She Had Her Gun All Ready

When Niki de Saint Phalle wore her Shooting Suit, she repurposed the phallic symbolism of the gun into a feminist tool of violent creativity…

Wearing her specially designed shooting suit, French artist Niki de Saint Phalle created a number of works that in addition to being performed ‘actions’ were also part sculpture, part collage, and part painting.

Often, the paintings were created in front of a live audience and recorded on film as they were constructed and then shot at, usually with a .22 calibre rifle though pistols were sometimes used. The transformative instant of ballistic impact was then evidenced in the resultant objet, and the process documented with film and photographs.

For such events, large assemblages of objects were coated in plaster and containers of paint were suspended in front of these large pieces or concealed within their structure. When the bullets hit these containers the pigments exploded, spattered, and dripped over the white surfaces. She called these shootings, Tirs. This was when Action Painting was en vogue, particularly in the male-dominated New York scene — the legacy of Jackson Pollock.

In 1962, for one of the signature works from this period, she made a hollow cast of the Venus de Milo in white plaster over a metal frame, and packed bags of black and red paints inside it. She then shot the statue from a distance. The bullets punctured the paint bags concealed…