Feminist art books, list by n.paradoxa : international feminist art journal (ISSN: 1461

Review reproduced from Volume 9, n.paradoxa, Jan 2002. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Sonia Abadzieva Deep Breathing Skopje: Skenpoint, 2001

(English and Macedonian texts)

9989-888-05-1

Largely illustrated with works from the 1990s and including only a very few from the 1980s and 1970s, this publication is less a recent history of contemporary Macedonian women artists or the few women artists' exhibitions since the 1990s , than a very personal discussion of issues and ideas about the feminine and female-orientated traditions in Macedonia, overlooking recent cultural politics or history. It includes around 80 biographies of artists and a chronology.

This article was first published by Katy Deepwell in Women's Art Magazine, April/May 1996. p.29-30 and discusses Parveen Adams The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Difference (London & New York: Routledge, 1996) ISBN 0-415 04622-X and Liz Wells (editor) Viewfindings: Women Photographers:'Landscape' and Environment (W.England: AvailableLight,1994) ISBN 1-899457-00-3

These two books provide an opportunity to discuss and compare two divergent trends within feminist art criticism : one, the presentation of contemporary women artist's work and the other, the feminist critique of the mechanisms at stake in the representation of gendered representations (not necessarily or exclusively produced by women). What interests me is the contrast represented by these two approaches : Liz Wells foregrounds women artists' actual work, the photographs themselves, emphasising women's political and multicultural diversity ; Parveen Adams offers a singular and consistent feminist critique within a primarily Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, a perspective developed and revised in relation to an encounter with specific artworks. The Emptiness of the Image presents papers written by Parveen Adams since 1987 and offers a very specific feminist critique of psychoanalytic concepts (e.g. hysteria, identification,voyeurism, castration) in order to discuss how psychoanalysis might by applied to analyse individual artworks by both male and female artists, including Francis Bacon, Della Grace, Mary Kelly and Orlan. Liz Wells' Viewfindings is a very different kind of book which presents the work of 13 women photographers to demonstrate the diversity of contemporary approaches to the questions of woman, 'nature'; landscape and enviroment. It is framed by a short, albeit revised and extended, essay offering a social-historical context by Liz Wells entitled 'Reframing Landscape' which was published in a different form by Women's Art Magazine in 1993/4. Although the strength of Liz Wells' book is invested in the visual reproductions in colour of the photographic work and complemented by short statements and one interview with one of the artists, this is not the case in Parveen Adams' book where reproductions are few and far between and confined to black and white. Does the presentation itself indicate two divergent audiences for these books? Strong visual images often attract artists to borrow, read or buy books where the artwork is mainly presented rather than books where verbal analysis is the principal issue and the books 'look' academic. This is not to say that either book falls into the trap of presuming the works 'speak for themselves' nor the opposite where the analysis is so overdetermined as to limit any other form of possible enagagement in the work, but it is to point to a common split reproduced in art publishing where books of art criticism , which are neither catalogues from exhibitions nor monographs, have generally poor reproductions, particularly those with feminist content. Liz Wells' book was made with the assistance of the Arts Council in order to develop the generally high production values, whereas Routledge, Parveen Adams' publisher, rarely publishes colour plates in its art history series, even as it maintains an orthodox stranglehold on publication of certain forms of academic research.

As a feminist strategy for making women's work more visible and to frame it within a coherent and graspable way in a new field of enquiry where little has been published, Liz Well's book is highly effective but I regret that each artist does not receive a more detailed critical analysis even as I recognise the role of the book in distributing women's photography to a wider audience. Women's work needs not just physical visibility but also the assistance of extended critical discussion. While Liz Wells properly seeks to problematise 'landscape' as a category, I wanted to read more in-depth analysis of how particular women photographer's had in the late 20th Century defined their subjects' relationship to property, territory, entrepreneurship, class, racism, Imperialism, and patriarchy (like Ingrid Pollard's Pastoral Interlude or Stevie Bezencenet Right of Passage or Roshini Kempadoo's Trans-formations portfolio which are reproduced). In a world where women's activities are almost 'automatically' subject to a failure to recognise the positions from which women speak or to give credibility to anything they have to say, the need for commentary becomes all the more important. Contrary to the frequent misapprehension that this detracts from the work, or that critical analysis may destroy the work, in-depth criticism may actually provide a means of access to the project of the artist. Comparisons between artists may also offer a means to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the work itself and this is the very difficulty and tension between representing the necessary diversity of women's art practice in relation to the questions of photography and landscape and framing adequately beyond the categories of 'Margins'; 'Territories'; 'Image, Metaphor, Myth' which Liz Wells offers. Liz Wells is also the editor of Photography: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 1996 ISBN 0-415-12559-6) : a valuable teaching text to introduce photography's history and theory.

Perhaps these comments about further critical work are also prompted by the contrast with Parveen Adams' work, where a very different strategy is operating. Here an individual artists' work acts as a prompt, a vehicle for elaborate investigations about pyschoanalytic concepts and their adequacy to address fully how identificatory mechanisms within artworks produce meaning. Her enquiries are refreshingly readable amongst work in this field. What is productive here is the way that both the operations of artwork and / or text and the psychoanalytic concepts themselves are subjects of her questioning. For, Parveen Adams has generally avoided what has become an unfortunate tendency in some art historical texts which employ psychoanalysis is that the artwork is discussed only where it fits a pre-existing pyschoanalytic framework without subjecting that framework to any questioning. Parveen Adams has instead opened up how an encounter with a work might prompt reflection of both psychoanalysis and artistic strategies. However, there is one essay where this is not the case, and this concerns the analysis of Catherine Mackinnon's text on pornography in terms of sadism. The possibility of this as a deliberate polemical strategy in political life is dismissed in order to demonstrate the violence inflicted on the reader by the text itself . The comparison of this strategy to those of other pornographic or sadistic writers strikes me as hopelessly inadequate as a means of critiquing the logic of the text and its accurately observed conflation of reality and representation. This is not to say, I support Mackinnon's position but my criticisms of it arise because of the civil legislation which follow from her critique and whether or not these are workable in any state. This is where the more subtle and absorbing sense of possibilities and rereadings offered in the other essays (like chapters on 'Of female bondage' and 'Per (os)cillation') dissolves into a very specific problem for feminists : i.e. how social and political demands for social change can be critiqued by psychoanalytic processes which reflect upon actions and events to reveal and revise psychoanalysis itself rather than to structure new forms of political or social activity. Is it coincidence that this is the only essay jointly written in the book, and with Mark Cousins? By contrast, her reading of Mary Kelly's Interim is really intriguing and insightful in terms of the ways in Lacan's ideas about discourse (including the discourses of Master, University, Hysteric, and Analyst) are deployed to reflect upon the relation of textuality and interpretation: specifically how the same question can mean and imply different things in different situations. Parveen Adams explores how 'Interim gives us the place of the object petit a at the limit of the image' (p.84) , representations which both interrogate the object of desire and interrupt the movement of desire on the part of the spectator in his/her misrecognition of the object : a relation of transference which refuses the discourse of the Master. The essays on the horror provoked by the operations of the French performance artist Orlan and her analysis of Della Grace's 'The Three Graces' in relationship to a lesbian Phallus are also thought-provoking readings.

While these two books may represent two divergent trends in feminist publishing , they nevertheless are both significant and desirable books to read.

Review reproduced from Volume 27, n.paradoxa, Jan 2011. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Lene Adler Petersen Kvindetegnet Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2010 ISBN: 9788702078923

This catalogue documents the 484 collages/drawings known as Cuttings on Paper with the O-Sign(1974) now owned by the Statens Museum fur Kunst in Copenhagen. Birgitte Anderberg's introduction emphasises Lene Adler Petersen's formal strategies within the black and white format of this work and its dissection of images of women in relation to what was the sign for feminism in the 1970s. Produced in the lead up to her first major solo show in 1975, Adler Petersen was also heavily involved in the planning of Kvindeudstillingen XX (The Women's Exhibition) in Charlottenborg the same year. Although the essay stresses her radical credentials in foregrounding a female psyche and the potential of a new political language from women, an opportunity to examine the links to other feminist artists and groups working around her in Denmark has been lost.

Review reproduced from Volume 17, n.paradoxa, Jan 2006. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Andrea Fraser Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser

Alexander Alberro (ed. and intro.) Boston: MIT, 2005 ISBN:0-262-06244-5

MIT series of artist's writingscontinues with the collected performance scripts, lectures and published articles of Andrea Fraser bringing together her work in depth for the first time. A foreword from Pierre Bourdieu sets the tone for her critique of the museum as both knowledge-producing and status-conferring institutions. Her critique is carried through essays like 'Creativity= Capital?' and in her performance scripts in which she plays the various roles of autodidact, docent and provider of 'artistic services' to the public. Re-interpretation of assumed values and cultural rituals as a form of translation combined with mimicry and excess are the hallmarks of Fraser's determined sometimes ironic social analysis.

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Anna Alchuk (ed) Woman and Visual Marks Moscow: Idea-Press Publishers, 2000

Open Society Institute/ Woman Network Program. Russian text.

The theme of this collection is the imageof woman in mass consciousness produced by the mass media, TV, photos, advertising, periodicals, etc. This is quite a new theme for theoretical analysis in Russia. The collection brings together well known philosophers, sociologists, art critics and other feminist intellectuals. It offers an historical analysis of the mechanisms of emerging of new woman's images on the ruins of Soviet ideology.

Colour reproductions of 12 Russian women-artists are included:-A. Alchuk, T. Antoshina, L. Gorlova, E. Elagina, I. Makarevitch, I. Nachova, S. Sochranskaya, N. Tournova, A. Tchijova. Essays on the representation of women in former Soviet times and in today's Russia by V. Aristov ; N. Koslova ; O. Vanstein ; A. Levinson ; A. Jurchak. ; I. Aristarchova. and O. Turkina; on pornography O. Voronina; E.Goshilo and T. Michailova; and interviews with O. Lipovskaya and N. Azhgichina and M. Ryklin; analysis of the internet by S. Kuznetzov and Bredichina writes on 'Representative practices in women's art in Moscow in the 1990s.'

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Christina Z. Anderson Tutti Nudi: Reflections on the Nude from the Greeks to the Twenty-First Century New York: Midmarch Arts press, 2000. ISBN 1 877675 34 2

A gentle introduction to this topic, highlighting the links between religious doctrine and the representation of the female nude over the last two millenium with some sharp and incisive comments to provoke a feminist consciousness in the reader.

Review reproduced from Volume 17, n.paradoxa, Jan 2006. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Konstfeminism Dunkers Kulturhus, Liljevalchs konsthall and Riksutställningar

Sverige, Sweden Exhibition catalogue, 2005-2007 ISBN: 91-7389-201-7

(Swedish/English text)

Organised by a team of six curators, this exhibition is the first major retrospective of the strategies of the feminist art movement in Sweden. The project was instigated by Barbro Werkmeister who proposed such a survey in the 1990s and wrote the major survey essay included on the emergence of the women's art movement in Sweden and her own involvement. The large well-illustrated catalogue contains recollections by illustrator, Cecilia Torudd; essays by Lena Lennerhed on feminism in Sweden since the 1960s; Ann-Charlotte Glasberg Blomqvist on feminist textile artists in Gothenburg; Annika Nordin on the different approaches of Ewy Palm and Maria Lind; Magnus Jensner on the use of the everyday in women's art; Anna Lena Lindberg on feminist art history; Niclas Ostlind on masculinity in contemporary art; Eva Hallin interviews members of Sapphos Dottrar (Sappho's Daughters); Louise Andersson and Lena Lindgren on feminism in gallery education; Gertrud Sandqvist on feminism in art schools; Anna Livion Ingvarrson on 'Claiming Space'; Isabella Nilsson on comic-strips and women's representation; and Griselda Pollock on her links with Swedish feminism, from Monica Sjoo to Ann Sofi-Siden.

Review reproduced from Volume 15, n.paradoxa, Jan 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Suzanne Anker and Dorothy Nelkin The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2004

ISBN: 0 87969 697 4

This engaging book examines the impact of DNA as a visual icon for modern biology in contemporary art since the 1980s. Divided into five sections, the authors explore the reduction of the body to a script of code in the information age; the blurring of boundaries between human and animal in transgenics; a new eugenics; the commodification of genes; and science as culture in artists' work. As a comment on the book jacket suggests the question is raised but not answered: whether the artist's engagement is fuelled by protest, explication or just fascination? A wide range of artists' work is discussed, from Boltanski to Marc Quinn, Hans Bellmer to Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney to the Tissue Culture and Art project, Gunter van Hagens to Helen Chadwick. Women artists feature prominently in the discussion, including Faith Wilding, Ellen Levy, Christine Borland, the Storey Sisters, Orlan and Cornelia Hesse-Honegger.

Review reproduced from Volume 11, n.paradoxa, Jan 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Benjamin Lignet (ed.) Ida Applebroog Are You Bleeding Yet? New York: la maison Red ISBN: 1-56466-087-7

A comprehensive overview of the New York painter Ida Appelbroog presented through images of her work and edited quotations from essays, reviews and interviews. Introduced by Francine Prose, the book tracks her exhibition history from 1976 to the present day in a lavishly illustrated monograph.

Review reproduced from Volume 19, n.paradoxa, Jan 2007. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (eds) Women Artists at the Millennium Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006. ISBN: 978-0-262-01226-3

The 16 contributors to this volume took part in a conference of the same name in 2001, re-examining the legacy of Nochlin's 1971 essay 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?' and the relationship between "women", "artists" and the "milennium". Yvonne Rainer, Martha Rosler, Ann Hamilton and Mary Kelly were invited to speak about their own practice. Art historians and writers offer readings of many more women artists: Louise Bourgeois, Lygia Clark, Ellen Gallagher, Agnes Martin, Mona Hatoum, Bracha Ettinger, Carrie Mae Weems, Anna Maria Maiolino, Rosemarie Trockel, Sally Mann, and Francesca Woodman. de Zegher's introduction stresses how 'co-affectivity, transference, the relational and the transsubjective' all emerge as key themes, hopefully laying a foundation for a transformative politics in reading and understanding women artists.

Review reproduced from Volume 19, n.paradoxa, Jan 2007. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Sara Arrhenius & Friedrich Meschede (eds) Works by Annika Eriksson

Leipzig: DAAD, IASPIS, Propexus, Revolver, 2005. ISBN 91-87952-20-3 (Propexus) ISBN 3-86588-131-9 (Revolver - Archiv fur aktuelle Kunst)

Introduced by a critical essay by Peio Aguirre, this major exhibition catalogue documents Eriksson's practice between 1991-2005 in photos and project descriptions of her installations and videos. Her "staff pieces" where co-workers from bus companies or museums introduce themselves and explain where they come from reveal and make visible migration, displacement and belonging in the modern work place. In other works, Eriksson sets up a situation of work which unmasks relationships of power and authority. Her collaborative works are thus described by Aguirre as a mixture of 'anthropological optimism, humanist socialism and feminism': a public looking glass.

