So what exactly does femmage mean? The use of the term as this blog’s name constitutes a nod to feminist conceptual artist Miriam Schapiro, who coined the word to describe her works, abstract collages composed of textiles usually associated with women’s work, such as embroidery or lace.
(heresiesfilmproject.org)
Gates of Paradise,
Schapiro, 1980, Brooklyn Museum
I first encountered this word femmage along with some of Schapiro’s works about a year ago, and
since then, femmage and the meanings
it carries have stayed with me, probably because of how effectively that one
word synthesizes Schapiro’s argument about the work and validity of women in a
male-dominated art world.
Since the Renaissance, a sharp division has existed between art and craft. On the one hand, art,
restricted to painting, sculpture, and architecture, and almost always
undertaken by educated white men, brings the connotation of genius,
inspiration, and significance. Craft
includes all media outside our understanding of art, such as fiber and
textiles, ceramics, glass, and wood, among many others. Craft is associated with the work of women
and non-Western peoples, and carries a connotation of mindless labor following
a pattern, and of trivial activity to pass the time.
For most of human history, the artistic efforts of women
were regimented and generally restricted to those activities closely associated
with the home: work with textiles, baskets, and other utilitarian crafts. As
late as the twenties, at the avant-garde art school the Bauhaus, Anni Albers
was restricted from the painting studio because of her gender, and reluctantly
deferred to weaving.
Anni Albers portrait (Wikimedia Commons)
Hanging, Anni
Albers, woven silk and rayon 1967 (designed 1926), Victoria and Albert Museum
However, later in the twentieth century, female artists
looking to carve a place for themselves in a male-dominated art world would
turn to traditional craft media and use it subversively, paying homage to the
anonymous female artists whose work consisted of quilts, doilies, baskets, and
other crafts. Schapiro and other
post-Modern feminist artists like Harmony Hammond argue for a different history
of abstraction, looking back to geometric, repetitive techniques such as
stitching and weaving that women used long before Kasimir Malevich painted Black Square in 1915.
Black
Square, Kazimir Malevich, 1915, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
(( A famed example of radically pure abstraction, and a
milestone in the history of modernism. ))
Hunkertime, Harmony Hammond, 1979-80; installation photo by Brian Forrest, from the WACKsite by the Museum
of Contemporary Art.
(( An alternative, post-Minimalist abstraction driven by
repetitive female techniques such as wrapping, weaving, and stitching. A bodily and sensual answer to Black Square and other minimal works.
))
Rather than adopt Western theories about what constitutes
excellent design and important concepts, artist Faith Ringgold, like Miriam
Schapiro, looks back to a different, less acknowledged, history of art—her own
lineage as an African American woman from Harlem. Ringgold started painting on unstretched
canvas, and began collaborating with her mother, Willi Posey, to create quilted
borders for her paintings, thus acknowledging traditional African American
craft, and promoting a spirit of collaboration that is foreign to the Western
ideal of high art. Ringgold also combines
texts and sometimes performs stories with her works, terming them story quilts and reflecting the African
traditions Ringgold wants to honor. By
looking to an unacknowledged art heritage, Ringgold subverts the expectations
of Western modernism, asserting the importance and relevance of her own
trajectory of art history.
The French Collection Part I, # 4: The Quilting Bee at Arles, Faith Ringgold, 1991, private collection.
The term femmage encapsulates
this dialectic of opposition to the canonical Western view of art history’s
trajectory. Femmage uses the word collage,
a term intimately associated with Cubism, one of the great cornerstones of
Western art history and a movement that embodies all our stereotypical
associations of fine art: fame, artistic genius, difficult for a lay person to
understand, and monumental masterpiece paintings, to name a few. Femmage
takes the word collage and denies all
of that importance, subverting the word to refer to an alternate history of art,
one that exists in female traditions and includes collaboration, textile and
fiber techniques, and honors the efforts of women who were long excluded from
the canon of Western art history. And
of course, by using femmage as a name
for her own works, Schapiro transforms her works into a direct reply to
Picasso’s collages, thus asserting their importance and breaking into the canon
of art history.
Still Life with Chair
Caning, Pablo Picasso, 1912, Musée Picasso
Connection, Miriam Schapiro, 1978,
University of Iowa Museum of Art
So, besides honoring Miriam Schapiro, I’m respectfully
appropriating her term and using it as the vision for this blog. For Schapiro’s work Connection, she asked women she met at lectures and events each to
send her an example of a handmade textile, and incorporated these disparate elements
in one unified composition. Similarly,
this blog discusses different works of art, different experiences and events,
and demonstrates the influences of various people and ideologies, yet the
separate entries come together to form and explain one unified worldview. Like Schapiro’s compositions, this collection
of writings is a femmage.
