By Flavia Frigeri

Flavia Frigeri charts the ways in which film-makers and artists Cecilia Mangini, Giosetta Fioroni, Marinella Pirelli, Laura Grisi, Ketty La Rocca, and Nicole Gravier subversively  used lens-based media to disrupt patriarchal representations of womanhood.

Cecilia Mangini, Essere donne, 1965. Film still. Film, color, sound, 29:00 mins. Courtesy of Archivi AAMOD – Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico

“They look at us from magazines and posters, they invite us to be like them, ever happier and more confident in the present moment as well as in the future. They are the leading images of the wellness myth but, behind them, society tries to hide contradictions and violence. They are also premonitory images, signals, warnings. Who can recognize themselves in these images? Not the six million women who work in manufacturing in Italy. Not the millions of women who stay at home, tied up in domestic labor. Not these fourteen and fifteen year old girls, who work in an Apulian pasta factory.”¹

These words spoken by a stern male voice introduce us to Cecilia Mangini’s documentary Essere donne (Being Women) from 1965. The male narrator draws our attention to the contradiction at the heart of women’s contemporary condition, a point reinforced by a fast-paced sequence of found images, which juxtapose stereotypical constructions of femininity with the tragedy of nuclear warfare. Beauty, and especially the reification of the female body by newspapers and magazines, is paired here with mass annihilation, implying that both, despite their differences, are affronts to civilization. Mangini’s captivating prelude bears an aesthetic quality similar to that of Ketty La Rocca’s and Lucia Marcucci’s photomontages, with their piercing estrangement of images and words, aimed at re-writing, with a good dose of parody and humor, the contemporary bias against women. Mangini’s subversive strategy also calls to mind Martha Rosler’s political photomontages, Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain (1966-72) and House Beautiful: Bringing the War Back Home (1967-72) deconstructing representations of women in mass circulation magazines and denouncing the Vietnam War, respectively. The documentarist’s exercise: cutting and pasting found images of commodified female flesh to show how the vexed role of women in a commercially-oriented world was the subject of an interdisciplinary discourse centered around image-making through lens-based media.

Mangini’s guerrilla-inflected commentary becomes all the more poignant when considered alongside the rest of the documentary, which presents a rather bleak picture of worker’s rights and women’s rights (or lack thereof). Essere donne takes us on a journey from Milan to Apulia and, through the words of elderly and middle-class women, we are introduced to the dark side of the “economic miracle.” Chartering the difficult lives of women working in Italian factories (the most recognisable symbol of Italy’s 1960s booming economy) and tobacco plants, as well as the mass emigration from Southern to Northern Italy, Essere donne offers a reflection on the struggles faced by women in a country which still largely relegated them to the domestic sphere. Overworked, poorly paid, and with little to no support, the women interviewed by Mangini are having to choose between working and caring for their children. A choice that is not always easy to make, and that many women still experience today. 

Cecilia Mangini, Essere donne, 1965. Still da film. Film, colore, sonoro, 29:00 min. Courtesy Archivi AAMOD – Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico

Arguably, the stark realism of Essere donne is somewhat out of sync with the more self-centered hyperbolic efforts of her contemporaries working with art and language. Yet, the emphasis placed on labor, both inside and outside of the home, and the subordination of women within the family that Mangini’s documentary exposes, resonate with the issues most fiercely debated by the feminist movement; even as the documentarist eschewed such a direct affiliation, claiming “My ‘feminism’ doesn’t exist.”² This statement should be understood not as an outright rejection of feminism, but rather as a reassertion of her commitment to equality and human rights, beyond gender.³ Essere donne presents us with a crude picture of 1960s Italy seen from a female perspective of struggle and disadvantage that speaks (perhaps unconsciously so) to Silvia Federici’s call to bring the struggle “out of the kitchen and bedroom and into the streets.”⁴ While Mangini is not literally taking the streets, she is nonetheless urging a public response through the medium of film. Borrowing Marshall McLuhan’s famous diktat “the medium is the message,” one could argue that Mangini charges film with the power to empower.

