A Revealing New Exhibition in Germany Delves Into the Files of Top Art Dealers From the 1960s to Show How Female Artists Were Kept Out

Sometime around 1965, the young American artist Lee Lozano was
chatting with the upstart curator Kasper König.

“You are a good painter and a nice girl,” König said to Lozano,
as she recounted later in her notebook.

“Wrong on both counts,” Lozano replied. “I am a very
good painter and not a nice girl!”

The provocative interaction between the two, both of whom went
on to become art-world stars, inspired the title for a group show
in Düsseldorf that opens on January 18. The exhibition delves into
the history of pioneering female conceptual artists: Lozano, Adrian
Piper, Eleanor Antin, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Viewed together,
the archival material, including letters and notes, illustrates a
determined network of women, but also sheds light on
the institutionalized discrimination they encountered and
pushed back against during their careers.

“It is an instance of structural sexism framed as kindness,”
says the exhibition’s curator, Isabelle Malz, of the documented
conversation between König and Lozano, whose notebook is included
in a display of 11 books she filled during her lifetime but never
exhibited. “Each of these women raised very contemporary topics and
important questions that are still relevant and pressing today,”
Malz adds.

The vast majority of the ephemera on view charts correspondence
that the four first-generation conceptual artists had with the
influential German art dealer Konrad Fischer. Together with his
wife, Dorothee Fischer, Konrad played a significant role in the
conceptual art movement and was an early champion of artists like
Carl Andre, Bruce Nauman, and On Kawara. (Material from the Fischer
Archive forms the backbone of the exhibition.)

Ironically, though he maintained frequent contact with the
female artists in that cohort, Fischer did not exhibit their work
at his gallery with any regularity.

One can detect the hopeful tone in Antin’s 1972 letter to Konrad
Fischer, which she sent when she caught wind that the esteemed
dealer was coming to the US for a visit. “I hope we can meet
‘in the real world’ when you’re in town,” she wrote. “I understand
[fellow conceptual artist] John Baldessari is to drive you around.
He knows where I am.”

Another letter, sent to German curator and art historian Klaus
Honnef (with legendary curator Harald Szeemann listed as in “cc” at
the bottom), from Hungarian-American conceptual artist Agnes
Denes, is a little less friendly. “I was recently told by a ‘spy’
that Konrad Fischer ‘doesn’t like’ my work—which is fine with me,
except that he has never seen my work,” writes Denes,
complaining about being rejected from a documenta show. “A man
never recommends a woman unless she is his woman.”

The work of Adrian Piper introduces yet another critical
perspective, exploring the double marginalization female artists of
color experience. The show includes My Calling Card
#1, which the artist would hand out as an “intervention
in order to prevent co-optation” when someone would make a racist
remark. (The small card reads: “I regret any discomfort my presence
is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your
racism is causing me.”)

While a show drawing largely on archival material might
initially be dismissed as dry, this one offers compelling insight
into the art-world machine—and helps explain why the representation of women in
museum collections remains astonishingly low.

“A critical reading of the archival material reveals structural
mechanisms of discrimination within our society, along with
questions about hidden narratives in art history,” Malz wrote in an
introduction to the show. Her aim, she says, is to “liberate the
documents in the Fischer Archive from their storage boxes” and
activate them with new questions and perspectives.

See some of the show’s archival documents and artworks
below.

“I’m Not a Nice Girl!” is on view at K21 –
Kunstsammlung NRW in Düsseldorf from January 18 through May 17,
2020.

The post A Revealing New Exhibition in Germany Delves Into
the Files of Top Art Dealers From the 1960s to Show How Female
Artists Were Kept Out appeared first on artnet News.