Dramatic Gestures- Marjorie Strider

Marjorie Strider
Critical Praise

Excerpt

Dramatic Gestures
By Marjorie Strider

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Before Pop art, before Feminist art, before "Performance..." there was Marjorie Strider, who heralded them all but refused to be pigeonholed into any one. Her "Triptych" (1963) inspired the infamous International Girlie Show at Pace Gallery which, alongside works by such artists as Warhol and Lichenstein, signaled the beginning of Pop art. But as Raphael Rubinstein notes in his introduction to Dramatic Gestures, "while her Pop paintings of the early 1960's certainly deserve the renewed attention they are receiving, this should be a mere prelude to an appreciation of Strider's work as a whole, and a wider recognition of her substantial, continuing artistic achievement."

Showing at New York galleries before female artists were yet to be embraced, her signature urethane Ooze was, as Donald Kuspit notes in the book's essay, "an inspired example of woman's insurgency...as artistically radical as the Women's Movement was socially radical." And when she proclaimed the Art world narrow and elitist, she took her work to the streets, creating site-specific installations and three-dimensional "Framing" performances that spoke directly to the public en masse. Marjorie has even been credited with coining the term Performance art" as it is used today.

Though Strider is represented in books on Pop, Minimalist, Realist, Conceptual and Feminist art, critic Jon Perrault says, "it is my contention that she has carved out a unique place of her own...To paraphrase Rauschenberg's famous saying about working in the gap between art and life, Strider works in the gap between painting and sculpture." Michael Kirby called it "work that accepts both the two-dimensional and three-dimensional visions and, in fusing them, exists 'interdimensionally.'" The result, said Phyllis Braff in the New York Times, "is sculpture that bursts, thrusts and generally astounds with its originality and wit."

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