In this context, Essere donne sets the tone for what is about to follow, that is a discussion of how, through lens-based media, women reclaimed subjecthood and created non-hierarchical spaces for action. Vindicating the autonomous female subject was a core concern for many women artists who came of age in the 1960s and early 1970s.⁵ Across a range of media, including film, painting, and photography, they rescued the female subject from its patriarchal foe. The body, and specifically the artist’s body, took centre stage, often as a reassertion of the well-known feminist credo: “the personal is political.” While many of the works produced at this time were inflected by the spirit of self-consciousness promulgated by the burgeoning feminist movement, not all artists readily embraced the practices and thinking of feminism, or, at least, did not do so by joining the ranks of feminist groups and women’s organizations. Feminist thinking, nevertheless, informed the self-critical awareness of artists like Giosetta Fioroni, La Rocca and Nicole Gravier, encouraging them to present a radical image of the feminine in stark contrast with the stereotypes fabricated by the mass media. Like Mangini, they drew attention to women as both active subjects and subordinate objects, a contradiction at the heart of the contemporary female condition. The installations and films of Laura Grisi and Marinella Pirelli were arguably at a further remove from feminist concerns, even though—as we shall see—Pirelli’s filmed self-portraits are imbued with questions around female identity that take as a point of departure the artist’s lived experience.

Cecilia Mangini, Essere donne, 1965. Still da film. Film, colore, sonoro, 29:00 min. Courtesy Archivi AAMOD – Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico

To draw a direct correlation between the work of Fioroni, Gravier, Grisi, La Rocca, and Pirelli and the Italian feminist movement (in all its multiplicity) is a non-linear operation, albeit one that has certainly gained more traction, both in the academic sphere and the curatorial realm, in recent years. While the self-critical awareness that underpinned the practices of many female artists in the 1960s and 1970s was related to the spread of feminist thinking and the beginnings of radical feminist activism, these artists did not necessarily define themselves as feminists. They were vocal in denouncing the discrimination to which women had been traditionally subjected to, and asserted their rightful place as artists in a society that had long ago cast them aside, often by participating in all-female exhibitions; possibly another form of ghettoization, but at least one that granted them some visibility. Most importantly though, they understood art as a locus in which the disparity between sexes could be denounced, which in turn led to a radical rethinking of life and gender identity. With this in mind, the struggle for liberation carried forth by the feminist movement and the visual ambitions of contemporary female artists appeared well-aligned. The weak link (if one might define it so) of this operation was the schism between art and critical reception. In many cases, it was a missed encounter. I am thinking specifically here of Carla Lonzi, whose abandonment in 1970 of art criticism and general disenchantment toward art—understood as the purview of a deeply problematic patriarchal structure—led her to overlook the immediate ties that could have been established between feminism and the work of contemporary women artists. Anne Marie Sauzeau Boetti, another important critical voice of the time, was more sympathetic to the efforts of her female peers and gave them visibility in her writings. Later Lea Vergine, with her now legendary exhibition “L’altra metà dell’avanguardia” (The other half of the avant-garde, 1980) brought artists and works by female artists, which had long been overlooked, back to the fore. Only more recently—and perhaps off the back of landmark feminist international exhibitions such as “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007), “Elles@centrepompidou” in Paris (2010), and “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985” at the Hammer Museum (2017)— has there been a more concerted effort to realign the work of female Italian artists active in the 1970s and interested in gender with contemporary feminist thinking.

As discussed above, feminist art is a search that often starts with the self. In this essay, I take an expanded view on what the self means, and with its implications in relation to the work of Fioroni, Gravier, Grisi, La Rocca, and Pirelli. Along with growing self-awareness, representation—or lack thereof—was a shared concern. The body took on a symbolic value and through the camera lens and the video screen another femininity was revealed. Overturning traditional tropes produced by and for the male gaze meant engaging in a play of roles that motivated these artists to take on multiple guises: subject and object, actor and operator, photographer and model.

OVERTURNING TRADITIONAL TROPES PRODUCED BY AND FOR THE MALE GAZE MEANT ENGAGING IN A PLAY OF ROLES THAT MOTIVATED FIORONI, GRAVIER, GRISI, LA ROCCA AND PIRELLI TO TAKE ON MULTIPLE GUISES: SUBJECT AND OBJECT, ACTOR AND OPERATOR, PHOTOGRAPHER AND MODEL.

