Leeds Beckett University Fine Art - Breaking the Mould Publication by Arts Council Collection

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AKI AKI NG NG THE THE MOU MOU LD LD

BREAKING THE MOULD: SCULPTURE BY WOMEN SINCE 1945

AN ARTS COUNCIL COLLECTION TOURING EXHIBITION

5:1

A response to “Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women Since 1945” Curated by Natalie Rudd Senior Collection Curator Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Spring 2021

BRE AKI NG THE MOU LD Contents

INTRODUCTION ‘Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945’

the 5:1 associates

Ben Judd

Ellie Huddlestone

Declan Clark

Jessica Smith

Jess Miller

Kelly Umpleby

Nicole Dodds

Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945 INTRODUCTION In November 2019, we were offered insight into the making of an Arts Council Collection touring exhibition; Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945. We met with Senior Collection Curator, Natalie Rudd who gave us a tour of Longside Gallery near Wakefield. The Gallery is shared by the Arts Council Collection and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the latter providing beautiful panoramic views from the unique gallery space. Natalie was kind enough to show us some of the sculptures in the new exhibition which was in the process of being assembled, including works by Rachel Whiteread, Wendy Taylor, Sarah Lucas and Eva Rothschild. We were also informed of the reasons behind the Arts Council Collection’s decision to curate the show. Upon discovering that only 25% of sculptures in their entire collection were by women, and that 30% of these pieces had not seen daylight in a decade, we understood the significance of this exhibition. Works by female artists were at risk 1

of being forgotten due to the male-dominated narratives of their time. It saddened us that showcases such as Breaking the Mould are still necessary in the modern day, and that art in itself is still being thought of as a binary concept when it is so much more than that. To us, art is fluid and ever-changing. It’s adaptable, versatile and funnily enough, doesn’t fit a singular mould. It belongs to no one and to everyone. Inspired by the female sculptors in Breaking the Mould, we present you with a variety of works including photography, film, writing and sculpture. Despite our 5:1 name representing the ratio of female to male artists in our collective, it is merely a reference to the origins of our collaboration with Arts Council Collection. The art you see here provokes thought and encourages the value of human connection. This is our identity, and like everything else in this world, it is subject to change. And so, we celebrate art not by men and women, but by ARTISTS. Many thanks, The 5:1 Team

The six young artists in 5:1 have been producing new work and responses to the exhibition Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945 , curated from the Art Council Collection at Longside Gallery. The exhibition hopes to readdress the male-dominated art historical canon by including only sculpture made by women since the Second World War. How does a diverse group of contemporary young artists, living in the 21st century, respond to this prompt? It’s difficult to define post-war sculpture made by women and Breaking the Mould seeks to avoid a singular narrative. However, the art world is and has been patriarchal; the exhibition therefore could be seen as a reaction against the monumental sculpture of male artists such as Henry Moore, Anthony Caro or Anthony Gormley. The work in Breaking the Mould includes highly varied approaches (methods, processes, media, scale) and can be seen within that context— as a reaction to something. The artists in the exhibition, and perhaps all artists, are trying to create a world that is interesting and relevant to them; an aspect of that process might be a reaction against something that already exists. For example, some art in the exhibition was made soon after the Second World War, and as a reaction to the war explored ideas of renewal, optimism and progress. Other examples include 3

Sarah Lucas and Rebecca Warren, both of whom use symbols and motifs of the patriarchy and subvert them; they use an existing visual language and do something new with it. In response to these ideas the artists Jessica Smith, Jess Miller, Declan Clark, Nicole Dodds, Kelly Umpleby and Ellie Huddlestone have been thinking about these ideas of materiality, making and identity, and how their own identity is explored / forged through the process of making and the materials they use. They are in the process of developing their identities as artists; who they are as people and individuals, but also who they are in society, in relation to everyone else. This project is ultimately an exploration of that process, seeking to identify connections and tensions between artists’ multifarious processes and ways of seeing the world.

