A 1979 Fiat 127 Palio advert showed the car in question and a note for consumers: "If it were a lady, it would get its bottom pinched”. Sadly, it was a typical slogan of that "donne e motori" (women and cars) patriarchal binomial equation often used by car manufacturers.
Photographer Jill Posener took a picture of a great alteration of the misogynist billboard: in black spray somebody had added the comment: "If this lady were a car, she'd run you down". Pure bliss.
Posener took further pictures of other defaced ads, from a Lee Cooper denim billboard featuring a muscular model, with a sprayed "I'm a macho bore" to a Pretty Polly tights ad showing a pair of long legs sticking out of an egg with the description "Legs as soft and smooth as the day you were born", defaced with a more punkish "Born Kicking".
Posener's black and white photographs of the hacked adverts that mocked consumerism, punched women's objectification in the face and vindicated women, are part of the recently opened exhibition "Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970 - 1990", currently on at London's Tate Britain (until 7th April 2024).
Curated by Linsey Young with Zuzana Flaskova, Hannah Marsh and Inga Fraser, and with a title inspired by Eve Figes's 1970 text "Patriarchal Attitudes: The Case for Women in Revolt", the exhibition features over 130 women artists and collectives residing and working in the UK.
All of them employed rebellious methods and unconventional approaches to leave an indelible mark on British culture, influencing culture, during a period of profound social, economic, and political transformations.
The most shocking thing about this event - that includes a long list of artists who expressed their thoughts and ideas through a variety of mediums and materials, from painting and drawing to photography, textiles, printmaking, film and sculpture - is the fact that this is actually the first major museum survey that looks back at women artists and collectives in the UK.
In several instances, the featured art and artists depict women pushed to extremes, expressing themselves through screams of pain or pleasure, wails, or sheer exhaustion.
In 1977, artist Robina Rose captured the intense experience of childbirth, filming a woman in labor at home, while "3 Minute Scream," filmed in the late '70s, showcased Gina Birch, a young art student, screaming passionately at the camera. Gina Birch's raw and explosive energy eventually found its outlet in music, leading to the formation of The Raincoats with Ana da Silva.
Similarly, Maureen Scott's powerful painting "Mother and Child at Breaking Point" portrays an exhausted woman holding a screaming child.
Both mentally and physically pushed to their limits and rejected from traditional art spaces turned into exclusive clubs for men, women artists began to experiment with creating their works in unconventional settings - at home, in community centers, and women's cooperatives.
Art graduates and new mothers Su Richardson and Monica Ross, for example, joined forces with artist Kate Walker in the mid-'70s to initiate a women's postal art project. These small, resourceful artworks, made with everyday materials found around the house and with techniques traditionally associated with women's crafts like crocheting, were sent by post, establishing creative communication channels between sender and recipient. The themes they tackled included feelings of entrapment and invisibility as wives and mothers.
Motherhood, as depicted by some of the artists included in the event, offers no redemption; rather, it exposes the harsh realities of pregnancy, childbirth, and caregiving.
Susan Hiller documented her pregnancy through photos of her expanding stomach, while Mary Kelly's "Post-Partum Document" (1973-79) explored the mutual process of socialization between mother and child in the early years of life.
Contrary to the idealized concept of the domestic goddess, many of these women artists challenge the endless cycle of domesticity that often ensnares women. Helen Chadwick transformed fridges and ovens into wearable sculptures, first presenting this performance for her graduation show in 1977.
Alexis Hunter's "The Marxist's Wife (Still Does the Housework)" features a woman's hand attempting to clean an image of Karl Marx's face with the words "Revolutionary", "Thinker", "Man". The surface becomes increasingly dirty as she approaches the word "Man". The work is a comment on Marx's refusal to recognize the significance of female domestic labor within the home.
The portrayal of women as working machines, constantly laboring both within and outside the home, is a recurring theme. Many women were (actually, are) trapped in a routine that involved (involves) rising at five to prepare breakfast, cleaning the house, going to work, then returning to childcare and dinner.
The recreation of Bobby Baker's 1976 installation titled "An Edible Family in a Mobile Home" is used to make a comment about domesticity and women.
This installation features a life-size family crafted from cake, installed in a small 1960s prefab house similar to Baker's own early residence.
The walls and floors are adorned with tabloid pages, ranging from publications such as Jackie and the Daily Mail. Notably, the mother in this edible family is mobile and represented by an articulated plastic mannequin that can traverse the space, offering snacks from compartments in her stomach, symbolizing the fact she is almost a robotic entity, a dispenser of love and food.
The empashis on bodies in these artworks becomes a means of reclaiming agency over one's body and space, asserting control in situations where control may be lacking, and finding empowerment in self-expression. Frequently, this empowerment was channeled through acts of protest like the one that followed the 1970 edition of Miss World.
