Archive Newsletter No. 12
January 2024
The 1990 publication of Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity can be described in retrospect as a generational shift in feminist discourse: While previous theoretical approaches emphasized, for example, the historical contingency of existing images of women, Judith Butler focused on the constructedness and performativity of gender. At the same time, scholar Donna Haraway countered the scientific claim to objectivity with her feminist concept of situated knowledge, while a number of queer artists increasingly questioned the heterosexual social contract. The 1994 group exhibition Oh Boy, it’s a girl at Kunstverein München reflected these lively negotiations and brought together works by over thirty artists who questioned the binary subdivision logic of gender. In her guest article in the Archive Newsletter, Hedwig Saxenhuber, curator at the Kunstverein from 1992 to 1995 and responsible for the exhibition, describes the prevailing zeitgeist, the reaction in the press and the after-effects of the project.
Oh boy, it’s a girl!
by Hedwig Saxenhuber
“Home for me right now is still a home in which community is a vibrant part of my being, and that history will carry me through that in the same way that this self-portrait has carried me through 30 years and continuing to make art.” (Catherine Opie, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, press email from October 3, 2023)
What a coincidence! Almost three decades ago, the (self-)portraits of Catherine Opie and her queer friends from the Los Angeles leather dyke community were shown at the Kunstverein München in Oh boy, it’s a girl!. “It was the time when AIDS had taken many people in their 20s and 30s. Opie’s photographs were a strong political statement in the era of conservatism and homophobia. The representation of her queer friends was so new, in diversity and sublime beauty Opie created a space where the ‘queer and trans bodies could feel at home with others’.”
As a former curator of the Kunstverein, I was delighted to be asked to write for the Archive Newsletter, but it also irritated me. How do I relate to an archive to which I myself have contributed? How do I position myself as a curator and critic of my own history and of an exhibition about art that has found its place in feminist historiography? The digitization of the Kunstverein’s archive on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the institution has now found its central location - the Internet. It was still young at the time and now provides us with renewed visibility and existence for our projects.
Oh boy, it’s a girl! was the title of the 1994 exhibition, which came about at the suggestion of artist and graphic designer Dorit Margreiter as a reference to a work by William Wegman. This exhibition operated at the intersection of feminism and art of the 1960s and 1970s – with iconic works by Carolee Schneeman, VALIE EXPORT and Gina Pane, among others – and also showed examples of works with parodic impulses of emerging queer identity politics. The fact that in Oh boy, it’s a girl! questions were posed about current feminisms, gender politics and corresponding art practices along the lines of “Anglo-American gender theories” [1] only affected one part of the exhibition. It is true that the partly conflicting, mutually replacing feminisms took up a lot of space in the exhibition. However, the caesura in the German gay movement was also addressed by means of the retrospective - for example by means of the works of Thomas Eggerer / Jochen Klein or Jürgen Baldiga. Debates on masculinity, that aimed at its decentering, were juxtaposed with works that dealt with gender issues as “dispositives of power” embedded in structures of “white” racism (Nicole Eisenman).
My personal encounters with VALIE EXPORT [2] her first museum exhibition in 1992 at the Landesmuseum in Linz, her films and the exhibition Kunst mit Eigensinn 1985, which she initiated at the Museum moderner Kunst / Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts (now mumok), as well as the accompanying symposium Weibliche Ästhetik: Fiktion, Idee oder realistisches Projekt (Female Aesthetics: Fiction, Idea or the Realistic Project) had a formative influence on my generation in the Viennese film and art scene. VALIE EXPORT had already pointed out very early on in her work that “femininities” were constructed, artificial or false. “Femininity cannot be represented.” While solidarity [3] and self-awareness in groups were key impulses for the feminist movement in the 1970s, in the 1980s the focus of difference began to shift to “women” between and among women. A provocative thesis by Monique Wittig was “lesbian women are not women”.
The reading of Teresa de Laureti’s Technologies of Gender (1987) and Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities (1991) as well as Donna Haraway’s A Manifesto for Cyborgs (1985) had a major influence. Also formative were film screenings by Yvonne Rainer, which were one of our first program items at the Kunstverein München - with subsequent discussions, including the edition of a collection of texts by and about Yvonne Rainer translated into German for the first time under the title Talking Pictures. Films, feminism, psychoanalysis, avant-garde, the extraordinary work of Adrian Piper and the frequent presence of Andrea Fraser in Munich. All of this together opened up an infinite cosmos that encouraged me to stay in the feminist field. With Unbehagen der Geschlechter (Gender Trouble, 1990/1991), Judith Butler had created a large echo chamber of representational possibilities. Gender identities are permanent imitations, copies of a non-existent original. With her polarizations, Butler created indignation and euphoria, a pleasurable betrayal of feminism. With humor and in a subversive language, these gender confusions were translated into images, sculpture, photography and film, resulting in the motif of disappearance and non-binarity being comprehensible as a symptom in the exhibition through various movements (through the works of G.B. Jones, Alix Lambert, Nicole Eisenman, Chuck Nanney, Catherine Opie, Jürgen Klauke or Elke Krystufek).
