Women Power Exhibition

A major event for Anne was her participation in “Woman Power Exhibition” at the Swiss Cottage Library in London.

John A Walker in his book “Art & Outrage: Provocation, Controversy, and the Visual Arts” Pluto Press (1999) devotes a whole chapter (9) to the exhibition. Here is a quotation from the chapter extolling its historic importance.

“1973: WOMANPOWER EXHIBITION PROVOKES STRONG REACTIONS”

“In 1973 an important Feminist art show was held in a London public library. It mounted a challenge to entrenched patriarchal power structures and gender divisions. It prompted much public controversy and press coverage; even the police became involved…As far as the participants’ artistic careers were concerned, the exhibition was not a stepping stone to success…[yet] the Swiss Cottage exhibition was a bold initiative which succeeded in its aim of demonstrating the power of women when they band together in pursuit of their emancipation. It also raised issues that were to be keenly debated in the years to come; it empowered many of the women who saw it and served to educate some male viewers.” pp 62-7.

Towards a Revolutionary Feminist Art

Also of importance was the manifesto “Towards a revolutionary feminist art”
Anne wrote part of it with Monica Sjöö. This is referred to in the first volume of her diaries, 1971, page 21 describing her meeting with Sjöö and Skinner, followed by their correspondence.

Anne Berg co-authored this manifesto with Monica Sjöö in 1971 as a contribution to a pamphlet “Towards a Revolutionary Feminist Art” that contained contributions from Elizabeth Moore, Beverley Skinner, Roslyn Smythe, Pat van Twest, Anne Berg, and Monica Sjöö

  In it Liz Moore wrote “We are women painters, and proud of it. For a woman to become, and remain, an artist is a revolutionary process…”

Mary Stott reviewed it in The Guardian 21st December 1971 writing “What makes me laugh is the thought that people…who over the years have called professional women like me “pseudo-men” and asked ‘why can’t we fulfil ourselves as women’ are likely to be even more affronted by women like Monica Sjöö, Beveley Skinner and Anne Berg who want to do just that”

Left to Right: Monica Sjöö (Sweden),Anne Berg (UK), Rosalyn Smythe (Canada), Beverley Skinner (USA), Elizabeth Moore (UK)

IMAGES OF WOMANPOWER – ARTS MANIFESTO (Anne Berg & Monica Sjöö)
(trying to give a rough and necessarily incomplete idea of what we are about)

