Marianne Wex | Let’s Take Back Our Space

Marianne Wex

Let’s Take Back Our Space

Berlin, Germany: Frauenliteratur Verlag, 1979

366 pp., 24 x 19 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown 

Brilliantly illustrating Sol Lewitt’s axiom that “Art shows come and go but books stay around for years”, Let's Take Back Our Space became a legacy project for the artist who took sick shortly after producing it and left the art world for the remainder of her life. 

Marianne Wex first presented her extended photo essay in a group exhibition in 1977, and soon after was diagnosed with a serious illness, leading her to leave her art practice behind, and travel the world researching alternative medicine.  As best as I can gather, she did not make another work in the forty-one years between this and her death in the autumn of last year. 

In 2009, Let’s Take Back Our Space was exhibited for the first time since its unveiling and has shown at least once every year subsequently. The work is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

Subtitled Female and Male Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, the work features 2037 photographs of men and women and asserts that body language is a result of sex-based, patriarchal socialization, affecting all of our other "feminine" and "masculine" role behaviour. 

Anticipating the phrase "manspreading" thirty-five years ago, the volume illustrates how feminine postures are closed and protected, while masculine postures are expansive:

"[Women will sit] legs held close together, feet either straight or turned slightly inward, arms held close to the body. In short, the woman makes herself small and narrow, and takes up little space." Men, on the other hand, sit "legs far apart, feet turned outwards, the arms held at a distance from the body. In short, the man takes up space and generally takes up significantly more space than the woman.”

Let’s Take Back Our Space is considered to be Wex’s lone surviving art work.