Body, fragment and the androgyny of sexuality

By Tone Lyngstad Nyaas

The works of art created by Carole Feuerman in the 1970s explore the concepts of body, eroticism and desire from a Western cultural point of view. Most of her works deal with sex-related taboos, which are the central theme of her artistic research. Feuerman’s works from the 1970s were groundbreaking by virtue of her use of body fragments and their powerful sensual content. Although Feuerman was a pioneer within the Superrealist movement, her works did not receive much attention, and the erotically charged sculpted fragments were seen as controversial and provocative. One example of this is that a gallerist in Fort Worth decided to close down her first individual exhibition in 1978 because he feared the reactions of the public.1 The fact that Long Island Girl at the Museum of Sex in NYC is the first museum show of Feuerman’s works from the 1970s in the USA, where some works have never been exhibited before, says a lot about how male-dominated the 1970s art scene was.2 In 2024, the Tampere Art Museum in Finland presented an exhibition titled HYPER. The curators divided the exhibition into five main categories: human icons, manipulation of scale, transformations, body parts, and monochrome approaches. Within the context of the representation of body parts, Feuerman was mentioned as a pioneer in the early stages of the realist movement of the 1970s.3

The iconography of the body fragments can be seen in the context of the nascent women’s rights movements of those years, with a focus on the art scene of New York, where we find clear parallels with the photographs of Hannah Wilke, Martha Wilson, and Ulrike Rosenbach. That a woman may take the power of definition of sexuality and eroticism pulsates as a narrative through Feuerman’s work, reflecting a period of cultural change. Consistent themes such as androgyny, erotic pleasure, and the sensual beauty of the body can be related to Camille Paglia’s thoughts on the Dionysiac (or chthonic = of the earth) principle, which is identified as the pagan, instinctive, and chaotic forces of nature.4 Her criticism of what she sees as a form of feminism hostile to sex and beauty is also relevant to an analysis of those Feuerman’s works that centre on sensuality and beauty.

A line can be drawn between Feuerman’s use of fragmented and polychrome sculptures and the sculpture traditions of antiquity. The body fragment can also be linked to the votive traditions of antiquity, when painted body fragments served as thanksgiving tokens to Asclepius, the god of medicine. Her works inspire a ritualistic reflection in which physical desire is analysed through a dynamic movement between seductive and repulsive, clean and unclean, artificial and natural. In some pieces, the powerful form of the genitals is revealed, creating a striking contrast to the innocent design of the lace panties. Humour also plays an important role in many works, as in Salutation of the Flowers from 1976, where the flower-print panties may be interpreted as an ode to female sexuality. The idea that sexual desire is reserved for men, while women are relegated to a passive expression, is challenged by her representation of female erotic desire and an androgynous, fluid gender. Sensuality is expressed in the way hands move towards breasts and genitals in a moment of ecstatic delight. The fragmentation of the sculptural language focuses on erotic themes, thus creating an abstraction and reflection on the meaning of sensuality in a cultural, existential, and philosophical context.

The sculpted pieces have clear parallels to photography, cinema, and the erotic descriptions found in popular culture. These elements are recreated in the form of brutal cuts that make it seem as though someone has torn out a picture sequence from a magazine, a photograph or a movie. The optical effects of motion pictures thus become part of anonymous but very real bodies, which infringe on taboo areas of the culture. In Feuerman’s works, the stereotypes of beauty meet nature’s own interferences, as the sculptures are cast from living human beings who are allowed freedom of action. This may be seen within the context of the feminist movement’s need for self-definition and for a wider sphere of action for women, in which private and public arenas — such as the home, the workplace, sexuality, and education — were being renegotiated and discussed in the public debate. According to one of the slogans of the feminist movement, women must participate in the construction of reality to achieve a self-defined being in the world. In an overwhelmingly male-dominated art world, Feuerman’s sculptural fragments broke with the stereotypes and renegotiated sex through an androgynous expression.

