Woman up! London is fizzing with fiery feminist art

In London this month, there are two shows dedicated to women’s activism. Tate Britain’s ‘Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990’ is an exhaustive walkthrough of 20 years of protest, soundtracked by Gina Birch’s guttural 3 Minute Scream (1977). Richard Saltoun’s ‘Women’s Work is Never Done’ features artists since the post-war period who use art as a political tool. As proven in both, fighting for women’s rights is arduous work.

Sutapa Biswas is showing in ‘Women in Revolt!’ alongside 100 pioneering names including Linder, Sonia Boyce and The Neo Naturists. Her formidable Housewives with Steak-Knives (1985) looms over visitors. Biswas renders the gender-fluid Hindu goddess Kali as a blade-wielding housewife, with the heads of white men strung around her neck and holding a flag emblazoned with Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (1612-13).

“It was important to include Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting in order to draw parallels across the globe in terms of violence against women,” says Biswas, who painted the work as a student at Leeds University. She was the first South Asian woman to graduate from Leeds and become a member of the Black Arts Movement. The first historical works she encountered at university were Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840) and Manet’s Olympia (1863), which were discussed in terms of technique rather than their distressing racial content. Her painting addresses the erasure of westernised art history, and the blank background references Rauschenberg’s White Paintings.

“This icon leaps out of a metaphorical white space,” she says. “I was very used to seeing effigies of Hindu deities; they often celebrate feminine power. The fact she isn’t called ‘Kali with steak-knives’, but ‘housewife’, talks about the kind of protest involved in highlighting how undervalued domestic labour is.” When first exhibited at the ICA in London in 1985, a visitor spat between Kali’s eyes.

Penny Slinger’s Bride’s Cake series is also at Tate. The photographs depict the artist surrounded by a giant cake that reveals her genitals. The works adeptly combine the bride’s presumed lily-white innocence with her sexual and domestic responsibilities. When the images were shown at Flowers in 1973, the police shut down the exhibition.

Slinger believes there have been radical changes to marriage since. “We have seen the emergence of same-sex weddings, the styling of new kinds of wedding vows, and less conventional approaches to accompanying rituals,” she says. “We have not evolved beyond this to cater for the emerging needs of individuals, male or female, to find connection with others in ways more related to tribal dynamics and bonding than to the outgrown nuclear family.”

Slinger often used her body as the site of protest. “I was my own billboard, not advertising the latest perfume, but broadcasting my desire to be truly seen as the fully sentient, multi-dimensional being that I am,” she says. “I am currently chipping away at that next glass ceiling: the way in which women in their older years are viewed. I am not willing to accept the invisibility that emerges to swallow a woman who is no longer the sexually magnetic creature she was.”

‘Women’s Work is Never Done’ features 20th-century heavyweights such as Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse. The show highlights the power of art to fight political oppression. “Things are constantly being negotiated,” says curator Catherine de Zegher. “We cannot say that we have reached an equitable outcome, and, of course, this is not unique to the condition of women. Hard-fought victories are often lost and must be struggled for again. I am very conscious of the work involved in this, and the cost to an individual life, but I believe in the potential of what may be.”

Ideas of community are present throughout both exhibitions, not only in the multitudes of activist groups but their engagement outside the art world bubble. “These are artists who have opened matters that have come to be critical to our thinking of the world,” considers De Zegher. “Artists such as Anna Maria Maiolino and Cecilia Vicuña who, after lives of working unacknowledged, have received the Golden Lion in Venice, a life achievement award. Often very slight, daily gestures have astonishing consequences.”