A fade-out

Giosetta Fioroni, La solitudine femminile, 1967. Film still. Film. Courtesy of the artist, and Archivio Giosetta Fioroni

In 1972, the painter Giosetta Fioroni stated: “Nowadays, […] a slide projector is a normal piece of equipment—and I made use of it as I would with any other artist’s tool such as a spatula, oil color or brushes.”⁶ The projector, an interface between the artist’s canvas and the found photographs from which she drew her subjects, was part and parcel of her image-making process. Starting in 1963, Fioroni had turned her attention to the “sea of photographs surrounding us daily” and sought to filter them through painting.⁷ Rooted in contemporary image culture, her visual lexicon was specifically concerned with women and their representation in newspapers and magazines. Young and beautiful girls appeared like “fade-outs” on Fioroni’s canvases, lending to painting a photographic connotation; a feature enhanced by the color silver, intended to create a distancing effect and recall a memory of something both past and present. Womanhood was, in fact, questioned through stereotypical attributes attached to femininity. As the artist later recalled: “The basic criterion on which I selected the photos was connected with the possibility of capturing some particular element such as femininity, elegance, astonishment, expectation. Or the horror of the stereotype, predominant seriality, consumption etc.”⁸

Giosetta Fioroni, La ragazza della televisione, 1964. Courtesy of the artist, and Archivio Giosetta Fioroni

A sensation of fixity, combined with the flatness of the representation, underscore the one-dimensionality of these found women. For the most part strangers to Fioroni, they are stand-ins for the trappings of the female stereotype in its differing declinations. Attributes such as the eyes and the mouth are given centre-stage, qualifying as signifiers of a femininity that overrides individuality in the name of seriality. In contemporary newspapers and magazines, difference was diluted, as an oversimplified concept of femininity sought to represent womanhood in its full complexity. Fioroni’s paintings make this bias apparent. At the time, critics (and especially male ones) were adamant to frame them as snapshots “about female feelings or perhaps rather the female essence.”⁹ A superficial reading, premised on the eeriness of the painted figures too easily equated with absence of character, and explicitly disavowed by Fioroni in her description of the works as fade-outs.   

The fade-out married with the apparition and the film still represents a formal strategy deployed by Fioroni to conceive of painting in an expanded way. No longer just the site of pictorial representation, it becomes a conduit for the coming together of different media: photography as source, painting as surface and film as subject. The cinematographic fade-out is, in fact, central to Fioroni’s vision. In her words: “I was looking for the lightness of something like an ancient sequence by the Lumière brothers, one of the earliest films, something that passes, something that could be imagined as a series of shots (of which I blocked one): something capable of making the viewer think of a slight flicker, an apparition, a fade-out.”¹⁰ Fioroni translates the cinematic effect into pictorial terms, fixing the moving image into a still one, a process that comes full circle in the short film Solitudine Femminile, a little-known work made by the artist in 1967, ostensibly off the back of her portraits of women. In it, the poet Rosanna Tofanelli is filmed while she puts on make-up, a quintessentially feminine action. At the same time, Tofanelli is portrayed giving voice to her inner quandaries. The contrast between beautification and the search for identity could not be starker. Ultimately, in the span of a few minutes, Fioroni shows how torn women are between pleasing society, while also fulfilling their innermost desires; two facets difficult to reconcile, Fioroni tells us.

Actress-Operator

Marinella Pirelli, Doppio autoritratto [Double self-portrait], 1973-74. Film still. Film, 16mm, digital transfer, color, sound, 13:00 mins. © The Estate of the Artist. Courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

“In this film I filmed myself I act simultaneously as an operator and as an actress. In the moving sequences I move with the camera in my hand facing me. No one controlled the camera during the shoot. The camera was my partner: each of you is my partner now.”¹¹ A programmatic, but also intimate statement introduces us to Marinella Pirelli’s film Doppio autoritratto (Double self-portrait, 1973-74) in which the artist plays multiple roles, subject and object, actress and operator; both in front of and behind the camera.