Ben Judd Senior Lecturer BA Fine Art Leeds Beckett University

Ellie Huddlestone Working with the Arts Council Collection influenced me to create a zine that was concerned with the making and thinking process of Rebecca Warren’s practice. I have become more aware of the notion of how female artists aren’t adhering to traditions or rules implying a rebellious nature. The Exhibition at Longside Gallery celebrates the strengths of sculpture made by women. Rebecca Warren’s practice has inspired me to consider traditional views of women and womanhood. Warren’s practice has inspired me to consider the traditional views of the female body in sculpture and how these ideas are viewed in everyday life. In particular her exploration of what precisely makes a sculpture a “sculpture” and the process of giving shape to matter. Far from delicate, Warren’s heavy clay mounds carry the memory of being tugged, pulled, pressed and kneaded like dough. Incomplete forms spur fanciful images of plants, humans, clouds and insects. However, I did not want my focus on her practice to include sculpture with clay, I decided to explore the sculptures of the body through photographic means. I aim to create a series that focuses on manipulating the body with a combination of domestic household objects that were deemed of a female nature. 5

Ellie Huddlestone Magazine 2020

Rebecca Warren Regine 2007, Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © the artist

Declan Clark Parts of my practice are concerned with the use of kinetic sculpture. So, when I became a part of this project, responding to Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945 as the only man, it made me reconsider the knowledge I held about kinetic art. Much of the research, suggestions, and common offhand understanding is male-dominated: Fischli and Weiss, Jean Tinguely, Alexander Calder, Takis, Naum Gabo, Roman Signer; the exception being Rebecca Horn, though the few times I have seen her work presented, it seemed to place her performance work at the forefront, and rarely her kinetic work. I started to broaden my knowledge of women in kinetic art by looking at the two kinetic works in the show: + and –, 1994, by Mona Hatoum and See Thru Koan, 1969, by Liliane Lijn. Looking back, it’s ironic that I wasn’t aware of Lijn’s work despite their being a nine-metrehigh piece of hers (Converse Column, 2019) rotating across the road from our studio at university. Since the beginning of this project, I have begun to widen my knowledge of kinetic artists who are women; Angela Connor, Phyllis Mark, Irma Hünerfauth, and Lin Emery to name a few. I would love to be able to spend some time here and go into further detail about these artists, however, these names weren’t the thing that provoked the response given here in this publication. At the bottom of the kinetic art Wikipedia page, underneath the ‘see 7

also’ section, read the name Denise René. Upon a click, I discovered that René, in a self-made position as a gallerist, had been instrumental in the forming and popularisation of kinetic art. Originally this project was to take form as an exhibition, and I was to construct and realise a large site-specific kinetic sculpture. Then the Covid-19 pandemic ensued, and lockdowns made the idea of a physical exhibition impossible to carry out for the near future at the time. Since, this project has now turned into this publication, and though I wanted so badly to produce something sculpturally kinetic or a film work, written word was the only medium that seemed just. The next several pages contain an essay I wrote about Denise René, outlining a brief history of her life and career from 1944 onwards, and a discussion on the ever-ongoing findings and erasures of information about René and her work. It is also an ekphrastic piece of writing, using the imagery of Mona Hatoum’s + and – from the Breaking the Mould exhibition to evoke and structure the history and research about an extraordinary woman who became the gatekeeper to the familiarisation of kinetic Mona Hatoum +and-, 1994, art to the world. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © the artist

