Work
Women (2010) features the torsos of iconic women artists Lynda Benglis, Francesca Woodman, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, Marina Abramovic, K8 Hardy, and Yoko Ono. Each artist is presented from belly to neck, in a detail from appropriated photographic imagery from their iconic works. For example, Women (Lynda) shows the artist’s body from her infamous 1974 Artforum ad, where she posed naked except for sunglasses and a double-ended dildo. The source of much outrage, this incident is notorious in feminist art history and has become a symbol for the confrontational nature of much of the work made at that time. Hinant, however, says it was not Benglis but Hannah Wilke that inspired this work:
Hannah Wilke was the inspiration for my piece Women because she makes me wonder if and how women can take control over their own sexual image. I like the ambiguities and contradictions in her work and I notice that I trip over the same issues as her. It’s amazing – the process of re-appropriating your own body from popular consumption. How could she not fail?
Women elucidates in the ambivalence of its creator. While Hinant acknowledges a tremendous debt to the second wave of feminist artists – the work is not possible without theirs as palimpsest – she also knows the pitfalls of making provocative work and its perception by a mainstream audience.
–Battista, Kathy, New York New Wave: Feminist Artists in Emerging Practices, London: IB Taurus, 2019.
Image Courtesy Joe Sheftel Gallery, New York