A new eros: sexuality in women's art before the feminist art movement

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Content A NEW EROS: SEXUALITY IN WOMEN’S ART BEFORE

THE FEMINIST ART MOVEMENT

by

Rachel Middleman

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)

August 2010

Copyright 2010 Rachel Middleman

ii
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Richard Meyer, who has provided
me with guidance, support, and inspiration throughout this project. I will take what I
learned from him into all my scholarly pursuits. Professor Nancy J. Troy offered me
constructive advice on every level from how to frame my dissertation to how to
navigate the academic world as a young scholar. Professor Akira Lippit introduced
me to the world of avant-garde and experimental film, and his insights kept theory in
the picture for me. I would also like to thank Professor Anne Friedberg who told me
to follow my instincts and to whose intellectual creativity I aspire.
Having the opportunity to interview artists and those who worked closely with
them has enhanced my project greatly. I thank these people for their generosity in
sharing with me their personal experiences: Donald Goddard, Eunice Golden, Marco
Nocella, Joan Semmel, Marsie Scharlatt, Carolee Schneemann, and, especially, Anita
Steckel whose friendship I value deeply.
Research for this dissertation was assisted by grants from the University of
Southern California’s Art History Department, Visual Studies Graduate Certificate
Program, and the Center for Feminist Research. These grants, along with a Research
Assistantship at Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery
of Art, allowed me to pursue archival research in Los Angeles, New York, and
Washington D.C. A Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art
enabled me to complete the research and writing of my dissertation. I am most
grateful to these institutions for their support.

iii
I would like to thank the staff of a number of libraries and archives for their
assistance during my research: Wendy Hurlock Baker, Marisa Bourgoin, and the staff
at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Robert Haller and Andrew
Lampert at the Anthology Film Archives in New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art
Library and Archives; Electronic Arts Intermix, New York; Getty Research Institute,
Los Angeles; Marsie Scharlatt with the Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive;
Elizabeth Mariko Murray at the Museum of Sex in New York; Museum of Modern
Art Library, New York; National Gallery of Art Library, Washington; Marco Nocella
at Ronald Feldman Gallery; and Beth Kleber at the School of Visual Arts Archives.
Discussions with my wonderful graduate school colleagues at USC and beyond
aided the conception and writing of my dissertation, and their friendship made it fun. I
thank especially Kate Heckmann, Alison Hoffman, Aleca LeBlanc, Leta Ming, Amy
Von Lintel, and Sandra Zalman who have given me support personally and
professionally.
I thank all my family and friends for their endless encouragement and
understanding. My aunt, Nancy Hervey, hosted me for long periods in D.C., and my
friend, Christopher Turnier, generously gave me a place to stay numerous times in
New York. Sara Nolan was always my first editor and trusted friend. I cannot thank
my grandmother, Mae McDonald, enough for her support in my graduate school
pursuits. Finally, I thank my husband, Adam Aaronson, whose belief in me has never
wavered and whose love keeps me going on a daily basis and my parents, Lee and
Donnie Middleman, who have supported and encouraged me throughout my life.

iv
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

List of Figures v

Abstract xv

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Early Experiments: Eros in Carolee Schneemann’s Films and
Performances 41

Chapter 2: The Problem of Figurative Erotic Art: Marjorie Strider and Pop Art 103

Chapter 3: Abstract Erotic Art: Hannah Wilke’s Sculptures and the Problem
of Feminist Heterosexuality 153

Chapter 4: Humor, Sex, and Censorship: Anita Steckel and the Founding of
the Fight Censorship Group 208

Conclusion 273

Bibliography 302

Appendices:
Appendix A: Carolee Schneemann, “Introduction to ‘Erotic Films by
Women,’ Telluride Film Festival, September 4, 1977” 321

Appendix B: Carolee Schneemann, “From tape 2 of Kitch’s Last Meal
(super 8 film 1973-1977)” 323

v

List of Figures

Figure 1: Martha Edelheit, Flesh Wall with Drawing Table, 1964-65, oil on 38
canvas, three panels, 80 x 195 in.

Figure 2: Martha Edelheit, Flesh Wall with Ladder, 1965, acrylic and oil on 38
canvas, 84 x 91 in.

Figure 3: Installation photograph, Martha Edelheit, Byron Gallery, 1966, 39
photograph by D. E. Nelson

Figure 4: Installation photograph, Martha Edelheit, Byron Gallery, 1966, 39
photograph by D. E. Nelson

Figure 5: Martha Edelheit, DX2, 1969-71, acrylic on linen, 42 x 68 in. 40

Figure 6: Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude #57, 1964, synthetic 40
polymer on composition board, 48 x 65 in.

Figure 7. Page from Jack Bacon, Eros in Art (Los Angeles: Elysium Inc., 1969) 40

Figure 1.1: Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975, photograph by 95
Anthony McCall

Figure 1.2: Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll 95

Figure 1.3: Carolee Schneemann, Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions, 1963, 96
photographs by Erró

Figure 1.4: Carolee Schneemann and Robert Morris in rehearsal for Site, 1964, 96
photograph by Hans Namuth

Figure 1.5: Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964, 16mm, color, sound, 6 min. 97

Figure 1.6: Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964, silver print 97

Figure 1.7: Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964, photograph by Al Giese 98

Figure 1.8: Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964, photography by Harold 98
Chapman

Figure 1.9: Village Voice, November 26, 1964, cover 99

vi
Figure 1.10: Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, 1964-67, 16mm, color, silent, 99
22 min

Figure 1.11: Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, film still 99

Figure 1.12: Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, film still 100

Figure 1.13: Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, film still 100

Figure 1.14: Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, film still 100

Figure 1.15: Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, film still 101

Figure 1.16: Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, film still 101

Figure 1.17: Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses notebook, c. 1964-67 101

Figure 1.18: Carolee Schneemann and Anthony McCall, postcard, c. 1971 102

Figure 2.1: Marjorie Strider, Triptych, 1963, acrylic paint, laminated pine on 143
masonite, three panels, 105 x 72 in., installed at the University of Art,
Philadelphia, March 2010, photograph by author

Figure 2.2: Village Voice, January 1964, cover 143

Figure 2.3: Village Voice, January 1964, cover, detail 144

Figure 2.4: Marjorie Strider, Triptych II, Beach Girl, 1963, carved wood on 144
board with acrylic and extensions, 72 x 52 in. each

Figure 2.5: Playboy Bunny outfit, c1960 144

Figure 2.6: Playboy, 1953, cover 145

Figure 2.7: Marjorie Strider, Triptych, 1963, detail 145

Figure 2.8: Village Voice, January 1965, cover 145

Figure 2.9: Marjorie Strider, Woman with Radish, 1963, acrylic and wood 146
With wooden extensions, 6 x 4 ft.

Figure 2.10: Marjorie Strider, Pace Gallery, 1965, installation photograph 146

Figure 2.11: Arena of Love, Dwan Gallery, 1965, exhibition announcement 146

vii

Figure 2.12: Arena of Love, Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, installation 147
Photograph, in Artforum, February 1965

Figure 2.13: Wynn Chamberlain, Untitled, 1963, oil on canvas (destroyed) 147

Figure 2.14: Marjorie Strider, Mouth, 1963, oil and plaster on board, 147
48 ! x 54 ! x 6 " in., installed at the University of Art, Philadelphia,
March 2010, photograph by author

Figure 2.15: Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe’s Lips, 1962, synthetic polymer, 148
silkscreen ink and pencil on canvas

Figure 2.16: Marjorie Strider, Triptych, in Artforum, May 1965 148

Figure 2.17: Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude #55, 1964, assemblage, 148
in Artforum, May 1965

Figure 2.18: Larry Rivers with Lamp Man Loves It, 1966, in Erotic Art ’66, 149
Sidney Janis Gallery

Figure 2.19: Ernst Krichner, Girl Under a Japanese Umbrella, 1909, oil on 149
canvas

Figure 2.20: Willem de Kooning, Woman, I, 1950-52, oil on canvas 149

Figure 2.21: Roy Lichtenstein, Girl with Ball, 1961, oil and synthetic polymer 150
paint on canvas

Figure 2.22: Marjorie Strider, installation in front of Architectural League, 150
New York, Streetworks IV, 1969

Figure 2.23: Photograph of woman looking at Marjorie Strider’s installation 150
on 5
th
Avenue & 45
th
Street, New York City, New York Times, March 17, 1969

Figure 2.24: Marjorie Strider, Frame Dress worn by Deborah Hay, 1969, 151
wooden frame, 3 x 4 x 1 ft.

Figure 2.25: Marjorie Strider, Eros Kalos, 1972, foam, epoxy, and masonite, 151
68 x 65 in.

Figure 2.26: Marjorie Strider, Building Work with Urethane Foam at 112 151
Greene Street, November 1970, in Art & Artists, January 1972

viii
Figure 2.27: Marjorie Strider, Soda Box, 1973, mixed media including 152
Styrofoam, 4 x 4 ft.

Figure 2. 28: Marjorie Strider, Brooms, 1972, Styrofoam, urethane foam, 152
50 in. each

Figure 3.1: Hannah Wilke, Barbara Rose, 1970, latex and cloth 194

Figure 3.2: Hannah Wilke, Barbara Rose, latex and cloth, 1970, current state, 194
Hannah Wilke Collection & Archives, Los Angeles

Figure 3.3: Exhibition photograph, Hetero Is, NYCATA Gallery 1966, 195
Archives of American Art

Figure 3.4: Exhibition photograph, Hetero Is, NYCATA Gallery 1966, 195
Archives of American Art

Figure 3.5: Exhibition photograph, Hetero Is, NYCATA Gallery 1966, 196
Archives of American Art

Figure 3.6: Exhibition photograph, Hetero Is, NYCATA Gallery 1966, 196
Archives of American Art

Figure 3.7: Arnold Wells, “Raw Sex Art Exhibit,” The National Insider, 197
March 19, 1967

Figure 3.8: Joyce Greller, “Aesthetical Fuck,” The East Village Other, 197
December 15, 1966

Figure 3.9: Hannah Wilke, early ceramic sculptures c. 1963-66, 198
Ronald Feldman Gallery

Figure 3.10: Hannah Wilke, Untitled (Phallus) 1960s, partially glazed ceramic, 198
7 x 2 x 2 in.

Figure 3.11: Photograph of Hetero Is in Jack Bacon, Eros in Art 198
(Los Angeles: Elysium,1969)

Figure 3.12: Photograph of Hetero Is in Jack Bacon, Eros in Art 199
(Los Angeles: Elysium,1969)

Figure 3.13: Hannah Wilke drawing in Nous: The Sex Issue, 1966-67 199

ix
Figure 3.14: Hannah Wilke, Untitled, 1963-66, pastel and charcoal on paper, 199
19 ! x 24 in.

Figure 3.15: Installation photograph, Eccentric Abstraction in New York Times, 200
1966

Figure 3.16: Installation photograph of Primary Structures in Arts Magazine, 200
December 1966-January 1967

Figure 3.17: Installation photograph of Eccentric Abstraction in Arts 200
International, November 1966

Figure 3.18: Eva Hesse, Several, 1965, acrylic, papier-mâché, latex, and 201
rubber, 84 x 11 x 7 in.

Figure 3.19: Hannah Wilke, Untitled, 1966, in The Hudson Review, 1967 201

Figure 3.20: Hannah Wilke, Venus Cushion, 1972 (no longer extant) 201

Figure 3.21: Hannah Wilke pouring latex, 1974 202

Figure 3.22: Hannah Wilke’s studio, 1971, Ronald Feldman Gallery 202

Figure 3.23: Hannah Wilke, San Antonio Rose, 1966 202

Figure 3.24: Pink Champagne, 1975, latex and metal snaps, c. 5 ft. 203

Figure 3.25: Hannah Wilke, S.O.S. Starification Object Series, 1974-82 203

Figure 3.26: Hannah Wilke, S.O.S. Starification Series, 1974-82 203

Figure 3.27: Publicity photograph of Jane Russell for Outlaw, 1943 204

Figure 3.28: Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #6 204

Figure 3.29: Hannah Wilke, Marxism and Art, Beware of Fascist Feminism, 204
1977, poster

Figure 3.30: Artists Make Toys, 1969, The Clocktower, exhibition poster 205

Figure 3.31: Hannah Wilke, Advertisements for Living: Double Portraits, 205
1966-84, cibachrome diptych, 28 x 81 in.

x
Figure 3.32: Hannah Wilke, Laundry Lint (C.O.’s), 1973, double-fold laundry 205
lint, 11 x 96 in.

Figure 3.33: Hannah Wilke, Art News Revised, May 1976, 1976, photograph 206
by eeva-inkeri

Figure 3.34: Yayoi Kusama in Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show, 206
Gertrude Stein Gallery, New York, 1964, photograph by Rudolph Burkhardt

Figure 3.35: Yayoi Kusama, collage, c. 1966, no longer extant, photograph by 207
Hal Reiff

Figure 3.36: Hannah Wilke, advertisement for exhibition at Ronald Feldman 207
Fine Arts, 1972

Figure 4.1: Anita Steckel, New York Skyline series, 1970-80, mixed media 256
6 x 9 ft., (no longer extant)

Figure 4.2: Anita Steckel, New York Skyline series, (no longer extant) 256

Figure 4.3: Anita Steckel, Giant Woman on Empire State, from the Giant 256
Woman series, 1969-72, ink and oil on found photograph, 36 x 48 in.

Figure 4.4: Photograph of Anita Steckel in her studio in BolaffiArte magazine, 257
1974

Figure 4.5: Mom Art exhibition announcement in The New York Times, 257
June 16, 1963

Figure 4.6: “Mom Art,” Esquire magazine, October 1963 257

Figure 4.7: Anita Steckel, Birthmarks, Mom Art, 1963, mixed media on found 258
Photograph

Figure 4.8: Anita Steckel, Magnolia Dreamin’, Mom Art, 1963 258

Figure 4.9: Anita Steckel, Return of the Wet Nurse, Mom Art, 1963 259

Figure 4.10: Desert: To Lenny Bruce, Mom Art, 1963 in Tuli Kupferberg, The 259
Mississippi: (A Study of the White Race) (Birth Press, 1962)

Figure 4.11: Anita Steckel, The Expatriate, Mom Art, 1963 260

Figure 4.12: Pablo Picasso, Woman in a Fish Hat, 1942 260

xi
Figure 4.13: Roy Lichtenstein, Woman with a Flowered Hat, 1963 260

Figure 4.14: Pablo Picasso, Femme Assise au Chat, 1941 261

Figure 4.15: Anita Steckel, The Company Picnic, Mom Art, 1963 261

Figure 4.16: Tapestry designed after Watteau Swing, c. 1730-60 261

Figure 4.17: Anita Steckel, Annual Banquet of the Lampshade Manufacturers 262
of Argentina, Mom Art in Esquire, October 1963

Figure 4.18: Anita Steckel, The Beginner, Mom Art, 1963 262

Figure 4.19: Anita Steckel, Fat Man: death grows fat on war, Mom Art, 1963 262

Figure 4.20: Anita Steckel, The Librarian, Mom Art, 1963 263

Figure 4.21: Anita Steckel, The Imposter, Mom Art, 1963 263

Figure 4.22: Anita Steckel, Das Wunderkind, Mom Art, in Esquire, October 264
1963

Figure 4.23: Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936 264

Figure 4.24: Anita Steckel, Girl Scout, Mom Art, in Esquire, October 1963 264

Figure 4.25: Thomas Eakins, The Biglin Brothers Racing, 1872 265

Figure 4.26: Anita Steckel, Last Supper, Mom Art, 1963 265

Figure 4.27: Anita Steckel, Last Supper, Giant Woman series, 1969-72 265

Figure 4.28: Anita Steckel, Mom Art exhibition announcement, May 1963 266

Figure 4.29: Anita Steckel, Solo, Giant Woman series, 1969-72 266

Figure 4.30: Candy Darling with Anita Steckel’s The Big Rip Up in Status, 266
May 1969

Figure 4.31: Anita Steckel, The Big Rip Up, 1964 267

Figure 4.32: Anita Steckel with New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town, in 267
Status, May 1969

xii
Figure 4.33: “Anita’s World,” Best Bets, New York Magazine, 1969 267

Figure 4.34: Anita Steckel, Nostalgia, Giant Woman series, 1969-72 268

Figure 4.35: Invitation to Contemporary Erotica, Van Bovenkamp Gallerie, 268
1965, Archives of American Art

Figure 4.36: Anita Steckel, Freud, pencil on photograph, 30 x 40 in. 268

Figure 4.37: Anita Steckel, Group Soup, Food Box series, 1966 269

Figure 4.38: Anita Steckel, Head of Lettuce, Food Box series, 1966 269

Figure 4.39: Anita Steckel, Tongue Sandwich, Food Box series, 1966 269

Figure 4.40: Image from Crawdaddy magazine, January 30, 1972 270

Figure 4.41: Image from Crawdaddy magazine, January 30, 1972 270

Figure 4.42: Anita Steckel, Just Waiting for the Bus, Giant Woman series, 270
1969-72, ink and oil on found photograph, 36 x 48 in.

Figure 4.43: Image from Crawdaddy magazine, January 30, 1972 271

Figure 4.44: Photograph of Anita Steckel’s studio at Westbeth in Avant Garde, 271
1971

Figure 4.45: Anita Steckel, New York Skyline series, mixed media on canvas 271

Figure 4.46: Anita Steckel, Legal Gender, 1971, collage and ink on paper, 272
2 ! x 6 in., reproduced in Photostat copy

Figure 4.47: Anita Steckel, New Mona Takes the Brush, Giant Woman series, 272
1969-72, ink and oil on found photograph, 36 x 48 in.

Figure 4.48: Anita Steckel, Pierced, Giant Woman series, 1969-72, ink and 272
oil on found photograph, 36 x 48 in.

Figure 5.1: Anita Steckel, Fight Censorship Group appearance at The New 293
School for Social Research, October 1973

Figure 5.2: Joan Semmel, Fight Censorship Group appearance at The New 293
School for Social Research, October 1973

xiii
Figure 5.3: Louise Bourgeois, Martha Edelheit, and Judith Bernstein, Fight 293
Censorship Group appearance at The New School for Social Research,
October 1973

Figure 5.4: Eunice Golden, Louise Bourgeois, and Martha Edelheit, Fight 294
Censorship Group appearance at The New School for Social Research,
October 1973

Figure 5.5: Juanita McNeeley, Eunice Golden, and Louise Bourgeois, Fight 294
Censorship Group appearance at The New School for Social Research,
October 1973

Figure 5.6: Anne Sharp, Juanita McNeeley, and Eunice Golden, Fight 294
Censorship Group appearance at The New School for Social Research,
October 1973

Figure 5.7: Louise Bourgeois, Sleep II, 1967 295

Figure 5.8: Detail of Bourgeois, Femme Maison series, 1945-47, in 295
Lucy Lippard, From the Center, 1976

Figure 5.9: Louise Bourgeois, Fillette, 1968 295

Figure 5.10: Judith Bernstein, A.I.R. Installation, 1973 296

Figure 5.11: Judith Bernstein, Horizontal, 1973, charcoal on paper, 9x12 ! ft. 296

Figure 5.12: Anne Sharp, pastel, in The International Museum of Erotic Art 296
catalog, 1973

Figure 5.13: Anne Sharp, cover, James Bertolino, Terminal Placebos (New 297
Rivers Press, 1975)

Figure 5.14: Anne Sharp, image in James Bertolino, Terminal Placebos (New 297
Rivers Press, 1975)

Figure 5.15: Barbara Nessim, Woman Wearing Headdress, watercolor, in 298
First International Exhibition of Erotic Art (Kronhausen Books, 1968)

Figure 5.16: Barbara Nessim, Woman Girl, 1973, watercolor, pen, and ink, 298
16 x 12 in.

Figure 5.17: Joan Glueckman, calendar, 1973, Archives of American Art 298

xiv
Figure 5.18: Eunice Golden, Purple Sky, 1969, oil on canvas, 48 x 72 in. 299

Figure 5.19: Joan Semmel, Erotic Yellow, oil on canvas, 72 x 72 in. 299

Figure 5.20: Joan Semmel, Red White and Blue, oil on canvas, 48 x 58 in. 299

Figure 5.21: Anita Steckel in her studio, New York Magazine, February 1974, 300
photograph by Henry Groskinsky

Figure 5.22: Louise Bourgeois in her studio, New York Magazine, February 300
1974, photograph by Henry Groskinsky

Figure 5.23: Juanita McNeely in her studio, New York Magazine, February 300
1974, photograph by Henry Groskinsky

Figure 5.24: Joan Semmel in her studio, New York Magazine, February 1974, 301
photograph by Henry Groskinsky

Figure 5.25: Hannah Wilke in her studio, New York Magazine, February 301
1974, photograph by Henry Groskinsky

xv
Abstract

While the 1970s are known for the rise of feminism and female sexual
imagery, my research shows that women were already creating a wide range of
sexually themed art in the 1960s. Even before the formation of the first women
artists’ group, Women Artists in Revolution, signaled the beginning of a collaborative
feminist art movement in 1969, female artists working in a variety of media—
including filmmaker Carolee Schneemann, painter Marjorie Strider, sculptor Hannah
Wilke, and collagist Anita Steckel—began redefining the boundaries of contemporary
art through their sexually explicit works. My dissertation argues that erotic art made
by women artists was central to the radical changes that took place in American art
and politics during this period—from the crumbling of modernist aesthetics to the
expanding field of art practice to the emergence of the feminist art movement. In the
midst of a male-dominated contemporary art world, the public display of sexual
content by female artists challenged the paradigm of formalism and laid the
groundwork for a discussion of gender and sexuality in representation. These artists’
battles with censorship and discrimination attest to the considerable challenge their
work posed not only to the rules of art but also to accepted social standards for
women.

1
Introduction
In the spring of 1966, artist Allan Kaprow contributed an article to the Village
Voice that specifically addressed the rise of women’s erotic art. Prompted by an
exhibition of figurative painter Martha Edelheit’s work at Byron Gallery in New York,
Kaprow described this emerging phenomenon of contemporary art: “Female fantasy is
pervasive, boundless, unconcerned with definition and measure. When sex is its
primary involvement, the involvement is total and therefore shameless. It is for this
reason terrifying to men.” In contrast to “heterosexual male artists,” whom Kaprow
saw as “still excessively conventional” in their treatment of sex, women’s art “plays
no games.”
1

Edelheit’s exhibition featured a series titled Flesh Walls, including three
mural-sized paintings of intertwined male and female nude bodies rendered in palettes
of pinks, blues, yellows, and greens (Figs. 1 and 2).
2
Installation photographs show
the enormous scale of these paintings as they hung in the gallery (Figs. 3 and 4).
Close examination of Flesh Wall with Drawing Table (1964-65) suggests that the
impact of Edelheit’s work came not only from its powerful aesthetics, but also from

1
Allan Kaprow, “Female Art: No Games,” The Village Voice 11, no. 28 (April 28, 1966): 12. Martha
Edelheit, Byron Gallery (April 12-May 7, 1966).

2
The Flesh Walls series (1964-66), made specifically for this exhibition, combined Edelheit’s previous
experimentation with pattern and decoration with her interest in nude figures. She also exhibited
smaller watercolors and objects in the exhibition. See checklist in Byron Gallery records, circa 1950s-
1991, bulk 1960-1971, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Edelheit had been making erotically themed work since 1961, in the form of watercolors and
paintings, and had two previous solo shows in New York at the Reuben Gallery in 1960 and the Judson
Gallery in 1961. Martha Ross Edelheit, Strings Masks and Paintings, Galleria BE’19 (April 22-May
10, 1992), n.p. Martha Ross Edelheit [artist file], Museum of Modern Art Library, New York.

2
the knowledge that it was made by a woman.
3
In the painting, the artist’s table in the
foreground denotes the space of the studio, overwhelmed by the numerous, tangled
bodies covering the surface of the six-by-sixteen-foot canvas in bright, unnatural
colors. Surrounded by these vibrant and explicit nudes, sits a window into another
space, depicted in black and white, in which we see the artist herself painting the
scene. Caught in the midst of work, the artist’s imagination seems to leap beyond the
frame of her canvas, “boundless,” as Kaprow declared. By representing herself in the
painting, turned away with a long braid sweeping down her back, Edelheit asked the
viewer to identify with her position as creator. In this gesture, the work draws
attention to Edelheit’s agency as a female artist in the process of making erotic art.
Kaprow found Edelheit’s “female fantasy” to be indicative of the frank
representations of sexuality appearing in art made by women artists. He saw this body
of work as a direct challenge to traditions of erotic art, which had long assumed a male
heterosexual perspective. “In the arts, sexual themes are increasingly prevalent on a
conscious and forthright plane,” Kaprow explained, “the two strongest and most
critical confrontations with such [sexual] subject matter have been made by ‘minority’
groups among artists: male homosexuals and women.”
4
While “homosexual camp
neutralizes passion,” women’s art, Kaprow believed, was “direct and concrete.”
5
For
Kaprow, Edelheit’s giant images collapsed the abstract or allegorical distance usually

3
Flesh Wall with Drawing Table and Flesh Wall with Ladder are now titled Flesh Wall – Female and
Mixed Flesh Wall respectively, according to the artist’s website: www.marthaedelheit.com.

4
Kaprow, “Female Art: No Games,” 12.

5
Ibid. Kaprow mentioned that the “question of explicit lesbian erotic art” should be raised but does not
offer any characterizations of such work.

3
constructed to guard the viewer from explicitly sexual content. The realism of
Edelheit’s nudes—that is, their direct confrontation of the viewer—negated the sexual
myths usually upheld in fine art through formal treatment and romantic symbolism.
Furthermore, Kaprow seized on the significance of such work for its time—its power
to disrupt artistic traditions and social conventions of heterosexuality.
6

Indeed, Kaprow was not the only one to recognize the provocative nature of
Edelheit’s paintings. Other reviewers cited the “frank sensuality,” “provocative
positions,” and “weighty reality” of the nudes in these “quite erotic works.”
7
The
critics complimented Edelheit’s direct portrayal of sexualized bodies, expressed
through the formal construction of space, scale, line, and color. However, the
reception of the show also reveals the critics’ difficulty in accounting for Edelheit’s
aesthetic choices in rendering the nude. For example, the New York Herald Tribune
praised “the artist’s wit, skilled draughtsmanship and concern with spectral color,” but
also noted “a certain lack of taste.”
8
This response supports Kaprow’s assessment that
these works disrupted aesthetic expectations.
9

6
At the conclusion of his review, Kaprow names Lee Bontecou, Jean Follett, Marisol and Yayoi
Kusama, as women artists making work that raises similar issues.

7
Colta Feller, “Martha Edelheit,” Arts Magazine 40, no. 8 (June 1966): 49; E. McG., “Edelheit at
Byron,” unidentified newspaper source (April 21, 1966), n.p.; J.W., “The Galleries: Martha Edelheit,”
New York Herald Tribune (April 23, 1966), n.p. Byron Gallery records.

8
J.W., “The Galleries: Martha Edelheit,” n.p.

9
In a letter to the Byron Gallery from an angry visitor who identified herself as a staff member of a
local, unnamed museum, aesthetic criticism turned into moral outrage. In the letter, the woman likened
Edelheit’s work to “a sick woman’s obscene pictures” that were “not only pornographic but degrading
to a gallery such as yours.” Looking at the installation photos over forty year later, it is hard to imagine
such a dramatic reaction; however it does give insight into the conservative nature of the public at the
time and the power of Edelheit’s paintings to arouse controversy. Ruth A. Pursel to Byron Gallery,
April 14,

1966, Byron Gallery records.

4
In January of 1973, the first large-scale museum exhibition comprised
exclusively of the work of female artists contextualized Edelheit’s work within the
feminist art movement.
10
Women Choose Women at the New York Cultural Center
included Edelheit’s DX2 (1969-71), a frontal double portrait of a nude male model
reclining against a satiny background (Fig. 5).
11
In order to initiate this landmark
exhibition, the organizers, Women in the Arts (WIA), sent a letter to six institutions
demanding simultaneous shows of women’s art throughout New York City and staged
a demonstration outside the Museum of Modern Art with the same request. WIA
argued that a profusion of art made by women would be the first step in correcting the
museums’ long history of poorly representing female artists.
12
The first survey book
on the feminist art movement, The Power of Feminist Art, speculates that Women
Choose Women was “probably the first time that art concerned with feminist

10
Women Choose Women, The New York Cultural Center (January 12-February 18, 1973).

11
The work previously appeared in Cindy Nemser, “Representational Painting in 1971: A New
Synthesis,” Arts Magazine 46, no. 3 (1971-72): 42.
Artist-members of WIA Pat Passloff, Ce Roser, and Sylvia Sleigh, art historian Linda Nochlin,
art critic Elizabeth Baker, and Mario Amaya and Laura Adler from The New York Cultural Center
selected the more than 100 works for the exhibition out of a pool of WIA’s 500 members. Lucy
Lippard wrote the catalogue introduction: “A Note on the Politics and Aesthetics of a Women’s Show,”
Women Choose Women (New York: New York Cultural Center, 1973). For critical reception and
reports of the show see Grace Glueck, “Pinks and Pastels and Parabolas,” The New York Times
(December 10, 1972): D29; James R. Mellow “Art: Focusing on Works by Women,” The New York
Times (January 14, 1973): 57; Rosalyn Drexler, “Women on Their Own,” The New York Times (January
28, 1973): 129; Ellen Lubell, “Reviews: Museums: Women Choose Women, New York Cultural
Center,” Arts Magazine 47, no. 4 (February 1973): 66-67; April Kingsley, “Women Choose Women,”
Artforum 11, no. 7 (March 1973): 72-73. “Women Choose Women: Art Show Opens in N.Y.,” Art
Workers Newsletter 2, no. 10 (1973).

12
The open letter from WIA to The Brooklyn Museum, The New York Cultural Center, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and
Whitney Museum of American Art began, “Women in the Arts, an organization of more than 300
members, today proposes a revolutionary concept of museum exhibitions,” Women Choose Women, 4.

5
representation of sexuality was seen by a broad public in New York.”
13
The same
year, a feminist publication based in Washington D.C., Off Our Backs, witnessed an
“amazing phenomenon” that “women all over the country and in all media are
describing unprecedentedly explicit sexual content.”
14
Burgeoning feminist
organizations and publications in the early 1970s excitedly promoted the fact that
contemporary female artists made sexual art. Although women artists had
experimented with such content during the previous ten years, it took the collaborative
feminist art movement to introduce their work to the broader museum-going public.
In the process of Edelheit’s identification with the feminist movement, however, the
earlier history of her nudes as erotic art in the 1960s was lost.
Looking back to Edelheit’s show at the Byron Gallery in 1966 and the
responses it engendered opens up a number of issues that are central to this
dissertation: the importance of erotic art made by women in the 1960s in challenging
both aesthetic and social standards; the struggle of art critics to fully account for work
that portrayed sexuality in a non-traditional way; and the relationship between erotic
art made by women in the 1960s and the later feminist art movement.
While the 1970s are associated with rise of feminism and female sexual
imagery, my research shows that women were already creating a wide range of
sexually themed art in the 1960s. Even before the formation of the first women

13
Judith K. Brodsky, “Exhibitions, Galleries, and Alternative Spaces,” in Norma Broude, Mary D.
Garrard and Brodsky, The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and
Impact (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1994), 108.

14
Maryse Holder, “Another Cuntree: At Last, a Mainstream Female Art Movement,” Off Our Backs 3,
no. 10 (September 30, 1973): 11. Off Our Backs began publication in February 1970.

6
artists’ group, Women Artists in Revolution, signaled the beginning of a collaborative
feminist art movement in 1969, female artists working in a variety of media began
redefining the boundaries of contemporary art through their sexually explicit works.
From 1963 to 1973, particularly in New York City, erotic imagery by women artists
moved from being a private pursuit of individual artists into the public arena of
museum and gallery exhibitions. This dissertation focuses on this ten-year period
beginning in 1963, when artists including Martha Edelheit, Carolee Schneemann, Joan
Semmel, Anita Steckel, Marjorie Strider, and Hannah Wilke began producing art that
dealt openly with issues around sex. This dissertation concludes with 1973, when
Steckel founded the Fight Censorship Group to advocate for women’s sexual
expression and to protest restrictions on phallic imagery in museums. Rather than
focusing on the impact of feminism on women’s art in the 1970s, as surveys of
feminist art have done, I investigate the earlier history of sexual art by female artists
beginning with experiments in erotic art in the 1960s. I argue that erotic art made by
women artists was central to the radical changes that took place in American art and
politics during this period—from the crumbling of modernist aesthetics to the
expanding field of art practice to the emergence of the feminist art movement.
Through four case studies on filmmaker and performance artist Carolee
Schneemann, painter Marjorie Strider, sculptor Hannah Wilke, and collagist Anita
Steckel, I illuminate the artistic contributions of female artists who addressed the issue
of sex in the 1960s. Working in new directions in a variety of media, these artists
probed aesthetic possibilities for generating sexual content. Schneemann

7
experimented with performance and non-narrative film; Strider pushed the definitions
of painting and sculpture with build-outs from the flat canvas; Wilke tested the use of
latex in her hand-folded sculptures; and Steckel montaged her fantastical drawings
with found photographs. In these works, the artists took on the issue of sexuality from
the perspectives of their heterosexual and female experiences, thereby subverting
traditional and patriarchal values in both art and society.
In the midst of a male-dominated contemporary art world, I argue, the public
display of sexual content by these artists challenged the paradigm of formalism and
laid the groundwork for a discussion of gender and sexuality in representation. Each
chapter investigates the critical reception of these artists’ works when they were first
exhibited in the mid-1960s in order to show how the work existed within aesthetic
debates in avant-garde art and in parallel to the rising women’s liberation movement.
These artists’ battles with censorship and discrimination attest to the considerable
challenge their work posed not only to the rules of art but also to accepted social
standards for women. Indeed, the public exhibition of women’s erotic art helped
initiate a visual discourse of sexual difference that would later be formalized by the
feminist art movement in the 1970s. However, the majority of the work discussed in
this dissertation was produced before the term “feminist art” designated a category of
artistic practice. After the feminist art movement took hold in the 1970s, debates over
the appropriate methods of feminist art complicated the status of sexual art made by
women before 1970, particularly in the case of work that explicitly represented female
heterosexuality. Thus, this study does not seek to claim these artists’ early works as

8
preexisting examples of feminist art, but rather to uncover the historically specific
intersections of gender, sexuality, and aesthetics in women’s art practice before the
feminist art movement.

Erotic Art in the 1960s
In his annotated bibliography of the literature on erotic art, art historian Eugene
Burt states the difficulty in defining and differentiating the terms erotica, erotic art,
and pornography. “Erotic art,” he notes, “is art that primarily addresses some
aspect(s) of the human sexual experience.”
15
Although vague, his definition includes
two important ideas. First, he defines erotic art as “art,” something we presumably
can assess by the materiality or aesthetics of the object. Second, the content of the
work deals with “human sexual experience.”
In the 1960s, art critics used the term “erotic art” to describe works that went
further than “the nude” in depicting sexual experience. Since art critics’ purview
consisted of gallery openings, museum exhibitions, and artist-sponsored events, the
question was not whether erotic art was art per se, but whether or not the art was good
or bad and whether it was obscene or offensive. For example, artist and critic Brian
O’Doherty wrote a long explanation to the readers of Art & Artists in 1966, explaining
that the difference between pornography and art hinged on the aesthetic nature of the
object:

15
Eugene Burt, Erotic Art: An Annotated Bibliography with Essays (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1989),
xvii.

9
Pornography is a very applied art aimed at getting down to the thalamus as
quickly as possible. Thus it uses the most immediately recognisable visual
conventions (of which photography is sometimes one). These are usually of a
debased naturalism which the pornographee [sic] doesn’t even realise is a
convention. The more efficiently pornography functions, the more it uses the
artistically debased conventions of its time, all aimed at cutting out how the
image is transferred. It is immediate, non-symbolic, easy to read, and in a
hurry. Genuine erotic art is generally more difficult to read, cool, not in a
hurry. Artistic value militates against pornographic bias. In other words,
eroticism in art, even in such a brute as Courbet, turns out to be a connoisseur’s
language, like any other high art…”
16

The deceptively simple idea that “artistic value” separates erotic art from pornography
creates the problem of how to assess such value. What are the criteria for judging a
work of erotic art? This question will be subject to considerable debate in the
historical period examined in this dissertation. In the 1960s, the term “erotic art” had
currency as a genre of figurative art. However, by the end of the decade, eroticism
could be found in a completely abstract work. Most notably, art critic Lucy Lippard
replaced the notion that erotic art must figuratively delineate sexual subject matter
with the idea that sensuous and erotic experience could be communicated through
abstract form.
Qualifying a work of art with the label “erotic art” caused problems in the
1960s because formalism was still the dominant mode of art criticism in New York.
Historians of modernist art considered great art “original” for its formal innovations—
its reaction to or distance from any pre-existing academic category or specific genre of
subject matter. Although many celebrated artists produced erotic art, it was largely
ignored or suppressed. For example, the most influential formalist art critic from the

16
Brian O’Doherty, “Urogential Plumbing,” Art & Artists 1, no. 8 (November 1966): 17.

10
1940s to the 1960s, Clement Greenberg, heralded nineteenth-century French painter
Gustave Courbet as “the first real avant-garde painter” because of Courbet’s
formalism. “A new flatness begins to appear in Courbet’s painting,” Greenberg wrote
in 1940, “and an equally new attention to every inch of the canvas, regardless of its
relation to the ‘centers of interest.’”
17
In Greenberg’s evaluation, Courbet’s all-over
treatment of the canvas prevailed over his depictions of contemporary life within
them.
18
And, yet, Courbet also produced a highly realistic erotic painting of a female
nude, L’Origine du monde (1866), one hundred years before the peak of the erotic art
boom in America—a painting hidden from the public eye in private collections until
1988 when it was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum.
19
While the painting now sits
prominently at the Musée d’Orsay, in the 1960s, modernist art history could not have
accounted for the piece as its erotic content could hardly be suppressed by formalist
concerns.
Despite formalist prohibitions, erotic art exploded in the 1960s, encouraged by
the publication of radical theories of sexual liberation, the loosening of censorship
laws, and the proliferation of mass-produced pornographic visual material in the
United States. The genre arguably gained its art world sanction through a number of
group exhibitions staged at such influential contemporary art galleries as Sidney Janis

17
Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” (1940) reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The
Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986), 29.

18
Ibid.

19
Courbet Reconsidered, The Brooklyn Museum (November 4, 1988-January 16, 1989). The work
became part of the Musée d’Orsay’s collection in 1995. See Linda Nochlin and Sarah Faunce, Courbet
Reconsidered (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); and Nochlin, “L’origine du monde’: The
Origin without an Original,” October 37 (summer 1986): 76-86.

11
in New York.
20
The Pop artists associated with Janis, most of them male, are known
for their appropriation of sexually explicit imagery from popular culture, for example,
Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude series (1961-68) (Fig. 6).
21
However,
artists produced a far broader range of erotic art at the time, including a significant
body of work by women artists who sought to redefine the very category of erotic art
for themselves.
Although critics used the term “erotic art” extensively during the 1960s to refer
to works that might contain anything from explicit sexual imagery to classical female
nudes, they did not question erotic art’s history as a genre dominated by male authors
and audiences until women stepped into those roles. I argue that women artists who
chose to articulate their ideas about eroticism in their art, in turn, instilled that work
with the power both to challenge the naturalized assumptions about the artist as a
heterosexual male and to problematize the content of erotic imagery. Moreover, the
critical attention to erotic art in the 1960s brought out the issues of the representation
of sexuality and of the long history of objectification of women—topics that both
artists and art historians would later respond to in the 1970s with such texts as Woman
as Sex Object (1972) edited by Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin. The sexual
revolution has been generally recognized as a precursor to the second wave feminist

20
The First International Girlie Exhibition Pace Gallery, New York (1964); Contemporary Erotica,
Van Bovenkamp Gallery, New York (1965); The Arena of Love, Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (1965);
Erotic Art ’66, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York (1966); Hetero Is, NYCATA Gallery, New York
(1966-67); and Inaugural Exhibition, The Gallery of Erotic Art, New York (1969).

21
In his scholarship on Wesselmann, David McCarthy dates the series to 1968 ending with Great
American Nude #99. He views Great American Nude #100 (1970-73) as an afterthought. McCarthy,
The Nude in American Painting, 1950-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 212n97.

12
movement, and, as a part of that history, the boom of erotic art exhibitions
significantly contributed to the development of feminist art and criticism.

Histories of Erotic Art
Whereas curators in the 1960s publicly promoted and exhibited erotic art at the
same time as critics debated its aesthetic and social merits, Kenneth Clark’s The Nude:
A Study in Ideal Form (1956) remained the only art historical authority on the subject.
An often-cited passage by Clark touches briefly on the connection between the nude
and eroticism:
No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige
of erotic feeling, even though it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not
do so, it is bad art and false morals. The desire to grasp and be united with
another human body is so fundamental a part of our nature that our judgment
of what is known as ‘pure form’ is inevitably influenced by it; and one of the
difficulties of the nude as a subject for art is that these instincts cannot lie
hidden, as they do, for example, in our enjoyment of a piece of potters, thereby
gaining the force of sublimation, but are dragged into the foreground, where
they risk upsetting the unity of responses from which a work of art derives its
independent life.
22

It seems that while the nude necessarily “aroused” an erotic feeling, it was also in
danger—more so than any other type of art—of allowing human “instincts” to cloud
the experience of a work of art as autonomous. As we shall see, in the decade
following the publication of Clark’s book, there would be general consensus among
art historians and critics that art, in order to be art, should never have eroticism as its
primary goal.

22
Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Form (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 29.

13
There were, however, a number of popular books on the subject of eroticism in
art published during the 1960s. These books, A Pictorial History of Love (1966) and
Eros in Art (1969) for example, are full of illustrations of sex from both high art and
popular culture but contain little text.
23
Drawing on issues of freedom of speech and
battles against censorship of “obscene” materials, publishers of such books positioned
them as antidotes to sexual repression. This literature, along with articles on erotic art
written for magazines like Playboy, constructed a mainly heterosexual male view of
erotic art, and, by extension, of sex, by focusing on representations of heterosexual
intercourse and nude women in sexually suggestive or explicit poses. Eros in Art, for
example, featured contemporary photographs of such subjects mingled with works of
art. A page from the book juxtaposes a drawing by French illustrator Tomi Ungerer, a
painting by artist Judy Gerowitz (who would later change her name to Judy Chicago),
a photograph of a man and woman in the midst of sexual activity, and a clip from a
review of an erotic art exhibition from the East Village Other (Fig. 7).
24
Before art
historians took on the genre, these books and alternative newspapers contextualized
the growing interest and acceptance of erotic art within the changing sexual mores of
the time.
25

23
Paul Tabori, A Pictorial History of Love (London: Spring Books, 1966) and Jack Bacon, Eros in Art
(Los Angeles: Elysium, 1969). For further references see Burt, Erotic Art: An Annotated Bibliography
with Essays.

24
Judy Gerowitz changed her name to Judy Chicago in 1970, according to the artist: “in an effort to
liberate herself from male-dominated stereotypes.” See www.judychicago.com. 1970 was also the year
she founded the Feminist Art Program at California State University, Fresno.

25
Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen’s publications on their erotic art collection are an exception to this
genre of popular books on erotic art in the 1960s. The Kronhausens, psychologists by trade, were
largely interested in the educational and therapeutic properties of erotic art. Their ahistorical approach

14
Not until the 1970s did scholars begin to examine the subject of erotic art. Art
historical surveys of eroticism and sexuality in art, as well as new books on “the nude”
appeared in the early 1970s, beginning with Studies in Erotic Art (1970).
26
Edited by
Theodore Bowie and Cornelia V. Christenson, this anthology included essays by
Robert Rosenblum on Picasso and Leo Steinberg on Michelangelo, among others.
Such well-known art historians no doubt legitimized the attention to eroticism in art, at
least in the case of art history’s most canonical artists.
However, with a few notable exceptions, there has been little consideration of
art made by women in the art historical literature on erotic art or “the nude.”
27
When
art historians discuss the erotic work of female artists, they do so in terms of feminist
re-appropriation of the female body or feminist views of the male nude in work made
after the feminist art movement emerged in 1970. For example, in the most recent

to cataloging their collection is represented in their books which contain limited text and little
attribution information. Nevertheless, the Kronhausens focused solely on objects designated as art and
differentiated such work from pornography unlike the books mentioned above. Eberhard and Phyllis
Kronhausen: The First International Exhibition of Erotic Art, exh. cat. (Copenhagen, Denmark:
Kronhausen Books, 1968); Erotic Art: A Survey of Erotic Fact and Fancy in the Fine Arts (New York:
Grove Press, 1968); Erotic Art: Sammlung Kronhausen, exh. cat. (Geneva: Societe d’Etudes
Financieres, 1969). Erotic Art 2 (New York: Grove Press, 1970); Erotic Bookplates (New York: Bell
Press, 1970); The International Museum of Erotic Art (San Francisco, 1973); A Gallery of Erotic Art
(New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 1974); The Complete Book of Erotic Art: Erotic Art, Volumes 1 & 2
(New York: Bell Publishing Company, 1978); and an essay “Modern Erotic Art,” Art & Artists 5, no. 5
(August 1970): 14-17.

26
Edward Lucie-Smith, Eroticism in Western Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972); Volker
Kahmen, Eroticism in Contemporary Art (London: Studio Vista, 1972); Volker Kahmen, Erotic Art
Today, Eng. ed. (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1972); Thomas B. Hess and Linda
Nochlin, Woman as Sex Object (New York: Newsweek, 1972); Philip Rawson, Erotic Art of the East
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973); William Gerdts, The Great American Nude (New York:
Praeger, 1974); Peter Webb, The Erotic Arts (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975).

27
Margaret Walters, The Male Nude (New York: Paddington Press, 1979); Gill Saunders, The Nude: A
New Perspective (New York: Harper and Row, 1989); Edward Lucie-Smith, Sexuality in Western Art
(New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991); David McCarthy, The Nude in American Painting, 1950-1980
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Alyce Mahon, Eroticism and Art (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005).

15
survey on the subject, Eroticism and Art (2005), author Alyce Mahon writes, “The
pursuit of peculiarly feminine and feminist eroticism began with what feminist art
historians have called ‘vulvic art’ or ‘cunt art.’”
28
Mahon refers only to art made post-
1970 and to art with a very specific type of imagery when defining “the pursuit of
peculiarly feminine and feminist eroticism,” even though in her brief survey she also
recognizes that Schneemann’s 1960s work “liberated female sexuality, making her
own erotic body integral to the work.”
29
Margaret Walters’s The Male Nude (1979)
and David McCarthy’s The Nude in American Painting, 1950-1980 (1998) offer
compelling analyses of male nudes painted by women artists. However, as the
examination of artworks in this dissertation will show, women’s incursions into erotic
art went beyond vaginal iconography and male nudes.
One significant attempt to account for the breadth and depth of women’s
sexual art, including erotic art, nearly appeared in the mid-1970s. Artist Joan Semmel,
whose colorful figurative paintings of heterosexual couples engaged in sexual acts will
be discussed in the conclusion of this dissertation, complied a manuscript between
1973 and 1976 entitled “A New Eros: Sexual Imagery in Women’s Art.” Although
never published, it included a compilation of essays and images of nearly one hundred
works of art.
30
In the introduction, Semmel described the broad range of content
found in this body of work:

28
Mahon, “Eroticism in Art,” 208.

29
Ibid., 196.

30
The manuscript includes essays by Joan Semmel, Lucy Lippard, Carol Duncan, April Kingsley,
Eunice Lipton, Rosalind Schneider, and Elizabeth Weatherford. Joan Semmel, “A New Eros: Sexuality

16
From vaginal iconography to the male nude, from phallic symbols to
androgynous biomorphic shapes, from figures fucking to menstruating
mothers, the prolonged probe of women’s art touches the raw nerves of a
system whose most basic structure is being questioned.
31

She intended to gather this diverse imagery under the rubric of sexuality in order to
show its challenges to “patriarchal myths.” I have titled this dissertation after her
manuscript, in admiration for its attempt to record a movement of women’s sexual art.

The Sexual Revolution, Women’s Liberation, and the Feminist Art Movement
The increased visibility of erotic art in the 1960s related directly to the “sexual
revolution,” a term that characterizes a period of social change in America when
attitudes towards sexuality drastically altered and sex emerged as a topic of discussion
in the public realm. Historians define the sexual revolution through such events as the
introduction of the birth control pill, the release of new scientific research on
sexuality, the publication of treatises by radical social theorists, the legal battles over
obscenity and pornography, and, in the later 1960s, the emergence of women’s and
gay liberation movements.
32
Alfred C. Kinsey’s scientific studies on sexual behavior

in Women’s Art,” n.p. Carolee Schneemann papers, 1959-1994, Getty Research Institute, Research
Library, Accession no. 950001. Richard Meyer describes the manuscript as “a dazzling dossier of
sexually suggestive and explicit art by nearly one hundred contemporary female artists.” Meyer, “Not
Me: Joan Semmel’s Body of Painting,” in Solitaire: Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Joan
Semmel, ed. Helen Molesworth (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University,
2008).
The publisher Hacker Art Books could not find a distributor for Semmel’s manuscript, “A
New Eros.” Ellen Lubell, “Joan Semmel: Interview,” Womanart (winter 1977-78): 14-29.

31
Joan Semmel, “A New Eros: Sexuality in Women’s Art,” n.p.

32
David Allyn, Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution, an Unfettered History (New York,
Routledge, 2001); John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in

17
in the United States—Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual
Behavior in the Human Female (1953)—are most frequently cited for their wide
effects on changing attitudes about sex. According to Intimate Matters: A History of
Sexuality in America, Kinsey’s first book “propelled sex into the public eye in a way
unlike any previous book or event had done…the Kinsey reports stimulated a
nationwide examination of America’s sexual habits and values.”
33
The reports’
cataloguing of previously private sexual habits brought out the discrepancy between
perceptions and lived experiences of sexuality in the U.S. without resorting to
moralizing conclusions.
Publications dealing specifically with female sexuality and experience also
began to appear. Simone de Beauvoir’s polemical The Second Sex (1949), first
published in translation in the U.S. in 1953 and then repeatedly during the 1960s,
investigated women’s status as the inessential “Other.”
34
Betty Friedan’s The
Feminine Mystique (1963) scathingly criticized the harmful effects that the norms of
femininity inflicted on middle-class American women. These books raised women’s
consciousness about their unequal, gendered positions within the contemporary
culture. Practical “sex manuals” and popular magazines openly talked about sex.
Most famously, Helen Gurley Brown’s autobiographical book, Sex and the Single Girl
(1962), advised young, unattached women on how to enjoy their sex lives. She later

America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); Jeffrey Escoffier, ed., Sexual Revolution (New York:
Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003).

33
D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 285.

34
At least four different New York publishers issued copies of The Second Sex during the 1960s.

18
reinvented Cosmopolitan magazine for the same audience of sexually liberated
women. These publications exemplify some of the ways sex became a greater part of
the popular culture directed towards female consumption. Women had an important
stake in the sexual revolution as the new discourses about sex and inventions like the
birth control pill offered them new choices—and presented them with new problems.
35

The sexual revolution aided in raising public consciousness about pervasive
gender inequalities in American society and gave rise to the women’s liberation
movement. According to The Power of Feminist Art,
The modern feminist movement in America can be traced to the publication of
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the addition of the category of
sex to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the founding of the National
Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966.
36

Radical feminism defined by its insistence on gender as the central political issue
emerged in 1967 with the founding of New York Radical Women by Shulamith
Firestone and Pam Allen and expanded through the end of the decade.
37
The
following year proved crucial in American political life. In the midst of unrest spurred
by the assassinations of both Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as
race riots and war protests that spread across the country, radical feminism began to
take hold. A protest against the 1968 Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City attracted
national attention with the burning of bras and high-heeled shoes in a public
condemnation of “feminine” attributes. In New York, women discouraged by the

35
Allyn, Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution, an Unfettered History.

36
Broude, Garrard, and Brodsky, The Power of Feminist Art, 90. The Title VII of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 granted equal opportunity employment.

37
New York Radical Women became New York Radical Feminists in 1969.

19
sexism of the New Left united into new groups including The Feminists (out of
NOW), WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), and
Redstockings. The New York Radical Women published Notes from the First Year,
an anthology of influential feminist texts announced as “The first theoretical journal of
the modern Women's Liberation Movement.”
38

In 1969, the first feminist artists’ group, Women Artists in Revolution (WAR),
formed in New York out of the Art Worker’s Coalition (AWC) and launched the
feminist art movement. WAR members felt that the AWC did not take women’s
issues seriously, and so they founded an organization dedicated to concerns of women
artists. More feminist art groups appeared in New York in 1970, including the Ad
Hoc Women Artists’ Committee and the Women, Students and Artists for Black Art
Liberation, while Judy Chicago opened her women’s program at California State
University at Fresno. 1971 saw increased organization including the founding of
Women in the Arts and the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the
Arts.
In 1971, Art News dedicated its first issue of the year to the topic: “Women’s
Liberation, Woman Artists and Art History.” The issue opened with Nochlin’s
formative essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”
39
Although often
cited as the origin of feminist art history, the very publication of this special issue of
Art News shows that feminist questions likely already circulated within the art world,

38
Notes from the First Year (New York: New York Radical Women, 1968).

39
Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Art News 69, no. 9 (January
1971): 22-39, 67-71.