Blade and Wing: The Findings and Erasures of Denise René A wooden frame sits flat upon a white plinth, containing a pit of sand. The sand sits momentarily in parallel pathways curving around a leaden centre, before a wing of swift, rotating metal glides over, the sand momentarily flattened. It annihilates those pathways, those streets. Paris. 1944. German occupation of the city had created a void beneath mainstream forms of culture that were used to keep Parisians subdued. Though the wing brings destruction, it also levels out the grains. Occupation had ended on the 25th of August after being liberated by the French and Americans. The cultural void finds itself in a more quietened state. The traces of those lines still faintly visible in the sand. Across the leaden centre and opposite that destructive wing is another blade of metal. Unlike the wing, the blade has a jagged edge that graces the sand, forming back the traceable lines. The sand stays momentarily static, flattened, for twelve seconds before the blade begins to cut through. Yet the cultural void’s quietened state didn’t get the same luxury of waiting for the blade to make its mark. The 13th of July 1944. Paris. A then thirty-one-year-old French gallerist, Denise René, hosts an exhibition of drawings and graphic compositions by artist Victor Vasarely at her self-titled gallery located at 124 Rue La Boétie. The exhibition ends in late July. The wing levels the lines.

René shows Vasarely again in the winter of that year. The serrated blade retraces the lines. September of 1945 and the war is officially over. In the next ten years René puts on a cycle of exhibitions. The wing and the blade continue to rotate in equilibrium. Displays of geometric abstraction and non-figurative work installed, viewed, and emptied for the next show, every few weeks or months, for years. Concentric circles being drawn in the sand and then erased consistently at two and a half rotations per minute. This ten-year period climaxes in its last year. 1955. Paris. The artificial light of the gallery space is seen to reflect brightly off the blade, the grooves it now makes in the sand feel the greatest yet. René decides to work closely with the artist she first presented in her gallery space almost a decade prior, Victor Vasarely. Vasarely creates a pamphlet called Le Manifeste Jaune, or The Yellow Manifesto, which proposes colour, light, motion, and time, as the four principles for the development of kinetic sculpture. This manifesto accompanies the exhibition Le Mouvement, which René hosts at her gallery, opening on the 6th of April. Fifteen beginnings of rings in the sand move around the pivot of the blade and wing. Ten artists’ work appeared in the exhibition space. Yaacov Agam, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Victor Vasarely produced pieces that unfurled as the viewer moved around the gallery. Agam, along with Pol

Bury, Robert Jacobsen, and Richard Mortensen, showed work that could be altered by active participation on the part of the viewer. Jean Tinguely, not well known at the time, provided the show with motorised work that propelled itself to move. René further included Marcel Duchamp’s Rotary Demisphere and mobiles by Alexander Calder to link new kinetic artwork with early avant-garde kinetic experiments. And Robert Breer created an accompanying flip book. Furthermore, René understood the role that cinema played in connection with ideas of movement in artistic disciplines. René would host a set of screenings alongside Le Mouvement. Programmed in were a host of filmic works, from 1920’s abstract expressionist films by Henri Chomette and Viking Eggeling, to the films of Norman McLaren, Oskar Fischinger, and Len Lye. Jacobsen, Mortensen, and Breer also contributed film works to these screenings. Yet as we now are all aware, as soon as the blade creates, the wing ruins and sets anew. Le Mouvement finished on the 30th of April 1955. The show that René hosted, organised, and collaborated on, would go down as the first major kinetic art exhibition in history. It paved the way for more kinetic art exhibitions, the ‘kinetic art’ term we now associate with being used for the first time at the Museum of Design, Zurich, in 1960. The creation of the term Op Art was also triggered by the events of Le Mouvement, the term being created to define art that gave the impression of moving rather than art that actually moved, and Op Art took off with a successful 1965 exhibition called The Responsive Eye at the MoMA in New York. It would propel the career of Jean

