170,99 €
Original essays offering fresh ideas and global perspectives on contemporary feminist art
The term ‘feminist art’ is often misused when viewed as a codification within the discipline of Art History—a codification that includes restrictive definitions of geography, chronology, style, materials, influence, and other definitions inherent to Art Historical and museological classifications. Employing a different approach, A Companion to Feminist Art defines ‘art’ as a dynamic set of material and theoretical practices in the realm of culture, and ‘feminism’ as an equally dynamic set of activist and theoretical practices in the realm of politics. Feminist art, therefore, is not a simple classification of a type of art, but rather the space where feminist politics and the domain of art-making intersect. The Companion provides readers with an overview of the developments, concepts, trends, influences, and activities within the space of contemporary feminist art—in different locations, ways of making, and ways of thinking.
Newly-commissioned essays focus on the recent history of and current discussions within feminist art. Diverse in scope and style, these contributions range from essays on the questions and challenges of large sectors of artists, such as configurations of feminism and gender in post-Cold War Europe, to more focused conversations with women artists on Afropean decoloniality. Ranging from discussions of essentialism and feminist aesthetics to examinations of political activism and curatorial practice, the Companion informs and questions readers, introduces new concepts and fresh perspectives, and illustrates just how much more there is to discover within the realm of feminist art.
The intersection of feminist art-making and feminist politics are not merely components of a unified whole, they sometimes diverge and divide. A Companion to Feminist Art is an indispensable resource for artists, critics, scholars, curators, and anyone seeking greater strength on the subject through informed critique and debate.
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Cover
Series Editor Preface
About the Editors
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Geographies
Being
Doing
Thinking
Relating
Conclusion/Collaboration/Companionistas
Part I: Geographies
1 Recurring Questions, Cyclical Energies
Collectivity and collective action
Multiple sources, local resources
Heritage and discontinuity: two perspectives
Renewal and dissent
At the minute: 2017
2 Debunking the Patriarchy
Argentina: Mujeres Públicas
Bolivia: Mujeres Creando
Chile: Malignas Influencias
Santiago–Buenos Aires
Perú: Laperrera
Conclusion
3 Women Artists
The double gaze: Women as subject
The uses of text: Painting as citation
The reproductive body and its denial
An aesthetic of toxicity
4 Feminism as Activism in Contemporary South African Art
Introduction
A context for gendered violence in South Africa
Zanele Muholi
Diane Victor
Conclusion
5 Moving Towards Paratactical Curating
The politico‐economic programmes in Turkey in the early twenty‐first century
The contemporary art scene in Istanbul during the 2000s
Feminist curating in Istanbul during the 2000s
Moving towards paratactical curating
Acknowledgements
6 From Within, From Without
Neutralizing feminism
Where are the women artists?
Writing art history without men and without politics
Against the “monoculture” of gender
Wonder mother and Eastern Europe’s black skin
Extra‐national counter‐narratives: Building the feminist alliance
7 Crossing Borders and Other Dividers in Western Europe and the British Isles
Transhistorical solidarities
Within and against gender
Border crossings: Between exile and diaspora
8 Wheels and Waves in the USA
Amnesiac Return Amnesiac Return
1
The feminist wheel
Spin cycle
Interview
Obituary
Amnesia (third iteration, 2015)
Note
Part II: Being
9 Essentialism, Feminism, and Art
Nominal essentialisms and the body
Essentialisms in US‐ and UK‐based feminist art discourse, 1970–1995
Queering essence: The rise of theories of “performative” gender
Transnationalism, trans* identification, and feminist visual theory: New bodies, new genders, new theories
Trans* feminist futures?
10 Feminist Ageing
Feminism’s ageism
Approaching old age
Challenging the invisibility of age
Renegotiations: Age as performance
Renegotiations: Visualizing transageing
Conclusion
11 Letters to Susan
12 Feminist Art Re‐Covered
2007
2017
13 Collecting Creative Transcestors
Towards a transfeminist art hirstory
The imperative to portray oneself
Vital documentation
Re‐inhabiting the body
Concluding thoughts: An uneven uptake
Part III: Doing
14 Witness It
15 Feminism and Language
Language as discourse
Gender and terminology: Woman artist/artist who is a woman
Gendering the artist
Art and/as language
Feminism, language, power
Art, feminism, language
Gender as performativity
Sexual difference
Feminism: What does this term mean?