20
if not academia. The concerns of feminist art historians ran parallel to the political
concerns of the women’s movement and to the professional concerns of living women
artists. The subtitle of Nochlin’s essay, “Implications of the Women’s Lib movement
for art history and for the contemporary art scene—or, silly questions deserve long
answers; followed by eight replies,” expressed the intended polemical nature of her
title question and the understanding of the dialogical nature of the issue. Nochlin
proclaimed that feminism “must come to grips with the intellectual and ideological
basis of the various intellectual or scholarly disciplines—history, philosophy,
sociology, psychology, etc.—in the same way that it questions the ideologies of
present social institutions.”
40
Just as feminist art practice questioned naturalized
assumptions of modernism, Nochlin called upon art historians to question the
ideological groundings of the discipline, “so we may see the unstated domination of
white male subjectivity as one in a series of intellectual distortions which must be
corrected in order to achieve a more adequate and accurate view of historical
situations.”
41
Such feminist critiques unmasked prejudices structured into the
discipline’s standards of valuation and inclusion, thereby revealing a long history of
discrimination against women in the art world.
Nochlin explored possible feminist approaches to art history in her essay,
beginning with the notion of recuperating women artists from history in order to add

40
Ibid., 23.

41
Ibid., 24.

21
them to the canon of great artists.
42
Next, she described a separatist approach that
would find women’s art different from men’s and therefore measure it against a
different set of criteria. However, while these approaches celebrated women artists,
she felt they fell short of challenging the discipline of art history itself. The standards
and assumptions of art history (and related structures of society and the art world) that
had allowed for the erasure of women from the history of art, needed to be questioned.
The real problem, as Nochlin saw it, stemmed from the institutional structures and
educational systems, including with them “everything that happens to us from the
moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs and signals.”
43
Thus, she
shifted the focus from the individual artist to the conditions of production. Her history
of the unavailability of the nude model to women artists from the beginning of the
modern period through the nineteenth century offers one example of how women’s
social and historical positions disadvantaged them in the art world. Nochlin’s work
spurred a growth in biographically and socially based feminist art historical literature
that documented the work of women artists.
44
Recovery of women artists and their
insertion into the canon of western art history constituted an important goal for
feminist art history, though influential feminist art historians later critiqued such

42
Ibid.

43
Ibid., 25.

44
Of an overview of the literature published in the 1970s after Nochlin’s essay see Lamia Doumato,
“The Literature of Women in Art,” Oxford Art Journal 3, no. 1 (April 1980): 74-77.

22
scholarship for not probing deep enough into the standards of the discipline that had
allowed for such exclusions.
45

While feminist art history in the early 1970s focused on women artists of past
centuries and on the methodologies of the discipline itself, feminist art criticism
provided the forum for discussion of contemporary art practice. Critics responded to
the challenges current women artists brought both to the traditions of fine art and to
their practical concerns about discrimination in their professional lives. The same year
“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists” appeared in Art News, Lippard
published “Sexual Politics, Art Style” in Art in America. In it, Lippard accounted for
the developing women’s art movement and gave a list of nine different ways women
experienced discrimination in the art world, offering such examples as, “‘That’s so-
and-so’s wife; I think she paints too’ and, from a gallerist, ‘Sorry, we already have a
woman.’”
46
Through her activism with such groups as the Ad Hoc Women Artists’
Committee, her critical essays, and her curatorial work on all-women exhibitions,
Lippard proved to be a pivotal figure in the feminist art movement.
47
In the catalog
for a 1971 exhibition, she defended her choice to curate a women-only show:
I took on this show because I knew there were many women artists whose
work was as good or better than that currently being shown, but who, because
of the prevailingly discriminatory policies of most galleries and museums, can

45
Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews provide an extensive list of feminist art history in this
vein in “The Feminist Critique of Art History,” The Art Bulletin 69, no. 3 (1987): 327.

46
Lucy Lippard, “Sexual Politics, Art Style,” Art in America 59, no. 5 (September/October 1971): 19.

47
See Lippard, “Prefaces to Catalogues of Women’s Exhibitions (three parts),” From the Center:
Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: Dutton, 1976), 38-55.

23
rarely get anyone to visit their studios or take them as seriously as their male
counterparts.
48

Like Nochlin, Lippard concerned herself with the sexist structures of the art world and
their very concrete effects on the professional lives of women artists.
In 1972, the feminist art movement grew through new publications, galleries,
exhibitions, and organizations. Cindy Nemser, Patricia Mainardi, and Irene Moss
started The Feminist Art Journal. The first women-only art spaces, Artists in
Residence (AIR) Gallery, Women’s Interart Center, and The Feminist Art Studio,
opened in New York, while the groundbreaking Womenhouse exhibition opened in
Los Angeles.
49
Also in 1972 the Women’s Caucus for Art developed under the
umbrella of the College Art Association to address the concerns of women working in
the arts; similarly, Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C hosted the first national
“Women in the Visual Arts” conference. Therefore, by 1973, when Women Choose
Women opened at the New York Cultural Center, women artists had well established
the feminist art movement.
50

The artists of focus in this dissertation—Schneemann, Strider, Wilke, and
Steckel—participated in the feminist art movement of the 1970s in various ways. The
emergence of the movement provided a new framework in which to present their
erotic art. However, since they produced work in the 1960s, before there was an
organized feminist art movement and before anyone applied the term “feminist” to art,

48
Ibid., 38.

49
Womenhouse was a project of the Feminist Art Program.

50
For a detailed report written during the 1970s about the effects of the women’s movement on the art
world, see Lawrence Alloway, “Women’s Art in the ‘70s,” Art in America 64, no.3 (May 1976): 64-72.

24
I use the more historically accurate terms “erotic art” and “sexual art” to describe the
artists’ early works. Nonetheless, I do address later debates in feminist art history and
criticism that influenced the reception of these works in order to demonstrate the
changes in perception brought about by the feminist art movement.
While most women artists and feminist critics have longed for a time when the
designation of “woman artist” would no longer be necessary, the reality is that, due to
discrimination in the art world and in society at large, women have a different
collective history in the field of art. My use of the category “woman artist” is
important to my study because I look at how gender played a role in these artists’
careers, particularly in their reception. I realize that the term “woman artist” is
problematic, particularly because it raises the question of whether women artists
should be judged by different criteria. In the introduction to her 1976 book, Lippard
wrote:
The most valid objection to the notion of a ‘woman’s art’ is the basic fear that an
individual’s art will not be seen with a free eye, or seen at all, if preconceptions
and categorizations overwhelm it. But it would be naïve not to realize the extent
to which this is already true in today’s art world.
51

Indeed, the idea of “women’s art” is even more problematic than that of “woman
artist,” however, the “basic fear” is the same. The artists studied in this dissertation
wanted to be seen as autonomous individuals who could compete in the art world
based on standards of quality and skill. Although feminists have critiqued such ideas
of universality, there remains a notion that art can be judged autonomously as good or
bad.

51
Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, 9.

25
My research builds on the work of feminist art historians in developing
historical and interpretive approaches to art made by women. A few scholars have
recently taken up the work of the artists central to this dissertation and argued for their
importance in the history of contemporary art. In the case of Schneemann, scholars
have begun to address the artist’s practice beyond the confines of feminism. Amelia
Jones’s book on body art interprets the performances of Schneemann and Wilke not as
universalizing female imagery but as postmodern critical practices that engage the
viewer.
52
Annette Kubitza delves into the relationship of Schneemann’s performances
to theories of sexual liberation in the context of the 1960s avant-garde. Kristine
Stiles’s research on Schneemann’s epistolary and performance practices also expands
our knowledge of the artist’s body of work.
53
Kalliopi Minioudaki has recently
published her argument that women’s Pop art was proto-feminist, and her essay
contributes historical support for my claims about Strider’s manipulation of sexual
imagery.
54
Saundra Goldman’s monographic dissertation on Wilke provides
substantial documentation of the artist’s life and career, and Richard Meyer’s essays

52
Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

53
Annette Kubitza, “Fluxus, Flirt, Feminist? Carolee Schneemann, Sexual Liberation and the Avant-
garde of the 1960s,” N. Paradoxa 15 (July/September 2001): 15-29; Kristine Stiles, “The Painter as an
Instrument of Real Time,” in Carolee Schneemann, Imaging her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003) and “Schlaget Auf: The Problem with Carolee Schneemann’s Painting,”
in Carolee Schneemann: Up to And Including her Limits (New York: New Museum of Contemporary
Art, 1996).

54
Kalliopi Minioudaki, “Pop’s Ladies and Bad Girls: Axell, Pauline Boty and Rosalyn Drexler,”
Oxford Art Journal 30, no. 3 (2007): 402-430.

26
on Steckel and the Fight Censorship Group ground my findings in the third and fourth
chapters.
55

Sexual Imagery and Feminism

Perhaps no topic has been as controversial among art historians, critics, and
artists identified with feminism as sexual representation. Equally as important as
recovering women artists to feminist art history in the 1970s was the analysis of sexist
representations of women in art made by men. Nochlin’s work again serves as a key
example. Her essay “Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art”
(1972) critiqued the category of erotic art as essentially “erotic-for-men.”
56
Her
analysis of the male viewpoint in traditional erotic art denaturalized the gendered
differences between images of men as representations of “power, possession, and
domination” and women as representations of “submission, passivity, and
availability.”
57
Nochlin and other feminist art historians took up this approach
reevaluating representations of women in light of social circumstances and patriarchal
ideologies.
When Carol Duncan’s article, “The Esthetics of Power in Modern Erotic Art,”
appeared in the first issue of the feminist journal Heresies in 1977, a visual essay titled

55
Saundra Goldman, “’Too Good Lookin’ to be Smart’: Beauty, Performance, and the Art of Hannah
Wilke” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas Austin, 1999); Richard Meyer, “Hard Targets: Male Bodies,
Feminist Art, and the Force of Censorship in the 1970s,” in Cornelia Butler, et al., WACK!: Art and the
Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007).

56
Hess and Nochlin, Woman as Sex Object; Studies in Erotic Art, 1730-1970.

57
Nochlin, “Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art,” reprinted in Women, Art, and
Power: And Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 142.

27
“Now Women Repossess Their Own Sexuality…” comprised of images of art by
women dating from 1968 to 1976 followed Duncan’s critique.
58
Duncan’s essay
targeted the subject of men’s modern erotic art as “frequently about the power and
supremacy of men over women.”
59
She demonstrated how male artists’ formal and
allegorical choices affirmed the lesser status of women through visual representation.
She explained how the belief in the power and moral goodness of high art protects
such works as Delacroix’s Woman in White Stockings (1832) or Willem de Kooning’s
Woman series from criticism and hides their ideological damage to women:
The modern masterpieces of erotic art that I have been discussing enjoy this
ideological protection even while they affirm the ideals of male domination and
female subjugation. Once admitted to that high category of Art, they acquire an
invisible authority that silently acts upon consciousness, confirming from on high
what social customs and law enforce from below.
60

The following article in this issue, “Now Women Repossess Their Own Sexuality…,”
responded as a visual feminist essay with images made by women.
The current art historical literature on early feminist art focuses on the ways
women repossessed female sexuality through images of the female body. In her essay,
“The Body through Women’s Eyes” in The Power of Feminist Art, Joanna Frueh
explained the historical significance of this tendency:
Seeing the body through women’s eyes was a critical aspect of women’s self
determination and self-actualization. Artists worked to wrest the
representation of the female body to some degree from patriarchal

58
The artists were Louise Bourgeois, Marisol, Ann Leda Shapiro, Dotty Attie, Joan Semmel, and Anita
Steckel.

59
Carol Duncan, “The Esthetics of Power in Modern Erotic Art,” Heresies 1, no. 1 (1977): 46.

60
Ibid., 50.

28
authority…Feminist artists transformed the female nude, and in so doing
became ‘cunt-positive.
61

Indeed, many feminist artists did focus on the female body as an important political
strategy, a way of bringing women’s experiences into the public realm in order to
legitimate them. Judy Chicago’s and Miriam Schapiro’s commitment to “central-
core” vaginal imagery was a way of asserting female sexual identity, and is a prime
example of how art history remembers 1970s feminist art. However, it is also
important to point out that when Chicago and Schapiro’s statements about “cunt art”
reached New York in 1971, in Everywoman and then in The Art Journal, some
feminists felt the concept to be reductive and responded negatively. Vocal among
their opponents were Cindy Nemser and her colleagues from The Feminist Art
Journal.
62

Whether using male or female imagery, feminist artists attempting to subvert
the masculine tradition of erotic art attracted criticism from other feminists in the
1980s for reproducing the sexualized female body. For example, in Old Mistresses:
Women, Art, and Ideology, Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock asked, “What is the
effect of these attempts to validate female experience, to reappropriate and valorize
women’s sexuality?” Parker and Pollock determined that these attempts ultimately
fail due to the fact that “they are easily retrieved and co-opted by a male culture
because they do not rupture radically meanings and connotations of women in art as

61
Joanna Frueh, “The Body Through Women’s Eyes,” in Broude, Garrard, and Brodsky, The Power of
Feminist Art, 192.

62
Cindy Nemser, "The Women's Art Movement," The Feminist Art Journal (winter 1973-74).

29
body, as sexual, as nature, as object for male possession.”
63
The authors saw work
depicting women’s sexuality as too entrenched in the patriarchal system of language
and in the unconscious, leaving deconstruction as the only possible course of action
for women. The introduction of psychoanalytic theory into feminist interpretation
(beginning with film theorist Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
in 1975) created another problem in accepting a simple role reversal between women
and men as sexual objects.
64
Mulvey’s essay identified scopophilic pleasure with male
sexual desire and power, and though her essay has been challenged and reworked, the
difficultly in accepting sexual imagery that seems to fit a traditional heterosexual
model remains. The debates about pornography in the 1980s raised additional
questions about the negative effects sexual imagery might have, particularly in
promoting violence to and degradation of women.
65
Putting aside these later
poststructural and psychoanalytic theories about the ideological and bodily harm
caused to women by sexual imagery, even when it is made by women, this dissertation
looks at a period of time in which women artists turned to expressions of heterosexual
female sexuality, pleasure, and desire as a form of liberation.

63
Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1981), 130.

64
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (autumn 1975): 6-18.

65
The group Women Against Pornography was founded in New York in 1979. Andrea Dworkin
became the best known figure of the feminist anti-pornography movement as an activist and writer. See
Woman Hating (New York: Dutton, 1974); Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Dutton,
1981) [published by at least four different presses that year]. Also see the anthology Laura Lederer, ed.,
Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography (New York: William Morrow, 1980). For alternative
views on the relationship between pornography and feminism and on the censorship of sexual art in the
1980s and early 1990s see Carol Jacobson, “Redefining Censorship: A Feminist View,” Art Journal 50,
no. 4 (1991): 42-55; and Carole E. Vance, “Feminist Fundamentalism: Women against Images,” Art in
America 81, no. 9 (1993): 35.

30
Feminist Heterosexuality

Female heterosexual visual pleasure, in particular, has been under-examined in
feminist art history because of the problem heterosexuality posed conceptually to the
feminist cause. The consciousness-raising about repressive forms of heterosexual
relationships for women—including sex, marriage, love, and rape—that took place in
the early 1970s may have limited the acceptance of work that could be read as
celebrating heterosexuality. In the 1990s, Jane Gaines looked back on the history of
feminist art and concluded that “feminist heterosexuality” had been erased from its
history.
66
She argued that artwork made by women that expressed heterosexuality
became conceptually unacceptable within the feminist movement because of the
power that it seemed inevitably to acquiesce to men.
Indeed, feminist theorists questioned many traditional aspects of heterosexual
relationships.
67
As early as 1968, with the publication of Kate Millett’s essay “Sexual
Politics: A Manifesto,” the notion that the relationship between the sexes was a
political one led to analyses of the power structures within heterosexual, interpersonal
relationships and sex practices.
68
Essays followed Millett under the rubric of radical
feminism that aimed at raising women’s consciousness about their roles in these types
of relationships, particularly regarding heterosexuality as a structure of patriarchal
society rather than as biologically determined necessity. Sheila Cronan’s “Marriage”

66
Jane Gaines, “Feminist Heterosexuality and Its Politically Incorrect Pleasures,” Critical Inquiry 21,
no. 2 (1995): 382-410.

67
See Anne Koedt, et al., Radical Feminism (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973) and Shulamith
Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex; the Case for Feminist Revolution, (New York: Morrow, 1970).

68
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970).

31
(1970) saw the institution as a structural equivalent to slavery and as a cultural
mechanism for sustaining inequality between men and women. Shulamith Firestone
in The Dialectic of Sex; the Case for Feminist Revolution theorized love as a method
of keeping women in a submissive role in heterosexual relationships.
69
The validity of
heterosexual women’s desire for sex could be questioned on any number of grounds—
the most sensational being expressed in the essay “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm”
(1968), in which Anne Koedt outlined her suspicions that men perpetuated the “myth”
in order define women “sexually in terms of what pleases men,” and specifically to
exploit and control women.
70

According to radical feminists, the sexual revolution brought with it a
heightened sexualization of women and further violence against them, and so a
backlash ensued, intending to free women from the sexual revolution.
71
Dana
Densmore, a member of the radical feminist group Cell 16 in Boston who helped start
the publication No More Fun and Games: A Journal of Female Liberation, wrote of
her experience at the time, “Everywhere we are sexual objects, and our own
enjoyment just enhances our attractiveness.”
72
According to Densmore, a “desire to
become powerful by merging with the powerful” motivated women’s desire for sex
with men in a kind of sexual transference or as the result of an internalization of

69
Firestone, “Love,” The Dialectic of Sex; the Case for Feminist Revolution, 142-64.

70
Anne Koedt, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” Notes from the First Year.

71
Barbara Mehrof and Pamela Kearon, “Rape: An Act of Terror,” (1971) in Radical Feminism, 228-33.

72
Dana Densmore, “Independence from the Sexual Revolution,” (1971) in Radical Feminism, 111.

32
exterior structures such as the media, which work to convince women of their need for
sex.
73
In addition, ideas about lesbianism as a political choice challenged the notion
that feminists could have sexual relationships with men. Feminist activist T-Grace
Atkinson’s famous phrase, “Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice,”
exemplifies this stance.
74
In the conceptual world of radical feminism, erotic art made
from the perspective of heterosexual women did not have a place.
Challenges to heterosexuality can be traced back to the 1960s, and the term
“heterosexuality” is important to this dissertation as a category that was continuously
challenged and reaffirmed during the period considered. Jonathan Katz, in his
historical look at the construction of heterosexuality as a category created in
opposition to homosexuality in The Invention of Heterosexuality, identifies the years
between 1963 and 1975 as a particularly significant moment in the “destabilization” of
heterosexuality, beginning with the feminist theories discussed above. “Radical
feminists explicitly linked the personal and the sexual with power and politics,” Katz
states, “initiating the first open feminist critique of the social structuring of
heterosexuality.”
75
Adopting Katz’s view, we can now see that while The Feminine
Mystique spoke particularly to middle class white, heterosexual women, the problems
facing that particular social, racial, sexual group relate to the women artists of this
study who fit in this particular demographic. All of them had either already separated

73
Ibid., 112.

74
Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1989), 238.

75
Jonathan Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 114.

33
from their husbands or soon divorced in the early 1960s. All of them strove for
professional careers as artists against the powerful structures and social mores that
should have discouraged them. As Griselda Pollock wrote,
A feminist intervention in art initially confronts the dominant discourses about
art, that is the accepted notions of art and artist…In the late 1960s the
paradigm of the artist was unquestionably masculine and the history of art both
past and present offered little space for women.
76

Despite the unlikelihood of professional success as an artist, Schneemann studied art
at Bard College and the University of Illinois, Strider graduated from the Kansas City
Art Institute, Wilke received her degree from Stella Elkins Taylor School of Fine Art
at Temple University, and Steckel studied with painter Edwin Dickinson.
77
Although
this dissertation does not aim to draw a straight line between the artists’ biographies
and the content of their work, their personal experiences and, in some cases, their
relationships with men bear on the circumstances of production, exhibition, and
reception of the work. The dynamics of their situation as young, white, heterosexual
women who arguably had some access to the New York art world allowed them to
intervene in the dominant discourses about art.

Chapter Summary

My first chapter, “Early Experiments: Eros in Carolee Schneemann’s Films
and Performances,” examines Schneemann’s work in the context of 1960s
experimental art in New York. Informed by avant-garde sensibilities developed at the

76
Griselda Pollock, “Feminism and Modernism,” in Rozsika Parker and Pollock, Framing Feminism:
Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-1985 (London: Pandora, 1987), 81-82.

77
The four artists also all taught or still teach art classes to support themselves.

34
Judson Dance Theater and by psychoanalytic theories of sexual liberation,
Schneemann created her groundbreaking performance, Meat Joy (1964), of men and
women wearing bikinis performing a score with such materials as paint and raw fish,
and her film, Fuses (1964-67), based on footage of the artist making love to her male
partner. These works tested the limit to which an artist could blur the distinctions
between art and life, public and private, particularly when representing one female
artist’s experience. This chapter investigates these works as live and filmic
performances of erotic heterosexuality. Their critical reception in the 1960s makes
evident that the sexual context created by Schneemann challenged accepted social and
artistic standards. However, through the lens of 1970s feminism and the
historicization of Schneemann’s most well known piece, Interior Scroll, this chapter
demonstrates the erasure of feminist heterosexuality in the reception of her work.
Chapter Two, “The Problem of Figurative Erotic Art: Marjorie Strider and Pop
Art,” considers Strider’s Pop paintings of pin-up girls in the context of their first
exhibitions in The First International Girlie Exhibition (1964) at Pace Gallery in New
York and The Arena of Love (1965) at Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles. Analysis of
these shows and their critical reception situates Strider within the mid-1960s erotic art
boom. Along with works by other artists associated with Pop and figuration, formalist
critics such as Barbara Rose dismissed Strider’s large-scale appropriations of pin-up
imagery. This critical rejection of erotic art on formal grounds opened up discussion
of what erotic art should look like and paved the way for feminist critiques of erotic
subject matter in the early 1970s. This chapter explores how Strider’s status as a

35
woman artist creating erotic Pop art with female imagery complicates the received
history of Pop and argues for Strider’s critical manipulation of images of male
heterosexual desire.
“Abstract Erotic Art: Hannah Wilke’s Sculptures and the Problem of Feminist
Heterosexuality” looks at the development of a discourse around abstract eroticism in
the work of female artists. Wilke’s ceramic sculptures of abstracted genital forms,
which she first showed in an erotic art exhibition Hetero Is at a New York non-profit
gallery in 1966, expressed a new frankness in dealing with sexuality. Chapter Three
positions her early sculpture in relation to critical debates about abstraction and
figuration. In particular, Wilke’s work affirms critic Lucy Lippard’s argument for
“eccentric abstraction” over figurative erotic art in the mid to late 1960s. In the early
1970s, when feminist critics put forth ideas about “vaginal iconography” and
“feminine aesthetics,” Wilke’s art might have been a quintessential example.
However, this chapter analyzes Wilke’s tentative reception with feminist critics
because of the heterosexual eroticism in her work and, at times, its direct reference to
her intimate relationships with men.
In Chapter Four, “Humor, Sex, and Censorship: Anita Steckel and the
Founding of the Fight Censorship Group,” the exhibitions of Steckel’s work and their
critical and popular reception in New York in the 1960s and early 1970s serve as a
case study of the changing stakes for women artists as the feminist art movement
coalesced. Shown in 1963, her photocollage Mom Art series used nudity and sexual
innuendo to tackle issues of civil rights and the Vietnam War. Her formal technique

36
combined with her sense of humor and strong political messages situated the work
within a 1960s avant-garde. Less than ten years later, her exhibition The Feminist Art
of Sexual Politics in 1972, featuring a new montage series of giant female nudes on
found photographs of New York City positioned itself squarely in the context of
feminism. When local officials threatened to close the show for obscenity, defenses of
her work focused on feminist politics rather than eroticism. The experience led
Steckel to form the Fight Censorship group with other women artists to defend and
promote their sexual art.
My conclusion looks closely at the Fight Censorship Group, considering the
great range of art, in addition to that of Edelheit, Steckel, and Wilke, created by the
participants: Louise Bourgeois, Joan Glueckman, Eunice Golden, Juanita McNeely,
Barbara Nessim, Joan Semmel, and Anne Sharp. Although women had been creating
sexual art for almost a decade, with the growth of the women’s art movement and the
formation of the Fight Censorship Group, museum exhibitions and published articles
publicly recognized the significance of such work as feminist art.
While critics in the 1960s had trouble responding to women making art that
openly dealt with sex, daring female artists chose to explore such imagery despite its
taboos. Although women’s erotic art registered as different to critics, it was not yet
named “feminist.” Since the term came into use in the early 1970s, critics and art
historians have struggled to define the status of earlier erotic works from the 1960s
and their relationship to the feminist art movement. My examination of erotic art by
Schneemann, Strider, Wilke, and Steckel in the 1960s, including its heterosexual logic

37
and assumptions, challenges received notions that women only began exploring issues
of sexuality from their gendered viewpoints after 1970 and that they did so only
through female imagery. Broadening the scope of feminist art history to account for
work outside of these narrow confines provides a more powerful lens through which to
see the work of artists—both today and in the past—dealing with heterosexual female
pleasure and desire.

38

Fig. 1. Martha Edelheit, Flesh Wall with Drawing Table, 1964-5, oil on canvas, three
panels, 80 x 195 in.

Fig. 2. Martha Edelheit, Flesh Wall with Ladder, 1965, acrylic and oil on canvas, 84 x
91 in.

39

Fig. 3. Installation photograph, Martha Edelheit, Byron Gallery, 1966, photograph by
D. E. Nelson

Fig. 4. Installation photograph, Martha Edelheit, Byron Gallery, 1966, photograph by
D. E. Nelson

40

Fig. 5. Martha Edelheit, DX2, 1969-1971, acrylic on linen, 42 x 68 in.

Fig. 6. Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude #57, 1964, synthetic polymer on
composition board, 48 x 65 in.

Fig. 7. Page from Jack Bacon, Eros in Art (Los Angeles: Elysium Inc., 1969)

41
Chapter 1: Early Experiments: Eros in Carolee Schneemann’s Films and
Performances

Carolee Schneemann’s performance Interior Scroll (1975, 1977) is one of the
most iconic works of American feminist art. Any contemporary art history survey that
includes feminist art would certainly mention Interior Scroll and likely illustrate the
work with a particular photograph showing the artist standing slightly crouched on a
table, reading from a long strip of paper extending from her vagina (Fig. 1.1). In
many ways, this documentary image has come to stand in for the piece, freezing
Schneemann in this position. The well-published photograph characterizes the
performance with a single image, drawing attention to her statuesque nude body
standing above the camera lens. The image conveys how Schneemann’s use of her
own body subverted an entire tradition of Western art in which male artists idealized
the female nude.
1
As a feminist statement, Schneemann became both the image and
the “image-maker” in Interior Scroll.
2

What this single photograph does not convey, however, is that Interior Scroll
went beyond simply offering a revised image of the female nude conceived by a
woman artist. Revisiting a description of the time-based performance reveals how it
not only challenged the traditional status of women as objects in the history of art, but
also interrogated the relationships between an artist’s physical body and a work of art,
as well as between the artist and her audience. On August 29, 1975, at the “Women
Here and Now Festival” in East Hampton, New York, Schneemann began her

1
The female nude will be discussed further in the section “Feminist Art Criticism and Interior Scroll.”

2
Carolee Schneemann, “Istory of a Girl Pornographer” (1974), in More Than Meat Joy, ed. Bruce R.
McPherson, 2nd ed. (Kingston, N.Y.: McPherson, 1997), 194.

42
performance fully clothed, carrying an armful of sheets towards a folding table. She
proceeded to remove her clothes in front of the live audience, wrap one sheet around
her body, and drape a second sheet over the table that would serve as her platform.
She told the audience that she would read from her self-published book, Cézanne She
Was a Great Painter (1974), and disrobed. Next, she covered herself with strokes of
paint, mimicking the shape of her nude body, and climbed onto the table where she
struck a series of poses reminiscent of an artist’s model while reading from her book.
Dropping the text, she then slowly extracted a thin strip of paper from her vagina and
began to read it. The presence of the artist’s nude body used as material in this
performance would have undoubtedly registered as more real and consequential than
any photograph or realistically rendered painting of a nude. Viewing a series of
photographs taken of the performance rather than just the one, gives a better sense of
the way her naked body shattered taboos related to the nude in art (Fig. 1.2). By
stripping off her clothes, standing naked in the flesh, literally painting her body, and
removing part of the artwork from inside her vagina, Schneemann reconceptualized
not only the history of the female nude in art, but art’s connection to the erotic.
This chapter begins with a rethinking of Interior Scroll through an
examination of Schneemann’s second performance of the piece in 1977 and a critical
review of her reception in feminist art criticism. While the work has served as a
touchstone in feminist art history, particularly in the area of women’s body art, my
inquiry of Interior Scroll and its complex negotiation of art and the erotic opens onto
my focus for the remainder of the chapter—a look at two groundbreaking works of

43
eroticism created by Schneemann roughly a decade prior to Interior Scroll: Meat Joy
(1964) and Fuses (1964-67). These works will be considered in their historical
contexts of avant-garde performance and experimental film of the 1960s and as
contributions to a growing field of women’s art that focused on representations of
female sexuality. These works were arguably the first to engage explicitly with
heterosexual experience from a woman’s point of view, a theme that runs throughout
my dissertation. While, on one hand, I argue that these two works are precedents for
later feminist art dealing with the issues of women’s experience, I also want to
demonstrate how they connected with aesthetic and political concerns relevant to their
historical moment in the early to mid-1960s, issues that were not completely displaced
by feminism in the 1970s. Since Schneemann’s place in the history of postwar
American art is complex as she contemporaneously worked across disciplines of
painting, performance, and film, this study draws on scholarship and criticism from
these three fields to understand her contribution on the issue of eroticism. I will show
how, in the early 1960s, Schneemann began a rethinking eroticism in art, drawing
equally on her personal experience, her intellectual research, and her aesthetic
experimentation, the consequences of which still resonate in contemporary art today.

Feminist Art Criticism and Interior Scroll
Schneemann’s Interior Scroll has become emblematic of the feminist art
movement of the 1970s which is remembered especially for works incorporating the
artist’s own female body or image. By using the artist’s self-image, this type of work

44
aptly illustrates the famous statement, “the personal is political.” Moreover, self-
representation by women artists challenged the objectification of women throughout
the history of Western art and in contemporary American visual culture. However,
Schneemann began working with her own body almost a decade before the feminist
art movement and her Interior Scroll performances, as early as her 1963 performance
Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions which has been recognized as the first
experimentation with body art by an American artist, male or female.
3
In this piece, a
nude Schneemann interacted with materials such as paper and paint in her studio in a
private performance. She posed with the painting constructions and kinetic sculptures
she had built there while a friend, the Icelandic artist Erró, captured the event with
photographs (Fig. 1.3).
4
Schneemann has written about her intentions in bringing her
body into the work of art in Eye Body:
Covered in paint, grease, chalk, ropes, plastic, I establish my body as visual
territory. Not only am I an image-maker, but I explore the image values of
flesh as material I choose to work with. The body may remain erotic, sexual,
desired, desiring but it is as well votive: marked, written over in a text of stroke
and gesture discovered by my creative female will.
5

Crucial for understanding the complexity of her work, this statement expresses her
ideas about the body as material for art as well as the body’s innate erotic qualities. It
also suggests her indebtedness to the legacy of Abstract Expressionism which will be

3
Hal Foster, et al. Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames
and Hudson, 2004), 566.

4
Schneemann also exhibited her paintings and constructions separately from performances. For
examples of this work see Carolee Schneemann: Early Work 1960/1970 (New York: Max Hutchinson
Gallery; New Paltz: Documentext, 1982). A 1964 exhibition was reviewed in Jill Johnston, “Carolee
Schneemann [Turret],” Art News 63 (1964): 59.

5
Schneemann, Meat Joy, 52.

45
discussed below. This quote was not written in 1963 but some time in the 1970s,
before its publication in Schneemann’s book More Than Meat Joy in 1979. In the
later decade, under the rubric of feminism, the concept of a “creative female will”
would have had more currency than in the 1960s.
The concept of “creative female will” certainly applied to Interior Scroll in the
1970s. It corresponded with the concurrent feminist interest in locating examples of
female power and achievement buried in the past. For example, the feminist
periodical Heresies illustrated Interior Scroll in relation to the concept of the “great
goddess.”
6
In the caption for the photographs, Schneemann describes the scroll’s
implications: “The serpentine manifestation of vulvic knowledge can be associated at
several symbolic levels…ticker tape, rainbow, torah in the ark, chalice, choir loft, bell
tower, umbilicus and tongue.”
7
In line with feminist notions of female power related
to the concept of the goddess, Schneemann connected her research of ancient female
imagery to her concern with “vulvic space” in Interior Scroll, a performance using her
own body.
8

In the same issue of the magazine, literary scholar and critic Gloria Feman
Orenstein asserted that the theme of the goddess appearing at that moment in women’s
art referenced a transhistorical feminine principle. In her essay, “The Reemergence of
the Archetype of the Great Goddess in Art by Contemporary Women,” Orenstein

6
Heresies 2, no. 1 (spring 1978).

7
Ibid., 128.

8
In 1960, Schneemann read Donald Alexander Mackenzie’s The Migration of Symbols (1926) and
began to identify with ancient goddess and womb imagery. Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews,
Projects (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 153.

46
explained to her readers, “Evoking the memory of an earlier psychic state…the
Goddess has become that symbol of transformation which activates those forces
within women identified with holiness and with creative power.”
9
She named
Schneemann among other women artists turning to the “Goddess archetype” in order
to “exorcis[e] the patriarchal creation myth through a repossession of the female
visionary faculties.”
10
A particular aspect of these female faculties was the idea of a
“mind-body totality” instead of a “mind-body duality” represented in the masculine
archetype. Moreover, the concept of “intuitive body-knowledge” as a “faculty of
intelligence” attempted to reclaim ways of understanding the world that were
considered more innate to women.
At the same time that feminist writers celebrated Schneemann’s works such as
Interior Scroll, other feminists began to raise new questions about the effectiveness of
representations of the female bodies in the service of feminism. Some critics
considered the use of the female nude as essentializing a notion of woman. Others
found the use of a female artist’s own body to be narcissistically focused or to cater
unwittingly to male desire. Lucy Lippard, an art critic who supported the idea of a
“feminine aesthetic” in the 1970s, was perhaps the first to articulate the issues raised
by body art in relation to gender. In an essay published in 1976, Lippard described
body art “as a new type of art in which the primary image and/or medium is the artist’s
own body” and argued that the differences between such work made by men and

9
Gloria Feman Orenstein, “The Reemergence of the Archetype of the Great Goddess in Art by
Contemporary Women,” in Arlene Raven, et al. Feminist Art Criticism, An Anthology (UMI Research
Press, 1988 [originally published in Heresies (spring 1978), 74-84]), 71.

10
Ibid., 75.

47
women testified to the “gulf between male and female experience in our culture.”
11

She warned of the challenges that this particular method presented to women artists:
[T]here are ways and ways of using one’s own body, and women have not
always avoided self-exploitation. A woman artist’s approach to herself is
necessarily complicated by social stereotypes…it is a subtle abyss that
separates men’s use of women for sexual titillation from women’s use of
women to expose that insult.
12

Lippard placed the responsibility on the woman artist to navigate the uncertain
territory between exploitation and feminist artistic statement. Moreover, she implied
that male artists did not face the same difficulty, presumably because the male body
did not carry the same cultural implications. Indeed, Schneemann’s art school
experience verified this double standard when a professor told his students that her
nude self-portraits were narcissistic while “the male students doing their endless self-
portrait studies were not.”
13

By the end of the 1970s, some feminist critics began to question the
“glorification of an essential female art power” in all forms of vaginal painting and
sculpture, as well as anything associated with female mythology or ritual. They
argued that this work, which was incidentally the most recognizable imagery of
feminist art, was not only essentializing and therefore limiting, but also perpetuated
patriarchal structures by failing “to challenge conventional notions of female

11
Lucy Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: Women’s Body Art,” Art in America 64, no. 3
(May/June 1976): 73.

12
Ibid.

13
Schneemann, “Istory of a Girl Pornographer,” Meat Joy, 193.

48
sexuality.”
14
For example, one might question how vaginal imagery confronts
traditional ideas about a woman’s place as mother and nurturer. Critics of such
imagery advocated instead for a text-based model, as Judith Barry and Sandy
Flitterman-Lewis argued in “Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art Making” (1980),
calling for a “more theoretically informed art.”
15
In textual works, the authors argue,
“the image of women is not accepted as an already produced given, but is constructed
in and through the work itself.” Their essay, a product of its time in terms of its
deconstructive and post-structuralist approach, betrays their general distrust of images
as too ambiguous to be useful for feminist purposes. I argue, as have recent defenders
of early feminist art, that female imagery is capable of breaking down preconceptions
about women as a stable category. Moreover, a dismissal of Interior Scroll on the
basis of female body imagery neglects the textual aspects of the piece.
The famous photograph of Interior Scroll, in which Schneemann stands
hunched over on a table and reads a scrap of paper that remains connected to her
vagina, gives only visual information about the performance. As Norma Broude and
Mary Garrard write in The Power of Feminist Art, the words Schneemann spoke were
a critical aspect of the performance in which she “attempted the metaphoric
transformation of the female body from passive object to speaking agent.”
16
Interior

14
Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art Making,” Screen
21, no. 2 (1980): 35-48. Reprinted in Amelia Jones, ed., The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader
(London: Routledge, 2002), 90.

15
Ibid., 88.

16
Mary D. Garrard and Judith K. Brodsky, The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the
1970s, History and Impact (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1994), 22.

49
Scroll claimed that women could be acting (producing) and speaking subjects rather
than simply art’s object (image). A look at another performance Schneemann
participated in a decade earlier with Robert Morris, Site (1964), makes this point
clearer by way of contrast. In Site, Schneemann’s role consisted of recreating the pose
of the nude model in Manet’s 1863 painting Olympia (Fig. 1.4). With the soundtrack
of a jackhammer, Morris began the performance by manipulating large white plywood
boards around the stage wearing workman’s clothes and a mask.
17
Moving the boards
from their original box arrangement, he revealed Schneemann reclined behind the
construction and adorned in the manner of Olympia. Morris’s arrangement played
with the concern in modernist criticism for flatness in painting while also interrogating
the meaning of “the artist” as a producer.
18
However, Schneemann’s role as the
artist’s model, replicating Manet’s prostitute which was itself mimicking a reclining
Renaissance nude, did nothing to disrupt the identity of “the artist” as male. As the
woman, Schneemann sat passively while Morris performed the physical actions of the
piece. In Interior Scroll, she took control as the artistic producer of the work,
choreographing the performance such that her naked body challenged the traditional
place of woman as model and giving the female nude a voice.
Whereas the 1975 performance of Interior Scroll took place at a feminist event
attended mostly by women, Schneemann felt circumstances at the Telluride Film
Festival in Colorado demanded an encore performance in 1977. Having been invited

17
Allen Hughes, “Dance Programs Have Premiere,” New York Times (March 17, 1964): 30.

18
Thomas E. Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent (New
York: Abrams, 1996), 138-9.

50
by celebrated independent filmmaker (and long-time friend) Stan Brakhage to join him
in assembling a panel of erotic films made by women, Schneemann was dismayed to
find the session had been titled “The Erotic Woman.” Such a title limited the concept
of the panel by assuming that “erotic” would necessarily describe “woman” and
potentially transfer the descriptor to the female filmmaker rather than her films. At the
event, Schneemann read an introductory statement criticizing the title of the program.
“Having been described and proscribed by the male imagination for so long,” she
explained during her prologue,
[N]o woman artist now wants to assume that she will define an ‘erotic woman’
for other women – the very notion immediately reverts to the traditional
stereotypes which this program of films vividly counters...We take the
forbidden camera into our own hands. We are not actresses extending or
sustaining anyone’s image of what is ‘female.’ Each of these films
demonstrates concrete experience, the lived-life, not an invented, fantasized
sexuality.
19

Schneemann took exception to both the objectification of the female filmmaker and
the phrase “The Erotic Woman” for its narrow and prescriptive label (for full text, see
Appendix A).
After reading the protest statement aloud to the audience, Schneemann
commenced her second performance of Interior Scroll, this time beginning the piece
clothed in only the sheet, and painting herself with mud from a nearby river. She
removed a strip of paper from her vagina and read from it the text that came from her
film Plumb Line (1971). An imagined dialog between Schneemann and a male

19
“Carolee Schneemann: Introduction to ‘Erotic Films by Women’ Telluride Film Festival, September
4, 1977.” Carolee Schneemann papers, 1959-1994, Getty Research Institute, Research Library,
Accession no. 95001. For full text, see Appendix A.

51
“structuralist filmmaker,” the text vividly expresses the unfavorable reception of
Schneemann’s work and her witty and determined response. The male voice
dismisses her work as too personal, emotional, primitive, and painterly and mandates
instead a structuralist approach to filmmaking that deals with the medium itself in the
manner of formalism.
20

Frustrated by the fact that “film language exists for and in only one gender,” an
argument that has been leveled against modernist formalism in other artistic genres as
well,
21
Schneemann concluded the passage with the following lines,
he said we can be friends
equally tho we are not artists
equally I said we cannot
be friends equally and we
cannot be artists equally

he told me he had lived with
a ‘sculptress’ I asked does
that make me a ‘film-makeress’?

Oh No he said we think of you
as a dancer
22

Her text points to the fact that while modernist critics defined the formalist approach
as disinterested in the sense that it was supposed to be about the medium not the
maker; the discourse was, in fact, gendered with terms like “sculptress” (for full text,

20
Schneemann later said in interviews that Annette Michelson was the imagined “structuralist
filmmaker”: “There are some women whose insight is so important to me, but who couldn’t understand
my work and couldn’t deal with it or regard it. She [Annette Michelson] was one of those.”
Schneemann quoted in Josephine Winters, “Feminist Performance Art: Performing, Discovering,
Transforming Ourselves,” in The Power of Feminist Art, 295 n. 19. Schneemann also talks about this
text as a response to Michelson and her students in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema: Interviews
with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 143.

21
See the writing of Amelia Jones, Lucy Lippard, and Griselda Pollock.

22
For full text, see Appendix B.

52
see Appendix B). Furthermore, the unacceptability of her films because they dealt
with her personal experience as a woman overshadowed the lengths to which
Schneemann manipulated the film medium. At this panel, Schneemann was scheduled
to show Fuses, her self-shot, highly collaged film, based on footage of her and her
partner, Jim Tenney, having sex, which will be the subject of the final section of this
chapter. But here it illuminates a concrete connection between Interior Scroll and her
earlier erotic works of the 1960s. In both cases, she used her own body to transform
the female nude from “passive object to speaking agent” and to claim the artist’s erotic
agency as well. Whereas being thought of as a dancer means being thought of (at least
in part) as a body on display for the pleasure of others.
As previously touched on, Lippard suggested that it could be difficult for
women artists to create works using their own bodies that did not cater to male desire,
complicit with a tradition of exploitation. Thus, we can assume that working with the
concept of eroticism explicitly would have been an even greater danger. In the later
1970s, art historian Lisa Tickner warned women of the potential that they might
internalize male desire in attempts to assert female sexual freedom. In “The Body
Politic: Female Sexuality & Women Artists since 1970” (1978), she encouraged art
that negated a patriarchal understanding of sex through concentration on female
biological realities. “The most significant area of women and erotic art today,” she
wrote, “is that of the de-eroticizing, the de-colonizing of the female body; the
challenging of its taboos; and the celebration of its rhythms and pains, of fertility and

53
childbirth.”
23
The contradiction implied in “de-eroticizing” erotic art should be noted.
Despite this negation of eroticism, Tickner praised Schneemann for reminding the
author, “We cannot afford to lose also an authentic joy in the very real pleasures of the
body.” However, Tickner offered no strategy for distinguishing between “real
pleasures” and the “alienated desire” women experience “within patriarchal culture.”
24

This shows that by the late 1970s the discrepancy between erotic experience and
feminist ideals became a difficult issue. For this reason, it is important to look back at
Schneemann’s erotic work made before the discourse of feminist art began to form in
order to understand how she integrated eroticism with her feminist beliefs at that time.
In the 1990s, art historian Amelia Jones began to reexamine 1970s feminist art,
challenging its dismissal as essentialist and theorizing the embodied nature of art
production and experience.
25
In her book, Body Art / Performing the Subject (1998),
Jones writes about Interior Scroll as a performance with the potential to disrupt the
traditional modernist concept of the relationship between art and the disinterested
viewer, creating what she terms “intersubjectivity,” a psychoanalytic and
philosophical term meaning “contingent on the other.” In Schneemann’s case, Jones
argues that the artist’s eroticized bodily presence in her performances opens up the

23
Lisa Tickner, “The Body Politic: Female Sexuality &Women Artists since 1970,” Art History 1, no. 2
(June 1978): 239.

24
Ibid., 246, 238.

25
See for example Amelia Jones, ed. Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, exh.
cat. (Los Angeles: Armand Hammer Museum of Art, University of California Los Angeles, 1996).

54
“circuits of desire informing artistic production and reception.”
26
In other words, the
relationship between performer and viewer, artist and critic, is involved and
interdependent. Although Jones refers only to Schneemann’s use of her own body and
the relationship between artist and audience in her argument, the concept of
“intersubjectivity” is a useful model for understanding the bodily interactions
happening within Schneemann’s other works as well. In particular, both Meat Joy and
Fuses include multiple eroticized bodies, both male and female, whose actions are
necessarily contingent on the others for the making of the work. In the 1960s, in
response to the received modernist tradition that separated art from life, Schneemann
began this critical engagement with erotics, attempting to rediscover the relationship
between artist and audience and to re-imagine the relationship between the artist and
her work.

Performing Heterosexuality: Sexual Revolution and Meat Joy (1964)
Working in the milieu of avant-garde art in the 1960s, Schneemann was
arguably the first women artist in the postwar period to make erotic art with explicit,
figurative, sexual imagery. While Yoko Ono used her own body in such works as Cut
Piece (1964), and Yayoi Kusama and Louise Bourgeois were making abstract but
sexually suggestive sculptures, Schneemann’s presentation of semi-nude male and
female bodies cavorting with materials such as paint and raw meat in Meat Joy (1964)
challenged notions of aesthetics and sexuality and pushed the limits of what was

26
Amelia Jones, Body Art / Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1998), 5.

55
acceptable art for women to create (Fig. 1.5). In her writings, Schneemann
characterized Meat Joy as an “erotic rite.” She described the range of feelings and
experience she meant to conjure with the performance which included multiple men
and women (including Schneemann) intimately interacting with messy, non-art
materials while wearing very little clothing:
Meat Joy has the character of an erotic rite: excessive, indulgent; a celebration
of flesh as material: raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic,
rope, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is toward the ecstatic, shifting and
turning between tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon—qualities that
would at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent.
27

As an “erotic rite,” Meat Joy exploded conventional ideas about how male and female
bodies should properly act with each other and with the world. Moreover, it suggested
that these animalistic, ritual, and sexual actions should be a part of art.
Like many artists working in the early 1960s, Schneemann considered her
work to extend principles learned from the previous generation’s Abstract
Expressionists. Allan Kaprow drew this connection between Abstract Expressionism
and the type of theater and experimental art he and Schneemann were making in his
seminal essay, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” published in Art News in 1958.
28

Kaprow’s polemic related Pollock’s death to the death of modern painting. While
understanding that Pollock’s drip paintings arose from a formalist tradition of modern
painting, Kaprow believed Pollock’s work also put an end to that tradition and
signaled the way toward a new art. In his argument, the formal qualities of Pollock’s

27
Carolee Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics, 61.

28
Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Art News 57, no. 6 (October 1958): 24-6, 55-7.

56
paintings, such as scale, all-over composition, and the visibly gestural process by
which they were made, dissolve the traditional boundaries of art from the rest of life
and engaged the spectator in a new way. Kaprow saw this as opening up a new area of
art practice in which the artist turned to the “real” world for materials. Kaprow
concluded by describing some of the ways artists were engaging differently with the
world:
Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become preoccupied
with and even dazzled by the space of objects of our everyday life, either our
bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-second Street. Not
satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other senses, we shall utilize
the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch.
Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric
and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other
things that will be discovered by the present generation of artists.
29

Claes Oldenburg’s The Store (1961) is perhaps the best-known realization of
Kaprow’s manifesto encouraging the use of non-art materials and the artist’s body to
create experiential works of art that inundate the senses and break apart modernist
conceptions of art. As part of The Store, Oldenburg transformed an actual store front
into an environment filled with his messy sculptural replicas of everyday objects made
from a mixture of cloth and plaster covered with brightly colored paint intentionally
left uneven and dripping. This installation became integral to performances he staged
there, including one in which Schneemann participated in February of 1962.
30
As a

29
Ibid, 56-7.

30
Schneemann participated in Store Days I, February 23-24, 1962.
Oldenburg partially constructed The Store in Environments, Situations, Spaces, Martha
Jackson Gallery (May-June, 1961) before opening his own space. Oldenburg’s first environment, The
Street (1960), was built for his “Ray Gun Show” at the Judson Memorial Church from rubbish collected
from the street. It was the site of his first happening Snapshot from the City (1960).

57
participant in this avant-garde movement, Schneemann took the gesture and action
associated with Abstract Expressionist painting into the realms of space and time,
while also testing new and non-traditional art materials in her painted constructions
and performances. At the same time she explored use of the artist’s body as material,
as suggested in Kaprow’s essay, and, in doing so, I argue, Schneemann’s work
exposed the manifold associations and possibilities of the female body and
experimented with its erotic relation to other bodies.
Schneemann presented Meat Joy first in Paris (Centre Américain des Artistes,
May 29, 1964), then in London (Dennison Hall, June 8, 1964), and finally in America
at the Judson Memorial Church in New York on November 16, 17, and 18, 1964.
31

She has described the “intensive rehearsal” required for Meat Joy, particularly
“moving through taboos with the participants” in order to present a “fluid,
unpredictable performance.”
32
The cast included nine performers: four men, four
women, and a female assistant (called the “serving maid”) who, at a certain point in
the performances, emerged with a tray of raw meat which she threw out to the
participants who had by then stripped down to bikinis. They could not be naked as
Schneemann had originally imagined because laws in both Europe and the U.S.
forbade performers to be naked unless they did not move.
33
Instead, she clothed them

31
Schneemann first conceived Meat Joy for the Paris performance at the Workshop de la Libre
Expression organized by Jean-Jacques Lebel.

32
Schneemann lecture, Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, April 25, 2008. She
also discusses the rehearsal process in Imaging Her Erotics, 61.

33
Carolee Schneemann, “The Obscene Body/Politic,” Art Journal 40, no. 4 (winter 1991): 29.

58
in bikini underwear with the women’s costumes decorated with leather and feathers to
avoid persecution under obscenity laws. The performers were not professional actors
or dancers but people who Schneemann selected from the street or at parties for their
physical qualities.
34

Today, an understanding of Meat Joy must be constructed through
documentation of the performances which exists in photographs, a 16mm film, written
reports by critics who witnessed them, the artist’s recollections and notes, as well as
her performance script. According to Schneemann, the length of film footage was
lost, but an edited six-minute version of moments from the three performances was
created, and recently she produced a new cut with more footage (a total of twelve
minutes).
35
However, the performance score is lengthy and calls for 60 to 80 minutes,
the climax of which is seen in the film and in photos of nearly-naked young men and
women rolling together in piles of paper, paint, and raw meat (Fig. 1.6). The complex
score involved various props, lighting, sound, and human components. The audio
recording played during the performance included a prologue of sound with
Schneemann’s voice reading from her notes on Meat Joy, excerpts of French language
exercises, recorded noises from the street (Rue de Seine) and a ticking clock.
36

The erotic transgressions apparent in the combination of such materials as raw
meat with almost naked male and female bodies did not go unnoticed by the critics.

34
Written by James Tenney in the program for the New York Meat Joy performance. Carolee
Schneemann papers.

35
Meat Joy (1964) filmed by Dominik Gaisseau, edited by Bob Giorgio, 16mm, 6 min., sound/color.

36
The “Meat Joy Notes As Prologue” can be found in More Than Meat Joy, 65.

59
Jill Johnston wrote in her review of the performance for the theater column of the
Village Voice:
The point of the meat and fish and paint was to demonstrate the sensual and
scatological pleasure of slimy contact with materials that the culture consumes
at a safe distance with knife and fork and several yards away in a gallery or
museum.
37

Schneemann’s breaking of taboos in the realm of sexual pleasure was unusual as it
was not acceptable at the time for women to be public about their sexual life. Also
controversial was Schneemann’s role as a female artist in her mid-twenties directing
and choreographing such a sexualized performance which advocated pleasure and
experimentation while it challenged standards of appropriate behavior for women.
In 1964, sexual liberation was a major cultural issue, and Schneemann’s art
must be understood in the context of the debates raging at the time.
38
As mentioned in
the introduction of this dissertation, the Kinsey reports on male and female sexuality
in the U.S. had altered the public’s perception of the reality of sexual behavior in
American society. Books such as Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization:
Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) offered a philosophical argument for the
liberation of Eros as part of his conception of a higher-evolved, non-repressive
society. Publications specific to female sexuality also appeared including Helen
Gurley Brown’s autobiographical self-help book, Sex and the Single Girl (1962), and

37
Jill Johnston, Village Voice 10, no. 6 (November 26, 1964).

38
I am using the terms “sexual liberation” and “sexual revolution” to refer to a historical period of
social change in the 1960s when attitudes towards sexuality drastically altered. I am writing this with
the understanding that there was a longer history of sexual liberation in the modern period.

