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This chapter takes a comparative look at several models of interdisciplinary conceptualist practices that responded critically to Conceptual Art’s original claims. Artists responded to a limitation they identified in the narrow focus of early Conceptual Art, and turned to the social, the political, and the “life-world,” external to the hermeneutic definition of art. When this second wind of conceptualism integrated external subject matter, it was no longer in the modernist sense of art and politics. Synthetic conceptualism incorporated the basic investigations of Conceptual Art to form a complex method of artmaking that was deconstructive just as it was referential. Artists integrated a meta-critique to reveal frameworks that endowed artistic language and strategies with pre-conceived meaning. Three artists exemplify this shift. Adrian Piper transitioned from an analysis of the art object as a factor of time and space to the role of cultural forms in formulating gendered and racialised social meaning; Mary Kelly from labour and gender issues to the discourse of the subject; and Martha Rosler from the documentary mode to the critique of representation in mass media.

Andrew Walker examines playwright Mary Kelly’s writings on village theatre and her production of agrarian pageantry for purposes of expanding notions of the genres and cultural impacts of rural modernity. Kelly, best known as the model for Miss La Trobe in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, enjoyed success as a director of rural theatre in the 1920s and 1930s. This led to two influential books on rural arts, How to Make a Pageant (1936) and Village Theatre (1939). Envisioning the theatre as an outgrowth of folk religion and mythology grounded in agricultural and fertility ritual—a vision taken up to great effect by T. S. Eliot—Kelly advocated a theatre run by and on behalf of rural performers, producers, and audience. This chapter looks at her development of these ideas in print and practice as a way of examining interwar rural dramatic production writ large.

This chapter is a re-evaluation of the concept of indexicality as introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce and revived by Rosalind Krauss’s ground-breaking two-part article, “Notes on the Index”, of 1977. The photographic index came under sustained criticism during the 1970s and 80s as it seemed to fix the meaning and establish the truth of the image. More recently, as in the writing of Mary Ann Doane, the index has been rehabilitated as a type of sign caught up in contingency, chance, and accident. It is understood as a type of sign really affected by its object, but non-mimetic. An excursus on Leo Steinberg’s conception of the ‘flatbed’ picture plane as a model of creative receptivity is followed by a survey of artworks composed of the accumulation of dust. This includes discussions of works by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Mary Kelly, and Gabriel Orozco.

The conclusion explores how oral histories might contribute to future activism. It suggests that the S&A interviewees’ accounts affirm the value of intergenerational exchange and organisational experience and tolerance, illuminating the movement’s intellectual, cultural and domestic achievements and its strategic limitations and political challenges, contesting reductive narratives of feminism’s progress or decline. It acknowledges that just as 1970s/80s feminists could be ambivalent or indifferent to the oral histories of suffrage campaigners, so their own oral histories must make their case for a new generation’s attention. However, it anticipates the new opportunities offered by evolving technologies to access the emotive voice and sound lost in oral history transcription, and how these can find interactive, creative and inspirational forms in walks, broadcasts, and soundworks, including Mary Kelly’s Multi-Story House. It ends by calling for feminist silence and deep listening as conditions for activism in the crowded and competing noisescape of today. 149 words