Paintings and Photowork
from the late 1960s and 1970s
March 15 – April 19, 2003
with image at bottom of page
This exhibition is the third in a series of shows of strong and important feminist work at the gallery this season. Ms Golden’s exhibition was preceded by Betty Tompkins’ explicit paintings from the early 1970s and by recent paintings from Kathe Burkhart’s Liz Taylor series. It will be followed in April with new paintings by Joan Semmel.
Eunice Golden is a pioneering feminist artist. In the mid 1960s she deployed a bold expressionist figuration at the service of a newly emerging sensibility. While other women were involved with self-definition and the revaluation of “women’s work,” Golden presented the male body as a primal landscape of struggle and desire. Her work is unusual in the context of early feminism for this straightforward, metaphorical representation of men. Unlike Sylvia Sleigh’s reversed gender odalisques, Golden does not turn tables to present the male figure as a sexual object according to patriarchal precedent. Rather, she subsumes the tropes of expressionism and surrealism to create new, aggressively visceral images of male sexuality and sexual politics from her woman’s perspective. The male body becomes female terrain: literal, romantic landscapes in which lurk pleasures and monsters too. Rape becomes the onerous face of realizably oneiric acts; patriotism, a penis wrapped in the flag.
In the early 1970s Golden began working with performance, body art, photography and film. She photographed herself and her models naked, painted and serially presented. Male bodies were adorned with female anatomy. Female bodies were slathered with pigment and food and wrapped in transparent plastic. Embracing couples were limned by the language of their encounters. Golden also made a number of well-received feminist films in the early 1970s. One, Blue Bananas and Other Meats (1973), was a recreation of the famous surrealist dinner in which a woman lay like a platter on the dining table. Golden however substituted a man, adroitly arranging the fruits of the feast to incorporate his crotch.
Where Eunice Golden’s late 1960s paintings anticipated earth art, in the early 1970s she moved into the actual landscape, photographing figures formally, anatomically, marking time and space. Little seen at the time, Golden’s photographic work is a significant contribution to the body of 70s performance and documentation art.
