Chagué 1

EXPLORING THE BODY: WOMEN'S ART IN ITALY'S 1970

Alix Chagué

Institute of Fine Arts

FINH-GA 3036.001: Art and Politics in Italy's Long 1960s
Professor Ara H. Merjan
December 16th, 2014
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In 2005, Eva Rus started her study of Italian feminism in the post-war period 1 reminding

her reader that in scholarly works on national feminisms, the case of Italy had often been

overlooked. In the domain of art history, still in 2014, we are forced to come to the same

observation. In actuality, this statement is not only true when it comes to speaking about so-

called feminist art in Italy, but it is also valid about the study of Italian women artists in the

1970s and more broadly in the twentieth century. Male artists are not the only ones to blame for

stealing the show from their female contemporaries: interestingly, a select few Italian women

artists from the pre-modern period have captured most of the attention from scholars interested

in the situation of women artists in Italy. A simple search on Italian women artists on any

browser will bring the names of Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavina Fontana and Barbara Longhi a

good hundred times before Carla Accardi, Marisa Merz or Ketty La Rocca start to make their

way to us. It is evident Italian art produced by women in the twentieth-century, in particular in

the 1970s, have been marginalized. And yet, this seems surprising when we consider the

changing the discipline of art history went through during that same period: the 1970s have seen

emerging, in most Western countries, a strong activism from women and intellectuals in favor of

women's emancipation. Authors such as Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock have actively

worked at re-framing the discipline of art history in making women -artists and subjects- a new

object of analysis; which a priori insured women artists from that period a greater visibility in

the art historical surveys to come. It was unfortunately not the case of Italian women artists'

production in the postwar era. Three causes could be identified in understanding this

marginalization. First, as revealed by feminist art historians, it is a general tendency in art

1 Eva Rus, “From New York Radical Feminists to Rivolta Femminile: Italian Feminist Rethink the Practice
of Consciousness Raising, 1970-1974” (Irish Feminist Review, no.1, 2005), 1.
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history to reproduce a patriarchal discourse that excludes feminine values, and denies women

the status of creator. In spite of feminist art historians' efforts, this still is true in today's

approaches of the discipline. Secondly, what could have given birth to a “style” consistent

enough to be included in art historical surveys and art historians' concerns is actually a very

problematic element: as formulated by Abigail Salomon-Godeau in 2010, in an essay

introducing to an exhibition on the Feminist Avant-Garde of the 70s, “feminist artistic practices

are themselves so diverse, debates about the existence of a feminist aesthetics so unresolved,

that the concept of a discrete entity called feminist art remains either too broad or too narrow to

be useful.”2 There might never have existed such a thing as feminist art, despite the growing

production of art works by women artists who embraced their gender and displayed its reality in

their art during that period, in Italy as elsewhere on the globe. This is where we meet the third

cause I observe: the growing presence of women's art in the 70s is a global phenomenon, often

exemplified by American “feminist-influenced art,”3 which makes little room or justification for

studies on a national specificity. Given these circumstances, I cannot claim the existence of an

already controversial Italian feminist art. Rather, my interest is in trying to understand the

influences of and responses to the feminist struggle in art produced by women in Italy in the

1970s, and to reintroduce the centrality of the representation of the body in these discourses.

The patriarchal Italian society, often characterized as macho, made great use of rhetoric of

domination based on the subjection of women's body. However, studies on Italian feminist-

influenced art have often left out this crucial sign in favor of a focus placed on non-figurative

art. After showing the limit of such reading of art produced in Italy under the influence of

2 Abigaïl Salomon-Godeau, “The Fine Art of Feminism,” (Donna: Avanguardia Femminista Negli Anni '70
dalla Sammlung Verbund di Vienna, Milan: Electa, 2010), 40.
3 Ibid.
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feminism, I want to analyze how the representation of the body intended to play an essential role

in the subversion of traditional representation that as a result immediately echoed feminist's

concerns.

I. Battaglia sul corpo femminile

The Italian culture in the early 1970s carried a heavy legacy from patriarchal institutions

that exercised and expressed an oppression particularly visible on women's bodies. One of the

battles led by third-wave feminism, specifically in Italy, had for stake the recovery of these

bodies.