Pirelli’s double self-portrait is a moving act of self-revelation. In a manner not too dissimilar to Fioroni’s Solitudine Femminile, we are confronted here with the complexity of female subjecthood in its rawest form. Portrayed with closed eyes at first, Pirelli goes on to reveal herself to us. She stares straight into the camera and invites us to engage with her from the other side of the screen. A stark shift follows and we lose sight of Pirelli’s face. Close-ups of the artist’s body haphazardly besiege the camera. The artist is still present, but we only catch glimpses of her hair, neck and scalp. At the end of the film, we are reunited with Pirelli’s face, which acquires a different quality in light of the more unconventional portrayal we just observed. Melancholy clouds Pirelli’s final expression, as she bids farewell to us and to the camera. This was, in fact, the artist’s last film. Having recently lost her husband, the artist turned to the camera as a site of both mourning and self-discovery. “QUANDO MI VIDI NON C’ERO” (when you saw me I was not there), the words of conceptual artist Vincenzo Agnetti—to whom Pirelli dedicates the self-portrait—voice the experience of finding oneself in the long shadow of loss.

Marinella Pirelli, Doppio autoritratto [Double self-portrait], 1973-74. Film still. Film, 16mm, digital transfer, color, sound, 13:00 mins. © The Estate of the Artist. Courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

Mood-wise, the contrast with Narciso, a film from 1966, could not be starker, even though the premise is similar, in that both films are self-portraits. Narciso, as the title suggests, is informed by narcissistic indulgence. Body and language become one, as Pirelli takes us through an undisciplined script akin to a stream of consciousness. She revels in life and self. All the while the camera that she is holding in her hand shows us different parts of her body. While Pirelli’s voice is explicitly sensual, the thoughts she voices underscore the existential tension she experiences as a woman divided between the home and the studio. The artist speaks her truth by turning language into a loaded gun and the camera is there to record this. The immediacy of the medium, as well as its ability to unite sound and image in a seamless bind, guide Pirelli in this subjective exercise in and around identity. Narciso ends on a sober note with the artist stating “silence is falling.” Unlike Doppio autoritratto we never see Pirelli’s face, just her body. In both instances, the artist conceives of the camera as a specular tool aiding in the search and reaffirmation of her shifting identities. Thus, as a prosthetic extension of the artist’s being, the camera becomes a site of knowledge and empowerment, reaffirming Pirelli’s self as a woman and an artist.

Laura Grisi, Distillations – 3 Months of Looking, 1970. Artestudio, Macerata, cm 22,5×24. Courtesy of Laura Grisi Estate; and P420, Bologna. Photo by Carlo Favero

“I look at variety in plants – Mindanao, Sulu Islands”
“I look at how plants move – Maupiti, Leeward Islands”
“I look at fire – Chad Desert”
“I look at how the ocean moves – Rangiroa”
“I look at the horizon – Niger Desert”
“I look at a lava flow – Tanna Volcano, New Hebrides”
“I look at the sun – Manihi, Tuamotu Atolls”
“I look at water – Raiatea, Leeward Islands”¹²

In 1970 Laura Grisi travelled for three months. A time during which she looked and looked hard at her surroundings. The four elements, earth, water, air and fire, were central to Grisi’s observation of nature. With each place a new set of data was created, carefully recording the artist’s observations, as well as her physical and emotional responses to the changing landscape. Arguably, in a twist on “the personal is political” Grisi’s project was predicated on the personal is nature. Her observation of different natural conditions was at once freeing, and guided by a set of rules created by the artist herself. These were meant to organise and classify her visual perceptions, lending to the project as a whole a conceptual-scientific underpinning. Task-driven and experiment-led, Grisi’s desires and subjective notations were transformed into objective data. Nonetheless, the “I” remained central to the artist’s observations, putting her-self at the heart of the project.

