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Exploring The Body Womens Art in Italys
Exploring The Body Womens Art in Italys
Exploring The Body Womens Art in Italys
Alix Chagué
In 2005, Eva Rus started her study of Italian feminism in the post-war period 1 reminding
her reader that in scholarly works on national feminisms, the case of Italy had often been
overlooked. In the domain of art history, still in 2014, we are forced to come to the same
observation. In actuality, this statement is not only true when it comes to speaking about so-
called feminist art in Italy, but it is also valid about the study of Italian women artists in the
1970s and more broadly in the twentieth century. Male artists are not the only ones to blame for
stealing the show from their female contemporaries: interestingly, a select few Italian women
artists from the pre-modern period have captured most of the attention from scholars interested
in the situation of women artists in Italy. A simple search on Italian women artists on any
browser will bring the names of Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavina Fontana and Barbara Longhi a
good hundred times before Carla Accardi, Marisa Merz or Ketty La Rocca start to make their
way to us. It is evident Italian art produced by women in the twentieth-century, in particular in
the 1970s, have been marginalized. And yet, this seems surprising when we consider the
changing the discipline of art history went through during that same period: the 1970s have seen
emerging, in most Western countries, a strong activism from women and intellectuals in favor of
women's emancipation. Authors such as Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock have actively
worked at re-framing the discipline of art history in making women -artists and subjects- a new
object of analysis; which a priori insured women artists from that period a greater visibility in
the art historical surveys to come. It was unfortunately not the case of Italian women artists'
production in the postwar era. Three causes could be identified in understanding this
1 Eva Rus, “From New York Radical Feminists to Rivolta Femminile: Italian Feminist Rethink the Practice
of Consciousness Raising, 1970-1974” (Irish Feminist Review, no.1, 2005), 1.
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history to reproduce a patriarchal discourse that excludes feminine values, and denies women
the status of creator. In spite of feminist art historians' efforts, this still is true in today's
approaches of the discipline. Secondly, what could have given birth to a “style” consistent
enough to be included in art historical surveys and art historians' concerns is actually a very
introducing to an exhibition on the Feminist Avant-Garde of the 70s, “feminist artistic practices
are themselves so diverse, debates about the existence of a feminist aesthetics so unresolved,
that the concept of a discrete entity called feminist art remains either too broad or too narrow to
be useful.”2 There might never have existed such a thing as feminist art, despite the growing
production of art works by women artists who embraced their gender and displayed its reality in
their art during that period, in Italy as elsewhere on the globe. This is where we meet the third
cause I observe: the growing presence of women's art in the 70s is a global phenomenon, often
exemplified by American “feminist-influenced art,”3 which makes little room or justification for
studies on a national specificity. Given these circumstances, I cannot claim the existence of an
already controversial Italian feminist art. Rather, my interest is in trying to understand the
influences of and responses to the feminist struggle in art produced by women in Italy in the
1970s, and to reintroduce the centrality of the representation of the body in these discourses.
The patriarchal Italian society, often characterized as macho, made great use of rhetoric of
domination based on the subjection of women's body. However, studies on Italian feminist-
influenced art have often left out this crucial sign in favor of a focus placed on non-figurative
art. After showing the limit of such reading of art produced in Italy under the influence of
2 Abigaïl Salomon-Godeau, “The Fine Art of Feminism,” (Donna: Avanguardia Femminista Negli Anni '70
dalla Sammlung Verbund di Vienna, Milan: Electa, 2010), 40.
3 Ibid.
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feminism, I want to analyze how the representation of the body intended to play an essential role
concerns.
The Italian culture in the early 1970s carried a heavy legacy from patriarchal institutions
that exercised and expressed an oppression particularly visible on women's bodies. One of the
battles led by third-wave feminism, specifically in Italy, had for stake the recovery of these
bodies.
operated and interacted in the political and cultural domains. As a consequence, social pressure
and legal frames located women at home and men in the public and political field. The Fascist
ideology of women's place in society echoed the traditional gender-based repartition of roles
defined in Europe during the modern period. Mussolini's discourse, however, far from abating
the dichotomy between men and women's sphere, reinforced it for the sake of the nation: “War
is to man what maternity is to woman.” 4 Women's role was determined by motherhood and
domestication. Denied any legitimacy in the Italian Fascist society other than that of
engendering sons for the nation, women's existence in the Fascist ideology was guided by their
womb, an idea of women's natural destiny located in maternity that lasted long after the fall of
4 Mussolini quoted by Jennifer Griffiths, “Erotically engaged: Olga Carolina Rama's Politically Defiant
Bodies” (Women's Studies Quaterly, 2013), 82.