Twentieth-century Italian society was structured around patriarchal institutions that

operated and interacted in the political and cultural domains. As a consequence, social pressure

and legal frames located women at home and men in the public and political field. The Fascist

ideology of women's place in society echoed the traditional gender-based repartition of roles

defined in Europe during the modern period. Mussolini's discourse, however, far from abating

the dichotomy between men and women's sphere, reinforced it for the sake of the nation: “War

is to man what maternity is to woman.” 4 Women's role was determined by motherhood and

domestication. Denied any legitimacy in the Italian Fascist society other than that of

engendering sons for the nation, women's existence in the Fascist ideology was guided by their

womb, an idea of women's natural destiny located in maternity that lasted long after the fall of

Mussolini's regime.5 In spite of the emergence of a movement of female emancipation in the

4 Mussolini quoted by Jennifer Griffiths, “Erotically engaged: Olga Carolina Rama's Politically Defiant
Bodies” (Women's Studies Quaterly, 2013), 82.
5 Andrea Hayek, “Defining Female Subjectivities in Italy: motherhood and abortion in the individual and
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immediate years after the war, the political forces of the country did little to follow. They

revealed powerlessness in changing women's position and representation in the Italian society.

Right after the fall of the Fascist regime, the political landscape of Italy was dominated in major

part by the Christian Democratic Party, as Catholicism maintained a long-lasting significance in

the political sphere despite its separation from the State in 1929. In her study on the early

feminist wave in Italy in the first years of the twentieth-century, Helena Dawes demonstrated the

ideological incompatibility between the defense of women's emancipation and the Catholic

doctrines, which led to the failure of the catholic feminist movement in those years. At the root

of this incompatibility lies the Catholic concept of women, a “fundamentally anti-feminist

dogma,”6 which defined women as having been “created to be man's helper” 7 and therefore

considered “her state in life [to be] defined by her relation to him.” 8 This ideology was restated

in 1930 by Pope Pius XI in order to protect the “character and the dignity of motherhood.” 9

Following the influence of Catholic doctrine, women's position in Italy was that of a mother,

peripheral to any political power. Contrastingly, as a consistently strong force of opposition to

Christian Democracy in the decades following World War II, the Italian Communist Party (PCI)

was placing women's emancipation at the core of the evolution of society toward democracy. In

1945, when tackling the “questione femminile,” Palmiro Togliatti argued that women's

emancipation was “one of the central issues in the renewal of the Italian state and of Italian

society.”10 In spite of the PCI's rallying to the women’s cause, with, for example, its support to
collective memories of the 1970s women's movement in Bologna” (Women's History Review, 23, 4, 2014),
546.
6 Helena Dawes, “Catholic feminism in Italy in the early 1960s” (Catholic Historical Review, 97, 3, July
2011) 497.
7 Ibid, 496.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid, 497.
10 Palmiro Togliatti, quoted by Pamela Schievenin in “Italian communism and the 'woman question' in post-
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the creation of the Union of Italian Women11 (UDI), little was achieved by the party. In her study

on the relation between women's emancipation and the PCI, Pamela Schievenin indicates that

many retired female leaders of the UDI and members of the PCI signaled in their memoirs the

“difficulties [they were confronted with] in pushing women's demands onto the party's political

agenda,”12 at least until the 1970s. Overall, the Italian political situation in the decades after the

war gave little support to the women's struggle, from either of the two dominant political parties,

maintaining if not reinforcing women's legitimate presence as a mother, a procreating body,

silent and passive, secluded to the domestic sphere.

This representation of women had important resonance in Italian visual culture, in great

part fed by advertisement on the one hand, and cinema on the other hand. In the years of the

miracolo economico, the impact of American economic assistance actively participated in

reinforcing women's seclusion to the domestic space. Strong emphasis was placed on home

design in Italy, as the country aligned with the induction given by the American market and the

American Dream ideal: it resulted in the promotion of ideally equipped kitchens, for equally

ideal housewives, whose social achievements were defined in terms of occupation and

decoration of the domestic space. Molded to the consumerist society, “[t]he “new woman” ...