When realist sculpture was in its early stages in the 1970s, the movement wanted a new approach to the human motif, which had been abandoned by abstract expressionism and stringent minimalism. Carole Feuerman worked on existential themes such as alienation and sexual taboos. She revitalised old crafts techniques such as casting and created polychrome sculptures, a mimetic practice where illusionistic effects recreate every tiny detail, such as body hairs, blood veins, pores, and complexion, which are rendered with convincing precision. In later works, this painstaking approach is developed further, as witnessed by the realistic rendering of the water drops that meet the skin in her whole-figure sculptures of swimmers and bathers.

Her works from the 1970s were, then as now, based on taking casts from living models, creating a cast that could be used several times with different materials, such as resin (a synthetic polymer), marble, bronze or vinyl.5 They were then finished with oil paints and airbrush. Feuerman’s works delve into taboo subjects that centre on sexuality and the cultural premises of eroticism, which are broken apart through shifts in the relationship between sex and identity. She explores how sculpture, through a fragmenting of the body, enters into a force field charged with sexual energy. The concept of alienation is associated with the fragmented body, and permeates many of Feuerman’s works where the anonymisation of the model and the fragments of erotic acts are, to an increasing extent, focused on the voyeuristic gaze of the observer, rather than on the identity of the model.

The shift in gender-based conventions, women’s freedom, androgyny and freedom of speech

The 1970s were a crucial decade, during which issues linked to women’s rights, spheres of action, and freedom were put on the agenda. Feuerman’s early works were created in a period when feminist art became one of the most ambitious and influential art movements. This movement resulted in a dramatic redefinition of art and addressed socially relevant issues after a period characterised by aesthetic formalism. At the same time, it broke new ground in the use of performance, photography and audiovisual media.

Lucy Lippard played a central role as a theoretician in those years. Based in New York, she used her writings and curatorship to make room for feminist practice in a field where social inscription was non-existent. The works from the 1970s are highly relevant to this discourse by virtue of the way they thematise the right to self-definition, freedom of speech and the possibility of criticising gender-based conventions. The alternative to a fixed gender-role pattern was an androgynous expression, strikingly visualised in Suspenders (1976) and Leg Iron (1981). In the former piece, the torso wears overalls, a work garment associated with hard physical work, something that has traditionally been associated with the male sphere. A hand lifts the right breast towards the spectator, a metaphor for offering one’s work services. The unkempt nails on the hand tell the story about of a hard-working woman who is very distant from a Barbie-doll beauty ideal. The metaphorical theme of work, which centres on the visualization of a female body silenced through a patriarchal power structure, brings to mind Julia Kristeva’s Stabat Mater where she gives voice to the experience of the birthing woman, the nursing woman, motherhood and sexuality which, in much of the Western cultural sphere, has been removed in favor of worshipping an asexual cleanliness embodied in the icon of the Virgin Mary. In this context, the overalls may be read as a metaphorical exploration of the hard work done by the female body, be it pregnancy, nursing, childbirth or sex work. Not least, the work alludes to the body-liberating strategies of the 1970s, when it was fashionable to go topless and when bras were seen as a hindrance to free movement. Another reference in Suspenders is the implicit allusion to Duane Hanson’s sculptures of American male workers, who are presented with a meticulously cast representation of their work uniforms.

The feminist uprisings of the 1970s largely rejected artistic expressions in which the female body was reduced to an object for enjoyment or consumption. The strength of Feuerman’s works is that she embraces a long artistic tradition by using the seductiveness of the female body as a force. Some sculptures feature an invasive intimacy and vulnerability, such as her casts of female breasts from 1976. In Breast, Kiss, Hand on Bra and Suspenders, the fragments bear witness to everything individual and unique about different female breasts.