Broadcast live on BBC One, the show took place at the Royal Albert Hall in London, and was hosted by Bob Hope. The American comedian commented that it was like a "cattle market". "I've been back there checking calves," he added. Soon after, he was met by flour bombs threw by women in his direction.
Margaret Harrison participated in the Miss World protest as Miss Loveable Bra, wearing a pre-formed plastic chest with orange fur nipples and a smile on a stick. Harrison's art also encountered challenges: her solo exhibition at Motif Editions Gallery in London faced closure after just one day on charges of indecency.
The exhibition's satirical drawings portrayed pin-up girls on giant bananas or in ice-cream cones, to hint at the fact they were as consumable as the food they were associated with. But the pin-ups weren't the problem: it was her portrayal of Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner as a buxom Bunny that irked the police.
Harrison went on to co-found the London Women's Liberation Art Group and the Women's Workshop of the Artists' Union, and then focused on the experience of working women. With Mary Kelly and Kay Hunt she documented the experiences of female workers in a south-east London metal box factory, aiming to uncover the tangible impact of the Equal Pay Act of 1970 - a key demand of the women's movement - and discovered that little had changed.
Harrison also created artwork on Greenham Common, a peace camp established in 1981 by a group of Welsh women. A reaction to the storage of US nuclear missiles at Greenham Common in Berkshire, the camp lasted for almost two decades.
The strength of collective action is evident in the exhibition: visitors are reminded how on the night the UK government, led by Margaret Thatcher, passed the controversial Section 28 law in 1988, which prohibited the "promotion" of homosexuality, six lesbian activists entered the House of Lords and two of them descended from a balcony using a washing line rope.
Artists actively reacted to Section 28 and the AIDS crisis: Tessa Boffin's images of a lesbian angel exploring safe sex, comment about the neglect of lesbians in sex education and healthcare.
This desire to come together was almost a reaction to Thatcher's obsession for individualism, embodied by the claim that there was "no such thing as society". The exhibition highlights indeed that collective action was a potent force for female artists in the 1980s.
The music scene also played a significant role and the exhibition includes among the others X-Ray Spex' Marianne Elliott-Said (Poly Styrene), The Neo Naturists, Throbbing Gristle's Cosey Fanni Tutti (the exhibition features a leotard for her striptease performances), collagist Linder and Jill Westwood.
Frontwoman for the noise band Fistfuck, Westwood engaged in provocative performances that blurred the boundaries between art and life, urinating on and beating willing audience members.
The exhibition is actually accompanied also by a 14-track album released on Music for Nations, co-compiled by exhibition curator Linsey Young and Julie Weir, Head of Music for Nations, featuring tracks from the most trailblazing women working in the British industry between 1977 and 1985 (it features The Slits, X-Ray Spex, The Raincoats and Strawberry Switchblade among the others).
The exhibition also looks at Black women, who suffered marginalization on both racial and gender fronts, among the other work there is also Marlene Smith's sculptural installation, titled "Good Housekeeping". Originally created in 1985 as a response to the tragic police shooting of Dorothy "Cherry" Groce at her doorstep earlier that year, the recreated installation portrays a Black woman positioned beneath the poignant words, "My mother opens the door at 7 am. She is not bulletproof."
Claudette Johnson, a painter, is remembered: in 1985 she curated the exhibition "The Thin Black Line", featuring key figures like Ingrid Pollard, Sonia Boyce, Sutapa Biswas, and Chila Kumari Singh Burman. "Women in Revolt!" includes 1985 Biswas' Housewives with Steak-Knive, a portrait of Kali, the goddess of destruction and dispeller of evil, as a housewife wielding steak knives, wearing a string of heads around her neck symbolizing evil dictators.
Aside from original art, "Women in Revolt!" includes a vast selection of memorabilia, such as magazines, flyers, badges, and other tangible mementos like the agitprop posters for progressive causes by the See Red Women's Workshop. One of their first works featured a green-skinned woman rejecting traditional roles of housewives and porn mag models. The workshop was vandalized by the National Front for their posters challenging a sexist, racist, and homophobic society.
"Women in Revolt!" is not just about rediscovering artists who may have been forgotten or presenting them to new generations (as other exhibitions about women artists are currently doing), but it is about taking stock, considering also how things haven't changed that much.
Women are still fighting for equality, abortion rights are trampled upon, there is no end to violence, abuses and rapes and feminicides that, in some countries in Europe such as Italy, keep on happening every day.
Some things have actually changed - if you think about it, feminism has mutated, it has splintered in many different categories. This was the year of capitalist feminism (or feminist capitalism...), a trend that prevailed after Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" film, but that started a few years ago with some fashion houses à la Dior, telling women we should all be feminist, but essentially selling us overpriced products that most of us simply can't afford.
