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This is the BBC. Here's

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a cool fact. A crocodile can't

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stick out its tongue. Another

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uh1.com. history

0:44

seriously and I'm thrilled to say we

0:46

have a brand new live episode to

0:48

finish the series. It's all about the

0:51

life and music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

0:53

I was joined by the comedian David

0:55

O'Darketty, the historian Dr. Hannah Templeton and

0:57

the BBC Concert Orchestra, all 54 of

0:59

them, and their conductor Gavin Sutherland

1:01

as we played songs and music from Mozart's life

1:03

as well as telling jokes and having a lovely

1:06

time learning about him. It's one of our best

1:08

ever episodes and I'd love you to hear it.

1:10

You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. Just

1:12

type in, You're Dead to Me. BBC

1:19

Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

1:22

Hello, my name is Anna-Wyeth Har I'm a new generation thinker

1:24

on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities

1:26

Research Council

1:29

to share new academic research. In this episode of

1:31

the Arts and Ideas podcast, I'll be reading

1:34

my essay on what it means to build a collective

1:37

history of feminist art. Hello

1:43

world, my name is Aurora and I'd like to tell

1:45

you about my newest series called Tierjerker. Over 12 episodes

1:48

together, we'll explore

1:51

the healing power of emotional music from songs of hope

1:53

to grief and sorrow with music from beauty and music.

2:00

to for classical tracks, to, but,

2:02

and beyond. You'll

2:30

have to be very quick if you want to

2:32

meet Bobby Baker's family. They are disappearing fast. This

2:36

article introduced readers to the artwork

2:38

and edible family in a mobile

2:40

home, for which the artist Bobby

2:43

Baker transformed her ACME Housing Association

2:45

prefab, in East London, into a

2:47

sculptural installation and treated visitors to

2:49

tea, and more

2:51

provocatively, invited them to eat several

2:53

members of a nuclear family, mother,

2:56

father, teenage daughter and son

2:58

and baby, who were all

3:00

made of cake, biscuit and

3:02

meringue, except the mother,

3:04

who was built with a dressmaker's dummy

3:06

torso and a teapot as a head.

3:10

As weeks went by, these perishable

3:12

sculptures were eaten and the artwork

3:14

vanished. When

3:16

Tate Britain opened its exhibition Women

3:19

in Revolt in autumn 2023, Bobby

3:21

Baker recreated this unorthodox tea party.

3:25

Both playful and uncompromising,

3:27

she has often used art materials

3:29

like foodstuffs that were associated with

3:31

traditionally feminine domestic skills such as

3:33

cooking and baking. And

3:37

in that way, she has also attacked

3:39

the conventional trappings of art, making her

3:41

an obvious candidate for the show at

3:43

Tate, which is described as a wide-ranging

3:45

exploration of feminist art by over 100

3:48

women artists working in the UK. Interested

3:52

by the new visibility of feminist

3:54

art, I spent the last six

3:56

months alongside colleagues speaking to feminist

3:58

artists across the UK. My

4:01

interview with Bobby Baker suggests that

4:03

her relationship with a so-called feminist

4:05

art canon is a less straightforward

4:07

story. To my surprise,

4:09

Baker told me that there was

4:11

nothing consciously feminist about an edible

4:14

family. It was a work

4:16

that she made based on her intuition at the age

4:18

of 25. In

4:20

those years, she said, she didn't

4:22

discuss feminist concerns with other women

4:24

artists, nor was she yet

4:27

aware of the women's liberation movement,

4:29

let alone taking part in consciousness-raising

4:31

groups. As she put it, honestly,

4:33

that's how out of touch I was. In

4:37

the wake of the women's liberation

4:39

movement in the 1970s, artists rebelled

4:41

against an overwhelmingly male art world

4:44

which excluded women from the very

4:46

possibility of artistic greatness. Between

4:49

1970 and 1990, the Tate Gallery held 344 exhibitions, of which only

4:51

17 included women.