remained circumscribed within a doctrine of separate gender spheres by the modern era’s

overriding emphasis on consumption as a particularly female activity.” 13 Tied to consumption,

the image of the new woman imported in Italy from the US fueled the apparition of visual and

war Italy: from memory to history” (Twentieth Century Communism, 4, May 2012), 189.
11 Pamela Schievenin reminds us that the organization was created in 1944, intended to gather women
beyond political divisions, but was soon left by the Christian Democratic women and endured as the
association of left feminist women.
12 Schievenin, “Italian communism and the 'woman question' in post-war Italy,” 192.
13 Emily S Rosenberg, “Consuming Women: Images of Americanization in the 'American Century'”
(Diplomatic History, 2002), 481-482.
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mental representations of women as object of consumption. Interestingly, the traditional image

of the mother was not altered by this new figure: they cohabited, secluding the Italian woman

into these two paradigms. Analyzing the relationship between women designers and the

profession in the post-war period, Catharine Rossi draws attention to male-based set of values

that dominated in the sphere of creative design and that permeated in the designers and

advertisers' formal vocabularies. “Th[e] objectification of women in designed objects,” she says,

“mirrored the sexualized depiction of women in Italian culture at the time.” 14 The example of

Gaetano Pesce's armchair15 shows the complexity of women's representation and the interaction

operated between the two paradigms evoked before. The armchair recalls the figure of the

mother: the connection between the armchair and the round footrest hints at the act of giving

birth. However, the maternal dimension of the furniture is coupled with round forms that are

evocative of hips and breasts, that of a voluptuous creature. Pesce's object exemplifies the

formal use of women's bodies orchestrated by Italian design: her body was not solely

ideologically objectified; Italian creators transformed it into actual domestic objects. Similar

operations were done in the realm of cinema. In her survey of Italian cinema during the

twentieth-century in relation to the female figure, Marga Cottino-Jones has noted that in spite of

women's overwhelming presence in Italian movies, “the film discourse … seems to limit the

relevance of the female protagonists' role vis-à-vis the male protagonists' role, [projecting]

fascinating images of beautiful but powerless women on the screen.” 16 In other words, in the

Italian cinema, women protagonists were either presented under the traditional figure of the

14 Catharine Rossi, “Furniture, Feminism and the Feminine: Women Designers in Post-war Italy, 1945 to
1970” (Journal of Design History, 22, 3, 2009), 252.
15 Illustation 1.
16 Marga Cottino-Jone, Women, Desire and Power in Italian Cinema (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010),
1.
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mother, either as spectacles, or “pleasurable, sexy object[s] of male desire” 17 -a mode of

representation that Cottino-Jones linked directly to the patriarchal organization of the Italian

society and the dominant Catholic ideology. This cinema reproduced an ideal of women as

“harmless to men and socially devised according to a male point of view.” 18 It is only in the

1970s that a few Italian movies “aim[ed] at 'decentering the masculinity' and highlighting the

female potential.”19 These deviances to traditional representation “reflected the social changes

that were considered in Italian society … that eventually took place in the legislative and

sociocultural system of Italy in the [1970s and 1980s], thus validating that art is closely

intertwined with the cultural humus from which it takes its inspiration.” 20 The conclusion drawn

by Cottino-Jones enables us to understand the importance of the interaction between the

political and the arts. As a new wave of feminism swelled in the 1970s from the US, rapidly

reaching the Italian territory, one would seek for reactions from the Italian art world to feminist

impulses.

II. The feminist response

The Italian 1970s displayed “a background of social ferment -the Italy of divorce, family

law and the struggle to legalize abortion- … [and was a] time when Carla Lonzi was circulating

the Manifesto of Women's Revolt (1970) along with Carla Accardi and Elvira Benotti, while

Elena Gianini Belotti published Little Girls (1973), soon to become an icon in the history of

17 Ibid, 2.
18 Ibid, 3.
19 Ibid, 5.
20 Ibid, 5-6.
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feminism.”21 This synthetic approach of Italian feminism helps understand the resonance and

reactivity of women in Italy to the impulse of new feminist concerns in the 1970s, following on

from women's emancipation movements in the decade immediately after the end of World War

II. In her study of Rivolta Femminile and the Italian Feminist movements in the early 1970s,

Rus signaled the important influences of American, French and British feminist theories to its

appearance in Italy, but intends to demonstrate, however, that there was a distinctive character to

Italian feminism. Taking the example of the “autocoscienza” groups, that were imported from

the American “consciousness-raising groups,” she considered the importance of “the process of

personal change [that was seen] as a key to liberation and, thus, posed the practice of

autocoscienza and separatism as the shared instruments for a process of individual, collective

and social transformation.”22 Her evocation of Rivolta Femminile enables us to understand the

specific dominant form taken by the feminism struggle in Italy. Contrary to the emancipation

movement of the immediate after-war, exemplified by the UDI, this new wave of feminism

intended to act out from the outside of the political sphere: a change needed to be operated from

within the society. They were critical of UDI's achievements and of the reliability of institutional

structures:

“Rivolta Femminile rejected the notion of legal equality as a sop offered by

reigning authorities against women's true liberation. The groups denounced the
intellectual and political authorities of Western culture, including the Roman
Catholic Church, the traditional family, and the Communist Party, as institutions
that had each colluded in the subjugation of women.”23

21 Angelandreaina Rorro, “On Ketty's Side” (Donna: Avanguardia Femminista Negli Anni '70 dalla
Sammlung Verbund di Vienna, Milan: Electa, 2010), 46.
22 Rus, “From New York Radical Feminists to Rivolata Femminile,” §2.
23 Leslie Cozzi, “Spaces of Self-Consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian
Feminism” (Women & Performance: a journal of feminist Italy, 21, 1, March 2011), 74.
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Women did not only need to earn more rights, they also needed to have a space where they

could express themselves: as was signaled by Schevenin, women battling immediately in the

political sphere, in the male sphere, “felt uncomfortable and sometimes inadequate … unable to

express themselves in a ['male language'].”24 Feminist separatism intended to provide women

with a language that eventually allowed them to occupy the political sphere. Considering the set

of feminism in Italy, it is interesting to assess the resonance such discourses found in art

practices of the time.

Rorro included the name of Carla Accardi in her brief statement on the Italian context for

feminism in the 1970s: interestingly, she presents the Italian woman as a theorist of a major

importance, actively involved in the elaboration of a framework for the activist group Rivolta

Femminile. Indeed, as presented by Leslie Cozzi, “Accardi was an influential force behind the

emergence of Italian feminism in the 1970s … As an artist and a polemicist, through her

artworks and through her texts … [she] helped shape Italian feminism's anti-institutional

character and separatist praxis.”25 Rivolta Femminile had a pioneer position in Italy: it is

considered “one of Italy's first feminist groups”26 in the period. Not solely a theorist, Carla

Accardi was an artist, initially. As her career began in the middle of the 1940s, she was already

well-installed in the Italian artistic scene when she started gaining interest in feminist

struggles.27 At that point in her stylistic elaboration, Accardi had been evolving in the realm of

non-figurative art and developing her use of plastic as a main material. The case of Carla

Accardi offered an attractive approach to the study of art productions influences by feminist

24 Schievenin, “Spaces of Self-Consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian
Feminism,” 193.
25 Leslie Cozzi, “Spaces of Self-Consciousness,” 73.
26 Ibid, 67.
27 Ibid, 68.
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theories and struggles: acting both in the realm of politics and theory with the numerous texts

she published through Rivolta Femminile, and in the domain of art, both her art and texts are

seen as absolute examples of Italian Feminism and Italian Feminist art -for scholars that

intended to defend the existence of such an entity. Surprisingly, Cozzi noted that in spite of her

engagement in the feminist movement, most of Accardi's works have been studied only from an

aesthetic approach that ignored the political implication of, for example, the tents and

environments she created between 1965 and 1971. Cozzi's study of Tent, Triple Tent and Orange

Environments28 presented them as “quasi-domestic structures [that] were intended to provide an

analogue and revaluation of female difference … [and that proposed] new forms of social space

that would both shelter and support female creativity.” 29 The analysis therefore intended to

reinforce the political dimension of these installations -that she considered a determinant

parameter- drawing a parallel between Accardi's activism and the formal and spatial evolution of

her structures.

“The scale of the work may in fact relate to the timing of the piece in relation
to Accardi's own experience of feminism … by 1970 Accardi was beginning to
conceive of feminism as a group endeavor. Thus the larger work tallies with the
increasing fervor and participation surrounding Accardi's feminist project.”30
By doing so, however, Cozzi, it seems, intended to read the evolution of feminism in Italy

through the specific case of Accardi. Cozzi's understanding of Accardi's feminism is essentially

based on the construction of a separate sphere that yet presents porous limits. Indeed, the use of

plastic materials helps to delimit a space without for it to be concealed from outside gazes. In

that sense, these structures stand as convincing manifestations of Accardi's defense of a separate