60
Friedan’s exposé on the plight of the American housewife in The Feminine Mystique
(1963).
In January of 1964, Time magazine ran the cover story, “SEX in the U.S.:
Mores & Morality.” Attempting to fairly portray the recent changes in attitudes
towards sex, the authors offered a brief history of American morals in relation to sex
and examined some of the consequences of the most recent sexual revolution, in
particular, “spectator sex” which “bombards” Americans in books, film, theater,
magazines, and even skimpy clothing. The authors considered the effects on young
people of a culture with eroding Puritan morals where “pleasure [was] increasingly
considered an almost constitutional right rather than a privilege,” citing statistics on
rises in teen pregnancy, psychological problems in young women, and increased cases
of extramarital sex.
39
Thus, while the popular press recognized the changing
sentiment regarding sex in America, there were still questions about the positive and
negative effects of the sexual revolution on contemporary culture.
As discussed in the introduction, “sexual revolution” had variety of
connotations, some of which were not yet in use at the time Schneemann began her
practice of exploring eroticism with her own body in her work. However, psychiatrist
Wilhelm Reich—whose book, Sexual Revolution, was published in English in the U.S.
in 1945 and had a steadily growing following in the early 1960s—particularly
influenced her.
40
His examination of the negative effects of sexual repression led him

39
“Morals: The Second Sexual Revolution,” Time (January 24, 1964), n.p.

40
Annette Kubitza has written about the influence of Reich’s ideas, particularly about the centrality of
sexual experience and orgasm for total health, on Schneemann’s art. Kubitza argues that his works

61
to create a philosophy based on personal liberation through orgasm, in particular,
orgasmic experience achieved through heterosexual intercourse. In the creation of her
work, Schneemann melded Reich’s ideas with Antoine Artaud’s radical ideas about
theater and Simone de Beauvoir’s revelations about the constructed nature of
womanhood.
41
The combination of aesthetic, political, and sexual theories
characterizes the intellectual concerns of many artists in the early 1960s, including the
group of artists with whom Schneemann worked at the Judson Dance Theater.
The Judson Memorial Church, the site of Meat Joy in the U.S., was a center of
avant-garde artistic activity in the mid-1960s. The ministry of the church supported
Happenings, poetry readings, theater performances, film screenings, and art shows,
offering artists a place to present their work without fear of censorship. Formed by a
group of artists, only some of whom identified first as choreographers, the Judson
Dance Theater became part of the Church and a locus of avant-garde dance in New
York. The Judson Dance Theater has been historicized as a place that gave women
more freedom and control as artists, partially due to the facts that the Church was a
noncommercial space and that dance was already considered an acceptable discipline

were the reason Schneemann wanted to explore “the experience of orgasm itself” in Meat Joy and
Fuses. See Annette Kubitza, “Fluxus, Flirt, Feminist? Carolee Schneemann, Sexual Liberation and the
Avant-garde of the 1960s,” N. Paradoxa 15 (July/September 2001).
Reich, a student of Freud, moved to the U.S. in 1939. Reich was discredited in the 1950s, and
the FDA destroyed his inventions and books in 1956 before he was eventually sent to prison in 1957
where he died shortly. He is credited with coining the term “sexual revolution” in the 1920s. His book
was released in English in the U.S. in 1945 with the title Sexual Revolution. For more on Reich’s
influence in the U.S. see David Allyn, Make Love Not War, The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered
History (New York: Routledge, 2001).

41
Antoine Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove, 1958 [originally published 1938]);
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Knopf, 1953) [originally published 1949].

62
for women at the time.
42
Having moved to New York in the early 1960s, Schneemann
quickly became involved with the group of artists who created the Judson Dance
Theater in 1962. Parallel to the work of other artists there, such as Yvonne Rainer,
Schneemann expressed interest in new ways of using the human body in art. Inspired
by recent publications of phenomenological and psychological theory in the U. S.
Schneemann coined the term “Kinetic Theater” to describe the performances she
scored, directed, and participated in at Judson Dance Theater and elsewhere. She
believed that the women at Judson “really toughened, formalized, broke into existent
conventions. The women originated unexpected forms of physical power, the
deaestheticized body, complex influences for movement as varied as Zen ritual,
ordinary actions of labor, animal motions, games.”
43
In the case of Schneemann,
Judson offered her a place to perform her eroticized works in public where she could
test out her experiments with a live audience rather than having her potentially
controversial work confined to her studio.
Schneemann identified the erotic as a tool for sexual liberation, in Reich’s
terms, and this carried over into art dealing with issues of sexuality.
44
In retrospect,
she understood the liberating experiences of her works as being especially important

42
Sally Banes, “Earthly Bodies: Judson Dance Theater,” in Wendy Perron and Daniel J. Cameron, eds.,
Judson Dance Theater (Bennington, Vt.: Bennington College, 1981).

43
ND (Austin, Texas), no. 14 (1991), 5-10, reprinted in Imaging Her Erotics, 120.

44
Schneemann was not the only artist using bodies in eroticized performances. Nam June Paik and
Charlotte Moorman “Patterson’s Whipped Cream Piece (Lick Piece), first performed during the Fluxus
Concerts held at the Fluxhall/Fluxshop, New York City, in 1964, calls for covering a body with
whipped cream (the artist Lette Eissenhauer volunteered) and for any number of people male or female,
to lick it off. See Kristine Stiles, “Between Water and Stone; Fluxus Performance, A Metaphysics of
Acts,” in In the Spirit of Fluxus (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993), 84.

63
for women. “Women artists explore erotic imagery because our bodies exemplify a
historic battleground,” she wrote in the early 1990s regarding her lifetime of work,
“we are dismantling conventional sexual ideology and its punishing suppressions—
and because our experience of our bodies has not corresponded to cultural
depiction.”
45
Indeed, unlike those feminist critics who doubted the sexual revolution’s
positive impact on the lives of women, Schneemann and others proposed that the
power of eroticism could aid the feminist effort. For example, in 1978 Audre Lorde
delivered her influential essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” at a
women’s conference, declaring eroticism a feminist necessity. “In touch with the
erotic,” she told the women, “I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those
other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair,
self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”
46
She described the erotic as “a source of
power and information” of women’s “deepest and nonrational knowledge.”
47

Advocating a shared experience of sex, Lorde also declared her position as a lesbian
feminist. Perhaps in the context of this feminist conference, it would have been more
difficult to envision a heterosexual relationship that would allow this female erotic
power to be fully realized in the equitable way that Lorde imagined.
As I have shown, Schneemann intended her work to be liberating for the
audience and the performers. Drawing on her personal experience and using her own

45
Schneemann, “The Obscene Body/Politic,” 28.

46
Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” (Keynote, Fourth Berkshire Conference on
the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978), reprinted in Jeffrey Escoffier, ed.,
Sexual Revolution (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003), 171.

47
Ibid., 166-167.

64
body, her work broke taboos specifically related her lived experience, in her case as a
heterosexual woman. I argue that Meat Joy was her first work to directly deal with
heterosexuality. Two critics, Michael Smith and Johnston, writing for the Village
Voice, the alternative newspaper that reviewed and promoted avant-garde art, rendered
descriptions of the event that give a sense of the experience and shed light on the
sexual content in Meat Joy:
Images: a brilliantly lit, vast cascade of paper pouring, pouring down from the
balcony to the floor of the church; two pairs of embracing bodies clad in
bikinis and paper and rolling, rolling about the floor…a woman painting a
man, brushing on bright colors, then a man painting a women…rubbing their
painted bodies together, spreading and spearing the colors…and then the
meat…sausages from a serving tray thrown onto a pile of bikini-clad male and
female bodies.
48

They rub the dead flesh on their partners’ bodies, hit each other with it and
throw bits across the plastic sheets that cover the floor. The men paint the
women’s bodies in gaudy colors, and the women paint the men; when it’s over
they embrace, and the jumbled, glistening bodies roll around in a sticky crust
of paint, crushed sausages, fish and chickens. And above it all, while an
audience of hundreds watches from church pews, is the din and throb of
records by The Beatles and Elvis.
49

Both reviewers noted the partnering of male and female performers in sequences that
involved close touching of their nearly naked bodies. They interpreted the
suggestiveness of the performers’ “embraces” and “glistening bodies” tumbling on the
floor with meat while listening to the “throb” of pop music.
Photos from the performances capture this heterosexual eroticism with
snapshots of various couples rolling on the floor or applying paint to each other’s

48
Michael Smith, “Theatre: Meat Joy,” Village Voice (November 26, 1964).

49
Jill Johnston, “Happenings: Sex or Art?” Cavalcade (April 1965). Carolee Schneemann papers.

65
bodies (Fig. 1.7). The cast included eight members paired into four male/female
couples (“central man” and “central woman,” “two lateral men” and “two lateral
women,” “independent man” and “independent woman,”) along with the “serving
maid” who,
functions throughout as a stage-manager-in-the-open, wandering in and out of
the performance area to care for practical details (gathering discarded clothing,
spreading plastic sheeting, distributing props, allocating fish and chickens, etc.)
Her matter-of-fact actions are deceptive, since cues and coordination of
material & sequences often depend on her.
50

Thus, while wearing an apron that seemed to suggest subjection, in fact, the “serving
maid” directed the other performers during the event.
An abbreviated description of the main interactions between the performers
and the scene will help clarify my point about heterosexual eroticism in the
performance.
51
According to the score, some of the performers arrive on the stage
dressed while two of the women are already wearing bikinis. The performers first
gather around a table and chairs to apply make up and drink refreshments, getting
ready for their parts in front of an already seated audience—for an entire twenty
minutes. Next, the lights go out in one of four “black outs” during the performance
timed to change the scene and to disjoint it from the next section. The two lateral men
climb to the balcony and drop paper onto the stage as loud pop music plays—Blue
Suede Shoes, Tutti Frutti, etc. The men slide down ropes, find their female partners
lying in the audience area, and carry them to locations around the pile of paper on the

50
Schneemann, Meat Joy, 67.

51
Full score and cast list published in Meat Joy, 67-85.

66
stage. The script narrates, “Central Man and Woman enter from under balcony, begin
Undressing Walk—slow motion.” It continues,
She walks backward; no more than a few paces apart, their eyes on one
another. Undressing occurs as a series of rhythmic exchange motions, one
after the other, a pause in between. Only one hand is used at a time in a clear,
sustained, slow reaching to the clothing of the other….As they walk each
article of clothing is removed is dropped slowly, clearly.
52

In one sequence of photographs illustrating this portion, Schneemann and Tenney
stand as if frozen in the midst of a dance (Fig. 1.8). She wears a skirt (emphasizing
the opposite sex of the couple). They remove each other’s clothing in determined
movements.
In another sequence called “Body Package,” the other men cover their female
partners in paper that they tie on with ropes provided by the serving maid. In the next
section, descriptively titled “Body Roll,” couples tumble on the floor in movements
choreographically arranged in terms of speed and direction. The songs continue to
play—From Me to You, Baby Love, Where Did Our Love Go, That’s the Way Boys
Are, Wishin’ and Hopin’, My Guy, I Only Want to Be With You, and so on. These rock
’n’ roll and Motown hits released in 1963 and 1964 are all about young love, sung by
young stars. At this time, conservative listeners and some parents believed the
sexuality expressed in this type of music threatened the morals of young people.
53

Time magazine mentioned the “words and rhythms of pop-music erotica” in their
cover story on the sexual revolution issued in January of 1964, the same year Meat Joy

52
Meat Joy, 68.

53
Escoffier, “Before the Revolution: Rock ’n’ Roll, the Beats, and Playboy” in Sexual Revolution, xiii.

67
was performed.
54
However, the messiness and suggestiveness of multiple semi-nude
bodies writhing in the performance transgressed the somewhat innocent and upbeat
pop songs about love.
Throughout the performance, there are moments that highlight erotic exchange
between the male/female couples. The central couple that undressed each other in the
beginning of the performance later painted each other’s bodies in a ritualistic and
sexually suggestive manner. Schneemann’s wrote in her script:
He shakes her long and violently until they fall over onto the paint table. Very
slowly she slips off him, crouching to reach under the table with one hand, and
pulls out brushes and paint bowls. She rises, moves toward his head, and
begins Love-Paint-Exchange. Slowly painting his face, chest, arms, thighs,
sex, feet, legs, she moves around in back of the table.
55

“Love-Paint-Exchange” eroticizes painting as the man and woman mutually caress
the other’s body with brushes and cover him/her with paint. In Johnston’s review in
the Village Voice, she picked up on the sexual associations throughout the
performance, and, in particular, in this “exchange:”
I was bemused by the association of sex with paint and dead meat. James
Tenney lies on a table so that Miss Schneemann can wash him all over with
paint from a can. When she is similarly decorated they move around the space
together in a kind of dance, rubbing flesh and paint as though paint was an
enhancement of flesh, or vice versa, in the spectrum of sensual possibilities.
56

Johnston not only saw the mixing of nude bodies, paint, and raw meat as transgressing
art, but also this uncommon juxtaposition expanded “sexual possibilities.”

54
“Morals: The Second Sexual Revolution,” n.p.

55
Meat Joy, 70.

56
Johnston, Village Voice.

68
The “independent man” and “independent woman” meanwhile have their own
set of dependent actions to complete that are centered around a mattress that the
women brought on stage along with pillows, books, tea, and cakes. Eventually, the
bikini-clad performers end up in the mass of crumpled paper where the men
orchestrate various poses with the women’s bodies. Finally, the group lies still in the
pile of debris and the “serving maid” carries out a large tray filled with meat including
raw chicken, sausages, mackerel, and throws it out onto the resting bodies. At this
point, actors have their individual instructions: “slips, flops, flips, jumps, throwing and
catching, drawing, falling, running, slapping, exchanging, stroking. Tenderly, then
wildly.”
57
Paint is reintroduced and mixed with the raw meat and writhing bodies
until, “Each man grabs up a woman and carries her out over the littered floor into the
paper pile where everyone buries everyone else as the “central woman” yells,
“Enough, enough!”
58

Having been recently performed in Europe where it received recognition in the
press, the Meat Joy performance was well-attended in New York. The week after the
performance, the Village Voice featured three photographs of Meat Joy on its cover
and two articles reviewing the show, one in the theater section and one in dance (Fig.
1.9). While the Village Voice critics who were accustomed to reviewing avant-garde
performances did not seem shocked by Meat Joy, there had been some violent
reactions in Europe. In Paris, a man from the audience tried to strangle Schneemann

57
Meat Joy, 80.

58
Meat Joy, 81.

69
in the midst of the performance (female audience members stopped him).
59
Although
she by no means desired such an aggressive reaction, she did intend the work to
involve the audience in a more concrete way than traditional theatre would allow.
As Schneemann developed more “kinetic theater” pieces in the following
years, she continued to explore ways of incorporating the audience. Termed by some
as “Intermedia, multimedia, mixed-media or total theater” for its interdisciplinary use
of the arts along with new technologies, “[kinetic theater’s] goal [was] to involve
audiences or participants in an experience on a direct, even visceral, level.”
60
In Meat
Joy, Schneemann had just begun to experiment with the use of multiple actors, a
variety of materials, and an audio recording of collaged sound. Taking inspiration
from Artaud who wrote, “At the point of deterioration which our sensibility has
reached, it is certain that we need above all a theater that wakes us up: nerves and
heart,” Schneemann devised a script that would “eroticize [her] guilty culture.”
61
She
hoped to unsettle the relationship between audience and performers, between actors
and other actors, between traditional art materials and base matter. She disrupted
congruent narrative, sound, and time—all in the service of awakening the erotic in a
traditionally Puritan culture. In 1970, she wrote a piece for Creative Camera that
described her Kinetic Theater in a similar way:
My pieces are characterized by physical contact between a core of performers
and an expanding physical relationship to the environment and

59
Schneemann, “The Obscene Body/Politic,” 31.

60
Elenore Lester, “Intermedia: Tune In, Turn On- And Walk Out?” New York Times (May 12, 1968):
30, 66.

61
Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 84.

70
audience…Each Kinetic Theater work is created or adapted for a specific
performance location; each piece is structured on a basic visual metaphor
which acts as a shifting plane on which tactile, plastic, kinetic encounters are
realized—immediate and sensuous. The nature of these encounters, while
personal to me, exposes and confronts a social range of current cultural taboos
and repressive conventions.
62

As her writing demonstrates, Schneemann intended to breakdown barriers between
performers and audience by using disparate, non-traditional materials and using the
encounter to challenge the taboos of her culture. Thus her work makes the connection
between the sexual revolution and erotic art on a level that was meant not only to
challenge official forms of censorship, but also to engage directly with people’s
experience in order to change their consciousness. For all of these reasons, as well as
Schneemann’s recognition of the influence of feminist writers such as de Beauvoir,
Meat Joy might rightly now be considered a feminist work. However, in 1964, artists
were not using the term “feminist” to describe their art.
Furthermore, Schneemann wrote early on about the difficulties she faced as a
female artist in combating sexist expectations and in being denied teaching work.
63

During art school, she remembers, “My advisor said, ‘don’t set your heart on art
because you’re only a girl. You’re really good, kid, but don’t set you heart on art.’”
64

Her early nudes were censored—a nude self-portrait was excluded from an exhibition
at Bard College where Schneemann was a student, and she experienced the ridicule of
a nude painting of her lover Tenney because she included genitals in the depiction.

62
“Carolee Schneemann: Image As Process,” Creative Camera no. 76 (October 1970): 304.

63
Letter written by Schneemann about discrimination in art schools teaching jobs dated 1963. Carolee
Schneemann papers.

64
Interview with Kate Haug in Imaging Her Erotics, 28.

71
Undoubtedly, these setbacks did not have a self-censoring effect on Schneemann’s
artistic production, as evidenced by her use of semi-nudity in Meat Joy as well as the
explicit sexual intimacy portrayed in her film, Fuses, which she began the same year.

Filming Female Heterosexuality in Fuses (1964-67)
In 1964, the same year she presented Meat Joy, Schneemann embarked on the
first sexually explicit film project by a female American artist. Now considered a
classic of American experimental film, Fuses has rarely been discussed outside of the
scholarship on avant-garde film.
65
However, this film should not be excluded from
discussions of Schneemann’s use of her own body in her work, including Interior
Scroll and Meat Joy, for the film is based on footage of the artist having sex with her
partner, experimental composer Jim Tenney. For three years, Schneemann worked on
the film, continually editing and recording new footage. Fuses was first publicly
shown in London in 1968 at the Roundhouse Theater for the “Dialectics of Liberation”
conference and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), and then later that year at
the Yale film festival, although Schneemann had screened it throughout the production
process to smaller audiences in her New York studio.
66
The ICA announcement
advertised “Carolee Schneemann’s Love Film ‘Fuses,’” and the Yale film festival,
October 21, 1968, described it as “an honest and poetic film about the experiences felt

65
The restored version 2007, 16 mm, 29:51 min.

66
ICA performance June 27, 1968; 2nd Annual Yale Film Festival, October 21, 1968.

72
by two people making love.”
67
As with Meat Joy, she hoped the work would be a
“transformative…erotic rite to activate my guilty culture.”
Schneemann conceived of the film in response to visual representations of sex
in popular culture, none of which resonated with her own experience of sex.
68
“I
really wanted to see what ‘the fuck’ is,” she brazenly said, “and locate that in terms of
a lived sense of equity.”
69
She captured her vision of a “lived female sexuality”
through footage of her own intimate and “ordinary” life with Tenney and her cat Kitch
in an old farmhouse in upstate, rural New York.
70
At the same time, she tackled head-
on the “suppression around lived sexuality” she experienced in culture because the
“pleasure of a young woman [was] considered obscene.”
71
Thus, influenced by ideas
of sexual liberation circulating in the mid-1960s, Schneemann saw her film as having
both personal and cultural significance.
In the field of experimental film, she made Fuses in dialog with Brakhage’s
film, Window Water Baby Moving (1959), a work with explicit footage of the birth of
his first child, which Schneemann felt allowed the male artist to take possession of
childbirth, an aspect of female sexuality. In addition, she had some negative feelings
about the experience of “acting” in two of Brakhage’s films, Loving (1956) (a fast
edited film that includes images of Schneemann and Tenney having sex outdoors) and

67
Carolee Schneemann papers.

68
Schneemann, “The Obscene Body/Politic.”

69
Interview with Kate Haug in Imaging Her Erotics, 23.

70
Robert Enright, “The Articulate Body: Carolee Schneemann in Conversation,” Boarder Crossings
(winter 1998): 14-27.

71
Schneemann lecture, Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, April 25, 2008.

73
Cat’s Cradle (1959), in which the couple also appeared.
72
In response to these films
by Brakhage, Schneemann embarked on her first autobiographical film project,
“inspired by a relationship of ten years, using the sexual love of that relationship as
image as basic as a painter using landscape as basic environment.”
73
She believed that
her film would be different from Brakhage’s work because she was a woman and an
artist who was trained as a painter.
Rather than creating a coherent or linear narrative love story, Schneemann’s
approach to representing “lived female sexuality” was organic and filled with collages
of imagery and materials. From friends she borrowed Bolex cameras with motors that
had to be wound every thirty seconds and created small pieces of footage that she
edited together into a silent film. She set up the camera in precarious ways—hanging
it with straps, propping it up on things—in order to get unusual angles and unexpected
viewpoints. She wrote that the camera’s parallax viewfinder, with which one sees two
images, often left her with results that she did not expect.
74
As reels of film were
printed and returned to her, she continued to film new footage. She also went to work
on the prints, treating the film stock as a three-dimensional collage canvas.
75
She
painted on it, baked it, burned it, scratched it, and exposed it to the weather (Fig. 1.10).

72
Scott MacDonald interview manuscript and “Carolee Schneemann Interviewed by Phillip Drummond
‘72” in Carolee Schneemann papers.

73
“Further Fuses Notes,” February 1969, Carolee Schneemann papers.

74
Interview, Alexandra Juhasz, Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 71.

75
Lecture notes dated 1990, Carolee Schneemann papers.

74
At a certain point, the original film could no longer be printed because it was simply
too thick.
76

As with her performances, Schneemann has spoken about the influence of
Abstract Expressionism on the making of this film. “I needed the implicit energy of
abstract expressionism to become more materialized, more dimensional….Film
became another way to paint in time—to speed my frames simultaneously.”
77
The
relevance of this influence is apparent in the film’s rapidly succeeding images,
superimpositions, and color fields. The heavily worked film appears as a collage of
color, texture, and imagery that move in a nonlinear fashion. For example, there is an
image of Schneemann standing naked in front of a window, her body silhouetted
against the bright outdoors. A few seconds later, the short sequence of her walking
towards the window begins. Streaks of light and a rainbow palette of colors disrupt
readings of the recognizable imagery (Fig. 1.11). Sometimes the focus is blurry, at
other times there is a close up of the vagina, penis, or buttocks. Scenes of
Schneemann running through waves at the beach are superimposed and interspersed
with images of her and Tenney having sex on their bed (Figs. 1.12 and 1.13). Sexual
encounters between their naked bodies are dispersed through cuts of the domestic
space of their farmhouse, the landscape changing with seasons, and, most notably,
their cat, Kitch (Fig. 1.14). In some cases, Kitch’s eyes seem to be watching the
lovers, as frames cut between the cat and Schneemann’s and Tenney’s naked bodies.

76
Schneemann lecture, Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, April 25, 2008.

77
Juhasz, Women of Vision, 69.

75
Both are also shown reclining in nude poses, sharing tender kisses, and holding each
other (Fig. 1.15). They have sex in multiple positions, but the film switches too
quickly to understand more than a second of action (Fig. 1.16). Often it is only after
the image has past that one can make sense of what was seen. Some of the images are
reversed, upside down, and almost always complicated with superimposed imagery,
under or overexposure, or scratches and paint on the film stock itself. There are
frames of solid color with markings that look written, scratched, painted or spilled.
Mixed with this abstract imagery, pieces of Schneemann’s domestic life appear: a
Christmas tree, a window with lace curtains, a pile of papers and books next to a
resting cat. Sometimes the images move in fast succession and sometimes they are
slow. All of these qualities combine to produce an effect, as the representation of an
experience, not merely the recording of one.
In a note written in 1969, Schneemann described the connection between
Fuses and her painting, in particular the need to break out of the traditional frame, the
rectangle of the canvas and the film frame, in order really to capture her life
experience in art:
I think of the film as a flesh landscape shifts of bodies bed windows in and out
doors rectangle of camera eye from each paper canvas and to breaking in the
film itself – as eye in perception – the domination of the rectangle. Using the
bodies our bodies in loving simply, directly, without self-consciousness.
78

There was an idealistic simplicity to her conception of directness, and yet the technical
process was quite complicated, and the film took three years to complete. The length
of time she worked on this project suggests the effort that realizing her vision of

78
“Further Fuses Notes.”

76
representing her experience of “sexual love” required. This would only be the
beginning of obstacles faced in the film’s production, exhibition, and reception.
Schneemann’s use of footage of herself and Tenney having sex posed potential
censorship problems from the start. For a while, she sent her reels of film to be
processed by the lab Brakhage used in Denver on the premise that they had experience
with alternative films. However, they would accept the film only if “each reel was
accompanied by a letter from a psychiatrist.” Schneemann explains, “The Xeroxed
letter sent with every little reel read, ‘Carolee Schneemann’s current film work is an
examination of the archetypal evolution of the cross.’”
79
This weak metaphoric
explanation for the explicit imagery was apparently enough to convince the lab to
process the film. The lab she used in New York also expressed concerned about
police raids, though Schneemann later found out that they were running a pornography
lab in the basement.
80
But like other independent filmmakers, she was dependent on
these commercial labs to produce her films, even while the technological advances in
the early 1960s had finally made filmmaking cheap enough to be more accessible.
Feminist film scholars have argued that, like the permissive environment at the
alternative space of the Judson Memorial Church, film’s marginal status in the art

79
ND interview, Imaging Her Erotics, 123.

80
Schneemann lecture, Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, April 25, 2008.

77
world allowed experimental filmmakers more freedom and women more opportunity
to produce their work.
81

Schneemann’s battles with censorship over Fuses have been documented from
the time of the film’s first showing in 1968 to as recently as 1989 at the Moscow Film
Festival.
82
These incidents attest to the threat that her frank portrayal of sexuality
presented. In response, those who saw her film as work of art were willing to put their
support in writing. In 1968, Derrick Hill, whom Schneemann describes as a
“courageous independent distributor,” asked her to send letters of support from
respected individuals in the American art community to preempt difficulties with the
London screening the film.
83
Letters to Hill from the Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA), the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), and the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA) testifying to the status of Fuses as a work of art
can be found in the artist’s archive. Adrienne Mancia from the Museum of Modern
Art’s Department of Film wrote,
Fuses is a personal statement by a young artist which expresses the joy of
heterosexual love…Even if one accepts the premise of censorship, it should be
clear that this is not a film made for exploitation or commercial reasons but for
artistic necessity.
84

81
Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982),
185; Lauren Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-
Garde Cinema, 1943-1971, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).

82
Censored by the dean and other officials at the University of Texas El Paso in 1976. The Prospector,
“Blown fuse?” Willie Varela (student and artist) letter to the editor, November 23, 1976, Anthology
Film Archives.
For details on the Moscow censorship see Aviva Rahmani, “A Conversation on Censorship
with Carolee Schneemann,” Meaning 6 (1989): 56-7.

83
Interview with Kate Haug, Imaging Her Erotics, 27.

84
Letter from Adrienne Mancia, MoMA, dated August 1968, Carolee Schneemann papers.

78
A letter from John B. Hightower, Executive Director of the NYSCA declared that,
“the film to be shown in Albert Hall is clearly a work of art. The film is a positive,
passionate, often lyrical treatment of making love,” he continued, and “has the rare,
almost never seen quality of straightforward honesty.”
85
And Jan van der Marck from
the MCA explained,
The very fact that the protagonists are their own director and cameraman
eliminates whatever voyeuristic taint might otherwise detract from the end
result. FUSES is frank without being exhibitionist, intimate without license
and poetic in an earthy, self-liberating, orgiastic way.
86

It is interesting that these letters amount to some of the highest praise for the film.
They tend to focus on the motivation for the film, the fact that the actors were also its
creators, and other aspects of its production relating to the sexual imagery. They do
not reference the highly formal aspects of the film in order to prove its status as art,
but rather focus on “straightforward honesty.” In addition, none of the writers
consider that the male participant could be wrongly objectified or abused in the
making of the film. By all accounts, Tenney was completely supportive of the project
and, in a letter written in May of 1968, he gave Schneemann all rights to use his image
and name in her work for the price of one dollar.
87

In the U.S., problems arose when the film was to be shown in Los Angeles in
1969. According to a letter from James Lithgow, the L.A. District Attorney “arrested

85
Letter from John B. Hightower, Executive Director, NYSCA, dated July 31, 1968, Carolee
Schneemann papers.

86
Letter from Jan van der Marck, MCA, dated August 20, 1968, Carolee Schneemann papers.

87
Letter from James Tenney to Carolee Schneemann, dated May 1968, Carolee Schneemann papers.

79
the theater manager and confiscated the films…Fuses was among those seized.”
88

This arrest also resulted in the loss of a booking in San Jose, California, where the
local police chief demanded to see the film ahead of time and then threatened the
theater with permanent closure if they showed it.
89
But there were enough supporters
like Lithgow and Hill, and many others in New York, to keep Fuses available for
public viewing, including the screening at the 1969 Cannes film festival in France.
Schneemann reported that audience reactions were mixed, and some thought
Fuses was an example of “narcissistic exhibitionism.” When shown at the Cannes
Film Festival, a group of angry male audience members tore up the theater seats with
knives.
90
Similar to the attempted strangulation over Meat Joy, this violence, I
believe, attests to the social unacceptability of her position as a woman creating such
explicit sexual imagery. However, the critics writing on underground and
experimental film praised it.
91
The influential filmmaker and editor of Film Culture
magazine, Jonas Mekas wrote that Fuses was “certainly the most beautiful film of the
year” in his Village Voice column “Movie Journal,” which supported developments of
independent cinema.
92
Prolific film theorist and critic Gene Youngblood devoted the

88
Letter from James Lithgow, dated July 17, 1969, Carolee Schneemann papers.

89
Letter from James Lithgow, Film-Makers’ Distribution Center, August 9, 1969, Carolee Schneemann
papers.

90
“On Censorship: Interview with Aviva Rahmani” in Imaging Her Erotics, 211.

91
Interview with Kate Haug, Imaging Her Erotics, 32.

92
Jonas Mekas, “Summing Up the Year 1968,” (December 26, 1968). The Movie Journal column
began on November 12, 1958. Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema,
1959-1971 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), Introduction, ix. “In this decade, Mekas has

80
most words to Fuses, which he called “a supremely beautiful film, the kind our
schizophrenic society continues to reject.”
93
Arguing that “few Hollywood ‘adult’
movies, girlie movies or traditional pornographic films are erotic,” Youngblood
identified Fuses as an erotic form of the type of film he termed “synaesthetic cinema.”
Such a cinema involved “multiple-image, superimposition, sound-collage type of films
which replace montage with collage as their structural mode.” These films have “the
effect of merging the physical act with its metaphysical connotation-or ‘stream of
consciousness’-which is very Joycean and very erotic.” Youngblood praised
Schneemann’s use of such a technique in representing explicit sexual scenes. “By
combining, interspersing, interweaving images of sexual love and images of mundane
joy (the sun, a pet cat, light through a window),” Youngblood explains, “Miss
Schneemann expresses sex without the self-consciousness of a spectacle.”
94
He later
comments, “If there’s anything unique about a pornographic film made by a woman
it’s this emotional unity that ties the images together.”
95
Paradoxically, then, it is the
disjunctive collage film assembled from the day-to-day aspects of a woman’s life that
actually leaves Youngblood with a more complete cinematic representation of the
experience of sex.

helped to lead the artists of the ignored and vilified “underground” avant-garde in their battle against
the powerful Hollywood and European film-makers.” (back flap).

93
Gene Youngblood, “Panavision 70 Penis Meets Mammoth Vagina,” Los Angeles Free Press (July 19,
1968), Anthology Film Archives.

94
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, Inc., 1970), 13.

95
Ibid., 121.

81
This groundbreaking work of heterosexual eroticism has also been discussed in
more recent film scholarship, where recognition exists of the revolutionary role of
sexual subject matter in the history of American avant-garde film.
96
In his definitive
study of 1960s American film, film scholar David James explains the connection
between sex and cinema at the time:
First came the beats’ renegotiation of homosexuality, and then the polemical
display of the female body and of eroticism in general by the underground and
art cinemas. Publicly tagged as a sex cinema, underground film was always
identified with proscribed eroticism.
97

The “display of the female body” in these films, James writes, often “objectified
[women] as the sign of the sexual in general” and the “explicit representation of
sexuality was made to signify social freedom.”
98
Thus, Fuses must be situated along
with homosexual and “sex cinema” and with such films as Warhol’s Blue Movie (also
called Fuck) (1969) and Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947), in addition to the more
“lyrical” though still directly sexual, Window Water Baby Moving. This body of erotic
films constantly invited censorship, taking on societal taboos with new aesthetic
means. An article in the New Art Examiner by Ruby Rich attempted to explain the
relationship of sex in New American Cinema (from as early as the 1940s to the
1970s). In it, filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas is quoted arguing that film, raised to
the level of the other arts, no longer can be mistaken for pornography. “Works of art

96
The terms American avant-garde, underground, experimental cinema were often used
interchangeably. New American Cinema generally refers to late 1950s-1970s. All categories refer to
independent films that were not distributed through or made by mainstream Hollywood avenues.

97
David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1989), 314.

98
Ibid., 315.

82
are above obscenity and pornography,” he insists, “or more correctly, beyond what the
police understand as obscenity and pornography. Art exists on a higher spiritual,
aesthetic, and moral plane.”
99
Erotic films made as art by independent filmmakers (all
men up to this point) needed to be separated from pornography, and a similar struggle
was occurring in other arts such as literature and painting during the mid-1960s as part
of the sexual revolution. Schneemann’s work connects to this broader context of
erotic and avant-garde art while also uniquely dealing with her experience of sex as a
woman.
A review of Fuses that appeared in the underground newspaper, the San
Francisco Express Times, after the 1968 showing did compare Fuses to
Warhol’s Fuck and Anger’s Fireworks, showing that there were indeed perceived
correspondences between these films. The author praises Fuses as “The best fuck film
I can recall seeing.” One of the reasons for his admiration seems to be the fact that the
maker is a woman, for he writes,
The cultural history of male America has passed down too much shit for a man
to have made ‘Fuses,’ which views love-making subjectively, from within.
The interior view is both more erotic and less pornographic, more like doing it
than watching it. An American male would have to uncloud his eyes of several
thousand playmates to see things that way.
100

He calls the film “intersubjective,” noting, as Jones did many years later, that
Schneemann’s work exposed a certain dependency between people. “Merging two
foci of sexual experience—male and female—analogously to the way binocular vision

99
Jonas Mekas, Village Voice (1964) quoted in B. Ruby Rich “Sex and Cinema” The New Art Examiner
(Summer 1979): 3, 11. In March of 1964, Mekas was arrested for screening Flaming Creatures.

100
Dave Mc Cullough, “Eat Movies,” San Francisco Express Times (February 25), n.d. Carolee
Schneemann [artist file], Museum of Modern Art Library, New York.

83
fuses two images,” he writes, “‘Fuses’ presents a complete fuck, not half a fuck, which
is a joy to see and doubtless satisfying to make.”
101
This idea of completeness and
intersubjectivity registered in later film criticism in terms of the equality between the
man and the woman during the lovemaking act. Scott MacDonald and other scholars
took note of the fact that both the male and female body are exposed equally during
the film, and read this as a sign of “equity in the relationship.”
102
In addition,
MacDonald reads the printing of certain images in reverse, which creates two versions
of the sexual act taking place, one with Schneemann on top and one with Tenney on
top, as similarly egalitarian. Similarly, critics have recognized that the irresolution of
some of the images, and the dissolving of one genital into another, blurs strict ideas
about the heterosexual male/female dichotomy.
103
These interpretations suggest that
Schneemann’s formal choices challenge the traditionally dichotomous heterosexual
relationship in American culture, in which the male partner holds greater power not
only sexually, but also economically, socially, and politically. Schneemann’s
confusion of the male/female positions denies the autonomy that the male partner
needs in order to keep his place in the hierarchy.
Within film criticism related to New American Cinema, there have been two
strands of inquiry that relate to Fuses; the first regards autobiographical, lyrical film,
and the second studies the construction of the film itself. In Visionary Film (1974),

101
Ibid.

102
Scott MacDonald, “Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Autobiographical Trilogy,” Film Quarterly 34, no. 1
(autumn 1980): 28.

103
Kubitza, “Fluxus, Flirt, Feminist?”

84
the first history of American avant-garde film, P. Adams Sitney wrote about lyrical
film as Brakhage’s discovery. In a sense, lyrical film is autobiographical in that it
represents the filmmaker’s perception. He describes the genre as follows:
The lyrical film postulates the film-maker behind the camera as the first-person
protagonist of the film. The images of the film are what he sees, filmed in
such a way that we never forget his presence and we know how he is reacting
to his vision. In the lyrical form there is no longer a hero; instead, the screen is
filled with movement, and that movement, both of the camera and editing,
reverberates with the idea of a man looking. As viewers we see this man’s
intense experience of seeing.
104

He goes on to compare the space of lyrical film (with its superimpositions and use of
the “flatness and whiteness of the screen”) to the “flattened space of Abstract
Expressionism” as opposed to the conception of the screen as a window.
105
This
correspondence between lyrical film and painting could be applied to Fuses.
Schneemann used techniques such as fast cuts, non-linear imagery, and manipulation
of the film and camera to address the personal and intense experience of sex. She
described her film not as documentary, but a “desperate desire to capture the
passionate things of life.”
106

Although Fuses was not a documentary, it was about her life experience, and it
became the first of three autobiographical films by the artist. The films Plumb Line
(1971) and Kitch’s Last Meal (1978) also centered on Schneemann’s serious and
intimate relationships with men and her cat Kitch. While Fuses is based on footage of

104
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978, 2nd

ed. (Oxford
University Press, 1979), 142.

105
Ibid.

106
Interview with Kate Haug in Imaging Her Erotics, 37.

85
the artist having sex with her partner Tenney (they were together for thirteen years),
her heavy treatment of that footage negates the possibility of understanding the film as
a straightforward autobiography. It is a construction that represents her sexual
experience in this relationship. An anecdote about the making of the film will clarify
this point. She recalled in an interview:
I remember weeping over the sink doing the dishes one morning and Jim
asking what was wrong. ‘Well, I really don’t want to go back to bed and do
some footage of Fuses,’ I said. ‘It seems so mechanical but it’s snowing and
the light’s just right.
107

This quote demonstrates that there was not a one-to-one correlation between the
sexual footage and her life with Tenney. This disjunction relates to Sitney’s
theorization of autobiography in the realm of avant-garde film. In an essay on the
subject, he proposed, “film-makers resemble the literary autobiographers who dwell
upon, and find their most powerful and enigmatic metaphors for the very aporias, the
contradictions, the gaps, the failures involved in trying to make language (or film)
substitute for experience and memory.”
108
Schneemann wrote as much to Jonas
Mekas when he was writing on her films in his Village Voice column:
Viewers may take the psychological atmosphere of the film as ‘being her life’
(an open ended time in their perceptions), but I will have changed and been
changed by working on the film…The processes of filming itself, editing, and
more mysterious collusions cannot be imaged as ‘real life’—only as ‘reel
life.’
109

107
Enright, “The Articulate Body: Carolee Schneemann in Conversation.”

108
Sitney, “Autobiography in Avant-Garde Film,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and
Criticism (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1978), 200.

109
Schneemann letter to Mekas, January 9, 1972. Carolee Schneemann papers. Partially reprinted in
Mekas, “Movie Journal,” Village Voice (February 3, 1975), n.p.

86
In other words, autobiography is a representation of a life, not the life itself. At the
same time, life includes the experience of making the film, which thereby changes the
filmmaker.
In a 1980 essay, film scholar Scott MacDonald was perhaps the first to
acknowledge the formal complexity of Fuses. He was correct in stating that “the
obvious pleasures of Schneemann’s films—their unusual intimacy and emotional
authenticity, their sensuous rhythms and gorgeous textures—frequently blind viewers
to the considerable formal intricacy and ingenuity of her work.”
110
MacDonald broke
down the technical aspects of Schneemann’s filmmaking process and presentation of
the three autobiographical films, carefully demonstrating for the reader the extent of
her conceptualization and construction of each project. With respect to Fuses, for
example, MacDonald listed the different speeds of film, the camera positions, the
exposure levels, the multiple print generations, and the superimpositions, showing the
various ways that Schneemann worked with the medium to produce its visual effects.
Despite the films’ personal nature (in the sense that each centers on an intimate
relationship of Schneemann), her representation in the film medium is quite
formalistic. In addition, there is a strong metaphoric quality to the film’s images that
MacDonald enumerates, including the relation between the lovers and the cycles of the
seasons as natural, the use of windows to frame both outdoor and interior space, the
images of Schneemann running through the surf, and the cat’s presence throughout as
a non-judging observer of the lovers.

110
MacDonald, “Carolee Schneemann’s Autobiographical Trilogy,” 27.

87
In addition to these aspects of Schneemann’s process that MacDonald’s
detailed analysis of Fuses has illuminated, the artist’s notes on the making of the film
reveal the length to which she choreographed the imagery. For example, one page
shows Schneemann working out a progression of bodily positions through sketches
(Fig. 1.17). In her notebook pages, Schneemann arranged imagery from film footage
that she had collected, taking care to construct transitions between frames in order to
create a particular sequence of imagery for the viewer.
As one of the first women to work in the field of experimental film in the
1960s, Schneemann took advantage of the interest in showing women’s films that
developed in the following decade alongside the feminist art movement, and she
appeared at many conferences on the subject. Women’s filmmaking exploded in the
early 1970s, and one hundred and twenty films were shown at the First International
Festival of Women’s Films in June 1972. Among the topics discussed was “Is There a
Female Film Aesthetic?” in a panel chaired by film scholar Annette Michelson.
111

The same year, the Women and Film journal was founded in California.
112
As the
recognition spread that women had been excluded from all aspects of filmmaking
except for acting, there was interest in recovering “lost” women directors and in
searching for a female aesthetic. However, Schneemann’s films were quite different
from newer films made under the banner of feminism. Film scholar Lauren
Rabinovitz remarks that Fuses was withheld from the First International Festival of

111
“Women, Their Films, and Their Festival,” Spare Rib (August 12, 1972): 31.

112
In 1973, the Whitney Museum ran a program of films by women filmmakers, as did the New York
Cultural Center. In 1972, two groups formed: New Day Films and Women Make Movies. In 1975, Iris
Films and Women/Artists/Filmmakers were founded.

88
Women’s Films in 1972 because “her self-proclaimed interest in creating ‘sensory
arenas’ and her detailed, graphic depiction of various sexual acts” could not be
critically situated in the context of new feminist film.
113
In an essay published toward
the end of the 1970s, Laura Mulvey offered a retrospective description of feminist film
during the decade:
Looking back at feminist film criticism and festivals in the early 70s, it is
obvious that the first unified wave of films produced by women came directly
out of the Women’s Movement, characterized by a mixture of consciousness-
raising and propaganda.
114

In other words, early film designated as “feminist” based itself on a belief in film as
“transparent medium” that could represent the plight of women under patriarchy in the
United States. Schneemann’s films were at once too sexual and too aesthetically
complex to align with this type of feminist message making.
In Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema (1975), Mulvey famously criticized
mainstream cinema as sexist and objectifying, and, in “Feminism, Film and the Avant-
Garde,” she advocated for the development of a new film language “probing
dislocation between cinematic form and represented material, and investigating
various means of splitting the established rapport between screen and spectator.”
115

She proposed that alternative forms of filmmaking might be better suited to
deconstructing the roles of women in Hollywood film. Anti-illusionism and

113
Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-garde Cinema,
1943-1971, 192.

114
Laura Mulvey, “Feminism, Film and the Avant-Garde,” Framework, 10 (spring 1979): 6.

115
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (autumn 1975): 6-18.
[originally written in 1973] “Going far beyond highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness, the cinema
builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself,” 12.

89
formalism “foregrounding the process itself, privileging the signifier, necessarily
disrupts aesthetic unity and forces the spectator’s attention on the means of production
of meaning.”
116
In other words, the “cinematic apparatus is not ideologically
neutral.”
117
According to Mulvey, New American Cinema appearing in the 1960s
negated the traditional forms of illusionist film, giving it the potential to disrupt the
ideology of film. Though Mulvey did not write about Fuses, her notions of
dislocation, of disrupting the narrative and drawing attention to the process of film
itself, can be productively applied to Schneemann’s films.
While on the one hand, Schneemann idealized the directness of Fuses, she was
also supremely aware of her mediation through the materials of film. Her process was
at once constructive and deconstructive. She pieced together a collage of footage to
express her experience of sex while at the same time unsettling conventions of
commercial pornographic films and troubling societal expectations of women. As
previously mentioned, Schneemann was invited to lecture at the Institute of
Contemporary Art in London in 1968, the year after the film was completed. For the
event, which she appropriately titled Naked Action Lecture, Schneemann gave an art
history slide lecture about her work and influences during which she continuously
undressed and dressed “while asking the audience, ‘Can a woman artist be a nude and
an art historian? Can a woman painter be an art historian and a nude?’”
118
After the
lecture, two male volunteers joined her in “demonstrating a principle of collage” by

116
Mulvey, “Feminism, Film and the Avant-Garde,” 7.

117
Ibid., 8.

118
Brooklyn Rail (April 2005): 15, Anthology Film Archives. For full description, see Meat Joy.

90
undressing, covering each other with paste, and diving into a pile of shredded paper.
As the finale, the lights went out and Fuses was projected for the audience. This
performance provides evidence of Schneemann’s feminist consciousness in her
vocation as an artist because she understood that, as a woman, her nude body
provoked new questions about the gendered standards and assumptions of both art and
art history. At the same time, these aesthetic experiments in eroticism were not
always received as feminist, as discussed earlier. Penthouse magazine mentioned her
performance at the ICA, showing that in the right context, her art might appeal to a
heterosexual male audience. After all, she made the film in the mid-1960s, “a time
when the female nude dwelled mainly in girlie magazines, pornographic detective
fictions, photographic reports on ‘primitive natives,’ classic Western painting,
Abstract Expressionist dis-memberments, and the iconic, frontal-spread paper dolls of
Pop art.”
119
Fuses and Naked Action Lecture work within and against this culture at
the same time.
Although the sexual revolution had given women more control over their
reproductive freedom and broke taboos about female sexuality, by the early 1970s,
feminists had begun to criticize sexual revolution ideologies as enforcing the
patriarchal structure of American society by making women more available to men.
In art, representations of female heterosexual desire and pleasure became a problem
(as I showed in my earlier review of the criticisms of women’s body art). Not only
were female artists in danger of self-exploitation, but also the practice of

119
Schneemann, “The Obscene Body/Politic,” 28.

91
heterosexuality itself posed a conceptual problem to the feminist cause.
Consciousness-raising groups about repressive forms of heterosexual relationships for
women—including sex, marriage, love, and rape—that took place in the early 1970s
may have limited the interest in work that could be read as celebrating heterosexuality,
such as Schneemann’s performances and films.
A few scholars have recently addressed the problems of female heterosexuality
within the feminist art movement. In the 1990s, Jane Gaines posited that “feminist
heterosexuality” had disappeared from the history of feminist art.
120
She argued that
artwork expressing heterosexual experience became conceptually unacceptable within
the feminist movement, and, therefore, such works fell out of the history as a canon of
feminist art emerged. In Re-making Love: The Feminization of Sex, the authors
directly challenge the idea that the sexual revolution was oppositional to feminist
goals by examining what they name the “women’s sexual revolution.” They argue
that women did not merely have more sex during the sexual revolution, but that they,
began to transform the notion of heterosexual sex itself: from the irreducible
‘act’ of intercourse to a more open-ended and varied kind of encounter. At the
same time, the social meaning of sex changed too: from a condensed drama of
female passivity and surrender to an interaction between potentially equal
persons.
121

By focusing on this aspect of the sexual revolution, whether one believes it succeeded
or failed, we can gain insight into the motivations of artists like Schneemann who

120
Jane Gaines, “Feminist Heterosexuality and Its Politically Incorrect Pleasures,” Critical Inquiry 21,
no. 2 (1995): 382-410.

121
Barbara Ehrenreich, et al. Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (New York: Anchor
Press/Double Day, 1986), 5.

92
imagined that it was possible to envision female heterosexual desire and sexual
relations in a non-repressive and egalitarian way.
One final example reveals some telling parallels with more recent work
arguably indebted to Schneemann’s early experiments in erotic film and performance.
In the early 1970s, while living mainly in London, Schneemann embarked on a joint
film project with her lover at the time, filmmaker Anthony McCall. The film was
never completed and the footage was ultimately lost. However, the couple had
conceived of a type of diary film about their relationship told from both sides.
122
For
the project, they interviewed and filmed each other. They talked to each other’s
friends and inquired about past lovers. Then they reviewed the tapes together,
learning about themselves and their relationship in the process. In a description of the
project, the filmmakers characterize their work as a “dynamic process” recognizing
that their relationship will be changed by the very fact of its surveillance:
Into the dynamic process of a relationship, which is a psycho-sexual,
discovery-adjustment-reaction-rediscovery cycle, is added another dynamic
process, that of recording…In some ways, we are laying out what happens to
any couple in a relationship, but because of the media, and our inclination, we
are probing into the dynamics more fiercely.
123

The effects of artists’ intimate relationships on their work would have been explored
in this film, undoubtedly including some frank footage of their sex life. In postcards
made from collaged texts and images Schneemann referenced their work-in-progress.
One such postcard featured a photograph of her and McCall, joyously leaping from

122
National Film Theatre Programme Notes, n.d, Carolee Schneemann papers.

123
Carolee Schneemann and Anthony McCall, “Further notes on their film/ New York July 10, 1972,”
Carolee Schneemann papers.

93
wooden chairs in the nude (Fig. 1.18). Regarding the extension of the film production
into her personal life, Schneemann acknowledged that the project would necessarily
alter her relationship, creating an exchange between art and life. Indeed, this work
would have made apparent the undeniable connections between one’s personal life and
one’s art. In fact, it was McCall who took the famous photo of Schneemann standing
on the table during the performance of Interior Scroll, thereby evidencing the presence
of her male partner at the women’s conference. The trajectory from Meat Joy and
Fuses in the mid-1960s to Interior Scroll in the mid-1970s demonstrates
Schneemann’s ongoing engagement with performance and film as media for aesthetic
examination of the issues of sex, gender, and erotics.
Schneemann’s examinations of heterosexual eroticism prefigure a number of
more recent works that might also be hard to understand in strictly feminist terms.
Yet, like Schneemann’s films and performances, these works challenge a variety of
assumptions about what art is and how a woman can negotiate life as an artist. Sophie
Calle’s Double Blind (1994), for example, tells the story of a cross-country road trip
she took with her lover, Gregory Shephard. Each recorded the journey with a hand-
held video camera. At the end of the trip, they got married at a drive-through wedding
chapel in Las Vegas, although by then the viewer of the video knows that the
relationship is doomed. Calle and Shephard edited the footage upon arrival in
California and broke up not long after the film was complete. Recently, Andrea Fraser
received publicity for her video in which she has sex with an unnamed collector who
had arranged to pay Fraser $20,000 for the privilege of making the work with her.

94
Following upon Schneemann’s examples, both Calle and Fraser test the boundaries of
their personal life, their bodies, and their work. Thus, the legacy of Schneemann’s
Meat Joy and Fuses reaches beyond the 1960s to a history of women’s contemporary
art engaged with the complexities of eroticism and art making.

95

Fig. 1.1. Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975, photograph by Anthony McCall

Fig. 1.2. Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll

96

Figure 1.3. Carolee Schneemann, Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions, 1963,
photographs by Erró

Figure 1.4. Carolee Schneemann and Robert Morris in rehearsal for Site, 1964,
photograph by Hans Namuth

97

Fig. 1.5. Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964, 16mm, color, sound, 6 min

Fig. 1.6. Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964, silver print

98

Fig. 1.7. Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964, photograph by Al Giese

Fig. 1.8. Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964, photography by Harold Chapman

99

Fig. 1.9. Village Voice, November 26, 1964, cover

Fig. 1.10. Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, 1964-67, 16mm, color, silent, 22 min.