4:58

Women artists sought to challenge this, setting

5:00

up alternative display spaces and

5:02

experimenting with a range of

5:05

media including photography, performance, film,

5:07

but also painting, drawing, and

5:09

sculpture. They touched

5:11

on subjects including childcare, women's

5:14

health, and domestic labour. They

5:17

organised as collectives and

5:19

produced bold posters, photographs,

5:21

or small craft work

5:23

pieces to spotlight society's

5:25

expectations about femininity and

5:27

housework. This collective

5:29

impulse countered the image of the artist

5:31

as a singular genius that was widespread

5:33

in art schools, and many

5:36

in the feminist movement drew on

5:38

their experiences in consciousness-raising groups and

5:41

other radical organisations to create more

5:43

egalitarian ways of making art. It

5:46

was a time of political upheaval, with

5:48

many artists taking part in campaigns against

5:51

the Vietnam War and to racist activism

5:54

and nuclear disarmament protests. Bobby

5:57

Baker's comments suggest, however, that there is a series

5:59

of political movements an image of the

6:01

feminist artist and what she looks like, one

6:04

that Baker didn't feel she lived up to. Baker

6:07

is by no means the exception. In the

6:09

interviews I have conducted, it seems

6:12

clear that artists encounters with feminism

6:14

were diverse and contested. While

6:16

for many this was straightforward and they

6:18

unambiguously grounded their practice in the tenets

6:21

of the women's movement, for

6:23

others feminism evoked instances of conflict

6:25

and they could only see themselves

6:27

as more peripheral to organized struggle.

6:31

Even when feminist concerns seemed central

6:33

to their work, they read feminist

6:36

magazines or exhibited alongside other women,

6:38

artists might still wonder, was I

6:41

feminist enough? And

6:43

like them, I have been grappling with

6:45

this question, what is

6:47

feminist art? In

6:50

my conversations with these artists, I've asked

6:52

myself how I might work through these

6:54

ideas with them without imposing my own

6:57

interpretations onto their art, their politics and

6:59

lives. As a

7:01

feminist historian, Lyn Abrams has argued,

7:03

all historians need to interrogate their

7:06

research practices and dig deeper into

7:08

the meanings embedded in women's narratives.

7:11

My interviews with these feminist artists have

7:13

certainly encouraged me to be attentive to

7:15

narratives. Artist

7:18

works gets reevaluated and

7:20

reinterpreted. No don't, but

7:22

how we talk about things and the

7:24

words that we use matter. Some

7:28

months ago, I took my tape recorder and

7:30

went along to talk to members of the

7:32

photography collective Hackney Flashers. In

7:34

the 1970s, they used art

7:36

to highlight the lack of child care provision

7:38

in East London. Childcare, they

7:41

argued, was a question of money and

7:43

class. It was a key demand

7:45

in the women's liberation movement. To

7:47

cast a light on this problem, the

7:49

Hackney Flashers staged an exhibition called Who's

7:51

Holding the Baby. As

7:53

they told me, photography was limited because

7:55

it couldn't show something that didn't exist.

7:58

That is, if there were no public

8:00

subsidized nurseries, you couldn't take an

8:02

image of them. So the

8:04

group worked collectively to make a series

8:06

of panels that expanded their usual use

8:09

of photographs. They included statistics

8:11

on nursery cuts, as well

8:13

as cartoons of working mothers unable to

8:15

afford nursery places and struggling with the

8:17

double shift of work in the home

8:20

and the factory. One

8:22

of the members painted a graffiti of a baby in

8:24

a stroller with a speech bubble,

8:26

where's my free nursery? Meanwhile

8:28

other members took photographs of the graffiti

8:30

and made a montage superimposing it with

8:33

an image of a mother busy with

8:35

housework while her two children ate supper.

