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Introduction: addressing the other woman

Kimberly Lamm

in Addressing the other woman: Textual correspondences in feminist art and writing

This chapter introduces the importance of text and images of writing for feminist art practices in the late 1960s and 1970s. Beginning with the 2008 exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, ... More

This chapter introduces the importance of text and images of writing for feminist art practices in the late 1960s and 1970s. Beginning with the 2008 exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, it demonstrates that an engagement with language was a significant part of women artists’ efforts to resist the ways in which late-twentieth-century visual culture reinforces the idea that women should serve as the other of patriarchal culture. The introduction presents the three artists who are the focus of the book – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – and argues that the ‘writerly’ qualities of the artwork they produced in the 1970s undermines the visual dominance of spectacle culture and the production of woman as a sign that represents passivity and sexual availability. The introduction also makes a case for pairing the artwork of Piper, Spero, and Kelly with the writings of Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Laura Mulvey. In aligned historical contexts, these writers also addressed the limited range of images through which women were allowed to appear, and thereby suggest what it means to receive the artwork’s call to other women to collaborate on the project of creating a feminist imaginary.Less

From Reproductive Choice to Reproductive Barbie: The Politics of Visibility

Laurie Shrage

in Abortion and Social Responsibility: Depolarizing the Debate

Evaluates “pro‐life” and “pro‐choice” media campaigns, featuring fetuses and coat hangers respectively, and shows how both reflect individualistic ideologies about responsibility and freedom. Rather ... More

Evaluates “pro‐life” and “pro‐choice” media campaigns, featuring fetuses and coat hangers respectively, and shows how both reflect individualistic ideologies about responsibility and freedom. Rather than participate in public discourses that construe individual responsibility and liberty as simple moral alternatives, considers feminist political art that raises questions about our collective responsibilities to support others. Also considers visual and performance artwork that draws attention to the way that pregnancy and persons are culturally constructed. Urges reproductive rights activists to jettison the coat hanger image in favor of images that would promote constructive public dialog on access to contraception, child and family support, the duties of all citizens to provide life‐saving help, the positive aspects of enabling women to control their fertility, and the dangers of religious extremism.Less

Lure and Allure: Mirrors, Fugitive Agency, and Exiled Sexuality

Diana Tietjens Meyers

in Gender in the Mirror: Cultural Imagery and Women's Agency

Although Narcissus was a man, narcissism is commonly considered a feminine vice. Over the centuries, several symbolic systems mediate this transfer: the myth of Narcissus evolves to reassign ... More

Although Narcissus was a man, narcissism is commonly considered a feminine vice. Over the centuries, several symbolic systems mediate this transfer: the myth of Narcissus evolves to reassign narcissism to women; the image of a woman gazing into her mirror becomes a staple motif of western art; and psychoanalytic theory solidifies the bond between women and narcissism and extends it to gay men. Meanwhile, to satisfy its appetite for expanding markets, consumer capitalism manufactures unattainable, ever‐changing beauty ideals that keep women hooked on self‐beautification products and services. This symbolic and economic legacy encodes a no‐win “feminine” psycho‐corporeal dynamic of eroticized estrangement from self – a subjectivity of self‐doubt, perplexity, and frustration, which I term the psychic‐psyché economy. In contrast, a number of contemporary feminist artists ironically appropriate and critically repudiate conventional woman‐with‐mirror imagery, and five of their self‐visionary projects are explored.Less

Prostitution and the Problem of Feminist Art: The Emergent Queer Aesthetic of COUM Transmissions

Siona Wilson

in Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance

COUM Transmissions’ notorious performance-based installation, Prostitution (1976) was presented one month after Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document at the very same venue. Chapter three finds ... More

COUM Transmissions’ notorious performance-based installation, Prostitution (1976) was presented one month after Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document at the very same venue. Chapter three finds unexpected points of connection between the two installations, and argues that COUM’s riotously queer aesthetic challenges many long-held assumptions about feminist art.Less

Goddess: Feminist Art and Spirituality in the 1970S

Jennie Klein

in West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977

Unlike other gender radical movements such as gay rights or even radical feminism, feminist spirituality has always remained on the margins of mainstream culture and academic acceptability. To this ... More

