It goes without saying how difficult it is for a woman working in the visual arts to find a space of her own, where she can move with freedom and determination and with the same possibilities as men.
If this were not the case, we would not have even organised this conference, tackling the inherent bitterness and difficulties; we would not be here comparing notes, de-bating among women artists filled with a rage that has been accumulating not since the beginning of the current crisis but al-ways, since market laws have prevented us from practising our profession and gaining through it our economic independence.
Art, dear friends, is a quite ambiguous, much-debated, controversial subject, since across the centuries it has always served men to sanction and glorify a pow-er gripped tightly in their fists. Women have always been excluded from it, driven back, exiled to the private sphere and assigned as they were to the humblest tasks, those that were not gratifying enough to men, they have always been barred from involvement in the res publica or, as we say today, en-gaging in politics. They were forbidden to go outdoors, to gather with other lumpenproletarian women like themselves, to cause a commotion and protest, upsetting the order so dear to the male pyramidal hierarchy.
It’s just as well, in the end. Women can claim the alibi of not having contributed directly to the triumph of the powerful, who have always crushed the weakest, from the triumphs of Darius, Alexander and Nero to Charles V, the Popes, the Sun King, Napoleon, Fascism and Nazism.
Every so often in the history of art a woman’s name crops up: Artemisia Gentileschi, Sofonisba Anguissola, Rosalba Carriera.
Among the poets, a name from the ancient world: Sappho.
Of her, it has always been said, with disdain: she was a lesbian. Only a few fragments of verse survive, but of such calibre that they eclipse millions of others.
Lesbian, as an insult? She was a woman, an artist, the first with the courage to understand that one can turn to other women with affection, one can engage. That it is not and must not be considered shameful for women to love each other. That was the birth of feminism. And then it was immediately buried, forgotten for millennia, lost in the labour of millions of unknown women, the Roses, Marys, Joannes, Fabiolas who have, across the centuries, hidden their creativity in the folds of their kitchen aprons, sacrificing their personalities under the pressure of the power wielded by men, in whose service they gave tears, blood, life. To survive, they made bands to bind the children, who would grow up to become as oppressed as they were or more so, to bind the calves of the soldiers, so they would keep killing each other. To survive, they devoted themselves to tunics, embroidery, decoration, household objects: that multitude of timeless, placeless, priceless, pains-taking works made by women.
All this to avoid beating their heads against the wall, to deceive, appease, deny their own intelligence, made into a useless bur-den of pain.
And yet, in the various revolutions, when it came to trying to change something, women had their weight, and not just the queens, the courtesans and the muses, as the his-tory dictated by men has always tried to convince us.
No, no, no, we do not want to be muses of what is static and unchanging, we want to subvert, we want to revolutionise and overturn history.
The French Revolution was driven by women, by their rage, their refusal to continue being crushed – Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the first feminist manifesto during the French Revolution, right alongside the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
She was a confident, determined woman, full of enthusiasm, interests and intelligent drive, but in the end, dying in childbirth, she fell into the trap of her femininity.
We must no longer allow ourselves to be caught in this web, which ensnares us with its sticky slime! We must no longer toil to make ourselves beautiful at any cost, to please others and above all the consumerism of advertising. We must rediscover a diversity, a femininity that is beneficial to us, that is true for us, that does not force us into a thousand labours that wear us down and leave us empty-handed at the end, when all these efforts are no longer enough to sustain a body already worn down by time. We must reclaim a femininity that rediscovers our capacity for creativity, lifts us out of our subordination and opens new paths to independence, which in our younger years, blinded by centuries of tradition, we hadn’t even considered.
We must no longer submit to the trauma and alienation of feeling like women in a male context, demeaning ourselves for menstruation, pregnancy, menopause.
None of this can nor must impede our full and conscious creativity.
We must joyfully want to be women, not accept or suffer our sex as a form of castration, belief in which renders us a priori submissively subordinate.
I realise that my anger, our anger, really, is leading me away from the main subject, which is women in art, a real issue with real weight. There are many of us, and this stands as proof, even though men have always divided and demeaned us, claiming that women artists do not exist. And do you know why? Because we lack a penis, the font of creation. But who is more creative than a woman, with her womb teeming with life?
We must stop letting ourselves be deceived. We must stop being submissive, conforming to the traditional image society
expects of us. Let us stand firm against the daily impositions that seek to limit us and let us unwind ourselves with confidence, like thread released from a ball, without losing ourselves in the labyrinth.
Professionalism means serious and uninterrupted research, in-depth analysis of language, commitment to content, precision and mastery of technique. Moreover, the personal voice that is gained through years of work, day by day, will allow us to recognise ourselves in art with an unmistakably feminine creativity.
Some of us have come to understand that we do not want to identify with men’s work, we do not want to be influenced. Others have not yet reached that maturity and for now still struggle in useless and damaging competition.
As for me, and speaking of my personal experience, which I think may be relevant to everyone here, my work, which I’ve been doing for more than twenty years, since receiving my hard-won diploma, has gone through different stages, always seeking inner validation and always finding illusionistic approval.
I recall that many years ago, Giorgio Kaisserlian would often tell me, ‘if you were a man, you could go far’. With this ‘if’, my sex was called into question, and artistic abilities were of secondary importance.
Other times, someone would praise my work with the usual compliment that conceals the trap: ‘You work like a man’, ‘you are strong like a man’. At the time, I was delight-ed. I was under the illusion that I had reached the pinnacle of all my aspirations. I didn’t realise that this compliment was intended to make me even more subordinate. I began to question things when, during a solo exhibition, the gallerist told me that someone had wanted to buy my work, but when they found out that the artist was a woman, they disappeared like snow in the sun.
Those doubts became certainties when doors were repeatedly slammed in my face, with this excuse: ‘Women artists don’t sell; there’s no market for their work’.
As recently as a few months ago, a collector declared that they would never buy a work made by a woman. This time, I finally found the courage to laugh in his face.
I no longer care about this discrimination, which years ago made me suffer so much. But the anger of marginalisation, built up for years, triggered in me the drive for a more analytical, minute, close form of work. This freed me from much of the male culture that had suffocated me until then, and I emerged from the suffering of marginalisation with a direction of my own shaped by feminine creativity. Using simpler means and more modest materials, never the traditional ones of male culture, these past few years I’ve been ironically narrating the history of women through my objects of female culture: sometimes criticising, sometimes defending, but never pitying, indeed calling upon women to act, to rise up and overturn the rules of the game.
I have been struck by the work of various women artists recently and especially the pieces by Louise Nevelson and Niky [sic!] de Saint Phalle at the Modern Art Museum in Paris. One now advanced in years, the other still quite young, they give me hope for the future of female creativity and the place of women artists in society.