28 Illustration 2, 3.
29 Cozzi, “Spaces of Self-Consciousness,” 68.
30 Ibid, 73.
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environment that yet does not intend to completely cut itself off from the public sphere. As

exposed by Cozzi: “These modestly scaled, semi-transparent enclaves blurred clear distinctions

between interior and exterior [and] translated the personal realm into a semi-public spectacle

just as autocoscienza would later convert individual reflection into an active political tool.” 31

The self-consciousness groups remained a dominant form of feminist activism in Italy in the

early 1970s,32 which explains the attractiveness of using Accardi's artwork as a lens through

which to understand the elaboration of feminist discourses in Italy at that same time. “She also

proclaimed that the Tenda represented an acknowledgment of traditionally undervalued female

cultural forms. … [her] environments promoted female labor as a central concern,” 33 reported

Cozzi. This concern for the rehabilitation of devalued craft art associated to women's activity

has also been expressed by other artists in that period. Lately integrated as the only female

participant in the movement of Arte Povera, Marisa Merz's artworks were composed from

simple and repetitive actions, such as the performance of knitting. A good example of the type of

production she made during the 1960s is an untitled composition 34 she realized in 1969, that

presents a triangular structure manifested by knitting needles passing through a work in

progress. The formal language remains simple as the knitted fabric forms a round pattern

enclosed in the triangle constructed by the needles. Given the feminine anchorage of these

materials, however, studies of her artistic production have often emphasized her gender, which,

as a result, weakened the strength of her works. “Rather than producing in the traditional artistic

space of the atelier, she reinvent[ed] the home as a space of production and reappropriate[d]

31 Ibid, 68.
32 Rus, “From New York Radical Feminists to Rivolata Femminile,” § 14. “The prevailing political form of
Italian feminism between 1971-74 was, and remains, the small autocoscienza group.”
33 Cozzi, “Spaces of Self-Consciousness,” 83.
34 Illustration 4.
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artistic labor through craft.”35 The move operated by Merz is interesting: rather than conceding

her style to the dominant structure of art production -that which was shaped according to male

expressivity- she imposed the female space as defined by the patriarchal structures in the realm

of art creation. In 1968, Merz wrote:

“I could still be available to a child, but not to a man, no.

If a man asks me to do something, I do it the way I want to.” 36
These two lines taken from her “declaration” showed her active resistance to the patriarchal

structure in which she evolved. Therefore, her work ought to be understood not as a naïve

expressivity developed by a woman who may owe her artistic existence to her marriage to one

of the most important figures on the Italian art scene, Mario Merz. On the contrary, as she

claimed her independence vis-à-vis the dominating male styles, modes of expression and

institutions, her knitted works stand as subversive attempts, where she grasped this material

secluded to a domestic, amateurish, crafting and therefore devalued environment, and forced it

into the space of the gallery. In doing so, she paralleled one of the stakes of Accardi's structures:

as both artists forced the domestic into the museum institutions, they manifested the feminist's

statement that the “personal is political,”37 under the affirmation that the domestic can be public

and artistic.

In spite of Accardi's active engagement in the feminist movement, and in spite of an

acknowledgment of the importance of her contribution, 38 a reading of Italian feminism through

35 Mariana Moscoso, “An(other) Marisa Merz: an alternative interpretation to the 'feminized' artworks of
Arte Povera Artist Marisa Merz,” (UCLA Center for the Study of Women, Spring 2014), 7.
36 Marisa Merz, “Come una dechiarazione” quoted by Mariana Moscoso, “An(other) Marisa Merze,” 4.
37 The phrase was popularized after the publication Carol Hanisch's essay “The Personal is Politcal” in 1970.
38 Cozzi, “Spaces of Self-Consciousness,” 74. “The collective achieved public notoriety after they circulated
mimeographed copies of their manifesto throughout Rome. In this document, the groups explicitly
articulated the conception of female difference and the rejection of egalitarian politics that would become
central to much Italian feminist discourse for the next three decades.”
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Accardi's work remains only a reading of Accardi's feminism. It is hard to believe her work is

sufficient to embrace the variety of Italian artworks produced by women in Italy and those that

have been influenced by feminist theories. Besides, Marisa Merz and Carla Accardi's

productions both remained in the realm of non-figurative art, which too often leaves figurative

expressions out of studies on feminist artistic expression. Focused on the deconstruction or

construction of spatial division, both artists have barely tackled the question of women's body

and image, whereas it has been presented as one of the central issues at stake in feminist

struggle, namely inside the autocoscienza structures: “among the discussion topics since 1971,

under the influence of Lonzi's work, is the analysis of sexuality.” 39 The recovery of women's

autonomous sexuality implied the recovery of autonomous bodies and therefore a raise against

women's physical subjection. “Rape …, pregnancy, parturition, domestic and reproductive labor,

sexuality, the body were all central issues within [this] feminism,” 40 said Solomon-Godeau.

