Female Perspectives
More visibility for art by women
When video art found its origins in the late 1960s and early 1970s, women and men alike took on the role of pioneers. During this period, numerous female artists consciously turned to the new, historically unencumbered media of photography, film and video, and in particular also used performances as a means of artistic expression. Together with their male colleagues, women thus occupied a niche of the new.
Today, however, it is predominantly the names of male artists such as Nam June Paik that have come to stand for media art. The ZKM | Karlsruhe is now showing four solo exhibitions by outstanding female media artists and is grouping them together under the title »Female Perspectives« to achieve more visibility. The idea of giving more space to female artists was also prominently implemented by the ZKM | Karlsruhe in spring 2020 with the digital festival FEMINALE DER MUSIK, which was dedicated to the work of international female composers. A digital feature titled »Femmes4Music«, has presented four more outstanding female musicians since November and December 2022.
»Female Perspectives« showcases female artists who, almost without exception, belong to the first generation to create electronic artworks. Born in the 1940s and 1950s, they and their male counterparts became the pioneers of video and sound art. This was possible because media art in the 1970s was still so marginalized that it could be left to women without further thought. Whereas painting and classical music were considered the only true arts and are still characterized by patriarchal structures even today, in the 1970s the video scene was already collaborative, without any struggle between the sexes. Together, they produced “outsider art,” as it were, in a niche in which women could also engage in artistic activity.
To this day, the electronic arts are not a terrain where there is gender-specific hierarchization, perhaps also because the various forms they take are still not marketable. Nor is the cliché that males have a greater affinity for the technical arts is obviously not true here. Apparently, it is sometimes even easier for women to open up new possibilities in the media than to situate and assert themselves in the male-dominated discourse of the classical arts.
-
An overview of the solo exhibitions
»Soun-Gui Kim: Lazy Clouds« September 10, 2022 – February 5, 2023
October 29, 2022 – February 5, 2023
»Analivia Cordeiro. From Body to Code« January 28 – May 7, 2023
June 3, 2023 – January 7, 2024
When contemporary media art first found its definitive mode of expression in the invention that is modern video technology, from today’s perspective there were essentially three aspects that can be understood as specific artistic challenges.
The technical parameters: The mobility of the easy-to-use video camera and the possibility of simultaneously recording and screening opened up a whole new spectrum of expanded pictorial experience and visual culture. The conquest of the dimension of time: The possibility to capture and also communicate art experience in the temporal dimension not only unleashed artistic creativity, it also “compelled” reception behavior to be different which suggested, if not demanded, reflection on the experience of time. The expanded sense of mission: Inspired by the extensive reach of the medium of television, from the outset video art was experienced, used, and appreciated as a political medium that could enable a different kind of television. In this, the artists always sought to connect with performance and concept art.
Just how autonomously the pioneering women artists work with the new time-based arts can be seen in each of the four solo exhibitions of Soun-Gui Kim (*1946 in Buyeo, Korea), Marijke van Warmerdam (*1959 in Nieuwer-Amstel, Netherlands), Analivia Cordeiro (*1954 in São Paulo, Brazil), and Ulrike Rosenbach (*1943 in Bad Salzdetfurth near Hildesheim). Influenced by their own cultural environments, each artist developed her own distinctive oeuvre. Kim from Korea who went to France early on and worked in the USA in the 1970s, understands video technology as a cosmic medium, a medium for mind-expanding images. Ulrike Rosenbach, on the other hand, who is almost the same age as Kim, is more committed to feminism, to political agitation. She acts as a critic of society and she disappeared from the art market in the 1980s because of her feminism. Marijke van Warmerdam, who is about ten years younger, focuses on the motif of repetition. On the basis of her critique of media studies, in her art she seeks difference in repetition. Analivia Cordeiro has been shaping the entire media art of South America since the early 1970s as its first video artist. In addition, the ZKM is now dedicating a major solo exhibition to her.
»Femmes4Music«
Digital feature on outstanding female composers
Women are far from being adequately visible in music, as well. Like video art, electronic sound art in music, whose boundaries to performance and concept art are fluid, offers female artists a niche. With »Femmes4Music«, the ZKM presents internationally acclaimed female composers born in the 1940s to the 1960s. The edition »Masters of Music« presents only men, even though these four female composers should have been represented here long ago. Naturally, the ZKM has always engaged with and featured these female composers on a sporadic but regular basis.
