At Marc Straus, 18 Women Artists Ask What ‘Prime’ Means

In 2008, the feminist art historian Linda Nochlin opened an essay on the late Louise Bourgeois with a pair of questions: What is an “old-age style”? Is it the same as a “late style”? Nearly two decades on, those questions hang over a Manhattan gallery show that takes the aging woman artist as its subject.

The exhibition, The Prime of Your Life, is on view at Marc Straus Gallery and gathers 18 women artists over the age of 75. According to Hyperallergic, which reviewed the show, the result is less a unified statement than a cacophony: painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, in widely varied scales, forms and techniques, that read as calls and responses rather than harmony. Age is the only thing that binds them.

That is where Nochlin’s essay becomes a useful lens. Examining Bourgeois’s seven-decade career, she asked how a work made at the end of an artist’s life changes our understanding of one made at the start. Borrowing from the literary theorist Edward Said, she concluded that late styles abandon the “comforting segues and aesthetic connections” that hold an art object together, dealing instead with disconnects, abysses and unresolved contradiction. In other words, late work can refuse to fit neatly into the story told about earlier work, whether or not the artist’s biography explains the shift.

The show’s organizing question, as Hyperallergic frames it, is a pointed one for 21st-century feminist art history: What does “prime” mean for a woman artist whose work is most likely to be embraced by the market and by museums only in her older years?

The review singles out Marina Abramović’s photograph “Standing with Skeleton” (2008/2016) as the piece that introduces that question. Hung near the gallery entrance, the large-scale image shows the artist in black against an equally dark background, an ivory skeleton draped across her back. For half a century, Abramović has built a practice around her own body, favoring direct confrontation over subtlety. Her 2010 exhibition and performance The Artist Is Present, in which she sat across from a series of individuals during museum hours, is widely regarded as a career high point.

Against that rigor, the reviewer finds the photograph, at best, inanimate and, at worst, close to a parody of her practice. The skeleton, the review says, reads more like lighthearted Halloween decor than an elegiac meditation on old age. The review does not settle the matter; it asks instead whether knowing Abramović’s stronger work makes this one look like pastiche, whether the comparison is even fair, and whether a lesser later work diminishes the force of an earlier, more innovative one.

The critic’s answer is a hedge, and an intriguing one. How will we know whether “Standing with Skeleton” is a late work at all? Abramović is now 79; perhaps, the review suggests, she is only just hitting her prime, with an epoch of work still on the horizon.

It is a fitting note of uncertainty for a show built on the idea that the timeline of a woman’s career rarely follows the one the art world draws for it.