunesse, le niveau d’éducation, le passage par le gauchisme – ajoutées aux comportements requis par le mouvement à ses débuts (non-mixité, grande disponibilité, etc.) ont déterminé le style du mouvement naissant.’ Naty Garcia Guadilla, ‘Le mouvement de libération des femmes (M.L.F.) en France de 1968 à 1978’, doctoral thesis, EHESS, Paris, May 1979, p. 352. (In France, the active elements of the movement at the end of the 1960s were small groups of women (young people), most of them students who had broken (more or less completely) with leftism. These characteristics – youth, education level, going through leftism – added to the behaviors required by the movement in its early days [single-sex, high availability, etc.] which determined the style of the emerging movement.) 31 Naty Garcia Guadilla, Libération des femmes: Le M.L.F. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1981), p. 77. 32 Ibid., pp. 77–78. 33 Ibid., p. 78. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., p. 81. 36 Ibid., pp. 80–81. 37 Author interview with Raymonde Arcier, Paris, November 2006. 38 Others, influenced by the Situationists, questioned feminist claims concerning this brand of MLF behavior which was seen to embed women further into the spectacle culture inherent to capitalism where roles had already been prescribed: ‘On a pu dire n’importe quoi sur cette société, même qu’elle était patriarcale. On ne répètera jamais assez ce qu’elle est effectivement: marchande et spectaculaire. La mise en spectacle de la réification sous le capitalisme moderne impose à chacun un rôle dans la passivité généralisée. La femme n’échappe pas à cette loi. La femme “émancipée” court s’y soumettre. En tant que “femme émancipée”, revendiquant une identité (biologique, psychologique, phantasmatique, etc.), et à ce titre un statut (le droit à la différence, par exemple biologique, psychologique, phantasmatique, et social), elle détient un rôle apparemment provisoire [2] la préparant au rôle définitif qu’elle assume déjà en élément positif et conservateur dans le fonctionnement du système marchand.’ ‘De la Misère en milieu féministe ou la pouffiasserie à visage humain’  (Paris: Les Émissions des Femmes, November 1977), n.p. Courtesy Mehdi El Hajoui. (So many things have been said about this society,

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even that it was patriarchal. We can never repeat enough what it actually is: commercial and spectacular. The spectacularization of reificiation under modern capitalism imposes on each person a role in generalized passivity. Women do not escape this law. The ‘emancipated’ woman rushes to comply with it. As an ‘emancipated woman’, claiming an identity (biologically, psychologically, phantasmatically, etc.), and as such a status (the right to be different, for example, biologically, psychologically, phantasmatically, and socially), she has an apparently temporary role [2] while preparing for the definitive role already assumed as a positive and conservative element in the functioning of the market system.) 39 Anne Zelensky, interviewed by Irène Issorel, ‘Le Mouvement de libération des femmes vu par la presse nationale française 1970–1972’, Mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 2000, pp. 32–33. 40 Marie-José Chombart de Lauwe, ‘Les femmes en 1971: images d’une oppression, images d’une libération’, La nouvelle critique: Politique, marxisme, culture, no. 53 (234) nouvelle série (May 1972), pp. 30–42, pp. 37–38. 41 Anne Tristan and Annie de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, Preface by Simone de Beauvoir (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1977), p. 69. My emphasis. 42 Amelia Jones, for example, persuasively argues that body art can be construed as anti-Cartesian in its consistent attack on the myth, and the interrogation, of the (Western) subject. See Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 37–38. 43 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 9th edition. www.academie-francaise.fr/ le-dictionnaire/la-9e-edition. 44 Chombart de Lauwe, ‘Les femmes en 1971: images d’une oppression’, p. 34. 45 See ‘The Suffragette Face: New Type Evolved by Militancy’, Daily Mirror, 25 May 1914, in Rosemary Betterton, An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists, and the Body (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). Betterton notes how during the period of 1911–1914 in Britain, for example, ‘Physical appearance was used as an index of femininity and mobilized ideologically on both sides of the debate [concerning the women’s movement]’, p. 50. She also points out the availability of Charcot’s archive of French photographed hysterics which may have influenced the suffragettes’ representations, pp. 64–68. The 1871 caricatures of les pétroleuses, by Eugène Girard, among others typical of the period, depict women with wild, exaggerated and distorted features. See also Gay L. Gullickson, Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 46 Jacques Lacan, ‘Le stade du miroir’, in Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), pp. 93–100. 47 Joan Copjec, ‘Cutting Up’, in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 227–246, p. 235. 48 Dany Bloch, ‘L’Art vidéo 1965–1980’, unpublished thesis, 1980, pp. 187–188. Bloch Papers at Les Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes. Bloch cites curator Alain Sayag and Pontus Hulten on Ikam. 49 Catherine Ikam had a show, ‘environnement vidéo’, at the Centre Pompidou (23 January–3 March 1980). Nam June Paik had written an essay about Ikam’s

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work for the catalogue, ‘Video Cryptography’. Catherine Ikam: dispositif pour un parcours vidéo, exhibition catalogue, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980, n.p. 50 See also Stéphanie Jeanjean, who points to Doudou, a factory worker whose face (though not always in extreme close-up) was shown for 55 minutes in ‘Grève des femmes à Troyes’ (1971), created by five women from the MLF with no prior video experience who documented a women’s strike in a hosiery factory. ‘Disobedient Video in France in the 1970s: Video Production by Women’s Collectives’, Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 27 (Summer 2011), pp. 5–16, p. 7. 51 Françoise Giroud, ‘L’opération anti-pilule’ [October 1966], in Une poignée d’eau (Paris: Laffont, 1973), pp. 12–14, pp. 12–13. Giroud reports that two dermatologists noted while interviewing patients at the Hôpital Bichat that women were reporting certain skin problems and a loss of hair after taking the pill, p. 12. 52 Ibid., p. 13. 53 Writing on Boltanski’s close-up photographs of the same period, Rebecca de Roo points out that unlike Messager’s focus on individual identity, ‘Boltanski was an artist who effaced his individuality so that others could identify with his work, and the family album was the basis for a new, broadly accessible and democratic point of collective identity’. Rebecca de Roo, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 123. 54 Beauty was one of the main topics presented at the 1970 Elle magazine ÉtatsGénéraux de la Femme in November of that year. See Chapter 2. 55 Tristan and de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, p. 34. 56 ‘Faut-il que les hommes aient peu d’imagination pour le réduire au seul attrait physique! Cela montre bien qu’ils ne s’intéressent en nous qu’à l’aspect extérieur. La culture mâle procède toujours par restrictions, en tous domaines, elle s’ingénie à mutiler, à tronquer la réalité complexe et riche. Elle nous a coupées de notre disponibilité envers le monde.’ Ibid., p. 31. (Men must have little imagination to reduce it to mere physical attraction! This shows that they are only interested in how we look. Male culture always proceeds by restrictions, in every area, and strives to mutilate and truncate a rich and complex reality, thereby cutting off our availability to the world.) 57 Annette Messager, exhibition catalogue, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1973. Republished in Annette Messager: Word for Word: Text, Writings and Interviews, ed. Marie-Laure Bernadac, trans. Vivien Rehberg (New York: DAP, 2006), p. 355. 58 ‘Interview with Aline Dallie [sic], 1975–76’. Republished in Annette Messager: Word for Word, p. 388. 59 ‘Interview with Robert Storr, 1995’, ibid., p. 408. 60 Email correspondences with Gretta [Grzywacz] Sarfaty, July–August 2019. 61 Photographie actuelle en France, 1978 (Paris: Contrejour, 1978), p. 25. Métayer featured in the group exhibition of the same name at the Galerie Contrejour in Paris. (Photographer Claude Batho, discussed in this chapter, was also part of the exhibition.)

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62 Métayer had previously critiqued the effects of the dissemination of images through mass communication in her painting Télécommunications which focused on the images of gagged women and combined aspects of figuration, geometric abstraction, hyper-realism and tachism and was shown at the 25th Salon de la Jeune Peinture in 1974. More of Métayer’s photocopied facial compressions on handmade, Japanese paper can be seen in Nicole Métayer, Cordes-sur-Ciel (Tarn), Galerie Michel Gaudrion, 1979. 63 Christian Rigal, L’Artiste et la photocopie, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Edition Galerie Trans/Form: 1981). Exhibition title: Electrographies, Galerie Trans/ Form, July–August 1981. Artists included Lourdes Castro, Miguel Egaña, Anna Bella Geiger, Margareth Maciel, Jürgen O. Olbrich, Wilfrid Rouff, Claude Torey. See also Christian Rigal, ‘Le Copy Art’, Opus International, no. 78 (Autumn 1980), pp. 54–58. 64 Rigal, L’Artiste, n.p. 65 Claude Torey, ‘Extrait de “Les femmes de l’Art”’ (À paraître), in Rigal, L’Artiste, n.p. 66 Unpublished letter sent by Claude Torey to Aline Dallier. Undated letter. Les Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes. 67 Do-it-yourself books on copy art were in circulation by the late 1970s. See Patrick Firpo et al. (eds), Copy Art: The First Complete Guide to the Copy Machine (New York: Richard Marek, 1978). 68 Rigal, L’Artiste, n.p. 69 Author interview with Jeanne Socquet, Paris, June 2006. 70 Marguerite Duras, ‘La Voix’, Sorcières, no. 2, p. 7. Duras also mentions Socquet by name, saying that she discovered a ‘great woman painter’ who brought her ‘joy’. See her interview with Xavière Gauthier, in Woman to Woman [Les parleuses], trans. Katharine A. Jensen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), p. 18. 71 ‘Dix questions sur l’art corporel et l’art sociologique: Un débat entre Hervé Fischer, Michel Journiac, Gina Pane et Jean-Paul Thenot’ [Nov. 1973], Artitudes, no. 6–8 (December 1973–March 1974), pp. 4–16, p. 6. 72 Julia Kristeva, ‘unes femmes’, Les Cahiers du GRIF, no. 7, pp. 22–27, p. 23. Cited and adapted in Cécile de Préval, ‘Le Mouvement de libération des femmes à Paris de 1969 à 1974.’ Mémoire de maîtrise d’Ethnologie, Université Paris VIII Saint-Denis, 1996–1997. 73 Le Torchon brûle, no. 0, p. 19. Cited in de Préval, ibid., p. 74. 74 See Noa Steimatsky, The Face on Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 18–19. 75 The image was published in L’Humidité, no. 24 (1977), to illustrate the collective statement ‘Enfermement / Rupture’, signed by Claudette Brun, Colette Deblé, Françoise Eliet, Monique Frydman, Christine Maurice and Michèle Herry, pp. 40–41 (see Figure 4.14). 76 In the first week of its release in 1973, Emmanuelle attracted 126,530 spectators in Paris and caused long queues outside the cinemas. With the liberalization of pornography in the early 1970s the success of the films created a palpable commercial impact. In July 1974, of the fifty-six theaters in Paris, twenty-six

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were showing erotic films. The films were also seen as ‘therapeutic’, according to L’Express magazine. ‘Le Dr. Willy Pasini …, déclarait, avec une belle simplicité …: “L’utilisation de l’audio-visuel atteint des couches archaïques de la personnalité, par un biais direct de l’image et du son”.’ ‘“Emmanuelle” a gagné’, L’Express, 15–21 July 1974. (Dr. Willy Pasini … said, with great simplicity …: ‘The use of audio-visual reaches archaic layers of the personality by means of images and sounds.’) 77 Eva Klasson confirmed that the body parts featured in this series of photographs were her own. She used a special technique at the time to render the images in ‘high definition’. Author interview with Eva Klasson, July 2019. 78 Sorcières, ‘Fidélités’, no. 8 (1977), p. 54. 79 ‘J’éprouvais le besoin de retirer, petit à petit, les éléments qui composent la réussite d’une photo, aussi bien sur le plan esthétique que sur celui du langage pictural. En un mot, je voulais retrouver ce que l’on appelait conventionnellement le mauvais.’ Sorcières, ibid. (I felt the need to remove, little by little, the elements that contribute to the success of a photo, both in terms of aesthetics and pictorial language. In a word, I wanted to find what was conventionally called bad.) 80 Igrecque [Yolaine Simha], ‘À propos d’Eva Klasson’, Sorcières, ‘Fidélités’, no. 8 (1977), p. 53. 81 Friedrich Engels, The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man [1876] (New York: International Publishers, 1950), p. 9. 82 See Gloria Orenstein, ‘Exorcism / Protest / Rebirth: Modes of Feminist Expression in France’, Womanart (Winter 1977–1978 ), pp. 8–11, p. 9. Also https:// actualite.nouvelle-aquitaine.science/denise-a-aubertin-dans-le-corps-dulivre. 83 Maya Anderson and Frédérique Touratier de Goeje, Sorcières, ‘Mouvements’, no. 15, p. 12. 84 Cited in Emi Fontana, ‘From My Words to Yours and from Your Words to Mine’, in You: Ketty La Rocca: Works and Writings, 1964–1976, ed. Angelika Stepken (Berlin: Revolver, 2017), pp. 17–23, p. 20. Originally cited in Lucilla Saccà (ed.), Ketty La Rocca: i suoi scritti (Turin: Martano Editors, 2005). 85 Lea Vergine, Body Art and Performance: The Body as Language (New York: Skira, 2000), pp. 44–45. 86 ‘… compared to the small number of women artists traditionally included in exhibitions of sculpture or painting, video programs and exhibition catalogues of the 1970s (including special exhibitions such as the 1973 and 1975 Whitney Biennials, the 1976 Paris Biennial, and Documenta 6 in 1977) list a surprising number of women.’ JoAnn Hanley, ‘The First Generation: Women and Video, 1970–1975’, The First Generation: Women and Video, 1970–1975. JoAnn Hanley, Guest Curator. New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1993, pp. 9–17, p. 10. See also 1974 video show at ARC 2 with Dany Bloch in Chapter 6. 87 ‘Derrière la caméra comment ne pas (nous) enfermer dans le silence et le regard, à l’atelier “des femmes et la vidéo”’, Des femmes en mouvements, no. 8–9 (August–September 1978), pp. 86–87, p. 87. About fifteen women

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participated in the video atelier staged amongst other activities (such as photography, drawing/painting and seminars on the body) during the ‘Rencontre de femmes à Saint Rémy’ in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in July 1978. 88 Hanley, ‘The First Generation’, pp. 13–14. 89 ‘Pour une féminité radicale. Pour un cinéma autre.’ October 1977, Cinémaction I, n. hors-série d’Écran 78, May 1978. Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes. 90 See also Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, ‘Manifeste pour un cinéma corporel’. Athènes, 1978, Jungle no. 4 Subversion. Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes. 91 Jean-Luc Monterosso, ‘M.L.F. et photographie’, Le Quotidien de Paris, 30 November 1977. (Batho, who exhibited in Photographie actuelle en France, 1978, was later exhibited by Galerie des femmes with a book of her photographs produced by them in 1981.) 92 Ibid. 93 ‘Mais au-delà de la pure sensibilité, en quoi cet univers justifie-t-il un combat et une contestation? En regard du projet initial de la Librairie des femmes, que signifie cette vision du monde? Certes, il est important que des femmes puissent publier leurs photographies. S’il s’agit d’un simple – mais réel – problème d’édition, cette collection est parfaitement justifiée. Là où il convient cependant d’émettre quelques réserves, c’est sur son contenu. Si dans la littérature il paraît souhaitable de révéler les forces vives d’un mouvement de revendication des femmes trop longtemps contenu, il ne semble pas que la situation soit exactement la même en photographie. En d’autres termes, même si la qualité des photographies présentées n’est pas mise en cause, ce qui surprend tout de même c’est le côté un peu passéiste de cette collection. Car enfin, que présente-t-elle, sinon les images d’une certaine forme de résignation? Est-ce là l’image que la femme veut donner d’elle-même et de ses luttes? La photographie permet quand même plus d’audace et cette collection, en un mot, devrait prendre plus de risques si, en regard de ce qui se fait actuellement en photographie, elle ne veut pas se retrouver très vite à la traîne d’un mouvement et d’un combat.’ Ibid. (But beyond the question of pure sensibility, in what way does this universe justify a fight and a protest? With regard to the initial project of the Librairie des femmes, what does their vision of the world mean? Admittedly, it is important that women are able to publish their photographs. If it is a simple – but real – problem of publication, then this collection is perfectly justifiable. Where it may be appropriate to air some reservations, however, is along the lines of its contents. Even if in literature it seems befitting to reveal the life force of a women’s rights movement too long subdued, the situation is not exactly the same in photography. In other words, even if the quality of the photographs presented is not called into question, the somewhat backward look of this collection remains surprising. After all, what does it present to us besides images of a certain form of resignation? Is this the image that women want to give of themselves and their battles? Photography allows more audacity, and this collection, in a word, should take more risks so that when compared to photography’s current

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trends, it does not end up very quickly lagging behind a movement and a fight.) 94 For more sustained connections between activist imagery across France, England and the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, see Colleen Denney, The Visual Culture of Women’s Activism in London, Paris and Beyond (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018). Gloria Orenstein also began her narrative on French women artists with a symbol of the hand: ‘The clenched fist raised in protest has traditionally been the symbol of power and revolution. For the newly emerging woman artist the gesture of the hand that protests is now slowly becoming identified with the gesture of the hand that paints.’ ‘Exorcism / Protest / Rebirth’, p. 8. 95 Gina Pane, ‘Blessure/Mort: Corps Collectif ’, in Lettre à un(e) inconnu(e) (Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 2003), pp. 24–25. Originally published in Italian: ‘Morte/Borghesia/Ferita/Morte: il corpo collettivo’, Controcultura (Brescia), no. 1, 15 September 1976, p. 12. My emphasis. 96 Women trade unionists would create the Working Women’s Charter in 1974. The year after the Women in Work exhibition, Papers on Patriarchy (Brighton: Women’s Publishing Collective, 1976), the proceedings of Patriarchy Conference in London on 15–16 May 1976, highlighted issues of women and labor along with more theoretical approaches to Marxism and psychoanalysis. For more on the British women’s liberation movement and the differences between radical and socialist feminism, see Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson, ‘The British Women’s Movement’, New Left Review, no. 148 (November–December 1984), pp. 74–103. 97 Tract. ‘Groupe de prise de conscience’, November 1973. MLF de Bruxelles. Archives BMD. 98 ‘The Uncanny’ [1919] in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. XVII (1917–1919) (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 219–256. 99 Anne Marie Boetti [Anne-Marie Sauzeau Boetti], ‘“Lo specchio ardente”: Appunti teorici sul concetto di ‘altra creatività’ di segno (o gene?) femminile’, Data, no. 16/17 (July/August 1975). Italian artists Carla Accardi and Marissa Merz were also interviewed. For more on Sauzeau Boetti and Italian women artists in relation to Julia Kristeva, see her ‘Negative Capability as Practice in Women’s Art’, Studio International, January–February 1976, pp. 24–25. For Sauzeau Boetti in context, see Laura Iammuri, ‘Words and Silences: The Critical Scene’, in Body and Words in Italian and Lithuanian Women’s Art from 1965 to the Present exhibition catalogue, MAGMA (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2018), pp. 38–47. My thanks to Laura Iammuri. 100 Lucy Lippard, ‘The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: Women’s Body Art’, Art in America, May–June 1976, pp. 73–81. 101 ‘I have been told that both the male editor of an Italian art tabloid and a male French neo-Duchampian artist have discouraged women from working in other ways by publicly and powerfully applauding women’s art which limits itself to these areas.’ Ibid., p. 75.

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102 Ibid. See Catherine Francblin, Art Press, no. 20 (September–October 1975), pp. 14–15. 103 L’art corporel, exhibition catalogue, Galerie Rodolphe Stadler, 1975. The exhibition took place in Paris from 16 January to 22 Feburary 1975 at the Galerie Stadler. 104 ‘Dix questions sur l’art corporel et l’art sociologique: Un débat entre Hervé Fischer, Michel Journiac, Gina Pane, et Jean-Paul Thenot’, ArTitudes, 1973, p. 11. 105 See Hervé Guibert, ‘Happening: Gina Pane à Beaubourg’, Le Monde, 1 February 1979. Gina Pane immediately wrote a scathing letter to art critic and editor François Pluchart about the number of mistakes in the article – Guibert incorrectly mentions her use of acupuncture needles, for instance. Pane further scorns him for his alleged ‘racism’ toward women and Italians. See letter from Paris dated 1 February 1979 to Pluchart. For Pane’s statements on Michel Journiac, see her letter from Paris to Pluchart dated 5 February 1979. Both letters in Fonds d’Archives François Pluchart et Aline Dallier-Popper: Correspondance et entretien de Gina Pane. Les Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes. 106 ‘SI J’OUVRE MON “CORPS” AFIN QUE VOUS PUISSIEZ Y REGARDER VOTRE SANG, C’EST POUR L’AMOUR DE VOUS: L’AUTRE.’ Published in ‘Dossier Gina Pane’, Artitudes International, no. 15–17 (October–December 1974), p. 34. Reprinted in Pane, Lettre à un(e) inconnu(e), p. 16. 107 ‘Il s’agira de soumettre le désordre féminin, son rire, son incapacité à prendre au sérieux les coups de tambour à la menace de décapitation. Si l’homme fonctionne à la menace de castration, si la masculinité est ordonnée dans la culture comme menacée de castration, eh bien on peut dire que le coup … la répercussion de cette menace de castration sur la femme, c’est sa prolongation en tant que décapitation, en tant qu’exécution de la femme, en tant que perte de la tête.’ Hélène Cixous,‘Le sexe ou la tête?’ Les Cahiers du GRIF, no. 13 (1976). Elles consonnent. Femmes et langages II. pp. 5–15. English trans: ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ Trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs, vol. 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1981), pp. 41–55, p. 43. (It’s a question of submitting feminine disorder, its laughter, its inability to take the drumbeats seriously, to the threat of decapitation. If man operates under the threat of castration, if masculinity is culturally ordered by the castration complex, it might be said that the backlash, the return, on women of this castration anxiety is its displacement as decapitation, execution, of woman, as loss of her.) 108 The exhibition, curated by Artitudes founder, François Pluchart, was earlier held the Galerie Stadler in Paris from 16 January to 22 Feburary 1975 before traveling to Brussels. It was Isy Brachot’s wife, Christine Duchiron Brachot, who was responsible for inviting Gina Pane to Brussels for the one-time performance. Author email exchange with Christine Duchiron Brachot. 13 February 2018. 109 Jean Clair, Art en France: une nouvelle génération (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1972), p. 19. See Chapter 6. 110 J. F. Lyotard, Économie libidinale (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974), p. 11. ‘Toutes ces zones aboutées en une bande sans verso; bande de  Moebius, non pas

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intéressante parce que fermée, mais parce qu’uniface, peau moebienne non pas lisse, mais (est-ce possible topologiquement?) au contraire toute couverte d’aspérités, recoins, replis, cavernes qui, lorsque ça passera au “premier” tour seront cavernes, mais peut-être au “deuxième” bosses. Mais nul ne sait ni saura à quel “tour” on en est, dans l’éternel tour’ (All these zones are joined end to end in a band which has no back to it, a Moebius band which interests us not because it is closed, but because it is one-sided, a Moebian skin which, rather than being smooth, is on the contrary (is this topologically possible?) covered with roughness, corners, creases, cavities which when it passes on the ‘first’ turn will be cavities, but perhaps on the ‘second’, lumps. But as for what turn the band is on, no one knows nor will know, in the eternal turn). Eng. trans. Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 2–3. 111 Françoise Picq, Libération des femmes: Les années mouvement (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993), p. 73. 112 Préval, ‘Le Mouvement de libération des femmes à Paris de 1969 à 1974’, pp. 24–26. Cited is Danièle Léger, Le féminisme en France (Paris: Sycamore, 1982), pp. 13–15. Eleni Varikas problematizes this equation with a reference to Greek οίκος and its historic opposition to the political in ‘Le Personnel est Politique’: Avatars d’une Promesse Subversive’, Tumultes, no. 8 (September 1996), pp. 135–160, p. 140. 113 Bourgeois comments that the piece was made as ‘a joke … a comment on the sexes because they are so mixed up today’. Cited in Marjorie AllthorpeGuiton, ‘Bourgeois Banquet’, Royal Academy Magazine, issue 96 (Autumn 2007), p. 23. 114 Author’s email correspondence with Colette. August–September 2019. 115 Ibid. 116 Maurice Agulhon, Marianne au Combat (Paris: Flammarion, 1981), p. 102, pp. 129–156. 117 Martine Neddam’s [Veuve Angine] email correspondence with the author. August 2018. 118 Ibid. 119 Aline Dallier, ‘Le rôle des femmes dans l’éclatement des avant-gardes et l’élargissement du champ de l’art’,  Opus International, no. 88 (Spring 1983), pp. 24–30, p. 27. 120 Alina Szapocznikow April 1972. Tumeurs, herbier, exhibition catalogue, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1973. 121 Ibid. See also Carole Naggar, ‘Alina Szapocznikow’ Opus International, no. 46 (September 1973), pp. 39–41, and Françoise Collin, ‘Alina Szapocznikow, sculpteur’ in Cahiers du GRIF, Dé-pro-ré créer, no. 7 (1975), pp. 57–58. 122 Ipoustéguy: Sculptures et dessins de 1957 à 1978, 20 June–15 August 1978. Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques. Paris. See also, Michèle Demoulin, ‘Ipoustéguy ou la vérité de l’homme’, Opus International, no. 70–71 (Winter 1979), pp. 108–109. 123 Author interview with Raymonde Arcier, Paris, November 2006.

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124 Feministische Kunst Internationaal, exhibition catalogue, De Appel, Amsterdam, 1978. Also see Kathleen Wentrack, ‘What is so Feministische Kunst Internationaal? Critical Directions in 1970s Feminist Art’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 33, no. 2 (2012), pp. 76–110. Arcier’s work was criticized to some extent by Peter Cunningham who reviewed the traveling show and singled out Arcier’s sweater, Heritage: My mother’s knitting (also known as The Heritage of My Mother’s Sweaters), for being more ideologically than aesthetically oriented – a charge that he leveled at the show in general. ‘Feministische Kunst Internationaal: A Review’, Oxford Art Journal, April 1980, pp. 83–84, p. 83. 125 ‘Ça ne fait pas avancer: on prend son bain bimestriel d’écriture féminine et puis après?’ Nancy [Huston], ‘Sorcières’, Sorcières, ‘Poupées’, no. 13 (1978), p. 48. (It does not help us to progress: we take a bimonthly dip in to écriture féminine and then what?) Nancy Huston, however, does not suggest a similar role for art which also plays a vital role in the journal. Anne Rivière, who along with other editors/writers voted on works to be included in each issue of the journal, claimed that the artworks and imagery were an embodiment of a ‘feminine’ essence equivalent to the writing of écriture féminine. Author interview with Anne Rivière, Paris, July 2006. 126 ‘Une femme qui en a marre des féministes a déclaré récemment: l’homme dit “je pense donc je suis”: la femme dit “je mets un Tampax donc je suis.”’ Nancy [Huston], ‘Sorcières’, Sorcières, ‘Poupées’, no. 13 (1978), pp. 47–48, p. 47. (A woman who is fed up of feminists recently said: the man says ‘I think, therefore I am’: the woman says ‘I use a Tampax, therefore I am.’) 127 Marsha Meskimmon, ‘Chronology through Cartography: Mapping 1970s Feminist Art Globally’, WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: The Museum of Contemporary Art / MIT Press, 2007), pp. 322–335, p. 323. 128 See Bronwyn Winter, ‘Public and Private: Politicizing the Personal – Questioning the Public/Private Divide’, in A Cultural History of Women in the Modern Age, ed. Liz Conor (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 97–117. See Winter’s discussion of the hijab in the Muslim world and the West, pp. 112–113.

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Instase: Psychanalyse et Politique and the spaces of women’s art

Chaque fois qu’une femme a une réaction de révolte, au bureau, au lit, à la cuisine, dans la rue, elle est M.L.F. Parce que la lutte contre notre oppression se mène autant dans un meeting, ou une manifestation que dans la vie quotidienne, pour chacune, au niveau et dans la situation particulières où elle est. … Prétendre changer le monde sans se changer mène à une impasse. Anne Tristan [Anne Zelensky] (1977)1 Whenever a woman has a reaction of revolt, at the office, in bed, in the kitchen, in the street, she is M.L.F. Because the struggle against our oppression is as much in a meeting, or a demonstration, as in everyday life; this is true of each woman in terms of the individual circumstances she finds herself in. … Pretending to change the world without changing oneself leads to a dead end. Comme le vocabulaire de guerre convient mal à ce qui est avant tout un drame intime! Florence Montreynaud (2004)2 How badly suited is the vocabulary of war to what is first and foremost an inner drama!

Part I: Revolution within Turning inward through psychoanalysis separated the women of Psychanalyse et Politique, or Psych et Po, a movement founded by Antoinette Fouque, from other MLF groups.3 Fouque describes the genesis of the movement: Notre mouvement a commencé en octobre 68, dans la foulée de la révolution de mai – en lutte contre les autoritarismes (État, Universités …), et les impérialismes (occidental sur le monde, américain au Vietnam) –, dans l’ignorance totale du Women’s Lib américain et sans aucune relation ou information quant à d’éventuelles associations féminines ou féministes françaises. Telle est son origine – et son originalité.4

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Our movement began in October 68, in the aftermath of the May revolution – a battle against authoritarianisms (State, Universities …), and imperialisms (the West around the world, Americans in Vietnam) –, in complete ignorance of the American Women’s Lib movement and without any relationship or knowledge of possible French women’s or feminist associations. Such is its origin – and its originality.

The separation and intellectual elitism of Psych et Po was a source of antagonism and myth amongst women in other feminist groups. Mystery shrouded many of their activities, which Fouque, who was regrettably suffering from a degenerative illness that affected her ability to walk, could independently maintain and fund.5 From their meetings and auto-analysis (which each member could conduct without interruption) that often lasted until the morning hours, to a lack of notes taken during any of their sessions, their identical manner of speaking in low tones, an ‘eerie’ similarity of look and dress (often hennaed red hair, North African tunics and, later, trademark green carrier bags from Librairie des femmes), the distinctions of the group did not always sit well with other women’s movements – Anne Zelensky described Fouque scathingly as at once ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘husband’ and ‘grand priestess’ to the ‘anxious women’ in attendance.6 The cultural relevance and power of Psych et Po, however, could not be overlooked. The group was influenced by the ‘open air’ psychoanalysis lectures freely available at Vincennes as well as by the seductive persona of Fouque. Formerly an editor of Italian at the publishing house Éditions du Seuil, she had read Lacan before Freud, discovered Tel Quel as introduced by François Wahl, was introduced to the writer and poet Pierre Jean Jouve and his wife Blanche Reverchon (a psychoanalyst and translator of Freud), and was analyzed by Lacan whose seminars she began to follow from 1969 onwards.7 She was also analyzed by Luce Irigaray who was herself deeply influenced, according to Elisabeth Roudinesco, by the teaching of Jacques Derrida and the analysis of Serge Leclaire.8 It was Monique Wittig who helped radicalize Fouque by dragging her to the Sorbonne during May ’68. The nascent group formed in October, initially reading and critiquing Marx, Engels and Lenin before trying to find a more subjective, female-centered approach: ‘Nous étions embarquées sur les causes marxistesléninistes-maoïstes mais nous ramions à contre-courant’ (We had embarked on Marxist-Leninist-Maoist campaigns but we were rowing against the current).9 The Marcusian Wittig and Lacanian Fouque later parted company. Fouque’s group ‘incubated’ for two years, meeting, exchanging information and producing tracts before publicly emerging at the end of April 1970 at Vincennes. She then ran a permanent ‘course’ there in September.10 Funded in part by the immense wealth of the Schlumberger family inherited by Sylvina Boissonnas, the group founded the publishing house des femmes in 1974. It published works by Hélène Cixous, Chantal Chawaf, Julia

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Kristeva, Juliet Mitchell (in translation), Xavière Gauthier, Igrecque [Yolaine Simha], Victoria Thérame, Françoise d’Eaubonne, Benoîte et Flora Groult, Evelyne Le Garrec and others. In addition it ran a bookstore, Librairie des femmes, produced magazines such as Le Quotidien des Femmes (1974–1976) and Des femmes en mouvements (1977–1979; 1979–1982) and staged informal art exhibitions that led in December 1980 to the creation of an art gallery within the Librairie des femmes at 74 rue de Seine, Paris.11 The inaugural exhibition was by Milvia Maglione (see Chapter 5).12 The importance of Marie Dedieu, who was paralyzed after a car accident in 1971, and became a quadriplegic, can also not be overestimated. Dedieu signed the ‘Manifeste des 343’ and went on to direct Le Torchon brûle (1971–1973) in addition to contributing to the magazine Des femmes en mouvements. She was also critical to the exhibitions that took place at des femmes’s gallery, helping to set up the inaugural exhibitions and having a voice in their execution. (Artist Marie Orensanz, for example, mentioned that she had met Marie Dedieu and Michèle Barrière, but not Antoinette Fouque during her exhibition at the gallery in 1982.)13 Dedieu was also very close to Antoinette Fouque who had shared with her the idea of creating a museum of women artists and sent her and ‘Michèle B.’ (Barrière) to see the Frauen Museum in Bonn, Germany, as an example.14 The aim was to search for short-term artworks for the gallery and longer term ones for the museum.15 Dedieu came into national prominence (including her past feminist activities) when she was kidnapped by Somali gunmen and died in captivity in 2011.16 Archival notes suggest that Antoinette Fouque was involved with the early selections of artists through their dossiers ([Milvia] Maglione, [Françoise] Martinelli, [Kate] Millett and [Michèle] Knoblauch), with ‘Sylviane’ (likely Sylvina ‘Sylvie’ Boissonnas who worked with artists Niki de Saint Phalle and Olivier Mosset in the 1960s) and herself doing much of the organizing, and with ‘Sylviane’ occasionally helping with installation. However, over time, Fouque progressively left such decisions to the gallery women, which every so often resulted in confusion as to the direction to take.17 The focus on consciously shaping women’s culture was essential for the women of Psych et Po. Whereas groups such as Femmes Révolutionnaires were based on a ‘sorority’ of collective female identity united against ‘l’ennemi principal’ (common enemy) of patriarchy, for Psych et Po the emphasis was on a ‘culture féminine’ manifested in spontaneity, plurality, disorganization, speaking up and out of turn, laughter and emotions which were consciously used as weapons to subvert power and ‘destabilize the oppressor’.18 While many of these behaviors were shared with other MLF groups, what made Psych et Po distinctive was Fouque’s insistence on intellectual theory and critical analysis (citing the relevance of contemporaries such as Lacan and Derrida), which she believed were obscured by feminist activism and media attention. She instead preferred interpretation, positive energy and women’s creative action as ‘counterweights’

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to the oppression of a patriarchal society.19 Fouque’s meetings each attracted roughly 200 people, including intellectuals such as Julia Kristeva who sympathized with the Lacanian and structuralist agenda. She attended several meetings before rejecting the group for their insistence on remaining separate – which they justified as a retreat from male ‘violence’ – and for being, according to Philippe Forest, what appeared to be a ‘perverse’ community with ‘sadomasochistic’ rules.20 Artist Irène Laksine (see Chapter 5), who was a short-term member of the MLF Maoist group Vive La Révolution! as well, also attended some meetings with Antoinette Fouque, Sylvie Boissonnas and Marie Dedieu (in whose home they would meet) for analysis and discussions about power structures. But these gatherings ultimately did not sit well with the artist, who stopped attending.21 The group focused on diverse themes: ‘structure du viol et nom-du-père (illégitimité et programmation psychotique des femmes); l’hystérique (la torture politique / la question psychanalytique); Dora, Anna O (women ‘hysterics’ in Freud’s case studies), le corps et le discours, l’homosexualité, analyse des textes de Freud, Lacan, Melanie Klein’ (structure of rape and name-of-the-father [illegimitacy and the psychotic programming of women]; hysteria [political torture / the psychoanalytic dimension]; body and discourse; homosexuality, analysis of texts by Freud, Lacan and Melanie Klein) and the theory and practice of psychoanalysis in the service of the women’s movement.22 The group also practiced collective readings.23 Often accused of intellectual elitism, Fouque insisted that her group was interested in the role of the unconscious in everyday life (for all social classes) and the use of a discourse that could account for it: Il était partout question à cette époque de désir, d’antipsychiatre, d’anti-Œdipe, et la psychanalyse était, à Vincennes, enseignée à ciel ouvert. Le luxe plutôt que l’élitisme venait de la prétention à articuler l’une à l’autre. Un de mes désirs, à cette époque, c’était d’apporter ce qui était alors la pensée contemporaine la plus aiguë, au plus grand nombre, c’est-à-dire de faire un saut au-dessus de la culture petite-bourgeoise stéréotypée. … on m’accusait de terrorisme théoriciste; seulement les accusatrices n’étaient pas des ouvrières, c’étaient des sociologues, des universitaires, très hostiles à la psychanalyse.24 And at that time everyone was talking about desire, antipsychiatry, anti-Oedipus, and at Vincennes psychoanalysis was taught outdoors. Our claim that we were articulating psychoanalysis and politics felt more like a luxury than elitism. One of the things I wanted, at the time, was to bring to as many people as possible what was then the cutting-edge of contemporary thought – in other words, to transcend the stereotypes of petit bourgeois culture … I was accused of being a theorizing terrorist; only the accusers weren’t workers, they were sociologists, academics, who were very hostile to psychoanalysis.

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Psychoanalysis and sexual identity in the 1970s The importance of female sexuality as a site of alternative identity, pleasure and power for the women of Psych et Po was based on Lacan’s reading of Freud, which questioned the primacy of the phallus. Rather than focusing on a single libido (with women having a ‘little’, or defective, penis discovered at the time of castration, later leading to hysteria), Lacan separated the concept of the ‘phallus’ from the penis, making the phallus the signifier of power that could be represented by either sex.25 Fouque broke with the feminism and existentialism of de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe and appropriated the ideas of Freud and Lacan, privileging concepts that affected women such as ‘sexualité’, ‘rêve’ and ‘désir’ (‘sexuality’, ‘dream’ and ‘desire’) which were used as a trademark by the group even at international psychoanalytic events.26 This emphasis on pleasure broke with the hardened Marxism of other groups such as Femmes Révolutionnaires, Les Pétroleuses and others, by focusing on the politics of female sexuality. Fouque used Freudian psychoanalysis as a basis for investigation of the primacy of the phallus and the fetish it represented in society.27 She then linked Lacanian thinking to a political analysis of the condition of women: Le phallus est l’emblème, l’image, le signifiant-maître, l’équivalent général de l’intégrité de Narcisse. Une femme, quand elle se trouve privée d’une ‘libido à soi’, subit son impérialisme et est soumise à son mode de développement économique. Si elle ne veut pas se contenter de faire Echo, elle n’a donc d’autre choix pour s’exprimer que d’emprunter cette voie, mais c’est au prix de son intégrité psychique et physiologique; elle y engage son corps, ou plutôt elle est mise en demeure d’y abandonner son corps en otage, de tomber dans une pathologie où elle sera prise pour le phallus, par elle-même et par les autres, le phallus bien sûr, corps et âme, corps obélisque et érigé comme c’est encore le cas de beaucoup d’actrices de cinéma, de mannequins, âme-Père-Dieu pour bien des femmes écrivains ou ministres.28 The phallus is the emblem, the image, the master signifier, the general equivalent of narcissistic wholeness. A woman, when she finds herself deprived of a ‘libido of one’s own’, is subjected to its imperialism, to its mode of economic development. If she is not satisfied with acting as Echo, then she has no choice for self-expression other than to take the phallic path, but at the expense of her psychic and physiological integrity; she commits her body to it or, rather, she is given notice that she must surrender her body as a hostage and succumb to a pathology in which she will be seen by herself and by others as the phallus – body and soul, the erect obelisk body that one still sees today in many movie actresses and models, the Father-God souls that many women writers and government ministers seem to have.

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Using the language of psychoanalysis to analyze women and women’s condition led to a privileging of the body, sexuality and jouissance as well as the relationship with the mother and the maternal body. This helped to nourish the culture that included women’s writing later labeled écriture féminine, to present a new understanding of the body (physical and psychical) in language that had been repressed by a society ordered by men.29 Interestingly, the greatest output of women’s writing appeared at the same time as the political struggle for the legalization of abortion: 1970–1975.30 Fouque at one point refutes any political connections between female writers (many of whom she published) and the concept of an écriture féminine, or even their allegiance to the MLF, which she believed could overwhelm their individual identities/voices: D’autre part, cette tarte à la crème de l’écriture féminine a été utilisée comme une arme absolue, jetée à la face d’écrivains de premier plan, qui n’avaient attendu ni le M.L.F. ni les éditions Des Femmes pour énoncer leur poétique. Je pense très précisément à Hélène Cixous: Dedans, qui lui a valu en 1969 le prix Médicis, portait en germe tout ce qu’elle a écrit par la suite.31 Moreover, l’écriture féminine has been used as an ultimate weapon, a cream pie to be thrown in the face of first-rate writers, who didn’t wait either for the M.L.F. or Des Femmes to come into being before setting forth their poetics. I’m thinking specifically of Hélène Cixous: her Dedans, which won her the Prix Médicis in 1969, carried within it the seeds of everything she would write later.

In this way, Fouque both encourages and challenges the precepts of women’s writing and politics, while at the same time affirming them – as des femmes published most of Hélène Cixous’s novels in the 1970s. Psychanalyse et Politique and art There was no precise women’s equivalent in art to the women’s writing phenomenon that was écriture féminine in France (see Chapter 6). Although the women of Psych et Po held informal art exhibitions, it took until 1981 to show art in the Galerie des femmes, which they proclaimed the ‘first’ women’s art gallery in Europe.32 Established on the Rue de Seine, the gallery’s exhibitions showed a mix of national and international artists in different media (painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, photography and glassware, etc.) of various statures, testifying to the diversity of the gallery and its commitment to women: artists such as Milvia Maglione (1 January–28 February 1981), Françoise Martinelli (3 March–15 April 1981), Michèle Knoblauch (12 June–31 September 1981), Sonia Delaunay (1 October–7 November 1981), Sophie Clavel (12 November–12 December 1981), Dominique Garros (2 February–5 March

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1982), Ann Wärrf (2 May–18 June 1983), Louise Nevelson (17 January–3 March 1984), June Wayne (15 April–15 June 1985), Françoise Gilot (15 June–21 July 1986), Sheila Hicks (14 December 1985–15 March 1986) and photographers such as Kate Millett (25 April–30 May 1981), Claude Batho, Tina Modotti (16 December 1981–30 January 1982), Ilse Bing (November–December 1984), Imogen Cunningham (2 October–3 November 1984) as well as artists Elisa Tan (see Chapter 5) and Cristina Martinez (21 June–31 July 1983) (Plate 24). Exhibitions such as one in Avignon city hall from 20 July to 2 August 1981 included a range of women artists which spanned the historical to the contemporary (Figure 4.1). Artists included Colette Alvarez-Bravo, Claude Batho, Ilse Bing, Marcelle Cahn, Sophie Clavel, Geneviève Claisse, Des Femmes, Sonia Delaunay, Michèle Knoblauch, Erika and Elizabeth Lennard, Milvia Maglione, Françoise Martinelli, Kate Millett, Marie-Michelle Poncet and Sophie Tauber-Arp. (The exhibition was staged to draw attention to the MLF regionally and set up as a form of publicity to attract new members to the MLF in Avignon. The exhibition was internally declared a success by the gallery for the number of MLF ‘inscriptions’ (enrollments) that it drew in Avignon: ‘C’est un saut symbolique et politique’ (It’s a symbolic and political feat)).33 Many of the interests of and approaches to women’s art in the 1970s ultimately bore fruit in the 1980s, including the Éditions des femmes publication of Anne Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin’s Femmes peintres 1550–1950 (which received some hostile reviews in France), based on their exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1976, and Lea Vergine’s L’Autre moitié de l’avant-garde in 1982.34 (This last was a financial success and brought revenue to des femmes.)35 In the early 1980s, one of the stated goals of the gallery was to work with Antoinette Fouque to bring politics and psychoanalysis to women (des femmes) and art.36 The gallery during this period had understood, based

Des femmes exhibition at Avignon, 1981.

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on an exhibition at FIAC (Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain), that artists of ‘quality’ were not enough: there had to be ‘ideological’, ‘symbolic’ and ‘political’ aspects to make the art understood by a larger public.37 During Françoise Gilot’s exhibition in 1986, Antoinette Fouque commented on the relationship between interior life and art, specifically painting: La vie dans les yeux, la femme peintre touche son horizon intérieur, se remet en face des choses, les atteint et les transmet de les atteindre plutôt que de les représenter. Instase. Descendre au lieu inné, en soi, où l’autre se désaltère, et faire naître. S’éloigner de plus d’une mort; faire vivre plus d’une vie par cet effort d’amour. La peinture est un acte, un fait qui me réveille, me touche à l’intouchable; l’élément chair aussi à ses rêveries de labeur. Relation d’être à être, en écho, sans miroir, de pensant-vivant.38 With life in her eyes, the woman painter touches her inner horizon, facing things squarely in order to reach and transmit rather than represent them. Instase. To descend to the innate place, in the self, where the other quenches a thirst and creates. Moving away from more than one death; creating more than one life through the effort of love. Painting is an act, a truth that wakes me up, to touch the untouchable; the element of flesh also daydreams of labor. Relationship between beings, in echo, without a mirror, thinking-alive.

Fouque explicitly draws the connection between the work of art and the act of birth, labeling the act of painting as sexed: ‘Et si toute naissance était anamorphose? La (pro)création serait géni(t)ale ou ne serait plus. Alors, il faudrait saluer ici une naissance de peinture’ (And if all birth was anamorphosis? (Pro)creation would be geni(t)al or would no longer be. Thus, we should herald this moment as the birth of painting).39 Fouque uses theory and the oblique relationship between art and psychoanalysis to ‘gender’ artwork, conceiving of abstract painting not as neutral but sexed, and showing the pervasiveness of her dependence on psychoanalytic discourse to construe the world or to ‘gender every birth’. Although Fouque uses Lacanian theory to draw equivalences between abstract painting and gender (with hints toward Lacan’s Seminar XI on anamorphosis), how did the artists themselves conceive of this relationship, if at all?40 Fouque sees the emphasis on abstraction as a function of interiority, a production that was ‘géni(t)ale’ in contrast to the primacy of the phallus. A tactical ‘counterpractice’ is established by Fouque’s appropriation of abstraction by women beyond artist intentions. To what extent, if at all, was it a political exercise? What were the motivations between women abstractionists? How was such a terrain between abstractionists formed in the 1970s? There are three levels at work here: Fouque’s proposition that is reflected in some of the artists that she supported; the artists’ own intentions which can slip from any established or imposed theory; and my

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own intention of forming a terrain of women abstractionists in the 1970s in light of écriture féminine, psychoanalysis, philosophy and the politics of the period to gain an insight into a diversity of shared and overlapping practice(s). In this way, the territories of the feminine expand across disciplines and media. This is not theory ‘as method’ but a way in which to think what concepts were being territorialized by women through visual and verbal means and what these propositions brought to bear on women’s art and discursive practice of the era. This includes the type of pressures, slips/slippages and rejections that occur when media are confronted.41 Instase: space as excess If more militant art, as in Chapter 3, is dependent on the ‘spectacular’ or the ‘spectacle’ as a means of expression, a more subtle art practice construed as political was based on the drives and rhythms of the woman’s body. If one branch of the MLF movement was dependent on the ‘spectacular’, another was construing itself as ‘anonymous’ and ‘subterranean’, capable of capitalizing on the ‘interior’ body, or interiority, and which became militant in light of the personal as political. These practices can be seen to fit within two of the main branches of the MLF. Fouque comments on the divisions within the feminist movement: Oui, bien sûr, ou en tout cas, des divergences politiques importantes, qui, après Vincennes ont donné lieu à deux tendances: le féminisme, avec une pratique spectaculaire, et la mise en avant de femmes écrivains, une pratique du geste théâtral. Et nous, que, de l’extérieur, on appelait ‘Psych et Po’ (psychanalyse et politique), avec une pratique anonyme, souterraine: des taupes. Nous voulions faire de Psych et Po un laboratoire pour comprendre les impasses du mouvement de Mai et celles du mouvement des femmes (car il y a non-pensé dans tout mouvement, à mesure qu’il s’engendre). Et pour travailler sur ce nonpensé, nous utilisons les instruments de pensée contemporains, la psychanalyse en particulier, le seul discours qui existait à ce moment-là sur la sexualité.42 Yes, of course, or in any case, after Vincennes, important political differences gave rise to two trends: feminism based on spectacle and one based on theatrical style which emphasized women writers. And we, on the outside, called ‘Psych and Po’ (psychoanalysis and politics), with our anonymous, underground practice were moles. We wanted to make Psych and Po a laboratory to understand the impasses of the May movement as well as those of the women’s movement (because there is non-thought in any movement while it grows). And to work on non-thought, we turned to the tools of contemporary thought, psychoanalysis in particular, the only discourse on sexuality that existed at the time.

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This is not to reinstate binaries between body and mind for the women of Psych et Po: there was no such distinction. Fouque’s analogy of a ‘mole’ to seek out the inner life is a constructive one. For her, women’s geometric and abstract art was construed as political. (The focus on abstraction may also be a direct reaction to the power of the Nouvelle Figuration trend in art in the early 1980s, according to the group’s archival documents; thus a strategic appropriation.)43 Reflecting on the events of the 1970s and in particular on her relationship with Sylvie Boissonnas and the filming of Une jeune fille by the women of Psych et Po at Sylvie’s home in 1973, Fouque remembers seeing a painting by Albers, Hommage au carré (bleu et vert) in the bathroom.44 This painting led her to an interest in artists such as Resistance heroine Geneviève Asse (in particular her ‘blue’ paintings), Aurélie Nemours (and her use of black squares), and artist and filmmaker Catherine Lopes-Curval who used ‘squares’ with figurative/surrealist imagery (her figuration is not seen as a contradiction here). (Fouque neglects to mention the French sculptor Nathalie Talec who also took part in the exhibition.) Taking together different generations of French women artists, Fouque equates geometric art and its construction with the construction of the self/being: ‘Trois générations de peintres femmes ont choisi la géométrie simple, la surface parfaite, la stabilité dynamique du carré. Œuvre d’art, œuvre d’être’ (Three generations of women painters chose simple geometry, the perfect surface, the dynamic stability of the square. Work of art, work of being).45 Fouque rather assertively, if somewhat problematically, draws together women’s abstract practices as a reflection of the ‘being’ through a prism of psychoanalytic discourse and deliberately sidelines historical concerns to take a political position. However, her positioning can be an instructive one. Is it possible to read women’s abstraction against the context of the period’s women writers and philosophers?46 Is there a shared terrain of artistic, poststructuralist and psychoanalytic concerns that can be seen to be mutually beneficial? Semiotic spaces: color, light, rhythm Growing out of variant styles of abstractionist painting from the 1950s, women artists continued to nuance their practices in the 1970s: artists such as Geneviève Asse, Pierrette Bloch, Geneviève Claisse, Aurélie Nemours, and later Vera Molnar, in addition to the ongoing careers of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Marie Raymond (the mother of Yves Klein) and Anna-Eva Bergman. Seen as a contrast from the militant actions of women artists focused on the body in the 1970s, this meditative nature, or ‘cognitive’ art, pushed women toward a more relational, sensible space based on color, light or form. In the early 1970s, Kristeva elaborated her notion of the semiotic, or the pulses that exist within the Lacanian symbolic that recall the space of the chora or ‘imaginary’

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womb-like structure, that contain vibrations similar to the rhythms of the mother’s womb.47 Although used in relation to the poetic impulses within a male avant-garde such as Lautrémont, Mallarmé, Joyce and Artaud, the visual aspect in Bellini’s paintings was revisited in her essay ‘Maternité selon Giovanni Bellini’ (1975). In it she uses the artist’s color and form as the basis of a ‘spatialisation lumineuse’ (luminous spatialization) that surrounds the figure of motherhood as the ‘langage ultime d’une jouissance’ (ultimate language of jouissance).48 Although Kristeva uses figuration, she suggests that it is often within the play of color or light that psychical identity is manifested (or that normative identity escapes and is nourished). In ‘La joie de Giotto’ Kristeva writes that ‘la perception exige une non-identification de l’objet, que le bleu et justement en deçà et au-delà de la forme fixe de l’objet, qu’il est une zone où s’échappe l’identité phénoménale’ (the perception of blue entails not-identifying the object; that blue is, precisely, on this side or beyond the object’s fixed form; that it is the zone where phenomenal identity vanishes).49 Geneviève Asse’s ascetic blue paintings from the 1970s, such as Ouverture de la nuit (1973), layered shades of her namesake blue paint (Asse bleu) with a slash of white paint/canvas at the center (Plate 25). The sensitive shading, reminiscent of contemporaries such as Claude Bellegarde, Martin Barré and James Bishop, dissolves line into color to create the effect of open space. The blue, though of a more tempered shade than Giotto’s ecstatic color, takes on the dimension of light, or ‘la lumière formulée qui saute aux yeux par le bleu’ (struck by the light that is generated, catching the eye because of the color blue) where light consists not literally of atoms or molecules, but is the geometry of the surface color.50 These ‘soft’ transitions and luminescent light were in contrast to the hard, bright edges of contemporary Geneviève Claisse’s geometric paintings. Her Invariant rouge (1973) shows a series of three concentric circles playing on the optical properties and dynamism of the forms that is similar to kinetic art (Plate 26). The white center of the inner circle abutting the two radiant red circles reflects space, light and absence (or a zero-state) in the painting. The optical tilt of the circles created by color and the glowing white light at the center share properties with Liliane Lijn’s kinetic, three-dimensional koans of the late 1960s and 1970s, such as her Tilt (1969) (Plate 27), which served as a prototype for her White Koan (1969–1971). Shaped like a cone (a deliberate pun), each ‘koan’ had transparent ellipses cut into the sides that were then lit from within by colored bulbs, giving the impression of radiant tubes of light. Influenced in part by her one-time partner in France, the Greek-born sculptor Takis, Lijn used light as a medium to convey energy and literally, through whiteness and color, to illuminate the Buddhist paradox and ‘trigger enlightenment’.51 The American artist Sara Holt, living in France, experimented with the effects of color through light in her polyresin sculptures, much as her later

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photographs sought to capture light phenomena in the sky. Holt, promoted by Pierre Gaudibert, had a solo exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1971, and also featured at the 11th Biennale de Paris in 1980. Her early sculpture was seen to draw from the energy of Eastern traditions, like Lijn, and was linked to ‘kundalini’ and tantric teachings by critic Alain Jouffroy (Plate 28).52 Maintaining her interest in light, the artist later turned to the camera to capture the illumination of the night sky, in a series of mystic, long-exposure photographs (Plate 29). These explorations of light underscore the transcendent aspect of abstraction’s move to immateriality that contrasts with the immanence and materiality of the body. Influenced by the Catholic tradition, Gina Pane’s Azione sentimentale (1973) uses performance to explore bodily transcendence. Comprising a series of white and red roses held in different positions at the torso, with an arm punctuated by a trail of thorns, the action displayed a final razor cut of the wrist to symbolize the relationship between mother and child – with the mother symbolizing death.53 The desire for deeper, more profond embodiment against the need for lightness and release is echoed in the standing thorns pressed lightly into the flesh and the flow of blood from the wound. Earlier, the corporeality of this intervention was seemingly reversed in her conceptual, empty white visiting card from 1970. She sent the card through the post bearing the words 3e projet du silence, signed ‘Gina Pane’ in the righthand corner and dated ‘décembre 1970’ – attempting to convey silence as a means of communication (‘après la parole et le regard’ – after speech and the gaze) in a different (sociopolitical) manner than the artists who used form, line and color to convey it in two and three dimensions.54 These conceptual uses of luminosity, silence, absence and transcendence highlight another aspect of women’s art that throws into relief the aesthetic values of abstraction that is mirrored in discourse of the same period. In her essay ‘Sorties’ in La jeune née, Cixous decenters light from its spiritual traditions and makes it an intrinsic property of the (female) body. She comments that light is the antithesis of masculine hierarchy and power through its qualities of ‘diffusion’: La lumière féminine ne vient pas d’en-haut, ne tombe pas, ne frappe pas, ne traverse pas. Elle irradie, c’est une montée, lente, douce, difficile, absolument inarrêtable, douloureuse, et qui gagne, qui imprègne les terres, qui filtre, qui sourd, qui enfin déchire, humecte, écarte les épaisseurs, les volumes. Depuis le fond, luttant contre l’opacité. Cette lumière ne plante pas, elle fraie. Et je vois qu’à cette lumière, elle regarde de tout près, et elle aperçoit les nervures de la matière. Dont il n’a que faire … Son lever: ce n’est pas une érection. Mais diffusion.55 Feminine light doesn’t come from above, doesn’t fall, doesn’t strike, doesn’t go through. It radiates, it is a slow, sweet, difficult, absolutely unstoppable,

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painful rising that reaches and impregnates lands, that filters, that wells up, that finally tears open, wets and spreads apart what is dull and thick, the stolid, the volumes. Fighting off opacity from deep within. This light doesn’t plant, it spawns. And I see that she looks very closely with this light and she sees the veins and nerves of matter. Which he has no need of. Her rising: it is not erection. But diffusion.

This language of écriture féminine uses light as the basis of a jouissance that is embedded in female sexuality (that which escapes symbolic ‘castration’) based not on domination (or ‘erection’) but on a ‘diffusion’ of power through body/ space. It is a slow, subtle illumination that is evident in the light and coloring seen in the work of Geneviève Asse, in the concrete forms of Geneviève Claisse and Liliane Lijn and in the mixed media of Sarah Holt. This is a psychoanalytic appropriation based on sexuality, in which light as a principle is metaphorically embodied. Liliane Lijn wrote that, for her, kinetics (or light in the form of electricity) and feminism were politically related. ‘Possibly kinetics and feminism are more closely related than one realises. Our use of electricity exploits an imbalance in potential between two poles, one positive and the other negative. In other words the energy is so vital to our culture it seems to come from an interplay of opposites.’ 56 Lijn deliberately challenged the belief of the mind and spirit as a solely masculine domain by choosing it over the traditionally ‘feminine’ areas of the body and emotion: In Paris in 1960 a sure way to recognition for women artists was through their bodies. Stripping naked was a very good route, but even better was some form of masochistic performance enhanced with eroticism … I did not want to exploit my body and my looks to get attention. I preferred to choose what seemed at the time to be the more male path. I could not accept that areas of interest such as abstraction, spiritual quest, science, should be gender-prescribed.57

Intra-spaces Introduced as early as 1950 by Julien Alvard in Art d’aujourd’hui, Pierrette Bloch used heavy black china ink on various types of paper (ranging from Japanese, Canson, Ingres, bristol, armé to Kleenex) in ivory, white and later black, to explore in a series of heavy black ink dots, the surface and limits of surface thinking, to express fullness and emptiness, time and space.58 In the early 1970s she explored the restructuring and breakup of time and space in collage form to create new meanings, utilizing the dot-like stains, marks or traces to generate a new visual language (Plate 30). From 1973 to 1977 her practice evolved into a subtle series of repetitive, rhythmic dots similar to the

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series of phrases in Opalka’s painstaking series of white numbers on white canvas, but with a thread-like ease, lightness and spontaneity in an all-over method. Bloch restrains language to the ‘paroles essentielles’ (essential words) in her work, using only black and white to create, for her (in the words of Kandinsky), ‘les deux grandes possibilités du silence’ (the two great possibilities of silence).59 This creation of a ‘visible witness’ through a meditative presence and absence is seen once again in the forms of Aurélie Nemours, who recreates a dynamic tension through space and color on canvas. Cubist-inspired and mathematical in character, Nemours’s training in the studios of both André Lhote and Fernand Léger is evident in her forms. Focusing on black and white squares in the late 1970s, she shares the formal properties of minimalism in the period, as witnessed in her return to a ‘primitive’ language, or what she terms ‘l’absence l’espace / l’aube’ (absence, space / dawn) in her studio.60 The constructivist approach to the square recalls investigations into passages and architectural forms in black and white that toy with properties of lightness and weight, while recalling the experience of Walter Benjamin’s mystical arcades where the subject confronts himself in the enclosed spaces.61 Unlike the bubble-like forms of Bloch, that recall the large, organic, oval-shaped Meuns of Simon Hantaï, or the delicate, flat lines of the series of Déroulements of Judit Reigl in the mid-1970s (Chapter 6), Nemours uses the aspects of the hard line and space to break apart matter with a ‘neutrality’ that attempts to consider what she terms the ‘structure du silence’ (Figure 4.2).62 Both Bloch’s

Aurélie Nemours, Le rythme du millimètre, 1976.

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consistent use of black and Nemours’s use of color recall the work of Pierre Soulages and Hans Hartung and the appearance of black as a territory with its own mystery, gravity, sophistication and shift between presence/absence. In discourse, the investigation into black parallels the psychoanalytic and literary ambitions of Hélène Cixous, who in the 1970s claimed the ‘dark’ or black territory as the space of the feminine identity, based on Freud’s reading of women as the ‘continent noir’; or one marked by space and darkness: On peut leur apprendre, dès qu’elles commencent à parler, en même temps que leur nom, que leur région est noire: parce que tu es Afrique, tu es noire. Ton continent est noir. Le noir est dangereux. Dans le noir tu ne vois rien, tu as peur. Ne bouge pas car tu risques de tomber. Surtout ne va pas dans la forêt. Et l’horreur du noir, nous l’avons intériorisée.63 As soon as they [women] begin to speak, and at the same time as they’re taught their name, they can be taught that their territory is black: because you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is dark. Dark is dangerous. You can’t see anything in the dark, you’re afraid. Don’t move, you might fall. Most of all, don’t go into the forest. And so we have internalized this horror of the dark.

The psychoanalytic rereading of Freud and reappropriation of the dark continent/‘black territory’ as a feature of women’s identity resonates in both Nemours’s and Bloch’s use of sensitive black forms during this period. (This is not to suppress actual women of color but to think through Cixous’s equivalence between form and metaphorical womanhood based on her reversal and appropriation of Freud’s original equation.) In this light, women artists’ use of the characteristics of dark and light in their abstract work can take on features of psychical identity while not wholly being defined by it. (This simultaneous openness and resistance to being theorized deepens the relationship between the unconscious and abstract art – and, in the case of women artists, the female unconscious in particular.) The illumination of the black stain, territory or passage through artistic creation is politically motivated, according to the principles of écriture féminine, for its ability to define and/or illuminate the unconscious, and specifically the feminine as well as racial and/or marginal identities in relation to societal power. As Algerian-born Cixous writes in her manifesto, slyly punning on the American black liberation movement or other postcolonial/decolonization movements in a French artistic context: ‘We are black and we are beautiful.’ 64 As a figurative counterpoint, American Nancy Spero’s mythologically driven Black Paintings, created in Paris from 1959 to 1964, about thirty in all, reflect mostly archetypal female figures (mothers, prostitutes) emerging from an inky haze, revealing her sensitivity to the female

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form. Painted at night, the series’ palette was inspired by her interest in existentialism, and is a reflection of her interest in philosophical more than political concerns. Elsewhere, Spero acknowledges her sympathy and awareness for the Algerian War while living in Paris, but stressed that Vietnam was more influential for her on her return to the United States.65 In a later interview, Nancy Spero, in speaking of her work on the female gaze, particularly in the context of a recent work Rebirth of Venus (1984), emphasized the following: ‘The French feminists are talking “l’écriture féminine,” and I am trying “la peinture féminine.”’ 66 Art historian Lisa Tickner astutely challenges the alignment: It is certainly possible to see parallels between the writing of, say, Cixous and Spero’s interest in the possibility of a peinture féminine. But the notion of a peinture féminine does not sit well with images of women, which tend to make a kind of truth-claim in feminist painting (these are images of real women redeemed from patriarcal distortion both as subject and as images). This fixes both the truth of femininity and the form of representation – which has to approximate realism or one of its expressive variants – and undermines the project of a ‘feminine’ writing or painting, which is above all the enemy of fixity as the means by which the heterogeneity of the feminine is repressed.67

Such a position, however, limits, or delimits, the ‘feminine’ to a figurative, or representative model. Although this is true of Spero’s practice, and position, the discursive concept of écriture féminine (which is more expansive than Cixous and her manifesto) lacks a precise painterly equivalent. Spero, in her focus on subjectivity and the female experience, elaborates one such possibility, but does not foreclose it as the only form of a peinture féminine, if one were to exist (as potentially seen below). Rhythms The obsessive brushwork and intricate network of lines that define the spaces of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva continued to receive attention and garner success in the 1970s, making her the most recognized woman ‘abstract’ painter of her generation. Exhibitions in Paris and the provinces included the Retrospective Vieira da Silva in 1969 at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris as well a retrospective at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier in 1971, followed by another large-scale retrospective, Vieira da Silva: Peintures à tempera, 1929–1977, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1977. Paintings such as Bibliothèque en feu (1974) show a hyper control of space through a number of lines and formal rhythms that saturate the surface. In between the stacks of books, created by a network of lines and traces, irruptions of light break through the structure (Plate 31). The use of light by Vieira da Silva is

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intricately connected to her manipulation of different atmospheres to create the effect: Au départ, je ne pense pas non plus vraiment à la lumière. En revanche, j’essaie toujours de voir mes tableaux sous des éclairages différents. Je travaille la nuit, le jour, je les porte à la campagne. Là, il y a l’atelier d’Arpad et le mien, qui n’ont pas la même lumière. Je les portais – et je les porte encore maintenant – dans le sien pour les voir sous sa lumière. J’ai besoin de voir mon travail sous tous les éclairages.68 Initially, I was not really thinking about light. However, I do always try to view my paintings under different lighting. I work at night and during the day, I carry them to the countryside where there is Arpad’s studio and my own which do not have the same light. I was carrying them – and I still carry them now – to his studio to see them in his light. I need to view my work under all lighting conditions.

This use of light to read the paintings becomes embedded in her canvases, which demonstrate complex layering of color and light effects to parallel ‘rythmes musicaux’.69 These rhythms find resonances in the work of Marie Raymond, who followed a different trajectory than Vieira da Silva: working in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in the 1940s, a recipient of the Prix Kandinsky in 1949 and continuing a career and commitment to abstraction into the 1980s.70 Unlike the subtle strokes of Vieira da Silva, Raymond often used intense color and freer lyrical form on her canvases. Her pieces from the 1970s, such as J’ai tendu les cordes et je danse (Rimbaud) (1979), show years of thinking about the relationship of forms, mixing rhythmic lines with more geometrical ones (Plate 32). This generosity and play of forms contrasts with the cold flinty surfaces of the Norwegian Anna-Eva Bergman, wife of Hans Hartung, who also began her practice of abstraction in the 1940s and worked primarily in France from the 1950s onwards, with a retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1977. If Vieira da Silva and Raymond saturate their surfaces with light and demarcate it through rhythmic form and sensitive lines, Bergman counters the forms with a delicate and intensely subtle play of light on the surface of silver metal paper that cannot be predicted or contained, but is in the process of a continual escape, or fuite, that materially echoes the private, subjective experience of viewership (Plate 33). In her formative notebooks, Bergman sets out her preconditions for a painting as reflecting interior life: ‘Une peinture doit être vivante – lumineuse – contenir sa propre vie intérieure. Elle doit avoir une dimension classique – une paix et une force qui obligent le spectateur à ressentir le silence intérieur que l’on ressent quand on entre dans une cathédrale’ (A painting must be alive – luminous – containing its own inner life. It must have a classical dimension – a peace and a force that compels the viewer to experience the inner silence that we feel when we enter a cathedral).71

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Vieira da Silva also explains how her practice is intimately linked to the psychological construction of herself.72 In an interview in 1974 published in Libération, Vieira da Silva comments: Je me suis toujours sentie un peu faible et la peinture est une manière de me construire moi-même, en produisant mon tableau … Je me suis toujours dit que s’il devait y avoir l’expression d’une poésie ou d’une spiritualité, elle viendrait automatiquement. Ça doit sortir de soi, se faire tout seul, comme le résultat d’une maîtrise intérieure … 73 I always felt a little weak and painting was a way of reinforcing myself; in making my paintings … I always said that if there had to be an expression of poetry or spirituality, it would come automatically. It must come from myself, made all by myself, as the result of an inner mastery …

This interiority created from rhythm, color and light is reflected in the work of abstract artists, pointing toward a ‘self ’ that ‘resists analysis’ but creating identity in/on a two-dimensional space. These various practices at first seem at odds with the politics of subjectivity in the 1970s, where the focus is on the liberation of the body and bodily rights. However, as Michel Seuphor originally commented with respect to Vieira da Silva’s work, ‘Cette savante maîtrise, cette mesure presque inespérée en présence de tant de dynamisme, donne à cette peinture son expression en quelque sorte incommunicable qui est peutêtre la libération par l’intérieur, la seule libération vraie de toutes les limites’ (This learned mastery, this almost unexpected consideration in the presence of such dynamism contributes to the painting’s somewhat incommunicable quality which is perhaps a liberation from within, the only true liberation without limits).74 The rhythms created from line and color, the vibrations that echo semiotic impulses, and the ‘silence’ found in these canvases echo the womb space (no exact equivalent) and experience of maternity proposed in the 1970s by Kristeva, in her articulation of the chora: La théorie du sujet proposée par la théorie de l’inconscient nous permettra de lire dans cet espace rythmé, sans thèse, sans position, le procès de constitution de la signifiance. Platon nous y introduit lui-même, lorsqu’il désigne ce réceptacle comme nourricier et maternel.75 The theory of the subject proposed by the theory of the unconscious will allow us to read in this rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position, the process by which significance is constituted. Plato himself leads us to such a process when he calls this receptacle or chora nourishing and maternal.

