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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A person’s face appears on a screen with a pink digital outline and green background, creating a glitch effect.

Shigeko Kubota capitalized on the emerging video technologies of the early 1970s to make her Self-Portrait, using the Sony Portapak and a synthesizer to manipulate her own moving image in real time. Rendered in riotous color and kinetic patterns, Self-Portrait imagines a version of reality characterized by self-determination and limitless possibility. "Once cast into video's reality," she wrote, "infinite variation becomes possible. Not only weightlessness, but total freedom to dissolve, reconstruct, mutate all forms, shape, color, location, speed, scale...liquid reality."

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

The Big Rip-Up

9

Shigeko Kubota, Self-Portrait, 1970–71

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