16 Busy Hands, Light Work
The fabric of Photography
Soft processes and pastel hues: Photography and printmaking
Photography as folk art
The nostalgic image
Hand‐made photographs
Busy hands
17 Reading Posthumanism in Feminist New Media Art
18 Finding Ourselves Feminists
Personal to political: An introduction/a conversation
Private + public: Institutions/organisations
Strategies of the feminist curator
Collaboration, corroboration and anti (or are they simply alternative?) hierarchies
19 Erasure, Transformation and the Politics of Pedagogy as Feminist Artistic/Curatorial Practice
Invisible labour
Public/private practice
Reproductive labour and the radical
Part IV: Thinking
20 Art Matters
Entanglements: Mind/body, subject/object, meaning/matter
Generous selves: Responsibility beyond teleology
Vital figurations: From reflection to diffraction
21 The Hidden Abode Beneath/Behind/Beyond the Factory Floor, Gendered Labor, and the Human Strike
Fire in the nail salon
Lonzi’s legacy
The human strike and the feminist movement in Italy, 1970
Ready‐made
Italy’s “May, 1968:” A Creeping May 1969–1977
Human strike
22 Dear World
23 From Representation to Affect
Sedgwick, Sherman, ideology critique and the avoidance of surprise
Armoured women: Affect, empathy and the return of the real
24 Call and Response
On healing coloniality and collective knowledge creation: A dialogue with teresa maría díaz nerio
Striving for self‐education, consciousness and knowledge: A dialogue with Jeannette Ehlers
Bare feet in the snow: A conversation with Patricia Kaersenhout
Part V: Relating
25 On Feminism, Art and Collaboration
Mobilising collaboration in the
International Dinner Party
Monumentalising collaboration in Judy Chicago’s
Dinner Party
Performing collaboration in
I am a Helicopter, Camera, Queen
26 Opening the Patriarchive
Documentary, archive, and the state:
Three Guineas
Material archive: Susan Meiselas’ Kurdistan
Failed archive: Zineb Sedira’s
Gardiennes d’images
Conclusion
27 Maternal Mattering
Citational practices/herstory repeats itself
Working with the maternal
Labor, affect, care, and compromise
28
Ars Eroticas
of Their Own Making
Introduction
Feminist
ars erotica
in the late twentieth century
Feminist
ars eroticas
in the early twenty‐first century
29 Masculinity, Art, and Value Extraction
Patriarchy strikes back: Introductory notes on male power and capital’s empire
Art’s re‐discovery of the male working class: Political consciousness, ideology, and value extraction
Politics as ethics: Ideology, power over, and transgression in globalisation’s hard‐core art
On the transmission of knowledge: Renzo Martens’
Episode 3
30 New Subjects and Subjectivities
Changing the world
A feminist trajectory
Art, science and subjectivity
A subject language
The body–body problem
From trace to neural connectivity
New trajectories
Index
End User License Agreement
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
Lucy R. Lippard Lecture
performance with Kelly Doley and Diana Sm...
Figure 1.2 Fiona Foley (Badtjala people, Wondunna clan, Fraser Island). Blac...
Figure 1.3 Emily Floyd,
The Dawn
, 2014, detail. Collection National Gallery ...
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Mujeres Públicas, Cajita de fósforos, 2005.
Figure 2.2 Malignas Influencias, Cinturón de castidad, 2007.
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Bharti Kher (b. 1969).
Family Portrait
(Digital print on archival...
Figure 3.2 Anita Dube (b. 1958).
Silence (Blood Wedding)
(human bones, velou...
Figure 3.3 Sonia Khurana,
Logic of Birds
(video still), single channel video...
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Zanele Muholi,
Being
, 2007, Triptych, Silver gelatin prints and a...
Figure 4.2 Zanele Muholi.
Boitumelo Mimie Sepotokele, White City, Soweto Joh
...
Figure 4.3 Diane Victor,
No Country for Old Women,
2013. Smoke drawings on g...
Figure 4.4 Diane Victor,
No Country for Old Women,
2013. (Detail) Smoke draw...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Roma Kale Panthera (Tamara Moyzes, Věra Duždová),
SuperMom
, vide...
Figure 6.2
SuperMom
, installation (posters, objects, video) in the exhibiti...
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Quilla Constance, Pukijam, 2015, HD digital video still. (Note: Q...
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 “The 13 Tenets of Future Feminism,” scan of hand‐out to audience ...
Figure 8.2 “The Future is Female,” T‐shirts for sale in the Future Feminism ...
Figure 8.3 “The Future is Female,” T‐shirts for sale in the Future Feminism ...
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Vaginal Davis, headshot from her website, http://www.vaginaldavis...
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Martha Wilson.
Beauty + Beastly 1974 and 2009
(B/W p...
Figure 10.2 Joan Semmel,
The Unchosen
(2011).
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 Lorraine Wild, cover of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angel...
Figure 12.2 Mary Beth Edelson,
WACK
! Alternative Cover,
2007.
Chapter 13
Figure 13.1 Untitled, photography from series “BEFORE/AFTER” (2009–ongoing) ...
Figure 13.2 Images of Kiley May, from the
They
project in the
100 Crushes
se...
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1
Figure 14.2 Tanja Ostojić. From:
Looking for a Husband with a
EU
Passport
, 2...
Chapter 17
Figure 17.1 Lynn Hershman Leeson,
Phantom Limb
, 1988.
Figure 17.2 Paula Gaetano Adi,
Alexitimia
, 2006–2007.
Chapter 18
Figure 18.1 Freddie Robins,
He’s Behind You, 2011
at Collyer Bristow G...
Figure 18.2 Installation view of works for
Liberties
by Alison Gill and Hele...
Figure 18.3 Installation view of works for
Liberties
by Frances Kearney, Hel...
Chapter 19
Figure 19.1 Sparky Tate, November 2006 (a family day devised for children an...
Figure 19.2 Exhibition in the Duveen Galleries of sculpture made by Sam Gorm...
Chapter 20
Figure 20.1 Joanna Frueh with Frances Murray,
Pink Dream
from the
Self‐Evide
...
Figure 20.2 Phil Sayers,
Homage to Pierre Molinier
, performed with Monica Gr...
Chapter 21
Figure 21.1 Untitled (We are all clitoridian women), 2015. Spraypaint on sil...
Figure 21.2
Sputiamo su Hegel: La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale
brick...
Chapter 22
Figure 22.1 Carrie Moyer, Lesbian Avengers,
We Recruit
, 1990s.
Figure 22.2 Carrie Moyer,
Shared Women
, 2007.
Chapter 23
Figure 23.1 Cindy Sherman.
Untitled #465
, 2008. Chromogenic colour print, 64...
Figure 23.2 Cindy Sherman.
Untitled #476
, 2008. Chromogenic colour print, 84...
Chapter 24
Figure 24.1
Hommage à Sara Bartman
, 2013, performance by Teresa María D...
