WOMEN POP ARTISTS 1958-1969
Is it possible to conceptualise Pop without invoking those qualities trademarked under the name ‘Warhol’? Can Pop be imagined outside what might be called the logic of reproduction; and if Pop was an attitude, perhaps, more than a style, a sensibility encapsulated in Warhol’s affectless ‘liking’ for the products of post-war American capitalism, is the use of pop imagery sufficient to label an artist ‘pop’? ‘Seductive Subversions: Women Pop Artists 1958-1969’, a touring exhibition of international work from twenty women, prompts these questions. Pitched as an explicitly revisionist exercise aimed at ‘recovering important artists and enlarging the canon to more accurately reflect the Women artists who worked in the movement alongside its more famous male practitioners’, the exhibition wants to enlarge what it calls ‘the narrow definition of classic Pop art’.
As the exhibition would have it, ‘Pop’ was a shifting category which could include craft (Dorothy Grebenak’s hand-hooked rug of the US dollar bill), assemblage (Niki de Saint Phalle’s amalgam of dolls, toys, lace and plastic spiders), paintings of media figures (Pauline Boty’s pictures of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Chicago mobster, Jim Colosimo), as well as political photomontage (Martha Rosler’s juxtapositions of magazine-based advertising and war imagery). It could also include Chryssa’s Ampersand IV (1964), a neon work encased in a plastic cube; Joyce Wieland’s stitched-together clear plastic pillows of iconic images and film reels, Stuffed Movie (1964), Kay Kurt’s large photorealist painting of chocolates For All Their Innocent Airs, They Know Exactly Where They’re Going (1968), and Marjorie Strider’s Green Triptych (1963), a comic-book image of a bikini-clad woman, in triplicate, with molded buttocks and breasts.
In the roster of work assembled by curator Sid Sachs, some of it not... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Martha Rosler, Vacuuming Pop Art, 1966-72. Photomontage, 60.96 x 50.8cm.
Pauline Boty, With Love to Jean Paul Belmondo, 1962. Oil on canvas, 101.6 x 152.08cms. Collection Nadia Fakhoury, Paris.