Laura Grisi, Distillations – 3 Months of Looking, 1970. Artestudio, Macerata, cm 22,5×24. Courtesy of Laura Grisi Estate; and P420, Bologna. Photo by Carlo Favero

The findings resulting from Grisi’s three months of looking were collated into a photo-book titled Distillations – 3 Months of Looking, in which written data was shown alongside black and white images. For Grisi, distillation was “[a] procedure: an extract of visual, mental, spiritual experiences.”¹³ This concept went on to inform a series of works. The first of the Distillations was The Measuring of Time (1969) an action which saw Grisi counting the grains of sand in the desert. An incommensurable undertaking, given the impossibility of ever truly knowing how much sand there is in the desert, The Measuring of Time emphasized Grisi’s repetitive gesture by honing on her hands. Shot in a single spiral sequence the film started with a close-up of the artist’s hands and gradually expanded to reveal the artist performing the action.

Laura Grisi, Distillations – 3 Months of Looking, 1970. Artestudio, Macerata, cm 22,5×24. Courtesy of Laura Grisi Estate; and P420, Bologna. Photo by Carlo Favero

While repetition in time is The Measuring of Time’s main contention, Grisi the subject is what interests me here. Unlike her contemporaries she never turned to her own body as a site of self-reflection. The investigation of natural elements, as well as their replication in the space of the gallery remained one of Grisi’s chief concerns. Voicing the struggles of women was not an imperative she actively pursued making her an unlikely figure to discuss in the context of this essay. However, I would contend that Grisi’s presence in many of her works is more telling than one would be led to assume. On a very basic level she took on multiple guises: subject and object, director and actor, photographer and model. In other words, Grisi embedded herself in the work and, in doing so, reasserted her role as creator and observer. Even when nature was concerned, the “I” retained control as exemplified by Distillations – 3 Months of Looking. The “I” that Grisi consistently pursued was never strictly tied to self-representation, rather it was reasserted by her chosen medium, photography. From the start of her career, Grisi treated the camera as a mediating device enhancing her vision of the world. In the 1960s, like Fioroni, she went on to pursue a hybrid model of painting, which she described as “a world seen through a camera lens.”¹⁴ In this series of works, the canvas was host to a hypothetical lens, mostly out of focus, that altered the perception of reality. Like Pirelli, Grisi too, went on to experiment with film and installation. But the camera lens, both as a documentary tool and as a metaphor for looking, remained a fixed trait. Arguably, the camera lens was Grisi’s alter ego, allowing her to look and be looked at without necessarily focusing on herself. 

I, woman

Ketty La Rocca, La Gabbia, 1964-65. Collage, cm 44,5 x 29,5. Courtesy of The Ketty La Rocca Estate (managed by the artist’s son Michelangelo Vasta)

Accounts of Italian art and feminism from the 1960s and 1970s include the work of Fioroni, Grisi, and Pirelli only sporadically. Unlike Gravier and La Rocca, these three artists did not explicitly frame their works as weapons of protest and social contestation. Their feminism, if one can describe it as such, was subtle and often disguised under layers of experimentation. Even when painting was concerned—see Fioroni’s portraits of women—the camera as an optical and metaphorical instrument responded to a specific and widespread need for awareness and autonomy. Ultimately, the camera, both cinematographic and photographic, was a vehicle for interpreting the unspoken, as well as the spoken. In this regard, Fioroni, Grisi and Pirelli’s research is closely aligned to Gravier’s and La Rocca’s experiments with photography and photomontage. In their respective oeuvres, Gravier and La Rocca made conscientious strides into a male-chauvinistic culture by countering female stereotypes. Through the juxtaposition of images and words, they succeeded, as we shall see, in drawing out new meanings from existing ones.

La Rocca contested the alphabet as the preserve of a male-dominated culture. Like her contemporaries Mirella Bentivoglio and Tomaso Binga, she undertook a systematic scrutiny of language aimed at foregrounding a new feminist dialectic. The body, for La Rocca, took on a symbolic value in this effort to re-situate the female subject. In her photomontages, she sabotaged the way in which mass-media communications insistently portrayed women as objects of desire and reverie. In La Gabbia (1964-65), for instance, La Rocca voiced the struggle experienced by women, at once trapped, by household chores (exemplified by the sweater hanging on a laundry line) and subject to society’s pressure to be young and beautiful (symbolized by the make-up products). The irreverence of La Rocca’s verbo-visual pairings inscribed them in a Dadaist tradition that harked back to Hannah Höch’s political photomontages. Moved by a similar yearning to denounce society’s evils, La Rocca actively rejected the female image as sole purveyor of beauty, youth, purity, and reframed it by acknowledging womanhood as a contested site.

