2 November 2019

In Seeing Ourselves Frances Borzello discusses Women’s Self Portraits and argues contemporary women’s self-portraiture could be a genre in itself. There is an enormous amount of useful information about historic female artists in the book and the context in which they were working. However most interesting to me are the chapters about contemporary women’s self-portraits.  

 

During the first wave of Feminist art in the 1970s Borzello links women’s experience of consciousness raising, to the use of their own bodies in their work. Showing how artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll1975 reclaimed the female nude, choosing to display her own body, wrenching it away from traditional art historic ideas of erotic objectification. Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document 1978-79 and Susan Hiller’s Ten Months 1970 do this in different ways, making the personal very much political. Borzello describes this presentation of abstract issues through the artist’s body as a ‘Feminist version of personification’. She goes on to show how this simplistic way of dealing with being a woman (artist) in contemporary society was gradually dropped in favour of something more subtle and complex. Health became a key subject for many – Jo Spence’s and Hannah Wilke’s photography – the autobiographical self-portrait, also seen in Tracy Emin’s video works such as ‘How it feels: why I never became a dancer’. Eventually leading to Jenny Saville’s monumental nudes, a view of the nude that shakes viewer’s assumption’s and prejudices.

 

I found the book inspiring though it left me about lots of questions about my own work and about painting versus photography as a medium. The questions about my own work centre around how courageous you have to be to so honestly use your body in this way and whether or not I have it in me. I think most interesting of all is all the different ways in which women have used their bodies, or the trace of their bodies, in their work. Helen Chadwick in particular blurs the line between self-portraiture and the art of ideas in Piss Flowers 1991-92 and Viral Landscapes 2006. 

 

Borzello, F. (1998, expanded edition 2016) Seeing Ourselves, Women’s Self Portraits London: Thames and Hudson Limited