Fig. 1.11. Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, film still

100

Fig. 1.12. Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, film still

Fig. 1.13. Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, film still

Fig. 1.14. Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, film still

101

Fig. 1.15. Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, film still

Fig. 1.16. Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, film still

Fig. 1.17. Carolee Schneemann, Fuses notebook, c. 1964-67

102

Fig. 1.18. Carolee Schneemann and Anthony McCall, postcard, c. 1971

103
Chapter 2: The Problem of Figurative Erotic Art: Marjorie Strider and Pop Art

In January 1964, Pace Gallery in New York City launched artist Marjorie
Strider’s career when they featured her “girlie” triptychs in The First International
Girlie Exhibition alongside works by known Pop artists Roy Lichtenstein, Mel Ramos,
Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann.
1
Strider, a new artist on the scene, stood out in
the show with her “pop-out Pop Art pinup girlies”—six-foot-tall acrylic paintings
depicting women in bathing suits with their breasts and bottoms sculpted out of wood
and protruding from the canvas (Fig. 2.1).
2
The Village Voice featured a picture of
Strider on its front page, showing her with Brunette (1963), a triptych of a seated
bikini-clad woman in three different pin-up poses (Figs. 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4).
3
The bikini
cups jut out from the surface of the canvas, drawing attention to the visual spectacle of
the woman in her yellow bathing suit as she smiles invitingly at the viewer. A shining
silver background replaces any illusionistic landscape or atmosphere. Strider and
Brunette appeared on the newspaper’s cover along with works by Jackson Pollock and
George Segal. The caption characterized Pollock as part of the Abstract Expressionist

1
My two main sources for information on this exhibition are John Perreault, “Marjorie Strider: An
Overview,” in Marjorie Strider: 10 Years, 1970-1980, selected works, exh. cat. [traveled 1982-84]
(Greenvale, NY: Hillwood Art Gallery, C.W. Post Center, Long Island University, 1985); and John
Canaday, “Art: From Clean Fun to Plain Smut: ‘Girlie Exhibit’ Opens at Pace Gallery,” New York
Times (January 7, 1964): 31. I have not been able to locate a checklist for the exhibition.
Strider was the only female artist to be included in both the First International Girlie Show and The
Arena of Love. She was identified as a Pop artist at the time. See, for example, Lucy Lippard, Pop Art
(New York: Preager, 1966). Rosalyn Drexler participated in The First International Girlie Show and
Idelle Weber and Sandra Daly in The Arena of Love.
My colleague, Jason Goldman, first brought Strider’s “girlie” works to my attention in his
presentation on Strider for a seminar at the University of Southern California lead by Richard Meyer
and Nancy Troy, “Making the Modern: The Visual Culture of Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” spring 2006.

2
Kim Levin, “Marjorie Strider,” Art News 63, no. 9 (January 1965): 11.

3
Village Voice 9, no. 14 (January 23, 1964), cover. Brunette is sometimes referred to as Triptych II.

104
past and the Pop art of Segal and Strider as exemplifying the contemporary mode:
“Jackson Pollock takes on the aspect of an old master. The most visible sound in the
galleries today is Pop...The pop art at bottom is by Marjorie Strider and is called
‘Brunette on Silver Ground.’”
4

Despite this early recognition and gallery exposure, Strider’s work has
virtually disappeared from the history of Pop art. Although Lucy Lippard included
Strider in Pop Art (1966), one of the first books ever published on the subject, surveys
and scholarly studies that have appeared since do not discuss Strider’s participation.
5

Recently, art historian Kalliopi Minioudaki accounted for the erasure of women artists,
including Strider, from Pop art’s history. In an essay for the catalog of the first
exhibition dedicated to the work of women Pop artists, Seductive Subversion: Women
Pop Artists, 1958-1968, Minioudaki argues that female Pop artists have been
overlooked due to gender discrimination in the 1960s art world, a narrow historical
canon of Pop artists created by art critics, and neglect by feminist art historians.
6

While these scholars have focused on recovering female artists from the past,
Minioudaki rightly notes that, by the 1970s, many art historians and critics considered
Pop “synonymous with women’s exploitation in visual culture, rendering the female
Pop artist into an oxymoron invisible for feminist art history and eclipsing the

4
Ibid.

5
Lucy Lippard, Pop Art. The other exception is Michael Compton, Pop Art (London: Hamlyn, 1970).

6
Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, The University of
Arts, Philadelphia (January 22-March 15, 2010). Also see Kalliopi Minioudaki, “Pop’s Ladies and Bad
Girls: Axell, Pauline Boty and Rosalyn Drexler,” Oxford Art Journal 30, no. 3 (2007): 404-30.

105
possibility of a feminist Pop.”
7
The relative obscurity of Strider’s “girlies,” works
made in the 1960s that appropriated the pin-up image from popular culture and
appeared in Pop art exhibitions, can be attributed to this problem. In the early 1970s,
feminist writers analyzed the pin-up as one aspect of popular visual culture that
objectified women, thus making art that seemed to celebrate the pin-up a target for
criticism.
8

Taking the recognition of the presumed incommensurability of feminism and
Pop as a starting point, this chapter looks back to the mid-1960s and examines
Strider’s work in the context of its original exhibitions and reception. In particular, I
consider two group exhibitions of erotic art—The First International Girlie Exhibition
(1964) at Pace Gallery in New York and The Arena of Love (1965) at Dwan Gallery in
Los Angeles, both relatively new galleries of contemporary art. That Pace Gallery
introduced the art world to Strider’s work in the context of an erotic art exhibition lays
the groundwork for understanding further obstacles in reconciling her “girlies” with
her later identification with the movement. Unlike the reaction to abstract erotic art,
discussed in the following chapter, critical response to Strider’s figurative work, which
fell into the subcategory of Pop, reveals a tension between the audacity of a female
artist to depict sexual subjects and her potential complicity with gender biases.

7
Kalliopi Minioudaki, “Pop Proto-Feminisms: Beyond the Paradox of the Woman Pop Artist,” in
Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968, exh. cat. (forthcoming 2010).

8
Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin, Woman as Sex Object; Studies in Erotic Art, 1730-1970 (New
York: Newsweek, 1972).

106
The initial critical response to erotic art exhibitions in the 1960s, like the
response to Pop art, was generally unfavorable.
9
Art critic Barbara Rose’s 1965 essay
“Filthy Pictures,” published in Artforum, exemplifies the negative critical response to
Strider’s work in these contexts. Rose’s discussion of the aesthetics of “new erotic
art” was the first to take on the increased visibility of sexual themes in New York art
galleries in the mid-1960s.
10
She dismissed the predominantly Pop figurative works
for their “perverse eroticism”—their failure, in her view, to follow conventions of
representing the nude human body in an aesthetically pleasing way. Although she
changed her stance on Pop art by 1967, I will show how Rose’s initial reaction to the
perceived formal inadequacies of Pop and new erotic art in 1965 also reveal her
ideological issues with the contemporary nude. I argue that Rose’s rejection of new
erotic art, including Strider’s “girlies,” foreshadowed the later 1970s feminist critiques
of the history of erotic imagery made by male artists and its complicity with the
objectification and oppression of women. These critiques, exemplified by the work of
Linda Nochlin and Carol Duncan, will be discussed later in this chapter.
The problem of figurative erotic art for formalist critics in the 1960s and
feminist critics in the 1970s has indeed obscured the history of Strider’s early erotic
Pop. Public exhibitions of erotic art in the 1960s exposed viewers to more explicitly

9
The negative critical reception of Pop is well documented and analyzed in the following sources:
Barbara Haskell, Blam!: The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance 1958-1964 (New York:
The Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984), 86-89; Steven Henry Madoff, ed., Pop Art: A Critical
History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Carol Anne Mahsun, ed., Pop Art: The
Critical Dialogue (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989); Sara Doris, Pop Art and
the Contest Over American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

10
Barbara Rose, “Filthy Pictures,” Artforum 3, no.8 (May 1965): 21-25.

107
sexual images of women and paved the way for feminist critiques of female imagery
in both high art and popular culture. As discussed in the introduction of this
dissertation, the sexual revolution has been recognized as a precursor to the second
wave feminist movement for opening up discourse about sexuality while also leading
to questions about the benefits and disadvantages for women living in a more sexually
permissive society. This chapter demonstrates that likewise the boom of erotic art
exhibitions proved a significant factor in the development of feminist art and
criticism.
11
However, if this is the case, how can we reconcile Strider’s participation
in erotic art exhibitions in light of these feminist critiques? Can we find evidence of
proto-feminism in her “girlie” pieces? How does the history of Pop art change if we
consider that a woman made some of the so-called exploitative works?

Erotic Pop Art: Marjorie Strider’s “Girlies”

In The First International Girlie Exhibition (January 7-25, 1964), the first
show of contemporary erotic art that took place in the U. S. in the 1960s, Strider
showed at least two of her “girlies,” Triptych and Triptych II, each constructed out of
three panels with different images of the same larger-than-life woman dressed in a

11
In her dissertation, Margo Hobbs Thompson made a similar claim that the boom of erotic art in New
York galleries in the 1960s, along with the topic’s entrance into art history in the 1970s, was significant
in laying the groundwork for feminist art, and, in particular, for work by women that utilized imagery of
the female body. However, Thompson does not deal with the fact that women artists responded not
only with images of the female body. Feminist artists worked with both male and female imagery, will
be evidenced in the final chapter of this dissertation. Furthermore, it is significant that even before the
feminist art movement began in the 1970s, women artists were reworking images of the human body in
light of their own individual experiences as women, in many ways that ran counter to previous
traditions of representation. Margo Hobbs Thompson, “Sex and Sensibilities: The Aesthetic and
Political Struggles over Women’s Representation of the Female Body, 1966-1980” (Ph.D. diss.,
Northwestern University, 1998).

108
bikini (Figs. 2.1 and 2.4). Strider created these pieces in 1963 and remembers that her
work prompted the show. “They [Pace Gallery] told me I was the inspiration for it,”
she recalled in an interview. “It was a major show that year,” she continued, “I
showed a piece called Triptych, a set of three carved and painted wooden panels of 3-
D girls in bikinis (three dimensional breasts and bottoms).”
12
The sculptural additions
to the painting draw attention to the anatomy presumably hidden under the two-piece
bathing suits.
The title of the exhibition made reference to popular “girlie” images of scantily
clad women, in particular the “pin-up” image. The motivation of Pace Gallery, as
quoted in the New York Times, was to present “a representative group of paintings
demonstrating the inspiration of girlie or pin-up as an American symbol.” The gallery
invited guests of the opening festivities to enjoy “a party at which pink champagne
will be served by girls in bunny costumes.”
13
These “bunny costumes” likely
referenced the uniforms (consisting of satin corset, bunny ears, bowtie, cufflinks,
stockings, high-heels, and white fluffy tail) worn by cocktail waitresses in the popular
Playboy Clubs, which first opened in 1960 (Fig. 2.5).
14
The Playboy bunny costume,
like the bathing suit pin-up, was designed to enhance the visual eroticism of the female

12
Marjorie Strider interviewed by Jon Gams, April 5, 2003, in Strider, et al., Dramatic Gestures
(Lenox, Mass.: Hard Press Editions, 2004), 98-99. Arne Glimscher and Fred Mueller were the partners
of Pace Gallery and to whom she refers in this quote.

13
Quoted in John Canaday, “Art: From Clean Fun to Plain Smut,” New York Times (January 7, 1964):
31.

14
Playboy clubs existed from 1960 to 1988, and recently one was opened in Las Vegas in 2006. Ryan
Nakashima, “Playboy Resurrects Nightclub in Vegas,” The Washington Post (October 1, 2006).
Although there were historical presidents to the pin-up, the term “pin-up” had been coined fairly
recently, in the early 1940s, in reference to the photographs of women that United States Army recruits
posted on their walls.

109
body while partially concealing it, thereby intensifying the viewer’s desire to see. The
gallery’s appropriations of the female pin-up and Playboy bunnies constructed an
assumed male-gendered, heterosexual customer and exemplified the sexist
underpinnings of this and other erotic art shows at the time.
Scholars have traced the pin-up genre back at least to the nineteenth century,
contextualizing its history in modern developments, including the technologies of
mass production and distribution and a rapidly expanding market for cheap and
sexually explicit publications.
15
Art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau has argued
that the female pin-up exemplifies the link between femininity and commodity as a
constructed icon of “feminine desirability.”
16
Certain formal conventions identify the
modern pin-up, most significant being the isolation of a single figure posed in a
manner that alludes to sex but does not reveal enough of the body to be considered
pornographic. In the mid-1960s, the pin-up genre survived in mainstream culture
through Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine, first published in 1953 featuring sex
symbol Marilyn Monroe on the cover (Fig. 2.6). With Playboy, Hefner principally
targeted a heterosexual male audience.
17

None of the work in The First International Girlie Exhibition, in art critic John
Canaday’s opinion, did justice to the actual pin-up, the “grand tradition of Jane Russell

15
See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Other Side of Venus: The Visual Economy of Feminine
Display,” in Victoria De Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption
in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) and also see Maria Elena
Buszek, Pinup Grrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

16
Solomon-Godeau, “The Other Side of Venus,” 115.

17
Buszek, Pinup Grrls, 237.

110
and Betty Grable.” While likely tongue-in-cheek, his comment testified to his dislike
of the show. He described the art on display as “paintings by ten artists ranging from
good clean fun to just plain smut.”
18
He remarked that the art made by the two women
in the show offered especially unattractive images of women:
Two women are among the newcomers, Marjorie Strider and Rosalyn Drexler.
Surprisingly, they do more than their share to shatter an illusion of centuries,
already undermined by male pop artists, the illusion that girlies are really
attractive. The Misses Strider and Drexler are right in there with additional
proof that, when you face it, girlies are really rather repulsive.
19

Canaday’s reaction suggests that Strider’s work did more than appropriate the pin-up;
she transformed the pin-up to negative effect. Indeed, on close inspection, the
protruding breasts in Triptych are quite angular and un-naturalistic (Fig. 2.7). The
repetition and exaggeration of the parts of the female body presumed to be the most
attractive to men are thus made grotesque. This is heightened by the fact that these
giant breasts and bottoms jut out into the viewer’s space. However, no further
analysis of the fact that a female artist created the “girlies” and of their potentially
subversive nature has been explored until now. Canaday’s review did not touch on
gender critiques, but merely evaluated the erotic and formal qualities of the pieces
based on universal notions that will be discussed below.
The First International Girlie Exhibition created a name for Strider who had
recently graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1962 and moved to New
York. While critical reception was negative, the exhibition drew positive attention

18
Canaday, “Art: From Clean Fun to Plain Smut,” 31.

19
Ibid.

111
from the public and collectors. The show led to a sold-out, one-woman exhibition at
Pace Gallery in January 1965, in which she continued to explore the relief technique
used in her “girlie” paintings.
20
Strider was on the cover of The Village Voice again,
this time with her painting Woman with Radish (1963), a close-up of a women’s face
with a radish suspended in her white teeth between her red lips (Figs. 2.8 and 2.9).
21

The picture’s caption referred to Strider as “a pace-setter in last year’s International
Girlie Show.”
22
Woman with Radish appeared in the show along with her newer,
large-scale painted constructions of flowers, fruits, and vegetables. An installation
photograph shows her flower works on the left wall and a peapod and a tomato cluster
on the far wall (Fig. 2.10). Portions of the item depicted are sculpted in relief so that
they burst out of the canvas into the viewer’s space. The juxtaposition of Strider’s
flora with the “girlie” pieces suggested a parallel between them, and a critic for Art
News noted the sexual undertones of the newer works, writing of the “equally
voluptuous asparagus, radishes and turnips.”
23
In a recent interview, Strider
specifically described the radishes as “balls,” offering a sexual interpretation of the

20
Marjorie Strider interviewed by Jon Gams, April 5, 2003 in Dramatic Gestures, 99. Marjorie Strider,
Pace Gallery (January 4-31, 1965). Strider has exhibited every year since The First International Girlie
Show.

21
This work is sometimes referred to as Mouth.

22
Village Voice, 10, no. 12 (January 7, 1965): cover. See inside “At the Galleries” [Marjorie Strider]
Village Voice (January 7, 1965): 8.

23
Kim Levin, “Marjorie Strider,” Art News 63, no. 9 (January 1965): 11.

112
girl with a radish clenched between her white teeth. Even so, critics tended to discuss
the plant pieces in strictly formal rather than metaphorical terms.
24

In 1965, the Dwan Gallery selected Strider’s piece Mouth (1963) for inclusion
in the Arena of Love exhibition (January 5-February 6), which was dominated by
figurative artworks featuring images of women. The gallery played with the erotic
theme by holding the exhibition just before Valentine’s Day and designing an
invitation with pictures of chocolate candy kisses wrapped in metallic foil. The
artists’ names replaced the Hershey brand on the paper tag (Fig. 2.11). An installation
photograph of the Arena of Love published in Artforum shows Mouth positioned on
the back wall amongst the thirty-some pieces in the show (Fig. 2.12).
25
In some cases,
female and male subjects are shown together, fully nude or in embrace, for example,
in Wynn Chamberlain’s untitled painting of a man holding hands with two women
(Fig. 2.13). While Strider’s piece did not include genitals or even nudity, in some
ways Mouth was more explicit than a simple nude. Strider’s close-up of a woman’s
face rendered in a simplified comic book style with shining red lips that emerge from
the canvas and surround a gaping hole of a mouth alludes to oral sex (Fig. 2.14).

24
For example, the following reviews: Donald Judd, “Marjorie Strider,” Arts Magazine 39, no. 5
(February 1965): 56; Anne Hoene, “Marjorie Strider,” Arts Magazine 40, no. 4 (February 1966): 63.

25
In addition to Strider, two other women were represented in the show: Idelle Weber who is known for
her photorealist works of the 1970s and Sandra Daley. Other artists in the show were: John Altoon,
Billy Apple, Al d’Arcangelo, Lew Carson, Wynne Chamberlain, CPLY, Marcel Duchamp, Oyvind
Fahlstrom, Charles Frazier, Ralph Goings, Richard Hamilton, Yves Klein, Roy Lichtenstein, Constantin
Nivola, Albert Radoczy, Mel Ramos, Marial Raysse, Herald Stevenson, Strider, Ben Talbert, Wayne
Thiebaud, Nick Quinnell, and Andy Warhol. Dwan Gallery records, 1959 - circa 1982, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

113
Like The First International Girlie Exhibition, critics received the Arena of
Love as both an erotic art and a Pop art exhibition.
26
While the installation photograph
suggests that on the surface the gallery offered a heterosexual view of erotic art with
the majority of the artists being male and working with depictions of the female body,
at least one critic experienced the show as subverting these expectations. The article
accompanying the installation photograph in Artforum, written by editor Philip Leider,
highlighted Warhol’s influence on younger artists in the exhibition by drawing
attention to Diptych (Marilyn Monroe’s Lips) (1962) hanging in the center of the
gallery, high above the rest of the show (Figs. 2.12 and 2.15). The article proposed
that the erotic theme was intended as a provocation, taking after the teachings of
Warhol:
The idea, implicit in Warhol’s paintings (and explicit in many of his films) that
one most effective way to get under the skin of bourgeois America is by
threatening its sexual values, is the theme of the Dwan show.
27

Perhaps Leider alluded to what he would not say outright at the time about Warhol’s
repetitive painting of Monroe’s lips—that it connected femininity and homosexuality
through a camp sensibility. The isolation and exaggeration of the sex symbol’s mouth
created a composition that could hardly be perceived as a traditional pin-up. Leider
believed the works in this show, like Warhol’s example, meant to be more provocative
than previous Pop art:
if, on one hand, all those lips, nipple-pinchings, harems and nudies are just a
kick, the dead-pan, comical subject matter of Pop, they hint, on the other hand,

26
Philip Leider, “Saint Andy,” Artforum 3, no. 5 (February 1965): 26-28. Also see Madoff, ed., Pop
Art: A Critical History.

27
Leider, “Saint Andy,” 27.

114
at a sexuality that is more open, illicit, freer than, and consequently threatening
to, bourgeois sexuality.
28

Leider’s linkage between the “comical subject matter of Pop” and a “more open,
illicit, freer” sexuality was likely indebted to Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on
‘Camp,’” which was published in the fall of 1964, just months prior to the exhibition.
In the essay, Sontag defined camp as a modern sensibility of unnaturalness: “the
essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp
is esoteric – something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban
cliques.”
29
Included in this passage are two fundamental aspects of camp for Sontag:
its aesthetic nature as both artifice and exaggeration and its use by subcultures as a
method of distinction from the mainstream. Although in some senses Sontag
downplayed the gay aspect of camp, she also made it known to a mainstream audience
that arbiters of camp taste were “mainly homosexuals.”
30
Leider may have been
sensing a camp sensibility in the show as a provocation and cited Pop art as an
antecedent for this new development of erotic art. At this moment, however, the
specifically female provocation of Strider’s Mouth, aggressively challenging women’s
traditionally passive role in heterosexual relations, did not register.
Despite this highly sexualized content and context of the Arena of Love, art
critics who have since written about Strider’s work tended to stay away from its sexual
suggestiveness. Described in 1969 by artist Michael Kirby as “Interdimensional

28
Ibid.

29
Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Partisan Review 31, no. 4 (1964), reprinted in Against Interpretation and
Other Essays (New York: Picador, 1990), 275.

30
Ibid., 290.

115
sculpture,” Strider’s method of applying three-dimensional additions to the flat canvas
created a work existing “between dimensions,” clinging to both the illusionistic, two-
dimensional pictorial plane and the three-dimensional, “real” space of sculpture.
31
In
his interpretation, Kirby drew upon contemporary critical discussions about the formal
merits of painting and sculpture.
32
Likewise, in her 1966 book, Pop Art, Lippard
highlighted the formal conception and appropriation of pop culture in the “girlies” as
precursors to Strider’s fruits, vegetables, and flowers:
They [the “bathing beauties”] stood out, literally, with protruding buttocks,
lips, and breasts carved from wood and later from the lighter Styrofoam, which
enabled her to build larger, gravity-defying sections. Half painted, half
sculpted, rendered in a crude commercial idiom like that of Lichtenstein, these
figures are conceived in resolutely formal terms, more apparent when the pin-
ups gave way to immense flowers and vegetables in 1964.
33

Lippard suggested that the garden-inspired pieces better exemplified Strider’s formal
contribution without directly criticizing her appropriation of the pin-up or recognizing
a sexual critique. Instead, Strider’s use of pin-up is elided by Lichtenstein’s
appropriations of comic strips, erasing her difference as a female artist working with
commercial images of women. Kirby and Lippard analyzed Strider’s unique
contribution to art critical debates about the formal problems of painting and sculpture.
They did not, however, deal with the fact that Strider was negotiating the terms of

31
Michael Kirby, “Marjorie Strider’s Interdimensional Sculpture,” in The Art of Time: Essays on the
Avant-Garde (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1969). Michael Kirby was Strider’s husband.
The concept of working between painting and sculpture held currency in the later 1960s.

32
Contemporaneous to Strider’s solo exhibition at Pace Gallery, Lawrence Alloway curated The Shaped
Canvas at the Guggenheim Museum. The show explored the question of three-dimensionality and
painting.

33
Lippard, Pop Art, 131.

116
painting and sculpture in work that hinged on gender and sexuality. As I have
demonstrated, it was her eye-catching appropriation of “girlie” images combined with
her technical methods that first gained her recognition. Yet, the art critics did not deal
with this subversive combination, nor is there record of Strider making such a claim at
the time.

The Rejection of New Erotic Art: Barbara Rose’s “Filthy Pictures”

Barbara Rose was the first art critic to address at length what she believed to be
the troubling aesthetics of contemporary erotic art in relation to figuration, Pop, and
camp in her essay, “Filthy Pictures,” which appeared in Artforum in May of 1965.
34

Rose’s essay is significant as the first full-length article to lay out a critique of erotic
art not only on formal grounds but on ideological ones as well. In the article, Rose
investigated the reasons why Gustave Klimt’s and Egon Schiele’s nude figures, which
had been on view at the Guggenheim Museum from February to April 1965, as well as
new erotic art made by such artists as Tom Wesselmann, Wynn Chamberlain, Phillip
Pearlstein, Mel Ramos, and Marjorie Strider had gained recent popularity though both
groups seemed as rather “poor art” to Rose.
35
She wrote that the turn-of-the-century
Viennese paintings and the recent Pop works were “poor art” because they were

34
In the following chapter, I note that Rose did not mention the abstract erotic sculpture of Hannah
Wilke.

35
Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (February-April
1965).

117
ornamental and made “no great formal or expressive point.”
36
She related the public’s
fascination with the current Klimt and Schiele exhibition to a contemporary taste for
“perverse eroticism” in the current New York scene. She defined “perverse eroticism”
as “specifically the nude which evokes not sexual desire but anti-sexual responses of
repugnance or distaste,” generally through the artists’ treatment of flesh, anatomical
focus on genitalia, or use of distorted bodily proportions.
37
To Rose, these formal
choices constructed un-idealized, and therefore unappealing pictures of bodies. Rose
found an affinity between the Viennese Expressionists and the new “camp” taste for
“art that is coy, over-developed, elegant and refined to the point of parodying elegance
and refinement, which is literally, as well as figuratively, superficial.”
38
She found
such work to be decadent, a quality she understood to be in opposition to significant
art.
One of the major problems with contemporary erotic art was, for Rose, the way
in which artists rendered the nude body un-idealized. Finding the results repulsive
rather than attractive, she observed, “considering these new ways artists are treating
the nude, I have been trying to make the point that erotic art is not necessarily sensual;
it can deny as easily as affirm the body.”
39
In other words, Rose noticed a trend in
portraying the nude in such a way as to repel the viewer rather than to arouse their
desire, and she considered this a failure. We can deduce from this observation that the

36
Barbara Rose, “Filthy Pictures,” 21.

37
Ibid.

38
Ibid.

39
Ibid, 24-25.

118
artworks chosen for these erotic art exhibitions needed only to contain explicit subject
matter to be qualified as “erotic art.” Thus, in line with Kenneth Clark’s assertion of
the need for good nudes to be both idealized and to “arouse erotic feeling,” Rose
criticized work such as Strider’s as “new ‘cold’ erotic art.”
40
For her, erotic art that
was not sensual was not just bad, but “the antithesis of the true erotic style.”
41
Of
course, the very personal nature of the kind of sensuality suggested with erotic art, in
turn, calls into question the objectivity of any aesthetic judgment. In a sense, Rose’s
analysis of erotic art revealed more about the critic’s expectations and the historical
conventions of the nude than of Strider’s work.
One of the specific ways in which Rose identified the un-idealized handling of
the nude was in the over-simplification and exaggeration of body parts. Strider’s
“girlies” and Wesselmann’s Great American Nude Series exemplified this tendency.
42

Rose felt both artists’ works objectified the body by fragmenting parts and treating
them with the indifference of any mere ‘thing’:
Wesselmann again reduced the human figure to an object-like status by failing
to differentiate between the appliquéd texture of the leopard-skin couch and the
appliquéd pubic hair of the nude reclining on it…Marjorie Strider’s girl in a
bikini, with its 3-dimensional breasts, is even more egregiously mammalian,
and even less art.
43

40
Rose, “Filthy Pictures,” 25. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Form (New York:
Doubleday, 1959 [originally 1956]): 29.

41
Rose, “Filthy Pictures,” 25.

42
Wesselmann’s Great American Nude Series first appeared at Tanager Gallery in December of 1961.
He continued to produce works for the series until 1973. For more on the series, see David McCarthy,
“Tom Wesselmann and the Americanization of the Nude, 1961-1963,” Smithsonian Studies in
American Art 4, no. " (summer-autumn, 1990): 102-127; and McCarthy, The Nude in American
Painting, 1950-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

43
Rose, “Filthy Pictures,” 24.

119
Here Rose referred to Strider’s Triptych and Wesselmann’s Great American Nude
#55, both illustrated in the article (Figs. 2.16 and 2.17). It should be noted that Rose
interpreted the exaggerated breasts on Strider’s “girlies” as further objectifying the
body, even though at the time Rose understood the meaning of Strider’s aesthetic
choices only in relation to their status as “Art.”
It is perhaps no surprise that the initial critical response to erotic art was
negative, as it still generally continued to be for Pop art at the time.
44
Rose’s critique
of the work as not aesthetically significant and maybe not even “Art” mirrors critical
reactions to Pop. The first erotic art exhibitions such as The First International Girlie
Show prominently featured known Pop artists alongside new artists, such as Strider,
thereby tying lesser-known artists to the increasingly recognized style. In mid-1960s,
the category of Pop art was still quite new, having been defined in the U.S. under the
title New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery in November of 1962.
45
Critics also
used the terms “Neo-Dada” and “Sign Painters” in the early 1960s to describe the
representational, collaged, and assembled work drawing on recognizable common
objects and media images, before the designation “Pop” stuck to a narrow group of
artists after 1966.
46
In 1964 and 1965, almost any work of contemporary art might be

44
See n. 9.

45
New Realists, Sidney Janis Gallery (October 31-December 1). According to the Whitney Museum of
American Art’s exhibition catalogue, Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance
1958-1964, “Environments, Situations, Spaces” at Martha Jackson Gallery in 1961 was the first
exhibition of Pop art. The exhibition positioned the work of Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine as pivotal
in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop art. Warhol, Wesselmann, Lichtenstein, and
Rosenquist all developed the Pop styles they became known for in the early 1960s.

46
In 1966, for example, Lippard defined a Pop canon of five “hard-core Pop artists in New York”:
Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, Rosenquist, and Oldenburg in Pop Art. Lawrence Alloway’s

120
grouped under the more amorphous rubric of Pop if it possessed bold figurative
imagery and appropriated subject matter from popular culture, which a large part of
the new erotic art did.
47

Rose was aware that erotic art was becoming increasingly popular, and this
prosperity intensified her dislike of it. “What is remarkable about this art is not that it
is being made—there has always been underground erotic art, even in the most
repressed societies,” she informed her readers, “but that, as part of the general sexual
revolution which permits the distribution of banned books, the screening of banned
movies, and the use of banned words, it is now being exhibited.”
48
She disapproved of
the lengths to which this new freedom had affected art, creating works overrun with
sexual images and lacking in “taste.” She saw this new, more vulgar erotic imagery,
exemplified by Pop art, as an unfortunate effect of the sexual revolution:
A good deal of this perverse eroticism has found its way into a new style in
figure painting, related to Pop Art, which appears to be emerging…mostly
theses figures are nudes, and their erotic content is quite explicit.”
49

exhibition American Pop Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art (April 6-June 16, 1974) and the
corresponding catalogue limit the list of American Pop artists to the following: Richard Artschwager,
Billy Al Begston, Allan D’Arcangelo, Jim Dine, Joe Goode, Phillip Hefferton, Robert Indiana, Jasper
Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Mel Ramos, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James
Rosenquist, Edward Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann. Lawrence Alloway, American Pop
Art (New York: Collier Books, 1974). A later definition of the Pop canon can be found in Madoff’s
review of the critical reception of Pop, in which he dedicates section to the “major artists” of Pop:
Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Rosenquist, Warhol. Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History.

47
See Carol Anne Mahsun, “Defining Pop Art,” in Pop Art and the Critics (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Research Press, c1987).

48
Rose, “Filthy Pictures,” 22.

49
Ibid.

121
Rose acknowledged “erotic content” in the work because of its nude subject matter
and yet denied that it was truly erotic because of its lack of sensuality.
Moreover, Rose rejected “new erotic art” on ideological grounds as category
symptomatic of a culture that she characterized as “sexually obsessed American
society.” “The world of Pop Art and the new ‘cold’ erotic art,” she wrote, “is the
double of the world where giant mouths and breasts stare down from billboards and
movie screens.”
50
This description calls to mind Strider’s large-scale Triptychs and
Mouth pieces, which referenced over-sized advertising imagery and schematize the
female body into simplified, sexualized parts. Rose resisted art that celebrated the
commingling of sex and commodity culture, as Strider’s work appeared to do.
In Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism, Sylvia Harrison contends that
the explosion of Pop art in the early 1960s posed a challenge to art critics, such as
Rose, who were deeply entrenched in a formalist approach to criticism.
51
Not only
was Pop art figurative rather than abstract, but it also drew directly on what Greenberg
had famously described as kitsch.
52
Moreover, this gallery art had a mass-market
appeal and its reception was not limited to the initiated few. Faced with the task of
responding to Pop and “its depiction of not ‘nature’ but, rather, ‘culture,’ that is, the
illusory, mediated world created by mass communications in their sophisticated post-

50
Ibid., 25.

51
Sylvia Harrison, Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001). Also see Cristin J. Mamiya, “The Pop Movement and the Institutional Matrix: The
Critics,” in Pop Art and Consumer Culture: American Supermarket (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1992).

52
Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” Partisan Review (autumn 1939): 34-49.

122
war form” most critics rejected the new style, while a few, such as Susan Sontag and
Lawrence Alloway embraced it with a new critical approach.
53
In her analysis of the
influences and changing stakes for art critics working in New York City, Harrison
shows how Rose eventually abandoned a formalist paradigm modeled by Greenberg
largely because she found formalism incapable of dealing with the Pop and minimalist
art produced in the 1960s.
Rose’s career as an art critic began around 1963 after moving back to New
York from Spain in 1962. It should also be noted that Rose was married to abstract
painter Frank Stella and influenced by the prevailing mode of formalist criticism
exemplified in Greenberg’s writing. However, by the end of the 1960s, Rose
developed her own approach to art criticism in order to deal with work outside of
abstract painting created during the decade. In her examination of the changes in art
criticism spurred by Pop, Harrison writes about Rose’s philosophical transformation
from formalist to “pragmatic criticism.” While Rose’s essay “Pop in Perspective”
(1965) criticized Pop for lack of formal quality, just two years later, in “The Value of
Didactic Art” (1967), Rose began to assess the need for the “discovery of new critical
criteria capable of evaluating fresh aesthetic developments as they occur.”
54
In 1969,
Rose put forth her own history for 1960s art, seeing in Pop and Minimalism a uniquely

53
Harrison, Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism, 3.

54
Ibid., 118.

123
American heritage in contrast to the European legacy of Greenberg’s first and second
generation abstract painters.
55

Similar to the way that Pop art changed Rose’s stance as a critic, I would argue
that the great interest in erotic art in the mid-1960s led critics to alternative methods of
inquiry. Rose’s analysis of erotic art, particularly her rejection of it on formal
grounds and in relation to advertising and popular culture, prefigures the work of
feminist art historians who furthered the investigation of connections between artistic
representations and social realities. In the early 1970s, such feminist scholars as Linda
Nochlin and Carol Duncan deconstructed images of women, demonstrating how the
ideological constructions of sexist gender roles in art reciprocated with power
structures in society.

The Defense of “The New Deluge of Erotic Art”
Despite protest from Rose and other critics, new erotic art exploded into New
York art galleries in 1966. According to art critic Hilton Kramer who was writing for
The New York Times, the fall of 1966 was a “season highlighted by what is called
“Erotic Art.”
56
Kramer announced that “the new deluge of erotic art” was descending
upon the city. The genre arguably reached peak attention in the media following

55
For more on the philosophical basis of Rose’s art criticism see Harrison.

56
Alfred Werner, “Nudest of Nudes,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 1 (November 1966): 36-38. The erotic art
trend was also mentioned in Lil Picard, “Turned on Art,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 1 (November 1966):
15; Art and Artists [erotic art issue] (November 1966); and Village Voice, “Scenes,” (March 5, 1966),
n.p.

124
Erotic Art ’66 at Sidney Janis Gallery (October 3-29, 1966).
57
The New York Times,
Newsweek, and Time all reviewed the show. This season, Kramer predicted, would
meet great commercial success since “the art world,” in his estimation, “loves nothing
so much as a new and saleable commodity.”
58
Indeed, works by Tom Wesselmann
and others sold before the last week of Erotic Art ’66.
59
Kramer identified the Pop
sensibility dominating this movement of new erotic art and, in keeping with his
reading of Pop art, claimed that it was aesthetically bankrupt. Janis’s show provides
the context for the initial reception of Strider’s work. Not only did the show gain a
large amount of critical attention, it also articulated the impetus behind the new boom
in erotic art.
Sidney Janis and his son, Carroll Janis, who had originally suggested the idea
for their erotic art show, presumably read the local art critics’ negative assessments of
both erotic art and Pop art. In the catalog for Erotic Art ’66, Janis took the opportunity
to articulate his contrary opinion. He framed the exhibition in the context of art

57
Group exhibitions of erotic art included: First International Girlie Exhibition, Pace Gallery (January
7-25, 1964); The Arena of Love, Dwan Gallery (January 5-February 6, 1965); Contemporary Erotica,
Van Bovenkamp Gallerie (February 16-March 20, 1965); Erotic Art 66, Sydney Janis Gallery (October
3-29, 1966); Eccentric Abstraction, Fishbach Gallery (fall 1966); Hetero Is, NYCATA, (December 4,
1966-January 14, 1967); First International Exhibition of Erotic Art, Sweden (1968).

58
Hilton Kramer, “The New Deluge of Erotic Art,” The New York Times (August 28, 1966): 119. For
more on the perception in the mid-1960s of the art market boom and its relationship to Pop see: “Vanity
Fair: The New York Art Scene,” Newsweek (January 4, 1965): 54-59. And for historical perspective on
the 1960s market for Pop, including influential dealers and collectors see Doris, Pop Art and the
Contest Over American Culture, 122-54.

59
Glueck, “Up At Eros’ Pad,” New York Times (October 23, 1966): X30.
Artists in Erotic Art ’66 exhibition: Arman, Castro-Cid, Dine, Fahlstrom, Hoffman (Martin),
Jones, Kitaj, Klein, Linder, Marisol, Rivers, Rosenquist, Rotella, Segal, Steinberg (Saul), Stevenson,
Warhol, Watts, Whitman, Wesselmann, Whitman. Works by Blake, Hockney, Kienholz, Rauschenberg,
Raysse, Tinguely “could not be readied in time for either the catalogue or showing,” according to the
catalog. Sydney Janis, Erotic Art ‘66, exh. cat. (New York: Sidney Janis Gallery), n.p.

125
history with new erotic art positioned as the most up to date iteration of a universal
theme and, even more importantly, as a response to abstract art. “For it was only
natural to find after a succession of XXth Century abstract art movements,” Janis
wrote, “that many of the younger advance guard — primarily New Realists and Pop
artists — have chosen the erotic as a fresh and stimulating theme.”
60
He proposed in
his exhibition catalogue that the progress of technology had opened up new areas of
“media ranging from synthetics to cinema, light, sounds and kinetics, with which the
new artist has evolved a new lexicon of erotic images.”
61
This new lexicon would be
represented in (and in part created by) Janis’s own exhibition. For him, these
advances in art combined with a more liberal society provided the beneficial
conditions that allowed his artists to delve back into the erotic and offer something
original.
Indeed, in the 1960s, creating erotic art was one of the ways in which artists
challenged the reigning critical paradigms of modernism. Most significantly, their
work questioned the recent formalist art criticism of Greenberg and his followers,
which argued that art should be autonomous, separate from life, and medium specific.
Art critic Christopher Finch explained the plethora of erotic art to the readers of Art &
Artists by stating that now “everything is suitable to the subject matter of art.”
62
In the
1966 article, “Synthetic Pubism,” he tied the erotic art boom to the spirit of the
moment, which “allows into art things that have not previously been considered fit for

60
Janis, Erotic Art ‘66, n.p.

61
Ibid.

62
Christopher Finch, “Synthetic Pubism,” Art & Artists (November 1966): 8.

126
inclusion – radio static, stuffed animals, tee-shirts,” thereby placing erotic art under
the same rubric as “comic strips” and “neon lighting.”
63
“The artist has chosen, in his
annexation of Everything,” Finch wrote, “to come to new terms with the erotic.”
64
In
the same issue of the magazine, critic Brian O’Doherty argued that changed attitudes
about sex in society had lessened the taboo of erotic art and allowed for a more
detached representation, exhibition, and reception of sex in high art galleries—a
“cooling off a once-hot subject.”
65
In other words, he understood there to be a
reciprocal reaction: as eroticism became suitable for art, it was stripped of some of its
scandalous effect.
Erotic visual art came into the public eye following legal battles won against
the censorship of literature. The Supreme Court decision on June 24, 1957 in the case
of United States v. Roth laid the groundwork for easing restrictions on sexual
material.
66
The ruling defined obscenity in a more liberal fashion, requiring that a
work had to be “utterly without redeeming social importance,” among other
conditions, in order to be found legally obscene. This ostensibly opened the
floodgates for freedom of expression in the arts. Although obscenity laws came out of
debates about popular culture and literature (the defendant, Roth, sold “smut

63
Ibid.

64
Ibid, 9.

65
Brian O’Doherty, “Urogenital Plumbing,” Art & Artists (November 1966): 14.

66
There were, of course, still cases regarding the censorship of printed erotic material after 1957. For
example, the prosecution of Ralph Ginzburg for Eros magazine in 1962 gained much publicity. For the
Ginzburg story, see Ralph Ginzburg, Eros on Trial (New York: Fact Magazine, 1965).

127
magazines” through the mail, in addition to banned literature), the question of
obscenity in the visual arts also came up for public debate.
67

By the mid-1960s, then, some of the top galleries of modern and contemporary
art put erotic art on display. Gallery exhibitions such as those at Pace, Dwan, and
Sidney Janis radically expanded notions of what was acceptable as high art. These
were more socially accepted venues than the small presses that published banned
literature or the non-profit spaces discussed in the previous chapter in connection with
Schneemann’s films and performances. The commercial galleries now exhibited
imagery that went beyond the more accepted category of “the nude” with pieces that
suggested sexual actions and behavior more directly than ever before.
68
The most
talked about piece in Erotic Art ’66 was Lamp Man Loves It (1966) by Larry Rivers.
In the mixed-media construction, which was made for the exhibition, a standing male
figure seems to be entering a woman from behind—with his light bulb penis (Fig.
2.18). Janis made a point to articulate the difference between pornography and art in
his catalogue, relying on aesthetics: “Pornography is merely done to arouse the carnal
spirit. While eroticism may be titillating, it has esthetic interest first and foremost.”
69

Although of the opposite opinion as Rose, Janis likewise relied on formal grounds in
his defense of the work. As the curators fielded the question of pornography and
newspapers used the sensational subject to attract readers, there were no reports of the

67
Museum of Sex, NYCSEX: How New York City Transformed Sex in America (London: Scala, 2002).

68
Although certainly some of the artworks in erotic art exhibitions could be read simply as “nudes” in
other contexts.

69
Quoted in “Eros in Polyester,” 103.

128
exhibition being threatened with censorship or closure.
70
Sensational reporting merely
provided publicity for the show, and Erotic Art ’66 was the gallery’s best attended
show to date.
71

Although Janis’s trendsetting commercial art gallery validated erotic art and
raised it above the realm of the obscene, the critics’ response remained
overwhelmingly negative.
72
Following Rose’s lead in “Filthy Pictures” and not unlike
previous critical reactions to Pop art, critics reproved figurative work falling under the
erotic art rubric for its appropriation of debased popular culture and for its salability in
the art market. Furthermore, critics felt the concept of the group erotic art show was
overtly focused on the sexual aspects of the work rather than the “quality” or formal
achievements of individual artists.
73
Critics expressed displeasure about the publicity

70
Although the New York Times printed an article titled “Janis Art Show Visited by Police” the day
after the show opened, the police presence was due to the overcrowding of 1,000 attendees rather than
complaints about the content. “Janis Art Show Visited by Police,” New York Times (October 4, 1966):
53.

71
Attendance was high enough that the gallery had to print extra catalogues. Carroll Janis said, “We’ve
printed 2,800 catalogues—1,000 more than usual, and we’ve just about run out.” Quoted in Grace
Glueck, “Up At Eros’ Pad,” New York Times (October 23, 1966): X30.

72
Reviews of the show: Grace Glueck, “Up At Eros’ Pad;” James R. Mellow, “New York Letter,” Art
International 10, no. 9 (November 20, 1966): 55-56; Lael Scott “Erotic Art Showing Barely Makes the
Grade,” n.p.; John Canaday, “This Way to the Big Erotic Art Show,” New York Times (October 9,
1966): X27; John Canaday, “Art: The Trammels of False Emphasis,” New York Times (October 4,
1966,): 53; “In the Picture: Erotica,” Arts Magazine (September-October 1966): 12; “Eros in Polyester,”
Newsweek (October 1966): 103; “Exhibitions: Modern Times,” Time (October 14, 1966):
www.time.com.

73
There were also solo shows referred to in the context of erotic art in art criticism. For example,
mentioned in Picard: Wynn Chamberlain at Fischbach Gallery (1966); Marisol at Sidney Janis (1966);
Walter Gutman, Great Jones Gallery (1966). Mentioned in Douglas M. Davis, “The New Eroticism,”
Evergreen Review (September 1968): Bob Stanley’s “fuck paintings” show at Bianchini Gallery (1966),
Nora Jaffe at A.M. Sachs, James Gill at Landau-Alan, Peter Holbrook at Richard Grey Gallery,
Chicago, Dakota Daley, and Nicholas Quennel at Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles.

129
garnered almost automatically by erotic art exhibitions and were “turned off” by the
work they found in them.

Woman As Sex Object, Not Artist: Feminist Critiques of Figurative Erotic Art

As previously discussed, historical scholarship suggests that Pop art
engendered a moment of crisis for art criticism in the United States.
74
Formalist
criticism, which focused on issues related to specific media rather than readings of
pictorial content, had trouble coping with the plethora of new figurative imagery and
metaphoric constructions. The seeming disregard for authenticity, authorship,
originality, and formalism in Pop art carried over into evaluations of erotic art such as
Strider’s, which ostensibly appropriated the pin-up. The attention to the “proper”
aesthetics and purpose of erotic art in the 1960s based on formalist criteria by such
writers as Rose, and the clear inadequacies of such a method to evaluate the work,
opened up a space in which to question the naturalized assumptions about twentieth-
century erotic art in art history.
In the early 1970s, some five years after the erotic art boom, feminist art
historians began taking a deconstructive approach to erotic imagery. In line with post-
structuralist critiques of language and representation, feminists denaturalized the male
viewpoint in famous works of the female nude by demonstrating how aesthetic
choices communicated the supremacy of men over women and neglected to consider
women’s erotic experience. Linda Nochlin’s and Carol Duncan’s groundbreaking

74
Cristin J. Mamiya, “The Pop Movement and the Institutional Matrix: The Critics” in Pop Art and
Consumer Culture: American Supermarket (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992).

130
scholarship serves as a prime example of how nineteenth- and twentieth-century art
might be read through a feminist lens. Nochlin’s essay, “Eroticism and Female
Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art,” originally presented to the College Art
Association in 1972 and then published in Woman as Sex Object in 1973, critiqued the
category of erotic art as specifically “erotic-for-men.”
75
“As far as one knows,” she
wrote, “there simply exists no art, and certainly no high art, in the nineteenth century
based upon women’s erotic needs, wishes, or fantasies.”
76
She assessed the
significance in the work of such artists as Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, and Paul
Gauguin of the gendered differences in images of men as representations of “power,
possession, and domination” and images of women as representations of “submission,
passivity, and availability” as having a direct correlation to gender inequalities in
society.
77

Carol Duncan’s essay “Virility and Domination in Early 20
th
Century
Vanguard Painting,” published in Artforum in December 1973, put forth a feminist
reading of erotic art made by avant-garde male artists. “Much of their art not only
celebrates male erotic experience, it promotes some wider, still unexamined, notions
about women in general,” she contended.
78
She read the nudes of such artists as Ernst

75
Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin, Woman as Sex Object; Studies in Erotic Art, 1730-1970 (New
York: Newsweek, 1972).

76
Linda Nochlin, “Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art,” (1972) reprinted in
Women, Art, and Power: And Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 138.

77
Ibid., 142.

78
Carol Duncan, “Virility and Domination in Early 20
th
-Century Vanguard Painting,” Artforum 12, no.4
(December 1973): 30-9. She made similar arguments in first issue of the feminist publication Heresies.
Duncan, “The Esthetics of Power in Modern Erotic Art,” Heresies 1, no. 1 (January 1977): 46.

131
Kirchner, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso as expressions of male sexuality and
dominance, stated through the aesthetic rendering of the female image. For example,
of Kirchner’s Girl Under a Japanese Umbrella (1909) she wrote:
The artist seems to attack his subject, a naked women, with barely controlled
energy. His painterly gestures are large, spontaneous, sometimes vehement,
and his colors intense, raw, and strident. These features and the audacious
manipulation of the model’s body proclaim his unhesitant and uninhibited
response to sexual and sensual experience. Leaning directly over his model,
the artist fastens his attention mainly to her head, breasts, and buttocks, the
latter violently twisted toward him.
79

The large, gestural brushstrokes understood through Duncan’s eyes take on a reference
to violence and domination applied to the woman in the painting (Fig. 2.19). Of
Matisse’s work, she suggested that with “extreme reductions and distortions of form
and color…the assertion of virility becomes sublimated, metamorphosed into a
demonstration of artistic control.”
80
Duncan pointed out how these underlying sexist
presumptions of erotic art served to propagate the lesser position of women a time
when women were gaining ground towards equality in cultural life. She summarized
her reading of the male painters’ nudes simply: “Their function is ideological: they
affirm the superiority of men and justify their domination of women.”
81

Most relevant to the reception of Strider’s work was Thomas Hess’ essay
critiquing erotic postwar art, “Pinup and Icon” (1972), in which he traced the recent
history of the pin-up in the realm of high art, beginning with Willem de Kooning and

79
Duncan, “Virility and Domination,” 31.

80
Ibid., 33.

81
Ibid., 38.

132
his Woman series of paintings dating from 1950-55 (Fig. 2.20).
82
Hess read the series
as “violent intellectual and emotional criticism, in visual form, of the
contemporaneous situation of the American woman as reflected in the pinup
photograph.”
83
He found that de Kooning, “expressed with extraordinary candor a
hidden social condition—the debasement of women, their inferior social status, their
exploitation as sex objects and their simultaneous elevation, ‘on a pedestal’ as the
cliché put it, to a pantheon of goddess-dolls.”
84
Hess understood de Kooning’s
expressionist brushwork and grotesque rendering of the female form as exposing
women’s objectification and victimization in American culture.
Hess based his analysis of the pin-up on feminist views asserted in recent
books on the situation of American women—Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique
(1963), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), and Germaine Greer’s The Female
Eunuch (1970). He articulated how the pin-up constructed, through formal choices, a
leveling and objectification of the image of woman:
The artifice with which the elements of her anatomy are composed and
photographed erases all the details and peculiarities of the model (wrinkles,
moles, body hair), generalizes the body into a format and robs it of any logical
scale. Thus a pinup can be reduced to an inch in a magazine advertisement for
cigarettes or enlarged to 12 feet for a billboard. The symbol works in almost
any conditions, in almost any context.
85

82
Thomas Hess, “Pinup and Icon,” in Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art, 222-37.

83
Ibid., 230.

84
Ibid.

85
Ibid., 227.

133
Such observations about the construction of gender in advertising may be common
today, but Hess, Nochlin, and Duncan were among the first to critically and
historically analyze the implications and ideological messages communicated through
images of women in art.
While Hess found de Kooning’s approach to be critical of the status of women
in society, he felt that in the case of Pop, the pin-up was merely appropriated and re-
presented without disrupting the status quo. Lichtenstein’s Girl with Ball (1961) read
as a “cool, calculated application of paint, in flat colors granulated by Ben-Day dots,
[and] underlines the banality and everyday aspect of the girl with a beach ball (Fig.
2.21).”
86
In its appropriation by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Rosenquist, and Wesselmann,
the pin-up was “deglamorized” and not erotic, but campy or nostalgic. According to
Hess, the pin-up, thereby “became cliché,” a banal symbol for America in Strider’s
and other Pop artists’ paintings as early as 1965.
87

Strider’s own understanding of Pop art would seem to validate Hess’s opinion
that it merely reiterated messages from popular visual culture. In her lecture notes,
written while teaching in the early 1970s, Strider informed her students about Pop art:
Pop artists decided to approach the world with a positive rather than a negative
standard. Our culture is a rapidly changing, mass media society. We are
bombarded with mass communication. Our primary visual data are for the
most part secondhand. The pop artists decided logically that art should be
made out of what we see. And what do we see? Billboards, comic strips, neon
signs, packaging labels and trade names.
88

86
Ibid., 235.

87
Ibid.

88
Strider teaching lecture notes c. 1973-74, Marjorie Strider papers, 1965-1978, Archives of American
Art, Smithsonian Institution.

134
In other words, Pop artists intentionally used such things as billboards and comic
strips, and by extension, the pin-up, because they appeared in the contemporary visual
culture surrounding them. Although Strider would later identify with the feminist art
movement, her Triptych and Mouth have an uncertain status in the lexicon of feminist
art for two reasons. First, she made the pieces in the 1960s before these critiques of
images of women had been articulated in feminist terms. Second, the formal
execution of the works—their shiny surface and multiplicity of attractive female
bodies on display—made it hard for critics to read them as anything but celebratory of
the pin-up.
89

Conclusion
The identification with the pin-up and Pop art seems to have been a problem
for Strider since she quickly turned away from the “girlies” and began exploring other
subject matter and techniques. “After that [1965] I didn’t do the girls any more,” she
recollected in a 2003 interview, “but I was still involved in what I called ‘build outs’
from the surface.”
90
Additionally, according to an exhibition catalog from 1985,
Strider considered the “girlies” her “only truly Pop works,” thereby distancing herself
from the category of Pop in the mid-1980s.
91
I speculate that Strider’s turning away

89
Even Buszek’s analysis of the pin-up and its subversive feminist potential places Pop art as
embracing the non-confrontational, thus, watered down version of the pin-up.