Unlike other gender radical movements such as gay rights or even radical feminism, feminist spirituality has always remained on the margins of mainstream culture and academic acceptability. To this day, the nature Goddess/witch figure is depicted as monstrous, abject, and horrific. This chapter examines feminist artwork that references the Goddess in order to answer the following questions. First, what is feminist spirituality? Second, why was feminist spirituality so appealing to artists, particularly artists based on the West Coast? Third, what is the relationship between feminist spirituality and the counterculture movements? Fourth, why has feminist art that references spirituality and/or the Goddess continued to be marginalized in discussions of that art, even by scholars who are very sympathetic to the artwork?Less

Varieties of Aesthetic Disgust

Carolyn Korsmeyer

in Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics

Much contemporary art is notorious for its deliberate arousal of disgust, but the phenomenon is hardly new, and the artworks this chapter considers span centuries, genres, and media. Literature, ... More

Much contemporary art is notorious for its deliberate arousal of disgust, but the phenomenon is hardly new, and the artworks this chapter considers span centuries, genres, and media. Literature, paintings, movies, performance—all present examples in which disgust is provocatively evoked. Sometimes the disgust aroused by art remains an aversion, as with the recoil inspired by horror movies. Other times disgust rivets attention and invites savor of repulsive qualities. The chapter reviews a range of works of art including feminist painting and war narratives, as well as other examples that demonstrate the huge range of appreciative responses that employ disgust. The diversity of forms of aesthetic disgust sustains the book's thesis that no single account of the “enjoyment” of disgust will suffice to explain all cases.Less

Writing from the heart

Griselda Pollock

in Writing otherwise: Experiments in cultural criticism

This essay is a eulogy for Griselda Pollock's long time friend and collaborator, the art historian Rozsika Parker. It reflects on the early years of the women's art movement and feminist art history. ... More

This essay is a eulogy for Griselda Pollock's long time friend and collaborator, the art historian Rozsika Parker. It reflects on the early years of the women's art movement and feminist art history. It considers how we respond to the death of those close to us, and how this response might be translated into art practice. Throughout, it demonstrates how ‘writing from the heart, characteristic of Rozsika Parker's own practice, informs the writing of this tribute to her.Less

Conclusion

Leah Modigliani

in Engendering an avant-garde: The unsettled lansdcapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism

The historical evidence of a backlash levied against the Vancouver Art Gallery and the perceived hegemony of the Vancouver School that reached a peak in 1989-1990 is addressed in the conclusion. ... More

The historical evidence of a backlash levied against the Vancouver Art Gallery and the perceived hegemony of the Vancouver School that reached a peak in 1989-1990 is addressed in the conclusion. Diverse groups of artists became critical of the very process of discourse formation that this book reflects upon, and became much more vocal about demanding their inclusion in symposia, exhibitions, and critical writing. Unsurprisingly this backlash dovetails with the rise of foreign investment in condominium development and urban gentrification called “Vancouverism” after Expo 86. The discursive territory of Vancouver photo-conceptualism, built upon the image of a defeatured landscape, became ensconced as an international commercial success just as the public spaces of the city were opened up to the ‘global’ reach of neoliberal capitalism, ensuring that the actual features of the city would be less accessible and more expensive to live in for those artists living there.Less

The Spectator as Reproducer: Mary Kelly’s Early Films

Siona Wilson

in Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance

In an analysis of Mary Kelly’s early works in film, performance, and photography, Chapter Two traces the links between feminist labor activism and Kelly’s emerging commitment to psychoanalysis. I ... More

In an analysis of Mary Kelly’s early works in film, performance, and photography, Chapter Two traces the links between feminist labor activism and Kelly’s emerging commitment to psychoanalysis. I analyze her political aesthetic in relation to Andy Warhol’s Factory and Laura Mulvey’s important feminist polemic on cinema.Less

Revolting Photographs: Proletarian Amateurism in Jo Spence and Terry Dennett’s Photography Workshop

Siona Wilson

in Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance

The open-ended collaborative project, Photography Workshop (run by Jo Spence and Terry Dennett), ends the decade and the book with the emergence of photography as a newly critical art form. The ... More

The open-ended collaborative project, Photography Workshop (run by Jo Spence and Terry Dennett), ends the decade and the book with the emergence of photography as a newly critical art form. The frictions between Marxism and feminism, social and psychic issues, labor and sexuality coalesce to reshape our understanding of an embryonic postmodernism.Less

Nightcleaners: The Ambiguities of Activism and the Limits of Production

Siona Wilson

in Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance

Chapter One establishes the political and aesthetic setting for the book through a reading of Nightcleaners (1972-5)--an experimental documentary by the Berwick Street Film Collective--and its ... More