Review reproduced from Volume 4, n.paradoxa, July 1999. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Axis Gender, Media,Art CD ROM

Netherlands,Amsterdam Axis: Bureau Voor de Kunsten V/M 1999.(Oudezuids Voorburgwal 72, 1012 Amsterdam.) To preview or order: http://www.axisvm.nl/media/GMA.htm

Concept: Deanna Herst, Jan Torpus, Alex Schaub.

This CD-Rom contains details of 12 Axis-organised projects between 1997-1998. Over 75 artists are represented, including Lynn Hershman, Annie Sprinkle, Sadie Benning, and Debra Solomon 'Women with Beards' calendar. The interface uses Quicktime (also included), and relies on manipulation of three interlocking circles where one locates different wigs upon different heads to blend genders, identities and access other parts of the CD-Rom. Sections include use of sound,video clips and dynamic graphics to show quotations on gender, media and art theory; a floating sequence of talking heads discussing the situation of women in the media and hot link clicks to artworks; individual artist's projects ranging from examinations of identity politics, queer theory, gay identities, cross-dressing, gender-blending and pornography. As an anthology of work, this is an invaluable CD-Rom to have.

Review reproduced from Volume 16, n.paradoxa, July 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Orla Barry Portable Stones exhibition catalogue (Belgium: SMAK, 2005) ISBN: 90-7567-918-1

The first two sections of this catalogue are documentation of several major projects by the artist since 1991, from her graphic and paper-based installations like The Barmaid's Notebook and Year X to both the scripts and stills from five of her video/ films including A Tear for a Glass of Water and Portable Stones. The third part contains 2 essays by Eva Wittocx and Enrique Juncosa with an interview from 2004 between the artist and Bruce Haines (the 3 curators from each of the exhibition venues: SMAK; London, Camden Arts Centre, end 2005-2006; Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2006). Working between Belgium and Ireland, Barry's video work offers some compelling monologues, primarily focused on a female character, often in trouble, seeking a new direction, a way to make sense of the world or a means to announce their own position on life, art and sensual existence in the world.

Review reproduced from Volume 12, n.paradoxa, July 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Orla Barry Foundlings Brussels: Argos, 2002.

Includes DVD of video and sound work, Foundlings ISBN 90-76855-11-0

Published on occasion of exhibition at Argos in Brussels and Temple Bar Gallery in Dublin, most of this catalogue/book is a photo-text work compiled alongside the production of the video. The work is an evocation of place - a beach in Ireland - of childhood memories and current conflicts but at the same time throughout it is a love-letter. 'This is my place. The only place i feel physical space. The only place i feel at home. The only place i am not craving something else…' As a reader one is pulled into the text by Barry's'use of language, its strong lyrical sensual quality, playing with both sense and our expectations of meaning. Two essays by Cherry Smyth and Jon Thompson offer interpretations of the work, the former on seeing the video installation, the latter on its complex relation to themes from literature, especially Beckett and Joyce and Sappho.

Review reproduced from Volume 13, n.paradoxa, Jan 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Eli Bartra (ed) Crafting Gender: Women and Folk Art in Latin America and the Carribean Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0-8223-3182-9

A new anthology which focuses on women's contribution as producers and consumers of "folk art". This book positions its case studies as gender-based with attention to social context and the analysis of specific belief systems and aesthetic values. Questioning the category of "folk art", the essays embrace both women artists in indigenous communities and the mestiza society of the region. Sally Price writes about fashions in "traditional" Maroon art in Suriname; Norma Valle about Santeras in Puerto Rico; Mari Lyn Salvador on Kuna women's arts in Panama; Dorothea Scott Whitten on Canelos Quichua women in Ecuador. Eli Bartra writes about Mexican ceramicists of Mata Ortiz; Ronald J. Duncan analyses women's folk art in La Chamba, Columbia; Dolores Juliana writes on Mapuche craftswomen in Argentina; Maria Rodriguez-Shadow on votive paintings in Chalma, Mexico; Betty LaDuke on Teodora Blanco in Mexico and Lourdes Rejon Patron on Mayan women's costumes.

Review reproduced from Volume 20, n.paradoxa, July 2007. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Ruth Ben-Tovim and Trish O'Shea Encounters: The Shop Collections Sheffield, UK: Site Gallery, 2006 ISBN: 1-899926-76-3

This small and interesting catalogue documents the artists' project since 2002 taking over disused shops in Sharrow, and establishing encounters with the local community in an exchange of lost and found objects, memories and organised workshops.

Review reproduced from Volume 1, n.paradoxa, Jan 1998. Katy Deepwell 'Short Reviews of New Publications' --- This book brings together ten years of Rosemary Betterton's writing on women artists : including conference papers, catalogue essays and articles. She describes the process of constructing the book as a 'gathering and reusing' of ideas : setting up an opposition between women's processes of working (parallel to their practice of patchwork) and the masculine model of academic 'mastery'. Feminism's 'central project of reframing and re-fashioning the body within a feminist politics of sexual difference' is, in her own words, central to the diverse areas she explores across the 20th Century. The idea of 'embodiment' plays a central role in the analysis she adopts, located at different historical moments and mapped in terms of conflicting ideologies in specific debates.

Chapters : 1. 'An Intimate Distance: Women,Artists and the Body'; 2. 'Mother Figures:The Maternal Nude in Kathe Kollwitz & Paula Modersohn-Becker' ; 3. ' "A Perfect Woman" : The Political Body of Suffrage ; 4. 'Bodies in the Work :The Aesthetics and Politicis of Women's Non-Representational Painting' : 5. 'Life and A.R.T:Methaphors of Motherhood and Assisted Reproductive Technologies': 6. 'Body Horror? Food (and Sex and Death) in Women's Art' : 7. 'Identities,Memories & Desires: The Body in History'.

Review reproduced from Volume 14, n.paradoxa, July 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Rosemary Betterton (ed.) Unframed: Practices and Politics of Women's Contemporary Painting

London: IB Tauris, 2004

ISBN: 1-86064-722-3

An anthology which incorporates artists' perspectives (primarily UK-based) as well as critical readings of some contemporary women's painting practices by UK-based and one Canadian writer.

Contents: Rosemary Betterton: introduction 'Unframing' and an essay on the work of Susan Hiller; Alison Rowley on Virginia Woolf's fictional character, painter Lily Briscoe; Marsha Meskimmon on Judy Watson (from Australia); Joan Borsa on Ann Harbuz (both from Canada). Contributions from artists on their own work include: Barbara Bolt, Partou,Rebecca Fortnum, Pam Skelton, Lubaina Himid, and a dialogue with Rose Lee, Jo Bruton, Beth Harland, Nicky May and Katie Pratt.

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Ursula Biemann been there and back to nowhere: Geschlecht in transnationalen Orten/ Gender in Transnational Spaces.Postproduction Documents, 1988-2000. English and German text

Berlin: B books, 2000.

ISBN 3 933557 12 7

Documentation of the research, ideas and script of Performing the Border, Biemann's major videowork on women's exploitation - both economic and sexual - in the border zone between Mexico and the USA, forms the heart of this new publication. The book as a whole also documents several other major, often collaborative, projects, Global Food, Lexicon Hispanica, Afghan Collection, Kueltuer, Trafficking and Trading in which Biemann has worked as both producer and curator, e.g. at the Shedhalle, Zurich, pursuing different models of institutional critique in late consumer capitalism.Thought-provoking introductory essays by Avtah Brah and Yvonne Volkart explore trans-national identities in con-temporary art and culture. (See article by Biemann in n.paradoxa vol 4, July 1999)

Review reproduced from Volume 2, n.paradoxa, July 1998. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Derek Birdsall & Bruce Bernard (eds) intro: John McEwen.

Evelyn Williams:Works and Words London: Omnific,1998. ISBN 0 9532316 0 7

In spite of the introduction, and its two male editors, this book is dominated by the juxtaposition of Evelyn Williams' own words - drawn from her writings since 1990 - and large good-quality reproductions of her figurative sculptures, reliefs, drawings and paintings in the last twenty-six years. John McEwen seeks to position her solely in a long line of humanist, expressionist, figurative (all male) painters, poets and sculptors. It is as if, apart from one mention of the novelist Fay Weldon because it is the title of one of her paintings, women artists or feminism had no impact on this artist's life or the decisions she has taken and the what she treats her subjects. Yet, Evelyn Williams' subject is, in the tradition of expressionism coupled with a visionary tradition from Blake, the relationship of the artist to society, the individual to the mass and it is centred in a projection of that vision to the world through witnessing exterior emotion in physical gestures. In Evelyn's world, close interpersonal relationships of mother to daughter, and between lovers and friends form a major thread in her work. But there is another side to her work, that of the large group drawings of the mid-1980s where oppression, torture, imprisonment, images of mass demonstrations or repetitive conformity dominate. It is these qualities which make for a remarkable body of work and provide the interest in her accounts of incidents, decisions and objectives found in her work and words.

Review reproduced from Volume 24, n.paradoxa, July 2009. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Jane Blocker Seeing Witness: Visuality and the Ethics of Testimony

University of Minnesota Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-8166-5477-2

This book is a very valuable contribution to debates about how the visual constructs knowledge and at the same time how problematic is the interpretation of what we see. The subject of the discussion is focused on what happens when we witness performance and installation artists' work as well as what it means to bear witness. Works discussed include: James Luna, Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Alfredo Jaar, Eduardo Kac, Christine Borland, Ann Hamilton to Feliz Gonzalez-Torres. In consdering how testimony figures in their work, Blocker is concerned to analyse how art has the capacity to challenge dominant accounts of events and question knowledge of the "real" in art's diverse production of representations and differences in regimes of representation.

Review reproduced from Volume 6, n.paradoxa, July 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Lisa Bloom (ed.) With Other Eyes Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1999

ISBN 0-8166-3223-5

This anthology is offered as a course reader for an expanded notion of a feminist visual cultural studies within the academy. Essays from the 1990s by Inderpal Grewal, Francette Pacteau, Caren Kaplan, Ann Pellagrini, Irit Rogoff are republished alongside new work by Shawn Michelle Smith, Griselda Pollock, Aida Mancillas/Ruth Wallen/Marguerite R. Waller, Zoe Leonard/Cheryl Dunye, and Jennifer A. Gonzalez. This outlines a field in which gender,race and nationalism is explored alongside postnational aesthetics in a range of subjects from British Museum guide books to the Body Shop, to the work of Sutapa Biswas and Sandra Bernhard. Feminist methodology acts as the umbrella for these seemingly diverse explorations and as Lisa Bloom suggests in the introduction feminist readings of visual culture have tended to oscillate between two positions which she defines in terms of bell hooks's notion of 'oppositional looks' where the gaze functions as a site of resistance and the use of parody and imitation to provide a challenge to existing racist and sexist stereotypes. The essays go on provide more possibilities.

Review reproduced from Volume 19, n.paradoxa, Jan 2007. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Lisa E. Bloom Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity

London & New York: Routledge, 2006 ISBN: 978-0-415-23221-0

Exploring both ' "an experience of marginality vis-a-vis whiteness and an experience of whiteness and belonging vis-a-vis blackness"', Bloom attempts to look at the contradictions and ambiguities of Jewishness as a secular form of ethnicity in American feminist art. Her book focuses on the contributions of Judy Chicago and Mierle Ukeles in the 1970s, Eleanor Antin and Martha Rosler but Bloom also discusses other contemporary feminist art practices in New York and California. Bloom takes great care to provide situated accounts of race, nationality and class in relation to American WASP identity and Jewish understandings of self in relation to this and anti-Semitism or stereotyping, while demonstrating how the contributions of earlier debates (Greenberg in particular) continue to haunt present attitudes.

Review reproduced from Volume 16, n.paradoxa, July 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Stephen Bode (ed.) Jananne Al-Ani (London: Film and Video Umbrella, 2005) ISBN: 1-90427-014-x

This is a small edition catalogue, published to coincide with the completion of her Film and Video Umbrella commission, Muse (2004) and a touring exhibition of the artist's work. The catalogue documents Al-Ani's practice since 1991 as a photographer and video artist, especially the series of works which feature five women:- the artist, her mother and her three sisters and includes: Echo (1994/2004), A Loving Man (1996/1999), Reel (2001), Cradle (2001), She Said (2000); 1001 Nights (1998); Veil (1997). Against her development of works based around the faces, voices, movement of these five women, Muse initially represents a radical departure as its motif is a single man walking in a desert landscape, but it could also be seen as another extension of her family story - born in Iraq, living in England with an Iraqi father and Irish mother. While Al-Ani's works subtly reference her family history they are never directly autobiographical, they deal instead with the problems of communication; of word-games and story-telling; and of cultural (mis-)representation. The catalogue includes two essays by Angela Weight and Claire Doherty and an interview between the artist and Richard Hylton.

Review reproduced from Volume 15, n.paradoxa, Jan 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Barbara Bolt Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image London: IB Tauris, 2004 ISBN: 1 85043 411 5

This book, by an Australian based writer, is an enquiry into what happens in practice, in the heat of practice as experienced in painting,and sometimes writing, when the work takes on a life of its own. Questioning the interpretative framework in which visual art is only seen as representation, the book mounts a critique of representationalism to try and speak of other qualities in art: light, vision, execution, embodiment, ritual and transference. The ambition is to move towards a materialist ontology about practice, especially the experience where there is an exchange between imaging and reality. To this end she redeploys Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, CS Pierce and Judith Butler, and Paul Carter into her use of the term methexis for practice (to signal something of and beyond the radical material performativity of Indigenous Australian cultural productions).

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Frances Borzello A World of Our Own: Women as Artists

Thames and Hudson, 2000 ISBN 0 500 23776X

Divided into 6 chapters, each introduced by a 'cast of characters' - either prominent women artists of the day or the subjects of feminist art history and recovery - Borzello spans 500 years of women's art production and examines a wide range of questions about women's self-identity as artists, their survival strategies, issues of representation and changing subject-matter, training and methods. Lavishly illustrated, it is written as an uplifting text of struggle, enthusiasm and enjoyment in their art, against the odds of financial hardship, indifference and discrimination. Given its breadth, it can offer only a limited selection of women, and as a history of women artists it bears comparison with Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race or Linda Nochlin's and Ann Sutherland Harris's Women Artists 1550-1950.

Review reproduced from Volume 8, n.paradoxa, July 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Peg Zeglin Brand Beauty Matters

Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000 ISBN 0 253 21375 4

There is an interesting tension in this book between the disciplines of philosophy/ aesthetics in Plato, Kant and Hegel and cultural studies attention to popular culture, social/political context and racial/sexual stereotypes, when it comes to defining the concept of beauty. The doubleplay in the title reinforces this: whose concept of beauty matters and which beauty matters are we discussing? Feminist essays include: Peg Brand discussion interview with Orlan; Hilary Robinson on the value of Irigaray for feminist discourse; Eva Kit Wah Man on ideals of beauty in China; and Susan Bordo (re) discovering the male body in Calvin Klein adverts.

Review reproduced from Volume 8, n.paradoxa, July 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'..Entre Femmes: Isabelle Bribosia, Pascale Wiedemann, Pascale Willi Luxembourg: Casino Luxembourg, 2000. (French/English text) ISBN 2 919893 29 7

An exhibition catalogue which includes extracts from a conversation between the artists, curators and friends on the subject of women artist's confidence and necessary perseverance today.