This is an experience of writers/artists of both sexes (although Kristeva favors the male writer in La révolution du langage poétique), but it again evokes the space that signals female artists’ return to the ‘mother’ – a return fraught with

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negativity for women.76 Semiotic drives themselves are both positive and negative in character: Il s’agit donc de fonctions sémiotiques pré-œdipiennes, de décharges d’énergie qui lient et orientent le corps par rapport à la mère. Insistons sur le fait que la “pulsion” est toujours déjà ambiguë, assimilante et destructrice à la fois; ce dualisme qu’on a pu représenter comme une tétrade ou comme une “double hélice” suivant en ceci la configuration de la molécule ADN et ARN, fait du corps sémiotisé un lieu de scission permanente.77 Drives involve pre-Oedipal semiotic functions and energy discharges that connect and orient the body to the mother. We must emphasize that ‘drives’ are always already ambiguous, simultaneously assimilating and destructive; this dualism, which has been represented as a tetrad or as a double helix, as in the configuration of the DNA and RNA molecule, makes the semiotized body a place of permanent scission.

These biological impulses, manifested as linguistic disruptions, as rhythms, musical and untranslatable, in the poetry of Mallarmé, are interesting when expanded materially and viewed in the rhythms of lines in the abstract paintings of Vieira da Silva and Vera Molnar.78 Kristeva posits that color, like rhythm for language, contains meaning and is linked by the death drive to an excess of meaning.79 Unlike Vieira da Silva’s painstaking hand technique, Hungarian-born Vera Molnar moved from abstract imagery early in her career to computer-generated imagery in the 1970s, mixing geometrical form and kinetic ideas of technology on printer paper. Images such as Transformations (1976) show how energy and technology change the nature of the flat, controlled surfaces of geometric art with the swerving ‘(un)predictability’ of the computer to create a complex surface (Figure 4.3). This unreadable ‘surface’ teases the eye in the manner of Vieira da Silva (who could take up to a year – or much longer – to finish a painting) although with mechanical instead of biological rhythms, thus contrasting speed with exquisitely nuanced time.80 Molnar comments that, for her, art is a conscious process ‘reinforced by a cognitive versus intuitive thinking’.81 She explains her technique of using a CRT screen and a program called RESEAUTO to generate a maximum number of geometric forms (starting with concentric squares) in a statement from 1975: Using a computer with terminals like a plotter or/and a CRT screen, I have been able to minimize the effort required for this stepwise method of generating pictures. … The available variables are: the number of sets, the number of concentric squares within a set, the displacement of individual squares, the deformation of squares by changing angles and length of sides, the elimination of lines or entire figures, and the replacement of straightlines by segments of

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Vera Molnar, Transformations of 160 Rectangles, 1976

circles, parabolas, hyperbolas and sine curves. Thus from the initial grid an enormous variety of different images can be obtained.82

Computer-generated rhythms versus those made organically expose two sets of complex labyrinths that necessitate a closer, ‘intimate’ look, at the same time revealing in the work of each artist a level of visual resistance, intellectual possibility, or psychical protection against vulnerability. Politics of abstraction A certain solidarity existed between many of the women artists involved in abstraction, beyond any psychoanalytic features that they manifest or share in their individual works as seen above. As a part of a special eighteen-page report on women’s art in Art in America (1976), which included an article by Lucy Lippard on women’s body art, Lawrence Alloway, professor and art critic for the Nation, tried to contextualize what he saw emerging as a ‘new avant garde’. He noted the absence of a ‘manifesto’ but pointed out that ‘the women’s movement can be considered an avant garde because its members are united by a desire to change the existing social forms of the art world’.83 He goes on to claim that women abstract painters often had more in common with other representational women artists than the male artists who shared their medium: If common, imagistic, technical and stylistic factors do not define most women’s art, what is the basis for looking at it in a unified way and for calling it avant-garde? The innovative factor is precisely the attribute of non-stylistic homogeneity – the factor that makes some women abstract artists feel closer to women representational artists than to male abstract artists. The pattern of cross-stylistic contacts among today’s women is unusual in the history of active artists’ groups in the 20th century. Obviously, stylistic kinship will be a factor

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for some artists (many of the first generation of artists at A.I.R. resembled one another stylistically, for instance); but this is one factor among others … the members [of women artists’ groups] are compatible for social and political purposes, and these take priority. The capacity to suspend esthetic criteria under pressure produces an enhancement of the power of artists to collaborate with each other.84

This appears to be true for Aurélie Nemours (who exhibited in the UFPS salon and with Féminie-Dialogue), as well as Geneviève Claisse (UFPS and Féminie-Dialogue), Pierrette Bloch (UFPS, Féminie-Dialogue) Marie Raymond (Féminie-Dialogue), Vera Molnar (Féminie-Dialogue and, as a member of Femmes en Lutte [and, later, Collectif Femmes/Art], the 1975 Salon de la Jeune Peinture) and Liliane Lijn, who helped organize the Hayward Annual in London in 1978 dedicated to women artists. The one notable exception of stature was Vieira da Silva, who had key institutional support. (Critics such as Serge Guilbaut regard her, like the other women artists of her generation, as eclipsed by the ‘success of the nouveau réaliste art’, despite the ‘academic recognition’ she may have received.)85 In a 1982 interview, when asked by the Le Nouvel Observateur ‘Est-ce difficile, quand on est une femme, d’être peintre?’ (Is it difficult to be a painter when one is a woman?), Vieira da Silva replied: ‘Pour moi, exceptionnellement peut-être, ça n’a pas été difficile. Je n’ai pas eu plus de difficultés que les peintres hommes de ma génération. Mais il est étrange de constater que toutes les femmes peintres du passé étaient des filles de peintre’ (For me, uniquely perhaps, it was not difficult. I did not have more difficulties than the male painters of my generation. But it is strange to think that all the women painters in the past were daughters of painters).86 Instead of giving an insight into the experience of her female contemporaries, Vieira da Silva comments on the past experience of women artists. Her response could also be seen as negating the ultimate value of ‘suffering’, associated as it was with the struggle for women to be recognized as artists.87 That feeling often latently held together the luttes, or political ‘struggles’, of both feminism and women artists’ groups. Did women artists identify more with the struggle than the art itself, and did that spell the end for group practices as much as for the MLF? (See Chapter 5.) Spaces of power: Con-naissance In 1972, Le Torchon brûle published an article, ‘Le pouvoir du con’, that announced: ‘Découvrez votre corps, sœurs! Les dimensions infinies de notre propre sexualité ont été ignorées, déniées, déviées, bafouées par l’égo-gland de l’homme’ (Discover your body, sisters! The infinite dimensions of our own sexuality have been ignored, denied, deviated, flouted by the ego-gland of men) (Plate 14).88 This appeal to power to counteract ‘phallocratic’ society was

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made through an understanding of the female organ in terms of aesthetic beauty, pleasure and medical health and as a site of ‘con-naissance’, or knowledge, and birth (naissance).89 Published as vehicle to counter patriarchal power through imagery (two grainy, green photographs were included), the article was condemned as pornographic and there was an attempt to put its authors – two women from Psychanalyse et Politique – on trial. Their anonymity was maintained, however, as was that of all writers who contributed to Le Torchon brûle, and the charges were later dropped – to the chagrin of other MLF militants, who wanted the attention of the trial.90 Vaginal imagery became a trend in the 1970s both for its subversive quality, its equation with sexual freedom and the women’s liberation movement and for the timing of the legalization and success of pornographic films such as Histoire d’O and Emmanuelle that were controversially to become mainstream hits.91 Books such as Vaginal Politics were published in translation (keeping the English title) and announced in Le Monde.92 Dominique Desanti, who reviewed Ellen Frankfort’s book, noted that medical examination and an understanding of the body were the best way to approach feminine identity.93 This latter view had been critically assessed a year earlier in the philosophical model offered by Luce Irigaray’s Speculum de l’autre femme (1974), which was aimed to subvert centuries of male (medical) appropriation and control over the female body. Irigaray used the gynecological metaphor of the speculum as a tool to reverse phallocentric and patriarchal thinking from Freud to Plato, with the latter’s cave signaling a return to the womb. Such biological and conceptual models reflect aspects of anatomy and also ideas of what escapes medical anatomy, such as jouissance, which were being produced by both male and female artists. Jacqueline Dauriac’s painting Le con de Carole (1974) and her study Dessin sur calque (1974), created the same year as Irigaray’s book, show a woman upside down with her legs spread in place of her head (Figures 4.4 and 4.5). This con-naissance, or the privileged position of the head replaced by the vulva, displays a reversal and subversion of the head (or mind) as source of knowledge where thinking and seeing are equated. In Dessin sur calque, Dauriac captures the subtleties of light and shading (and visible tape) through several layers of imaging that construct or deconstruct the body (as a source of knowledge). Discussing her paintings from the series, some of which contain several layers of transvestism, critic Alain Jouffroy notes Dauriac’s willingness to take on and use aspects of pornography as a source of inspiration mixed with latent voyeurism: Il n’y a pas d’autre sens à découvrir, je crois, dans ce tableau, intitulé le con de Carole où une femme masquée se tient, nue, renversée sur la tête, le sexe ouvert comme une ciboire au vide souverain qui l’entoure. Et pourtant, si l’on songe à l’extraordinaire vulgarité des photographies de revues pornographiques dont

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Jacqueline Dauriac, Le con de Carole, 1974.

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Jacqueline Dauriac, Dessin sur calque, 1974.

4.5 

Jacqueline Dauriac tire parfois le sujet de ses tableaux, on mesure assez précisément la distance qui la sépare de la mythologie des voyeurs…Rien de commun, et pourtant ce seul point commun, brûlant, essentiel: le vertige de l’autre.94 I believe that there is no other meaning to discover in this painting entitled le con de Carole, where a masked woman stands, naked, upside down on her head, her sex open like a sacred vessel to the absolute emptiness

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surrounding it. And yet, if we consider the extraordinary vulgarity of pornographic magazine photographs that Jacqueline Dauriac sometimes takes as the subject of her paintings, we can quite precisely measure the distance that separates it from the mythology of the voyeur … Nothing in common, except for this single, burning, essential point: the vertigo of the other.

4.6 

This introduction of the ‘forbidden’ element of the sexual organ into her painting is a deliberate means to destabilize the viewer and his/her thinking through the ‘unrepresentable’, or that which Hélène Cixous labeled death and the feminine sex.95 This could be seen as a deliberate method to introduce and imply hysteria – which was believed to be a condition of the uterus – and thereby generate a ‘feminine’ language through the visibility of the organ, as much as to confirm the erasure of individual identity (Le con de ‘Carole’) created by pornography.96 This was a double strategy on the part of the artist, as one critic noted: ‘C’est de la crête de cette dissemblance que se soutient la pratique de Dauriac: pervertir c’est introjecter l’hystérie’ (It is the peak of this dissimilarity that underscores Dauriac’s practice: to pervert is to introject hysteria).97 If Dauriac presents one vision of con-naissance, then sculptors such as French-born Ipoustéguy had been exploring the relationship between birth and women’s organs in an anatomical context since the late 1960s. La Naissance (1968) was sculpted in marble at the height of the sexual and cultural revolution in France (Figure 4.6). The revolutionary and political impulse in Ipoustéguy’s work was an essential element of his creation: Oui, l’œuvre est révolutionnaire par sa participation même à la réalité. Toute réalité qui vient de l’homme participe de l’esprit révolutionnaire. Et puis on abuse tant du terme révolutionnaire qu’on ne l’est peut-être plus du tout dès l’instant qu’on le proclame le plus fort. Je ne fabrique que des mythes.98 Yes, the work is revolutionary by its engagement with reality. Every reality that stems from man is part of the revolutionary spirit. And yet, the term revolutionary is abused to the degree that it ceases to be so when it is most strongly declared. I only make myths.

Ipoustéguy, La Naissance, 1968.

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Although the sculpture comments as much on the creative process as the hyper-realist birth, the imagined angle of perspective is at once as coldly clinical as a medical diagram and as startlingly explicit. The energy of birth and the force of the new life are captured: ‘Ainsi “La Naissance” comme un boulet hors du corps. J’ai toujours cherché à exalter, par le mythe, la pulsion vitale’ (Thus, La Naissance, like a cannonball out of the body. I have always sought to exalt, through myth, the vital impulse).99 This same energy is seen in his bronze model Triptych (1976), which shows a hand opening the folds of a vagina. This clinical image, created at the time of the MLF’s declaration to ‘know one’s body’, is an analytical model that shows two hands shaping matter in a creative process similar to sculpting. The image heightens the relationship between modes of knowledge and their transmission, sexuality and rebirth in the form of transgression both for man and artist through the demystification of the female body. The form of Triptych echoes Argentinian-born Virginia Tentindo’s Le chat d’octobre (1977) in marble and bronze with black patina. Working in Paris since 1953, Tentindo was highly influenced by Surrealism and psychoanalysis, and her subtle use and symbols of vaginal imagery contrast with Ipoustéguy’s clinical form. Using mythology and the unconscious informed by her life in both South America and Europe, Tentindo uses the cat’s body and legs as the outer form of the organ, a nude bronze woman representing its inner folds and a rabbit lithely circling the neck of the cat as the jouissance, thus artfully blending and layering forms of sexual identity and culture. The highly polished marble and bronze with their different surfaces, textures and colors were expertly honed using techniques learned in part at the École de Torrano in Carrara, Italy, in 1976, and reflected in the craftsmanship (Figure 4.7). The glossy patina of the material, as much as the mythological symbols, creates the notion of jouissance, or intense pleasure, through the visual and tactile senses. If Le chat d’octobre engages the sense of pleasure, the drive between sex and the death impulse (similar to Dauriac’s reversal of head and vagina in Le con de Carole) is witnessed in Tentindo’s Ci-gît le verbe (1977) (Figure 4.8). The latter uses the contrast between marble and bronze to portray the drive between sex and death, with the skull as the literal underside of sexual ecstasy to mimic the duality of creation and destruction seen also in the work of Ipoustéguy. Tentindo claims that the work was partly created to escape death itself (both for the viewer and the sculpture), as José Pierre writes of the artist: Caressant distraitement la cambrure d’un phallus ou l’agressive saillie d’un sein, voire le pur porphyre d’une grappe de raisins. Et comme pour elle-même, elle murmurait: ‘Ils nous ressemblent beaucoup, au fond. Sauf qu’ils ne se décident pas à mourir: ils croient toujours qu’il y a mieux à faire.’ 100 Distractedly caressing the curve of a phallus or the aggressive protuberance of a breast, even the pure porphyry of a bunch of grapes. And as for herself,

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Virginia Tentindo, Le chat d’octobre, 1977.

4.8 

Virginia Tentindo, Ci-gît le verbe, 1977.

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she murmured: ‘In truth, they are a lot like us. Except they make a choice not to die; always trusting that there are better things to do.’

Colette Bréger’s drawing on the cover of Sorcières, no. 9, ‘Le sang’ (1977), of the vagina as an open bleeding wound simultaneously provokes and attracts the gaze as it appears to emit waves of blood (Plate 34) Aspects of repulsion, fear and magic are themes explored by women in this period, culminating in Julia Kristeva’s Pouvoirs de l’horreur (1980), in which she articulates a psychoanalytic theory of the power of abjection as a protection against the fear of death.101 Blood becomes another form of creative language. Such traditionally taboo areas as menstruation furthered women’s power through acceptance of its systematic repulsion or rejection. This interest in the vagina, blood and wound is taken from the psychical imaginary and made physical in the work of Gina Pane who writes, ‘Pour moi qui suis une femme, la blessure exprime aussi mon sexe, elle exprime aussi la fente saignante de mon sexe. Cette blessure a le caractère du discours féminin’ (For me who am a woman, the wound also expresses my sex, it also expresses the bleeding crevice of my sex. This wound has the characteristic of feminine discourse).102 The interest in the wound and vagina as a source of language is a point of departure between the French and the Americans, who use the organ more as a codified symbol of power.103 Participants at the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College in California as early as 1970 were asked to make ‘cunt art’ to explore their identity.104 Faith Wilding’s delicate Flesh Petals from 1970, for example, is reminiscent of the latent sexual imagery in American Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers, thus reprising a history and tradition of women’s art in America while reaffirming it through the body. (Such works were paralleled in France, as seen in Anne Saussois’s sensitive pencil drawings in light pastels of various abstract curls and folds in the late 1970s; Plate 35.) This art practice and the desire to ‘free’ the sexual body through materially based construction (as opposed to some of the psychoanalytical or philosophical approaches taken in France) coincided in 1970 with the publication of influential feminist works such as Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics.105 This desire to express and resurface the body with blood and wounds is evident in Pane’s Action psyche (1974), in which Pane uses a razor to cut traces onto her stomach. The wound is reminiscent of the stigmata of Christ in canonical representations, and her use of white and red symbolizes the blood and milk of motherhood, or the embodiment of passion and purity. Pane’s work coincides with Paris-based Italian Marxist Maria Antonietta Macciocchi’s politicizing and theorizing about women’s blood and its meaning in spiritual and secular traditions.106 The lines and symbolization (of discourse) were realized earlier by Pane in a different context. A noticeable absence of subject exists in her Action of 12 December 1970, in which the fine and delicate

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lines of a tire on sand take on formalist qualities that later appear on her body.107 Such a movement from line and trace to their materialization on the body is characteristic of Pane’s work. The imagery and questions of female subjectivity create an interest and tension between the artworks discussed in this section and the ideology espoused by the MLF and Psych et Po and the way in which the more concrete forms of political actions find resonance with the poetic. The political resistance of women’s groups (seen in Chapter 2) demonstrates precisely how repulsion and resistance (in politics) can be an act of symbolism and subjectivity in art, as well as in the spaces of transgression examined below. Part II: Liberating space: women artists, subjectivity and the subversive imagination The feminine ‘imagination’ may choose not to take power but to find or create spaces in the social fabric where something radically new can be said and done.108

Transgressive spaces With a suicidal leap from her Paris apartment, Unica Zürn came to be viewed as the earnest but angst-ridden artist. Her drawings from the 1960s display a sensitivity of line, influenced in part by close friend Henri Michaux, and an interiority that we see reflected in the complex practices of Art Brut and, in particular, the works of Adolf Wölfli.109 In a drawing from 1966, the fragility of line and form erupts into a softness and complexity that resembles a series of faces, heads or sea creatures, in a repetition of tightly coiled patterns. Her interest in the unconscious and her sharing of Michaux’s own druginduced hallucinations in art serve as a rupture from Surrealist women’s selfrepresentative practices of depicting themselves with various mythological, magical and alchemical symbols, as seen in the work of Carrington, Varo, Fini and others.110 Zürn’s imagery creates a resistance to interpretation, and the intricacy of line and surface mirrors a watery depth, instability and resistance that contrast with the tightly bound and resurfaced anatomies of her partner Hans Bellmer’s poupées. In Unica, from 1958, Bellmer raises the skirt above the breasts of the mannequin and painfully ties the legs together with rope. The restriction of sexuality and movement, along with the level of violence and humiliation endured by the doll, is coded as misogynist with the female body as the object of defilement.111 The lack of subject, therefore, in Zürn’s own drawings is noteworthy in light of Bellmer’s poupées. Luce Irigaray, for example, sees

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Zürn’s work as a form of psychical protection against Bellmer’s aggression in his drawings and representations of her: Bellmer dessine ces corps sans extrémités, limites, ni peaux de la perte de sens érotique – de l’énergie qui circule, s’arrête, s’échange, passe en l’autre, se confond à l’autre, du moins à ses profils ou ses parties. Il est savant, très savant. Unica Zürn dit parfois des états similaires mais elle décrit moins et transforme plus? Pendant qu’il la décrit, les décrit, elle devient autre: animal, gestes, musique … Elle échappe à son anatomie, à ses sites corporels. Elle mute. Elle ne se transfigure pas pour autant. Bellmer double jusqu’à la laideur. Pour être vrai? Par plaisir? Il n’est pas le seul.112 The bodies Bellmer draws – without extremities, boundaries or enclosing skins – are bodies where erotic sensibility disappears, bodies where energy circulates, stops, exchanges, enters the other, fuses with the other, at least with the other’s outline or parts. Bellmer knows what he is describing, he is very acute. Unica Zürn sometimes tells of similar states, but perhaps she describes less and transforms more? While he describes her, describes them, she becomes other: animal, gestures, music … She escapes from her anatomy, from the sites of her body, she mutates. But in so doing, she does not transform herself. Bellmer emphasizes ugliness. For the sake of truth? For pleasure? He is not the only one.

This resistance to objectification is at the expense of a subject, where her own heavily coiled drawings appear to be hiding or defacing a head, or exposing a wound or a womb.113 Two years after Zürn’s death, Françoise Janicot produces in her studio a series of encoconnage in which she coils herself up with a rope (Figure 4.9 and Plate 57). The deliberate restriction of the female body and the lack of subjectivity, as demonstrated in the concealment of her face, create a work of art that challenges Bellmer’s own misogynistic impulses and expresses the female subject as bound and erased. Janicot created the works in her studio on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris and invited spectators to come and witness the performance, and then had photographs of herself taken.114 The rope and the wrapping of the œuvre not only comments on the political place of the female in the art historical canon (bound and erased) but also more poetically circumscribes itself with the process of the winding and unwinding of the canvas from the frame as seen in the male-dominated group, Supports-Surfaces (Chapter 6). Janicot’s subversive performance with its rope winding and bondage recalls the ‘hidden face’ of the subject that appears in paintings of the same era by artist Sabine Monirys. In La traversée des apparences (c.1976), Monirys obscures the face with a cool elegance that belies the hot red background against which

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Françoise Janicot, Encoconnage, 1972.

the figure stands (Plate 36). The trench coat, which recalls a cinematic history of crime thrillers, or ciné noir, as well as the cool nonchalance reprised by the Nouvelle Vague in the 1960s, was also a feature of the work of her former partner, artist Jacques Monory, who often worked in tones of glacial blue (Plate 59). Monirys, however, uses the coat and belt as elements, not in a historical or cinematic statement of subversion, but as an obscuring of identity and confining bondage which she confronts with a protruding and escaping arched foot. (The foot’s arc recalls that of Gradiva – although critic GassiotTalabot finds Monirys more phantasmal than mythological.)115 This move heightens the anxiety evidenced by the restraining male arm, which creates a similar tension between both hiding and seeking that plays out in Janicot’s earlier work. Meanwhile the taut red background and featureless face recall the plight of ‘everywoman’, displacing and increasing the sense of alienation of the subject seen in Encoconnage, much as in other artists’ work of Narrative Figuration. In January and February 1972, Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, Sandra Orgel and Aviva Rahmani performed Ablutions at Guy Dill’s Studio in Venice, California, using rope, tape recorders, raw eggs, animal kidneys, earth and blood to construct a scene that echoed the emotional turmoil of a rape. Two women bathed in eggs, blood and earth, while another woman was bound completely

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by gauze bandages around the chair and then by rope to everything else in the room while a tape recording of women’s rape testimonies was played. This work, which preceded that of Janicot, used the bound woman as a metaphor for experiences of violence. This bondage is different in symbolic weight to that of Janicot’s ‘self-wrapping’, which through the gesture speaks of women’s masochism as well as obfuscation in society. If women’s slow disappearance and lack of subjectivity is due to violence – as crime or self-inflicted – ORLAN’s Strip-tease occasionnel à l’aide des draps du trousseau (1974–1975) performs a removal and cleansing of these identities through a series of photos, from Bernini’s Teresa of Avila in the first image to a progressive nakedness and the disappearance of the subject in the last frame (Figure 4.10). In this work, ORLAN criticizes the position of women in society – as she does in Le Baiser de l’artiste (Figure 5.1) – while showing the purported dichotomy of traditional Catholic womanhood, moving from the poles of virgin to ‘whore’, and finally to a complete absence, suggesting death or freedom from all roles. The photographs appear to borrow from Charcot’s studies of hysterics at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in the 1880s, which later influenced and informed Freud’s thoughts about women’s sexuality and the history of psychoanalysis. The Surrealists regarded hysteria as a liberatory

ORLAN, Strip-tease occasionnel à l’aide des draps du trousseau, 1974–1975.

4.10 

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method of freeing the unconscious and sexuality, while around the same time Joan Riviere’s ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ (1929) in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis discussed the performative aspects of sexuality and gender which women could enact and reveal through psychical ‘masks’ and ‘veils’ as elaborate projections/protections of identity. Likewise, ORLAN’s performance several years later in front of the public at the Musée du Louvre on October 16, 1978, a day of 39 artist performances, saw the artist strip in front of a painting by Jacques Blanchard, Venus and the Three Graces Surprised by a Mortal (1631–1633). In the performance, the artist used a black and white photographed image of her nude body printed on canvas cloth to place in front of her actual body as she manipulated her pubis in front of Blanchard’s actual canvas. She did this with a palette in hand and brush in mouth in a series of gestures which included painting in hairs (in reference to their absence in the painting). At the same event, Jacqueline Dauriac and Sylvie Durastani’s ad hoc performance saw the two artists with their blouses spread open and Dauriac pinching Durastani’s breast, sardonically reprising the painting by the École de Fontainebleau of Gabrielle d’Estrées and the Duchess de Villars (c. 1594). In this way, the artists confronted the real with the painted women, the waning of the fetish in front of the female gaze and, through physical actions performed in the museum space, an attack on institutions that historically favored representations of women over actual ones. The binaries of gender are contested in Michel Journiac’s 24 heures de la vie d’une femme ordinaire (1974), in which the artist is photographed in various women’s clothes during a day and carrying out woman’s daily activities, taking on a series of performative identities in 24 photographs. He thus interrogates the norms of each gender through transvestism, precisely at the time the MLF were critiquing women’s roles and traditional notions of ‘femininity’ (often seen in the media) and forms of normative heterosexuality. This was a few years after Guy Hocquenheim published Le désir homosexuel (1972) with its challenge to the marginalization of the homosexual experience (Figure 4.11). Two photographs from this series by Journiac were published in the women’s journal Sorcières, no. 3 (1976), dedicated to the theme of ‘prostitution’ (one of the roles portrayed by Journiac, along with the striptease and others, that highlighted the different sexual roles enacted by women [and men]).116 Later in the decade, Sophie Calle covertly entered striptease clubs to perform the act, both to incite male desire and to clinically analyze herself and her motives through a conscious dépouillement (stripping) as an artist (Figure 4.12). She comments that, for her, the roots of the striptease lay in a ritual with her grandparents that she performed in an elevator as a 6-year-old, so that she would be ready for bed on entering the apartment. Later, she comments that she wore a wig in the strip clubs to prevent her family members from recognizing her if they should

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Michel Journiac, 24 heures de la vie d’une femme ordinaire, 1974.

4.11 

Sophie Calle, Strip-tease, c. 1978–1981.

4.12 

happen to pass by. She continued working there – until she was beaten on the head by another stripper for the chair.117 These narratives show how identities were constructed, fixed, subverted and recalibrated in various articulations of dressing and undressing: Calle consciously reprises the ‘femininity’ of the 1950s at the apex of strip clubs explored by Jean Tinguely and the Nouveaux Réalistes. Or, in the winding and unwinding of the bonds of society and

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identity we see a move to define and elaborate a personal subjectivity, while recognizing perhaps its inherent impossibility.

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Sorcières: witchcraft as counterpractice With articles in Le Monde proclaiming the death of Surrealism, and reevaluations of the movement in intellectual journals such as Tel Quel in 1968, the legacy of Surrealism was under fire.118 In 1971 Xavière Gauthier published her influential Surréalisme et sexualité that criticized the position of women in Surrealist works of art as misogynistic and damaging. (Simone de Beauvoir, as early as 1949 in Le deuxième sexe, had already protested against André Breton for his use of women in L’Union libre (1931) in which he conflated parts of the female body with nature.)119 In 1976, Gauthier launched the periodical Sorcières (in homage to and in contrast with de Beauvoir’s position, as she uses nature as a potential site of power for women ‘sorcières’).120 Together with arts editor Anne Rivière, they dedicated the review solely to the portrayal and depiction of women’s art and literature.121 Though not overtly political, the liberation of the imagination was one strategy through which to approach the liberation of women. The journal was not intended to be a search for a female ‘essence’, according to an interview with Xavière Gauthier, who nonetheless became a part of Psych et Po when her book Rose saignée, about an abortion, was published by des femmes in 1974.122 The periodical combines major figures of the period including Hélène Cixous and Chantal Chawaf (who contributed her own drawings), intellectuals such as Julia Kristeva, and articles and works by Françoise Eliet and Françoise Janicot, and images and text by Leonor Fini as well as by lesser known figures such as Jeanne Socquet (who was admired by Duras), Agnès Stacke, Colette Deblé, Colette Bréger, Jacqueline Delaunay, Elisa Tan and others. Each issue in a series published from 1976 to 1982 was devoted to a particular theme with the art and literature reflecting its various aspects.123 The range of art included the original art of women based locally in Paris and its environs as well as image reproductions of works of ancient, medieval and Renaissance art, historical women of interest such as Artemisia Gentileschi, contemporary Vietnamese sculptor Diem Phung Thi, male artists such as Hans Bellmer (who died in 1975) and Michel Journiac, outsider artists, women Surrealists, and a range of global production such as traditional Chinese Taoist diagrams, Indian temple, tantric, miniature and Mithila art, pre-Columbian art, symbols from North African harqūs and ethnographic photographs among others. The periodical, though specialized, included readers’ letters and comments at the back of each issue, as well as notices for women to demonstrate and produce art, such as La Spirale and Collectif Femmes/Art. As a literary outlet it had more in common with Surrealist avant-garde journals like

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Minotaure (1933–1939) than with the purely intellectual and political vehicles of the time such as Tel Quel (1960–1982) or even Catherine Millet’s Art Press, 1972–present. The political tendencies of the journal reflected the reconstruction of woman in reappropriating a negative image of women. Zürn had done so earlier with the publication of her witchcraft-inspired play of anagrams HEXENTEXTE in 1954, as had Varo in her precise alchemy-themed paintings, Carrington in her calculated use of mythology and Fini in her own deliberate and sinuous drawings of the 1950s and 1960s.124 The interest in witchcraft in the 1970s coincides with the rise of the MLF and Psych et Po and multiple women’s groups which had the ‘fire’ and momentum of resistance against the patriarchy after May ’68. The holocaust of ‘burning witches’ in Jules Michelet’s historical account La Sorcière shows particular sensitivity for the time.125 This is also the quality that both Duras and Gauthier appropriate in their discourses.126 Unlike the women Surrealists, who ‘play’ with the metaphor of witchcraft throughout their works as a site of resistance/enchantment, Gauthier – who had already displayed her awareness of women’s place in history in her Surréalisme et sexualité – uses to full benefit the political and psychical/ sexual implications of this name for women. In the first issue of Sorcières, ‘La nourriture’, Gauthier justifies her choice of the name as follows: Pourquoi les Sorcières? Parce qu’elles jouissent. On a voulu nous faire croire que les femmes étaient frigides, prudes, chastes. C’est seulement parce qu’on voulait les forcer à jouir droit, selon le modèle masculin, dans les limites masculines, en terme de conquête, de possession. En réalité, elles éclatent, leur corps entier est désir, leurs gestes sont caresses, leur odorat, leur goût, leur écoute sont sensuels. Leur jouissance est si violente, si transgressante, si ouverte, si mortelle que les hommes n’en sont pas encore revenus. Par peur, ils ont brûlé un si grand nombre de femmes – on a dit huit millions en deux siècles.127 Why Witches? Because they enjoy pleasure. They wanted to make us believe that women were frigid, prudish, chaste. It was only because they wanted to force women’s pleasure to be straight, according to the masculine model, within masculine limits, in terms of conquest, of possession. In reality, they are explosive, their whole body is desire, their gestures are caresses, their senses of smell, taste, hearing are sensual. Their pleasure is so violent, so transgressive, so open, so deadly that men still have not yet recovered from it. They burned a large number of women out of fear: we are told eight million in two centuries.

Witchcraft in the 1970s becomes a mode of resistance and creativity (and voice) that is also found in the need to portray female genitals in image and in text, corresponding with Luce Irigaray’s concept of the ‘two lips’ of the

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Jacqueline Delaunay, Cover of Sorcières, ‘Se prostituer’, no. 3, 1976.

vagina/discourse.128 (This aligns broadly with a comment by arts editor Anne Rivière to the author, in which she expressed the desire to seek a women’s visual equivalent, ‘or essence’ to complement those seen in the [bodily] practices of écriture féminine.)129 The 1976 issue of Sorcières exhibits a photograph of the pubis by Jacqueline Delaunay (Figure 4.13). The image not only suggests covert lesbianism (as was often believed of members of the MLF and Psych et Po and other ‘women’s groups’) through its placement with the title ‘Sorcières’ on the cover, but also its cropped, slightly out-of-focus quality creates an air of mystery, or taboo.130 Some of the imagery in Sorcières attempts to capture ironically the same strain of repulsion and fear (as articulated in Kristeva’s later theory of abjection) as a site of power while maintaining a balance between action and engagement and awareness of the interiority of women’s issues. The strategy is double: that is, to regain the momentum lost in history of women’s imagery, and to demystify women while using sexual/biological spaces as potentially creative ones. Shape of space In the 1970s, the concept of space was being redesigned among women to make use of the space created after May ’68 (which has been theorized to have taken place due to the literal lack of space for students in the classroom; see Chapter 1).131 Post-1968, women had to conceive and find a new space in which to organize and to gather to protest their condition. Their rallies took place in the street, in studios and in public halls.132 Collectives experimented with different forms and symbols of space as sources of empowerment. For

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Monique Wittig, this collective space for women is conceived of as an O, in her 1969 book Les Guérillères, with several pages of the novel dedicated solely to the symbol.133 The form of the O recalls the zero, an origin, an egg, a return to a full or empty womb, or a vagina, through a shape that disrupts the hierarchy and the vertical (phallic) linearity of the patriarchal order. The ‘O’ – construed differently, a symbol of anonymity and sexual orifice – echoes Pauline Réage’s [Anne Desclos’s/Dominique Aury’s] book, Histoire d’O, from 1954 with its account of subjugation and/or a ‘libertine’ women’s erotic adventures.134 Earlier, in Georges Bataille’s avant-garde pornographic novel Histoire de l’œil (1928), the O is used as a symbol of transgression through the transformation of round-shaped objects, eggs, testicles and eyes throughout the book.135 (Bataille – whose glissade-like tendencies were noted by Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s – was enjoying a resurgence in France after a Cerisy-la-Salle conference in 1972.)136 The ‘O’ evolves slightly to a more dynamic spiral within the literary and artistic group La Spirale, under the direction of Charlotte Calmis. Here, the spiral is a more active space/shape of creation: ‘Pourquoi (La) spirale?, / Parce que (La) spirale au féminin est diapason de vie, symbole de l’infini et remise en question de l’histoire au masculin’ (Why (The) spiral?, / Because (The) feminine spiral is the tuning fork of life, symbol of the infinite and a challenge to masculine history).137 Displaying the same resistance to patriarchal thought, the spiral becomes another metaphor for the origins of life and creation that challenges the linearity of male-dominated power and history. At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari are trying to change the shape of that power and history by moving from linearity toward more complex forms of structural behavior. In 1976, they turn to nature and theorize the shape of the ‘rhizome’ to challenge causality and/or dialectical thought: Un rhizome ne commence et n’aboutit pas, il est toujours au milieu, entre les choses, inter-être, intermezzo. L’arbre est filiation, mais le rhizome est alliance, uniquement d’alliance. L’arbre impose le verbe ‘être’ mais le rhizome a pour tissu la conjonction ‘et … et … et …’. Il y a dans cette conjonction assez de force pour secouer et déraciner le verbe être. Où allez-vous? d’où partez-vous? où voulez-vous en venir? sont des questions bien inutiles. Faire table rase, partir ou repartir à zéro, chercher un commencement, ou un fondement, impliquent une fausse conception du voyage et du mouvement (méthodique, pédagogique, initiatique, symbolique).138 A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be’, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction ‘and … and … and …’. This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be’. Where are you going? Where are you coming from? Where are you heading for? These are

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totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation – all imply a false conception of voyage and movement (a conception that is methodical, pedagogical, initiatory, symbolic …).

Deleuze and Guattari attempt to reshape experience socially and politically through the collectivity of the space, which is neither single nor multiple but shared and dimensional.139 For women, this was important. Rhizomatic theory, for example, directly influenced Tania Mouraud’s short-lived mixed group Trans.140 While Deleuze and Guattari were responding to post-May ’68 social atomization with a new form of theorization, women, in particular, were well placed to redirect their energies toward new forms of collective practice. Women were often characterized by a quality of shared space and collective/ multiple identities by French sociologists, who saw these traits as an integral part of French women’s lives in terms of maternity, work, family life and community demands.141 This inherent plurality allows for diverse points of engagement and complex ‘movement(s)’ across terrains. The way in which women artists, in particular, inhabited their space in the 1970s, whether within a collective practice or alone, will be considered below. I contend that it is often through unconventional spaces that women artists reappropriate the spheres of patriarchal power and domination to assert their own subjectivity. From trace to space The difficulty and rewards of a collective practice for women artists in the 1970s, whether in groups or working individually, was something each artist had to discover for herself. The dynamism of a group space with a strong leader often inspired other artists. Such was the case of Aleppo-born, Egyptianraised Charlotte Calmis, whose La Spirale was created for artists and writers without the pressure of the ‘misogynistic’ art world. The group was formed in 1972 (by Calmis, Marie-Josèphe de La Motte and Catherine Valabrègue) with both male and female members, but by 1974 was solely female and remained so until its dissolution in 1982. (See Chapter 5.) Calmis, known as a mystic, would lead group meditations before then creating works.142 Her intuitive thinking on women was equated, by member Marie-Jo Bonnet, to discourse she heard in Jacques Lacan’s seminar on Teresa d’Avila.143 Calmis’s Jewish heritage inspired her interest in the kabbalah which she occasionally shared with members.144 In her Blessures de la lumière (1970), she wrote the words ‘blessures de la lumière’ on the surface of a cloth panel stitched with red and black flames (Plate 37). Composed after an eye operation in 1970, the work displays a sensitivity and violence that recall Gina Pane’s ‘Actions’ of the same era. Calmis uses the ‘blessures’ as a mystical force that leads one to purity and

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salvation (‘lumière’) in the same way as did the holy suffering of the saints. The female separatism of the group La Spirale and of Calmis herself is evident in the way she constructs identity. The search for a female space and language is evident in works such as the collage self-portrait La femme dans la cité (1976) (published in Sorcières, no. 13, 1978) and in Notre pain quotidien (c. 1975). The former, reminiscent of Hannah Höch’s dada collages (which were seen at the retrospective at ARC 2, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1976), shows an image of Calmis fragmented as if by broken glass, and the typed words seem to both create and shatter identity with the pieces of the selfportrait lodged between the larger buildings (Plate 38). In Notre pain quotidien Calmis displays a dynamic and swirling energy that places the word ‘identité’ between images of a priest from the Catholic Church and groups of women, with a lone female figure standing in the middle, her eyes blotted out. Calmis’s approach is delicate, with a sensibility and a violence that is searching through poetry and images for a place in the 1970s for a woman’s proper subjectivity, amidst the more militant actions of the MLF. The group Collectif Femmes/Art was founded by the psychoanalyst, ethnologist and painter Françoise Eliet, who along with Suzanne Pagé of ARC 2 in 1976, considered putting together an exhibition solely of women’s art. The preparations gave Eliet unprecedented access to the portfolios and slides of women’s work and the women painters who formed a small group around her, including Claudette Brun, Colette Deblé, Monique Frydman, Christine Maurice, Michèle Herry and others.145 The provisional title for the exhibition was Écritures de femmes.146 Despite the cancellation of the proposed exhibition the group remained together, producing a manifesto in February 1977 entitled ‘Enfermement / Rupture’, and it attracted as many as thirty or more members (including Françoise Janicot, Jacqueline Delaunay, Bernadette Delrieu, Lea Lublin and Marie Gerbault) who met once a month in various studios to discuss how best to overcome their difficulties and succeed as women in the art world (see Chapter 5).147 For Françoise Eliet, women’s painting was a deeply violent act linked to the rupture of the social order.148 She writes in the manifesto for the group: Peindre ou combattre, telle semblait être l’alternative qui se posait en 1968. Peindre, écrire, produire un travail théorique semblait aller contre le sens de l’histoire. Aussi certaines d’entre nous ont-elles renoncé à toute pratique picturale pendant ces années, pensant qu’elles devaient investir ailleurs leur temps et leur énergie. Oser peindre, dessiner, photographier, filmer en 1977. Est-ce simplement l’aveu d’un échec? Nous ne le pensons pas.149 Painting or fighting such were the alternatives before us in 1968. Painting, writing, producing a theoretical work, seemed to go against the course of

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history. Some of us also gave up pictorial practice during these years, thinking that our time and energy should be invested elsewhere. To dare to paint, draw, photograph, film in 1977. Is this simply an admission of failure? We do not think so.

4.14a & b 

The manifesto clearly links theories of militancy, artistic practice and identity together in an open practice that relies on spaces (of subjectivity) to define identity through symbolic release in artworks (Figure 4.14). In Sorcières, Françoise Janicot exhibits a painting of the floor with a text from which the following is an excerpt (Figure 4.15): Et par un phénomène de contraction/symbiose, je suis devenue, eh bien oui, je suis devenue le plancher de l’atelier, mon propre plancher d’atelier. Il craque, se penche, se replie, caresse, s’étire, tape ou bascule, eh bien je craque, me penche, me replie, caresse, m’étire, tape et bascule, et … me replie à l’extérieur.150 And by a phenomenon of contraction and/or symbiosis, I became, uh well yes, I became the floor of my studio, my own studio floor. The places where it cracks, bends and folds over, caresses, stretches, taps or tilts, uh well, I crack, bend, caress, stretch, tap and tilt, and fold up to the outside.

Her identification with the floor underlies women’s interest in the ‘unseen’ or unacknowledged spaces of subjectivity. The painting of the floor (which

Claudette Brun, Colette Deblé, Françoise Eliet, Monique Frydman, Christine Maurice, Michèle Herry, ‘Enfermement/Rupture’, L’Humidité, no. 24, 1977.

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Françoise Janicot, Plancher, Sorcières, ‘Art des femmes’, no. 10, 1977.

also recalls Judit Reigl’s Guano series from the late 1950s and early 1960s) is a representation of the female subject which has been touched, tortured and unacknowledged over time. (Françoise Eliet’s own introduction to art was also connected to floorboards as she discovered the surface texture of the floor when experimenting with a box of pastels for the first time.)151 In the same issue of Sorcières, and in contrast to the more muted work by Janicot, multi-media artist Lea Lublin in a work from 1969 Fluvio Subtunal, displays herself within a large clear ‘phallic’ inflatable plastic tube from which one can exit like a ‘vagina’

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(Plate 39).152 The tunnel (900 m in length, 23 m x 2 m diameter) requires the spectator to enter by opening the two inflatable columns (or lips); concentric spheres containing liquids and air columns can be touched and manipulated before the exit is reached. Lost sensations and memories are symbolized by Lublin’s tunnel, and she asserts that one of the problems in truly understanding or ‘seeing’ women is that the vagina (or the female organ of jouissance) is invisible to the human eye: Est-ce que le problème d’un dehors et d’un dedans de la perception, et du fonctionnement de ses organes, ne réside pas dans un rapport du visible à l’invisible; double réalité, la problématique de la femme ne se pose-t-elle pas au niveau de l’impossibilité de pouvoir voir l’organe de sa jouissance, qui n’est pas visible au niveau de l’œil, moins à celui du regard?153 Is the problem of an outside and an inside of perception, and the functioning of her organs, not found in the relation of the visible to the invisible? This is a double reality. Doesn’t the difficulty of women arise by virtue of the impossibility of seeing the organ of jouissance, which is not visible to the eye, even less to that of the gaze?

This acknowledgment of a separate regime of the visible with regard to sex is a position shared with and elaborated by Luce Irigaray, who in 1974 published her Speculum de l’autre femme which sought to theorize this difference. Irigaray’s perceived critique of Freud circulated widely at the time, as seen in mainstream press like Le Monde.154 The book challenged scopic privilege through an attack on a philosophical tradition shaped by men, by using the speculum (traditionally the instrument wielded by men to examine the female vagina) to turn the light of the mirror (speculum) back onto male discourse in order to expose its weakness. In this double act, or mimicry, Irigaray does not seek to ‘overthrow’ the eye, or the patriarchal order, but to use the ‘feminine’ to disrupt and disturb it. She writes: L’important étant de déconcerter le montage de la représentation selon des paramètres exclusivement ‘masculins’. C’est dire selon un ordre phallocratique, qu’il ne s’agit pas de renverser – cela reviendrait finalement au même – mais de déranger, d’altérer, à partir d’un ‘dehors’ soustrait, pour une part, à sa loi.155 For what is important is to disconcert the staging of representation according to exclusively ‘masculine’ parameters, that is, according to a phallocratic order. It is not a matter of toppling that order so as to replace it – that amounts to the same thing in the end – but of disrupting and modifying it, starting from an ‘outside’ that is exempt, in part, from phallocratic law.

Lublin’s installation, which preceded Irigaray’s book, similarly foregrounded the haptic over the visual in the entry to her installation Fluvio Subtunal. This

Psych et Po and the spaces of women’s art

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was an effort to restructure the contours of experience in order to disrupt patriarchal control and engender thought (Plate 39). This altering of and playing with space to discover the feminine will be examined further when we come to a consideration of the perceptual and conceptual spaces in women’s art. Tania Mouraud notes that she was one of the few people in France working with space in this way at this time – which Lucy Lippard recognizes in 1976, seeing Mouraud as an ‘ardent feminist’ (an expression widely avoided in France156) who rejected the ‘body’: From 1971 to ’74, French artist Tania Mouraud used the object-self/sexobject relationship in objective philosophical statements illustrated by subjective autobiographical images, and nude body parts … Mouraud is an ardent feminist; however, in the last year or so, in response to the circumstances surrounding women’s art in Europe, she has abandoned all female subject matter in favor of the same perception-word-concept form on a wholly neutral vehicle – the wall.157

Seeking her own space, Mouraud deliberately positions herself against the practice of men. She later comments: ‘Sur le terrain qui était le mien (c’est à dire l’intervention spatiale) j’étais assez isolée. Les seuls à avoir touché, en France, au concept d’environnement à partir de problématiques très diversifiées étaient alors: Jean-Michel Sanejouand, Malaval et Kowalski’ (As far as my own area – spatial intervention – was concerned, I was more or less on my own. In France, the only ones who dabbled in the concept of environment from their own very diverse positions were Jean-Michel Sanejouand, Malaval and Kowalski).158 Conceptual space Tania Mouraud’s presence as a female artist in 1970s France is underscored by the number of exhibitions and articles dedicated to her work.159 Despite this, however, she fell out of favor in French artistic circles for being unreceptive to what she called the ‘bourgeois’ ideals of art. Her interest in multi-media, conceptual art and communal living still ran counter-current to the art of the 1970s, and her international horizons led to her neglect by the French scene until the mid-1980s.160 Space, in the work of Mouraud, was evident from the early 1970s, notably in her series of Initiation Rooms which consisted of a lacquered white room (ceiling, walls and floor) with an indirect light. Mouraud would either sit alone, as in Initiation Room No. 2 from 1971 (Figure 4.16), or in collectivity with others in the same room, including an Indian sage and musicians, to create the notion of an infinite and sacred space.161 The space and indirect light created effects of formalist lines and spaces similar to the minimalist painting of Frank Stella or Agnes Martin, while the empty room recalls the transcendental space

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Tania Mouraud, Initiation Room No. 2, 1971.

of Yves Klein’s ‘Le Vide’ (1958). Mouraud conceptualizes this cold space in the construction of the room, but her use of Eastern music/philosophy with the suggestion of mind and body unity through meditation also disrupts the rational ideals of French Cartesian enlightenment. The light and its reflection between floor and ceiling also disrupt the sense of clear mathematical precision, instead shifting light into unexpected patterns depending on the angle of view. This play of light and the reflection of the physical being in the room between floor and ceiling immediately create a plurality of subject, recalling Narcissus and the reflecting pool or a symbol of an unbroken individuality before ego separation in the mirror stage.162 In her series Art Space from 1976, Mouraud transforms her space into sitespecific works in which she places adhesive letters onto vinyl plastic which she uses to cover the walls of a room or space. In Seeing Alone, Art Space No. 2 (1976) (Plate 40), Mouraud wraps the walls of a room (but not the floor or ceiling) with vinyl and the words ‘SEEING ALONE’ appear on the windows looking onto an outdoor scene. The play between perception/seeing and conceptual art was used earlier by Americans such as Sol LeWitt, but the moodiness of the interior (diffused light, wooden ceiling, concrete floor) also recalls the quiet isolation of Vermeer which plays on Mouraud’s use of ‘Alone’. The concept of ‘seeing alone’ over a traditional paned window (supporting it like a canvas frame) explains the isolation and genius of the ‘artist’ and also the lone

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viewer with voyeuristic intentions. The vinyl becomes like the gloss of a movie screen accounting not only for the images that are projected upon them, but the penetration into those spaces by dreams and sexual intentions that render the vinyl in the room like a prophylactic over the walls as the lights hang from the ceiling like the phallus. All suggest a resistance to women as a spectacle, or a to-be-looked-at-ness, in the words of Laura Mulvey, published a year earlier.163 The domestic space is conceived of as cold and sterile in Mouraud’s work, and is redolent of Jean Clair’s earlier theory of the ère glaciaire (see Chapter 6), or the onset of a sudden frigidity – a temperature change that reflects upon the subject – ‘seeing alone’. Freud links the condition, and that of a suggestion of ‘emancipation’ (through independent seeing), to women who are frigid sexually: Behind this envy for the penis, there comes to light the woman’s hostile bitterness against the man, which never completely disappears in the relations between the sexes, and which is clearly indicated in the strivings and in the literary productions of ‘emancipated’ women.164

Mouraud’s use of space in Seeing Alone contests Freud’s reading of frigidity with an acknowledged ‘seeing’ or understanding of the space itself; one which emancipates her not only from being conditioned by the space, or culture, but also from Freud’s reading of women. The intellectual ‘coldness’ or remoteness of the installation is one that Mouraud designates as ‘thinking’ feminine.165 She cites this form of art as a ‘resistance’ to the dominance of the ‘body’ in women’s art of the period and as a deliberate escape from the politics of ‘Psych et Po feminism’, which she strongly opposed for its separatist position based on what she considered an essentialism of the body.166 In this section we have considered the spaces of the feminine through the wound, the female sex organs, the floorboards and tunnels, and through spaces, patterns and collective organization. Women placed themselves into spaces forgotten or feared, which they appropriated in order to find subjectivity in discourse and in artistic practice in the male-centered art world of the 1970s. Similar to theories of poststructuralism and subjectivity evidenced in language, as seen in experiments by women writers, the spirit of deconstruction and the markers of psychoanalysis surface in visual terms for some women artists. This position was shared by their Anglo-American and other European and Latin American counterparts, but visualized differently within the terms of France’s collective practices, philosophical tradition and history. Such has been the aim in investigating the spaces and practices of art conveying the representations of the physical body and interior psyche, as well as by way of other spaces in which the two come to blend and/or contradict

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each other. This has been achieved through a dual reading of the feminine in all its artistic forms against the complex and shifting backdrop of MLF politics and its various factions in the 1970s.

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Notes 1 Anne Tristan and Annie de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, Preface by Simone de Beauvoir (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1977), pp. 100, 107. 2 Florence Montreynaud, Le féminisme n’a jamais tué personne (Montreal: Éditions Fides, 2004), p. 29. 3 The informal name of the movement has also appeared in texts as ‘Psych et Pol’ and ‘Psyché et Po’. The name is also sometimes written ‘Politique et Psychanalyse’. 4 Antoinette Fouque, ‘Femmes, sexualité et politique’, Automne 1970, tract distribué aux Beaux-Arts, lieu des premières AG du Mouvement des femmes. Depuis 30 ans: Des femmes: 1974–2004 (Paris: des femmes – Antoinette Fouque, 2005), p. 26. 5 Elisabeth Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France 2 (Paris: Fayard, 1994), p. 523. 6 Anne Zelensky describes the group’s meetings from an outsider’s point of view: ‘Dans le groupe “Psych et Po”, on retrouvait le phénomène du pouvoir tel qu’il se présente chez les hommes. Il y avait une tête inamovible, Antoinette, autour de laquelle s’organisait visiblement le groupe. J’avais dû aller en tout à deux réunions de ce groupe. Cela commençait en principe à neuf heures. A onze heures rien. On attendait. Alors apparaissait la petite femme entourée de ses “favorites”; tous les regards se tournaient vers elle. Tant qu’elle n’avait pas parlé, rien ne se disait, rien ne se passait. Dans un groupe qui refusait toute ouverture sur l’extérieur, tout se passait à l’intérieur. Antoinette drainait les fantasmes, les désirs, les angoisses de ces filles particulièrement “paumées”, comme nous toutes, en train de larguer les sécurisations. Il semblait qu’elle entretenait subtilement cette ambiance d’angoisse, qu’elle s’en nourrissait, araignée “savante” au milieu de sa toile tissée de psychanalyse, à la fois père, mère, mari, grande prêtresse de ces filles déboussolées. Tout cela ne me concernait pas et n’avait rien à voir avec la lutte des femmes.’ Tristan and de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, p. 90. For more details on the styles and practices of Psych et Po, see Naty Garcia Gaudilla, Libération des femmes: Le M.L.F. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1981), pp. 77–100. (In the group ‘Psych et Po’, we observed a phenomenon of power that resembles the one of men. There was an immovable head, Antoinette, around whom the group was visibly organized. I must have gone to two meetings of this group at the most. In principle, the meeting started at nine o’clock. At eleven o’clock, nothing. We would wait. At last the little woman would appear encircled by her ‘favorites’, with all eyes turned toward her. As long as she remained silent, nothing was said, nothing happened. In a group that refused every opening to the outside word, everything took place internally. Antoinette

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drained the fantasies, desires, anxieties of the girls, particularly the ones who were ‘clueless’, and who were, like all of us, in the process of abandoning security. It seemed that she subtly fostered this atmosphere of anxiety, that she was nourished by it, a ‘knowing’ spider in the middle of a web woven of psychoanalysis, and at the same time acting as father, mother, husband and high priestess to these bewildered girls. None of this behavior concerned me and it had nothing to do with the struggle for women’s rights.) 7 Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France 2, pp. 524–525. 8 Ibid., p. 525. 9 Antoinette Fouque, Il y a deux sexes (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), pp. 31–32. 10 Ibid., pp. 33–34. 11 For more on the ventures of the des femmes publishing house, see Jennifer L. Sweatman, The Risky Business of French Feminism: Publishing, Politics and Artistry (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). 12 Depuis 30 ans des femmes éditent…: 1974–2004 (Paris: des femmes – Antoinette Fouque, 2005), p. 352. 13 Author email correspondence with Marie Orensanz, July 2018. 14 ‘Galerie des femmes’ dossier, Archives Galerie des femmes, Paris. 15 Ibid. 16 www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/article/2011/10/25/marie-dedieu-pionniere feministe_1593558_3382.html 17 ‘Galerie des femmes’ dossier, Archives Galerie des femmes, Paris. 18 Cécile de Préval, ‘Le mouvement de libération des femmes à Paris de 1969 à 1974,’ Mémoire de maîtrise d’Ethnologie, Université Paris VIII Saint-Denis, 1996–1997, p. 74. 19 Fouque, ‘Femmes, sexualité et politique’, p. 26. 20 Kristeva did publish Des Chinoises with des femmes, but was asked to revise the preface to credit the beliefs of Psych et Po, which she refused, taking the manuscript to another publisher. In the meantime, des femmes accepted and published the text. Philippe Forest, Histoire de Tel Quel: 1960–1982 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995), pp. 515–518. Julia Kristeva comments in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur: ‘Je suis très attachée au mouvement féministe mais je pense que, comme tous les mouvements, le féminisme n’a pas besoin, de la part d’une intellectuelle, d’une adhésion sans condition. Je pense que le moment est venu où l’on devrait sortir de “l’entre-femmes” et d’une certaine mythification de la féminité: voir ce qui ne va pas, examiner quelles sont les impasses, essayer enfin de savoir ce que l’on peut faire. Du coup, je suis plutôt critique avec mes amies du mouvement des femmes: dans certaines réunions, j’ai dit des choses qui gênent et cela n’a pas eu bonne presse’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 20 June 1977, p. 106. (I am very committed to the feminist movement, but I think, as is the case for all movements, that feminism does not need an unconditional adherence from an intellectual. I think that the time has come when we should leave behind ‘women-only’ and a certain mythification of femininity in order to see what’s wrong, examine the impasses, and finally try to see what we can do. As a result, I am rather critical of my friends in

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the women’s movement: in some meetings, I said things that bothered them which did not get good press.) 21 Author discussion with Irène Laksine, August 2019. The artist also mentioned that some of her friends from the meetings had contributed to the second number of the journal Le Torchon brûle. 22 ‘Pratique Politique et Psychanalyse’, [mai 1974] Des femmes en mouvements, no. 12–13 (December 1978–January 1979), p. 78. 23 ‘L’analyse, comme demande d’écoute et de lecture avec une autre femme qui a amorcé la lutte des femmes dans le mouvement, en mai 68, a été le début d’une pratique collective … La lecture est un travail, une lutte, une analyse: nous lisons à plusieurs, nous parlons ensemble de nos lectures, nous parlons avec les femmes qui écrivent. Nous lisons des textes qui disent un corps de femme entre les mots et le code encore, mais qui leur résistent, les travaillent, les subvertissent. Nous sommes à l’écoute de ces textes comme à l’écoute de corps pluriels, différents.’ Le Quotidien des femmes, no. 3 (May 1975), Ibid., p. 80. (Analysis, which called for both listening and reading with another woman, kickstarted the women’s struggle in the movement in May 1968 and was the beginning of a collective practice … Reading is work, a struggle, an analysis: we read in groups of several women, we discuss our readings together, we speak with women who write. We read texts that speak of a woman’s body between words and still codify it, but which resist, shape, and subvert them. We listen to these texts like we listen to plural, different bodies.) 24 Fouque, Il y a deux sexes, p. 30. Eng. trans.: There Are 2 Sexes, trans. David Macey and Catherine Porter (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 15–16. 25 Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France 2, pp. 518–519. 26 Ibid., p. 647. 27 Fouque, Il y a deux sexes, p. 47. 28 Ibid. pp. 47–48. Eng. trans. There Are 2 Sexes, p. 28. 29 Antoinette Fouque comments, ‘Né(e) fille ou garçon, on devient femme ou homme, masculin ou féminin; écrire ne sera donc jamais neutre. Le destin anatomique se marque, se démarque ou se remarque. La différence des genres viendra confirmer ou infirmer la différence des sexes. Comment l’écriture, comme expérience d’un sujet sexué, pourrait-elle être neutre? … C’était un pari, un risque pris, que des textes écrits par des femmes fassent travailler la langue, y fassent apparaître, pourquoi pas, une différence sexuelle.’ Ibid., p. 41, Eng. trans. p. 23. (One is born a girl or a boy and then becomes a woman or a man, masculine or feminine; writing will therefore never be a neutral act. Anatomical destiny is always being marked or re-marked. The differences between genders come along and validate or invalidate the differences between the sexes. How can writing, as an experience of a sexually differentiated subject, be neutral? … We accepted the challenge, took the risk of proposing that texts written by women might put language to work in ways that perhaps could bring out – why not? – a difference between the sexes.) 30 Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France 2, p. 525. 31 Fouque, Il y a deux sexes, p. 41. Eng. trans. There Are 2 Sexes, p. 23.

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32 ‘Galerie des femmes’ dossier, Archives Galerie des Femmes, Paris, and Depuis 30 ans des femmes éditent, p. 352. 33 ‘Bilan de l’année’ in Galerie des femmes’ dossier, Archives Galerie des femmes, Paris. As much as the increase in MLF membership, the women were equally satisfied with the symbolic feat of bringing historical women – Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Sonia Delaunay and Marcelle Cahn – into the larger project of ‘des femmes’, rather than an isolated focus on artist or artwork alone. The Avignon exhibition was an initiative of Antoinette Fouque that took place during the 1981 Festival of Avignon at the same time as a meeting with the MLF in Vesc. Leading the effort was Marie [Dedieu], supported by Michèle B. [Barrière] and Claude de Perrety. The installation was carried out by Sylviane and ‘militants’ from Marseille. The women of ‘des femmes’ were pleased with the dissemination of the exhibition through posters and press, the militant women’s presence in the city and the heightened public awareness which together they felt changed the image of the MLF, creating ‘the effect of a surprise and shift in the image of the MLF’. 34 Some in the French press were acidic about the need for such a book. Le Quotidien de Paris wrote, ‘Il s’agit en fait du catalogue de l’exposition “Femmes peintres 1550–1950” qui avait eu lieu en 1976 au County Museum of Los Angeles. Le dit catalogue redécouvert quelques années plus tard par des féministes en quête de manuscrits se trouve être traduit et publié … devinez par qui? … Les Éditions des Femmes bien entendu. Je suis d’avis qu’il devrait être suivi d’autres volumes “les Homosexuels peintres”, “les Mongoliens peintres”, “les Nains peintres”. Puisque être femme doit sembler une telle tare puisqu’il faut à tout prix exhiber nos talents, puisqu’il faut accentuer des différences qui paraissent évidentes, et bien vraiment cela vaut la peine qu’on édite un livre!’ ‘Femmes au pinceau’, Le Quotidien de Paris, 29 September 1981. Archives BMD. (This is actually the catalogue of the exhibition Women Painters 1550–1950 which took place at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1976. The said catalogue was rediscovered a few years later by feminists in search of manuscripts and was translated and published – by guess who? – Les Éditions des femmes, of course. I believe that this book should be followed by other ones such as ‘homosexual painters’, ‘Mongoloid painters’, ‘Dwarf painters’ … If being a woman is such a handicap that it is necessary at all costs to exhibit our talents and if it is necessary to emphasize differences that are completely obvious, well then, it really must be worth it to publish such a book!) 35 ‘Galerie des femmes’ dossier, Archives Galerie des femmes, Paris. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Antoinette Fouque, ‘… Ou la prégnance du regard’, Anamorphose de Françoise Gilot, exhibition catalogue, Galerie des femmes, June 1986. Depuis 30 ans des femmes éditent, pp. 356–360, p. 359. My emphasis. 39 Ibid, p. 360. 40 The phenomenon of anamorphosis in art was a widely shared preoccupation during this time. The arts editor of Sorcières, Anne Rivière, published a seventeenth-century image of it to accompany her own article ‘Il y a de

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l’extérieur’ in Sorcières, no. 12 (1978), pp, 10–14, p. 13, which discussed the theoretical possibilities of ‘becoming woman’, citing Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, carefully counterbalanced by the names of Marguerite Duras, Carson McCullers and Virginia Woolf, while another anamorphic image, from the collection of the Musée des Arts décoratifs, was earlier published in a more illustrative capacity in Sorcières, no. 8 (1977), p. 35. 41 My intention here is not to return to the question of abstraction and embodiment considered earlier by Rosemary Betterton (with non-French artists), nor is it to unequivocally transpose or translate philosophical and literary theories by French women writers onto artistic practice or vice versa. Katy Deepwell (as cited by Betterton) has already foregrounded the pitfalls of translating ideas too closely, such as a textual ‘writing of the body’ (as promoted by écriture féminine) and the practice of buildup of surface/texture / tactility on the painting as a ‘bodily’ equivalent. See Rosemary Betterton, An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 94; Katy Deepwell, ‘Paint Stripping: Katy Deepwell on Feminist Possibilities in Painting after Modernism’, Women’s Art Magazine, 58 (1994), pp. 14–17, p. 16. As such, my interest is in a shared terrain of practice – which does not exclusively limit itself to nation or gender as seen elsewhere in this book; and can include common conceptual ground – that pays close attention, and takes into account, the slips/slides (les glissades) that arise between and among people and practices. 42 Catherine Clément, ‘“Notre ennemi n’est pas l’homme, mais l’impérialisme du phallus” nous dit Antoinette Fouque’, Le Matin, 16 July 1980. 43 One of the arguments for the gallery in the notes from meetings was to create a space that fought misogyny, pederasty, asexuality (artist as asexual and the trend of Nouvelle Figuration). ‘Galerie des femmes’ dossier, Archives Galerie des femmes, Paris. 44 ‘C’était une belle personne’ (Hommage à Sylvie Boissonnas), La culture pour vivre, exhibition catalogue, Centre Pompidou, 24 September–30 December 2002. Fouque eventually purchased paintings by Asse, Nemours and LopesCurval from the exhibition. 45 Ibid. 46 In ‘Bodies in the Work: The Aesthetics and Politics of Women’s NonRepresentational Painting’, Rosemary Betterton considers the possibilities and constraints of a painterly equivalent to écriture féminine and turns to ‘French feminist’ theory and the work of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva to explicate a series of women artists such as Rebecca Fortnum, Laura Godfrey-Isaacs, Beth Harland, Rosa Lee, Eve Muske and Georgia O’Keeffe, and to draw distinctions amongst their practices. Interestingly, Betterton gives primacy to anglophone women artists (although, notably, British artist Rosa Lee was born in Hong Kong) without analyses of artists from other contexts (such as France or elsewhere) that provide comparisons or contradictions to art produced in tandem with French thought. See Betterton, Intimate Distance, pp. 79–105.