5 Andrea Hayek, “Defining Female Subjectivities in Italy: motherhood and abortion in the individual and
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immediate years after the war, the political forces of the country did little to follow. They
revealed powerlessness in changing women's position and representation in the Italian society.
Right after the fall of the Fascist regime, the political landscape of Italy was dominated in major
the political sphere despite its separation from the State in 1929. In her study on the early
feminist wave in Italy in the first years of the twentieth-century, Helena Dawes demonstrated the
ideological incompatibility between the defense of women's emancipation and the Catholic
doctrines, which led to the failure of the catholic feminist movement in those years. At the root
dogma,”6 which defined women as having been “created to be man's helper” 7 and therefore
considered “her state in life [to be] defined by her relation to him.” 8 This ideology was restated
in 1930 by Pope Pius XI in order to protect the “character and the dignity of motherhood.” 9
Following the influence of Catholic doctrine, women's position in Italy was that of a mother,
Christian Democracy in the decades following World War II, the Italian Communist Party (PCI)
was placing women's emancipation at the core of the evolution of society toward democracy. In
1945, when tackling the “questione femminile,” Palmiro Togliatti argued that women's
emancipation was “one of the central issues in the renewal of the Italian state and of Italian
society.”10 In spite of the PCI's rallying to the women’s cause, with, for example, its support to
collective memories of the 1970s women's movement in Bologna” (Women's History Review, 23, 4, 2014),
546.
6 Helena Dawes, “Catholic feminism in Italy in the early 1960s” (Catholic Historical Review, 97, 3, July
2011) 497.
7 Ibid, 496.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid, 497.
10 Palmiro Togliatti, quoted by Pamela Schievenin in “Italian communism and the 'woman question' in post-
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the creation of the Union of Italian Women11 (UDI), little was achieved by the party. In her study
on the relation between women's emancipation and the PCI, Pamela Schievenin indicates that
many retired female leaders of the UDI and members of the PCI signaled in their memoirs the
“difficulties [they were confronted with] in pushing women's demands onto the party's political
agenda,”12 at least until the 1970s. Overall, the Italian political situation in the decades after the
war gave little support to the women's struggle, from either of the two dominant political parties,
This representation of women had important resonance in Italian visual culture, in great
part fed by advertisement on the one hand, and cinema on the other hand. In the years of the
reinforcing women's seclusion to the domestic space. Strong emphasis was placed on home
design in Italy, as the country aligned with the induction given by the American market and the
American Dream ideal: it resulted in the promotion of ideally equipped kitchens, for equally
ideal housewives, whose social achievements were defined in terms of occupation and
decoration of the domestic space. Molded to the consumerist society, “[t]he “new woman” ...
remained circumscribed within a doctrine of separate gender spheres by the modern era’s
the image of the new woman imported in Italy from the US fueled the apparition of visual and
war Italy: from memory to history” (Twentieth Century Communism, 4, May 2012), 189.
11 Pamela Schievenin reminds us that the organization was created in 1944, intended to gather women
beyond political divisions, but was soon left by the Christian Democratic women and endured as the
association of left feminist women.
12 Schievenin, “Italian communism and the 'woman question' in post-war Italy,” 192.
13 Emily S Rosenberg, “Consuming Women: Images of Americanization in the 'American Century'”
(Diplomatic History, 2002), 481-482.
