Katarzyna Oczkowska
A FEMALE ARTIST HAS A BIOGRAPHY: GENDER AND AGE IN CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST PRACTICES

In 1974 in Łódź, Ewa Partum presented an action entitled Zmiana [Change] at the Galeria Adres, of which she was the founder. The performance consisted in having half of her face painted by a make‑up artist hired for the process. The intention was to have the performer’s altered face become a work of art. That would have been barely surprising, except that the artist decided to make half of her face look older. Five years later, this time at the Galeria Art Forum in Łódź, Partum proposed an extended version of Change, complementing it with the subtitle My Problem Is a Problem of a Woman. This time, it involved ‘aged’ make‑up as well, not only on the face but over half of the body. The artist’s flesh, nude and subjected to painstaking make‑up work, was additionally intermediated through his transmitted image: the audience present in the gallery could watch the whole happening both live and on a TV screen. During the performance, Partum talked about the objectification and sexualisation of women, the regime of beauty and youth, and about the cultural images of the female body, intended to correspond to the dictates of the male gaze. The performer’s words were accompanied by a recorded reading of texts by Lucy Lippard, Ulrike Rosenbach, Valie Export, and Partum herself. The artist also presented her own manifesto of feminist art. In it, she pointed to the inadequacy of the social structure in which women live, forced to master the strategy of camouflage and question their own needs and personalities. Thus, the stakes would be for women to create a new social reality, discover themselves, access their own experiences and emotions, examine the experience of being a woman in a patriarchal society. A writing on the gallery floor read: ‘A male artist has no biography. A female artist – unlike the male – does have one. In the case of a female artist, it matters whether she is young or old.’¹

Ewa Partum, 29‑year‑old at the time, associated the title change not only with the visual transformation of her image but, first and foremost, with the topic of old age through which not only female artists but women in general are defined. Simultaneously, Partum pointed at the problem of women’s self‑identification and internalisation of the external gaze that defines the experiencing of a female body and age. Treating her body as a medium and emphasising the importance of age in the case of a female artist, she tackled the problem of visibility and invisibility of women along with the passing time. The categories of gender and age intersect and reinforce each other, making a female body hypervisible when young and invisible when ageing. The desire of visual culture and the images produced by it would therefore be to erase an older female body from the field of view, while appropriating, objectifying, and exposing the young and conventionally attractive one.² This reflection was as relevant when Partum performed Change as it is today; thus, in this text, I will study age- and gender- based discrimination practices and examine feminist strategies that problematise the hypervisibility/invisibility of the female body and the dictate of youth and beauty in the contemporary Polish art field. For this purpose, I will refer to the reflection of feminist researchers as well as projects by Iwona Demko and Agata Zbylut who use new technologies and social media in their creation. I will also let the creators speak by themselves: I asked them about the manifestations of ageism and sexism they had encountered during their careers.

A bold glance thrown towards authority

For a moment, I will return to Ewa Partum who continued the threads tackled during both versions of Change in the subsequent action: Samoidentyfikacja [Self‑Identification] from 1980. At the opening of the exhibition under the same title at the Mała Galeria ZPAF in Warsaw, the artist appeared naked, wearing only heeled shoes. She re‑read her manifesto, explaining that, in this context, nudity was a sort of costume, intended to highlight the alienation of women. Partum’s action was aimed at prompting a reflection that the naked female body functions primarily as an object of observation subjected to fetishisation. However, in a situation of direct confrontation, it becomes a gesture of transgression meant to provoke discomfort and critical reflection. The happening was accompanied by Partum’s declaration that she would keep performing naked until the art market and the museums underwent changes leading to the equality of the position of female and male artists. In this way, Partum problematised the question of women’s presence and position in the field of artistic production³ although, as Agata Jakubowska points out, the performer’s confrontational feminism and actions were more focused on herself rather than other women – and on building her own position. In the early 1980s, the critics noticed mainly Partum’s attractiveness and youth, recognising her work as feminist only later. As developed feminist discourse was absent in Poland of the time, it was impossible to ‘cover’ the artist’s nudity with any theoretical commentary.⁴

Self‑Identification was also composed of a series of black‑and‑white photographs where Partum photomontaged her nude image into the scenery of Warsaw streets, amidst its inhabitants. As Ewa Majewska writes about one the best‑known pictures of the series – naked Partum looking into the face of a militiawoman – in a sort of harbinger of the theory of resistance as approached by Jacques Rancière. Rigid rules are broken ‘[…] with a bold glance thrown at the authority by an individual who objects without breaking out of the crowd, while maintaining their ordinariness, fragility, and susceptibility to injury’.⁵

In contemporary feminist artistic practice, such a bold look would be sent by Iwona Demko to Instagram users. The difference is that, while Partum’s activities happened primarily in the field of art, in real time, and with the direct participation of viewers, the use of new digital social technologies in contemporary feminist discourse redefines the issues of visibility, time, space, and audience.⁶ Creation using new visibility technologies is characterised by universality, accessibility, and awareness of the transition of categories: from audience to users and from consumers to producers.