This review by Katy Deepwell was first published in Oxford Art Journal 1995 Vol 18 No. 2 p.119-122

The beautiful colour reproductions and the substantial qualities of this new Broude and Garrard anthology (literally its size and weight) create a totality and 'seeming' coherence to art history about the feminist art movement and confirm its importance as an object of study. There is no doubt that here, and not just within the pages of this book, is an important history which needs to be affirmed, celebrated, anthologised and documented. However, much as I and many others might wish to reiterate the importance of feminism, the question remains, what contribution will this book make to shifting the study of feminist art practice from the margins to the centre: from its frequent position as an addendum or one-off topic, into a key subject of study?

A new wave of feminist publications has arrived both this year and last including, in addition to those reviewed here, two new anthologies from Harper Collins by Joanna Frueh, Arlene Raven, Cassandra Langer (Feminist Art Criticism and Feminist Criticism; Art, Identity,Action) and a continuing stream of publications from both Bay Press in Seattle (see below) and MidMarch Arts Press in New York (e.g. Leslie King-Hammond (ed) Gumbo ya ya: Anthology of African American Women Artists and Laura Brunsman and Ruth Askey (ed) Modernism and Beyond: Women Artists of the Northwest). Both Lucy Lippard and Mary Kelly are publishing new editions of collected writings in 1995. The first feminist anthology from Britain on the visual arts since 1987 has just been published containing contributions by 23 different women artists,curators and writers : Katy Deepwell (ed) New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies (Manchester University Press,1995). What, collectively, will the impact of this new wave of publications have on teaching about feminist art practice in art schools and art history departments, even in women's studies ? Will it offer a means to redefine the curriculum? And, by this I mean, moving the study of feminist theory, criticism and practice out from the occasional guest lecture or one-off seminar tagged on to the end of the programme, into the centre of issues and debates explored within programmes on contemporary art. Perhaps, here, is the other great problem that art history departments in Universities rather than art schools tend towards, the absence of taught programmes about contemporary art practice in the last twenty-five years. What impact also will such books have in redefining the teaching of what constitutes feminist art practice, beyond the often officially-unacknowledged reassurance that such publications, which are typically out from the library, provide for women students of role models or possibilities for a future as practicing artists, art critics and art historians. After twenty five years, it is very clear , if only to those who have been involved, that the feminist art movement is in the process of redefining its own legacy and redrawing the boundaries and emphases of its own history. Overcoming the incredible backlash of the mid-late 1980's, renewing internal debates and addressing the 'generation gap' amongst its practitioners have emerged as key issues. The longstanding questions of feminism's critique of Greenbergian modernism, its potential interventions in the art world and its new, if tentative, alliances with postmodernism (in addition to its use of post-structuralist theory) remain on the agenda in all the new publications discussed here. Such reassessment is taking place in the context of a renewed interest from a younger generation of women artists in the supposedly brash and deliberately lewd feminist transgressions of the early 1970's to parallel their own in the guise of postmodern 'Bad Girls' or 'Cyberchics'. The Power of Feminist Art ends , appropriately, with an essay by Laura Cottingham ( a contributor to the ICA's 1993/1994 Bad Girls catalogue) which stresses a continuum linking 'Bad Girls' like Sue Williams, Zoe Leonard or Lorna Simpson to a legacy of feminism dating from the early seventies. The point is reiterated, from a different angle in Mira Schor's essay on 'Backlash and Appropriation', the dual themes of a feminist legacy in postmodern times. Schor contrasts David Salle's painting 'Autopsy'(1981) with Kiki Smith's sculpture/installation 'Tale'(1992) amongst other examples to demonstrate the casual sexism and discrediting of any feminist critique by the repitition of images of abject, often deliberately humiliated, women in the work of some of the art world's currently most celebrated 'golden boys' and 'girls'.

Given the increasing number of substantial publications on feminist art practice, isn't it now time to reassess how feminist art practice since the 1970s is now taught or even communicated to succesively younger generations of art students ? Art school culture still does not seem to have updated its ideas of feminism from either the stigmatising of everything feminist (particularly from the 1970's) as essentialist, even more perversely as 'sexist', or the attempt to bury feminism under the prefix of 'post'-feminism by the lads of the new academy.

In this respect it is significant that feminist interventions in teaching form such a central part of the material discussed in The Power of Feminist Art, specifically the impact of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro's feminist art program at Cal Arts and Fresno in the early 1970's (in interviews with both artists) and Linda Nochlin's own recollections of her early feminist teaching programs at Vassar and the vast expansion of work on women artists since the early 1970's. These women's interventions as teachers have had a significant impact as feminist role models, the former in a new focus on women's experience and perspectives as subject matter for works of art; the latter in switching the emphasis away from studying women as bearers of man's meaning into their significant contribution as makers of meaning. Nochlin's emphasis upon analyses of the representations of women ( coupled with developments in cultural studies) have achieved a limited orthodoxy as an appropriate 'academic' approach in many art history departments though they are not always accompanied by the groundswell of research into the work of women artists which developed from this work. I am still amazed at how few students have actually read her pioneering essay 'Why have there Been No Great Women Artists?' and been encouraged to apply her insights to new research on women artists.(The project of recovery is far from exhausted, even as methodologies change). The description of the feminist art program by former students, in Faith Wilding's account, and of the significance of the Womanhouse project which emerged from the work (Arlene Raven) , make exceptionally interesting reading for lecturers. Chicago and Schapiro's use of both a separate teaching space for women students and the intensive use of consciousness-raising techniques as the basis for issue-based work continue to inspire as well as suggest ways to problematise feminist approaches and methodologies.

To a British audience, clear theoretical differences remain in the reception of this American re-assessment of its own legacy. Firstly, the emphasis upon celebration. This appears as an, at times, uncritical celebration of women's creativity and connections within the mainstream, an 'art-world feminism' , which the British art scene has until recently apparently lacked. For we too, now have 'Bad Girls' and a new generation of women sculptors 'making it in the mainstream', e.g. Rachel Whiteread, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Helen Chadwick. What this celebratory element provides cannot be too quickly dismissed , however critical we might remain of the terms of some affirmations of all women's work as feminist statements , particularly those working within mainstream and well-established practices. Affirmation, at least, has the advantage of providing important documentation of works which have rarely been seen over here and a large number of extremely useful descriptive passages about the staging or content of the individual artworks, even while it provides little analytical commentary about the context in which such works were produced or received. It may appear to a more sceptical British audience, that the affirmation of women artist's activities per se is equivalent to all or any feminism, but what is actually being presented in this anthology is a quite well established canon of feminist practitioners, a great and good accounting of the visibility of feminism in the art world since the seventies. This is not to dismiss the usual complaints about the selection of writers and artists represented and its resulting exclusions and emphases. The book has provoked complaints in America because of its lack of representation of certain sections of the feminist art movement (literally its heterodoxy and its East coast/West coast emphasis) but it is certainly no less than the complaints of British feminist practitioners on the publication of Rosika Parker and Griselda Pollock's Framing Feminism: the Women's Art Movement 1970-1985 for its inclusions, exclusions and emphases. The mistake is in assuming that either book is definitive, the only possible account , and that the presentation consists of only those artists worth studying or even, in these cynical times, worth knowing about . For those who have well-established collections of feminist magazines or who have followed the major feminist exhibitions in America, there are no new surprises in this book , but what there is is a vast array of photographs reproduced in colour which had previously only been frequently known in black and white. The documentation of the Womanhouse project and photographs of early performance work are but two good examples.

Much of 'The Power' in the title brings into view the activism of American feminists in the art world, both protests against the status quo from Whitney demos to Guerilla Girls to Women's Art Coalition (WAC) as well as the more organised side of the women's art movement through the Women's Caucus for Arts (WCA) and the Coalition of Women's Organisations and the establishment of a variety of feminist publications and exhibition spaces for women. The broader picture of women artists' activism in terms of political engagement from street theatre to large scale collaborative projects enable links to be seen between the women's movement and content-based work. Overall the book stresses the centrality of activism to the individual and general level of public consciousness-raising about issues like violence against women, the peace movement, enviromental and health issues, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), levels of institutionalised discrimination in the art world , analysis of attitudes towards women's bodies and change for women in the workplace. The Power of Feminist Art also supports and enables connections to be seen between feminist practice over the last twenty five years and its centrality to the emergence of 'New Genre Public Art' which form the subject of both Suzanne Lacy's Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art and Nina Felshin's But Is It Art?: The Spirit of Art as Activism (both titles from Bay Press,1995). Activism within a recognised community in these three books provides an argument for overcoming standard oppositional definitions of public art as 'the turd in the plaza' and the incredibly diverse category called 'community arts' by foregrounding a definition of socially engaged and committed practice outside conventional gallery spaces with a specific constituency as both audience and participants. Collaboration (between artists and co-workers as much as the use of non-art audiences as participants in public artworks) becomes the key to challenging modernism's emhpasis on individualism and models of isolated art production as artworks travel from studio to gallery.

Underlying these comments about activism , however, is an important issue which the book does seek to address in a variety of ways, namely the question of the exclusions within feminism and whether or not feminism can be all-inclusive. This debate has a particular character in America which complaints about exclusivity, particularly debates about racism or the Eurocentrism of white feminists here, only superficially share. Firstly, this is because the make-up of constituencies in terms of ethnic and racial backgrounds and their colonial inheritances amongst feminists is different on either side of the Atlantic (see,for example, Lucy Lippard's Mixed Blessings: Art in Multi-Cultural America Panetheon,New York,1990). Secondly, as a consequence, this produces a variety of different emphases in how these factors affect both what constitutes the areas of activism as well as the levels of recognition possible within particular constituencies, specifically feminist, black and hispanic, both inside and outside the art world. In stressing engagement, via consciousness-raising, collaboration, community and activism, Broude and Garrard's anthology presents in a new light what had become a dividing issue amongst feminist constituencies: the question of essentialism versus anti-essentialism. There are side-swipes at recognisably anti-essentialist practices which engage directly at the level of Theory and refutations of the attacks or identification of certain feminist positions as essentialist throughout the book. However, rather than adopting the theoretical ground for a discussion of these issues (a debate here which can be seen in the arguments presented by Barry / Flitterman-Lewis as opposed to A.Partington in Hilary Robinson's Visibly Female Camden Press,London, 1987), this book stresses activism as a means to re-read the question of what makes a work a feminist intervention. Suzanne Lacy, for example, argues that 'deconstruction was tied to an activist project of shifting power relationships in daily life, rather than a theoretical exercise in rarifed language addressed to an art-world viewership' (p.264) and Judy Chicago states that the essentialist/anti-essentialist debate closes down on the real project, feminism's ongoing critique of patriarchy : 'The thing about essentialism is that it's being used by women to attack women . . . and to discredit their foremothers' (p.71). While 'activism' has the effect of foregrounding feminist practice as diverse and manifest in different levels of practical engagement from teaching to participation in feminist publications, street demonstrations or work with particular constituencies and communities, it also short-circuits the much more difficult theoretical questions of 'Woman/women' and analyses of the complexities of racism and multi-culturalism in relation to gender (particularly given the enterprises of feminist post-structuralist approaches in criticism and practice).

Overall The Power of Feminist Art maintains a vital emphasis upon the diversity of positions and perspectives in two and a half decades of feminist art practice but this diversity is stressed in and through a representational politics of identity rather than by sustained argument or dialogue. Two artists quoted within the book show the difficulty of arguing for the centrality of their own position in terms of identity politics which may leave different constitutencies isolated and without dialogue between them. Judith Baca states that feminism (since the 1970's) remains an important body of knowledge and a resource, but that 'Ethnicity won't join a white feminist agenda. It will transform it. It will become the central agenda of feminism, as rightly it should, because we are the majority'(p.274). While Ruth Iskin, in a different essay, argues equally for the centrality of a lesbian perspective, 'The lesbian relationship as metaphor stands at the heart of feminist art and has on some level affected every feminist's work' (p.202), thus echoing Adrienne Rich's arguments prioritising a lesbian continuum precisely for the importance attached to all woman-to-woman relationships. While critiques of the ethnocentrism and the 'invisibility' of lesbian perspectives are acknowledged by this approach which seeks to represent constituencies with equal weight, the arguments are rarely made in full, which may lead toonly tokenistic acknowledgement of their importance for all women.

This model of cultural diversity is, however, extremely useful precisely because it is so easily assimilable into teaching practice, providing a great number of examples for discussion while it at the same time leaving a lot of questions unanswered and a great number of future possibilities to be explored. Certainly this is the important challenge that a book like this offers readers and lecturers who adopt it as core teaching material and it underlines the importance of feminism as a politics and not an artworld style or art historical movement . While The Power of Feminist Art possesses the authority of grounding a potential field it also begs for further research to be undertaken. Hopefully, this publication will go a long way to overcoming the repetitive foregrounding of only Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger or Mary Kelly as worthy objects of study, (often as the acceptable face of anti-essentialist feminism in the postmodern art world via Craig Owens essay 'The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism ') and the positioning of Judy Chicago as representative of the 'bad' essentialist camp because of her revival of craft or use of core imagery. For, in spite of its celebration of the latter's work, it at least foregrounds a large number of women artists as alternative objects of study and points again to the importance of performance work for feminists from the seventies. There are also frequent references to the use of masquerade and transformative performances and photowork in representation as 'forerunners' of Cindy Sherman. Miriam Schapiro suggests that it is an 'absence of representations, of icons, of memory' (a lack in education as much as in art historical and critical discussion ) which leads contemporary women artists to 'endlessly repeat' images and signs of 'the ills of survival in patriarchy' (p.83). However, as Griselda Pollock, pointed out in her review of the book in Women's Art Magazine (Jan/ Feb 1995) such comments continue to muddy the waters by inaccurately failing to acknowledge the significance of the attribution of feminist readings of images of women produced by Cindy Sherman's work as if that were either the politics of the artist or an internal quality of the work.

Norma Broude and Mary D Garrard The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History(eds) IconHarperCollins, 1992 ISBN 0-060430391-8

This review was first published by Katy Deepwell in Women's Art Magazine Jan/Feb 1993 No.50

A decade ago Norma Broude and Mary Garrard published Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (Icon,1982) one of the first anthologies of feminist art history in America. The Expanding Discourse maps the progress and diversity of feminist art history debates through 29 essays written in the 1980s.

In the introduction they outline how the encounter with post-modern Theory has literally expanded and diversified the discourses of feminist art historians producing what they define as 'neo-Marxist'; 'constructivist' and 'poststructuralist' accounts in addition to their own "liberal feminist" project. While they still maintain feminist art history should raise "fundamental questions for art history as a humanist discipline" they do not believe feminist art history should be confined to the documentation of women artists (as a form of additive history). Nor does their selection preclude the work of male writers eg Craig Owens whose classic essay "The Discourse Of Others Feminists and Postmodernism" is included.