Figure 24.2
Stitches of Power. Stitches of Sorrow
, 2014. Performance by Patr...
Chapter 25
Figure 25.1 Documentation of Suzanne Lacy and Linda Pruess,
International Di
...
Figure 25.2 Documentation of Suzanne Lacy and Linda Preuss,
International Di
...
Figure 25.3 Emily Roysdon,
I am a Helicopter, Camera, Queen
, 2012, BMW TATE ...
Chapter 26
Figure 26.1
A General
, illustration from
Three Guineas
, 1938, Virginia Woolf...
Chapter 27
Figure 27.1 Courtney Kessel,
In Balance With
, FAB Gallery, Edmonton, Canada,...
Figure 27.2 Jess Dobkin,
The Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar
, Studio 303, ...
Figure 27.3 Alejandra Herrera,
Historia de la resistencia
, Museum of Contemp...
Chapter 28
Figure 28.1 Screenshot from Ann Hirsch,
karaoke time
. Capture screen video. ...
Chapter 29
Figure 29.1 Anu Pennanen and Stéphane Querrec,
Staande! Debout!
(2013, 40 m...
Figure 29.2 Anu Pennanen and Stéphane Querrec,
Staande! Debout!
(2013, 40 mi...
Chapter 30
Figure 30.1 Shona Illingworth, EEG Sonification prototype (installation).
Am
...
Cover
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These invigorating reference volumes chart the influence of key ideas, discourses, and theories on art, and the way that it is taught, thought of, and talked about throughout the English‐speaking world. Each volume brings together a team of respected international scholars to debate the state of research within traditional subfields of art history as well as in more innovative, thematic configurations. Representing the best of the scholarship governing the field and pointing toward future trends and across disciplines, the Wiley Blackwell Companions to Art History series provides a magisterial, state‐of‐the‐art synthesis of art history.
A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945
edited by Amelia Jones
A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture
edited by Rebecca M. Brown and Deborah S. Hutton
A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art
edited by Babette Bohn and James M. Saslow
A Companion to British Art: 1600 to the Present
edited by Dana Arnold and David Peters Corbett
A Companion to Modern African Art
edited by Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun Visonà
A Companion to American Art
edited by John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill and Jason D. LaFountain
A Companion to Chinese Art
edited by Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang
A Companion to Digital Art
edited by Christiane Paul
A Companion to Dada and Surrealism
edited by David Hopkins
A Companion to Public Art
edited by Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie
A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, 2 Volume Set
edited by Finbarr Flood and Gulru Necipoglu
A Companion to Modern Art
edited by Pam Meecham
A Companion to Nineteenth‐Century Art
edited by Michelle Facos
A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, 2nd Edition
edited by Conrad Rudolph
A Companion to Contemporary Design since 1945
edited by Anne Massey
A Companion to Illustration
edited by Alan Male
A Companion to Feminist Art
edited by Hilary Robinson, Maria Elena Buszek
Forthcoming
A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art
edited by Alejandro Anreus, Robin Greeley and Megan Sullivan
A Companion to Museum Curation
edited by Brad Buckley and John Conomos
Edited by
Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek
This edition first published 2019© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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The right of Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication DataNames: Robinson, Hilary, 1956– editor. | Buszek, Maria Elena, 1971– editor.Title: A companion to feminist art / editors, Hilary Robinson, Maria Elena Buszek.Description: Chichester, West Sussex ; Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |Identifiers: LCCN 2018061403 (print) | LCCN 2019000212 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118929186 (Adobe Pdf) | ISBN 9781118929193 (ePub) | ISBN 9781118929155 (cloth)Subjects: LCSH: Feminism in art. | Feminism–Political aspects. | Feminist art criticism.Classification: LCC N72.F45 (ebook) | LCC N72.F45 C67 2019 (print) | DDC 700.1/03–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061403
Cover Design: WileyCover Images: Reproduced by permission of Mira Schor
For our companionista Alanna Lockward (1961–2019)
Blackwell Companions to Art History is a series of edited collections designed to cover the discipline of art history in all its complexities. Each volume is edited by specialists who lead a team of essayists, representing the best of leading scholarship, in mapping the state of research within the sub‐field under review, as well as pointing toward future trends in research.
This Companion to Feminist Art focuses on the recent history of and current discussions within feminist art history, theory and practice. The wide‐ranging chapters include contributions that address questions such as configurations of feminism and gender in post‐Cold War Europe, to more focused conversations with women artists on Afropean decoloniality.
This volume is divided into five sections that signal the variety of voices that articulate feminist thought and art. Together the sections and essays challenge and expand our understanding of feminist art beyond the canonical definitions that are rooted in the 1960s. Through the chapters we encounter feminist art as dynamic and fluid, sitting at the intersection between culture, politics and practice.
As series editor, I was delighted to receive the proposal for this volume, which was both timely and thought provoking. As the editors note, the book’s evolution over a number of years has in part been a product of the differences of thought and experience of the editorial team. The volume has benefitted from this creative friction as the thematic sections and the essays they contain recognise and celebrate the diversity of feminist thinkers and practitioners. This collection of essays will be essential reading for students, researchers and teachers working on the histories, theories and practices of feminism and art, and in related fields. I have no doubt that A Companion to Feminist Art will make a very welcome addition to the series.
