It’s been a few years since that damned story about the rib, and yet the clichés and stereotypes commonly used to describe women still persist.
The little girl, the mother, the saint, the partner, the manager, the vamp, the man-eater, the femme fatale, the Lolita, the piece of ass, the babe, the bombshell, the stunner, the hag, the wreck, the airhead, the dead fish, and the dog are just a small sample of the terminology—often borrowed from the plant and animal worlds—commonly used to describe “the other sex.”

The artists invited to Bad Babes are:
Antonella Bersani, Marina Bolmini, Annalisa Cattani, Ottonella Mocellin, Francesca Perillo, Bice Perrini, Susanna Scarpa, Francesca Semeria, Fikafutura.

In the 1960s, to draw attention to the exclusion of women from the art system, American artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles staged performances in which, armed with a bucket and rag, she scrubbed the floor outside a museum or gallery. Around the same time, another American artist, Adrian Piper, would disguise herself as a Black man and cruise white women on the street, overturning the conventional role of man-as-hunter and woman-as-prey.

In France, in the 1970s, Orlan caused a media uproar with a performance in which, nude and seated on a stool, she offered passers-by her services for the modest sum of 5 francs. These artists were concerned with highlighting the political and economic exclusion of women within society and their complete absence from the art circuit.

Today, after years of political and ideological struggle that have improved women’s conditions—at least in Western countries (in much of the rest of the world, women continue to be exploited, enslaved, and sold like goods)—concrete and visible limitations have been replaced by more insidious and less apparent ones, conveyed through images and language: anorexic bodies, silicone faces, post-liposuction legs, bimbos and dominatrixes have become the new semiological tormentors.

The artists invited to Bad Babes, all under 40, share an interest in exploring some of these stereotypes. Though they use different expressive techniques—painting, sculpture, video, photography, and performance—they manage to expose, mock, and subvert the cultural tics and nonsense that surround the “female planet.”

Often featuring themselves in their works, these artists construct an “extreme” iconography meant to surprise, intimidate, irritate, and amuse viewers accustomed to strong visual stimuli. Aware of the seductive power of images, they succeed in revealing the cracks in semiological codes, offering us a chance for redemption and reminding us that, ultimately, to dismantle clichés, one must always look at things from an “other” perspective.

Alessandra Galasso