The editors argue there are three dominant tropes in feminist an history in the first decade: the female body and the male gaze; femininity as a social construct ; and feminist critiques of essentialism, postmodemism and the woman artist. Under the first category come some trenchant analyses of images of women in "great" male artists' work including Leonardo da Vinci (Mary D Garrard's essay in the book) Botticelli (Lilian Zirpolo); Titian (Rona Goffen); Degas (Norma Broude); Matisse (Marilynn Lincoln Bernard); Renoir (Tamar Garb) and Gauguin exploring his "Invention of Primitivist Modernism'' (Abigail Solomon-Godeau) ; and constructions of a "Tahitian Body" (Peter Brooks)

Mary Ann Caws' illuminating essay on the depiction of women in Surrealist art "Ladies Shot and Painted" is also included. Yael Even examines the images of women's subjugation on the ''Loggia dei Lanzi" sculpture court in Florence. While Carol Duncan's "MoMa's Hot Mamas" explores how the modern (male artists heroic struggle over the body of woman structures the visitor's experience at New York's Museum of Modern Art).

Femininity as a social construct is explored through an analysis of largely 19th century themes - another feature of feminist an history in the 1980s. These include Griselda Pollock's essay which redefines "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity" through an analysis of the spaces selected for representation in male/female Impressionists' works and Tamar Garb's analysis of a critical category "L'Art Feminin" used to pigeonhole women's work. Linda Nochlin argues that Berthe Morisot's "Wet Nurse" renegotiates the construction of work and leisure in impressionist painting while James Saslow's essay discusses the construction of a lesbian body in Rosa Bonheur's painting "The Horse Fair". Anne Higonnet's essay on 19th century women's "Secluded Vision'' in contrast with the former analyses of women's professional practice explores images of feminine experience in women's albums and "amateur" paintings.

Outside the research on the 19th century is Margaret Miles' study of the "Virgin's One Bare Breasts" which analyses nudity, gender and religion in Tuscan Early Renaissance culture and Natalie Kampen's "The Muted Other: Gender and Morality in Augustan Rome and 18th Century Europe". Helen Langa explores the work of women artists in America's New Deal arts projects of the 1930s. Langa contrasts the rhetoric of an "egalitarian vision" with the gendered experience of identity/difference across a male/public female/private political division.

The volume also includes some valuable studies of individual women artists which discuss the negotiation of feminine/ feminist identities and experiences Frida Kahlo (Janice Helland's essay); Lee Krasner as ''LK" (Anne M Wagner) and Georgia O'Keefe (Barbara Buhler Lynes). Explorations of contemporary feminist artists include Josephine Wither's on Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party" and two essays on Faith Ringgold on her observations of America in the 1960s (Lowery Sims) the other on Afrocentrism in Ringgold's and Elizabeth Catlett's work (Frieda Tesfagiorgis in line with poststructuralist debates about identity and subjectivity femininity is not assumed but explored as contradictory, strategic and fragmentary.

"Along with the dominance of a masculine value system in art and art history has often come a blindness to female existence even when the reality of women's roles is well documented by the art of a given place or period " (Broude and Garrard 1982)

Anyone involved with the teaching of art history today will understand the importance of Broude and Garrard's suggestion that feminist art history will continue to serve "a corrective need" in the next decade until the "values, categories and conceptual structures of our field" are profoundly rearranged.

Review reproduced from Volume 16, n.paradoxa, July 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Norma Broude and Mary D.Garrard (eds) Reclaiming Female Agency:Feminist Art After Postmodernism University of California Press, 2005 ISBN: 0-520 24252

This is the third anthology of feminist art historical research edited by Norma Broude and Mary Garrard. Arguing that their selection focuses on women's agency (as the first casualty of 'poststructuralist gender studies') and yet offers an engagement with ( potentially critique of) post-modern thought, they position the anthology against the 'narrow, self-limiting, and self-reflexive concerns of academic theory and [as] a desire to return to real-world issues.' Insisting on the importance of feminist scholarship as making a difference, the editors advocate a clearer analysis of the power and agency women have had and continue to exercise while at the same time using post-structuralist methods as a means to call into question the metanarratives of art history. The collection brings together North American scholars and the introduction makes distinctions about their own position largely by comparison with trends in UK-based scholarship. Sounding at times like they wish to hold on to a history of great women artists, but without prioritising women's cultural production in general, this anthology contains a mixture of analyses of women artists' work as well as feminist or gendered deconstructions of key works in the canon of great art: Rubens, David, Ingres, Daumier, Manet and Picasso. Essays on artists after 1945 include wiriting on Helen Frankenthaler (Lisa Saltzman); Louise Bourgeois's Femmes Maisons (Julie Nicoletta); Minimalism (Anna Chave); Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (Amelia Jones), Hung Liu (Allison Arieff) and Shirin Neshat (John B.Ravenal).

Review reproduced from Volume 4, n.paradoxa, July 1999. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Betty Ann Brown (ed.) Expanding Circles: Women Art and Community (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1996) ISBN 1-877675-21-0

This important anthology, which continues discussions of community-based activist work is divided into 4 sections which suggest the themes of the book: Women's Art Communities in Contemporary History; Identity in Community; Building Community; and Living in Community. Contributions include texts by: bell hooks, Lucy Lippard, Joanna Frueh, Betsy Damon, Suzanne Lacy, Ruth Weisberg, Lorraine Serena on Women/Beyond Borders, Frances K. Pohl and Betty Ann Brown who also interviews Judy Chicago, Arlene Raven, Cheri Gaulke, Rachel Rosenthal,and Suzanne Lacy. It is an ideal companion to earlier books like Lippard's Get the Message, Nina Felshin's But is it Art?, and Lacy's Mapping the Terrain.

Review reproduced from Volume 11, n.paradoxa, Jan 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela Salvioni (eds.)

Art/Women/California: Parallels and Intersections, 1950-2000

California: San Jose Museum of Art, 2002. ISBN: 0-520-23065-5

This important catalogue looks again at the history of women's art practice in California, highlighting the work of women from its diverse communities, as well as women artists' engagement with new technologies including film,video and photography. The attempt is made to construct a broader, more inclusive view of work by women artists shown and produced in California in the last fifty years. The work of black women, Asian women, indigneous women and chicanas are seen in parallel to eachother and to their European counterparts: as Whitney Chadwick's essay suggests as intersecting histories and not as art history and its Others.There is a lot of valuable material here in the text and in the images for another picture of the last fifty years to emerge. Contributors include, amongst others: Angela Y.Davis, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Phyllis J. Jackson, Jolene Rickard, Moira Roth, Joann Hanley, Allucquere Rosanne Stone.

Review reproduced from Volume 24, n.paradoxa, July 2009. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Lene Burkard (ed. and curator) Julie Roberts - in retro Odense: Kunsthallen Brandts, 2008 ISBN: 978-8777-66062-7

Lisbeth Bonde, Francis McKee, Lene Burkard and Lars Grambye contribute overviews of Julie Roberts' paintings since the early 1990s when she made her reputation with single, and rather sinister, images - often of hospital equipment - set against large backdrops (reminiscent of the 1990s paintings of Rita Duffy and Lisa Milroy). Since 2000 her painting has looked with increasingly irony at images of The Dead Artist or the Father of Evolution(Darwin); as well as re-examining myths of women's domesticity (1950s style), their nineteenth century art education and their family relationships in two series on the Dysfunctional Family and Girls painting.

Review reproduced from Volume 20, n.paradoxa, July 2007. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Cornelia Butler WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution Massachussetts: MIT and Los Angeles: MOCA, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-914357-99-5

Like the previous book, this large and well-illustrated exhibition catalogue is destined to become a classic reference point for feminist art histories as it too attempts to establish a new view of feminism's impact in relation to existing literature in the field (from the 1960s to 1984) by placing the American "power of feminist art" (of Broude and Garrard) in relation to some (mainly)Western European, South American and Asian counterparts. (Canadian and Australian trajectories of feminism are not well represented in its chronology of women's exhibitions or its histories). Contributors include: Marsha Meskimmon (on 'Chronology through Cartography'), Abigail Solomon-Godeau (on Self-Representation in first-wave feminist photographic practice), Peggy Phelan (on feminist performance art, 1960-1980), Richard Meyer (on male bodies and Censorship in the 1970s), Judith Russi Kirshner (on Italian feminists), Valerie Smith (on Black Women Artists), Nelly Richard (on women artists under Chile's dictatorship), Helen Molesworth (on painting), Catherine Lord (on a calligraphy of rage: lesbian/feminist culture 1965-1980) and Jenni Sorkin (on all-women group shows). The catalogue contains short critical essays on all the women artists selected as well as the standard short CV and bibliography one might expect and sections dividing the works, into exhibition displays such as Body Trauma or Pattern and Assemblage.

Review reproduced from Volume 15, n.paradoxa, Jan 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Sophie Calle Exquisite Pain London: Thames and Hudson, 2004/ in French , Actes Sud, Arles: 2003

ISBN: 0 550 51198 5

With pages framed in red and black marking the two halves of this artist's book, Calle traces the end of a love affair (fifteen years ago) as a result of taking a three month trip to Japan on a government travel grant. The first part is a 92 day countdown, a travel journal of her trip, while the second maps her own reaction to the end of the affair, marked by her lover failing to meet her in New Delhi hotel room, juxtaposed with the solace or consolation of other people's stories of suffering, loss and death. Exquisitely presented, witty and painful!

Review reproduced from Volume 16, n.paradoxa, July 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Sophie Calle Appointment intro. James Putnam.

Thames and Hudson, 2005 with Violette Editions.exhibition catalogue from London: Freud Museum. ISBN: 0-500-51199-3

This artist's book presents a project from 1998 at the Freud Museum in London where the artist placed relics from her own life amongst Freud's possessions in his former London home. Juxtaposing a photograph of the object in situ with the story about her connection to the object, the artist relates elements from her own psycho-biography. This approach takes on a particular poignancy in the context of the Freud Museum where Freud moved in 1938 and reconstructed his study from Vienna. The museum displays objects from former patients (the Wolf man's paintings), his collection of books, African art and other works, like the infamous image of Gradiva, and these are often accompanied by museum labels carrying fragments of his analysis or from his writings. Calle's project echoes her other works with image and text, word and object associations, double games, and the ongoing pursuit of love combined with her investigations of sexual curiosity and the re-enactment of desire.

Review reproduced from Volume 8, n.paradoxa, July 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Fiona Carson and Claire Pajaczkowska Feminist Visual Culture

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000 ISBN 0 7486 1046 4

The 15 chapters of this book point to a range of issues in the UK in fine art, design and mass media. It is a taster to these debates, given the short and very generalised approach and summaries offered and the often unacknowledged and uncritical Anglo-American bias of most arguments presented. It may be ideal for a foundation/first year student entering a degree course in the UK but it is disappointing for fellow professionals. The history of feminism in the UK has been re-routed through the yBA and the subtlety of the distinction between feminist readings and "histories" eroded. This stress may be symptomatic of the UK's current art school culture but it is not enough to argue for the value of the "visual" to feminism nor to launch a new area in what is still known as cultural studies/visual culture.

Review reproduced from Volume 4, n.paradoxa, July 1999. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Whitney Chadwick (ed) Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation (Massachusetts, MIT press, 1998, USA touring exhibition catalogue)

ISBN 9-780262-531573

The exhibition, for which this book acted as a catalogue, displayed visually the parallels between women artists in Surrealist movement of the 1930s and 1940s and contemporary women artists, e.g. Cindy Sherman and Claude Cahun, or Paula Santiago and Meret Oppenheim or Unica Zurn and Francesca Woodman. The essays themselves seeks to problematise these relationships. How does the Surrealist negotiation of the femme-enfant, of Women's position as both Other and Muse sit next to the cultural mediations of subjectivity and identity politics in contemporary work? The question is not one simply one of drawing lines of influence historically in terms of precedents but an analysis of representational strategies and points of contact. How does Joan Riviere's idea of Womanliness as masquerade continue to haunt the self-portraits of women artists? This book is a stimulating contribution to the debate about women's self-representations and Surrealist legacies. Essays by Whitney Chadwick, Dickran Tashjian, Katy Kline, Salomon Grimberg, Dawn Ades, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Helaine Posner.

Review reproduced from Volume 2, n.paradoxa, July 1998. Hilary Robinson 'Book Reviews'

Whitney Chadwick Framed (London: Macmillan, 1998) ISBN 0-353-71950-6

If there are aspects of Art History which are akin to crime solving - trying to see with fresh eyes, collating evidence, and resolving questions through interpretation - then there are aspects of feminism which resemble a never-ending thriller - the frequent twists of the plot, the need to find out why all this outrageous stuff is happening, and the desire to see wrongs righted. It is hardly surprising, then, that most of the feminist art historians I know confess to loving thrillers with female protagonists. The sites of identification and fantasy are not hard to find: good woman finds bad mess, is jeopardised by bad men, and triumphantly restores order through her own wit and tenacity.

No wonder, then, that Framed by art historian Whitney Chadwick hits all the right buttons. Chadwick has created in Charlotte Whyte a character who is a nice mixture of independence, snottiness, and vulnerability. An art historian working in San Francisco, she is invited to hear a gay male colleague, Michael, lecture on David. The lecture never happens: Michael is murdered minutes before he is due to start. The grieving Charlotte is invited to finish Michael's work on a David catalogue, and manages to piece together not only the art history but also the murder mystery. Lacking the all-singing, all dancing scientific talents of Dr Kay Scarpetta (Patricia Cornwell's heroine), and the reams of accident-prone or conveniently employed relatives of V I Warschawski (in Sara Peretsky's books), Charlotte Whyte is a believable woman in a believable setting. Framed is marred in places by clumsy editing (it gives nothing away to say that the penultimate paragraph implies that the Arena chapel is in Tuscany), but would make a great holiday read.

Review reproduced from Volume 17, n.paradoxa, Jan 2006. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumarkt (eds)

At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet Boston: MIT, 2005 ISBN:0-262 03328-3

This major anthology of 20 essays includes writing by the editors, Johanna Brucker, Maria Fernandez, Heidi Grundmann amongst many others, exporing the roots/ routes of distribution and communication in new media, digital networks, mail art, music, radio and telematics. Linking developments in the 1970s with histories of futurism, the institutionalisation as well as histories of these developments is a major concern throughout.

Review reproduced from Volume 14, n.paradoxa, July 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Sylvie Coellier Lygia Clark (L'enveloppe) La fin de la modernite et le desir du contact (text in French) Paris:L'Harmattan,2003

ISBN: 2-7475-4408-7

A detailed account of the life and work of Lygia Clark (b. 1920, Brazil), this book offers an account of the intellectual positions and philosophy behind her work and its development of a tactile participatory form of sculpture. Central to her argument is a distinction made between enveloppement (a strategy pursued by many men in the representation of women) and l'enveloppe (Clark's): a distinction which rests on Luce Irigaray's appeal to an art which is not dependent on sight, but relies on the other senses.

Review reproduced from Volume 5, n.paradoxa, Jan 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Valerie Connor (ed) Anne Tallentire

Dublin: Project Press,1999. ISBN 1-872-493-14-9

Anne Tallentire represented Ireland at Venice this year. This book, commissioned by the Project Centre, Dublin, offers through interesting essays and documentation, a view of her past 10 years work as a photographer/video artist. Contributors include Jean Fisher, Sabina Sharkey and Tallentire's occasional collaborator, John Seth.

