Gina Pane is a French artist of Italian origin who lived between 1939 and 1990. Pane made body-themed sculptures and installations for a while and then turned to performances in which she used her own body.
Gina Pane was born in 1939 in Biarritz, France, to an Italian father and an Austrian mother. She spent most of her youth in Italy. She grew up speaking both Italian and French. Her father was a piano maker, and Pane explained that the use of felt in her art stemmed from her father's profession: As a child, the first material I came into contact with was cutting discs to repair pianos.
In 1961 Pane moved to Paris to attend the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts. She also spent time working at Atelier d' Art sacré, an organization that pairs artists to carry out projects for civic and religious buildings. This was an important training ground, especially for female artists.
Gina Pane, one of the representatives of the Body Art movement, which started to become widespread in the 1970s, has done important work on behalf of the feminist struggle within art. Pane uses her own body as the surface of her art, and she does this in ways we are not used to seeing before.
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, called "Art corporel."
Her productions, where art turns into performance, consist of small cuts she makes on her skin with the help of a razor, fires she extinguishes with her bare hands and feet while lying on a metal bed, and glass particles she puts into her mouth and chews.
Especially the performances she made during the period covering the end of the 1970s, the installations she produced using photographs, can also be defined as the performances she presented together with photographs from which she had previously injured herself.
The damage caused to the body by pain caused by methods such as eating until you vomit, stapling your arms with nails, making cuts on your skin, and climbing a spiked ladder have a symbolic value in Pane's works.
It can be thought that this direct damage to her body is a representation of the attack on the image of women imposed by the dominant heterosexual culture.
Pane saw this as an experience that had to be lived somehow and as a way to cope with the intellectual pain she experienced. Here, challenging pain, as Pane does, can be considered as challenging the perception in culture.
The current general perception is that no matter what a woman experiences, she should not spoil the perfection of her appearance. Moreover, even if pain is inevitable in certain situations, a woman must need someone stronger than herself when dealing with pain. Pain is not something that a woman can overcome alone; she must weaken, scream, cry, and feel weak when necessary so that the man can act heroically. These are all "feminine" characteristics. However, Pane goes beyond this “feminine” perception. She said the following about her art: "Through the actions I perform with my body, my aim is to show what the widespread image of the body, which we feel as the bastion of our individuality, really is, and to ground this image in its essential reality, which is the function of social mediation (...) The body is the first and natural instrument of sociology."
Although Pane's works can be interpreted as protesting by using the body, which is like the first limit of man, as a medium, it has been criticized. American artist and critic Judith Barry and semiology expert and critic Sandy Flitterman-Lewis examine Pane's works in their article titled "Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art Making". According to the two authors, Pane's work is an acceptance of the duality of pain and pleasure.
Although Pane displays an oppositional stance, doing this by injuring himself also means carrying the pain to the status of power.