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Jean-Luc Godard, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1967.

Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past (2016)

Japanese national flag redesigned by Genpei Akasegawa, 1970s.

「天下泰平旗」／櫻画報 1971

Artist Genpei Akasegawa (1937 - 2014) at home with works, ca. 1966.

Genpei Akasegawa (1937 - 2014), Raging Picture Prison Mail Newsletter 獄送激画通信 (三) 発砲所 娑婆留闘社, 1970.

Valie Export, Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969.

photo: Peter Hassmann

Valie Export’s most iconic image is Action Pants: Genital Panic, a set of six identical photographs taken in 1969 by Peter Hassmann in Vienna. Export is sat on a bench, her legs spread wide and her feet bare. Her leggings have a hole cut into the crotch. In her hands she holds a machine gun, and her hair rises in a wild shock as if she’s been electrocuted. The image was made as partner to a piece of performance art Export coined in a cinema in Munich. The same crotchless leggings were worn as she walked the crowd, exposing her genitalia to the seated audience at head-level. It’s become the stuff of avant-garde, and specifically feminist, legend, and various retellings exist; in an interview with the Los Angeles-based magazine High Performance, Export is quoted as saying Genital Panic took place in a pornographic cinema. She carried a machine gun, offering to have sex with anyone in the audience while levelling the gun at them. As she moved from row to row, people silently left the theatre in repulsion. Export has since denied this version of events, but it adds to the mystery.

Hannah Wilke, Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism, 1977.

Wilke made the poster Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism in response to an invitation in 1975, from the Center for Feminist Art Historical Studies (Los Angeles), to create a work of art for a project entitled What is Feminist Art? It was included in the exhibition of that name at the Women’s Building, Los Angeles in 1977. It is a small black and white print in which the title words sandwich a photograph of the artist challenging the viewer with a confrontational pose. Her shirt opened and thrust aside to reveal her naked shoulders, breasts and stomach above low-slung jeans, she stands staring at the viewer with her hands on her hips and a knowing, half-smile on her lips. Hanging between her breasts and over her bare stomach, a large garishly patterned tie stages a joke phallus knotted around her neck. Small bumps incongruously dot her face and torso like diseased growths: these are her signature chewing gum wounds or, in her words, ‘cunts’.

The photograph is one of a series of approximately fifty ‘performalist’ self-portrait photographs collectively known as the S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974-82). These feature the artist topless, satirising the poses of glamour models in women’s magazines using a range of props including sunglasses, a cowboy hat and toy guns, rollers, a silk turban and a plastic toy. In all the pictures, Wilke is dotted with the gum wounds which ‘starify’ her, transforming her into a star at the same time as emphasising her scarred or wounded state. The regular and symmetrical placement of the wounds recall the African ritual of scarification in which bodies are ritually scarred, usually as a means of marking a developmental rite of passage. Wilke’s ‘starification’ thus hints at a ritual scarring process necessary to become a female star. In her public performances of this work, documented indirectly by the photographs, Wilke would hand sticks of gum to visitors as they entered the gallery space, before removing her shirt. She would then request the chewed gum from her audience, twisting each piece into a vagina form and sticking it to her bare skin, thus marking herself with a sign. She commented: ‘I chose gum because it’s the perfect metaphor for the American woman – chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out and pop in a new piece’

Gerhard Richter, Hood, 1996.

Yellow, red, blue, and black offset print on white handmade Japanese paper. Based on a photograph taken from the Deutsche Presseagentur, which appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The newspaper image was painted over, photographed and then printed in an offset printing process.

Michael Wolf, Real Fake Art.

Between 2005 and 2007, Michael Wolf photographed painters in Shenzhen, China, who reproduced famous works of art. Each portrait consisted of a "copy artist" along with an example of a copied work. The settings were described as "dirty alleyways and street corners." One reviewer wrote that the pictures "document intimate cultural and economic facets of globalization even as they record and complicate critical dilemmas about authenticity and the non-economic values of art." The series was collected in his book Real Fake Art published in 2011.

A triple exposure photograph of Pablo Picasso taken in 1949 at his home in Vallauris, France