PARIS.- Martha Wilson is a unique personality in the history of American art and one of the first artists to use her body to question social representations of the feminine. Her pioneering work conducted in the early 1970s falls into the category of conceptual practices with a radical irony. Bringing together more than forty works, the Centre Pompidou is the first French institution to dedicate a monographic exhibition to her.

Born in Philadelphia in 1947, Martha Wilson began to stage herself in the early 1970s, alone in front of the camera, using video, photography and text. At the time, she was teaching English literature at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the Canadian city of Halifax. In this place much frequented by – essentially male – artists from the American conceptual scene, she blurred gender lines by making her own image the principal material of her work. The artist transformed and travestied her appearance, caricaturing the identity stereotypes of neoliberal America with caustic humour. Her work immediately stood out for its very personal language, initially based on the performative relationship she established between photographic self-portraits and her comments, written in the frame of the image. Performance art, she wrote on the development of this form in the 20th century, is «the place of intersection between the image and the text». Martha Wilson jointly made videos of bodily actions, engaging her own body in processes of extreme disfigurement. Her critique targets not only the social mirror of the feminine, going so far as to question the counter-models arising from feminist culture. At a time when the international art market was expanding rapidly, she aimed more broadly and with merciless lucidity at the manufacture of the identity and value of the artist, underscored by the precarious nature of the condition of female artists.

Covering the period of her stay in Halifax, from 1972 until she moved to New York in 1974, the Centre Pompidou exhibition illustrates the establishment of these radical acts. From Breast Forms Permutated (1972), a delightful mockery of the abstract grids of minimalism, to A Portfolio of Models (1974), a stroll through the clichés attributed to female psychology, the artist chisels a laconic and incisive language.

In her series entitled Posturing, she complicates role plays by exploring the desire for alterity: for example, Posturing: Drag (1972) shows her attempting to embody a man posing in the manner of a woman. In the wake of the analyses by sociologist Ervin Goffman (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1956), Martha Wilson subtly explores the everyday as a masquerade and the role of language in the elaboration of representations. In certain respects, her work prefigures Judith Butler’s reflections on the performance aspect of gender. She also inaugurates strategies that were to be continued by other contemporary female artists like Eleanor Antin, Martha Rosler and Cindy Sherman, using female cross-dressing and its verbal deconstruction to question the social injunction to «strike a pose». As early as 1973, Martha Wilson’s work showed an interest in art critic Lucy Lippard who, in her exhibition « C. 7,500 » (1973-1974), contextualised her first pieces in the framework of her pioneering research into feminist conceptual practices.

Martha Wilson’s artistic activity was quickly extended to a commitment to community service directed at the underground culture and artistic activism that drove the «culture wars» of 1970s and 1980s New York. In 1976 she created Franklin Furnace, the scene of public programmes and an archive dedicated to artists’ books and other ephemera produced by alternative artistic movements that were neglected by the institutions. Two years later, she founded the female music group DISBAND, whose members, it was pointed out, did not know how to play any instruments: unbridled vocalisations, noisism and punk amateurism unleashed a satirical critique of the art world and political life. She is also famous for her stand-up performances in which she notably imitated the wives of American presidents, public personalities assigned mainly to a role as images, whom she calls «second-class citizens». Martha Wilson’s freedom and irreverence have never ceased to elude the system of aesthetic, market and political values.