Centuries of exclusion cannot be corrected in years or even in decades. More than 50 years ago, Linda Nochlin asked a rant question that never ceases to resonate. “Why were there no great female artists? asked the art historian in a seminal feminist text. The exhibition Paral(elles): another history of design of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) is part of this long mission to give women creators their rightful place.
With 250 objects covering 150 years of design in North America, the project led by curator of modern and contemporary decorative arts Jennifer Laurent is noble.
This other story, which is worth at least the others told so far, includes the usual chapters in the evolution of aesthetic techniques, knowledge and discourse.
The exhibition still does not clear unexplored ground, as there are so many books on the subject — Feminine design (Phaidon, 2021) or Women in Design: From Aino Aalto to Eva Zeisel (Laurence King Publishing, 2019), to name a few. The purpose of the Montreal museum is based on two objectives: to dust off the word “design” and to further feminize its collections.
“The term design, in popular discourse, is associated with industrial design,” says Mary-Dailey Desmarais, chief curator of the MMFA. With this exhibition, we are putting forward a broader concept that includes jewelry, ceramics, embroidery and all these arts. [classés comme] domestic work, women’s work. We want to review this categorization. »
If the rooms are full of textile works and distinct unique pieces of the reproducible nature unique to the consumer industry, Paral(they) is not a pamphlet against industrial design. This is obvious from the emblematic staircase of the “old” Michal and Renata Hornstein pavilion (located on the north side of Sherbrooke Street), in front of which was placed a 1958 Corvette — the model Fancy Freewhose interior was designed by Ruth Glennie.
There will be no other cars – the “Museum of beautiful tanks”, a mocking name from the 1990s, is not to be unearthed. Halfway through, the exhibition nevertheless returns to this era of General Motors known as the “young ladies of design”. A video shows the show which associated the models designed by these “ladies” with women in seduction mode. We were advancing slowly.
This evolution of practices – and mores – is at the heart of Paral(they), arranged chronologically. It starts with the movementArts and Crafts», born to promote craftsmanship in reaction to the industrialization of societies. This is followed by rooms devoted to the interwar period, the boom of the 1950s and 1960s and the feminist and postmodern decades. A brief look at our time concludes the tour.
Once in the shade
Ray Eames, Denise Scott Brown, Lucia DeRespinis and Clara Driscoll share the fact of having worked in the shadow of a man — a husband in the case of the former, a boss for the latter. By adding a better-known designer (Anni Albers) or Quebecers Micheline de Passilé and Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, the list of “wives of” seems endless. This is one of the answers to Nochlin’s question.
Mary-Dailey Desmarais nevertheless wishes to point out that Clara Discroll, present in the exhibition with one of her lampshades attributed to the famous Louis Tiffany, was one of the highest paid women in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. century. Tiffany had made her the boss of a team of thirty-five women. Except that at each of her marriages (a widow, she had remarried), Discroll lost her job, caught up in marital duty.
Emblem of feminist art, installation The Dinner Party (1974-1979) by Judy Chicago is cited by the presence of four of the porcelain plates and a video testimony of the artist. The emancipation of women follows a course “of ups and downs”, she says, referring to the inclined form of her work.
If the vases, domestic objects and jewelry return from one period to another, the material diversity increases little by little until it “explodes” in the last room. Artists are now working on digital (Skawennati) or interactive (Ying Gao) creation, 3D printing (Eliza Au) and recycling (Jay Sae Jung Oh). Best example of a sustainable practice, Tate No Waste (2003) by Diane Leclair Bisson consists of edible nylon containers.
Initiated with the Stewart Foundation, with which the MMFA has had a long history since it absorbed the Musée des arts décoratifs, Paral(they) was first a web project. Now exhibited, it has led to the acquisition of twenty-five works on loan from the Stewart Foundation, including a unique “impact wrench”. According to Mary-Dailey Desmarais, this donation is another step to extract the representation of women in the design collection from a starving rate (13%). ” Paral(they) sets the tone for how we [verrons] the history of art”, promised for his part Stéphane Aquin in front of the journalists, announcing a year 2023 entirely feminine.