They are themes that had been dealt with in former feminisms but that came up with a renewed

visibility at that time. According to Abigail Solomon-Godeau, all these themes were considered

plausible subjects for art production all over the world, but their treatment in Italian artists' work

have been dismissed in studies on Italian so-called feminist art.

III. The body as a sign for emancipation

A long struggle was engaged by women in order to regain autonomy on their own bodies

through the twentieth century. The discourse elaborated in the 1970s was therefore to be inserted

39 Rus, “From New York Radical Feminists to Rivolata Femminile,” §14.

40 Solomon-Godeau, “The Fine Art of Feminism,” 38.
 Chagué 15

inside a longer history of attempts to expose the patriarchal oppression in the realm of art

production. One of the main tools for the denunciation of women's subjection was the

subversion of its language. In Italy, the works of the Florentine artist Ketty La Rocca stood as

attempts to reveal systems of domination based on gender and race in Italy and in its visual

culture. Developed in the 1960s, and throughout the 1970s until her premature death in 1976,

her work responded to the social changing that happened during the period before and

contemporary to 1970s feminism. Her attack was located in the realm of language -words and

physical communication based on the body- and reflected on the muting “influence of mass

media.”41 A series of collages that she realized during the 1960s were the first step in the

organization of her criticism. In 1965, she created Sana come il pane quotidiano (Good as daily

bread)42, a collage on a profound black background on which she associated the image of a

blond and naked pin-up girl and a group of poor-looking children in the street. While the woman

stares flirtatiously at the viewer, her stomach is transformed into a circular space where the

children evoke the “povera realtà rurale”43 that La Rocca experienced before she moved to

Florence. In this collage, she subverted the main two images that framed women's

representation: that of the mother, and that of the desirable, sexualized woman. The round

element that encloses the children is evocative of maternity, and yet, the traditional iconography

of the nourishing mother is subverted by its association with notions of alienation, poverty and

starvation. This rhetoric of maternity seems doomed to fail. Besides, the added text functions as

a caption full of irony: “sana come il pane quotidiano.” It applies to the pump pin-up and reveals

41 Elisa Biagini, “L'ossessione del linguaggio: le prime opere di Ketty La Rocca” (Italian Culture, 19, 1,
January 2001), 115.
42 Illustration 5.
43 Biagini, “L'ossessione del linguaggio,” 114.
 Chagué 16

her transformation into an object of daily consumption, like bread is. However, this comparison

fails because the children are here to signal the inexistence of such a thing as a daily bread to

eat: therefore is woman is not sane. Being compared to bread, this representation of a woman

intends to denounce her objectification and her transformation into an object of consumption: La

Rocca's collages, as exemplified by Sana come il pane quotidiano, were meant to “underscore

the 'fake sexual liberation that even more transformed the woman into an object of extremely

easy and almost free consumption.”44 Other collages focused on showing women's oppression

and incapacitation to express themselves. In that sense they echoed both the political situation of

women's engaged in feminist struggle after the second wave of feminism in Italy -as was evoked

earlier- and the general muting of women in the society as they remained unheard by their male

fellows. In a collage that evoked the domestic sphere and consumerism, Iconoclassic,45 La

Rocca showed two women on a white background, they are secluded to the bottom left corner

and leave a large empty space for the groups of words “elettro...addomesticati” and “se ne

parla.”46 The irony operates once again in the relationship between the captions and the images.

Far from being on the verge of talking about anything, the woman at the foreground is gagged.

She manifests the negation of her voice, but also her domestication, or sequestration to the

domestic space. The woman behind does not seem hampered in any way, but she presents an

intriguing mustache made of a stand of her hair passed above her lips. This couple of women,

one gagged, the other wearing men's attribute, displays a clear message: be a man or keep quiet.

