NANCY SPERO (1926, Cleveland – 2009, New York)
“The one thing that artists must possess above all other qualities is immense courage.” (Jean
Rouch) For more than half a century, Nancy Spero’s courage propelled a
practice of enormous imagination that moved across painting, collage,
printmaking, and installation, constructing what Spero once called a
peinture féminine that could address – and redress – both the struggles
of women in patriarchal society and the horrors perennially wrought by
American military might. Spero’s art is ambiguous, using a complex
symbolic language incorporating goddess-protagonists drawn from Greek,
Egyptian, Indian, and pagan mythologies.
Her career was also fueled by her
enduring dialogue with her husband Leon Golub, whom she met in the late
1940s at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1959 to 1964
the couple lived in Paris, where Spero produced the Black Paintings,
somber, figurative works, marking Spero’s first consistent oppositions
to the prevailing conventions in art making.
It was with the War Series (1966-70),
produced during the Vietnam war in New York, that Spero established her
politicization of painting. She constructed a picture of conflict as
orgy, its grotesque realism being all the more disturbing for what Spero
once described as its “weird combination of the celebratory and the
horrendous”.
Spero joined the Art Workers Coalition in 1968, Women Artists in
Revolution in 1969, and became a founding member of the women-only
cooperative Artists in Residence Gallery (A.I.R.).
The series of scroll works Codex
Artaud (1971/72), which have been described as the first works of
Post-Modernism, used collage to juxtapose text and image, the linearity
of their elements recalling hieroglyphics, pieces of text taken from
Antonin Artaud’s writings exposing her “anger and disappointment at the
art world and at the world as a whole”.
Following the Artaud series, Spero began to work on her pioneering and
critically lauded scroll works: Hours of the Night, 1974 (Whitney Museum
of American Art), Torture of Women, 1976 (National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa) and Notes in Time on Women, 1979 (Museum of Modern Art, New
York).
I am speaking of equality, and
about a certain kind of power of movement in the world, and yet I am not
offering any systematic solutions.
Nancy Spero, quot. Hans Ulrich Obrist and Galerie Lelong
LEON GOLUB (1922, Chicago – 2004, New York)
Leon Golub first came to prominence
during the 1950s as a part of the Monster Roster, whose work depicted
monsters and human/animal hybrids. At this time he realized that
contrary to the tenets of the prevailing Abstract Expressionists,
representation of actions and events was crucial in experiencing the
modern world. Leon Golub and Nancy Spero were leading figures in
activist artists’ groups such as Artists and Writers Protest Against the
War in Vietnam (1960s-70s) and Artists Call Against American
Intervention in Latin America (1980s).
Leon Golub’s work is about power and
the recurring misuse of power through violence as an expression of
organized, often state-sponsored, oppression and brutality. A
fundamental tension is at the heart of his paintings, a tension between
the figures and the canvas as well as between the role of the artist and
the wider background of society. Golub described his work as “a
definition of how power is demonstrated through the body and in human
actions, and in our time, how political and industrial powers are
shown…“
In the Napalm series, produced during
Vietnam war, the body emerged as the symbol of conflict – the central
source of pain and distress. The relationships between black and white
soldiers in the Vietnam and Mercenaries paintings echo the racial
tensions in the US. The Mercenaries and White Squad series, begun in
1979, reference the subversion of war into acts of terrorism and
torture, seen by many as linked with America’s interventionist foreign
policy, while the Riot paintings illustrate the violence in urban
everyday-life.
In his last years Leon Golub broke
with structured, confrontational images, but his language still remained
sardonic. Dogs, lions, and cyborgs are now representing elements of
aggression, the eerie, and irrational.
I have pictured some of the events
and some of the kinds of experiences that undercut our current world
pictures, that is to say the effects of power and domination, the uses
of interrogation to control dissidence or opposition, how such
behaviours effect the consciousness and psychic responses of victimizers
and victims and also to indicate some of the public and private
behavioral gestures of men acting out real time reactive scenarios.
Leon Golub 1948-1996, Do Paintings Bite?, hrsg. von HU Obrist, Cantz 1997 and Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2000