Tinguely. Eventually Tinguely would present one of his best-known works, Homage to New York, five years later in the sculpture garden of the MoMA. And its long-standing repercussions in Paris included the creation of an optokinetic collaborative artists’ group called Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) that would be active from 1960 to 1968. The blade and the wing keep circling the sand, in what feels like an infinite process of production and destruction. Even though Le Mouvement is undoubtedly René’s most well-known historic achievement, René and her gallery continued to manifest success. In 1957, René hosts Piet Mondrian’s first solo exhibition at her gallery. In years prior and following, René presents a whole range of artists from places further afield than the immediacy of Europe, including Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez, and the Argentine artist Julio Le Parc, at a time when it was uncommon to see many other galleries internationalising. René represents her gallery and artists internationally too in such events as Documenta and the Venice Biennale, and briefly opens new galleries in Dusseldorf and New York. In 1966, she opens a space on the Rive Gauche for the distribution of artist ‘multiples’; meaning a series of limited edition, signed, identical artworks usually for the purpose of being sold for cheaper prices than that of one original artwork, a term which René coined. The revolutions of the wing and the blade never felt more active and alive. Paris. 2012. The wing sweeps across and this time it flashes a blinding white as the metal catches the

backscattering of light, a disorienting and sombre sensation as the room comes to after such intensity of brightness. On the 9th of July, Denise René passes away at the age of ninety-nine. Yet the small metal mechanism is persistent in its turning. In 1991, the gallery moved to the Marais district of Paris, where it is still currently situated, after René gave the gallery director position to Denis Kilian. Despite René’s death, the gallery continues to exhibit work to this day, with online shows taking place during the Covid-19 pandemic. The sound of the sand grains parting, gathering, and dispersing out as the blade and wing take their turns is faint. The history of Denise René and her gallery’s successes presented here is a brief one. The dispersing of the sand builds up walls on the outskirts of the rotation, containing the blade and wings act of making and unmaking. Lockdowns have obstructed the ability to travel, the possibility of entering institutions to gather information, to borrow a book from a library. Our movement determined by the result of a test, positive or negative. All the information in this text has come from what can be found online, via what is commonly accessible in such a restricted time. Information on René and Le Mouvement has gone through waves of appearance and erasure. René resurrected Le Mouvement at her New York gallery in 1975, twenty years after the original Parisian show. To accompany the exhibition, René produced a catalogue about the 1955 show and its impact which also included a copy of

Vasarely’s Le Manifeste Jaune. The blade draws anew in the sand. The catalogue seems to be impossible to find, with no free excerpts or pdf versions, and The Yellow Manifesto only exists in what is written about it. The wing erases what is drawn leaving its faint traces of what was before. In 2010, Museum Tinguely, located in Basel, Switzerland, restaged Le Mouvement with an added exhibition sub-heading: From Cinema to Kinetics. The blade retraces. Their website goes into detail about the events of the 1955 show, but seldom mentions the exact artworks Museum Tinguely exhibited or how much of their recreation stayed true to the original. The wing dissipates. Le Mouvement is yet to be revived for a fourth time. René’s name and her contribution are stated on the Wikipedia page for Kinetic Art. The blade draws. Yet the Tate website’s definition is the first to turn up in the Google search, and doesn’t feature her name, however it does mention the artist she represented, and collaborator of Le Mouvement, Victor Vasarely. The wing diffuses what is drawn. The Denise René Gallery website have deleted a list of all the exhibitions they’ve ever hosted from 1944 to the present day, removing a highly informative archive from the public eye and minimising the available history about what René achieved in her lifetime. And what’s more, when you type Denise René into the Google search bar and click her name, it changes from Denise René to Denise René Gallery; the legacy which has now grown and will continue to grow beyond René’s life has taken precedent over her personal impacts and history.

Situations have been created in which there has been a collective effort to draw attention to René herself with the work of the ten male artists she hosted in Le Mouvement being secondary to that. In 2001, the Centre Pompidou hosted an exhibition titled Denise René, l’intrépide: une galerie dans l’aventure de l’art abstrait, 1944-1978 or as it translates The Intrepid Denise René: A Gallery in the Adventure of Abstraction, 1944-1978. The blade makes its marks again. It would be wonderful to be able to explain what the exhibition entailed – however, the Centre Pompidou’s webpage about the show opens with a lovely 404 error, and French written catalogues are an unreachable and rare commodity. The wing withdraws what the blade marked. Copies of a book called Conversations with Denise René, published in 2001, do exist out there; finally, an insight into René’s thoughts and feelings about her life, philosophies, reflections on her career, and the impressions she has made on the art world. The blade draws once more. Unfortunately, this book seems to only exist in the short quotes and footnotes of random essays on the most irrelevant subjects, uploaded online as pdfs. The wing prevails in the end. René’s death in 2012 created a small resurgence in her interest in the form of obituaries. And like this text, these articles go into brief histories and musings about her achievements, mainly about the success of Le Mouvement and Mondrian’s first solo exhibition. Few barely reach down further and attempt to resurface and reanalyse the essays in catalogues that are hiding