Review reproduced from Volume 12, n.paradoxa, July 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Joan Copjec Imagine There's No Woman:Ethics and Sublimation

Cambridge, Mass: MIT press, 2003 ISBN: 0-262-03299-6

Starting from Lacan's famous proposition about female sexuality ,'the Woman does not exist', Copjec demonstrates how Freud's attempts to define a theory of sublimation were restructured by Lacan as the key to his ethics. His ostensible negative proposition about women's existence, Copjec argues, is not to be taken as a nominalist denunciation of another universal but as an instance of how thought posits and creates difference. The difference she goes on to explore is between views of the same object but the split which structures the object to itself, an area she explorse especially well in the gap between the real and its representations.

This analysis Copjec pursues through a variety of case studies in film, contemporary art, and philosophical or psychoanalyical readings, interwoven as always with her detailed analysis of theoretical points drawn from psychoanalysis, analysis of tropes/metaphors and broader social and political concerns. Her reading of Kara Walker positions her beyond the negative press as a manipulator of stereotypes to an artist calculating offering a doubleplay of negation as the founding of a modern identity - critiquing her own "inner plantation" - yet very much attached to coming to terms with and distancing herself (and us) from a historical past through its nostalgic representations in Americana.

Other topics discussed in this book include: the figure of Antigone; Stella Dallas; Cindy Sherman's film stills; Kant's concept of radical evil; Pasolini's film Salo; the film noir classic Laura; and the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination.

Review reproduced from Volume 27, n.paradoxa, Jan 2011. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Vanessa Corby Eva Hesse: longing,belonging and displacement London: IB Tauris, 2010 ISBN: 978-1-84511-544-9

Taking as its point of departure two drawings from 1960/1961, Corby seeks to explore their role as 'bearers of subjectivity' and develop a new reading of Hesse against the climate of her time and the impact of the Holocaust.

Review reproduced from Volume 22, n.paradoxa, July 2008. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Paul Couillard (ed) Ironic to Iconic: The Performance of Tanya Mars

Toronto: FADO Performance, 2008 Book and DVD.

Tanya Mars' exemplary, fascinating and humorous performances from the 1970s to the present day are documented in this new book. The accompanying DVD profiles her site-specific work Tyranny of Bliss (2004). Mars is co-editor (with Joanna Householder) of Caught in the Act (Toronto: YYZ, 2004), a major anthology of performance art by Canadian women artists. Mars was recently awarded The Governor General's Award for Media and Visual Arts in Canada.

Mars contributed the script of her performance Pure Virtue, based on an ironic look at Queen Elizabeth I, to n.paradoxa About Time vol 5 (2000).

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Amanda Cruz, Amelia Jones, Elizabeth A.T.Smith

Cindy Sherman: Retrospective Thames and Hudson, 2000 ISBN 0 500 27987X

Published for the retrospective at LA MOCA and MCA, Chicago, as well as reproducing a huge cross-section of her work, and 3 new essays on her work, this volume aslo contains very revealing notes by the artist which outline some of her decision-making strategies in the numerous constructions of self and identity from 1975 to the present. Amada Cruz offers an overview of the different series Sherman has produced, Elizabeth AT Smith an art historical set of comparisons invoking parody as the principal strategy and Amelia Jones, a feminist reading, of the performative character of the work, given its attention to the construction of femininity as part of emerging postmodernist debates in the 1980s.

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Cutting Edge Women's Research Group

Digital Desires: Language, Identity and New Technologies London: IB Tauris, 2000 ISBN 1 86064 575 5

Cyberbodies,cyborgs, cyberfeminism, women's work in/using computers, virtual spaces, artificial life and gendered language/ identities in the digital domain are some of the issues tackled by this book and its numerous contributors. Cutting Edge is based at Westminster University (London) and these papers were given at one of their conferences.

Review reproduced from Volume 3, n.paradoxa, Jan 1999. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Cutting Edge: Women's Research Group (eds) Desire by Design: Body, Territories and New Technologies

London: I B Tauris, 1999 ISBN 1-86064-280-2

A new collection of critical essays by artists, designers, lecturers,curators and critics on women artist's uses of technology and body politics. The book arose from a Cutting Edge conference at University of Westminister.

Contents: Alexa Wright 'Partial Bodies'; Sarah Hember 'Nits and NRTS'; Jane Prophet 'Imag(in)ing the Cyborg'; Jackie Hatfield 'Imaging the Unseeable'; Nicky West 'The Body & the Machine'; Katy Deepwell 'Digital Sampling'; Erica Matlow 'Escape from the Flatlands'; Rosie Higgins,Estella Rushaija,Angela Medhurst 'Technowhores'; Helen Coxall 'Representing Marginalized Groups in Museums'; Uma Patel, Erica Matlow 'What have Science,Design & Technology got to do with Gender?'; Danielle Eubank 'Accumulation of Subleties'; Janice Cheddie 'From Slaveship to Mothership'; Gail Pearce 'A Reflection on Mirror,Mirror'; Jos Boys 'Positions in the Landscape?'; Alex Warwick 'Bodies of Glass'; Marion Roberts 'City Futures'.

Review reproduced from Volume 9, n.paradoxa, Jan 2002. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Pen Dalton

The Gendering of Art Education: Modernism, Identity and Critical Feminism

Buckingham, Philadelphia: Open University, 2001

0-335-19648-9

This is a thoughtful and engaging book for art educators, especially for feminist practitioners trying to re-consider the legacy of modernist practices in the art school and find other models in art education. Retracing the history of modernist art education with a critical feminist perspective and close attention to its gendering of disciplines and practices, Pen Dalton exposes its production of a division of labour in creativity and design methods and approaches. Her reassessment of these strategies and outline of other potential directions, given postmodernism, offers new lines of enquiry and practical ideas for women lecturers teaching in the studio.

Review reproduced from Volume 11, n.paradoxa, Jan 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Flaudette May V. Datuin Home, Body, Memory: Filipina Artists in the Visual Arts,19th Century to the Present. Quezon City: University of Philippines Press, 2002. ISBN: 971-542-346-9

Datuin engages with semiotics and a materialist feminist analyses to reframe the history of Filipina artists in terms of home, body and memory. She argues that the feminine is a feminist "elsewhere" and pursues the important distinction between the feminist and the feminine to open up different approaches within her main analysis. Her notion of "elsewhere" draws on Theresa de Lauretis notion of a "space-off" (via Griselda Pollock's use of the term), described as determining a feminist perspective in relation to the canon and patriarchy. Datuin uses the term to try and describe the differences amongst women, situating the feminine as a site of contestation within a specifically Filipina perspective. What is interesting about this book is not just the factual insights into the work of a wide range of Filipina artists but the ways in which Datuin is negotiating feminist theory (largely European and American) for her own ends and remapping a fragmented and dispersed history through original research. She looks closely at the emergence of the Kasibulan and Kalayaan women's organisations in the late 1980s and the work they did which included holding conferences, events and all-women exhibitions to promote Filipina artists. Twentieth century artists discussed in the book under the main themes of home, body, memory include: Imelde Cajipe-Endaya, Areceli Limcaoco-Dans, Lani Maestro, Ofelia Gelvezon-Tequi, Brenda Fajardo, Lydia Ingle, Irma Lacorte, Cristina Taniguchi, Agnes Arellano, Cecil de Leon, Ma. Angelica Bunoan and Karen Flores.

Review reproduced from Volume 27, n.paradoxa, Jan 2011. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Ellen de Bruijne (ed) L.A.Raeven: Analyse/Research Paris Hatje Cantz, 2010 ISBN: 978-3-7757-2706-8

L.A. Raeven aka twin sisters Liesbeth and Angelique have for ten years in a variety of performance and video projects investigated the ideal body shape, mediated by fashion trends, culture, ballet and advertising. This book documents their approach as "artist/researchers" as they explore the effects of women's attempts to match these ideals through women's self-control, surgery, eating dis-orders and strange and obsessive behaviours to present, secure and deliver their image of ultimate femininity.

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Emanuela De Cecco & Gianni Romano Contemporanee: Percorsi, lavori e poetiche della artiste dagli anni Ottanta a oggi Italian text.

Milan: Editori Associati srl, Ancona-Milano, 2000 ISBN 88 489 0025 9

Commentaries, interviews and individual critical writings on over 40 women artists whose practice has been widely shown in Europe and America in the 1990s. Most sections of this book are published in Italian for the first time and come from a wide variety of sources, including art magazines and catalogues. Artists discussed or interviewed include: Ghada Amer; Marina Abramovic, Grazia Toderi, Tacita Dean, Elke Kystufek, Vanessa Beecroft, Rebecca Horn, Francesca Woodman, Nan Goldin, Doris Salcedo, Sophie Calle, Soo-ja Kim.

This over-view of the book is an extract from the general introduction of New Feminist Art Criticism : Critical Strategies (St Martins / Manchester University Press, 1995) by Katy Deepwell - The five sections of the book address what have emerged as important areas for feminist criticism and art practice in the late 1980's. Within each section, the contributors foreground a different set of questions for the development of feminist strategies in the 1990's. Different perspectives on the sites, strategies and positions of contemporary women artists emerge as each outlines their own particular position.

The impact of post-structuralist theories has undoubtedly had an effect in transforming the terms of feminist debate since the early 1980's. The majority of the contributors make reference to the ways in which both criticism and the relationships between theory and practice have been transformed by interest in French feminism, deconstruction, theories of the subject, and critiques of narratives of history and the boundaries between disciplines.

In the first section, Between Theory and Practice, Janet Wolff identifies an impasse in feminist art criticism with divisions into essentialist and anti-essentialist camps; for and against theory. She considers the implications of current critical theory for feminist practice in overcoming such binary oppositions and the inadequacy of such binary oppositions to classify and debate women artist's work. Gilane Tawadros analyses how the 'postmodern' analysis of identity is neatly identical to contemporary black women artists' analysis of the narratives of history in their practice. Moira Roth's analysis of Sutapa Biswas' project 'Synapse' offers her own account of the mutual recognition and challenge presented to her by the artist in terms of a post-colonialist encounter. Roth's account seeks to situate and question her own responses to Biswas's work as much as it presents the artist's explanation of her own approach.

In the gap between theory and practice, there is the role played by institutions in validating and maintaining particular ideas, values and beliefs. Frances Borzello examines the institutional constraints upon the appearance and circulation of feminist ideas from a publishers perspective. She examines how little mainstream art writing is devoted to women artists, be it in newspaper reviews, art and literary journals and magazines, catalogue essays, T.V. and Radio etc.. Feminist perspectives,she argues, in art criticism occupy a still smaller area of coverage within these spaces. The period 1985-1988 saw a flurry of publications in Britain on this topic e.g. Gisela Ecker's Feminist Aesthetics (Women's Press,1985);Hilary Robinson's Visibly Female (Camden Press,1987),Rosika Parker & Griselda Pollock's Framing Feminism (Pandora/Routledge,Kegan and Paul,1987); Leslie Saunder's Glancing Fires (Women's Press,1987) and G.Elinor et alWomen and Craft (Women's Press,1988). There have also been two specialist magazines published over this period (1987-1992), Women's Art Magazine (formerly WASL Journal,now Make) and Feminist Art News which have worked hard to initiate new debates about women's art practice. However, since 1988, only three other books on feminist art practice have been published in the UK: Janet Wolff's Feminine Sentences (Routledge,Kegan and Paul,1990); Wendy Beckett's Contemporary Women Artists(Phaidon,1988) and Maud Sulter's Passions (Urban Fox Press,1990). Borzello's argument raises the important questions about access to writing about women in the visual arts as well as the inaccessibility or not of certain forms of academic debate.

The section concludes with two contrasting essays about feminist interventions in the culture of another major institution, the art school. Val Walsh provides an outline of a potential framework for feminist teaching while Pen Dalton's piece questions the underlying models from developmental psychology on which much 'modernist' studio teaching since 1945 is based in an attempt to lay bare the male bias in teaching practices.

In Curatorship and the Art World two gallery directors, Maurenn Paley (Interim Art) and Elizabeth Macgregor (Ikon Gallery) present how they see the pleasures and pitfalls of their respective positions in the commercial and public sectors. The art world and the role of public and commercial exhibitions is a further piece of the institutional structure of the art world. How to intervene as a feminist and initiate change is a question which all the contributors in this section explore.

From her experience as curator of touring exhibition The Subversive Stitch Pennina Barnett analyses audience reaction to the contemporary work selected. She argues that although the show attempted to renegotiate definitions of art/craft, feminine/feminist, much of the press reception and audience reaction remained trapped within more conventional critical categories, closing down on the debates which the exhibition aimed to initiate. How women negotiate making and exhibiting their work in gallery and non-gallery settings is explored by Debbie Duffin's analysis of her own and other artist's exhibiting strategies. Both Debbie Duffin and Fran Cottell argue against the idea that the artist waits to be discovered by the dealer but must actively seek and make choices about the context and display of their work. Fran Cottell's piece offers her own experience of exhibition across painting,performance and installation, highlighting the ways in which she renegotiated her practice to meet new audiences.

The marginalisation of women's concerns and the handling of the presentation of their work when it deals with controversial subjects are analysed by the three contributors in On the Question of Censorship. Anna Douglas's discussion of the pre-emptive removal of one of Deanna Petherbridge's works from a solo exhibition highlights the misconceived pressures of institutional prejudices in the public sector by employing Annette Kuhn's theorisation of censorship as regulation. In Douglas's argument the actual content of the work made by the artist becomes an irrelevance because of the troubled reception of the 'politically' charged signifier in its title when the work travels from a private gallery to a public gallery. By contrast, in Naomi Salaman's chosen examples it is purportedly the 'sexual' content of the work which underlies the removal of works from sale or exhibition in her three case studies. Sally Dawson pursues a very different argument, aligning censorship with the taboo on women's perspectives which discrimination in our culture enforces, she presents the work of four women who address different aspects of women's experience and history. These works are not 'censored' in the conventional sense of removed, not displayed, not seen but they address areas of women's social and political experience which appear 'censored' by a patriarchal culture.

The Engagement with Psychoanalysis addresses the impact of one of the most powerful influences on feminist art practice here in the late 1980's. The legacy of Lacan is surplanted by the impact of Irigaray and Kristeva. As Christine Battersby's piece argues the adoption of psychoanalytic terms and models,specifically from Luce Irigaray, may prove fraught for feminist art practice if we do not address these writers' own analyses of the place of painting. Hilary Robinson enthusiastically demonstrates how critical terms from psychoanalysis have enabled a rethinking of representation of the body and how it has been used as the starting point for a broad range of women artists producing work in the late 1980's as well as for new critical readings of their work. Joan Key with reference to her own practice presents how pyschoanalysis, particularly Kristeva's discusssion of the abject and the repression of the maternal body, provides a position for painting which addresses the physicality of colour. A very different approach is offered by Mary Kelly who provides a discussion of 'Historia' the fourth and last section of her project Interim which analyses the attitudes of women aged 45-55 to their body,money,power and history as the 1968 generation involved in women's liberation. In this section of 'Interim',Kelly questions what is at stake in how a subject positions itself historically: particularly how a feminist identifies a particular 'ideal' moment of radicalism (1968) only to be challenged by the different perspectives of a younger generation. Kelly approaches Kristeva's analysis of 'Women's Time' and redeploys Foucauldian ideas of history as a form of genealogy and archeology in relation to her continuing critique and dialogue with Lacan concerning femininity and the construction of women's identity, evident in the other sections of both Interim ('Corpus','Pecunia', and 'Potestas') and Post-Partum Document.