Overview of the »Femmes4Music« series
Online here
Female composers
-
Meredith Monk (*1942 in New York City, USA)
Meredith Monk is one of the world’s most influential and important contemporary artists. She is primarily known for her vocal innovations, the “extended vocal technique,” which is characterized by wordless sound gestures such as humming, croaking, wheezing, laughing, moaning, as well as throat sounds that seem at once prehistoric and futuristic.
Monk’s repertoire includes solo pieces for voice with and without accompaniment, instrumental works, ensemble works, stage works, works for cinema, and performances. Her work influences the Icelandic artist Björk, for example, which is why she sees herself as the “aesthetic mother of Björk,” who in turn interpreted Monk’s song “Gotham Lullaby” on her 1981 solo album »Dolmen Music« in collaboration with the Brodsky Ensemble.
Monk is the recipient of the Nation Medal of Arts, the highest honor for artistic achievement in the United States, which was awarded to her by Barack Obama in 2014. Among countless other awards, she has received ten honorary doctorates. In honor of her 80th birthday, a CD box set containing all of her vocal pieces was released in late 2022.
-
Kaija Saariaho (*1952 in Helsinki, Finland)
Kaija Saariaho studied at IRCAM at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among other places, where she engages with algorithmic composition and electronic sound synthesis, as well as acoustics and psychoacoustics and work with tape and live electronics.
Her body of work is as comprehensive as it is versatile. In addition to orchestral works, it includes chamber music, solo works for various instruments, electroacoustic works, choral works and, last but not least, a number of operas. Her compositional style for instruments is defined by a specific aesthetic, which she derives from the conception of her computer music works.
Saariaho’s compositions include the work »Vent nocturne« (2006) for violist Garth Knox. Together with video artist Brian O’Reilly, Garth Knox created an audiovisual version of the piece at ZKM in 2010, which was released on a DVD (Spectral Strands, 2010, Wergo, Edition ZKM) along with other compositions.
In 2011 she received a Grammy for her opera »L’amour de loin« in the category Best Opera Recording. Saariaho’s work »Semafor«, commissioned by Carnegie Hall, had its world premiere this April. In honor of her 70th birthday, classical musicians from Finland are currently creating a historically oriented collaboration inspired by Saariaho’s music.
-
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (*1939 in Miami, Florida, USA)
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich set a definitive tone in a number of ways. In 1975, she became the first woman to receive a PhD from the Juilliard School, and in 1983 she was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. She is also the first female composer to be awarded a residency at Carnegie Hall, in 1995, a position she held until 1999.
Pierre Boulez, who received the ZKM Giga-Hertz Award for Electronic Music in 2011, performed her work »Symposium« with the Juilliard Symphony Orchestra in 1975, which helped her to gain international recognition.
Taaffe Zwilich’s repertoire includes pieces for chamber ensembles, vocal ensembles, choirs, and orchestras, whereby her set of musical and aesthetic tools range from jagged, atonal harmonies to gentle melodies with simple structures.
»Gramophone« magazine listed her in an August 2022 article as one of the ten must-hear female composers. In September 2022, her »Cello Concerto« (2020), performed by Zuill Bailey and the Santa Rosa Symphony under the baton of music director Francesco Lecce-Chong, was released on Delos Records along with three other well-known works.
-
Jennifer Higdon (*1962 in Brooklyn, New York, USA)
Jennifer Higdon enjoys a reputation as a technical maestro whose skills have a great impact on audiences. She has been praised by the »Washington Post« as "Higdon is a savvy, sensitive composer with a keen ear, an innate sense of form and a generous dash of pure esprit at her disposal.”
Her work covers a variety of genres, ranging from orchestral and chamber pieces to wind ensembles, vocal, choral pieces, and operas. Her works are rhythmically demanding. Time and again, individual experimental, avant-garde accents appear, but these are mainly integrated into traditional structures and sound worlds.
Jennifer Higdon has received three Grammys in the category Best Contemporary Classical Composition. In late September 2022, she celebrated the world premiere of her »Cold Mountain Suite«, which was commissioned by New Music for America. The work is adapted from her opera »Cold Mountain«. For the opera a consortium of more than 36 orchestras was assembled which were spread across the entire USA. The Delaware Symphony will premiere the work in Wilmington, Delaware. She received a commission from the American Brass Quintet and the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music for a brass concerto which premiered in October 2022