in libraries, the archives stored in the backs of galleries, or the writings of recorded conversations that René had, currently sitting on a bookshelf gathering dust, or as a casual read lying on someone’s desk. The wing and the blade continue to rotate in equilibrium. This text is a way of drawing a line. The way the blade makes its circular indentations in the sand. Inevitably, it will get lost to time. The way the wing approaches and erases. Another arrangement of information distributed, unsaved and then forgotten. But as we are now aware, the lines are still there, faint in appearance. And the blade will come around again, to retrace what once was.

Photograph of Denise René, 1955.

Jessica Smith My work for this project is inspired by my practice and works like Barbara Hepworth’s Icon 1957 and Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (6 Spaces) 1994 Resin. The softness and fluidlike movement in Barbara’s sculpture can be reflected in the softness and fragility of the ends of the ribbon. The inspiration of Rachel’s work can be seen in the colour of the imagery. Both are displayed better in the light so that you are able to see the contrasting colours. My ends of the ribbons work uses medals that belonged to my great grandfather and were awarded at the end of the Second World War. The medals were created after the war ended, as were the works of the artists showcased in the Breaking the Mould exhibition. Some ribbons belonged to my grandfather although these were not awarded during the Second World War but were awarded to him for taking part in the conflict in Cyprus in the 1950s. Although my grandparents received recognition for their service, most of these female artists in Breaking the Mould did not have theirs. As a family we do not discuss our relatives taking part in the conflicts, they are stored away in a plastic box. The artists taking part in the Breaking the 17

Rachel Whiteread Untitled (6 Spaces) 1994 Resin, Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © the artist

Mould exhibition are now getting the recognition they deserve, and so for myself I wanted to bring to light the way times have changed.

Ribbons, 2020

Jess Miller When considering the artists and works in the Breaking the Mould exhibition, initially I was moved by the idea of the relationships these female sculptors had with the people closest to them and how these relationships may have influenced their practice. This may be more apparent for those who worked in a time where male artists dominated the scene, but I feel it is important to pay equal attention to more contemporary artists in order to find patterns that might emerge. Instead of focusing on the specifics of one artist’s experiences, I considered how to portray the role relationships might have in affecting a person’s decisions and ultimately their life. I believe that there is something unsaid about how many of us have faced similar issues in our lives, and how much more powerful these would be if they were shared. This led me to decide to write letters to various members of my family, discussing how i feel they have impacted my life and even opening doors previously left closed. I have left the subject completely anonymous, so that you cannot deduce the age, gender or relationship of the person I am writing to. Titled Familiar, the intention behind this work is to leave more room 21

for readers to empathise with the issues at hand, as I do not believe that the topics discussed are specific to me alone. I will not be sending these letters to the intended recipients as I feel that this would alter their meaning; that we all have more in common than we might think.

Familiar, 2020

Kelly Umpleby Traditional gender roles were my inspiration for this piece of work. I wanted to create a piece that was reminiscent of what was considered to be a feminine hobby, such as crochet. I made the crochet hook bigger and heavier than a traditional hook through using materials and tools that were considered to be masculine.

