‘I Am the Last Woman Object’, the title of the first retrospective of the Moroccan-born French artist Nicola L. (1932–2018) in Europe, is borrowed from an early sculpture by the artist. Once displayed by the dealer Iris Clert in the window of a jewellers, Little TV Woman: ‘I Am the Last Woman Object’ (1969) is a subversive femme télévision, with a TV monitor in place of a stomach, and breasts approximated by padded cream vinyl drawers with nipple-like knobs. Playing on its screen, an audio recording declares, ‘I am the last woman object / You can take my lips / Touch my breasts, / Caress my stomach, / My sex. / But I repeat it, / it is the last time.’ The work encapsulates the way the artist’s idiosyncratic practice – which incorporates collage, sculpture, painting, performance and film – mines forms of the female body to explore gender and play, sex and domesticity.
Nicola L. began these functional sculptures in the late 1960s. Influenced by the decade’s predilection for malleable plastics and synthetic materials, in 1967, she created a series of sofas in the shape of a single oversized foot, fabricated from vinyl in vivid colours with glossy finishes. Other pieces take a modular form: a fragmented body, with pliant sofa cushions as limbs that can be detached and rearranged. She often returns to the exaggerated shape of the female body, or extracts certain desirable features, making Plexiglas lamps in the shape of wide eyes and puckered red lips. She was determined that these works would be utilitarian. ‘I refused to create sculptures that were not going to be used for some- thing,’ she is quoted as saying in a 2005 profile. ‘I did not want to make decor.’
The spirit of interaction had guided a group of works she began earlier that decade, which came to be known as the ‘Pénétrables’. Made of fabric featuring various holes, they were dubbed pénétrables in reference to the way the viewer can place their head and limbs through their apertures, participating in the works by putting them on. In 1969– 70, at Milan’s Galleria Apollinaire, she exhibited La Chambre en Fourrure (The Fur Room), a freestanding structure made from purple fake fur and zippers, which visitors were invited to occupy by pushing their bodies through the openings in its walls. This idea of sharing by wearing is also at the heart of Red Coat (1969), which can be worn by 11 strangers, in an act of bodily transformation that links the group together into a single organ- ism. This egalitarian spirit becomes more pronounced with communal garments in the 1970s, with the artist designing the ‘Pénétrables’ in the style of political protest banners, emblazoned with slogans such as ‘same skin for everybody’ or ‘we want to breathe’.
Sexual revolution and feminist politics have often been used to frame Nicola L.’s investigation of objectification. The artist herself explained that her paintings on bedsheets depicting the life of historical and fictional women, ‘Femmes Fatales’ (1995), ‘represent exactly what the femmes fatales did not want to be: objects’. But the libidinal charge of her representation of eroticism and sexuality is distinctive. Comparisons between the series ‘La Femme Commode’ (1969–2014) – individual lacquered wooden cabinets which cartoonishly simplify the cliché of the hourglass figure, with drawer knobs protruding from the erogenous zones – and Salvador Dalí’s Venus de Milo with Drawers (1936) are irresistible. Refiguring the historical conventions of the surrealist object, she imbues it with lightness, humour and a spirit of joie de vivre. Alongside that of Evelyne Axell, Niki de Saint Phalle and Marjorie Strider, I would situate Nicola L.’s work within a strand of mid-1960s art that the art historian Connie Butler has termed ‘erotic pop’: a specific moment ‘where a rethinking of Duchamp and the found object got reworked through the form and vehicle of the female body’.
Nicola L. moved from Europe to New York in 1979, later becoming a permanent resident of the Chelsea Hotel, where she made documentaries about pioneering Black hardcore band Bad Brains’ gigs at CBGB and the activist Abbie Hoffman, and performed herself at La MaMa theatre. In the years following, she became preoccupied with two motifs. The first was the human head, as she designed bookcases, fish tanks, sofas and tables in the shape of a large head seen in profile and made a series of collage-and-oil-paint ‘Planet Heads’ (1990). The second was the snail, which she obsessively worked into a prolific amount of designs: rugs, bed headboards, tables, lamps, all featuring the swirled contour of the gastropod. As early as 1969, the French critic Pierre Restany compared those occupying the ‘Pénétrables’ to molluscs, ‘constantly in search of a protective shell’. This evocation of body and architecture, interaction and function, speaks to the humanist and utopian concerns at the heart of Nicola L.’s practice.
'Nicola L.: I Am the Last Woman Object' is on view at Camden Art Centre, London, UK, until 29 December.
This article originally appeared in Frieze Week London magazine 2024 with the title ‘Hard Furnishings’.
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Main Image: We Want to Breathe, 1975, Ink, cotton, wood © Nicola L. Collection and Archive. Courtesy The Collection of Donald Porteous, acquired from Alison Jacques, London Photo: Michael Brzezinski
