Another Measure: Photography and Feminist Art in Italy

Abstract

This article analyses from a historical perspective the relationships between art, photography, and feminism in the Italian cultural context of the 1970s, in order to shed light on a chapter of Italian historiography that has been explored only marginally. During this decade, photographic practice and feminist thought formed a close connection: many artists who were active in awareness-raising groups or embraced feminist theories chose photography as their expressive means both for its ability to grasp issues relating to subjectivity and the body, and as a tool to demystify the stereotypes linked to the gender difference widespread in Western visual culture. Photography became the privileged means adopted by these artists to criticize the symbolic order of the dominant language and its masculine inflection. In a historical moment in which women struggled to overturn the canons of patriarchal culture, photography, with its specific indexical nature and its relationship of adherence to external reality, also allowed these artists to construct a radical social criticism of the way images were used to portray femininity, to challenge the centuries-old invisibility of women’s experiences, and to deconstruct the mechanisms of fetishization and eroticization characterizing the representations of the female body.

Keywords:

• photography
• contemporary art
• feminism
• seventies
• women photography

Raffaella Perna is Research Fellow at the Sapienza University of Rome. She obtained her PhD in Art History in 2014 and was lecturer in Contemporary Art History at the University of Macerata from 2016 to 2018. She has authored the following books: Piero Manzoni e Roma (Piero Manzoni and Rome, 2017), Pablo Echaurren. Il movimento del ′77 e gli indiani metropolitani (Pablo Echaurren. The protest movement in 1977 and the Metropolitan Indians, 2016), Arte, fotografia e femminismo in Italia negli anni Settanta (Art, photography and feminism in Italy in the 1970s, 2013), Wilhelm von Gloeden. Travestimenti, ritratti, tableaux vivants (Wilhelm von Gloeden. Disguises, portraits and tableaux vivants, 2013), In forma di fotografia. Ricerche artistiche in Italia tra il 1960 e il 1970 (Photographic form. Artistic researches in Italy from 1960 to 1970, 2009). She is also co-editor of the volumes: Ketty La Rocca. Nuovi studi (Ketty La Rocca. New Studies, 2015) and Il gesto femminista. La rivolta delle donne: nel corpo, nel lavoro, nell'arte (The feminist gesture. Women's revolt: body, work, art, 2014). She has curated the exhibitions: L'altro sguardo. Fotografe italiane 1965–2018 (The other gaze. Italian women photographers 1965–2018, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome), and Ketty La Rocca 80. Gesture, Speech and Word, with F. Gallo, in the context of the 17^th Biennale Donna, Contemporary Art Pavilion, Ferrara (2018), The Unexpected Subject. 1978 Art and Feminism in Italy (Frigoriferi Milanesi, Milan 2019).

Notes

1 The Italian term autocoscienza actually better translates as “self-awareness.”

2 In this regard see the interviews and recollections published in Weller (1976).

3 Only Santoro, Oursler, and Monselles will be considered here because they were active in Italy.

4 In the 1980s, the aesthetic and political effectiveness of such experimentations, focusing on the image or on the exhibition of the female sex organs and corporeity, was questioned by various exponents of poststructuralist feminist art criticism: these works were labeled “essentialist,” because they were accused of anchoring subjectivity to the biological element, instead of investigating the social and political contradictions linked to the image of women in patriarchal culture. Already in the first half of the 1990s, however, the attitude of closure expressed by the poststructuralist critics toward works founded on the representation of the vagina, or on the symbols associated to it, was in turn questioned by feminist thinkers of the new generation. For an overview of the debate on essentialism and anti-essentialism, see Rozsika and Pollock (1981); Broude and Garrard (1994); Robinson (2001); Jones (2003).

5 The process of downgrading can be likened to Bataille’s formless.

6 The expression Narrative Art includes experiences of European artists active in the first half of the 1970s who used photography in connection with writing, often with a narrative outcome, and more evocative tones than the aseptic tautologies of conceptual art. In Italy, the phenomenon had a certain relevance and has been the focus of several exhibitions, including Narrative Art, held in Rome (Studio Cannaviello) in 1974 and curated by Filiberto Menna, and Narrative Art, held at the Diagramma Gallery, directed by Luciano Inga-Pin, in Milan in January 1976.

7 In 1976, Binga and Monselles inaugurated the following exhibitions together: Noi donne, held at the Galleria Centrosei in Bari; Litanie Lauretane – Ecce Homo, at the Studio Del Monaco in Bari; Mater – Ecce Homo, at the Galleria Eremitani in Padua; in 1977: Mater – Ecce Homo, at the Galleria Lamanuense in Parma; Litanie Lauretane – Ecce Homo, Incontri Internazionali Arte, in Rome; Penne alla Binga e Sangrilla alla Monselles, at the Studio Out-Off in Milan.

8 This video led to a collaboration with RAI Radiotelevisione italiana (Italian Radio and Television) and to the creation of a television program in 1973 called “Nuovi Alfabeti” (New Alphabets) for the hearing impaired.

9 For further reading on the Collettivo di, see Fedi (1986).

10 For an in-depth analysis of the book, see Casero (2015).

11 The topic is vast and cannot be examined at length here. Some fundamental works are: Eco (1985); Chadwick (1998); Krauss (1990); Owens (1978); Dubois (1990).

12 On the work realized in Rome, see in particular Casetti and Stocchi (2011); Pedicini (2012).