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of the mother was not altered by this new figure: they cohabited, secluding the Italian woman
into these two paradigms. Analyzing the relationship between women designers and the
profession in the post-war period, Catharine Rossi draws attention to male-based set of values
that dominated in the sphere of creative design and that permeated in the designers and
advertisers' formal vocabularies. “Th[e] objectification of women in designed objects,” she says,
“mirrored the sexualized depiction of women in Italian culture at the time.” 14 The example of
Gaetano Pesce's armchair15 shows the complexity of women's representation and the interaction
operated between the two paradigms evoked before. The armchair recalls the figure of the
mother: the connection between the armchair and the round footrest hints at the act of giving
birth. However, the maternal dimension of the furniture is coupled with round forms that are
evocative of hips and breasts, that of a voluptuous creature. Pesce's object exemplifies the
formal use of women's bodies orchestrated by Italian design: her body was not solely
ideologically objectified; Italian creators transformed it into actual domestic objects. Similar
operations were done in the realm of cinema. In her survey of Italian cinema during the
twentieth-century in relation to the female figure, Marga Cottino-Jones has noted that in spite of
women's overwhelming presence in Italian movies, “the film discourse … seems to limit the
relevance of the female protagonists' role vis-à-vis the male protagonists' role, [projecting]
fascinating images of beautiful but powerless women on the screen.” 16 In other words, in the
Italian cinema, women protagonists were either presented under the traditional figure of the
14 Catharine Rossi, “Furniture, Feminism and the Feminine: Women Designers in Post-war Italy, 1945 to
1970” (Journal of Design History, 22, 3, 2009), 252.
15 Illustation 1.
16 Marga Cottino-Jone, Women, Desire and Power in Italian Cinema (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010),
1.
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representation that Cottino-Jones linked directly to the patriarchal organization of the Italian
society and the dominant Catholic ideology. This cinema reproduced an ideal of women as
“harmless to men and socially devised according to a male point of view.” 18 It is only in the
1970s that a few Italian movies “aim[ed] at 'decentering the masculinity' and highlighting the
female potential.”19 These deviances to traditional representation “reflected the social changes
that were considered in Italian society … that eventually took place in the legislative and
sociocultural system of Italy in the [1970s and 1980s], thus validating that art is closely
intertwined with the cultural humus from which it takes its inspiration.” 20 The conclusion drawn
political and the arts. As a new wave of feminism swelled in the 1970s from the US, rapidly
reaching the Italian territory, one would seek for reactions from the Italian art world to feminist
impulses.
The Italian 1970s displayed “a background of social ferment -the Italy of divorce, family
law and the struggle to legalize abortion- … [and was a] time when Carla Lonzi was circulating
the Manifesto of Women's Revolt (1970) along with Carla Accardi and Elvira Benotti, while
Elena Gianini Belotti published Little Girls (1973), soon to become an icon in the history of
17 Ibid, 2.
18 Ibid, 3.
19 Ibid, 5.
20 Ibid, 5-6.
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feminism.”21 This synthetic approach of Italian feminism helps understand the resonance and
reactivity of women in Italy to the impulse of new feminist concerns in the 1970s, following on
from women's emancipation movements in the decade immediately after the end of World War
II. In her study of Rivolta Femminile and the Italian Feminist movements in the early 1970s,
Rus signaled the important influences of American, French and British feminist theories to its
appearance in Italy, but intends to demonstrate, however, that there was a distinctive character to
Italian feminism. Taking the example of the “autocoscienza” groups, that were imported from
the American “consciousness-raising groups,” she considered the importance of “the process of
personal change [that was seen] as a key to liberation and, thus, posed the practice of
autocoscienza and separatism as the shared instruments for a process of individual, collective
and social transformation.”22 Her evocation of Rivolta Femminile enables us to understand the
specific dominant form taken by the feminism struggle in Italy. Contrary to the emancipation
movement of the immediate after-war, exemplified by the UDI, this new wave of feminism
intended to act out from the outside of the political sphere: a change needed to be operated from
within the society. They were critical of UDI's achievements and of the reliability of institutional
structures:
21 Angelandreaina Rorro, “On Ketty's Side” (Donna: Avanguardia Femminista Negli Anni '70 dalla
Sammlung Verbund di Vienna, Milan: Electa, 2010), 46.
22 Rus, “From New York Radical Feminists to Rivolata Femminile,” §2.
23 Leslie Cozzi, “Spaces of Self-Consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian
Feminism” (Women & Performance: a journal of feminist Italy, 21, 1, March 2011), 74.
