fiona macdonald and therese mastroiacovo: access restricted
Fiona Macdonald has recently collaborated with Thérèse Mastroiacovo, an artist from Montreal, on an installation work titled Access Restricted. Alex Martinis Roe, who entered into a written dialogue with Macdonald to create the text for the small room brochure, joined the collaboration. Access Restricted is a double-side poster installed in the gallery with the wall side obscured.
The ‘work’ is a re-make of a 1974 poster by Lynda Benglis. Mastroiacovo, in conceptual collaboration with Macdonald, redraws a page from a little known book about New York art which includes an illustration of a photograph of Lynda Benglis which was used as a poster to advertise one of her exhibitions.1 The image itself was an engagement with Robert Morris, Benglis’s then partner, who had also appeared in an advertisement in Artforum as a masculine prototype of the heroic avant-garde artist.
Posing nude apart from a pair of sunglasses, Benglis holds a large double-headed dildo between her legs. Originally taken out as a centrefold advert in Artforum in 1974, the image caused considerable controversy at the time as the editors of the magazine reviled over the indecency of the image. The essential issue for Macdonald et al is that Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson joined five of the six associated editors and published a letter to the then editor-in-chief, John Coplans, saying they were offended by the ‘extreme vulgarity’ of the picture. It was said to have ‘made a shabby mockery’ of ‘the movement for women’s liberation’.2 Krauss and Michelson subsequently went on to found the journal October and in 2009, in response to an article in the New York Times by Roberta Smith, which detailed the Benglis incident