8:39

Above the image you could read, who's still

8:41

holding the baby? A clear

8:43

message that for all women's gains in working

8:45

rights the fight for equality in the home

8:48

was a long way off. During

8:51

my interview with the Flashers one

8:53

of the members reflected that in retrospect

8:55

art historians have given names to these

8:58

artistic strategies but that in

9:00

her view they were just solving a problem. I

9:03

wanted to know when and where they held

9:05

meetings and how regularly and

9:07

the answer was when necessary

9:09

explaining that there was no formal

9:11

structure. In one case

9:14

one of the Hackney Flashers jotted down every

9:16

single thing in their meeting minutes including that

9:18

the child of another member had put on

9:20

the floor. These

9:22

small details suggest a DIY

9:24

approach, an informal process of

9:26

learning and making mistakes together.

9:29

As one of them recalled there was no

9:32

plan, there was no formula, they just had

9:34

to work out how you did it. The

9:38

five former Hackney Flashers members all seemed

9:40

in agreement that they never considered themselves

9:42

artists. They were professionals working

9:44

in the media who used their skills to

9:46

highlight the lack of affordable child care for

9:48

working women. Their approach

9:51

was more agitprop than art but

9:53

as of 2010 the contemporary art

9:56

museum Reina Sofia in Madrid acquired

9:58

23 panels of who's

10:00

holding the baby into its permanent collection,

10:02

now on show at Tate Britain. This

10:06

raises questions about the changing status of

10:08

the work, which has troubled some former

10:10

members because the work was made to

10:13

be shown in venues like community centres

10:15

and trade union conferences rather than art

10:17

galleries. What we were

10:19

doing was using the tools of our trade to

10:21

make a political point. The

10:24

question of what histories we tell

10:26

is increasingly in focus, with shows

10:28

at Tate and other museums, a

10:30

host of recent exhibitions celebrating artists

10:33

like Lubena Himmid awarded the

10:35

Turner Prize only in 2017 at the age of 63, as well

10:37

as in

10:40

mainstream publications such as Katie Hesel's

10:42

Bassella, The Story of Art Without

10:44

Men. These events

10:46

are tremendously important, but for every

10:48

artist who has earned this well-deserved

10:50

recognition, there are many others who

10:52

are yet to be documented and

10:54

remembered. In selectively

10:56

presenting individual great women artists, there

10:58

are risks of losing a variety

11:00

of perspectives and indeed of forgetting

11:02

the often precarious conditions in which

11:05

many of these artists fought to

11:07

be recognised in the art world

11:09

or worked against it, struggling

11:11

to make ends meet, living in

11:13

squats or making art on kitchen

11:16

tables while juggling domestic chores. A

11:19

canon of feminist art threatens to iron

11:21

out the more complex social history that

11:23

made it possible for it to emerge

11:26

in the first place. And here,

11:28

the role of the oral historian

11:30

is to bring out the textured

11:32

and at times incongruous history of

11:35

this relationship between feminism, art and

11:37

politics. With

11:39

some artists, I have encountered ambivalences

11:41

about feminism and gender's place in

11:43

other struggles. I

11:45

spoke with Sonia Bois, who was

11:47

awarded the Golden Line at the

11:49

Venice Biennale in 2022 for Feeling

11:51

Her Way, a sound and video

11:54

installation featuring a collaboration with five

11:56

black female musicians around the idea

11:58

of finding a voice. In

12:01

our conversation, Boyce highlighted the formative

12:03

power of feminism in her college

12:05

days, and recalled feeling

12:07

supercharged after an art history

12:09

lecture while she was on her foundation

12:11

course that talked about emerging

12:13

feminist art practices, and in particular

12:16

feminist artists Kate Wolker and Monica

12:18

Ross from the collective Phoenix. Boyce

12:21

later met another significant feminist artist,

12:24

Margaret Harrison, during the trilogy of

12:26

groundbreaking feminist exhibitions at the ICA

12:28

in London in 1980. After

12:32

this encounter with Harrison, it all just

12:34

kind of clicked, Boyce said. It

12:36

bolstered her interest in feminist conferences,

12:39

the Green and Common anti-nuclear peace

12:41

camp, and importantly, seeing

12:43

that it was legitimate to do work

12:45

about women's experiences. It opened

12:48

up a different way of understanding what

12:50

art could be. By

12:52

the early 80s, Boyce had become involved with

12:54

the Black Art Group, an association

12:56

of young black artists who were raising

12:58

questions about what black art was and

13:00

what it could become. And in

13:03

this sense, Boyce was clear about the failure

13:05

of much feminist art criticism to

13:07

engage with the critical discourses around race

13:10

and racism that were central to many

13:12

women of colour artists. She

13:14

recalled feeling angry at having to decide

13:16

either to position herself in terms of

13:18

gender or race, expressing that

13:21

she didn't feel able to separate one from the

13:23

other. As she said, I am

13:25

me, and me actually is

13:27

affected by all these different things, and

13:30

the work itself is not singular either.