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47 Julia Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974), p. 23. 48 Julia Kristeva, ‘Maternité selon Giovanni Bellini’ [1975], in Polylogue (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977), p. 435. Although Julia Kristeva rarely discusses contemporary women during this period, her discussion of Belgian writer and artist Sophie Podolski’s (1953–1974) use of color, sensation and language comes closest to her analyses of male practices. See Julia Kristeva’s interview with Xavière Gauthier, ‘From oscillation du “pouvoir”, au “refus”’ in Tel Quel no. 58 (Summer 1974) and Eng. trans. ‘Oscillation Between Power and Denial’, trans. Marilyn A. August in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), pp. 165–167. Her introduction to a special volume of Tel Quel no. 74 (Winter 1977) dedicated to women, seemingly places Podolski (whose unpublished work was included in the same issue) in the context of dissident, or ‘outsider’, in line with her ‘Outsider’ art, to illustrate the female condition. Interestingly, Kristeva penned the introduction to the issue at Beaubourg (Centre Pompidou). 49 Julia Kristeva, ‘La joie de Giotto’ [1972], in Polylogue (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977), p. 400. Eng. trans. ‘Giotto’s Joy’, in Desire in Language, trans. Thomas Gora and Alice A. Jardine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 225. 50 Kristeva, ‘La joie de Giotto’, p. 407. Eng. trans. ‘Giotto’s Joy’, p. 224. 51 David Alan Mellor, Liliane Lijn: Works 1959–80 (Warwick: Mead Gallery, 2005), p. 52. In April 1973, Lijn also completed a film on koans, What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping? Her notes describe it as ‘A film about seeing sound. Sound being carried on electromagnetic waves of a lower frequency than the visual, we receive it through our ears and we call that hearing. Silent sound can be seen. See the sound of silence. … From seeing the sound of words the film moves to seeing life in a line of light’ (p. 52). 52 ‘À propos des accumulateurs de la lumière de Sarah Holt’, Sarah Holt, exhibition catalogue, Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1971. 53 Pane explains: ‘Dans cette action, la mère était symbole de mort. Parce que la relation entre la mère et l’enfant est une relation très renfermée … c’était vraiment un espace miroir où toutes les femmes qui ont participé à l’action ont revécu leurs propres problèmes, soit avec leur mère, soit avec leurs enfants, leur problèmes affectifs de femmes.’ Anne Tronche, ‘Interview de Gina Pane par Irmeline Lebeer, 1975’, in Gina Pane: Actions (Paris: Fall Éditions, 1997), p. 83. (In this action, the mother was a symbol of death. Because the relationship between mother and child is a very closed one … it was really a mirrored space where all the women who participated in the action relived their own problems, either with their mother, or with their children, their emotional issues as women.) 54 ‘Le silence, comme moyen d’intensifier la force de la pensée, de concentrer dans l’action une réflexion sur l’histoire, n’est d’aucune façon un refuge. Au contraire, le silence apparaît bien ici comme un acte de résistance, comme un moyen de provoquer l’éveil des consciences.’ Tronche, Gina Pane, pp. 54–56. (Silence, as a means of intensifying the force of thought, channeling in an

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action a reflection on history, is in no way a refuge. On the contrary, silence shows up here as an act of resistance, as a means of provoking the awakening of consciousness.) 55 Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties’, in La jeune née (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1975), p. 163. Eng. trans. The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), p. 88. 56 ‘Interview with Liliane Lijn’, Light and Memory (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), p. 76. 57 Ibid., pp. 73–74. 58 Serge Lemoine, Pierrette Bloch and Lucile Encrevé, Pierrette Bloch: Dessins, encres, et collages (Grenoble: Musée de Grenoble, 1999), pp. 30–38. 59 Ibid., p. 32. 60 Aurélie Nemours in Yves Michaud and Catherine Panchout, ‘Aurélie Nemours’, Ateliers au féminin (Paris: Au même titre, 1999), p. 17. 61 Walter Benjamin, Paris capitale du XIXe siècle: Le livre des passages (Paris: CERF, 1989). 62 Michaud and Panchout, ‘Aurélie Nemours’, p. 17. 63 Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, L’Arc 61, 1975, p. 41. Eng. trans. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith and Paula Cohen, Signs, vol. 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976), pp. 877–878. 64 ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, p. 878. In the original French ‘Nous sommes “noires” et nous sommes belles.’ 65 Nancy Spero in conversation with Stephanie Buhmann, The Brooklyn Rail, 1 November 2003. 66 ‘Defying the Death Machine’, interview with Nancy Spero by Nicole Jolicœur and Nell Tenhaff, Parachute, no. 39 (July–August 1985), pp. 50–55, p. 53. 67 Lisa Tickner, ‘Nancy Spero: Images of Women and la peinture féminine’, in Nancy Spero (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1987), pp. 4–19, pp. 7–8. 68 Hervé Gauville, ‘Qui vivra Vieira da Silva’, Interview, Libération, 23 September 1988, p. 45. 69 Ibid. 70 Robert Fleck, Marie Raymond / Yves Klein, exhibition catalogue, Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Angers, 20 November–27 February 2005. 71 ‘Carnet 10.17.46’, Anna-Eva Bergman, Pistes (Fondation Hans Hartung-Anna Eva Bergman, 1999), n.p. 72 ‘De fait, les tableaux de Vieira da Silva refusent l’analyse: si détaillée que soit leur écriture et si tenté que l’on soit de morceler le tableau, chacun ressent de l’ensemble une fusion d’un seul tenant, car elle en bride mille coursiers ne formant qu’un seul équipage.’ Pierre Granville, ‘Vieira da Silva sur les rives du Léman’, Le Monde, 9 May 1974. (In fact, the paintings of Vieira da Silva defy analysis: however detailed in their writing and however tempting it is to piece apart the painting, each is a sum of its parts fused to a whole, since she manages to keep a tight rein on a thousand steeds to form only a single herd.) 73 Elisabeth Lebovici and Daniel Soutif, ‘Vieira da Silva, la dame de carreaux’, interview. Libération, 7–8 March 1992, p. 31.

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74 Michel Seuphor, ‘Promenade autour de Vieira da Silva’, Cahiers d’art, no. 2 (1949). Paris-Paris: 1937–1957, exhibition catalogue, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1981, p. 392. My emphasis in bold. 75 Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique, p. 25. Eng. trans. Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 26. 76 Julia Kristeva, ‘Une femmes’, Les Cahiers du GRIF, ‘Dé-pro-ré-créer’, vol. 7 (1975), pp. 22–27, p. 26. 77 Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique, pp. 26–27. Eng. trans. Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 27. 78 Ibid., p. 29. In modernity, the relationship between verbal and visual language was forged to the degree that elements of the verbal remained ‘mute’ and more open to experience/knowledge of the visual, as Marcelin Pleynet comments. See ‘La levée de l’interprétation des signes’, Art et Littérature (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977), p. 415. 79 ‘Le dispositif coloré, comme le rythme pour le langage, implique ainsi un éclatement du sens et de son sujet en une gamme de différences. Mais ces différences s’articulent dans un hors-sens qui est un surplus de sens. La couleur n’est pas le sens nul: elle est l’excès du sens par la pulsion, c’est-à-dire par la mort qui, en détruisant le sens unique-normatif, y ajoute sa force négative pour affirmer le passage du sujet.’ ‘La joie de Giotto’, p. 395. Eng. trans. ‘Giotto’s Joy,’ p. 221. (The chromatic apparatus, like rhythm for language, thus involves a shattering of meaning and its subject into a scale of differences. These, however, are articulated within an area beyond meaning that holds meaning’s surplus. Color is not zero meaning; it is excess meaning through instinctual drive, that is, through death. By destroying unique normative meaning, death adds its negative force to that meaning in order to have the subject come through.) 80 ‘Vieira da Silva’, Interview, Le Nouvel Observateur, 20 March 1982. 81 ‘My final aim, in common with so many painters of history, is to be able to create valuable works of art in a conscious way.’ Vera Molnar, Statement. Tihany, France. August 1975. 82 Ibid. 83 ‘Women’s Art in the ’70s’, Art in America, May–June 1976, pp. 64–72, p. 72. 84 Ibid. My emphasis. Also see Diana Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art à Paris dans les années 1970’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2003, p. 46. 85 ‘Moreover, women artists’ visibility in Paris faded proportionally to the success of the nouveau réaliste art and to Yves Klein’s ascension to the new bourgeois pantheon.’ Serge Guilbaut, ‘Marie Helena Vieira da Silva’, Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth-Century Art, ed. Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 319–329, p. 329. 86 ‘Vieira da Silva’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 20 March 1982. 87 This did not mean Vieira da Silva did not recognize her contemporaries’ situation or struggles. In an interview, Jeanne Socquet spoke of meeting in friendship with Vieira da Silva on several occasions. Author interview with Jeanne Socquet, Paris, June 2006. Further, Vieira da Silva was not averse to

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taking part in women artist exhibitions, particularly high-profile ones, such as Grandes femmes petits formats at Galerie Iris Clert in 1974 and the statesponsored ‘Festival de la femme’ in 1977 to cite two of them (see Chapters 5 and 2). 88 ‘Le pouvoir du con’, Le Torchon brûle, no. 2 (1972). 89 Subtitles included ‘Le con est beau’, ‘Les Arts et Réflexes du Plaisir’ and ‘La Médecine orientée par des mâles’. 90 Tristan and de Pisan, Histoires du MLF, p. 177. 91 ‘Six mois d’exclusivité aux Champs-Elyseés, un record, pour les découvertes délicieuses d’une jeune femme à Bangkok: “Emmanuelle” a été le succès no. 1 du cinéma français. La vague du sexe a été aussi ce déferlement de productions annoncées par un étalage d’affiches excitantes ou alléchantes.’ JeanPierre Guillaume, ‘Une seule vedette: le sexe’, L’Express, 30 December 1974–5 January 1975, p. 50. (Six months of exclusivity at Les Champs-Elysées, a record for the delectable discoveries of a young woman in Bangkok: Emmanuelle was the no. 1 success of French cinema. The sex trend continued in the surge of movies announced by a display of exciting or enticing posters.) 92 ‘Vaginal Politics: c’est un signe des temps que ce titre n’ait pas besoin de traduction, nous admettons qu’il y ait une “politique” de la génitalité. Ces Américaines (mais en France, au M.L.A.C., elles ont des symétriques et des émules) explorent, manient, manipulent, examinent au speculum et, au besoin, soignent leur corps. … En France peut-être cette toute-puissance est-elle moins marquée … mais dans les hôpitaux elle domine, surtout en gynécologie et en psychiatrie.’ Dominique Desanti, ‘L’Univers féminin: du gynécologue aux magazines’, Le Monde, 31 January 1975. (Vaginal Politics: it’s a sign of the times that this title needs no translation. We acknowledge that there is a ‘politics’ of genitality. These Americans (but there are French equivalents and disciples at M.L.A.C.) explore, handle, manipulate, examine with the speculum and, if necessary, use it to treat their body. … In France perhaps its widespread influence is less recognized … but it dominates in hospitals, especially in gynecology and psychiatry.) The use of vaginal imagery by women artists was addressed, amongst others, in the United States by Barbara Rose who published Vaginal Iconology, in New York Magazine (1974), p. 59, and in Britain by Lisa Tickner who also addressed the theme in ‘Female Sexuality & Women Since 1970’, Art History, vol. 1, no. 2 (June 1978), pp. 236–251. For a later situating of vaginal imagery in feminist history around the revisiting of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, see Amelia Jones (ed.), Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, exhibition catalogue (Berkeley and Los Angeles: UCLA Armand Hammer Museum and UC Berkeley Press, 1996). 93 Ibid. 94 Alain Jouffroy, ‘La transparence-opaque de Jacqueline Dauriac’ in Dauriac, exhibition catalogue, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 6 May–15 June 1975, n.p. 95 Cixous, ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’.

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96 Jeanne Lapointe, ‘Le meurtre des femmes chez le théologien et le pornographe’, Les Cahiers du GRIF, ‘Jouir’, March 1983, p. 48. 97 Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, ‘Notes sur la perversion’ in Dauriac, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 6 May–15 June 1975, n.p. 98 ‘Interview with Ipoustéguy’, Ipoustéguy: Sculptures et dessins de 1957 à 1978, exhibition catalogue. Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques, Paris, 20 June–15 August 1978, n.p. Interview by Jean Paget, April 1978. 99 Ibid. 100 José Pierre, ‘Virginia Tentindo dans la fabrique des dieux’, Paris 1986. In Virginia Tentindo: Sculptures (Geneva: Galerie de l’Hôtel de Ville, 1986), n.p. 101 See Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980), p. 67. 102 Gina Pane, ‘Action Laure’, 28 April 1977. Reprinted in Lettre à un(e) inconnu(e) (Paris: École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 2003), p. 23. 103 Faith Wilding, ‘The Feminist Art Programs at Fresno and Calarts, 1970–1975’, in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s History and Impact, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry Abrams, 1994), p. 35. 104 ‘… “cunts” – defiantly recuperating a term that traditionally had been used derogatorily and thereby opposing the phallic imagery developed by men. We vied with each other to come up with images of female sexual organs by making paintings, drawings, and constructions of bleeding slits, holes and gashes, boxes, caves, or exquisite vulval jewel pillows. Making “cunt art” was exciting, subversive and fun, because “cunt” signified to us an awakened consciousness about our bodies and our sexual selves.’ Ibid. 105 See Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: William Morrown, 1970) in which chapter 3 offers a critique of Freud; and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday & Co, 1970) which discusses Freud, and also touches briefly on the economic impact of psychoanalysis in the marketplace – following Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963) – in chapter 4 of the book. 106 Macciocchi, for example, acknowledged Saint Theresa de Lisieux’s parallel between her first menstrual blood and Christ’s wounds. Elsewhere she implied that under Mussollini’s leadership in Italy, women’s menstrual blood could be deemed political (as opposed to spiritual) in so far as it reflected a sacrifice for Mussolini and the (fascist) state. For these two respective points, see both ‘Sexualité féminine dans l’idéologie fasciste’, Tel Quel, no. 66 (Summer 1976), pp. 26–42, which was based on a conference paper presented in Milan in 1975, and Jacqueline Aubenas, Hedwige Peemans-Poullet and Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, ‘Le GRIF interroge M.A. Macciocchi sur le fascisme’, Les Cahiers du GRIF, no. 12 (1976), ‘Parlez-vous française ? Femmes et langages I’, pp. 55–60. 107 Jean-Jacques Levêque, ‘Gina Pane’, Opus International, no. 38 (November 1972), pp. 39–41, p. 40. 108 Carolyn Greenstein Burke, ‘Report from Paris: Women’s Writing and the Women’s Movement’, Signs, vol. 3, no. 4 (Summer 1978), pp. 843–855, p. 855.

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109 See Walter Morgenthaler, Adolf Wölfli (Paris: Compagnie de l’art brut, 1964) and Lucienne Peiry, Art Brut (Paris: Flammarion, 1997). 110 Leonor Fini’s presence in the 1970s was due in part to her close relationship with Xavière Gauthier, who promoted her in her journal Sorcières (1976–1982) and published a monograph on her, Leonor Fini (Paris: Le Musée de poche, 1979). Earlier, Jean Genet considered the impact of her work from a masculine perspective in Lettre à Leonor Fini (Paris: Loyan, 1951). 111 It is worth noting that critic Hal Foster frames Bellmer’s poupées as being less about the female subject than about repressed femininity within the male subject abused and violated after the war. See Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 112 Luce Irigaray, ‘Pour Unica Zürn’ [5 décembre 1983], Le Nouveau Commerce, Cahier 62–63. Trimestriel (Autumn 1985), pp. 41–47, p. 44. English trans. ‘A Natal Lacuna’, trans. Margaret Whitford, Women’s Arts Magazine, no. 58 (May–June 1994), pp. 11–13, p. 12. 113 In Margaret Whitford’s introductory remarks to ‘A Natal Lacuna’, she highlights the way ‘madness’ was configured by Irigaray at first as ‘potentially revolutionary’, only to later withdraw from that position to see Zürn’s inability to ‘sublimate the persecutory drives’ (arising in part from her position as a woman, or lack, in a symbolic system ordered by men) as a symptom of her breakdown and suicide. Ibid., p. 11. Hilary Robinson later challenged some of Whitford’s assumptions about Irigaray as being dependent on a ‘literary’ model, particularly Whitford’s claim that Zürn exemplified 1970s women artists that were ‘driven by patriarchy into madness’. Robinson argued that artists in the 1970s were more politically aware than to fall into this trap. She further suggests it is the process of reading Irigaray – the gaps, etc. – that is also of particular use to the feminist artist more than a straight/‘linear’ reading of her art criticism as Whitford had emphasized. ‘Irigaray’s Imaginings’, in Twenty Years of MAKE Magazine: Back to the Future of Women’s Art, ed. Maria Walsh and Mo Throp (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), pp. 114–115. 114 Also see Sarah Yung’s unpublished dissertation, ‘Françoise Janicot: Un Art entre la politique et la poésie’, Université Paris-Sorbonne IV, 2004. 115 Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, ‘Sabine Monirys’, Opus International, no. 61–62 (January–February 1977), p. 100. 116 The photographs accompanied the anonymous article ‘Cygnes’, pp. 18–21, p. 19. The exhibition of Journiac’s photographs from the series was on view at the Galerie Stadler in Paris from 7 November to 7 December 1974. 117 Sophie Calle, Les panoplies (Paris: Actes sud, 1998). 118 Tel Quel, no. 32 (1968). 119 Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). 120 See Xavière Gauthier’s use of nature as a source of empowerment for women ‘witches’ in ‘Sorcières’, Sorcières, no. 1, ‘La Nourriture’, p. 1; and the position shared by Chantal Chawaf in ‘Sorcières’, Sorcières, no. 3, ‘Se Prostituer’ (1976).

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121 The title ‘Sorcières’ comes from Gauthier’s interview with Marguerite Duras for the book Les parleuses (1974) and was inspired by the book by Jules Michelet (republished in 1966). See M. Duras and X. Gauthier, Les parleuses (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974) pp. 163–164. For a discussion of the creation and experience of Sorcières, see Xavière Gauthier’s ‘Sorcières, nous tracerons d’autres chemins’, in Sorcières et Sorcelleries, ed. Christine Planté (Cahiers Masculin/Feminin, Université Lumière-Lyon 2, 2002), pp. 95–104. 122 Author interview with Xavière Gauthier, Paris, November 2006. 123 Themes included 1.‘La nourriture’, 2. ‘La voix’, 3.‘Se prostituer’, 4. ‘Enceintes, porter, accoucher’, 5. ‘Odeurs’, 6. ‘Prisonnières’, 7. ‘ Écritures’, 8. ‘Fidélités’, 9. ‘Le sang’, 10. ‘L’Art et les femmes’, 11. ‘Espaces et lieux’, 12. ‘Théorie’, 13. ‘Poupées’, 14. ‘La jasette’, 15. ‘Gestes/mouvements’, 16. ‘Désirs’, 17. ‘Vêtement’, 18. ‘La mort’, 19. ‘La saleté’, 20. ‘La nature assassinée’, 21. ‘Nouvelles et autres’, 22. ‘Sorcelleries’, 23. ‘Enfants’, 24. ‘Mythes et nostalgie’. Chantal Chawaf provided portrait drawings for her article ‘Sorcières’ in Sorcières, no. 3 (1976), pp. 4–6, p. 6. 124 See Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer, HEXENTEXTE: zehn Zeichnungen und zehn Anagrammtexte, exhibition catalogue, Galerie Springer, Berlin, 1954. 125 See Jules Michelet, La Sorcière [1862] (Paris: Flammarion, 1966); also see his work La femme (1859). 126 See Gauthier, ‘Sorcières, nous tracerons d’autres chemins’, p. 103. 127 Xavière Gauthier, ‘Pourquoi sorcières’, Sorcières, ‘La nourriture’ (1976), p. 4. 128 The concept of the vagina as a vehicle of female ‘voice’ was published in Irigaray’s Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977), in which she elaborates her position of the ‘two lips’ of the vagina and the ‘two lips’ of women’s discourse to formulate her theory of parler-femme (speak (as) woman). 129 Author discussion with Anne Rivière, Paris, July 2006. (See Chapter 3, note 125.) 130 The conflation of ‘vagina’ with ‘woman’ underscores a biological essentialist position which has been the grounds for critiques of so-called ‘French feminism’ in the 1980s and 1990s. Toril Moi’s Sexual / Texual Politics (London: Metheun, 1985) and Diana Fuss’s Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), for example, nuance this claim. See also Introduction. 131 On the move from the university to the mobilization on the street, see Ronald Fraser, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (London: Chatto, 1988) pp. 107–203. 132 Amy Mazur, Gender Bias and the State: Symbolic Reform at Work in the Fifth Republic France (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), pp. 71–72. 133 ‘Elles disent que les féminaires privilégient les symboles du cercle, de la circonférence, de l’anneau, du O, du zéro, de la sphère.’ Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), p. 61. Eng. trans. Les Guérillères, trans. David Le Vay (Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), p. 45. (The women say that the feminaries give pride of place to the symbols

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of the circle, the circumference, the ring, the O, the zero, the sphere.) An excerpt from this novel regarding the ‘O’ also appears in Sorcières, ‘Espaces et lieux’, no. 11, p. 9. 134 Pauline Réage, Histoire d’O (Paris: J.J. Pauvert, 1954). The ‘O’ remained an ambiguous symbol, but the sexual violence depicted in a film version of the book led to women’s demonstrations against the film in Paris in September 1975. 135 Georges Bataille, Histoire de l’œil [1928] (Paris: Gallimard, 1967). 136 Georges Bataille was enjoying a renaissance after the Tel Quel conference in 1972 at Cerisy-la-Salle on Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille. Jacques Derrida earlier characterized the inherent slippage (glissement) in Bataille’s thought and writings emphasizing an interplay between an absence of meaning against which meaning is generated that ‘nous fassent glisser’ (make us slide). ‘Vers quoi?, Vers d’autres mots, d’autres objets, bien sûr ….’ (Toward what? Toward other words, other objects, of course …). From ‘De l’économie restreinte à l’économie générale: Un hégélianisme sans réserve’, L’Arc, no. 32, special issue on Georges Bataille (1967), pp. 24–44, p. 33. Introduced by Derrida in the late 1960s, Kristeva’s and Cixous’s rewritings of Bataille in the 1970s served as ground for the formulation of some of their own theories. See, for example, Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, La jeune née (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1975), Julia Kristeva, ‘Bataille, l’expérience et la pratique’, in Bataille (Actes du Colloque de Cérisy-la-Salle), ed. Phillipe Sollers (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1973), pp. 267–301. 137 Advertisement in Sorcières, ‘Odeurs’, no. 5 (1976), p. 61. 138 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘Rhizome’ [1976], reprinted in Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1978), pp. 9–37, p. 37. Eng. trans. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 25. 139 ‘Résumons les caractères principaux d’un rhizome: à la différence des arbres ou de leurs racines, le rhizome connecte un point quelconque avec un autre point quelconque, et chacun de ses traits ne renvoie pas nécessairement à des traits de même nature, il met en jeu des régimes de signes très différents et même des états de non-signes. Le rhizome ne se laisse ramener ni à l’Un ni au multiple … Il n’est pas fait d’unités, mais de dimensions, ou plutôt de directions mouvantes.’ Ibid., p. 31. (Let us summarize the principal characters of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is neither reducible to the One nor the multiple … It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion.) Trans. Massumi, p. 21. 140 DIEUCOMPTELESLARMESDESFEMMES, exhibition catalogue, Le Quartier, Centre d’art contemporain Quimper, 1996. Manifestos for the group include: TRANS 1. KUNTZEL/MOURAUD, Paris, 16 November 1976; TRANS 2. GIBSON/KUNTZEL/MOURAUD, Paris, 8 January 1977, pp. 63–64.

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141 See Joëlle Deniot, Annie Dussuet, Catherine Dutheil and Dominique Loiseau (eds), Femmes, identités plurielles, Actes du Colloque, Femmes de l’Université de Nantes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001). 142 See Marie-Jo Bonnet, ‘Charlotte Calmis, Mémoire présente d’un langage futur’, in Les écrits d’artistes depuis 1940: actes du colloque international Paris et Caen, 6–9 mars 2002, ed. Françoise Levaillant (Caen: Éditions IMEC, 2004), p. 295. 143 Marie-Jo Bonnet, Mon MLF (Paris: Albin Michel, 2018), pp. 225–226. Lacan’s seminar on Bernini’s Saint Teresa took place on 20 Februrary 1973. 144 Ibid., p. 226. 145 See Aline Dallier’s ‘Activités et réalisations de femmes dans l’art contemporain’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Paris VIII Saint-Dénis, 1980, p. 147, and Quinby’s, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, pp. 24–25. 146 Quinby notes that the provisional title for the exhibition, Écritures de femmes, was used only once and mentioned under the heading ‘Actualités’, in Art Press. The exhibition was to be organized by Suzanne Pagé and Françoise Eliet in collaboration with Catherine Millet. ‘Une exposition de femmes à l’ARC 2’, in Art Press, no. 5 (March 1977), p. 40; ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, pp. 24–26. 147 Dallier, ‘Activités and réalisations de femmes’, pp. 147–149. 148 ‘Une peinture de femmes est par définition violente, viol du code social (d’où aussi le fait que le châtiment se produise sous la forme du viol) puisqu’elle met en scène une aventure du corps qui devrait être tue. Elle produit un corps pulsé alors que le corps de la femme devrait être immobile et muet.’ In ‘Peindre/combattre’, Sorcières, no. 10, ‘L’art et les femmes’, p. 22. (Women’s painting is by definition violent, a violation of the social code [hence also the fact that punishments occur in the form of rape] since it shows off the experiences of the body that should be killed. It produces a pulsating body while a woman’s body should be motionless and silent.) 149 ‘Enfermement / Rupture’, Bulletin Femmes / Art, no. 1 (October 1977), pp. 5–7. 150 Sorcières, no. 10 (1977), p. 51. 151 Eliet had bought the pastels as a gift for a child she had met on the train and became fascinated by them. ‘Crouching over the floor, she [Eliet] took them in her fist and began to knead, grind and rub them into the paper that she had spread before her so that the grain of the wood might give texture and design to the colorful imprints of the pastels. Once she had begun she could not cease. For three days and three nights she continued…’ Gloria Orenstein, ‘Exorcism / Protest / Rebirth’, p. 8. 152 Lea Lublin, ‘La créativité ou les organes invisibles’, Sorcières, no. 10 (1977), pp. 46–50, p. 47. 153 Ibid, p. 49. 154 Roger-Pol Droit, ‘Freud se serait-il trompé?’ Entretien avec Luce Irigaray. Le Monde, 1 November 1974. 155 Luce Irigaray’s discussion of Speculum de l’autre femme (1974) appears in Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1977), p. 67. Eng. trans. This

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Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 68. 156 ‘Feminist’ remained a word associated more with the Anglo-American women’s liberation movements. Even Antoinette Fouque distanced herself from the word: ‘je ne me suis jamais définie comme féministe. Par la suite, j’ai lutté pour que le Mouvement des femmes ne devienne pas le “Mouvement féministe”. Il me semblait, peut-être à tort, qu’avec le mot femme nous avions des chances de nous adresser, sinon à toutes, du moins au plus grand nombre.’ Antoinette Fouque interviewed by Pierre Nora and Marcel Gauchet between October 1989 and February 1990. Published in Le Débat, no. 59 (April 1990). (I never defined myself as a feminist. Later, I fought for the Women’s Movement not to become the ‘Feminist Movement’. I thought, perhaps incorrectly, that with the word woman we were likely to speak to, if not every woman, at least the greatest number of them.) The term was seldom used self-referentially by French academics, rather by American ones to distinguish humanities and social sciences-based ‘Anglo American feminism’ from ‘French feminism’, that was seen to rely on theory, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism and deconstruction. Critics Robyn Warhol and Diane Herndl admit, however, that read together the distinctions become ‘blurred’. ‘About Feminisms’, in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. xvi. For French ‘AntiAmericanism’ and ‘anti-feminism’, or anti-amér-féminisme, see Judith Ezekiel, ‘“Le Women’s Lib”: Made in France’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 9, no. 3 (2002), pp. 345–361. 157 Lucy Lippard, ‘The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: Women’s Body Art’, Art in America, vol. 3 (May–June 1976), pp. 75–81, p. 78. 158 See article by Robert Fleck, ‘Un art de l’environnement’, DIEUCOMPTELESLARMESDESFEMMES, exhibition catalogue, Le Quartier, Centre d’art contemporain Quimper, 1996, pp. 9–27, p. 15. 159 Tania Mouraud is the sole French female to have an article and review in Art Press, no. 3 (March–April 1973), p. 26, among her many press pieces of the period. Her solo exhibition was held at ARC 2 in 1973. 160 See Fleck, ‘Un art de l’environnement’, 1996. 161 They included the Indian singer Pandit Pran Nath, Terry Riley, Ann Riley, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. See Arnauld Pierre, Tania Mouraud (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), p. 33. 162 See Jacques Lacan, ‘Le stade du miroir’, in Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), pp. 93–100. 163 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975), pp. 6–18. 164 Sigmund Freud, ‘Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. XI (1910) (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 205. 165 Author interview with Tania Mouraud, Paris, May 2005. 166 Author interview with Tania Mouraud, Paris, May 2005.

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Nous nous rendons compte de ce que ces propos ont d’utopique, mais c’est à ce poids d’utopie que nous nous référons d’ordinaire pour mesurer dans une idée ce qu’il y a de vraiment révolutionnaire … Le point de vue des femmes créatrices sur ce monde en devenir sera passionnant dans la mesure où les créatrices ne seront pas le reflet des créations passées, mais bien une nouvelle façon d’envisager la création, un nouveau regard et une nouvelle expression. Suzanne Horer and Jeanne Socquet, 19731 We realize that these words are utopian, but it is the weight of utopia, as it is commonly understood, that we usually cite to measure what is truly revolutionary about an idea … Creative women’s perspective on this world in the making can only be compelling to the degree that they do not simply reflect past artistic works, but discover a new way to envisage, look and express them. Je veux pour les femmes tous les droits, toutes les libertés. Mais la femme au foyer ne doit pas sortir du couvent de son ménage pour entrer dans l’anti-couvent d’un féminisme qui l’emprisonne, tout sexe déployé, dans l’exclusivité de sa féminité. Hélène Parmelin, 19752 I want every right, every freedom for women. But the housewife should not leave the convent of her household to enter into the anti-convent of a feminism that imprisons her – sex unleashed – in the exclusivity of her womanhood.

In this chapter the institutional confrontations and formation of groups for women artists in the 1970s will be explored. Particular attention will be paid to existing women’s artistic collectives such as the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs (UFPS). Later the major collective groups (La Spirale, Femmes en Lutte, Collectif Femmes/Art, and Art et Regard des Femmes) in addition to the exhibiting collective Féminie-Dialogue will be discussed in tandem with the work of independent artists and the type of works produced (with the

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exception of those by the largely collaborative Art et Regard des Femmes and La Spirale, which has little available work outside that of its leader Charlotte Calmis). The groups will be presented chronologically according to their development in the 1970s, with Femmes en Lutte and Collectif Femmes/Art receiving more detailed attention to their organization, politics and cultural impact. Each collective will be considered, via illustrations and interviews, with specific attention to group formation. A number of artists that are unknown outside these contexts are also presented.

5.1 

Women and institutions In 1977, ORLAN performed her Le Baiser de l’artiste which, through sight and sound, re-enacted the relationship between the artist (specifically the woman artist) and consumerism, at the FIAC (Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain) in Paris (Figure 5.1). The work questioned the role of money and sex as a metaphor between the prostitution of the artist in institutions and/or their selling of themselves in public, as well as the conventional role of women in society. The dichotomy ORLAN creates between the ideal virgin (pristine white robes) and whore (body ‘corset’) exaggerates traditional stereotypes of women. She upholds the idea that women’s role as a sexual object and art as a form of transcendence represent a paradox that cannot be united in women artists. A kiss from the ‘real’ ORLAN, or ‘ORLAN corps’, was sold for 5 francs at FIAC, while the image of ‘Sainte ORLAN’ was represented by a cut-out of a

ORLAN, Le Baiser de l’artiste, 1977.

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robed figure carrying a child, ‘lit’ candles and white lilies, the symbol of Mary. In her explanatory notes on the relationship between art and prostitution accompanying the work, ORLAN attacked the Catholic Church as a vehicle of repression for women: ‘Approchez, Approchez, Venez sur mon piédestal, celui des Mythes: la mère, la pute, l’artiste … Au pied de la croix deux femmes: Marie et Marie-Madeleine’ (Come one, come all, Come on to my pedestal, the one of Myths: mother, whore, artist … At the foot of the cross are two women: Mary and Mary Magdalene).3 At the heart of ORLAN’s invention lay an attack on the stereotypes underlying not only the lives of women but also the sanctified role of the artist and the ‘purity’ (as represented by white lilies) of cultural and religious institutions. In attempting to change public perceptions of women artists, the need to change the reality of beliefs concerning women, artists and their legitimatization had to be confronted politically. Could the binary opposites of virgin and whore be undermined by the plurality that a collective group embodied? The institutional possibilities for women to exhibit their art were limited (with the exceptions of ARC and, subsequently, ARC 2 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, which consistently exhibited women artists from 1968 onwards). In 1972, Niki de Saint Phalle and Sheila Hicks were ultimately the only two women to be included in Douze ans d’art contemporain, amongst at least seventy men, after others had been excluded. A few years later, American art critic Lucy Lippard, in her landmark catalogue essay, highlighted the fact that only 25 women out of 123 artists were included in the Biennale de Paris in 1975.4 To some extent the difficulty for many women artists of finding opportunities with established institutions and galleries forced them to seek out alternative groups and structures in which to exhibit to the public. The decline of Les trente glorieuses also coincided with a period of cultural conservatism during the Giscard d’Estaing years. The budget for culture within the overall national budget had risen under Pompidou from 0.42 percent to 0.57 percent in the years 1970–1974. The budget under Giscard d’Estaing fell progressively to 0.45 percent by 1981 (except for the construction of Beaubourg in 1977).5 Pompidou’s personal interest in contemporary art was supported by his cultural minister, Jacques Duhamel (1971–1973), who shouldered the blame for the controversy generated by the exhibition Douze ans d’art contemporain in 1972 (see Chapter 6). With André Malraux supporting Giscard d’Estaing’s rival Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Duhamel’s replacement, Maurice Druon, did not make a strong impact; nor did his successor, Françoise Giroud (1976–1977), who had a high profile but no real power to make decisions.6 Despite Giscard d’Estaing’s professed support for women – ‘Je crois avoir été celui qui a inséré la femme française dans la vie de notre société’ (I believe that I was the one who integrated the French woman into

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the life of our society) – this had not translated into exhibitions of their art in major institutions (outside the rather superficial ‘Festival de la femme’ in 1977 at the Palais des Congrès; see Chapter 2).7 Rather, as his senior officials admitted, Giscard d’Estaing’s taste leaned toward ‘traditional’ art, unlike his predecessor’s.8 His focus on the patrimoine of the nation included the creation of the Institut Français de Restauration des Œuvres d’Art, and the decentralization of artistic matters through the creation of the DRAC (Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles).9 (This was an inheritance well exploited and expanded to all regions with appropriate funding by Jack Lang, the cultural minister appointed by François Mitterrand in 1981.) The massive success of the opening of the Beaubourg, or Centre Georges Pompidou, dedicated to contemporary art in 1977 (six million visitors in the first year), belied the fact that large crowds visited more conventional exhibitions in preceding years: Picasso in 1972 (490,000 visitors) and the 100 years of Impressionism exhibition in 1973 (500,000 visitors).10 The candid public reaction to the opening of the contemporary art museum was captured by Italian director Roberto Rossellini’s final 56-minute documentary film, Beaubourg (1977), which caught off-guard comments by visitors. Elsewhere, women were vocal about their hatred of Beaubourg for the alienation it represented and the seeming political and ‘phallic’ control that the building and its contents exerted over them: Tu penses alors à l’autre femme – la fausse femme peinte derrière la fausse fenêtre de la fausse façade de cet immeuble bien connu du centre Beaubourg. Et peut-être que tu te poses les fausses questions que l’on veut que tu te poses: tu te demandes s’il ne vaut pas mieux être cette vraie-fausse femme plutôt cette fausse-vraie femme, au risque, sinon, de n’être rien du tout: comme ce trou des Halles, stérile souvenir d’une fécondité qu’on t’interdit en la faisant croire périmée, perdue, mise de côté au profit de ce phallus-éprouvette, néo-dadaiste qu’est Beaubourg.11 Then you think of the other woman – the fake woman painted behind the fake window of the fake facade of this well-known building in the Beaubourg center. And maybe you ask yourself the false questions that they want you to ask yourself. You wonder if it’s not better to be this real-fake woman rather than this false-real woman, at the risk, otherwise, of being nothing at all: like this hole in Les Halles, a sterile memory of a fertility that is forbidden to you by making it seem out-of-date, lost, set aside for the benefit of this phallic-test-tube, neo-Dadaist Beaubourg.

It was up to individual women and their collectives to create opportunities to exhibit. Some failed (such as the large exhibition planned at ARC 2 discussed later in the chapter), while others succeeded to a certain extent, including the

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small-scale atelier exhibitions of Collectif Femmes/Art. In the 1970s, however, institutions for the most part remained ambivalent toward women. One exception was ARC / ARC 2, which staged various exhibitions such as Gisèle Freund (1968), Sara Holt (1971), Ruth Francken (1971), Alina Szapocznikow (1973), Tania Mouraud known as Mouraud (1973), Nil Yalter (1973), Annette Messager (1974), Hessie (1975), Jacqueline Dauriac (1975), Titina Maselli (1975), Nancy Blanchard (1976), Emma Kunz (1976), Hannah Höch (1976), Judit Reigl (1976), Florence Henri (1978), Magdalena Abakanowicz (1982), Joan Mitchell (1982), Nil Yalter (1983), Annette Messager (1984), and others, as well as mixed group shows such as Art / Vidéo Confrontation (1974) and Boîtes (1976–1977) that featured a number of women. However, it must be pointed out, as Opus did, that the budget for the Duchamp exhibition inaugurating the Centre Georges Pompidou in January 1977 was equivalent to twenty years of the budget spent on ARC.12 The bittersweet relationship between women and the state was manifested in works such as Dorothée Selz’s Palais de Justice (c. 1977), which was a photograph coated with sugar – suggesting the fragile relationship between ‘women’ with the state as well as the sucrée (sugary-sweet) promise of justice or fairness (implying falseness or ‘hypocrisy’), in addition to women’s heritage as domestic cooks/laborers for others’ visions rather than as ‘artists’ in their own right (Figure 5.2).13 There had been a number of important women gallery owners since the 1950s,14 and Iris Clert took the lead in 1974 with her exhibition of women

Dorothée Selz, Palais de Justice, c. 1977.

5.2 

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artists, Grandes femmes petits formats. In what she termed a ‘micro-salon’ at her gallery, she included Eva Aeppli, Geneviève Asse, Anna-Eva Bergman, Pierrette Bloch, Bona, Marcelle Cahn, Sonia Delaunay, [Natalia] Dumitriesco, Marianne Fayol (later UFPS president), Leonor Fini, Ruth Francken, Eve Gramatzki, Hessie, Shirley Jaffe, Françoise Janicot, [Ida] Karskaya, Nadia Léger, Liliane Lijn, Joan Mitchell, Tania Mouraud, [Milvia] Maglione, Joyce Mansour, Annette Messager, Jacqueline Monnier, Aurélie Nemours, Louise Nevelson, Nicola [L.], Niki de Saint Phalle, Meret Oppenheim, Vera Pagava, Marta Pan, Gina Pane, Marie Raymond, Bridget Riley, [Maria Helena] Vieira da Silva, Dorothée Selz and Osa Scherdin, representing abstraction, optical/ kinetic art, Surrealism, performance art, sculpture, photography, etc., that spanned several generations.15 The exhibition received some positive attention in the press for its focus on women.16 Clert herself, however, did not support the idea that exhibiting women artists was any type of meaningful ‘liberation’ and distanced herself from the MLF: Je ne sais pourquoi, le fait de réunir quatre-vingt-dix-neuf femmes semble à certains un geste de libération. De libération. De Mouvement de Libération des Femmes avec trois majuscules. Mais je ne veux libérer personne, moi! Mais je n’ai pas besoin d’être libérée. Je suis libre. Et comme je suis libre, je refuse les majuscules, et les mouvements.17 I do not know why the gathering of ninety-nine women seems to some to be a form of liberation. Of liberation. Of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes with three capital letters. But I do not want to liberate anyone! But I don’t need to be liberated. I’m free. And because I’m free, I refuse the capital letters, and the movements.

Clert asserted the fact that she was more ‘misogynist’ and had created the exhibition more out of an ‘interest’ in seeing women’s art exhibited together than for any overt political goals: ‘Au fond, je suis plutôt misogyne, c’est un fait. Les femmes qui se prennent pour des Femmes m’embêtent. Comme je n’ai pas de principes, et comme j’ai trouvé quatre-vingt-dix-neuf femmes que j’aime bien, il m’a paru intéressant de les voir exposer ensemble’ (Truthfully, I am a something of a misogynist, it’s a fact. Women who believe they represent all Women annoy me. As I lack principles, and as I found ninety-nine women that I like a lot, I thought it would be interesting to see them exhibit together).18 In 1975, UNESCO’s L’Année de la femme provided some encouragement for women artists and their exhibition and recognition. The most important spaces for women’s art, however, were perhaps at times the

Women’s groups and collective art practices

least visible. Outside the traditional UPFS, examined below, women were forced to organize in order to make a more cohesive impact on the state. The trajectories and achievements of the groups are described in the next section.

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Femmes artistes en lutte Inspired by MLF politics and their struggle to increase the freedom of their gender in society, women artists in France began to organize collectively in the 1970s in order to counteract the elitism of the male-dominated art world. The spell was altogether brief. Coming to fruition in the 1970s, after the spark of May ’68, a number of women sought opportunities to work together in order to instill self-confidence, seek mutual support through solidarity, and organize politically and professionally to define a group statement or increase the opportunities to share and exhibit their work. This was a different experience from that of women who had already come to artistic maturity after World War II or in the 1960s, such as Niki de Saint Phalle or Sheila Hicks, both of whom continued their successful careers in the 1970s.19 Artist Michèle Katz, appointed Secretary of the Jeune Peinture in 1969, was on the committee for the 24th Salon de la Jeune Peinture whose theme was ‘work’ for which she painted a couple making love over an alarm clock at 6 in the morning. Katz eventually quit over the other committee members’ unwillingness to recognize women’s structural oppression (by men) under capitalism and to protest the rules that governed participation in the salon.20 Her understanding was that for women the ‘phallocratic’ and ‘patriarchal’ system had to change before the conditions of the working class could improve.21 (She would go on to form a women’s, Groupe de Conscience, that would contribute to Simone de Beauvoir’s guest edited issue of Les Temps modernes – ‘Les femmes s’entêtent’ – in 1974; see Chapter 3.)22 In a lengthy dialogue with other group members – who included the Salon president Gérard Fromanger – reproduced in the salon’s exhibition catalogue of 1973, Katz was fiercely polemical: Le système d’exploitation de l’homme par l’homme marche très bien, l’image de l’homme au-dessus de tout ça etc., ne marche que parce qu’il y a le patriarcat. Une autre articulation sur la créativité, parce qu’effectivement les individus ne sont pas libres en général, ne sont pas créateurs. C’est pas nouveau. Vous avez lu: la créativité des femmes ne pourra être reconnue tant que les critères d’évaluation du génie seront ceux établis par la société phallocratique. Entre parenthèses, être le chef, le génie, le champion, ce sont des images typiquement masculines.23 The exploitation of man by man is a system that functions very well. The image of man at the top, etc., only works because of patriarchy. What

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this calls for is another form of creativity because individuals that are not generally free, cannot be creators. This isn’t new. You have read: women’s creativity cannot be recognized as long as the criteria evaluating genius are established by phallocratic society. As an aside, being leader, genius, champion, typically means male images.

Women’s artist groups provided one way in which to confront patriarchy and generate new forms of solidarity and creative excellence. These ‘female only’ driven art practices ranged from the speculative, essentialist or mystical (La Spirale), to the pointedly political (Femmes en Lutte), to an open artistic forum (Collectif Femmes/Art), to the promotion of international women’s creativity (Féminie-Dialogue), and to the interdisciplinary and experimental (Art et Regard des Femmes). This was certainly not the first time that women had organized together to promote themselves in the art world. The Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs (UFPS) was founded by the sculptor Madame Léon Bertaux in May 1881 as a union that would help women exhibit as well as attend the École des Beaux-Arts and be an artist in residence.24 The original UFPS was met with amusement and condescension at its inception as a forum for women’s arts in the late nineteenth century, as reviews of the shows reveal.25 Like women’s groups in the 1970s, the UFPS was founded in part by what Tamar Garb calls ‘the professionalization of women and their struggles to challenge the imposed limitations of their experience [with] an awareness born of feminist struggles [that] articulated their exclusion from existing institutions’.26 Garb also notes the socioeconomic necessity of forming groups outside these institutions and the predominantly male Salon des Indépendants, as well as what she characterizes as women’s interest in maintaining what was ‘good and noble in France’s artistic heritage’ alongside any burgeoning feminist concerns noted above.27 For women’s groups in the 1970s – post suffrage and post May ’68 – the concerns were still about finding a way in which to confront an art world that was conducive to women neither economically nor politically, as exhibitions in France during the 1970s confirmed. This struggle was reflected in the types of groups that were formed and the length of time they were active, as well as the purpose and ideology of their group – which varied from the spiritual to the militant and to open forums. The materiality of art made space a necessity, both in terms of its creation and of its exhibition. These realities demanded a commonality of purpose in economic and social terms for artists, in addition to meeting their personal and emotional needs. At the same time the groups had to be open to experimentation and discovery in ways that other ideological and predominantly male groups could not supply.

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Available space: Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, or ‘Le Salon des Femmes’ From its founding in 1881, the UFPS continued to be a forum for women artists to exhibit their work without a political ideology, in the tradition of promoting the talent of women artists as Bertaux had envisioned. However, in the 1970s, with the MLF at the height of its power, the politics of women’s liberation and women’s rights reached the Salon in the form not of radical politics, but of UNESCO’s L’Année de la femme. Intended to ‘celebrate’ women, the UNESCO event had instead turned a critical eye on women’s issues and events that year in Paris, as many feminists feared institutional appropriation of their struggles. In 1975, under the direction of Christiane de Casteras, the Salon raised a number of underlying debates over the quality of the works selected, the bourgeois nature of the salon, and its future with regard to its slightly passé reputation: Malheureusement les salons ont acquis une mauvaise réputation. On leur reproche de s’enliser dans la routine, d’offrir une vision de type ‘fourre-tout’ dont le seul but est de favoriser l’autosatisfaction. L’Union des femmes peintres et sculpteurs a pris conscience de son mal d’autant plus que sa réputation de réunion ‘mondaine’ apparaissait de plus en plus anachronique à notre époque. Ce que le nouveau jury a essayé de réaliser pour ce salon 1975? D’abord une sélection beaucoup plus rigoureuse. Puis tout en restant sévère sur la qualité, nous avons voulu des expressions qui représentent l’art contemporain dans son aspect vivant.28 Unfortunately, the salons have acquired a bad reputation. They are criticized for getting bogged down in routine, offering a ‘mishmash’ type of vision whose sole aim is to encourage self-satisfaction. The Union of Women Sculptors and Painters have given consideration to its faults and even more so since its reputation as a ‘fashionable’ meeting place now seems more and more out of date. What did the new jury try to achieve for the 1975 salon? Firstly, a much more rigorous selection. Secondly, whilst remaining rigorous about quality, we wanted styles representative of contemporary art as it exists today.

It is worth recognizing that a number of contemporary women artists were looking to separate themselves from the Salon. The result was the basis for the foundation of groups such as Femmes en Lutte, which took on a more militant feminist perspective. In this it anticipated Christiane de Casteras’s own break with the Salon to form the group Dialogue and the exhibitions Féminie (also

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known as Féminie-Dialogue for the collaboration). Collectif Femmes/Art also implicitly set itself out against Salon art by upholding ‘anti-bourgeois’ art using psychoanalytic and theoretical underpinnings to define the ‘anti-structure’ of the group, which had been formed as much out of the failed attempt to exhibit at ARC 2 as of Salon politics.29 Dany Bloch, vidéaste at ARC 2, was a member of the jury for the 1975 UFPS Salon, from which she later resigned partly due the disjuncture she saw between the work that was presented to her and the state of contemporary art – in particular, the avant-garde. In her resignation Bloch stated: J’avais accepté avec plaisir de faire partie du jury du Salon des Femmes Peintres … Je démissionne avec regret: en toute honnêteté, il m’est impossible de cautionner un choix qui ne saurait être le mien puisque j’ai refusé les trois quarts des dossiers qui m’ont été soumis. Je pensais proposer et défendre une certaine ‘avant-garde’ et il semble bien que ma participation au jury le sous-entendait. Pour moi, CASTRO, DAURIAC, MAGLIONE, MOURAUD, JANICOT, MESSAGER, PANE, SELZ … sont des artistes avant d’être des femmes et ce qu’elles ont à dire va bien au-delà des propos couramment tenus sur la condition féminine. Or, elles ont refusé de participer à ce Salon, ou se sont désistées après avoir réfléchi; leurs raisons sont des plus valables et elles les ont défendues avec humour et passion …30 I had accepted with pleasure to be part of the jury of the Salon des Femmes Peintres … I resign with regret: in all honesty, it is impossible for me to endorse a choice that cannot be my own since I refused three quarters of the files that were submitted to me. I thought to put forward and uphold a certain ‘avant-garde’ and it seems that my participation in the jury implied as much. For me, CASTRO, DAURIAC, MAGLIONE, MOURAUD, JANICOT, MESSENGER, PANE, SELZ … are artists before being ‘women’ and what they have to say goes far beyond what is commonly said about the female condition. However, these women refused to participate in this Salon, or withdrew after a period of reflection; their reasons are absolutely valid ones and they defended them with humor and passion ….

Bloch’s defense of the women who were working in what she calls the ‘avantgarde’ in the 1970s was to some extent a contradiction of the politics of the Salon des Femmes, which was trying to give women artists of quality (and not just ‘fashion’) a legitimate voice. For Bloch, however, the question was of honoring ‘talent’.

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For many long-time participants of the UFPS, the Salon was a chance to exhibit works that were the fruits of often figurative or abstract practices. It provided the women opportunities to grow as independent artists and refine their craft without the pressure of market forces. Most importantly for women, however, was that their work was seen. A supportive community grew out of the Salon for women who admired each other’s work. In an interview, Thérèse Boucraut, a repeat contributor to the Salon in the 1980s, admitted to feeling the constant pressure of working against the trends of the time.31 However, the UFPS in 1975 had attempted to define a new generation of women artists, by exhibiting traditional works alongside more cutting-edge contemporary ones. The show combined pieces by Ruth Francken and Françoise Janicot, a statement of protest by Annette Messager, and work by Nicola [L.], with works from a previously established generation such as the abstraction and geometrical abstraction of Pierrette Bloch, Marcelle Cahn, Geneviève Claisse, Sonia Delaunay (who designed the Année de la femme poster), [Ida] Karskaya, Aurélie Nemours, and the sculpture of Osa Scherdin.32 (The strategy of including protests by Dany Bloch and Annette Messager, for example, tried to highlight the tensions surrounding women’s art instead of masking them.) Politically motivated art that directly referenced the MLF was also included, such as Lell Boehm’s Thèse sans passion, as well as the pregnancy/abortion debate such as Céline Chalem’s Mademoiselle Vidéo. The show, held at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris from 14 February to 3 March 1975 and benefiting much from the attention raised by L’Année de la femme, attempted to show the new, bold directions the Salon could take in the future through its rich and diverse panel of jury members and participants. These included artists such as Brassaï, Jean Dewasne, Édouard Pignon (husband of novelist and essayist Hélène Parmelin) and critics Jean-Jacques Levêque and Pierre Mazars, panel discussions with Yvette Roudy, Gisèle Halimi, film directors such as Yannick Bellon and Agnès Varda, discussions on Suzanne Horer and Jeanne Socquet’s book La création étouffée, and a number of debates and homages to women artists such as Suzanne Valadon, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Sonia Delaunay, Marie Laurencin, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and others.33 Salon culture and women artists The one constant of the Salon UFPS is that there was a diversity of artists and representation. Amongst its artists in the 1970s there was often a mixture of abstraction and semi-abstraction, representational and figurative work, Surrealist-inspired practices (Simone Lacour was trained in part by René Magritte), and École de Paris cubist-inspired work (a few, such as Thérèse Boucraut, Colette Levine and Bernadette Kelly were at the Grande Chaumière

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and the atelier(s) of Marcel Gromaire and/or André Lhote). The second point about the UFPS is that it rarely defined the career of the participating artists. For many of them the UFPS was a meeting ground, a point of solidarity, as well as a door-opener to further exhibitions and a means of allowing the public exposure to their work. For artist Simone Lacour, the Salon was a ‘belle rigolade, rien contre’ (good fun, nothing against it).34 At times the women participating in the Salon were more independent in spirit than the women who followed ideological groups or trends – if less commercially successful. In speaking of their figurative practices, Colette Levine said (referring to herself and friend and fellow artist Bernadette Kelly): ‘Ni Bernadette ni moi ne faisons partie du groupe. Je ne peux pas juger. Ce sont ces femmes qui s’en sortent le mieux’ (Neither Bernadette nor I were part of a group. I can’t judge. These are the women who fare better).35 In contrast to artists like Jacqueline Dauriac, who had key institutional support (such as her 1975 exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris) and who stated that for her, ‘Ce n’était jamais un problème d’exposer’ (It was never a problem to exhibit), for other women artists who were not working in particular trends the Salon provided a venue for them to exhibit their works and join in solidarity with other women artists.36 It also permitted women with families to pursue their career while balancing their family duties, as was the case for Colette Levine and Thérèse Boucraut.37 The latter also commented on the lack of opportunities and the ‘centralization’ of exhibitions in the 1970s before DRAC/FRAC, supported by Jack Lang, created more chances to exhibit in the provinces.38 Boucraut had found the Minister of Culture (Jacques Duhamel) ‘trop dominant’ during the 1972 Douze ans d’art contemporain en France, which had limited their opportunities to exhibit.39 Due to the shifting reputation of the Salon, some women celebrated their participation while others deliberately left it off their CV in later years in order to appear more commercial.40 Many women artists felt the presence of the women’s rights movement in the 1970s. For painter Geneviève Zondervan its influence may have been as overt as moving from her precise socialist architect-inspired geometric practice – her mainstay since the 1950s – to a sudden interest in figurative art and the landscapes of the female body she produced from the 1970s onwards (Plate 41). Colette Levine, a member of Gisèle Halimi’s Choisir, also created pastel drawings of nude females in the 1970s and was occasionally involved in Psychanalyse et Politique (Plate 42). Bernadette Kelly, who produced original photographs of May ’68 (seen in Chapter 1) and worked on the posters for May ’68 in the Beaux-Arts, painted romantic portraits, such as Dimanche (1968) (Plate 43) with its groups of young students and lovers, and the placid, intimiste-feel of the light-saturated studio of a woman painter in Atelier jaune (1978) with its elaborate mise-en-scène

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of windows and canvases, that can be seen as testing the values of the new society. Thérèse Boucraut also continued to produce figurative works in the 1970s (Plate 44). English-born painter Gerda Sutton, who trained with André Lhote, produced violent forms of abstraction and collage. Marianne Fayol, UFPS president in the mid-1980s, worked on careful abstraction that reflected years of practice in l’art construit, which used layers of light, lines and geometrical and crystal-like forms in subtle gradations of color (Plate 45). (Fayol’s personal history was remarkable. Born Marianne Israël in 1909 to a bourgeois Jewish family in Strasbourg, she married Pierre Lévy and lived primarily in Marseille. In 1942, Marianne and Pierre, fleeing persecution under the Vichy regime, joined the French Resistance in Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Haute-Loire, where thousands of Jewish refugees were saved from deportation.41 Whilst in the Resistance, they would cross paths with Albert Camus.42 Later, Marianne moved with her husband to Morocco, where she taught art and exhibited her work until the country’s independence in 1956. During this period, she would return to Paris for an extended break to become a student of André Lhote in 1951.) Fayol had been a frequent contributor to the UFPS since 1964 and her influence in the Salon over time was clearly felt.43 The lives of women artists, especially as independents, had a precarious nature. Although some had gallery representation, semi-figurative and abstract painter Lucienne Berthon worked for a number of years running an agency that made cartoons and films, Colette Levine produced a textbook on creating pastels, while others accepted commissions and/or taught, or had husbands on whom they could rely financially to some extent. Catherine Gonnard produced a documentary of the women who had participated in the UFPS and their experiences, interviewing them in their studios and presenting their life stories.44 The Salon, however, was becoming increasingly less political by the time of MLF struggles; the attempt to address these issues, as in the 1975 catalogue, only led to some discontent in trying to reshape this historical, long-standing institution. MLF and ART: Une nouvelle génération In France, as elsewhere, women artists gained varying levels of public recognition and exhibition histories in the 1970s. But they also subsequently reinvented themselves in order to develop their legacy and keep their work relevant outside any commitment to a ‘feminist’ project in the 1970s. (Indeed it is my finding [over the course of numerous interviews], as well as that of Griselda Pollock, that in the early 2000s many women for political reasons denied their interest/involvement with 1970s feminism or, as Pollock puts it, ‘actively disown that legacy’ so as to not be labeled ‘feminist’ due to professional or

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market pressures.)45 Although most women artists in France were not directly involved in MLF demonstrations (some, including Raymonde Arcier, did participate), almost all knew of its existence, even if any substantive influence on their life or practice varied according to the artist. For certain artists like Françoise Eliet and others, the feminist influence was an impetus to the formation of all-women art groups, as the MLF did not directly support women artists; for others including Anne Delfieu, it was small, private acts such as donating money for impoverished women to travel for abortions in the Netherlands (pre-la loi Veil); while another set of women artists such as Judit Reigl or Gina Pane (via partner Anne Marchand) have strongly denied any ‘political’ or feminist influences in their work.46 Some women artists interviewed expressed the view that although political events remained highly influential in their personal development, they were not always directly manifested in their work. This was the case for the daughter of André Breton and painter Jacqueline Lamba, the collagist Aube Elléouët: ‘Je suis très frappée de ces années; les femmes de tous les pays différents et l’esclavage permanent des femmes’ (I am very struck by these years; women from so many different countries and the permanent slavery that women experienced).47 For the British painter Angelica Garnett, living on and off for decades in the South of France, and more permanently there since the 1980s, there was a distance from Paris’s militant events (although she was aware of them). In her case, the feminist influence was not politically immediate but a result of her lived experience with the Bloomsbury Group and her years working independently in France. (Garnett was the daughter of artist Vanessa Bell and the niece of Virginia Woolf.)48 For others such as Christiane de Casteras and Andrée Marquet who participated in and/or organized FéminieDialogue and the UFPS, the political interest translated into more stimulating and/or additional exhibitions that broke with any institutional role. At the same time the output of filmmakers – notably Carole Roussopoulos’s various militant documentaries in the 1970s and Coline Serreau’s Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veulent (1975–1978) and Agnès Varda’s L’Une chante, l’autre pas (1976) – can be seen as actively reflecting the goals of the MLF while simultaneously stimulating the movement, as seen in the film reviews published in journals. Thus film (and literature) appeared to have translated the militants’ political goals more quickly than did the visual arts. Groups 1: La Spirale Charlotte Calmis’s group La Spirale, formed in 1972, brought together women under her guidance to create art and writing from ‘alternate sources’ of energy derived from spirituality, as one method to confront patriarchal culture.49 If Psych et Po used psychoanalysis to investigate women’s libidinal drives and

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instincts, La Spirale turned to metaphysics as another source of political power: SPI et non PSI, ‘Psi comme psychanalyse, comme psychologie, comme psychopolitique, comme psychose …’ Colette Martin notre amie Kabbaliste, spirâliste, fait siffler, souffler le mot SPI et RALE. Spiritualité, sacralité et réalité, pourquoi pas? La parole de la femme reste toujours et encore l’INTERDIT de cette ‘autre’ chose à dire. Quoi? Une métaphysique du secret? … L’inaudible de ce continent noir, l’ombre et à l’ombre des tabous frontières du seul langage souverain en cours, le discours PSI et POL de notre civilisation en berne. Courant d’énergie Yang fureur, violence, syntaxe et codification.50 SPI and not PSI. ‘Psy like psychoanalysis, like psychology, like psychopolitics, like psychosis …’ Colette Martin, our Kabbalist friend, spi-ralist, whistles, breathes the word ‘Spi’ and ‘Ral’ [n.b. in French ‘grumbles’]. Spirituality, sacrality and reality, why not? Women’s speech is and continues to be FORBIDDEN from this ‘other’ thing to say. What? A metaphysics of the secret? … The inaudible of this dark continent, the shadow and in the shadow of the border taboos of the only sovereign language, the discourse PSI et POL of our flagging civilization. Current of energy, Yang furor, violence, syntax and codification.

This mixture of language, of both ‘SPI’ from ‘Spi’-rale and ‘PSI’ for psychanalyse, etc., reveals the double strategy of attaching the concepts of psychoanalysis (such as women as ‘le continent noir’) and the possibility of spirituality as a non-codified, non-hierarchical language available to ‘every’ woman. Antoinette Fouque’s position as leader of Psych et Po bore some similarities to Charlotte Calmis’s charismatic leadership of La Spirale. Meeting in cafés, the group comprised about thirty members at a time (often with different participants representing all classes and/or outcasts from other political groups) who were allowed to enter and leave the premises freely.51 Dedicated to art, literature and other exploratory forms, the politics of La Spirale contrived to be ‘apolitical’: ‘A-POLITIQUE REVOLUTIONNAIRE! Politique de femmes à inventer ensemble’ (A-POLITICS OF REVOLUTION! The politics of women inventing together).52 The group’s collective practice was designed to include women participating in exercises (such as silence) to stimulate their creativity and work together.53 One example was the reinvention of the female body using a multitude of names and phrases to create a corporeal practice, to reflect a corpus. An image created by the women of La Spirale for the Femmes en Lutte section of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture included a drawing of a woman, Gaia, by Charlotte Calmis and twenty-seven signatures of women participants in the group (Figure 5.3). The image, which uses the title of Gaia, or the Greek earth

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La Spirale, Gaia, 1975.

goddess, predicts some of the later goddess-based philosophy of feminism and ecology proposed in the late 1970s by American scholars Gloria Orenstein and Mary Daly in her Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978). Created in the year of UNESCO’s L’Année de la femme, the image shows the result of a plural art practice with individual poetic phrases such as ‘Profonde et sans fond nos corps nos pensées sont à être et à créer – Françoise’ placed on the thigh and ‘Tracer l’harmonie différente d’une mathématique d’espace de femme – Mireille’ written on the wrist (Deep and without a limit to the depths, our body, our thoughts are to be and to be created – Françoise / To trace the different harmony of the mathematics of a woman’s space – Mireille). The work is one of the few by La Spirale to exist since the group, as contemporary feminist critic Aline Dallier noted, was not well known in the art world apart from Calmis’s own works.54 However, the intention to challenge the art world was a stated purpose of the group’s doctrine: Y a-t-il une spécificité de la création féminine? Existe-t-elle … cette énergie muette gommée par l’histoire? Verdict des sociétés: ‘la femme engendre, elle ne crée pas’. … Quelle fut l’attitude de la société française face à une des plus importantes explosions de la peinture féminine dans l’abstraction, le surréalisme et autres mouvements?

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Une enquête auprès des galeries les plus importantes de Paris (Galerie Maeght, Galerie de France, Galerie Arnaud, etc. etc. etc.) révèle que chacune en vingt ans n’a exposé qu’une seule femme peintre.

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Cette année de la femme (au nom de raisons politiques peu avouables) est en train de récupérer, ridiculiser et manipuler une des plus importantes démarches de l’histoire … la libération de la psyché féminine, consciente enfin de sa richesse, de son énergie et de sa liberté à prendre …55 Is there a specificity to women’s creation? Does it still exist? This mute energy erased by history? Society’s verdict: ‘woman engenders, she does not create’. What was French society’s attitude to one of the most important explosions of women’s painting in abstraction, surrealism and other movements? A poll of the most important Parisian galleries (Galerie Maeght, Galerie de France, Galerie Arnaud, etc. etc. etc.) reveals that in twenty years each gallery exhibited only one woman painter. This ‘Year of the Women’ (created in name only for little respected political ideals) is appropriating, ridiculing, and manipulating one of the most important initiatives in history … the liberation of women’s psyche, conscious at long last of its richness, of its energy and of the liberty to be had.

This liberation of the psychical feminine was not addressed in exhibitions that ignored women’s artistic work and consistently overlooked women’s influence in dominant artistic trends. (This attitude of course predates the major exhibitions and scholarly contributions redressing the balance, such as Linda Nochlin and Anne Sutherland Harris’s exhibition, Women Artists 1550–1950, Künstlerinnen International 1877–1977 in Berlin in March 1977, and books such as Lea Vergine’s L’autre moitié de l’avant-garde (1982 in French/1980 in Italian).) The attitude of Calmis and the other group members who created the petition stemmed from their dissatisfaction with the exhibitions they saw dedicated to women in 1975: Les expositions de cette année de la femme à Paris révèlent l’ambiguïté octroyée à la création féminine. Par exemple … l’exposition aux Arts Décoratifs ‘Les femmes peintres du Mithila aux Indes’. Exposition qui révèle que pour apprivoiser les ‘Dieux Mâles’ les femmes-peintres-poètes-du-Mithila préserveront durant des millénaires les rites, la tradition et les Mythes, sans rien changer, sans modifier le code chiffré du Sacré. L’adaptation à la politique, à la technique, à l’esthétique phallocratique est encore aujourd’hui pour toutes créatrices féminines le feu vert de leur admission dans la Société-Mâle.56

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The exhibitions of this année de la femme [Year of the Woman] in Paris reveal the ambiguity granted to women’s creativity. Let’s take for example, the exhibition at the Arts Décoratifs, The Mithila Woman Painters of India. This exhibition reveals that to tame ‘Male Gods’ the woman-painter-poets of Mithila have perpetuated the same rites, traditions and myths without any change for thousands of years, failing to alter the ciphered code underlying the Sacred. Adapting to the politics, techniques, and phallocratic aesthetics remains till today the green light of their admission into Male-dominated Society.

Women’s art created out of submission to masculine domination also dissatisfied Calmis’s group, which sought a more authentic and essential female voice.57 The release of a more profound source of ‘cosmic’ energy and the liberation of the internal dialogue through writing on a white piece of paper were amongst the practices of the group.58 (The latter exercise shares qualities with the ‘automatic writing’ of the Surrealists, although for Calmis it was a gendered practice in that it awakened the latent and unexploited creative feminine energy of women.) This compares with other women artists who were Jewish-born like Calmis, such as Ruth Francken, who referenced goddess imagery in Lilith (1972), and Liliane Lijn who directly credits her religion in her understandings of female primeval energy (see Chapter 4). This idealized ‘goddess’ energy contrasts with other forms of feminist art such as Annette Messager’s Mes jalousies (1972), which did not seek to find a unified feminine energy but rather to show the split and dissociation in women’s experience as a reflection of contemporary society and the power of subjective (and negative) feeling in everyday life. The ‘mystical’ focus led to a misunderstanding of the group, according to Marie-Jo Bonnet, who finds the message particularly reductive of Calmis’s teachings.59 However, contemporary critics such as Aline Dallier were in part responsible for perpetuating that message in the 1970s.60 Some were deeply critical of such a mythology for women; Lawrence Alloway in 1976 even drew a parallel with men and abstract expressionism: ‘To compare the improvised myths of the ’70s with the male equivalents of the ’40s shows that the mother-goddess is as intellectually disreputable as the hero-king.’ 61 If La Spirale was seen as mystic, Calmis also had solid political and practical goals for the group. These included finding La Spirale’s purpose in art history and ways to counterbalance male perspectives in art. In a group statement written in 1974, La Spirale aimed to not only organize exhibitions of art created in the group, but also arrange conferences to explore women’s creativity and present the work of ‘unknown’ women artists.62 As part of the process of creation and opening out beyond the confines of the group, La

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Spirale appealed to the MLF to join them in an ‘exhibition of feminism’ that took the form of liberating the ‘cri sur la page blanche’ (outcry on the blank page) which included poems, collages, posters, tapestries, reliefs, illustrations and decoupage. Each group of the MLF was to ask for public places for it to be shown, such as a museum or at the mairie.63 At the same time La Spirale denounced the activities of commercial galleries for their failure to support women artists in the past, and specifically targeted Parisian galleries for the oversight: L’Amateur d’Art du jeudi 24 octobre 1974 nous annonce (ironiquement) qu’un nouveau Salon de la Femme sera créé en 1975 sur les cendres des salons des années précédentes. … La nausée nous envahit. Cette récupération est un scandale. Qu’ont fait les galeries, comme celle d’Iris Clert, pour montrer les œuvres féminines durant ces vingt dernières années – bien entendu avant que le féminisme ne soit à la mode? Combien d’ateliers de femmes peintres depuis vingt années ont été exposées par ces galeries parisiennes? Jugez-en. La galerie Maeght expose en vingt ans un seul sculpteur femme. La galerie Arnaud expose deux femmes peintres durant ce même lapse de temps. La galerie de France en avoue deux également. L’enquête menée auprès d’une vingtaine de galeries nous donne les mêmes références.64 L’Amateur d’Art on Thursday, October 24, 1974, has announced (ironically) that a new Salon de la Femme (Women’s Salon) will be created in 1975 on the ashes of the previous salons … Nausea overcomes us. This appropriation is a scandal. What have the galleries done – like the one run by Iris Clert – to exhibit women’s art in the last twenty years – before feminism became fashionable? Let’s judge. Galerie Maeght exhibited only a single woman sculptor in the last twenty years. Galerie Arnaud exhibited only two women painters during this same period. Galerie de France admitted to showing two women also. A poll of close to twenty galleries reveals the same thing.

