Grace Graupe-Pillard: Grace Delving into Art
© Riding Balloon Dog, Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog (Orange), at Christies, NYC
Grace Delving into Art:
A photo series by Grace Graupe-Pillard
Grace Graupe-Pillard is a friend of friends and I have been following her work for years, but I haven't been to New York since 2011, so we have not yet met in the flesh. There is a lot of flesh and skin and hair all through her work: she represents the bodies and their limits, smallest wrinkles included, when she paints or draws, and doesn't spare them in some of her videos. Not to mention her blonde wigs…
The photographic series I chose is about Grace’s bare, mature flesh, her body haunting (she says delving into) famous art works and interacting with them, adding irony and modernity, provoking at the same time thoughts and smiles. I would suggest that humor is a great way to make people think in new ways about old topics: it can actually change a point of view. It's probably much better than being serious, tragic, bullying or even apocalyptic like some people tend to do, especially when they try to convince others of their reasons, and to apply their rules to the rest of the world.
I believe this Grace Delving into Art series to be revolutionary in a very positive way.
It is about art, but goes beyond the sacralizing that's part of the museum institutional role. It is about the female body, which has been one of the main subjects of art and, if we believe what the Guerrilla Girls said in the 1970s , it used to be the only way for a woman to enter a museum. (Fifty years later, it's a bit better, but not by much.)
It is about the elderly body (please forgive me, Grace!) so becomes a declaration against agism and fixed ideas.
It is a way of living your later years in full and helping others to do the same without shame.
Not long ago I was at a party and a younger man said Now all women take their clothes off. Apart from the absurdity and rather bad taste of the proposal - it was a birthday party not an orgy - what struck me was the phrase another woman said in an aside to me: I'd never: after forty... She gave me the impression of disliking her body, feeling it is a problem and not as the source of pleasure and essence of life that it should always be.This made me think about the relationship women have with their bodies, which they always tend to find defective, even when they are young and look beautiful to everybody else.
Accepting your body is a conquest, and it means accepting yourself as a person. Our society is fixated on youth and beauty and women are especially subject to pressure in that sense: make up, plastic surgery, gym, diets, hair extensions are all around us. Going around with grey hair is in itself a statement of independence, and letting them grow grey (they say silver) and long is considered quite unbecoming "after a certain age". It has been said to me more than once, usually by women, that's why I know.
Artists working with their bodies follow two paths: one, which I dislike because of the masochism it implies, goes to extremes of suffering, saying it's an accusation of what society puts women through: Gina Pane, Ana Mendieta, Regina José Galindo... The other one is still an accusation but it is more political and much more cathartic, as in the performances of Carolee Schneemann and Marina Abramovic. You might like or dislike or disapprove of them, but they do something more, and better, than cutting up one's body or burying it into sand and mud. In any case, when these women performed in the nude they were young and rather beautiful.
Above image: © Grace Graupe-Pillard, Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss and Grace
Accepting your mature body requires courage. For Graupe-Pillard, showing it in her works is a means of questioning the given ideas about femininity, art, society, and is more than many artists would be able and willing to do. And she does it with humor, a great passion for art and her brilliant knowledge of it. Grace Delving into Art can be seen as a series of art history lessons that won't be easily forgotten. As Robert Mahoney (article on Yahoo, 2013) wrote: “By her posture, her pose...she makes a statement about the art. It's an art review by an artist using her body and not her voice.”
This is what Grace wrote me the other day, when we were discussing the pieces for this review: "I attempt in all the works to change/add to the meaning of the original art through the inclusion of my septuagenarian, naked body challenging how the original usually male-centric sculpture is viewed. If there is a historical narrative I disrupt it with a female intervention. I also love the idea of bringing sculptures from the 14th-21st century to life - as if the pieces themselves were anthropomorphized - that they were human - breathing and emotionally responsive - not inanimate stone, marble, bronze or wood. There is also a Do Not Touch - Preciousness about artwork and Museums that I attempt to defy in this series."
All true. But being a woman (European, Italian, Milanese), living in a country where classic art is our heritage, I tend to appreciate the disruptive force of her statement about the aging female body as the leading message of the series, even beyond the splendid game of the dialogue between herself, her body and the established, institutionalized, untouchable Art.
Carla Della Beffa
Milan, March 8th, 2019
(I really didn't plan to write this on International Women's Day: it just happened. But it makes perfect sense.)
Carla Della Beffa lives and works in Milano, Italy. She is a photo, video and relational artist. Formerly art director and creative director in international advertising agencies, in the past she has had experiences and exhibitions as a painter and a net-artist. Now she's mainly working with digital images and words, making exhibitions, producing artist's books, working on public art projects (Culburb 2012, NoPlace3 2016, 50th Premio Suzzara 2018 and others).
A woman and an artist, she's always been interested in gender issues and in the relational side of life: see many of her videos and her latest book, Herstories, la centrale edizioni 2018.