The shifting definitions of practice and the employment of new theoretical frameworks from 'post-stucturalist' theories of language, deconstruction and decoding are taken up again in Janis Jefferies piece which introduces the last section, Textiles,linking it back to but extending in a different direction the analyses provided by J.Wolff, G.Tawadros, and H.Robinson. Textiles situation on the boundaries, at the margins, as a 'hybrid', in the relationship between text/textile and the use of metaphors from embroidery and weaving provides the diversity of practices within this field with a specific relationship to postmodern debates. The position of textiles both in and out of the fine art or craft arenas (see P.Barnett also), crossing and at the same time challenging hierarchies and definitions, myths and ideologies, in both theory and practice are explored here in relation to the work of individual women artists and debates from the 1970's on the revaluation and transformation of 'traditional crafts' with radical feminist messages. Ann Newdigate, Dinah Prentice and Ruth Scheuing each present their own practice in the context of these debates, demonstrating how through tapestry, piecing, and weaving respectively, the artist works to undo politics and patriarchal myth-making while creating feminist work.

Review reproduced from Volume 3, n.paradoxa, Jan 1999. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Katy Deepwell (ed) Women Artists and Modernism Manchester: Manchester University Press,1998.

USA: St Martin's Press. ISBN 0-7190-5082-0

A new anthology in which each essay offers a different feminist methodology through which to explore questions concerning women artists and modernist art histories.

Contents: Rosemary Betterton on women artists, modernity and suffrage, in UK and Germany, 1890-1920; Jane Beckett & Deborah Cherry on women, metropolitan culture and vorticism; Pauline de Souza on gender and representation in the Harlem Renaissance; Bridget Elliott on Romaine Brooks and Gluck's 1923 portraits of eachother; Susan Platt on Elsabeth MacCausland; Katy Deepwell on Hepworth and her critics; Nedira Yakir on women in the St Ives Group; Moira Roth 'Talking Back' with Marcel Duchamp; Joanna Frueh on 'Women's Bane,Women's pleasure' ; Hilary Robinson on Irigaray's re-valuings; Renee Baert on 'Desiring Daughters.'

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Aruna D'Souza (ed) Self and History: A Tribute to Linda Nochlin

Thames and Hudson, 2001 ISBN 0 500 28250 1

In this anthology, fellow art historians pay tribute to the full range of Nochlin's art historical scholarship by addressing and developing areas which her own work on sexual politics, realism, Impressionism has made possible. Very few works address her life and scholarship directly, Abigail Solomon-Godeau or Moira Roth's portrait/dialogue with her are exceptions.

Review reproduced from Volume 1, n.paradoxa, Jan 1998. Katy Deepwell 'Short Reviews of New Publications' - This book attempts to cover aspects of women artist's work in China, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, India, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam. This is a tall order given the range of work and the numbers of women artists in Asia. The essays vary widely between analyses of the emergence of feminism (often identified and described through theoretical models of Western feminism with the occasional references to post-colonial and post-structuralist theories) and case studies of individual women artists. The book is beautifully illustrated and reproduces an incredible diversity of work. Where it is frustrating is in its omission of details and footnotes and bibliographic references which would encourage greater research. Nevertheless the material is fascinating including a description of the only women's art gallery in Asia: the Senwati Gallery in Bali,Indonesia founded in 1991(but no address!) ; and the feminist groups called 'Hyung'sang' and '30 Carat' in Korea (no contact or details of joint exhibitions or work!). Many of the women artists discussed are starting to be shown in international biennals (from Venice to the Asia-Pacific triennal,Australia) and major group exhibitions, such publications can only fuel this development and the dissemination of knowledge about their work.

Essays include:- Jane Chia 'Trouble at Hand: Singapore Women Artists' ; Xu Hong 'Dialogue: The Awakening of Chinese Women's Consciousness' ; Kim Hong Hee 'Sex and Sensibility: Women's Art & Feminism in Korea' ; James B.Lee 'Yi Bul :The Korean Installation Artist'; Yang Wen-I 'A Banana is not A Banana: The New Women Artists of Taiwan' ; Anna Kirker 'Poised in Equilibrium: Irene Chou' ; Yuri Mitsuda 'Flowers for Wounds: Contemporary Japanese Women Artists' ; Helen Michaelson 'Traces of Memory: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook' ; Ana P.Labrador 'Beyond the Fringe: Making it as a Contemporary Filipina Artist' ; Astri Wright 'Undermining the order of the Javanese Universe: the self-portraits of Kartika Affandi-Koberl' and 'A Woman's Place: the Senwati Gallery in Bali' ; Martinus Dwi Marianto 'Srikandi,Marsinah & Megawati: Lucia Hartini' ; Nora Taylor 'Invisible Painters: North Vietnamese artists from the revolution to Doi Moi' ; Gayatri Sinha 'Indian Women Artists' ; Nilima Shekh 'Materialising Dream: Arpita Singh'.

Review reproduced from Volume 11, n.paradoxa, Jan 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Mary Beth Edelson The Art of Mary Beth Edelson New York: Seven Cycles, 2002

ISBN: 0-9604650-6-5

Like her famous poster Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper, this book is a rich, multilayered collage of critical essays; documentation of works; interviews by Edelson of other women artists about the changing face of feminism in the US and attempts to map her own history in a stylish and graphic manner. Designed by the artist herself, the book as a whole tracks many different phases and bodies of work in the artist's thirty, nearly forty, years of exhibitions and art production. These include her later works about women in film; her activist contribution to WAC, Heresies, Chrysalis, New York Soho Artists co-operatives; her poster series on women artists; her performance work; as well as her activist projects like Combat Zone (against violence against women) and StoryGatheringBoxes. E.Ann Kaplan , Laura Cottingham and Alissa Rame Friedman provide some of the short essays in this anthology of Edelson's life and her work.

Review reproduced from Volume 24, n.paradoxa, July 2009. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Silvia Eiblmayr Zehn Jahre: Galerie im Taxispalais / Ten Years: Galerie im Taxispalais Dokumentation 1999-2008 Innsbruck: Galerie im Taxispalais, 2008

Text in German and English ISBN: 978-3-7082-3283-8

Documenting 11 years of work at the Galerie im Taxispalais by one of the most outstanding feminist curators in Europe (who is also responsible for the Austrian pavilion this year at the Venice Biennale) this is an unusual book. Eiblmayr's work has contributed to the international reputation of this publicly-funded gallery in Innsbruck, but under her leadership, the gallery has also resolutely put forward exhibitions as arguments and as interventions in what is seen or known in current contemporary art debates, deliberately and thoughtfully furthering debates or reconsidering key political/aesthetic questions: on leisure/survival, on work (Arbeit), on the concept of Suture, and on The Wounded Diva. Eiblmayr also organised many significant one-person shows of Eastern European women artists: Milica Tomic, Sanja Ivekovic, Jasmila Zbanic, Ana Lupas, Greta Bratescu, Sejla Kameric, in a programme in which half the solo exhibitions were by women. These included exhibitions of VALIE EXPORT, Eva Schlegel, Dorit Margreiter, Atusko Tanaka, Michaela Melian, Helena Almeida, Ketty La Rocca, Ellen Gallagher, Laura Horelli, Carol Rama, Charlotte Posensnska, Carola Dertnig, Esther Stocker, Isa Genzken, Ulrike Lienbacher, Charlotte Salomon, Hedrun Holzfeind, Katerina Seda and Monika Schwitte.

Review reproduced from Volume 6, n.paradoxa, July 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Silvia Eiblmayr, Dirk Snauwaert, Ulrich Wilmes and Matthias Winzen (eds.) Die verletzte Diva: Hysterie, Korper, Technik in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts / The Wounded Diva: Hysteria, Body and Technique in Twentieth Century Art

Koln: Oktagon, 2000

Text: German and English

ISBN 3-89611-088-8

This valuable and fascinating book, a must for scholars on this subject, was published to accompany an exhibition at the Munich Kunstverein and touring to Baden-Baden June-August 2000. It makes available a new set of commentaries upon the subjects of hysteria, women/machine/medium, and the category of the abject. Republishing texts by Gilles Deleuze on 'Hysteria'; Klaus Theweleit on epidemics of hysteria, Slavoj Zizek on identification and the sublime, provides a context and opens up a space for the newer and largely more feminist essays on the subject by Silvia Eiblmayr, Christina Von Braun ('Voice of Diva'), Elisabeth Bronfen ('The Language of Infirmity'), Georges Didi-Hubermann, Peter Gorsen, Thomas Lischeid, Kate Meyer-Drawe ('Camouflaged Sensibility'), Irit Rogoff, Karin Sagner-Duchting and Matthais Winzen.

Review reproduced from Volume 17, n.paradoxa, Jan 2006. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Melanie Keen & Eileen Daly (eds) Necessary Journeys Arts Council of England: Decibel, Blackworld, 2005

ISBN:0-7287-112-5

An arts project about travel and migration in film, photography and writing organised through journeys and residences at the archives of British Film Institute and University of Central England and Birmingham Central Library. New commissions from women artists (33% of those invited) include: Oreet Ashery (Israel/Palestine); Margareta Kern (Bosnia/Herzogovina); Jackie Kay (poet); and susan pui san lok.

Review reproduced from Volume 6, n.paradoxa, July 2000. Elaine Kowalsky 'Book Reviews'

Video Loupe: a collection of essays by and about the videomaker and critic Catherine Elwes KT press, 2000 ISBN 0 9536541 0 9

When there is currently a renewed attempt in the UK to bring to a new audience/generation the ideas and work from the 1970s, as evident in the Whitechapel exhibition Live in Your Head, the publication of Video Loupe is apt and timely. It is significant in two respects: firstly, because we still have a society, that for all its liberal ideology, finds issues raised from the feminist perspective both marginal and irksome - in fact, not just the issues but the very idea of feminism itself - and secondly, because it is a small one-woman publisher who offers us the republished works of this feminist artist/writer.

Years ago, realising that nobody was going to review her work with any clarity and understanding the issues raised in her work and others like her, Catherine Elwes began to write about video and performance work,in particular, that of women. Elwes sets the agenda herself with the statement:

'Performance, independent film and video all contributed to the critical, counter-culture environment of the 1970s and the early 1980s, but it was the existence of feminist politics as an active force within society that convinced me I could exploit video as a vehicle for my creativity from a gendered position.'

Her first published letter to Art Monthly in 1981, for example, outlines the failings in a review of two shows by women, Women's Images of Men, and the show of women artists at the ACME gallery in Shelton Street, and is a brilliant and systematic criticism of the lack of any understanding about what was actual being shown. From then on, one notes that Elwes's own writing was published more often in the magazine. How could they refuse? She said it all so clearly and the questions, raised in her reviews and essays, still need to be asked today.

The strength in Elwes' writing comes from her ability to locate the work she reviews in a broader context, outlining its historical background and contrasting it with other works to bring out many pertinent issues and ideas, especially in relation to a feminist schedule. In her reviews of primarily video works, she notes quite clearly the pitfalls of narcissism inherent in the medium and the lack of any political agenda in many of today's artists' work. She is able to negotiate with some clarity the work of the new generation of yBa's (young British artists) performance work and installations in relation to the previous generation. It is the lack of a political agenda, she notes, that sets the work of older women artists apart and gives their work bite. The message is simple "Know your history! Or we are doomed to keep reinventing the wheel!"

I often look at young women artists today, as a teacher and as an older woman, and I am proud of their confidence and the ideas in the work that they do, but I am aware how few reviews of their work link it to women's art history or a feminist perspective. Too often women artists start discussions around relevant issues with the opening statement 'I am not a feminist but…' in order to distance themselves from the negative associations that have been placed on feminism. However despite my enjoyment of her writing, I am critical of how the book is constructed, as it would have flowed better without the reviews of Elwes' 'wn video work which the book also documents. These selected reviews do not enhance her reputation as an artist or add to what she has to say as a critic. With the exception of the commissioned introduction essays that frame the context of the book, the writing on her work is redundant and does her no favours. If anything it muddies the waters and weakens the overall structure and flow. In contrast the essays by Lisa Steele, Jeremy Welsh and Julia Knight have an intellectual weight and clarity that compliment and extend an understanding of her work.

I read sections of the book to my evening students. A good thought provoker for them was 'Women and Technoculture','first published in Variant. The excitement of the ensuing discussions and debate amongst them was revealing. They also enjoyed her analysis with Jacqueline Morreau of the show Women's'Images of Men. I dug out the catalogue of the show from my collection and brought it to the next class. It was well received. But the longest debate and ensuing discussion came out of her letter to Art Monthly called 'Feminism & Political Elitism' 'p. 43). Too often when feminist ideals are mentioned, minds are turned off. The popular press in the UK has done a very good job of trivialising the whole feminist agenda. Yet the same issues are still very alive, as was illustrated by my evening students, who from their diverse social and economic backgrounds, debated and understood quite clearly what she had to say. They found the ideas exciting, pertinent and applicable to their own life experiences. I say this in all seriousness, for after reading this new book on her writings and her work, one is left with the desire that more people should know about it.

Review reproduced from Volume 3, n.paradoxa, Jan 1999. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Lithuanian Art / Women Experience

Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, published on the occasion of the Lithuanian Women Art Exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC

October 1998. Essay: Dr. Ieva Kuiziniene.

This catalogue represents and documents over 40 women artists from Lithuania through a single photograph of a piece of their work and a CV. It was produced with the assistance of the Soros Centre of Contemporary Arts Archives in Vilnius of over 300 Lithuanian artists. The work is wide-ranging in media and approach but it documents many artists marginalised in the offical Communist art world in the middle of the 20C (Jusefa Ceicyte, Kazimera Zimblyte) as well as those whose careers have started since post-Glasnost independence and exhibit abroad (Egla Rakauskaite, Nomeda Urboniene, Elena Urbaitis).

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Liana de Girolami Cheney, Alicia Craig Faxon, Kathleen Russo Self-Portraits by Women Painters

London: Ashgate, 2000

ISBN 1 85928 424 8

The list of "most significant" or interesting women's self-portraits attended to in this book, overlaps the European/American story presented in Borzello's above. The 3 scholars' approach, while less passionate, examine questions of interpretation, identification and attribution in art history from antiquity to the present day.

Review reproduced from Volume 6, n.paradoxa, July 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Catherine Fehily, Jane Fletcher and Kate Newton

I Spy: Representations of Childhood

London: I.B. Tauris, 2000

ISBN 1-86064-384-1

IRIS, the women's photography project at Staffordshire University co-ordinated and developed this lavishly produced and well-illustrated publication with essays by Val Williams, Melissa Benn, Jane Fletcher and Patricia Holland. The work of professional women photographers from the US, UK and Ireland, Caroline Molloy, Cath Pearson, Catherine Fehily and Wendy Ewald, is Review reproduced alongside photographs by children from the Holly Street Public Art Trust where children document their own experience of childhood alongside the adult view of either a remembered childhood or their own children. The essays in the book touch on the controversy surrounding Sally Mann's photographs; the work of women and feminist photographers in their real and reconstructed photographs of childhood and the problematic questions surrounding distinguishing a paedophilic gaze or exploitation of children from a more positive representation of children's lives in photography, given the widespread concern today about child abuse.

