Oh boy, it’s a girl!
with Bas Jan Ader, Jürgen Baldiga, Manuela Burghart, Jeanne Dunning, Lukas Duwenhögger, Thomas Eggerer/Jochen Klein, Nicole Eisenman, Valie Export, Robert Gober, Undine Goldberg/Cornelia Wittmann, Wendy Jacob, G. B. Jones, Birgit Jürgenssen, Mike Kelley, Jürgen Klauke, Elke Krystufek, Inez van Lamsweerde, Alix Lambert, Christian Lindow, G. J. Lischka, Robert Longo, Paul McCarthy, Dorit Margreiter, Paul Myoda, Christa Näher, Chuck Nanney, Luigi Ontani, Catherine Opie, Tony Oursler, Ria Pacquée, Gina Pane, Ugo Rondinone, Carolee Schneemann, William Wegman
20 July – 11 September 1994
What is a man or a woman? Which pictures and ideas in our culture are connected with these concepts? Behind these simple questions lies an intensively led controversy: to what extent can the categories of the “masculine” and “feminine” be understood as biologically essential or socio-culturally constructed?
For a long time, feminist theoretical approaches focused on emphasizing the historical contingency of existing images of women and thus also criticizing the seemingly natural claim to exclusivity of “male” subjectivity. In the recent theoretical debate, it seems possible to establish a shifting of the question. The categories of male and female themselves are at the disposition, the division into “homo” and “hetero”, “physical sex” and “social gender”, the binary thinking in general.
Fig. 1:
G. B. Jones, Tattoo Girls, in the exhibition Oh boy, it’s a girl!
Fig. 2:
Nicole Eisenmann, o. T., in the exhibition Oh boy, it’s a girl!, installation view
Fig. 3:
Jürgen Klauke, Männerphantasien, in the exhibition Oh boy, it’s a girl!
Fig. 4 - 14:
Installation views: Oh boy, it’s a girl!, Kunstverein München e.V., 1994. Photographs by: Wilfried Petzi.