Is there an antidote to all this? Keeping on being creative, like these women did, writing, painting, sculpting, weaving, embroidering, knitting or crocheting (check out Rita McGurn's trio of women on a crocheted rug made with scraps of wool) without forgetting a healthy dose of rage, anger and activism.
Almost as an invitation to keep on working and being creative, the exhibition closes with a recreated piece from Kate Walker's 1987 performance "Art of Survival, A Living Monument": a shirt, skirt and paint palette in stone-coloured fabric on a plinth, a symbolic "monument" to overlooked women artists. Rather than waiting to be acknowledged posthumously, Walker suggested indeed that women shouldn't remain passive.
The women in this exhibition found their own space, at times going solo, in other cases becoming part of a community or a collective or even founding one. So be active, be angry and, if you feel the need, scream. Because that's what has been missing, not only in the art scene, but in everyday life - a woman's joyful, defiant, enraged, painful yet vengeful scream.
The exhibition is accompanied by a podcast including artist interviews and a Spotify playlist featuring the album artists and the new generations of musicians they have inspired. After Tate Britain, "Women in Revolt!" will transfer to Edinburgh's National Galleries (May 2024 - January 2025) and Manchester's Whitworth Art Gallery (March - June 2025).
Image credits for this post
1. Jill Posener, Fiat Ad, London, 1979, reprinted 2023. Courtesy of the artist
2. Gina Birch, still from Three Minute Scream, 1977. Courtesy the artist
3. Installation view of Maureen Scott's "Mother and Child at Breaking Point" at" Women in Revolt!", Tate Britain, London, 2023 © Tate (Larina Fernandes)
4. Su Richardson, Sand Souvenir, 1975-76 © Su Richardson Courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery, London and Rome. All rights reserved, DACS 2023
5. Postal Art displayed in "Women in Revolt!", Tate Britain. Photo © Tate (Madeline Buddo)
6. Installation view of Susan Hiller's Ten Months at "Women in Revolt!", Tate Britain, London, 2023 © Tate (Larina Fernandes)
7. Helen Chadwick, In the Kitchen (Stove), 1977 © The Estate of the Artist. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London and Rome
8. Alexis Hunter, The Marxist Wife Still Does The Housework, 1978/2005. © The Estate of Alexis Hunter Courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery, London and Rome. All rights reserved, DACS 2023
9 - 12. Bobby Baker Edible Family. Photo (c) Tate (Madeline Buddo)
13. Margaret Harrison, Banana Woman, 1971. Purchased by Tate in 2008. © Margaret F Harrison
14. Installation view of Margaret Harrison's Greenham Common installation at "Women in Revolt!", Tate Britain, London, 2023 © Tate (Larina Fernandes)
15. Installation view, "Women in Revolt!" at Tate Britain, London, 2023 © Tate (Larina Fernandes)
16. Alison Lloyd, SUPPORT THE MINERS, Solidarity will win! 1984 © Alison Lloyd
17. Mumtaz Karimjee, Stop the Clause protest, 1988. Photograph. Courtesy the artist
18. Tessa Boffin, Untitled #1, 1989_2023, Photo by JSP Art Photography
19. Dr Jill Westwood, Potent-Female, 1983. © Dr Jill Westwood
20. Caroline Coon, The Slits, Post House hotel, Cardiff, June 1977, 1977. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery London and New York
21. Marian Elliott-Said (A.K.A Poly Styrene), Germ Free Adolenscents, 1977. Courtesy of the Polystyrene Estate and Archive
22. Installation view of Cosey Fanni Tutti's bodysuit at "Women in Revolt!", Tate Britain, London, 2023 © Tate (Larina Fernandes)
23. Linder, Untitled, 1976. Purchased by Tate in 2007. © Linder
24. Installation view of Marlene Smith's "Good Housekeeping" at "Women in Revolt!", Tate Britain, London, 2023 © Tate (Larina Fernandes)
25. Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Solidarity with Sisters, 1981. Photography Varda Agarwal
26. Installation view of Sutapa Biswas' Housewives with Steak-Knives, 1985, at "Women in Revolt!", Tate Britain, London, 2023 © Tate (Larina Fernandes)
27. See Red Women’s Workshop, 1974-1990, Protest, 1974. See Red Women’s Workshop
28. Installation view of Rita McGurn, Untitled Rug and Figures, at "Women in Revolt!", Tate Britain, London, 2023 © Tate (Larina Fernandes)
29. Installation view of Rita Keegan's Red Me, 1986 at "Women in Revolt!", Tate Britain, London, 2023 © Tate (Larina Fernandes)
30. Installation view of Kate Walker's 1987 "Art of Survival, A Living Monument" at "Women in Revolt!", Tate Britain, London, 2023 © Tate (Larina Fernandes)
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