Using statistics to build their case, La Spirale attacked the hypocrisy of Parisian galleries for attempting to organize an exhibition in 1975 to mark L’Année de la femme, while having shown only one or two token women in the previous twenty years. The exhibition, Du riffiffi chez les femmes peintres (rififi = slang for fight/combat), was to be organized by asking women to present a file containing photos of their work along with a personal picture, for selection by a jury of ten women (including Iris Clert) and ten men. Conferences, seminars and films were to be organized so as to ‘sensibiliser le public le plus large et d’être le reflet le plus objectif de l’art au féminin’ (sensitize the greatest number of people and be the most accurate reflection of art made by women).65 La

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Spirale pointed out that many of these galleries had been ignoring women’s contribution for two decades: Est-ce à dire qu’il n’y avait pas de talents féminins, qu’il n’y avait pas d’œuvres à exposer? Nous témoignons qu’il y a eu durant ces vingt années une explosion de la création féminine plastique. Nous témoignons que nombre d’ateliers de femmes qui ont des œuvres importantes sont restés dans le silence et l’oubli. Nous témoignons que les recherches les plus importantes de l’abstraction lyrique et de la couleur ont été menées par des femmes.66 Is this to say that women with talent do not exist, that they have no works of art to exhibit? We say that in the course of the last twenty years there has been an explosion of women’s plastic arts. We say that a number of women’s studios containing important works have remained in silence and obscurity. We say that the most important research on lyrical abstraction and color is spearheaded by women.

Part of La Spirale’s initiative was to draw attention to weaknesses in institutions and commercial galleries, while showing that important work by women remained in obscurity, or ‘darkness.’ In this way, beliefs imposed on female identity, such as Freud’s ‘dark continent’ (which was a specific reference to women’s sexuality used elsewhere by La Spirale), slip or slide into interpretations of women’s art, or even into the analyses of the material conditions of women’s lives and practices. So it follows that La Spirale was trying to reinstate women within a wider artistic current by liberating both women and their art even if ultimately relying on projections about their identity in order to do so. (The reference to women’s use of color, specifically, and lyrical abstraction, suggest a canny repositioning, or a different future for them.) The project of recovering and highlighting women’s names and art that were overlooked began in the 1970s and continues into the present. What set La Spirale apart from other groups was their emphasis on trying to find a women’s ‘specificity’, or female energy, and then translate it into an individual or shared artistic practice. These experiences, in turn, shaped the group’s beliefs about the exhibition of women’s art (Figure 5.4). In 1977 La Spirale organized the exhibition Utopie et féminisme, held at the Centre International de Séjour de Paris in the 12th arrondissement from 3 to 19 February 1977 (Figure 5.5). The exhibition was designed to focus on women’s creative ‘difference’ that would challenge the existing patriarchal culture not by directly confronting it, but by turning to ‘other’ ideals such as psychical, physical and spiritual values.67 This exhibition strategy relied on running ‘parallel’ to existing culture, by employing other ‘structures’, ‘motivations’ and ‘potentials of

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La Spirale, group photo 1977. Pictured: Françoise Basch, Charlotte Calmis, Jann Matlock, Maj Skadegård, Catherine Valabrègue and other artists.

5.4 

La Spirale, Utopie et féminisme, 3–19 February 1977. Centre International de Séjour de Paris.

5.5 

beauty’, rather than trying to force itself into the mainstream.68 It included paintings, tapestries, drawings, ceramics, objects, sculptures, texts and poems, and showed works by Louise Batnin, Bonna [sic] (Bona de Mandiargues), Charlotte Calmis, Guidette Carbonnell, Dominique Dalozo, Jeannine Fortin,

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La Spirale, Discussion at Utopie et féminisme, 1977.

Greca, Léone Hébert, Louise Janin, Edda Maillet, [Nelly] Marez-Darley, Vera Pagava, Yvonne Régnier, Jeanine Dabourin and Le groupe italien de Némésiaques (Figure 5.6).69 Only two members of La Spirale were part of the show.70 Reactions to the exhibition were mixed.71 A public debate was also organized on the subject of ‘Y-a-t-il une spécificité de la création féminine?’ (Is there a specificity to women’s creation?) with writers Annie Le Brun (who published her scathing critique of feminism, Lâchez tout, that year), Catherine Valabrègue, Madeleine Laïk and Evelyne Le Garrec.72 Although the exhibition was poetic in language and feel, the political impulses were also evident in 1977 with the slow fading of the MLF’s goals after the abortion law. This created a new language in the women’s movement: ‘Apprendre à s’écouter, à “s’entendre” chacune, ensemble, peut devenir Révolution et nouveau militantisme de femmes’ (To learn to listen to one another, to ‘hear’ each individual and collective voice could lead to Revolution and a new activism for women).73 Even with the slow dissolution of La Spirale around the end of the decade, Charlotte Calmis’s utopic vision continued as she championed a proposed museum for women’s art in 1979. She cited specific goals for women artists, such as the preservation of the works of women before they disappear; the creation of a photographic record of the works; the necessity of forming connections between art and research; and the need to stimulate new ways in which to conceive and run a Musée de Femmes. The latter would be organized by a dozen women of all ages and experience with the quality of the work being judged by artists themselves.74 At the same time she criticized the way in which institutions were choosing works (mainly of critically acclaimed male artists) and the way in which decisions were taken in the late 1970s: ‘Et dois-je protester, pour toutes, de l’absence totale de l’organisation de l’espace des femmes elles-mêmes, vivant ces espaces dans l’exil de leur potentialité

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créatrice … ce lieu de la coupure du dialogue de l’intelligence et de la responsabilité, fondamental pour l’humanité’ (And must I protest, on behalf of all women, against the total absence of an organized space for them? These women who live in exile from their creative potential … this place of rupture in the dialogue between intelligence and responsibility, which is fundamental for humanity).75 Calmis’s sharp focus on the external art world and its organization of power, coupled with her internal explorations of alternative sources of female energy and women’s creativity defined the poetic and political goals for her group until its dissolution around 1982. Groups 2: Femmes en Lutte Marching on a rainy Saturday afternoon from the Place de la Bastille to the Place d’Italie in Paris, more than 2,000 women gathered to protest the events of UNESCO’s L’Année de la femme on the International Day of Women on 8 March 1975.76 Their chanted slogans reprise their feelings: ‘Travail, famille, patrie, y en a marre!’ ‘Ni Giroud ni l’ONU ne parlent à notre place’ ‘Les hommes ne savent plus quoi faire … Ils causent de nous dans les forums … Ils nous préparent de petites réformes. Trois pas en avant, trois pas en arrière, trois pas sur le côté, trois pas de l’autre côté …’ 77 Work, family, homeland, sick of it! Neither Giroud nor the UN speak for us Men don’t know what to do … They chatter about us in the forums … They propose small reforms on our behalf. Three steps forward, three steps back, three steps to the side, three steps to the other side …

Many women amongst the MLF groups were vehemently against the way in which women’s issues were superficially appropriated by the establishment to create the L’Année de la femme, thus undermining to some extent their own work. A group of women artists also responded to the ideology of L’Année de la femme while critiquing the policy of the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs held earlier that year in February. They wanted to make a visual and political response at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture held at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris from 18 April to 6 May 1975.78 The women artists called themselves Femmes en Lutte (a name attributed to Nil Yalter) and were composed of Claude Antonini, Claude Bauret-Allard, Charlotte Calmis (and the group of La Spirale), Isabelle Champion-Métadier, Pascaline Cuvelier, Florence Julien, Kiki, Irène Laksine, Milvia Maglione, Marie-Annick MaupuDugain, Nicole Métayer, Françoise Noël, Raphaëlle Pia, Dorothée Selz, and

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others labeled simply as ‘et d’autres’ such as Liliane Camier, Cristina Martinez, Nil Yalter and Hessie.79 (Hessie’s individual work for the salon that year [since lost] consisted of an intervention in the form of a perforated photograph of an embroidered work – likely Trous [Plate 47] – that directly engaged feminist debates with the punched-out words ‘OUI’ and ‘NON’ and, at the base, in her handwriting ‘le droit de vote de la femme’ [women’s right to vote] [Figure 0.2].) The jury of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture included Dorothée Selz, who was also a member of Femmes en Lutte and the only female on the elevenmember jury.80 The imbalance between men and women on the jury not only revealed the need for a critique by women of the events in the art world in the ‘year of the woman’, but also reflected the history of dominance by male artists in the Salon since its creation in 1949.81 Political in trajectory since the 1960s, the 26th Salon in 1975 included groups such as Anti-fascisme, CollectifÉcologie, Groupe 18 mars, La Commune à l’offensive, Confrontation, Peintres dissidents de l’URSS, Vie Quotidienne, etc.82 Within this climate a number of women artists organized and responded by exploring their gender and identity through a political lens. The initial group (which Diana Quinby notes as meeting privately in each other’s studios from the autumn of 1973) comprised Dorothée Selz, Isabelle Champion-Métadier, Hessie, Milvia Maglione, Vera Molnar, Nil Yalter, Liliane Camier, Catherine Hekking, Michèle Katz, Cristina Martinez, Anne Saussois and others, who gathered to discuss their roles as artists which included some questions of feminine sexual identity as proposed by Psychanalyse et Politique (whose theoretical difficulty was a hindrance for some artists) as well the militancy of the left-wing MLF group, the Marxist Les Pétroleuses.83 The latter ‘group’ used the designation ‘Tendance lutte de classe du mouvement de libération des femmes’ and had radical left allegiances; it was sensitive to the exploitation of women in terms of class, family and work, to the role of women in perpetuating capitalism/ consumption, and to women’s sexuality, including abortion rights.84 Marxism provided a political critique in which to explore images of women in society that were later presented at the Salon. One example was De l’utilisation de la femme dans la publicité (On the use of women in advertising), a collage of advertising images that are collectively commented upon by women in their own hand (Figure 5.7). Statements such as ‘Maintenant Les Hommes Vont Aimer Les Femmes Qui Font La Vaisselle’ (Now Men Will Love Women Who Do The Dishes) is written in felt pen next to a conventional image of a man seducing a woman, while photos of a woman’s naked bottom with the words ‘Le Cul au Service du Capital’ (Sex in Service of Capital), and of the face of a woman on a can of food with the phrase ‘les plats préparés en boîte, C’est Bel et Bon, Les Boîtes’ (ready-made meals in a can, It’s Tasty and Good, Cans) comment on women as objects of exploitation in sex and in work, specifically

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Femmes en Lutte, De l’utilisation de la femme dans la publicité, 1975.

in the kitchen. This attempt to reclaim ‘images’ of women in society not only had links with the MLF’s own militant attacks on advertisements by firms such as Moulinex or DIM; it also created a way in which women artists could begin to reclaim an identity inherent to the specific artist, by first collectively ridding themselves of imagery promoted by advertisements in a capitalist society. The statement of intent provided by Femmes en Lutte focused on two main areas of artistic- and gender-based concerns behind UNESCO’s L’Année de la femme and the general philosophy of the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs exhibition that took place in February of that year. The women artists rejected the invitation to participate in the UFPS salon, taking exception to the choice of works and their apolitical status: En définitive ce salon est complètement stérile par rapport à la possibilité d’une véritable analyse de la fonction de la pratique artistique aujourd’hui, et plus particulièrement par rapport à la possibilité d’une analyse de la pratique artistique spécifiquement féminine; et ce salon risque de tromper l’opinion publique sur les actuelles préoccupations de la femme artiste et de la femme en général. Cette manifestation démontre une fois de plus que les femmes ne peuvent pas faire aujourd’hui une manifestation (ou une action) quelle qu’elle soit (artistique ou autre) sans faire préalablement une analyse politique de leur situation réelle dans la société.

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L’importance de ce texte est de concerner toutes les femmes dans leur pratique quotidienne du travail, et de dénoncer l’esprit de mystification dans lequel le cadre de l’Année Internationale de la Femme nous implique. Il est indispensable de faire un APPEL MASSIF AFIN DE PRÉVENIR TOUTES MANIPULATIONS dans tous les domaines.85 In the end, this show is utterly pointless when compared to the possibility of a legitimate analysis of the role of artistic practice today, and even more so in relation to the possibility of an analysis of a specifically women’s artistic practice; and this show is likely to mislead public opinion about the present-day concerns of woman artists and women in general. This exhibition demonstrates once more that women today cannot run an event (or initiative) of any kind (artistic or not) without first making a political analysis of their actual situation in society. The text is important because it concerns women in their daily practice of work and denounces the spirit of mystification in which the organization of l’Année Internationale de la Femme [International Women’s Year] tries to involve us. It is essential to make a MASSIVE APPEAL TO STOP ALL MANIPULATION in every part of life.

This thrust toward discovering a feminine identity was echoed in the text added by Charlotte Calmis and La Spirale, which focused on the lack of women’s work on display in museums and galleries and the importance of the feminine energy and ‘specificity’ seen in works of art: ‘La créativité de la femme manifeste aujourd’hui cette prise de conscience, la liberté de choisir la survie même de l’humanité! Parole, écriture, gestes, pensée arc-boutés contre le discours mâle … la spécificité EXISTE, se manifeste, témoigne et crée’ (The creativity of women today manifests this awareness, the freedom to choose the very survival of humanity! Speech, writing, gestures, committed thought against male discourse … specificity EXISTS, manifests, testifies and creates itself).86 Femmes en Lutte were aggressive in challenging any political solution or the creation and appropriation of an ‘easy’ feminine identity that did not take account of women’s differences, such as those proposed by the documentation of UNESCO’s L’Année de la femme.87 The group instead sought to discover feminine identity through a negation of the imagery of women in society, as a first step toward the creation of a feminine identity based on truth rather than on advertising or ideology. Illustrating Femmes en Lutte: black out Femmes en Lutte used the L’Année de la femme to create a collage image of the feminine symbol with UNESCO imagery, which they critiqued with

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Femmes en Lutte, Mise en Question de la Fonction de L’UNESCO à travers le dossier: 75 Année Internationale de la Femme, 1975.

cut-out and redacted/blacked-out text (caviardage) and corrections and highlighting made with a black felt pen (Figure 5.8). The images, entitled Mise en Question de la Fonction de L’UNESCO A Travers le Dossier: 75 Année Internationale de la Femme, radically questioned statements in the pamphlet on L’Année de la femme such as ‘susciter du fond des âges le nouvel essor de la vie au féminin’ (to give rise from the depths of the ages the new soaring of feminine life), while ironically highlighting the repetition of words like ‘bénéfice’, ‘tirer’ and ‘la paix’ (profit, to take/shoot, and peace) and phrases which they felt were too inflated and lyrical such as ‘Elle danse et prend son vol, réduite à la forme pure’ (She dances and takes flight, reduced to pure form). Femmes en Lutte was responding ‘textually’ to visual images in society, rather than generating their own new images, with the intention of first liberating women artists from the identity created for them by a capitalist society and

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the appropriation of ‘real’ women’s issues by popular events such as L’Année de la femme. This critique of L’Année de la femme extended to the production by Swiss Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig, Iona Weider and Nadja Ringart – known as Les Insoumuses (a combination of ‘insoumise’ and ‘muses’, and recalling ‘insolente’) – of their documentary Maso et Miso Vont en bateau (1976) [55 minutes, black and white] in which they edit a television talk show program featuring Bernard Pivot and the Secrétaire d’État à la condition féminine, Françoise Giroud, and other guests speaking about their attitudes to women during the Year of the Woman. They then use written critiques on signboards and on screen to subvert the message that the ‘establishment’ figures of the young Pivot and Giroud were promoting about women. Like Femmes en Lutte, Les Insoumuses took imagery that was publicly distributed or broadcast and had women rewrite or re-edit it. The documentary cannily edits and breaks up Pivot’s show with a number of signs in black pen, such as a heart with an arrow through it marked ‘version Année de la femme de “Mon Homme”’ (version Year of the Woman of ‘My Man’), and demonstrating the superficiality of the year of the woman with the suggestion MENU ONU: 1974 FAIM, 1975 FEMME, 1976 FROMAGE ou DESSERT (UN Menu: 1974 WHETTED APPETITE, 1975 WOMAN 1976 CHEESE or DESSERT) (Figure 5.9 a & b). This pointed critique can also be seen in director Agnès Varda’s 8-minute short ‘ciné-tract’ Réponse de femmes (1975), which was created for television and broadcast on Antenne 2 for the program F comme Femme for L’Année de la femme. Varda films a number of women individually and collectively nude and clothed, to try to advance a more subjective view of women – ‘Je suis unique, ok, mais je suis toutes les femmes’ (I am unique, ok, but I am all women) – interspersed with cuts to white paint on glass to define and disrupt the flow of imagery. Unlike the critiques of Les Femmes en Lutte and Les Insoumuses, she uses white paint (as opposed to black) for its more ‘positive’ message and the ‘openness’ of dialogue it implies. This can be seen in her white paint chapter headings: ‘qu’est-ce qu’être femme?’ ‘la femme’, ‘Est-ce que toutes les femmes veulent être mère?’ (‘What does it mean to be a woman?

Les Insoumuses, stills from Maso et Miso Vont en bateau, 1976.

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‘woman’, ‘Do all women want to be a mother?’), followed by several images of advertisements that had been verbally attacked by the women for the use of (naked) female bodies as objects of consumption. These were offset in Varda’s film by a number of ‘positive’ images of naked women, including a pregnant one in the film (Plate 46 a & b).88 This look at maternity/family and their representation in advertisements was mirrored in further collages of found and copied images from Femmes en Lutte as a riposte to conventional beliefs about women’s happiness in marriage and its (implicit) relation to capitalist consumption. Examples include their Saint-Médard. Quand on prévoit d’être heureux très longtemps (Saint-Médard. When you plan to be happy for a very long time) (Figure 5.10) and De l’utilisation de la famille ou la vraie valeur des choses choses (On the use of family or the true value of things), which show women as mothers with husband and child in poses of ‘fulfillment’ while verbally questioning her role as a domestic servant (Figure 5.11). If these statements during L’Année de la femme were made collectively to represent the bondage and possibilities of all women, Annette Messager individually critiqued the institution of marriage by cutting out marriage

Femmes en Lutte, Saint-Médard. Quand on prévoit d’être heureux très longtemps, 1975.

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Femmes en Lutte, De l’utilisation de la famille ou la vraie valeur des choses, 1975.

announcements from the newspaper and showing her own fantasy ‘wedding’ in her Collector’s Albums (1972). She also scribbled over other women’s faces in Mes jalousies to imply the fragility of any collective emotion on the part of women as a group in part due to the complexity of their feelings about each other, thus undermining any claims to solidarity seen above (Figure 3.10). Some of these works had already been seen by the public in her solo exhibition at ARC 2 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1974. For Femmes en Lutte the insertion of vitriolic text ‘violently’ severed the harmony of the image which society tried to present of women. Their work was a militant response to the apolitical artwork found at the UFPS, which Femmes en Lutte believed failed in its goal of presenting a true representation of womanhood. The UFPS, they felt, relied on gender opposition instead of liberating women from the social conception of ‘femme’ in order to make genuine discoveries. (The latter position is in accordance with Simone de

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Beauvoir’s existentialist declaration, On ne naît pas femme, on le devient [One is not born a woman, but becomes one].89) In their tract they write: ‘On ne parle pas de production artistique masculine mais par contre on se permet de pouvoir dénommer une certaine production dite féminine avec tout le racisme, et sexisme culturel et idéologique que cela suppose. On ne fait pas des Salons d’Hommes, mais on se permet de proposer un Salon des Femmes’ (Male artistic production is not discussed, on the other hand, a certain artistic production designated as ‘female’ is allowed to be treated with all the racism, cultural and ideological sexism the term implies. We do not have men’s salons, but women’s salons are sanctioned).90 Femmes en Lutte only lasted for the initial Salon de la Jeune Peinture in 1975. A smaller contribution to the 27th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, which ran from 28 April to 24 May 1976, was spearheaded by Groupe Alternative which included artists Marianne Heske, Florence Julien, Nicole Métayer, Dorothée Selz and Hessie. In the catalogue to the exhibition the group rebelliously scrawled, in actual handwriting, ‘nous ne voulons pas faire de texte’ (we do not want to produce a text) under the group caption and individual names (Hessie’s name also handwritten, as opposed to typeface, may have been deliberate, or a later insertion). Another group, Les Plasticiennes en Lutte, appeared for the 1977 Salon de la Jeune Peinture which was held at the Musée du Luxembourg from 29 April to 24 May 1977. This was a pivotal year, with the opening in January of the Centre Georges Pompidou, the inclusion of more women artists in Mythologies Quotidiennes 2 at ARC 2, ORLAN’s Le Baiser de l’artiste at FIAC along with the manifesto ‘Enfermement / Rupture’ by the women of Collectif Femmes/Art, and the publication of scathing critiques of feminism framed as forced beliefs about the limitations of women seen in Lâchez tout by Annie Le Brun. Plasticiennes en Lutte garnered little outside publicity for their contribution to the Salon de la Jeune Peinture. (Journalist Geneviève Breerette, for example, neglects to mention their endeavors in her round-up of women’s art in her article in Le Monde at the end of 1977.)91 The Salon was dedicated to either collective or individual work produced within a collective that had a political, ideological and social focus, according to the show’s guidelines.92 However, unlike the previous Salon where the women consciously set themselves against UNESCO’s L’Année de la femme, Plasticiennes en Lutte did not collectively critique society through their work, but tried to challenge the male-dominated art world by portraying the depth of activity of women artists – not unlike the foresaid UFPS. The twenty-four women (relatively unknown and predominantly figurative artists) included in the show were Moda Allenet Ascencio, Benedito, Yolande Brunet-Noury, Charlotte Calmis (who provided the image L’Identité), Françoise Canal, Liliane Camier (who exhibited her plastic pockets on cloth), Catherine Caron, photographer Jacqueline Delaunay, Mirabelle Dors-Rapin, Louise Emily, Sylvie

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Yolande Brunet-Noury from Plasticiennes en Lutte. Image and statement from the exhibition catalogue of the 28th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, 1977.

Fauconnier, Maryse Giambiasi, Micheline Hachette, Linda Idelson, Bella Inguanzo, Liliane Moreau, Françoise Nicod, Ginette Paillot, Woodie Roehmer, Ella Schwartz, Geneviève Tasiv, Annie Varga, Florence Villers and Natalie Volpelière. The president of the jury and group was Mirabelle Dors.93 For some women in the group, the psychological aspects of balancing the expectations of being a woman and being an artist were as critical as the art produced. As artist Yolande Brunet-Noury wrote: ‘Nous ne devons plus nous sentir coupable d’EXISTER, Mais vivre pleinement nos contradictions: avortement, contraception, grossesse souhaitée, toutes ces contradictions qui sont Femmes. Il ne faut plus refuser, mais EXISTER en tant que FEMMES INDEPÉNDANTES, FEMMES MÈRES, FEMMES ARTISTES’ (We must no longer feel guilty for EXISTING, but fully live our contradictions: abortion, contraception, desired pregnancy, all these contradictions which are Women. We must no longer hold back, but EXIST as INDEPENDENT WOMEN, WOMEN MOTHERS, WOMEN ARTISTS) (Figure 5.12).94 Groups 3: Groupe Dialogue, Salon Féminie [Féminie-Dialogue] Christiane de Casteras, an artist who had participated in the UFPS since the 1960s, was named president of the UFPS in 1974 and became its head in February 1975 – the year of L’Année de la femme and the same year the abortion law, la loi Veil, had been put into effect in January for a provisional five years.

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Many women critics (such as Dany Bloch, the video specialist who had worked closely with Suzanne Pagé at ARC 2 since 1974) were dissatisfied with the works being chosen in the UFPS and de Casteras, along with close friend and artist Andrée Marquet, Marie-Rose Montassut and Marie-José Beaudoin, decided to create another event which would allow women more freedom of expression and the opportunity to exhibit with men.95 In an interview Christiane de Casteras modestly described the break with the UFPS occurring with her noticing that the Salon was beginning to ‘s’endormir un petit peu’ (get a bit tired) and needing to ‘remuer un petit peu ailleurs’ (shake things up a bit somewhere else).96 Andrée Marquet, who had attended the conferences organized for L’Année de la femme at UNESCO with speakers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi, also decided that an exhibition of women’s art had to be created.97 Marquet met de Casteras, whom she describes as having left the UFPS for being ‘trop classique’ (too traditional) and decided ‘qu’il faut faire autre chose’ (that we need to do something else).98 The president of the new group Dialogue was Christiane de Casteras, the vice-president was Marie-Rose Montassut and the general secretary was Andrée Marquet. The advisory board consisted of Dany Bloch from ARC 2, Suzanne de Coninck who was an attachée at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and Sabine Marchand, an art critic. The funding for the group’s exhibition Féminie came from a grant they won from UNESCO to put on an international – in accord with UNESCO’s political goals – show of women’s and men’s art. The funds also allowed them to put together a catalogue that friend and critic Aline Dallier insisted was essential in order to have a ‘trace’ that the show had taken place.99 De Casteras envisioned a politically ‘neutral’ space that was a true reflection of the state of women’s contemporary art and which allowed women and men to exhibit together.100 She described the aim of the group as uniting women artists of all nationalities ‘dans un esprit de réflexion et de recherche, “Dialogue” entend promouvoir la créativité féminine’ (in a spirit of reflection and research, “Dialogue” intends to promote women’s creativity).101 The catalogues for each show presented different artists with some biographical notes (name/title/date/country of origin); some catalogues, such as ‘Espace cousu’ (see Chapter 6), were also divided with agenda pages. The press reviews, however, found the lack of coherent critical perspective or avant-garde edge as a weakness of their exhibitions.102 In a review of the 1977 show Geneviève Breerette wrote: ‘L’aspect “militant” de ces expositions, c’est seulement le fait de souligner que “les femmes aussi …”, de dénoncer avec plus ou moins de force un certain étouffement de la création des femmes et de chercher à mettre en évidence les conditions de cet étouffement’ (The ‘militant’ aspect of these exhibitions serves only to emphasize that ‘women also …’, to denounce more or less strongly a certain stifling of women’s creative work and to seek to highlight the conditions that make it so).103

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This was in spite of a statement by Dany Bloch that was included in the catalogue. Bloch had publicly left the jury of the 1975 UFPS on finding that she needed to reject ‘trois quarts des dossiers’ (three-quarters of the files) that she had received for their lack of rigor and poor quality, and by virtue of the fact that the women she considered the ‘avant-garde’ of the 1970s (without necessarily justifying why) – such as [Lourdes] Castro, [Jacqueline] Dauriac, [Milvia] Maglione, [Tania] Mouraud, [Françoise] Janicot, [Annette] Messager, [Gina] Pane, and [Dorothée] Selz – were not all included.104 However, Bloch emphasized the reality of seeing a separation between militant goals and women’s art, and the importance of women exhibiting with men to avoid a politically weak women’s ‘ghetto’, while at the same time cultivating a feminine identity through a display of the works themselves: Évidemment, les artistes femmes refusent ces critères sexistes: elles combattent pour leur identité. A l’intérieur de la lutte des femmes – et cette lutte n’est pas essentiellement artistique – elles sont conscientes d’avoir une double action. Par ailleurs, elles n’acceptent pas de se laisser enfermer dans un ghetto: elles refusent souvent de montrer leurs œuvres dans une exposition qui leur serait réservée et d’où les hommes seraient exclus. Contrairement aux apparences, il n’y a pas ambiguïté: la reconnaissance de leur statut suppose d’abord qu’elles ne soient ni privilégiées, ni tolérées, ni exclues. Ces artistes qui revendiquent l’étiquette de femmes en lutte pour les combats les plus justes, se battent en définitive, avec des armes semblables à celles de leurs frères: dans leurs œuvres, la sincérité de leur engagement côtoie la poésie, la recherche formelle se développe souvent parallèlement à une prise de conscience de tout un ensemble de problèmes: ceux des hommes, ceux des femmes, ceux des artistes. Et ce sont les mêmes, au fond: la recherche de la liberté d’expression sous toutes ses formes, le souci de la communication totale, l’effort pour une vie plus libérée.105 Of course, women artists reject these sexist criteria; they are fighting for their identity. Within the women’s struggle – and this struggle is not essentially artistic – they are aware of their dual course of action. Furthermore, women do not accept being stuck in a ghetto: they will often refuse to show their works in an exhibition reserved for them and that excludes men. Contrary to how it may seem, there is no ambiguity: the recognition of women’s status presupposes being neither privileged nor tolerated nor excluded. These artists, who claim the label femmes en lutte for fighting the most just battles, fight in a similar way to their brothers by choosing to use the same weapons: in their artworks the sincerity of their engagement borders on the poetic, formal research often develops alongside an awareness of a host of problems: men’s, women’s, and artists. In truth, they boil down to the same ones: the search for freedom in all forms of expression, the concern for total communication, the struggle toward a more liberated existence.

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Abstract artists like Geneviève Claisse, Aurélie Nemours, Ruth Francken, Marie Raymond, sculptor Osa Scherdin and Pierrette Bloch had experienced the male control of the art world in the 1950s and 1960s, and they participated either in the 1975 Féminie exhibition or in subsequent annual shows. The 1975 exhibition was international, again in accordance with the UNESCO funds, drawing participants from Argentina, Britain, Canada, Chile, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, USA, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and other countries. Works by the organizers Christiane de Casteras, Andrée Marquet and MarieJosé Beaudoin and later UFPS president abstract painter Marianne Fayol were also included. Members of women’s groups such as Collectif Femmes/Art (discussed below), Femmes en Lutte and others also participated in 1976–1979, including Liliane Camier, Colette Deblé, Michèle Katz, Françoise Janicot, Milvia Maglione, Anne Saussois and Hélène Villiers as well as author and artist Jeanne Socquet and artist Tania Mouraud. Also shown in the FéminieDialogue exhibitions were the Surrealist-influenced Bona as well as her friend, Israeli performance artist (with strong French ties) Myriam Bat-Yosef, and the Portuguese artist (with British links) Paula Rego (Figures 3.6 and 3.8). The group also promoted itself outside France through Féminie Dialogue in Porto-Vecchio, Corsica, which was held in tandem with a larger inquiry into the politics and culture of the island by Des femmes en mouvements.106 In an effort to promote diversity and increase the nature of the ‘dialogue’ in each exhibition, in 1977 other forms of artistic expression such as architecture and a section entitled Couture-Peinture (Stitching-Painting), curated by Aline Dallier, were included alongside the painting, sculpture, drawing, photography and mixed media that had featured in previous years. The 1979 show was used to specifically commemorate UNESCO’s Year of the Child.107 Aline Dallier promoted an espace cousu (sewn space) in 1976 that included women’s ‘soft arts’ such as weaving, textiles, embroidery and so on (see Chapter 6). The group continued to exhibit regularly until 1985 at the Maison de l’UNESCO. Christiane de Casteras’s promotion of women’s arts continued through her direction of the group and organization of exhibitions with a special emphasis on textile arts until her death in 2009. Several shows had been held at the Grand Palais in Paris. In the 1970s, the funds granted from UNESCO not only were reflected in the diversity of works and countries the group presented, but also highlighted the lack of French institutional support (or its refusal) to exhibit substantial amounts of women’s art for political reasons (as was the case with the failed show at ARC 2 in 1977, discussed below). Groups 4: Collectif Femmes/Art Françoise Eliet, a psychoanalyst, ethnologist and painter, was approached – in all likelihood by Suzanne Pagé (although critic Elisabeth Lebovici

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acknowledges the influence of Dany Bloch)108 – in 1976 to organize an upcoming exhibition of women’s art at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.109 As a result Eliet received a number of dossiers containing slides and photos from artists based in Paris and throughout France, which she judged with other artists and theoreticians, and thus became a central figure around whom other women artists gathered.110 When the proposed exhibition was later ‘canceled’, or abandoned, several artists remained close and, under Françoise Eliet’s leadership, continued to discuss and work together in the group that became known as Collectif Femmes/Art. The original idea of forming a group was born when Françoise Eliet met with philosopher and painter Claudette Brun (the cofounder of the Psychanalyse et Politique chapter in Nancy) at Jacques Lacan’s seminars in 1975 at the Faculté de droit in Paris.111 Eliet and Brun, along with Brun’s friend the painter Monique Frydman, eventually gathered at the latter’s studio to discuss challenges for women artists and areas for them to exhibit, while outlining the aims for an emerging group.112 The sociopolitical trajectory of this initial group lay in associations in previous political groups (feminist and mixed) that had been active in 1968 and the early 1970s, such as Groupe d’Information sur les Asiles, Vive la Révolution!, Politique et Psychanalyse[sic], and others.113 The difficulties these groups had encountered in terms of determining the level of political engagement led to a decision by Eliet and the others to separate ‘painting’ from ‘combat’ – they could ‘combat’ through the act of painting but only ‘anonymously’ which, as Aline Dallier critically points out, few women could do over the long term other than in occasional events.114 The initial participants in the nascent group were Claudette Brun, Colette Deblé, Françoise Eliet, Monique Frydman, Christine Maurice [de Buzon] and Michèle Harry.115 The group expanded over time to include Claude BauretAllard, Liliane Camier, Isabelle Champion-Métadier, Jacqueline Delaunay [Hologne], Bernadette Delrieu, Jacqueline Desarménien, Catherine Hekking, Françoise Janicot, Michèle Katz, Irène Laksine, Lea Lublin, Cristina Martinez, Mechtilt, Najia Mehadji, Vera Molnar, Marie Orensanz, Marie Gerbault [Ponchelet], Anne Saussois, Elisa Tan, Claude Torey, Hélène Villiers, Judith Wolfe, and Nil Yalter, with occasional additional participants in exhibitions such as Anne-Marie Pécheur and Tania Mouraud.116 Although the average age of the participants was 35 there were essentially two generations in the group: the younger artists were between 24 and 27 years of age and the older artists were between 48 and 53 years old; many artists created core relationships with those of their general age group.117 The participants were united by the fact that most had previous education either in the art field (art schools or atelier training) or in the liberal arts, which created a common foundation beyond cultural or class differences.118 The artists were free to attend meetings (as there was no official ‘membership’) and to join in exhibitions. Many of the artists

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showed varying levels of commitment at a given time – amongst the most faithful to Eliet’s group were Claude Bauret-Allard, Colette Deblé, Monique Frydman, Michèle Harry, Françoise Janicot and Lea Lublin.119 In spite of the fact that the group was not ‘barred’ to men, very few, if any, attended meetings and the circle remained predominantly female. On average, twenty-five to thirty women regularly attended the monthly meetings held at different studios, although the number could fluctuate between ten and forty women at any given time.120 The ‘flexibility’ of the group was one of its trademarks. The manifesto cited its lack of specific ‘rules’, focusing instead on the creation of original art that broke with the art of the past: Nous essayons de mettre en place un groupe de travail qui soit un lieu de rencontre et de réflexions, un lieu où chacun puisse parler de sa propre pratique. Nous pensons qu’il est nécessaire de maintenir une structure aussi ouverte que possible sans défendre, ou proposer une forme de pratique picturale ou plastique spécifique. Cela ne veut pas dire que nous soyons prêtes à soutenir n’importe quelle forme de pratique picturale ou plastique. Il ne s’agit pas de verser dans un éclectisme qui proposerait simplement la reproduction de la société telle qu’elle est. Aussi ne sommes-nous pas intéressées, pour le moment, par ce qui se présente comme une simple copie, une imitation de ce que produit la société: fétiches en tout genre. Par contre, nous sommes décidées à soutenir tout effort pour transformer le fond à partir de quoi travaillent la peinture, la photographie ou le cinéma.121 We are trying to set up a work group that could be a place for meetings and introspection, a place where everyone can speak about their individual practice. We believe in the importance of maintaining as open a structure as possible, without advancing interests, and the same goes for proposing a specific form of pictorial or plastic arts practice. This does not mean that we are ready to support just any pictorial or plastic arts practice. It is not a question of drowning in an eclecticism that would simply reproduce society as we know it. Neither are we interested, for the moment, by the appearance of mere copies, an imitation of what society produces: fetishes of all kinds. However, we are determined to support every effort to transform the ground from which painting, photography or cinema emerge.

The media of the artists varied, with broad range given to diverse forms of artistic expression, including three-dimensional drawing and/or architectural elements such as those done by Colette Deblé. Monique Frydman concentrated on drawing the body and Najia Mehadji made a series of charcoal ‘traces’ with/without sound. Other artists interested in drawing included

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Liliane Camier, Jacqueline Desarménien, Cristina Martinez, Anne Saussois and Catherine Villiers. Artists interested in abstract painting included Isabelle Champion-Métadier, Bernadette Delrieu, Michèle Herry, Mechtilt, Irène Laksine and Judith Wolfe, while Vera Molnar experimented with geometrical abstraction on the computer. Françoise Janicot, Lea Lublin, Marie Orensanz, Elisa Tan and Claude Torey worked with several media such as photography, drawing, performance art and video; Nil Yalter worked with video and installations; and Marie Gerbaud [Ponchelet], created ceramics. Michèle Katz worked with painting techniques from the Middle Ages while Claude BauretAllard and Catherine Hekking used pastels. Jacqueline Delaunay-Hologne was a photographer and sculptor.122 Other participants included Bernadette Bour, Gretta Grzywacz and Paulette Nef.123 A number of these women – Isabelle Champion-Métadier, Cristina Martinez, Vera Molnar, Marie Orensanz and Elisa Tan – would later show at Antoinette Fouque’s Galerie des femmes in the 1980s. (See Chapter 4.) ‘Enfermement / Rupture’ and Collectif Femmes/Art In February 1977, the group produced a statement of intent entitled ‘Enfermement / Rupture’, which was published in their Bulletin Femmes/Art in autumn that year: Nos pratiques comme peintres, photographes, cinéastes, sont donc divergentes. Elles ne reflètent pas une ligne théorique commune. Leur point commun, c’est de parler de la violence qui nous est faite, des barreaux et des cages dans lesquelles nous avons été enfermées. La toile, le cadre, le châssis, les lignes horizontales et verticales, la surface, la chambre noire où fonctionne l’appareil cinématographique ou photographique, que sont-ils sinon des cages, des prisons, héritées de l’ère bourgeoise et qu’il s’agit de transformer, de libérer des conditions historiques dans lesquelles ils sont apparus et auxquels ils restent liés. Peindre ou combattre, telle semblait être l’alternative qui se posait en 1968. Peindre, écrire, produire un travail théorique semblait aller contre le sens de l’histoire. Aussi certaines d’entre nous ont-elles renoncé à toute pratique picturale pendant ces années, pensant qu’elles devaient investir ailleurs leur temps et leur énergie. Oser peindre, dessiner, photographier, filmer en 1977. Est-ce simplement l’aveu d’un échec? Nous ne le pensons pas.124 Our practices as painters, photographers, and filmmakers are necessarily diverse. There is no shared theoretical angle between them. What they have in common is an ability to speak of the violence that we face, the bars and cages in which we have been locked up. The canvas, the frame, the support, the horizontal and vertical lines, the surface, the dark room where the

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cinematographic or photographic camera works, what are they if not cages, prisons, inherited from bourgeois times and which must be transformed, liberated from the historical conditions in which they appeared and to which they remain tied? Painting or fighting, such were the alternatives before us in 1968. Painting, writing, producing a theoretical work, seemed to go against the course of history. Some of us also gave up pictorial practice during these years, thinking that our time and energy should be invested elsewhere. To dare to paint, draw, photograph, film in 1977. Is this simply an admission of failure? We do not think so.

The statement suggested a clear rupture with movements such as Surrealism, and the promotion of new forms of art in all media – painting, drawing, photography and film. The focus on the concepts of bars and cages as well as horizontal and vertical lines was evident in the different forms of art produced by the group, as was the deconstruction of the painting into canvas, frame and support which had echoes of the all-male group Supports-Surfaces. The difference was that Supports-Surfaces applied Marxist ideology and a philosophy of deconstruction toward painting, while Collectif Femmes/Art was dependent on being inclusive of the militant aspects of women’s oppression and on expressing these forms conceptually (or metaphorically) as a psychological method of liberation.125 Although it is important to point out that Eliet and others were in all likelihood speaking metaphorically – as the manifesto stated that there was no underlying theory to the group – the literal appearance of horizontal and vertical graphic lines, as well as bar and cage imagery, was evident in the work of artists associated with the group during this period. Colette Deblé’s sequence of drawings Fenêtre-en-boîte (1976–1977) presented a series of windows with horizontal and vertical bars viewed from the outside, creating a visual trompe-l’œil (Figure 5.13). Françoise Eliet produced a series of vertical lines in pastel on paper entitled Rythmes (November 1976), while Françoise Janicot made graphic drawings of floorboards (1977–1978) that echo her studio floor on the Île Saint-Louis (Figure 4.15). Moroccan-French artist Najia Mehadji used charcoal to produce in 1977 a series of delicate vertical and horizontal lines in sensuous movements which were made in response to sound. Often executed on the wall, the sensitive traces revealed its texture through barriers of darkness and light. (Figure 5.14).126 Photographer Jacqueline Delaunay created a more explicitly feminist work, XXe No Man’s Land, that used English titles to delineate the borders, areas and territories that separate men from women. This included two long vertical lines cutting through XX, signifying the time of the twentieth century and the confrontation which exists between and within sexes, thereby forging a ‘no man’s land’, in a new cartography of gender (Figure 5.15).127

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5.13 

Colette Deblé, Fenêtre-en-boîte, 1976–1977.

5.14 

Najia Mehadji, Untitled, 1977.

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315

Jacqueline Delaunay, XXe No Man’s Land, c. 1977, Sorcières, no. 11, 1978.

5.15 

Nil Yalter, L’Architecture du harem du Grand Sultan, 11 March 1978.

5.16 

Like Colette Deblé, Cairo-born artist of Turkish origin Nil Yalter used the metaphor of a window in front of a window in her installation L’Architecture du harem du Grand Sultan (11 March 1978) to symbolize the exterior world seen from the interior world of the women in Françoise Janicot’s studio (Figure 5.16). The long vertical lines of the windows and the repetition of horizontal bars in the interior and exterior windows echo the bars of a prison while also

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Kate Millett, The Maja Rediscovered, 1968. Small Mysteries installation, NOHO Gallery, New York, 1976.

suggesting the repercussions of imperialism and masculine control. This ‘cage’ is also evident in Evelyne Ortleib’s cover image for the ‘female prisoners’ edition of Sorcières (no. 6, 1976) as well as in Kate Millett’s installation (1968) published later in Des femmes en mouvements (Figure 5.17).128 The stultifying space of the harem – a site of orientalist fantasy and repeated trope in European art history, often featuring scantily clad and objectified women, becomes a locus of feminist awakening (as seen earlier in Hermine Freed’s Art Herstory [see Plate 4]). Commenting on her work, Yalter wrote: ‘Femme humiliée, ta vision du monde Sultan s’arrête sur un vide noir avec une lointaine lumière d’une fenêtre mirage. L’architecture puise ses sources dans le mythe du mâle tout puissant’ (Humiliated woman, your vision of the Sultan’s world ends in a black void with a distant light from a mirage-like window. Architecture draws its sources from the myth of the all-powerful male).129 The solidarity of the women and their mutual isolation in the ‘harem’ echoed Nil Yalter’s participation in an earlier video examining women’s prison experience, La Roquette, prison de femmes. L’Architecture can also be seen to parallel the experience of the women of Collectif Femmes/Art who collectively were seeking a ‘window’ into a male-dominated art world through solidarity and self-expression. Whether or not the imagery deliberately paralleled (or provided the impetus for) the statement of ‘Enfermement / Rupture’, the artists associated with the group who acknowledged the barriers literally or conceptually (for women in the art world) in their work echoed the period of their group’s emergence in 1976–1978, during the time of the MLF struggles (the latter was still fighting to find common ground after the abortion law passed in 1975; see Chapter 2). This ‘conscious’ or ‘unconscious’ process of ‘liberation’ resonates with some of

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the overt political goals of the MLF movement – although the group Femmes/ Art was officially apolitical and more empirical and theoretical in their attitude toward the production of art than the MLF, who took no sustained measures to support it. This underlines to some extent the psychological process of discovery undertaken by each artist individually and collectively to confront the signs of oppression.130 Such confrontation signaled a moment of solidarity, growth and experimentation for women artists, if also ultimately spelling its doom due to the growing desire of each artist for freedom, the waning of the MLF, as well as an increasingly conservative government and a continuing period of economic decline in the late 1970s. All of this occurred to disband the group around 1980. This was a few years before Françoise Eliet ended her life in 1983. The culture of Collectif Femmes/Art: theory, ateliers and exhibitions Although critic Aline Dallier promoted her version of American feminist art in France in Opus as early as 1974, groups in France such as Femmes/Art were generating their own distinct character while maintaining ties with women’s art movements in other countries.131 Their language was developed and articulated by manifestos such as the collective ‘Enfermement / Rupture’ (February 1977), which outlined the vision of the group: Nous partons de cette constatation que beaucoup de groupes de lutte en France, qu’il s’agisse d’hommes ou de femmes, ont échoué parce qu’ils partaient d’un point de vue trop rigide, trop dogmatique. Avant de pouvoir parler d’une spécificité des pratiques féminines il nous semble qu’il faut construire un lieu où les différences des femmes entre elles puissent se parler, se construire. Une des tendances du mouvement féministe, compréhensible comme moment de la lutte est de vouloir parler de la femme, en se référant à une unité psychique, voire biologique, du sexe féminin par opposition au sexe masculin. … Comme femmes nous sommes opprimées politiquement, socialement, économiquement. Voilà l’unité de notre destin. Mais la différence, les différences, ne se fondent pas au niveau biologique mais au niveau du signifiant; non au niveau du corps mais de ce qui en est dit, de la parole. Or c’est un fait que les femmes ont le plus grand mal à penser et la différence sexuelle et les différences entre elles. Beaucoup de groupes de femmes ont comme idéologie un idéal de la fusion, accompagné d’un refus des pratiques individuelles. Cette aspiration à l’unité, fondée sur l’idée d’un corps pur, non aliéné par les vicissitudes de l’histoire, nous semble à nouveau très fascinante. Le respect de la différence, des différences comme telles, est le fondement même de la démocratie.132

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We begin with the observation that many of the struggle groups in France, whether those of men or women, failed because they started from a perspective that was too rigid and dogmatic. Before we can speak about the specific nature of women’s practices, we believe that we must establish a place where the differences between women can be discussed and developed. One of the trends of the feminist movement, understandable as a moment of struggle, is to want to speak about the woman, by referring to a psychic, even biological, unity of the female sex in contrast to the male one. … As women, we are oppressed politically, socially and economically. This is what gives us a common destiny. But the difference, or the differences are not based on biology but on the signifier; not based on the body but on what is said about it, the words. And yet, it is a fact that women have great difficulty to think both of sexual difference and of the differences between them. Many women’s groups hold as an ideology an ideal of fusion, alongside a rejection of individual practices. This aspiration for unity, based on the idea of pure body, unalienated by the vicissitudes of history, seems to us, once more, very intriguing. Respecting the difference, differences such as they exist, is the very foundation of democracy.

The group’s need to limit the influence of politics and provide support for artistic freedom was expressed in the openness the group maintained for members to work both independently and collectively. The rejection of the search for a universal female, or biological ‘essence’, or what the group termed ‘la femme’, separates it from some of the earlier art produced in the United States. American critic Lucy Lippard, who the women of Femmes/Art sought to meet in March 1977, earlier pointed out that initially ‘“female imagery” was first used … to mean female sexual imagery. That wasn’t understood and it got all confused’.133 Instead the group set out to limit ‘fétiches en tout genre’ (fetishes of all kinds) and to create a more independent group which had links with feminism, while respectfully trying to maintain a distance from it. Eliet was quoted as saying that the MLF’s impact on art could only be negative: ‘comme tout mouvement politique, un art, son art, autrement dit la fin de l’art’ (as in any political movement, an art, its art, would be, in other words, the end of art).134 Yet some participants in the group had taken part earlier in an American exhibition called Combative Acts. Profiles and Voices, which was an invitational exhibition organized by Dotty Attie and Nancy Spero at the women’s A.I.R. Gallery in New York City from 22 May to 16 June 1976.135 Aline Dallier was invited to curate the show that was to reflect the state of women’s art in France. Including the artists Cuban-born Hessie (Carmen Djuric), Italian-born Milvia Maglione, Françoise Janicot, Bernadette Bour, Martine Aballéa, Nicole Croiset, American-born Judy Blum, Mimi and Nil Yalter, it focused on painting,

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photography, video stills and textiles. In the catalogue, Aline Dallier wrote about the (lack of) connection between feminism and art in France: We have no organized women artists movement in France. But last year a group of about thirty artists, students, and people of various trades and professions were formed. This group at once showed itself more concerned with issues covering a broad political spectrum than with a narrowly professional one. They criticized the stereotyped image of women which was being put forward by the press and UNESCO on the occasion of the International Women’s Year. Since then the militants who were not particularly interested in art have split away from the artists. However, the group continues to think in terms of communication with women outside the artistic orbit and develops its collective criticism of the dominant ideology as it applies to women. It also tried to establish the responsibility each artist could assume in a feminist project on two levels, social and aesthetic.136

Dallier is commenting on the group Femmes en Lutte which presented at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture in 1975, as we have seen, and of whom some members – Claude Bauret-Allard, Isabelle Champion-Metadier, Irène Laksine – drifted toward the later Collectif Femmes/Art. So did occasional participants who moved freely between groups, such as Liliane Camier, Hessie and Nil Yalter. Milvia Maglione was also a former member of Femmes en Lutte. Dallier outlines her selections for the exhibition below: Although the artists taking part in this exhibition are not all members of the group, it would be true to say that all are investigating the permanent relationship between the private and the political. It is this dialectic which I would like to illustrate at A.I.R. through two different kinds of work. One of these could be termed ‘textile’ (though it might also include painting and graphics); the other could be termed ‘photographic’ (and might include drawings and written texts).137

Included in the show were images of Françoise Janicot’s performance Encoconnage (1972) (translated in the catalogue as Hiding and Winding Thing), as well as her Gare de Lyon (1975) photographs of joined clocks, portraying one clockface with hands and the other without (Figure 5.18). Also appearing were Milvia Maglione’s felt images with embroidery and objects recalling ex votos, such as Many Hours of Work (1975) (Figure 5.19), and silhouettes drawn on felt with crystal drops (in Dedicated to … (1974)) which recall festivals in her native southern Italy and the Madonna’s decorative cope.138 Hessie provided stitching such as Survival Art – Writing (1973) as well as embroidered holes entitled Masculine-Feminine (1973) (later known as Trous) (Plate 47). Bernadette Bour in Untitled (1974) mixed painting and sewing in different ‘skin’-like substances and textures with ‘superimposed layers of thin paper on canvas’ in order to

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5.18 

Françoise Janicot, Gare de Lyon, 1975.

5.19 

Milvia Maglione, Many Hours of Work, 1975.

‘criticize the smooth surface and structures in the minimal art tradition’ (Plate 48).139 Martine Aballéa, Judy Blum, Nicole Croiset, Mimi and Nil Yalter, collectively known as the Groupe de Cinq (Group of Five), had stills from their 1974 video of La Roquette prison included in the show (Figure 5.20). (Lucy Lippard would later highlight this work as significant to women’s art of the 1970s.)140 These visions of women artists allowed the personal and political to

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Judy Blum, Nicole Croiset and Nil Yalter [Originally: ‘Groupe de Cinq’], stills from La Roquette, 1974.

blend through an exploration of different surfaces and media to reflect women’s imagination and experience. Its lack of overt militant character set the stage that Femmes/Art would be developing in the months and years to come. Collectif Femmes/Art also attracted a number of critics and intellectuals who attended several meetings or activities. Among these were Aline Dallier, Danièle Boone who directed the journal L’Humidité, literary theorist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, and fellow Tel Quel critic Viviane Forrester.141 The local intellectual environment and stimulation of ideas complemented their material participation and presence in other international exhibitions. Künstlerinnen International 1877–1977, curated by a group of German women painters, was held in Berlin in March 1977 and featured approximately 200 women artists of several generations, such as Paula Modersohn-Becker, Vanessa Bell, Hannah Höch, Frida Kahlo, Käthe Köllwitz and Suzanne Valadon.142 Contemporary European artists included in the show were Magdalena Abakanowicz, Marina Abramović, Annette Messager, Bernadette Bour, Ketty La Rocca, Titina Maselli and Mechtilt alongside American artists Diane Arbus, Helen Frankenthaler, Eva Hesse, Louise Nevelson, Carolee Schneemann and Joan Mitchell (resident in France). Women artists important to the Russian avant-garde, Dada and Surrealism were also included. Collectif Femmes/Art made its presence felt in the show with ‘Enfermement / Rupture’ printed in the catalogue and works presented by Claudette Brun, Gretta Grzywacz, Isabelle Champion-Métadier, Colette Deblé, Florence Débaste, Françoise Eliet and Monique Frydman.143 (A number of works in the catalogue were misattributed, including those by Florence Débaste, Gretta Grzywacz, Isabelle Champion-Métadier and Colette Deblé whose names were switched in the captions and only later corrected by an errata sheet.)144 The works by Collectif Femmes/Art were presented by a slideshow, or ‘Dia-Show’, in the exhibition and the catalogue also mentioned a lack of time for a more comprehensive

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presentation.145 Nonetheless, Françoise Eliet was very pleased with the show which stimulated ideas in terms of range and quality for further women’s exhibitions: Le premier sentiment: une très grande légèreté. Cela est dû d’abord à l’extraordinaire impression de liberté donnée par l’exposition. L’accrochage est loin des conventions ordinaires. Rien de massif, d’ordonné, de pré-établi. Je marche d’œuvre en œuvre sans avoir le sentiment de l’étiquetage. J’apprends des choses; cela me concerne, concerne ma propre histoire, notre propre histoire.146 The initial feeling: a very great lightness. This is due above all to the extraordinary impression of freedom inspired by the exhibition. The hanging is far from ordinary and conventional. Nothing massive, ordered, pre-established. I walk from one work to the next without having the feeling of labels. I am learning things; it affects me, affects my own story, our own story.

Various participants in the group took part in the international exhibition at the Rencontres Internationales de Caldas da Rainha au Portugal that took place on 1–12 August that year (1977), organized by Egidio Alvaro, which included exhibitions, debates, films, performances, interventions, theater, ballet etc.147 Both the intensity and the informal joviality amongst participants in the show are evident in photographs taken during the event that demonstrate a type of utopic climate for sharing and serious and light-hearted discussion (Figures 5.21 and 5.22). The exhibition displayed works by Marie Orensanz, Gretta Grzywacz, Françoise Janicot, Monique Frydman, Anne-Marie Pécheur, Françoise Eliet, Lea Lublin, Claudette Brun, Isabelle Champion-Métadier and Elisa Tan. Included in the show was Lea Lublin’s Interrogations sur l’art (originally created in 1974), a banner which reflected a series of questions that were asked of individuals in different formats, ranging from markets to museums, in a number of countries over time. (In one iteration, a person’s answers were recorded as they watched themselves respond in real time on a television screen; in another, passersby were recorded responding to the questions in front of a supermarket in Neuenkirchen, Germany, in June 1975.) Frydman’s powerful corporeal drawings were exhibited as well. ORLAN was also at the exhibition and performed three of her interventions, or actions (Figure 5.23).148 Françoise Eliet would later write in Art Press about one of ORLAN’s performances in Caldas da Rainha for which she placed a photograph of her ‘open sex’ organ as a mask on her face and walked through the market, thereby creating a ‘scandal’.149 In November 1977 Aline Dallier organized a show of women artists at the Galerie NRA [Nicole Rousset-Altounian] in Paris entitled Femmes / Graphismes / Textes / Musiques / Actions, which included fourteen women artists using different media as methods of expression. The artists included a range of

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323

Rencontres Internationales de Caldas da Rainha au Portugal, 1–12 August 1977. Seated in stripes, Françoise Eliet. Standing with headband, Lea Lublin.

5.21 

Rencontres Internationales de Caldas da Rainha au Portugal, 1–12 August 1977. Left to right: Claudette Brun, Lea Lublin, Françoise Janicot, Françoise Eliet and unknown.

5.22 

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ORLAN, Rencontres Internationales de Caldas de Rainha au Portugal, 1–12 August 1977.

generations (from nineteenth-century-born Marcelle Cahn to 1940-born Monique Frydman) and a spectrum of political messages ranging from the seemingly neutral abstract computer-generated graphic work of Vera Molnar to the performance art, or ‘feminist’ actions, and readings by ORLAN that called into question the relationship between art, prostitution and women.150 Dallier, however, emphasizes that one purpose of this exhibition was not simply to engage in a political debate between women and art, but to open up the forum to enjoy the fruits of women artists in particular.151 Events included a story by Emmanuelle Huret based on Molnar’s images, a sound and graphic work by Eugénie Kuffler, a trumpet score by composer Janine Charbonnier, and poetry by Michèle Métail.152 Significantly, Dallier stresses that this evening of activities by women set the stage for similar events in artists’ ateliers that were to follow. Atelier activities Collectif Femmes/Art met at various studios, although frequently at the open studio space in Françoise Janicot’s apartment on the Île Saint-Louis (Figure 5.24). On 11 March 1978, Janicot organized a day of performance art which included the work of five artists and drew crowds from 10 o’clock in the morning to 10 o’clock in the evening.153 The five participants were Janicot herself, Lea Lublin, Elisa Tan, Claude Torey and Nil Yalter (pictured in Figure 5.25 during their atelier activities). (Yalter also shot a video which captured some of the energy and intensity of the day’s events inside the studio with the participating artists in a 14 min. 20 sec. video called Cinq Femmes.) Janicot presented J’aime ta binette, Lea Lublin performed Dissolution dans l’eau (which

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Atelier discussions. Françoise Janicot. Seated center Vera Molnar, Aline Dallier with back turned.

5.24 

Atelier activities. Outside atelier of Françoise Janicot, March 1978. Left to right: Claude Torey, Lea Lublin, Françoise Janicot, Elisa Tan and Nil Yalter.

5.25 

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was held at the Pont Marie bridge at 5 p.m.), Elisa Tan presented the Conjugaison du verbe travailler, Claude Torey showed Le paradoxe de Zénon ou l’œil en face des trous, and Nil Yalter presented her aforementioned L’Architecture du harem du Grand Sultan. Janicot’s work J’aime ta binette – I like your face comprised a series of ‘parallels’ in which she ‘parallels’ the relationship between a ‘face’ and a ‘façade’, drawing comparisons with the bondage of identity (or identities) presented in L’Encoconnage. In the second of two performances (the first consisted of cutting newspaper images on the floor; Plates 49 a & b), Janicot displayed slides of herself dressing and undressing and interrupted the slideshow by changing clothes during the projection.154 Claude Torey’s Le paradoxe de Zénon used fifty-one photographs of commercial spaces to analyze spatiotemporal connections in order to highlight the impact between eye and thought, and the way in which we (the viewer) become blind to the mechanisms of power in society when seen as ‘objects’ capable of being ‘overlooked’. Elisa Tan, who was born in China, raised in the Philippines and educated in the United States, was living in France in the mid-1970s, and created a piece that conjugated the verb ‘to work’ for 9 hours, in order to comment on the menial factory tasks that she and others were exposed to in a handbag factory where she once worked in 1977 (Figure 5.26 a & b). The repetition of mindnumbing tasks was captured in a typed script repeating the elementary ‘i

Elisa Tan, Conjugation of the verb: to work, 1978.

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worked you worked he worked she worked’ and becoming progressively illegible, mirroring the boredom, repetition and shared solidarity of the task. Lea Lublin’s Interrogations sur la femme was also comprised of a list of questions that examined the identity of women: ‘la femme est-elle un fantasme sexuel?’, ‘la femme est-elle une image masculine?’, ‘la femme est-elle une vierge mère?’, ‘la femme est-elle une putain?’, ‘la femme est-elle un sac de sperme?’, ‘la femme est-elle un phallus à l’envers?’, etc. (is woman a sexual fantasy?, is woman a masculine image?, is woman a virgin mother?, is woman a whore?, is woman a sack of sperm?, is woman an inverted phallus?) (Plates 50 a–g). The work was then taken to the Pont Marie in Paris by Lublin and others and thrown off the side of the bridge in a poetic act that symbolized the ‘dissolution’ of false identities for women through a ritual cleansing in the Seine. This performance observes one of the principles written in the manifesto a year earlier that objected to a vision of art that focused solely on ‘la femme’ or the search for a feminine specificity: ‘Une des tendances du mouvement féministe, compréhensible comme moment de la lutte est de vouloir parler de la femme, en se référant à une unité psychique, voire biologique, du sexe féminin par opposition au sexe masculin’ (One of the trends of the feminist movement, understandable as a moment of struggle, is to want to speak about the woman, by referring to a psychic, even biological, unity of the female sex in contrast to the male one).155 Lublin uses a series of oppositions and negations of women’s identity before ‘washing away’ the stereotypes in the river to suggest a rebirth of identity. This calls to mind the Lacanian equation ‘La Femme n’existe pas’ in the inability to define a specific identity for women (in other words, the unconscious has no ‘signifier’ for woman), although Freud had attempted (unsuccessfully) to do so.156 On 20–21 May 1978 another exhibition was organized by Monique Frydman in her atelier, which was set up to be two ‘contradictory’ days of masculine and feminine studies to complement her dynamic ‘sketches’ of the body.157 Included in the event were a ‘création musicale’ by Jean-Yves Bosseur, films on the male body, and a debate entitled ‘Les femmes ont-elles accès au symbolique?’ (Do women have access to the symbolic?) with presentations by Françoise Eliet, Lea Lublin and Viviane Forrester, Philippe Sollers, Marc Pierret and Xavier Girard.158 Aline Dallier comments rather acerbically that even with the male participants (or in spite of them) nothing ‘new’ came out of the debate, since the men only took a ‘paternalistic’ or ‘ironical’ role while the women remained ‘defensive’.159 Philippe Sollers, for example, ‘avait plaisamment affirmé qu’il préférait le homard à tout Femmes/Art…’ (jokingly said that he preferred (in a play on words) lobster or ‘homme-art’ [man art] to Femmes/ Art [women/art], a direct reference to ‘Collectif Femmes/Art’), according to Christine Maurice [de Buzon].160 Dallier also writes that it was difficult for women intellectuals in Paris where men were not likely to concede their position of power, yet Paris also exposed and prepared women artists to deal with

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the tough world of the commercial galleries.161 Earlier that year, on 7 January 1978, the group Femmes/Art had gathered at Hessie’s atelier for an exhibition by Jacqueline Delaunay, Bernadette Delrieu, Marie Gerbault and Michèle Harry. Here, women intellectuals such as Catherine Francblin, Viviane Forrester and Françoise Janicot suggested ‘plural’ readings of Virginia Woolf; Viviane Forrester also read excerpts from her book Vestiges, and the event concluded with a discussion between critics Danièle Boone and Catherine Millet and the women of Femmes/Art, including Claude Bauret-Allard, Colette Deblé, Jacqueline Desarménien, Lea Lublin and Najia Mehadji.162 In June 1978, Collectif Femmes/Art presented the journées de travail at the Centre Culturel du Marais, from 5 to 9 June, which, due to the dominance of men at Monique Frydman’s atelier, was reserved exclusively for women.163 Françoise Eliet and Françoise Janicot prepared the event, which drew upon women’s artistic and intellectual contributions. Questions such as ‘Y a-t-il un imaginaire féminin?’ (Is there a women’s imaginary?) were asked and responses collected from women with a range of different cultural experiences, featuring texts by Françoise Collin (who was present), photographs by Jacqueline Delaunay, Colette Deblé’s fenêtres-en-boîte (Deblé also drew the poster for the show), Viviane Forrester’s Vestiges (heard earlier in the year at Hessie’s atelier), a discussion by Françoise Eliet on women’s imagination, Eva Klasson’s slides of her photography with a text by Igrecque [Yolaine Simha] (also appearing in Sorcières, as discussed in Chapter 3), Lea Lublin interviewing Mechtilt, an excerpt of Christine Maurice’s doctoral work on Artemisia Gentileschi (which precedes Lublin’s own work on this artist inspired by Judith au Holopherne164), charcoals by Najia Mehadji and a performance called kairos by Tania Mouraud, who wrote an Indian sage’s words on vinyl, as well as actor, director and set designer Garance’s reading of Les Écrits de Laure (recently published by the artist’s nephew Jérôme Peignot) and videos by Nil Yalter and her group.165 Claude Bauret-Allard featured paintings and drawings alongside Michèle Katz. Françoise Janicot’s photographs of encoconnage were also seen. Claudette Brun spoke of Lou Salomé and Marie-Christine Hamon on the ‘Feminization of discourse’, and Boston professor Claudine Herrmann discussed the ‘forms’ specific to women. Anne-Marie Sauzeau Boetti also spoke of the current condition of Italian women in ‘Italie 1978: femmes, institutions’ (see Chapter 3, note 99) while Aline Dallier posed questions about a women-only exhibition (Figure 5.27).166 This view into ‘feminine’ culture in France during this period shows a rich cross-fertilization and pollination, with artists being inspired by the work of other artists and intellectuals and exposed to ideas that nurtured their work. This ranged from drawing the atelier experience outwards to the public to create a greater culture, an effort also seen in different magazines and reviews such as Sorcières, helping to create a window into women’s artistic contributions in

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Collectif Femmes/Art, Journées de travail, poster.

France in the 1970s. Other shows also took place, including an atelier show in June at Claude Bauret-Allard’s, with works by Bauret-Allard, Liliane Camier, Jacqueline Désarménien, Catherine Hekking, Michèle Katz, Cristina Martinez, Anne Saussois, Hélène Villiers, and two artists not in Femmes/Art, Renée Bertrand Bossaert and Micaëla Henich.167 A large-scale exhibition called Écritures de femmes/Polyfèmes, which included thirty women artists, was held in the Abbey in Saint-Maximin from 14 October to 11 November 1978, conceived as a ‘laboratoire’ (laboratory) for women’s art which included an installation of Monique Frydman’s body sketches (Figure 5.28).168 There were also occasional shows at Le Lieu-Dit, a ‘salon du thé et de lecture’ (a tea and reading salon) located at 171, rue Saint-Jacques in Paris. Exhibitions of women artists’ work at the latter included Échos: 10 femmes exposent (9–30 November 1978), which had works by Isabelle Champion-Métadier, Colette Deblé, Françoise Eliet, Monique Frydman, Michèle Harry, Françoise Janicot, Irène Laksine, Lea Lublin, Marie Orensanz and Elisa Tan.169 The café/gallery had been founded that year by Yolaine Simha (known as Igrecque, or sometimes Ygrecque), who often contributed to Sorcières and whose exhibitions of women’s art were the closest in feel to the A.I.R. Gallery in New York. She also facilitated meetings, conversations and places to discuss art, with debates and conferences

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Monique Frydman’s body sketches in Écritures de femmes/Polyfèmes at the Abbey in Saint-Maximin, October–November 1978.

taking place in the café/gallery’s space during the late 1970s and early 1980s (Plate 51). Publicity for the events at Le Lieu-Dit were often found in Des femmes en mouvements and other journals (such as exhibitions for Françoise Eliet, Françoise Janicot and Irène Laksine – (Plate 52) – for example).170 (Laksine, whose father was dentist to Pablo Picasso, had early exposure to collective practices such as an initial cadavre exquis with Picasso, his wife Jacqueline and his daughter Paloma, Irène’s father Gorgious and her sisters Danielle and Nadia; Figure 5.29.) Laksine, who took part in MLF groups (see Chapter 4), and was frustrated by the male dominance of contemporary art and by groups like the male artists of ‘BMPT’, found alternatives within the women’s groups and within her own independent practice: Très jeune je m’étais laissée écraser par des artistes terroristes qui jugeaient le travail d’après des critères personnels, étouffants: le groupe B.M.P.T. (Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni). Une fois libérée de leur influence je me suis dit: tout ce que je fais est bien, c’est mon plaisir et ma liberté, c’est moi qui décide. Peindre me donne ma force, c’est mon moteur, je ne peux m’arrêter … Il me faut un espace pour travailler.171 At a very young age, I allowed myself to be crushed by terrorist artists who judged work according to their own stifling personal criteria. They were the group B.M.P.T. (Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni). As soon as I was liberated from their influence, I told myself: everything that I make is good, it’s what gives me pleasure and freedom, it’s me who decides. Painting gives me strength, it’s my driving force, I can’t stop … I must have a space to work.