Therefore none of them is susceptible to talk about women's “domestication.” This image finds

44 Ibid, 117. “sottolineare la 'falsa liberazione sessuale che ha a fatto della donna, doppiamente, un oggetto di
più facile e semigratuito consumo.'”
45 Illustation 6.
46 “electro...domesticated,” and “they talk about it”
 Chagué 17

echos in La Rocca's personal concerns: according to Judith Kirschner, the artist described in

1974 “her own deficiency as a woman, despaired of her ability to express the condition of

women artists, and compared this frustration to a marriage gone bad.” 47 In the same article,

Kirschner evoked the impression of “something extremely private” that emanated from La

Rocca's work, in particular in later works realized by the Italian woman. In spite of the visual

efficiency of her collage to point out women's subjection, “Ketty La Rocca [remained] unable to

break into the male art world with her art and with her writings.” 48 As a consequence, she started

to develop a language based on her own expressivity that she centered on her own body. In

1971, she created a book collecting black and white photographs of her own hands that intended

to form sense without the support of words. The work soon evolved into the elaboration of a

series called La mie parole e tu?49 where La Rocca intended to render visible the relationship of

otherness that founds the language. Using her body to express this, she hints at the physical

experimentation of relation to Others. One of the images that compose the series represents a fist

surrounded by two hands half opened. With their spread fingers, these two hands are evocative

of a cage, either transforming the scene on an anatomical representation of the heart trapped a

ribcage, either evoking oppressive forces that capture an individual element. The sharp contrasts

of light cast a dramatic tension of the composition, hinting at a discrete and possibly violent

confrontation between different forces. At a time when third wave feminism discourse placed

the individual and its liberation at the core of women's emancipation, the emphasis that La

Rocca put on an expression of the individual self is relevant. A constant apparition, the notion of

47 Judih R. Kirschner, “You and I: The Art of Ketty La Rocca” (Artforum International, 31, March 1993) § 3.
48 Lucy Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasure of Rebirth: European and American Women's Body Art” (The Pink
Glass Swan: Selected essays on feminist art. New York: New Press, 1995), 107.
49 Illustration 7.
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the “Other” worked as an element of unification in her productions. In La mie parole e tu? it

appears through the repetition of “you,” that covers the lit parts of the hands. As signaled by

Biagini, “[t]his work of transcription also serves to define the limits of the self, creating a subtle

separation between inside and outside, between public and private.”50 “You,” the other, is where

definition of the self starts, where communication begins. In 1973, she started a series,

Craniologia,51 which engaged her own body further into her art. Using X-ray radiographers of

her brain, she created montages that associated images of her hands to her brain, “[h]er skull as

a fetal image with the hand -the language symbol- about to burst out of it, the image outlined by

the hand written word “you” repeated around its boundary.” 52 Blurring the separation between

an individual sphere and a social sphere of confrontation to the Other, La Rocca's research

inscribes itself in formal searches led by artists influenced by feminism like Accardi and Merz,

who intended to move the domestic into the public space. Using images taken from her own

body, La Rocca acknowledged its symbolical, significant potential and attempted to create a

new system of signification, based on the individual, offering therefore a recovered individuality

that, as observed by Chadwick traditional art had taken from women: “Confounding subject and

object, [history of art] undermines the speaking position of the individual woman artist by

generalizing her. Denied her individuality, she is displaced from being a producer and becomes

instead a sign for male creativity.”53 In that sense, Ketty La Rocca elaborated a critical discourse

reflective on the question of the self and its formation, as starting point for the elaboration of

language, and that continually inserted itself in resonance with feminist struggles.

50 Biagini, “L'ossessione del linguaggio,” 113. “Quest'opera di trascrizione serve inoltre a definire i limiti
dell'io, creando una delicata separazione tra interno ed esterno, tra pubblico e privato.”
51 Illustration 8.
52 Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasure of Rebirth,”107.
53 Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society (London; New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 21.
 Chagué 19

The pictorial display of women's body, of her body, that she developed remained only

one aspect in the diversity of expressions found by women artists during the period, often in

resonance with feminist discursive articulations. Body art that developed during the 1960s

offered women a fundamental means to reappropriate their bodies. As presented by Lippard,

while “it is difficult to find any positive image whatsoever of women in male body art,” 54

women's body art was always a positive politicized recovery of their individuality that opposed

male language. Indeed, “when women use their own bodies in their art work, they are using

their selves, a significant psychological factor converts these bodies or faces from objects to

subject.” One important female figure of body art attached to Italian culture was Gina Pane.

