There is an irony built into the title of Strip. To strip is to reveal, to peel away until something remains. Yet the exhibition, bringing together photographs by Carolee Schneemann, Jimmy DeSana, and Martha Wilson, repeatedly challenges the idea that nudity offers access to truth. On display at P·P·O·W through July 31, Strip does not simply show the body exposed. It is fragmented, doubled, dispersed, or swallowed by the photographic image itself. Created amid the male-dominated world of conceptual art and the broader social conflicts surrounding feminist, civil rights, and queer liberation movements, these works reveal a generation of artists who understood visibility itself as a political struggle.
The exhibition’s most commanding work, Carolee Schneemann’s ICES STRIP / ISIS TRIP (1972), unfolds as a grid of twenty black-and-white photographs documenting a striptease performed aboard a moving train. This six-hour train ride from London to Edinburgh was transformed into an experimental and conceptual journey as Schneemann performed lines from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Logical Philosophical Treatise), 1921. By rearranging words and phrases in both her recitation and the project’s title, Schneemann’s witty wordplay coincides with her playful undressing. Citing the Egyptian goddess Isis alongside a renowned male philosopher, ICES STRIP / ISIS TRIP (1972) affirms female eroticism as a source of creative agency. And at P·P·O·W, the photographs are displayed serially and accompanied with the lyrics of Schneemann’s performance, allowing the viewer to transport themselves to this very train ride.
That insistence on seriality finds an unexpected counterpart in Jimmy DeSana’s photographs, where the body seems perpetually on the verge of disappearing. In one image, a nude figure lies almost indistinguishable from the dense grasses that surround it. Flash obliterates distinctions between skin and vegetation until both become equally abrasive textures. Elsewhere, a woman stands naked before an oval mirror, yet the reflected face and the body seen from behind refuse to cohere into a stable self-portrait. In DeSana’s pictures, nudity never guarantees visibility. If anything, the body becomes harder to locate the more insistently it is presented.
Martha Wilson’s Transformance: Claudia (1973) extends this investigation of identity as an unstable photographic construction through the deliberate invention of persona. Rather than using the camera to reveal an authentic self beneath appearance, Wilson treats transformation itself as the subject. Through costume, gesture, and exaggerated characterization, she exposes femininity as a performed language – one assembled through cultural expectations and visual codes. The work’s humor and theatricality undermine the authority of fixed identities, suggesting that the self is not uncovered through exposure, but continually produced through acts of repetition and reinvention.
Across photography, performance, and conceptual practice, DeSana, Schneemann, and Wilson each reveal that the act of “stripping” is less about removing clothing than dismantling inherited systems of power. More than fifty years after these works were created, their questions remain urgent, making Strip an exhibition that resonates as both an art historical reconsideration and a timely reflection on the politics of visibility, identity, and freedom.
– Emily Satterthwaite