Second Sculptures

Margot Pilz’s “Second Sculptures” respond to a defining personal experience: attending the 3rd Viennese Women’s Festival in 1978, she is arrested and suffers light injuries; she files a complaint, but the police refuse to investigate. The photographic sequence is the first in which she stages her own female body as the subject of her art—a key juncture in feminist art’s struggle for women’s self-determination and control over their identities. The result is a poignant expression of what it feels like to be at the mercy of an oppressive power. In framing the performing human body as a temporary sculpture, Pilz anticipates the principal idea of an expanded conception of sculpture that will later be developed by Erwin Wurm and others.

Not on display