Nancy Spero Presents a Feminist’s View at MOCA

Nancy Spero watches through the small circles of her English National Health Service glasses as images of her artwork rise across a gallery wall at the Museum of Contemporary Art like hieroglyphics in a pyramid.

Her all-female iconography--except for an occasional male clutching his phallus--represents women torture victims, ancient fertility symbols, a pornographic graffito from a men’s toilet and on to a defiant Artemis and a contemporary Olympian athlete. They are printed on frieze-like strips of paper around the gallery, and at times move onto the gallery walls.

Two assistants shuffle through a pile of plastic plates on a sawhorse table, selecting images of a Celtic goddess and a Greek religious prostitute engaged in ritual dance. They roll gold paint over the Celtic goddess and press her against the white of the wall. Then they paint the prostitute pink.

Anxious and nervous, Spero directs the work--looking something like a spare, angular hieroglyphic herself, her thin frame lost in the volume of khaki pants, her blond barber-shop hair slicked back with gel.

She wears heavy, black Reeboks and the little black-rimmed glasses stand out harshly on her pale complexion. At a glance she could be one of the war victims she paints. Except Spero, 62, is smiling.

“I think it’s exciting,” she says of the installation of more than a dozen of her works that will be on view at the museum through December. But Spero means much more than that.

Congratulated by critics for her stamina, she has been painting in relative anonymity for most of her life. In the last several years she has begun receiving broader recognition, as the kind of political messages she imparts have become stylish in prominent art world circles.

But Spero is far from a fashionable feminist. “Nancy Spero’s pictures are the most savage, unsentimental and incendiary feminist art I know,” Donald Kuspit writes in Art in America.

Spero agrees. Her imagery is “heavy-duty,” but her works are light and delicate, cut-out collage figures, largely appropriated and modified from art history sources, printed on scroll-like strips of paper.

“I as a woman artist just may see the world differently than you guys do,” Spero says, waving toward an adjacent gallery of Frank Stella works--the kind of oil-on-canvas art that she sees as hierarchal and confrontational. Spero leaves spaces, pauses, breaks things up.

“This sounds tough, but what’s marvelous is that one plays in the symbolic arena. How much consequence art has on the real world is hard to gauge.”

Yet Spero came to feminist art through real-world problems, paradoxically as an artist.

“I was always out of phase,” she says, explaining her lack of notoriety. As Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism successively came into vogue, Spero stubbornly stuck to figurative representation.

Also, as she declares, “male artists have a terrible time, but women have it worse.”

In the ‘50s in Chicago, she and her husband, political Expressionist Leon Golub, shared a studio, and when people came to see Golub’s art, he would tell them, “here’s my wife’s work.” “There’s nothing deadlier,” says Spero, who spent the decade “hiding behind the nuclear family,” a mother of three boys. “Even the dog was male,” she laughs.

In the late ‘60s, she was portraying the horrors of war, inspired by Vietnam, using women as victims. But it was also a personal vision. “I didn’t have any identity as an artist,” she says. “If my art wasn’t recognized, that meant my viewpoint wasn’t recognized either.”

In 1969 and ‘70, she joined two women artists’ groups, picketing New York’s Whitney Museum and delivering a manifesto to the Museum of Modern Art demanding parity with men in exhibitions.

Today, despite a number of women curators, Spero sees the situation as little better, citing low ratios of women at such major international events as West Germany’s Documenta. The Whitney, which she says now includes 20%-30% women in its Biennial, rates a “pretty good;” MOMA, a “terrible.”

“It’s an all-boys’ club,” she declares.

“Male artists, even artists like Paul Klee, have male authority behind them and can be heroicized. Women can’t be heroicized,” she claims, but they can work on a large scale. Spero points to Barbara Kruger’s expanded billboard-size works, Jenny Holzer’s large moving signs and Cindy Sherman’s big photographs.

“I’m taking my space too,” she says, indicating “The First Language,” a work that charts the social evolution of women and wraps 190 feet around the gallery.

The work chronicles the progress of womankind from victimization (rape, war and social oppression) to a celebration of women in control of themselves; it also parallels the artist’s personal coming of age.

Spero says Golub, to whom she has been married for 36 years, is a great supporter of her feminism. Still, she says she used to try to practice Simone de Beauvoir’s tenets, though the kitchen has remained the main social space in the couple’s studio. “Before I’d say I’m on strike, but it didn’t work.” Now, with greater affluence, the two artists often go out for dinner.

Likewise, Spero supports both her own and Golub’s sometimes sensitive political art. Golub, who has had six panels depicting torture scenes on display in the Saatchi Collection in London, has been attacked by artists who point out that the Saatchi advertising firm has affiliates in South Africa.

Spero doesn’t feel the source of museum funding should be the artist’s concern. “Who’s on the straight and narrow?” she asks. “Leon and I aren’t paragons of virtue, all right, but we make our statements.”

Meanwhile, the Celtic goddess, a symbol of both fertility and destruction, has taken on a more robust russet color and is asserting herself on the gallery wall, the pink prostitute dancing tantalizingly over her head.