Mirror Images

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 Santiago.This book, which accompanies an exhibition
organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, explores specific aspects of the
relationship between historic and contemporary work in the context of Surrealism.
The contributors reexamine art historical assumptions about gender, identity, and
intergenerational 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?Contributors: Dawn Ades,
Whitney Chadwick, Salomon Grimberg, Katy Kline, Helaine Posner, Susan Rubin
Suleiman, Dickran Tashjian.