In her project entitled Real selfie‑feminism, initiated in 2017, Demko established a dialogue with the phenomenon of selfie‑feminism. The practice, using new technologies and the social media environment, was promoted by Zofia Krawiec through the Nuerotic Girl Instagram account, a text published in ‘Szum’ magazine,⁷ as well as the exhibition Na pozór silna dziewczyna, a w środku ledwo się trzyma [A Strong Girl on the Face, Crumbly on the Inside], held in 2018 at Warsaw’s Lokal 30 gallery. Krawiec further tackled the topics of selfie‑feminism and slut shaming in an experimental series combining film and new media Łatwo płonę [Burning Easily] from 2019. All these actions provoked an extended discussion and controversy in the environment of Polish art which problematised the discourse and practice of selfie‑feminism, although this is not the subject of this text.⁸

The feminist strategy disseminated on social media using selfies, which often featured nudity, was intended to be an emancipatory tool in the sphere of corporeality, inspired by the work by such artists as Audrey Wollen and her Sad Girl Theory.⁹ This represented a kind of depressurisation of the patriarchal power, dominance of the male gaze and the centuries‑old practice of appropriating and fetishising women’s bodies and their images in a male‑dominated culture. Therefore, the stake of selfie‑feminism would be to capture the image of the female body and show it from its own perspective, on its own terms. Though this gesture, women would regain agency and subjectivity in a new kind of public space, which the internet has become. In this context, new technologies become an identity‑creating and emancipatory tool that offers the possibility of agency, control, self‑creation, and autonomy; simultaneously, however, supporting or even strengthening the current inequality‑based dynamics of power. On the one hand, digital discourse encourages women to explore and engage in technological practices related to identity, corporeality, or sexuality; on the other hand, they are punished for using these visibility strategies. The tools and environment of power have changed, but the power itself, based on gender inequality, remains the same.¹⁰

In Real Selfie‑Feminism, Iwona Demko broadens the visibility of selfie‑feminism criticised, inter alia, for being seemingly intended mainly for white, privileged, young, and conventionally attractive women,¹¹ in exposing what is marginalised in Instagram, or more widely, in the cultural field of view. Pointing to the reality of selfie‑feminism in the title of her project, the artist publishes self‑portraits which are deliberately free from aesthetisation and show her body changing with age and her face without makeup and her hair uncombed. The latter evokes Anna Bilińska’s famous Self‑portrait with a Palette from 1887 which aroused controversy as it presented the artist’s tousled hair, work apron, as well as the nonchalantly displayed work tools: brushes and a palette. Incidentally, Demko also refers to this work which, besides the criticism, also brought Bilińska a gold medal at the Paris Salon. In the photographic triptych I Am Me, You, Her from 2021, we see Bilińska’s self‑portrait dissolving into a similarly posed self‑portrait of Demko, with the exception that the subdued colours are replaced by intense pink – the contemporary artist’s hallmark – and the sewing machine and computer in her hands instead of a painter’s accoutrements.

In her Instagram post of 9 April 2017, featuring the vividly exposed structure, colour, and wrinkles on her skin in a tightly framed close‑up selfie that initiated the ongoing Real Selfie‑Feminism project, Iwona Demko wrote: ‘Now, selfie‑feminism is in vogue, mainly owing to the young and beautiful Zofia Krawiec. I am no longer young, I have never been beautiful, but I am a feminist. I wanted to present my 43‑year‑old face, a little saggy already, with its many discolourations, yesterday’s make‑up not quite removed… I will add I am courageous enough to go down to the grocery store like that. I would call it the real selfie‑feminism.’¹²

The artist emphasises that the publication of the first ‘ugly’ photo was a kind of transgression for her. A gesture paid with a great fear of breaking ties with the social media convention and cultural requirements for the female appearance and the ageing process. This, in turn, could ruin her image and throw her out of adjustment with the regime of the male gaze. However, the noticeably ageing body became a fact, making Demko treat Real Selfie‑Feminism as a sort of therapeutic process through which she would begin to get used to and accept what was happening to her and to her body. Making the changes visible and, over time, beginning to treat them as natural, despite the fact that culture tells us to do the opposite, aims to provoke a similar reaction in persons of all genders. Looking again at the imperfect, ageing body, we finally perceive it as an ordinary element of the visual field. In Demko’s photographs, we find not only an un‑made‑up face with visible signs of ageing processes but also greying hair, belly folds, and menstrual blood. They have recently been followed by posts about the onset of menopause, another tabooed topic we need to regain. The experience of menopause also appeared in one of the artist’s last sculptural works – Saint Menopause from 2024 which visually refers to Saint Mother from 2009, focusing on the experience of motherhood. Although positively received, Demko’s project, accompanied by descriptions as important as the photos themselves and abounding in feminist content, sometimes arouses negative comments – ‘It happened to me that one or two very young girls posted “yuck” in their comments […]. It was a very predictable reaction.’¹³ Because, as Cynthia Rich noticed as early as the 1980s, in a book written together with Barbara Macdonald, a pioneer of feminist research on old age, girls and young women learn very early to pride themselves on their diversity and superiority to older women.¹⁴

In The Beauty Myth, a classic title in feminist discourse, to which Iwona Demko often refers, Naomi Wolf writes about the patriarchal culture that has based the female identity on the idea of beauty, because in this way we constantly remain dependent on external approval, exposing our self‑esteem to public view. Thus, competition among women has become part of the myth, separating them from one another. As a result, elderly women are afraid of the young ones and the young ones fear the old ones, which fuels mutual resentment or discrediting of the experience, age, appearance of the ‘rival’. The dichotomy between youth and old age, to which patriarchy trains women, is expressed in the fact that youth and sometimes also virginity are treated as a currency as they are equivalent to the lack of experience, and therefore to the possibility of manipulation and potential transgression of boundaries. On the other hand, women’s ageing means the greater awareness and power that are gained over time and to which a patriarchal society cannot agree; neither can it accept the establishment of intergenerational bonds among women.¹⁵

Old age, sexuality, and witches

The problem of this type of dichotomy was presented in Ti West’s X from 2022. The clash of the old and the new takes place in the American director’s film not only through his fascination with genre cinema – X is a slasher, consciously dialoguing with B‑movie horror – but also through the narrative. It is about a group of friends who go to Texas to shoot a porn movie that would allow them to break into the industry. Their stay at a farmhouse inhabited by an elderly, nearly hundred‑year‑old married couple is followed by a series of bloody murders that seem to stem from longing for what has been lost. It is the old woman who turns out to be the murderer; her desire to explore her femininity, culturally completely repudiated and subjected to taboo, is opposed to the blooming sexuality of the main character – a young debutante in the porn industry. Most importantly, both characters are played by the same actress: Mia Goth. In this way, it is possible for the young heroine to recognise herself in the old woman that she will one day become. Simone de Beauvoir, one of the first feminist writers to take up this topic, points to the need for such a recognition in The Coming of Age.¹⁶ And the topic is not popular within feminist circles since not even feminists were free from the prejudice – ubiquitous in the Western civilisation – against women and old age. The fact that ageism, like sexism and racism, is the result of ignorance and disregard for basic human rights, was described by some feminist theorists only when they themselves grew old and experienced the process of marginalisation by the younger generations of feminists no less than by others. It was and is an experience of double invisibility – as a woman and as an elderly person.¹⁷

Age discrimination – which accompanies feminist discourse too – affected, for example, Hannah Wilke. Initially, feminists accused her – then a young and attractive woman – of treating her body as a medium, duplicating the dynamics and principles of a male gaze, objectifying the female body. When the artist turned fifty in the early 1990s and in the series of photographs Intra‑Venus (1991–1992) showed her ageing body altered by the experience of a neoplastic disease, she violated the norms of conventional visibility again by exposing what cultural taboos dictate should be kept hidden.¹⁸

The elderly woman or, in other words, old hag, is one of the triad of archetypes of femininity, next to the young girl and the woman of the so‑called reproductive age. Joanne Sienko, in The Crone Archetype, writes that the archetype of an old woman is a dynamic process to prepare for. However, how an ageing woman enters the third and last stage of life is related to the perception of this process by society, and this perspective is then internalised by women.¹⁹ Therefore, as in the case of other systems of inequality, what is at stake in the study of age relations is returning voice to those who can share their experience from their own perspective.

Getting back to Ti West’s film, what is most shocking is perhaps the fact that X does not deal with an elderly woman’s sexuality, which arouses fear and disgust from a patriarchal perspective; the woman is very old and infirm, a being associated for centuries, in Western culture, with living death. In Erasmus of Rotterdam, for example, we find such a fragment – ‘[…] old women, even dead with age, and such skeletons one would think they had stolen out of their graves, […] exhibit their dry, wilted breasts in a desire to fan the withering lust with moaning, trembling from old age.’²⁰ The combination of femininity, old age, and sexuality is a mixture that provokes extreme social disapproval. Women were denied all right to a sex life due to either their inability to bear children or their widowhood; those more experienced or not deprived of desires were perceived as immoral and as threats to the social order. Having lived beyond reproductive age, they would lose social respect and usefulness as they could no longer be mothers; they were also accused of jealousy towards younger women. In the 15th century, menopausal women began to be associated with witches based on the infertility of both groups, and often on their sexual needs as well.²¹

The body unmasking the ideology

In In Defense of Witches, Mona Chollet mentions an episode in the series Broad City entitled Witches where one of the heroines finds a grey hair on a friend’s head.²² ‘You are becoming a witch: a dope and powerful fucking witch!’ – she says, but the owner of the grey hair does not share her excitement and quickly arranges an appointment to get Botox injections. The beautician performing the procedure is fifty‑one but she looks twenty years younger. She explains: ‘It is my full‑time job, but, for most other women, it’s their second full‑time job, where you’re losing money.’ Less and less enthusiastic about the Botox, the main character comments: ‘I think you’re really beautiful, and I think you would be even if you didn’t do all this crazy shit to your face.’²³

What we accept or even affirm in other women is often unacceptable in ourselves, even when we are fully aware that the need for ‘beauty’ and preservation of ‘good looks’ is an oppressive tool of control. According to Naomi Wolf, it is the Western culture’s last and best system of beliefs thanks to which patriarchal power persists and remains intact. ‘In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.’²⁴

Agata Zbylut brings up this problem in the photographs from the series Pańcia [Lady], which she began publishing on Instagram in 2018. The artist presents self‑portraits taken just after aesthetic medicine procedures, with visible traces of hyaluronic acid or Botox injections and the use of lifting threads on her face and neck. In this way, Zbylut exposes what is usually supposed to remain invisible, just as Demko does, but focusing on the visible signs of ageing. The paradox consists in the fact that, despite the cult of youth and myth of beauty, all attempts to maintain them provoke reactions intended to discipline and shame the women who use the services of aesthetic medicine or undergo plastic surgeries. ‘There are a million ways to effectively embarrass women. The famous “mutton dressed as lamb” is one of them’ – writes Zbylut under one of the photos in which we see her face with swelling and bruises around her lips.²⁵ Lady also consists of a video in which a doctor talks about aesthetic medicine treatments, and her conclusion is similar to the one heard in Broad City: preserving beauty and youth is an endless work which requires huge financial outlay. Zbylut is fully aware of her entanglement in reproducing the patterns regarding the female body, imposed by patriarchy: ‘If I have not been able to accept what is so far, then perhaps I will at least be able to accept that I do not accept it.’²⁶

Agata Zbylut alludes to the above statement in a subversive and distanced way in The Power of Love. The series of photographs from 2019 consists of images of the naked artist posing in intense makeup and a blonde wig, against the background of a golden stage curtain, with improperly applied lifting patches. Instead of stretching and smoothing, the patches deform parts of her body, producing an effect of vaginal forms in her armpit, on the elbow, in the front and back of her neck. Zbylut creates a role of a stage star, a diva à rebours, asking a question about the eponymous power of love, or rather self‑love, and the cost of (self-) acceptance in an oppressive system.

