Strip

PPOW is pleased to present Strip, a group exhibition bringing together three major works by the groundbreaking artists Jimmy DeSana, Carolee Schneemann, and Martha Wilson. In 101 Nudes, 1972, ICES STRIP / ISIS TRIP, 1972, and Transformance: Claudia, 1973, DeSana, Schneemann, and Wilson combine performance with seriality, text, and photo to establish the body as medium within conceptual art. Created between 1972-1973 in the context of a male dominated conceptual art movement and a cultural backdrop of conservative backlash against the recent civil rights, feminist, and gay liberation movements, these performance driven works undermined societal taboos and restrictions surrounding sexuality and gender within the art world and beyond. DeSana, Schneemann, and Wilson’s campy, provocative, and collaborative works claimed their autonomous subjectivity within spaces that were not accustomed to such commanding presence. By dressing up and dressing down, the artists in Strip simultaneously undressed assumed systems of authority, transforming them into sites of radical liberation.

Jimmy DeSana’s 101 Nudes , 1972 was originally self-published as a portfolio for his undergraduate thesis at Georgia State University, where homosexual sex was still illegal and classified as a felony. This suite of 56 offset prints combines the artist’s early exploration of post-war suburban culture and nude figuration to subvert the image of the ideal American family. In doing so, DeSana reframes the domestic setting as a site of freedom and expression for both himself and his community. Facing censorship and regulation from both school officials and the city, DeSana’s grainy, flash-lit images depicted his queer and female friends erotically posing in various domestic and suburban settings. Humorously inverting conventions of 1950s mass market softcore pornography, DeSana’s playfully staged snapshots articulated a far more informal and participatory set of aesthetic and social relationships. Bringing a conceptual and performative approach to the medium of photography, the startling immediacy of 101 Nudes is as apparent today as when originally created fifty years ago.

Carolee Schneemann’s ICES STRIP / ISIS TRIP took place on a commuter train from London to Edinburgh as part of the International Carnival of Experimental Sound (ICES) during the summer of 1972. Bringing performance art into alternative public spaces, ICES transformed a six-hour train journey into an immersive multisensory experience that was open to the public. In the dining car, Schneemann performed a comic striptease atop a table, then donned roller skates and glided along the length of the ICES Festival Train as it hurtled at 133 kph. All the while Schneemann recited phrases from Austro-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notoriously didactic Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Logical Philosophical Treatise) , 1921. The resulting installation pairs this text with twenty images taken of the performance by her then partner, artist Anthony McCall. Schneemann scrambles Wittgenstein’s statements, which posit the world as a numbered system of absolute truths, and replaces his hierarchical ordering with the train’s rail times. The wordplay of the artworks’ title invokes the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis, worshipped as the "mother" of all deities. Juxtaposing this imposing matriarchal figure with playful modes of undress and reframed recitations of text by a revered male philosopher, Schneemann jubilantly dismantles the ideas of universal “male authored” logic and asserts the creative power of female eroticism.

In 1973, Martha Wilson was 26 years old and just beginning to understand herself as an artist while teaching English at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, then a hotbed of conceptual art. Without any female faculty members at the art school or visiting artist program, it was not until Wilson met the influential curator and critic Lucy Lippard that she became aware of the word "feminism", found encouragement as an artist, and discovered other women that were making performance-based work. Lippard would introduce Wilson to Jacki Apple and soon after the two began planning Transformance: Claudia. "Claudia" was a composite character based on Apple and Wilson’s idealized feminine selves as dictated by the standards of 1970s America. Claudia was powerful, gorgeous, sensual, self-assured, rich, and mobile. On December 15, 1973, Wilson and Apple invited four other women, and one man, to join them in performing their fantasy selves throughout a selection of New York City locales: lunch at the Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel, a limousine ride down Fifth Avenue, and art galleries in Soho. The group also included friends who documented the day while posturing as journalists and paparazzi. In the resulting 36 photos and 33 related texts, Wilson reveals that by mimicking ingrained neoliberal American female stereotypes, she and Apple transformed oppressive gender and class ideals into devices for genuine self-awakening.

About the artist

Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) , a key figure in the New York downtown scene of the 1970s and 80s, created a body of photography that evinces a singular style typified by concealed figures, saturated colors, and surreal mise-en-scene, with subject matter that index the artist’s fascination with American suburbia and queer fetish subculture in equal measure. Throughout his career, DeSana seamlessly blended the tropes of fashion photography, camp sensibility, and experimental art, resulting in images that are simultaneously relatable in their use of quotidian settings, yet entirely otherworldly in their depiction. DeSana grew up in Atlanta, GA, and received his bachelor’s degree from the Georgia State University in 1972 before relocating to New York’s East Village in the early 1970s. 

Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) activated the female nude with a multidisciplinary practice that spanned sixty years and included painting, assemblage, performance, and film. She received a BA in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and an MFA from the University of Illinois. Originally a painter in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Schneemann was uninterested in the masculine heroism of New York painters of the time and turned to performance-based work, primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relation to social bodies. Although renowned for her work in performance and other media, Schneemann began her career as a painter, stating, “I’m a painter. I’m still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas.”

Martha Wilson (b. 1947) is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, who over the past five decades created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformations, and “invasions” of other people’s personae. She began making these videos and photo-text works in the early 1970s while in Halifax in Nova Scotia, and further developed her performative and video-based practice after moving in 1974 to New York City, embarking on a long career that would see her gain attention across the U.S. for her provocative appearances as political personae. In 1976 she founded, and as Founding Director Emerita, continues to help guide Franklin Furnace, an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion and preservation of artists’ books, installation art, video, online and performance art, further challenging institutional norms, the roles artists play within society, and expectations about what constitutes acceptable art mediums. For four decades, Wilson has performed nationally and internationally in the guises of Alexander Haig, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, and Tipper Gore, among others.