In this context, it is highly relevant to mention Martha Wilson’s work Breast Forms Permutated (1972), where the artist combines the critical spirit of feminism with the serial procedures of conceptualism. The photographs represent different breasts which, like Feuerman’s work, stand out in protest against an idealised presentation of the female body6. There is an evident parallel in theme, where both call attention to and challenge socially established conventions and views on women. The breasts are cast from life, the sculptural equivalent of three-dimensional photographs; the works relate to one another through their representation of fragments drawn from real life. Both seem to ask: who has the power to define the cultural stigmas surrounding the female body? In Kiss, two powerful male hands embrace a female torso; one of the breasts is lifted towards the observer. The composition articulates a reconciling beauty, a warm and humble respect for the life-giving power of the female body. It is this sociocultural filter of nature that reveals the specific realism and materiality of the body. What makes Feuerman’s sculptures unique is the fact that their fragmented nature places the observer face to face with the position of the sexes; they disrupt and challenge conventions, fetishism and desire without dispelling sensuality or eroticism. In Red Tie (1976-2011) and Not For Sale (2012), the main motif is a female torso cut below the groin, at the throat, and at the shoulders. The torsos feature naked breasts and a slip, which is kept in place by two male hands that seem to threaten and inhibit the woman’s freedom of movement. The tie represents the conventional, male and phallic, contrasted with the naked torso. Placed around the neck like a rope, a tie may also suggest a male punishment for the woman’s assumption of male power positions. The pieces thematise the relationship between sexuality and power, and bring to mind the major global social problem represented by sexualized violence against women around the world. The naked female breasts, the tie and the frontal representation feature interesting points of contact with Hannah Wilke and her poster Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism (1977). The poster was a reaction to dogmatic feminist agitprop and rigid political assertions. Wilke poses as if in a fashion magazine, topless with a tie featuring a geometric pattern that evokes American minimalism, a movement mainly dominated by men. Just as in Red Tie, the photograph is cut just below the groin, and the body is covered with chewing gum pieces, reflecting the female body as an object of consumption for a sexualized gaze. The parallels in the symbolically loaded visual language consist of the tie as a phallic symbol, placed on the naked female body, an act which stages a power shift that challenges the domination of male culture and its power of definition over the female body. The fact that Wilke resorted to seductive allure at the same time as she claimed a feminist position has clear parallels to the worship of eroticism in Feuerman’s representation of the female body. Both artists use and demonstrate the woman’s dilemma between self-presentation and objectification. In the youth rebellions and alternative political movements that appeared in the 1960s, the use of ties was often associated with conservatism, and not wearing a tie was a sign of protest against the established and traditional male society. Themes that touch on instrumentalisation and consumption are even more evident in Not For Sale (1976-2020), where a tie sparkles with diamonds against the woman’s naked skin. Another example of the connection between the photographic medium and hyperrealist sculptural expression can be found in Hannah Wilke’s Gestures from 1976. Wilke used stills from video recordings of a performance, resulting in photographs of different variations of hand movements towards the face. Performative expression is also latent in Feuerman’s Self-Portrait (1989-2018), which features fragments of the artist’s hand and face.

It is highly relevant to mention the different points of contact that may be observed between Wilke’s terracotta sculptures from the 1960s — the first three-dimensional images of vulvas originating from the women’s liberation movement — and Feuerman’s intimate representations of groins and genitals. In the early 1960s, she modelled five androgynous terracotta sculptures with oval openings as symbols of creation. A similar theme appears in Feuerman’s Hands Breaking in the Toe Shoes (1981), where a ballet shoe is stretched between two hands; the oval opening and pink colour evoke a vulva.