The artist also problematises economic and class issues related to aesthetic medicine treatments. In the project 28700 zł progressing in parallel with Lady, Zbylut shows a face already healed after the incisions, a sort of ‘target’ appearance; the title names the total amount of money spent on the treatments. At the end of 2020, it was PLN 28,700 and the sum keeps rising since both the treatment and the project are a work‑in‑progress. The project title is going to change along with the growing expenses. The artist compares the format of self‑portrait and counting to Roman Opałka’s actions and counted paintings, accompanied by photographic documentation of the artist’s face changing with age. Opałka’s work was about the universalisation and conceptualisation of transience and the passage of time. Zbylut’s goal, in turn, is to look at the coercion and effects of attempts to stop the inevitable effects of time, which can be treated as the genderisation of the category of time. In an essay on the work of Louise Bourgeois, Griselda Pollock writes that female ageing is a fearless confrontation with the inconsistencies between femininity and age. However, from a feminist perspective, an ageing body does not have to be treated as an area of contradiction when gender and sexuality are permanent areas of identity. The feminist elderly body, writes Pollock, is the antibody of the invisible body.²⁷ ‘Today when I am fifty years old,’ says Zbylut, ‘on the one hand, I cannot believe that my body is changing so much. I observe it with surprise, as if ageing should not concern me in spite of all, and yet it does. On the other hand, I very much appreciate the fact that the body ceases to be treated primarily in a sexual context, that other strengths are coming to the fore.’²⁸

Performance theorist Philip Auslander noted that the body within postmodern performance can be understood as unmasking the ideological discourses that produce it.²⁹ Agata Zbylut’s processual projects, much like Iwona Demko’s actions, are performances of deconstructive nature; they demystify the patterns of functioning, feeling, and visualisation of the female body.

Too old, too young, or perhaps simply a woman?

When asked about the experience of age discrimination, Iwona Demko replied that when she was young, it was mainly elderly male artists with an established position who were in the picture. However, now that she herself is the age of those who once held the symbolic and economic capital, there has been a turn towards the youth and creativity of young artists, while many female creators her age are being completely overlooked in artistic discourse.³⁰

Agata Zbylut, in turn, recalled a situation when, immediately after graduation, due to her professional acquaintance with an older man who held a director’s position, she was labelled as one who ‘sleeps her way to the top’. ‘Neither was it sleeping nor the top but it was enough to discredit me in the environment for some time. I wondered then where my boundaries were. That was when I created red posters and chocolate sculptures where my bitch and I squat and urinate, feeling defenceless in this position, but peeing on it anyway.’³¹ Zofia Krawiec, younger by about a generation, emphasises that the age category was constantly very important in the evaluation of her creativity and work. She writes about the reactions caused by her selfie‑feminist practice in this way: ‘I did not imagine it could infuriate so many people. As soon as the first reactions appeared, I felt as if I had been caught on some bloody offence during a sabbath and dragged to the centre, in front of a community that judged me, humiliated me, analysed my words, and invented stories about me […].’³²

Then, in 2017, in the Easter weekend edition of ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’, a conversation with Krawiec was published in a column where invited people talked about their weekend plans, she was unexpectedly flooded with hate. Her age, estimates based on the photos added to the text, became the main axis of the conflict. According to the comments, she was too young to get a platform for expression, visibility, and the right to vote. On the other hand, she was accused of being too old, asked why she had no husband or children to spend Christmas with.³³ In addition to public comments of this type, she received dozens of private messages in which she was threatened or insulted. At the time of publication of this text, Zofia Krawiec was thirty years old. In her perspective, these paradoxical and hateful accusations concerning age and gender generate a tension between youth, which can be trivialised while being associated with the patriarchal coercion of reproduction – and a more advanced age when perhaps one is not denied competence, but one type of discrimination is replaced with another.³⁴

***

As Lucy Delap writes in her groundbreaking book Feminisms. A Global History where she renounces the adopted linearity and waviness of this most extensive emancipatory project in human history: ‘Feminism has been repeatedly written off as a political movement that has achieved its aims – only to come back with renewed force as another generation of women angrily name their malaise.’³⁵ The 2016 US presidential campaign is a notorious example of how mutually intersecting and reinforcing age- and gender‑based discrimination remains in use as a tool of oppression and shame. Hillary Clinton, during her campaign for the presidency that she lost to Donald Trump, had been forced to defend herself against attacks by the media as well as those of her opponent, who would comment on and attack her because of her gender, age, and appearance. Thus, the issues taken up by Ewa Partum are still topical and continued by subsequent generations of female artists. The title My Problem Is a Problem of a Woman remains the same; only the artistic tools change. Similar is the case for the aforementioned power within the framework of new technologies, which Iwona Demko, Agata Zbylut, and Zofia Krawiec eagerly use. The tools of power and its environment have changed, but the power itself, based on gender inequality, remains the same. However, as Delap emphasises, what matters is that we are able to identify and name this type of oppression, while developing new strategies and perspectives.