To name 5 female artists, they are Faith Ringgold, Judy Baca, Marina Abramovic, Kathe Kollwitz and Maya Lin. These 5 female artists are from different background, but in their creative life path they all used art as a tool to document the world in their perspective, and also each of them uses different art form spoke to the theme of women’s role in the war experience.
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Faith Ringgold
American People Series #20: Die 1967
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Faith Ringgold uses her “advantage” as an African American artist to record and playback scenes that happened around her. And she created American People Series to show the race relations in the United States in the 1960s. The mural-scale painting, Die is inspired by Picasso’s Guernica. Ringgold was intrigued by the depiction of the tragedies in the war, she studied it and recreated a painting that represents her points of view. In the painting Die, it showcase women and man in different ethnicity tangled with each other, and blood splattered all over the canvas, which indicates that no one can escape from this struggle. Also, what really appeals to attention is the white suit that men are wearing, which suggests that the upper class is being held accountable in this violence. The children sit in the lower centre, holding each other with their shocking faces, where is our future? From this chaotic presence, all we can see is the fear of the future.
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Marina Abramovic
Balkan Baroque.1997
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“id like to tell the story how we in Balkan kill the rats…” in the Venice Biennale, Marina was performing her art in response to the deaths caused by the Balkan war. In this performance, she was sitting on top pf 1500 bloody cow bones wearing a white dress and scrubbing the bones with a wire brush. And on the screen next to her, there was a recorded description of her dressing as a doctor standing in between her parents' images, elaborating “how we in Balkan kill the rats.”, and singing the folksongs of her hometown. Marina once explained her idea about her performance that aims at the war in Bosnia, “The whole idea that by washing bones and trying to scrub the blood, is impossible. You can’t wash the blood from your hands as you can’t wash the shame from the war. But also it was important to transcend it, that can be used, this image, for any war, anywhere in the world. So to become from personal there can be universal” It is not just disturbing to look at but also smells unbearable, but Marina was sitting there scrubs the blood from the bone for six hours in six days. This disturbing scene really touches audiences nerves and make people stop and think about what has happened behind the number of deaths in the war.
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Maya Lin
Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
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Mya Lin is an American architect, she studied architecture and sculpture at Yale University. In her senior year, as a 21 years old Asian American Lin participated the nationwide competition to design a monument in honour of soldiers who had served and died in the Vietnam War, surprisingly her design took the first prize. Winning the prize, Lin once mentioned that she doubts she ever would have won this prize if anyone had known that she was a student, not to mention a woman and an Asian.
Her work is really reformational to that time, it was a V-shaped granite wall, with each side of the wall measuring 247 feet, and the names of the deaths ware inscribed on the granite. The monument is minimal and abstract, It's a change from the traditional heroic image that celebrates the deaths, to using more of a pain and graceful way to honour the deaths and document the distress that brought by war.
But the change made the work controversial for the public. In the testimony before Congress, Lin spoke about her vision of her work, the source of its power from: “the wall itself; the visual impact of the names, thousands upon thousands of them, carved into granite so highly polished you see your own reflection hovering over the lettering; and the way you walk slowly down toward the centre, coming deeper and deeper into the enormity of the loss, and then slowly back up, gradually returning to the world as it is now.”
After a nationwide debate in-between veterans and politicians, they decided to build three realistic statues of soldiers, near the monument designed by Lin. Now, this monument attracts tourists from all over the country, and more than 10,000 people visit every day. With the massive, and emotional, it becomes more and more well known as well as powerful, Lin once talked about her work, “I like to think of my work as creating a private conversation with each person, no matter how public each work is and no matter how many people are present.”
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| Käthe Kollwitz Attack1844 |
Käthe Kollwitz used her lifetime to portray human suffering of poverty, hunger and war on the working class. In childhood time, Käthe lost her younger brother, and lost her youngest son in World War I, then after that she continually suffered numerous losses in the war. Through her own life, there isn’t any moment that she can get rid of the pain of loss, she knows the taste of by heart of losing people that she loves. While morning for the deaths, she has become the icon of anti-war protest, “This is my task, but it is not an easy one to fulfil.” Kollwitz’s well-known artwork Attack was inspired by Gerhart Hauptmann, The Weavers, and was about the revolt of the Silesian weavers in 1844. However, this work evoked the politicians when it was shown in 1898. The Kaiser refused to give her the medal that she had won for it (Chadwick)
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| Judy Baca The Great Wall of Los Angeles began in 1976 |
In 1974, Judy was asked by the Army Corps of Engineers about their idea of creating a mural in the flood control channel as part of a beautification project. Two years later, this project began. The creation of the Great Wall is contributed in all kinds of forms by many government agencies, community organizations, businesses, and individuals. This project summoned ten artists and five historians collaborated under the direction of Judy Baca. This word was designed to depict the historical stories from the days of dinosaurs to 1910. But when Judy finish the part she felt the urge to continue, then each year they added 350 feet. In The Great Wall, there is a piece speaks about World War I, in this part of the painting, it put the gentle aspect of the human in the war under the spotlight. The soldiers leave, kissing their lovers goodbye, which also shows the women’s role in the war experience.
Works Cited:
Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. Thames Hudson Ltd, 2020.
Faith Ringgold. American People Series #20:Die. 1967 MOMA
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/199915
"The Great Wall of Los Angeles", Social and Public Art Resource Centre, 23 April 2019
http://sparcinla.org/the-great-wall-part-2/
"MarinaAbramović Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works", The Art Story
"The Great Wall of Los Angeles", Social and Public Art Resource Centre, 23 April 2019
http://sparcinla.org/the-great-wall-part-2/
"MarinaAbramović Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works", The Art Story
http://philandfem.blogspot.com/2010/03/kathe-kollwitz-feminist-artist.html
Paul Goldberg, "Reflected Grief", Vanity fair, 23 March 2012
Paul Goldberg, "Reflected Grief", Vanity fair, 23 March 2012
"Maya Lin - Sculptor, Architect - Biography", BIOGRAPHY, 12 April 2019
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