Dana Arnold, 2019
Hilary Robinson is Professor of Feminism, Art, and Theory at Loughborough University. Her publications include Visibly Female: Women and Art Today (1987), Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (2006), Feminism–Art–Theory 1968–2014 (2015). Initially she trained as a painter, at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne; she also has an MA in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art, London and a PhD in Art Theory from the University of Leeds. Hilary’s academic career has been in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and London, England. At the University of Ulster (1992–2005) she taught the history and theory of contemporary art to studio Fine and Applied Art students, at BA, MFA, and PhD levels. In 2005, she was appointed Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. While in Pittsburgh her board memberships included The Andy Warhol Museum; Silver Eye Centre for Photography and The Mattress Factory Museum. She headed the Creative Entrepreneurs project, to retain artists in post‐industrial Pittsburgh. She moved back to the UK in 2012 to take up the position of Professor and Dean of the School of Art and Design at Middlesex University for a four‐year term before taking up her present research professorship. Her current book project is ReSisters: Art, Activism and Feminist Resistance.
Maria Elena Buszek is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Colorado Denver. Her publications include the books Pin‐Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (2006) and Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (2011). She has also contributed writing to numerous, international exhibition catalogues: most recently, essays in Dorothy Iannone: Censorship and the Irrepressible Drive Toward Divinity (2014), Andrea Bowers (2014), Mark Mothersbaugh: Myopia (2014), and In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States (2012). Her scholarship and art criticism have appeared in such publications as Art Journal, TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies, and Art in America, and (with Kirsty Robertson) she edited a special issue of Utopian Studies on the subject of “craftivism.” Dr. Buszek is also a prolific independent curator, whose most recent exhibitions include the 2016 exhibition Danger Came Smiling: Feminist Art and Popular Music and the traveling exhibition Raised in Craftivity. Before coming to CU‐Denver, she was Assistant Professor of Art History at the Kansas City Art Institute and served as a curatorial assistant at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Her current book project, Art of Noise, explores the ties between contemporary activist art and popular music.
Felicity Allen is an artist, writer, and educator. Her career’s work is a model of The Disoeuvre, the neologism she coined to describe the contingent and adaptable practices that she has developed (like many other artists), in contrast to a conventional ‘oeuvre’. In the last decade she has made five series of Dialogic Portraits projects, producing paintings, films, and artists books (included in Tate’s and Getty’s artists’ books collections). She has written numerous articles on gallery education, published poetry, and sustained a long‐term project with a Syrian artist based in Damascus.
Tanya Augsburg is a humanities‐trained, interdisciplinary feminist performance scholar, critic, and curator who can be occasionally persuaded to perform. She teaches at San Francisco State University, where she is Professor of Humanities. Her current projects include completing a book‐length manuscript on the interdisciplinary arts and a book‐length manuscript on what she is calling “feminist ars erotica.”
Jill Bennett is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor of Experimental Arts at the University of New South Wales. She leads a transdisciplinary research team investigating the experience of ageing and neurological/mental health, and producing 3D immersive visualization of subjective experience. She is Founding Director of The Big Anxiety: Festival of Arts + Science + People. Her books include Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art and Practical Aesthetics, as well as monographs on media arts and curating.
Susan Best is Professor of Art History and Theory and Deputy Director (research and postgraduate) at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. She is the author of Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant‐Garde (2011) and Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography (2016).
Lucy Day is a lecturer, writer, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Alongside her 30‐year curating career, Day has supported artists and arts organizers through mentoring, workshops, and organizational change. For over 10 years as part of the independent curatorial partnership Day + Gluckman, she has collaborated with a variety of organizations, and in 2015 founded A Woman’s Place Project CIC, which takes equality as its starting point, exploring it creatively through contemporary‐art exhibitions, projects, and events.
Angela Dimitrakaki is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Edinburgh. She has co‐edited Economy: Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century (2015, with Kirsten Lloyd) and Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures, and Curatorial Transgressions (2013, with Lara Perry), and special issues on social reproduction for the journals Historical Materialism (2016) and Third Text (2017), and on antifascist art theory for Third Text (2019). She has authored Gender, ArtWork and the Global Imperative (2013), and Art and Globalisation: From the Postmodern Sign to the Biopolitical Arena (2013, in Greek). Her forthcoming book is Feminism, Art, Capitalism. She has received an Academy of Athens award for fiction writing (2017).
Julie Ewington is a writer and curator based in Sydney, Australia. Between 2001 and 2014 she was Head of Australian Art at Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. She has written numerous catalogue essays and reviews for journals, including The Monthly, Art Monthly Australasia, and Artforum. Major publications include monographs on Fiona Hall (2005) and Del Kathryn Barton (2014). In 2016 Ewington curated The Sculpture of Bronwyn Oliver for TarraWarra Museum of Art, and in 2017 was a curatorium member for Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism, at ACCA, Melbourne.
Maria Fernandez teaches at Cornell University. She works on the history and theory of digital art, postcolonial and gender studies, Latin American art and architecture, and the intersections of these fields. She is the author of Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture (2014) for which she was awarded the Arvey Prize by the Association for Latin American Art in 2015. She edited Latin American Modernisms and Technology (2018) and with Faith Wilding and Michelle Wright coedited Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices (2002).
Eliza Gluckman was Curator of the New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, the largest collection of works by women in Europe, from 2015 to 2018, and is currently Senior Curator and Deputy Director of the Government Art Collection (UK). For over 10 years as part of the independent curatorial partnership Day + Gluckman, she has collaborated with a variety of organizations, and in 2015 founded A Woman’s Place Project CIC, which takes equality as its starting point, exploring it creatively through contemporary‐art exhibitions, projects, and events.