90
Marjorie Strider interviewed by Jon Gams, April 5, 2003, in Dramatic Gestures, 98-9.

91
John Perreault, “Marjorie Strider: An Overview,” Marjorie Strider: 10 Years, 1970 – 1980
(Greenvale, NY: Hillwood Art Gallery, Long Island University, 1985), 9.

135
from the “girlies” and the label of “Pop” arose out of her interest in the feminist
movement and her desire to explore other media. As an instructor of painting,
drawing and sculpture at the School of Visual Arts in New York in the early 1970s,
Strider helped organize a women’s group for students and supported other
consciousness raising activities.
92
“I feel that I can’t be anything but a feminist, being
a woman in today’s world. I think the feminist movement has helped me a lot,” she
said in 1982.
93
Although Strider joined the feminist movement, she never wanted “to
be known as a woman artist.”
94

Between 1967 and 1971, Strider experimented with the use of the picture
frame in conceptual performance and site-specific installation pieces.
95
Situating
empty picture frames throughout city streets as part of a group exhibition titled
Streetworks, Strider challenged viewers to examine the device of the frame itself and
to experience it in three dimensions as a part of life (Figs. 2.22 and 2.23).
96
It was her
submission for the Fashion Show Poetry Event at the Center for Inter-American
Relations in 1969, however, that related most significantly to the “girlies.” Strider’s
Frame Dress (1969) worn by experimental choreographer Deborah Hay was
constructed out of wooden frames that both confine and reveal the human figure (Fig.

92
Marjorie Strider to Nancy Irwin, December 10, 1971. Marjorie Strider papers.

93
Perreault, “Marjorie Strider: An Overview,” 20.

94
Dramatic Gestures, 101.

95
Donald Kuspit, “The Wizard of Ooze,” in Marjorie Strider: Dramatic Gestures (Lenox, Mass: Hard
Press Editions, 2004). She also used the frame in Cherry Smash performed at the Whitney Museum in
1971.

96
“Artists, ‘Doing Thing,’ Do Streets,” New York Times (March 17, 1969): 44. Strider participated in
five Streetworks exhibitions in New York in 1969.

136
2.24). The frames surrounding the live women’s nude body can be read as a feminist
critique of the fragmentation and objectification of the female body in representations
of the nude in art.
While experimenting with the concept of the frame, Strider also expanded her
materials by introducing urethane foam into her constructions. These pieces again
raised the issue of sexuality, this time in the contexts of feminism and postminimalism
in the early 1970s. She applied the urethane foam, which was made of a compound
that when mixed by the artist expanded into billows of foam, to painting constructions
of every day objects and recreations of historical works of art sometimes in a sexually
suggestive manner (Fig. 2.25). Artist Eunice Golden, who was working on nude male
subject matter at the time, was the first and only person to describe the foam shapes in
Strider’s simulated Greek vase construction, Eros Kalos (1972), literally as “large
penises.”
97
Golden connected this work of Strider’s to an interest in representing the
male nude that had been going on underground among women artists, and yet had only
recently come to light as a strategy of feminist art. Golden and the male nude will be
discussed further in the final chapter.
In the 1970s, critics favored Strider’s architectural foam installations and use
of everyday objects from the home as these works aligned with contemporaneous
ideas about female sensibilities and women’s experience in the 1970s.
98
Donald

97
Eunice Golden, “The Male Nude in Women’s Art: Dialectics of Feminist Iconography,” Heresies 3,
no. 4 (May 1981): 41.

98
These themes are also explored by April Kingsley in “The Magnified Materialism of Marjorie
Strider,” in Marjorie Strider: 10 Years, 1970-1980 (1982), 30-32.

137
Kuspit wrote of Strider’s urethane foam as “ooze” with “the spirit of liberated
femininity.”
99
For Lucy Lippard, it was also the “ooze” and its grotesque quality of
the “inelegant assertion of the flesh” that got her attention as a feminist art critic. She
likened the spreading of the foam to Pandora’s box, an easy metaphor for the feminist
art movement.
100
Strider’s additions of foam to architecture, such as the installation at
Green Street Gallery in 1970, and to household objects in such works as Soda Box
(1973) and Brooms (1972), suggested an uncontainable, or unframeable, expanding
energy (Figs. 2.26, 2.27 and 2.28). In 1982, reviewing the previous decade’s work,
John Perreault, artist, critic, and long-time friend of Strider’s expanded on the
unbounded nature of her art:
[Strider’s] art tests the boundaries of painting and sculpture, the real and the
surreal, the personal and the social…I think of her foam pieces as symbolic of
her art in general: the organic and the unconscious will always break through,
resisting and contradicting language and categories.
101

Indeed, by the time of this retrospective exhibition, the critics understood the formal
characteristics of her work not only as breaking away from media specificity, but also
as embedded in culture both literally (integrated with buildings and on the streets) and
figuratively (representing a feminist breakthrough).
In light of Strider’s personal identification with feminism and the work in the
1970s discussed above, I want to return to the questions laid out at the beginning of

99
Donald Kuspit, “The Wizard of Ooze,” 15.

100
Lippard, “Pandora,” Strider: Sculpture and Drawings, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, The University of
North Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina (October 16-November 10, 1974). Reprinted in Lippard,
From the Center (New York: Dutton, 1976), 231-233.

101
Perreault, “Marjorie Strider: An Overview,” 20.

138
this chapter regarding Strider’s “girlies” and their status as erotic art, Pop art, or
feminist art. In her dissertation, Kalliopi Minioudaki argues that the work of female
Pop artists Axell, Pauline Boty and Rosalyn Drexler was proto-feminist, “emerging in
the form of a conscious voicing of sexual difference.”
102
In the exhibition catalog for
Seductive Subversion, she expands her argument to include others in the show—Niki
de Saint Phalle, Jann Haworth, Marisol, Joyce Wieland, and Marjorie Strider. Their
subversive use of female body imagery, she posits,
includes the radical employment of the pin-up as cipher of active female
sexuality in an empowering feminist gesture, not easily fathomable by all
camps of feminist art history, and yet daringly assertive of women’s right to
look and celebrate women’s bodies.
103

Whether Marjorie Strider’s bikini girls can be read as an “empowering feminist
gesture” may seem questionable considering that they were shown in the erotic art
context in which women were made the object rather than the acting subject of art.
However, examined in hindsight and in relationship to her 1970s work, we can see
that Strider’s drive to break out of the two dimensional canvas took on an ideological
significance beyond the rejection of formalism.
In his innovative scholarship on the nude in American postwar art, David
McCarthy has looked back to the Arena of Love exhibition in reference to Wynn
Chamberlain’s nudes. McCarthy argues that in the 1960s such artists as Chamberlain
employed the male nude to retool the image of men and masculinity. Revealing that

102
Kalliopi Minioudaki, “Pop’s Ladies and Bad Girls: Axell, Pauline Boty and Rosalyn Drexler,”
Oxford Art Journal 30, no. 3 (2007): 402; Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968,
curated by Sid Sachs, organized by the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, The University of the Arts,
Philadelphia (January 22-March 15, 2010).

103
Minioudaki, “Pop Proto-Feminisms,” 128.

139
Chamberlain based his untitled painting of three nudes, which appeared in the Arena
of Love exhibition, on a photograph from Teenage Nudist magazine, McCarthy argues
that Chamberlain challenged traditional notions that a nude must be idealized and, in
doing so, also challenged “restrictive standards of masculinity.”
104
His point is crucial
in that it shows how increased interest in depicting and exhibiting male and female
nudes in the 1960s did not merely reiterate stereotypes, but also expanded ideas about
gender and sexuality through representation.
Following McCarthy’s lead, I posit that the formal qualities of the “girlies” put
forth an alternative to the traditional and idealizing image of women in art and popular
culture. Moreover, the fact that Strider was a woman artist, I believe, complicates a
reading of her work as aggressive towards women in Duncan’s terms. Instead, based
on the critical reaction, we might read the “girlies” as aggressive toward the viewer
due to their potentially “repulsive” projections. In close proximity, the breasts and
buttocks extending from the canvas in Triptych appear angular rather than round. In
addition, considering Strider’s reference to the radishes as “balls,” the photograph of
Strider smiling out at the camera in front of Woman with Radish on the cover of the
Village Voice in 1965 now reads as defiantly asserting women’s power in the realms
of sex and art.
In conclusion, I offer one final anecdote regarding the feminist potential of the
“girlies” despite the anti-erotic art and anti-Pop rhetoric that would seem to exclude
the paintings from feminist discourse. In 1974, one of Strider’s Triptychs nearly made

104
David McCarthy, “Social Nudism, Masculinity, and the Male Nude in the Work of William Theo
Brown and Wynn Chamberlain in the 1960s, Archives of American Art Journal 38, no. 1/2 (1998): 35.

140
an appearance in a large-scale feminist exhibition, Women’s Work – American Art ’74
in Philadelphia in 1974.
105
The show included more than eighty women artists and
was held at the Philadelphia Civic Center as part of a larger feminist program,
“Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts,” two months of over seventy
events organized by the group Focus.
106
Feminist art critic Cindy Nemser organized
the exhibition, which was originally titled “In Her Own Image” until the Philadelphia
Civic Center determined that it was “too confining” and changed it to Women’s Work
– American Art ’74.
107
Strider initially agreed to send her Triptych of a woman in a
green bikini bathing suit to the exhibition.
108
However, due to limitations of the
gallery space, organizers asked her to select a different object.
109
In its place, Strider
sent Brooms, a sculpture of four brooms in various positions of erectness and with
blobs of ooze coming out of the bristles, and Soda Box (Figs. 2.27 and 2.28).
110

What appeared in Women’s Work – American Art ’74, therefore, were two
pieces that aligned nicely with both connotations of “women’s work” as artistic output
and domestic labor. As Minioudaki points out, Lippard had already reframed Strider’s
Brooms as “household imagery” in 1973, a move that Minioudaki argues positioned

105
Women’s Work – American Art ’74 (April 28-May 26, 1974).

106
“Focus: A Philadelphia Story,” Art Workers News 4, no. 4 (May-June 1974): 1.

107
Philadelphia Civic Center Letter to Marjorie Strider, January 16, 1974, Marjorie Strider papers.

108
Lending agreement with Philadelphia Museum of Art, June 8, 1974, Marjorie Strider papers.

109
Philadelphia Civic Center to Marjorie Strider, January 16, 1974, Marjorie Strider papers.

110
She made multiple Brooms pieces.

141
Strider as “feminist artist divested of her Pop past.”
111
Minioudaki rightly
acknowledges that Lippard and other feminist critics writing in the 1970s articulated
an essential difference between Pop art’s use of domestic imagery and that of feminist
artists.
112

But one has to wonder, what would the response to the “girlie” triptych have
been had it been installed in the feminist art show in 1974? Certainly, Strider’s work
would have posed a unique set of problems because of its figurative and Pop
representation of the female body. By 1974, feminist Andrea Dworkin had leveled her
critique of pornography as “the collective scenario of master/slave,” and the pin-up
would surly have registered as a watered down but relative category. A year later, in
1975, Laura Mulvey published her seminal essay, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative
Cinema,” which spurred discourse about the “male gaze” and the “female spectacle.”
Mulvey asserted, “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously
looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic
impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.”
113
The dichotomy of
active male/passive female in narrative cinema, Mulvey argued, reflected the ideology
of patriarchal society. The tradition of the female pin-up, hung in the barracks of
military men and looked at in Playboy magazines, could then be understood in
Mulvey’s psychological framework as constructing the female as passive object of

111
Minioudaki, “Pop Proto-Feminisms,” 98.

112
Ibid. Minioudaki points out a similar change in reception for Marisol.

113
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema” (1975), reprinted in Amelia Jones, ed., The
Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 2003).

142
desire. However, while deceptively straightforward in their simplified, large-scale
depiction of the pin-up, Strider’s play between painting and sculpture through these
images of women carried the potential to disrupt the viewer’s gaze. The jutting
breasts verge on crude vulgarity and “threaten to break the spell of illusion.”
114

114
Ibid., 844.

143

Fig. 2.1. Marjorie Strider, Triptych, 1963, acrylic paint, laminated pine on masonite,
three panels, 105 x 72 in., installed at the University of Art, Philadelphia, March 2010,
photograph by author

Fig. 2.2. Village Voice, January 1964, cover

144

Fig. 2.3. Village Voice, January 1964, cover, detail

Figure 2.4. Marjorie Strider, Triptych II, Beach Girl, 1963, carved wood on board with
acrylic and extensions, 72 x 52 in. each

Fig. 2.5. Playboy Bunny outfit, c1960.

145

Figure 2.6. Playboy, 1953, cover

Fig. 2.7. Marjorie Strider, Triptych, 1963, detail

Fig. 2.8. Village Voice, January 1965, cover

146

Fig. 2.9. Marjorie Strider, Woman with Radish, 1963, acrylic and wood with wooden
extensions, 6 x 4 ft.

Fig. 2.10. Marjorie Strider, Pace Gallery, 1965, installation photograph

Fig. 2.11. Arena of Love, Dwan Gallery, 1965, exhibition announcement

147

Fig. 2.12. Arena of Love, Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, installation photograph in
Artforum, February 1965

Fig. 2.13. Wynn Chamberlain, Untitled, 1963, oil on canvas (destroyed)

Fig. 2.14. Mouth, 1963, oil and plaster on board, 48 ! x 54 ! x 6 " in., installed at the
University of Art, Philadelphia, March 2010, photograph by author

148

Fig. 2.15. Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe’s Lips, 1962, synthetic polymer, silkscreen
ink and pencil on canvas

Fig. 2.16. Marjorie Strider, Triptych, in Artforum, May 1965

Fig. 2.17. Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude #55, 1964, assemblage, Artforum,
May 1965

149

Fig. 2.18. Larry Rivers with Lamp Man Loves It, 1966, in Erotic Art ’66, Sidney Janis
Gallery

Fig. 2.19. Ernst Krichner, Girl Under a Japanese Umbrella, 1909, oil on canvas

Fig. 2.20. Willem de Kooning, Woman, I, 1950-52, oil on canvas

150

Fig. 2.21. Roy Lichtenstein, Girl with Ball, 1961, oil and synthetic polymer paint on
canvas

Fig. 2.22. Marjorie Strider, installation in front of Architectural League, New York,
Streetworks IV, 1969

Fig. 2.23. Photograph of woman looking at Marjorie Strider’s installation on 5
th

Avenue & 45
th
Street, New York City, New York Times, March 17, 1969

151

Fig. 2.24. Marjorie Strider, Frame Dress worn by Deborah Hay, 1969, wooden frame,
3 x 4 x 1 ft.

Fig. 2.25. Marjorie Strider, Eros Kalos, 1972, foam, epoxy, and masonite, 68 x 65 in.

Fig. 2.26. Marjorie Strider, Building Work with Urethane Foam at 112 Greene Street,
November 1970, in Art & Artists, January 1972

152

Fig. 2.27. Marjorie Strider, Soda Box, 1973, mixed media including Styrofoam, 4 x 4
ft.

Fig. 2.28. Marjorie Strider, Brooms, 1972, Styrofoam, urethane foam, 50 in. each

153
Chapter 3: Abstract Erotic Art: Hannah Wilke’s Sculptures and the Problem of
Feminist Heterosexuality

Inside a cardboard box deep in an archive sits Barbara Rose (1970), a
collapsed latex sculpture whose once graceful, dark-pink folds have deteriorated into a
yellowing brittle mass (Figs. 3.1 and 3.2). Sculptor Hannah Wilke (1940-93) created
this abstract yet sexually suggestive piece in 1970, naming it after the art critic who
wrote that new erotic art, particularly the figurative nudes by Pop painters, was
tasteless and perverse in her article, “Filthy Pictures,” published in Artforum in 1965.
Although Wilke was already creating her sensual sculptures in 1965, it would not be
until nine years later, during the height of the feminist art movement, that Rose would
take notice of Wilke’s sexual art. In the 1974 essay, “Vaginal Iconography,” Rose
described Wilke’s sculptures as feminist propaganda and suggested that they failed to
communicate any genuine erotic feeling.
1
Thus, if Wilke’s work is not unknown
today, the deteriorating material condition of the sculpture Barbara Rose is
nevertheless hauntingly emblematic of the forgotten history of postwar erotic art made
by women artists before the feminist art movement coalesced.
This chapter focuses on Hannah Wilke’s sculptures and drawings made in the
1960s, examining the specific circumstances of their public exhibition and reception in
art criticism as “erotic art.” In 1966, in particular, Wilke’s art came into the public
view through group exhibitions and discussion of her work as erotic. Interviews with
the artist from the mid-1960s reveal that Wilke was consciously working with the
issue of sexuality as an aspect of her heterosexual, female experience at the time,

1
Barbara Rose, “Vaginal Iconography,” New York Magazine (February 11, 1974): 59.

154
though she did not yet have a feminist language with which to talk about her genital-
like objects. Although her work appeared in a group exhibition of erotic art titled
Hetero Is in 1966, photographs of the installation reveal, nonetheless, the stark formal
contrast between her work and the other more representational images in the show.
The feminist significance of Wilke’s abstract sculptures will be further
illuminated and supported by a discussion of Lucy Lippard’s concept of “Eccentric
Abstraction” which she first articulated in 1966 through lectures, an exhibition, and
published art criticism. In the 1970s, both Wilke’s sculpture and Lippard’s criticism
grew into declaratively feminist statements about “vaginal imagery” and a “feminine
aesthetic.” This chapter investigates the formative period for what was later identified
as feminist art. Furthermore, the examination of Wilke’s work in the context of erotic
art in the 1960s suggests that the roots of her problematic reception with feminist
critics in the 1970s and 1980s, some of whom accused the artist of narcissistically
deploying images of her own beautiful body, rest with the issue of her open
negotiation of heterosexuality in her work.

Vaginal Iconography as Erotic Art: Hannah Wilke’s Sculpture in the 1960s
The inclusion of one of Hannah Wilke’s genital-like, clay sculptures in a
sensational group exhibition titled Hetero Is in 1966 challenges dominant perceptions
of feminist art, particularly the assumption that vaginal imagery created by women
first surfaced in the 1970s as overtly feminist statements in such work as The Dinner
Party (1974-79) by Judy Chicago. As this dissertation argues, Wilke and other female

155
artists created a wide range of sexually themed art in the 1960s under the rubric of
erotic art that drew attention to female experience and gender differences. Although
the exhibition Hetero Is at NYCATA gallery (December 4, 1966-January 14, 1967)
opened the same year as Erotic Art ’66 at Sidney Janis Gallery (October 3-29, 1966)
in a “season highlighted by what is called ‘Erotic Art,’ the two exhibitions differed
greatly in terms of content and reception.
2
As discussed in the previous chapter,
Janis’s show included known American and European artists who had gallery
representation and specialized in what would become known as Pop art. Far from
having the status of the Sidney Janis Gallery, one of the most influential New York
galleries in terms of taste making and production of commercially successful new
artists since the 1950s, NYCATA, a non-profit arts association, promoted underground
films and had recently opened a gallery space on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
3

Cassandra Gerstein, who was primarily a filmmaker rather than a professional
curator or dealer, co-organized the exhibition at NYCATA.
4
She told a reporter
covering the show about her wish to bring erotic artwork into the public eye:
Most artists do erotic work, but they hide it in their studios. They do it because
erotica is part of human life and the expression of human life has always been
the greatest challenge to any creative artist…but aside from their friends and

2
Alfred Werner, “Nudest of Nudes,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 1 (November 1966): 36-38. The erotic art
trend was also mentioned in Lil Picard, “Turned on Art, Making the Scene with Lil Picard,” Arts
Magazine 41, no. 1 (November 1966): 15; Art and Artists, issue on erotic art (November 1966); and
“Scenes,” The Village Voice, (March 5, 1966).

3
NYCATA stood for the New York City Arts Theatre Association. It was located at 55 West 86th St,
New York.

4
She co-organized the show with artist Al DiLauro who also included his own pieces in the exhibition.

156
some wealthy art collectors only rarely does anyone see these pieces. Now we
have created an opportunity!
5

The NYCATA exhibition’s stated goals were both to bring erotic art to the public and
to provide opportunities for the artists to sell their work—everything in the show had a
price.
Hetero Is included a wide range of contemporary work in a variety of media
from bronze, clay, and found object sculpture, to photography and film, to two-
dimensional prints, drawings, and paintings by both known and unknown artists. “It
features one of the most varied and open exhibits ever revealed to the public on the
subject of sex with a fascinating assortment of work from both prominent and
unknown artists,” said Joyce Greller, an artist in the show who also wrote an article
about it for a local alternative newspaper The East Village Other.
6
Photographs of
visitors taking in the exhibition give a sense of the broad range of work on display
including a suitcase filled with found objects such as lingerie created by Joyce Greller
(Fig. 3.3), a Bob Stanley silkscreen of a woman performing fellatio (Fig. 3.4), “touch
boxes” made by Jo Ramon that treated the visitor daring enough to insert their hand

5
Arnold Wells, “Raw Sex Art Exhibit,” The National Insider (March 19, 1967): 8. Lucy R. Lippard
papers, 1940s-2006, bulk 1968-1990, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

6
Joyce Greller, “Aesthetical Fuck,” The East Village Other (December 15, 1966): 14. Lucy R. Lippard
papers. Greller was also an exhibiting artist in the show. A comprehensive checklist for Hetero Is does
not seem to exist, however I was able to compile a list of names from reviews and a partial checklist.
Artists mentioned in the reviews include: Arthur Bardo, Barbara Bluestain, Vinnie Caffarelli, Al
DiLauro, Rosalyn Drexler, Don Dugga, Sherman Drexler, Irene Duggs, Charlie Frazier, Cassandra
Gerstein, Mordi Gerstein, Joyce Greller, Walter Gutman, June Hildebrand, Mario Jorin, Robert Rapulls,
Joe Roman, Dick Ruben, Bob Stanley, Charles Stark, Anita Steckel, Tomi Ungerer, Hannah Wilke.
Artists listed on exhibition checklist in NYCATA file, Museum of Modern Art Library, New York:
Terrance Barrell, Mark Berchash, Barbara Bluestain, Dominic Caposiano, Robert D’Enjin, Ali Di
Lauro, Charles Frazier, Cassandra Gerstein, Walter Gutman, June Hildebrand, Mario Jorrin, George
King, Bob Manning, Marcia Marcus, Jo Roman, Richard Ruben, Bob Stanley, Charles Stark, Anita
Steckel, Hannah Wilke.

157
into the holes to unseen textural objects (Fig. 3.5), the female bottom lovingly painting
by Charles Stark (Fig 3.6), and a genital-like sculpture by Hannah Wilke (Fig. 3.4).
Hetero Is quickly inspired articles with such headlines as “Raw Sex Art
Exhibit: Ultra Daring Exhibits of Erotica!” from the tabloid The National Insider and
“The Aesthetical Fuck” from the local alternative newspaper, the East Village Other
(Figs. 3.7 and 3.8). “Sexual realism has hurdled a major barrier in the United States
with the opening of the most daring erotic art exhibit ever seen in this country,”
declared Arnold Wells for The National Insider, describing Hetero Is as the most
audacious of recent exhibitions of erotic art.

He continued: “Some modest exposure of
sex organs – and an almost shy depiction of erotic involvement – was contained at the
Van Bovenkamp show [Contemporary Erotica]…But all inhibitions have been
discarded at the NYCATA gallery.”
7
As it progressed, the article became more
sensational, naming sexual acts represented in the art with excessive use of
exclamation points. Wells tantalized readers, explaining that “the borderline between
what the authorities label pornography ---and what can pass as legitimate art ---is a
narrow one,” and that much of what he saw could not be “safely reproduce[d]” as
illustrations for the article.
In addition to these write-ups in a tabloid and an alterative newspaper (rather
than in art journals or the New York Times where Janis’s exhibition received notice),
photographs of Hetero Is also appeared in Eros in Art (1969) by Jack Bacon. As

7
Arnold Wells, “Raw Sex Art Exhibit,” The National Insider (March 19, 1967): 8. Lucy R. Lippard
papers.
The Van Bovenkamp Show is discussed in Chapter 4 of this dissertation.

158
discussed in the previous chapter, Eros in Art was a short book published by an
alternative press and contained various sexual images culled from both pornography
and art with little text.
8
Perhaps some of the reasons why the NYCATA show’s
reception occurred in these low-brow publications instead of art magazines are that the
exhibition was located at a non-profit gallery that included many unknown artists,
advertised its focus on sexual subject matter, and did not advocate for any specific
style—issues that were not a problem for the Sidney Janis Gallery. The interest
garnered by Hetero Is in tabloid newspapers and erotic books also suggests that erotic
art as a category was gaining momentum in the popular culture and not limited to the
art sphere.
One of the most shocking aspects of Hetero Is, according to The National
Insider, was that “sex organs, both male and female, are exposed here life size – with
brutal realism – not only as parts of nude bodies, but as separate entities.”
9
Wilke’s
sculpture fell under this category; the hand-built clay form can be seen hanging in one
of the installation photographs (Fig. 3.4). In Greller’s article for the East Village
Other, which should be considered more promotional piece than critical review since
she was also a participating artist, she described Wilke’s contribution as a “startling
sculpture of a portion of the male mounted on a wall plaque.”
10
Greller identified the

8
As described in the Introduction, such “erotic art” books, which began to appear in the late 1960s,
were concerned with the iconography of various sexual acts across media in both art and popular
culture. The lack of analysis implies that they were more about providing sexy pictures than anything
else.

9
Wells, “Raw Sex Art Exhibit,” 8.

10
Greller, “Aesthetical Fuck,” 14.

159
piece as relating to male genitals, and, indeed, Wilke’s work was not limited to
“vaginal iconography,” as Rose would later suggest. The sculpture in the photograph
could be read as vagina or phallus, or something in-between. Her built ceramic
sculptures of the early 1960s (cut, folded, pressed, stretched and shaped by hand)
suggested male, female, and sometimes androgynous sexual forms (Figs. 3.9 and
3.10).
11

The context in which Wilke exhibited her sculptures in Hetero Is, an exhibition
premised on heterosexual eroticism as alluded in its title, is perhaps key to
understanding why her early negotiation of sexuality in art has been somewhat
obscured in the history of feminist art. By the mid-1970s, definitions of feminism
began to exclude from their purview any positive reading of the female experience of
heterosexual sex and instead critiqued male desire, as well as women who seemed to
cater to male desire in any way. In an installation photograph of Hetero Is, Wilke’s
sculpture hangs above a Bob Stanley print, Smile (1966), which depicts a young,
attractive woman’s face in close proximity to male thigh and genitals, perhaps as if
seen from the male figure’s point of view (Fig. 3.11). This piece, likely one of his
series reworking images found in pornography, glorifies the fantasy of anticipated
fellatio performed by a glamorous woman. The juxtaposition of the Wilke and the
Stanley in this photograph demonstrates the discrepancy between the context in which

11
In her monographic dissertation on Wilke, Saundra Goldman interprets these early sculptures in terms
of their relationship to the interest in gesture in Abstract Expressionism: “Wilke’s hand motions are
visible in the punctured surfaces and in the extremities of objects which appeared to have been stretched
and pulled into their current shapes.” Goldman, “’Too Good Lookin’ to be Smart’: Beauty,
Performance, and the Art of Hannah Wilke” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas Austin, 1999), 31.

160
Wilke’s work was first exhibited and viewed and the later, declaratively feminist
language with which she and critics spoke about vaginal imagery. On an adjacent wall
hangs a similarly themed work of Stanley’s, again a high-contrast, brightly colored
print showing in close-up a woman performing fellatio (Fig. 3.4). This picture of a
heterosexual act, along with the many other figurative works emphasizing the female
body as erotic object, reinforce the show’s title, Hetero Is, and show that while the
imagery may have been risky, the premise of erotic art as heterosexual was rather
traditional (Fig. 3.12). The presence of Wilke’s sculpture in Hetero Is thus
complicates a feminist reading of her vaginal imagery because, in the context of this
1966 exhibition, Wilke’s work could have registered as celebratory of a patriarchal
construction of heterosexuality defined by male desire and represented through the
objectification of women.
But Hetero Is, which was her second group show in New York, was not the
first or only instance in which Wilke’s work was contextualized as erotic art. Her first
show, Three-Dimensional Art at Castagno Gallery (March 15-April 9, 1966), a show
of contemporary sculpture by fourteen young artists, took place earlier the same year.
The press release advertised, “Wilke’s strange and personal, painted ceramic boxes.”
12

It should be mentioned that Wilke was well aware of the use of the term “box” as

12
Press Release “Group Show of Three-Dimensional Art at Castagno Gallery.” Castagno Gallery file,
Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. Use of term “3-D” instead of “sculpture” by the gallery
emphasized a break from the sculptural traditions such as using a pedestal for display and making the
work from standard materials. Since most of Wilke’s early sculptures are untitled, it is difficult to
identify which ones were exhibited.

161
slang for “vagina.”
13
The Castagno exhibition also included some of her erotic prints
and drawings that were likely similar to the one she published in Nous: The Sex Issue,
in 1966, for these were exemplary of her two-dimensional work at the time (Fig. 3.13).
A publication of the Philadelphia College of Art, Nous dedicated this issue to new
questions and concerns about sexual behavior and attitudes as they related to life at the
college. The multiple phallic imagery is representative of the kind of sexual drawings
Wilke made in the early to mid 1960s, as seen also in a pastel and charcoal drawing
owned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Fig. 3.14). Revisiting these
appearances of Wilke’s work in 1966 demonstrates the ways in which Wilke’s art first
came to public attention in the context of erotic art, and, in the case of Nous, related to
the increased visibility of sexual issues in public life.
In the 1960s, before there was an organized feminist art movement or a public
discourse about feminist art, Wilke spoke of her erotic sculptures in personal terms
rather than political ones. Of course, it would have been impossible at that early stage
for her to talk about her pieces in relation to a feminist manifesto or aesthetic
sensibility, but she did articulate her work in terms of her female experience. In the
first article on Wilke’s work, “Ceramic Erotica” (1966) written for a leftist Australian
magazine, author Lillian Roxen described Wilke’s “ceramic boxes” as “female and

13
“The differences in my early clay pieces and my later clay pieces [was that] the early ones, from ’63
to ’67 were using the pun ‘box.’ So, I made a little square box, and, then I made a shape over it, and
then, later, I put layer upon layer upon layer…” Quoted in “Artist Hannah Wilke Talks with Ernst,”
Oasis d’Neon 1, no. 3 (1978), n.p. Ronald Feldman Gallery archives, New York.

162
explicitly genital…flower-like and blossoming.”
14
When asked about her motivation,
Wilke foregrounded female sexual experience:
If you could get the whole female experience of fulfillment and give it body
and solid shape, it would be like these boxes. Why boxes? Because they are
gifts. When someone gives you something, fulfillment, you want to say thank
you. And another thing, when you’re beautiful, and I’m resigned to the fact
that I am, no one ever looks inside you. I want to show people that the outside,
the beauty, is just garbage. The true beauty is what’s inside me, inside any
women.”
15

In this interview, Wilke discussed sexual pleasure in terms of “female experience of
fulfillment,” suggesting that she believed women were both capable and deserving of
sexual fulfillment. With this, she also showed her awareness that society treated
women, such as herself, as objects and valued them primarily for their looks. Indeed,
in the article, Roxen commented that Wilke was an “extravagantly good looking”
woman.
16
In response to such observations, Wilke’s ceramic boxes hinted at an
unseen interior both physically and metaphorically. “The true beauty is what’s inside
me, inside any woman,” she told Roxen. In addition, Wilke’s recognition of her own
physical beauty as an issue in this interview both prefigures the use of her body in
later performance and photographic works and indicates why such work became a
point of contestation in feminist criticism. But it should be noted that as early as 1966,
Wilke was already aware that her beauty complicated the way that people understood
her.

14
Lillian Roxen, “Hannah Wilke: Ceramic Erotica” Comment [Sidney, Australia] (August 1966): 9.

15
Ibid.

16
Ibid.

163
In the interview, Wilke also expressed concern over potentially losing her
teaching job because of the sexual nature of her art. Regarding the ceramic pieces she
said, “They are a completely personal experience. And I am never sure what my
family or the headmaster of the high school where I teach art would say if I got the
wrong sort of publicity.”
17
She had to be careful about how she contextualized her
work in order to safeguard her teaching career, her main source of income at the
time.
18
This conflicting experience was presumably one of the hardships that led her
to join the feminist movement in the early 1970s and, particularly, the Fight
Censorship Group, the goal of which was to raise awareness about the artistic and
political importance of erotic art made by women.
19

In the 1970s, Wilke expanded on her folded ceramic shapes in a multiplicity of
mediums—from clay to laundry lint, chewing gum, kneaded erasers, and latex. As she
experimented with different materials, critics also began to associate her shapes
specifically with the vaginal form. Rose’s “Vaginal Iconology” article published in
1974 asserted, “Although there are many categories of women’s erotic art, the most
novel are those that glorify vaginas…at issue in vaginal iconology is an overt assault
on the Freudian doctrine of penis envy.”
20
Although Rose acknowledges that this type
of work comes from pre-existing category of erotic art in this quote, she makes clear

17
Ibid.

18
Wilke taught at high schools in Pennsylvania and New York from 1962 to 1970 before she became a
faculty member at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1972.

19
The formation of the Fight Censorship Group is discussed in Chapter 4 of this dissertation.

20
Rose, “Vaginal Iconography,” 59.

164
that such work does not produce any feelings of or reference to sexual desire or
pleasure. She writes, “much of the feminist art that has been labeled ‘erotic’ because
it depicts or alludes to genital images is nothing of the sort. It is designed to arouse
women, but not sexually.” First on her list that follows this statement is “Hannah
Wilke’s soft latex hanging pieces.”
21
In this essay, Rose thus denied the eroticism of
Wilke’s sculptures.
Building on the writings of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro—two artists,
activists, and educators for whom the commitment to “central core” imagery was a
feminist assertion of sexual identity—Rose concluded that such vaginal imagery was
“in effect, propaganda for sexual equality.”
22
The year prior to “Vaginal
Iconography,” in 1973, Chicago and Schapiro published an essay entitled “Female
Imagery” in Womanspace Journal, a publication connected with the feminist
collective Womanspace Gallery in Los Angeles. In the article, Chicago and Schapiro
asked:
What does it feel like to be a woman? To be formed around a central core and
have a secret place which can be entered and which is also a passageway from
which life emerges? What kind of imagery does this state of feeling
engender?
23

Responding to these questions the authors asserted, “There is now evidence that many
women artists have defined a central orifice whose formal organization is often a
metaphor for a woman’s body.” The two artists set out to find this metaphor in the

21
Ibid.

22
Ibid.

23
Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, “Female Imagery,” Womanspace Journal 1, no. 3 (1973): 11-14.

165
work of women artists, from historical artists like Georgia O’Keefe to Chicago and
Schapiro’s own contemporary work, believing that their gender “shapes both the form
and context of their work.” Whether the artist was conscious of this or not, Chicago
and Schapiro suggested that the “woman artist, seeing herself as loathed, takes that
very mark of her otherness and by asserting it as the hallmark of her iconography,
establishes a vehicle by which to state the truth and beauty of her identity.”
24
Chicago
and Schapiro advocated for the appropriation of vaginal iconography by women artists
as a strategy for asserting a positive representation of their sexual identity.
However, many feminist critics took issue with Chicago and Schapiro’s ideas
about “female imagery,” especially the potentially essentializing logic of drawing a
direct parallel between an artist’s gender and her art.
25
One particularly outspoken
opponent, Cindy Nemser, art critic and co-founder of the Feminist Art Journal based
in New York, wrote in response, “Everywhere women artists run into biologically
based stereotyped assumptions of what their art should look like: delicate, sensuous,
exquisite, earthy, pale-toned, and most recently, womb-centered.”
26
Nemser felt that
the concept of “female imagery” subjected women artists to these stereotypes about
women’s art. “Female imagery” constituted therefore a highly contested issue from
the moment of its dissemination in the early 1970s, and work such as Wilke’s
sculptures quickly became mired in these debates. Moreover, the feminist interest in

24
Ibid.

25
Patricia Mainardi, “A Feminine Sensibility?” Feminist Art Journal 1, no. 1 (1972): 4, 25.

26
Cindy Nemser, “The Women Artists’ Movement,” The Feminist Art Journal (Winter 1973-74).

166
the issue of vaginal iconography overshadowed other possible associations in Wilke’s
work, as well as its pre-feminist history.
In the February 1974 issue of New York Magazine, opposite Rose’s article,
“Vaginal Iconography,” two images of Wilke appeared as part of an article called
“The Female View of Erotica” by Dorothy Seiberling. In the article, Wilke spoke
about her experience exhibiting work in the 1960s:
In 1966 I exhibited a lot of my terra-cotta boxes. The shapes were very sexy,
like little tiny genitalia. But nobody noticed them. If you do little things and
you’re a woman, you’re doomed to craftworld obscurity. But if women can
allow their feelings and fantasies about their own bodies to emerge, it could
lead to a new kind of art.
27

In the 1960s, Wilke’s expression of “feelings and fantasies” included divergent and
sometimes ambiguous genital imagery. Although Rose categorized Wilke’s vaginal
pieces as feminist propaganda in 1974, Wilke had been creating works dealing with
sexuality and erotics more broadly prior to her involvement with the feminist art
movement. Her early abstract sculptures are better understood in relation to
sexualized abstraction, an idea that emerged in curatorial work of Lucy Lippard in
1966.

Postminimalist Sculpture and Erotic Art: Lucy Lippard’s Criticism and the
Emergence of Feminist Aesthetics

In 1966 and 1967, art critic Lucy Lippard experimented with ideas about
abstract eroticism in relation to a new aesthetic she was witnessing in contemporary

27
Dorothy Seiberling, “The Female View of Erotica,” New York (February 1974): 58.

167
sculpture, including the work of Hannah Wilke.
28
Many of the aspects of “eccentric
abstraction” articulated by Lippard would later develop into her ideas about a “female
sensibility” in the 1970s. This concept of “female sensibility”—the idea that in some
women’s art one can find certain formal qualities that link to their identity as
women— relates directly to another reading of Wilke’s work as feminist art that was
also fraught with contradictions within the feminist art movement.
Lippard’s exhibition, Eccentric Abstraction (September 20-October 8, 1966) at
the Fishbach Gallery offered an alternative to the “cool” trend of Minimalist sculpture
then dominating gallery shows. Lippard gathered a group of work that she felt
exemplified a new style, one that combined the recent interest in primary structures (or
Minimalism) with surrealist characteristics. The term “eccentric abstraction,” which
Lippard later confessed she was glad never stuck, represented artists who “refuse to
forego imagination and the expansion of sensuous experience while they also refuse to
sacrifice the solid formal basis demanded of the best in current non-objective art.”
29

Eccentric Abstraction followed on the heels of the Jewish Museum’s Primary
Structures (April 27-June 12, 1966) organized by Kynaston McShine. Declared “the

28
“What is Female Imagery?” Ms. Magazine 3, no. 11 (May 1975): 62-5, 80-3.
The definition of contemporary sculpture was of critical importance in 1967. The Los Angeles
County Museum of Art organized American Sculpture of the Sixties (April 28-June 25, 1967 at Los
Angeles County Museum of Art and September 15-October 29, 1967 at Philadelphia Museum of Art) to
mark the significant work that had been produced during the decade and the catalog included influential
essays from the loudest voices on the subject, including Lippard, Clement Greenberg, Barbara Rose,
Irving Sandler, and others. The entire summer 1967 issue of Artforum was dedicated to American
sculpture.

29
Lippard, Eccentric Abstraction, exhibition pamphlet. Lucy R. Lippard papers.
The reviews of Eccentric Abstraction did not give much credence to the title, though they were
not necessarily negative about the art in the show. For example, Arts Magazine commended Eva
Hesse’s work, while commenting that it “is not eccentric at all or any other epithet.” Mel Bochner,
“Eccentric Abstraction,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 1 (November 1966): 58.

168
most anticipated apotheosis of the year,” Primary Structures was a touchstone for
Minimalism as a movement.
30
Reviewed in the New York Times and art magazines, as
well as Newsweek and Life, Primary Structures was recognized by critics as a
landmark exhibition, codifying a current “period style.”
31
Eccentric Abstraction built
on and responded to this style, in particular by reinserting eroticism into abstraction.
Although this exhibition has been cited as pivotal for the articulation of postminimalist
aesthetics, and the parallel development of postminialism and the women’s movement
has been suggested, the issue of eroticism in Eccentric Abstraction has not been
sufficiently explored.
32

30
David Bourdon, “Our Period Style,” Art and Artists 1, no. 3 (June 1966): 54.

31
“Our Period Style,” Art and Artists; Grace Glueck, “Anti-Collector, Anti-Museum,” The New York
Times (April 26, 1966): X24; Hilton Kramer, “Art: Reshaping the Outermost Limits,” The New York
Times (April 28, 1966): 48; Hilton Kramer, “‘Primary Structures’—The New Anonymity,” New York
Times, (May 1, 1966); 147; For further discussion of the exhibition and reception see James Mayer, “A
Tour of Primary Structures,” in Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2001), 13-30.

32
See Briony Fer on Eccentric Abstraction in “Objects Beyond Objecthood,” Oxford Art Journal (22.2
1999): 25: “If objecthood was a term used to describe the literalness of the object, its mere thing-like
status, then this work moved beyond objecthood, not by repairing the rift and returning to the object its
aesthetic plenitude, but by taking it even further down the road of literalness itself and into a realm of
excessive, bodily materiality. In doing so, it laid the ground for a whole range of work which was
subsequently come to be labeled Postminimalist. The moment is mythic in so far as it has come to be
charged with the significance of reveling all that Minimal art itself had sought to repress.” Also see
Richard J. Williams, After Modern Sculpture: Art in the United States and Europe, 1965-1970), Chapter
3, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 47: “Lippard’s achievement in eccentric
abstraction was therefore not simply the presentation of new work, as it was not, after all, very much
different from the work shown at Primary Structures. Instead, by shifting the emphasis to the reception
of the object from its production, she facilitated what can be described as the return of what Minimal
Art had repressed, the individual imagination and sensual experience. In the scenario I have outline
here, the value of eccentric abstraction therefore lies in its offering a way beyond the impasse that was
Minimal Art.” And see Robert Pincus-Witten, “Eva Hesse: More Light on the Transition from Post-
Minimalism to the Sublime,” Eva Hesse: A Memorial Exhibition, exh. cat., The Solomon R
Guggenheim Museum, December 1972-February 1973, reprinted in Postminimalism (New York: Out of
London Press, 1977): 50-51: “The Eccentric Abstraction exhibition, held in September and October of
1966, is one of the most influential group exhibitions in recent history.”
In Sense and Sensibility: Women Artists and Minimalism in the Nineties, curator Lynn
Zelevansky states that Post-Minimalism “which often involved an emphasis on the artist’s ‘touch,’

169
Lippard’s notion of eroticism would grow out of a concern for formal
characteristics over pictorial illustration. In the pamphlet for Eccentric Abstraction,
Lippard listed characteristics of the works she had chosen: off-center, idiosyncratic,
perverse, non-sculptural, usually planar, and large in scale.
33
She also rejected
figuration, nostalgia, and anthropomorphism. Installation photographs from the
exhibition show large-scale sculptural forms sitting on the floor and hanging from the
ceiling and walls (Fig. 3.15). The artists—Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, Eva
Hesse, Gary Kuehn, Bruce Nauman, Don Potts, Keith Sonnier, and Frank Lincoln-
Viner—worked with non-traditional materials like rubber, cloth, fiberglass, and other
industrial materials. In her framing of the show, Lippard drew on the ideas laid out by
Donald Judd in his “Specific Objects” (1965) essay and Robert Morris’s first “Notes
on Sculpture” (1966), both of which emphasized the phenomenological presence of
sculptural objects over their metaphorical or representational qualities.
34
Lippard
wrote, “It [eccentric abstraction] has a direct parallel in recent structural idioms and

sometimes evoked the ‘primal,’ and would be emphatically hand-made—extended the boundaries of
what was acceptable to the art world in a manner that paralleled certain goals and strategies of the
Women’s Movement.” Lynn Zelevansky, Sense and Sensibility: Women Artists and Minimalism in the
Nineties, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 7.

33
Eccentric Abstraction, exhibition pamphlet. Lucy R. Lippard papers.

34
Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 74-82. Judd defines “specific objects” as
neither painting nor sculpture, but works that challenged the conventions of illusionism in painting (the
rectangular canvas) and sculpture (composition of parts). He advocates for new work to be three-
dimensional and exist in “real space.” He believes this work to be more powerful and capable of
creating the most important quality of “interest” because it is experienced as unitary.
Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 1.” Artforum 4, no. 6 (February 1966): 42-4. Morris
emphasized shape as the most important aspect of sculpture. Unlike painting, he argued, sculpture
never had the problem of illusionism but was instead subject to replication. He argues that sculpture
should be about the medium’s literal qualities, and thus a sculptor should place work on the floor, avoid
“additive” color, and chose simple forms based on polyhedrons. The aim of the use of these unitary,
autonomous form was to create a gestalt experience for the viewer.

170
indirect affinities with the incongruity and often sexual content of Surrealism.”
35
She
saw the exhibition as building on the non-representational sculpture/objects shown in
Primary Structures but with an infused “sexual content.” Eccentric abstraction,
Lippard argued, opened up “new areas in materials, form, color, and sensuous
experience.”
36
A comparison of an installation photo of Primary Structures with one
of Eccentric Abstraction shows the contrast between the polished geometric shapes in
the former and the organic, irregular forms in the latter (Fig. 3.16). One of Eva
Hesse’s contributions to the exhibition, Several (1965), consisted of a bundle of
variously sized rubber hoses hanging from the wall by strings. Covered in paper-
mâché and black and gray acrylic paint, the organic forms become erotically
suggestive (Figs. 3.17 and 3.18).
Lippard parlayed her work for the exhibition into a longer article, “Eccentric
Abstraction,” which was published in Art International in November of 1966 as an
attempt at defining a new kind of art.
37
This version of Lippard’s essay further
emphasized the erotic nature of the work and argued for its superiority to figurative
erotic art:
There has been much talk about a ‘new eroticism’ supposedly languishing in
the studios because it is too strong for public consumption, but I doubt that
more pictures of legs, thighs, genitalia, breasts and new positions, no matter

35
Eccentric Abstraction, exhibition pamphlet. Lucy R. Lippard papers.

36
Ibid.

37
Lippard had been developing her concept of eccentric abstraction previously and used the term in
“An Impure Situation (New York and Philadelphia Letter),” Art International, May 20, 1966.

171
how ‘modernistically’ portrayed, will be as valid to modern experience as this
kind of sensuous abstraction.
38

“Sensuous abstraction” did not depict nude bodies, genitals, or sexual encounters, nor
did it represent them metaphorically. The artists, in Lippard’s estimation, “object to
the isolation of biological implications and prefer their forms to be felt, or sensed,
instead of read or interpreted.” Here she focused on the phenomenological aspect of
the work in line with Judd’s writing about the viewer’s encounter with sculptures as
objects. She continued, “Ideally, a bag remains a bag and does not become a uterus, a
tube is a tube and not a phallic symbol, a semi-sphere is just that and not a breast.”
Thus, all representational content had to be eliminated in order to merge form and
content into one. Lastly, she made clear that emotions did not have a place in work
that approached eroticism “non-romantically.”
39
Instead, she left her readers and
viewers with “sensuality purged of sentiment.”
40
Sentiment was too personal and
certainly in danger of becoming kitsch when represented in art. Similarly to Rose’s
rejection of Pop Art in “Filthy Pictures” discussed in the previous chapter, Lippard
criticized the new figurative erotic art, particularly the representations of female nudes
and body parts.
When Lippard expanded on her notions of eroticism in “Eros Presumptive,”
published in The Hudson Review in the spring of 1967, she included a photograph of
Wilke’s piece as it hung in Hetero Is. This article was prompted by two “entirely

38
Lippard, “Eccentric Abstraction,” Art International 10, no. 9 (November 1966): 40.

39
Lippard, “Eccentric Abstraction,” 39.

40
Ibid., 35.

172
unsatisfying” exhibitions, in Lippard’s eyes, Janis’s Erotic Art ’66 and NYCATA’s
Hetero Is, both of which had recently taken place in New York and gained notice in
the press.
41
In her estimation, her own show, Eccentric Abstraction, contained
“sensuous and broadly erotic qualities” that “were far more conspicuous than in the
unprurient peep show up the street at Janis.”
42
Considering that a few years later, in
the early 1970s, Lippard came to identify herself as a feminist art critic and developed
her concept of a feminine aesthetic, it is quite possible that in 1966 she was already
reacting to the male-gendered perspective of erotic art exhibitions, particularly of the
“peep show” variety. “Mere representation of genitalia, breasts, thighs, sado-
masochistic paraphernalia, new positions,” she wrote, “have little erotic or even
pornographic force in an era of topless nightclubs and girlie advertising.”
43
In other
words, the proliferation of sexual representations of women in popular culture
lessened the potency of figurative erotic art.
Lippard posited that abstract sculpture with certain formal qualities, the likes
of which she had compiled for Eccentric Abstraction, was more erotic than figurative
depictions of sexual subject matter. She explained this notion as a formal
development of advanced art:
Younger artists today, however, no longer depend on symbols, dream images,
and the ‘reconciliation of distant realities’; they minimize the allusive factor in
an attempt to fuse formal and evocative elements. Ideally, form and content
are an obsolete dualism. The union of the two is particularly important in
erotic art…Materials, or medium, become more important when pure sensation

41
Lippard, “Eros Presumptive,” The Hudson Review 20, no. 1 (Spring 1967): 91.

42
Ibid., 91.

43
Ibid., 94.

173
is stressed over interpretive symbolism or the realistic portrayal of
recognizable subjects.
44

We might understand this as a phenomenological approach to erotic art in that it
privileges bodily sensation created by formal, abstract qualities over narrative
concepts depicted figuratively. Lippard believed that “visually sophisticated” viewers
would not only appreciate but also “prefer the heightened sensation that can be
achieved by an abstractly sensuous object.”
45
Thus, the debate between abstraction
and figuration entered into the territory of the erotic, an area previously connected
more with iconography, symbolism, and narrative, and the forms used to communicate
these aspects. “The possibility of abstract eroticism may seem far-fetched,” Lippard
admitted to her audience, but she argued for it anyway: “with few exceptions, the best
erotica being made today is abstract to a greater or lesser degree, concentrating on a
purity of sensation which in turn engenders a stronger response.”
46
Traditional erotic
art was too dependent on individual taste because of its explicit imagery, and so
Lippard put forth what she believed was a better form of eroticism—the more
detached and, in a sense, more universal sensuousness of abstract sculpture.
Not all the work in Hetero Is was a problem for Lippard, however, and Wilke’s
work, in particular, met Lippard’s approval. Lippard included an image of Wilke’s
“androgynous terra cotta” sculpture hanging in the exhibition as an example of
“sensuous abstraction” in “Eros Presumptive” (Fig. 3.19). Presumably, the three-

44
Ibid., 98.

45
Ibid., 91.

46
Ibid.

174
dimensional, abstracted qualities combined with the material and pink fleshy color of
the clay fit with Lippard’s theory. However, when she revised the essay for
publication in Gregory Battcock’s Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology in 1968, Lippard
removed the Wilke example from her essay.
47
This leads one to wonder whether
Wilke’s piece no longer exemplified Lippard’s perception of good “erotic art.”
Lippard later recognized that many of the artists she promoted under the rubric
of “eccentric abstraction” were female and began to articulate her ideas about
“feminine sensibility.” In the preface of an exhibition catalog for one of the first all-
female artist exhibitions—Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists at the Aldrich
Museum in April 1971—Lippard looked back to Eccentric Abstraction noting that she
had selected many women for the exhibition. She was now convinced that they had a
different “sensibility” than male artists.
48
Two years later, in 1973, she went so far as
to list some formal elements that characterized this female sensibility she found
recurring in women’s art, using such descriptors as “sensuously tactile” and

47
Ibid., 96. It has been documented that Wilke felt slighted by Lippard when she later removed mention
of the piece in a rewrite of the essay for an anthology edited by Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art: A
Critical Anthology (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968), and when Lippard criticized Wilke in an essay on
women’s body art: “She [Wilke] has been making erotic art with vaginal imagery for over a decade,
and, since the women’s movement, has begun to do performances in conjunction with her sculpture, but
her own confusion of her roles as beautiful woman and artist, as flirt and feminist, has resulted at times
in politically ambiguous manifestations which have exposed her to criticism on a personal as well as an
artistic level.” Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: Women’s Body Art,” Art in America 64,
no. 3 (May/June 1976), 75-6. However, Wilke was included in an exhibition selected by Lippard,
Contact: Women and Nature, Hurlbutt Gallery (January 7-29, 1977). Lippard also intended to illustrate
Wilke’s Venus Basin (1972) in the essay for Joan Semmel’s manuscript, “A New Eros.” For more on
Wilke’s response to Lippard’s criticism, see Goldman, “Too Good Lookin’ To be Smart.”

