Installation
Femvertising
2019
Installation from clothes rails, hangers, T-Shirts with screen prints, digital prints, embroidery, price tags
140 x 50 x 180 cm
Femvertising
For this installation, the various logos of the Wiener Frauenakademie (WFA) and a photograph of a statue of Iason, a mythological figure of antiquity, were printed on T-shirts.
Wiener Frauenakademie (Vienna Women's Academy)
The WFA (originally called Kunstschule für Frauen und Mädchen) was a private and later state-funded art school for women and girls. It was open from 1897 to 1939 and was an artistic educational institution for women in Vienna. The school was opened at a time when women who wanted to be trained in painting, graphic arts or sculpture were still forced to take private lessons. Although the artists Rosa Mayreder and Tina Blau were co-initiators, the WFA was founded by Adalbert Franz Seligmann and largely run by men.
The Legend of Iason
The Greek legend about the figure of Iason, eponym to this work, deals with the robbery of the Golden Fleece from the Kingdom of Colchis and its consequences.
Iason achieved the robbery only by taking advantage of the love of the Colchian king's daughter Medea, who left her homeland for him and betrayed her family. Nevertheless, Iason took the next opportunity to outcast Medea and her children and marry the Corinthian king's daughter Glauke in order to increase his power. Out of pain and anger, Medea kills Glauke, her father and their children with Iason. Iason's opportunism, driven by his greed for power, finally becomes his downfall and he dies old, insignificant and alone under the ruins of his collapsed, rotting ship.
Insight into power structures
The Iason narrative is a metaphor for a hegemonic masculinity that is valid as a historical continuum from antiquity to the present. This can be seen, for example, in the fashion industry through the strategy of pinkwashing and in the exhibition WILD SPOERRI ROSENSTEIN through the collection of female artists from the early twentieth century through the male curator Adam Szymczyk as well as a multitude of artistic contributions by male artists, myself included.
The exhibition and sale of the T-shirts with the WFA logos symbolizes the appropriation of creative female work as commercialized goods. They also exemplefy the questionability as an illustration of the WFA, because they are ahistorical and because of the use of symbolism at the time, which was already strongly influenced by National Socialist image politics in the 1930s.
Detailed view of
Femvertising
Overview of used logos and emblems
I would like to say thank you to Prof. Marina Gržinić, the Austrian Association of Women Artists (VBKÖ), Adam Szymczyk, Wienbibliothek, National Library Vienna, Anne Zühlke, Anna Fastnacht and Coco Bayer