Chapter One establishes the political and aesthetic setting for the book through a reading of Nightcleaners (1972-5)--an experimental documentary by the Berwick Street Film Collective--and its controversial reception. A newly radicalized film culture after May ’68 and a highly charged feminist activist campaign generate a remarkable visual document.Less

Black Feminist Performance

Macelle Mahala

in Penumbra: The Premier Stage for African American Drama

Chapter five recognizes the practice of black feminist performance at Penumbra during the nineteen nineties and early two thousands, concentrating specifically on the work of Rebecca Rice, Laurie ... More

Chapter five recognizes the practice of black feminist performance at Penumbra during the nineteen nineties and early two thousands, concentrating specifically on the work of Rebecca Rice, Laurie Carlos, and Robbie McCauley.Less

Private Dis-Pleasures: Mona Hatoum, Mediated Bodies and the Peep Show

Stephen Monteiro

in Screen Presence: Cinema Culture and the Art of Warhol, Rauschenberg, Hatoum and Gordon

In subject and mode of presentation, Mona Hatoum’s 1980s and 90s video works centring on the body drew on the history of pornographic and medical imaging techniques. Making comparisons to porn ... More

In subject and mode of presentation, Mona Hatoum’s 1980s and 90s video works centring on the body drew on the history of pornographic and medical imaging techniques. Making comparisons to porn peepshows and MRI, both of which were newsworthy in Britain (for very different reasons) when Hatoum left Lebanon to study art in London in the 1970s, this chapter provides a close analysis of a handful of her installations, chief among them her Corps Etranger of 1994. It examines how Hatoum’s heavily mediated images and carefully constructed environments raised questions about gender, sexuality, and the identity politics of social space. Just as peepshows became political battlegrounds eliciting heavy government regulation by testing the rules of public space and social interaction, Hatoum’s installations tested the rules and expectations of art exhibition spaces. These works opened zones where visitors would become equally aware of the potential for transgression and surveillance in their own daily performance of body and self.Less

Screen Eroticisms: Exploring Female Desire in Feminist Film and Video

Amelia Jones

in Resolutions 3: Global Networks of Video

This chapter explores feminist art practice by addressing the profound technological and ideological shift in the feminist visualization and conceptualization of eroticism (and the sexed subject in ... More

This chapter explores feminist art practice by addressing the profound technological and ideological shift in the feminist visualization and conceptualization of eroticism (and the sexed subject in general) in screen-based culture, from experimental cinema in its heyday of the 1960s to experimental video in the 1990s. It performs an extended comparative analysis of two major feminist screen-based projects, both of which are now viewed as classics within these media: Carolee Schneemann’s experimental film Fuses (1964–67) and Pipilotti Rist’s video Pickelporno (Pimple Porno, 1992). By focusing on these two pieces, each produced by a key feminist artist at different periods in the history of contemporary art and in different locations, the chapter seeks to explore the shifting articulation of a female eroticism through specific screen-based media (16 mm film and video, respectively), each with its own potential to render and position the human subject differently. Ultimately, by showing how each artist pushes the technological capacities of each medium to render different modes of female sexual agency through the spatial, temporal, and narrative capacities of each medium, the chapter points to broad transformations in beliefs about sexual identity and embodiment in the contemporary period.Less

Animals, art, abjection

Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn

in Abject Visions: Powers of Horror in Art and Visual Culture

Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn’s essay, ‘Animals, Art and Abjection’, teases out the implications of Kristeva’s contention in Powers of Horrorthat the abject engenders a fragile state within which ... More

Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn’s essay, ‘Animals, Art and Abjection’, teases out the implications of Kristeva’s contention in Powers of Horrorthat the abject engenders a fragile state within which the human strays on the territory of the animal. For Kristeva, some cultures have branded animals as abject and as ‘representatives of sex and murder’. In such cultures, the animal is figured in negative terms and notions of animalism, of the human as an animal species, are suppressed. Animals therefore figure as impure and are made to form the constitutive outside to the human. Creed and Hoorn, however, argue that contemporary art practices that explore animals and animality do so as a means to challenge the notion that animals form humankind’s abject other. In this context, the artworks do not function to purify the abject but rather embrace what has hitherto been labelled as abject as a means to renegotiate its status from within an anthropocentric society.Less

Beginnings

Macelle Mahala

in Penumbra: The Premier Stage for African American Drama

Chapter one looks at the founding of the theatre, its initial mission, and the establishment of a particular production aesthetic during the first year of the theatre’s existence.