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Women did not only need to earn more rights, they also needed to have a space where they
could express themselves: as was signaled by Schevenin, women battling immediately in the
political sphere, in the male sphere, “felt uncomfortable and sometimes inadequate … unable to
with a language that eventually allowed them to occupy the political sphere. Considering the set
of feminism in Italy, it is interesting to assess the resonance such discourses found in art
Rorro included the name of Carla Accardi in her brief statement on the Italian context for
feminism in the 1970s: interestingly, she presents the Italian woman as a theorist of a major
importance, actively involved in the elaboration of a framework for the activist group Rivolta
Femminile. Indeed, as presented by Leslie Cozzi, “Accardi was an influential force behind the
emergence of Italian feminism in the 1970s … As an artist and a polemicist, through her
artworks and through her texts … [she] helped shape Italian feminism's anti-institutional
character and separatist praxis.”25 Rivolta Femminile had a pioneer position in Italy: it is
considered “one of Italy's first feminist groups”26 in the period. Not solely a theorist, Carla
Accardi was an artist, initially. As her career began in the middle of the 1940s, she was already
well-installed in the Italian artistic scene when she started gaining interest in feminist
struggles.27 At that point in her stylistic elaboration, Accardi had been evolving in the realm of
non-figurative art and developing her use of plastic as a main material. The case of Carla
Accardi offered an attractive approach to the study of art productions influences by feminist
24 Schievenin, “Spaces of Self-Consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian
Feminism,” 193.
25 Leslie Cozzi, “Spaces of Self-Consciousness,” 73.
26 Ibid, 67.
27 Ibid, 68.
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theories and struggles: acting both in the realm of politics and theory with the numerous texts
she published through Rivolta Femminile, and in the domain of art, both her art and texts are
seen as absolute examples of Italian Feminism and Italian Feminist art -for scholars that
intended to defend the existence of such an entity. Surprisingly, Cozzi noted that in spite of her
engagement in the feminist movement, most of Accardi's works have been studied only from an
aesthetic approach that ignored the political implication of, for example, the tents and
environments she created between 1965 and 1971. Cozzi's study of Tent, Triple Tent and Orange
analogue and revaluation of female difference … [and that proposed] new forms of social space
that would both shelter and support female creativity.” 29 The analysis therefore intended to
reinforce the political dimension of these installations -that she considered a determinant
parameter- drawing a parallel between Accardi's activism and the formal and spatial evolution of
her structures.
“The scale of the work may in fact relate to the timing of the piece in relation
to Accardi's own experience of feminism … by 1970 Accardi was beginning to
conceive of feminism as a group endeavor. Thus the larger work tallies with the
increasing fervor and participation surrounding Accardi's feminist project.”30
By doing so, however, Cozzi, it seems, intended to read the evolution of feminism in Italy
through the specific case of Accardi. Cozzi's understanding of Accardi's feminism is essentially
based on the construction of a separate sphere that yet presents porous limits. Indeed, the use of
plastic materials helps to delimit a space without for it to be concealed from outside gazes. In
that sense, these structures stand as convincing manifestations of Accardi's defense of a separate
28 Illustration 2, 3.
29 Cozzi, “Spaces of Self-Consciousness,” 68.
30 Ibid, 73.
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environment that yet does not intend to completely cut itself off from the public sphere. As
exposed by Cozzi: “These modestly scaled, semi-transparent enclaves blurred clear distinctions
between interior and exterior [and] translated the personal realm into a semi-public spectacle
just as autocoscienza would later convert individual reflection into an active political tool.” 31
The self-consciousness groups remained a dominant form of feminist activism in Italy in the
early 1970s,32 which explains the attractiveness of using Accardi's artwork as a lens through
which to understand the elaboration of feminist discourses in Italy at that same time. “She also
cultural forms. … [her] environments promoted female labor as a central concern,” 33 reported
Cozzi. This concern for the rehabilitation of devalued craft art associated to women's activity
has also been expressed by other artists in that period. Lately integrated as the only female
participant in the movement of Arte Povera, Marisa Merz's artworks were composed from
simple and repetitive actions, such as the performance of knitting. A good example of the type of
production she made during the 1960s is an untitled composition 34 she realized in 1969, that
progress. The formal language remains simple as the knitted fabric forms a round pattern
enclosed in the triangle constructed by the needles. Given the feminine anchorage of these
materials, however, studies of her artistic production have often emphasized her gender, which,
as a result, weakened the strength of her works. “Rather than producing in the traditional artistic
space of the atelier, she reinvent[ed] the home as a space of production and reappropriate[d]
31 Ibid, 68.
32 Rus, “From New York Radical Feminists to Rivolata Femminile,” § 14. “The prevailing political form of
Italian feminism between 1971-74 was, and remains, the small autocoscienza group.”