Because of the radical dimension of her performances, Pane stood out on the artistic scene. Her

repeated mutilations gave a radical character to her work that protected her from the common

risk of being “relegated to the categories of naïve art or craft art.” 55 As a matter of fact, when it

comes to women, art history has mostly retained the names of radical body artists. From Ana

Mendieta to Carolee Schneeman, those artists struck for the violence they staged on their body.

In the case of Gina Pane, this violence in most of her performances was addressing the

relationship between herself and her spectators. As explained by Judith Kirschner, “[r]adically

testing her limits and risking bodily integrity, she demonstrated her empathy for the 'other' in

part to create a community of the audience, who became her witnesses.” 56 The mutilation she

imposed on her body, were “sign[s] of the state of extreme fragility of the body, a sign of

suffering, a sign which indicates the external situation of aggression, of violence to which we

54 Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasure of Rebirth,” 110.

55 Ibid, 100.
56 Judith R. Kirschner, “Voices and images of Italian feminism” (Wack!: art and the feminist revolution.
Camridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007), 385.
 Chagué 20

are always exposed.”57 In that sense, her work is concerned with displaying the individual

vulnerability, to eventually give it a universal resonance under the form of her female body. One

of the most iconic actions, that she performed in Milan in 1974, Azione Sentimentale,58

particularly illustrates the fashion in which her actions echoed, to a certain degree, feminist

theories developed at that time in Italy. Performed in front of an audience composed of women

only,59 her actions involved the re-creation of a separate sphere in which she intended to

reproduce “the Women/Women relationship”60 in an emotive register. As she planted the thorns

of a rose into her own arm, and cut the palm of her hand with a razor blade, she transformed her

arm into a “red rose, mystic flower, erotic flower, transformed into a vagina by a reconstitution

in its most present state, the painful one.” 61 Taking the form of a ceremonial sacrifice, her

performance therefore staged a fundamental aspect of women's relationship to their body, that of

a suffering doomed to be experienced in silence. In that sense, Azione Sentimentale performed a

move similar to that of feminist groups at the same time: from the individual, or the individual

experience of pain, to the group, and the political, rising against a silencing imposed by exterior

forces, using the body as consistent support.

In this essay I have shown the centrality of a rhetoric elaborated on the body both in the

establishment and maintaining of a domination of women in the Italian society, and in the

construction of an opposition to this discourse in a dynamic given by feminist theories. Because

the body of women was immediately attack by patriarchal discourse -secluded, silenced,
57 Gina Pane, quoted by Kirschner, ibid, 385.
58 Illustration 9.
59 Kirschner, “Voices and images of Italian feminism,” 385.
60 Gina Pane, quoted by Lea Vergine, Body Art and Performance: The Body As Language (Milan: Skira,
2000), 197.
61 Gina Pane, quoted by Vergine, ibid, 197.
 Chagué 21

objectified, consumed- the use of the female body by women in arts tends inevitably to be

charged with a political character that linked it to feminism. In Italy, it interestingly led to the

elaboration of a dynamic that emanated from the individual, to be eventually an address to the

society.
 Chagué 22

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Champagne, John, Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy. London and New
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Chiavola Birubaum, Lucia, Liberazione della donna, feminism in Italy. Middletown, Co:
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Cozzi Leslie, “Spaces of Self-Consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of
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Kirschner Judih R., “You and I: The Art of Ketty La Rocca” in Artforum International, 31, no.7
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Kirschner, Judith R., “Voices and images of Italian feminism” in Wack!: art and the feminist
revolution. Camridge, Mass: MIT Press (2007). 384-399.

Lippard, Lucy R., The Pink Glass Swan: Selected essays on feminist art. New York: New Press,
(1995).
 Chagué 23

Mader Rachel, and Schweizer Nicole, “'Your Body is a Battleground': de quelques objets de
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Vergine, Lea, Body Art and Performance: The Body As Language. Milan: Skira (2000).
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ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Gaetano Pesce, UP5 Donna Armchair and UP6 footrest, from UP series, 1969.

2. Carla Accardi, Tent (1965).

 Chagué 25

3. Carla Accardi, Triple Tent (1969-71).

4. Marisa Merz, Untitled (1969). London: Tate Modern.

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5. Ketty La Rocca, Sana Come Il Pane Quotidiano, 1965.

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6. Ketty La Rocca, Iconoclassic, 1965.

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7. Ketty La Rocca, La mie parole e tu? (1971).

8. Ketty La Rocca, Cranionolia (1973).

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9. Gina Pane, Azione Sentimentale, Milan (1974).