Review reproduced from Volume 24, n.paradoxa, July 2009. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Martha Rosler: Photographic Works, 1965-2008

Essays by Zdenek Felix, Martina Pachmanova (Prague: Langhans Galerie, 2008)

ISBN: 978080-902816-5-3

This catalogue surveying forty years of Rosler's practice in photography is the first exhibition of the artist in the Czech Republic. Martina Pachmanova, whose two anthologies in Czech have done much to introduce ideas about feminist art to the local scene, wrote the introductory essay offering an overveiw of her practices and her feminism. Text is in Czech and English.

Review reproduced from Volume 13, n.paradoxa, Jan 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Maria Fernandez, Faith Wilding, Michelle M. Wright (eds) A SubRosa Project: Domain Errors New York: Autonomedia, 2002 ISBN: 1-57027-141-0

'Part performative intervention, part radical polemic and activist manifesto', this book examines the intersections between race, technology and cyberfeminism. Divided into 3 sections, 'Racism and cyberfeminism in the integrated circuit', 'The female flesh commodities Lab', and 'Research! Activism! Embodiment! Conviviality!', the book aims to explore 'a contestational politics for cyberfeminism'. The international contributors include the editors, SubRosa, Lisa Nakamura, Irina Aristarkhova, Susanna Paasonen, Rhadika Gajjala/Annapurna Mami-dipudi, Lucia Sommer, Christina Hung, Emily de Araujo, Tania Kupczak, Amelia Jones, Terri Kapsalis, Nell Tenhaaf and Hyla Willis.

Review reproduced from Volume 15, n.paradoxa, Jan 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Penny Florence Sexed Universals in Contemporary Art New York: Allworth Press, 2004 ISBN: 158115 313 9

Focusing on close readings and comparisons of traits in both male and female artists, this book is best summed up by one of its quotations: Penelope Deutscher's 'The point of some contradictory positions is their contradictory status'. The concept of a sexed universal is itself paradoxical and the interpretation slips between concepts of a universal (acknowledged as male, with a view to feminist critique), and Irigaray's ideas of sexual difference (which are not wholly embraced), becoming occasionally a female universal, a feminine universal and sexed as both male and female, with full acknowledgement of social.cultural belief systems. The routes discussed as well as the choices of examples are interesting: Barbara Hepworth is juxtaposed with Constantin Brancusi , Anish Kapoor and Liz Larner; Lynn Lapointe with Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe.

Review reproduced from Volume 14, n.paradoxa, July 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Alicia Foster

Tate Women Artists London: Tate Publishing, 2004 ISBN: 1-85437-311-0

The Tate Collection currently owns works by 316 women artists (11%) compared to the 2,600 men. Very few of these women are represented by more than one work and their works form only 7% of the collection's total. When the Tate opened in 1897 only five of the 253 pictures in the new gallery were by women. Women artists are proportionately better represented in the twentieth century, although the collection has works dating from the seventeenth century. This book documents the presence of women in the collection and offers 250 short portraits of the women artists and their work in this major collection.

Review reproduced from Volume 27, n.paradoxa, Jan 2011. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Karen Frostig and Kathy A. Halamka (eds.) Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women and Feminism Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007 ISBN: 9781847183767

Although published several years ago, this anthology of American authors deserves some attention. Divided into four sections on Leadership, Criticism, Collaboration and The Work, its 32 essays cover a broad spectrum of debates across second-wave and third-wave US art world politics. Many of the contributions in the anthology arose from the 2006 Women's Caucus for Art conference in Boston, called Digging Deeper to Build New Paradigms. Patricia Hills and Eleanor Dickinson reflect on the history of WCA and throughout there is much discussion of the inclusions/ exclusions within different generations; different groups within the feminist movement and different attempts to act in an activist inclusive and open manner, while establishing new collaborations or opportunities for different groups of women. Personal stories are a strong part of the contributions as the writers speak largely from their own experience, about their own work and often as representatives of particular groups or institutions. Some of the contributions are very short, some quite anecdotal. As Jennifer Colby remarks 'the true test of good scholarship is whether it informs praxis'. (p.298)

Review reproduced from Volume 8, n.paradoxa, July 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Joanna Frueh Monster Beauty: Building the Body of Love

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001 ISBN 0 520 22114 1

This anthology brings together performance lectures and writing largely written/published/performed since 1998. Divided into 3 sections, 'Erotic Weight', 'Pleasure and Pedagogy', 'Icons of Pleasure', Frueh discusses representations of eroticism in literature and art, bodybuilding, multiple ideals of beauty and bodily pleasure in a wide range of relationships and human encounters.

Review reproduced from Volume 22, n.paradoxa, July 2008. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Joanna Frueh Clairvoyance (for those in the desert) Performance Pieces, 1979-2004 Duke University Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-8223-4040-9

This new book by Joanna Frueh republishes her performance scripts, spanning twenty-five years. An extensive introduction is included by JillO'Bryan exploring the major concerns in her writing and in her performances as well as her intellectual contribution to feminism. The book is illustrated by images of Joanna Frueh in performance but also by their joint photography project: Joanna in the Desert (2006).

Review reproduced from Volume 5, n.paradoxa, Jan 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Coco Fusco (ed) Corpus Delecti: Performance Art in the Americas Routledge, 1999. ISBN 0-415-19454-7

A wide cross-section of Latino performance art is discussed, documented and presented in this volume which highlights both trans-national and feminist viewpoints in Chile, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela and Brazil as part of a general picture and the work of many women artists, including: Maris Bustamente; Lygia Clark; Ana Mendieta; Neo Bustamente; Marta Minujin; Tania Bruguera; Lotty Rosenfeld and Coco Fusco's own. This book has much to offer in its analyses of the relationships between per-formance art, theatre and cabaret; the role performance can play in political activism and transforming cultural stereotypes; and the debates around performance art, the legacy of dada in performance and its reinvention under the title 'non-objectual' art. The book contains scripts as well as documentation of work from the 1980s and 1990s.

Review reproduced from Volume 6, n.paradoxa, July 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Maria Pininska-Beres 1931-1999 Galerie Sztuki Wspolczesnej Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow, Nov.-Dec. 1999 Text : Polish and English

ISBN 83-86905-22-0

A retrospective catalogue of an outstanding and eclectic Polish artist. Academically trained, her sculpture moved from realist sculpture in the 1950s to an entirely new aesthetic in the early 1970s employing soft, sewn and quilted fabrics, and a whole artistic strategy based on "thinking pink" alongside many political and feminist performances-actions from the late 1960s . The artist's own text 'On Feminism in Art?' states: That which I managed to articulate about my sex, emotional experiences connected with the struggle with a range of taboos, and the breaking of the commandments touching women, all this has not shaken, however, my conviction in art's superiority. An essay by Maria Hussakowska analyses the politics of her use of pink in relation to feminist strategies in the 1970s, the question of a feminine subject in art, and political and cultural attitudes in Poland. Her Washing performance of 1980 where she washed numerous items of clothing before painting on each item a letter of the word feminism is offered as one example of how she sought to renegotiate feminine/feminist ideas. Janine Ladnowska takes up this question of a female aesthetic read as feminist in her essay on her sculpture.

Review reproduced from Volume 22, n.paradoxa, July 2008. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Catherine Gonnard and Elisabeth Lebovici

Femmes Artistes, Artistes Femme: La Creation en France, 1900-2000

Paris, Edition Hazan, 2007 (Text in French) ISBN: 978-2-7541-0206-3

This is one of the most important reference books to be published on the subject of women artists from France. Although the book concentrates on Paris, it is the first major attempt to map and link in one book a trajectory of women artists' work stretching from the Union of Femmes Artistes (founded in 1881); the group, Femmes Artistes Moderne (1931-1938); through the work of women as gallerists in Paris; into the work of contemporary feminist artists from Annette Messager and Tania Mouraud to Dominique Gonzalez-Forster and Elisabeth Ballet. The sources for this research include: analyses of state collections; published art criticism; diaries, monographs and theses as well as photographic records. The authors also conducted new interviews with artists and gallerists from different generations for this book.The authors negotiate the complex territory d'un art feminin and the shifting definitions of modern feminism in their efforts to explore the episodic treatment of women artists in French culture as frequently celebrated and often marginalised.

Review reproduced from Volume 8, n.paradoxa, July 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Germaine Greer The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and their Work London: IB Tauris, 2001 reprint, 1979 ISBN 1 86064 677 8

The republication of this feminist classic is worth noting. While the scholarship in the intervening years has often challenged or expanded its theses on the "obstacles" facing women artists as more in-depth studies of some women discussed from the 10th-early 20th centuries have been undertaken, it nevertheless remains an informative, thought-provoking introduction to the question of women artists' lives and the challenges they faced.

Review reproduced from Volume 9, n.paradoxa, Jan 2002. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Uta Grosenick (ed) Women Artists in the 20th and 21st Century

(separate German and English editions) Koln & London: Taschen, 2001 3-8228-5854-4

93 women artists are featured in this book, each with a short profile, a photograph and four or five images of their work. The hidden selection criteria mirrors the other two anthologies discussed (Art and Feminism and Feminism-Art-Theory) in so far as 46 live or work in America, 10 in the UK, 14 in Germany, 17 in other European centres and a further 6 in total from South America, Australia and Japan. As a German book, the inclusion of more German women from both past and present should I hope underline the specific location and histories offered by all three anthologies. The book aims to negotiate the stereotypes of "feminist" and "feminine" and point to a wide-ranging cross-section of different art practices from women artists but does not identify the nature of the feminism in particular artists' projects. The majority of artists chosen have worked in the last twenty years of the twentieth century, with the notable exceptions of some "great women artists": Sonia Delaunay, Natalia Goncharova, Hannah Hoch, Barbara Hepworth, Georgia O'Keefe, Germaine Richier, Frida Kahlo and Lee Krasner. The selection appears premised on a museum and market-led assessment of the value of particular women artists currently. The relationship of their practice to any feminist legacy or art movement is played down. The introduction acknowledges dis-crimination through the last century but paints an uncritical picture of a triumphant chronological march towards increasing numbers of women artists and recognition of their strength and individualism in the twenty-first century.

Review reproduced from Volume 4, n.paradoxa, July 1999. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Marina Grzinic (ed) with Adele Eisenstein

The Spectralization of Technology: From Elsewhere to Cyberfeminism and Back : Institutional Modes of the Cyberworld. (Slovenia, Maribor: MKC, Youth Cultural Center/ Festival of Computer Arts, 1999) ISBN 961-6154-02-8

This new anthology in English continues the ongoing discussion of cyberfeminism from East/West perspectives questioning perceptions in this equation. Essays by Cornelia Sollfrank; Helene von Oldenburg; Marina Grzinic;Claudia Reiche; Eva Ursprung;Kathy Rae Huffman & Margarete Jahrmann.

Review reproduced from Volume 24, n.paradoxa, July 2009. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Marina Grzinic and Tanja Ostojic (eds) Integration Impossible? The Politics of Migration in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojic Germany: Argobooks, 2009 Exhibition Innsbruck: Kunstpavillion Tiroler Kunstlerschaft ISBN: 978-3981-255263

This anthology brings together documentation by the artist with a range of critical essays about her projects since 2000 on immigration, border controls, acquiring visas to travel into Europe, people sans papiers,questions about language as a model for integration and discrimination against Roma people, as well as her remake of Courbet's L'Origine du Monde as a statement about the "Fortress Europe" in 2004. Ostojic's major project Looking for a Husband with an EU Passport (2000-2005) is also documented and discussed, in which she as a citizen of the former Republic of Yugoslovia, living in Belgrade, advertised for an EU husband, married and then divorced a German citizen to obtain papers to live and work in Germany. Ostojic's challenging work on these subjects has produced a book which challenges us to reconsider how we think about "subjects" and "citizenship" in today's globalised economy. Essays by Suzana Milevska, Pamela Allara, Rune Gade, Sefik Tatlic, Manuela Bojadzijev and Judith Surkis.

Review reproduced from Volume 6, n.paradoxa, July 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Harmony Hammond Lesbian Art in America:A Contemporary History

New York: Rizzoli International Publications Inc, 2000

ISBN 0-8478-2248-6

Advertised as a 'history of which girls made and showed what, when and where', this volume promises to be the most comprehensive documentation of lesbian artists in America. The introduction makes it clear that the territory mapped contains many problematic definitions post-Stonewall of the terms, lesbian, lesbian artist, feminist lesbian artist. Taking Martha Gever's definition as a guide each definition is situated in relation to the 'complex, often treacherous, system of cultural identites, representations and institutions, and a history of sexual and social regulation.' Three hundred artists and thirty years of this story are included in this original and in-depth research developed alongside Harmony Hammond's own activism in this period with many feminist and lesbian artists in America as an organiser and artist.

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Nat Muller & Deanna Herst (eds) Ctrl+shift alt-ctrl+shift gender: Convergences of Gender, New Media and Art Netherlands, Amsterdam: Axis Bureau voor de Kunsten V/M, 2000.

A new reader from Axis, anthologising existing material on cyberfeminism, electronic music, internet sites, women's images in computer games and issues in new media art, aesthetics and web design. Contributors include Faith Wilding, Verena Kuni, Hannah Bosma, Yvonne Volkart, Angelika Beckmann, Anne-Marie Schleiner and Cornelia Sollfrank, Kathy Rae Huffman and Margarete Jahrmann. A wide range of websites are also presented.

Review reproduced from Volume 1, n.paradoxa, Jan 1998. Katy Deepwell 'Short Reviews of New Publications' - This book contains documentation and interviews about Susan Hiller's work as a multi-media artist from 1973 to the present. The book has been produced through a collaboration between Susan Hiller and Barbara Einzig and foregrounds the idea of art as epistemology : a lens through which we can view the grounds of culture and knowledge formations. Hiller's interests and her work as an anthropologist are discussed ; alongside her interest in automatism, shamanism : language, sex and death against the legacy of conceptualism, a critique of representation and specifically scientific forms of empiricism.

1. Inside all Activities: The Artist as Anthropologist ; 2.Within and Against : Women Being Artists; 3.Fragments of A Forgotten Language:Automatism,Dream,Collective Reveries; 4. Working Through Culture: Convetions of Seeing; 5.Objects as Events Extended Over Time:Nature as Representation 6.Art and Knowledge: A Critique of Empiricism.

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Home presents Home 2

A DVD published by Jordan UK and Home. A DVD. Artists' performances in the second exhibition/presentation at home, a space in South London set up and run by the artist Laura Godfrey-Isaacs. This DVD features performances, scripts, images & introductory texts from: Bobby Baker, Helena Bryant, Michelle Griffiths, Anna O (Janet Hand & Tessa Speak), Hayley Newman, Clare Roberts, Joshua Sofaer, Gary Stevens, John Seth & Anne Tallentire, Julian Woropay.