33 Cozzi, “Spaces of Self-Consciousness,” 83.
34 Illustration 4.
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artistic labor through craft.”35 The move operated by Merz is interesting: rather than conceding
her style to the dominant structure of art production -that which was shaped according to male
expressivity- she imposed the female space as defined by the patriarchal structures in the realm
structure in which she evolved. Therefore, her work ought to be understood not as a naïve
expressivity developed by a woman who may owe her artistic existence to her marriage to one
of the most important figures on the Italian art scene, Mario Merz. On the contrary, as she
claimed her independence vis-à-vis the dominating male styles, modes of expression and
institutions, her knitted works stand as subversive attempts, where she grasped this material
secluded to a domestic, amateurish, crafting and therefore devalued environment, and forced it
into the space of the gallery. In doing so, she paralleled one of the stakes of Accardi's structures:
as both artists forced the domestic into the museum institutions, they manifested the feminist's
statement that the “personal is political,”37 under the affirmation that the domestic can be public
and artistic.
35 Mariana Moscoso, “An(other) Marisa Merz: an alternative interpretation to the 'feminized' artworks of
Arte Povera Artist Marisa Merz,” (UCLA Center for the Study of Women, Spring 2014), 7.
36 Marisa Merz, “Come una dechiarazione” quoted by Mariana Moscoso, “An(other) Marisa Merze,” 4.
37 The phrase was popularized after the publication Carol Hanisch's essay “The Personal is Politcal” in 1970.
38 Cozzi, “Spaces of Self-Consciousness,” 74. “The collective achieved public notoriety after they circulated
mimeographed copies of their manifesto throughout Rome. In this document, the groups explicitly
articulated the conception of female difference and the rejection of egalitarian politics that would become
central to much Italian feminist discourse for the next three decades.”
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Accardi's work remains only a reading of Accardi's feminism. It is hard to believe her work is
sufficient to embrace the variety of Italian artworks produced by women in Italy and those that
have been influenced by feminist theories. Besides, Marisa Merz and Carla Accardi's
productions both remained in the realm of non-figurative art, which too often leaves figurative
construction of spatial division, both artists have barely tackled the question of women's body
and image, whereas it has been presented as one of the central issues at stake in feminist
struggle, namely inside the autocoscienza structures: “among the discussion topics since 1971,
under the influence of Lonzi's work, is the analysis of sexuality.” 39 The recovery of women's
autonomous sexuality implied the recovery of autonomous bodies and therefore a raise against
women's physical subjection. “Rape …, pregnancy, parturition, domestic and reproductive labor,
sexuality, the body were all central issues within [this] feminism,” 40 said Solomon-Godeau.
They are themes that had been dealt with in former feminisms but that came up with a renewed
visibility at that time. According to Abigail Solomon-Godeau, all these themes were considered
plausible subjects for art production all over the world, but their treatment in Italian artists' work
A long struggle was engaged by women in order to regain autonomy on their own bodies
through the twentieth century. The discourse elaborated in the 1970s was therefore to be inserted
inside a longer history of attempts to expose the patriarchal oppression in the realm of art
production. One of the main tools for the denunciation of women's subjection was the
subversion of its language. In Italy, the works of the Florentine artist Ketty La Rocca stood as
attempts to reveal systems of domination based on gender and race in Italy and in its visual
culture. Developed in the 1960s, and throughout the 1970s until her premature death in 1976,
her work responded to the social changing that happened during the period before and
contemporary to 1970s feminism. Her attack was located in the realm of language -words and
physical communication based on the body- and reflected on the muting “influence of mass
media.”41 A series of collages that she realized during the 1960s were the first step in the
organization of her criticism. In 1965, she created Sana come il pane quotidiano (Good as daily
bread)42, a collage on a profound black background on which she associated the image of a
blond and naked pin-up girl and a group of poor-looking children in the street. While the woman
stares flirtatiously at the viewer, her stomach is transformed into a circular space where the
children evoke the “povera realtà rurale”43 that La Rocca experienced before she moved to
Florence. In this collage, she subverted the main two images that framed women's
representation: that of the mother, and that of the desirable, sexualized woman. The round
element that encloses the children is evocative of maternity, and yet, the traditional iconography
of the nourishing mother is subverted by its association with notions of alienation, poverty and
starvation. This rhetoric of maternity seems doomed to fail. Besides, the added text functions as
a caption full of irony: “sana come il pane quotidiano.” It applies to the pump pin-up and reveals
41 Elisa Biagini, “L'ossessione del linguaggio: le prime opere di Ketty La Rocca” (Italian Culture, 19, 1,
January 2001), 115.