48
Lippard, “Preface,” Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists, exh. cat. Aldrich Museum, New York
(April 1971), reprinted in Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York:
Dutton, 1976), 39.

175
“indefinable looseness or flexibility.”
49
In the introductory essay for the first large-
scale museum exhibition dedicated solely to female artists, Women Chose Women at
the New York Cultural Center in October of 1973, Lippard stressed her newfound
agreement with Chicago’s and Schapiro’s thesis of “female imagery” in women’s art.
Lippard expanded on her own observations about corresponding formal aspects in
women’s contemporary art, including:
A uniform density, or overall texture, often sensuously tactile and repetitive to
the point of obsession; the preponderance of circular forms and central focus
(sometimes contradicting the first aspect); a ubiquitous linear ‘bag’ or
parabolic form that turns in on itself; layers, or strata; an indefinable looseness
or flexibility of handling; a new fondness for the pinks and pastels and the
ephemeral cloud-colors that used to be taboo unless a woman wanted to be
‘accused’ of making ‘feminine art.’

By 1973, then, Lippard had fully merged her formal interests with her feminist
politics.
Other art critics including Robert Pincus-Witten (who coined the term
“postminimalism” in the late 1960s) recognized the correspondence between what
Lippard described as “eccentric abstraction” in 1966 and as “female sensibility” in
1971 under the umbrella of postminimalism. In the introduction to his anthology of
articles on postminimalism, Pincus-Witten wrote,
The new style’s relationship to the women’s movement cannot be overly
stressed; many of its formal attitudes and properties, not to mention its
exemplars, derive from methods and substances that hitherto had been

49
Lippard, “A Note on the Politics and Aesthetics of a Women’s Show,” in Women Choose Women,
exh. cat. (New York: WIA and New York Cultural Center, 1973). Women Choose Women ran from
January 12-February 18, 1973, and was organized by Women in the Arts and the New York Cultural
Center.

176
sexistically tagged as female or feminine, whether or not the work had been
made by a woman.
50

More recently, this correspondence between formal aspects of postminimalism and a
“female sensibility” in the early 1970s was dealt with in an exhibition, More Than
Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the ‘70s, at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis
University in 1996. One of the significant contributions of this later analysis was the
idea that the women artists represented in the exhibition “proposed a new subject for
abstraction and spoke not to an ideal viewer but to the unfixed nature of human
experience as lived in the physical, sexed, and gendered body.”
51
In other words, the
curators argued that the work was un-essentializing by suggesting the “unfixed nature
of human experience.”
However, in the mid-1960s, before a feminist aesthetic could be articulated,
“eccentric abstraction” presented an alternative construction of eroticism that seemed
at once broader in its appeal and more direct in its effects on the viewer.
52
It did not
force the viewer to identify with specific imagery or particular sexual acts, unlike the
predominantly figurative works that appeared in the group erotic art exhibitions
previously discussed. Thus, analysis of Lippard’s concept of “eccentric abstraction”
shows how the coupling of phenomenological interests and eroticism would lead the

50
Robert Pincus-Witten, Postminimalism (New York: Out of London Press, 1977), 16.

51
Susan L. Stoops, ed., More Than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the ‘70s, exh. cat. (Waltham,
MA: Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 1996), 10. The exhibition was displayed April 21-June
30, 1996.

52
See Janet Sawyer and Patricia Mainardi, “A Feminine Sensibility? Two Views,” Feminist Art Journal
1, no. 1 (1972): 4, 22; and Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago, “Female Imagery,” Womanspace
Journal 1, no. 3 (1973): 11-14.

177
way toward a feminist understanding of the viewer’s gendered experience of art.
Wilke’s genital-like sculptures would seem to demonstrate this innovative formal
approach, at the intersection between postminimalist and feminist aesthetics.
However, her reception continued to be a problematic issue throughout the 1970s and
1980s.
In the early 1970s, when theories about postminimalism were taking root in
art criticism, Wilke began experimenting with non-traditional art materials to make
her signature forms, and she was again exhibiting in New York galleries. In 1971,
Wilke showed in two exhibitions at Richard Feigen Gallery. The press release for
Americans: 10 Painters, 1 Sculptor described six sculptures by Wilke as “small,
biomorphic sculptures…quite abstract and yet contain strong sexual overtones. Her
imaginative use of fired clay in some and folded rubber in others, is heightened by her
subtle command of flesh-toned colors.”
53
At this time, more art critics began to take
notice of the abstract, yet undeniable sexuality of her sculptures. A review in Craft
Horizons agreed that Wilke’s objects were both sexual and subtle, a far cry from the
reactions to the earlier erotic art show, Hetero Is in 1966. In the article, Ruth Lusker
wrote, “the terra-cotta she uses suggests an organic sensuousness…Her mixed media
vocabulary integrate a low key erotic message with tactile ingenuity.”
54
A critic for
the local newspaper, Manhattan East, described the understated sensuality of the
works: “The sculptures of Hannah Wilke are also deceptively innocent. They might

53
Richard Feigen Gallery press release, April 12, 1971. Hannah Wilke Collection and Archives, Los
Angeles.

54
Ruth Lusker, “Downtown Feigen Gallery, NY,” Craft Horizons 31 (August 1971): 65. The
exhibition took place April 3-May 5 1971.

178
be described as loose, terra cotta envelopes. The viewer encounters their seductive,
spare presence once and does not forget it.”
55
These critics responded positively to
Wilke’s sculptures, reading them as at once highly sensual and subtly sexual.
However, it was not until her first exhibition at Ronald Feldman Gallery that Wilke
would gain notice outside of these relatively obscure publications.
Reviews of the opening of Wilke’s first solo show in 1972 at the Ronald
Feldman Gallery identified the sexual nature of her work directly with feminism for
the first time. In Art News, Douglas Crimp described the sculpture and collages on
view as “feminist metaphor.” It was her larger, poured latex pieces “dyed
pink/orange, snapped together and pinned to the wall,” such as Venus Cushion (1972),
that attracted Crimp and garnered his positive review (Fig. 3.20).
56
By this time Wilke
had developed her technique of pouring a compound made with latex into strips,
assembling the dried pieces into layers, fastening them with metal snaps, and
displaying them on the wall (Figs. 3.21 and 3.22). Wilke had started to work with
latex as early as 1970 and before that had experimented with covering the surface of
her clay pieces with liquitex. The large hanging pieces recalled the untitled sculpture
in Hetero Is, which unlike her other sculptures at the time, hung on the wall. The
earlier untitled sculpture, therefore, could be considered a transitional piece in the
artist’s oeuvre between her earlier clay “boxes” that sat on the floor or on a pedestal

55
Marjorie Welish, “Art,” Manhattan East (August 24, 1971): 5.

56
Douglas Crimp, “Hannah Wilke” Art News 71, no. 6 (October 1972): 83. Other reviews of the show appearing
in the art press: April Kingsley, “Hannah Wilke,” Artforum 11, no. 4 (1972): 83-84; Roberta Smith, “Hannah
Wilke,” Arts Magazine 47, no. 2 (November 1972): 72; Marjorie Welish, “New York Letter,” Art International
16, no. 10 (1972): 60-71.

179
and her celebrated hanging latex pieces of the early 1970s. A year after her debut at
Ronald Feldman Gallery, the Whitney Museum included In Memory of My Feelings
(1973), another large, richly pink-colored, hanging latex piece, in the Biennial
exhibition of 1973. A comparison of a ceramic piece, San Antonio Rose (1966), with
a later latex piece, Venus Cushion (1972), shows the change in formal attributes of her
work (Figs. 3.23 and 3.20). The latter is more biomorphic, larger in scale, translucent
in color, at once more delicate and more complex. Unfortunately, like the sculpture
named after Barbara Rose, few of these early latex pieces still exist and certainly not
in their original condition, partially because their material was fragile and unstable.
Wilke was still experimenting and would soon find that combining this latex with
different materials such as acrylic paint would allow for a more permanent piece that
kept its shape, such as Pink Champagne (1974) (Fig. 3.24).
57

At the same time that critics and curators began noticing Wilke’s work, she
began to develop her own ideas about vaginal imagery as the feminist art movement
also drew attention to her. “My art is a very female thing; it is about multilayered
forms, and it’s organic, like flowers,” she was quoted in New York Magazine. “When
I developed my latex hangings,” she said,
I decided to use metal snappers to hold the folds together, but also to combine
toughness and softness. The effect is frightening to some people, but I like the
shiny, gritty nastiness and the fact that the snaps make the structure possible –

57
Interview with Donald Goddard.
Wilke did not give up working in clay, and she continued to make sculptures in that medium
throughout her career.

180
as well as vulnerable. You want to unsnap the piece, but that would destroy
the shape.
58

This larger-scale, latex work garnered critical attention for its combination of delicacy
and sexual suggestiveness, and, at the same time, her work began to align with new
ideas not only about vaginal imagery but also about a feminine aesthetic.
But, like the concept of “female imagery,” the suggestion of the existence of a
“female sensibility” raised disagreements among feminist art critics. By the 1980s,
many felt that both ideas should be discredited for their essentialism. For example, in
the September 1987 issue of Art Bulletin Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia
Mathews wrote, “A second generation of feminists has abandoned the issue of female
sexuality, and of female sensibility, in favor of an investigation of the workings and
interactions of gender differences rather than the nature of the specifically female.”
59

They criticized concepts of “female sexuality” and “female sensibility” as reductive in
assuming that women’s experience was something universal and definable. Instead,
Gouma-Peterson and Mathews advocated a deconstructive approach to representation
in feminist art and art history. These crucial debates about approaches to feminist art
have certainly resonated in the reception of Wilke’s work. However, it was perhaps
her willingness to discuss her heterosexual female desire and her intimate relationships
with men in the context of her work and career as an artist that elicited a cool
reception from certain critics.

58
Dorothy Seiberling, “The Female View of Erotica,” New York Magazine 7, no. 6 (February 11,
1974): 58.

59
Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews, “The Feminist Critique of Art History,” The Art
Bulletin no. 3 (September 1987): 338.

181
The Problem of Feminist Heterosexuality
Despite her successes, Wilke has been a somewhat controversial figure in the
history of feminist art though she was identified with the movement since it began in
the early 1970s.
60
Her work has consistently been exhibited by feminist organizations
and has appeared in shows focused exclusively on women artists. She was
represented abroad as a participant in the American women’s art movement in the
American Woman Artist Show in Kunsthaus Hamburg (April 14-May 14, 1972), which
included work by forty-seven artists (organized in part by feminist artists and critic Lil
Picard).
61
However, Wilke’s body art and performances, which she called her
“performalist self-portraits,” and her “vaginal iconography” have continued to
provoke debates about how feminist art should look.
62

Although some of her body art referenced the Great Goddess concept (such as
Super-T-Art (1974), a performance in which Wilke had herself photographed
wrapping a white sheet around her body, slowly transforming herself from Mary
Magdalene to Christ), her S.O.S. Starification Series (1974-75) dealt with what we
might call the “glamour goddess,” the contemporary image of the Hollywood starlet or

60
Wilke participated in the Fight Censorship group (discussed in Chapter 4 of this dissertation) and in
exhibitions of women artists at the Women’s Building in Los Angeles (1977), Rutgers University Art
Gallery (1977), Smith College Museum of Art (1979), New York Feminist Art Institute (1981) and
sponsored by the Women’s Caucus (1978). Recently, curator Cornelia Butler selected Wilke’s work for
inclusion in the first feminist art retrospective in a museum, WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution,
at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2007.

61
“Wahl de Damen,” Der Spiegel no. 20 (May 8, 1972): 156. Ronald Feldman Gallery archives.

62
“Performalist Self-Portraits” was the title of an exhibition at Washington Project for the Arts, 1979,
and the first use of that term to describe her work.

182
fashion magazine model.
63
In the series, Wilke poses topless for the camera in
numerous seductive ways with tiny morsels of gum in the shape of vaginas adhered to
her body (Fig. 3.25). Referring to the pieces of gum as “wounds,” Wilke suggested
the harmful nature of the gaze upon women’s bodies, and, in particular, the effects of
media images.
64
Her addition of props such as the sunglasses, hat, and apron support a
reading of these images as a role-playing critique of the constructed nature of beauty
and seduction in advertising and film (Figs. 3.26 and 3.27).
However, feminist critics writing in the 1970s and 1980s chastised Wilke for
using her own body in her work, particularly because she was considered beautiful by
contemporary social standards. In “Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art Making”
(1980), for example, Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis argued a text-based,
deconstructive model for feminist art and criticized Wilke’s use of her body as
ambiguous and complicit:
She does not make her own position clear; is her art work enticing critique or
titillating enticement? It seems her work ends up by reinforcing what it tends
to subvert. In using her own body as the content of art, in calling her art
‘seduction,’ she complicates the issues and fails to challenge conventional
notions of femininity.
65

Literature and performance scholar Jill Dolan’s essay “The Dynamics of Desire:
Sexuality and Gender in Pornography and Performance” published in Theater Journal

63
See Goldman’s dissertation for analysis of influences from fashion photography on Wilke.

64
“Artist Hannah Wilke Talks With Ernst,” n.p.
During related performances, Wilke passed out chewing gum to her audience and then asked
for it back after it had been chewed in order to form each small morsel into a vulvic form and press it to
her body.

65
Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art Making” Screen
21, no. 2 (1980): 35-48, reprinted in Amelia Jones, ed., The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader
(London: Routledge, 2002), 90.

183
of May 1987 stated that Wilke “privileges women’s biological, natural capabilities
over an examination of the cultural construction of gender differences in her
performance art.”
66
However, the examples that Dolan gives are from Wilke’s
interviews where she expressed the belief in “the physical superiority of women as the
life source” rather than in analysis of the artist’s works, of which the S.O.S.
Starification Series would make a strong counter-argument.
67

In the 1990s, scholars began to recuperate Wilke as a feminist artist working in
a deconstructive vein. Amelia Jones has continuously argued for the criticality of
Wilke’s work, particularly in her performative self-portraits such as S.O.S.
Starification Series. “The pose, Wilke illustrates time and time again, not only enacts
the subject (producing the subject as a body and a self),” Jones writes, “but also
unhinges the notion of the subject as a stable, centered individual.”
68
Thus, Jones
theorizes a way of reading Wilke’s work as non-essentialist in that it “unhinges” the
very idea of an essential human subject. Jones and other art historians have
recognized Wilke’s “performalist self-portraits” as precursors to slightly later work
such as Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), the series in which Sherman
enacted stereotypically feminine roles in Hollywood in black and white photographs

66
Jill Dolan, “The Dynamics of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Pornography and Performance,”
Theater Journal 39, no. 2 (May 1987): 158.

67
For a discussion of feminist essays that negatively critique Wilke’s art see Amelia Jones, Body
Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 171-3.

68
Jones, “Everybody Dies…Even the Gorgeous’: Resurrecting the Work of Hannah Wilke,” in The
Rhetoric of the Pose, Rethinking Hannah Wilke, exh. cat. (Santa Cruz: University of California, Santa
Cruz, Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery, 2005), 2.

184
(Fig. 3.28).
69
The work of such scholars has prompted reexamination of all of Wilke’s
work separated from accusations of essentialism (for her use of vaginal forms) and
narcissism (for what was seen as inappropriate displays seductiveness and beauty).
In a 1998 retrospective catalog, Laura Cottingham argued that the issue of
Wilke’s “self-objectification” in the deployment of her own beautiful body in her art
has also overshadowed Wilke’s abstract works in much of the literature.
70
Often
placed in a category with Carolee Schneemann, the subject of my first chapter, Wilke
was sometimes seen as complicit with the very standards of beauty and female
objectification that feminists wanted to destroy.
71
Lippard articulated this dilemma as
early as her 1976 essay, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: Women’s Body Art,”
cautioning:
A woman using her own face and body has a right to do what she will with
them, but it is a subtle abyss that separates men’s use of women for sexual
titillation from women’s use of women to expose that insult.
72

Lippard and other feminist critics writing in the 1970s were concerned that such work
would not be read correctly and would thus perpetuate women’s continued
objectification. Lippard criticized Wilke, in particular:

69
Anna Chave, “‘I Object,” Art in America 97, no. 3 (March 2009); Laura Cottingham, “Hannah Wilke:
Some Naked Truths about Her Legacy in the 1990s,” in Hannah Wilke, A Retrospective, exh. cat.
(Copenhagen: Nicolaj Contemporary Art Center, 1998); Jones, “Everybody Dies;” Goldman, “‘Too
Good Lookin’ to be Smart.’”

70
Laura Cottingham, “Hannah Wilke: Some Naked Truths about Her Legacy in the 1990s,” 56-59.

71
Wilke and Schneemann have also been represented in some of the same exhibitions on theme of
desire and the nude: Revealing Desire, Christinerose Gallery, New York (February 4-March 11, 1995);
Nothing But Nudes, The Downtown Whitney, New York (January 26-March 3, 1977).

72
Lucy Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: Women’s Body Art,” Art in America 64, no. 3
(May/June 1976): 75.

185
She [Wilke] has been making erotic art with vaginal imagery for over a
decade, and since the women’s movement has begun to do performances in
conjunction with her sculpture, but her own confusion of her roles as beautiful
woman and artist, as flirt and feminist, has resulted at times in politically
ambiguous manifestations which have exposed her to criticism on a personal as
well as on an artistic level.
73

Unapologetic about the content of her work, Wilke once told an interviewer, “I didn’t
separate my art from my body; it was just another part of it.”
74

Wilke responded directly to this kind of criticism in her words and in her art.
“To be the artist as well as the model for her own ideas, whether sexually positive or
negative,” she wrote for an exhibition catalog in 1980, “she must also resist the
coercion of a fascist feminism, which devolves on traditional politics and hierarchies
in feminist guise rather than self-realization with respect to the physically superiority
of woman as the life source.”
75
She expressed these beliefs in a visually arresting
manner with a poster using a photograph from her S.O.S. Starification Object Series
and the words “Marxism and Art, Beware of Fascist Feminism” (1977) (Fig. 3.29).
She made the piece in response to the question, “What is Feminism and what can it
become?”
76
Based on her experience, Wilke chose a cautionary answer as opposed to
a celebratory one. Her poster suggested that feminism could become authoritative,
limiting women’s freedom of expression rather than promoting it.

73
Ibid.

74
“Artist Hannah Wilke talks with Ernst,” n.p.

75
“Visual Prejudice,” American Woman Artists, exh. cat. (Sao Paulo, Brazil: Museu de Arte
Contemporanea da Universidade de Sao Paulo, 1980) reprinted in Hannah Wilke, A Retrospective
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 141.

76
“Artist Hannah Wilke talks with Ernst,” n.p.

186
It is likely that the criticism of Wilke followed in response not only to the use
of her own body in potentially objectifying ways, but also to her public display of her
relationships with men. For example, Wilke chose to submit a photograph of herself
naked and in bed with Claes Oldenburg to be used in promotion of a group exhibition
both artists participated in, Artists Make Toys at the Clocktower, New York, in 1969
(Fig. 3.30).
77
Wilke was involved in a romantic relationship with Oldenburg from
1969 to 1977. I would argue that this gesture was more than a taboo assertion of
“Wilke’s sex-toy position to her more famous male artist companion” when viewed in
the context of her body of work.
78
For instance, Richard Meyer recently wrote about
Wilke’s archive of male nude photographs taken of men who she knew intimately for
their potential use in works of art. Meyer posed the question, “how are we to put
Wilke’s interest in the male body (back) into the picture of her career as a feminist?”
79

Similar to Carolee Schneemann’s refusal to separate her personal life from her art,
and, furthermore, using her sexual relationships as support, inspiration, and even
material for her art, Wilke asserted her feminist heterosexuality by exploring male
nude imagery.

77
Artists Make Toys, The Clocktower, New York, (January 1-February 15, 1975). See Goldman’s
dissertation for a detailed account of the story and the effects of Wilke’s relationship with Oldenburg on
her life and work.

78
Cottingham, “Hannah Wilke: Some Naked Truths,” 9.

79
Richard Meyer, “Hard Targets: Male Bodies, Feminist Art, and the Force of Censorship in the
1970s,” in Cornelia Butler, et al., WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles: Museum of
Contemporary Art, 2007), 381.

187
Wilke’s work that directly referenced her relationships with men also spoke to
the larger cultural issues facing a female artist trying to succeed in New York. As
Cottingham persuasively argues:
What’s unique about Wilke is that she was willing to enunciate some of the
conflicts that circumscribed her sexual life with men, render them visible in her
art – and in a way that functions in critical relationship to both the male
domination of art history and the ongoing sexism implicit in contemporary
art’s production and distribution.
80

In the Advertisements for Living series (1966-84), for example, Wilke juxtaposed
photographs of herself and her male lovers with the names of well-known male
contemporary artists. One panel of the series includes a large-scale photograph of
Wilke laughing with her arms around the neck of Pop artist Richard Hamilton paired
with a photograph of an industrial window with the name “Sol LeWitt” inscribed
across it (Fig. 3.31). The work hints at the contradictions between the artist’s private
life and her success within the art world, particularly for a female artist whose name
would not carry the commercial significance of “Sol LeWitt.” Other photographs in
the series include partial nudes of Donald Goddard and Claes Oldenburg, two other
men whom Wilke had long-term relationships with and who both worked in the art
world.
Though perhaps less obviously, this critical negotiation of her relationships
with men in her private and professional life also surfaced in her abstract sculptures.
For example, Wilke formed vaginal shapes out of laundry lint collected from drying
Oldenburg’s clothes and lined these soft sculptures in a grid on a floor (Fig. 3.32). In

80
Ibid.

188
this piece, Wilke referenced both the personal and the aesthetic, emulating a
Minimalist grid of repetitive objects laid on the floor and nodding to Oldenburg’s
famous “soft sculptures” while also referencing her traditionally womanly duties
inside the home. She mixed with the male art stars in the art realm while doing their
chores in the domestic realm.
Wilke further activated the (hetero)sexual charge of her abstract pieces by
posing with them in photographs. In Art News Revised (1976), for example, Wilke
appears in a photograph topless and standing next to her installation at Ronald
Feldman Gallery in 1975 (Fig. 3.33). She made the photograph in response to a
similar picture published in Art News in which she was fully clothed. In the mid-
1960s, another female artist working with abstract sculpture, Yayoi Kusama,
commissioned similar photographs of herself posed nude with her gallery installations.
One such photograph shows the artist posed in the nude amidst Aggregation: One
Thousand Boats Show at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in 1964 (Fig. 3.34). We see the
artist’s naked body from behind with a slight profile of her face slightly turned toward
the camera. Her naked body becomes a sculpture of light and dark tones. In another
example, a collage in which Kusama inserted a photograph of herself, the artist lies
nude like a pinup girl wearing a pair of high-heeled shoes upon a couch covered in her
white phallic shapes (Fig. 3.35). The polka dots cover her body, blending it with the
repetitive sculpture surrounding her. In both cases, Kusama’s choice to pose in the
nude solicits one to look upon her as an object, paradoxically, within the context of her

189
own installations.
81
The genital associations in Kusama’s and Wilke’s sculptures
combined with the artists’ young, semi-nude bodies heighten the sexual charge in
these photographs and by extension in the artwork on display.
Amelia Jones has argued that in works such as Art News Revised Wilke
disrupts the Cartesian conception of the subject by confusing her subject/object
position:

In the revised image Wilke unveils her body/self among her works to
instantiate herself as both their ‘subject’ and a parodic imitation of woman as
conventional ‘object’ of artistic practice (the female nude [here almost] nude).
In doing so, she collapses the incompatibility between the functions
male/artist/subject and female/object.
82

At the same time Jones sees “ambivalence” in this photographic piece in that Wilke
“both exposes and makes use of conventional codes of feminine display to increase
her notoriety (and her desirability) in the male-dominated art world.”
83
Indeed, in
another instance in the early 1970s, Wilke chose to advertise her first solo exhibition

81
While acknowledging, “Kusama was known to be publicity hungry,” Lynn Zelevansky has argued
that Kusama’s commissioned photographs of herself also demonstrate her engagement with gender
issues and manipulation of stereotypes before there was a feminist theoretical language to account for
such strategies. Lynn Zelevansky, “Driving Image: Yayoi Kusama in New York,” Love Forever: Yayoi
Kusama, 1958-1968, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1998), 20-23.

82
Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject, 155. In this book, Jones considers Wilke’s use of her own
body in her art as a case study for investigation of feminist body art’s critique of the objectification of
women in western culture and “the gendered oppositions structuring conventional models of art
production and interpretation (female/object versus male/acting subject).” Wilke began inserting her
own image into photographic works and using her own body as material for her performances in 1974,
with such works as her S.O.S. Starification Object Series. Jones argues persuasively for the feminist
significance of Wilke’s self-involved work, interpreting “strategic feminist narcissism” as a strategy of
performative subject creation, and she does so in response to critics who dismissed Wilke’s work as
narcissistic and complacent with traditions that feminists were trying to break.
Wilke is better known for her photographic and performance work from the 1970s to the
1990s, and this work can be found in museum collections. For example, MoMA, the Los Angeles
Country Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Centre Pompidou, all own pieces
from the S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974-82).

83
Ibid.

190
with a photograph taken by Oldenburg when they were living in Los Angeles at the
Chateau Marmont (Fig. 3.36). In the image, Wilke stands leaning over a desk
apparently working with one leg propped up on the chair beside her. Only a sheer pair
of panty hose covers the artist from the waist to her boots, showing off the contour of
her legs and buttocks. Used as an advertisement for her exhibition, the image
certainly raises questions about whether she is the subject or the object and what
exactly is she selling.
84

Not only did Wilke’s choice to credit Oldenburg on the photograph potentially
raise questions about how she was using her relationship with the more famous artist
to market her work, but it also made direct reference to their heterosexual relationship.
In the photo, Wilke poses for Oldenburg who operates the camera presumably in the
intimacy of their shared hotel room. With feminist consciousness-raising groups and
critiques of heterosexual sex, marriage, and love published in the early 1970s,
acceptance of art celebrating heterosexuality was understandably limited among
feminist critics.
85
The radical feminist notion that the relationship between the sexes
was a political one led to analyses of the power structures within heterosexual
relationships and sex practices as early as 1968 in Kate Millett’s essay “Sexual

84
This ad calls to mind Linda Benglis’s controversial ad that appeared in Artforum in November 1974.
The photograph shows the artist nude, greased-up, and holding a dildo while striking a pose for the
camera.

85
Sheila Cronan, “Marriage,” (1970) and Kate Millett, “Sexual Politics: A Manifesto for Revolution”
(1968), reprinted in Anne Koedt, et al., Radical Feminism (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973);
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex; the Case for Feminist Revolution, (New York: Morrow,
1970).

191
Politics: A Manifesto.”
86
Heterosexual female artists, such as Wilke, who had
absorbed some of the ideas of sexual liberation into their work, experienced a backlash
within the women’s movement for their involvement with men in both their personal
lives and their work.
Heterosexuality also raised a problem of essentialism within the feminist
movement. Early feminist organizations were not immune to homophobia, and
sometimes attempted to erase differences among women to further their cause. In her
survey of lesbian art, artist Harmony Hammond describes the conflict between women
of hetero- and homosexual identifications: “As lesbians became more visible, active,
and powerful, tensions with straight women surfaced in virtually every feminist
project or program of the ‘70s.”
87
These tensions led to new statements of lesbian
feminist politics, including the idea of lesbianism as a political choice as well as the
“analysis and formulation of heterosexuality as an institution of male supremacy,”
making female heterosexual pleasure and identity hard to accept in radical feminist
terms.
88
As Jane Gaines argued in a 1995 essay, “Feminist Heterosexuality and Its
Politically Incorrect Pleasures,” artwork that expressed heterosexuality became
incongruent with feminist theories dominating the movement.
89

86
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970).

87
Harmony Hammond, Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (New York: Rizzoli, 2000),
15.

88
Hammond, Lesbian Art in America, 17. Also see “The Woman Identified Woman,” Radicalesbians
(Pittsburgh: Know, Inc. 1970).

89
Jane Gaines, “Feminist Heterosexuality and Its Politically Incorrect Pleasures,” Critical Inquiry 21,
no. 2 (1995): 382-410.

192
Conclusion
During Wilke’s illness from lymphoma at the end of her life in the early 1990s,
she continued to make images of herself and exposed her body to the camera as
deformed as it became during her sickness and treatment. This finally proved to many
critics the seriousness of her methods. Intra-Venus (1992-93), the project including
the self-images as well as paintings and works made from her lost hair, was shown
posthumously at Ronald Feldman Gallery in 1994.
90
During her lifetime, however,
Wilke was frustrated by the lack of recognition from feminist critics of her work,
particularly the vaginal-like sculptures, when other such artists as Judy Chicago
gained notoriety for similar subject matter.
91
And while Barbara Rose did include
Wilke’s art in the essay, “Vaginal Iconography,” Rose considered it solely as a
feminist political statement and not as erotic. It seems that Rose was unable to read
Wilke’s work as having both meanings.
Feminist artist and critic Joanna Frueh has been one of the few to consider
Wilke’s early work as both erotic and feminist. In an essay accompanying the first
retrospective of Wilke’s career in 1989, Frueh wrote that Wilke’s large latex works
“address female sexual pleasure, its plurality in terms of orgasms, the overall
responsiveness of the female body as well as the many locales of sensitivity in her

90
Amelia Jones notes this exhibition as a turning point in Wilke’s reception in “Everybody Dies…Even
the Gorgeous: Resurrecting the Work of Hannah Wilke.”

91
In the first chapter of her dissertation, Goldman traces the development of Wilke’s sculpture and her
later photographic and performance work while interpreting it through Wilke’s interest in “gesture.” It
should be noted that Goldman also asserts that Wilke’s early sculpture, in addition to its importance for
feminism, should be considered in the broader context of 60s art.

193
external and internal anatomy.”
92
Frueh also interpreted the clay box-shaped and
vaginal forms as a gendered critique of Minimalism, stating outright what Lippard
suggested earlier in her art criticism, namely that Wilke’s sculpture challenged the
presumed objectiveness of abstraction. However, what is still missing from this
account is that Wilke’s critique came from a position of feminist heterosexuality.
Recovering this aspect of Wilke’s art and examining its difficulties in reception
highlights significant tensions within the shifting category of feminist art. Wilke’s
feminist heterosexuality reveals both the internal inconsistencies and the broader
scope of the history of feminist art. Analysis of heterosexual female pleasure, desire,
and intimacy in early feminist art such as Wilke’s may also open up new approaches
to exploring the feminist potential of sexually charged imagery today.

92
Joanna Frueh, “Hannah Wilke,” in Thomas H. Kochheiser, et al., Hannah Wilke, A Retrospective
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 18.

194

Fig. 3.1. Hannah Wilke, Barbara Rose, 1970, latex and cloth

Fig. 3.2. Hannah Wilke, Barbara Rose, latex and cloth, 1970, current state, Hannah
Wilke Collection & Archives, Los Angeles

195

Fig. 3.3. Exhibition photograph, Hetero Is, NYCATA Gallery 1966, Archives of
American Art

Fig. 3.4. Exhibition photograph, Hetero Is, NYCATA Gallery 1966, Archives of
American Art

196

Fig. 3.5. Exhibition photograph, Hetero Is, NYCATA Gallery 1966, Archives of
American Art

Fig. 3.6. Exhibition photograph, Hetero Is, NYCATA Gallery 1966, Archives of
American Art

197

Fig. 3.7. Arnold Wells, “Raw Sex Art Exhibit,” The National Insider, March 19, 1967

Fig. 3.8. Joyce Greller, “Aesthetical Fuck,” The East Village Other, December 15,
1966

198

Fig. 3.9. Hannah Wilke, early ceramic sculptures c. 1963-66, Ronald Feldman Gallery

Fig. 3.10. Hannah Wilke, Untitled (Phallus) 1960s, partially glazed ceramic, 7 x 2 x 2
in.

Fig. 3.11. Photograph of Hetero Is in Jack Bacon, Eros in Art (Los Angeles:
Elysium,1969)

199

Fig. 3.12. Photograph of Hetero Is in Jack Bacon, Eros in Art (Los Angeles:
Elysium,1969)

Fig. 3.13. Hannah Wilke drawing in Nous: The Sex Issue, 1966-67

Fig. 3.14. Hannah Wilke, Untitled, 1963-66, pastel and charcoal on paper, 19 ! x 24
in.

200

Fig. 3.15. Installation photograph, Eccentric Abstraction in New York Times, 1966

Fig. 3.16. Installation photograph of Primary Structures in Arts Magazine, December
1966-January 1967

Fig. 3.17. Installation photograph of Eccentric Abstraction in Arts International,
November 1966

201

Fig. 3.18. Eva Hesse, Several, 1965, acrylic, papier-mâché, latex, and rubber, 84 x 11
x 7 in.

Fig. 3.19 Hannah Wilke, Untitled, 1966, in The Hudson Review, 1967

Fig. 3.20. Hannah Wilke, Venus Cushion, 1972 (no longer extant)

202

Fig. 3.21. Hannah Wilke pouring latex, 1974

Fig. 3.22. Hannah Wilke’s studio, 1971, Ronald Feldman Gallery

Fig. 3.23. Hannah Wilke, San Antonio Rose, 1966

203

Fig. 3.24. Pink Champagne, 1975, latex and metal snaps, c. 5 ft.

Fig. 3.25. Hannah Wilke, S.O.S. Starification Object Series, 1974-82

Fig. 3.26. Hannah Wilke, S.O.S. Starification Series, 1974-82

204

Fig. 3.27. Publicity photograph of Jane Russell for Outlaw, 1943

Fig. 3.28. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #6

Fig. 3.29. Hannah Wilke, Marxism and Art, Beware of Fascist Feminism, 1977, poster

205

Fig. 3.30. Artists Make Toys, 1969, The Clocktower, exhibition poster

Fig. 3.31. Hannah Wilke, Advertisements for Living: Double Portraits, 1966-84,
cibachrome diptych, 28 x 81 in.

Fig. 3.32. Hannah Wilke, Laundry Lint (C.O.’s), 1973, double-fold laundry lint, 11 x
96 in.

206

Fig. 3.33. Hannah Wilke, Art News Revised, May 1976, 1976, photograph by eeva-
inkeri

Fig. 3.34. Yayoi Kusama in Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show, Gertrude Stein
Gallery, New York, 1964, photograph by Rudolph Burkhardt

207

Fig. 3.35. Yayoi Kusama, collage, c. 1966, no longer extant, photograph by Hal Reiff

Fig. 3.36. Hannah Wilke, advertisement for exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts,
1972

208
Chapter 4: Humor, Sex, and Censorship: Anita Steckel and the Founding of the
Fight Censorship Group

In early 1972, artist Anita Steckel drew the attention of New York media with
her controversial exhibition, The Feminist Art of Sexual Politics, held at the Rockland
Community College art gallery in Suffern, New York.
1
Suzanne Frank, a reviewer for
Arts Magazine, described the overtly sexual and political nature of the works on
display, having viewed them in Steckel’s studio before the opening of the show.
Frank noted Steckel’s “use of sexual organs as symbols of power...in such large pieces
as a 6 x 9 foot photo on canvas of the New York skyline with enormous phalluses
projecting upward like organic extensions of the more prominent skyscrapers.”
2
From
Steckel’s New York Skyline series (1970-80), the piece Frank referred to was likely the
one in which Steckel vertically stretched the silhouette of the Manhattan cityscape
with painted outlines of penises extending from the tops of buildings, or perhaps a
more humorous version in which phalluses perch atop the same buildings, looking as
sculpturally round as classical columns (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2).
3
Steckel’s treatment of
these symbols expressed a frank visual message about male dominance over economic

1
Richard Meyer first brought this controversy at Rockland Community College and Steckel’s work to
my attention. His lectures on the topic of the Fight Censorship group and his essay, “Hard Targets:
Male Bodies, Feminist Art, and the Force of Censorship in the 1970s,” written for the catalog of the
2007 exhibition, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, organized by the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Los Angeles, provided the jumping off point for this chapter. I thank him for sharing his research
and introducing me to the artists.

2
Suzanne Frank, “Anita Steckel at Rockland College,” Arts Magazine 46, no. 5 (March 1972): 56.

3
Steckel began the series in 1970 when she ordered the New York skyline silk-screened onto multiple 6
! x 8 ! foot canvases. She then painted on the surface of these silkscreen prints. She continued to
produce works for the series into the late 1970s. Her technique will be discussed later in this chapter.
Article mentioning at least one of the skyline series: Sally Helgesen and Howard Smith, “Anita
Steckel,” Village Voice 16, no. 36 (September 9, 1971).

209
and political power in contemporary American society. As a counterpoint, Steckel
also included in the exhibition her Giant Woman series (1969-72), a group of
montages featuring larger-than-life female nudes interspersed in photographic scenes
of urban life in New York. In Giant Woman on Empire State (1969-72), for example,
a nude rides the iconic structure high above the crowded metropolis, claiming her own
power over the landscape with the sweeping gesture of her arm (Fig. 4.3). Other
works combined male anatomy and female nudity, including two paintings of totem-
like phalluses encircled by small female figures (Fig. 4.4).
The colossal phallic imagery was a particular sticking point for critics of
Steckel’s show, who labeled it obscene and called for its censorship. The most vocal
opposition to the exhibition was a Rockland County legislator, John Komar.
4
“The
Skyline of New York represented more of a sick culture to me than anything else,” he
told one reporter, “It certainly didn’t turn me on!”
5
Komar’s reading of Steckel’s
representation of New York as one of a “sick culture” shows that on some level he
understood the work to be a critique. However, he was unable to reconcile the critique
with the artist’s use of sexualized imagery. The fact that it did not “turn him on”
reveals his disturbance that sexual imagery could fail to perform this function. A
writer for Rockland Community College’s student paper made a similar observation
stating, “if anyone is offended by Ms. Steckel’s art it is probably because he is turned

4
“Picture Exhibit a Revealing Study,” New York Daily News (February 13, 1972).

5
Chuck Stead, “Feminist Art Show Catches Political Eye,” Outlook (February 14, 1972): 9.

210
off by it, not because he is aroused.”
6
Thus, the content of Steckel’s work upset some
viewers’ expectations by offering explicitly sexual iconography—phalluses and nude
women—and yet through composition and style not allowing those images to be easily
consumed as erotic art.
Meanwhile, Frank, the Arts Magazine critic who found some of the large-scale
works to be “simple-minded” for their blatant political symbolism (and in comparison
to the “delicate draftsmanship” and “pictorial wit” of the smaller works), was
nevertheless impressed with the rallying of support for Steckel’s art that came from
the New York art community. She reported, “It took a massive campaign of telegrams
from critics and curators to persuade the trustees of Rockland College not to close the
show.”
7
Another article on the effort, “Art World Backs Feminist’s Exhibit,” related
that the president of Rockland Community College, Dr. Seymour Eskol, was “getting
telegrams from art critics, gallery managers, and art scholars throughout the country
supporting the right of feminist artist Anita Steckel to display her work free of
censorship.”
8
Although Frank considered Steckel’s message too overt at times, Frank
herself sent a telegram from Arts Magazine to the president of the college explaining
that Steckel used genitalia “as symbols of social reality” and that “labeling her work

6
“To Seek and To See,” Outlook (February 28, 1972): 10.

7
Frank, “Anita Steckel at Rockland College,” 56.

8
Taplin R. Clinton, “Art world backs feminist’s exhibit,” The Record (February 9, 1972).

211
pornographic is an insult to her artistic seriousness of purpose.”
9
Such institutions,
publications, and organizations as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Art News,
and the Women in the Arts foundation sent similar messages of support.
10

The debates about obscenity and the place of political activism in art that arose
around Steckel’s exhibition at Rockland Community College are exemplary of the
issues surrounding the reception of women’s sexual art in the early 1970s. Her work
navigated the difficult territory in representation between the pleasure of eroticism and
the critique of patriarchal power, particularly with her images of the male phallus.
Having felt the influence of second-wave feminism, such woman artists as Steckel
began to confront taboos with their work and sexual discrimination in their individual
professional careers. Previously, in the 1960s, the growing popularity and acceptance
of contemporary erotic art and literature led to the public defense of art against
charges of obscenity and to the separation of erotic art from low-brow categories such
as pornography. The introduction of feminist politics to the realm of erotic art in the
1970s, however, required that viewers be educated about the social and political
significance of sexual subject matter, in addition to the unceasing need to safeguard
such work against censorship. Moreover, art critics had to come to terms with the
reality that women were making erotic art, which looked different from work of the

9
Telegram from Suzanne Frank, Staff Reviewer, Art Magazine, to Dr. Seymour Eskol, President,
Rockland College, February 8, 1972, Political Art Documentation & Distribution (PAD/D) Archive,
Museum of Modern Art Library, New York.

10
According to Steckel’s notes: supporters were Lawrence Alloway, Lawrence Campbell, James
Bishop of Art Worker’s News. According to the school newspaper, support also came from Charles
Frankel, a former employee of the Secretary of State for Cultural Affairs, John Baurn, Whitney
Museum; Henry Raleigh, Dean of Fine and Performing Arts at SUNY New Paltz; Paul Brack, Dean of
the Art School of California Institute of the Arts. Outlook, (February 14, 1972).

212
past and seemed to break from traditions of erotic art. The controversy over The
Feminist Art of Sexual Politics led Steckel to form the Fight Censorship group in 1973
in order to promote understanding of her work alongside other women who pushed the
limits of what was considered decent subject matter for art by openly dealing with
sexual themes.
The episode at Rockland Community College bound Steckel closely with the
feminist art movement that had recently emerged with the first women’s art group,
WAR, in 1969. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Steckel’s work appeared in all the
major feminist publications that dealt with art—Heresies, Chrysalis, the Feminist Art
Journal, Off Our Backs, Spare Rib, Womanart, and Women Artists News. However,
the feminist lens is not the only one through which to view Steckel’s aesthetic
accomplishments. In fact, Steckel had been pursuing her own mix of humor,
sexuality, and political commentary already for more than a decade before she began
using the term “feminist” to describe her art practice.
This chapter analyzes Steckel’s artistic production in the 1960s and 1970s and
its changing critical and popular reception. It focuses on three solo exhibitions of her
major series of works during that period—Hacker Gallery in 1963, Kozmopolitan
Gallery in 1969, and Rockland Community College in 1972—and her establishment of
the Fight Censorship Group in 1973. It argues that these pivotal moments in her
career are also exemplary of the changing definitions and intentions of erotic art made
by women between 1963 and 1973. Shown at Hacker Gallery in New York in 1963,
her Mom Art series employed the medium of photocollage to tackle major political

213
issues of civil rights and anti-war activism in the 1960s: racism, gender, and war. Her
formal use of found objects and a collage aesthetic, combined with her sense of humor
and strong political messages, situate the work within a 1960s avant-garde. The
Kozmopolitan Gallery (a gallery specializing in American and European art)
exhibition in 1969, which was highly successful in terms of attendance and publicity,
marked the beginning of a turning point in her career. Over the following two years,
Steckel reworked two pieces shown in an early stage at Kozmopolitan Gallery and
transformed the montages into a series with a powerful feminist message, the Giant
Woman series. The opening of The Feminist Art of Sexual Politics at Rockland
Community College in 1972 squarely framed Steckel’s work in the context of
feminism. While she faced criticism and censorship of this exhibition, especially for
phallic imagery in such work as the New York Landscapes, her defense of the work
tended to focus on feminist politics and away from the its sexual suggestiveness. The
last section of the chapter examines the founding of the Fight Censorship Group,
formed by Steckel in 1973 with artists Louise Bourgeois, Martha Edelheit, Joan
Glueckman, Juanita McNeely, Joan Semmel, Anne Sharp, and Hannah Wilke, thus
placing Steckel’s work in the context of a broader feminist movement.
Each section of the chapter addresses the changing reception of Steckel’s work
in the period of 1963 to 1973. Although the exhibitions at Hacker Gallery,
Kozmpolitan Gallery, and Rockland Community College span less than a decade, the
framework in which viewers encountered her art altered drastically during that time.
Thus, this chapter seeks an answer to several of the overarching questions of this

214
dissertation: How can we account for artwork considered “erotic” in one instance and
“feminist propaganda” in another? Should we assume that a new feminist
consciousness replaced sexual freedom ideologies that had promoted “erotic art”? Or
did the “banner of feminism” simply offer more public exposure? To the extent that
Steckel’s work has been identified with feminist art since the early 1970s, it might be
difficult to think about it in other contexts. However, the next section begins by
looking at an earlier series in which the commixing of the erotic and the political
remained more ambiguous.

Mom Art, 1963
In 1963, Steckel’s one-woman exhibition of a series of photomontages titled
Mom Art gained critical notice for its combination of a witty political commentary and
a formal collage aesthetic. In the series, Steckel took on some of the major social and
political issues circulating in 1963, including the Civil Rights Movement and the
growing anti-war sentiment. Based on a collection of found photographs, often from
the turn of the century and usually portraits of some kind, Steckel’s series transformed
photographic imagery with delicately painted touches. She then matted each piece
with marbleized end papers. As she related the story, her friend, Bill Wilson, sent her
four old photographs that “seemed so sad and dead and gone,” and so she painted on
them. “I started laughing,” she remembered, “it brought them to life.”
11
Believing her
work might easily be categorized as Pop art for its use of found images and a college

11
Anita Steckel, interview with the author, June 21, 2007 (New York, NY).

215
aesthetic (and no doubt for its wit as well), she resisted the idea that critics might
subsume her work into that male-dominated category. Preemptively, she titled the
series Mom Art as advertised in the New York Times by Hacker Gallery for the
opening on May 21, 1963 (Fig. 4.5). Of course, she understood that the label “Pop”
referred to the incorporation of popular imagery from mass culture into works of art,
but to her, the designation “Pop” implicitly referred to an art trend made infamous by
a small group of male artists. She used the play on words to draw out this gendered
aspect of the category “Pop Art,” something that would only later be seriously
discussed by art historians.
12

Critics reviewed the show positively, and Hacker Gallery extended the Mom
Art exhibition for an extra two weeks. The New York Post praised Steckel’s
originality, and the review opened, “The shock of recognition has its counterpart, one
bean in a jar of thousands: the shock of originality. A young lady of just such voltage
is Anita Steckel…”
13
Esquire magazine published a two-page spread on the show
with limited text but colorful illustrations in October of 1963 (Fig. 4.6). Esquire
quoted Steckel (described as a “lady painter”) explaining the series title Mom Art:
“It’s just a pun…and isn’t it funny that they used to call a movement Dada instead of
Mama?”
14
To be sure, Steckel might have asked: Why would a “lady painter” want to

12
See Cecile Whiting, A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender and Consumer Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).

13
Jerry Tallmer, “In the Art Galleries,” New York Post (August 11, 1963).

14
“Mom Art,” Esquire 60, no. 14 (October 1963): 134-35.

216
make “Pop Art?” The irony of the term “lady painter” was not lost on Steckel, and
she wrote a letter to the magazine after the article appeared commenting:
It was very thoughtful of you to refer to me as a ‘lady painter’ in the October
issue (Mom Art). Due to the huge numbers of man painters named Anita
running about, there might have been considerable misunderstanding—and
your foresight, I’m certain, saved us the humiliation of mistaken identity.
15

Her letter points out the difference between the gendered title she gave to her work,
Mom Art, and the gendered label the magazine assigned her personally as a “lady
painter.” Steckel, as well as many other artists, experienced that being called a “lady
painter” or even a “woman artist” had negative connotations in the 1960s. Since the
art world did not treat women equally, a female label might negatively influence the
reception of the work.
Reviews often cited her use of the “photo-collage medium” in the Mom Art
series as particularly innovative. Steckel found herself working primarily with collage
and montage because of what she could convey with those mediums. Quoted in
Esquire, she explained the importance of her technique:
No matter how upsetting is the subject matter of a painting, we feel relatively
safe. We know it isn’t real. But paint an image into a photograph, which we
are conditioned to believe is an unquestioned reality—then there sets up an
uneasiness of another sort. A little more disquieting, a little harder to
disbelieve.
16

For Steckel, the medium of photography could be manipulated to unsettle the viewer’s
perceptions of reality more effectively than with painting. It must be underscored that
Steckel articulated the aesthetics of photomontage as a disruption of the real before the

15
Letter to Esquire from Anita Steckel. Archives of Anita Steckel.

16
Quoted in “Mom Art,” Esquire, 134-5.

217
publication of seminal contemporary writings on photography by such authors as
Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Rosalind Krauss, which made popular a new
theoretical discourse on photography in the late 1970s and 1980s. In addition, I would
argue that Steckel opened up the meaning of photographs by situating them in a larger
social context, something that can seem absent from a single photograph taken in a
brief moment. Sontag wrote about this disjunctive effect of still photography in one of
her first essays on the medium in 1973:
Photography reinforces a nominalist view of social reality as consisting of
small units of an apparently infinite number…Through photographs, the world
becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles…The camera makes
reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies
interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the
character of a mystery.
17

Steckel brought back the interconnectedness and continuity that Sontag speaks of—
that which gives a moment or a person its history. Steckel did this by painting her
own additions to the photographs, delicately blended into the original composition,
which exposed the posed subjects of the portraits in different ways.
Fellow collagist Ray Johnson, whose work Steckel admired, once wrote that as
an artist, she “goes all the way,”—an appropriate phrase to describe her expert
exploitation of the multiple meanings of words and images, particularly playing with
sexual connotations, in order to challenge a viewer’s naturalized assumptions about
the world (and probably make them smile in the process).
18
Steckel never intended for

17
Susan Sontag, “Photography” New York Review of Books 20, no. 16 (Oct 18, 1973) and “In Plato’s
Cave,” On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977).

18
Letter of recommendation from Ray Johnson to Guggenheim Museum for Anita Steckel, n.d.,
Archives of Anita Steckel.

218
the viewers of Mom Art to rest easy, detached from the subject matter of the work. In
this sense, the series was strikingly different from the painted Pop art of Wesselmann,
Lichtenstein, or Warhol, which was known for its coolness and superficiality.
However, the obvious influence of Dada artists, particularly Duchamp, on her work
aligns her with collage and assemblage artists such as Johnson, who critics sometimes
considered under the rubric of Pop.
19

With her montage technique, Steckel made visible things not initially seen in
the photographs that bring their subjects back into the realm of history and politics.
For example, in a number of the Mom Art pieces, Steckel addressed racism by
meticulously drawing black figures standing around, behind, or even enveloping the
white bodies in the original photographs, exposing the racial issues that have
historically affected every aspect of life in the U.S. In Birthmarks, a dark figure with a
sinister and toothy smile appears behind a seated white woman (Fig. 4.7). Her blouse
is gone, and the black hands of the intruder touch her breast and hip, which Steckel
has painted in. All the while, the woman continues to stare out at the viewer in a
pleasantly composed manner of denial. Similarly, in Magnolia Dreaming, a shadowy
figure rests his head on the shoulder of a posed woman, peering over the decorative
folds of fabric adorning a woman’s shoulders (Fig. 4.8). Both of these works imply a
sexual closeness between the couple, perhaps romantic, as secret lovers, or violent,
playing on the fears of prejudice white women. In Return of the Wet Nurse, a black

19
Duchamp’s first retrospective exhibition took place in 1963 (the same year as the Mom Art
exhibition) at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum). The exhibition is known to
have influenced a generation of experimental artists in Southern California. Steckel did a series of
collages based on appropriations from Duchamp (1997-2005).

219
female figure, breast exposed, reaches down to intimately hold a fancily dressed
woman (Fig. 4.9). Steckel has painted a harried look on the second woman’s face.
Her down-turned mouth and the whites of her eyes show as she peers toward her right
shoulder, hesitating at the apparition of the nude female figure surrounding her from
behind. In each case, Steckel’s additions create a new narrative for the original
portrait. And in doing so, she puts on display what the upper-class white figures
would presumably want to deny—their intimate relationships with blacks.
20
By
extension, the pieces speak the complicated history of race in America, one of both
segregation and familial closeness.
As Steckel believed in civil rights and concerned herself with the social and
institutionalized discriminatory treatment of blacks in the U.S., she tackled racial
issues in her work. One of her Mom Art photocollages appeared in an anti-racism
book, Mississippi: A Study of the White Race (1969) by poet Tuli Kupferberg, a friend
of Steckel’s. This “study” was, in fact, a text and image collage of poetry, fake
advertisements, political statements, and art works including Steckel’s Desert, an
appropriation of one of the most canonical works of art, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last
Supper (Fig. 4.10).
21
Steckel cropped the central Christ figure from an image of the
infamous fresco and transformed it into a black Jesus served with a slice of
watermelon. Through the rear windows of the room, the New York City skyline
appears. Among Kupferberg’s editorials on the opposite page is the statement, “We

20
Richard Meyer has noted that works such as Return of the Wet Nurse calls to mind the more recent
work on the subjects of identity and race, such as Adrian Piper’s Vanilla Nightmares, a series begun in
1986, in which the artist drew black figures onto the pages of the New York Times.