American feminist scholar Gloria Orenstein credited a meeting with Hélène de Beauvoir (see Chapters 1 and 2) with inspiring her to start a women’s salon

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Irène Laksine, Pablo Picasso, Paloma Picasso, Jacqueline Roque Picasso, and Laksine’s father Gorgious and her sisters Danielle and Nadia, Cadavre exquis, 12 August 1961 at Irène Laksine’s family home in Cannes.

in New York which she brought to Paris in 1978–1979 when she directed the Rutgers’ Junior Year in France.172 Orenstein had helped organize and take part in the events of Le Lieu-Dit alongside some of the women from Femmes/ Art and had presented a slide lecture on ‘The Re-emergence of the Great Goddess in Art by Contemporary Women’ in the summer of 1979.173 She participated in salons that included Aline Dallier, Françoise Eliet, Françoise Janicot, philosopher Michèle Le Doueff, Françoise Pasquier of Éditions Tierce, Monique Plaza and German writer Renate Stendhal, and she would write about some of these artists.174 Orenstein also brought Hélène de Beauvoir to visit Le Lieu-Dit ‘to show it to her’.175 Highlights at Le Lieu-Dit included the exhibition Hystériques au 19e siècle that featured women ‘hysterics’ and epileptics who were treated by Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital in the 1800s. The exhibition, which took place in the summer of 1979, emphasized the ‘artistic’ merit of photographs and engravings taken from nineteenth-century books by Bourneville and Regnard, which were re-photographed for the show by Guy Charoy. It further featured discussion and analysis by Monique Plaza and Jacqueline Thiard on the place of hysteria in women’s discourse and by Bernard de Fréminville and Thiard on the clinical aspects of the condition.176

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Groups 5: Art et Regard des Femmes The Istanbul-born artist Ody Saban moved to France in 1977. A self-appointed ‘outsider’ artist, Saban focused on integration and language in her early intimate journals from the 1970s. Pages show her explorations into writing and language as one form of her integration into France (Figure 5.30 a–c). Saban organized a women’s collective, Singulières Plurielles, and took part in the 29th Salon de la Jeune Peinture from 16 May to 15 June 1978.177 According to Saban, the group was composed exclusively of lesbian and bisexual women.178 Artists included: Claudia Beltrain, Martine Corre (alias Tina Korr), Saban’s partner Dominique Erret, Helen Hedgley, Liliane Kahn, Nina, Marie Renard and Ody Saban and featured painting, sculpture, dolls, tapestry, among other art forms. Working against the patriarchy and the state, Saban declared that the group’s presence ‘fit un scandale inattendu et nous a fait connaître’ (was unexpectedly controversial and made us known).179 Earlier, in March 1978, sculptor Nicole Millet published the testimonies of semi-anonymous women who had participated in the Jeune Peinture – one woman (Martine) was happy to work on the theme of the woman which she believed was in alignment with her own practice. Another woman (Lyliane), who worked both collectively and individually, admitted some degree of conflict in the choice of the joint theme amongst the women.180 In the same month – March 1978 – another group dedicated to art and forms of expressions was created in Paris under the guidance of Nicole Millet. The aim of this group was to enable women to meet and discuss ideas and to create an environment that enhanced the artistic experience through different stimuli, giving women the opportunity to pursue an artistic career.181 In Ody Saban’s words, a few of the women from Singulières Plurielles had joined the group; however, most were newcomers, which had changed the character of the original group: heterosexual, feminists, but also married bourgeois women, some with money and time to spare, etc.182 The first meeting on 15 March at the FIAP (Foyer international d’accueil de Paris) attracted artists and other participants and numbered around 200 people, which led to a more permanent organization directed by Nicole Millet, Anne-Marie Gournier and Annie Vasseur.183 Other sources suggest the number of participants at the March meeting was about 130 with the ages ranging from 20 to 70 years old.184 The mission was to find a permanent exhibition space (with direct sales between artist and client) and to liberate women who did not feel like official ‘artists’, or, as one participant Fatima put it: ‘Ça m’intéresse ton projet parce que je suis une sculpteure refoulée’ (Your project interests me because I am a repressed [female] sculptor).185 Saban stressed the inclusive and non-hierarchical nature of the group, its focus on ‘sororité’ (sisterhood) in contradistinction to the ‘fraternité’ (brotherhood), which along with liberté and égalité (liberty and equality), comprised the French revolutionary

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Ody Saban, L’Écriture de 1977 dans Le cahier No. 1, 1977.

slogan which, she choice of words.186 way the women in opposed to formal

believed, excluded the participation of women by its Elsewhere she emphasized the ‘near- or middle eastern’ the group interacted – seated on the floor and casual as and ‘distingué’ (mannered) like the French.187 American

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intellectuals like Gloria Orenstein and Kate Millett also participated in events (Plate 53).188 It would take another two years, or until February 1980, before the group had a permanent place, or ‘atelier-galerie’, located in the 11th arrondissement at 22, rue du Faubourg du Temple in Paris. The ‘atelier-galerie’ was funded in part by a grant of 65,000 francs a year channeled by the Secrétariat de l’État de la Culture through the F.I.C. (Fonds d’Intervention Culturelle).189 The cost of participation was 80 francs a month and the fees were used to run the ‘atelier-galerie’, which was likely guided by the group’s experience with collective studios which were open to ‘toute femme qui a le désir de travailler avec d’autres femmes dans un sens de création, de recherche et de rencontre’ (any woman who has the desire to work with other women for creative reasons, research and meetings).190 A typical week’s program of open-studio events included such diverse artistic forms as writing, collage, sculpture and the use of materials (such as fabric); found/used, or recycled, items were also a focus of exploration by the women. Other activities included women pushing artworks in baby carriages on the Paris streets to comment on the difficulty of (pro)creation.191 Events were intermedial with music, art and poetry featured, such as in Déroulements de rouleaux, in which poems were read by Annie

Art et Regard des Femmes events: a. Ody Saban’s Déroulements avec les rouleaux with Calck Hook Dance and photography by Vivianne Simane, 4 May 1980. b. Ody Saban during Déroulements de rouleaux with poems read by Annie Vasseur and music and singing by Neige Haye, 17 May 1980.

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Vasseur about the works of Ody Saban with Neige Haye singing and playing instruments, which ran as a continuing series between April and May 1980 (Figure 5.31 a & b).192 Experimental and innovative programming took place, often beyond what was officially declared – including an evening of nude drawings and other events and happenings that testified to the spontaneity and dynamism of the group (Figure 5.32).193 The group was short lived, however, despite the benefits of the generous evening hours which allowed women who had daytime jobs to participate and the drive to ‘open up’ to a broader female culture that focused on collective activities and shared education.194 According to one participant, Marie Teisseranc, the group functioned with more freedom, allowing freelancing in various studios, than one located in specific place; but political problems also arose between women who wanted a firm feminist agenda for the group and those who wanted art for art’s sake.195 In 1981, when Mitterrand’s socialist

Ody Saban with her 10-meter roll of watercolor painting on the street in 1980.

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government came to power, the group’s grant was not renewed and due to financial pressure it closed in July, although the group carried on informally in studios for a short time afterwards, ultimately disbanding around 1983. In this chapter we have explored the tradition of the UFPS salon in the 1970s in conjunction with the four dominant groups that arose in the 1970s during the period of the MLF. Both individual attention to particular members and their works – and their relation to the larger motivations/ideologies of the groups – are explored in detail so as to create threads which exist between the individual artworks and group formations and the political goals of the MLF seen in Chapter 2. The aim of presenting a series of portraits of the groups and the range of their activities has also been considered. The relationship between the artworks produced by women in conjunction with the overall trends in art such as Nouvelle Figuration and Supports-Surfaces during this time will be explored more widely in Chapter 6. Notes 1 Suzanne Horer and Jeanne Socquet, La création étouffée: Femmes en mouvement (Paris: Pierre Horay, 1973), p. 11. 2 Hélène Parmelin, ‘embrasser le monde’, Politique Hebdo, no. 202, 18–23 December 1975. 3 ORLAN, ‘Art et prostitution’. Explanatory notes for Baiser de l’artiste, 1977. 4 Lucy Lippard,  ‘Le mouvement des femmes-artistes: Et après?’ Published in French and English. 9th Biennale de Paris, 1975, n.p. Names included Marina Abramović, Alyce Aycock, Valie Export and Rebecca Horn. American artist Hermine Freed’s video situating women in art history, Art Herstory (see Introduction and Plate 4), was also shown. 5 Pascal Ory, cited in Jean-Jacques Becker, Crises et Alternances: 1974–1995 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998), p. 214. 6 Giroud was succeeded by Michel d’Ornano (1977–1978) and Jean-Philippe Lecat (1978–1981). Each had very close political ties to the president and prime minister (Raymond Barre), but also held additional ministerial responsibilities (such as the Environment and Communications) that affected their commitment. Ibid., p. 215. 7 Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in L’Express, 17 May 1980. In J. R. Frears, France in the Giscard Presidency (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 151. 8 Ory in Becker, Crises, p. 212. 9 Ibid., pp. 216–217. The FRAC or Fonds Régionaux d’Art Contemporain were added in 1983 and provided further funding to enable regional museums to be more independent and to improve their collections. 10 Serge Bernstein and Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Pompidou Years: 1969–1974, trans. Christopher Woodall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 214. 11 Anne, ‘Faux Bourg II’, Des femmes en mouvements, no. 10 (October 1978), p. 67. 12 Jean-Louis Pradel, ‘Nouvelle subjectivité (Festival d’automne)’, Opus International, no. 61–62 (January–February 1977), p. 101.

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13 Le Nouveau Petit Robert, (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1996), pp. 2161. Pejorative meaning of sucré/ée. 14 Women gallery owners were influential during the inter- and postwar years in Paris. Lydia Conti exhibited Gérard Schneider and the first personal exhibition of Hans Hartung. Denise René, ‘sans un sou’ but equipped with an ‘eye’ and a ‘space’, promoted geometrical abstraction. Colette Allendy (widow of psychoanalyst René Allendy) showed Hartung, Stahly, Wols, Mathieu and Bryen. Florence Bank, with the aid of Michel Seuphor, hung prewar abstraction such as the Rayonism of Goncharova and Larionov as well the work of Dutchwoman Nicolaas Warb, at La Galerie des Deux-Îles behind NotreDame. Earlier Jeanne Bucher launched Nicolas de Staël and Jeanne Castel promoted Jean Fautrier. Although none specifically supported women artists, Jeanne Bucher launched the first solo exhibition of Vieira da Silva in 1933 and Denise René also worked with Sonia Delaunay. On Denise René, see Elisabeth Lebovici and Henri François Debailleux, ‘Denise René, Figure de l’abstrait’, Libération, 21–22 April 2001, pp. 32–33. René had inherited the gallery space from a wealthy aunt who wanted her to use it for fashion. For this mapping, see dossier ‘Galleristes’, Archives BMD. 15 The catalogue included photographs of each contributor as well as their country of origin and the zodiac sign of their birth. Grandes femmes petits formats. Micro-Salon 99 exposantes, exhibition catalogue, Iris Clert-Christofle, 1974. 16 Otto Hahn used the exhibition to confront the misconception that ‘Les femmes font du tricot, pas de l’art.’ (Women knit, not make art). He supported the exhibition by highlighting how it drew attention to the male dominance of the art world and to the obstacles that women artists faced. ‘99 femmes chez Iris Clert’, L’Express, 15–21 July 1974, p. 41. 17 Iris Clert, ‘Des Femmes … Des Femmes … Des Femmes …’, Grandes femmes petits formats, exhibition catalogue, 1974. n.p. 18 Ibid., n.p. 19 The latter two artists were the only women included in the 1972 exhibition initiated by Georges Pompidou, Douze ans d’art contemporain en France, which included seventy-two contemporary artists organized at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais to show the world (in particular, New York) the success of contemporary French art. Jean Clair explains that the artists, ‘longuement sélectionnés, avaient été chargés d’y représenter les courants les plus “vivants” et les plus audacieux de la création contemporaine’ (scrupulously chosen, had been commissioned to represent the most ‘dynamic’ and most audacious trends in contemporary art). Jean Clair, Art en France: une nouvelle génération (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1972), p. 7. The show eventually met with protest outside the venue when ‘anti-establishment artists from the visual artists’ “Front” [Front des Artistes Plasticiens, or FAP] clashed with CRS riot police, and then held exhibits up to ridicule’. When Michel Poniatowski later questioned Minister of Culture Jacques Duhamel in the National Assembly about ‘twelve years of contemporary hoaxing’, Duhamel ‘stoutly defended’ artistic freedom. Bernstein and Rioux, The Pompidou Years, p. 213. The videos of Tania Mouraud, Gina Pane and Sarkis were ‘déprogrammées’, or

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withdrawn from the show before the exhibition – and for Mouraud, without prior notice. Mouraud believed that there were also other artists – besides the famous Malassis group on the night of the opening – who removed their works from the exhibition outside the media spotlight. Author’s email correspondence with Tania Mouraud, 17 August 2019. 20 Author’s email correspondence with Michèle Katz, July–August 2019. Katz rejected the format to compete in the salon with a 130 x 130 cm size work in black and white on the theme of work. She felt that these regulations on creativity were yet another form of patriarchal control. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 24th Salon de la Jeune Peinture. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 21 June–9 July 1973, p. 52. 24 Christiane de Casteras, ‘Hasard? Miracle? Punition?’, UFPS catalogue, 1975. De Casteras has the founding of the group in 1884, possibly to reflect the legalization of syndicats/unions that was signed on 21 March that year by René Waldeck-Rousseau, Minister of the Interior in the Republican cabinet of Jules Ferry. 25 ‘Disons-le tout de suite, il ne s’agit pas ici de peinture sérieuse, mais, bien plutôt, d’un gracieux badinage, qui parfois n’est pas sans charme. L’examen sévère des oeuvres qui garnissent les deux salons du Palais des Champs-Elysées n’en laisserait pas substituer un grand nombre: cependant l’impression générale qu’elles produisent en bloc est aimable et comme veloutée. … Chose aussi remarquable que normale, cette peinture de femme est, ou délicate comme une fumée vague, ou grossière come une miche de pain d’orge: réduite à des intentions, elle est amusante; veut-elle aller au fond, préciser, s’affirmer, elle devient ridicule, il n’y a pas de milieu …. Près de trois cents ouvrages réunis par plus de cent dix artistes, c’est beaucoup. Nous nous bornerons à signaler quelques toiles qui se distinguent de leurs voisines par des qualités de facture seulement, car on ne trouve nulle part d’effort imaginatif.’ G. Dargenty, ‘Chronique des expositions’, Courrier de l’art (1885), p. 126. Archives BMD. (Straight away, let’s admit that it is not a question here of serious painting, but, rather, one of gracious banter, which sometimes is not without charm. A rigorous examination of the works which decorate the two salons of the Palais des Champs-Elysées would not demand a large number of substitutions, nevertheless, the general impression that they produce en bloc is pleasant and smooth. … As remarkable as it is commonplace, this women’s painting – delicate, like hazy smoke, or coarse like a loaf of barley bread – when reduced to intentions, is amusing; should it go any further, defining, asserting herself, it becomes ridiculous, there is no place for it …. Nearly three hundred works exhibited together by more than one hundred and ten artists is quite a lot. We will confine ourselves to singling out a few canvases which are distinguished from their neighbors on the basis of their quality of brushwork since there is no imaginative effort to be found.)

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26 My paraphrase. Tamar Garb, ‘Revising the Revisionists: The Formation of the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs’, Art Journal, vol. 48, no. 1 (Spring 1989), pp. 63–70, p. 70. 27 Ibid., p. 67. 28 Sabine Marchand, in 91st Salon UFPS, exhibition catalogue, 1975. 29 See ‘Enfermement / Rupture’ Texte collectif, signé par Claudette Brun, Colette Deblé, Françoise Eliet, Monique Frydman, Michèle Herry, Christine Maurice. Published in L’Humidité, no. 24 (Spring 1977), pp. 40–41; Alternatives, no. 1 (June 1977), p. 132; and Bulletin Femmes/Art, no. 1 (October 1977), pp. 5–7. 30 Dany Bloch, in 91st Salon UFPS, exhibition catalogue, 1975. 31 Author interview with Thérèse Boucraut, Paris, December 2006. 32 The Salon also included works by international artists such as Véronique Bigo and Michèle Blondel, in the style of Nouvelle Figuration, as well as the lyrical abstractions of American Claudia Hutchins, Denise Lioté, Anne Monnier and Evelyne Ortleib, and the figurative work of Kathleen Burke, Mette Ivers, Béatrice Casadesus, Christine Thozeau, sculptures by Louise Bentin and [Jenny] Saint-Macé, photography by Sarah Moon, the kinetic art of Anne Hutchins, etc. 33 Debates were also organized with André Parinaud, the Director of the Revue Galerie Jardin des Arts. Suzanne de Coninck at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Françoise d’Eaubonne of Écologie-Féminisme and others were also scheduled. In addition to those noted above, other homages to women artists included Léon Bertaux, Christine Boumeester, Séraphine de Senlis, Alice Halicka and Zoum Walter. 91st Salon UFPS, exhibition catalogue, 1975. 34 Author interview with Simone Lacour, Paris, December 2006. 35 Author interview with Colette Levine, Paris, December 2006. 36 Author interview with Jacqueline Dauriac, Paris, September 2006. 37 Author interview with Thérèse Boucraut, Paris, December 2006. 38 Ibid. [DRAC] Direction régionale des affaires culturelles, [FRAC] Fonds régional d’art contemporain. 39 Ibid. 40 Author interview with artist requesting anonymity, Paris, 2006. 41 Personal letter written to the author by Serge Fayol [son of Marianne (1909–2003) and Pierre Fayol], 28 November 2006. Changing their names several times, Marianne officially took the name Fayol in 1949 in tribute to her husband’s role in the seizing of Le Puy where he was known in the Resistance as ‘Commandant Fayol’. 42 Retrospective Marianne Fayol, exhibition catalogue, Chapelle des Ursulines, Ville de Lannion, August 1999, n.p. Courtesy of Serge Fayol. 43 ‘En 1981, le Salon a sa place dans les grandes manifestations artistiques internationales, et bientôt, grâce à l’action de Marianne Fayol, les artistes exposent au Grand Palais, encouragées et soutenues par les mouvements féministes et les femmes ministres qui se succèdent au gouvernement, à partir de 1974. Une victoire dont elle est fière, et qu’elle évoque avec émotion, comme une

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étape indiscutable vers la justice et l’égalité, même si au début, elle le reconnaît, l’idée de participer à une sorte d’apartheid des sexes, lui apparut un peu comme une aberration. L’évolution rapide des mentalités, à partir des années 70, ainsi que la qualité croissante des œuvres exposées, grâce à la sélection sévère d’un jury, imposée par la présidente Christiane de Casteras, font changer son jugement à cet égard.’ Rolande Diot, Marianne Fayol: Itinéraire d’un peintre dans le siècle (Paris: Daigremont éditeur, 1999), pp. 48–49. (In 1981, the Salon has found its place in major international artistic events, and thanks to the efforts of Marianne Fayol, artists will soon exhibit at the Grand Palais, encouraged and supported by feminist movements and women ministers who succeeded one another in the government from 1974 onwards. This is a victory of which she is proud and which she speaks about with emotion as an indisputable step toward justice and equality although, at the beginning, she acknowledges that the thought of participating in a kind of apartheid of the sexes seemed something of an aberration. The rapid evolution of attitudes since the ’70s, as well as the increasing quality of the exhibited works, due to president’s Christiane de Casteras’s insistence on a rigorous jury selection, changed her opinion about it.) 44 UFPS DVD 2007 [53 minutes] Centre Simone de Beauvoir. I was allowed to watch a rough-cut of this documentary in 2006. 45 ‘After thirty years of feminist work in art and art history, how many woman scholars in art history would unembarrassedly name themselves feminists, define their work as feminist, desire it to be seen as such? Increasingly that framing of the project is on the wane. … Artists whose creative explorations of a whole range of areas, themes, and issues were made possible by the dramatic challenges to the phallocentric hegemony launched by the feminist cultural revolution in the 1970s now actively disown that legacy. They seem to fear its contaminating “politics” and, worse, its dreaded lack of marketability.’ Griselda Pollock, ‘Rethinking the Artist in the Woman, The Woman in the Artist’, in Women Artists at the Millennium, ed. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 35–83, pp. 57–58. 46 Author interviews with Raymonde Arcier (Paris, November 2006); Anne Delfieu (Paris, October 2006); Françoise Janicot (Paris, June 2006); Judit Reigl (Marcoussis, June 2006); Anne Marchand regarding Gina Pane (Paris, May 2004). 47 Author interview with Aube Elléouët, Paris, January 2007. 48 Author interview with Angelica Garnett, Forcalquier, January 2007. Garnett, independent in spirit, worked outside of ‘trends’ and away from other French movements. In an interview in her home/studio, she emphasized the importance of her family, the experiences in her personal biography and her admiration for the poetics and modesty of artist Richard Tuttle. 49 The group La Spirale in France had no relationship to the civil rightsmotivated African-American artist group ‘Spiral’ (1963–1965) founded by Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff and others.

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50 ‘La Page SPIRALE de … Charlotte Calmis’, 19 October 1975. Archives BMD and Archives Marie-Jo Bonnet. 51 Aline Dallier, ‘Le mouvement des femmes dans l’art’, Opus International, no. 66–67 (Spring 1978), pp. 35–41, p. 36. 52 ‘La Page SPIRALE de … Charlotte Calmis’, 19 October 1975. Archives BMD. 53 ‘Selon Charlotte Calmis, ce potentiel tiendrait dans le silence forcé des femmes qu’il s’agirait de transformer en “silence-vide-plein de promesses de création”.’ Dallier, ‘Le mouvement des femmes…’, p. 36. (According to Charlotte Calmis, this potential was held in the forced silence of women and that it was a question of transforming the ‘silence-void-fullness into the promises of creative life’.) 54 Dallier, ‘Le mouvement des femmes…’, p. 36. Also in Aline Dallier, ‘Activités et réalisations de femmes dans l’art contemporain’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Paris VIII Saint-Dénis, 1980, p. 139. 55 ‘“La Spirale” De la Communication à la création au féminin’, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, April 1975. Archives BMD. 56 Ibid. See my comments on Yves Véquaud’s collection of Mithila painting and their promotion by UNESCO in the Introduction. 57 ‘La création féminine à travers l’histoire reste au niveau du cri, cri de la femelle blessée d’amour. Les pythies, les sorcières et les saintes traversent seules l’interdit du discours masculin.’ Charlotte Calmis, ‘25 December 1974’. Archives Marie-Jo Bonnet. (Women’s creation throughout history remains at the level of a cry, the cry of a female wounded by love. Pythonesses, witches and saints alone transgress the ban on masculine discourse.) 58 ‘Le potentiel cosmique, la tradition d’un savoir mystique, l’expérience spirituelle et transcendantale sont également des sources d’énergie. Nous ne sommes pas que société. L’oubli de ces choses est une des causes de la détérioration de notre civilisation. La femme est flouée de son énergie créatrice. Des forces inconnues et latentes en elle sont inexploitées. Ses moyens de s’exprimer ne sont pas ceux de l’homme. La prise de conscience de ces faits est à la base des recherches de la Spirale qui se propose d’expérimenter ainsi la libération de l’espèce féminine.’ Charlotte Calmis, ‘La Spirale’, Paris, 25 March 1974. Archives Marie-Jo Bonnet. (Cosmic potential, the mystical knowledge tradition, and spiritual and transcendental experiences are also sources of energy. We are not only society. Forgetting such matters is one of the causes of the deterioration of our civilization. Woman is cheated of her creative energy. The unknown and latent forces in her remain unexploited. Her methods of self-expression are not those of men. The awareness of these truths forms the basis of the research that La Spirale proposes to investigate in order to liberate the female species.) Ces exercices sans préméditation s’écrivent au noir d’une feuille blanche repliée … surprise de ce travail, une énergie médiumnique se révèle au niveau de conscience de la PSYCHÉE du groupe qui s’interroge à travers chacune.’ Charlotte Calmis, 1 December 1975. Archives Marie-Jo Bonnet. (These exercises without premeditation were written in black on a folded white sheet … a surprise of this work, a mediumistic energy surfaces

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at the level of consciousness of the group’s [feminine] PSYCHE which is questioned by each woman.) 59 Author interview with Marie-Jo Bonnet, Paris, 2005. 60 ‘Pour revenir aux premiers jours de La Spirale, Charlotte Calmis, qui est en quelque sorte une “mystique socialisante”, se refuse à former un club de spécialistes [sic] où l’on ne parlerait que de peinture.’ ‘Le mouvement des femmes …, p. 36. (To return to the early days of La Spirale, Charlotte Calmis, who is something of a ‘socializing mystic’, refuses to form a club of specialists [sic] where the discussion would only be about painting.) 61 ‘The search for sexual specifics in women’s art has led to the neglect of intersexual comparisons, however. In this case, for instance, the play with myth is similar to that of the New York School myth-makers of the 1940s. The mythologies of Gottlieb and Mark Rothko were a patchwork of ideas from Frazer, Freud, Jung and Nietzsche. Portentousness lurked behind the poetic symbols of these artists because their access to myth rested on the idea of the artist as seer, gifted beyond other people. What has feminism to gain from the revival of these affected attitudes? Surely women artists do not want to enhance their sex at the expense of their individuality.’ Laurence Alloway, ‘Women’s Art in the 70s’, Art in America, May–June 1976, pp. 64–72, p. 70. 62 ‘C’est aussi d’organiser des expositions de toutes les manifestations créatrices au niveau de la recherche et de l’expression de la femme elle-même, d’organiser des colloques sur les processus de la création féminine … Les buts de cette Association sont de faire éditer les premiers essais et ceux qui suivront sous le nom de “Marginales”, d’organiser des expositions et débats pour présenter l’œuvre d’ateliers de femmes inconnues du public, d’organiser toute action d’information autour de ces problèmes.’ [L’action de La Spirale] Paris, 25 March 1974. Archives BMD. (It is also to organize exhibitions for all creative manifestations with respect to research and the expression of the woman herself, to organize conferences on the processes of women’s creation … The aims of this Association are: to publish the first essays and the ones to follow under the name of “Marginales”, to organize exhibitions and debates that present the artwork from studios of women unknown to the public, and to organize any necessary information campaign around these problems.) 63 Tract. ‘Une Exposition du féminisme,’ La Spirale, Paris, 19 August 1974. Archives BMD. 64 Tract. ‘Marchands de tableaux, Directrices de galeries, Qu’avez-vous fait pour ces ateliers de femmes?’ La Spirale, Paris, 6 November 1974. Archives BMD. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 ‘Utopie? Notre crise de civilisation ouvre une conscience d’un féminisme qui ne se réclame pas “du pouvoir contre le pouvoir” mais d’une autre liberté créatrice investissant des valeurs de civilisation différentes. Utopie … Féminisme? A tous les niveaux de la réflexion des femmes s’interrogent, s’écoutent, pour anticiper la spécificité et la conscience archaïque d’autres

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valeurs parallèles de civilisation, psychiques, physiques et spirituelles.’ ‘Utopie et Féminisme’. Archives BMD. (Utopia? Our civilizational crisis brings into being an awareness of feminism that does not demand ‘power versus power’ but another creative freedom committed to different values of civilization. Utopia … Feminism? At every level of understanding, women are questioning each other, listening to each other, anticipating the specificity and the archaic consciousness of civilization’s other parallel values: psychic, physical and spiritual ones.) 68 Ibid. 69 As far as the author is aware, a catalogue of this show does not exist. 70 Dallier, ‘Le mouvement des femmes …’, p. 37. 71 The Livre d’Or (the exhibition’s guest book) varied in terms of response. While some visitors appreciated the focus on women – ‘Enfin je trouve des femmes qui s’expriment comme des femmes. L’éclatement d’une très grande sensibilité, un dégagement de chaleur intense’ (Finally I find women who express themselves as women. The bursting forth of a great sensibility, the giving off of an intense heat) – others were decidedly more confused or aggressive: ‘Bof!!!!!’ (Blah!!!!!) and ‘Moi, je repars au bout d’une heure et demie complètement frustrée … Des femmes ensemble parlant de la création, la leur, la mienne, pas vrai  ! ‘Utopie, où? Féminisme, où?’ (Me, I left after an hour and a half … Women together talking about creation, theirs, mine, not true! Where is the utopia? Where is the feminism?). Archives Charlotte Calmis. Courtesy Marie-Jo Bonnet. Special thanks to Marie-Jo Bonnet for sharing the contents of the visitor’s book for the exhibition Utopie et Féminisme. Jann Matlock had an occasion as a young American artist living in Paris to exhibit with some of the women of La Spirale in 1977. She mentioned guardedly expressing a feeling of disappointment about the exhibition at the time, likely related to the essentialist divides of the era. Author’s email correspondence with Jann Matlock, January 2010. Today, Matlock remains amazed by the group’s energy and commitment to feminism. 72 Utopie et féminisme. Archives BMD. 73 Ibid. 74 Charlotte Calmis, ‘Quelques réflexions pour un centre de recherche et un musée de l’art des femmes’, 25 January 1979. Archives BMD. 75 Charlotte Calmis, ‘De la Chose … Des Forums … Et des Musées …’, 13 September 1979. Archives BMD. Calmis’s criticism extended to the constant selection of male artists who were supported by critical reviews. She writes: ‘Les consécrations des nouveaux Musées consacreront entre autres Pollock – de Staël – Hartung – Modigliani – Gromaire, etc. en liaison avec les critiques fort connus qui les consacrèrent en leurs temps. Il suffit de consulter la revue “Derrière le Miroir” éditée (des années 1947 à nos jours) par les Éditions Maeght, pour voir surgir ce “Permanent” et sa permanence officielle’ (The consecrations of the new Museums will include figures such as Pollock – de Staël – Hartung – Modigliani – Gromaire, etc., in partnership with the famous critics who consecrated them in their times. It is enough to peruse

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the magazine Derrière le Miroir published (from 1947 to the present day) by Éditions Maeght, to see the emergence of these ‘Permanent’ artists and their official permanence). 76 The protest was organized in part by the the MLF group Les Pétroleuses, who distributed songs against [Françoise] Giroud: ‘Au Gai vive la Rose’, etc. ‘8 mars contre l’année de la femme’, Les Pétroleuses. Archives BMD. 77 Christiane Chombeau, ‘Ni Giroud, ni l’ONU ne parlent à notre place’, Le Monde, 10 March 1975. 78 ‘Texte collectif réalisé à l’occasion du Salon de la Jeune Peinture par le Groupe de Travail sur l’Année Internationale de la Femme, sur l’Image de la femme dans la publicité et sur la Famille. Ce Groupe de Travail des Femmes s’est constitué à partir d’un manifeste … s’opposant au Salon des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs qui a eu lieu en Février 1975 à Paris. Ceci a été le début d’un travail d’analyse et de réflexion à partir de notre pratique spécifique et de notre position d’individu-femme, conscientes de la double oppression exercée par le pouvoir en tant qu’individu et en tant que femme. C’est pour cette raison (double oppression) que nous avons décidé de traiter trois sujets importants aussi bien pour leur actualité (75 Année Internationale de la Femme) que pour leur impact dans la société (Publicité) que pour leur importance fondamentale et ancestrale vis à vis de l’oppression de la femme (la Famille).’ ‘Femmes en Lutte’, 26th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, exhibition catalogue, 1975, p. 47. (Collective text produced on the occasion of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture by the Groupe de Travail (Working Group) for the International Year of the Woman, on the Image of the Woman in Advertising and in the Family. This Women’s ‘Groupe de Travail’ was established from a manifesto … opposing the Salon des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs that took place in Paris in February 1975. This was the beginning of a work of analysis and reflection which came from our specific practices and shared position as ‘individual-woman’, aware of the double oppression exerted by the powers-that-be on the individual and on the woman. It is for this reason (double oppression) that we have decided to focus on three important topics as much for their relevance (1975, International Women’s Year) as for their impact on society (Advertising) and their essential and ancestral importance vis-à-vis the oppression of women (the Family).) 79 Author interview with Liliane Camier, Paris, July 2006. See also Fabienne Dumont, who identifies some of the ‘others’ as noted above. ‘Femmes et Art dans les années 70: Douze ans d’art contemporain version plasticiennes’, doctoral thesis, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, 2004, p. 124. 80 The jury for the 26th Salon de la Jeune Peinture comprised Sergio Birga, Pierre Bouvier, Dominic Canioni, André Chabot, Dego, Michel Caudrion, Ivan Messac, Roger Renaud, Dorothée Selz, Pedro Uhart and Peter Valentiner. 26th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, exhibition catalogue, 1975. 81 As part of her statistical analysis of women’s art in the 1970s, Fabienne Dumont finds the contribution of women in the Salons was approximately 15 percent to 20 percent, as much of the work was collective and often no first

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names were given. She establishes women’s contribution in the 1975 Salon de la Jeune Peinture as 7 percent, with presence of Femmes en Lutte doubling the share to 14 percent women. Dumont, ‘Femmes et Art dans les années 70’ p. 67 note 84, p. 124. 82 26th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, exhibition catalogue, 1975. 83 Diana Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art à Paris dans les années 70’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2003, p. 34. 84 ‘Les Pétroleuses ne rendent pas compte de tous les groupes de quartier du mouvement. Les Pétroleuses regroupent également des groupes d’entreprises, de lycéennes et d’étudiantes, des groupes de travail et des femmes qui participent à quelque chose qui les intéresse sans pour autant être dans un groupe.’ See Les Pétroleuses, maternité, politique, sexualité, libération, February 1975. Archives BMD. (Les Pétroleuses are not aware of all neighborhood groups in the movement. Les Pétroleuses also include business groups, high school students, work groups and women who participate in what interests them without being in a group.) 85 ‘Femmes en Lutte’, 26th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, exhibition catalogue, 1975. 86 ‘Texte du Mouvement de la Spirale’, 26th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, exhibition catalogue, 1975. 87 ‘Après une lecture du dossier Unesco Année Internationale de la Femme, nous contestons que leurs textes reflètent la politique caractéristique de l’ONU, c’est-à-dire qu’elle ne prend pas position contre les différentes formes de domination, l’impérialisme, le colonialisme, le paternalisme/matérialisme, le moralisme et le racisme. 1975 est au féminin. Pourquoi? Nous dénonçons tout de suite le langage du dossier, en apparence objectif, et avec lequel nous pourrions par moments être d’accord, mais ses contradictions et ses ambiguïtés évidentes révèlent les véritables intentions de l’Unesco envers les femmes.’ ‘Femmes en Lutte’, 26th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, exhibition catalogue, 1975, p. 47. (After reading the Unesco International Year of Women dossier, we dispute that their texts reflect the politics characteristic of the United Nations, in other words, it does not make a stand against the different forms of domination, imperialism, colonialism, paternalism/materialism, moralism and racism. 1975 is female. Why? We immediately denounce the language of the seemingly objective dossier, even if we could at times agree with it, but the obvious contradictions and ambiguities within it reveal the true intentions of Unesco toward women.) 88 Varda mentions in her introduction to Réponse de femmes that some members of the public were angered by the portrayal of naked women in the ciné-tract shown on television before children were in bed. Varda tous courts. CinéTamaris. DVD, 2007. 89 ‘Aucun destin biologique, psychique, économique ne définit la figure que revêt au sein de la société la femelle humaine; c’est l’ensemble de la civilisation qui élabore ce produit intermédiaire entre le mâle et le castrat qu’on qualifie de féminin.’ Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, vol 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). Eng. trans. The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila

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Malovany-Chevalier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), p. 283. (No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine.) 90 ‘Femmes en Lutte’, 26th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, exhibition catalogue, 1975. 91 ‘Du côté des artistes femmes’, Le Monde, 31 December 1977. Breerette mentions the groups Spirale and Femmes/Art as well as the exhibition Féminie at UNESCO which included Aline Dallier’s Couture-Peinture. She also cites Dallier’s other exhibition of women artists, Femmes / Graphismes ..., ranging from geometric abstraction to figuration at Galerie NRA in Paris which included Marcelle Cahn, Ruth Francken, Aline Gagnaire, Eve Gramatski, Françoise Janicot’s floorboard drawings, Mythia Kolesar, Vera Molnar, ORLAN and Claude Torey. ORLAN’s work was also included among the diverse art by women shown in Lyon, where her acts were framed as not only being by a woman artist, but also a ‘femme-artiste-de-province’ (woman artist of the provinces). 92 28th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, exhibition catalogue, 1977. Archives Liliane Camier. 93 Ibid. Also see Dumont, ‘Femmes et Art dans les années 70’, pp. 129–133. 94 28th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, exhibition catalogue, 1977. Archives Liliane Camier. 95 See, for example, Dany Bloch’s resignation letter in the UFPS catalogue, 1975. 96 Author interview with Christiane de Casteras, Paris, December 2006. 97 Author interview with Andrée Marquet, Paris, December 2006. 98 Ibid. 99 Interview with Christiane de Casteras, Paris, December 2006. Andrée Marquet also spoke of support from the wife of the General Director of UNESCO, A.-M. M’Bow, for the staging of a women’s exhibition. Interview with Andrée Marquet, Paris, December 2006. 100 Dallier, ‘Le mouvement des femmes …’, p. 38. 101 Dialogue, ‘La Femmes et ses images’, Dialogue, exhibition catalogue, 26 May–30 June 1978 at the Club UNESCO Marseille and 7 July–31 August 1978 at the Maison de la Culture de la Corse Ajaccio and Maison de jeunes en Corse. Archives Christiane de Casteras. 102 Dallier, ‘Le mouvement des femmes…’, p. 38. 103 Geneviève Breerette, ‘Du côté des artistes femmes’, Le Monde, 31 December 1977, p. 15. 104 Dany Bloch, Untitled letter, 91st Salon UFPS, exhibition catalogue, 1975. 105 Dany Bloch, ‘1975 … L’année de la femme’, Féminie 75, exhibition catalogue, UNESCO, 17–25 December 1975. 106 Des femmes en mouvements, no. 8–9 (August–September 1978), p. 2. See note 101 for catalogue details. Antoinette Fouque’s father was of Corsican origin. For des femmes’ extensive research on the island, see Des femmes en mouvements, no. 7 (July 1978), pp. 33–61.

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107 Les artistes s’expliquent, exhibition catalogue, Féminie-Dialogue, UNESCO, December 1979–January 1980. 108 Author telephone interview with Elisabeth Lebovici, art critic for Libération, Paris, January 2007. 109 Dallier, ‘Activités et réalisations de femmes’, pp. 146–147. Also in Dallier, ‘Le mouvement des femmes …’, pp. 39–40. Dallier has no further explanation as to why the proposed exhibition did not take place. She believes that France was simply not yet ready for an exhibition of women’s art. When queried about the importance of Dany Bloch’s role in the proposed exhibition, Dallier admits that although Bloch was a ‘friend’ to many women artists, Suzanne Pagé had control at the museum. No trace of this proposed exhibition remains in the archives at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (which the author had also searched for with the aid of archivist Florence Rouzières-Pustienne in August 2018). Diana Quinby suggests that the dossiers in Françoise Eliet’s collection were likely returned to individual artists. Author’s discussions with Aline Dallier-Popper and Diana Quinby, 2009. In her thesis, Quinby suggests it was Eliet who took the exhibition idea to Pagé, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art,’ p. 24. 110 The painter Michèle Herry kept a list of women who attended a preparatory meeting for the exhibition in late 1976 or early 1977, which included a number of well-established names. The list was as follows: Suzanne Pagé, Chantal Beret, Elizabeth Auclaire, Judit Reigl, Sheila Hicks (an American living in France), Betty Anderson (Reigl’s partner), Jacqueline Desarménien, Monique Frydman, Claudette Brun, Cristina Martinez, Irène Laksine, Elizabeth Trehard, Colette Deblé, Isabelle Le Vigan, Françoise Palluel, Françoise Coulon, Naomi Dickerson, Christine Maurice, Hélène Villiers, Michèle Herry, Zuka, Ruth Francken, Shirley Jaffe, Béatrice Conrad-Eysbesfeld, Lea Lublin, Carole Juillet, Martine Aballéa, Elisa Tan, Bernadette Bour, Isabelle Champion-Métadier, Dorothée Selz, Nil Yalter, Françoise Eliet, Vera Molnar, Barbara Silvergold. Cited in Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, p. 25. See also Dallier, ‘Le mouvement des femmes …’, p. 40. 111 Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, pp. 21–22. 112 Ibid. 113 Dallier, ‘Activités et réalisations de femmes’, p. 150. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid., p. 147. Also in Dallier, ‘Le mouvement des femmes …’, p. 40. 116 Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, p. 18. 117 Ibid., pp. 15–18. 118 Ibid., p. 19. 119 Ibid., p. 18. 120 Ibid., pp. 14–19. 121 ‘Enfermement / Rupture’. See note 29 above (see Figure 4.14). 122 The categorizations as well as the list of main participants in the group are in Quinby’s ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, p. 18. 123 Fabienne Dumont also includes these three women in the group. See ‘Femmes et art dans les années 70’, p. 135. Gretta Grzywacz (now Sarfaty) confirmed

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in an email to the author that she attended Collectif Femmes/Art meetings held at the Centre Pompidou. In Februrary 1976, Gretta (as she was known) had met Dany Bloch who exhibited two of her works (See Artitudes, no. 10, July–September 1976). Bloch hosted Gretta for two months at her apartment in Paris that year and introduced her to Françoise Eliet who presented Gretta to the women of Femmes/Art. She attended several meetings of the group at the Centre Pompidou. Author’s email correspondence with Gretta Sarfaty, 12 August 2019. 124 Excerpt from ‘Enfermement / Rupture’. Bulletin Femmes/Art, no. 1 (October 1977), pp. 5–7, p. 6. 125 In autumn 1976, Françoise Eliet wrote: ‘Des hommes coupent, cousent, découpent la toile, plient, tressent, collent, balaient, repassent, etc. La différence entre la peinture des hommes et des femmes ne peut donc se définir au niveau des gestes ou des matériaux. La jouissance d’un sexe, c’est de s’approprier la jouissance de l’autre. Toute tentative de subversion de l’ordre social s’articule là.’ ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une femme peintre?’, Bulletin Femmes/Art, no. 1 (October 1977), pp. 8–11, p. 10. (Men cut, sew, cut the canvas, fold, weave, stick, sweep, iron, etc. The difference between men’s and women’s painting cannot thus be defined at the level of gestures or materials. The jouissance of one’s sex is to appropriate for itself the jouissance of the other. Any attempt to subvert the social order is articulated there.) 126 Author interview with Najia Mehadji, Paris, July 2006. In a more recent exchange with the author, Mehadji said she was not active in the 1970s Moroccan women’s groups in Paris mentioned in the Introduction. 127 J. D. ‘Femmes / Art Présente’, Sorcières, no. 13, pp. 57–58, p. 58. Delaunay, the likely author of the article, includes the work in a discussion of a Femmes/Art event at Hessie’s studio on Saturday, 7 January 1978, which also included the work of Bernadette Delrieu, Marie Gerbaud and Michèle Herry. 128 Sophie Keir, Kate Millett’s partner, believes the photograph published in Des femmes en mouvements, no. 5 (May 1978), p. 16, was taken by Millett during her Small Mysteries  Installation, NOHO Gallery, New York, 1976. Author email correspondence with Sophie Keir, July 2019. 129 Nil Yalter, Catalogue de la journée d’actions chez Françoise Janicot, 11 March 1978, n.p. Cited in Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, p. 214. Nil Yalter shared this catalogue and her video recording of the day’s events, Cinq Femmes, with the author in her studio in preparation for this book. 130 Françoise Eliet specifically opposed any influence on art by the MLF, which she believed to be too ideological. In Canal magazine she was quoted as saying that the MLF was ‘comme tout mouvement politique, un art, son art, autrement dit la fin de l’art’. No. 8, October 1977 (translation in main text; note 134). Aline Dallier responded in her Opus article, stating that she did not share the same ‘negative’ view of the MLF’s influence (i.e. feminist art) but respected the fact that Femmes/Art was fighting on two fronts – that of the art market and institutions – through concrete measures such as

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publishing the Bulletin Femmes/Art as well as staging an exhibition in an artist’s [Hessie’s] studio loft which included works by Michèle Harry, Bernadette Delrieu, Jacqueline Delaunay, Marie Gerbault [Ponchelet]. Dallier, ‘Le mouvement des femmes ...’, p. 40. Dumont, ‘Femmes et art dans les années 70’, p. 146. 131 Aline Dallier, ‘Le feminist art aux U.S.A’, Opus International, no. 50 (May 1974), pp. 70–75. 132 ‘Enfermement / Rupture’, pp. 5–6. 133 Lucy Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: Dutton, 1976), p. 81. On Lippard, see Dallier, ‘Le mouvement des femmes ...’, p. 40. 134 See note 130. 135 ‘A.I.R. was founded in 1972 by twenty women artists as a nonprofit organization devoted to changing attitudes about art by women. The programs A.I.R. has sponsored to realize this objective are Members’ Exhibitions, Invitational Exhibitions, Information and Referral Services for Women Artists, and the Monday Program, a series of workshops, panels and open forums on issues of concern to women artists.’ Combative Acts, Profiles and Voices, A.I.R. Gallery, 1976. For a review, see Barbara Cavaliere, Womanart (Fall 1976), p. 32. 136 Aline Dallier, ‘Introduction’, Paris, February 1976 (trans. Ruth Brandon), Combative Acts, Profiles and Voices, exhibition catalogue, A.I.R. Gallery, 1976. 137 Ibid. 138 Ibid. 139 Ibid. 140 Lucy Lippard, ‘Sweeping Exchanges: The Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s’, Art Journal, vol. 40, no. 1/2 (Autumn/Winter 1980), pp. 362–365, p. 364. 141 Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, p. 18. 142 The organizers were Ursula Bierther, Evelyn Kuwertz, Karin Petersen, Inge Schumacher, Sarah Schumann and Petra Zöfelt. Françoise Eliet, ‘Berlin: L’art des femmes (1877–1977)’, Sorcières, no. 11 (1978), pp. 55–56, p. 56. Cited also in Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, p. 208. See also Dallier, ‘Activités et réalisations de femmes’, p. 156. 143 Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, p. 208. Quinby notes that along with Florence Débaste, women such as Marie Goffaux, Sophie Lebeaupin and Elisabeth Salem were also included in Femmes/Art and were likely brief participants. 144 Kunstlerinnen International 1877–1977, exhibition catalogue, NGBK Berlin, 1977, pp. 286–288 and errata sheet. 145 ‘In der Ausstellung zeigen wir ihre Arbeiten in einer Dia-Show. Für den Katalog konnten wir leider nicht mehr rechzeitig das gesamte Material bekommen, deshalb nur einige Abbildungen als Beispiel.’ Ibid., p. 286. (In the exhibition we show her work in a slide show. Unfortunately, we were not able to get all the material for the catalog in due time, so only have a few illustrations as an example.)

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146 ‘Berlin 1977. La première grande exposition internationale organisée par des femmes peintres, la seule jusqu’à ce jour. Un lieu privilégié, trop peut-être: l’orangerie du château de Charlottenburg, dans un parc dans et hors de Berlin. mars–avril 1977. Une sorte de sanctuaire: la première fois que j’entre dans une exposition organisée par des femmes et qui nous tire de notre amnésie générale. Notre, la mienne.’ Françoise Eliet, ‘Berlin: L’art des femmes (1877–1977)’, p. 55. (The first major international exhibition organized by women painters, the only one to date. It is in a privileged place, rather too much so – the orangery of Charlottenburg Castle which is in a park and outside Berlin. March–April 1977. A kind of sanctuary: the first time I enter an exhibition organized by women that frees us from our general amnesia. Ours and mine.) 147 Exhibition Invitation, Archives Françoise Janicot, Paris. For a fuller account of activities, which includes ORLAN’s performance, see the 25th anniversary special commemorative edition of the events in ‘IV Encontros Internacionais de Arte – 1977–2002’, Gazeta das Caldas, 2 August 2002. Courtesy Gretta Sarfaty. 148 List of participants and schedule of events. Archives Françoise Janicot, Paris. 149 ORLAN ARTISTE, Art Press, no. 14 (January 1978), p. 45. 150 Dallier, ‘Activités et réalisations de femmes’, p. 153. 151 ‘L’une des particularités de cette exposition était d’avoir délibérément refusé le débat à propos de la question des femmes et de l’art au profit d’une soirée d’événements produits par des femmes’. Dallier, ‘Activités et réalisations de femmes’, p. 153. (One of the peculiarities of this exhibition was to have deliberately refused the debate about women and art in favor of an evening of events created by women.) 152 Ibid. See also Frank Popper, Art, Action et Participation (Paris: Klincksieck, 1980), p. 185. 153 Ibid., p. 154. 154 Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, p. 213. 155 ‘Enfermement / Rupture’, p. 5. In this manifesto, the group aligns the female body in the form of the ‘mother, goddess and mother-goddess’ with ‘fascism’, p. 6. 156 Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX [1972–1973] Encore (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975). 157 Dallier, ‘Activités et réalisations de femmes’, p. 154. 158 Ibid. 159 Ibid. 160 Christine de Buzon, ‘Perdre de vue: Premières notes sur une histoire du Collectif Femmes/Art’, unpublished, 1998, p. 4 note 8. Quoted in Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, p. 216. 161 ‘Le deuxième point c’est qu’en se mêlant de près à l’élite intellectuelle parisienne, les femmes se retrouvent forcément à la seconde place, les premières places étant prises depuis longtemps. Cela dit, ce type d’expérience qu’il ne s’agit pas de dénigrer mais envers lequel il convient de rester critique, a permis aux plasticiennes françaises de faire l’économie d’une étape, celle de la

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galerie qui a tendance à favoriser l’esprit corporatiste et à couper les artistes de l’ensemble des femmes.’ Dallier, ‘Activités et réalisations de femmes’, pp. 154–156. (The second point is that by mixing closely with the intellectual elite of Paris, women find that they are inevitably in second place, the first places long since occupied. That said, this type of experience – not so much to be denigrated but more to emphasize remaining critical – allowed French women artists to skip a step, the one of the gallery which tends to encourage a corporatist spirit and to cut artists off from each other.) 162 Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, p. 211; Dallier, ‘Activités et réalisations de femmes, pp. 149–150; Françoise Eliet in Art Press, no. 16 (March 1978), pp. 40–41. Exhibition event card dated January 7, Archives Françoise Janicot. 163 Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, p. 217. 164 Geneviève Breerette also discussed Artemisia Gentileschi and Judith au Holopherne at some length in her article on women artists’ exhibitions, ‘Du côté des artistes femmes’, in Le Monde, 31 December 1977. Also Françoise Eliet, ‘Lutte des femmes dans l’histoire de l’art’, and Christine Maurice, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi’, both in Art Press, no. 5 (March 1977), pp. 24–26; 20–21. 165 According to Jane Moss, Garance also performed Les Écrits de Laure at the Lucernaire Forum in 1978. ‘Women’s Theater in France’, Signs, vol. 12, no. 3 (Spring 1987), pp. 548–567, p. 556. See also Sorcières, no. 13 (1978), p. 61. Bibliothèque Nationale de France also has documention from Garance’s performance of Laure’s writings which took place in 1981. https://data.bnf.fr/ en/39474649/les_ecrits_de_laure_spectacle_1981/. 166 Poster for the event; also Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, pp. 217–218. 167 Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, p. 218. 168 Artists included Ghislaine Amon, Claude Bauret Allard, Mireille BrunetJailly, Isabelle Champion-Métadier, Florence Débaste, Colette Deblé, Danièle Dubeau Midjani, Françoise Eliet, Monique Frydman, Danièle Gibrat, Nicole Gauchas, Pamela Härkönen, Michèle Herry, Françoise Janicot, Monique Kissel, Irène Laksine, Muriel Lattay, Geneviève Lebon, Myriam Librach, Lea Lublin, Corinne Mercadier, Elisabeth Mercier, Marie-Geneviève Moreau, Marie Orensanz, Annie Pascal, Barbara Pollak, Vicky Rémy, Elisa Tan, Jacqueline Van Bruaene, Françoise Vergier. Collège d’échanges contemporains. Opening events included concerts, Lublin’s videos, Garance reading Laure and a public debate in Marseille at the FNAC. Archives Françoise Janicot and Gloria Feman Orenstein. 169 Archives Françoise Janicot, Paris. 170 Janicot’s and Eliet’s exhibitions at Le Lieu-Dit announced in Des femmes en mouvements, no. 12–13 (December 1978–January 1979), p. 3. Laksine is mentioned along with Janicot, Eliet, Gunvor Berquist and Marion Settekorn in Gloria Feman Orenstein’s ‘Paris Salon is a Magnet for Artists and Writers’, Women’s Artists Newsletter, vol. 5, no. 5 (1 November 1979), p. 12. 171 Irène Laksine, ‘Artist Statement’, 18 February 2016. Courtesy Sally Perigo. 172 See Gloria Feman Orenstein, ‘Salon Women of the Second Wave: Honoring the Great Matrilinieage of Creators of Culture’, in Entering the Picture:

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Judy Chicago, the Fresno Feminist Art Program, and the Collective Vision of Women Artists, ed. Jill Fields (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 184–201, pp. 192–193. 173 Ibid. 174 Ibid. Le Lieu-Dit, which opened its doors in November 1978, included solo exhibitions in its first year by Eliet, Janicot, Laksine, as well as Gunvor Berquist and Marion Settekorn. For Orenstein’s writings on women’s art, which included a number of women from Collectif Femmes/Art, see ‘Exorcism/ Protest/Rebirth: Modes of Feminist Expression in France’, Womanart, Winter 1977–1978, pp. 8–11. 175 Author email correspondence with Gloria Orenstein, 15 September 2019. 176 Press Statement in the Dossier ‘Hystériques du XIXe siècle’, Archives Gloria Feman Orenstein. The images were taken from D.-M. Bourneville and P.-M.L. Regnard’s three-volume work, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière. Service de M. Charcot (Paris: V. Adrien Delhayahe & Ce), published in 1876–1877, 1877–1878, 1879–1880). The exhibition, which ran from 7 June to 12 July 1979, also provided commentaries by Bourneville and Regnard on the individual women photographed. 177 29th Salon de la Jeune Peinture exhibition catalogue, pp. 126–129. 178 Ody Saban, ‘Le plus intime est le plus politique’, unpublished statement written for this book [Counterpractice]. 15 September 2019. 179 Ibid. 180 Nicole Millet, ‘des femmes au salon de la jeune peinture’, Des femmes en mouvements, no. 3 (March 1978), p. 95. 181 An official statement presented by the group at the Police Headquarters in Paris in March 1978 declared the intentions of the group as follows: ‘Création d’un lieu d’expression plastique pour les femmes professionnelles ou non pour qu’elles puissent rencontrer, exposer, travailler ensemble, s’initier, s’informer et prendre en charge leur production artistique.’ ‘Déclaration d’Art et Regard des Femmes faite à la préfecture de police le 29 mai 1978’, Journal Officiel de la République Française. Quoted in Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/ Art’, p. 44. (Creation of a place of visual expression for professional or nonprofessional women so that they can meet, exhibit, work together, initiate themselves, learn and take charge of their artistic production.) (Statement by Art et Regard des Femmes made at the police headquarters on May 29, 1978). 182 Ody Saban, ‘Le plus intime est le plus politique’, unpublished statement written for this book, 2019. 183 Ibid. The core group included Doune Cesari, Dominique Guyot-Dionnest, Marie-Claude Pignet, Mariette Teisserenc, Micheline Doke, Marie-Noëlle Abirtrol, Colette Grangier, Isabelle Lawrence, Evelyne Petiteau and Viviane Siman. 184 No Author, ‘Et si ça se mettait à bouger du côté des femmes artistes!’, Des femmes en mouvements, no. 4 (April 1978), p. 4. 185 Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, p. 44.

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186 ‘C’est ce qu’en France on a appelé la “sororité” en résonnance ironique avec le slogan de la révolution française de: “liberté, égalité, fraternité”. Cette “fraternité”, qui était souvent réelle et révolutionnaire, excluait pourtant spontanément les femmes sans y voir le moindre problème.’ Ody Saban, ‘Le plus intime est le plus politique,’ unpublished statement written for this book, 2019. (It’s what was called ‘sorority’ in ironic resonance with the French revolutionary slogan, ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. This ‘fraternity’ which was often real and revolutionary, nevertheless spontaneously excluded the participation of women without the slightest problem.) 187 Ibid. 188 Orenstein’s lecture on the goddess and surrealism was announced for the group Art et Regard des Femmes in Des femmes en mouvements (November 1978), p. 4. 189 Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, p. 45. 190 Dallier, ‘Activités et réalisations de femmes’, p. 162. 191 A week’s program ran as follows: ‘Lundi: atelier sauvage de rencontre, de 19 à 21 h. Mardi: interrogation-rencontre sur la création, de 19 à 21 h. Mercredi: atelier d’écriture, de 19 à 21 h., atelier de collage de 19h à 21h. Jeudi: atelier de sculpture, de 19 à 21h. Vendredi: atelier-matière, de 19 à 21 h. Samedi: atelier de récupération-récréation de 15 à 19h.’ Ibid., p. 162, p. 150. (Monday: unofficial meet-up workshop, from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday: reflections-meeting on creation, from 7 to 9 p.m. Wednesday: writing workshop, from 7 to 9 p.m., collage workshop from 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday: sculpture workshop, from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday: material workshop, from 7 to 9 p.m. Saturday: rest-recreation workshop from 3 to 7 p.m.) 192 Author’s email correspondence with Ody Saban, August–September 2019. 193 Saban, ‘Le plus intime est le plus politique’, unpublished statement written for this book, 2019. 194 Dallier, ‘Activités et réalisations de femmes’, pp. 161–162. 195 Quinby, ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art’, pp. 45–46. Interview between Mariette Teisserenc and D. Quinby, 4 July 2000, p. 46.

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6

Hard politics, soft art: subversive practices from écriture féminine to soft art

La révolution pour eux, c’est l’art, et c’est par l’art qu’il faut faire la révolution. Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, 20001 The revolution for them is art, and it is through art that the revolution must be made. Ultimately, both men and women can and must be equally involved in projects of creativity and transcendence. Only then will women be seen as aligned with culture, in culture’s ongoing dialectic with nature. Sherri B. Ortner, 1972/19742

In this chapter the impact of women’s artistic contributions and avant-garde practices will be measured in relation to the dominant trends of cultural life during the 1970s in France. This includes the complex relationship between art made by women within and outside the male-dominated tendances such as Nouvelle Figuration and Supports-Surfaces, while also taking into account the focus on corporeality in art made by women. Trends such as écriture féminine will be examined in light of avant-garde practices in writing and authorship while ‘soft art’, or the use of materials such as embroidery, knitting, weaving and other soft materials, will be looked at in relation to ‘hard’ contemporary institutional policies and politics and the conscious insertion of women’s ‘traditional’ forms of art into exhibitions by a few critics and curators. The dual positioning of women as ‘minor’, or politically secondary to men, and a ‘minor’ form of art (often considered domestic or artisan) was utilized not just in France but in other parts of the world as well to establish a heritage of art by women which was furthered, if not altogether acknowledged as a powerful medium, in the 1970s. Glissade: Une ère glaciaire / An Ice Age The progressive flourishing of the experimental surfaces of the 1970s, with its hyper-focus on clean, sharp inquiries into time and space, pointed reflections

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on ideology, and breathtaking confidence in delving into remote and erudite places in thinking about culture, structure and ‘choses’, was inspired by the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and the nouveau roman, Roland Barthes’s structuralism, and visual depictions in film such as découpage and camera movements. Together these created an artistic landscape at once grounded in the visual experience and decentered into an avant-garde one. This gave rise to a number of tendances (trends) in France such as the continuation of 1960s Nouveau Réalisme, with Arman, César and Niki de Saint Phalle raising everyday objects to the status of high art; the continuation of gestural abstraction through Judit Reigl and Simon Hantaï; the intricate and unpredictable ‘tissage’ of Supports-Surfaces; and the space-suffused surfaces and tampering with time and space in Nouvelle Figuration amongst others. The 1970s also witness further developments in art corporel, or body art, by Michel Journiac and Gina Pane; kinetic art; and land art and its various interventions in nature by Christo and others. Within this environment, Jean Clair, writing in 1972, reflects on the developments in France since the mid-1960s as representing an ère glaciaire, or the onset of an ice age: L’art sensible, intimiste, et feutré dont la tradition française s’honorait semblait avoir disparu pour faire place à un art neutre, impersonnel et lisse, défiant l’appréhension, fatiguant la vue. En fait, les héritiers de l’École de Paris semblaient plus occupés à liquider leur héritage qu’à le faire fructifier.3 Sensitive, intimate, and subdued art which the French tradition honored has seemed to have disappeared to make way for a neutral, impersonal and smooth art, defying apprehension and exhausting the eye. In fact, the inheritors of the School of Paris seemed more occupied in liquidating their heritage than making it fructify.

The subtle mechanisms of culture are at work here, inspired by the antimaterial concerns of Marxism and capitalism as expressed by Jean Baudrillard, Barthes’s text on the death of the author (1967), and Maurice Blanchot’s writing from the 1950s on death and absence create a landscape where a certain generation of artists are working through themes of loss, alienation and the struggle to find the ‘real’ – themes that splinter the artistic world into various factions that often produce works independently of each other. Given this terrain, to what extent does women’s art (painting, performance, object) offer a different (untold) story to that of the ice age of Jean Clair? Women artists working through embodiment, concerns of femininity, and power (in tandem with the rise in women’s rights and social status) become visible just as the subject in painting is in retreat. I will, in this chapter, approach the work of women artists through specific works of their male counterparts using the

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structure of Clair’s ère glaciaire – not to reinstate a binary, dialectical structure, but to demonstrate how a subtle glissade (from glisser, to slip/slide or glide) takes place, as women deepen and challenge the artistic terrain while at the same time consciously inscribing them in a more defined critical history.4

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‘Embodying’ art In 1969, Nicola [L.], a young French artist who studied at the École des BeauxArts in Paris and exhibited with the Nouveaux Réalistes Yves Klein, Raymond Haines and Gérard Deschamps – without being considered one herself – staged for the first time her action Red Coat – Same Skin for Everybody in a pure red plastic cape that was performed from the late 1960s onwards in the streets, on a ski slope, at rock concerts and even on a beach in Ibiza.5 The performance allowed eleven individuals to wear the same plastic ‘skin’ that was connected by one piece of material (Plate 54). The red material, with its Marxist and utopic overtones, flattens social differences through displacement and forces both connection and anonymity. The hoods are loosely reminiscent of the red Phrygian caps worn throughout the Revolution as a symbol of liberty (seen on La semeuse on French franc coins; see Figure P.4), and the rough-hewn material of the coat’s construction serve to shape, hide and conceal sexual body parts while liberating (and displacing) the body through the experience of a shared skin. (It is unknown whether Nicola was already familiar with Brazilian artist Lygia Pape’s large-scale collective performance with white fabric, Divisor, first performed in 1968 at Río de Janeiro’s Museu de Arte Moderna.) The scale of the work, its fluid surface and play between absence and presence are further revealed in relation to Simon Hantaï’s Meun (1967) (Plate 55). Hantaï, coming from a heritage of early Surrealism and Tachism, presents surfaces with large-scale forms of color that evoke the semiotic (preverbal) language consistent with the structuralist ideas then being published by Tel Quel. Meun, conceived with the technique of pliage – the painting of the folded canvas or the using of the imprints of a painted canvas to create folds – is based on the pli which Heidegger places between the interior soul and exterior world (which never ceases to fold and unfold), and which Gilles Deleuze places between superficiality (the surface) and eternity through the oriental and baroque line.6 The communication and dissonance in the work forces the viewer to inhabit the space while being alienated from it. The experience, displaced but subtle, not only prefigures the violence and containment of a forthcoming May ’68, but, through the unconsciousness of the pli with its spaces of hidden interiority and dominant territoriality, displaces the viewer into what the MLF calls le non-dit (the not-said). If Nicola’s work fosters or forces communication, Hantaï’s work shows its very limits. The pliability of

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the surface in Hantaï’s work shares characteristics with Supports-Surfaces by using the limits of the object as a non-lieu of thought or engagement. The installations of Supports-Surfaces (with its varied practitioners) focus on the winding and unwinding of the material surfaces of an ideologized form that empty out both meaning and structured thought. The soft materials used, such as rope, canvas and frames, create malleable materials that erase the conventional notion of a ‘subject’. In the installation shot taken in the Galerie Fournier in 1970, the work of Patrick Saytour, Claude Viallat, Daniel Dezeuze and André Valensi is exhibited in an otherwise empty space stripped of context that restricts the viewer to the material itself (Plate 56).7 This control and repression in the atmosphere forms an important contrast with Françoise Janicot’s Encoconnage of 1972 (Plate 57). Janicot’s self-wrapping was presented as a ‘feminist’ intervention and one meant to be politicized: ‘La pulsion, le désir, le pas vers la sortie de l’étouffement passent par le montrage d’une a-lien-ation … constat d’enfermement, volonté de montrer sa situation de femme piégée, la contrainte par des liens s’impose tout naturellement comme métaphore’ (The drive, the desire, the step toward the exit of being suffocated take place through the show of an a-lien-ation [‘lien’ in French is a bond, cord, or tie, and ‘n-ation’ is nation, or France] … the condition of being closed in, the will to show the situation of a trapped woman, the disaffection from the patrie and the constraints of being tied develop naturally as a metaphor in the work).8 The careful repetition and methodical wrapping of the body and disfiguration of the ‘surface’ is at once at odds with Supports-Surfaces in its metaphorical, bodily and feminist concerns, but shares their position with regard to the repressed or alienated subject/object. This is seen in the dismantled and deconstructed paintings of Supports-Surfaces as much as the hide-and-seek body wrapping of Françoise Janicot, where the artist seemingly ‘returns’ the body to flexible materials (such as those seen in Supports-Surfaces) in a dual act of recuperation and figuration /disfiguration. Juliet Mitchell, in her book Mad Man and Medusas, argues that male hysteria is the result of a lateral relationship between siblings, or the tensions arising from a sibling rivalry between brothers and sisters, which has been ignored in the twentieth century.9 The result has been a labeling of the female as hysteric due to her weakened position in the vertical relationship of the Oedipal complex, in which the male has the privileged heterosexual dynamic with the mother. Hysteria as a mimetic and repetitive act in relation to the lateral/vertical power dynamic of human relations is an interesting point of insight into the practice and installations of Supports-Surfaces and its material use of horizontals and verticals combined with the repression, or disappearance of the subject. In this way, a glissade between practices reflects a new engendering of hysteria in the early 1970s. Contrasting with Françoise Janicot’s performances is the work of Brazilian Lygia Clark, who frequently visited Paris in the late 1960s and taught at the

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Sorbonne from 1972 onwards. Her touch and sensory experiments between the interior and exterior body, to open up new avenues of healing/thought, were conducted to return the subject to original and privileged states of being. In Architectures biologiques: naissance (1969) she allowed students to slide between nylon sacks that had been sewn together (Plate 58). This literal glissade between one state of being and another represented a rebirth (the sacks resemble the birth canal) by the enlivening of the sense of touch which led to a feeling of abandon and, through healing, dissolved the distinction between the artist and the object.10 This heightened sense of touch returns us to its literal repression and absence in Jacques Monory’s Jungle de velours no. 13 (1971), presented at the Monory exhibition at ARC 2 in the same year: the cold blue canvas and the wealth of flowers are isolated through technology as the hand on the right-hand corner pushes a button to access touch (as if on a screen) (Plate 59). The absence and impenetrability of a distanced emotion is not at all meant to be structured as masculine; the sense of touch and its limits are just as fine in the work of Monory as in that of Clark, but reading them together reveals their control and abandonment within the different surfaces of the mediums. This series of ‘surface’ confrontations occurs not only when relating women’s art to the larger network of men’s art, but also through (inter)readings of women’s work. Feminine interventions In Drap/Décodage (1973) Judit Reigl, under the spell of what she terms a ‘nouvelle impulsion’ (fresh impulse), uses the surface of the cloth like a skin that she imprints with the torso of a man, which bleeds through to the other side onto a thin canvas hung on the studio’s wall (Figure 6.1). This break with her

Judit Reigl, Drap/Décodage, 1973.

