The differences between men and women are both obvious and subtle. The obvious ones continue to be the subject of an unpleasant turf war on X and are none of this column’s business. But the subtle differences take us deep into the world of art, and there we do need to take notice.
Two women-only shows that have opened in London plunge us into the distaff side of artistic creativity, and manage, in their varied ways, to emphasise the creative divide between the sexes.
Abstract Erotic, at the Courtauld Gallery, is the bigger and more enticing of the two events. It brings together three women artists working in America in the 1960s whose sculpture was so tangibly female it constituted a fresh voice. Something whispery, nervy and sexual had arrived in the galleries of New York.
Although the show’s title brands them as abstract artists, the pioneering threesome of Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Alice Adams actually worked in the fertile territory that lies between abstraction and reality: the shadow lands of art, where things remind you of other things, but do not describe them.
Hanging Janus, made by Bourgeois in 1968, is apparently two droopy penises, joined together at the shaft, and suspended from the roof like a naughty mobile. The protruding bell ends have been rubbed to their underlying bronze so they glow with the patina of centuries, like fertility sculptures in a Hindu temple rubbed by visitors for luck.
Hesse’s Addendum, from 1967, is a coat rack made from a row of female breasts with floppy umbilical cords hanging from the nipples. The entire ensemble is white, so it has something of the maternity ward about it. Nothing specific is being said about producing babies and feeding them, but the atmosphere being evoked is more factory than home.
Adams is the least figurative of the three, and the least obviously erotic. Big Aluminium 2, from 1965, is a huge hammock made of chicken wire that hangs from the roof. Unless it’s a giant uterus reduced to its metal armature and suspended from its ends. In this show, you just can’t tell.
Everything is stark, blobby, mysterious. A striking exhibition design, based on 1960s examples, gives the event the look of a piece of black and white typography. The cool atmospheres brand the art as minimalism, but the lesson being taught, the one we need to take heed of, is that female minimalism is fiercely different from the masculine variety.
In case you’ve forgotten, minimalism was an American art movement of the 1960s and 1970s that sought to trigger sublime feelings with simple materials. The most notorious example is Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII, otherwise known as “the Tate bricks”, which triggered a media frenzy in 1976 because it consisted of 120 firebricks arranged in a rectangle.
Andre was trying to evoke the feeling when you step into the sea and the water laps around your ankles: no higher, just the ankles. It’s a very elusive atmosphere. If you’re not in the right mood, it’s a nonsense and you phone the Daily Mail about it.
Female minimalism has a different tonality. Its materials are correspondingly lowbrow but its preferred atmospheres are organic rather than industrial. Even Adams, with her tubes of chicken wire, is striving for shapes that have their origin in nature: trees, roots, intestines.
Where masculine minimalism favours the straight line and the hard edge, Hesse is conspicuously allergic to both. Instead, she gives us sculptures that sag like ageing skin and droop like soggy testicles.
Underlying this erotic shape-making are, it seems, regular visits to the shrink and deep dives into the unconscious. Bourgeois, who enjoyed 30 years of Freudian analysis, takes us on a blobby, risky, inchoate journey that keeps stepping onto moist sexual terrain: the breast, the testes, the vulva. We seem to be looking at the world from inside rather than outside. The truths feel internal rather than external. The vagina, I intuit, is addressing the penis.
You’ll be pleased to hear none of that goes on at Connecting Thin Black Lines, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, a display devoted to 11 women artists who exhibited their work here 40 years ago at a pioneering event entitled The Thin Black Line. That show, in 1985, had ambitions to put black and Asian women’s art on the map. The art world was ignoring it: a wrong needed to be righted.
Not all the original exhibitors are still with us, but I admit I was surprised by the smallness and modesty of this rerun. It has been a while since the ICA turned its attentions properly to art, and this was an occasion for a big blast. Instead, we get a gallery and a corridor that seem more nostalgic than bellicose. The surviving exhibitors have returned to the site of their triumph for a communal hug with little sense of shared direction.
Nor is it true any more that black and Asian art continues to be ignored. One of the exhibitors here, the marvellous Sonia Boyce, represented Britain in 2022 at the Venice Biennale, the most prestigious slot available in British art. Another, the Turner prizewinning Lubaina Himid, is representing us next year. The turnaround has happened.
Thus, Connecting Thin Black Lines is tangibly lacking in shared concerns. The creative divide between the sexes — the issue we started out with — is only vaguely evident in the fact that the show is happening at all.
I simply cannot imagine a bunch of blokes who showed communally in 1985 wanting to show together again 40 years later. The impressionists would never have done it. It’s a girl power thing.
Abstract Erotic, at the Courtauld Gallery, until September 14; Connecting Thin Black Lines, at the ICA, until Sep 7