21
The image is printed in reverse in the book.

220
believe in broadening and deepening the Negro revolution until it becomes a white
revolution.”
22
Indeed, the title of the book, Mississippi: A Study of the White Race,
implied that it was the “white race” rather than a racial minority that should be studied
in order to understand the problems of racism and the need for civil rights activism in
the United States. Kupferberg’s perception of this issue in 1969 corresponds with
recent scholarly studies of “whiteness,” which investigate the white race as a
naturalized and invisible race in the U.S.

due to its position of power.
23
This
deconstruction of “whiteness” elucidates the way Steckel’s insertion of the black
figures in such works as Magnolia Dreaming did not introduce race into the scene, but
rather emphasized that race was already an issue in the original portrait. Presumably,
many of the well-dressed protagonists in the photos relied on the labor of people of
other races and from lower classes. Moreover, by appropriating da Vinci’s Last
Supper, one of the most iconic works of Christian art in the history of western
civilization, Steckel implicated both the discipline of art history and the Catholic
Church in perpetuating social inequities.
In line with many artists of the 1960s, Steckel appropriated found images in
her Mom Art series. In particular, her use of printed reproductions of famous works of
art corresponds with work from the time by the better-known Pop artists such as

22
Tuli Kupferberg, The Mississippi: A Study of the White Race (New York: Birth Press, 1962), 5.

23
“Whiteness” entered into the academy as an area of study in the 1990s. For an overview of
scholarship in this field see Mike Hill, Whiteness: A Critical Reader (New York: New York University
Press, 1997).

221
Lichtenstein and Wesselmann who cited art from the past.
24
For example, Steckel
painted into a photographic copy of Picasso’s Woman in a Fish Hat (1942) and
renamed it Expatriate (Figs. 4.11 and 4.12). The male figure added to the composition
in the style of Picasso humorously sports a hotdog hat and holds hands with the
woman. Lichtenstein made his own versions of Picasso paintings between 1962 and
1964, including Women with a Flowered Hat (1963) (Figs. 4.13 and 4.14).
25

Lichtenstein’s appropriation of Picasso and other artists’ known masterpieces
amounted to a leveling of content through the application of Lichtenstein’s signature
Ben-day dot style and limited color palate. He described his goals in making the
Picassos stating in an interview, “I think Picasso is the best artist of this century, but it
is interesting to do an oversimplified Picasso – to misconstrue the meaning of his
shapes and still produce art.”
26
His wanted to create a piece that would challenge the
notion of authenticity in art and yet still qualify as art on a formal basis. “When I do a
‘Mondrian’ or a ‘Picasso,’” he has said:
it has, I think, a sort of sharpening effect because I’m trying to make a
commercialized Picasso or Mondrian…At the same time I’m very much

24
Wesselmann appropriated famous art in his still life interiors, for example, the recreated Mondrian in
Still Life #20 (1962), and in his Great American Nude Series, which drew on Matisse and included
simulations of his paintings in works such as Great American Nude #26 (1962). Lichtenstein repainted
modern masterpieces by Picasso and others in his own comic book style.

25
Lichtenstein’s series of five paintings based on Picasso’s paintings of women: Femme au Chapeau
(1962), Femme dans un Fauteuil (1963), Woman with a Flowered Hat (1963), Femme d’Alger (1963),
Still Life (1964). See Lichtenstein’s Picassos: 1962-1964, exh. cat. Gagosian Gallery (February 6-
March 26, 1988) (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 1988).

26
John Coplans, “Roy Lichtenstein: an interview” in catalog of Roy Lichtenstein exhibition, Pasadena
Art Museum, California (April-May 1967), reprinted in Roy Lichtenstein (London: The Tate Gallery,
1968), 13.

222
concerned with getting my own work to be a work of art, so that it has a sort of
rebuilding aspect also to it.
27

Lichtenstein wanted to assert his own identity as an artist by remaking the work of
canonical modern artists in his signature style. Thus, his Women with a Flowered Hat
would be recognized at once as both a Picasso and a Lichtenstein.
In a more subtle and insidious way, Steckel interpolated her own imagery into
appropriated masterpieces by carefully integrating her brushstrokes with the original
style of the piece. We see this strategy throughout her series in such works as The
Company Picnic, an Antoine Watteau painting turned into an indictment of slave-
ownership and lynchings, for example (Figs 4.15 and 4.16).
28
Thus, not only did Mom
Art transform historical photographs and paintings into imaginative critiques of social
matters, but it also made a claim, through the appropriation of masterpieces, for art
history’s culpability in these areas as well. Rather than eschewing content, as one
might argue Lichtenstein’s appropriations did by making works seemingly only about
the subject of art itself, Steckel’s additions brought out new, and often political,
readings of the original works. Yet, they maintained a high level of artistry and
delicacy, particularly through her delicate brushstrokes, the small scale of the work,
and the framing in decorative endpapers.
Steckel’s combination of found imagery and political commentary proved to
create a powerful visual message. She made shocking anti-war statements in pieces

27
Quoted in Richard Morphet, “Roy Lichtenstein,” Roy Lichtenstein, 22.

28
The original image is actually a photograph of a tapestry designed after Watteau, Swing c. 1730-60,
9’10” x 9’2 in. According to the Getty Photostudy Collection at the Getty Research Library, “this scene
is designed on Watteau's “Plaisirs Champêtres” at Chantilly & “Les Bergers” at Potsdam, among other
pictures by Watteau.” George Smith Bradshaw (British, 1717-1812) was the weaver.

223
such as the Annual Banquet of the Lampshade Manufacturers of Argentina (Fig. 4.17).
In this case, the application of Hitler mustaches to a group of businessmen referred to
Argentina’s collaboration with Nazi Germany. Of course, one cannot help thinking of
Duchamp when looking at the Mom Art series, as it includes altered Leonardo da
Vinci’s and applied mustaches. However, Steckel not only addressed the history of
art, but also drew attention to the fact that many Nazis who fled to escape prosecution
after the World War II found a safe haven in Argentina. She implicitly connected the
men in the photograph to the Nazi practice of making of lampshades from human skin
in concentration camps. A review of the Mom Art exhibition in the New York Post
reported that the images upset a group of visiting Argentinean businessmen.
29

Another piece that draws on Hitler imagery, The Beginner, one of her most visually
ironic compositions, turned a young boy into a Hitler-in-training, warning the
audience about the fine line between innocence and culpability (Fig. 4.18). In Fat
Man: death grows fat on war Steckel clearly illustrated a correspondence between
male power, war, and death, by depicting the robust man in military uniform with a
smiling skeletal face (Fig. 4.19). In each case, Steckel’s alteration of an old
photograph warns the viewer to learn from the past horrors of war and to beware of
the men who continue to promote it.
One of the most vivid aspects of Steckel’s social commentary in the Mom Art
series was her willingness to mix sexual imagery with political messages. A positive
review of the exhibition in Art News commented on this aspect: “She over paints old

29
Jerry Tallmer, “In the Art Galleries.”

224
photographs and prints with a meticulous hand, instilling a caustic commentary, often
with sexual connotations, to the composition.”
30
The “sexual connotations” came out
most explicitly in cases where Steckel revealed the human body in a humorous and
defiant manner, as we saw in Return of the Wet Nurse, for example. Other pieces such
as The Librarian and The Imposter exposed the body to reveal a concealed sexuality
(Figs. 4.20 and 4.21). In these two works, the figures are partially unclothed leaving
them at once vulnerable to the viewers’ eyes and betrayed by the hypocrisy of their
vocations. The Librarian wears nothing but her underwear, thanks to Steckel, and a
long necklace with a cross around her neck. The juxtaposition of the curvaceous body
and crucifix added by Steckel and the woman’s original serious expression,
conservative hairdo, and glasses creates a humorous riff on figures of authority who
demand others obey the rules. She implies that they may be less than obedient
themselves. The priest in The Imposter has been given sunglasses and a long pair of
sexy female legs complete with high-heeled shoes. Again, the seriousness of his
original visage combined with the casual eyewear and female legs reveals a hidden
sense of fun and sexuality under the cloak of religious leadership. In an interview,
Steckel recalled that in a high school art class, she drew a disturbing image of a nun
instead of the assigned still life arrangement. Even then she wanted to challenge the
value placed on celibacy and its hypocrisy in the lives of women she knew.
31
This
urge to challenge authority, especially for the double standards it placed on women,

30
James H. Beck, “Anita Steckel” Art News 62, no. 3 (May 1963): 61.

31
Anita Steckel, interview with the author, March 19, 2008 (New York, NY).

225
struck her at a young age; however, in high school, and later when she created the
Mom Art series in 1963, she was not yet describing her position as feminist, nor was it
received that way.
However, many of the Mom Art pieces created new relationships within the
images in a way that showed Steckel’s attention to the issue of gender early on in her
career. Das Wunderkind, for example, is a surrealist juxtaposition of sexual
suggestiveness (Fig. 4.22). The long, bare, and shapely legs, fitted with red high-
heeled shoes are the epitome of popular notions of female sexuality as they rest
against a fabric bordered with lace. A baby from the original photograph now
becomes “sophisticated” with a martini in hand and a cigarette hanging from her
mouth. She is surrounded by fur reminiscent of Surrealist Meret Oppenheim’s Object
(1936). The notorious fur-lined teacup, saucer, and spoon covered in fur play on the
incongruence of sensual pleasures and to some viewers implied a certain attraction to
and repulsion from female sexuality (Fig. 4.23).
32
As characteristic of the Mom Art
series, the base of Das Wunderkind is a photograph whose surface has been worked
with oil paint, collaged with other materials, and fixed to decorative end papers. The
delightful incongruence of the adult attributes attached to the photo of this child is at
once humorous and thought provoking. What does it mean to sexualize a child so
young? How superficial are these markers of femininity and sophistication (or good
taste)?

32
Object illustrated in Volker Kahmen, Eroticism in Contemporary Art, (London: Studio Vista, 1972),
n. 259.

226
In Girl Scout, Steckel cropped a reproduction of a Thomas Eakins painting,
The Biglin Brothers Racing (1872), and added an elongated female figure striding over
the heads of the rowing brothers (Figs. 4.24 and 4.25). The white, linear figure of the
woman contrasts with the realism of Eakins’ original oil painting. However
interpolated the female figure appears or tenuous her balance seems, she now leads the
way for the male rowers, guiding them through a landscape painted by one of
America’s most celebrated nineteenth-century artists. Thus, Steckel’s commentary
also spanned the issues relevant to her as a female artist, namely her situation in a
male-controlled art world and working within a history of art that neglected the work
of women artists.
In Mom Art, Steckel engaged history, and within that, art history, and brought
both to bear on contemporary social issues and her own life as an artist. This complex
dialog continued and became more personal in the following ten years of her career.
She later transformed two of the 1963 Mom Art pieces, The Last Supper and Solo, into
works for her Giant Woman series shown in The Feminist Art of Sexual Politics in
1972. In the process, the female figures acquired Steckel’s own face, and her ex-
husband and father-in-law were placed around the table in The Last Supper (Figs.
4.26-4.29). We will see how these works became more personal in their subsequent
evolution and took on a direct feminist message when she exhibited them under the
title of “feminist art.” After Mom Art, Steckel did not have another solo exhibition
until 1969, but she participated in a number of group exhibitions with such themes as
the self-portrait and erotic art during the decade. Like the artists discussed in the

227
previous chapters, Steckel found an outlet for her art that dealt with sexual subject
matter during a boom in erotic art in the mid to late 1960s. But it would not be until
the early 1970s that she started to use the term “feminist” in the titles of her
exhibitions.

Erotic Art and Emerging Feminism, 1969-71

The opening of Steckel’s one-woman exhibition at Kozmopolitan Gallery in
1969 was a veritable social event, attracting celebrities, artists, and socialites from the
New York art scene.
33
Some 500 people came to the opening, requiring a call to
police “because the street outside Kozmopolitan Gallery was so filled with people
waiting to get in.”
34
Reviews of the show appeared in such general interest
publications as the New York Free Press, Status, and New York Magazine, as well as
the art journals Art News and Arts Magazine.
35
Status included a two-page spread of
photographs from the gallery and after-party, documenting the presence of artists,
musicians, and celebrities. In one photograph, Warhol’s film star Candy Darling
poses with a blasé look, cigarette in hand, in front of Steckel’s self-portrait, The Big
Rip Up (1964) (Figs. 4.30 and 4.31). The photograph aptly illustrates the gap between
the flashy art scene and the art—the self-portrait was a work so personal that Steckel
refused to sell it, and it remains in her possession today. The image also speaks to the

33
Kozmopolitan Gallery was located at 168 W 86
th
St., which Steckel describes as a married couple’s
apartment and existed from 1968 to 1970. Barbara Koz Paley, Art consultant and real estate investor.
Steckel’s exhibition was displayed March 1-March 29, 1969.

34
Dale Lewis, “Anita Steckel,” New York Free Press (1969).

35
“Status Scene,” Status (Incorporating Diplomat) 18, no. 222 (1969).

228
transition in Steckel’s production and reception from the 1960s to the 1970s, a shift
particularly marked by the Kozmopolitan Gallery exhibition in 1969.
The main attraction at the Kozmopolitan Gallery was the debut of Steckel’s
new montage “erotic fantasies,” featuring large-scale nude women interspersed with
scenes of urban life in New York City.
36
The New York Free Press reported that
“more than 500 friends, critics and collectors came to look at Anita’s giantesses
sprawled and impaled on N.Y.,” and determined that it was “definitely her women in
New York who steal the show.”
37
The article featured an image of the work then titled
N.Y., N.Y., It’s a Wonderful Town in which a woman rides the Empire State Building,
dominating its phallic structure and the skyline of the city. Status published the same
work in a candid photograph of Steckel smiling at the camera, appearing proud of her
show (Fig. 4.32). New York Magazine chose a different illustration of Steckel’s
female nudes to single out—a work later titled Nostalgia in which a nude female
reclines, superimposed onto the city (Figs. 4.33 and 4.34). In a positive review, the
magazine also focused on the female nudes:
Nude giantesses sprawl and cavort over cityscapes—wrapping their legs
around prominent buildings, slouching casually among a group of bundled-up
people waiting for a bus. One amazon does a lonely arabesque on a railing at
Coney Island in between a pair of lovers and a family group.
38

The large-scale nudes clearly impressed both the critic from the underground
newspaper and from the mainstream magazine as something original and worth

36
Al Brunelle, “Anita Steckel,” Art News 68, no. 1 (March 1969): 69.

37
Lewis, “Anita Steckel.”

38
Julie Baumgold, ed., “Anita’s World,” New York Magazine (1969): 42.

229
writing about in 1969. In the early 1970s, Steckel renamed this group of works the
Giant Woman series and showed them in the Feminist Art of Sexual Politics, thereby
repositioning them as explicitly feminist. However, when revealed at the
Kozmopolitan Gallery in 1969, they had none of the same feminist framing.
The accidental loss of the original artworks—which were color photographs
with female nudes added by Steckel in ink and oil—led to the black and white
versions shown at the Kozmopolitan Gallery exhibition. She sent two original pieces
from the series to the First International Exhibition of Erotic Art organized by Phyllis
and Eberhard Kronhausen in Sweden in 1968, and both works were misplaced.
39

Since the Kozmopolitan Gallery show was coming up, Steckel decided to have much
larger black and white prints made from her slides of the two missing montages.
40

Arts Magazine specifically mentioned the “two huge pictures” in the Kozmopolitan
Gallery that showed “scenes of New York skyscrapers dominated by female giants.”
41

The loss of the original version of the works sparked a discovery that increased the

39
Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, psychologists by profession, organized five exhibitions of erotic
art in Europe between 1968 and 1969 before eventually bringing their collection to the U.S. and
opening The International Museum of Erotic Art on March 18, 1973 (closed 1975). The couple also
compiled and wrote a total of eight survey books and catalogs on erotic art, beginning with the
exhibition catalog for The First International Exhibition of Erotic Art I, Kunsthall, Lund, Sweden (May
3-July 31, 1968). (For full list of books see my Introduction, 9n27.) Reports of the exhibition’s
opening reached a U.S. audience in Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times. Newsweek reported
that the Kronhausens had amassed a collection of more than 3,000 pieces of erotic art from around the
world. According to the article, The First International Exhibition of Erotic Art consisted of about
1,000 works spanning time and space, mostly from the Kronhausen’s private collection of erotic art,
and broke attendance records for the Lund Kunsthall. “Eros in Sweden,” Time (May 17, 1968);
“Erotica on Tour,” Newsweek (September 16, 1968): 105; Grace Glueck, “Art Notes,” The New York
Times (April 28, 1968): D35.

40
Anita Steckel, interview with the author, October 30, 2008 (New York, NY).

41
William D. Allen, “Anita Steckel,” Arts Magazine 43, no. 5 (March 1969): 59.

230
visibility and impact of the pieces, both through their enlargement and production in
black and white.
Steckel’s work had appeared in a number of group shows between 1963 and
the Kozmopolitan show in 1969, some of which were based on the popular theme of
erotic art. In addition to the First International Exhibition of Erotic Art in Sweden
(where her nudes were misplaced), Van Bovenkamp Gallery included Steckel in
Contemporary Erotica at in 1965.
42
This show exemplifies the heterosexual
underpinnings of the erotic art exhibitions staged in New York in the mid-1960s.
Much broader stylistically than the mostly Pop Art exhibitions at Pace and Dwan
galleries discussed in Chapter Two, Contemporary Erotica featured the work of at
least forty-five artists.
43
The exhibition “was a serious attempt at signaling a trend in
all the arts in America recently,” and included fifty works of art by various artists,
from surrealist Salvador Dali to sculptor Allen Jones, famous for his sculptures of
women contorted into furniture. This exhibition was the first to use the word “erotica”
in its title. The director, Sandra Zimmerman, played light-heartedly with the topic of
erotica, choosing Valentine’s Day for the preview. The collaged invitation featured a
drawing of an old fashioned couple—a woman beckoning a man in a top hat for a
secret liaison (Fig. 4.35). While not explicitly defined, the image suggested that the

42
Contemporary Erotica, Van Bovenkamp Gallery (February 16-March 20, 1965, extended to March
25).

43
Artists participating in Contemporary Erotica: Lulu Greenbaum, Marty Greenbaum, Sandra Gurstein,
Lillianna Porter, Anita Steckel, Haig Adishian, Steve Antonakos, Robert Beauchamp, Mel and Eunice
Birnkrant, Victor Brauner, Luis Camnitzer, Ross Coates, Jean Cocteau, Bruce Connor, Salvador Dali,
Joan Danziger, Martha Edelheit, Miles Forst, Dick Hall, Mimi Hovsepian, Nora Jaffe, Allen Jones, Sita
Kanelba, Lee Lozano, Marisol, Maryan, Lori Michel, Barbara Nessim, Tino Nivola, George Ortman,
Bernie Pfriem, Lucas Samaras, Peter Saul, Harold Sclar, Robert Stanley, Charles Stark, Pavel
Tchelitchew, Reva Urban, Paul Waldman, Thomas Wesselmann.

231
category of erotic art represented in this exhibition was based on heterosexual
experience and fantasy, as was the case with the previously discussed exhibitions.
Zimmerman wanted to give artists the opportunity to show work that they were
“unable to exhibit…because of their dealers’ fears—fears of the police, the law…”
44

And she herself was not without concern, leaving a sign on the gallery door that
announced “adults only.”
A reviewer in Art News posed the question, “Where does erotic end and
pornographic begin?” Answering it he wrote:
The acid test is, when the shock of impact has worn off (that shock which will
make everyone look at an erotic picture before looking at the greatest
masterpiece in the world), there must be something left to make one want to
look at the work again.
45

Furthermore, he declared Steckel’s work among the best in the show: “Anita Steckel
had the most positive wit and Tom Wesselmann, the strongest impact, both were
worth a second visit.”
46
Whether their reviews were positive or negative, both art
magazines and newspapers found the exhibition noteworthy for its provocative
subject. Art News called the show a “serious attempt at signaling a trend in all the arts
in America recently,” and concluded that most of the art was worth more than its
initial “shock.”
47
One conservative newspaper heralded Contemporary Erotica as

44
Robert Fulford, “The Erotic Art Show” The Toronto Star (March 16, 1965): 23. Van Bovenkamp
Gallerie records, 1961-1965, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

45
Lawrence Campbell, “Contemporary Erotica,” Art News 64, no. 3 (May 1965): 14. There is no
record of which of Steckel’s pieces appeared in the show.

46
Ibid. There is no record of which of Steckel’s pieces appeared in the show.

47
Ibid.

232
“perhaps a breakthrough of sorts” for its “boldly unabashed display of erotic art.”
48

Another considered it “the first art show in the history of New York devoted entirely
to the subject of sex.”
49
And articles such as “Art or Pornography? The Erotic in Art”
in a sensational tabloid newspaper concentrated on the popularity of the show.
50
One
reporter noted that after another article compared the work to pornography, “the
gallery was entirely filled and there was a line-up on the stoop outside—the first line-
up I’ve ever seen at a private art gallery.”
51
The press, even if negative, only brought
in more viewers. For example, in the tabloid Newsday, Mike McGrady called it “an
exhibit of dirty pictures” and speculated that “the difference between pornography and
art can all be in the packaging.”
52

Steckel was also one of twenty-two artists to participate in the Inaugural
Exhibition of The Gallery of Erotic Art, which opened on June 3, 1969.
53
The
catalogue pictured her montage, Freud (1969), a photograph of the psychiatrist with
added drawings of nude women and an erect phallus, along with the more graphic

48
William Longgood, “Erotica Draws on Fine Distinctions” New York World Telegram and Sun (March
9, 1965): 12.

49
Fulford, “The Erotic Art Show,” 23.

50
J. Newman, “Art or Pornography? The Erotic In Art” The National Insider 6, no. 17 (April 25, 1965),
n.p. Van Bovenkamp Gallerie records.
One article in a Long Island newspaper stated that there were 200 people waiting to get a glimpse
of the show. McGrady, “Culture Comes to the Big City in Lovely Shades of Off Color” Newsday
(March 1965), n.p. Van Bovenkamp Gallerie records.

51
Fulford, “The Erotic Art Show,” 23.

52
McGrady, “Culture Comes to the Big City in Lovely Shades of Off-Color,” n.p.

53
The Gallery of Erotic Art: Inaugural Exhibition, exh. cat. (New York: The Gallery of Erotic Art,
1969). Gallery was located at 1240 Park Avenue, New York, and the exhibition opened June 3, 1969.

233
work by such artists as Charles Stark and Betty Dodson (Fig. 4.36). In the mid to late
1960s, the category of erotic art provided a framework for Steckel’s sexual art.
In 1966, Steckel sold a series of explicit erotic drawings, The Food Box Series
(1966) (also known as Group Soup) to collector and financier J. Patrick Lannan. The
series consists of twenty works of pen and ink on pre-made stationary with an ornate
border of vegetative decoration. Each one depicts nude figures, both male and female,
in various sexual positions. Group Soup, Head of Lettuce, and Tongue Sandwich offer
a sense of the fanciful series, which covered such activities as orgies, fellatio, and
cunnilingus, among many others, in a style reminiscent of Art Nouveau posters (Figs.
4.37, 4.38 and 4.39). Steckel sold the works to Lannan when she desperately needed
money to travel to New Hampshire to take a MacDowell Colony fellowship. In an
interview, Steckel remembered the difficulties she faced as a woman selling and
showing sexual work like the Food Box Series. Male collectors and curators
sometimes assumed that she was personally available because of the kinds of work she
made, thus making it hard for her to accept their money or attention, as she refused to
sell herself instead of her art.
54

It was Baby Jane Holzer, a model, socialite, and actress in some of Andy
Warhol’s films, who originally put Steckel in touch with Lannan.
55
According to
Steckel, Holzer wanted to purchase The Big Rip Up (1964), the piece Status magazine
pictured with Candy Darling at the Kozmopolitan Gallery. A self-portrait based on a

54
Anita Steckel, interview with the author, June 21, 2007 (New York, NY).

55
Anita Steckel, interview with the author, June 21, 2007 (New York, NY).

234
photograph taken when Steckel was a young woman, The Big Rip Up has added pencil
and paint, giving the impression of torn layers across her face and representing her
inner turmoil as a woman who had been damaged by the loss of her child and a
divorce. Something of an anomaly, The Big Rip Up differed from Steckel’s other
portraits that appropriated mass produced celebrity photos of such figures as Billie
Holiday and Freud.
56
Steckel’s use of commercial photographs of famous people
might be compared to Pop art works such as Warhol’s screenprints of Marilyn
Monroe’s publicity photos. One review noted this connection stating, “Anita Steckel
takes a photo of Billie Holiday, from a magazine, benday and all, adding a crown of
tears.’”
57
Steckel did not attempt to hide the mass-produced quality of the original
image. Holzer saw The Big Rip Up in a self-portraiture show at the Visual Arts
Gallery, which opened on January 8, 1965. It was also featured in a corresponding
article in Esquire magazine along with sixteen other artists and their self-portraits,
from Alex Katz to Jim Dine. Feeling the work was too personal to give up, Steckel
refused to sell it to Holzer.
58
As a self-portrait, The Big Rip Up stands out among what
she calls her “multiple imagery,” and it seems akin to Steckel’s reworking of her
female nudes into the Giant Woman series to include her own face.
1969, the year of Steckel’s Kozmopolitan Gallery show was a year of crucial
change in the New York art world, spurred by the growing political activism of artists.

56
Status magazine photos show Billie Holiday (c1964-69) hanging in the Kozmopolitan Gallery
exhibition. Steckel does not consider this work to be part of her “multiple image” series because she
started it earlier around 1964.

57
Allen, “Anita Steckel,” 59.

58
Anita Steckel, interview with the author, June 21, 2007 (New York, NY).

235
It is worth considering how Steckel’s involvement in the artists’ protests that sprang
up in 1969 against the New York art establishment, particularly against the Museum
of Modern Art, played a role the development of her own political activism. The
month following the Kozmopolitan Gallery exhibition, Steckel attended the first
meeting of the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), billed as a “public hearing” for artists
to share their complaints about institutions, at the School of Visual Arts on April 10,
1969.
59
Covering the event in The New York Times, Grace Glueck described the
audience as “composed of artists, writers, filmmakers, critics, museum people and
ephemeralists, its only point of unity is, if anything, its anti-establishmentarianism.”
60

At least 250 people attended the meeting that day and over fifty of them spoke,
including Steckel, who was referred to as an “erotic artist.” Her exclamation,
“J’accuse, Baby!” provided the headline for the article. She reportedly accused the
newspaper critics of neglecting to view her last show.
61
Not as anti-establishment as
Glueck described, the AWC’s main objective was to increase artists’ rights and
representation within the museum and, by extension, other institutions of art. Rather
than doing away with the museum, the artists wanted more control, and they presented

59
Art Workers Coalition notice, “An Open Public Hearing on the Subject: What Should be the Program
of the Art Workers Regarding Museum Reform and to Establish the Program of an Open Art Workers
Coalition,” Lucy R. Lippard papers.

60
Grace Glueck, “J’accuse, Baby!” New York Times (April 20, 1969): D28.

61
Steckel wrote a statement to the AWC dated February 24, 1970 in which she criticized the
newspapers for failing to view her show. Lucy R. Lippard papers.

236
this demand to the director of MoMA, Bates Lowry, in January 1969 as a thirteen-
point statement.
62

Although by March 1970, the AWC had reworked the list of demands to
include, among other things, an item focused solely on promoting female artists, this
acknowledgement of concerns particular to women artists came too late for some
participants. Second-wave feminism had arrived with the publication of Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, and a radical feminist movement was full-
fledged by 1970. Shulamith Firestone and Pam Allen founded the organization New
York Radical Women in 1967, which defined gender as the central political and class
issue.
63
The art world caught on in 1969, when women artists in the AWC formed the
first feminist artists’ group, Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), to fight the
discrimination of women in the art world. In her 1973 essay, “The Women Artists’
Movement,” feminist art critic Cindy Nemser described the impact that this group
made on the lives of women artists, bringing them together amid an isolated, male-
ruled art world:
Each woman alone in her own studio, excluded because of her sex from the
male artists’ haunts, was forced to make her way in solitary struggle against a
basically hostile masculine power structure. Therefore, it was a profoundly
revolutionary act that took place when the first women artists left the isolation

62
A press release “Artists Protest Against Museum of Modern Art” dated March 14, 1969, explains the
AWC originated out of an incident on January 3, 1969 at MoMA when artist Takis Vassilakis removed
his piece from the exhibition, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (November 27-
February 9, 1969) referred to as the “Machine Show,” in protest against its display (he had asked that it
not be shown). This eventually led to a meeting with the museum’s director, Bates Lowry, on January
28, 1969, in which “a group of seven artists and critics presented a 13 points program for change.” This
program included items for increasing artists’ representation and rights in the museum. Lucy R.
Lippard papers.

63
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963).
New York Radical Women became New York Radical Feminists in 1969.

237
of their studios to meet with their sisters. Indeed, since that decisive moment
that marked the foundation of WAR (Women Artists in Revolution) the art
world has never been the same.
64

Collectively women began voicing their demands for equal inclusion of women in the
New York art establishment, from the Museum of Modern Art to commercial
galleries. Nemser remembered, “They called for continuous, non-juried exhibitions of
women’s work, more one-woman shows, a women artists’ advisory board, and 50%
inclusion of women in all museum exhibitions.”
65
Later, in 1972, the group opened a
space to exclusively support women artists, the Women’s Interart Center, New York,
where Steckel participated in exhibitions.
66

In 1971, art critic Lucy Lippard wrote “Sexual Politics, Art Style” for Art in
America, in which she described nine points of discrimination experienced by women
in the art world. While this list is lengthy, it merits repeating here in order to lay out
the concerns of Steckel and other women artists at this moment. Lippard’s list reads
as follows:
1) disregarding women and stripping them of their self-confidence from art
school on;
2) refusing to consider a married woman or mother a serious artist no matter
how hard she works or what she produces;
3) labeling women unfeminine and abnormally assertive if they persist in
maintaining the value of their art and protest their treatment;
4) treating women artists as sex objects and using this as an excuse not to visit
their studios or show their work (‘Sure, her work looked terrific, but she’s such
a good-looking chick if I went to her studio I wouldn’t know if I liked the work
or her,” one male dealer told me earnestly, “so I never went.”);

64
Cindy Nemser, “The Women's Art Movement,” The Feminist Art Journal (winter 1973-4).

65
Ibid.

66
Steckel participated in at least two group exhibitions at the Women’s Interart Center: Games (1974)
and Women Artists’ Sketch Books (1978).

238
5) using fear of social or professional rejection to turn successful women
against unsuccessful women, and vice versa;
6) ripping off women if they participate in the unfortunately influential social
life of the art world (if she comes to the bar with a man she’s a sexual
appendage and is ignored as such; if she comes with a woman she’s gay; if she
comes alone she’s on the make);
7) identifying women artists with their men (‘That’s so-and-so’s wife; I think
she paints too’);
8) exploiting women’s inherent sensitivity and upbringing as nonviolent
creatures by resorting to personal insults, shouting down, art world clout, in
order to avoid confrontation or subdue and discourage women who may be
more articulate and intelligent, or better artists than their male company;
9) galleries turning an artist away without looking at her slides, saying, “Sorry,
we already have a woman,’ or refusing to have any women in their stable
because women are ‘too difficult’…
67

Lippard voiced these personal and professional insults on behalf of women artists
trying to compete in the contemporary art market. As a critic, Lippard wrote about her
own personal transformation between 1966 and the early 1970s from a formalist critic
into a self-proclaimed feminist and a promoter of women’s art.
68
She described how
her involvement in the women’s movement taught her to respond to art on a more
personal and autobiographical level. Moreover, feminism provided an alternative to
the impasse of modernism in her thinking about art. She boldly proclaimed,
“Feminism’s greatest contribution to the future of art has probably been precisely its
lack of contribution to modernism. Feminist methods and theories have instead
offered a socially concerned alternative to the increasingly mechanical ‘evolution’ of
art about art.”
69
This turn away from modernism would necessitate new criteria for

67
Lippard, “Sexual Politics, Art Style,” Art in America 59, no.5 (September/October 1971): 19.

68
Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: Dutton, 1976).

69
Lippard, “Sweeping Exchanges: The Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s,” Art Journal
40, no. ! (fall/winter 1980): 362.

239
evaluating art—one that could reach beyond a teleological, formal progression.
Lippard explained the issue as such:
One of the major questions facing feminist criticism has to be whether stylistic
innovation is indeed the only innovation, or whether other aspects of
originality have yet to be investigated…differing from the traditional notion of
the avant-garde by opposing not styles and forms, but ideologies.
70

The deconstruction of such terms as “stylistic innovation” and “originality” and a
move towards ideological criteria for art would lead, in some cases, to a negative
reception for both feminist art critics and artists. Lippard grappled with the difficulty
of becoming a feminist identified critic within an art system that was founded on the
principles of formalism and the avant-garde. “I have been told repeatedly by men
since I started writing about women; apparently I no longer qualify for the ‘avant-
garde,’” she related in From the Center.
71
She had to be willing to sacrifice some of
the respect she had gained as an art critic in order to pursue a new direction and
consider alternative criteria for evaluating art. Lippard articulates some of the changes
in commitment and focus that many women involved in art were experiencing at this
moment between 1969 and 1971.
During the same period, the transformation of Steckel’s series of female nudes,
first shown in the U.S. at the Kozmopolitan Gallery in 1969, into the Giant Woman
series paralleled the full-fledged emergence of the feminist art movement. It was
Steckel’s imagery of nude women actively engaged in their environment of New York
City that “stole the show” at Kozmopolitan Gallery. Whether defiantly riding the

70
Lippard, From the Center, 6.

71
Ibid.

240
Empire State, high above the city in N.Y., N.Y., It’s a Wonderful Town or casually
lying across an expanse of buildings along the riverfront, the women seemed to
viewers almost like mythological beings permeating the city. When they became a
series in their own right, their powerful message about women’s struggle to gain
power and visibility in their contemporary society came to the fore.
The grouping of these works into the Giant Woman series occurred somewhat
by chance when a writer from the rock music magazine, Crawdaddy, came to visit
Steckel’s studio.
72
Her friend and poet Tuli Kupferberg knew the editor of the
magazine and helped Steckel get the appointment. The journalist, Reaenne
Rubbenstein, first recognized that the female nudes comprised a series, and she
featured them in the magazine along with brief descriptions from the artist. The
issue’s editorial commented on the problem of hegemony in the Women’s Liberation
Movement, naming the movement’s tendency to speak for all women as suggestive of
a “mass-marketed movement.” In an attempt to counter this direction, Rubbenstein
offered Steckel’s work as an alternative:
Crawdaddy has decided to present a special feature on the photo-collages of
Anita Steckel. For it seems to us that Anita has managed to do that most rare
of rare things: this is, ask the question without offering up the villain or
pretending to absolutely know the answer. Anita’s women are not monsters;
they are not grotesque. But rather they are outsized, outgrown, and are found
wondering, ‘what next?
73

Indeed, Steckel wrestled with this question “what next?” herself, as she started to see
the significance of her series in terms of feminism. In a gesture similar to calling her

72
Crawdaddy began publication in 1966 and continues today.

73
Raeanne Rubbenstein, Editorial, Crawdaddy (January 30, 1972): 2.

241
earlier series Mom Art, she chose the title “Giant Woman” for this new series in
opposition to the term “little woman.” “We were referred to as ‘little women’ in those
days,” she has remarked.
74
The production of the series of three-by-four-foot
montages began with drawing and painting directly onto found photographs. She then
had them re-photographed, flattening and integrating the composition further by
creating a single surface. At one time, as many as twenty pieces comprised the series.
She liked the conversion into black and white, feeling that made the pieces look more
“journalistic.” Adding color, Steckel felt, would have been merely cosmetic, a
superficial add-on to a powerful image.
75
Five years after the Crawdaddy article, the
feminist publication Womanart highlighted the same “series of large canvases,
executed in blacks, whites and grays,” describing their lack of color as “Steckel’s
means of directly presenting her message (such as Picasso presented Guernica and
Rivera his murals) devoid of what she termed ‘seductive’ elements.”
76
This response
exemplifies the way feminist critics later felt the need to downplay the erotic aspects
of Steckel’s work in order to emphasize its political message.
In subsequent re-workings of the Giant Woman series between 1969 and 1971,
the nudes acquired Steckel’s face, collaged with photographs of the artist. For
example, she placed her face on the woman in N.Y., N.Y., It’s a Wonderful Town
shown at Kozmopolitan Gallery and renamed it Giant Woman on the Empire State

74
Anita Steckel, interview with the author, October 30, 2008 (New York, NY).

75
Anita Steckel, interview with the author, January 28, 2007 (New York, NY)

76
Lorraine Gillian, “Anita Steckel,” Womanart 2, no. 1 (fall 1977): 24. The works were actually on
paper not on canvas as stated in this quote.

242
(Figs. 4.40 and 4.3). Likewise, in Just Waiting for the Bus, the larger-than-life nude
woman casually posed on the city’s sidewalk, originally had an anonymous face
painted by Steckel. But in the later version, Steckel herself looks out at the viewer,
hand-on-hip, chin confidently raised (Figs. 4.41 and 4.42). The inclusion of this self-
portrait in the revised version seems to tell the viewer something about Steckel and her
confident attitude. Thus, the work’s statement became more personal, putting into
visual form the feminist motto “the personal is political.” Between the Kozmopolitan
Gallery exhibition in 1969 and the Crawdaddy publication in 1972, only one piece in
the series, Nostalgia, had gained Steckel’s visage (Fig. 4.43). Thus, the magazine
provides some of the only evidence of the series’ previous states.
Steckel fondly recalled the impact that the Giant Woman series had on viewers
when Westbeth’s Gallery showed it in September of 1971. She witnessed her work
communicating to other women with similar experiences. “When I merged my face
with the Giant Woman series it was like an understanding that we are each of us all of
these women,” she said in an interview, “sometimes victorious and sometimes
victim.”
77
Feminist magazine Chrysalis highlighted the feminist aspect of the series in
1977:
Steckel utilizes collage for its political potential. Collage provides Steckel
with a means of addressing and using available (male) traditions of culture
while giving them a feminist twist – allowing her to introduce her own point of
view of those traditions while using them.
78

77
Steckel quoted in Amanda Sebestyen, “Sex, Power, & Art: Amanda Sebestyen talks to a controversial
American artist,” Spare Rib (August 1979): 44.

78
Ruth Iskin, “Anita Steckel’s Feminist Fantasy: The Making of a New Ideology,” Chrysalis 3 (1977):
93.

243
In other words, with collage, Steckel appropriated and visually transformed male
culture. Steckel used collage and montage techniques to represent female nudes as
interventions in the New York landscape and, by extension, American culture.

Feminist Art of Sexual Politics, 1972
When Steckel’s one-woman show, The Feminist Art of Sexual Politics, opened
at Rockland Community College art gallery in Suffern, New York on February 2nd,
1972, attendees found the gallery filled with sexual imagery. The show included the
phallic New York Skyline series and the Giant Woman series. Due to objections from
local conservatives, the organizers posted a sign on the gallery entrance warning that
“male and female genitalia portrayed within might be offensive to some viewers.”
79

Thus, as the doors of the exhibition opened, the groundwork was already laid for a
public debate on censorship of art that would focus on Steckel’s sexual subject matter.
The exhibition proved to be “provocative to nearly everyone connected with
Rockland Community College,” and inspired discussions about censorship, sex, and
feminism in art.
80
Viewers received Steckel’s combination of feminist politics and
sexual imagery, particularly in the New York Skyline series, as powerful feminist
propaganda. A news reporter covering the controversy over the exhibition
summarized, “Artist Anita Steckel’s theme is that the male power structure dominates

79
Ibid. and Frank, “Anita Steckel at Rockland College,” 56. According to another article, a “hand
printed sign at the entrance to Rockland Community College’s Glass Lounge warns that the pictures
exhibited inside ‘display male and female genitalia and might be offensive.” “Picture Exhibit a
Revealing Study,” New York Daily News, February 13, 1972.

80
Betsy Marston, reporter, Channel 13 public-television newscast, February 1972. Archives of Anita
Steckel.

244
us all, and her symbol for that is an erect penis.”
81
It was a well-timed message
delivered during the initial growth of the feminist art movement.
Steckel began the New York Skyline series in 1970 when she moved into the
Westbeth Artists’ Community building in the West Village neighborhood of
Manhattan.
82
A photograph published in an article in Avant-Garde magazine on the
art scene at Westbeth shows the work hanging in her new studio (Fig. 4.44). The large
space allowed her to increase the scale of her pieces, and so she ordered copies of a
found photograph of New York (taken from the view of the East River) silkscreened
onto 6 ! x 8 ! foot canvases. Steckel has accounted their production and their
message:
All were made between 1970 when I moved in and ordered the skyline silk
screened on to canvas and had them rolled up. Set them on the wall and
worked on one at a time. Each one was whatever I was involved with at the
time. This one was about the male control over the city. At that time there
were no female anything, no female judges, no female cops…
83

Steckel connected the image of Manhattan, with its skyscrapers representing its
industries controlled by men, to the idea of phallic power by echoing the long shaft of
tall office buildings with erect penises.
A mention in the “Scenes” section of the Village Voice discussed Steckel’s
New York Skyline series in the fall of 1971 as representing “the world that males have

81
Ibid.

82
Sometimes referred to as the Large New York Landscapes, the series is subtitled Inner Landscape on
an Outer Landscape.

83
Anita Steckel, interview with the author, October 30, 2008 (New York, NY).

245
created as a horrifying phantasmagoria where nightmare fantasies come true.”
84
The
article went on to describe what the reporter saw in her studio as “enormous blow-up
photos of the New York skyline…painted over with surreal broken dolls, terrified
women masturbating on buildings and veiny muscular cocks exploding with red,
white, and blue sperm.”
85
The last phrase most likely referred to one of the works
singled out at the Rockland Community College show, which shows a man with a
large erection spewing red, white, and blue sperm (Fig. 4.45). One of the nude female
figures climbs the shaft to kiss the tip of the penis. On top of a nearby building, a
black phallus-as-cannon is shown in motion, spraying its weapons at the city and the
female nudes surrounding it.
86
To the right, a sphinx-like creature with a female torso
sends streams of blood down from hundreds of nipples. Despite the disturbing
combination of sexual and violent imagery in Steckel’s work, no one mentioned
censorship while it was on display at Westbeth Gallery in 1971 with the Giant Woman
series.
87
However, when a college gallery in the suburbs of New York City unveiled
the work, it became the center of a debate about censorship and art.
The warning at the entrance of the exhibition at Rockland Community College
telling of images of “male and female genitalia” underscored the main objection
certain members of the community had to the show. Local representative John Komar

84
Howard Smith and Sally Helgesen, “Anita Steckel,” Village Voice (September 9, 1971): 38.

85
Ibid.

86
Steckel always referred to this image as “a black cock/cannon.” Her use of the slang term “cock”
demonstrates how she draws on the vulgar to shock her viewers.

87
Maniacalaughter, Westbeth Gallery, New York (October 1971).

246
asked the college trustees to consider taking it down.
88
The board of the college met
to discuss the fate of the exhibition, along with members of the art department and
“three outside experts”—“Louis Dupre, an anthropologist with the American Field
Service; David Levy, dean of Parsons School of Design in New York City; and Patrick
Higgins, art critic and reviewer for The Journal-News,” were convened and “testified
before the trustees that the show is of serious artistic value.”
89
Komar also requested
that the Rockland District Attorney look into whether Steckel should be charged with
obscenity, but he declined to file charges. Instead, the battle took place in the press
between conservatives like Komar and those with a more liberal outlook like Robert
Kassel, leader of a local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. One exponent
against the show pronounced, “They [Steckel’s artworks] were so bad I’m ashamed
even to describe what was pictured.”
90
Surprisingly, this local attorney and politician
had not physically attended the show himself but hired a professional photographer to
take pictures of the exhibition. He brought the photographs to a meeting of politically
like-minded people to elicit their condemnation of the show.
91

Supporters of the show sent dozens of telegrams to the college president, Dr.
Seymour Eskol, urging him to keep the exhibition open. Though Art News published
no review of the show, an editor from the magazine wrote to Eskol that Steckel was a

88
Steven Hesse, “Komar: RCC art show should be closed,” The Rockland County Journal-News,
(February 5, 1972), n.p.

89
Ibid.

90
Frederick P. Roland quoted in Steven Hesse, “Steckel probe” Rockland County Journal-News
(February 2, 1972). Archives of Anita Steckel.

91
Ibid.

247
“serious artist whose work attacks repressive social situations which concerns her
deeply … work definitely not pornographic in my opinion.”
92
Messages came from
museum curators, art critics, artists, and scholars. Interest in the show grew from the
media coverage about its potential censorship. One local paper reported that John
Murphy, the head of the art department at Rockland Community College, claimed that
“attendance at the show has been extremely high in the wake of reports that some
county legislators and college trustees are exerting pressure to close the show on the
grounds it is obscene.”
93
Critics also appreciated Steckel’s work for its aesthetic
qualities. An art critic for the regional newspaper proclaimed, “This is not just good
art; it is excellent art.”
94

Rockland Community College offered Steckel the show as the first of a series
of one-woman exhibitions the college would devote to a female artist. She knew that
this could potentially lead to a teaching job at the college, located only about an hour
outside of New York City. She was hopeful about the opportunity to support herself
and finance her art. Before she even selected pieces for the show, however, a female
teacher at the school cautioned her not to bring any controversial work. “Should you
put any sexual work in the show,” the woman advised Steckel, “you can forget about

92
Telegram from James Bishop, Art News Editorial Associate, to Dr. Seymour Eskow, President,
Rockland Community College, February 8, 1972, PAD/D Archive.

93
“The artist answers..,” The Rockland County Journal (February 10, 1972), Archives of Anita Steckel.

94
David Spengler, “Critic Takes a Look – and Likes,” The Record (February 9, 1972): A-2.

248
getting the job.”
95
Steckel struggled with the decision of what to bring to Rockland
Community College, feeling trapped between the need for a job and the need to
exercise her artistic freedom. In the end, she decided to put every sexual piece she
had in the show, thereby forcing the issue out into the open. She feared that if she
worried about external restrictions on her art then she would never be able to produce
her best work in the studio.
96
She refused to constrain her process with “self-
censorship,” choosing instead to deal with the consequences.
In preparation for the exhibition, Steckel came up with a title that would make
her protest clear: “The Feminist Art of Sexual Politics.” She deliberately used the
word “feminist” in her title specifically to give her work the credibility of the political
movement.
97
In addition, she wrote a statement about her views on censorship to be
distributed at the opening with copies of a small work, Legal Gender, a collage with a
dollar bill cut-out in the shape of a penis (Fig. 4.46). Meyer describes the significance
of this piece: “by presenting the penis as a unit of currency, the work makes explicit
the unfair alignment of monetary value with male privilege.”
98
Indeed, this work
directly connected phallic power and economic power, and her statement set forth the
ways in which censorship would only reinforce these powers. Steckel’s
“Announcement of the Artist’s Views on Censorship” read as follows:

95
Anita Steckel, interview with the author, March 17, 2009 (New York, NY) and Meyer, “Hard
Targets.”

96
Ibid.

97
Ibid., Honor Moore advised her to “hang it on the banner of feminism.” Anita Steckel, interview with
the author, March 17, 2009 (New York, NY).

98
Meyer, “Hard Targets,” 365.

249
The uncensored, bold, subject matter of this exhibition strikes a powerful blow
against provincialism and censorship—and I wish to congratulate the Art
Department of this university for its urban, unintimidated stance—in the face
of the usual inanities of ‘petit bourgeois’ pressures.

I am not unaware, however, of those who would and do indeed apply economic
sanctions of the most reprehensible sort, such as ‘teaching job’ denials, upon
artists—in an attempt to impose their personal timidity—as ‘morality’—or,
even worse—as ‘esthetic judgment’—on art.

No matter how severe the threat—
No matter how fearful the artist is of economic censure—
An artist must be free.
An artist must not be censored in any way.

Free to grow in absolutely any direction—for absolutely any reason.
Nothing should be tolerated that attempts to interfere with the total freedom of
expression of the fine artist.
This is exactly what distinguishes the fine artist from others—total freedom of
choice and subject matter, unintimidated by threats of social or even economic
censure.
From Rembrandt’s cadavers and hanging raw beef—to the open-legged whores
of Toulouse-Lautrec—to ‘Guernica.’

Although nude women are traditional—even ‘wholesome’ subjects for art—
this is not the case with male nudity—and most especially with any male
depicted in the ‘potent’ state.

Also—women are traditionally excepted from even knowing that genitals
exist—and certainly not to admit it ‘in company’ or in their art.
Portraits—flowers—patterns and other ‘inoffensive’ subjects—were always
considered more ‘lady-like.’

Let it now be known that this women artist does not accept these rules.
Women see and know and experience their bodies and men’s bodies—and
there is no shame in this. The only shame is in the hypocrisy and in the lie we
tell our children and our students—by censorship. There is no longer any
decent one of us willing to put up with ‘white-gloved’ hypocrisy—which
pretends we don’t even know what is meant by a ‘dirty joke.’ Don’t know—
hell—we’re the entire subject matter of all those ‘jokes’ we’re not supposed to
know the meaning of.

Let’s have it clear that there are a lot of good jokes to be told by women too—
And I intend to tell a few.

250

Women, rip off your ‘white-gloves’—rip off the fig leaf—and then perhaps
we’ll all have a chance to get together and tell some jokes.”

—Anita Steckel
February, 1972
99

Her words focused on two points: first, that artists should have the freedom to
represent any subject matter free from sanctions and censorship, and, secondly, that
women should be allowed to depict male sexuality without these same threats and
without being subject to a double standard. From the beginning, Steckel maintained in
interviews that it was her depictions of male genitalia that conservative viewers found
most problematic. Furthermore, she asserted that the fact that a woman produced
these explicit renderings—even that a woman could imagine them—made the work
harder to accept.
Despite this forthright approach to her dilemma, Steckel could not have dreamt
that there would be such a dramatic response in the media, in newspaper articles and
even television news coverage of the story.
100
The evening of the show’s opening,
Steckel remembered having a polite tea with the faculty, while still unsuspecting of
the reaction that would ensue. The next morning, a telephone call from a radio station
awakened her and informed her of Komar’s call to close the show on grounds of
obscenity, asking for her live, on-air reply. Although the controversy over the
exhibition attracted publicity for Steckel, she felt overwhelmed at the time, unsure of

99
PAD/D Archive. Anita Steckel typed at the bottom of the page: “Distributed at Rockland State
Community College at the opening of a one woman show of art works by Anita Steckel.”

100
Channel 13 public-television newscast, February 1972. Archives of Anita Steckel.

251
how to capitalize on the attention and crushed over the criticism of her work.
101

Asked again and again for interviews, she began to develop and articulate her political
rhetoric.
During the controversy, Steckel’s description of her work in interviews tended
to focus on its political message and downplay its eroticism. In an article titled, “The
artist answers,” a local paper, The Rockland County Journal News, wrote, “Steckel, a
feminist critic of the Vietnam war said her work is ‘political’ in content rather than
erotic or obscene, as detractors have charged.”
102
Indeed, in interviews at the time,
Steckel drew attention to politics, situating her work as a “statement about forms of
oppression and liberation.”
103
Steckel worked with the publicity by highlighting the
polemical aspects of her subject matter. Through this episode, the positioning and
reception of her work became politicized and its eroticism harder to speak about. One
might say that eroticism disappears from the discourse when her art becomes
“feminist.” The threat of censorship set in motion a paradoxical operation, which
drew attention to her sexual iconography while, at the same time, producing a
language for defending the work that denied its erotic aspects.

Fighting Censorship

The controversy at Rockland Community College left Steckel determined to
continue the dialogue about censorship of art made by women, particularly work that

101
Anita Steckel, telephone interview with the author, March 17, 2009.

102
Ibid.

103
Ibid.

252
used sexual imagery to express the current circumstances of discrimination. The
publicity had enhanced Steckel’s reputation as one of the “best known non-famous
artists on the scene.”
104
She sent out an invitation to fellow women artists to come to
her Westbeth studio for a meeting on March 8, 1973—an event that became the first
assembly of the Fight Censorship group.
105
Steckel opened the discussion with a
statement on censorship:
We women artists
We believe sexual subject matter should be removed from the “closet” of
the fine arts where it resides in small portfolios, small works, off the walls, in
private collections, etc! We believe sexual subject matter includes many
things: political statements, humor, erotica, sociological and psychological
statements – as well as purely sensual or esthetic ‘art’ concerns – and of course
– the primitive, mysterious reason none of us know.
Sexual subject matter is kept out of museums and in ‘smut’ magazines,
films, etc. – by men still in power – because it is considered too unwholesome
for ‘high places.’
Nude and sexually portrayed women, however, are not kept out of
museums. It is always the men who cover their sex – who hide what they
consider ‘their shame’ – who think of their sexuality as unwholesome – the ‘fig
leaf tradition.’
We women artists object to this unhealthy sexist discrimination and we
demand an end to past sexist puritanisms in museums. We assert that sexual as
well as any other subject matter is entirely the artists concern and the museums
have no right to impose their puritanical and sexist – unbalanced – therefore
unhealthy timidity and coyness upon us all and upon future generations – and
we demand that sexual subject matter – as it is part of life – no longer be
prevented from being part of art. And since the woman has traditionally been
exposed in her full nakedness and sexuality in all the great museums of the

104
Village Voice (February 27, 1969): 12.

105
In addition to Meyer’s cited essays, the FC group has been referenced in New Feminist Criticism:
Art, Identity, Action edited by Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer and Arlene Raven (New York:
IconEditions, 1994); Carol Jacobson, “Redefining Censorship: A Feminist View,” Art Journal 50, no. 4
(winter 1991); Margaret Walters, The Nude Male: A New Perspective (London: Paddington Press Ltd,
1978).
Attendees at the first meeting were Louise Bourgeois, Ray Brooks (not an artist), Martha
Edelheit, Joan Glueckman, Juanita McNeely, Joan Semmel, Anne Sharp, Hannah Wilke, and an
unidentified woman, Rennie. From cassette recording of the meeting, March 8, 1973. Archives of
Anita Steckel.

