Feminist artists acted in accordance with the popular slogan of the women’s movement: the supposedly private and personal was made public, and shown to be politically relevant.
New media enabled their works to address contemporary themes – including gender roles and the politics of the body – more quickly and in a more immediately relevant way.
It went on to be shown in Madrid, Brussels, Halmstad (Sweden), Hamburg, London, Vienna, Karlsruhe (Germany), Stavanger (Norway), Brno (Czech Republic) and Barcelona.
Feminist artists understood the roles of housewife, spouse and mother as restrictive, rendering women into objects and even victims of patriarchal society.
Through their art and actions, feminist artists sought to attain more autonomy, creating new images of women, including a more free experience of their own sexuality.
Whether using clothes pegs or Scotch tape, many female artists used everyday objects as a form of bondage, often to the point of inflicting pain on themselves.
In “Don’t you think I am an Amazon?” Rosenbach shot arrows at a reproduction of Stefan Lochner’s Madonna of the Rose Bower and thus also at herself, since her own face was projected onto the figure of Mary.
[13] In this way, feminist works and actions critiqued the male-dominated image of women, but also fundamentally understood human subjectivity as something more transparent and mutable.
One typical move made by 1970s feminist art was, for example, the ironic appropriation and display of “male,” macho poses, using their own female, partly naked bodies.