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previous work of fine lines of abstraction came at the beginning of 1973, when she began depicting the male body and deconstructing its form.11 The meaning of this work, which Reigl places within her series of déroulements, lies in the power, strength and passivity of the male body (and its fuite, or escape) found on both sides of the canvas. The reversal of the objectification of the female body through the presentation of a male body appears to situate Reigl’s work in relation to a more ‘engaged’ feminism, an ideology which she resists.12 My attempt is not to place her painting in the context of an ideology, but to respect another form of glissade, a moment of slippage or excess, that takes place between the surface of her work and an attempt at embodiment which breaks with her practice of abstraction. This work stands in counterpoint to Yves Klein’s Anthropometries a decade and a half earlier, in which female bodies were painted and dragged along or pressed onto the paper support (later mounted on canvas) as directed by Klein. Reigl’s quiet, subtle use of the drap and the marking of the male’s body are in striking opposition to the work of the blisteringly rebellious ORLAN, an artist of a much younger generation. In 1968 ORLAN used sheets from her traditional wedding trousseau to embroider the sites of semen stains of her previous lovers (Figure 6.2). This ironic and profound sense of guile and rebellion against her Catholic education mark and ritualize the male body in the female space by the repetitive work of her needle. This reclaiming of space becomes a hallmark for her work in the 1970s. She repeatedly uses sheets to disguise and ‘mask’ herself in performances that post date and enact

ORLAN, Performance, Embroidery of trousseau sheets, c. 1968.

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Joan Riviere’s ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ (1929) (see Chapter 4). ORLAN consciously breaks with these conventions in later works by using her own skin and its (inter)penetrations through cosmetic surgery to transform her appearance. The gap between Judit Reigl’s and ORLAN’s work, so different in tenor and emotion, should not be ignored. The use of the sheet as a skin surface and the marking of the male body and its penetrations demonstrate a link and a rapprochement in their work. Yet this limit of the surface and its delving into space – filled with differences even between two women artists working in the same period and context – serve to highlight the penetrations, whether ephemerally through the bleeding (and escape) of color in Reigl’s work or through the careful and spitefully controlled repetitive pin-pricking gestures of embroidery seen in the work of ORLAN. Confrontations between works in the 1970s are not limited to contrasts between artists. They also reveal the way in which avant-garde practices arose in reaction to the policies of institutions and to radical politics. This is evident in the practices of écriture féminine, or women’s writing, and ‘soft art’ or the use of fabrics and fibers by women (and also men) to suggest various levels of inherent political critiques in the practices seen below. Hélène Cixous, who became an advocate of the practice of écriture féminine, was seen as embodying a type of ‘glissement’ (slippage), in her writing in contrast with conventional texts, as suggested by Gilles Deleuze well in advance of her 1975 manifesto, ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’: Quel est donc l’effet créé par Hélène Cixous? La matière de Neutre est faite d’éléments fictifs faits de désirs, éléments phonologiques faits de lettres, éléments linguistiques faits de citations, éléments actifs faits de scènes, etc. Ces éléments forment un ensemble immobile, complexe, difficile à déchiffrer, ‘neutre’, tant qu’on en reste à la vitesse = 0. À des vitesses intermédiaires [de la lecture], ils entrent dans des chaînes qui se rabattent, et les rabattent sur tel ou tel ensemble déterminé, constituant des histoires distinctes ou des versions distinctes d’une histoire. Et à des vitesses de plus en plus grandes, ils accèdent à un perpétuel glissement, à une rotation extrême qui les empêche alors de se rabattre sur un ensemble quelconque, et les fait aller toujours plus vite à travers toutes les histoires. Bref, c’est une lecture qui fonctionne suivant les vitesses d’association du lecteur.13 What then is the effect created by Hélène Cixous? Neutre is made of associated elements: fictive elements made of desires, phonological elements made of letters, linguistic elements made of figures, critical elements made of citations, active elements made of scenes, etc. These elements form an immobile, complex ensemble, that is difficult to decipher, ‘neutral’ [neutre], so long as one remains at speed 0 [la vitesse = 0]. At the intermediary speeds,

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they enter into chains that fall back [se rabattent] and fold the elements back [les rabattent] onto one or other determined ensemble, constituting distinct stories [histoires] or distinct versions of a story. And at greater and greater speeds they enter into a perpetual slippage, an extreme rotation that keeps them from falling back onto any particular ensemble and makes them go ever more rapidly across all of the stories. In short, it is a reading that functions according to the reader’s speeds of association.

Deleuze suggests that an écriture féminine ‘avant la lettre’ is a physical experience when read with speed, and that the language, through this glissement, can become a visual and bodily phenomenon that slips deeper into the consciousness as it mimics the drives (of the writer and reader) in ways that conventional writing could not. (Female literary critics also borrowed from this concept in narrating the slippery semantics of bodily writing, thus underscoring the differences between the sexes.)14 This creates a heightened subjectivity and awareness that goes beyond contemporary literature and is indicative of a ‘new’ type of body in the text, as discussed below. Writing the body: écriture féminine If militant feminists were attempting to liberate the female body through legislation in the political realm, a number of women writers were creating a new practice of writing that liberated the female ‘voice’ through the practice of ‘writing the body’.15 Women’s menstrual flows, pregnancies, sexual drives and bodily rhythms were explored in language, forming the basis of a writing experience that was expressed textually and would create a new basis of political power. Hélène Cixous attempted in La jeune née (1975) to crystallize the process: ‘Il faut que la femme écrive son corps, qu’elle invente la langue imprenable qui crève les cloisonnements, classes et rhétoriques, ordonnances et codes …’ (Woman must write her body, must make up the unimpeded tongue that bursts partitions, classes, and rhetorics, orders and codes …).16 The freeing of this ‘inner’ voice through language and experience was fundamental to women’s ‘breakthroughs’ in social, cultural and political arenas that were dominated by male voices and expression. Cixous’s ‘manifesto’ for the promotion of an écriture féminine, ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ (1975), was published in the literary review, L’Arc 61, a volume dedicated to Simone de Beauvoir during UNESCO’s celebration of L’Année de la femme. (De Beauvoir herself would come to reject the concept of a ‘female’ writing, dismissing the positions of a number of prominent women associated with the practice.)17 The opening lines of Cixous’s text stressed the urgent need for women to ‘write’ themselves and attract other women to do the same: ‘Je parlerai de l’écriture féminine: de ce qu’elle fera. Il faut que la femme écrive de la femme et fasse

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venir les femmes à l’écriture …’ (I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing …).18 Although not all women writers adhered to the practice of écriture féminine or the labeling of their writing as distinctly ‘feminine’ – including Monique Wittig, the radical, lesbian writer of Les Guérillères (1969), who most notably distanced herself from the concept – Cixous’s term eventually came broadly to embody a women’s experimental writing movement that emerged in the course of the 1970s and into the 1980s.19 ‘Feminine’, or ‘female’ writing, as the name suggests, was a practice conceived by Cixous as an attempt to counter Lacan’s reading of discourse as phallocentric, through the use of women’s ‘unrestricted’ and ‘uncodified’ voice. As such it shared properties with Derrida’s later notion of deconstruction to use female imagination (and body) to challenge the ‘male’ symbolic through jouissance.20 (Roland Barthes’s reading of plaisir vs. jouissance in his 1973 Le plaisir du texte is also formative to this reading experience.) Diverse authors with differing styles are considered as typifying women’s writing practice. They include Marie Cardinal, Chantal Chawaf, Andrée Chedid, Hélène Cixous, Dominique Desanti, Marguerite Duras, Françoise d’Eaubonne, Viviane Forrester, Jocelyne François, Xavière Gauthier, Benoîte Groult, Nancy Huston, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Annie Leclerc, Evelyne Le Garrec, Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, Françoise MalletJoris, Michèle Montrelay, Christiane Rochefort, Danièle Sallenave, Leila Sebbar and Victoria Thérame. (This was the ‘official’ list compiled by Xavière Gauthier and Anne Rivière, both former editors of the journal Sorcières. The various types of writers – novelists, historians, philosophers, psychoanalysts, critics, etc. – suggest a broad definition of écriture féminine.)21 Other names associated with écriture féminine are Mariejke Aucante, Yvonne Baby, Jeanne Champion, Madeleine Chapsal, Catherine Clément, Paule Constant, Geneviève Dormann, Josane Duranteau, Annie Mignard, Thérèse Guillaume, Paula Jacques, Sophie Podolski and Catherine Rihoit. Publishing houses like Éditions des femmes in 1974 and women’s intellectual and literary journals such as Sorcières (1976–1982), Brussels-based Les Cahiers du GRIF (1973–1997) and Histoires d’elles (1977–1980) – which also emerged from the subjective ‘diary entry’ styles of MLF militant journals such as Le Torchon brûle and Les Pétroleuses – bolstered and gave exposure to established and experimental women writers. A burgeoning women’s writing scene was thus supported by publishing houses, even if, as feared, the reality was often relegation to the ‘back shelf ’ of bookstores.22 The reservation and ambivalence shown toward women-only art exhibitions (as seen in Chapter 5) was shared also with collections of work that focused on women’s writing, where the threat of ‘ghettoization’ and the focus on established ‘stars’ were a constant concern.23 (Antoinette Fouque’s and Psych et Po’s Éditions des femmes

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highlighted the status of women’s contemporary art as potentially secondary in commercial importance to that of women’s literature [Fouque had previously worked as an editor at Seuil], with the gallery space for women’s exhibitions only growing out of Librairie des femmes in 1979, five years after the latter’s establishment.)24 Philippe de la Genardière, writer and director of the collection ‘Textes’ at the publishing house Flammarion, identifies the market situation for women writers: D’autre part, il y a le danger d’un ghetto de l’écriture féminine. L’avènement de cette écriture s’est parfois retourné en enfermement. Les livres des éditions des Femmes m’intéressent, certains sont passionnants, mais je regrette que ce soit emprisonné dans le ghetto militant. Créer une maison d’édition de femmes, … mais il ne faut pas ériger l’écriture féminine en culte militant. C’est curieux, c’est une autre façon d’être sexiste. Peut-être le ghetto a-t-il été nécessaire pour casser quelque chose.25 On the other hand, there is the danger of a ghetto of écriture féminine. The advent of this writing has sometimes retreated to captivity. Des Femmes’s books interest me, some are fascinating, but I regret that it is imprisoned in a militant ghetto. Create a women’s publishing house, … but do not make écriture féminine into a militant cult. It’s strange, but it’s another way of being sexist. Maybe the ghetto was necessary to shatter something.

The fear of the ghetto as an outcome of the creation and establishment of political possibilities for women’s voice and aesthetics was a theme explored in France in works such as Béatrice Didier’s L’Écriture-femme (1981), which examined the trajectory of women’s writing from Teresa of Avila, Madame de Staël, George Sand, Colette and Virginia Woolf to Marguerite Duras.26 The ‘ghettoizing’ of women’s literature in this period was due in part to the limited opportunities for women writers within France while simultaneously suggesting the possibility of their uprising in the style of May ’68, where Nanterre students were also positioned as being situated in a ‘revolutionary ghetto’.27 The interest generated by French women’s writing in Anglo-American universities’ French literature departments was evident in the publication in the early 1980s of Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron’s New French Feminisms (1980) and in articles such as Ann Rosalind Jones’s ‘Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of L’écriture féminine’ (1981). This scholarship gave the new experimental forms of expression that were grounded in theories of psychoanalysis, philosophy and deconstruction a legitimacy and momentum in departments trying to find another avenue outside empirical understanding through which to challenge patriarchal dominance. (A number of these women writers in France were later invited as visiting professors to these

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universities abroad.) International critics of ‘French feminism’ writing in English and French were rich and numerous and took differing stances (Claire Goldberg Moses on the dangers of essentialism, Gayatri Spivak on its limits in postcolonial contexts, French Christine Delphy on the dangers of losing socialist feminism in France to its radical counterparts, and Judith Butler’s poststructuralist critique of gender, to name but a few; see Introduction). Écriture féminine also had its detractors for its essentialist and incoherent language (which gave rise to defenders of it).28 French writer Nathalie Sarraute had flat-out dismissed the concept of an écriture féminine in an interview in 1984.29 Jean-François Lyotard somewhat reactively positioned ‘seduction’ against ‘conviction’ and agonistically advocated for an écriture mâle, one which conceptually countered ‘écriture féminine’. He did so by emphasizing that such writing was in the form of an ‘essai’ which was always a male enterprise (regardless if the writer was a woman): ‘Il se peut que, du moment que vous écrivez, vous soyez obligé d’être un homme’ (It may be that you are forced to be a man from the moment that you write).30 Writing the body Detractors of the concept of écriture féminine feared that such writing would stereotype the ‘feminine’ or ‘female’ and would lead to a definition of ‘woman’ which was by nature ‘undefinable’, and which if defined would open itself to the risk of being countered by masculine discourse.31 Any concept of écriture féminine would then have to rely on being ‘plural’. The voice(s) of écriture féminine varied in form but was often typified by spaces, gaps, ellipses and rhythms, which Julia Kristeva had identified in her La révolution du langage poétique (1974) as the ‘semiotic pulses’ that typified the experiences of the chora and were often manifested in male avant-garde writers such as Lautréamont, Mallarmé and Joyce. These ‘spaces’, ‘gaps’ or ‘suppressions’ were also evident in the work of Marguerite Duras, whom fellow writer Xavière Gauthier cites as demonstrating the ‘feminine’ in the text.32 While Duras relies on absent spaces outside syntax, for Cixous writing is the ‘excess’, the overflow – often physically manifested in milk (lactation), blood (menstruation), tears and sweat that emit from the female body – that makes up women’s unique body, experience and voice: Il faut que la femme écrive son corps, qu’elle invente la langue imprenable qui crève les cloisonnements, classes et rhétoriques, ordonnances et codes, qu’elle submerge, transperce, franchisse le discours à réserve ultime, y compris celui qui se rit d’avoir à dire le mot ‘silence’, celui qui visant l’impossible s’arrête pile devant le mot ‘impossible’: et l’écrit comme ‘fin’. En corps: plus que l’homme invité aux réussites sociales, à la sublimation, les femmes sont corps. Plus corps donc plus écriture.33

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Woman must write her body, must make up the unimpeded tongue that bursts partitions, classes, and rhetorics, orders and codes, must inundate, run through, go beyond the discourse with its last reserves, including the one of laughing off the word ‘silence’ that has to be said, the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops dead before the word ‘impossible’ and writes it as ‘end’. In body/Still more: woman is body more than man is. Because he is invited to social success, to sublimation. More body hence more writing.

The practice of writing the body, or the emergence of the subjective female voice, becomes a conscious source of power seen as much in the reclaimed ‘hysteric’ of Freud’s account of Dora as in the work of the Surrealists. This is evident also in the reclamation of witches in La Sorcière, Jules Michelet’s 1862 influential work which Cixous directly credits in La jeune née, as did Marguerite Duras and Xavière Gauthier in Les parleuses (1974). For Cixous, the ‘rire’, or the jouissance of Medusa’s laugh, was a voice of challenge to the patriarchy by way of reclaiming the subversive hysteric. The performative aspect of the hysteric – ‘a body that demands (rather than uses) a kind of theater’, according to Georges Didi-Huberman – should not be lost in terms of the emergence of a tactical discourse and the creation of its public.34 Novelist Chantal Chawaf echoes the appropriation of the hysteric: ‘À l’avant ma tante rit’ – “J’aurais fait danser vos jeunes filles à en mourir!” Hiff! Hiff! Frange teinte. Ahaaah. Hystérie. Lulu se tait. Ses lèvres, vulve rouge dans l’obscurité’ (In the front my aunt laughs, – “I would have made your girls dance to death!” Pff! Pff! Dyed bangs. Ahaah. Hysteria. Lulu keeps quiet. Her lips, red vulva in the dark).35 For Chawaf, the voice and body are created through sentence rhythm and syntax that at times displace the subject. This is best witnessed in the following passage describing motherhood and birth and the ultimate separation between mother and child: Autoritaire son fier cou blanc, son lait, s’éloigne d’où je descends dans un jet de sang le choc du jour sans rien d’elle penchée et elle ne se retourne pas. Petite tête chaude, chair des pommettes … j’ai appuyé ma joue contre sa joue toute nouvelle … le bébé, elle aurait pu le tenir comme je le tiens … mais ça aurait été moi contre elle, moi contre elle … Elle devait être comme l’élan vertical des maisons du nord, comme les rues où il pleut, toute la journée, près de la frontière … D’elle … Mais j’étais d’elle … Expulser … simplement expulser. De toutes ses forces, elle pousse. Brusquement, sort d’elle quelque chose de chaud, de dur, de mouillé qui crie … On ne me tendit pas à elle. Elle ne me prit pas dans ses bras. On m’emporta.36 Authoritarian her proud white neck, her milk, withdraws from where I descend in a blood spurt with nothing from her leaning and she does not look back.

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Warm little head, apple flesh … I have pressed my cheek against her brand new cheek … the baby, she could have held it the way I hold it … except it would have been me against her, me against her. She must have been like the vertical sweep of the Northern houses, like the streets where it rains, all day, near the border … Of her … But I came out of her … To expel … simply to expel. With all her strength, she pushes. Suddenly out of her comes something warm, hard, wet and screaming. I was not handed to her. She did not take me in her arms. I was taken away.

Chawaf uses body imagery, ‘cou blanc’ (white neck), and fluids such as ‘son lait’ (her milk) and ‘sang’ (blood) created through lyrical phrases and rhythmic syntax, repetitions and ellipses that demonstrate the self-consciousness and intimate relationship between mother and child. The language evokes the selfexploratory feminine experience. This ‘flux’ is representative of the subversive strategy of liberation that language presents to the established order or, as one critic points out, ‘À la libération des contraintes lexicales et morphologiques correspond la libération des contraintes syntaxiques. Celles-ci ont partie liée avec l’ordre des hommes …’ (The liberation of lexical and morphological constraints corresponds with the liberation of syntactical constraints that are linked to the order of men …).37 Marie Cardinal also challenged these boundaries by confronting her ‘madness’ – brought on by three years of undiagnosed menstrual bleeding and the eventual need for a hysterectomy – and ultimately rediscovering her voice through psychoanalysis: Mais l’histoire qui m’habitait, ‘la CHOSE’, cette colonne de mon être, hermétiquement close, pleine de noir en mouvance, comment en parler? Elle était dense, épaisse, parcourue à la fois de spasmes, de halètements et de mouvements lents comme ceux des fonds marins … J’avais honte de ce qui se passait à l’intérieur de moi … Il me semblait que n’importe quelle forme de vie était préférable à la folie.38 But the story that inhabited me, The THING, this column of my being, hermetically sealed, full of moving darkness, how to speak about it? It was dense, thick, covered with spasms, gasps and slow movements like the seabed … I was ashamed of what was going on inside of me … I was ashamed of the madness. It seemed to me that any form of life was preferable.

The need to liberate the female body and/or the repressed/suppressed voice was intimately linked to this practice of writing. It allowed insight into the ‘interior’ life of women at a time of public politics conducted by the MLF that provides context and sets the stage for a shared symmetry with some of the art production of the period.

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Art and écriture féminine Aline Dallier allies an ‘écriture de femmes’ with women’s art practices to consider the potential of female-only avant-garde production. She does so by probing a statement made by Julia Kristeva in 1983 (see Introduction). Previously, in 1977, artist Michèle Katz wrote a manifesto about painting by first turning to a citation drawn from Hélène Cixous’s La jeune née – ‘Il faut que les morts soient conservés à la fois morts et vivants. Cette façon féminine de conserver est une façon de résister à la mort’ (Those who are dead must be preserved as living and dead at the same time. This feminine way of preserving is a way of resisting death) (Figure 6.3).39 Katz heralded the life-affirming qualities of painting and the female imaginary – ‘Femme, reine de son royaume, peindre-vie’ (Woman, queen of her kingdom, painting-life) – while contesting the constraints of ‘phallocracy’, much like the claims Cixous made for women and writing. Like Cixous, Katz also wrote her own manifesto.40 Meanwhile, Françoise Eliet cited Luce Irigaray in a personal statement written in Sorcières where, in an effort to avoid women’s historical erasure, she equated centuries of women’s literary practice to what was being hailed as a new ‘écriture féminine’ (Figure 6.4).41 Women artists in France were certainly aware of the power and attention that women’s writing in the country was generating internationally. Antoinette

Michèle Katz, ‘Peindre’, from Sorcières, no. 10, 1977.

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Françoise Eliet, ‘Peindre / combattre’, from Sorcières, no. 10, 1977.

Fouque, who purchased the MLF trademark in 1979, was responsible for the dissemination and circulation of many of the women writers associated with the practice of écriture féminine through her des femmes publishing house. Fouque would also promote the artworks of women who were often better known as writers, such as Kate Millett (who very early on experimented with sculpture in New York and Japan) and Emma Santos [Marie-Annick Le Goff].42 Santos, at the outset, was an ‘outsider’ to both publishing and the art world. A victim of a childhood car accident, her biographical notes from the 1970s emphasized the ten years she had spent in psychiatric institutions, with her life experiences later published in a series of books with Éditions des femmes.43 Santos’s focus on the body and language, and her association with the women’s publishing house, meant critics routinely positioned her as a writer of écriture féminine.44 Meanwhile, her spontaneous artworks, which were little known, were occasionally presented in Des femmes en mouvements to advertise her exhibitions, and in turn, promote her books and/or theater plays.45 Santos used everyday materials at hand such as crayon, ballpoint pen, markers and colored pencils and materials like eyeshadow to make her figurative and/or organic and dream-like abstract drawings. At other times she employed a range of more traditional ink, pastel and charcoal, used word and text and made collages (see Chapter 2). Santos created intuitively and

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Hard politics, soft art

habitually, even completing works while undergoing medical treatment, such as Les 4 yeux de la mort, dessin sous perfusion (1979) (Plate 60). Simultaneously, women writers broadly – and at times mistakenly – grouped under the category of ‘écriture féminine’, were also writing about contemporary art.46 Luce Irigaray explores the relationship between the conscious feminine experience in writing and in drawing, distinguishing the ‘sensitive’ art of Unica Zürn from that of her partner Hans Bellmer (see Chapter 4). Irigaray attributes to Zürn, who died in 1970, a quality of levity located in the deconstruction of the material: ‘Tout le graphisme de Unica Zürn exprime un rapport au vide, un attrait pour une béance plus lourde que toute matière. Le poids du corps, des corps, se cherche, ne se trouve que dans la dislocation, la fragmentation, le déchirement de la chair et du monde’ (Everything that Unica Zürn writes/draws expresses a relationship to the void, an attraction toward a gaping emptiness heavier than any matter. The weight of the body, of bodies, is sought and found only in dislocation, fragmentation, the rendering of the flesh and of the world).47 For Irigaray, the question is how an artist (whose body is so similar to that of her mother) can create a new, unique body.48 She writes about Hans Bellmer’s images of the body, which Zürn cleverly subverts through her own illustrations, in a way that mirrors the relationship between écriture féminine and phallocentric discourse explored in Chapter 4: Bellmer dessine ces corps sans extrémités, limites, ni peaux de la perte de sens érotique – de l’énergie qui circule, s’arrête, s’échange, passe en l’autre, se confond à l’autre, du moins à ses parties. Il est savant, très savant. Unica Zürn dit parfois des états similaires mais elle décrit moins et transforme plus. Pendant qu’il la décrit, les décrit, elle devient autre: animal, gestes, musique … Elle échappe à son anatomie, à ses sites corporels. Elle mute. Elle ne se transfigure pas pour autant.49 (Trans. in Chapter 4 above)

For Zürn, the similarity of the body with the mother, and the psychoanalytical consequences of that relationship, led her to create a new body through pulses and rhythms, constantly transformed into animals and music in order to subvert the female body (controlled by men).50 This plurality of the body mirrors Irigaray’s attempts in works such as Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (1974) to create ‘multiple’ sites of jouissance on the female body in order to challenge the dominance of the penis posited by Freud, for whom the female is notable for her ‘lack of ’ the organ or is a ‘castrated’ boy.51 Irigaray writes, ‘Peut-être revenir sur ce refoulé qu’est l’imaginaire féminin? Donc la femme n’a pas un sexe. Elle en a au moins deux, mais non identifiables en un. Elle en a d’ailleurs bien davantage. Sa sexualité, toujours au moins double, est encore plurielle’ (Perhaps it is time to return to that repressed entity, the female imaginary. So woman does not have a sex organ?

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She has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as ones. Indeed, she has many more. Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural).52 This strategy of presenting the body as (already) double or plural also effectively bridges individual identity with political collectivity for women during the women’s liberation movement and its struggle for unity in the face of masculine hegemony. Such a unifying tactic was mirrored within the larger public body (and a strategic mimicry and a retrieval of what would be called representative of the ‘patriarchal’ and ‘phallocentric’ practices for militants) in the policies of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. His use of ‘plurality’ in his discourse was an attempt to unite France’s divergent political groups and to win support from a left that was still fractured by the legacies of the May ’68 ‘groupuscules’ and facing the reality that the PS and PCF could not effectively unite (see Chapter 2). Body and language Although there was no female equivalent in the arts to écriture féminine or one theoretical ‘catch-all’ to describe the various experiments of women artists, a number of women artists were using their bodies as means of performing and creating different types of ‘writing’ and body experiences. The women of Psych et Po orchestrated events for amateur artists to paint and express themselves by drawing/painting on paper hung on the walls as a communal activity to liberate their artistic expression similar to free-writing (Figure 6.5).53 Examples of

‘Envie de respirer, envie de faire de grandes gestes’, Des femmes en mouvements, no. 8–9. August–September 1978.

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women artists mining the work of women writers or using their body to create art, or their use of a series of repeated words or phrases, were often shown in Sorcières (which had Xavière Gauthier, with her acknowledged interest in women’s writing, at the helm). Swiss artist Maya Anderson used her body as a paintbrush/pen as she bent over a blank sheet of paper and dragged her paintladen hands across it (recalling the vertical hand-dragging performances of Ana Mendieta on paper in her Untitled (Body Tracks) from 1974) (Figure 6.6). The photograph, which was described as Anderson’s pictorial practice, was included in Sorcières, ‘Movements’, no. 15, next to a text by Michèle Montrelay about the work of Pierre Klossowski in which she comments on the censured or illicit gesture in art as the one that exceeds/reveals the body through its ‘strangeness’ to the everyday body.54 The experience of collective ‘writing’ was also seen privately in ateliers such as the group practice of Françoise Janicot and Claude Torey, who later made sound poetry by listening to music and reproducing the vibrations on paper – reprising the earlier charcoal ‘rhythms’ of Najia Mehadji (Figure 6.7).55 Françoise Eliet was also known to have made audible sounds with the brush as she painted.56 Lea Lublin constructed various evocations of woman, or ‘La Femme’, which were printed on paper in a series of plural definitions to suggest a woman’s

Maya Anderson, Untitled performance, Sorcières, ‘Mouvements’, no. 15, 1978.

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Françoise Janicot and Claude Torey, Sound drawings, Premier Festival de la Performance de Paris, 19 March 1982.

identity before the work was taken and released over the Pont Marie bridge, while on the same occasion Elisa Tan produced a commentary on labor by examining the word ‘work’. Such performances turn toward writing to define the woman in language before discarding the notion of a central definition (see Chapter 5). In homage to the writer Laure [Colette Peignot, 1903–1938], Gina Pane staged an elaborate performance at the Galerie Isy Brachot in Brussels on 28 April 1977.57 Using various elements from the life of Laure, as evoked in her Écrits, Pane fashions elaborate symbols to recreate Laure’s emotional life and ultimately guides a blade over her wrist to bleed on her writings (Figure 3.32). This use of the body to counter discourses and writings, and to create new ones, demonstrates the way in which women writers were utilizing the body as the basis of a new ‘language’ in order to create and confirm identity and describe the artistic and feminine experience. This language took various forms in terms of medium of expression and the writer’s/artist’s employment of it, either through literal use of language(s) or through the use of the body. (Luce Irigaray would further foster the connection between language and the haptic by emphasizing the relationship between analyst and analysand and the gestures which facilitate dialogue and listening in a psychoanalytic session, which she equated with the ‘topology of knitting or tapestry’.)58 The glissade, here a confrontation between media, also takes place between the production of language and women’s traditionally ‘artisan’ forms such as

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weaving and knitting. As such it parallels the practice of écriture féminine while also being a feature of its discourse, as seen in the work of some of the most prominent writers: L’autre métaphore qu’utilisent communément les écrivaines est celle du tissage; pour remplacer le tissu plein de trous, déchiré, brûlé de la parole de l’homme, Annie Leclerc appelle la femme à ‘tisser le tissu plein et neuf d’une parole jaillie d’elle-même’. Et comme celle du pétrissage, la métaphore du tissage peut s’appliquer, renforçant la chaîne métaphorique que nous venons de signaler, à l’enfant. Chantal Chawaf met en scène lingères, façonnières, journalières, brodeuses travaillant à la vie, tissant ‘cheveux de laine’ et ‘boyaux de taffetas’. Et Hélène Cixous parle de ‘tricoter un maillot de chair’. Ces métaphores empruntées aux domaines traditionnellement dévolus à la femme, assument une double fonction: d’une part, elles inscrivent l’écriture dans la gestuelle féminine, comme lorsque Annie Leclerc parle de ‘ce qui veut être brodé, tricoté, dit’, d’autre part, elles réhabilitent les tâches domestiques traditionnellement méprisées. En un mouvement circulaire, le mépris qu’on a pour les femmes s’étend à leurs tâches quotidiennes.59 The other metaphor frequently used by women writers is weaving; to replace the fabric full of holes, ripped, burned by man’s speech. Annie Leclerc calls women to ‘weave the full and new fabric of speech gushing up from itself ’. And like kneading, the metaphor of weaving can be applied, reinforcing the metaphorical chain that we have just mentioned, to a child. Chantal Chawaf depicts women linen-workers, dressmakers, day laborers, embroiderers working for life, weaving ‘woolen hair’ and ‘taffeta guts’. And Hélène Cixous speaks of ‘knitting a shirt of flesh’. These metaphors, borrowed from the domains traditionally ascribed to women, have a twofold function: on the one hand, they include writing in feminine gestures, as when Annie Leclerc makes reference to ‘what wants to be embroidered, knitted, said’. On the other hand, they rehabilitate domestic tasks traditionally held in contempt. Using circular reasoning, the contempt that we hold for women extends to their everyday tasks.

Less explored is the link between the rehabilitation of women’s daily domestic tasks and the amplification of her worth through the practice of écriture féminine and women’s ‘soft arts’ or domestic practices such as sewing, weaving and knitting, etc. These were used by female (and some male) artists to confront dominant artistic trends and politics in the late 1960s and 1970s France, as seen below.60 This is a position that novelist Marie Cardinal makes explicit in her references to embroidery and writing in Le passé empiété (1983).61 The etymology of the word ‘text’ – texere – signifies ‘woven thing’, thus bridging the worlds of writing and ‘craft’ such as weaving/embroidery.62 If American

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art critic Lucy Lippard once characterized textile – a word also derived from texere – art (amongst other forms) as part of a larger discussion on the perception of women’s art as ‘hobby art’, could the same be true of écriture féminine as a ‘hobby’ relegated to the largely female domestic sphere of (unacknowledged) production?63 This is a claim that écriture féminine radically appropriates, as the above citation indicates. Where is the line drawn between domestic practice and avant-garde production? Hard politics versus soft art At a time of hard, contestatory politics during the period of the Cold War, the emergence of the ‘soft’ in art offered an alternative to the hard-edged works seen in the United States in the early 1960s, and the ‘hard’ reality depicted in paintings in France in 1964. These were seen at the exhibition Mythologies Quotidiennes that year – ‘Ils opposent “tous” la précieuse mouvance de la vie, cernée dans la continuité ou dans l’un de ses moments privilégiés’ (They are all against the precious movement of life, defined by continuity or one of its privileged moments).64 The show included Eduardo Arroyo, Samuel Buri, Peter Klasen, Jacques Monory, Michaelangelo Pistoletto, Jean-Pierre Raynaud, Martial Raysse, Antonio Recalcati, Niki de Saint Phalle and Hervé Télémaque, amongst others. Gassiot-Talabot, who wrote the introduction to the catalogue, summed up the differences amongst the artists: ‘ils vous imposent la vision d’une image-choc prise dans le mouvement même de la vie … ils réintroduisent le sens de la durée dans le contexte pictural’ (they impose on you the vision of a shock image taken in the very movement of life … they reintroduce the sense of time in the pictorial context).65 The tenor of this work, its slick surfaces and cold objectivity, ushered in a change of ‘climate’ or what critic Jean Clair would come to term an ‘ère glaciaire’.66 The exhibition was striking for its deep political and cultural reassessments, showing works that displayed sensitivity to the banality of everyday life in its signs, consumption and alienation, as well as a new syntax of painting through a focus on the sleek painted image and instantaneous time that signaled a break with the past. In 1965, Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo and Antonio Recalcati cemented the status of this rupture through their attack on Marcel Duchamp and the history of art expressed in Vivre et laisser mourir, ou la fin tragique de Marcel Duchamp, a collective work made up of a series of eight canvases depicting works by the artist and his ‘staged’ murder and death (Plate 61). The theatricality of the death, which included a nude Duchamp at the end of a staircase, was not only a reversal of the importance of Duchamp in twentieth-century art history but also a testament to male domination of art, as his assassins were all men. Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No.

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Hard politics, soft art

2 (1912) and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923) were replaced by images of a castrated and nude Duchamp at the base of the staircase in the former and in the latter, the final canvas, by ‘bachelors’ acting as the male coffin bearers carrying the corpse of Duchamp (with no trace of the ‘bride’).67 According to Arroyo, Duchamp killed off artistic originality and independence by becoming too closely identified with it: ‘[Duchamp] incarne aujourd’hui d’une manière si indue, et non par hasard, ce dont précisément l’humanité est la plus dépourvue: l’esprit d’aventure, la liberté d’invention, le sens de l’anticipation, le pouvoir de dépasser’ ([Duchamp] embodies today in such an undue way, and not by accident, what humanity precisely lacks the most: the spirit of adventure, the freedom of invention, the sense of anticipation, the power to go beyond).68 This ‘patricide’ of the art ‘star’ Duchamp by male artists reveals the inherent violence with which the present was trying to disassociate itself from the influence of the past (and the legacy of the readymade) in order to construct a new way forward through painting. Insofar as it re-enacted the Oedipal drama with the absent mother, it was also significant for the emergence of feminist politics at the time. This violence, virility and showmanship through images and painting by Nouvelle Figuration artists contrast with the subtle reappearance in the same period of the craft techniques of anonymous women and men. These were borrowed by artists working with ‘soft’ materials to investigate time, volume, matter and space in three dimensions, which acted as a critique not only of dominant artistic forms, but also of dominant cultural politics. The tension between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ politics in the art world and in the political climate of 1960s France brings to light Sheila Hicks and the work she creates during this ‘cold’ climate of painting. In 1965, the same year as La fin tragique de Marcel Duchamp, American Sheila Hicks moved to Paris. She founded the atelier des Grands-Augustins in 1966 after a decade of studying weaving and looping practices in diverse countries including Mexico and Peru while drawing inspiration from Carmelite convents, flea markets and factories as well as remote islands and high-altitude villages. Os, created in Paris in 1965, demonstrated Hicks’s use of found objects such as dresses which were rolled and then looped tightly with threads. The forms were then subsequently shaped into organic forms that resembled bones or phallic objects (Plate 62a).69 Os, which recalls her early 1960s Falda series of knotted, wrapped and looped wool she made into ‘skirts’ in Mexico, shows a respect for tradition and a dependence on the study of local techniques similar to the way painters studied the old masters. Influenced in part by the structuralism and architecture of Bauhaus, where her professor, Anni Albers, taught before immigrating to the United States, Hicks’s art also developed from anonymous practices of art and craft methods that she incorporated into her own work to form a type

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of ‘writing’ that she used to create a ‘course enivrante à travers le temps et l’espace’ (an intoxicating race through time and space).70 This ‘writing’ manifests in her woven work, such as He and She (1965), which was created in Wuppertal and Salach, Germany, and comprises red and violet colored woven wool with various articulations of stitching. The two figures resemble each other but are dissimilar in size, length and vertical versus horizontal techniques. The latter technique suggests the intricate psychical (expressed through physical) differences between the male and female sex through structure, space and weave (Plate 62b). Hicks’s literal manipulation of time and space (manus = hand) through the engagement of traditional and ethnic methods of weaving in a contemporary context contrasts with the work by Aillaud, Arroyo and Recalcati which uses different layers of time and sequence flow to attack and overthrow the art historical legacy of Duchamp.71 (Although these artists’ agendas are admittedly very different, the politics point to a shared context of protest while the contrast between media and techniques used is highlighted.) The Cold War politics (another aspect of Jean Clair’s ère glaciaire) that dominated the 1960s lend insight into the work on Duchamp as well as into Hicks’s own work. The final canvas in the Aillaud, Arroyo and Recalcati work shows an American flag covering Duchamp’s coffin (a possible reference to the recent influence of Jasper Johns’s Flag series). The hard left political leanings of many of the participants of Nouvelle Figuration (as diverse as they were in practice) were fueled by anti-fascist sentiments (like those brought from Spain by Eduardo Arroyo and from Italy by Leonardo Creminini); the Marxist leanings of other members were witness to the prevalence and influence of communists, anarchists and Maoists in the French art scene of the 1960s and were revelatory of their ‘anti-Americanism’.72 The latter sentiment was also shared by art critics and journalists of the time, who were trying to protect a ‘French’ art scene from being swallowed up by more aggressive political and cultural trends.73 This challenge was also evident (although she was American by birth) in Hicks’s work, which makes reference to global territories decentered from the United States, such as Peru, Mexico, France, India and Ireland, to focalize her various weaving and looping techniques through both independent work and work with local collectives. Hicks’s work in India in 1966–1967 addresses the theme of patriarchy through the lingam, or phallus, which is worshipped in India. In her Couverture du lingam (1966–1967) she makes a ‘cover’ for the lingam’s energy from silk and wool which were crocheted, knitted and sewn in the sacred Hindu colors of red and saffron (Plate 63). The soft cover for the lingam (which is a creation of Hicks and does not exist in Hindu rituals) is a playful way of covering and ‘feminizing’ the masculine idol/sculpture of Shiva energy to protect, mask or subdue the energy of the phallus (colored red). The work diminished, or subverted, and quietly overthrew power by ‘covering’

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Hard politics, soft art

the lingam. Weaving, according to Freud, was the only art form attributable to women and was a substitute for their pubic hair, which thus endowed the technique with ‘feminine’ qualities.74 The lone string of Couverture du lingam, which reveals its single thread construction, also recalls the fuse of a bomb – a significant allusion at a time of nuclear proliferation (the Treaty on the NonProliferation of Nuclear Weapons [NPT] which included the United States, Russia and Britain, was not signed until the following year, in July 1968). Hicks’s slanting perspective – a lingam cover made in India – was redolent of a Cold War critique of America’s own dominant power through her turn to non-western countries for alternative means of production and forms of art. This move toward softer, looser forms and the use of cord, rope, soft ladders and canvas was seen in the political disappearance of the ‘traditional’ form of painting and its replacement with fragile components, as revealed in the exhibition Travaux de l’été 70 by Daniel Dezeuze, Patrick Saytour, André Valensi and Claude Viallat at the Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris in April 1971 (Plate 56). Influenced heavily by events, the male members of SupportsSurfaces – for all their internal discord and variant practices – staged a dozen exhibitions from 1969 to 1972. The group set out to create an art that unified ‘theory, practice and social revolution in the form of a “lutte des classes” [class struggle]’ which, because of its past and present ‘incoherence’, they felt, could not lead with assurance to a sustained artistic avant-garde.75 Through its sinews of rope, waving soft chassis, pieces of canvas/cloth and curving wood in pure shapes, and the reduction of essential forms and ideas to material ‘thought’, Supports-Surfaces attempted to present the elements of a painting as honed by layers of philosophical and political thought in the manner of both poetry and protest. These softened edges not only revealed a sensibility to what had become ideologically ‘hard’ in the production, repetition and failure in the history of art until this point, but also, by launching a new grammar of visual surfaces, they attempted to purify these spaces through new aesthetics that could lead to social revolution through a deconstruction and reappraisal of form. This breakdown of form also relied on primitive forms of weaving (which Plato said mirrored the state) through balance, harmony, natural forms and weaving that resembled a utopian society (one which was both horizontal and vertical, as seen in Plate 56). An image in Opus International (1977) displays the patterns and structures of the work of Claude Viallat, Daniel Dezeuze and others compared with those of an ancient Peruvian textile belonging to Sheila Hicks, to demonstrate the resemblance of repeated forms, structures and materials (Figure 6.8): L’existence de chefs de file est qualitativement tributaire de l’importance de la piétaille et S/S, à son tour ne manque pas d’épigones fascinés par ce qui a pu apparaître comme le succès d’une ‘matériologie’ contre la traditionnelle

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Peru textile chosen by Shelia Hicks, Opus International. Jean-Louis Pradel, ‘La stratégie de supports-surfaces,’ Opus International, no. 61–62 (January–February 1977).

iconologie, et, pourquoi pas, de l’expérimentation picturale du matérialisme dialectique. Parions que se trouve là la construction d’un nouvel académisme basé sur le retour à des pratiques artisanales ancestrales, voire primitives, tels que le batik, le tissage, le tressage, etc. …, participant de la restauration, de l’artisanat, ce travail manuel privilégié de la société libérale avancée.76 The existence of leaders is qualitatively dependent on the importance of the foot soldiers and S/S [Supports-Surfaces], in turn does not lack epigones fascinated by what might appear as the success of a ‘materiology’ against traditional iconology and, why not?, pictorial experiments of dialectical materialism. Let’s bet that we will find there the construction of a new academicism based on the return to ancestral craft practices, and even primitive ones, such as batik, weaving, braiding, etc. … participating in restoration work, crafts; the privileged manual labor of advanced liberal society.

Pradel’s charge of academicism undermines Supports-Surfaces’ claim to avantgarde status. Pairing the group’s art with Hicks’s ancient Peruvian textile to underscore the group’s neo-primitivism, he overlooks a potential shift in political alignments and soft art’s provocative challenge to the institution.

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These subtle shifts and variances between the masculine and the feminine in the practice of Supports-Surfaces challenge the rule of authoritarian power in class and society.77 As Françoise Eliet, artist, psychoanalyst and founder of Collectif Femmes/Art, noted in autumn 1976 with regard to borrowed techniques in painting: Des hommes coupent, cousent, découpent la toile, plient, tressent, collent, balaient, repassent, etc. La différence entre la peinture des hommes et des femmes ne peut donc se définir au niveau des gestes ou des matériaux. La jouissance d’un sexe, c’est de s’approprier la jouissance de l’autre. Toute tentative de subversion de l’ordre social s’articule là.78 [Trans. in Chapter 5, note 125]

The male ‘appropriation’ of female techniques normally associated with domestic and craft activities in the West carries a message of subversion not only in art practice but also deeper into the gendered roles of (Western) society. This is achieved by opposing gestures and materials and by upsetting what is accepted as weak or strong, hard or soft, as a potent political message addressing sex and class liberation as much as ‘bourgeois’ notions of painting itself. Expo ’72: public versus personal debates These slippery terrains of power and artistic renewal and the various forms they took were still politically relevant in 1972, at the time of the exhibition Douze ans d’art contemporain. Also known as the ‘Pompidou Exposition’, it was sponsored by the state and invited seventy-two artists (Pompidou gave the final approval) to exhibit their work at the Grand Palais. It set out to portray the richness and diversity of the contemporary art scene in France while shedding the remnants of postwar abstraction, and to provide less established artists a venue to exhibit outside the gallery circuit and stimulate the sluggish art market. The show featured a diversity of artists and stateowned works such as the Nouveaux Réalistes, including Arman, Christo, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle and Tinguely; Fluxus works by Ben; artists associated with Nouvelle Figuration such as Henri Cueco, Erro and Jacques Monory; Supports-Surfaces represented by Claude Viallat; abstract paintings from Simon Hantaï; as well as the optical/kinetic art of Pol Pury, Soto, Takis and so on. Only two women, both with strong Franco-American ties – Sheila Hicks and Niki de Saint Phalle – were included in the show despite the existence of the radical MLF, who with their general concern for women’s rights, could have prompted authorities to include a number of other female artists. Hicks, who had one of the largest ‘salles’, with one work measuring 4.7 x 9 meters, has since admitted that she also had faced some problems with her inclusion in the show.79 Other women artists slated to participate in Douze ans d’art

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contemporain, Tania Mouraud and Gina Pane (as mentioned) had their videos removed from the exhibition before the opening.80 (It was arguably not until 1974 and the specific courting of the female vote by Giscard d’Estaing that any type of mass consciousness concerning women’s art and other forms of expression entered non-institutional state consideration – as seen, for example, three years later, with the first ‘Festival de la femme’ at the Centre International at Porte Maillot, Paris, 12–15 October 1977, which featured artists such as Leonor Fini and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva; see Chapter 2.) With many of the artists influencing or influenced heavily by May ’68, it was ironic that the Grand Palais exhibition tried to instill a hierarchical and state-centered approach to ‘legitimizing’ artists who had earlier battled so fiercely to be free of such institutions.81 Eight people had rejected the invitation, according to the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition, while the Malassis group took their paintings out onto the street in protest in front of the cameras. Others recorded their objections by turning their works to face the wall.82 This reaction can also be regarded as creating a dialectic between the ‘hard’ right-wing institution and the ‘soft’ left of those still disenfranchised by the fragmented groupuscules of May ’68, whose disappointed utopic visions had led to a continuing unease between artist and state.83 In this way, women’s soft arts of knitting, embroidering, weaving, and their use of soft materials take into account a specific feminine education and experience that was not politically privileged (except by revisionist women) but can be seen as challenging institutions and the production of the artist. In the same way, artisanal work was appreciated and to some degree replicated by Supports-Surfaces and the École de Nice-trained Groupe 70 (whose soft forms were featured at the 8th Biennale de Paris in 1973). Like Sheila Hicks before her, Annette Messager’s various ‘needleworks’ that form part of her collector’s notebooks series (1971–1973) take on subversive qualities in this context of the personal as political and the conflict between individual and state. The notebooks form a space of intimacy in contrast to the public institutional role which her partner since 1971, Christian Boltanski, accepted by showing a series of childhood photographs at the exhibition Douze ans d’art contemporain. Her highly personal collections shown in pages of journals create an intimate space of identity in opposition to the public walls of the state. Messager in this way reinstates the notions of traditionally ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ domains in order to question and subvert them. Messager’s needlework, Travaille d’aiguille (Album Collection no. 7), shows the space of female control, with an ‘anonymous’ hand knitting a textile of a couple that is shown from both sides as a portrait of created ‘domestic bliss’. Reminiscent of the needlework samplers that would show off the accomplishment of a woman, the work also recalls the patterned textiles of ethnic cultures, as well as the deliberate structuring of space and time as measured by

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the woman’s needle. Messager further enacts control through the sweaters she makes for a series of dead ‘sparrows’, The Boarders at Rest (1971–1972), and thus shows how she represents suffocating maternity or even castration through knitting (Plate 64). The sparrow, or moineau (deriving from moine, or monk) in French is a slang word for the zizi, or penis.84 In this way she renders the objects even more impotent with her pastel hand-knitted ‘sweaters’, just as Sheila Hicks created the Couverture du lingam to subdue or contain the power of the male penis. Messager’s My Knitting Manual (Collection Album no. 42, 1972–1973) reveals the implicit violence of the innocuous pastime of ‘knitting’ through close-up photographs of women’s hands (with painted fingernails) as they carefully manipulate the yarn into a series of loops and penetrations that become a phallic substitute in a type of pleasurable wielding of artistic and female power (Figure 6.9). The artist’s accompanying text details each manipulation and obliquely reveals and measures the passage of women’s time and the way in which her needle acts as both a critique and a consecration of women’s work that lends meaning to her days.

Annette Messager, Mon guide du tricot/My Knitting Manual, 1973. Collection Album no. 42.

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The artist’s own horror, perhaps, of anonymity, or what fuels her work of both ironizing and legitimizing women’s time and their ‘productions’, is at odds with her self-conscious wish to be an established artist in her own right. (This is a tension implicit within the work of women’s collectives in the 1970s as well as in the other utopias such as the espace cousu discussed below.) Messager’s Collection to find my best signature (Collection Album no. 24, 1972) shows the repetition, fantasy and innovation involved in finding one’s individuality. She writes, ‘Having one’s own beautiful signature means being interesting, having a deep personality, it is the self-image one presents to others, it means becoming an adult.’ 85 This sense of ‘making it’ was achieved by her one person show at ARC 2, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1974. Curated by Suzanne Pagé, possibly with the influence of vidéaste Dany Bloch (who joined the museum that year), the show took place from 25 April to 2 June.86 Pagé had already exhibited women artists such as the posthumous show of Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow’s Tumeurs, herbier (8 May–3 June 1973), while Tania Mouraud’s solo exhibition FOCALE ou la fonction de l’art and Turkish-origin Nil Yalter’s Topak-Ev, which featured her tent La yourte, maison des femmes, ou prison des femmes (seen in Chapter 3) were both shown from 7 November to 7 December 1973. (Around this time, Yalter began expanding the meaning of the personal into civic space in her textile collaboration with American artist Judy Blum, focusing on neighborhood maps in their Paris Ville Lumière (1974).)87 Like the other women artists who were exhibited at ARC 2 by Pagé, Szapocznikow’s work revealed aspects of the ‘personal’ in the form of sculptures based on body parts, specifically tumors from which she later died, as did the perspective of consciousness offered by Mouraud in her conceptual photographic work ‘Where is the Unknown?’ (note the English, international title) or in Yalter’s tent, La yourte, where nomadic women were both protected and/or imprisoned in the home. Each exhibit shows a struggle to locate the feminine or personal experience, the relationship between daily life and creativity, fixed and nomadic identities. It also exposed the thin veil between the internal and external world which resonated in Messager’s personal collections, finally making the transition from the enclosed, private, intimate space of the album onto the walls of public exhibitions. Despite Pagé’s wish, Rebecca de Roo reports, the other museum curators saw little importance in Messager’s ‘message’ to the state and refused to purchase even one of the albums for the museum’s permanent collection.88 This small example might be indicative of the institutional refusal that pushed many women artists toward the UFPS, or the Salon des Femmes, and a refusal within that that created Féminie-Dialogue and a number of alternative collectives. This alternative sphere of exhibitions provided an outlet for women to exhibit that was not dictated by the policies of curators and gallery

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owners. The needlework ‘samplers’ of conventional proverbs in Messager’s work, such as Les femmes sont instruites par la nature, les hommes par les livres (Ma collection de proverbes, 1974), show the way in which women could be ‘softly’ vindicated through the precise wielding of a needle like a pen to challenge the message through ‘feminine’ means (Figure 6.10). In this way, women could sew and embroider contemporary critiques of society and state in a traditional artistic context, just as les précieuses (some of whom were connected with the anti-absolutist La Fronde) could speak in salons and compose artful, romantic missives – challenging the notion of women being aligned with nature; they would later give rise to the intellectual women who during the Revolutionary period could more directly use their education to change the relationship between women and print, and, thus, the state.89 (This resistance to governmental authority could be seen in subversive activities of les tricoteuses of the same period.)90 This critique was also evident in Cuban-born Hessie’s Survival Art, which took place at ARC 2 between 12 February and 16 March 1975, coinciding with UNESCO activities during International Women’s Day (8 March) during L’Année de la femme. One of her works created in 1975 used women’s needlework as a form of ‘writing the body’ just as Cixous was urging women to do the same in literature (Plate 65). Her fragile, voluptuous figuration through sewing resembled academic drawings of the body with ephemeral threads creating an originality of surface on the canvas that

Annette Messager, Les femmes sont instruites par la nature, les hommes par les livres (Ma collection des proverbes, 1974).

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abandoned traditional brush and paint for a pricking needle (on a conventionally masculine surface), reconstituting a body in the same way that ORLAN embroidered semen stains on the pure white sheets of her trousseau.91 Other times the implications would be less direct. At the 8th Biennale de Paris in 1973, artist Hortense Damiron, an artist from Brittany who trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, presented a painting of a vintage sewing machine titled La veuve Heuvrard, after the brand – and used trompe-l’œil to great effect by creating a painted tablecloth on canvas, thus bridging the worlds of painting and textiles, or so-called masculine and feminine domains of painting and sewing/ textiles (Plate 66).92 Exhibiting ‘soft art’ Espace cousu In 1974, Aline Dallier, the lone feminist critic publishing on themes of women’s art in France at the time, published two important articles on women artists in the art journal Opus International. (It is worth pointing out that the editorial board of Opus shared close personal and political ties with the original ARC.)93 The first was ‘Le feminist art aux U.S.A.’, which brought the American feminist scene to France. It focused in part on the activities of the A.I.R. Gallery in New York and examined the question, ‘Existe-t-il un art spécifiquement féminin? (Does a uniquely women’s art exist?)94 The second article, ‘Le soft art et les femmes’, published in autumn 1974, included images of works such as ribboned paper by Patsy Norvell, a series of buttons on cloth by Hessie, Lygia Clark’s work on sensory touching between couples dressed in white hats and jackets, Zizine Bouscaud’s knitted sweater that opened to reveal the ‘breasts’ of France, Annette Messager’s ‘needleworks’ from her collector’s albums, and a banner by Vera de Figueiredo. Alongside constructivist-influenced dresses by Popova and textiles by Stepanova were Milvia Maglione’s crocheted wool tea cups and saucers reminiscent of Meret Oppenheim’s Le Déjeuner en fourrure (1936), Maude Boltz’s Hand Loom, Sara Holt’s Arc-en-Ciel à l’envers in rainbow shades of wool yarn, Anne Healy’s nylon ‘web’ and Barbara Chase Riboud’s cape of bronze and hemp cords.95 Dallier, translating ‘soft art’ as ‘art souple’ in French, explained its emergence in the United States as a practice for women to return to their roots and define a ‘culture féminine’ during the 1960s in the same way that Black ‘revolutionaries’ referenced African art.96 This form of art was also important for embodying a reaction against technology, overturning the long-held belief of textile work as craft or merely ‘ouvrages de dames’ (ladies’ handicrafts), validating the tradition of women’s leisure time given to needlework in bourgeois households as well as being a labor necessity for working women,

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and forging a link between women and certain ethnic groups as oppressed people.97 Soft art also had conceptual possibilities in the 1970s as a linguistic link between ‘software’ (la matière grise) and ‘softness’ (la souplesse), according to Dallier, who also saw its three-dimensional and fluid potential as grounded in social change: ‘Sur le plan symbolique, le Soft Art, c’est la main et l’esprit, l’ancien et le nouveau, la tradition et la révolution, c’est-à-dire la révolution qui amènerait une restructuration des comportements féminins’ (On a symbolic level, Soft Art is hand and mind, old and new, tradition and revolution, that is to say the revolution which would bring about a restructuring of feminine attitudes).98 Seeing the political possibilities of a women’s art grounded in history and tradition – while also publishing articles and organizing exhibitions for Féminie-Dialogue and Combative Voices at A.I.R. Gallery – Dallier in the 1970s prepared her doctoral thesis on the subject ‘Activités et réalisations de femmes dans l’art contemporain. Un premier exemple: les œuvres dérivées des techniques textiles traditionnelles’, focusing on contemporary women’s art and textiles, which she defended in June 1980.99 Excerpts of Dallier’s groundbreaking thesis were published in journals such as a special edition of Pénélope: pour les histoires des femmes dedicated to Les Femmes et la Création (Autumn 1980), thereby influencing future artists and historians.100 Artisanal work, to draw a clear distinction, was not the primary concern for the country as it came out of Les trente glorieuses: economic stability for the country was the focus during a time of recession.101 The crisis among women textile factory workers and the decline in the sector was not overlooked by Des femmes en mouvements.102 The political possibilities of ‘soft art’ became a reality with the founding of Féminie-Dialogue, which in 1976 included an ‘espace cousu’ conceived by Aline Dallier as a recurring element of the exhibition.103 Although the Féminie-Dialogue exhibitions organized by Christiane de Casteras were not themselves specifically motivated by any political ideology, but were rather to reflect the diversity of women’s contemporary practices, Dallier’s espace cousu provided a utopia which united the goals of women’s art and women’s liberation: Dans le cas des travaux d’aiguille, il semble que les artistes qui s’y consacrent se meuvent à la fois à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur du cadre dans lequel se produit la création. Le fait de se partager entre le champ social et le champ esthétique constitue déjà un geste de liberté qui ne peut que bénéficier la cause des femmes.104 In the case of needlework, it appears that the artists who dedicate themselves to it move both inside and outside the frame in which the creation is produced. This participation in both the social and aesthetic fields already establishes a freedom that can only benefit the women’s cause.

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The range of materials that could be exhibited in the espace cousu included natural materials such as cotton, silk, wool, felt, feathers and fur as well as synthetic materials like nylon and thread and fibers, that could be manipulated through various sewing, weaving, knitting, embroidery, quilting and other techniques that revealed the artist’s ‘hand’ in the creation. The intention, as Dallier writes, at a time of an emerging écriture féminine, was to give space to a ‘nouveau vocabulaire des formes’ (new vocabulary of form).105 The aim, shared with the new practice of women’s writing, was to find a practice inherent in women’s experience, or a feminine ‘specificity’. For écriture féminine this was the expression of a women’s body in the form of rhythms, pulses and drives that articulated the inner experience in writing through subject, repetitions, silences and syntax. (It may be worth noting that experimental women’s writing had an impact on American art critic Lucy Lippard who, in her novel I See / You Mean from 1979, momentarily moved away from art writing and employed a form of écriture féminine.)106 For ‘soft art’ the use of various sewing techniques created a strong link with the tradition of women’s artistic/artisan productions while trying to establish a contemporary trend of ‘women’s’ (and men’s) art that enabled a variety of techniques and materials at a time when traditional painting was in decline. The threads, too, according to Dallier, could be ‘read’ as a form of ‘poem-signs’ as, for example, in the work of Hessie (Plate 65).107 Both forms of art had subversive intent toward the more dominant male-led groups as women sought to consciously shift the balance of power through imagination and avant-garde forms. If thought and philosophy were the privileged domain of the masculine, Aline Dallier sees textile work as a demonstration of women’s mastery of their emotions rather than the silence with which it has wrongly been associated: À la couture et autres travaux d’aiguille demeure attachée l’image du silence et de la frustration des femmes ou peut-être plus encore celle d’un discours non-pensant. Mais les choses ne sont pas si simples et si les femmes ont été réduites par ce type de travail et séparée des mouvements culturels dominants de leur temps, une histoire des tactiques chez les brodeuses comme chez les femmes peintres et écrivains – je les mets volontairement sur le même plan – ne manquerait pas de prouver que leur silence est un mythe parmi d’autres. En fait, les broderies comme les peintures et les écrits de femmes, représentent souvent un moyen de contrôler leurs émotions et parfois une arme plus ou moins aiguisée contre l’autorité patriarcale.108 Sewing and other needlework remain stuck to the image of women’s silence and frustration, or even more so to unintellectual discourse. But things are not so simple. If women have been diminished by this type of work and cut off from the dominant cultural movements of their time, a history of tactics among embroiderers as well as women painters and writers – I voluntarily

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put them on equal footing – would not fail to prove that their silence is one myth amongst others. In fact, embroideries, like women’s paintings and writings, often represent a way for women to control their emotions, while at other times, they are a weapon pointed with varying degrees of sharpness toward patriarchal authority.

The objects shown in the inaugural espace cousu reflected the theory that Dallier laid out, explaining how women’s emotions were often contained within various sewing techniques that had been used for generations: Italian Milvia Maglione’s La leçon de broderie on felt used the concept of a young women’s traditional embroidery ‘sampler’ to show various ‘practice’ techniques that represented a woman’s accomplishment and education (Figure 6.11). Maglione’s work takes the theme of childhood and nostalgia in the form of the outline of a child within the frame, a rocking horse, toy trains, shovel and pail to suggest an idyllic childhood, while a number of ‘loose’ practice threads suggest both its ‘unraveling’ and the fragility of its construction. This ‘eclecticism’ of women’s imagination and daily life is seen in Liliane Camier’s

Milvia Maglione, La leçon de broderie, 1976.

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fabric with plastic pockets containing little objects, such as a paper boat filling one pocket, much like her domestic aprons representing the ephemera of an anonymous life (Plate 67). Christiane de Casteras and Andrée Marquet worked collaboratively to create Au fil des jours which turned women into an element of a ‘quilt’; it shows two women dressed as peasants creating their images by sewing used clothes and two figurative nylon women’s heads onto the multi-patterned quilt – quilt-making being an activity traditionally pieced together by circles of women (Figure 6.12). This complements the exquisite drawings by Andrée Marquet of perfectly starched and ironed dishtowels, or torchons, which also represented women’s invisible life and domestic arts and the way in which their ‘everyday’ life contrasted with the adrenaline of exhibitions like Mythologies Quotidiennes 2 (Figure 6.13).109 These images show how daily life, imagination and emotion counter silence through the subtle ‘hushed’ tones of women’s protest, seen in the diversity of their sewing techniques, and form an alternative aesthetic and political ‘space’ to challenge the lack of exhibition opportunities in major galleries and museums faced by many women during this period.

Christiane de Casteras and Andrée Marquet, Au fil des jours, 1976.

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Andrée Marquet, Torchons, 1976.

Other forms of ‘soft art’ Nature-inner nature The tension between nature and women’s inner ‘nature’ is obvious in the complexity of the highly wrought, fragile bonds of threads, weaving and embroidery and in the use of nature – grass, wood, flowers, stones – as a method of reflecting emotional and aesthetic energy. Aline Dallier had previously formulated this equation in designating certain forms of art, such as embroidery, as a method of ‘controlling’ women’s emotional expression and a way in which to literally ‘needle’ the patriarchy: ‘En fait, les broderies, comme les peintures et les écrits de femmes, représentent souvent un moyen de contrôler leurs émotions et parfois une arme plus ou moins aiguisée contre l’autorité patriarcale’ (translation above).110 This argument is furthered with a series of reflections or manipulations of nature in ‘land art’, where the inherent nature of the object is respected while subtly being changed and reimagined by women. In the early 1970s, Sherry B. Ortner questioned the conflation of women with nature in her essay ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’, in which she challenges the concepts laid out by Claude Lévi-Strauss and explores the devaluation of women in every culture by the alignment of women with the reproductive function (hence physiologically closer to nature), while men (unable to give birth) produce objects of lasting value, or ‘culture’.111 However,

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in the 1970s, women were redefining their relationship to nature by aligning feminism with growing ecology movements. In 1978, this was seen in the group Écologie-Féminisme led by writer Françoise d’Eaubonne (who also helped create FHAR – Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire – in 1971). This group focused on political issues affecting the environment such as industrial pollution, crude oil spillages that affected the ocean, overpopulation, and the effects of earthquakes, and linked women’s liberation with issues affecting the earth as an extension of women’s bodily rights.112 Artist Marinette Cueco, wife of the figurative painter Henri Cueco, rejected painting for an art practice based on nature. When asked about the relationship between her work and contemporary painting she responded: J’ai souvent le sentiment de ne pas faire le même métier que mes amis peintres … comme si nous nous étions situés à deux pôles opposés, à deux extrémités! … Je me sens plus proche des arts primitifs ou premiers, dans leur relation aux éléments naturels, je me sens par contre très éloignée de toute représentation …113 I often feel that I do not do the same work as my painter friends … as if we were standing at two opposite poles, at two ends! … I feel closer to the primitive and tribal arts for their connection to the natural world, I feel, in turn, very removed from all representation …

However, some of the elements of painting remain in her grass constructions, which she labels an ‘impressionisme concret’ for its capture of the light, color, season and texture of the natural plant.114 Many of her early works were geometric squares resembling canvases in their form and construction, which echoed the intricacy and all-over dynamic approach of Jackson Pollock however fragile and painstakingly made by the artist. Cueco stresses the flow of energy in her body that had to be achieved in order to make each work: Ce travail nécessite la patience d’un geste lent et continu qui assouplira sans rupture: l’herbe, ni trop sèche ni trop humide exige pour la façonner un engagement total du corps: à la fois une grande concentration pour trouver le geste précis, sans brutalité et une décontraction totale du corps pour trouver un rythme lent, répétitif et sensible … il ne faut aucune tension dans le corps, pour libérer l’énergie dont la main a besoin; il y a aussi quelque chose de très particulier, comme dans le tricotage, d’envoûtant, d’hypnotique … cette redite infinie du geste est quasi obsessionnelle: cela devient à la fois insupportable et très productif, car une très infime modification du geste donne sa texture particulière à la matière travaillée.115 This work requires the patience of a slow and continuous gesture that will soften without breaking: the grass, neither too dry nor too wet, demands a

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total commitment of the body to shape it. Great concentration is needed to find the precise gesture, without roughness and, at the same time, a total relaxation of the body to achieve a slow, repetitive and sensitive rhythm … no tension should be in the body so as to release the energy that the hand needs. There is also something very rare, as in knitting, bewitching, hypnotic … this infinite repetition of the gesture is near obsessive: it becomes both unbearable and very productive, since a tiny modification of the gesture gives its particular texture to the worked material.

Beginning in 1978, Cueco started to weave and braid grasses and fibers into a new language that was an expression of both the material and her design, and began to exhibit in 1979 and into the 1980s. In a series of works from the early 1980s, she used various plant substances to ‘compose’ her works through various techniques of weaving, knitting, knotting, braiding, crocheting and lacing, using materials ranging from ‘genêt cendré’ in the winter of 1980 to cherry stems in the summer of 1981 so as to preserve both seasonal and conceptual time through organic matter (Plate 68). The knots and weaving also recall the delicate pencil drawings of Liliane Camier, who carefully highlighted the weaving and unraveling of threads as a metaphor for women’s psychical strength and fragility, in a rhythmic series of woven threads with ‘dangerous’ ruptures and snags (Figure 6.14). Marinette Cueco manipulates the material to be ‘tamed’ (she elsewhere readily admits the ‘violence’ of nature) into subtle lines: ‘Cette ligne fine, menue, souple, maniable … je la retrouve avec l’herbe: infinie, tige après tige, infinie comme le trait du crayon … graphique dont la trace n’est ni écrite ni dessinée mais simplement posée là comme le résidu d’une opération’ (This fine line, thin, flexible, pliable … I find it with the grass: infinite, stem after stem, infinite as the line of the pencil …

Liliane Camier, Dessin tissé – Au fil des mots, 1977.

