Conceptual art puts artistic ideas above their material qualities. It challenges the notions of the uniqueness of artistic materials, as well as the artwork itself. This artistic approach allowed for the development of performance art, text-based art, installation art, and many other forms that surpassed the traditional limitations of painting and sculpture. Women artists have been present in conceptual art since its earliest days. Read on to learn more about 8 significant women representing the legacy of conceptual art.
1. Marina Abramovic: The Heroine of Performance and Conceptual Art
Serbian artist Marina Abramovic is the most important figure in performance art and one of the principal characters of conceptualism. She was born during the Communist regime in Yugoslavia into a family integrated into the establishment. In her later years, she often spoke about rethinking the harsh legacy of her land’s past and her privilege. Her performances often incorporate severe physical challenges and even life-threatening actions. In 1974, she almost died during her performance Rhythm 5, when she lay down inside the burning shape of a five-pointed star, both an occult and a Communist symbol. During the act, aimed to symbolize spiritual rejuvenation, she passed out from the lack of oxygen while her clothes caught fire.
The days of extreme performances may be over for Abramovic, but she continues to push boundaries. In 2020, she presented an opera project called Seven Deaths of Maria Callas, dedicated to the legendary Greek opera singer. Apart from her artistic career, she is the head of the Marina Abramovic Institute, which focuses on teaching young artists about performance art.
2. Emilia Kabakov
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Emilia Kabakov, an American performance artist born in Ukraine, gets significantly less credit compared to her husband Ilya Kabakov. Both artists were the leading figures of conceptual installation art raised on the grounds of Soviet culture and underground art. Both Kabakovs insisted they were equal collaborators.
Emilia Kabakov met Ilya in her forties when she was already an established art dealer and curator living in New York City. Their collaborative works often rely on the specificities of Soviet and Eastern European lifestyles as well as theoretical concerns about art, memory, and aspiration. One of the most famous works made by the couple is the installation called Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future. The title is based on the article Ilya Kabakov wrote on Kazimir Malevich.
3. Jenny Holzer
American conceptual art Jenny Holzer blends text-based art and technology. Her most famous works feature LED signs and light installations. These signs are most frequently placed outside cultural institutions, hidden in public spaces, or projected onto different buildings. Relative anonymity is one of the crucial aspects of Holzer’s work. She deliberately removes her persona from her art in order to force the audience to focus on the message she is sending and not her identity. Holzer’s text works often do not even look like works of art, they actually mimic advertisement billboards and neon signs.
Jenny Holzer’s work mainly deals with subjects related to violence, systematic oppression, inequality, wars, victims, and the treatment of these subjects in the media and governmental institutions. During the 2000s, Holzer worked with declassified archives of documents on government surveillance and war crimes, particularly those concerning the US Army’s actions in Iraq. Holzer projected some of these documents on the facade of the Kunsthaus Bregenz, an Austrian institution dedicated to contemporary art.
4. Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono remains a highly controversial figure within the art world, even if we choose not to associate with her famous late husband, John Lennon. Her conceptual artworks received substantial criticism for their absurdity, yet Yoko Ono had always said that her art was hardly too different from the male pioneers of Conceptual art. Ono worked in a vein similar to Joseph Kosuth, one of the movement’s fathers, yet it seems like his artistic language never provoked so much outrage.
One of the most important yet simple pieces created by Yoko Ono is the installation titled Ceiling Painting. Like many other works of Conceptual art, the piece is interactive and requires a visitor to climb a stepladder. Above it, a glass panel covers a small piece of paper with the word YES written on it. For Yoko, this piece functions as the manifestation of encouragement and the effort required to receive affirmation.
5. Tracey Emin
Women artists often push boundaries of what is considered acceptable or ladylike in art, but no one has ever done it more openly and boldly than Tracey Emin. Some critics praise her art, while others find it repulsive due to its innate physicality and the deliberate exploration of uncomfortable and socially unacceptable topics. Emin is an artistic exhibitionist who talks about her mental health, sexuality, and undesirable behavioral patterns freely. She heals her traumas by exposing them in front of the crowd.
In 2004, a fire destroyed a warehouse that contained many of Tracey Emin’s work, including the famous Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-65. The piece featured a small tent with its insides covered with the names of everyone Emin ever shared a bed with, both sexually and literally. It is considered one of the best works ever created by this feminist artist. However, despite the generous offers of art dealers to recreate the piece, Emin refused. This decision further marked her artistic process of reliving and letting go, without the need to capitalize on pieces that are no longer relevant to her.
6. ORLAN
One of the most radical artists on the contemporary art scene, ORLAN became famous for her uncompromising approach to body art and body modifications. In her artistic practice, she blends art and science and questions the standards of beauty. Her main artistic medium is her own body, which she radically transforms in her art.
From 1990 to 1993, ORLAN underwent a series of plastic surgeries that completely changed the look of her face. Every surgery focused on a particular facial feature, with the desired result modeled after a famous art historical artifact. Thus, ORLAN woke up with the forehead of Mona Lisa, the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the nose of Diana the Huntress, and the mouth of Boucher’s Europa. ORLAN explained her choice of models not with their representation of beauty standards but with the symbolic meanings of every character. During the surgeries, she mostly remained conscious, sometimes reading poetry. She also recorded the whole process on video. For ORLAN, her radical body transformation is the act of process against everything fixed and normative, as well as the celebration of contemporary science, which allows her to challenge the laws of nature.
7. Kara Walker
Kara Walker is an American multi-disciplinary artist who works with identity, racism, and the long-term implications of injustice and discrimination. The breakthrough in her career happened in the 1990s when she presented a series of paper cut-out silhouettes. This medium was very popular among the wealthy white elites during the years of slavery. It presented an idealized pastoral view of their lives and pastimes.
Walker inverted the narrative by adding scenes of violence, graphic depictions of sex, and images of mistreated people. This way, the artist highlighted the innate cruelty of the era which was often romanticized, both mocking it and revealing its true face. For Walker, references to the art of the past centuries are stark reminders about the inability of her predecessors to find their places in it, both in terms of creatorship and subject matter. Many of her works feature well-known figures from paintings and sculptures made by and for the white elites, with their racial or cultural contexts inverted.
8. Annette Messager: Blending Conceptual Art with Craft
The French installation artist Annette Messager provides a dark and unsettling look at the things we traditionally see as safe, calming, or associated with domestic bliss. Messager mutilates the photographic images of families and children, dresses dead sparrows in knit bonnets, and makes disturbing plush toys that offer terror rather than comfort.
The artist’s blend of domesticity and horror offers a new outlook on crafts like weaving and sewing which were considered feminine occupations for centuries. At the same time, these practices had deep spiritual connotations, often connected to matters of health and sickness, or life and death. Her works refer to both childhood nightmares and silly games, perverse fantasies of adults, and traumas that only expand with age.