Lubaina Himid is an artist, curator, and Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancaster. She was awarded the Turner Prize (2017), and an MBE for services to Black women’s art (2010). Recent exhibitions include Invisible Strategies, Modern Art Oxford, 2017, and Navigation Charts, Spike Island, 2017. Other exhibitions include the Studio Museum, New York, 1997, Tate Britain, 2011, and the Badischer Kunstverein, 2017. She represented Britain at the Gwangju Biennial, 2014 and the Berlin Biennial, 2018. She curated Five Black Women, Africa Centre, London 1983, The Thin Black Line, ICA London, 1985, and Thin Black Line(s), Tate Britain 2011.
Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor, Roski School of Art & Design, USC, and is a curator and scholar of contemporary art, performance, and feminist/sexuality studies. Recent publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012), co‐edited with Erin Silver, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (2016), and the edited special issue “On Trans/Performance” of Performance Research (2016). Jones is currently working on a retrospective of the work of Ron Athey and a book tentatively entitled In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance.
Alexandra Kokoli is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture, Middlesex University, London, and Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. A writer and curator, she has published widely on feminism, art, and visual culture in journals including Art Journal, Women and Performance, n.paradoxa, Performance Research, Oxford Art Journal, and Hypatia. Her books include The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (2016, paperback 2017), and (as editor) Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference (2008), and The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts by Susan Hiller, 1977–2007 (2008).
Tirza Latimer earned her PhD in Art History at Stanford University. Professor in Visual Studies at California College of the Arts, Oakland/San Francisco, her teaching, publications, and curatorial projects reflect on visual culture and visual politics from queer feminist perspectives. Her latest book, Eccentric Modernisms: Making Differences in the History of American Art, was released by University of California Press in 2016.
Alanna Lockward was a Dominican‐German writer, journalist, filmmaker and founding director of Art Labour Archives. Lockward conceptualized and curated the groundbreaking transdisciplinary meeting BE.BOP. BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS (2012–2018). She was the author of several books, including Apremio: apuntes sobre el pensamiento y la creación contemporánea desde el Caribe (2006) and Un Haití Dominicano: Tatuajes fantasmas y narrativas bilaterales (2014), and editor of BE.BOP 2012–2014. El cuerpo en el continente de la conciencia Negra (2016). She was research professor at the Center of Caribbean Studies, Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. Dr Lockward passed away in January 2019.
Natalie Loveless is an associate professor in the Department of Art and Design (History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture) at the University of Alberta, Canada, where she also directs the Research‐Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory. Recent projects include New Maternalisms and Immune Nations. Current work includes a forthcoming book, Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research‐Creation, and a collaborative project on art and ecology called Speculative Energy Futures.
Jaleh Mansoor is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia. She coedited the anthology Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (2010), and her monograph Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia was published in September 2016. She has contributed to October, Texte Zur Kunst, and Artforum. Mansoor’s current project traces the historical and structural entwinement of aesthetic and real (or concrete) abstraction, the latter understood as the extraction of surplus labor valorized on and by the market.
Michelle Meagher is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, where she teaches courses in the area of popular culture, feminist body studies, and art and activism. Her current research project, titled Art, Feminism, and the Periodical Press, considers the ways that feminist art was produced, defined, and circulated by periodical communities of the late 1970s and through the 1980s in the US context.
Marsha Meskimmon is Professor of Art History and Theory at Loughborough University (UK). Her publications include: The Art of Reflection: Women Artists' Self‐Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (1996), Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (2003), Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (2010), Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience (coedited, Dorothy Rowe, 2013), Drawing Difference: Connections between Gender and Drawing (coauthored, Phil Sawdon, 2016), and Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies (coedited, Marion Arnold, 2016). She is currently writing a trilogy, Transnational Feminism and the Arts for Routledge.
Richard Meyer is Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor of Art History at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on twentieth‐century American art, censorship, feminism, and queer studies. He is the author of What Was Contemporary Art? (2013) and, with Catherine Lord, Art and Queer Culture (2013). A new edition of Meyer’s first book, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth‐Century American Art, has just been published with a preface by the author that considers the book’s relevance to the cultural and political landscape of Trump’s America.
Martina Pachmanová is an Associate Professor at the Department of Theory and History of Art at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. As a researcher, writer, and curator she specializes in gender, sexual politics, and feminism in modern, post‐war and contemporary art and visual culture. She is an author, editor, and coeditor of numerous books and exhibition catalogues, including monographs of forgotten Czech female modernists related to their retrospective exhibitions.
Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director, Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CentreCATH) at the University of Leeds, UK. Committed to an international, postcolonial, queer feminist analysis of the visual arts, visual culture, and cultural theory, one major publication is Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (2018). Forthcoming publications included Is Feminism a Bad Memory? (2019) and Monroe’s Mov(i)es: Class, Gender and Nation in the Work, Image‐Making and Agency of “Marilyn Monroe” (2020).
Harriet Riches is an art historian whose current research focuses on issues of gender and the language of femininity in the historiography of photography. She has published widely on this subject in journals such as Oxford Art Journal, and writes regularly on contemporary photography for several international magazines including Afterimage: Journal of Media Arts & Cultural Criticism and Source Photographic Review. She is currently Director of postgraduate programs at Cambridge School of Visual & Performing Arts.
María Laura Rosa is a researcher at CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas, Argentina) and the Interdisciplinary Institute for Gender Studies at the University of Buenos Aires, Professor of Aesthetics, Department of Arts, Philosophy and Literature Faculty University of Buenos Aires, and Lecturer of Latin‐American Arts at ESEADE University, Buenos Aires. Dr. Rosa is the editor (with Soledad Novoa Donoso) of Share the World: The Experience of Women and Art (2017) and the author of Legacies of Freedom: Feminist Art in Democratic Effervescence (2014).