42 Illustration 5.
43 Biagini, “L'ossessione del linguaggio,” 114.
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her transformation into an object of daily consumption, like bread is. However, this comparison
fails because the children are here to signal the inexistence of such a thing as a daily bread to
eat: therefore is woman is not sane. Being compared to bread, this representation of a woman
intends to denounce her objectification and her transformation into an object of consumption: La
Rocca's collages, as exemplified by Sana come il pane quotidiano, were meant to “underscore
the 'fake sexual liberation that even more transformed the woman into an object of extremely
easy and almost free consumption.”44 Other collages focused on showing women's oppression
and incapacitation to express themselves. In that sense they echoed both the political situation of
women's engaged in feminist struggle after the second wave of feminism in Italy -as was evoked
earlier- and the general muting of women in the society as they remained unheard by their male
fellows. In a collage that evoked the domestic sphere and consumerism, Iconoclassic,45 La
Rocca showed two women on a white background, they are secluded to the bottom left corner
and leave a large empty space for the groups of words “elettro...addomesticati” and “se ne
parla.”46 The irony operates once again in the relationship between the captions and the images.
Far from being on the verge of talking about anything, the woman at the foreground is gagged.
She manifests the negation of her voice, but also her domestication, or sequestration to the
domestic space. The woman behind does not seem hampered in any way, but she presents an
intriguing mustache made of a stand of her hair passed above her lips. This couple of women,
one gagged, the other wearing men's attribute, displays a clear message: be a man or keep quiet.
Therefore none of them is susceptible to talk about women's “domestication.” This image finds
44 Ibid, 117. “sottolineare la 'falsa liberazione sessuale che ha a fatto della donna, doppiamente, un oggetto di
più facile e semigratuito consumo.'”
45 Illustation 6.
46 “electro...domesticated,” and “they talk about it”
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echos in La Rocca's personal concerns: according to Judith Kirschner, the artist described in
1974 “her own deficiency as a woman, despaired of her ability to express the condition of
women artists, and compared this frustration to a marriage gone bad.” 47 In the same article,
Kirschner evoked the impression of “something extremely private” that emanated from La
Rocca's work, in particular in later works realized by the Italian woman. In spite of the visual
efficiency of her collage to point out women's subjection, “Ketty La Rocca [remained] unable to
break into the male art world with her art and with her writings.” 48 As a consequence, she started
to develop a language based on her own expressivity that she centered on her own body. In
1971, she created a book collecting black and white photographs of her own hands that intended
to form sense without the support of words. The work soon evolved into the elaboration of a
series called La mie parole e tu?49 where La Rocca intended to render visible the relationship of
otherness that founds the language. Using her body to express this, she hints at the physical
experimentation of relation to Others. One of the images that compose the series represents a fist
surrounded by two hands half opened. With their spread fingers, these two hands are evocative
of a cage, either transforming the scene on an anatomical representation of the heart trapped a
ribcage, either evoking oppressive forces that capture an individual element. The sharp contrasts
of light cast a dramatic tension of the composition, hinting at a discrete and possibly violent
confrontation between different forces. At a time when third wave feminism discourse placed
the individual and its liberation at the core of women's emancipation, the emphasis that La
Rocca put on an expression of the individual self is relevant. A constant apparition, the notion of
47 Judih R. Kirschner, “You and I: The Art of Ketty La Rocca” (Artforum International, 31, March 1993) § 3.
48 Lucy Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasure of Rebirth: European and American Women's Body Art” (The Pink
Glass Swan: Selected essays on feminist art. New York: New Press, 1995), 107.
