Dissidances. The title of the exhibition suggests a potential reading which subsumes two basic aspects of the artist's work: its critical, non-conformist nature in terms of the politico-artistic situation she has lived through during her career and the importance of movement and of the body as vehicles for articulating her discourse. Organized chronologically, the show presents her work as a unitary project in which past and present become blurred, as in the ancient fables and narratives that have been an inspiration to her.
Nancy Spero (Cleveland, Ohio, 1926) is one of
the pioneers of feminist art and was a key
figure on the dissident New York scene of the
1960s and 70s, along with artists like Judy
Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Martha Rosler,
Faith Ringold and Adrian Piper, among others.
Nancy Spero. Dissidances is the first major
retrospective of this artist's work to be
mounted in both Europe and the United
States. The title of the exhibition, taken from
the text by Hélène Cixous for the catalogue,
suggests a potential reading which
subsumes two basic aspects of the artist's
work: its critical, non-conformist nature in
terms of the politico-artistic situation she has
lived through during her career and the
importance of movement and of the body as
vehicles for articulating her discourse.
Organized chronologically, the exhibition
presents her work as a unitary project in
which past and present become blurred, as
in the ancient fables and narratives that have
been an inspiration to her.
In 1959 Nancy Spero and her husband, Leon
Golub, both of them figurative painters
established in Chicago, moved with their
children to Paris, where they lived from 1959
to 1964, fleeing the preponderance of
abstraction on the North-American art scene.
In that city Spero made contact with literary,
more than artistic, intellectual circles and got
deeply involved in readings that would be
fundamental, later on, for her work, as in the
case of the writings of Artaud. During these
early years the artist created a series of works
grouped together under the title of Black
Paintings (1959-1960). These are figurative
pictures of a lyrical expressionism, focusing
on themes like night, maternity and lovers,
through which characters wander against
dark backgrounds laboriously created via the
accumulation of layers of paint. The feeling of
isolation and impasse that these works
transmit correspond to the artist's personal
and professional situation at the time.
Spero and Golub returned to New York in
1964, at a moment when opposition to the war in Vietnam and the Civil Rights
movement had begun to play a huge role in
her country. Her political commitment helped
her to escape from her isolation and
endowed her with a voice of her own, which
would henceforth become the basic
research motif in her work. Spero jettisoned
painting on canvas, a medium she
considered to be male, and settled for the
use of paper, whose fragility endowed her
painting with a new temporality, procedural
quality and expressiveness, as occurs with
the series War (1966-1970). In them, Spero
gives free rein to her anger and disgust visà-
vis the war, through manifestos in which
she introduces explicit gender imagery and
many-layered metaphors about the obscenity
and violence of power.
Her works are
suffused with tongues and phallic bombs,
helicopters and defecating mushroom
clouds and phrases from military slang. This
is an obsessive set of pictures that creates a
sort of hieroglyph or visual writing.
In 1969 Spero distanced herself from the
politico-military debate of the time in order
to create a group of works based on texts by
the French poet Antonin Artaud, the Artaud
Paintings (1969-1970). In them she
compulsively cites the poet in order to
express and exorcise the ire and alienation
she was feeling as an artist. These works
evolved towards the vast Codex Artaud (1971-
1972), consisting of 34 scrolls made up of
sheets of paper glued end-to-end. Openended
in format, this multifarious piece,
which recalls ancient writings, marks the
mature phase of her work and became a
turning point in the art of the 1970s.
Spero's participation in the feminist
movement - she collaborated with WAR
(Women Artists in Revolution)- led the artist to
deal with issues like women's torture and pain,
whilst conveying their strength and freedom.
This is the way of Marduk (1986) in which she
combines images and texts with references to
the sumerian myth Marduk and Tiamat that tell
us about the origins of human civilization. The torture of Tiamat denounce hate and cruelty
against women since this early times.
Nowadays “Tiamat” continue being affected
by the same attacks in prisons all around the
world, said Spero in 1983.
In the eighties Spero abandoned the
written word in favor of the female body as a
vehicle for expressive language. She adopts
a deliberately optimistic tone in order to
underline the power of the imagination and
of hope, in opposition to tyranny and
domination. In Godness Nut (1989) several
female figures proceeding from various
historical moments alternate in an extended
space, combining presence and emptiness
on the blank page. Nut, goddess of egyptian
heaven, inspire this work as a symbol of hope
and protection against adversity.
By the end of the 1980s Spero extended
her lexicon to include architecture.
In this
way she did away with any obstacle between
the work and the space it was shown in,
obliging viewers to participate much more
actively by altering their way of looking and
their position. In 1998 Spero produced an
installation called Let the Priests Tremble… in
the Ikon Gallery in London, the central part of
which we reproduce in the exhibition. In it,
strong, athletic women dance to the sound of a passage from an essay by Hélène Cixous
from her book The Laugh of the Medusa.
The 1980s and 90s were years in which she
created numerous exhibitions and achieved
critical recognition. From then on, Spero's
work became more exuberant and affirmative,
and expressed a kind of "utopia" involving the
possibility of change. Even so, she didn't turn
her back on themes and procedures that had
interested her since the beginning of her
career, like pain, destruction or violence. The
exhibition reflects this duality in the work
Ballad of Marie Sanders, an installation in
which she reworks the text with a 1934 Bertolt
Brecht poem about a Gentile woman tortured
for having had sexual relations with a Jew, as
a way of recording the suffering concealed
beneath oppressive regimes.
Finally, in Maypole: Take No Prisoners (2007), an
installation produced for the Venice Biennale,
Spero has gone back to a recurrent theme in her
work and, alas, in the politics of her country: war.
The piece is a maypole with 200 treated and
painted aluminum heads that, in the words of the
artist, she has cannibalized from her war
paintings of the 1960s. With this piece we close
the temporal circle of her trajectory; we go back
to the beginning and encroach on the
chronological boundaries of the retrospective.
This exhibition has been organized and produced by Museu d´art Contemporani de Barcelona
and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía de Madrid in collaboration with Centro Andaluz
de Arte Contemporáneo, Consejería de Cultura, Junta de Andalucía.
An extensive catalogue of the exhibition has been published featuring essays by Benjamin
Buchloh, Helène Cixous, Mignon Nixon and a selection of Nancy Spero writings.
Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo
Monasterio de la Cartuja de Santa Maria de Las Cuevas, Avda. Americo Vespucio - Sevilla