We are the artists of the oppressed peoples.
We as women bear on our shoulders oppression stretching back into the ancient past.…WE WERE THE FIRST OPRESSED==
We reject the abstract researches, playful gimmicks, characteristic of contented and successful male artists. Although aware that these pursuits are not entirely without purpose and interest, we feel that it is NOT possible as members of an oppressed group – half of the human race – and with powerful means of communication in our hands to sit around playing games with the surface of reality.
We accept that the early 20th. Century artists had to escape from Victorian romantic illusions and embrace reality (beyond illusion) via cubism and collage. Like scientists they were trying to get at the reality of vision on the level of atoms and cell-structures, the light and forms that make up what we consider to be the everyday world. In the early 20th century painters were also enthusiastic about technology because it seemed to hold the seeds of the future. Futurism, constructivism sought to explore technological reality – but NOW technology is submerged in a commercialism so obscene and decadent that for artists to embrace such values is beyond our comprehension.
Commercial life is the enemy of art and art cannot accept its visual signs as part of our language. DEATH TO THE PLASTIC CULTURE. Our century has tried to make art a part of reality, but the reality in our culture is crass, exploitative, capitalistic reality and NOT our function as artists should be to expose the sickness of this culture and NOT to embrace it.
Perhaps the only thing that can serve us now is a sort of tragic realism which is not expressionism because it is too real.
Nature and Machine cannot live together to living tissue is ground to dust… “A small and beautiful child walks thru the blasted scene of disaster – a scene that is atomised and disintegrated by the last convulsions of a society that will not die, but hangs on, desiring to bring everything to dust, amongst the violent tombs of sordidity and despair, supermarkets and bingo halls.” Where is the glorious new world of the machine?
Art, like science, must explore the world, attempt to heal it; abstract art now serves the ruling classes because it mystifies reality, it is undangerous, undisturbing – it has become like patterns on the level of interior decoration, the tedious technicalities of advertising. It cannot be used as a tool either exploring mystical reality or exploring social reality. WE REJECT IT. WE SAY NO TO EMPTY ABSTRACTIONS, to the ‘art for art’s sake’ philosophy of the privileged white middle-class male art world.
We THE OPPRESSED cannot afford this empty play with words and forms, for us the important task is to convey to people to WOMEN their dignity and strength and beauty – OUR PAST AND FUTURE. God – Woman giving birth to the universe out of her bloody womb, life, death, rebirth – the eternal mystery of life and its richness.
HOW DOES ONE COMMUNICATE WOMENS’ STRENGTH, STRUGGLE, RISING UP FROM OPPRESSION, BLOOD, CHILDBIRTH, SEXUALITY – IN STRIPES AND TRIANGLES, the time is passed when women dare not portray their fears, hatred, experience of oppression – we are no longer afraid to show in images the violence of our anger and remorse, and also our great sadness and love.
True love and inspiration no false limits and prejudice, as to technical means. Almost every male artist in the past was a member of the elite. Their leisure was bought at the cost of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives -who were allowed to be workers, models, supporters, secretaries, drudges but NEVER allowed themselves to create. (As well as reaping the wealth created by the working class and third world’s peoples).
We, the ones, who have been subjected to humiliation every day of our lives, denied our identity, history, and tradition, are not the ones to stand back coolly and analytically talk of objectivity and abstraction. So called objectivity – what is it but the separation of thought and reason from our real desires and wishes? Men use the terms to hide they have desires and wishes. Women are expected to follow suit and deny their own. FUCK YOUR “OBJECTIVITY” AND YOUR MIDDLE-CLASS CULTURE!
We want to give expression to the REAL hopes, needs and beliefs of women – of people – struggling to escape from oppression both material and psychological – servitude and contempt.
Even our history must be rewritten. Are we to continue bearing the myth that women are, have been, and will be passive, uncreative, and mentally inferior? The split between body-soul, material-spirit is a false separation of patriarchal civilizations who have formulated theories and philosophies over thousands of years excusing and re-inforcing our oppression by saying that women represent the negative, the dark, the passive, the non-creative and non-spiritual aspect a matter that men have to surpass and exploit in order to become pure spirit, pure activity, pure artist, aggressive and defined by non-positive energy.
LIES AND LIES ARE WE BRED ON! We were slaves with the consciousness of slaves. But myths are not destroyed solely by social change and logic. Women painters wish to destroy the myth of inferiority and replace it with a new pride and joy in womanhood – in sisterhood – and of all aspects of life that have been deformed and brutalised by capitalism and the patriarchal atomised family. We also want to release men from their narrow pseudo-scientific dogmatism the need to assert and subjugate in order to feel strong (some men cannot get a ‘hard on’ unless they can degrade and humiliate a woman sexually and mentally). Womankind, like the surface of this earth has been ravaged because of this false need.
But now WE ARE RISING to recreate at last our strength, dignity, wisdom, and creativity of women of the ancient past. WE WISH TO ACHIEVE WORLD VIEW.
In ancient cultures life and art were integrated. Art was the great religious rituals – the initiation dramas that expressed the collective dreams and experience of the whole community concerning life and the universe. Music, dance, masks, carvings, murals, all served a purpose and together created a wholeness. But… art which had once been the expression of both sexes became later divided into the Sacred and the Profane. Sacred art became a male province in the hands of a male priesthood, when the priestesses of the Great Mother were deposed at the beginning of the patriarchal era, and women were left with the ‘lesser arts‘ of pottery, weaving, etc.
Our dreams, hopes, feelings, cannot be realised in present patriarchal, capitalistic society that denies all experience or expression that does not serve the exploitation of human beings in the service of capitalism. And the most denied of all are the dreams, aspirations, feelings, intuition, and experience of women. WOMEN LIVE A SHADOW LIFE.
There is a one-sex view in art today; what we always see is the men’s vision of himself, the world, and woman. We are sick, sick, sick, of the continual visual exploitation of women’s bodies, of women as objects. “I paint with my prick” said Renoir only two true…
But we are women and WE ARE SUBJECTS and will portray ourselves as such and so at last we will end the ages of pornography-vision of women. If a woman dares to portray a man as her sexual object there is an outcry heard all over the land. (ed. note – Monica Sjoo did just that and her work was ordered to be taken down by the police – in the haven of artists – St. Ives Cornwall)
We are told we are not in the mainstream of artistic exploration, that we are not exploring modern forms; that we are ‘out on a limb’ – but we tell you that IT IS YOU WHO ARE OUT ON A LIMB!
What you have now is a half-world imagery at the point of stagnation. Women are presently accepted into the art world only if they confirm to the accepted attitude of the already dominant male art view of what art is and was: again HIS vision. Male artists have explored every aspect of the half-world view and expression, they express frustration in thrusting big, bigger, and biggest objects and canvasses, all with no content whatsoever and with no relation to real human feelings or aspirations. They have reached a dead-end.
But for women all explorations start now – we do not identify creative energy with phallic thrusting aggressiveness. Perhaps women have in fact great artistic traditions in the ancient past. Who created the cave-paintings? If one knows that the cave was the womb and the sanctuary of the Great Mountain Mother, who was served by female priests and who was the mother of all animals, one can well ask if the murals were not the work of women. Pottery was invented by women and the forms and patterns of ancient pottery are some of the greatest treasures of the past. The palaces of Crete with their beautiful murals and central heating systems – were not they the work of women painters and architects? In Africa women are musicians and dancers, they have secret songs and dances. Why so little is known about female culture is because the majority of anthropologists have been men and these women’s initiations, and secret societies are not open to men observers. In folk music in England a great many of the recorded folk songs were taken down from women singers. In America there was a whole tradition of blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. So little is known about women’s art because male historians have little interest in recording what women have created and achieved. It has been a positive embarrassment to them, but human life is an inter-action between two sexes. Art must be the expression of the total human world and only art fed by female and male views interacting can be vital. The time is NOW and it is overdue!
Anne Berg and Monica Sjöö