Mira Schor is a New York‐based painter and writer. Schor has been the recipient of awards in painting from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Pollock‐Krasner Foundations, as well as the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and an AICA‐USA award for her blog A Year of Positive Thinking. She is the author of two books of collected essays, Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture and A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life and coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism and M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online.
Gayatri Sinha is an art critic and curator whose primary areas of interest are gender and iconography, media, economics, and social history. She has curated and lectured extensively in India, Europe, and the United States. Sinha is the founder and director of Critical Collective, an initiative to build knowledge in the visual arts in India. Sinha’s publications include Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists (2010), Art and Visual Culture in India 1857–2007 (2009), and Indian Art: An Overview (2003), among others. She was the recipient of the Tate Asia Research fellowship in 2017.
Eliza Steinbock is Assistant Professor of Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, and former “Veni” Talent Scheme postdoctoral researcher awarded for “Vital Art: Transgender Portraiture as Visual Activism” (NWO 2014–2018). In addition to coediting four special journal issues, their articles have been published in the Photography and Culture, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Spectator, Feminist Media Studies, and in over fifteen edited volumes. Their forthcoming first book, Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment and the Aesthetics of Change, is with Duke University Press (Spring 2019).
Amy Tobin is a lecturer in the History of Art Department at the University of Cambridge and Curator of Events, Exhibitions and Research at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. She completed her PhD at the University of York in 2017 with a thesis on feminism, art, and collaboration in the 1970s. Her research on art, film, and feminism has been published in the journals Tate Papers and MIRAJ, as well as in Sue Clayton and Laura Mulvey’s edited collection Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s (2017). She is also coeditor of London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks 1960–1980 (2018) with Jo Applin and Catherine Spencer, and the author of 14 Radnor Terrace: A Woman’s Place (2017).
Karen von Veh is Associate Professor of Art History and Head of Department in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Her research interests include contemporary South African Art, the transgressive use of Christian iconography, postcolonial studies, and gender studies. She has written several articles in academic journals and chapters in books on these subjects, as well as two monographs on South African artist Diane Victor. Karen is a past president and long‐term membership secretary of the South African Visual Arts Historians Association, has served on the board of directors of Arts Council of the African Studies Association, and currently serves on the international board of AICA (International Association of Art Critics).
Siona Wilson is Associate Professor of Art History at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. She is the author of Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance (2015) and has published on topics including feminist politics of war imaging, documentary photography and film and video art, and the gendering of sound. She is currently working on a book addressing episodes in the history of documentary from the 1930s to the present and the figure of the female insurgent.
Ebru Yetişkin is an independent curator and media theorist. She works on the interaction of science, technology, politics, and art. She works as a full‐time researcher at Istanbul Technical University. She has curated media art related exhibitions entitled Cacophony (2013), Code Unknown (2014), Waves (2015), Contagious Bodies (2015), X‐CHANGE (2015), Illusionoscope (2016), and Interfaces (2017). In 2016, she edited a book of poetry, Like The Others written by a robot named Deniz Yılmaz, and curated an autograph session at the Istanbul Art and Book Fair.
The term “feminist art” has been misused as often as not. Understood as a codification within the academic discipline of art history and within the related curatorial and archival categories of museological practices, it has frequently come to represent a classification: feminist art. Used as such, the classification implies consideration under definitions familiar in other art historical and museological classifications, definitions of geography, chronology, style, materials, and influence (fifteenth‐century Florentine, Golden Age Dutch, Pre‐Raphaelite, and so forth). It therefore restricts consideration of feminist art to a particular overt content, style, use of materials, or chronological geographical influence since “women’s liberation” or the “second wave” of the feminist movement emerged in full force in the West in the late 1960s.
This book, however, comes to the term “feminist art” from a different direction. As editors, we have approached “art” as a dynamic set of material and theoretical practices in the realm of culture, and “feminism” as an equally dynamic set of activist and theoretical practices in the realm of politics. Given that culture and politics constantly intersect and work upon each other, “feminist art” for us is the space and place – the site – where feminist politics and the domain of art‐making intersect. Not surprisingly, it is also the place where both feminist politics and art‐making sometimes diverge and divide, in order to reconnect with greater strength resulting from this kind of critique and debate. It is not always a comfortable, safe, or secure place for those who work at that intersection: the art world in the twenty‐first century retains a hierarchy of thinking and of practice that is still overwhelmingly dominated by masculinist, Euro/USA‐centric values. (A quick look at the 100 most expensive modern and contemporary artworks sold at auction can verify the value assigned to non‐male, non‐Euro/USA artists.) To us, and to a determined, angry, joyous, powerfully creative, and increasing number of artists, critics, scholars, and curators, working at this intersection is an urgent activity.
The structure of the book is grounded in this approach to feminist art. Not a history, rather it is intended to give an overview of what is happening at the time of its writing, why, and how; and in different locations, ways of making, and ways of thinking. We have invited the writers to respond to the brief in the way that suits them best, rather than asking all to give an overview of the subjects in which they are specialists: sometimes the sharp focus can illuminate the tacit questions and challenges of a large sector of artists; sometimes an overview has been a more appropriate way to introduce or provoke further, focused questions for the reader. Either way, we hope that readers will, along with us, be cognizant that what is here is an indicator of how much more there is out there to discover. There is a recognition that we have tried to build into the structure of the book this diversity of feminist thinkers and practitioners. Indeed, the choice to coedit this volume emerged from a desire to include at the editorial level differences of thought and experience, and a challenge to each editor’s own, distinct ways of thinking and working. And, concomitantly, we’d like to recognize our editorial frustration at the inevitably partial nature of any such undertaking within the covers of one book and the reach of one language: for various reasons, we were not able to secure all the writers we wished for, or therefore all the voices and topics we wanted to share.