13:34

Even on the occasions where artists shared

13:36

feminist commitments to group work, like the

13:38

collective Hackney Flashers, they differed

13:40

in their journeys to political consciousness. For

13:43

some, socialism came first and

13:45

feminism second. For others,

13:48

it was reading quintessential texts, like Simone

13:50

de Beauvoir's The Second Sex or

13:52

Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, that

13:54

provided New Horizons. And

13:57

yet others first found feminism, in their words,

14:00

escaping marriage. Some

14:02

artists arrived from abroad, bringing with them

14:05

a set of different experiences. The

14:07

Black American artist and archivist Rita Keegan

14:09

settled in London in the early 80s

14:12

and along with other artists

14:14

was foundational in organizing exhibitions

14:16

at Brixton Art Gallery showcasing

14:18

artwork by women, lesbian and

14:20

gay artists. Talking

14:23

about her politicization, Keegan described growing up

14:25

during the civil rights movement as a

14:27

young black child and how much this

14:30

informed her early political awareness. In

14:33

our interview, I prompt Keegan to

14:35

talk about Brixton Art Gallery, especially

14:38

because of the wide-ranging collaborations that

14:40

were developed across intersecting identities. In

14:43

her view, there had been an awareness

14:45

and solidarity around race, but above all,

14:47

they were united by their gender, trying

14:50

not to be hierarchical or judgmental in

14:52

terms of how different women survived or

14:54

the art they made. This

14:57

is a thread that comes up consistently across interviews

14:59

that collaboration could only emerge in context grounded on

15:02

feelings of respect for one another, listening and being

15:04

listened to where

15:08

everyone was given equal space. As

15:11

Rita Keegan said, places where you didn't feel judged. On

15:16

the other hand, it would be naive to ignore that

15:18

disagreements and disputes also shaped or hindered the possibilities for

15:20

collaboration. All of which is enough to make a difference

15:24

all of which is enough to make you

15:26

wonder how do we talk about the feminist

15:29

art movement knowing that this was a group

15:31

with diverse experiences and political aims? As

15:34

Sonia Boyce said in our interview, people didn't

15:36

always arrive with the same intentions, with

15:38

the same outcomes, with the same desires.

15:41

So how can we account for

15:43

what was at once a highly

15:46

political but often multitudinous and sometimes

15:48

uncoordinated endeavor? Perhaps we

15:50

need to construct a canon against the

15:52

canon, one able to accommodate differences as

15:54

well as commonalities. It's from here that

15:57

we might start to build a collective

15:59

biography. of the feminist

16:01

art movement that doesn't flatten

16:03

or erase the diversity of

16:05

experiences, political commitments and the

16:07

messy side of creative experimentation.

16:13

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner. I'm the host of

16:15

You're Dead to Me. We are the comedy

16:17

show that takes history seriously and I'm thrilled

16:20

to say we have a brand new live

16:22

episode to finish the series. It's all about

16:24

the life and music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

16:26

I was joined by the comedian David O'Darketty,

16:28

the historian Dr. Hannah Templeton and the BBC

16:30

Concert Orchestra, all 54 of them, and

16:33

the conductor Gavin Sutherland as we played songs and

16:35

music from Mozart's life as well as telling jokes

16:37

and having a lovely time learning about him. It's

16:39

one of our best ever episodes and I'd love

16:42

you to hear it. You can find it

16:44

wherever you get your podcasts. Just type in, You're Dead to

16:46

Me.