Crowbar, 2020

Installation View, 2020

Nicole Dodds During this project, I have been looking into Anthea Hamilton’s work, more specifically her leg chair series. While my own practice does not directly concern feminism and is not inherently feminist, through my research I have come to feel that our works closely align to that concept. For example, Hamilton’s Jane Birkin 2011 along with the other leg chairs in the series, ‘is formed of a simple stand and seat flanked by suggestively splayed Perspex legs, which are based on the artist’s own’1. Splayed female legs or ‘womanspreading’ could be seen as a feminist stance interrogating how that specific pose is considered taboo and unsightly. This specific stance is dominative and invades the space in which it is situated, demanding attention. The work completely questions the rhetoric of gendered gestures and is confrontational. On the chair itself, there are images of Jane Birkin placed in the Perspex legs. To view these images you are implicated into a perverted situation that is uncomfortable to comprehend. Hamilton makes use of popular culture and the imagery it throws up. She has said: ‘Images complicate by their simple appearance: it is quotation, reference, collage, homage all in one’.2 I found this quote really interesting in 27

how Hamilton describes her own work and how it relates to my own personal practice. Within my own personal practice I do not use sculpture or materialise my work, but instead use the internet, social media and the screen. Similarly, I interrogate online imagery and the posts of social media users. Though images have ‘simple’ outward appearances, to fully digest them and understand them to the fullest extent takes a lot more. Arguably the fact Hamilton has these images she talks about printed out and brought into a physical space, makes you wonder why she wanted it be a tactile part of the work. Is it reminiscent of the period of time when the images of Jane Birkin were taken, mimicking promotional posters or magazine spreads?

With the lens and self portraiture evolving with cyberspace, what we now know as the ’selfie’ has emerged. The subject of a selfie can be dealt a sense of strangeness when dealing with the camera. As described by Pirandello, he would liken this feeling to the same sensation of the estrangement you feel when standing in front of your own image in the mirror. This reflected image has become easily accessible by the population. Arguably, we have become interlaced between the reflected self that we see on the screen and our physical selves. The reflected pixel-bypixel self is transported, though in the moment, the image was taken by the subject, themself and the lens alone, being aware that they will face the public and the consumers who constitute the market. In the internet market, they do not just offer the image. They offer their whole self, heart and soul. Self-branding is not just the visuals but the persona as a whole. As consumers if we are buying into something, we want it to be authentic, ‘good’ and transparent with

Nicole Dodds, 2020

us as viewers. Arguably, something the internet makes nearly impossible is to prove authenticity. Through the lens and mobile phones, ‘selfies’ can be autonomously changed and filtered. The image of our ‘self’ becomes distinctly different to our physical being. Through the ‘selfie’ we transport viewers to a space where we trick them into believing the image as truth, displaying our #dailylook. I therefore question: is any image seen online the truth or real? In reality it is not, it is manipulated pixels that have captured only that filtered faction of a second. In this short text I want to highlight and express

what my practice tackles in a post-social media era. This text may be reminiscent of a previous text you have read. However, I now believe it is more up-to-date in our world interlaced with media. Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses towards art. Why? Now in 2021 and onwards, we experience art from a multitude of extrinsic cyberspace sources and outlets. Rather than artwork just being reproduced as photographs, or as print in a newspaper, it is now digitally viewed and experienced a potentially infinite number of times. Compared to the pre-social media/internet age where we physically had to take ourselves to a gallery to experience a piece of work. This increasingly progressive reaction is characterised by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment of the constructed media we consume. This type of fusion is of great social and economic significance. Artworks that do not gain such momentum from viewers that challenge social norms or become a part of ‘popular culture’ are subject to having a large gap between public enjoyment and critique. With the screen becoming the most frequent way for art to be viewed, the critical and receptive attitudes of the users coincide. This is due to the massive persuasiveness of user comments or ‘likes’. The individual’s reaction is already predetermined by a previous user’s response 31

and/or media surrounding a piece. The moment these responses become manifested, they control each other. Rather than individual opinions, the population has come to a collective, consensusdriven opinion on the subject. 1

http://www.artscouncilcollection.org.uk/discover-collection/leg-

chair-jane-birkin 2

http://www.artscouncilcollection.org.uk/discover-collection/leg-

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