253
world – so should the male be uncovered – as sexually on display as the
woman – and the erect penis, therefore, as it is part of life – no longer be
prevented from being part of art.
If the erect penis is not wholesome enough to go into museums – it should
not be considered wholesome enough to go into women.
And if the erect penis is wholesome enough to go into women – then it is
more than wholesome enough to go into the greatest art museums.
106

These last two lines, in particular, drew attention. As Meyer points out in his essay on
the censorship of feminist art in the 1970s, Steckel’s “startling juxtaposition of
museum practice and heterosexual penetration…became something of a signature
statement for the FC group.”
107
Articles on the group often quoted Steckel’s
comparison in the following years, and she reiterated her beliefs in the equal exposure
of the sexes and in the eschewing of puritan ideals from the museum.
108

However, no less important than the demand that male nudes by female artists
be admitted into museums was the notion that sexual subject matter was not only
about eroticism. Sexual art, Steckel argued in her statement, could be about “political
statements, humor, erotica, sociological and psychological statements – as well as
purely sensual or esthetic ‘art’ concerns.”
109
When asked in an interview why there
were a significant number of women who were making art with sexual subject matter
at that time, Steckel noted that women felt free to create “gender-identified art” since

106
“Statement on Censorship by Anita Steckel (woman artist)” dated March 8, 1973, Archives of Anita
Steckel. Also published it in the Village Voice, “Press of Freedom” section (March 29, 1973).

107
Meyer, “Hard Targets,” 366.

108
“Women Artists Join to Fight to Put Sex into Museums and Get Sexism and Puritanism Out” Press
Release, PAD/D Archive.

109
Steckel, “Statement on Censorship.”

254
they had little success and reputation to risk.
110
Within the rising feminist art
movement at the time, the political aspects of Steckel’s sexual art registered as an
important development in the history of sexual representation. As the British feminist
magazine Spare Rib noted, “Steckel’s pictures raise an important question for
feminists: how can we create images that are sexual and not sexist?”
111

It is significant to note that despite Steckel’s struggle to have “the erect
penis…no longer be prevented from being part of art,” Steckel’s most reproduced
works focus on female sexual imagery, not male. New Mona Takes the Brush, Giant
Woman on New York, and Pierced are probably the best-known pieces in her oeuvre
(Figs. 4.3, 4.47 and 4.48). Her powerful images of women embodied some of the
feminist ideals in a direct manner. New Mona Takes the Brush was a favorite of
Arlene Raven, art critic and founder of the Los Angeles Women’s Building, the
Feminist Studio Workshop, and the publication Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s
Culture. In Raven’s essay “The Archaic Smile,” written in the spring of 1972 for the
publication of a book on feminist art criticism, she passionately wrote about the piece,
No action was taken before the 1970s to tear away at the vulnerable
relationship between art, artist, and female beauty, and to build a new alliance
between feminine comeliness and female liberation. The hairy-lipped Mona
Lisa remained the sole twentieth-century representation of this woman until
New York artist Anita Steckel presented a monumental mixed-media Mona
Lisa (1973) as an American artist, placing an empowering brush in her hand
and positioning her smack up against the Manhattan skyline.
112

110
Anita Steckel, telephone interview with the author, March 17, 2009.

111
Amanda Sebestyen, “Sex, Power, & Art: Amanda Sebestyen talks to a controversial American
artist,” Spare Rib (August 1979): 42-5.

112
Arlene Raven, “The Archaic Smile,” in New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action (New York:
IconEditions, 1994), 5.

255
Raven saw in New Mona a symbol of the many challenges being brought by the
feminist art movement to bear on the history of art. A celebratory image, the piece
reworks the Leonardo da Vinci placing the famous female figure in New York City,
now armed with her own paint brush and boldly revealing her right breast.
113

Giant Woman on the Empire State and Pierced, two pieces from the Giant
Woman series, represent two poles of female experience—one defeated and injured,
the other victorious. Feminist art critics read the image of a graceful female nude
impaled on the Chrysler building as an allegory of the treatment of women in the
culture at large, imaging the violence done by the systematic and institutionalized
devaluation of the female sex. They saw Giant Woman on the Empire State as a
“delicious fantasy – woman flying unhampered by patriarchal reality…She shows
herself dominating New York with ease and grace; its phallic towers become objects
for her pleasure.”
114
Steckel’s series provided versions of both sides of this story.
However, we must ask if by privileging her female imagery, critics inadvertently
sidestepped a body of work that endeavored to meet the challenge of creating erotic art
that was “sexual and not sexist.”

113
In the early 1970s, Steckel also provided an illustration for the Feminist Party of the Statue of
Liberty holding the symbol for the female gender in place of the torch. The illustration was used on
party documents such as this press release in Steckel’s files: “Media Workshop & the Feminist Party,”
Waldorf Astoria Hotel, January 21, 1972.

114
Iskin, “Anita Steckel’s Feminist Fantasy,” 95.

256

Fig. 4.1. Anita Steckel, New York Skyline series, 1970-80, mixed media, 6 x 9 ft., (no
longer extant)

Fig. 4.2. Anita Steckel, New York Skyline series, (no longer extant)

Fig. 4.3. Anita Steckel, Giant Woman on Empire State, from the Giant Woman series,
1969-72, ink and oil on found photograph, 36 x 48 in.

257

Fig. 4.4. Photograph of Anita Steckel in her studio in BolaffiArte magazine, 1974

Fig. 4.5. Mom Art exhibition announcement in The New York Times, June 16, 1963

Fig. 4.6. “Mom Art,” Esquire magazine, October 1963

258

Fig. 4.7. Anita Steckel, Birthmarks, Mom Art, 1963, mixed media on found
photograph

Fig. 4.8. Anita Steckel, Magnolia Dreamin’, Mom Art, 1963

259

Fig. 4.9. Anita Steckel, Return of the Wet Nurse, Mom Art, 1963

Fig. 4.10. Desert: To Lenny Bruce, Mom Art, 1963 in Tuli Kupferberg, The
Mississippi: (A Study of the White Race) (Birth Press, 1962)

260

Fig. 4.11. Anita Steckel, The Expatriate, Mom Art, 1963

Fig. 4.12. Pablo Picasso, Woman in a Fish Hat, 1942

Fig. 4.13. Roy Lichtenstein, Woman with a Flowered Hat, 1963

261

Fig. 4.14. Pablo Picasso, Femme Assise au Chat, 1941

Fig. 4.15. Anita Steckel, The Company Picnic, Mom Art, 1963

Fig 4.16. Tapestry designed after Watteau Swing, c. 1730-60

262

Fig. 4.17. Anita Steckel, Annual Banquet of the Lampshade Manufacturers of
Argentina, Mom Art in Esquire, October 1963

Fig. 4.18. Anita Steckel, The Beginner, Mom Art, 1963

Fig. 4.19. Anita Steckel, Fat Man: death grows fat on war, Mom Art, 1963

263

Fig. 4.20. Anita Steckel, The Librarian, Mom Art, 1963

Fig. 4.21. Anita Steckel, The Imposter, Mom Art, 1963

264

Fig. 4.22. Anita Steckel, Das Wunderkind, Mom Art, in Esquire, October 1963

Fig. 4.23. Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936

Fig. 4.24. Anita Steckel, Girl Scout, Mom Art, in Esquire, October 1963

265

Fig. 4.25. Thomas Eakins, The Biglin Brothers Racing, 1872

Fig. 4.26. Anita Steckel, Last Supper, Mom Art, 1963

Fig. 4.27. Anita Steckel, Last Supper, Giant Woman series, 1969-72

266

Fig. 4.28. Anita Steckel, Mom Art exhibition announcement, May 1963

Fig. 4.29. Anita Steckel, Solo, Giant Woman series, 1969-72

Fig. 4.30. Candy Darling with Anita Steckel’s The Big Rip Up in Status, May 1969

267

Fig. 4.31. Anita Steckel, The Big Rip Up, 1964

Fig. 4.32. Anita Steckel with New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town, in Status,
May 1969

Fig. 4.33. “Anita’s World,” Best Bets, New York Magazine, 1969

268

Fig. 4.34. Anita Steckel, Nostalgia, Giant Woman series, 1969-72

Fig. 4.35. Invitation to Contemporary Erotica, Van Bovenkamp Gallerie, 1965,
Archives of American Art

Fig. 4.36. Anita Steckel, Freud, pencil on photograph, 30 x 40 in.

269

Fig. 4.37. Anita Steckel, Group Soup, Food Box series, 1966

Fig. 4.38. Anita Steckel, Head of Lettuce, Food Box series, 1966

Fig. 4.39. Anita Steckel, Tongue Sandwich, Food Box series, 1966

270

Fig. 4.40. Image from Crawdaddy magazine, January 30, 1972

Fig. 4.41. Image from Crawdaddy magazine, January 30, 1972

Fig. 4.42. Anita Steckel, Just Waiting for the Bus, Giant Woman series, 1969-72, ink
and oil on found photograph, 36 x 48 in.

271

Fig. 4.43. Image from Crawdaddy magazine, January 30, 1972

Fig. 4.44. Photograph of Anita Steckel’s studio at Westbeth in Avant Garde, 1971

Fig. 4.45. Anita Steckel, New York Skyline series, mixed media on canvas

272

Fig. 4.46. Anita Steckel, Legal Gender, 1971, collage and ink on paper, 2 ! x 6 in.,
reproduced in Photostat copy

Fig. 4.47. Anita Steckel, New Mona Takes the Brush, Giant Woman series, 1969-72,
ink and oil on found photograph, 36 x 48 in.

Fig. 4.48. Anita Steckel, Pierced, Giant Woman series, 1969-72, ink and oil on found
photograph, 36 x 48 in.

273
Conclusion

By 1973, due in part to the work of the Fight Censorship Group, a veritable
movement of erotic and sexual imagery made by women artists had taken shape.
After its founding by Anita Steckel, the Fight Censorship Group made appearances at
local schools and on public television, educating people about the existence and
significance of women’s sexual art. During one appearance by the group at the New
School for Social Research in New York in October 1973, the artists brought pieces of
their work to illustrate their presentation.
1
Steckel’s slides from the event show the
artists—Judith Bernstein, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Glueckman, Eunice Golden, Martha
Edelheit, Juanita McNeely, Barbara Nessim, Joan Semmel, Anne Sharp, and Steckel—
seated on an auditorium stage passing the microphone and discussing the topic, “The
New Female Sexuality in Art” (Figs. 5.1-5.6).
2
Steckel read her statement about the
group’s objective to challenge museums’ reluctance to exhibit representations of male
nudity. “If the erect penis is not ‘wholesome’ enough to go into museums, it shouldn’t
be ‘wholesome’ enough to go into women!” she exclaimed to the audience.
3

Although Steckel’s statement on censorship specifically named the suppression
of depictions of male genitals, the driving concept of the Fight Censorship Group was
to defend all sexual imagery made by women artists and to promote its acceptance in

1
Steckel did not keep documentation of where and when all of the Fight Censorship Group appearances
took place. A panel “Pornography vs. Eroticism” with Bourgeois, Golden, Wilke, Semmel, and
Steckel, moderated by Nancy Spero, took place in 1975.

2
Announcement. “The New Female Sexuality in Art: Fight Censorship Group,” Archives of Anita
Steckel.

3
New York News Service, “Sexualism: Women Lead New Art Movement” (1973).

274
mainstream museums. In the catalogue for WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,
the first survey exhibition of feminist art organized by a major U.S. museum, Richard
Meyer wrote about the appearance at the New School for Social Research and the
Fight Censorship as a “counterpart to the vaginal, central core, or otherwise
gynocentric imagery for which feminist art of the day is most remembered.”
4
He
considers how the artists’ use of phallic imagery was “a means both to critique male
supremacy and to claim the male body as a site of female fantasy and desire.”
5

Indeed, Bernstein’s drawings of phallic screws and Steckel’s phallic skylines drew on
a different language of symbols than “vaginal iconography” for their feminist critique.
Unlike Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s interest in promoting “female imagery”
as metaphor for female experience, the Fight Censorship Group did not prescribe any
particular style or subject matter for other artists.
The diversity in the work of artists in the Fight Censorship Group attests to the
expansion of sexual imagery by women artists during the period covered in this
dissertation. A survey of the artists in the group (in addition to my previous analysis
of Steckel and Wilke who were members) will provide a sense of the breadth of sexual
art made by women that was circulating in the public sphere in 1973. The number of
works with phallic imagery is striking. Equally as significant are the artists’ divergent
opinions about the purpose of sexual imagery in art, even though the artists chose to
defend their work on a common, political ground.

4
Richard Meyer, “Hard Targets: Male Bodies, Feminist Art, and the Force of Censorship in the 1970s,”
in Cornelia Butler, et al., WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles: Museum of
Contemporary Art, 2007), 368.

5
Ibid.

275
Similarly to Wilke’s abstraction, Bourgeois’s sculpture often suggests genital
forms without explicit delineation. The best known of the Fight Censorship Group,
Bourgeois had been exhibiting her work for decades longer than the other women.
6

The older, more established artist had not always recognized the erotic aspects of her
art publicly, which makes her connection with the group worth consideration.
7
As
recently as 1969, Bourgeois had minimized the sexual content of her sculptures when
speaking to Museum of Modern Art curator William Rubin in an interview conducted
for an article in Art International (Fig. 5.7). He asked:
To what extent do particularized organic and sexual references (e.g. the phallic
character of Sleep II and Labyrinthine Tower) become conscious and/or
problematic in the conception? Do you ever feel any conflict between the
allusive and formal levels of the work?

Bourgeois replied:
I am not particularly aware or interested in the erotic of my work, in spite of its
supposed presence. Since I am exclusively concerned, at least consciously,
with the formal perfection, I allow myself to follow blindly the images that
suggest themselves to me.”
8

However, in a book of interviews with women artists published in 1981, Bourgeois
stated, “All my work from the beginning has to do with the relations of men and
women. This being so it does affect the material. Gender being part of the subject

6
Bourgeois’s first solo show in New York, Painting by Louise Bourgeois at Berthat Schaefer Gallery,
opened on June 4, 1945.

7
Lucy Lippard, “Louise Bourgeois: From the Inside Out,” Artforum 13, no. 7 (March 1975): 31.

8
“William Rubin—Louise Bourgeois: Questions and Answers” in Louise Bourgeois, Destruction of the
Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923-1997 (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1998), 85-6.

276
will determine what material is chosen.”
9
These conflicting statements suggest that
between 1969 and 1981 Bourgeois began to recognize the primacy of gender relations
in her work. However, despite this focus critics and curators have continued to debate
the subject of Bourgeois’ feminism. Although in the 1970s some of her more
figurative work appeared in the context of feminism—for example one of her Femme
Maison drawings (1945-7) served as the frontispiece for Lippard’s collection of
feminist art criticism, From the Center, published in 1976 (Fig. 5.8)—the catalog of
her recent retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2008
includes an essay by Elisabeth Lebovici dedicated to the question of Bourgeois’
feminism: “Is she? Or isn’t she?”
10
The author points to various inconsistencies in
Bourgeois’ responses to questions about her feminist politics and their relationship to
her art. This ambiguity is likely due to the abstract nature of Bourgeois’ sculpture.
However, the latex and plaster work Fillette (1968) that she brought to the New
School in 1973 is undoubtedly an audacious representation of the phallus (Fig. 5.9).
Bourgeois’ choice to participate in the Fight Censorship Group shows not only that
she acknowledged the sexual nature of her work at that time, but also that she was
willing to collaborate with other female artists even if it meant being labeled a
“woman artist.”

9
Lynn Miller, Lives and Works: Talks with Women Artists (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981), 7.

10
Elisabeth Lebovici, “Is she? Or isn’t she?” in Frances Morris, ed., Louise Bourgeois (New York:
Rizzoli, 2008). Exhibition held at the Tate Modern, London, October 10, 2007-January 20, 2008;
Centre Pompidou, Paris, March 5-June 2, 2008; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, June
27-September 28, 2008; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, October 26, 2008-January
26, 2009; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., February 28-June 7, 2009.

277
Judith Bernstein’s “mural-sized, architectural-scale, energetically gestural
charcoal drawings of screws” read as far less subtle than Bourgeois’ phallic imagery.
11

Bernstein’s first one-woman show at A.I.R. gallery, a women artists’ space, included
“large scale phallic/screw charcoal drawings” one of which, Horizontal (1973), was
nine by twenty-two feet (Fig. 5.10 and Fig. 5.11).
12
Like Steckel, Bernstein had
experimented with phallic imagery in the 1960s.
13
She began drawing the “screws” in
1969 and they became more explicitly phallic-shaped in the early 1970s. Bernstein
described the evolution of the giant screws:
The style is cleaner, it’s much larger, it’s all black and white, and before it was
very playful and fun and colorful and so on…I feel the phallus has stood for
power for so many centuries, and I feel that we women want to be part of that
power.

Believing that women could demand access to that power, she argued that “the phallus
and all it stands for is not exclusively a male image.”
14
With these giant screws,
Bernstein attempted to harness phallic power for the female artist.
A year after the formation of the Fight Censorship Group, Bernstein
experienced a highly publicized battle over censorship of phallic imagery in her art

11
Ellen Lubell, “Judith Bernstein at A.I.R.,” Art in America 72, no. 10 (November 1984): 159-160.

12
A.I.R. press release April 23, 1973. Judith Bernstein, A.I.R. Gallery (April 28-May 16, 1973). A.I.R.
Gallery opened in 1972. Judith Bernstein [artist file], Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. She
had another one-woman show (October 20-November 7,
,
1973) that included Big Horizontal,
Horizontal and Five Panel Vertical as new drawings.

13
Partially inspired by bathroom wall graffiti at the School of Art and Architecture at Yale, Bernstein
went into the men’s room and discovered what people were depicting on the walls: scribbles and jokes
about sex and war. She made two drawings, Supercock and Superzipper, from that experience. “I took
them out of the bathroom context and put them into the art-context,” she explained retrospectively in an
interview. “Judith Bernstein” (interview with Jeanie Weiffenbach) Criss-Cross Art Communications 1,
no. 4 (January 1977): 28. Her Union Jack-Off Flag Series (1967) employed this same symbolism in
messages about war and power.

14
Ibid., 33.

278
inciting such sensational headlines as “The Castration of Judith Bernstein.”
15
Her
piece, Horizontal, was selected and then excluded from an exhibition of over eighty
female artists, “Women’s Work—America ‘74” at the Philadelphia Civic Center (the
same exhibition in which Strider’s “girlies” almost appeared) in 1974.
16
Executive
Director of the Civic Center, John Pierron, the outspoken censor of Bernstein’s work,
called it offensive “on behalf of the children of this city.”
17
In support, many artists
sported buttons at the opening that read, “Where’s Bernstein?” Fellow artists also
signed petitions, one from the membership of A.I.R. and another that included
signatures from such well-known artists as Carl Andre and Tom Wesselmann.
Critic Lawrence Alloway also spoke out in support of Bernstein and against
Pierron’s censorship. Comparing Horizontal to Claes Oldenburg’s lipstick monument
at Yale among other works by male artists, Alloway found an “iconic eroticism” in
Bernstein’s work.
18
Contradicting Alloway’s notion of “iconic eroticism,” Bernstein’s
defense of Horizontal focused on her political statement about phallic power. She
insisted, “My work is sexual, but it’s not erotic in any manner and it’s not

15
Articles in the press regarding the censorship of Horizontal in Philadelphia appeared in: Philadelphia
Daily News, Philadelphia Inquirer, Soho Weekly News, The Nation, Majority Report, New York Times,
Art Workers News. Judith Bernstein [artist file], MoMA.

16
As mentioned in Chapter 2, the exhibition was part of a larger feminist program of two months of
over seventy events in “Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts” organized by the group
Focus Show was end of April through May 1974. Judges of the exhibition were feminist art critic
Cindy Nemser, Whitney Museum curator Marcia Tucker, sculptor Lila Katzen, Adelyn Breesk from the
National Collection of Fine Art and Anne d’Harnoncourt from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Anne
Sharp, “Focus: A Philadelphia Story – Censorship,” Art Workers News (May/June 1974): 1.

17
Lawrence Alloway, “Art,” The Nation (April 20, 1974): 510. According to a review in Artforum it
was the executive director, John Pierron, who censored the work. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, “Judith
Bernstein,” Artforum 12, no. 10 (June 1974), 67.

18
Alloway, “Art,” 510.

279
pornographic.”
19
However, her work was previously exhibited in the name of erotic
art at the First International Exhibition of Erotic Art in Sweden and appeared in The
International Museum of Erotic Art when it opened in San Francisco 1973.
20
Yet,
Bernstein felt the need to downplay the eroticism of her work in order to defend it
against censorship just as Steckel had done during her Feminist Art of Sexual Politics
exhibit. Furthermore, despite this well publicized scandal in Philadelphia and the
support Bernstein received from the art world in the mid-1970s, her work is still
relatively unknown.
Perhaps more obscure are the works of Anne Sharp and Barbara Nessim, two
artists in the Fight Censorship Group who created explicitly sexual illustrations. One
of Sharp’s drawings, an explicit pastel of an assemblage of sexual body parts—
including female genitals, a penis, and a woman’s mouth moistening her lips with her
tongue—was included in the First International Exhibition of Erotic Art (Fig. 5.12).
In the 1970s, Sharp showed collages that incorporated imagery of travel postcards,
celebrity photos, and pornographic sources.
21
Her postcard collages illustrated a book
of poetry by James Bertolino, Terminal Placebos, published in 1975.
22
The cover
features a collaged cutout of a naked woman whose look and large breasts identify her

19
Wieffenbach, “Judith Bernstein,” 33.

20
Her work also appeared in Allan Stone Gallery’s Erotica exhibition in New York in 1973. For more
information on the First International Exhibition of Erotic Art and The International Museum of Erotic
Art see Chapter 4.

21
Anne Sharp [artist file], Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. Joseph Dreiss, “Anne Sharp,”
Arts Magazine 49, no. 6 (February 1975): 16.

22
James Bertolino, Terminal Placebos, with postcard collages by Anne Sharp (New York: New Rivers
Press, 1975).

280
as coming from a pornographic magazine (Fig. 5.13). The book ends with the image
of a red S&M-like phallus (Fig. 5.14). Barbara Nessim, primarily known today for her
covers for such magazines as Time and Rolling Stone, also had a piece in the
Kronhausen’s collection titled Woman Wearing Headdress, a watercolor of a female
bust with serpentine phalluses emerging from her masked face (Fig. 5.15). In the
1970s, Nessim’s work appeared in erotic art books, and she participated in several
shows at the Erotic Art Gallery in 1973 most likely with her Woman Girl series of
small-scale, delicate female nudes (Fig. 5.16).
Eunice Golden and Joan Glueckman, both founding members of the woman’s
cooperative Soho 20 Gallery in New York in 1973, also participated in the Fight
Censorship Group.
23
While Glueckman primarily created colorful tapestries featuring
images of animals and women, she also experimented with phallic forms in her
needlepoint works and fabric sculpture.
24
In 1973, she created a calendar with line
drawings narrating a sexual encounter between a man and woman. Some of these
simple images depict genitals, while others show the couple in the midst of intercourse
(Fig. 5.17). Eunice Golden delved into phallic imagery in her paintings and
photographs. In particular, her series of painted “male landscapes” (1968-73)

23
Golden had multiple shows at Soho20 between 1973 and 1980. Glueckman showed there until her
death in 1978.
Soho 20 opened at 99 Spring St. in 1973 with twenty founding members. Members considered
their work to be stylistically diverse, more so than the abstract and conceptual art shown at A.I.R. Jean
Bergantini, “Soho 20: A Diverse Women’s Gallery,” Feminist Art Journal (summer 1976): 36-7. “The
criteria for membership is not restricted in style, theme or media.” Soho 20 records, 1973-1979,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

24
In addition to her tapestries, Glueckman also showed paintings, drawings, fabric sculpture, and multi-
media works in exhibitions at Soho 20 Gallery (and other New York galleries) until her death from
cancer in 1978. She was an organizer of the Women’s Interart Center. Soho 20 records.

281
objectified and aestheticized the nude male body by focusing on the genital region,
often showing an erect penis. Purple Sky (1969), a large painting she brought to the
New School in 1973, is one such work (Fig. 5.18). This sketchy, expressionist piece
features the lower portion of a nude male body reclining and holding an erect penis,
but the horizontal perspective and formal treatment of the figure transform the body
into a mountainous landscape of “phalluses and testicles metamorphosed into
pulsating masses of tumescent fleshiness.”
25
Golden described her piece similarly, but
with political implications: “In my painting ‘Purple Sky’ a six foot male torso seems
to expand beyond the edges of the canvas, his erect penis silhouetted against a velvety
night sky—a monument to power, an erotically charged monument.”
26
Golden
expressed the internal contradiction she felt between her heterosexual desire and the
burden of patriarchal culture as directly related to her work in an essay published in
the Women’s Art Journal:
I see the male as a landscape which surrounds me, one that reminds me daily
that I am a product of a male-oriented culture. This is a double bind for me
because I also have erotic fantasies and needs.
27

On the phallic theme, Golden experimented with many techniques including drawing,
photography, film, painting, and even paper dolls.

25
Joan Semmel and April Kingsley, “Sexual Imagery in Women's Art,” Woman's Art Journal 1, no. 1
(1980): 4.

26
Golden, “The Male Nude in Women’s Art: Dialectics of a Feminist Iconography,” Heresies 12 (May
1981): 41.

27
Eunice Golden, “Sexuality in Art: Two Decades from a Feminist Perspective,” Woman's Art Journal
3, no. 1 (1982): 14.

282
Like Steckel, Golden started working with provocative imagery before she
became part of the feminist movement.
28
“My commitment to work with male sexual
imagery had begun in 1960,” Golden remembers, “but it was not until 1971 when I
moved to NYC that I discovered the women’s movement in art and other artists
interested in exploring new images related to women’s experiences.”
29
It was in New
York in the early 1970s that she came in contact with like-minded artists. She relates
an anecdote about her first encounter with Linda Nochlin in 1972 when she asked a
group of women artists, “Why isn’t anyone doing the male nude?” Golden writes, “I
informed her that I had been working with that imagery for more than ten years.”
30

Although male artists, friends, and even her partner modeled for her, she still prefers
not to identify them by name today. In the 1960s and 1970s, it would have likely been
difficult for her to procure a nude model that was not an acquaintance because such
things were still unacceptable.
Not all the work of members of the Fight Censorship Group dealt with phallic
symbolism, nor did they agree on the purpose of sexual imagery in art. At the New
School appearance, Juanita McNeely “showed tortured, anguished paintings that used
birth, abortion, and death to ‘express women’s hidden feelings.”
31
A videotape of a
discussion with members of the Fight Censorship Group—Steckel, Golden, Edelheit,

28
Golden was a participant in the Ad Hoc Committee for Women Artists, the group formed out of the
Art Workers Coalition in 1970 to confront the Whitney Museum of American Art’s gender biases.

29
Golden, “Sexuality in Art: Two Decades from a Feminist Perspective,” 14.

30
Ibid. Like Bernstein, Golden also participated in the Erotica show at Allan Stone Gallery with Purple
Sky and Cracker Jack Prize (1972).

31
New York News Service, “Sexualism: Women Lead New Art Movement” (1973)

283
and McNeely—led by a professor from New York University in 1973 shows the
diverse and sometimes conflicting ways that this group of women approached sexual
art.
32
They all insisted that “sexual work is not always erotic,” but the video shows
that the terms sexual, erotic, and pornographic have different meanings to each artist.
Steckel argued that sexuality, in the erotic sense, was a very important part of life and
therefore that should not be excluded from the visual arts. Golden pointed out that
erotica had for too long been created by men citing Ingres and DeKooning among
others. She spoke out against the censorship of women depicting the male “potent
state.” Edelheit defended her male nudes stating that she had no idea there was a law
against totally nude (without a jock strap) modeling by men until one of her male
models told her. She announced that she was “turned on by working with the nude”
and talked about the intimacy of working with a nude model in her studio. During the
same discussion, she said that she never thought of her work as erotic though other
people have, which is curious since she admitted the practice of making the work was
exciting to her. She mentioned the “seduction” of art in a more general sense,
tempering the term “erotic.” McNeely, on the other hand, described her work as being
concerned with women’s bodily realities: monthly periods, abortions, and other taboo
subjects more familiar to the common understanding of 1970s feminist art in art
history.
Finally, Joan Semmel’s work represented feminist heterosexuality quite
explicitly. In 1970, she abandoned abstract compositions and began her First Erotic

32
Sterling-Manhattan Cable TV, Channel C, New York. Video in Archives of Anita Steckel.

284
Series, large-scale paintings of male/female couples engaged in sexual activity as a
personal, feminist response to the pornographic imagery she saw all over newsstands
in New York City. Her Second Erotic Series (1972-73) took on a hyperreal style, with
paintings composed like photographs using drastic cropping and foreshortening. The
formal composition and bold colors in such works as Erotic Yellow and Red White and
Blue draw attention to the bodies in sexual embrace (Fig. 5.19 and Fig. 5.20). Semmel
painted from photographs yet her source material was not pulled from pornography
but from photographs taken (with permission) by the artist of her models in the midst
of sexual activity.
33
She saw her treatment of this potentially pornographic subject
matter as an erotic remaking of a heterosexual encounter into one of mutuality and
equity, one that appealed to her. “The act of love is no longer accepted as one of
exploitation and submission,” she explained, “but rather as the coming together of two
people, equally participating and desirous, each demanding and each giving.”
34

Pornography, on the other hand, was “just hard sell:” “Hard sell in a way I found
demeaning to women. In the past, women’s sexuality had always been used against
them. I felt very strongly the sexual issue was crucial in terms of real liberation.”
35
In
1974, Screw magazine, a pornographic tabloid first published in 1968, reproduced
Erotic Yellow without the artist’s knowledge. Semmel was understandably upset that

33
Joan Marter, “Joan Semmel's Nudes: The Erotic Self and the Masquerade,” Woman's Art Journal 16,
no. 2 (1995/1996): 25.

34
Semmel and Kingsley, “Sexual Imagery in Women's Art,” 5.

35
Ellen Lubell, “Joan Semmel, Interview,” Womanart 2 (winter 1977-78): 15.

285
her work appeared in this context, even though Gregory Battcock, a known art critic
wrote the article.
36

Semmel’s works were so shocking that she could not find a gallery in New
York willing to show the Erotic Series, and so she rented a space and exhibited the
paintings herself in 1973.
37
However, art critics soon agreed with Semmel that her
approach to the nude was different than pornography and from sexual art by male
artists. For example, a featured review in Art Magazine in 1975 differentiated Semmel
from the male “photo-realists” for what the critic perceived as her greater personal
involvement with the subject matter.
38
In the words of one of the Fight Censorship
Group’s members, “We proposed to inform the art world that our ‘Erotic Art’ was a
celebration of sexuality and should not be confused with pornography, which
denigrated and exploited women…We shared a common vision.”
39
Their need to
distinguish their erotic art from pornography, which they viewed as pornographic-for-
men, shows the difficult ambiguity that existed between the two kinds of imagery.
Yet, only a year earlier, Erotic Yellow had appeared in Screw along with works by
artists such as photorealist John Kacere who painted numerous versions of the lower
portion of idealized women’s bodies clad in lingerie. Whether using male or female

36
Richard Meyer, “‘Not Me’: Joan Semmel’s Body of Painting in Helen Molesworth, ed. Solitaire: Lee
Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Joan Semmel (Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2008).
Battcock also included Semmel’s work in Super Realism: A Critical Anthology (New York:
Dutton, 1975)

37
Ibid. and “Semmel Exhibition Treats Sex on Monumental Scale,” press release, 141 Prince St.
Gallery. Joan Semmel [artist file], Museum of Modern Art Library, New York.

38
Judith Tannenbaum, “Joan Semmel,” Arts Magazine 50, no. 2 (October 1975): 7.

39
Eunice Golden, “Sexuality in Art: Two Decades from a Feminist Perspective,” 14.

286
imagery, women artists attempting to subvert the male tradition of erotic art have
faced moments of perceived failure like these. Semmel’s work exemplifies the
continuing double bind for women artists wishing to express female heterosexual
desires.
A core group of Fight Censorship artists gained publicity and a number of
articles featured their work collectively, first in a feminist publication and then in
national magazines. “Another Cuntree: At Last, a Mainstream Female Art
Movement” by Maryse Holder appeared in the feminist newspaper Off Our Backs in
September 1973.
40
The article covered the Fight Censorship Group and, in particular,
the work of Bourgeois, Edelheit, McNeely, Semmel, and Steckel.
41
Early in 1974, as
word of the Fight Censorship Group spread beyond the circles of feminist art, three
very different magazines—Viva, New York Magazine, and BolaffiArte—published
similar articles covering the work of artists in the group. The first piece appeared in
Viva, a woman’s adult magazine founded by Bob Guccione of Penthouse and Kathy
Keeton.
42
The article, “Woman in the Erotic Arts,” featured Edelheit, Semmel,

40
Maryse Holder was a feminist author whose letters were published posthumously with introduction
by Kate Millet in Give Sorrow Words: Maryse Holder’s Letters from Mexico (New York: Avon, 1980).
Holder was murdered in Mexico during a trip of self and sexual exploration there. The film A Winter
Tan (1987) was based on the book.

41
Apparently striking a nerve, the feminist paper Changes republished Holder’s article under the title
“The New Sexual Art of Women” in 1974, and the editors of New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity,
Action anthologized the essay in 1994. These publications positioned the Fight Censorship Group as a
significant force in the feminist art movement. Maryse Holder, “The New Sexual Art of Women,”
Changes 86 (1974), reprinted in Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer and Arlene Raven, eds., New
Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action (New York: IconEditions, 1994).

42
Viva was published from October 1973 to January 1979.

287
Steckel, and Wilke.
43
Under the headline was Steckel’s sensational quote from her
“Statement of Censorship” demanding that full male nudity be admitted into the
museum. The article opened similarly to Holder’s piece by declaring a new
development in art had arrived. “For the first time in the history of art,” the author,
Lynda Crawford, emphatically proclaimed,
a significant movement of women artists is seriously exploring sexuality and
erotica. Women artists are expressing sexuality in their own terms, reflecting
and discovering their own perceptions stripped of traditional methodologies,
unfettered by accepted imagery. And these women are creating art that speaks
to both sexes.
44

Both the feminist newspaper and the erotic magazine recognized something akin to a
movement forming. They saw a group of artists who shared a common interest in
representing sexual subject matter in art and who worked together towards the
common goal of promoting acceptance of their work. Crawford summarized,
Along with the political functions of the group, these women individually are
involved primarily in breaking new artistic ground. Their plunge into sexuality
constitutes the first real movement by women artists. It is a movement
characterized by content, if not by form—a number of different styles are
prominent.
45

Indeed, Steckel’s collages, Semmel’s colorful photorealistic paintings of male/female
couples engaged in sex, Edelheit’s life-sized male nudes, and Wilke’s abstract latex
and rubber sculptures provided a diverse and alluring visual sampling of the formal
achievements of these artists. The Fight Censorship Group likely represented to

43
Lynda Crawford, “Women in the Erotic Arts,” Viva: The International Magazine for Women 1, no. 4
(January 1974): 74-83.

44
Ibid.

45
Ibid., 77.

288
Crawford the “first real movement by women artists” because gender was the central
and binding issue among them.
A month after the Viva piece, “The Female View of Erotica” ran in New York
Magazine covering the work of Bourgeois, McNeely, Semmel, Steckel, and Wilke.
46

“The real news in erotic today,” Dorothy Seiberling wrote, “is that women are making
it.”
47
This may be one of the first instances that Bourgeois spoke openly about the
sexual imagery in her work in print:
For a long time, the sexual in my art was not openly acknowledged. People
talked about erotic aspects, about my obsessions, but they didn’t discuss the
phallic aspects. If they had, I would have ceased to do it. It is acceptable to be
obsessive because it shows drive. Now I admit the imagery, I am not
embarrassed about it.
48

The article quoted the artists at length about the meaning of her work and illustrated
their words with photographs of the women posed with their work in the studio (Figs.
5.21-5.25). These colorful, glossy photographs of artists surrounded by their art in the
studio combined with the text in their own words emphasized the women’s identities
as artists with individual voices. The idea of grouping of these artists into a movement
had enough strength to reach Europe in “Il sesso visto dalle donne,” an article in the
Italian magazine BolaffiArte.
49

46
Dorothy Seiberling, “The Female View of Erotica,” New York Magazine 7, no. 6 (February 11,
1974): 54-58.

47
Ibid., 54.

48
Ibid., 55.

49
“Il sesso visto dalle donne,” BolaffiArte 5, no. 38 (March 1974): 68-71 . This final article that
appeared in 1974 drew from both the Viva and New York Magazine articles featured the work of
Bourgeois, Edelheit, McNeely, Semmel, Steckel, and Wilke.

289
By 1974, the recognition by Holder, Crawford, and Seiberling of this
movement by women artists marked a new moment in the history of women’s erotic
art. Such art could no longer be understood under the rubric of erotic art, which had
been defined through the long-standing tradition of sexualized imagery produced by
male artists. Instead, the art made by women was seen as something different—“the
female view of erotica.” Having had the myth of eroticism as a universal quality
disproved by the creation of erotic art with a “female view,” critics sought new terms
that could encompass work with sexual iconography and diverse meanings. The
overarching terms then changed from “erotic” to “sexual.” Critics also showed an
understanding that sexual art could have many subjects other than just the erotic; it
could be political, for instance.
50

The appearance of Edelheit, Semmel, Steckel, and Wilke’s work in both the
feminist newspaper Off Our Backs and the “adult” magazine Viva represents a
convergence in interests between two publications with very different missions.
While precariously positioned as an attempt at encouraging women’s sexual equality,
Viva did, in fact, provide a public forum for the discussion of women as creators of
sexual art. Such magazines have been criticized for appealing to men by representing
a heterosexual, normative conception of sex that privileges male pleasure and control
and for promoting the idea the women’s oppression can be overcome with mere
equality in bed. Yet, the very existence of Viva, though fairly short-lived, could only

50
Some of artist published articles on women’s sexual art. Golden published two articles on the subject
of sexuality and male nudity in art made by women artists, which appeared in Woman’s Art Journal and
Heresies in the beginning of the 1980s. Semmel worked on a book of her own, “The New Eros: Sexual
Imagery in Women’s Art,” which was never published but produced in full manuscript form with an
introduction by Semmel, a compilation of essays, and images of nearly a hundred of works of art.

290
have been possible after the second wave women’s movement began. The coinciding
and conflicting interests between a publication expressly titled Off Our Backs and Viva
makes sense in light of the diversity of Fight Censorship Group artists’ approaches to
sexual subjects—from reversals of the male tradition of erotic art to appropriations of
phallic symbolism to expressions of female sexually.
As academic scholars and curators begin to historicize the feminist art
movement, it is crucial that the range of work produced by artists aligned with the
movement be remembered. Retrospective exhibitions such as WACK! Art and the
Feminist Revolution tend to single out individual artists, inevitably leaving others
behind. My own case studies have focused on specific artists in order to tell their
unique stories and to explore in depth their aesthetic contributions to the history of
contemporary art. Yet, I also hope that this study shows how collaboration developed
around the issue of women’s erotic art with the founding of the Fight Censorship
Group. Furthermore, it is through this lens of collaboration that other artists who have
remained invisible in the history of art for the past thirty years now begin to appear as
significant to the struggle for women’s equality in the visual arts.
Additionally, the artists of my focus each continued throughout their careers to
push the limits of what is acceptable sexual material for art. In 2008, Schneemann
completed a film titled Infinity Kisses – The Movie which includes images of the artist
kissing her beloved cat, prompting questions about the cultural taboos around the

291
relationships between humans and animals.
51
In the 1990s, Strider returned to pin-up
images in a series of paintings updating her work from the mid-1960s. Recently, she
embarked on a new series of cartoon-like renderings of body parts, which remain to be
interpreted. Until her untimely death in January 1993, Wilke created photographs
with her husband, Donald Goddard, of herself nude as she went through her cancer
treatments. The sexual imagery and the pain apparent in her body produced a
powerful combination and confront taboos about visual images of sickness. In 2008,
Steckel showed a series of collages expressing a biting commentary on the Bush
administration in an exhibition titled “The Grosz-est Bush: Goodbye and Good
Riddance.”
52
The works juxtapose satirical caricatures by German Dadaist George
Grosz, media images of the Bush administration, and female nudes, in a vivid protest
of the dehumanizing effects of government corruption and war. Finally, Semmel
began reworking her Second Erotic Series in the 1990s, adding a fresh layer of figures,
often an image of an older woman or the artist herself, and creating a new dialog with
the explicitly sexual scenes underneath. These artists’ continued use of erotic imagery
to represent their changing personal, political, and social concerns points to the
efficacy of sexual imagery in communicating these essential aspects of life.
In the preceding chapters of this dissertation, I have shown that women artists
began using more explicit sexual imagery in the 1960s to challenge both aesthetic and
social standards placed upon them as women. Through case studies on Schneemann’s

51
Carolee Schneemann, Infinity Kisses – The Movie, 2008, 9 min, color, sound. Includes some of the
124 color slides from Infinity Kisses (1981-8)

52
The Grosz-est Bush: Goodbye and Good Riddance, Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York (May 1-31,
2008).

292
experimental films and performances, Strider’s Pop painted constructions, Wilke’s
abstract sensual sculptures, and Steckel’s phallic political collages, I demonstrated the
ways erotic art made by women artists infiltrated avant-garde art of the 1960s. Each
artist approached erotic art in formally innovative ways through the lens of female
heterosexuality. They negotiated their personal identities as heterosexual women who
addressed sex and desire in their art, while simultaneously contending with their
diminished status as women in the art world. The radical work they produced and its
critical reception proved instrumental in laying the groundwork for a collaborative
movement of women’s sexual art to take hold in the early 1970s. By studying this
longer history—expanding the framework for interpreting the work of such known
artists today as Schneemann and Wilke, and retrieving some of the lesser known—I
hope to have shown the significant impact that women’s erotic art made on the
contemporary art world.

293

Fig. 5.1. Anita Steckel, Fight Censorship Group appearance at The New School for
Social Research, October 1973

Fig. 5.2. Joan Semmel, Fight Censorship Group appearance at The New School for
Social Research, October 1973

Fig. 5.3. Louise Bourgeois, Martha Edelheit, and Judith Bernstein, Fight Censorship
Group appearance at The New School for Social Research, October 1973

294

Fig. 5.4. Eunice Golden, Louise Bourgeois, and Martha Edelheit, Fight Censorship
Group appearance at The New School for Social Research, October 1973

Fig. 5.5. Juanita McNeeley, Eunice Golden, and Louise Bourgeois, Fight Censorship
Group appearance at The New School for Social Research, October 1973

Fig. 5.6. Anne Sharp, Juanita McNeeley, and Eunice Golden, Fight Censorship Group
appearance at The New School for Social Research, October 1973

295

Fig. 5.7. Louise Bourgeois, Sleep II, 1967

Fig. 5.8. Detail of Bourgeois, Femme Maison series, 1945-47, in Lucy Lippard, From
the Center, 1976

Fig. 5.9. Louise Bourgeois, Fillette, 1968

296

Fig. 5.10. Judith Bernstein, A.I.R. Installation, 1973

Fig. 5.11. Judith Bernstein, Horizontal, 1973, charcoal on paper, 9x12 ! ft.

Fig. 5.12. Anne Sharp, pastel, in The International Museum of Erotic Art catalog,
1973

297

Fig. 5.13. Anne Sharp, cover, James Bertolino, Terminal Placebos (New Rivers Press,
1975)

Fig. 5.14. Anne Sharp, image in James Bertolino, Terminal Placebos (New Rivers
Press, 1975)

298

Fig. 5.15. Barbara Nessim, Woman Wearing Headdress, watercolor, in First
International Exhibition of Erotic Art (Kronhausen Books, 1968)

Fig. 5.16. Barbara Nessim, Woman Girl, 1973, watercolor, pen, and ink, 16 x 12 in.

Fig. 5.17. Joan Glueckman, calendar, 1973, Archives of American Art

299

Fig. 5.18. Eunice Golden, Purple Sky, 1969, oil on canvas, 48 x 72 in.

Fig. 5.19. Joan Semmel, Erotic Yellow, oil on canvas, 72 x 72 in.

Fig. 5.20. Joan Semmel, Red White and Blue, oil on canvas, 48 x 58 in.

300

Fig. 5.21. Anita Steckel in her studio, New York Magazine, February 1974, photograph
by Henry Groskinsky

Fig. 5.22. Louise Bourgeois in her studio, New York Magazine, February 1974,
photograph by Henry Groskinsky

Fig. 5.23. Juanita McNeely in her studio, New York Magazine, February 1974,
photograph by Henry Groskinsky

301

Fig. 5.24. Joan Semmel in her studio, New York Magazine, February 1974, photograph
by Henry Groskinsky

Fig. 5.25. Hannah Wilke in her studio, New York Magazine, February 1974,
photograph by Henry Groskinsky

302
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Archives

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Museum of Modern Art, New York
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National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
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321
Appendix A: Carolee Schneemann, “Introduction to ‘Erotic Films by Women,’
Telluride Film Festival, September 4, 1977”

We have had to ask ourselves how did the men come to insist that their creation,
invention, interpretation and observation of woman was the only authentic one?

Why when women defined, explored and structured their own creative worlds was this
denied weight, seriousness – that only men among men could establish the mainstream
of culture? Why did Bronte, Eliot and Sand write under male pseudonyms? Why
were Dorothy Richardson’s innovations in language as a form of special memory
ignored? Why were the rare breakthroughs of female vision which were granted
importance in their own time, lost in subsequent history?

Art can be an area where we dismantle taboos, constraints of perception, materials,
structure. Traditionally men banished their constraining mothers from the psychic
spaces of rebellion, obsession, conviction. They excluded their sisters from competing
for attention, regard, importance. Wives and mothers were expected to sustain a
common ground – domestic, sexual, romantic, practical areas from which men were
freed in order to emphasize their cultural eminence. Masculine traditions
compartmentalized woman in very particular patterns.

Because men established the hierarchies and validations of their culture, they
expressed to women artists conscious or unconscious attitudes: Your art can never be
as significant or effective as ours…but you can bear children. Since this was assumed
it followed that women’s creative will and energy would be best placed within the
hands of those men inspired to construct her nature in forms which corresponded to
their needs and desires. And if a woman was not in reality a functional and mythical
Muse, she could in her own life ‘choose’ to serve the male artist in the realization of
his creative powers and process.

This brings me directly to objections to the public title of this program, “The Erotic
Woman”, which was not a title chosen by myself or Stan Brakhage, with whom I
made the selection of these films. Having been described and proscribed by the male
imagination for so long, no woman artist now wants to assume that she will define an
“erotic woman” for other women – the very notion immediately reverts to the
traditional stereotypes which this program of films vividly counters. Perhaps these
films will re-define ‘The Erotic Woman’; or to the contrary the films will be found to
be anti-erotic, sub-erotic, non-erotic. Perhaps this ‘erotic woman’ will be seen as
primitive, devouring, insatiable, clinical, obscene; or forthright, courageous, integral.

In any case these films personally and determinedly manifest aspects of our own
sexual vision apart from, and in resistence [sic] to those values inherited from

322
Appendix A (Continued)

masculine sexual visions. We are not Muse, whore, sexual object or an ideality. We
take the forbidden camera into our own hands. We are not actresses extending or
sustaining anyone’s image of what is ‘female.’ Each of these films demonstrates
concrete experience, the lived-life, not an invented, fantasized sexuality.

It is in all our interests to fully receive the visions of women made by women. In
effect it was the male artist who historically castrated himself in banishing, keeping at
a distance the full participation of women’s sensibility and cultural forms. Patriarchal
traditions split body/mind, romance/degradation, sacred/profane.

Finally I want to make clear that both in my own study of art history and in my
personal life, there have been those exceptional men who sustained and fought for the
works of women artists. The fact that we are here tonight, has been made possible by
the commitment of those women and men who encouraged and struggled for our
participations. My hope and expectation is that in the near future women will not be
the exceptional artists, that we will not have our work qualified as ‘woman’ painter,
sculptor, poet, musician, filmmaker. But that an equitable fusion of female and male
sensibility will automatically include our pronouns, our genital, and our art.

323
Appendix B: Carolee Schneemann, “From tape 2 of Kitch’s Last Meal (super 8
film 1973-1977)”

(as transcribed in Carolee Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works
and Selected Writings. Bruce McPherson, ed. 2nd ed. Kingston, N.Y.: McPherson,
1997)

I met a happy man
a structuralist filmmaker
—but don’t call me that
it’s something else I do—
he said we are fond of you
you are charming
but don’t ask us
to look at your films
we cannot
there are certain films
we cannot look at
the personal clutter
the persistence of feelings
the hand-touch sensibility
the diaristic indulgence
the painterly mess
the dense gestalt
the primitive techniques

(I don’t take the advice
of men who only talk to themselves)
PAY ATTENTION TO CRITICAL
AND PRACTICAL FILM LANGUAGE
IT EXISTS FOR AND IN ONLY
ONE GENDER

even if you are older than me
you are a monster I spawned
you have slithered out
of the excesses and vitality
of the sixties……..

he said you can do as I do
take one clear process
follow its strictest
implications intellectually
establish a system of

324
Appendix B (Continued)

permutations establish
their visual set…….

I said my film is concerned
with DIET AND DIGESTION

very well he said then
why the train?

the train is DEATH as there
is die in diet and di in digestion

then you are back to metaphors
and meanings
my work has no meaning beyond
the logic of its systems
I have done away with
emotion intuition inspiration—
those aggrandized habits which
sets artists apart from
ordinary people—those
unclear tendencies which
are inflicted upon viewers…….

it’s true I said when I watch
your films my mind wanders
freely……………
during the half hour of
pulsing dots I compose letters
dream of my lover
write a grocery list
rummage in the trunk
for a missing sweater
plan the drainage pipes for
the root cellar………..
it is pleasant not to be
manipulated

he protested
you are unable to appreciate
the system the grid
the numerical rational

325
Appendix B (Continued)

procedures—
the Pythagorean cues—

I saw my failings were worthy
of dismissal I’d be buried
alive my works lost………

he said we can be friends
equally tho we are not artists
equally I said we cannot
be friends equally and we
cannot be artists equally

he told me he had lived with
a ‘sculptress’ I asked does
that make me a ‘film-makeress’?

Oh No he said we think of you
as a dancer

Abstract (if available)

Abstract While the 1970s are known for the rise of feminism and female sexual imagery, this dissertation demonstrates that women were already creating a wide range of sexually themed art in the 1960s. Even before the formation of the first women artists’ group, Women Artists in Revolution, signaled the beginning of a collaborative feminist art movement in 1969, female artists working in a variety of media—including filmmaker Carolee Schneemann, painter Marjorie Strider, sculptor Hannah Wilke, and collagist Anita Steckel—began redefining the boundaries of contemporary art through their sexually explicit works. This dissertation argues that erotic art made by women artists was central to the radical changes that took place in American art and politics during this period—from the crumbling of modernist aesthetics to the expanding field of art practice to the emergence of the feminist art movement. In the midst of a male-dominated contemporary art world, the public display of sexual content by female artists challenged the paradigm of formalism and laid the groundwork for a discussion of gender and sexuality in representation.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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ALT LA: alternative art spaces that shaped Los Angeles, 1964-1978

Asset Metadata

Creator Middleman, Rachel (author)

Core Title A new eros: sexuality in women's art before the feminist art movement

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Art History

Publication Date 07/17/2010

Defense Date 05/13/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Anita Steckel,Anne Sharp,art in the 1960s,Barbara Nessim,Body art,Carolee Schneemann,erotic art,eroticism in art,Eunice Golden,experimental film,feminism,feminist art,feminist art history,fight censorship group,Hannah Wilke,Joan Glueckman,Joan Semmel,Juanita McNeely,Judith Bernstein,Judson Dance Theater,Louise Bougeois,Marjorie Strider,Martha Edelheit,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance,pinup,pop art,postminimalism,sexual imagery,women in art,women's art movement

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Meyer, Richard E. (committee chair), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member), Troy, Nancy J. (committee member)

Creator Email middlema@usc.edu,rachelmiddleman@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3193

Unique identifier UC1215532

Identifier etd-Middleman-3849 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-360069 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3193 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Middleman-3849.pdf

Dmrecord 360069

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Middleman, Rachel

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu