Greta Schödl & Tomaso Binga. VOCALIZING

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For Binga, the word is the political tool par excellence for deconstructing a language that has always been male-oriented, while for Schödl the written word is the graphic-aesthetic element that, emptied of meaning, becomes rhythm, vibration and the perfect seismograph to record her moods on a daily basis.

It has taken years for women to learn to ‘speak’ in order to be heard, to understand that the word is the key means to express feelings and thoughts and to give voice to an identity that has remained silent for too long. Like children in their early infancy who must work hard to line up vowels and consonants in order to find their own voice, women have had to struggle to find a common voice with which to express themselves. Within the feminist movement, the claims of female poets and visual artists gathered such strength that they have courageously rewritten not only the words that tell their stories, but also the very history of art.

Feminism was one of the most interesting intellectual and political movements of the last century – a revolutionary movement that, while grounding its roots in the battles for equal civil rights that began in France in the Revolution of 1789, succeeded in shaking our modern age with its subversive power right up until the second half of the twentieth century. In particular, as Griselda Pollock has insightfully suggested, the meeting between art and feminism was essential for the aesthetic and sociological impact that women artists had, especially during the 1960s and 1970s, in the transformation of artistic and literary practice. Language has always been a powerful tool for defining oneself and the world, and when women finally emerged from the creative and intellectual oblivion in which they had been confined by centuries of patriarchal culture, the basis of their visual poetics focused on language and the body. Their research – which aimed at undermining verbal language by turning it into the object and subject of works created with performance, collage, video and photography – defined not only a new aesthetic but also a new form of expression. Feminist artists began to deconstruct words visually in order to say what had never been said – what could not be said – and then finally to give voice to the ‘problem that has no name’, as Betty Friedan acutely defined it in her critical essay The Feminine Mystique. The mystification through which generations of women had been confined within domestic space and made to believe that it was wonderful to be a housewife began to be revealed and recounted by female artists and poets using these revolutionary verbal-visual techniques. Women’s liberation therefore involved not only sexual freedom and equality of civil rights, but also liberation from a male-coded language in order to arrive at the creation of a new form of visual writing capable of giving shape and intellectual dignity to the new identity that women were seeking.

This short essay presents the research of two female artists, Tomaso Binga and Greta Schödl, who have used the word to rethink language and its function.