Tag: space


Kooi
Lydia Schouten, 1978, 17’41’’

For this live performance, Schouten has shut herself in an iron cage of about two by two metres. Coloured crayons and chalks are attached to the bars of the cage, at equal distances from each other. Schouten is dressed in a tight-fitting white ballet outfit, which she rubs against the bars to colour herself.
In the documentary De vernietiging van het valse vrouwbeeld/The destruction of the false female image (1978), Schouten tells us that she used the performance Cage to make a comparison with those women who, at that time, were stuck inside their homes, spending all their time running their households and looking after husband and children. It was not that they did not want to get out into the outside world, but they did not know how. When they eventually vetured out, female participation in a male-dominated society turned out to be impossible. Bearing this in mind, we see how the performance runs parallel to the experience of these women.
Initially Schouten moves about the cage in a composed and self-conscious manner. Her movements are elegant and controlled. This refers to the women who were content with their role in the home, because that was all they knew. During the course of time, woman began to feel more and more closed in and stifled by their four walls, while at the same time there was growing excitement about the idea of getting out. They were literally and figuratively preparing to start exploring the outside world. At this stage, Schouten is moving faster and more wildly about the cage, looking for a way to escape. Meanwhile, the colours are spreading over her clothing and body. After the fiasco, the frustrations strike home. The women have found out for themselves that home was the only place for them. The question of whether this will ever change causes a panic. After running around the cage like a desperate maniac, Schouten collapses in the middle of the cage, totally disillusioned.
(Esther Kunkels)

Joseph Cornell,Toward the Blue Peninsula: for Emily Dickinson, c. 1953.

Box construction. 36.8 x 26 x 14 cm. The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman Photo The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman Photography: Quicksilver Photographers, LLC © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015.

“‘Toward the Blue Peninsula: For Emily Dickinson’ (c1953), a glass-paned wooden box with mesh framing a painted blue window looking out to open sky, references a deserted aviary and also the upstairs bedroom in Amherst, Massachusetts, where Dickinson wrote her poems. Like Cornell, Dickinson was reclusive, unmarried, untravelled. The bare room is at once a barred prison and a haven for contemplation and creation, and the work takes its title from a poem beginning, ‘It might be lonelier/ Without the Loneliness/ I’m so accustomed to my Fate’ and ending, ‘It might be easier/ To fail — with Land in Sight —/ Than gain — My Blue Peninsula —/ To perish — of Delight”.’

—Jackie Wullschlager