Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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Before the women’s liberation movement entered wider public consciousness in the early 1970s, women artists were creating an early feminist aesthetic and imagining new fields of possibility for themselves and their work. For historic Surrealists, the radical juxtapositions made possible by collage were appealing for their apparent capacity to communicate unconscious thoughts and desires. For the protofeminists of the 1960s, collage offered a way to highlight the myriad social, political, and psychological expectations imposed on women. This technique allowed them to combine abstraction with representational forms in order to convey the complexity of their personal experiences. Although the presence of sexual content meant their work was often sensationalized as “erotic art,” such artists held an expansive set of concerns, from gender and sexuality to objectification and artifice. As the experimental filmmaker and photographer Barbara Hammer would later reflect: “I was swept up with the energies and dreams of a feminist revolution. We could make a new world where everyone was equal. We believed it, and we tried our best to live it.”

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Two overlays of a resting person's face in black and white, casting shadows on one another.

In the early 1970s, Barbara Hammer produced intimate black-and-white photographs of herself, her friends, her lovers, and her collaborators, giving shape and dimension to the artist's social circle shortly after she came out as a lesbian. One of her subjects was the artist and writer Tee Corinne, whose face takes on an otherworldly, mask-like appearance through Hammer's embrace of layered images, multiple exposures, and darkroom "mistakes" like smeared emulsion. Hammer would use similar techniques to represent the complexity and delight of female sexuality in her experimental filmmaking practice.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

The Big Rip-Up

9

Barbara Hammer, Tee Corinne #7, 1972

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