Gina Pane

Gina Pane (Biarritz, May 24, 1939 – Paris, March 6, 1990) was a French artist of Italian origins. She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1960 to 1965, and was a member of the 1970s Body Art movement in France, "Art corporel."

Parallel to her art, Pane taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Mans from 1975 to 1990 and, at the request of Pontus Hulten, ran an atelier dedicated to performance art at the Centre Pompidou from 1978 to 1979.

Biography Born in Biarritz to Italian parents, Pane spent part of her early life in Italy. She returned to France to study under André Chastel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1960 to 1965. She died prematurely in 1990, following a long illness.

Pane claimed that she was greatly influenced by political protests in Paris in May 1968 and by such international conflicts as the Vietnam War (Ferrer 1989, pp. 37–8). In Nourriture-actualités télévisées-feu (1971; repr. Pluchart 1971) she force-fed herself and spat back up 600 grams of raw ground meat, watched the nightly news on television as she stared past a nearly blinding light bulb, and extinguished flames with her bare hands and feet. After the performance, she said, people reported a heightened sensitivity. "Everyone there remarked: 'It's strange, we never felt or heard the news before. There's a war going on in Vietnam, unemployment everywhere.'" (Stephano 1973, p. 22)

• Late 1970s-onward: Relationship of the body to the world. For the installation series Action Notation she mixed photographs of her previous wounds with objects, such as toys, glass, etc., from her previous actions. The process was controversial since it almost always involved an element of masochism: climbing up a ladder studded with razor blades, cutting her tongue or her ear, sticking nails into her forearm, smashing through a glass door, ingesting food to the point of nausea. Pane no longer based her approach on direct bodily experience, although the body remained pivotal and retained its symbolic significance through figures (cross, rectangle, circle) and materials (burnt or rusty metal, glass, or copper).

Interesting Facts about Gina Pane and her Role in Enhancing Feminine Art

• Escalade non anesthesiee occurred without an audience. Instead the artist, in collaboration with Francoise Masson, a photographer, managed to photo document the event, an aspect that she defined as a constat (Baumgartner 247).

• The significance of using a constant by the artist is that it illustrated the performative art more efficiently (Baumgartner 247).

• Pane published essays about her works in journals such as Art Press, Opus International, and Artitudes (Baumgartner 251).

• Gina Pane's late works are affiliated with martyr iconography about feminism.

• The suffering endured by the artist when displaying her artwork is associated with the idea that Pane “sacrificed herself on the altar of a homophobic civilization” for the stereotypic viewers to empathize with her.

• Her suffering is also associated with religious references in terms of it being compared to the sufferings that Christ endured on the cross. The wounds, in this case, are approached as necessary for the artist to highlight the pain subjected to her by society due to her homosexual identity(Leszkowicz, 1).

• Pane is perceived to have focused more on using commercial attributes in displaying her female contemporary performance(Maude-Roxby 5).

• The term jouissance is used to define Pane's works. The term entails the association between the self and the other(Gonzenbach 41).

• The use of lipstick in her 1974 artwork, psyche, is perceived to symbolically represent the idea of “ultimately feminine” (Gonzenbach 42).

• Through her performances, Pane is perceived to condition her audience while watching her due to the audience being influenced to be aware of the process involved in watching her (Gonzenbach 42).

• Live art is considered an element of re-performance that is adequately illustrated by Gina Pane in her female contemporary performances (Morgan 1).