Mirror images : women, surrealism, and self-representation

Bibliographic Information

Mirror images : women, surrealism, and self-representation

edited by Whitney Chadwick ; essays by Dawn Ades ... [et al.]

MIT Press, c1998

  • : pbk

Available at  / 24 libraries

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Note

"Issued on the occasion of the exhibition organized by and premiering at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and traveling subsequently to the Miami Art Museum and to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art."

Bibliography: p. [172]-183

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

During the 1930s and 1940s, women artists associated with the Surrealist movement produced a significant body of self-images that have no equivalent among the works of their male colleagues. While male artists exalted Woman's otherness in fetishized images, women artists explored their own subjective worlds. The self-images of Claude Cahun, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Remedios Varo, Kay Sage, and others both internalize and challenge conventions for representing femininity, the female body, and female subjectivity. Many of the representational strategies employed by these pioneers continue to resonate in the work of contemporary women artists. The words "Surrealist" and "surrealism" appear frequently in discussions of such contemporary artists as Louise Bourgeois, Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, Kiki Smith, Dorothy Cross, Michiko Kon, and Paula Santiago. This book, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, explores specific aspects of the relationship between historic and contemporary work in the context of Surrealism. The contributors reexamine art historical assumptions about gender, identity, and intergenerational legacies within modernist and postmodernist frameworks. Questions raised include: how did women in both groups draw from their experiences of gender and sexuality? What do contemporary artistic practices involving the use of body images owe to the earlier examples of both female and male Surrealists? What is the relationship between self-image and self- knowledge? Contributors: Dawn Ades, Whitney Chadwick, Salomon Grimberg, Katy Kline, Helaine Posner, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Dickran Tashjian.

Table of Contents

  • An infinite play of empty mirrors - women, surrealism and self-representation, Whitney Chadwick
  • "Vous Pour Moi?" - Marcel Duchamp and transgender coupling, Dickram Tasjian
  • in or out of the picture - Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman, Katy Kline
  • Frida Kahlo - the self as an end, Salomon Grimberg
  • orbits of the savage moon - surrealism and the representation of the female subject in Mexico and postwar Paris, Dawn Ades
  • dialogue and double allegiance - some contemporary women artists and the historical avant-garde, Susan Rubin Suleiman
  • the self and the world - negotiating boundaries in the art of Yayoi Kusama, Ana Medieta, and Francesca Woodman, Helaine Posner.

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