Spot On: Birgit Jürgenssen's high heeled irony

Though Birgit Jürgenssen was not widely known in her lifetime, today she is considered a major figure of the feminist avant-garde. With her ironic and striking images, she explores another kind of femininity

Invited by Valie Export to take part in the exhibition “Feminismus: Kunst und Kreativität” in Vienna in 1975, Birgit Jürgenssen presented photographs in which she wore a cooking apron that gave her the appearance of a domestic robot. A striking image of a woman reduced to her function.

A pioneer of feminist art, Jürgenssen was not as well known in her lifetime as her fellow Austrian, who received great media attention. When she died aged 54, she left behind a prolific body of work, cutting and ironic, which included photographs, drawings, watercolours, and sculptures in different materials. She made many stylised self-portraits, in which she deconstructed the reductive cultural and social duties imposed on women in the kitchen, in the form of repetitive household chores, and by fashion’s commodification of the female body.

Housewife, domestic woman, or domesticated woman, appearances are deceiving. In a series of drawings, we can see her ironing herself or becoming a decorative motif. In a series of photos, sculptures, and drawings, she offers a fetishistic view of the high-heeled shoe, the ultimate feminine accessory, which she transforms into extensions for her buttocks or a spiky growth on her forearms. In a series of sculptures, the shoe is also decked out in a wedding dress, becomes pregnant, and is turned raven-black.

Conceptual but not abstract, Birgit Jürgenssen’s work is inspired by the associative and disruptive mechanics of surrealism. She also employs the female body, her body, using it like a mask or a means of conveying a change of identity, in a bitter masquerade. Poetic and elusive, her art is never dry, no doubt because of the constant irony that pervades it. “For me, to be ironic about oneself is a sort of autobiographical strategy, which helps to reveal the potential for images to subvert and deconstruct,” Jürgenssen remarked.

It’s also a strategy for viewing the world with detachment. Well before the development of gender theory, Birgit Jürgenssen put masculine stereotypes of femininity into images and forms. Before Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman, she explored iconoclastic femininity through the metamorphoses of her body

BIRGIT JÜRGENSSEN 27/10 > 21/12, Gladstone Gallery, gladstonegallery.com

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