In many ways, this book is both a complement and a contrast to the archival anthologies compiled by one of us, Hilary Robinson’s Feminism–Art–Theory 1968–2000 and Feminism–Art–Theory 1968–2014. It is a contrast in that here you will find newly commissioned essays that focus upon the now and upon recent history, while the other anthologies are of pre‐existing texts, charting discussions and developments historically. It is a complement in starting from such values and pursuing such diversity, in its approach to feminist art and to feminist thinkers and practitioners, and in the words of these thinkers and practitioners themselves.
In her 1984 book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, the African‐American feminist scholar bell hooks influentially, and inclusively, defines feminism as “a movement to end sexist oppression.” And yet, she reminds us, feminism also “directs our attention to systems of domination and the interrelatedness of sex, race, and class oppression.”1 This definition has guided our work as feminist‐art scholars, and also our choices as editors of this anthology – beginning with the knowledge that, while the limitations of an English‐language publication prevented us from working with and translating the work of as many feminists as we’d have liked, this anthology needed to incorporate as many voices from around the globe as possible. We often spoke of the need for “on‐the‐ground” perspectives on global feminisms, and all the contributors to our “geographies” of feminist art live and work in the regions about which they write.
We have not pursued an “area studies” approach to this section; rather, we have compiled it from the belief that feminist politics and practices rest upon local conditions, and interact with local histories, and cultural and political practices. Nor did we address the section by thinking we needed a “compare and contrast” approach, which may have led to false competitions about which feminism was more urgent or more effective, or to a sense that differing locations were in themselves objects of study. Instead, we invited writers to identify the current issues for and of feminist art in their locations, along with the most appropriate way of exploring them.
In the opening chapter, Julie Ewington presents us with a survey of the Australian feminist movement in art, starting by situating it in a moment of historical reflexivity, internationalism, and a 2015 artwork by Kelly Doley and Diana Smith (working as the collective Sunday School), titled The Lucy R. Lippard Lecture. This piece itself reflected upon the visit to Australia 40 years earlier by American critic Lucy Lippard. Ewington goes on to trace the engagement of Australian feminist artists not only with the US but with current European (‘continental’) philosophy, and of course the UK (where Germaine Greer and a number of other Australians, later to become prominent in the arts and media, had emigrated in the 1960s). Against this backdrop, Ewington demonstrates the struggle of Australian feminists to produce methods and practices appropriate to their own condition, including that of the differing realities of Indigenous Australian lives and white post‐coloniality. She concludes with an examination of recent curatorial and art practices, including major exhibitions and the debates they embodied and provoked.
A different approach is taken by María Laura Rosa. Her chapter covers four countries – Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru – but she maintains a focus on particular types of practice: feminist collectives and their art activism. A strong theme through this chapter is that of access to public space, and how to make effective aesthetic interventions in it. Charting projects by four groups – Mujeres Públicas, Mujeres Creando, Malignas Influencias, and Laperrera – Rosa opens up the tactical thinking of these groups to reach the audiences that they wish to, in order to build solidarity and further action.
In contrast to the occupation of public space in Latin America, Gayatri Sinha’s essay traces the creation of subject space of women artists and feminism in India. Woven against a background of subaltern studies, Indian Marxism, class, and caste, she demonstrates how these artists realized their subjectivities and their publics in movements “compelled by the politics of a region of fraught cartographies.” Influences of goddesses and the lived politics affecting individual women are shown to effect both the growth and nature of feminism in India from the 1970s onwards, but are also necessary to understanding the work of the artists she discusses, such as Arpita Singh, Sheba Chhachhi, Nalini Malani, and a newer generation such as Sheela Gowda, Anita Dube, and Navjot Altaf. In all this work the artists question the “divine feminine, or the motherland.” Opening with “an initiative so silent that it was virtually unspoken,” Sinha argues that these artists have moved towards representing diverse subjectivities through re‐representing the gendered and “unquiet processes of nationhood.”
Karen von Veh’s chapter also focuses on the unquiet processes of nationhood, in this instance, in the formation of post‐apartheid South Africa, and in particular on how sexualities and sexual identities intersect with constructions of national identity and analysis of how contemporary South Africa is formed through its sexual politics. The work of two women, one black and one white, is brought to the fore. Zanele Muholi’s activist practices of photography focus on representations of queer black identities, particularly in her portraits of black lesbian women and trans men. Diane Victor’s mixed media works explore men’s violence against women in the new South Africa, across all communities. Both women, therefore, are exposing that which has been hidden in silence, and attempt instead to give visibility and voice. Muholi gives dignity, respect and self‐realization to communities that have been abused, denied, and subjected to crimes of “cure” by rape. They are portraits of those who have endured, survived, and who have found security in their individual subjecthoods and collective communities. Victor exposes (often shockingly and painfully) the crimes to which those communities, and other women, have been subjected. Not all the victims of corrective rape survived; elsewhere in black communities and in all sections of the white community, the levels of rape and woman‐murder are horrendous, bringing the female homicide rate to six times the average. Victor’s work focusses on particular crimes, bringing them out of the realm of anonymous statistics to present their narratives in a visceral manner. Von Veh completes her essay by outlining how both artists avoid the designation “feminist,” and how the term has a complex and problematic history in its rise in white communities before the end of apartheid.
The art world in one city, Istanbul, is the context for Ebru Yetişkin’s chapter, “Moving Towards Paratactical Curating.” She describes the algorithmic control exercised by state and corporations as producing systemic and functional stupidity, and analyses how this has been at work in Turkey and more specifically in the art world of Istanbul, and how feminist critiques through curatorial practices have attempted to develop effective techniques. Given some background in the political and economic programs of the Turkish state, including in the arts, she then moves to the development of curatorial practices, and thence to feminist practices of curation, particularly of new media art. In the increasingly autocratic and repressive state that is Turkey, paratactics are needed.