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graphic whose trace is neither written nor drawn but simply lies there as the residue of an operation).116 The tension of the work lies in the ‘constraint’ presented by the fragility of the material, which can break at any moment in the creation of a design. This is a practice that she admits is ‘feminine’ in the resistance and transformation of exterior materials to modify the interior (person).117 The use of Latin scientific names in Cueco’s work recalls that of Lourdes Castro’s series of flowers in the early 1970s, when she produced images of about 100 different species of plants during a trip to the Island of Madeira.118 Laying heliographic paper directly on the ground, Castro created images of plants through light absorption and the formation of violet shadows to generate a ‘memory’ of the living plant by capturing its ephemeral beauty and conducting a post-mortem (Figure 6.15). This ‘death’ was recorded in the naming of the plant family, using the scientific name as well as the French and common names, in a way that had resonances with the ‘objective’ labeling of Annette Messager’s personal collecting albums in the 1970s to blur the line between the reality of an intimate hobby and the fantasy of art. If Cueco shapes the actual materials of nature, Castro teases those lines between art and the ‘nature morte’, or still life, by capturing images of real plants as the focus of objective study. At the same time she highlights the ‘herbier’ as a source of medieval knowledge and the medicinal uses of plants which had ties to the occult and witchcraft.119 (Similarly, artist Hessie turned to working with real

Lourdes Castro, Geraniaceae and Solanaceae, grand herbier d’ombre, 1972.

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Hard politics, soft art

plants – dried stems and flowers – on paper in the early 1970s.) These are works that also consciously engender questions about the production of knowledge and its transmission as well as the more general questions about women’s education that were taking place in the 1970s.120 If the self-consciousness of a sampler was one form of working in the environment, Anne Delfieu presented another. Delfieu, the daughter of artist Raoul Ubac, turned toward the sculptural elements in nature that were in harmony with the environment in which they were often created, using branches and pieces of wood that she found on forest walks and recreated in the studio. (Although she began this practice in the late 1970s, like Cueco, she did not find space to exhibit until the more liberal ‘opening’ of galleries to little-known artists in the early 1980s, and only later began to work in situ when she received commissions.)121 Nature, for women in the 1970s, not only provided a backdrop for a growing interest in ecology but might also have provided another resource and outlet against the lack of consistent provision of gallery space or museum interest. Material as metaphor Collage and women: conflating time and space In writing about feminist art in the United States, Aline Dallier stressed the importance of women in Surrealism, many of whom had partners in the Surrealist movement but who were not always recognized as artists in their own right: ‘La lutte ouverte, en revanche, est plus rare mais ne date néanmoins pas d’aujourd’hui. Pour ne s’en tenir qu’à la période du Surréalisme, il ne faut pas oublier que Léonor Fini, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Meret Oppenheim et quelques autres ont beaucoup œuvré pour que les femmes, dans la peinture, passent du rôle d’objet qui leur était jusque-là dévolu, à la qualité de sujet’ (The open struggle, in contrast, may be rarer, but does not date from today. Thinking only of the Surrealist period, we must not forget that Léonor Fini, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Meret Oppenheim and a few others worked hard for women in painting to move from the role of object – until then ascribed to them – to that of the subject).122 The strong collective presence of women in Surrealism was evident at the exhibition Boîtes (16 December 1976–30 January 1977), which took place at ARC 2 and showed in the presentation of individual, thematic boxes how Surrealism and contemporary art shared common ground.123 The show featured works by both men and women (over 250 artists participated), spanning generations and stylistic categories, and included a catalogue with essays by writers, psychoanalysts and critics such as Ben, Michel Bernard, Hélène Cixous, Jean Clair, Françoise Eliet, A. Green, Jean-Jacques Levêque,

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Marc Le Bot, Pierre Restany, Claudine Roméo and Anne Tronche, amongst others.124 The presence of writer Hélène Cixous and psychoanalyst and artist Françoise Eliet marks the importance of écriture féminine, psychoanalysis and women’s issues filtering into the discourse of institutional shows. If the ‘box’ represented an easy metaphor in three dimensions between art and the unconscious, the collage, particularly in ‘soft’ materials, provided a way to critique and flatten two-dimensional time and space. Italian Surrealist artist Bona, wife of poet André Pieyre de Mandiargues, who featured in the 1976 Féminie-Dialogue espace cousu, turned toward textiles to layer a ‘material’ narrative from the fabric offcuts that fell from her scissors and her sewing with an awareness of the tension of her thread.125 (This was the same year as Hannah Höch’s Retrospective at ARC 2 which featured her photomontages as well as her soft dolls, Dada-Puppen, 1916/1918, which Suzanne Pagé, sensing the feminist trends of the times, highlighted in her interview with Höch; Plate 69.)126 In Bona’s La coquille et le clergyman (1970) (the title of Germaine Dulac’s 1928 film written by Antonin Artaud), an assemblage of various fabrics and materials is pieced together to form two figures, both of whom suggest the materiality of desire through the elaboration of signs and their transgression (Plate 70). The image counters the patriarchal and ecclesiastical exploitation of women by depicting the scene of a ‘clergyman’ erotically fingering the pink head of a snail coming out from under the young girl’s dress/shell. Critic Alain Jouffroy defended Bona in 1972, citing the difficulties encountered by women artists as part of their path and an element of the necessary transgression of social order found in their work: Les préjugés dont ne cessent d’être victimes les femmes, en particulier quand elles osent peindre, accomplir sur un autre plan que celui de la vie quotidienne des inventions, des projets intellectuels, ces préjugés tenaces et qui tiennent évidemment au caractère patriarcal de nos sociétés, je ne crois pas qu’ils puissent aussi vite disparaître qu’une phobie, ou une mode du jour. … Il semble donc que la transgression de certains tabous, d’ordre moral et social, soit la condition même, pour une femme, d’une recherche systématique, ou d’un processus inventif quelconque. Bona n’a pas, je pense, toute la place qu’elle mérite puisqu’on la situe d’abord comme nièce (d’un peintre célèbre), et comme épouse (d’un poète célèbre) … Bona, en effet, n’ayant jamais adhéré à un système formel, est passée d’une conception toute italienne de la peinture métaphysique à des recherches plus ‘parisiennes’ de matières et de textures, jusqu’à la trouvaille qu’elle a faite de ces tissus, ou plutôt de ce langage de coutures, de doublures et de coupures qui l’a rapprochée à nouveau de la peinture italienne (celle de Baj en particulier) tout en lui permettant de s’affirmer comme une aventurière de la découverte.127

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Women do not cease to be the victims of prejudices, especially when they dare to paint and accomplish on a different level than the one of daily life, creations and intellectual projects. These stubborn prejudices are obviously due to the patriarchal character of our societies. I do not believe that they could disappear as fast as a phobia, or a passing fad. … It seems, therefore, that the transgression of certain taboos of a moral and social order is the very condition – for a woman – of engaged research or of any inventive process. Bona does not have, I believe, the recognition that she deserves because she is identified as niece (of a famous painter) and as wife (of a famous poet). In fact, Bona having never adhered to a formal system, went from a completely Italian conception of metaphysical painting to a more Parisian interest in materials and textures, until the discovery she made with fabrics, or rather this language of stitching, lining and cutting which brought her closer, once more, to Italian painting (Baj’s, in particular), at the same time allowing her to assert herself as an adventuress of discovery.

These narratives of imagination are echoed by Gisèle Prassinos, the original femme-enfant who wrote poetry that mesmerized the Surrealist inner circle of André Breton and his group in the 1930s. Prassinos, who was first introduced to the Surrealist group by her artist brother Mario, wrote novels and created what she termed tentures, or tapestry-like felt and cloth panels with narrative scenes (Plate 71). She also composed writings to accompany her felt panels such as in Brelin le frou, a fantastical ‘portrait’ of a family (1975).128 The choice of material is not without significance. Prassinos was of Greek origin but born in Turkey where felt, believed to be the oldest recorded fabric, had been traditionally used since ancient times and was seen most notably in native objects such as the yourte, or tent for nomads (as in Nil Yalter’s construction (Figure 3.5)) – a just metaphor for Prassinos who had been shifting homes since the war. This link to tradition, especially female tradition, was important for Prassinos, who not only had a close relationship with her brother Mario, but also had to contend with the misogyny of the male Surrealist group.129 Prassinos credits the shaping of her tentures to the memory of her aunts sewing and the fact that she herself liked to ‘sew’ in the evening while her husband put on music to relax.130 The innocence of the depicted scenes and the playful vivid color of the forms belie the intensity of Prassinos’s message and her conscious subversion of history and religion through levity. The concept of paradise lost, or history overturned and subverted, is seen in the collages of Aube Elléouët. Influenced by Le Petit Journal Illustré, Aube Elléouët, the daughter of André Breton and painter Jacqueline Lamba, and

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wife of artist Yves Elléouët, was a social worker in the 1970s before finding her own medium of artistic expression in the form of collage.131 Demonstrating how much her work was a personal exploration, it took the insistence of friends to persuade her to exhibit her work publicly.132 Like Bona and Gisèle Prassinos, Elléouët also challenges the church and even male domination of the history of art in her image Le témoin ou la caverne d’Ali Baba (c. 1979), which comically reinterprets Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper with razor-like precision (Figure 6.16). American Mary Beth Edelson’s Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper (1972) also uses da Vinci’s canonical image by substituting various women artists in America for the figures of Jesus and the disciples (with Georgia O’Keeffe as Jesus) as a method of subverting the ‘sacred’ status of the history of male painting and genius.133 Elléouët meanwhile substitutes Jesus and the apostles’ heads with those of seahorses, with a lone floating seahorse suggesting the Holy Spirit, and she gives Simon the Zealot the head of a fish in a resulting scene of dada-like absurdity. The rows of barrels suggest a scene displaced in both time and space that has been carefully crafted to rupture conventional perspective and create new signs and imagery. (This is a technique shared by Nicole Pierre, wife of art critic José Pierre, who painstakingly created and began to exhibit ethereal collages similar

Aube Elléouët, Le témoin ou la caverne d’Ali Baba, c. 1979.

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to those of Elléouët during this period and later.) Elléouët carefully robs the Last Supper of its religious and high art canonical status and, by making it accessible through the absurd and imaginative, redirects the mind and imagination to a virgin space. These new forms gave Surrealism a fresh perspective, with materials (even in traditional methods like collage) used to criticize patriarchy with new techniques, thereby expanding the movement beyond the contemporary possibilities of its Boîtes exhibition (discussed above). What stands out in this work is the potentially sharper critiques – and their elaboration – by Surrealist women set against the period of the MLF in the 1970s.134 From the inflatable to the ingestible: material moments in plastic, rubber, cake! The structural utopia suggested in the 1968 exhibition Structures gonflables at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris – organized by the Marxist group Utopie with the participation of the curator of ARC, politically left-leaning Pierre Gaudibert – inflated the possibilities of an environment that fostered social revolution.135 This ‘soft art’ also had repercussions for women in the late 1960s and 1970s. As critic Marc Dessauce wrote: Pneumatics and revolution agree well. Both are fueled by wind and the myth of transcendence; as the balloon enraptures the child, they animate and transport us on the promise of an imminent passage into a perfected future. In the 1960s, as radical ambitions to fuse art and life regained currency, both became a norm of avant-garde practice and both produced spectacular uprisings in 1968.136

The social and conceptual possibilities for women artists in particular, seen through the ‘transparency’ of form that clear plastic promised, revealed a fresh perspective on potential social relations between genders and the manipulations of both creation and meaning through the medium. The sewn plastic ‘sacks’ of Lygia Clark’s Architectures biologiques: naissance (1969) demonstrated the way in which individuals could slide through a tunnel-like ‘birth canal’ with other participants (Plate 58).137 For Clark, the body’s relation both to itself and to other objects could lead to new forms of psychotherapeutic healing. The isolation of movement and the relationship to material was observed in ‘experiments’ such as her fingers moving in plastic/latex gloves in Conditionnement des gestes (1968). This led to new experiences in touch and helped form the basis of the series Structuring of the Self (1976 onwards). Using inflated plastic bags, shells and nylon sacks of balls, this series helped to awaken and heal the body through a variety of sensory experiences. Lea Lublin in 1969 had created a large plastic inflatable tube – a ‘phallic cylinder’ – through which participants could enter and exit like a vagina by splitting apart its two

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inflatable ‘lips’, and encountering liquids and air before exiting the structure of her Fluvio Subtunal (Plate 39). She described the experience in psychoanalytic terms as reflective of an inherent bisexuality – emphasizing the phallus as much as the vagina and the see-through material making visible the scopic drive of the viewer and the viewed.138 This experience for the participant could show, in a more transparent way than in Niki de Saint Phalle’s earlier plaster Hon, how interpenetration could be corrupted, transformed and psychically reorganized through material terms. The promise of a social utopia through inflatable plastic was similarly offered in Agnès Varda’s films, such as the inflatable Nana by Niki de Saint Phalle that floated lazily in the swimming pool amongst the lovers in Lions Love (1969), a movie which revisits the hippy culture in California as an eventual paradise lost. In films such as L’Une chante et l’autre pas (1976) and Quelques femmes bulles (1977) (produced for television), utopic scenes of singing and dancing take place amidst colorful balloons and balls floating and bouncing around, which echo the happiness of a wanted pregnancy. The songs in L’Une chante reflect this state: ‘Ah que c’est bon d’être une bulle / ah que c’est bon d’être un ballon, un atelier de molécules / un bel ovule’ (Oh it’s good to be a bubble / Oh it’s good to be a balloon, a workshop of molecules / a beautiful ovum).139 The Indo-European word ‘bhel’ suggests inflation, according to Claude and Léon Gaignebet, and shares meaning with words as diverse as ‘balloon’, ‘folly’, ‘belly’, ‘bold’, ‘blister’, ‘bladder’, ‘bloat’, etc.140 The inflatable plastic, one could contend, recalls the possibility of pregnancy, or the feminine state, as much as the cusp of a new change in society – thus suggesting the debates around abortion for women and the radical possibilities of hope emerging from both May ’68 and the MLF (Plate 72 and Figure 6.17). In 1970 Dorothée Selz, inspired by Daniel Spoerri’s 1968 Spoerri Restaurant and Eat Art Gallery in Düsseldorf, began her experiments with color and edible ingredients. If the inflatable suggested utopia in the external world, the ‘ingestible’ created a vibrant gustatory world that could transform the body from the inside out. Her creation was reminiscent of the Surrealist EROS exhibition in 1959, where Meret Oppenheim had placed a live nude model under a banquet of food to blur the boundaries between art/consumption and the role of the woman as practical nurturer and cook versus that of transcendent artist. In the same way, Selz, in her Gâteau arc-en-ciel (1974), invents a cake in the shape of rainbow with figures to recreate an idyllic paradise in a shocking array of blues, pinks, yellows, reds, which she created using food coloring (Plate 73). (The gaudy, polychromatic cake acts as a material riposte to the ‘transcendent’ blue cocktails famously served at the opening of Yves Klein’s exhibition of ‘Le Vide’ at the Iris Clert Gallery in 1958.) The cake, organic and perishable, suggests the bittersweet reality of the fragility of happiness and the joy of the moment. If Michel Journiac’s boudin, made from his blood

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MLF, Des femmes en mouvements hebdo, no. 44, 1981.

and consumed by participants at a gallery for Messe pour un corps (1969), suggested one type of religious and ritual transformation through pain, Selz promises the sweetness of transformation by a religious offering that is painless (and possibly empty), and questions the nature of art and transcendence. In speaking of the work, Selz deliberately attempts to conflate the boundaries between art and craft, artist and participant and spiritual and material sustenance through art comestible when she states: ‘In these sculptures the visual aspect is not important, but the main point is to nourish something invisible. Sharing an unusual moment is more invisible than one might think.’ 141 Glissades, fin This blend of warmth and coldness, of body and plastic, suggests research and evolution that contrast with the ère glaciaire in 1972, while nevertheless sharing properties with it. The subjective element of women’s work, whether consciously or unconsciously acknowledged, created another terrain in which to examine the revolutionary potential of artistic creation through materials that lent expression to an œuvre. By blurring boundaries, we have not only

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accounted for the glissade of plural practices in the 1970s, but have also presented a soft edge to hard, institutional politics through productions such as art forms that confront the body, writing practices that shaped a generation such as écriture féminine, the multidimensional and material (from organic to inorganic), and the elaboration of soft art in society. These practices evolved women’s art in the 1970s and have been presented here in all their richness and political possibility.

Notes 1 Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, ‘Les artistes et la révolution’, Les Années 68: le temps de la contestation. Sous la direction de Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand. (Paris: CNRS, 2000), p. 228. 2 Sherri B. Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ in Women, Society, and Culture, ed. M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 68–87, p. 87. 3 Jean Clair [Gérard Régnier] sees the key turning point as the exhibition Mythologies Quotidiennes (1964), where observers remarked on an immediate ‘refroidissement’ (cooling) to explain the change in artistic climate, mood and feeling. Art en France: une nouvelle génération (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1972), p. 10. Clair’s term may have originated with Gérard Gassiot-Talabot, the curator of Mythologies Quotidiennes (1964), who described the show as a ‘glaciation’. See Jean-Louis Pradel, ‘Mythologies Quotidiennes 2’, Opus International, no. 63 (May 1977), pp. 36–39, p. 36. Nevertheless, 1964 was the same year that Carolee Schneemann performed Meat Joy, foregrounding bodily excess in a mock ecstatic rite, for the first time at the Festival de la Libre Expression in Paris. 4 Can a feminist art history be rethought through a radical imaginary? See two divergent points on feminism and deconstruction: Richard Rorty, ‘Feminism, Ideology and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View’, Hypatia, vol. 8, no. 2 (Spring 1993), pp. 96–103, and Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous, La jeune née (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1975). 5 Nicola [L.] conceived this piece in New York, where she lived in 1966–1968 and befriended, among others, Carolee Schneemann. 6 ‘Le peint et le non-peint ne se distribuent pas comme la forme et le fond, mais comme le plein et le vide dans un devenir réciproque. C’est ainsi qu’Hantai laisse vide l’œil du pli, et ne peint que les côtés (ligne d’Orient); mais il arrive aussi qu’il fasse dans la même région des pliages successifs qui ne laissent plus subsister de vides (ligne pleine baroque).’ Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988), p. 51. Eng. trans. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Athlone Press, 1993), p. 36. (Painted and nonpainted surfaces are not divided as are form and content, but as the full and the void in a reciprocal becoming. That is how Hantaï hollows out the eye

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of the fold and paints only the sides [the Oriental line]; but sometimes he makes successive foldings in the same area that leave no place for voids [a full Baroque line].) 7 Saytour, bâtons dressés; Viallat, filets et toiles; Dezeuze, échelle souple; Valensi, au sol. November 1970, photograph, Jacqueline Hyde. 8 Françoise Janicot, L’œil, la main (Paris: Al Dante, 2006), p. 58. 9 Juliet Mitchell, Mad Man and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relationships on the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 323–325. ‘Reading hysteria along a horizontal as well as a vertical plane changes our mapping of human relations’, p. 345. 10 Lygia Clark, ‘Capter un fragment de temps suspendu’, Lygia Clark de l’œuvre à l’événement, exhibition catalogue, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 2005. 11 Mireille Guezennec, ‘Judit Reigl: ARC 2’, Opus International, no. 61–62 (January–February 1977), p. 112. 12 Author interview with Judit Reigl, Marcoussis, June 2006. 13 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Hélène Cixous ou l’écriture stroboscopique’, Le Monde, 11 August 1972. My emphasis. Eng. trans. ‘Hélène Cixous or Stroboscopic Writing‘, trans. Martin McQuillan, Oxford Literary Review, vol.  24, no. 1 (2002), pp. 203–205, p. 205. 14 See Jeanne Lapointe’s brief discussion ‘Glissements sémantiques’ in which she highlights Jean Paulhan’s misreading of Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O. See  her ‘Le meurtre des femmes chez le théologien et le pornographe’, in Féminité, subversion, écriture, ed. Suzanne Lamy and Irène Pagès (Montreal: Remue-Ménage, 1983), pp. 209–223, p. 218 and Les Cahiers du GRIF, no. 26 ‘Jouir’ (March 1983), pp. 43–53. Anu Aneja speaks of the ‘slipperiness’ of Cixous’s texts, such as in ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, and the deliberate indeterminancy created between positions of the ‘feminine’ and ‘women’. ‘The Medusa’s Slip, ‘Hélène Cixous and the Underpinnings of Ecriture Féminine’, LIT, vol. 4 (1992), pp. 17–27. 15 Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Writing the Body: Towards the Understanding of l’écriture féminine’, Feminist Studies, vol. 7, no. 2 (1981), pp. 247–263. 16 Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, La jeune née (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1975), p. 175. 17 De Beauvoir herself would represent a split between material feminism and poststructural- and psychoanalytic-inflected feminism. In an interview with Hélène V. Wenzel, de Beauvoir said of Cixous’s écriture féminine as seen in ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’: ‘Oh, I am not in sympathy with it at all. We need to steal the tools, women have to take back the tool that is language, but women cannot remake language. No more than the proletariat who want the state to wither away can remake our consciousness … We have to steal the tool, but not destroy it, in my opinion. And in any case, I find the word-games feminist writers play very feeble …’ De Beauvoir went on to admit that she liked Wittig’s first book, but did not like the ‘doctrinaire’ aspect of her work or the words cut and changed to show they are ‘female’. On other women writers: ‘I hardly know Kristeva’s work, I’ve found very interesting things in Irigaray, but

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I find her too ready to adopt the Freudian notion of the inferiority of women. She’s too influenced by that. … Anyone who wants to work on women has to break completely with Freud … But all of them, even Irigaray, they’ve always begun with Freud’s postulates.’ ‘Interview with Simone de Beauvoir’, Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century, Yale French Studies, no. 72 (1986), pp. 5–34, pp. 11–12. 18 Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, L’Arc, no. 61 (1975), p. 39. Eng. trans. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith and Paula Cohen, Signs, vol. 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976), p. 875. 19 The term écriture féminine was freely used in the special dossier Femmes: une autre écriture?, presented in Magazine littéraire, no. 180 (January 1982). 20 Elizabeth Wright, Lacan and Postfeminism (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2000), pp. 6–7. Jouissance is defined as a ‘primal, contiguous sexuality’. See the Jacques Lacan seminars Ethics (1959–1960). Lacan opposes desire (masculine) to jouissance (feminine), the latter being a feminine ‘rival’ to the masculine desire unleashed at the time of castration and which ‘exists outside of the linguistic norms in the realm of the poetic’. Elisa D. Gelfand and Virginia Thorndike Hules, French Feminist Criticism: Women, Language and Literature (New York: Garland, 1985), p. xxii. Annie Leclerc in Parole de femme (Paris: Grasset, 1974) further draws on the concept of jouissance to challenge the dominance of the phallus to create a new source of (multiple) voices attributable to woman. 21 The list was included in the dossier Femmes: une autre écriture?, Magazine littéraire, no. 180 (January 1982). 22 ‘Une collection-femme serait-elle un strapontin? Les librairies, c’est vrai, réservent souvent aux livres de ces collections la petite étagère du fond de la boutique. Les représentants de certaines maisons d’édition sont parfois assez tièdes lorsqu’il s’agit de proposer des ouvrages “gênants” aux commerçants: De l’amour lesbien, de Geneviève Pastre, ignoré par toute la presse, peu défendu par les représentants, mal exposé en librairie, s’est finalement très bien vendu … par correspondance!’ Dominique Pujebet and Ruth Stegassy, ‘les collectionneuses’, Magazine littéraire, no. 180 (January 1982), p. 31. (Should a woman’s collection be a folding seat? It is true that the bookstores often reserve a small shelf at the back of the shop for the books in these collections. The representatives of some publishing houses are sometimes lukewarm when it comes to proposing ‘problematic’ books to sellers: Geneviève Pastre’s De l’amour lesbien, ignored by all the press, little supported by representatives, badly displayed in bookstores, finally sold very well … by mail order!) 23 ‘Quelques noms connus, peut-être, pourraient aider ces petites collections à se forger une image de marque? Catherine Erhel reconnaît avoir changé d’avis sur ce point. En 1977, dans un texte de présentation de “Voix de Femmes”, elle écrivait avec Catherine Leguay: “Une collection-femme ne pourrait pas vivre dans l’ombre d’une vedette, une ‘mandarine’ avec sa cohorte de disciples qui ‘disciplinerait’ les paroles des femmes.” En fait, les maisons-mères n’ont été que trop heureuses de publier ces vedettes. (Marie Cardinal, Kate

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Millett) hors-collection. Le fameux “ghetto féministe”, bien sûr, mais lequel?’ Dominique Pujebet and Ruth Stegassy, ‘les collectionneuses’, Magazine littéraire, no. 180 (January 1982), p. 31. (Some famous names, perhaps, could help these small collections to create a brand name? Catherine Erhel admits to having changed her mind on this point. In 1977, in an introductory text in Voix de Femmes, she wrote with Catherine Leguay: ‘A women’s collection could not live in the shadow of a star, a “mandarin” with her cohort of disciples who would “discipline” the words of women.’ In fact, the big houses were only too happy to publish these stars. (Marie Cardinal, Kate Millett) as stand-alone titles. The famous ‘feminist ghetto’, of course, but which one?) 24 N.A., ‘les femmes qui éditent’, Magazine littéraire, no. 180 (January 1982), p. 32. 25 Philippe de la Genardière, ‘Femmes: une autre écriture?’, ibid., p. 34. 26 Béatrice Didier, L’Écriture-femme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1981). 27 Michael Scott Christofferson cites Daniel Cohn Bendit making this pronouncement. See Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai 68: l’héritage impossible (Paris: La découverte, 1998), p. 50. In French Intellectuals Against the Left (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), p. 49; n. 101, p. 82. 28 See, for example, Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of L’Écriture Féminine’, Feminist Studies, vol 7, no. 2 (Summer 1981), pp. 247–263. Arlene B. Dallery, ‘The Politics of Writing (the) Body: Écriture féminine’, in Gender, Body, Knowledge, ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pp. 52–67. 29 Michèle Gazier, ‘Nathalie Sarraute et son “il”’, Télérama, July, pp. 38–39, p. 38. Cited in Toril Moi, ‘I am not a woman writer’, Feminist Theory, vol. 9, no. 3 (2008), pp. 259–271, p. 261. 30 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Féminité dans la métalangue’, Rudiments païens: Genre dissertatif (Paris: UGE 10/18, 1977), pp. 213–233, p. 213. Eng. trans. ‘One of the Things at Stake in Women’s Struggles’, trans. Deborah J. Clarke, SubStance, vol. 6/7, no. 20 (Autumn 1978), pp. 9–17, p. 9. 31 Monique Wittig writes: ‘… let us state that there is no such thing as “feminine writing” and that it is a mistake to use and propagate this expression: what is “feminine” in “feminine writing?” It is there to express something about Woman. … “Woman” cannot be associated with writing because “woman” is an imaginary construct and not a concrete reality.’ Monique Wittig, ‘Prologue to the French Edition of Djuna Barnes’s “La passion”’, in French Feminism: An Indian Anthology, ed. Danielle Haase-Dubosc et al. (Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003), p. 104. 32 Xavière Gauthier: ‘Disons, sur la façon dont le langage s’organise dans vos textes, probablement d’une façon très différente de celle dont il s’organise dans les textes d’hommes.’ Marguerite Duras: ‘Je ne m’occupe jamais du sens, de la signification. S’il y a sens, il se dégage après. … Le mot compte plus que la syntaxe. C’est avant tout des mots, sans articles d’ailleurs, qui viennent et qui s’imposent. Le temps grammatical suit, d’assez loin. … C’est des blancs,

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34 35 36 37

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si vous voulez, qui s’imposent. Ça se passe comme ça: je vous dis comment ça se passe, c’est des blancs qui apparaissent, peut-être sous le coup d’un rejet violent de la syntaxe ….’ X. G.: ‘Je me demandais si, ça, ne serait pas quelque chose de femme, vraiment de femme, blanc. S’il y a, par exemple, une chaîne grammaticale, s’il y a un blanc dedans, est-ce que ce ne serait pas là que serait la femme?’ M. D.: ‘—Qui sait?’ X. G.: ‘—Parce que, ça, ce serait une rupture de la chaîne symbolique. Et dans vos livres, il y a ça. Moi, je vois ça, tout à fait.’ Marguerite Duras and Xavière Gauthier, Les parleuses (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974), pp. 11–12. Eng. trans. Woman to Woman, trans. Katharine A. Jensen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), pp. 1–2. (X. G.: Well, let’s say something about how language is organized in your texts. It’s probably very different from the way it’s organized in texts by men. M. D.: I’m never concerned about the sense or the meaning. If there’s sense, it shows up afterward … The word counts more than the syntax. More than anything, it’s words – without articles – that come and impose themselves. The grammatical tense follows, at a distance … So blanks turn up, you see. It happens like this – I’ll try to explain: perhaps the blanks appear as a result of a violent rejection of syntax. Yes, I think that’s it; that sounds right. … X. G.: I was wondering whether this blank itself wouldn’t be something of woman, truly of woman. If there is, for example, a grammatical chain, where there’s a space in it, wouldn’t that space be where woman would be? M. D.: Who knows? X. G: Well, because that would be a rupture of the symbolic chain. And in your books, there is just that.) Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties’, La jeune née, p. 175. Eng. trans. ‘Sorties’, Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, p. 95. On the subject of bodily fluids and women’s writing, see Rakhee Balaram, ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears: Exposing the Limits of the Body in écriture féminine’, in Exposure: Revealing Bodies, Unveiling Representations, ed. Kathryn Banks and Joseph Harris (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 35–48. Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 163. Chantal Chawaf, Retable, La Rêverie (Paris: des femmes, 1974), p. 14. Eng. trans. Mother Love, Mother Earth, trans. Monique Fleury Nagam (New York and London: Garland, 1992), p. 13. Ibid., p. 19; Nagam translation, p. 16. Christine Klein-Lataud, ‘La nourricriture ou l’écriture d’Hélène Cixous, de Chantal Chawaf et d’Annie Leclerc’, in Féminité, subversion, écriture, ed. Suzanne Lamy and Irène Pagès (Montreal: Remue-Ménage, 1983), pp. 93–106, p. 101. Marie Cardinal, Les mots pour le dire (Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle, 1975), p. 9. The book won the Prix Littré in 1976. Eng. trans. The Words to Say It, trans. Pat Goodheart (Cambridge, MA: Van Vactor & Goodheart, 1984), p. 3. Goodheart translated only part of the original citation in the English version. Michèle Katz, ‘Peindre’, Sorcières, no. 10 (1977), pp. 42–43. Eng. trans. of Cixous quote in Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, p. 110.

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40 Ibid., p. 42. See Cixous, ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, 1975. 41 Françoise Eliet, ‘Peindre / combattre’, Sorcières, no. 10 (1977), pp. 20–24. In speaking about salon literature, Eliet comments: ‘Il reparaît de nos jours et peut-être beaucoup de ce que nous nous empressons de saluer comme une nouvelle écriture féminine n’est qu’une résurgence, une forme moderne et modifiée de ces traditions anciennes’ (It returns in our time, and perhaps much of what we rush to herald as a new écriture féminine, is only a resurgence, a modern and modified form of these older traditions), p. 23. Her citation from Irigaray touches on ‘le matin grec des femmes’ or ‘the Greek morning of women’ which Eliet interprets as the sublimated homosexual ties which sustain the solidarity between women, p. 22. 42 The name Emma Santos is formed from a combination of her lover’s Portuguese surname ‘Santos’ and the two initials of her first name. 43 Books with Éditions des femmes included J’ai tué Emma S, ou l’écriture colonisée (1976), L’itinéraire psychiatrique (1977) and La loméchuse (1978). For the ten years in a psychiatric institution, see ‘Emma Santos dans Emma Santos’, Théâtre 140, Brussels. Saison 76/77, 1–6 March 1977. The play was written by Emma Santos and directed by Claude Régy. Original press release. 44 See Donna Kuinzenga, ‘“Abortive Meanings”: Inscriptions of the Self ’, French Forum, vol. 14, no. 2 (1989), pp. 339–50; Elsa Polverel, ‘L’itinéraire singulier d’Emma Santos: une écriture à l’intersection de la révolte féminine de la psychanalyse et de la déconstruction anti-psychiatrique’, in La folie parle: The Dialectic Effect of Madness in French Literature since the Nineteenth Century, ed. Gillian Ni Cheallaigh et al. (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014), pp 97–112, and Emma Murdoch, ‘(Re) Reading Trauma and Schizophrenia in the Work of Emma Santos’, in French Feminisms: 1975 and After, ed. Margaret Atack et al. (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2018), pp. 71–91. Murdoch claims Santos shares a stronger affinity with Irigaray’s speech-motivated parler-femme than the writing-based practice of écriture féminine, pp. 76–80. 45 Emma Santos exhibited at the Librairie des femmes in Lyon in June to coincide with the re-edition in paperback of her book La loméchuse. Des femmes en mouvements, no. 6 (June 1978), illustrations on pp. 5 and 85. Also see no. 3 (March 1978), illustrations on pp. 1, 45, 92. Santos would also feature in the journal Sorcières, ‘Désirs’, no. 16 (1976), pp. 9–10. 46 See Margaret Whitford on this point. Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 38. 47 Luce Irigaray, ‘Pour Unica Zürn’ [5 December 1983], Le Nouveau Commerce, Cahier, 62–63, Quarterly, (Autumn 1985), pp. 41–47. Eng. trans. ‘A Natal Lacuna’, trans. Margaret Whitford, p. 11. 48 ‘Mais comment une femme peut-elle créer en demeurant une? Comment peut-elle concevoir sans se fragmenter et se disperser? Si pour l’homme, elle est la mère unique et le pluriel femmes, comment une femme peut-elle engendrer? A moins de découvrir, déployer une morphologie autre, ni soumise, ni réactive … Si pour Naître est difficile pour une femme parce qu’elle est du même sexe que la mère, sa mère. Échapper à la fusion, ou à la destruction de

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l’une ou de l’autre, exige de se poser la question de la morphologie du sexe féminin. Ibid. Trans. ‘A Natal Lacuna’, pp. 11, 13. (But how can a woman create while remaining a woman/whole? How can she conceive without breaking into bits and pieces and becoming scattered? If, for the man, she is the one and only mother, and the multiplicity of women, how can one woman give birth? Unless she discovers and deploys an other morphology which neither submits nor merely reacts. … It is difficult for a woman to be born, because she is of the same sex as the mother, her mother. In order to avoid fusion, or the destruction of one or the other, we have to raise the question of the morphology of the female sex.) 49 Ibid. 50 This reading deliberately counters that presented by Margaret Whitford who characterizes Irigaray’s reading of Zürn in terms of ‘madness’ and a failure to overcome her female body which leads to her suicide. I would separate the work of the artist from her biography on this point (See chapter 4, note 113). 51 ‘Le “féminin” est toujours décrit comme défaut, atrophie, revers du seul sexe qui monopolise la valeur: le sexe masculin. Ainsi, la trop célèbre “envie du pénis” … Tous les énoncés décrivant la sexualité féminine négligent le fait que le sexe féminin pourrait bien avoir aussi une “spécificité”.’ Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1977), p. 68. Eng. trans. This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 69. (The ‘feminine’ is always described in terms of deficiency or atrophy, as the other side of the sex that alone holds a monopoly on value: the male sex. Hence the all too well-known ‘penis envy’. … All Freud’s statements describing feminine sexuality overlook the fact that the female sex might possibly have it its own ‘specificity’.) 52 ‘Or la femme a des sexes un peu partout. Elle jouit d’un peu partout. Sans parler même de l’hystérisation de tout son corps, la géographie de son plaisir est bien plus diversifiée, multiple dans ses différences, complexe, subtile, qu’on ne l’imagine …’ Ibid., p. 28. (But woman has sex organs more or less everywhere. She finds pleasure almost anywhere. Even if we refrain from invoking the hystericization of her entire body, the geography of her pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined …), Porter and Burke trans., p. 28. 53 ‘Envie de respirer, de faire de grands gestes …’ Des femmes en mouvements, no. 8–9 (August–September 1978). 54 ‘Le métier d’écrivain ou de peintre, de comédien, de musicien aussi bien, suppose l’invention des gestes, toujours plus précis et nouveaux. Un temps vient où le geste nécessaire impose à l’organe un mode d’être qui avait été censuré. L’avancée d’un mouvement de la main, du regard ou de la pensée, qui avait été décidée en fonction d’une nécessité technique, d’une logique de métier, devient subitement impossible. Elle terrifie ou plonge dans la stupeur. C’est que le geste excède le sens que la censure avait fixé. Il faut pourtant que ce geste se fasse. Il se fait, mais à quel prix! La main, le regard qui l’exécutent perdent leur sens; le corps, le monde deviennent étrangers.’

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Michèle Montrelay, L’Arc, no. 43 – Klossowski. Cited in Sorcières, ‘Mouvements’ no. 15 (1978), p. 25. (The profession of writer, painter, comedian, in addition to musician presupposes the invention of gestures, always more exacting and innovative. A time comes when the necessary gestures impose on the body a way of being that had been censored. The reach by the hand, gaze or thought which had been based on technical need according to professional logic, suddenly becomes impossible. It terrifies or plunges into stupor. The gesture exceeds the meaning which censorship had determined. However, this gesture must be made. It is made, but at what price! The hand and the look that execute it, lose their meaning; the body, the world become foreigners.) 55 Author interview with Najia Mehadji, Paris, July 2006. Many works were lost when an atelier burned down in the early 1980s, including pieces by Liliane Camier who had shared the large artist space with others. Author interview with Liliane Camier, Paris, July 2006. 56 Diana Quinby interview with Jean-Jacques Lebel and Françoise Janicot on 21 December 2000. ‘Le collectif Femmes/Art à Paris dans les années 70’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2003, p. 97. 57 The history of Laure’s publications in the 1970s is complicated by the number of editors she had during various periods. Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris and Jérôme Peignot (Laure’s nephew) annotated, collected, prefaced or appendixed her texts. A first edition released in 1971 (Jérôme Peignot and Georges Bataille, eds, Écrits de Laure, Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert) was censored by Laure’s brother who objected to its publication. A second edition appeared in 1976 entitled Laure, écrits, fragments inédits (Paris: Change Errant), and finally a third edition in 1978, Laure: Écrits, Fragments, Lettres (Paris: Union générale d’éditions), both edited by Jérôme Peignot. Later a fourth version included new material: Laure: Écrits retrouvés (Paris: Les Cahiers des Brisants, 1987). Acknowledgments of the re-editions of Laure’s works appeared in feminist vehicles such as in Sorcières, ‘Se Prostituer’, no. 3 (1976), p. 58. Also see ‘Action: Laure’ in ‘La femme surréaliste’, Obliques, no. 14–15 (1977), pp. 171–173. 58 Luce Irigaray, ‘The Gesture in Psychoanalysis’, trans. Elizabeth Guild, in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed.Teresa Brennan (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 127–138, p. 127. 59 Christine Klein-Lataud, ‘La nourricriture ou l’écriture d’Hélène Cixous, de Chantal Chawaf et d’Annie Leclerc’, in Féminité, subversion, écriture, ed. Suzanne Lamy and Irène Pagès (Montreal: Remue-Ménage, 1983), pp. 93–106, pp. 99–100. 60 Worthy of note among the recent reassessments of textile arts in France is Texte, texture, textile: Variations sur le tissage dans la musique, les arts plastiques et la littérature, ed. Françoise Bert and Valérie Dupont (Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 2013). 61 Marie Cardinal, Le passé empiété  (Paris: Grasset, 1983). On this point, see Carolyn A. Durham, ‘The Subversive Stitch: Female Craft, Culture, and

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Écriture’, Women’s Studies, vol. 17, no. 3–4 (1990), pp. 341–359. Durham makes a parallel between Cardinal’s novel and feminist art historian Rozsika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Women’s Press, 1984). 62 ‘Cardinal thus restores the female text to its original definition as an artisanal activity: text, from Latin “woven thing”, from texere, to weave, fabricate (hence the same double meaning as that contained within the concept “embroidery”).’ Durham, ‘The Subversive Stitch’, p. 358, note 1. 63 Lucy Lippard, ‘Making Something from Nothing (Toward a Definition of Women’s “Hobby Art”)’, Heresies, no. 4 (Winter 1978), pp. 62–65. 64 Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, Mythologies Quotidiennes, exhibition catalogue, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, July–October 1964, n. p. 65 Ibid. 66 Jean Clair coins the phrase ‘une ère glaciaire’ when he writes: ‘Quand elle commença cependant de se manifester, vers le milieu de la décennie, par exemple en 1964 à l’exposition des Mythologies Quotidiennes, les observateurs constatèrent vite un changement de climat, comme un refroidissement soudain: il semblait qu’on entrât dans une ère glaciaire.’ Art en France: une nouvelle génération (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1972), p. 10. (Nevertheless, when it started to manifest toward the middle of the decade, for example in 1964, at the exhibition of Mythologies Quotidiennes, observers took note of a climate change, like a sudden drop in temperature: it seemed as if we entered an ice age.) 67 Also see Jill Carrick, ‘The Assassination of Marcel Duchamp: Collectivism and Contestation in 1960s France’, Oxford Art Journal, Issue 3/11, 2007, pp. 1–25. 68 Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, ‘Arroyo: Interrogation sur l’antiformalisme’, in Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, Pierre Gaudibert, Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, Gilbert Lascault, Marc Le Bot, Jean-François Lyotard, Corinne Lyotard and Catherine Masson, Figurations 1960–1973 (Paris: Union générale de l’édition, 1973), pp. 9–23, p. 10. 69 Hicks said in a statement about the work: ‘I wrap articles of my clothing with colored threads and give them flexible bone shapes. Directly manipulating the textile-based materials, I treat them as independent units.’ Nina StritzlerLevine (ed.), Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor, Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts; Design and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 124. 70 ‘1965: Sheila Hicks et la nouvelle tapisserie’, in Florence Montreynaud, Le XXème siècle des femmes (Paris: Nathan, 1989), p. 509. 71 ‘Naturellement attaquer ou contester dans son fond la culture ne peut pas être une action elle-même culturelle. Il ne s’agissait donc nullement pour nous de faire quelque proposition constructive que ce soit. On ne démolit pas un édifice en y ajoutant de nouvelles pierres. Il s’agissait au contraire de réussir à mener en peinture un discours qui ne puisse pas être apprécié comme une suite de tableaux, c’est-à-dire comme produit d’une activité culturelle.’

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Aillaud, Arroyo, Recalcati. Extracts from Comment s’en débarrasser ou Un an plus tard, September 1966. In Bernard Ceysson et al., 25 ans d’art en France 1960–1985 (Paris: Larousse, 1986), p. 116. (Naturally to attack or contest the essence of culture cannot be an action which is itself cultural. Therefore, it was not for us to make any constructive proposal whatsoever. An edifice is not demolished by adding new stones. It was a question, on the other hand, of successfully spearheading a discourse in painting which could be appreciated as a series of paintings, that is to say as a product of cultural activity.) 72 Sarah Wilson, ‘Figuration Narrative: Théorie, Politique, Passions’, in Figuration narrative dans les collections publiques: 1964–1977, exhibition catalogue, Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, 21 December 2005–19 March 2006, and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole, 7 April–2 June 2006 (Paris: Somogy, 2005), pp. 32–38, p. 32. 73 Jean Clair noted that in 1964, at the time of the Mythologies Quotidiennes exhibition, the larger French art scene was rife with anti-American sentiment. ‘Cependant, à lire les hebdomadaires d’art de l’époque, il semblait que leurs éditorialistes ne fussent occupés qu’à défendre la pureté de l’art de tradition française contre les contaminations étrangères et, en particulier, contre la soi-disant vulgarité de l’art américain, à un moment où celui-ci, avec Rauschenberg, Barnett Newman et Jasper Johns, pour ne citer qu’eux, avait déjà produit ses chefs-d’œuvre.’ Art en France: une nouvelle génération, p. 11. (Nonetheless, reading the weekly art magazines of the time, it seemed as if their editorial writers were busy only protecting the purity of the French art tradition against foreign contaminants and, in particular, against the so-called vulgarity of American art, at a time when Rauschenberg, Barnett Newman and Jasper Johns, to mention only a few, had already produced their masterpieces.) 74 ‘Sigmund Freud, ‘New Introductory Lectures’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXII [1932–1936], trans. James Strachey. (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 132. 75 ‘Un groupe cohérent lié à la lutte nationale et internationale de libération des peuples, au niveau de cette pratique spécifique qu’est la peinture, ne peut exister que par l’élimination systématique de toute pratique subjective (surenchère individuelle profitable au marché de la peinture) et par un travail de mise au point de textes théoriques rigoureux fondés sur la théorie et la pratique de la seule classe révolutionnaire jusqu’au bout: (la classe ouvrière), le marxisme-léninisme (le matérialisme historique et sa philosophie, le matérialisme dialectique).’ Louis Cane, Marc Devade, Daniel Dezeuze. Tract. ‘Supports/Surfaces’, 23 September 1970. Exposition vernissage. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. (A cohesive group linked to the national and international struggle for the liberation of peoples, as expressed by the specific practice of painting, can only exist through the systematic elimination of all subjective practices (which result in individual one-upmanship profitable to the painting market) and by formulating rigorous theoretical texts based

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on the theory and the practice of the only truly revolutionary class (the working class), Marxism-Leninism (historical materialism and its philosophy, dialectical materialism).) 76 Jean-Louis Pradel, ‘La stratégie de Supports-Surfaces’, Opus International, no. 61–62 (January–February 1977), pp. 63–67, p. 66. 77 Sarah Wilson, ‘Entre Matisse, Duchamp, et le fémininmasculin d’un art des années 70’, Collection et conférence, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2000, pp. 9–16, pp. 14–15. 78 ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une femme peintre?’, Bulletin Femmes/Art, no. 1 (October 1977), pp. 8–11, p. 10. 79 In an email, Hicks mentioned that the exhibition was a ‘turning point’ for her since she had one of the largest rooms at the Grand Palais and works measuring about 5 x 9 meters. (The two works exhibited were Je savais que, si je venais un jour, j’y passerais mes nuits, 1972, 4.7 x 9 m; and L’épouse préférée occupe ses nuits, 1972, 520 x 260 x 20 cm.) However, she went on to write, curator François Mathey and artist César were forced to defend her. Hicks stated: ‘It was not easy.’ Author email correspondence with Sheila Hicks, July 2020. 80 See Chapter 5. Author email correspondence with Tania Mouraud, August 2019. 81 See Rebecca de Roo, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 117. 82 Annie Verger, ‘Le champ des avant-gardes’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 88 (June 1991), pp. 2–40, pp. 12–13. Verger identifies about 39% of artists coming from abstraction and Nouveau Réalisme, 23% independents (sculptors, post-surrealists), 20% from the Nouvelle Figuration movement, 13% from Fluxus and Mythologies individuelles, and 5% from Support[s]/ Surface[s]. 83 See, for example, Peter Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory after May ’68 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.) 84 ‘Moineau n.m = 4. Fam. Pénis (surtout de l’enfant) = 2. zizi.’ Le Nouveau Petit Robert (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1996), p. 1424. 85 Marie-Laure Bernadac (ed.), Annette Messager: Word for Word. Texts, Writings and Interviews (New York: D.A.P., 2006), p. 100. 86 Author interview with Elisabeth Lebovici, art critic for Libération, in 2007, on the late Dany Bloch’s influence on Suzanne Pagé – who was a second-in-command at ARC during the years of Pierre Gaudibert. Lebovici claimed Pagé stated that she chose artists of ‘quality’, regardless of sex. Pagé herself insists that her strategy was one of ‘pluralism’. ‘Ce pluralisme, souvent reproché, est présent, non seulement dans la diversité des formes et moyens d’expression, mais aussi, à travers les délégations du choix proposées régulièrement à d’autres acteurs de la création ou de la diffusion artistique.’ ARC 1973–1983 (Paris: Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1983), p. 6. (This pluralism, which is often criticized, is not only present in the diversity of forms and means of expression, but also through the delegation of choices regularly

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proposed to other creative professionals or those in arts distribution.) Dany Bloch, who joined the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1974, later went on to be part of a selection committee for the 1975 Union des Femmes Peintres and Sculpteurs from which she ultimately resigned (see Chapter 5). Dany Bloch’s importance as a promoter of women artists was confirmed to the author by several other artists interviewed, including Sabine Monirys. 87 Nil Yalter and Judy Blum collaborated on a series of ingenious maps of Paris’s arrondissements in Paris Ville Lumière (1974), a twenty-panel series of historical and subjective mappings of a walking tour of Paris – recalling situationist psychogeographies. The artists utilized photographs printed on cloth that were sewn on fabric panels with inscriptions and drawings used to ponder the oppression lurking behind architecture, address class exploitation and critique capitalism so as to reshape the capital through textiles from the perspective of two immigrant women. See Yann Pavie, ‘Paris Ville-Lumière, Judy Blum, Nil Yalter’, Opus International, no. 65 (Winter 1978), pp. 42–43. 88 De Roo, Museum Establishment, p. 156. 89 ‘The last decade of the eighteenth century saw the greatest extent of the gender gap in literacy: Most Frenchmen were literate and most French women were not. Illiteracy was a distinctly female phenomenon; women were perceived to be intimately connected with the oral.’ Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 9. 90 Although Messager does not allude to them directly, les tricoteuses were women who during the French Revolution knitted at the base of the guillotine or in group/political gatherings, masking the terror and deep social unrest with banality and practicality even as they gained unrestrained access to unfolding political events. 91 In writing of the show in 1983, Hessie stated, ‘Volupté de la sensation liée à la vision elliptique dimensionnelle d’un espace occupé temporairement. L’œuvre devient dialogue avec le public et au travers de cette chimie peut s’opérer l’émancipation de l’esprit.’ Hessie, ARC 1973–1983, April 1983, p. 56. (Exquisite pleasure of sensation linked to an elliptical dimensional vision of a temporarily occupied space. The artwork turns into a dialogue with the public and through this chemistry the emancipation of the mind can take place.) 92 Author interview with Hortense Damiron, Paris, January 2019. Also see Jean-Luc Chalumeau, Hortense Damiron (Paris: Cercle d’art, 2003). Damiron would participate in an important mixed exhibition of over forty artists, Peinture au beurre, which took place at Galerie Jean Briance in Paris from 18 May to 8 July 1978. Women in the exhibition included Lourdes Castro, Sonja Hopf, Milvia Maglione, Sabine Monirys, Alina Szapocznikow and Dorothée Selz. 93 Gérald Gassiot-Talabot wrote in 1983 on the tenth anniversary of ARC 2: ‘A ses débuts, l’ARC a été cet impétueux et pertinent mouvement de justice critique, ce ballon d’oxygène inespéré, et il coïncide pour moi avec ces années

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fécondes, avant et après 1968 où nous nous retrouvions à un déjeuner mensuel, Pierre Gaudibert, Michel Troche, Jean Clair et moi, comme un petit groupe occulte de concertation, dont les moyens d’agir étaient précisément l’ARC, la Création Artistique, les Chroniques de l’Art Vivant et Opus International.’ ARC 1973–1983 (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1983), p. 25. Also see Marc Dessauce (ed.), The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in ’68 (New York: New York Architectural League and Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), p. 49. (At its origin, ARC was this brash and timely critical justice movement, this bubble of unexpected oxygen, which coincided with the fruitful years before and after 1968 when we were meeting at a monthly lunch, Pierre Gaudibert, Michel Troche, Jean Clair and I, as a small occult group of collaborators, whose means of action were precisely l’ARC, la Création Artistique, les Chroniques de l’Art Vivant and Opus International.) 94 Aline Dallier, ‘Le feminist art aux USA’, Opus International, no. 50 (May 1974), pp. 70–75. Among the artists whose works were illustrated in the article were: Dottie Attie, Rachel Bas-Cohen, Judith Bernstein, Blythe Bohnen, Maude Boltz, Terry Braunstein, Harmony Hammond, Anne Healy, Nancy Kitchell, Louise Kramer, Rosemary Mayer, Patsy Norvell and Howardena Pindell. 95 Aline Dallier, ‘Le soft art et les femmes’, Opus International, no. 52 (September 1974), pp. 49–53. 96 ‘Le Soft Art, littéralement, c’est l’art souple. Au premier degré, il s’agit de la non-rigidité des matériaux employés: coton, laine, soie, nylon et fibres de papier, de verre, de caoutchouc ou de plastique. Au second degré, le terme implique une certaine flexibilité entre les notions d’art et d’artisanat, de théorie et de pratique.’ Dallier, ‘Le soft art et les femmes’, p. 49. Dallier also cites in the text Dona Z. Meilach’s influential book on the subject, Soft Sculpture and Other Soft Art Forms, with Stuffed Fabrics, Fibers and Plastics (New York: Crown, 1974). (Literally, soft art is flexible art. Firstly, it is the non-rigidity of the materials used: cotton, wool, silk, nylon and fibers of paper, glass, rubber or plastic. Secondly, or metaphorically, the term implies a certain flexibility between the notions of art and craft, theory and practice.) 97 Dallier, ‘Le soft art et les femmes’, p. 49. 98 ‘D’ores et déjà, il ne s’agit plus, pour les femmes, de s’en tenir à ces pratiques, qualifiées naguère de “mineures”, parce que des siècles de relégation à l’ombre des couvents, des châteaux ou des foyers bourgeois et populaires les y auraient contraintes, mais bien de retrouver des expériences à la fois méprisées et maîtrisées, aux fins d’une nouvelle liberté.’ Dallier, ‘Le soft art et les femmes’, p. 50. (Nowadays, it is no longer necessary for women to adhere to these practices, once described as “minor”, just because centuries of relegation to the shadows of convents, castles or churches, bourgeois and working-class homes, would have held them there. Rather they must seek out experiences that are both scorned and mastered for the sake of a new freedom.) 99 Dallier, who married fellow art critic Frank Popper, later became a psychoanalyst and had ceased working publicly on women’s art issues (in 2005). Author interview with Aline Dallier-Popper, Paris, November 2005.

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1 00 Pages 85–90. 101 ‘Menacés par l’évolution technique générale, les métiers d’art souffrent surtout, au sortir des “Trente Glorieuses”, d’un déficit de légitimité, qui en fait les victimes de la double indifférence des milieux économiques et des milieux culturels.’ Pascal Ory in Jean-Jacques Becker’s Crises et Alternances: 1974–1995 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998), p. 212. Two important measures by the government attempted to protect the sector: the integration of lace manufacturers in 1976 and the creation of the Institut français de restauration des œuvres d’art in 1977 (Ory, p. 212). (Threatened by the general evolution of technology, the artisan professions especially suffer a lack of legitimacy at the end of the ‘Trente Glorieuses’ which make them victims of a double indifference shown by the economic and cultural sectors.) 102 Des femmes en mouvements, no. 6 (June 1978), pp. 50–53. Later there was a focus on women and the sewing industry which included a discussion of Milvia Maglione, ‘Les femmes et la couture’, Des femmes en mouvements, no. 7 (July 1978), pp. 73–83. 103 The artists included in the espace cousu of the 1976 exhibition were Alma, Andrée Beauregard, Marie-José Beaudoin, Bona, Zizine Bouscaud, Jagoda Buic, Liliane Camier, Hélène-Elizabeth Cante, Avila Ester Chacon, Christiane de Casteras and Andrée Marquet [Collaboration], Véra Cardot, Agathe Gengiskhan Eristov, Claude Chaigneau, Félicia, Nicole Foulc, Micheline Jacques, Hessie [Djuric], Marie-Rose Lortet, [Milvia] Maglione, MarieClaude Quignon and Maria Simon. 104 Aline Dallier, ‘Espace cousu’ [1976], Féminie 76, deuxième exposition du groupe Dialogue, exhibition catalogue, UNESCO, 7 December 1976–8 January 1977. Archives Christiane de Casteras. 105 Ibid. 106 While Julia Bryan-Wilson sees ‘surface similarities’ between écriture féminine and Lippard’s writings in the 1970s, she stops short of designating her works from the period as a form of écriture féminine, preferring to see them as ‘verbal quilts’ or testimony to her investment in ‘craft’. Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 169. 107 Dallier, ‘Espace cousu’, n.p. 108 Ibid. 109 In 1977, the year that the Centre Georges Pompidou opened and attracted record crowds with its inaugural exhibition on Duchamp, ARC 2 promoted a second Mythologies Quotidiennes that was organized by critics Gérald GassiotTalabot, J.-L. Pradel and artists Bernard Rancillac and Hervé Télémaque to exhibit the works of eighty-six artists who used painting to confront both ‘the real’ and the everyday as a ‘critical instrument of a global visual system’. ARC 1973–1983 (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1983), p. 98. Artists in the show included many men from the Nouvelle Figuration trend as well as nine women: Denise Aubertin, Véronique Bigo, Michèle Blondel, Béatrice Casadésus, Lourdes Castro, Jacqueline Dauriac, Colette Deblé, Anne et Patrick Poirier, and Alina Szapocznikow. The small number of women

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exhibited could be in part due to Gérald Gassiot-Talabot’s own strong feelings against the politics of the women’s movement (whose ‘institutionalization’ he believed antithetical to the goals of May ’68), expressed by supporting Annie Le Brun’s scathing critique of the movement: ‘Le courageux pamphlet d’Annie Le Brun, Lâchez tout, qui a suscité une révulsion quasi générale, non seulement dans la presse féministe mais dans une autre lecture que celle qu’on lui accorde avec mépris. Le refus de l’avènement d’une idéologie oppressive de la haine des sexes et de cette fatalité qui conduit parfois les “justes causes” à engendrer des systèmes analogues à ceux qu’elles combattent est dans l’esprit de mai.’ Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, ‘Langages de mai: Envers de mai?’, Opus International, no. 66–67 (Spring 1978), pp. 12–13, p. 12. (Annie Le Brun’s courageous pamphlet, Lâchez tout, elicited near total revulsion by not only the feminist press but also in other readings than those bestowed on her with contempt. The rejection of the rise of an oppressive ideology of hatred between the sexes and the inevitability that sometimes leads to ‘just causes’, thereby engendering systems similar to those women fight against, is very much in the May spirit.) Gassiot-Talabot’s own curatorial effort at ARC 2, Tendances de l’art en France 1968–1978/9, parti-pris 2 (26 October–5 December 1979), included only Gina Pane amongst the forty-two participants he saw as embodying new trends in the last decade. The sterility of the Mythologies Quotidiennes 2 exhibition was intended to reflect that of daily life, as one of the participants Gérard Guyomard stated in the catalogue that accompanied the show: ‘Mes “Mythologies Quotidiennes” ont la substance du papier glacé et l’odeur de déodorant Spray’ (My ‘Mythologies Quotidiennes’ has the substance of glossy paper and the smell of deodorant). ARC 1973–1983, p. 100. The analysis of daily life by women was absent in this predominantly male show – thereby placing into even sharper relief women’s use of subjective spaces that were consciously shaped outside institutional controls, through traditional techniques, in nature, and with new materials and/or contexts against the backdrop of trendy shows like Mythologies Quotidiennes 2. 110 Dallier, ‘Espace cousu’, n.p. 111 ‘Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’, in Women, Society, and Culture, ed. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 68–87. 112 ‘La surpopulation qui n’est pas un simple aspect de la sous-consommation mais qui se fait sentir même dans les pays moins peuplés et riches par la lourde destruction écologique que comporte sa natalité, est la conséquence directe de la surexploitation de notre fécondité.’ ‘Bulletin d’Écologie-Féminisme’, January 1978. Archives BMD. (Overpopulation is not a simple fact of underconsumption, since it is also experienced in less populated and rich countries through the heavy ecological destruction associated with its birthrate. It is, in fact, the direct consequence of the overexploitation of our fertility.) 113 Entretien avec Évelyne Artaud, Marinette Cueco (Paris: Cercle d’art, 1998), p. 15. 114 Ibid., p. 9.

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115 Ibid., p. 6. 116 Itzhak Goldberg, ‘L’écriture botanique’ in ibid., p. 26. 117 ‘Qui doit vaincre les résistances extérieures en les transformant en outils, utiliser leur pouvoir caché et le détourner, les modifier de l’intérieur.’ ‘Entretien avec Évelyne Artaud’. Ibid., p. 10. (The one who must conquer exterior resistances, by transforming them into tools, uses their hidden power to divert from them, modifying them from within.) 118 Lourdes Castro, Grand herbier d’ombre (1972) 2002. ‘Feito na Ilha da Madeira durante o veräo de 1972, Grande Herbario de Sombras contém cerca de 100 espécies botanicas diferentes. L’embran-do-me das minhas primeiras sombras projectadas de objectos – feitas em 1962 directamente sobre a seda de serigrafia com luz de mercurio – e tendo à minha volta uma tal varíedade de plantas, àrvotes, ervas, frutos e flores, comecei a fixar as suas sombras sobre papel heliogràfico directamente ao sol … Mas sobretudo gosto de plantas, sembre vivi com das cuidei delas e vi-as crescer.’ (L.C. 1973). (Made on Madeira Island during the summer of 1972, the Grande Herbario de Sombras [Great Herbarium of Shadows] contains about 100 different botanical species. I remember my first projected object shadows – made in 1962 directly with mercury-light on silk screen – and around me such a variety of plants, trees, herbs, fruits, and flowers, I began to fix their shadows onto heliographic paper directly in the sun … But above all I like plants, I always lived with them and watched them grow. (L.C. 1973).) 119 ‘Entretien avec Évelyne Artaud’, Marinette Cueco, p. 14. 120 Mainstream papers and magazines during the 1970s had frequent articles on the role of girls’ and women’s place in the education system. For some, see: Nicole Bernheim’s ‘L’analphabétisme chez les femmes’, Le Monde, 15–16 November 1970; Martine Storti, ‘Le sexisme à l’école’, Libération, 28 November 1974, ‘École des filles’; and Paul Gerbod, ‘La longue marche des femmes savantes’, Le Monde de l’Éducation, no. 7 (June 1975), and ‘L’enseignement au féminin’, Le Monde, 9 June 1977 (which was in response to female teachers’ outrage at gender stereotypes in education perpetuated by Le Monde in three articles published on May 3, 4, 5 of that year). Archives BMD. 121 Author interview with Anne Delfieu, Paris, 2006. 122 Dallier, ‘Le feminist art aux U.S.A.’, p. 71. 123 ‘Cette exposition cherchait à témoigner de l’importance historique, sociologique, et esthétique de la boîte dans l’art contemporain avec un rappel historique centré sur l’époque Dada et le Surréalisme. La boîte comme structure formelle, espace mental, lieu psychologique.’ ARC 1973–1983 (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1983), p. 90. (This exhibition sought to underline the historical, sociological and aesthetic importance of the box in contemporary art with a historical focus on the Dada and Surrealist eras. The box, as a formal structure, is a mental space and a psychological place.) 124 Amongst the women in the show were: Thérèse Ampe-Jonas, Mary Bauermeister, Micheline Bounoure, Élise Breton, Lourdes Castro, Jacqueline Dauriac, Sonia Delaunay, Nina Drummen, Catherine Duquesne, Yolande

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Fièvre, Giosetta Fiorini, Ruth Francken, Jeanne Gatard, Rosaline Granet, Anne Gygax, Hessie, Marie-Jeanne Hoffenbach, Sara Holt, Valentine Hugo, Dorothy Iannone, Françoise Janicot, Karskaya, Mythia Kolesar, Josée Lapéreyre, Liliane Lijn, Erika Magdalinski, Milvia Maglione, Joyce Mansour, Maria Mercié, Annette Messager, Janine Mongillat, Jacqueline Monnier, Louise Nevelson, Meret Oppenheim, Gina Pane, Mimi Parent, Anne et Patrick Poirier, Joan Rabascall, Dorothée Selz, Maria Simon, Vera Székely, Toyen and Isabelle Waldberg. 125 ‘AINSI, en éparpillant les restes d’étoffes, en fouillant parmi les recoupes d’échantillons tombées sous les coups de ciseaux qui dans le tissu courent en ouvrant de longues blessures, parmi les draperies qui ont failli à leur destin d’être rideaux ou barrières entre le monde et la chair vive, parmi les lambeaux du tissu de ce monde lacéré comme un drap qui cède et se déchire en découvrant la peau inattendue et blanche … jusqu’à ce que ressorte de la mosaïque un dessin, un portrait, une moue, une grimace, le masque risible de la face humaine … en transperçant les contours mordus entre aiguille et navette d’une fulminante avancée de petits pas de fer, en tordant et retordant sous une mitraille de points le fil continuellement tendu, le fil en continuelle tension nerveuse qui va recoudre les accrocs du monde et y tracer des parcours de coups de foudre.’ Bona, ‘AINSI’, in Bona vingt-cinq ans d’imagination et de création, exhibition catalogue, Galerie de Seine, Paris, 1976, p. 48. (THUS, by scattering fabric remnants, searching among the cut-offs of samples fallen under the slice of scissors which creates runs in the fabric that open into long wounds, among the draperies which failed in their destiny to become curtains or barriers between the world and the living flesh, among the shreds of fabric of this world lacerated like a sheet that yields and tears itself on discovering unexpected and white skin … until from the mosaic arises a drawing, a portrait, a pout, a grimace, the laughable mask of the human face … in piercing the bitten contours between the needle and the shuttle of an all-out advance of little iron steps, in twisting and twisting again under a shrapnel of threaded points continuously stretched, the thread in continual nervous tension which will sew up the snags of the world and trace there a path of love at first sight.) 126 Suzanne Pagé, ‘Interview avec Hannah Höch’, 18 November 1975. In Hannah Höch, exhibition catalogue, ARC 2, MAMVP, Paris, 1976, pp. 23–32, pp. 27–28. Höch would also feature in L’Humidité, no. 24 (1977) in the same issue as Collectif Femmes/Art’s manifesto ‘Enfermement / Rupture’; see Danièle Boone’s ‘Hannah Höch: Points d’interrogation’, pp. 28–30. 127 Alain Jouffroy, ‘Bona, Peintre du déplacement’ [1972], in Bona: vingt-cinq ans d’imagination et de création, exhibition catalogue, Galerie de Seine, Paris, 1976, pp. 45–46, p. 45. Jouffroy also mentions Leonora Carrington, Manina [Tischler], Remedios [Varo], Frida Kahlo de Rivera and Unica Zürn amongst the other women artists who were kept on the sidelines and given marginal status. 128 ‘Ce ton parodique, cet humour glacé, font le prix d’un texte de divertissement écrit par Gisèle Prassinos pour accompagner douze merveilleuses tapisseries

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Hard politics, soft art

réalisées de sa main. La conteuse s’est faite l’historiographe de ses créatures de feutrine.’ Marion Renard, ‘Gisèle Prassinos, brodeuse et conteuse’, Le Monde, 12 December 1975. (This parodic tone, this icy humor, create the worth of this entertaining text written by Gisèle Prassinos to accompany twelve marvelous tapestries made by her own hand. The storyteller has become the historiographer of her felted creatures.) 129 On the subject of the Surrealists, Gisèle Prassinos is quoted as stating: ‘Ces grands hommes [les surréalistes] ne parlaient que de moi …de mon “génie”. Mais ils ne s’adressaient jamais directement à moi. Pour eux, j’étais transparente. Un objet, comme les femmes en général. Au fond, ils étaient très machos.’ Jean-Claude Perrier, ‘La Sauterelle est toujours en forme’, Le Figaro, 14 April 2003. Archives BMD. (These great men [the surrealists] only talked about me … about my ‘genius’. But they never addressed me directly. For them, I was invisible. An object, like women in general. Basically, they were completely macho.) 130 Author interview with Gisèle Prassinos, Paris, January 2007. 131 Author interview with Aube Elléouët, Paris, January 2007. 132 Ibid. 133 The artists seated at the table in the image (from left to right) are: Lynda Benglis, Helen Frankenthaler, June Wayne, Alma Thomas, Lee Krasner, Nancy Graves (Georgia O’Keeffe), Elaine de Kooning, Louise Nevelson, M. C. Richards, Louise Bourgeois, Lila Katzen, Yoko Ono. 134 Obliques dedicated a special volume to the women surrealists in 1977. The women included Belen (Nelly Kaplan); Maya Bell; Bona; Leonora Carrington; Lise Deharme; Mirabelle Dors; Jacqueline Duprey; Aube Elléouët; Josette Exandier; Leonor Fini; Aline Gagnaire; Giovanna; Jane Graverol; Marianne  Van Hirtum; Rosetta Hudji; Valentine Hugo; Karskaya; Greta Knutson; Laure; Annie Le Brun; Georgette Magritte; Manina; Joyce Mansour; Nora Mitrani; Meret Oppenheim; Gina Pane; Mimi Parent; Valentine Penrose; Gisèle Prassinos; Karina Raeck; Remedios (Varo); Sibylle Ruppert; Colette Thomas; Toyen; Isabelle Waldberg: Unica Zürn. Included also were Cécile [Reims] Deux, Titi Parant and Dorothea Tanning. Obliques: La Femme Surréaliste, no. 14–15 (1977). 135 Utopie, dedicated to ‘architecture as a social practice’, was influenced heavily by the thinking of Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre. The group included sociologists Jean Baudrillard and René Lourau, architects Jean Aubert, JeanPaul Jungmann and Antoine Stinco, as well as Isabelle Auricoste, a landscape architect, and editor and essayist Hubert Tonka. Marc Dessauce, Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in May ’68 (New York: Architecture League of New York and Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), pp. 20–21. See also [Utopie]. Structures gonflables, exhibition catalogue, ARC. Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, March 1968. 136 Ibid., p. 13. 137 Lygia Clark said of Architectures biologiques: naissance, 1969: ‘Divers aspects du travail entrepris depuis deux ans. Les partenaires sont considérés comme les structures portantes d’une vaste sculpture collective qui peut intégrer un

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nombre illimité de personnes (extension infinie). Au fil des expériences, les acteurs sont amenés à franchir le “territoire” d’autrui. Les comportements adoptés spontanément ont souvent un caractère de régression, ce qui les apparente à nombre d’expériences psychiatriques récentes (Laing, etc.).’ ‘Lygia Clark: l’homme structure vivante d’une architecture biologique et cellulaire’, Robho, no. 5–6 (1969), pp. 12–13, p. 12. (Various aspects of the work have been undertaken in the last two years. The collaborators are considered support structures of a vast collective sculpture which can incorporate an unlimited number of people (expanding infinitely). In the course of the experiences, the participants are brought to cross the ‘territory’ of the other. Behaviors, adopted spontaneously, often have a regressive character which is apparent in many recent psychiatric experiments (Laing, etc.).) 138 Lea Lublin, ‘La creativité ou les organes invisibles’, Sorcières, no. 10 (1977), pp. 46–50, p. 47. 139 Agnès Varda, Varda, par Agnès (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1994), p. 107. (Lyrics from the film L’Une chante et l’autre pas.) 140 Claude and Léon Gaignebet, ‘Untimely Considerations on Inflatables’, in Dessauce (ed.), Inflatable Moment, p. 29. 141 Laurence Dreyfus, Dorothée Selz: Offrandes, exhibition catalogue, Offrandes produite par Aprifel from 4 December 2003–21 February 2004. Galerie Fraîch’Attitude, Paris (Paris: Un, deux… Quatre éditions, 2003), p. 84.