Phallic symbols, from religious artefacts to advertising, are metaphors for masculinity, power and control over life and death. In popular culture, phallic symbols suggest self-assurance and maleness. An example of this is the gun, marketed as a symbol of male virility and dominance. The use of guns in works such as Leg Iron (1981), Joe’s Belly (1976) and Texas (1981) thematises the way in which American weapon culture represents an essential part of reality in the USA, which has the world’s highest rate of firearms per inhabitant. In this context, the gun calls forth associations with the American entertainment industry, where death and eroticism are intertwined in a sensual expression. The sculptures may be interpreted from a psychological perspective, as a visualisation of the life drives of Eros and Thanatos, analysed in Freud’s essay: Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), where Eros and the regulation of the libido, governed by the principle of pleasure, operate alongside Thanatos, the death drive in the drive theory. The Greek personification of death centres on human beings’ irrational urge towards destruction and annihilation, which often takes the form of aggressiveness. Works such as Leg Iron, Joe’s Belly and Texas feature a pulsation between Eros and potentially harmful acts that stand in contrast and opposition. It is interesting, in this context, to observe how female artists in the 1970s have used and appropriated a male, phallic symbolism. In her piece from 1969-1970, titled Art is a criminal action, Ulrike Rosenbach appropriates Andy Warhol’s silkscreen print Double Elvis (1963). Sporting a belt and a gun, Rosenbach appropriates a male myth, problematizing the domination of men in the art world by assuming the role, taking the weapon and aiming it at the public, thus assimilated in the male territory of art production.7

Both Feuerman and Rosenbach criticised the traditional representation of femininity and female sexuality by transforming the traditional depiction of gender stereotypes in art history. An example of this is Leg Iron (1981), where the woman takes hold of the gun. The naked foot is cut at thigh height, thus making her act the centre of attention. The woman’s finger is on the trigger; at the same time, a male hand is about to take control of her movements. This overlap creates an androgynous expression as the man’s masculine hand is confused with that of the woman. The gun holster is fastened below the ankle in a composition where seduction and destruction are intertwined. The woman’s attempt to take over this male phallic culture charges the work with tension; the tension of the instant before everything culminates in either sexual ecstasy or death.

The double standards and paradoxes found in the puritanical part of American society create a cognitive dissonance which Feuerman’s work articulates. In fact, at the same time as the feminist movement gained more momentum as a central aspect of the struggle for human rights, popular culture and the movie industry continued to worship patriarchal structures where romanticised violence represented the basis for the underlying structures of the entertainment industry.

Feuerman made her first cast in 1973, when she modelled a sculpture for the front page of the National Lampoon Magazine. As she worked with androgynous themes, gender and sexuality, a sculpture of hers was chosen as the front page of another magazine, The Age of Androgyny. Gender fluidity became more mainstream in the music and visual art milieus in the 1980s. Androgyny was a central issue within the women’s rights movement, and in this context, it is worth recalling not only the aforementioned Rosenbach but also Hannah Wilke’s poster for her video performance So help me Hannah (1979), where she poses naked with a gun in her hand, thus appropriating male power structures in a crusade against patriarchy. Even if Feuerman’s works do not possess the same evident agitational political character as Wilke’s, one perceives a threat in the erotic undertones, namely that the woman is capable of assuming male roles and appropriating the phallic dimension. This theme brings to mind Henrik Ibsen’s most popular and debated play, Hedda Gabler (1890). Gabler’s unusually mannish character was controversial in its time; the black dress, horses and not least the gun give phallic associations. With her finger on the trigger, the phallic Hedda stands like a man with power over life and death.8 Gabler threatened established society structures, and her quest for and enjoyment of life was too radical for its time, leading her to perdition and suicide. The piece foreshadowed how feminine art was to appropriate phallic power, written by the fervent feminist Henrik Ibsen, who described the patriarchal structures suppressing women in such censorious terms in A Doll’s House. It is precisely this theme—the struggle for life or death, emancipation or submission—that is visualised in Feuerman’s work, which may be linked to different spheres in art history, from Ibsen’s Gabler to pop art and to the feminist pioneers of the 1970s. The content of Feuerman’s work is radical and should be considered in the same context as feminist performance art, where the merger between superrealism and the fragmented creates a new sculptural vocabulary.

