‘Women In Revolt!’
If anger is an energy, there’s enough here to power the Tate for decades. The gallery is buzzing with the violent ire and shrieking fury of second-wave feminism, because after all the freedom and liberation promised by the Swinging Sixties, British women in the 1970s had to deal with the reality: that not much had changed. And they were furious. This is an exhibition of 100 feminist artists and collectives kicking violently against the system. It’s a sprawling, complex mess of a show. It opens with photos of marches and Women’s Liberation conferences, equal pay placards and protest posts, a world where society was being remade, and art was too. The most interesting early art here uses performance and photography. Penny Slinger presents herself as a cake, ready for male consumption, Anne Bean screams underwater, Hannah O’Shea covers herself in animal markings, Cosey Fanni Tutti cuts wound-like holes in her clothes, Helen Chadwick transforms herself into a kitchen. Performance and its documentation allowed these artists to centre themselves, to tell stories with their own bodies. They became their own zines, their own pamphlets and placards. Their bodies became weapons against sexism, domesticity, the burden of care. 1970s anger became its own movement. Punk is everywhere here; it’s in Linder’s iconic photographic montages and meat-draped performance with her band Ludus, it’s in The Raincoats’ Gina Birch’s incessant ear-piercing scream film, Delta 5’s Chila Kumari Singh Burman’