Maria Pachmanová addresses the region she calls in her title “post‐Wall Europe.” Through the essay, her terminology shifts as appropriate – “former Eastern bloc” (political); “eastern Europe” (geographical); the “former East” (chronological); even “ex‐East” which could remind us of the ex‐parrot in Monty Python – one description in a long list of ways to say the bird was dead. The resonance is not drawn flippantly: how to describe the complexity of this part of the world, not post‐colonialist but post‐communist though not all post‐Soviet, overwhelmingly white but subject to racial and ethnic abuse in the rest of Europe, and where wars between their newly formed states have been fought often on ethnic and sectarian grounds, and internal minorities including the Roma bear the collective brunt of such thinking. Pachmanová explores the status of “feminism” as a political concept in this environment, and the difficulty and significance of attention to the politics of gender and race in the art world here.
While the “former East” is and has been clearly problematized as a concept on many fronts, its counterpart, the “former West” is not often treated in a similar fashion. Its values are taken as having triumphed (if only because it has outlasted the Communist regimes of the former Eastern bloc), even while they have shifted. Further, its identity crises are happening internally within pre‐existing states, who are attempting to redefine themselves in distinction from each other or, more frequently, in distinction from people who have arrived from elsewhere and who are seen as a threat to that identity. In these new narratives of Western identity, old narratives are brushed off and re‐drafted, as if national identity were static. Alexandra Kokoli addresses these crises in “Crossing Borders and Other Dividers in Western Europe and the British Isles.” Her focus first is on transhistorical feminism; then on the shifting uses of “gender” as a category; and finally on transnationalism, exile, and diaspora, emphasizing how national identity is always contingent, even in times of retrenchment, and how feminist politics and art is constantly in negotiation with these changes.
To end this section, we move to the other end of the scale: one event in New York. Mira Schor’s “Wheels and Waves in the USA” starts with the concept of amnesiac returns – apparent successes leading to forgetfulness and the return of the need for and actuality of feminist acts which have, however, also forgotten their history. Schor’s account of the event, in turns acerbic and funny, pulls together her tweets from the event, her notes written at the time, her later reflections upon being there, and her political analysis. It spins off into reflections upon her own feminist history: throughout, the jamming together of the personal and the political across a generational gulf is to the fore. What is the reader to draw (for example) from her quotes of the speaker’s wish to escape from capitalism, and her observations of the financial realities of the event? Or the veteran and much‐respected feminist who hands over her speaking time to a white male? At the end, as a Jewish woman, she recounts the story of the Jews being made to wander in the desert until a generation has died and a new way of thinking can emerge: a story about the necessity of forgetting and the imperative of remembering. It is left to resonate with what we have read before, and with feminist politics in the USA.
Feminist politics frequently spring from the experience of inhabiting a body that is accultured in particular ways (trained to designated behaviors, appearances, and activities; assumed to be adept at certain functions; and understood as deviant or disruptive if it transgresses these sanctions). So, too, feminist art often grapples with the representation of these bodily acculturations, and the relationship between them and “femininity.” In this section, contributors confront some of the myriad, even contradictory, ways in which the experience of living in and perceiving aged, raced, and gendered bodies relates to feminist politics in the art world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering their growing visibility and impact upon feminist politics in the past decade, trans* persons, art, and theory emerge frequently in this section’s writing on representing contemporary feminist embodiment.
Amelia Jones opens this group of essays with a nuanced history and critique of “essentialism” in feminist art and theory (an issue raised by Schor at the end of the last section), and how queer and trans* bodies are productively problematizing the notion in the twenty‐first century. On the one hand, Jones recognizes the ways in which the “felt and visible” category of “woman” is necessary to recognize when confronting the fact of sexist oppression in heteronormative patriarchy. On the other, this categorization of “woman” as the opposite of a gender binary with “man” – as readily assumed in social‐constructionist feminist theory as essentialist – tends to limit the very freedoms and variety of gendered identities that feminism embraces. Analyzing the representations of gender in emergent trans* cultures as they have evolved out of queer theory, Jones proposes that the simultaneously social and individual, and always relational definitions of gender in the work of trans* artists like Vaginal Davis, Zachary Drucker, and Rhys Ernst offer feminism tantalizingly open, new ways of battling sexism without reverting to the binaries sexism upholds.
In the subsequent chapter, Michelle Meagher also applies the potential of “trans‐,” but in the context of feminist ageing. Utilizing Helene Moglen’s concept of “transageing” to disrupt narratives of age as linear and deteriorating, Meagher asks her readers to rather reconsider ageing as accumulation – of experience, knowledge, work, and self‐awareness. Conjuring tropes of ageing womanhood from the ancient crone to the contemporary cougar in the work of feminist artists from Louise Bourgeois to Cindy Sherman, Meagher compellingly argues for “the capacity for a feminist aesthetics of ageing” in both a women’s movement and an art world historically centered around the image and concerns of youth.
Artist Lubaina Himid’s chapter takes the form of letters to artist and collaborator Susan Walsh, in which Himid’s responses to a series of (here unseen) queries from her correspondent unfold into a narrative about the nitty‐gritty of everyday battles of Black women artists in the United Kingdom. The chapter ostensibly begins with Himid looking back at her experiences in organizing three groundbreaking exhibitions in London galleries: 5 Black Women (1983), Black Woman Time Now (1983/4), and The Thin Black Line