Iconoclasm and the sinful body fragment

The tensions of sexuality may be compared to a magnetic field of contradictions and contrasts, represented by the way the brutally severed body part contrasts with the soft surface of the skin. This artistic choice evokes associations with fragments of classical Greek sculptures, where the broken surfaces and cuts seem to have been made on purpose, to create an ideal, sensual contrast. There is also an affinity between the hyperrealist sculptural tradition and the polychrome sculptures of antiquity, characterised by eyeballs carved in various kinds of stone, eyelashes modelled in silver or bronze, skin rendered in ivory, and painted garments. In addition to all this, which we today would define as kitsch, some sculptures were even decorated with garlands and perfumed. They were indeed idealised, but the sensual aspect played a central part in the pathos-loaded impact of these statues. The magic of the fragment may be interpreted in the sense of the magic of allusions or omissions, and of the fact that the conveyed narrative triggers the onlooker’s imagination, inducing him or her to complete the work from fragment to whole. The creativity of the observer, who completes the sculptural tableau, therefore comes to play an important role. The history of Feuerman’s experience of being ignored and censored recalls art history’s many cases of iconoclasm, where precisely the erotic was persecuted and censored. According to the artist, the world was not ready to accept the fact that a sculptor could visualise eroticism seen from the woman’s point of view. We may trace this phenomenon back in art history to the way an iconoclasm aimed at the nude body developed in the early Christian period, when the Dionysiac world of the gods of antiquity was attacked by chiselling away sensual organs in the form of the eyes, ears, noses, mouths, and not least the uncovered genitals of the sculptures. Systematic attacks on pagan-mythological sculptures demonstrate the changed views on naked bodies and the introduction of concepts such as sin and shame during the early Christian period.9 The gradual change in attitude towards sculpted naked bodies is also manifested much later, in the 17th century, when the sculptures in the Vatican galleries were equipped with fig leaves for the first time. Many of the antique sculptures in the galleries were, at this point, censored once more. However, this time they were neither disfigured nor destroyed, but endowed with a popular motif inspired by the Bible and by how Adam and Eve covered themselves up in the Garden of Eden.10 We may draw parallels to our own century and to how the body art movement of the 1990s was maligned by homophobic reactionary forces in much of the USA when it debated and brought to the fore the victims of the AIDS epidemic and taboos regarding the way society marginalised homosexuals. In this regard, it is disconcerting to observe how the Trump administration stigmatises trans persons and attacks the gender fluidity through a reactionary view on the relationship between gender and identity. Universities and schools have been victimised by a new iconoclastic program that may, at worst, have consequences for artistic freedom of expression in the USA. 

Ex-votos and the vicarious function of the body fragment

The intimate rendition of body fragments in Feuerman’s work calls to mind the tradition of ex-votos: ceramic sculptures of body parts that were cast and painted by the temples and spas dedicated to Asclepius, the god of medicine. The holiest of them all was at Epidaurus on the Peloponnese in Greece, where there were dormitories for sick pilgrims. Sculptures representing every part of the body, such as hands, feet, legs, arms, genitals, female breasts and torsos, have been found at the temple in Corinth. The first casts from real body parts were made when this tradition was continued as part of the Catholic religion. Votive offerings showed God the healthy body part, and it was therefore of utmost importance to make the model as realistic as possible. It is interesting to relate this kind of vicarious function of the body fragment to Feuerman’s casts, as their realism challenges issues of ontology and reception theory by striving for an optimal vicarious function. In his book The Power of Images, art historian David Freedberg bases his studies of votive culture and polychrome sculpture on his philosophical hypothesis, namely that human beings do not make a clear distinction between the representation and the represented.11 He removes art from the object-oriented isolation it has been subjected to in our century by focusing on the functional and ritual side of representation. He poses a radical question as to what emotions, hopes, and aspirations people project onto pictures and sculptures, and why, in the belief that these illusions give true satisfaction. The author’s answer to this sweeping question is that human beings believe that psychological feelings and needs are satisfied by the visual experience of the observer, who responds as if the represented object were to be ontologically real.12 The consequences of the vicarious function of sculpture can, according to Pausanias’ story about Theagenes, be fatal. Theagenes was a famous athlete who won several Olympic games, and who, among other things, was an Olympic boxer in 480 B.C. When he died, people who had hated him when he was alive gathered around his sculpture at night to punch it as if they were giving Theagenes himself a beating. While fighting the sculpture, it suddenly fell down on the vindictive enemy, killing him. His son sued the sculpture, and the end of the story was that it was expelled from Athens and sunk into the ocean.