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Conclusion La révolution accomplie? Some legacies of women’s art in 1970s France

Le point de vue des femmes créatrices sur ce monde en devenir sera passionnant dans la mesure où les créatrices ne seront pas le reflet des créations passées, mais bien une nouvelle façon d’envisager la création, un nouveau regard et une nouvelle expression. Suzanne Horer and Jeanne Socquet (1973)1 Creative women’s perspective on this world in the making will be captivating to the extent that they will not merely reflect the art of the past, but will find new ways to make art, with a fresh eye and spirit. Si chacune d’entre nous pratique la chose en secret, admire la chose en silence ou se bat pour que la chose existe, il faut bien admettre que nous sommes peu à être descendues dans la rue pour réclamer un musée de l’art des femmes par exemple ou des crédits pour la recherche. Marie-Jo Bonnet (1980)2 If each one of us practices the thing in secret, admires the thing in silence or fights for the thing to exist, it is nonetheless a fact that few among us took to the street to demand a museum of women’s art, for example, or the funding for research.

Charlotte Calmis, founder of the 1970’s women’s group La Spirale in France, created a collage that appeared on the back cover of the women’s journal Pénélope in autumn 1980; featuring the words ‘Histoire de l’art’, male figures dressed in fascist uniforms were posed on a row of Doric columns as an expression of the male domination of art history (Figure 7.1).3 If this is one view of the history of art, with the passage of time outmoded, what can be said about the way women artists countered the hegemony of the male art world to achieve a more powerful role today? Calmis’s vision was to some extent informed by events before the war, when fascist regimes threatened Europe and the ‘feminine’ was ‘crushed’ by dictatorial regimes. With the benefit of fifty years of feminist criticism since Linda Nochlin’s defining essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (1971), women artists do receive more

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Charlotte Calmis, Histoire de l’art, c. 1980. Collage from Pénélope no. 3, 1980.

institutional support and gallery shows now than was the case at the time her essay was written. This book, like the work of women in the 1970s, has attempted to adjust the light on this critical period, which has defined generations of women. It has drawn attention to women’s artistic practices in France as they sensed the political potential of the acts of their Anglo-American and European counterparts, despite Cold War reservations. This was a liberation that had begun earlier, with their own Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe in 1949, and which returned to French soil for them to battle with in their own manner following the éclatement of May ’68. The Turkish artist Nil Yalter, working in France, simply put it thus: ‘Nous sommes tous les enfants de Simone de Beauvoir’ (We are all the children of Simone de Beauvoir).4 Whether in the public eye or in the private studio, women artists during the 1970s were sensitive to politics. They often explicitly used feminist, or female-inspired, themes in their work, and even if they did not, they still sought opportunities to increase exposure to their work by exhibiting with

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Conclusion: La révolution accomplie?

other women. This was at a time in which the legacy of Georges Pompidou as well as Giscard d’Estaing’s centrist policies continued to overshadow a still factionalized and weakened left. The glissade is realized by the reality of artistic pluralism. Men and women artists were inheritors of an abstraction that had dominated the 1950s, despite the work of the Nouveaux Réalistes in the 1960s and their aspiration toward the element of the ‘real’ in everyday life, the return of painting and figuration by Nouvelle Figuration, and the strings, ropes and ladders of Supports-Surfaces. Against this backdrop women, too, were inventing a new language inside and outside these terrains. There was no ‘prescription’ to the works of this period. Women were inventive in their visual language and media, for example through their discovery and elaboration of the body, pointed acts of rebellion, rediscovery of the ‘everyday’ in the lives of women (which, importantly, differed from that of men), exploration of the potential of abstraction and space, kinetic light, conceptual thoughts and new radical means of expression such as écriture féminine, and the promotion of soft arts – all leading to the elaboration of a network of signs that pointed back to themselves as much as they commented on women’s place in contemporary society. This subjectivity, even hypersubjectivity, is as important to our understanding of the legacy of the arts in this period, when politically women were coming to comprehend their own power (or their lack of it), as it is to our current critical views of that time in which the personal and political were deeply intertwined. La révolution accomplie? The 1980s and now The appearance of socialist François Mitterrand in 1981 changed the climate of France by institutionalizing many of the gains that the radical MLF had worked so hard to achieve – with many former MLF adherents accepting posts in the administration even as others continued to fight independently for their goals. Yvette Roudy became the Minister of Women’s Rights at a time when radical ‘feminism’, as it was known in the 1970s, was on the wane.5 Support for Mitterrand was widespread among some of the former ranks of the MLF (an insignia from late 1979 that now belonged to Psychanalyse et Politique) as well as amongst the female cultural elite who came out to support his candidacy in 1981.6 François Mitterrand, as leader of the Socialist Party, had since 1971 accumulated sufficient support amongst the cultural sector to make the Socialists, by 1981, the party that represented culture for the first time since the war.7 This was due in part to the efforts of their cultural secretary during the 1970s, Dominique Taddéi, who was sympathetic to the events of May ’68 and supported individual creativity, ‘public art’ and a ‘sociocultural synthesis’, and aimed to challenge pre-existing categories of art while trading hierarchical ministerial legacies for greater local responsibility. These policies

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were continued by Jack Lang, who succeeded him in 1979, with the result that the Socialists became the party that influenced substantial change in the cultural arena.8 For women who had lacked exhibition opportunities in the past, gallery spaces were beginning to open up, as typified by the Galerie des femmes – which dubbed itself the first women’s art gallery in Europe – as well as other commercial galleries that were willing to take risks on little-known artists.9 Like the institutionalization of the MLF, the gains of many women artists in the 1970s were consolidated in the 1980s as some made their first solo exhibitions following their research, experiments and experiences of the 1970s. Nostalgia Tania Mouraud’s black and white documentary photograph Ah! Paris, Rue Lepic (1981) captures the nostalgia of this era (Figure 7.2). Not only do the inexpensive women’s party shoes suggest empty consumption, an evening of night-club revelry or celebrations, but they also indicate the demise of the MLF at the end of an era when women from diverse backgrounds marched on the streets for their rights and at the advent of new government. These fruitful years, during which many young artists and writers found their voice, have given rise to a generation whose work continues to influence intellectual thought: Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and the late Jacques Derrida, among others. Women artists were articulating experiences that pointed toward new aesthetic and personal domains which were both evocative and experimental as well as representative of a generation – both the forgotten and the famous. Its ambassadors, such as Raymonde Arcier, Sophie Calle, Ruth Francken, Hessie, Lea Lublin, Françoise Janicot, Michèle Katz, Gina Pane, ORLAN, Tania Mouraud, Annette Messager, Dorothée Selz, Jeanne

Tania Mouraud, Ah! Paris, Rue Lepic, 1981.

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Socquet and Nil Yalter (to name only a few), are a part of a culture that was defined on the fringes of power and amid radical viewpoints that continue to color the critiques of today, some of which have become institutionalized. In her essay on Sally Mann’s photographs, Anne Higonnet wrote in 2006: ‘Feminism is of no use to this new generation …. But if feminism has to think about the past in a radically different way than it thinks about the present and the future, it will be a trivial price to pay for its success.’ 10 Ironically, perhaps, it is feminism’s ‘failure’ in some ways that accounts for its eventual success. The most important factor, as one artist expressed it, was the will to keep working irrespective of any short-term gains. The 1970s dream of establishing equality and visibility for women’s art through militancy, such as Marie-Jo Bonnet’s vision of women marching in the streets in 1980 to demand their own cultural museum, as mentioned in the epigraph, never came to fruition; nor did the planned show with Suzanne Pagé and Françoise Eliet in 1976 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In this regard, feminism’s later ‘success’, for some of these artists, is only partial and therefore incomplete. The light that allows some work and some women to shine and to speak for a generation of artists has also eclipsed that of others. The WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007–2008) exhibition, for instance, presented a large range of work by international women artists in the 1970s, and included works by those who were from (or influenced by) France or Belgium – Chantal Akerman, Lygia Clark, Lea Lublin, Annette Messager, Gina Pane, Niki de Saint Phalle and Nil Yalter, with Judy Blum and Nicole Croiset. This ‘new’ (improved) canon has nevertheless excluded the many works that reveal the contestatory nature and richness of women’s (and at times men’s) work in France. Subsequent exhibitions have rediscovered or recovered more names from the period but at the expense of others, as seen, for example, in exhibitions such as elles@ centrepompidou in France which closed the first decade of the 2000s. Nevertheless, such exhibitions and growing public recognition have also given rise to endorsements for some artists in large-scale, multi-author feminist compendiums that include women artists mentioned in this book.11 Reflecting on this cultural moment, both before and after a degree of institutional acknowledgment for women, presents a unique point of view seen in these chapters. Many of the artists interviewed in the early 2000s were unaware of the relative success to come. The work of the present book has attempted to deepen our view of a culture in the 1970s that was rich, inventive, experimental and also culturally specific as well as being internationally shared through the sheer number of artists working at the time of the political struggles of the MLF, as it articulated its own unique vision(s). At the time, many of these artists’ marginalization – deriving from the Latin margo ‘edge’ ‘margin’ ‘border’, or bord in French – are

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accounted for by the slippery surface, an unevenness of terrain characteristic of the 1970s, which engenders the slip, or glissade, creating a momentary passage, which, as this book demonstates, strategically blurs the line between inclusion and exclusion across fields. A 1990 issue of Le Nouvel Observateur quoted Françoise Giroud, the former minister of Women’s Rights and former cultural minister in the 1970s, declaring: ‘La Révolution est accomplie’ (The revolution is accomplished).12 As Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman famed for his observations of America, once put it, ‘In revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.’ Perspectives on the 1970s in France and abroad point to the chronic overexposure and underexposure of certain artists and forms of practices, although this is changing over time. The revolution has not been accomplished. In fact this book indicates, as do other works, that this heritage is still being clearly defined, as new, previously unseen works are discovered; as the practices, tensions and realities of the period are articulated through interviews; and as works are brought together in hitherto unseen juxtapositions and conjunctions that show the possibilities of their meaning. Through such research as this they are nuanced, given space and recognition and, most importantly – and sometimes for the first time in a long time – given sight. Notes 1 Suzanne Horer and Jeanne Socquet, La création étouffée: Femmes en mouvement (Paris: Pierre Horay, 1973), p. 11. 2 Marie-Jo Bonnet, ‘Introduction’, Special Issue: ‘Les Femmes et la création’, Pénélope: pour l’histoire des femmes [Guest Editor: Marie-Jo Bonnet], no. 3 (1980), pp. 1–4, p. 3. 3 Ibid. It is worth pointing out that Bonnet was a member of La Spirale as well as a close friend of Calmis. 4 Author interview with Nil Yalter, Paris, June 2006. 5 Khursheed Wadia points out that the Socialist Party was eager to quell the strains of radical feminism by setting up a Ministry of Women’s Rights. The result was not only a lack of militant support from women who believed the ‘struggle’ had ended with the creation of the Ministry led by Yvette Roudy, but also a fear amongst the male-dominated establishment [for whom] state feminism represented ‘a far greater threat than the militant MLF of the seventies ever had [...] Mainstream culture, through the media, announced the end of feminism and the return of femininity.’ ‘Women and the Events of May 1968’, in The May 1968 Events in France: Reproductions and Interpretations, ed. Keith A. Reader and Khursheed Wadia (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 148–166, pp. 163–164. 6 Invitation. ‘Pourquoi nous, femmes, votons F. Mitterrand dès le 1er tour.’ The participant list for a ‘réunion-débat’ held on 22 April 1981 at 7 p.m. in the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris included Hélène Cixous, Elizabeth

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Huppert, Kate Millett, George Pau-Langevin, Edith Cresson, Catherine Lalumière, Véronique Neiertz, Éliane Perasso and Yvette Roudy. Archives BMD. Also see: Tract. ‘Le Mouvement de Libération des Femmes et les élections.’ Archives BMD. 7 ‘A partir de 1971, l’arrivée à la tête du nouveau Parti socialiste de l’équipe conduite par François Mitterrand va, en l’espace d’une décennie, transformer le rapport de forces en faisant des socialistes, pour la première fois depuis la guerre, des interlocuteurs légitimes aux yeux des professions culturelles, à la fois sur le plan théorique et sur le terrain local.’ Pascal Ory in Crises et alternances: 1974–1995. Jean-Jacques Becker avec la collaboration de Pascal Ory (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998), pp. 219–220. (From 1971 onwards, the arrival of François Mitterrand and his team at the head of the new Socialist Party would go on to transform the balance of power within a decade and make socialists, for the first time since the war, legitimate interlocutors in the cultural sector, both in terms of ideas and on the ground locally.) 8 ‘La volonté de rénovation doctrinale, renforcée par l’adhésion de jeunes membres des professions culturelles, parfois un temps séduits par la critique radicale de Mai, conduisit en effet à la création au sein du parti, d’un secrétariat à l’action culturelle, confié à l’universitaire Dominique Taddéi. Parti d’une conception plutôt soixante-huitarde de la politique culturelle, mettant l’accent sur la créativité de chacun, l’art public et la synthèse socioculturelle, le PS infléchira peu à peu sa doctrine dans un sens plus continuiste sous l’égide de Jack Lang, successeur de Taddéi en 1979, après le congrès de Metz, mais surtout au contact des revendications catégorielles, des héritages ministériels et des responsabilités locales.’ Pascal Ory, ibid., p. 220. (The desire for doctrinal renewal, reinforced by the support of young cultural professionals joining the party who were still sometimes seduced by the radical criticism of May, resulted in the creation of a secretariat for cultural action, headed by Dominique Taddéi, an academic. Taking a rather ’68 view of cultural politics, which emphasized individual creativity, public art and sociocultural synthesis, the PS gradually started to shift its doctrine toward more continuity under the aegis of Jack Lang, successor of Taddéi in 1979, after the Metz congress, but even more by bearing in mind sectional demands, ministerial legacies and local responsibilities.) 9 Author interview with Anne Delfieu, September 2006. 10 Anne Higonnet, ‘Sally Mann: The Price of Success’, in Women Artists at the Millennium, ed. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 403–426, pp. 424–425. 11 Dictionnaire des féministes, France XVIIIe to XXIe siècle. Sous la direction de Christine Bard avec la collaboration de Sylvie Chaperon (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2017).   12  Françoise Giroud, ‘La Révolution est accomplie’, Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 1361 (6–12 December 1990), pp. 6–13.

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Index

‘101 propositions’ 111–112 Aballéa, Martine (b.1950) 178–179, 319–321 abortion 93–108, 113–115, 120, 123–124, 146–149, 157–158, 201, 298 Abramović, Marina (b.1946) 169, 190 abstract artists 222, 224, 230–233, 309, 312 abstraction 13, 172, 183, 222–235, 280, 285, 287, 294, 312, 355, 359, 379, 421 Acconci, Vito (1940–2017) 190 advertising, imagery promoted by 298–303 Aillaud, Gilles (1928–2005) 374 A.I.R. Gallery 22, 235, 318–319, 329, 384–385 Akerman, Chantal (1950–2015) 18, 178, 423 Algeria 5–7, 16, 91, 117, 159 Alloway, Lawrence 234, 292 Aloïse [Corbaz] (1886–1964) 173 Alvard, Julien 227 Alvaro, Egidio 322 Alzon, Claude 106–107, 146 Amara, Salika 6 anamorphosis 222, 263 Anderson, Maya 179–180, 371 animals 150–151, 188 L’Année de la femme (1975) 7, 280, 283, 285, 293, 297–307 see also year of the woman Apollo 11 moonwalk 69

Aragon, Louis 5 ARC / ARC 2 8, 66–68, 113, 156, 182, 194, 253, 277–278, 284, 304–305, 307, 309, 358, 382–384, 393–394, 397 Arcier, Raymonde (b.1939) 21, 200, 288, 422 AreaRevues (publication) 18 Argentina 16–17, 60, 309 Armstrong, Neil 69 Arroyo, Eduardo (1937–2018) 374–376 Artaud, Antonin 174, 387, 394 Art Brut 242 art comestible / Eat Art 398–399 Art et Regard des Femmes (1978–1983) 275, 282, 332–335 ‘art-vêtement’ / wearable art 195–196 Art / Vidéo Confrontation (exhibition, 1974) 182, 279 Asse, Geneviève (b.1923) 61, 224, 227 Assemblée Générale 58, 93 Association des femmes marocaines 6 Atelier Populaire (1968) 55, 58, 67 attention-seeking 83–84, 159 Attie, Dotty 318 Aubertin, Denise 178 Aurel, Jean 51 avant-garde 11–12, 124, 184, 193, 225, 235, 248, 251, 284, 307–308, 322, 354–355, 360, 364, 367, 374, 386, 397 awareness-raising 146 #BalanceTonPorc 21 Bardot, Brigitte (b.1934) 51–52, 84–86

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Index

Barjavel, René 69 Barre, Eva 119 Barreno, Maria Isabel 150–151 see also three Marias Barrière, Michèle 217 Barthes, Roland (1915–1980) 355, 362 Bataille, Georges (1897–1962) 251, 271–272 Batho, Claude (1935–1981) 184, 221 Bat-Yosef, Myriam (b.1931) 153–156, 309 Baudelaire, Charles 165 Baudrillard, Jean (1929–2007) 86, 355 Bauret-Allard, Claude (b.1936) 312, 328–329 Beaubourg (film) 278 Beaudoin, Marie-José 309 beautification processes 195 Beauvoir, Hélène de (1910–2001) 2, 58–60, 112, 330–331 Beauvoir, Simone de 2, 5, 9, 52, 59–60, 87–88, 94, 101, 110, 113, 126, 157, 178, 219, 248, 281, 304–307, 361, 420 Bebel, August 89 Belgium 13, 15–16, 21, 63, 423 Bell, Vanessa (1879–1961) 288 Bellini, Giovanni 225 Bellmer, Hans (1902–1975) 242–243, 248, 369 Bellon, Yannick 285 Belmont, Charles 101 Bendern, Caroline de (b.1940) 43–44 Benjamin, Walter 228 Berardinone, Valentina 181 Bergman, Anna-Eva (1909–1987) 61, 224, 231, 280 Berman, Sabina 11 Bernstein, Michèle (b.1932) 52 Bertaux, Madame Léon 282–283 Berthon, Lucienne (1926–2012) 287 Berto, Juliet 64 Bertrand, Mireille 122 biblical sources 192 Biennale de Paris 3, 8, 20, 161, 169, 180, 190, 195, 200, 226, 277, 380, 384

birth rates 152, 158 Blanchot, Maurice 355 Bloch, Dany 8, 67, 182, 284–285, 307–310, 375 Bloch, Pierrette (1928–2017) 227–229, 235 Blum [Reddy], Judy (b.1943) 18, 20, 178, 318, 320, 375, 382, 423 BMPT [Buren Mosset Parmentier Toroni] 330 Bobigny trial (1972) 100–101 body art / art corporel 3, 13, 190, 234, 355 body imagery 3, 20, 84–87, 104–106, 112, 115, 151, 147, 157–165, 171–175, 184–190, 194–198, 226, 286, 289, 311, 327–330, 358–360, 369–371, 384, 397–398 Boehm, Lell 285 Boetti, Anne-Marie [Sauzeau] 190, 328 Boiffard, Jacques-André (1902–1961) 174 Boissonnas, Sylvina [Sylvie] (b.1942) 218, 224 Boîtes (exhibition, 1976–1977) 279, 393, 397 Boltanski, Christian (1944–2021) 167, 374, 380 Boltz, Maude (1939–2017) 384 Bona [de Mandiargues] (1926–2000) 61, 280, 295, 309, 387–388, 394–396 Bonnet, Marie-Jo 20–21, 252, 292, 419, 423 Boone, Danièle 321, 328 Boucraut, Thérèse (b.1930) 285–287 Bouhired, Djamila (b.1937) 5 Boumédiène, Houari (1932–1978) 5 Boupacha, Djamila (b.1938) 5 Bour, Bernadette (b.1939) 312, 318–321 Bourgeois, Louise (1911–2010) 194–195 Bouscaud, Zizine 384 Brahimi, R. 4–5 Breerette, Geneviève 305, 307 Bréger, Colette (b.1946) 241, 248 Brennan, Teresa (1952–2003) 4

427

428

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Breton, André (1896–1966) 248, 288, 395 Brun, Claudette 253, 310, 321–322, 328 Brunet-Noury, Yolande 305–306 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 17, 83 Buren, Daniel (b.1938) 61 Butler, Judith (b.1956) 10, 27, 364 Cabanne, Pierre 61–62 Les Cahiers du GRIF 15, 22, 191, 362 Cahn, Marcelle (1895–1981) 221, 280, 285, 324 Calle, Sophie (b.1953) 19–20, 71–72, 246–247, 422 Calmis, Charlotte (1918–1982) 8, 62–63, 251–253, 276, 288–292, 295–297, 300, 305, 419–420 Camier, Liliane (b.1944) 298, 305, 309–310, 312, 319, 329, 380, 387–388, 391 Camus, Albert 287 Cannes Film Festival 76n.41, 150 capitalism 89, 157, 281, 298, 355 Cardinal, Marie (1929–2001) 120, 148, 362, 366, 373 Cartesian dualism 161, 200, 258 Casteras, Christiane de (1925–2009) 153, 283, 288, 306–309, 385, 388 castration anxiety 189, 191 Castro, Lourdes (b.1930) 49, 61, 284, 308, 392 Catholic Church 95–96, 111, 121, 277 Centre Georges Pompidou / Beaubourg 8, 114, 123, 277–279, 305 Chaban-Delmas, Jacques 91, 277 Chalem, Céline 285 Chambon-sur-Lignon 287 Charbonnier, Janine 324 Charlie Hebdo 126 Chawaf, Chantal (b.1943) 216, 248, 362, 365–366, 373 Cheval, Ferdinand (1836–1924) 196 Chevalier, Marie-Claire 100 China 8, 10, 99, 188 Chirac, Jacques (1932–2019) 110

Choisir group 94–97, 101, 119, 286 Cercle des femmes brésiliennes 7 Cixous, Hélène (b.1937) 10–13, 15, 126, 216, 220, 229–230, 238, 248, 367, 373, 377, 393–394, 422 castration / decapitation 191 dark continent (appropriation of) 229 light 226 Medusa’s laugh 365 women’s writing / écriture féminine 9, 360–364 ‘writing the body’ 364–365, 383 Clair, Jean (b. 1940) 13, 17, 259, 355–356, 374, 376, 393 Claisse, Geneviève (1935–2018) 221, 224–245, 227, 235, 285, 309 Clark, Lygia (1920–1988) 17, 20, 357–358, 384, 397, 423 class struggle 87, 90, 92–95, 101, 104, 112, 152, 377 see also ‘lutte des classes’ Clément, Catherine (b.1939) 9, 362 Clert, Iris (1917–1986) 279–280, 293 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel (b.1945) 44–45, 54–55 Cold War 69–70, 93, 376–377, 420 Colette [Lumière, or Justine] (b.1952) 195–197 collage 165, 220, 227, 253, 298–303, 393–397 Collanges, Christiane 122 Collectif Femmes/Art (1976–1980) 8, 63, 113, 158, 170, 175, 181, 190, 235, 248, 253, 275–276, 278–279, 282, 284, 305, 309–331 vision of the group 317 Collectif des femmes chiliennes 7 Collin, Françoise 10, 123, 328 colonialism xxvi, 5–6, 9 Combat (newspaper) 89, 91 commodification of women’s bodies 187–188, 194–195 computers, use of 233–234 concentration camps 198

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Index

conceptual art 181, 257–258 Coninck, Suzanne de 307 con-naissance 235–238 consumer culture 157 contemporary art 278, 284, 307, 362–363, 369, 379, 393 contraception 51, 86, 93, 98, 100, 110, 112, 115, 117, 146, 148–149, 158, 188, 201, 306 contre-avant-garde 3 Coordination des femmes noires 6–7 copy art / ‘Copie-Art’ 170, 172 corporeality 226, 354–355 Corsica 16, 309 cosmetics 167, 169 Counterpractice (book) sources for 15 structure of 13–17, 23 title of 2–4 Courtivron, Isabelle de 363 Couture-Peinture (exhibition, 1977) 309, 346n.91 craft 372–375, 379, 384 art versus craft 399 creativity 147–157, 178, 198 women’s 148–152, 300, 307 crèches 51, 98–99 Crozier, Michel 88 Cuba 7, 19, 60–61 Cueco, Henri (1929–2017) 67–68, 70–71, 379 Cueco, Marinette (b.1934) 68, 390–393 Dallier [Popper], Aline (1927–2020) 3–4, 11–12, 16–17, 22, 169–170, 196, 290, 292, 307, 309–310, 317–328, 331, 367, 384–389, 393 Daly, Mary 290 Damiron, Hortense (b.1945) 384 dark continent (Freud) 117–118, 229, 289, 294 Dauriac, Jacqueline (b.1945) 236–239, 246, 286, 308 Deblé, Colette (b.1944) 15, 248, 253, 309–311, 313–315, 321, 328–329

Debord, Guy (1931–1994) 52, 69 Debré, Michel 86, 120, 148 Decade of the Woman (1975–1985) 7 decolonization xxvi, 8, 10, 147, 229 deconstruction (philosophy) 163, 259, 313, 362–363 Dedieu, Marie (1945–2011) 94, 217–218 Delacroix, Eugène (1798–1863) 195 Delaunay [Hologne], Jacqueline 250, 312–315 Delaunay, Sonia (1885–1979) 7, 220–221, 280, 285 Deleuze, Gilles (1925–1995) 251–252, 356, 360–361 Delfieu, Anne (b.1947) 288, 393 Delphy, Christine (b.1941) 10, 47, 88–90, 93, 364 Deneuve, Catherine (b.1943) 21, 94 derivativeness 3 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004) 10, 216–217, 251, 362, 422 Desanti, Dominique 236, 362 Deudon, Catherine (b.1940) 150 Didier, Béatrice 363 Didi-Huberman, Georges 365 Diem Phung Thi (1920–2002) 248 digital platform for artists 20 disabilities, people with 108 divorce 87, 98, 110 Djuric, Carmen see Hessie Documenta 4 (exhibition, 1968) 49 Dora [Ida Bauer] (Freud’s case study) 218, 365 Dors, Mirabelle 305–306 Douze ans d’art contemporain en France / Pompidou exhibition 277, 286, 379–381 DRAC [Direction régionale des affaires culturelles] 278, 286 Druon, Maurice 277 Duhamel, Jacques 101, 277, 286 Dulac, Germaine 394 Duras, Marguerite (1914–1996) 9, 15, 56, 94, 148, 173, 248–249, 362–365 Durastani, Sylvie 246

429

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430

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d’Eaubonne, Françoise 94, 217, 362, 390 Échos (exhibition, 1978) 329 École de Paris / School of Paris xxxiv, 63, 285, 355 École des Beaux-Arts xxxiv, 53–55, 58, 65, 67, 88–89, 94, 282, 356, 384 Écologie Féminisme 390 ecology movement 390, 393 economic difficulties for women 120, 157 Écritures de femmes/Polyfèmes (exhibition, 1978) 329 écriture féminine 2, 9, 11–12, 22, 24, 220–221, 223, 227, 229–230, 250, 354, 360–374, 386, 394, 400 écriture mâle 364 Edelson, Mary Beth (1933–2021) 18, 396 Éditions des femmes 362–363 Ekotto, Frieda 11 electricity 227 Eliet, Françoise (1938–1983) 4, 8, 248, 253–255, 288, 309–311, 313, 317–318, 321–323, 327–331, 367–368, 371, 379, 393–394, 423 Elle magazine 90–91 Elléouët, Aube (b.1935) 288, 395–397 Elléouët, Yves (1932–1975) 396 elles@centrepompidou (exhibition, 2009–2011; 2012–2013) 18, 423 embroidery 24, 49, 309, 319, 355, 360, 373, 386–389 Enfermement / Rupture (manifesto) 254, 305, 312, 316–318, 321 Engels, Friedrich 89, 177, 216 Enlightenment thinking 200, 258 ère glaciaire/ice age 259, 354–356, 374, 376, 399 Ernst, Max (1891–1976) 9, 157 espace cousu (exhibition, 1976) 307, 309, 382, 384–387, 394 essentialism 2, 4, 7, 27, 201, 259, 364 États Généraux de la Femme 90–92 everyday materials and objects 63, 368 exhibitions on women 17–20 L’Express 102, 109, 111

facial close-ups 163, 166–168, 170, 184 factionalization 65, 94, 198 Fascism/Anti-fascism 109 Fayol, Marianne (1908–2003) 280, 287, 309 Feldman, Jacqueline 42, 64, 89 Fellini, Federico 150 ‘female only’ practices 282, 367 Féminie-Dialogue (1975–2009) 22, 153, 235, 275, 282, 288, 308–309, 382, 385, 394 Féminin Masculin Avenir (FMA) 42, 64, 89–90 Fémininmasculin (exhibition, 1995–1996) xxxviin.18 femininity attack on 246 reinvention of 183 return to 121 feminism anti-feminism as a response to 52 critique of 296, 305 described as ‘French’ 9–12, 33n.69 internal battles within 100–101, 121–122, 124–125, 146, 223 of the left and of the right 121 race concerns within 6–7 successes and failures of 423 unification of groups within 120 Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s (exhibition, 2010–) 20 Féministes Révolutionnaires 90, 106 Les femmes (film) 51 Femmes Algériennes en Lutte 5–6 Femmes en Lutte (1975) 282–283, 289, 297–305, 319 Femmes / Graphismes (exhibition, 1977) 322, 324 Des femmes en mouvements 16, 125, 217, 309, 316, 330, 368, 385 Femmes Révolutionnaires 107, 217, 219 Ferrey-Martin, Annie 101 Festival de la femme (1977) 118, 278, 380 Le Figaro 92 Figueiredo, Vera de 384

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figuration 67, 224, 421 film/film-making 51, 63–64, 97–98, 101, 109, 119–120, 150, 166, 175, 181–184, 224, 236, 254, 278, 285, 288, 302, 312–313, 322, 327, 355, 394, 398 Fini, Leonor (1907–1996) 15, 61, 118, 148, 248–249, 380, 393 Firestone, Shulamith 15, 241 first world 17, 99, 159 Fischer, Hervé 173–174 La foire des femmes 102–103 Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (FIAC) 222, 276, 305 foot-binding 99, 188 Forrester, Viviane (1925–2013) 321, 328 Foucault, Michel (1926–1984) 2, 24 Fouque, Antoinette (1936–2014) 2, 4, 16, 23, 72, 89–90, 93, 99, 104, 124–126, 183, 215–224, 289, 312, 362–363, 367–368 Foyer, Jean 108 Foyer international d’accueil de Paris (FIAP) 332 FRAC [Fonds régional d’art contemporain] 286 Francblin, Catherine (b.1943) 190, 328 Francken, Ruth (1924–2006) 21, 61, 83–86, 149, 165–166, 188–189, 280, 285, 292, 309, 422 Frankfort, Ellen 236 Freed, Hermine (1940–1998) 8–9, 182, 316 Freed, Leonard (1929–2006) 115 Freitas, Iole de (b.1945) 20, 190 Fréminville, Bernard de 331 French women’s preferences 111, 122–123 Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939) xxxii, 3, 13, 216, 218–219, 229, 236, 245, 256, 259, 327, 365, 369 Freudian theory 84, 174, 189, 191 see also castration anxiety; dark continent; Dora; hysteria and hysterics; unheimlich Friedan, Betty 52, 269

Fromanger, Gérard (1939–2021) 55–56, 281 Frydman, Monique (b.1943) 101, 113, 253, 310–311, 322, 324, 327–329 Gaignebet, Claude and Léon 398 Gainsbourg, Serge 84 Galerie des femmes 187, 220–222, 312, 422 galleries 277, 291–294, 300, 328, 388, 393, 422 Garcia Guadilla, Naty 159 Garnett, Angelica (1918–2012) 288 Gassiot-Talabot, Gérald (1929–2002) 66, 244, 374 Gaudibert, Pierre (1928–2006) 66–68, 226, 397 Gaulle, Charles de (1890–1970) 53, 65–66, 84–86, 89, 92 Gaulle, Geneviève de 5 Gauthier, Xavière (b.1942) 15, 217, 248–249, 362, 364–365, 371 Genardière, Philippe de la 363 Gentileschi, Artemisia (1593–1653) 192, 248 Gerbaud [Ponchelet], Marie 312 ghettoization 362–363 Giraud, Marie-Louise 94, 100 Giroud, Françoise (1916–2003) 88, 92, 104, 107, 109–112, 115, 121–123, 146, 166–167, 277, 297, 302, 424 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry (1926–2020) 12–13, 72, 84, 101, 104, 110–111, 119–121, 277–278, 370, 380, 421 glissade xxxiv–xxxv, 4, 12, 23, 251, 356–360, 372, 399, 421, 424 glissement xxxv, 4, 194, 360–361 Global Feminisms (exhibition, 2007) 20 Global South 17 Godard, Jean-Luc 63–64 Gonnard, Catherine 21, 287 Gouines Rouges 90, 95 Gradiva xxxii–xxxiv, 244 Grandes femmes petits formats (exhibition, 1974) 224

431

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432

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Greer, Germaine 18–19 Gromaire, Marcel 286 Groult, Benoîte 146, 217, 362 Groupe Alternative 305 Groupe de Cinq 178–179, 320–321 Groupe femmes algériennes 5 Groupe femmes latino-américaines 7 Groupe femmes marocaines 6 ‘groupuscules’ 53, 87, 370, 374, 380 grrêve / grêve des femmes (1974) 106 Grzywacz [Sarfaty], Gretta (b.1947) 170, 174–175, 321–322 Guattari, Félix (1930–1992) 251–252 Halimi, Gisèle (1927–2020) 5, 88, 94, 97, 100–101, 119, 285–286, 307 Hamon, Marie-Christine 328 hand imagery in women’s art 175–181, 185–187 hands and technology 181–184 Hantaï, Simon (1922–2008) 228, 355–357, 379 Harris, Anne Sutherland (b.1937) 221, 291 Harrison, Margaret (b.1940) 186–187 Hartung, Hans (1904–1989) 229, 231 Hassan II, King 6 Heidegger, Martin 10, 356 Hekking, Catherine 298, 310, 312, 329 Hendaye (demonstration) 109 Henriet, Jacques (1904–1988) 124 Herejías (journal) 7 Herrmann, Claudine 328 Hessie (1936–2017) 18–19, 182, 279–280, 298, 305, 318–319, 328, 383, 386, 392, 422 Hicks, Sheila (b.1934) 221, 277, 281, 375–381 Histoire d’O (film) 109–110, 160, 175, 236 Histoires d’A (film) 101 Höch, Hannah (1889–1978) 18, 253, 279, 321, 394 Hocquenheim, Guy (1946–1988) 246 Holt, Sara (b.1946) 225–227, 279, 384 homosexuality 10, 117, 158, 218 see also sexuality / sexualities

Horer, Suzanne 148, 152, 275, 285, 419 L’Humanité 16, 92 L’Humidité 175, 321 Hunt, Kay (1933–2001) 186–187 hysteria and hysterics 163, 174, 218–219, 238, 245–246, 331, 357 iconography 161, 195 L’Idiot International 89–90 Ikam, Catherine (b.1945) 165 Ikor, Roger 6 image-making 55–58 Indiana, Robert (1928–2018) 49 inflatables 397–398 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique (1780–1867) 9, 49 Les Insoumuses 302 installation 17, 60, 68–69, 195, 256, 316, 357 International Herald Tribune (newspaper) 89 International Women’s Day (8 March) 115–116, 126, 297, 383 intimacy 161–162, 175–177, 184, 186 Ipoustéguy, Jean-Robert (1920–2006) 199, 238–239 Irigaray, Luce (b.1930) 3, 10–13, 15, 190–191, 216, 242–243, 362, 367, 422 knitting / tapestry 372 parler-femme 271n.128, 405n.44 sexual plurality 12–13, 369–370 speculum appropriation 236, 256 ‘two lips’ 249–250 Unica Zürn 242–243, 369 Issartel, Marielle 101 Italy 16, 21, 100, 115, 121, 124, 161, 309 Ito, Hiromi 10 Janicot, Françoise (1929–2017) 18, 20, 243–245, 248, 253–255, 280, 284–285, 308–313, 315–316, 318–320, 323–331, 357, 371–372 J.K. (anonymous) 42–43, 64 Jonas, Joan (b.1936) 190 Jouffroy, Alain (1928–2015) 68, 226, 236–237, 387–388

Index

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jouissance 8, 12, 71, 152–153, 158, 191–192, 220, 225, 227, 236, 239, 256, 362, 365, 369, 379 Journiac, Michel (1935–1995) 190–191, 246–248, 355, 398 Jouve, Pierre Jean 216 Joyce, James 225, 364 kabbalah 252, 289 La Kahina 6 Kahlo, Frida (1907–1954) 187, 321 Kandinsky, Wassily 228 Katz, Michèle (b.1936) 15, 56–58, 157, 281–282, 298, 309–310, 312, 328–329, 367, 422 Kelly, Bernadette (b.1933) 47, 63, 285–286 Kelly, Mary (b.1941) 153, 186–187 kinetic art 225, 280, 355, 379 kitchen work 177–178, 288–289 Klasson, Eva (b.1947) 15, 175–177, 179, 328 Klein, Melanie (1882–1960) 218 Klein, Yves (1928–1962) 68, 258, 356, 359, 379, 398 Klonaris, Maria (1950–2014) 183–184 Klossowski, Pierre (1905–2001) 371 Kristeva, Julia (b.1941) 2, 8, 10–12, 15, 52, 99, 153, 216–218, 248, 321, 362, 367, 422 abjection 241, 250 avant-garde and women 11–12 chora 224–225, 232, 364 the semiotic 10, 27n.15, 224–225, 232–233, 364 women’s time, theory of 67 Künstlerinnen International (exhibition, 1977) 180, 291, 321–322 Lacan, Jacques (1901–1981) 3–4, 11–13, 60, 216–219, 327, 362 mirror stage 258 seminars 252, 222 symbolic order 4, 11, 224 Lâchez tout 114, 296, 305, 414n.109 Lacour, Simone (1926–2016) 63, 285–286

Lacy, Suzanne (b.1945) 244–245 Laksine, Irène (b.1943) 218, 297, 310, 312, 319, 329–331 Lam, Wifredo (1902–1982) 61 Lamba, Jacqueline (1910–1993) 288, 395 La Motte, Marie-Josėphe de 252 Lang, Jack (b.1939) 278, 286, 421–422 Langlois, Henri (1914–1977) 54–55 La Rocca, Ketty (1938–1976) 179–181, 190, 321 Latin American women artists 7 Lautréamont, Comte de 364 Léaud, Jean-Pierre 54 Lebel, Jean-Jacques (b.1936) 43 Lebovici, Elisabeth 21, 309–310 Le Brun, Annie (b.1942) 114, 296, 305 Le Doueff, Michèle (b. 1948) 331 Lefebvre, Henri 52, 69 Léger, Fernand 63, 228 Lemoine-Luccioni, Eugénie (1912–2005) 13 Lemsine, Aïcha (b.1942) 6 Le Parc, Julio (b.1928) 61 Lesseps, Emmanuelle de (b.1946) 88–89 Levine, Colette (b.1932) 285–287 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 151, 389 LeWitt, Sol 258 Lhote, André (1885–1962) 228, 286–287 Libération 15, 21, 232 Librairie des femmes 110, 125, 216–217, 363 Le Lieu-Dit (1978–1983) 329–331 Li Fenglan (b.1933) 8 Lijn, Liliane (b.1939) 225–227, 235, 292 Lippard, Lucy (b.1937) 17, 180, 190, 234, 257, 277, 318, 320, 374, 386 Lispector, Clarice 11 Londe, Albert 174 Lopes-Curval, Catherine (b.1954) 224 Lublin, Lea (1929–1999) 19, 60–63, 192, 253, 255–257, 310–312, 322–329, 371–372, 397–398, 422–423 ‘lutte des classes’ 95, 100–101, 117, 158, 377 ‘lutte des femmes’ 100–101, 117, 158

433

434

Index

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Lyotard, Corinne 71 Lyotard, Jean-François (1924–1998) 71, 193, 201, 364 Maar, Dora (1907–1997) 190 Macciocchi, Maria Antonietta (1922– 2007) 99, 123, 188, 241, 362 Maglione, Milvia (1934–2010) 61, 217, 220–221, 280, 284, 297, 308–309, 318–320, 384, 387 Magritte, René 63, 285 Malani, Nalini (b.1946) 202n.5 Mallarmé, Stéphane 225, 233, 364 Malraux, André (1901–1976) 8, 119, 277 Manifeste des 121 (1960) 5 Manifeste des 331 (1973) 101 Manifeste des 343 (1971) xviii, 93–94, 217 Mao Zedong 99 Maoism 47, 52, 64, 99, 216, 218 Marchais, Georges 92 Marcuse, Herbert (1898–1979) 15–16 ‘Marianne’ symbol 43–44, 84–85, 89, 195 Marie Antoinette, Queen 195 Marie-Claire (magazine) 92, 122 Marks, Elaine 363 Marquet, Andrée (b.1920) 153, 155, 288, 307, 309, 388–389 marriage 51–52 Martin, Agnes (1912–2004) 18, 257 Martin, Jean-Hubert (b.1944) 7–8 Marx, Karl 4, 216 Marxism 16, 52, 64, 66, 69, 95, 107, 157, 160, 219, 298, 313, 355–356, 376, 397 Masson, Catherine 71 Matta, Roberto 62 Maurice [de Buzon], Christine 253, 310, 327–328 May 1968 events 14, 17, 23, 43–44, 51–55, 58–59, 63–72, 87, 112, 160, 420–421 aftermath of 65–68 artists’ response to 53–64, 186, 191, 281–282, 286, 380 space (concept of) 250–252

Mehadji, Najia (b.1950) 18, 310–314, 328, 371 Mendieta, Ana (1948–1985) 18, 371 Menebhi, Saida (1952–1977) 6 menstruation 157, 241, 361, 364, 366 Meskimmon, Marsha 201 Messager, Annette (b.1943) 18–21, 58, 71, 162–164, 167–170, 190, 195, 198, 279–280, 284–285, 292, 303, 308, 321, 380–383, 392, 422 Métail, Michèle 324 Métayer, Nicole (b.1934) 170–171, 297, 305 #MeToo movement 21 Michaux, Henri (1899–1984) 242 Michelet, Jules (1798–1874) 249, 365 Millet, Catherine (1934–2017) 8, 15, 67, 165, 194, 241, 249, 316, 328, 332–334 Millet, Nicole 332 Minemura, Toshiaki 8 misogyny 9, 126, 395 Miss America and Miss World pageants 89 Missoffe, François 44–45 Missoffe, Hélène 120 Mitchell, Joan (1925–1992) 61, 279–280, 321 Mitchell, Juliet (b.1940) 3, 15–16, 190, 217, 357 Mithila painting 7–8, 248, 291–292 Mitterrand, François (1916–1996) 14, 104, 126–127, 278, 335, 421 Möbius strip 193, 201 modernism 12, 172 Modotti, Tina (1896–1942) 186–187, 221 Molnar, Vera (b.1924) 18, 224, 233–235, 298, 310, 312, 324–325 Le Monde 15, 21, 92, 106, 121, 191, 236, 248, 256, 305 ‘mongolienne’ faction in the MLF 108 Monirys, Sabine (1936–2016) 243–244 Monory, Jacques (1924–2018) 244, 358, 374, 379 Monroe, Marilyn 170

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Index

Montassut, Marie-Rose 307 Montrelay, Michèle 362, 371 Montreynaud, Florence 215 Morocco 6, 117, 159, 287 motherhood 10, 60–61, 67, 97, 100, 120, 124, 153, 195, 200, 225, 241, 365 Moulinex advertisements 89, 91, 151, 299 Mouraud, Tania (b.1942) 17, 19, 194, 252, 257–259, 279, 310, 328, 373, 375, 422 Mourir d’aimer (film) 51 Mouvement des femmes noires 6 Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) 2–4, 12–15, 21–23, 52, 59, 64, 71–72, 83–127, 146–153, 157–163, 217–221, 235–236, 239–242, 246, 249–250, 253, 281–285, 288, 293, 296–299, 316–318, 330, 336, 352, 362, 368, 379, 397–398, 421–423 activism of women artists and the militant body 43, 59–60, 168–174, 184, 187–189, 194–200 demonstrations against 127 factionalism within 108, 125, 127, 158 not to be seen as a single group 86 spectacle culture 96, 158, 223 trademark buyout 124–125 Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement (MLA) 94–96 Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement et de la contraception (MLAC) 101, 105, 126 Movimiento Democrático de Mujeres (MDM) 121 Mulvey, Laura (b.1941) 259 Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris 8, 51, 60, 67, 156, 226, 230–251, 253, 217, 285–286, 297, 304, 307, 310, 382, 397, 423 Musée de Femmes (proposed) 296 mutilation 188 La Mutualité event (May 1972) 96–98, 102, 148

Mythologies Quotidiennes (exhibition, 1964) 67, 374 Mythologies Quotidiennes 2 (exhibition, 1977) 305, 388 needlework 380–382, 386–387 Nelli, René 9 Nemours, Aurélie (1910–2005) 18, 224, 228–229, 235, 280, 285, 309 New French Left 61 Newsweek (magazine) 94 Nicola L. (1935–2018) 18–20, 56, 182, 280, 285, 283, 356 Nietzsche, Friedrich 89 Nochlin, Linda (1931–2017) xxxv, 20, 221, 291, 419 le non-dit 356 Nonon, Jacqueline 121 Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons 377 Nouveau Réalisme (Nouveaux Réalistes) 13, 49, 67, 247, 355–356, 379, 421 Le Nouvel Observateur 15, 93–94, 101, 424 Nouvelle Figuration 13, 67, 224, 354–355, 375–376, 379, 421 Nouvelle société 91 O’Keeffe, Georgia (1887–1986) 241, 396 Opalka, Roman (1931–2011) 228 Oppenheim, Meret (1913–1985) 61, 189–190, 280, 384, 393, 398 Orensanz, Marie (b.1936) 20, 180–182, 217, 310, 312, 322, 329 Orenstein, Gloria F. (b.1938) 290, 330–331, 334 orientalism, critiques of 8–9, 316 ORLAN (b.1947) 20, 49, 245–246, 276–277, 305, 322, 324, 359–360, 384, 422 Ortner, Sherri B. (b.1941) 151, 354, 389 outsider art 173, 196, 248, 332 Oyěwùmí, Oyèronkẹ 11

435

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436

Index

Pagé, Suzanne (b.1941) 67, 113, 194, 253, 307, 310, 382, 394, 423 Paik, Nam June (1932–2006) 165 painting, act of 222 Pane, Gina (1939–1990) xxx–xxxii, 18, 58, 68–70, 182, 185–186, 190–191, 193, 226, 241, 252, 280, 288, 308, 355, 372, 380, 423 Pape, Lygia (1927–2004) 356 Papon, Christiane 121 Paris commune (1871) xviii, 163 Paris Metro (newspaper) 112 Parmelin, Hélène (1915–1998) 5, 275, 285 Parti Communiste (Français) (PCF) 52, 67, 85, 91–92, 98, 107, 122, 125 Parti Socialiste (PS) 91, 98, 101, 126 Pasquier, Nicole (b. 1930) 118–120, 124 patriarchy 2, 4, 9, 52, 91, 157–158, 188, 194, 217–218, 236, 295, 332, 365, 389 Pécheur, Anne-Marie 310, 322 Peignot, Colette [Laure] (1903–1938) 193, 372 Peignot, Jérôme 328 peinture féminine 230 Pelletier, Monique (b. 1926) 121–122, 124 Pénélope (journal) 385, 419 Perec, Georges 86 performance art 153, 280, 312, 324 see also body art / art corporel ‘personal’ and ‘political’ interconnected 161, 194, 196, 201, 223, 320, 421 Les Pétroleuses group 106, 109–110, 152, 219, 298 photocopiers, uses of 170–172 photography 280, 309, 312–313, 319, 328 Picasso, Pablo (1881–1973) 61, 190, 278, 330 Picq, Françoise (b.1944) 64, 96, 105–106 Pierre, José (1927–1999) 239–240, 396 Pierre, Nicole (b.1931) 396 Pignon, Edouard (1905–1993) 285 Pisan, Annie de 113 see also Sugier, Annie Piton, Monique (b.1934) 166 Pivot, Bernard (b.1935) 167, 302

plants 389–393 Les Plasticiennes en Lutte (1977) 305 Plato 232, 236, 377 Plaza, Monique 331 Pluchart, François (1937–2008) 190 plurality 4–5, 13, 217, 258, 277, 369–370, 421 Podolski, Sophie (1953–1974) 165, 362 Pollock, Griselda 4, 17, 287 Pollock, Jackson (1912–1956) 390 Pompidou, Georges (1911–1974) 65–66, 84, 92, 101, 104, 114, 277, 421 population growth 85–86, 93, 123 pornography (and charges of) 104, 109, 117, 120, 150, 160, 175, 236–238, 251 Porter, Liliana (b.1941) 180 postcolonialism 10–11, 27, 229, 364 postmodernism 33 poststructuralism 259 power in the art world (reclaiming) 158 Prassinos, Gisèle (1920–2015) 395–396 pregnancy (and metaphors of) 100, 146, 153, 157, 183, 285, 303, 306, 398 prison / prisoners 5–6, 178, 315–316 Prix AWARE 20 Programme commun (1972) 98 prostitution (and metaphors of) 112, 115, 158, 246, 276–267, 324 provinces 47, 230, 286 Psychanalyse et Politique (Psych et Po) 3, 23, 87, 104, 109, 125–126, 146, 159, 174, 215–217, 223, 236, 242, 248–250, 259, 286, 288–289, 298, 310, 362–363, 370, 421 psychoanalysis 3–4, 12–13, 157, 218–221, 239, 259, 288–289, 310 Questions féministes (journal) 113 Qui tue? (exhibition, 1970) 51 quilt-making 388 Le Quotidien des femmes 16–17, 125, 217 Ray, Man (1890–1976) 84, 174 Raymond, Marie (1908–1988) 224, 231, 235, 280, 309

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Index

Réage, Pauline [Dominique Aury / Anne Desclos] 251 Rébérioux, Madeleine (1920–2005) 52 Recalcati, Antonio (b.1938) 374, 376 Rego, Paula (b.1935) 153, 155, 309 Reich, Wilhelm (1897–1957) 47 Reigl, Judit (1923–2020) 18, 228, 254–255, 279, 288, 355, 358–360 Rencontres Internationales de Caldas da Rainha (1977) 322–324 La Résistance / French Resistance 58, 224, 287 Restany, Pierre (1930–2003) 49, 394 Reverchon, Blanche (1879–1974) 216 Rey, Jean-Pierre (1936–1995) 43 rhizome / rhizomatic theory 251–252 Riboud, Barbara Chase (b.1939) 384 Rigal, Christian 172 Ringart, Nadja (b.1948) 110, 302 Rivière, Anne 15, 248, 250, 362 Riviere, Joan (1883–1962) 246, 359–360 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 355 Rochefort, Christiane 88, 94, 362 Roma (film) 150 Rosler, Martha (b.1943) 18, 178 Rossellini, Roberto 278 Roudinesco, Elisabeth 216 Roudy, Yvette (b. 1929) 14, 122, 285, 421 Rouge (newspaper) 6–7, 15–16 Rougemont, Guy de (b.1935) 55 Rousset-Altounian, Nicole 322 Roussopoulos, Carole (1945–2009) 166, 288, 302 Roy, Claude 58 Russier, Gabrielle (1937–1969) 50–51 Saban, Ody (b.1953) 332–335 Said, Edward (1935–2003) 9 Saint Phalle, Niki de (1930–2002) 18–20, 67–68, 153, 200, 280–281, 355, 374, 379, 398, 423 Salle Rouge (1969, Paris) 66–67 Salle Verte (1965, Paris) 67 Salon de la Jeune Peinture (1975) 235, 297–305, 319

Salon de Mai (1968, Paris) 60–62 Salón de Mayo (1967, Havana) 61 Santos, Emma [Marie-Annick Le Goff] (1943–1983) 165, 368 Sarraute, Nathalie (1900–1999) 355, 364 Sartre, Jean-Paul 5 Saussois, Anne (b.1945) 241, 298, 309–310, 312, 329 Scherdin, Osa (b.1932) 208, 285, 309 Schlumberger family 216 Schneemann, Carolee (1939–2019) 167, 190, 321 Sedgwick, Edie 170 Segal, George (1924–2000) 49 Selz, Dorothée (b.1946) 279–280, 297, 305, 308, 398–399 Sempé, Jean-Jacques (b.1932) 115–116 Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques 109–110 Sévigné, Madame de (1616–1696) 165 sexuality / sexualities 10, 46–51, 95, 117, 158–159, 161, 175, 177, 218–220, 250, 227, 245–246 Seyrig, Delphine (1932–1990) 94, 302 sibling rivalry 357 Sieverding, Katharina (b.1944) 190 Simha, Yolaine [Igrecque] (1944–1999) 176–177, 217, 328–329 Singulières Plurielles (1978) 332 Situationists 44, 47, 52, 69, 172 socialism 5, 89, 99, 186, 335, 364, 421 société bloquée 88 Socquet, Jeanne (b.1928) 21, 148, 152, 173, 248, 275, 285, 309, 419 soft art 3, 309, 354, 360, 384–386, 389–393, 397, 400, 422–423 Sollers, Philippe (b.1936) 52, 327 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 7 Sorcières (journal) 8, 12, 15, 168, 173, 175–177, 179, 200, 246, 248–250, 253–255, 316, 328–329, 362, 367–368, 361 SOS Femmes Alternative 112 Soulages, Pierre (b.1919) 228–229 Spare Rib 126 Spero, Nancy (1926–2009) 18, 229–230, 318

437

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438

Index

La Spirale (1972–1982) 8, 63, 158, 248, 251–253, 275–276, 282, 288–297, 300, 419 Spivak, Gayatri (b.1942) 10, 99, 364 Spoerri, Daniel (b.1930) 398 spontaneity 54, 160 Statue of Liberty image 146–147 Stella, Frank (b.1936) 257 Stendhal, Renate (b.1944) 331 striptease 246–247 subjectivity 9, 12, 24, 43, 182–184, 200, 230, 232, 242–248, 252–254, 259, 361, 421 Sugier, Annie (b.1942) 87 see also Pisan, Annie de Supports-Surfaces 243, 313, 336, 354–357, 377–380, 421 Surrealism 61, 239, 248, 280, 290–291, 313, 321, 356, 393, 397 Sutton, Gerda (1923–2005) 287 Szapocznikow, Alina (1926–1973) 18–19, 198–199, 279, 375, 382 Tachism 356 Taddéi, Dominique 421 Takis (b.1925) 225, 379 Talec, Nathalie (b.1960) 224 Tampax aesthetics 200–201 Tan, Elisa 221, 248, 310, 312, 322, 324–326, 329, 372 Tanning, Dorothea (1910–2012) 61, 393 Tantric teachings 226 Tchérina, Ludmilla (1924–2004) 118–119 Tel Quel 52, 99, 216, 248–249, 321, 356 Les Temps modernes 9, 157, 281 Tentindo, Virginia (b.1931) 239–240 textiles 22, 309, 319, 380, 384–385, 394 Thiam, Awa (b.1950) 6 Thiard, Jacqueline 328 Thomadaki, Katerina (b.1949) 183–184 three Marias 109, 150 see also Barreno, Maria Isabel tiers-mondisme / Third-Worldism 7, 120 Tillion, Germaine 5

Tinguely, Jean (1925–1991) 247 Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805–1859) 424 Tomb of the Unknown Soldier 88–89, 160 tondues 189 Le Torchon brûle 15, 98, 104, 163, 173–174, 217, 235–236 Torey, Claude 170, 172, 310, 312, 324–326, 371 Trans group 252 Les trente glorieuses 84, 277, 385 Tristan, Anne 83, 113, 215 see also Zelensky, Anne Truffaut, François 54 Ubac, Raoul (1910–1985) 393 unheimlich (Freudian) 189 Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs (UFPS) 275, 282–288, 297, 299, 304–309, 382 Unione Donne Italiane (UDI) 100, 121 United Nations Economic, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 7, 153, 159, 301, 307, 309, 319, 361, 383 see also L’Année de la femme Utopie group 397 vaginal imagery 236, 239–241, 250–251, 255–256 Valabrègue, Catherine (1917–1999) 252 Vaneigem, Raoul (b.1934) 52–54, 69 Varda, Agnès (1928–2019) 85, 94, 110, 148, 285, 288, 302–303, 398 Vasseur, Annie 332, 334–335 Veil, Simone (1927–2017) 104–105, 110 Viénet, René (b.1944) 45, 47 Véquaud, Yves 7–8 Vergès, Françoise 25n.9, 202n.4 Vergine, Lea (1936–2020) 17, 221, 291 video, use of 182–184 Vieira da Silva, Maria Helena (1908–1992) 18, 68, 118, 224, 230–235, 280, 285, 380 Vietnam 7, 16, 43, 53, 66, 89, 169, 216, 230, 248, 309

Index

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Vincennes (international women’s event, 1977) 117–118 Vinci, Leonardo da 396 violence, actions against 112, 121 visual actions (media-transmitted) 160 Vive La Révolution! group 64, 218, 310 Vraiment (exhibition, 1997) 18 WACK! (exhibition, 2007–2008) 20 Wahl, François 216 Warhol, Andy (1928–1987) 170 weaving 24, 309, 354, 373–380, 386, 389, 391 Weider, Iona 302 wenyi lilun (journal) 10 Wiazemsky, Anne 63–64 Wilding, Faith (b.1943) 241 witchcraft / witches 83, 174, 248–250, 365, 392–393 Wittig, Monique (1935–2003) 89–90, 98, 175, 216, 250–251, 362 Wölfli, Adolf (1864–1930) 242 Womanhouse (exhibition, 1972) xxxii womb imagery / metaphors 151, 153, 198, 224–225, 232, 243, 251 women celebration of see L’Année de la femme; year of the woman; International Women’s Day recording of lives and experiences of 181–182 relationship with the state 146 Women and Work (exhibition, 1975) 186 women artists groups and exhibition opportunities 283–336 lack of an organized movement in France 319 lack of opportunities with established institutions 277, 279, 293–294, 297, 300, 419–422

non-Western collectives of Chinese 8 Indian 7, 248, 291–292 Latin American 7 ‘women only’ concerns 87 women’s art dedicated publications on 22 international representation of 19–20 women’s movements and groups African and Antillean 6–7 American 16, 88, 215–216 European 16, 100, 115 Latin American 7 North African 5–6 women’s rights 2, 15, 283, 286 women’s role 64, 69, 151, 172 women’s votes 119 Woolf, Virginia (1882–1941) 147, 165, 288, 328, 363 World War I 100 writing the body 361–366, 383 Yalter, Nil (b.1938) 9, 19–20, 153–156, 178, 182–183, 279, 297–298, 310, 312, 315–320, 324–328, 382, 420 year of the woman (1975) 115, 159, 167, 319 backlash from 115 see also L’Année de la femme Zelensky, Anne (b.1935) 42, 64, 83, 87–89, 93, 105, 159–160, 168, 215–216 see also Tristan, Anne Zhongwai wenxue (journal) 10 Zondervan, Geneviève (1922–2013) 286 Zürn, Unica (1916–1970) 242–243, 249, 369

439

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document R. Brahimi, ‘des identités plurielles pour une société plurielle’ (1988), produced by the group Expressions Maghrébines au féminin for a conference in 1991.

1 

2 

Sonia Delaunay, UNESCO poster, 1975. Featured Delaunay’s Grande icône, c. 1970.

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Cover of UNESCO magazine Le courrier, 1975. Featured Mithila painting.

3 

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Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 4  Hermine Freed, Art Herstory, 1974.

5 

Nil Yalter, La Femme sans tête ou la Danse du ventre, 1974.

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Nous sommes le pouvoir, May ’68 poster.

6 

Michèle Katz (attributed), Vigilance: Indicateurs: ‘Civiques’ May ’68 poster.

7 

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8 

Gina Pane, Pierres déplacées, July 1968. Performance. Valley of Orco, Italy.

9 

Hélène de Beauvoir, Bons pavés, 1968.

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Charlotte Calmis, Mai 1968. c. 1970.

10 

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 11a 

Simone Lacour, Brûlant velum, 1969.

11b 

Simone Lacour, Le Bilingue, 1969.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Juliet Berto, still from Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, 1967.

12 

Henri Cueco, La rue, 1968.

13 

14 

‘Le pouvoir du con’, Le Torchon brûle, no. 2, 1972.

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Hélène de Beauvoir, ‘S.O.S. Femmes Alternative Alsace’, 1979.

15 

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16 

Michèle Katz, Duo de femmes, Chronique d’une femme mariée, 1974.

17 

Michèle Katz, Mâle désir d’un enfant, Chronique d’une femme mariée, 1974.

Cover of Le Torchon brûle, 1971.

18 

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19 

Emma Santos, La femme rupture, 1979.

Lea Lublin, Espace perspectif et désirs interdits d’Artemisia G., 1979.

20 

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Alina Szapocznikow, Tumeurs, 1971–1972.

Raymonde Arcier, Héritage, les tricots de ma mère, 1972–1973.

22 

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23 

Raymonde Arcier, Ar(t)mure pour art(r)iste, 1981 (detail).

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Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Galerie des femmes, exhibition catalogue cover, 1982.

24 

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Geneviève Asse, Ouverture de la nuit, 1973.

26 

Geneviève Claisse, Invariant rouge, 1973.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Liliane Lijn, Tilt, 1969.

27 

Sara Holt, Cône oblique, 1970.

28 

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Sara Holt, Trainée d’étoiles, 1978.

30 

Pierrette Bloch, Sans titre, 1972.

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Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Bibliothèque en feu, 1974.

31 

Marie Raymond, J’ai tendu les cordes et je danse (Rimbaud), 1979.

32 

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33 

Anna-Eva Bergman, N°48–1971 Mur de glace, 1971.

Colette Bréger, Cover drawing of Sorcières, ‘Le sang’, no. 9, 1977.

34 

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35 

Anne Saussois, Sans titre, 1978.

Sabine Monirys, La traversée des apparences, c. 1976.

36 

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Charlotte Calmis, Blessures de la lumière, 1970.

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Charlotte Calmis, La femme dans la cité, 1976.

38 

39 

Lea Lublin, Fluvio Subtunal, 1969.

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Tania Mouraud, Seeing Alone, Art Space No. 2, 1976.

40 

41 

Geneviève Zondervan, Untitled, from Face à la mer series, c. 1981.

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Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Colette Levine, Untitled, n.d.

42 

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Bernadette Kelly, Dimanche, 1968.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Thérèse Boucraut, L’Insomnie, 1968.

44 

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45 

Marianne Fayol, Portrait-de-l’oiseau-qui-n’existe-pas (Portrait-of-the-bird-that-doesn’texist), 1980.

Agnès Varda, stills from Réponse de femmes, 1975.

46a & b 

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Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 47 

Hessie, Trous [Masculin-Féminin], 1973.

48 

Bernadette Bour, Untitled, 1974.

Françoise Janicot, J’aime ta binette – I like your face, 1978.

49a & b 

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50(a–d)

Lea Lublin, Dissolution dans l’eau – Pont Marie, 1978

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(Continued)

50(e–g)

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Le Lieu-Dit, Archival photos from albums of Gloria Feman Orenstein.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Irène Laksine, Untitled, c. 1978. Painting included with the catalogue Écritures de femmes/Polyfèmes at the Abbey in Saint-Maximin, October–November 1978.

52 

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Kate Millett at a lecture by Marie-José Mondzain-Baudinet presented by Art et Regard des Femmes on 6 May 1980.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Nicola L., Red Coat – Same Skin for Everybody, 1969–2015.

54 

Simon Hantaï, Meun, 1967.

55 

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56 

Installation Supports-Surfaces, Exposition Travaux de l’été 70 (Daniel Dezeuze, Patrick Saytour, André Valensi, Claude Viallat) at the Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, April 1971.

Françoise Janicot, Encoconnage, 1972.

57 

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Lygia Clark, Architectures biologiques: naissance / Biological Architectures II – ‘1969’, 1969.

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Jacques Monory, Jungle de velours no. 13, 1971.

59 

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60 

Emma Santos, Les 4 yeux de la mort, dessin sous perfusion, 1979.

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Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo and Antonio Recalcati, Vivre et laisser mourir, ou la fin tragique de Marcel Duchamp, 1965.

61 

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62a 

Sheila Hicks, Os, 1965.

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Sheila Hicks, He and She, 1965.

62b 

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Sheila Hicks, Couverture du lingam, 1966–1967.

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Annette Messager, Boarders at Rest (Le repos des pensionnaires), 1971–1972.

64 

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65 

Hessie, Écriture, 1973.

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Hortense Damiron, Nappe sur fond rose, 1972.

66 

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67 

Liliane Camier, Tablier, 1977.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Marinette Cueco, Convolvulus Soldanella, Convolvulus Soldanella, Cerasus, Briza Media, Ginestea Cinerea, Convolvulus Soldanella & Juncus Anceps, Ginestea Cinerea, Convolvulus, Ginestea Cinerea, Convolvulus, Convolvulus, Juncus Tenuis, 1980–1983.

68 

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69 

Hannah Höch, Dada/Puppen, 1916/1918.

Bona, La coquille et le clergyman, 1970.

70 

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71 

Gisèle Prassinos, Frère, sœur et prix d’excellence, 1978.

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Agnès Varda, still from L’Une chante et l’autre pas, 1976.

72 

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73 

Dorothée Selz, Gâteau arc-en-ciel, 1974.