Womens bodies in art: liberating the female nude

On 3 May 2022, London’s Goodman Gallery held a private view for the artist Ghada Amer’s exhibition “My Body My Choice”. That title was bitterly prescient. Earlier that day, a draft was leaked of a US Supreme Court ruling, showing that Roe v Wade – the landmark 1973 decision conferring the right to abortion – was on the verge of being reversed.

Since the 1990s, Amer’s work has explored the policing of the female body – its sexual urges, its size and shape, its rights to exposure or concealment. Using stereotypically “feminine” media, she has transformed pornographic imagery in joyous explosions of coloured embroidery and spelt out feminist tenets in floral planters.

“My Body My Choice” was not a show about abortion rights: Amer tells me that she used the phrase “to speak about the right of women to use their body freely and not let society, culture, religion or advertising agencies use it and speak on their behalf.” Nevertheless, one of her key concerns is to offer a visible corrective to complacency. “The fight for women’s liberation that we are engaged in today is the same as that of older generations,” she says. “We need to always remember what our elders fought for and not let their battles go to waste, because history repeats itself.”

Art has long been a medium for both women’s repression and resistance. In 1973, the film theorist Laura Mulvey identified a phen­omenon she termed the “male gaze”: the idea that gender (and, we might retrospectively add, sexual orientation) has an effect on what we enjoy looking at and how we present that subject in art. The female body has historically been framed largely by and for the pleasure of the male gaze. Mulvey and her contemporaries explored how art might instead reflect the complexity of female experience, and what an impact a real woman with agency and intellect might have if she assumed the status of an art object.

Up to and Including Her Limits (1973-1976) by Carolee Schneemann

A recently opened show at the Barbican re-examines the work of one of the most celebrated proponents of “body art”, the late Carolee Schneemann, who, in 1959, travelled down the East Coast, then took a ferry to Cuba for an abortion, which was provided without anaesthetic. She was 20 and in a relationship, but did not wish to become a mother – hence the trip, and her willingness to endure such pain and hazard. After the procedure, Schneemann wrote about the sense of liberation she felt, her head “flooding with wonderful power… The body writhes and crumples and twists, the head is filled with joy, exultant and free.”

It was in 1973, the year of Roe v Wade, that the artist first performed Up To And Including Her Limits, for which she suspended herself naked in a tree surgeon’s harness and drew on huge sheets of paper, leaving her mark everywhere that the apparatus constraining her would allow. It was an act of creative defiance, in which her physicality became a powerful instrument pushing against the constrictions placed on it. Schneemann saw her performing body as a riposte to the supine nudes of art history – those perfected cultural objects untroubled by bodily functions, sexual cravings or a life of the mind. She spoke of “the power of the naked body as an active image rather the same old, pacified, immobilised, historicised body”.

In displaying her unclothed form and addressing sexuality with extraordinary frankness, Schneemann at times fell foul of both the art establishment and her feminist contemporaries. The beautiful naked body is tricky territory, then as now: efforts to control women’s physicality do not stop at the gallery door. Artists from Schneemann to Tracey Emin and beyond have been accused by fellow women of playing a double game, of showing off and enjoying the excitement they arouse. It is hard to demarcate what the feminist critic Lucy Lippard dubbed the “subtle abyss” that distinguishes an unclothed woman presented for sexual titillation, and one presented to protest sexual objectification.

Talking to the New York-based artist Tschabalala Self about her textile-enriched paintings of abundant Black bodies, showing at Pilar Corrias gallery in October, I suggest that her work celebrates women’s sexuality. Not exactly, she tells me. Sexuality is present in the work simply as part of life. To suggest it’s something to be celebrated “is like saying you need to celebrate eating or evacuating. It’s something inherent to the body. Because people don’t view it as such, it becomes politicised. In reality, it’s not a political action, it’s a function.”

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Self studied at the same college as Schneemann – Bard in New York – and feels a shared sensibility, but cautions that in her work, the politics of the female body cannot be separated from “a very particular Black American experience – one rooted in a particular narrative and history, the biggest part of that history being the fact that Black Americans are the descendants of individuals who were physically enslaved in this country”. In this context, the reversal of Roe v Wade becomes the latest in a long history of laws curtailing physical freedom. “That’s really a fundamental part of American culture, too,” she adds. “I think people should talk about all the other instances in which America has created laws in which people have no control over their body.”

Looking at the female body through the lens of its legacy of enforced labour, the counter position of repose holds its own political potency. This October, Self’s sculpture of a seated Black woman will be installed by Avant Arte at London’s Coal Drops Yard. “I felt it would be powerful to show a relaxed woman sitting at a large scale in a public space – for her to really be taking up that space,” she explains.

In Zoë Buckman’s recent exhibition “Bloodwork” at Pippy Houlds­worth gallery, the British-born artist looks to blood as a product of violence, as evidence of disease and as an emblem of kinship: ties that bind. Like Amer and Self, she turns to needlework for its evocation of the intimate feminine realm. Vintage textiles that once communicated domestic respectability are, here, evidence of private tension. Buckman embroiders texts that might as well be bloodstains: threats, and mournful admissions of heartbreak and desire. Many come from her poem “Show Me Your Bruises, Then”, a meditation on violence, sexual assault and female friendship that forms the script of a recent film performed by Sienna Miller and Cush Jumbo.

Dripping Jenny (2021) by Ghada Amer

“Bloodwork” touches on Buckman’s experience of miscarriage: a vanishingly rare subject for art, and one of outwardly invisible pain and grief. The stigma attached to both the loss of a child and abortion contributes to a cultural climate in which issues related to the female body become unmentionable – and by extension vulnerable to external control. In 2020, Buckman participated in “Abortion is Normal”, an “emergency” exhibition organised by Marilyn Minter, Laurie Simmons and others on the New York art scene, intended to bring the subject back into the open. Under pressure from the religious right in the US, Minter noted at the time, abortion was becoming a taboo topic: how can you fight for something you no longer felt empowered to discuss?

Buckman draws a direct connection between the reversal of Roe v Wade and violent abuse toward women. “Here I am, yet again, being reminded of how I am smaller than you,” she says, recalling the leaked documents on 3 May as both shocking but also horribly unsurprising. It’s a sentiment that echoes a text work released by Barbara Kruger at the time: “If the end of Roe is a shock, then you haven’t been paying attention.”

In 1998, Paula Rego drew on her own experience in paintings of 10 defiant women going through back-street abortions. The prints that she made from this series were circulated widely, and even reproduced in Portuguese newspapers, giving a human face to the issue ahead of a referendum legalising abortion in 2007. Artists have the power to keep difficult subjects in the public conversation: their work can help express what feels unsayable. As women’s rights come under attack, the courage, imagination and revolutionary spirit of artists can be the catalyst for change our society needs.

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