The colourful tableaux of antiquity may have had more in common with mannequins, plaster casts, movie set props, and wax casts than with monochrome sculpture as it evolved during Modernism. The subtext of mimetic approaches hovers somewhere between life and death, and between animated and hybrid, evoking a fantastic and daunting world.13 The film-still atmosphere surrounding Feuerman’s work creates an ambiguity that places it on the borderline between fiction and reality, but it also suggests that this medium may have acquired the pathos which was the prerogative of sculpture, painting, and drama in antiquity. When researchers charted the polychrome tradition of antiquity through archaeological digs in the 20th century, the discoveries also influenced contemporary painters and sculptors. It is relevant in this context to mention sculptor and painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, who in The Ball Player (1902) presented a nude woman sculpted in marble, covered in wax and painted to create a skin-like quality. Gérôme was deeply influenced by the painted polychrome terracotta figures found in Tanagra in Greece. The discovery was met with indignation, at the same time sowing the seeds for a new way to perceive white antiquity, where the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea served as a metaphor for how reality and illusion may be confused when the sculptor falls in love with one of his statues, which Venus then brings to life. Modernism perpetuates the neoclassical misunderstanding that classical Greek sculpture was white as snow. This has led to an essentialist line of thought, according to which one should relate to the essence or truth of the material. A sculpture in bronze or stone should not undergo any surface treatment, but rather reveal its true material character, because monochromy is an expression of timelessness. Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) defined new criteria for the autonomy of a work of art, since a fragment was considered an independent expression. He explored fragments of ancient sculptures when visiting Rome and observed that “Beauty is like god, a fragment of beauty is complete”. The fragment contains a microcosm of the whole, so that the part and whole are equivalent. Feuerman’s use of fragments makes the sculptures assume a similar articulated wholeness, and it is therefore relevant to compare her use of fragments with ancient sculptures, which, even if consisting of fragments, feature a comprehensive beauty. The way the fragment is formed in Feuerman’s art is of utmost importance and evokes disruption and alienation, because the brutality of the deformations has been sublimated in an aesthetic discourse rooted in Rodin’s fragmenting of the human body.14 An important liberating aspect of the fragmentation of the human body also consists in breaking with the integrity of sculpture in allegorical motifs or portraits that were based on a wholly clear and integral representation. Feuerman’s work has a place in this tradition, but it adds a perspective of erotic liberation to the body fragment.

The Dionysian popular culture. Sexuality as a meeting point between nature and culture