Oh boy, it’s a girl! therefore not only dealt with “feminisms in art”, but also with a “feminism without women” (Leo Bersani), which was cast in a new light by gender travesties, gay politics and the deconstruction of normative structures of desire. This in turn was the occasion for the exhibition Oh Girl, It’s a Boy! at the Kunstverein München [4], which took place 13 years later - a reference to the exhibition mentioned at the beginning in order to rethink, question and reassess the central aspects of the underlying debates on “gender politics” and “gender studies” at the time in light of a changing political present.
The prevailing reception of Oh boy, it’s a girl! in the media in 1994 was mixed: conservative male art critics praised the “anti-activist” quality of the exhibition; progressive left-wing male critics complained that Oh boy, it’s a girl! was “not a feminist exhibition because it had not formulated a social perspective”. One of the local Munich newspapers wrote: “Only Barbie dolls humans”; “Dusty exhibition, neither original nor precise nor visually impressive, unsatisfactory”. Harsh criticism came from local radio: “Crude mess!” “The selection should have been stricter and sharper”. While a national daily newspaper was full of praise: “A brilliant success. Goes beyond the scope (discursive accessibility and embedding instead of specialist jargon). Exemplary. Unpretentious. Conviction of the coherence and necessity of the discourse that the exhibition promotes. Embedded in contemporary phenomena. Cleverly designed”.
Why is feminism suddenly so sexy? [5] Art historian Bojana Pejic posed this question in an article in springerin in 2008, beginning with a quote from Charles Esche. Esche criticized “[...] The current trend in the art world to remember and even imitate the first feminism is gratifying. Nevertheless, it is almost tragic that it has taken until today to remember something that we deliberately forgot more than 20 years ago.” One is inclined to say by proxy: But not us, Charles! Many of us worked on it in the 1990s and are now visible again thanks to access to the Kunstverein München’s digital archive. Every decade and a half, feminism in art is rediscovered again and again, each time with euphoria and head-shaking: why only now, why so late, while overlooking the fact that it has been and is being worked on continuously.
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Hedwig Saxenhuber is a freelance curator and co-editor of springerin - Hefte für Gegenwartskunst and lives in Vienna. She has curated many international exhibitions, most recently the 5th Kyiv Biennale (2023).
Copy editing: Gloria Hasnay, Jonas von Lenthe, Lucie Pia
In order to have the website grow, we would gladly receive material such as photos, flyers, articles, or films on past exhibitions and events. Feel free to contact us at archiv@kunstverein-muenchen.de.
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Footnotes
[1] springerin.at/2008/1/review/oh-girl-its-a-boy/
[2] VALIE EXPORT’s Tapp und Tastkino (1968) was presented as a performance at Munich’s Stachus on the occasion of the 1st International Meeting of Independent Filmmakers of the World, Munich. In: Spilt:Reality VALIE EXPORT, 1997, p. 60.
[3] Women’s meeting of the German women’s emancipation groups at the Kunstverein München on the occasion of the first protest against section 218 of the German Criminal Code, which makes abortiona punishable offense, according to Haimo Liebich. In: Maurin Dietrich, Gloria Hasnay (Eds.), FOR NOW. 200 Years of Kunstverein München, 2023, p. 214–215.
[4] Under the direction of Stefan Kalmár, who saw the exhibition Oh boy, it’s a girl! as a visitor in 1994, the theme was taken up in the exhibition in 2007.
[5] springerin.at/2008/1/warum-ist-feminismus-pl%C3%B6tzlich-so-sexy
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Images
[1] Works by Inez van Lamsweerde and Paul McCarthy in Oh boy, it’s a girl!, Kunstverein München, 1994; photo : Wilfried Petzi
[2] Installation view, Oh boy, it’s a girl!, Kunstverein München, 1994; photo : Wilfried Petzi
[3] G.B. Jones, Tattoo Girls, 1987, Teil der Ausstellung Oh boy, it's a girl!, Kunstverein München, 1994
[4] Alix Lambert, Male Pattern Baldness, 1993, as part of the exhibition Oh boy, it’s a girl!, Kunstverein München, 1994
[5] Installation view, Oh boy, it’s a girl!, Kunstverein München, 1994; photo : Wilfried Petzi
[6] Jürgen Klauke, Männerphantasien, 1978, as part of the exhibition Oh boy, it’s a girl!, Kunstverein München, 1994
[7] Installation view with a work by Christa Näher, Oh boy, it’s a girl!, Kunstverein München, 1994; photo : Wilfried Petzi