Does a visual artist need a male name?

Opinion piece published in KULTURMONITOR. March 2020. By Augusta Atla

Opinion piece published in KULTURMONITOR. March 2020. By Augusta Atla

Innovation now?
As a visual artist raised by an art historian, and exposed to the history of Western art from an early age, even as a child I realised that art history was male-dominated and chauvinistic.

As a living female visual artist, it is fun to research and create your own art history and art theory, in an attempt to come up with a ‘pure’ approach to your profession and its methods. Female artists almost have to go right back to the ‘origins of art’, scrutinise the use of the artwork across the ages and thereby gradually invent their own language in the face of centuries of traditions, inventions and perceptions. This art-based, socio-psychological work is exciting and profitable, and there is still a vast amount of research to be done. It is an extremely fascinating academic subject and field of research, and my own works are part of it.

Does a visual artist need a male name?
The figures are unfortunately very negative for women. Works by women accounted for only 2% of the total sales at auctions in the period 2008-2019. At art fairs and in galleries, women artists still represent between 0 and 30% of the artists shown. At the largest art fair in the world, Art Basel, female representation has been less than 25% in the last four years.

Unfortunately, the problem stems from the fact that the contemporary art scene and market are still sexist. My generation of visual artists, art historians and curators were brought up on the basis of methods and art history developed and crystallised largely by heterosexual, white, male chauvinist men. It was partly due to these men that many female painters and visual artists disappeared from the face of art history like dew in the morning sun. Our academic programmes in Europe are still failing to add, elucidate and emphasise the importance of female artists to the history of art. The same applies to the curatorial machine, in which we artists must put our faith.

Contemporary art with an old-fashioned world view
Danish and international academic education, and exhibition and museum practices have a huge job of research and detection ahead of them, if we are to survey art history thoroughly without the censorship of gender politics.

There are certain venues in Denmark, such as Cisternerne, HEART and Copenhagen Contemporary, whose exhibition programmes feature predominantly male artists. This does not reflect the work of the countless talented female artists both in Denmark and abroad. Nor, when it comes to the acquisition of works by female artists by museums in Denmark, are the figures yet positive. Throughout the entire period from 2004 to 2019, only 22% of the acquisitions were works by female artists.The number of female artists shown in solo exhibitions was 29%.The figures are worrying, since it is the museums and major public art galleries who should be leading the way. Only then will the commercial galleries and buyers come into the picture.

Is Europe ready?
Since Ancient Greece, European civilisation has been based on the capacity of the work of art to communicate and cooperate with the religious and political convictions of the time. Throughout the history of the Western world, art has, to a large degree, helped to determine the virtues we value today. But it has also partly co-curated our memory, our sense of self and our political structures.

Even today, the question is whether, despite first-wave feminism and women’s hard-won right to vote, Europe is ready to accommodate the female gaze. Whether our Western visual culture is geared to facilitate women’s active creation, their creative aspirations and participation in power, thereby also allowing them, as visual artists, to help create images for our culture that will become part of our future collective heritage and memory.

In her book, Women & Power (2018), Mary Beard explains how Europe’s earliest literature provides examples of men rebuking and dominating women, and rendering them invisible. Mary Beard takes an example from a passage in Homer’s Odyssey, in which a boy, Telemachus, is brought up to be a man by reprimanding his mother, Penelope: “Mother, go back to your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff… speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power of this household.” Penelope accepts his command and leaves.Later, in Roman literature Ovid’s Metamorphosis, a European classic on a par with the Bible, describes how the god Jupiter transforms the poor woman Io into a cow to stop her speaking. Meanwhile, Echo is punished by having her own voice taken away from her so she can only repeat the words of others.

How do we change these deeply-rooted routines?
How do we change these deeply-rooted routines, in which curators, museum directors, gallerists – not forgetting the press and art collectors – even women in power – choose not to show the work of female artists? And when will we become genuinely interested in the approach of female artists and their liberation in painting and art history? Not just for the sake of equality or political correctness, but for the scholarly and quantitative sake of the artistic profession.

It is going to take some courageous pioneering work and substantial research if we are finally to get up to date, at the same time ensuring professional, top-notch levels of innovation.

In this day and age, we need discursively to construct this misogynistic cultural heritage, instead of being lazy and pretending that the problem does not exist. Of course, the most important thing is to be aware, and that is something I also investigate in my artistic practice.