Camille Paglia is best known for her sharp criticism of what she sees as a dogmatic feminism that is hostile to sex and beauty. This makes her texts highly relevant to many of Feuerman’s works, where the erotic power of attraction between man and woman comes into play and where the woman assumes an active, co-initiating role. In Paglia’s dualistic system, nature is opposed to culture, body to mind, picture to word. The Dionysian element is identified as nature’s pagan, instinctive, and chaotic forces that fight the Apollonian, which represents the creation of concept, form, hierarchical order, and civilisation. An immanent criticism of how Western civilisation favours rationality and suppresses the sensual, corporeal and erotic seems to pulsate in Feuerman’s work. Sexual Personae casts light upon the manifestations of the forces of chaos, where the creative process is described as a fluid union between female and male. These forces reverberate in Feuerman’s sculptures, where eroticism, pleasure, and sexual desire play a central role. After the early 1970s, a part of the women’s rights movement evolved in a puritan direction: most sexual expressions were frowned upon, and aesthetics based on female beauty in advertising, fashion and art were banned from the agenda. Feuerman’s work belongs to the history of artists who worship the beauty of the female body and who, not unlike Wilke, criticise the distinction between sensual and intellectual by recognising seductive traits as a quality which does not undermine the woman as a thinking, independently acting being. Paglia similarly observes the nude female body as an expression of a strength and primal power that the man fears and is attracted to at the same time. In Feuerman’s sculptures, the voyeuristic element is isolated, and the body is shown in all its “pagan glory”. She conceives a place that is free from morals, social categories, and limits. According to Paglia, puritan moralism represents a magnificent rationalising dream about absolute control over everything uncontrollable and unpredictable, because it is not possible to regulate all human interactions, and least of all our frequently ambiguous sexual sentiments, by law. Feuerman exposes the irrational driving forces of sexuality, which bring Dionysian popular culture, where sexuality and eroticism reveal the intricate meeting point between nature and culture, into play.15 At night, we descend into a dream world dominated by nature; moment by moment, the night flutters by with fantasies and erotic visions, undermining our pursuit of virtue and order and surrounding objects and persons with a threatening nimbus.16 The works of Feuerman are a representation of the fact that the sexes will always be dazed by violent shocks of attraction and repulsion, which, exquisitely, thematise a reorganisation of reality where art is a ritualistic subduing and control of the daemonic energy of nature.

1 - Ariel Plotek, Carole A. Feuerman: Long Island Girl, NYC Museum of Sex, New York, 2025, p. 5.
2 - Ibid.
3 - Selma Green, Piece by piece: parts of the human body, HYPER, Tampere Art Museum, Tampere, 2024, p.19.
4 - Camille Paglia, “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art”, in Sexual Personae. Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, translation and introduction by Marit Synnevåg, Cappelen Akademiske Forlag, Oslo, 2000.
5 - Plotek, cit., p. 6.
6 - When Wilson uses the concept of permutation, she borrows it from a branch of mathematics called set theory, which was used by conceptual artists, novelists and playwrights in the 1960s and 1970s, who availed themselves of the set theory to create formal and linguistic patterns. Instead of using it on intervals or words, Wilson used it on the breasts of nine women, where each image is accompanied by its own text.
7 - Theresa Dann, “Ulrike Rosenbach, Feminist Instruction”, in Feminist Avant-Garde.The art of the 1970s, (edited by) Gabriele Schor, The Sammlung Verbund Collection, Vienna, Prestel, Munich, Berlin, London, New York, 2012, p. 237.
8 - Anne Marie Rekdal, Frihetens dilemma. Ibsen lest med Lacan, Aschehoug, Oslo, 2000, pp. 242, 243.
9 - As androgyny is a common denominator in the artist’s way to deal with gender and sexuality it is relevant to mention how the androgynous god of wine was attacked in Ellenikon Therapeutike Pathematon (a cure for Greek diseases) where Theodoret, a bishop in Cyrrus in northern Syria between 423 and 457, ridiculed the female god of wine Bacchus and claimed that the god was possessed by demons with dangerous forces who had to be conquered and destroyed. Anna Minor, Ikonoklasme Kunsten som kampplads. Glyptoteket, Copenhagen, 2025, p. 15.
10 - Troels Myrup Kristensen, FØR FIKENBLADET, Senantik ikonoklasme mellom hedenskap og kristendom. Ikonoklasme Kunsten som kampplads, Glyptoteket, Copenhagen, 2025, p. 86.
11 - David Fredberg, The Power of Images, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989, p. 197.
12 - Ivi, p. 199.
13 - Mike Kelly, The uncanny (exhibition catalogue organized by Sonsbeek 93 in the Gemeentmuseum Arnhem, the Netherlands in collaboration with Fred Hoffman), Los Angeles, 1993. p. 5.
14 - Demetrio Paparoni, Feuerman: Superrealist Sculptures, Rizzoli, New York, 2024, p. 20.
15 - Camille Paglia, cit., pp. 31, 32.
16 - Ibid.