Ketty La Rocca, Intellettuali in collegio, 1964-65. Collage, cm 43 x 28,5. Courtesy of The Ketty La Rocca Estate (managed by the artist’s son Michelangelo Vasta)

Emerging from centuries of oppression, La Rocca’s women spoke out against the patriarchal and capitalist culture that had consistently coerced their bodies and erased their voices. Through the appropriation of photography’s commercial debris, the artist vindicated women’s right to speak up; a move that brings to mind Germaine Greer’s eloquently titled article ‘Il nudo non è in vendita’ (The nude is not for sale) published in the first issue of the feminist magazine Effe in 1973. In it, Greer called on women to rescue the depiction of the nude from rampant commodification and asserted how: “It’s not the exhibition of the real female body that humiliates us; what offends us is a substitution with a made-up, disguised and incomplete body.” To which she added the sour note: “It was photography that gave birth to this monster.”¹⁵ It is precisely this monstrous quality, which Greer attached to photography, that moved La Rocca in her pursuit of appropriated imagery. By reclaiming women’s agency over their bodies, La Rocca concurrently reclaimed photography’s agency from the pit of subordination in which commodity culture had trashed it.

Nicole Gravier, Non è Possibile, 1976 -1980. Collage on C- print. cm 30×40. Courtesy of the artist; and ERMES ERMES

In the series “Mythes et Clichés” (1976-1980) Gravier also set out to sabotage female stereotypes. Specifically, she exposed the clichés of the fotoromanzi (photo-romance): comic strip-style stories aimed at young women and housewives. Gravier parodied the saccharine style and storytelling conventions of the fotoromanzo by casting herself as the heroine of one of these stories. In doing so, she revealed how the fotoromanzo was ridden with stereotypical tropes envisioned by male publishers for their female readership. By accentuating the languid poses and rehashing well-trodden banalities, Gravier undermined the escapist nature of these highly choreographed melodramas.

In Non è possibile (“This is impossible”)—one of the “Mythes et Clichés”—the artist’s dismayed face tells us that the content of the letter she is holding in her right hand is shocking. The exaggerated gesture is enhanced by the thought bubble, which reads: “She still finds it hard to believe what she has read, her hands tremble as she holds the sheet of paper.”

Nicole Gravier, Roberto (Moro), 1976 -1980. Collage on C- print. cm 30×40. Courtesy of the artist; and ERMES ERMES

The emotional predictability of this and other stills from Gravier’s self-mythologized series are complicated by the insertion of elements alluding to contemporary politics and society. For example, in Roberto (Moro) Gravier is pictured lying on a pink blanket surrounded by magazines. She daydreams about: “Roberto…Roberto my love” and we are left wondering, who is Roberto? Her husband, her lover, or a character from a fotoromanzo? The answer is beyond the point, the artist is enthralled. A radical shift in tone occurs when we catch sight of the political magazine “Panorama” lying among the cheesy fotoromanzi. The cover story about the Christian Democrat politician Aldo Moro kidnapped and killed by the Red Brigades in 1978 changes the atmosphere of the staged scene imparting to it a dark overtone. By concealing ‘Aldo’ in a frame allegedly about ‘Roberto,’ Gravier lends to her fictional truth a new meaning. Hidden signifiers such as ‘Aldo’ charge Gravier’s clichéd scenes with a subversive quality, which undermines their sweet dumbness. As actor, narrator, stage designer and photographer, Gravier puts a feminist spin on a tried and tested format, that of the fotoromanzo, which had long been all but empowering. Like Fioroni, Grisi, La Rocca, Mangini and Pirelli she takes control of the story and shifts the perspective, away from the univocal male gaze and towards the female subject.

In varying degrees and forms, all of the women discussed here have dabbled in storytelling. Through representation and self-representation, role-play and observation, painting and photography, film and photomontage, they have asked a simple but presciently insightful question that still lingers with us today: whose story is this?