49 Illustration 7.
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the “Other” worked as an element of unification in her productions. In La mie parole e tu? it
appears through the repetition of “you,” that covers the lit parts of the hands. As signaled by
Biagini, “[t]his work of transcription also serves to define the limits of the self, creating a subtle
separation between inside and outside, between public and private.”50 “You,” the other, is where
definition of the self starts, where communication begins. In 1973, she started a series,
Craniologia,51 which engaged her own body further into her art. Using X-ray radiographers of
her brain, she created montages that associated images of her hands to her brain, “[h]er skull as
a fetal image with the hand -the language symbol- about to burst out of it, the image outlined by
the hand written word “you” repeated around its boundary.” 52 Blurring the separation between
an individual sphere and a social sphere of confrontation to the Other, La Rocca's research
inscribes itself in formal searches led by artists influenced by feminism like Accardi and Merz,
who intended to move the domestic into the public space. Using images taken from her own
body, La Rocca acknowledged its symbolical, significant potential and attempted to create a
new system of signification, based on the individual, offering therefore a recovered individuality
that, as observed by Chadwick traditional art had taken from women: “Confounding subject and
object, [history of art] undermines the speaking position of the individual woman artist by
generalizing her. Denied her individuality, she is displaced from being a producer and becomes
instead a sign for male creativity.”53 In that sense, Ketty La Rocca elaborated a critical discourse
reflective on the question of the self and its formation, as starting point for the elaboration of
language, and that continually inserted itself in resonance with feminist struggles.
50 Biagini, “L'ossessione del linguaggio,” 113. “Quest'opera di trascrizione serve inoltre a definire i limiti
dell'io, creando una delicata separazione tra interno ed esterno, tra pubblico e privato.”
51 Illustration 8.
52 Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasure of Rebirth,”107.
53 Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society (London; New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 21.
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The pictorial display of women's body, of her body, that she developed remained only
one aspect in the diversity of expressions found by women artists during the period, often in
resonance with feminist discursive articulations. Body art that developed during the 1960s
while “it is difficult to find any positive image whatsoever of women in male body art,” 54
women's body art was always a positive politicized recovery of their individuality that opposed
male language. Indeed, “when women use their own bodies in their art work, they are using
their selves, a significant psychological factor converts these bodies or faces from objects to
subject.” One important female figure of body art attached to Italian culture was Gina Pane.
Because of the radical dimension of her performances, Pane stood out on the artistic scene. Her
repeated mutilations gave a radical character to her work that protected her from the common
risk of being “relegated to the categories of naïve art or craft art.” 55 As a matter of fact, when it
comes to women, art history has mostly retained the names of radical body artists. From Ana
Mendieta to Carolee Schneeman, those artists struck for the violence they staged on their body.
In the case of Gina Pane, this violence in most of her performances was addressing the
relationship between herself and her spectators. As explained by Judith Kirschner, “[r]adically
testing her limits and risking bodily integrity, she demonstrated her empathy for the 'other' in
part to create a community of the audience, who became her witnesses.” 56 The mutilation she
imposed on her body, were “sign[s] of the state of extreme fragility of the body, a sign of
suffering, a sign which indicates the external situation of aggression, of violence to which we
are always exposed.”57 In that sense, her work is concerned with displaying the individual
vulnerability, to eventually give it a universal resonance under the form of her female body. One
of the most iconic actions, that she performed in Milan in 1974, Azione Sentimentale,58
particularly illustrates the fashion in which her actions echoed, to a certain degree, feminist
theories developed at that time in Italy. Performed in front of an audience composed of women
only,59 her actions involved the re-creation of a separate sphere in which she intended to
reproduce “the Women/Women relationship”60 in an emotive register. As she planted the thorns
of a rose into her own arm, and cut the palm of her hand with a razor blade, she transformed her
arm into a “red rose, mystic flower, erotic flower, transformed into a vagina by a reconstitution
in its most present state, the painful one.” 61 Taking the form of a ceremonial sacrifice, her
performance therefore staged a fundamental aspect of women's relationship to their body, that of
move similar to that of feminist groups at the same time: from the individual, or the individual
experience of pain, to the group, and the political, rising against a silencing imposed by exterior
In this essay I have shown the centrality of a rhetoric elaborated on the body both in the
establishment and maintaining of a domination of women in the Italian society, and in the
the body of women was immediately attack by patriarchal discourse -secluded, silenced,
57 Gina Pane, quoted by Kirschner, ibid, 385.
58 Illustration 9.
59 Kirschner, “Voices and images of Italian feminism,” 385.
60 Gina Pane, quoted by Lea Vergine, Body Art and Performance: The Body As Language (Milan: Skira,
2000), 197.
61 Gina Pane, quoted by Vergine, ibid, 197.
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objectified, consumed- the use of the female body by women in arts tends inevitably to be
charged with a political character that linked it to feminism. In Italy, it interestingly led to the
elaboration of a dynamic that emanated from the individual, to be eventually an address to the
society.
Chagué 22
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ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Gaetano Pesce, UP5 Donna Armchair and UP6 footrest, from UP series, 1969.