Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-representation

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

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

Review :
"Mirror Images is a welcome successor to Whitney Chadwick's significant work on the hitherto neglected history of women and surrealism. An impressive list of contributors explores the byways, bringing this tragic, funny, and engrossing story up to recent times." --Lucy Lippard, author of The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art