Review reproduced from Volume 9, n.paradoxa, Jan 2002. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Klaus Honnef (ed) Melanie Manchot: Love is a Stranger: Photographs 1998-2001

Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2001

3-7913-2532-9

Lavishly and generously illustrated in colour, this book documents several major series by the artist and includes short statements by her on the work. These include Liminal Portraits, frank and beautiful photos of the artist's mother positioned naked against the landscape; For a Moment Between Strangers; The LA Pictures; Gestures of Demarcation; The Fountainbleau Series - a series of double portraits of women based on a painting and several billboard projects. Essays by Janet Hand, Klaus Honnef and Stuart Horodner.

Review reproduced from Volume 22, n.paradoxa, July 2008. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Gabriele Horn, Ruth Ronen (eds) Sigalit Landau Kunst-Werke Berlin and Hatje Cantz, 2007 Texts in German and English ISBN: 978-3-7757-2104-2

Landau, who is based in Jerusalem, works across the media of sculpture, performance, video producing large scale installations often using sound or video. Her reputation as a powerful artist engaged with the politics of globalisation, especially issues of migration, oppression and the consequent degradation of the environment was secured by the showing of Resident Alien I at documenta X. The new work featured in this exhibition catalogue of The Dining Hall at Kunst-Werke is no less challenging, moving from an assessment of the spaces of communal life to the relationship between flesh, meat, salt and matter as metaphors for how we live today. Oral histories are retold in this space and they include voices of elderly women speaking about their stories, in contrast to the conflicts produced through Zionism, especially those related to food, nourishment and digestion and identity as described by Tali Tamir in the main essay on 'Collective Digestion and Table Manners'. Essays by other contributors address other works in her oeuvre. The book also contains documentation of works between 1994-2005 produced largely in Israel or Germany. Her later works are an examination of the politics and physical properties of the Dead Sea.

Review reproduced from Volume 16, n.paradoxa, July 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder (eds)

Caught in the Act:an Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (Toronto:YYZ Books, 2004)

ISBN: 0-920397-84-0

This is an impressive and important book and an invaluable teaching tool. Documenting women performance artists working in Canada in the 1970s and 1980s, it parallels the territory of Moira Roth's classic on American feminist performance art, The Amazing Decade. The book offers 25 profiles of women artists or groups working across Canada based on interviews, with extensive descriptions of individual performances and actions. Overviews of the field are offered by both performance artists and critics: Johanna Householder; Tanya Mars (emphasising the use of humour as a strategy); Tagny Duff (on work in Vancouver 1973-1983); Dot Tuer (on the body politic); Elizabeth Chitty (on embodiment practices) and Jayne Wark (on costume and dress). Dot Tuer's definition of performance as a means for women to 'render visible the politics of representation as a struggle over control of real bodies in time and space' underpins the approach of many whose work is recorded in this book.

Artists profiled include: Lillian Allen; Anna Banana; Rebecca Belmore; Berenicci; May Chan; Elizabeth Chitty; The Clichettes; Kate Craig; Rae Davis; Shawna Dempsey & Lorri Millan; Nathalie Derome; Margaret Dragu; Lily Eng; Gathie Falk; Vera Frenkel; Collen Gray; Johanna Householder; The Hummer sisters; Suzanne Jolly; Kiss and Tell; Sylvie Laliberte; Frances Leeming; Cheryl L'Hirondelle Waynohtew; Toby MacLennan; Tanya Mars; marshalore; Rita McKeough; Pam Patterson and Leena Raudvee; Paulette Phillips; Robin Poitras; Judy Radul; Francoise Sullivan; Sylvie Tourangeau and Colette Urban.

Text from feature reproduced from Volume 12, n.paradoxa, July 2003. From My Fingers: Living in the Technological Age

Taiwan: Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts May 8 2003 to July 27 2003

Curator: Elsa Chen

This exhibition, as the key event of the First International Women's Art Festival in Taiwan, explores how contemporary technology has transformed the human mind, body and behaviour in the works of eighteen significant international women artists and art groups from Taiwan and other East Asian origins. Employing a variety of media, from paper work to cyber art, the exhibition is a response to the trends towards using new technologies in contemporary art and culture. The works offered a mixture of warm and humorous representations of the women artists' anxieties, enthusiasms or skepticism towards their lives in today's technological age. n.paradoxa features some of the works included (print copy only). A catalogue is available from Kaoshiung Museum.First International Women's Art Festival in Taiwan: Women, Art and Technology: Collected Essays (Taiwan: Kaoshiung Museum of Fine Arts, 2004) curator: Elsa Hsiang-chun Chen ---- Review reproduced from Volume 16, n.paradoxa, July 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Elsa Hsiang-chun Chen (ed) First International Women's Art Festival in Taiwan: Women, Art and Technology: Collected Essays

(Taiwan: Kaoshiung Museum of Fine Arts: August 2004) Text in Chinese and English. ISBN 957-01-8066-8

Published to accompany a festival, this significant anthology of new essays brings together many prominent feminists across Asia for both historical reflection on feminist legacies and discussions about the nature of feminist art practices in countries as diverse as Taiwan (Elsa Chen), Korea (Gugok Kim Honghee), the Philippines (Flaudette May Datuin), North America and Japan (Keiko Sei), and Hong Kong (Phoebe Chingying Man) . Essays are included by both critics and artists about new technologies, the contexts in which they work/network and their art practices by Juin Shieh; Irina Aristarkhova; Shirley Tse; Mina Cheon; Varsha Nair; Tari Ito; while Griselda Pollock tackles 'What is Feminist Art: or How not to Answer a Question Like That in Six Thousands Words'.

Review first published in n.paradoxa online (May 1997) by Katy Deepwell -- This book addresses the question of gender in architectural practice. Touching on familiar questions for women practitioners : Do women design differently from men? Is there a feminine architecture? What does it look like? and at the same time trying to move beyond these into more complex questions of the problem of 'Woman' already-inscribed in language in its contradictory even opposition placement against the work of real women architects. The aim is to produce a collective autobiography of practice : one which multiplies that sense of possibility in gender beyond simple binary oppositions of male/female. As one reviewer put it, the book is collected 'with cunning and tact', essays are linked in a tangential but flowing manner.

Contents and Authors:

Beatriz Colomina discusses Eileen Gray's house E.1027 at Cap Martin and the contradictory place of Le Corbusier's gift mural within it. Martine De Maesener's essay plays on the conflicts in language and spatial design embodied in the notion of form and function : a play between up and side, 'Op-Zij' (in Dutch) inside/outside in 'Rear Window'. Francoise-Helene Jourda describes her architectural practice (and collaborations) in terms of principles specifically exploiting contradictory principles. Elizabeth Diller moves from an analysis of time-motion efficency in 1950s Taylorism to a clever pun on the pyschology of housewives dis-/mal-content in pressing the perfect shirt. Dagmar Richter, inspired by Cixous' challenge to put into words the unthinkable/unthought offers reflections on 'A Practice of One's Own' from building the Century City to using 'irony' as a method to redesign Beirut. Nasrine Seraji-Bozorgzad's reflections presented in image/text forms present reflections on territories and models of architectural practice in order to illuminate her own position. Catherine Ingraham takes up Francesca Hughes' suggestion of women operating as both insiders and outsiders in architecture language and its objects: as a site for a lament. Christine Hawley presents aspects of her own practice and offers ideas and salutary warnings about challenging the norms of architecture. Merrill Elam discusses some of her own projects and recollections ; Diana Agrest 'The Return of (the Repressed) Nature in the China Basin project; Magret Hargardottir discusses her design of City Hall, Reyjavick,Iceland and work in Wiesbaden; and Jennifer Bloomer the principles of composition and fascination in still life in her work.

Review reproduced from Volume 18, n.paradoxa, July 2006. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Mako Idemitsu What a woman made art media KY, DVD and booklet in Japanese, with English summary

www.amky.org

This invaluable DVD contains three of Japanese artist Mako Idemitsu's early feminist video works:What a Woman Made (1973), a film about menstruation and womanhood; Woman's House (1972), her footage of the Womanhouse Project in California and Another Day of a Housewife (1977), a video about the routine of housework. Mako Idemitsu produced artist's pages in Vol.16 of n.paradoxa.

Review reproduced from Volume 14, n.paradoxa, July 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Joanna Inglot The Figurative Sculpture of Magadalena Abakanowicz: Bodies, Environments, and Myths University of California Press, 2004 ISBN: 0-520-23125-2

While offering a critical perspective on Magdalena Abakanowicz which seeks to position her work in the context of Polish art developments and demythologise her reputation as the loner or outsider from Communist Poland, driven by intuition and imagination, in international circles, this book was nevertheless published without key reproductions or interviews. Permission for this was withheld by the artist in the final stages of its production in spite of her co-operation in the research. The tension in the book between the author's reading and the artist's perspective of herself is interesting here. Abakanowicz's early family life, her development as an artist are outlined as well as the shifts in cultural policy in Poland. Inglot also compares Abakanowicz with Alina Szapocznikow amongst her peers in Poland. However, more significant in the argument is how the author contrasts Abakanowicz's popular reception by many feminists in the US with the artist's own statements, in which she refuses to see equality as an issue (a common position in Eastern Europe where equality was official policy) combined with her refusal to acknowledge her perspective as gendered, while instead stressing its contribution to humanity, universal values and the importance of mystery in art.

Review reproduced from Volume 15, n.paradoxa, Jan 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Luce Irigaray Key Writings London/New York: Continuum, 2004 ISBN: 0 8264 6940 X

A new anthology of collected writings on philosophy, linguistics, art, spirituality, religion and politics, advancing her argument about 'a culture of two subjects' beyond the so-called neutered and universal subject but taking account of sexuate difference as a respect for difference in terms of speaking and being. Irigaray also describes this book as a return to her concerns in Speculum and the problem of how to approach the other as other.

Review reproduced from Volume 27, n.paradoxa, Jan 2011. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Sharon Irish Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between University of Minnesota Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-8186-6096-4

Offering a strong chronological overview of the different projects which Suzanne Lacy has made since 1972, this book is the first, apart from discussion in exhibition catalogues, to offer an extended insight into Lacy's work in the last forty years. It summarises how Lacy's work has resisted racism, promoted feminism and explored human relationships in her development of new genre public art.

Review first published in n.paradoxa online (May 1997) by Katy Deepwell -- Jo Anna Isaak analyses and presents the work of women artists from the U.S., the former Soviet Union; the United Kingdom and Canada in this book, beginning with the work from her 1982 exhibition 'The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter' and its 1992 sequel 'Laughter Ten Years After'. Two chapters engage with her work on Freud and feminist readings 'Art History and Its Discontents' and 'Encore'; and on Cixous in 'Mapping the Imaginary'. There are many insights and ideas presented for feminist analysis within this book. What is immediately striking is the move towards an international appraisal of parallels within feminism and the importance of 'heteroglossia'.

Chapters : The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter ; Art History and Its (Dis)Contents ; Reflections of Resistance: Women Artists on the Other Side of the Mir; Mothers of Invention ; Mapping the Imaginary ; Encore.

Review reproduced from Volume 20, n.paradoxa, July 2007. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Sanja Ivekovic Public Cuts Ljubljana, Slovenia: P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E., 2006

ISBN: 10-961-91737-1-6

This catalogue introduced by Bojana Pejic documents the work of Sanja Ivekovic in public spaces in the last three decades from her renowned performance action Triangle (1979) staged on one of President Tito's visits to Zagreb to LiverPoll (2004 Liverpool Biennial), her street sculptures based on responses to a poll of public opinion and Attention: Women at Work! (2006), a series of altered traffic signs in Ljubljana.

Review reproduced from Volume 15, n.paradoxa, Jan 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Natalie Jeremijenko and Eugene Thacker (Biotech Hobbyist)

Creative Biotechnology: A User's Manual Newcastle: Locus +, 2004

ISBN:1 899377 22 0

Divided into two parts, with each contributor framing their own approach to the subject, this is both an instructional manual and an operator warning system for biotech hobbyists. Jeremijenko's discussions are framed by the strange arrest and ongoing prosecution of Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble by US authorities under the mail and wire fraud act, and not anti-terror laws, and what it means for an artist to experiment with "innocent" bio-technological materials in the US, given the current wave of cultural panic about terrorism. While Thacker documents his own biomolecular practice and experiments with language, Jeremijenko seeks to provide a context for working with biological experiments. Her own work includes experiments with artificial skin grafts, micropropogation, test equipment for Milgram's mice, and genetic horoscopes.

Review reproduced from Volume 2, n.paradoxa, July 1998. Hilary Robinson 'Book Reviews'

Amelia Jones Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) ISBN 0 8166 2773 8

This is a book which, I feel, will have a far-reaching effect upon the development of the theoretical discourses around performance, representations of the body, and body art in particular. Amelia Jones develops models for thinking through the representation of the artist's body/self in artworks and the associated problematics of the mediation of subjectivity between artist and audience. Using a phenomenological basis for developing understanding of body art as intersubjective (rather than subject/object), Jones traces body art's disruption of the normative values of the modernist art world. The significance of the particularity of the body used is demonstrated through close readings of certain works: any artist's body/self used in an artwork becomes explicitly non-universal, non-transcendent. In this lies body art's potential for radical (including feminist) practices. Works by Vito Acconci and Hannah Wilke are analyzed in depth against this background, enriched by readings across a host of works by other artists, demonstrating the delicate but insistent play of intersubjectivity.

This is not a book 'about' body art, then (and still less is it one 'about' particular artists), so much as one which aims to develop the critical vocabulary and shape the discourses of body art, opening spaces for gender-aware and anti-racist practices. This it does productively and provocatively. Its language is rich and challenging (if with a decided American accent - many nouns extended into adjectives and verbs). Its main fault for the researcher-reader is its lack of separate bibliography: one has to trace back through the notes, which is frustrating, as they take up over a quarter of its pages.

My main problem with the book's argument is tangential to its aim: it lies with one of Jones's definitions of "body art", which I feel is an over-protective handling of a methodological problem. Early on, Jones stresses that body art is dependent upon photographic documentation (p.13), later adding that it [depends] on documentation to attain symbolic status within the realm of culture (p.33). While photographic documentation is crucial for the retrospective researcher, it is important to distinguish between body art intended to be mediated in photographic format (like some of Wilke's work under discussion), and that which is documented through photographs - in which case the photographic evidence remains highly contingent and partial, and the structures of discourse around them differ. A few photographs taken during (say) a 12-hour non-stop body art work can only be understood as a trace record, rather than privileged access to the artist/subject; the most reductive critic would at this point mourn the loss of such access, deeming it only possible through attending/participating in the performance itself. The significance of this distinction is not clear in the book (indeed, the import of time in the processes of body art is notably absent from the discussion). This point (and my terminology) cut across Amelia Jones's intentions of elucidating the intersubjective nature of body art, but it is crucial in the thorny debate about the representation of body art and the possibility not only for adequate documentation but also for a radical (feminist) retrospective critical analysis. Jones positions the reading by Alan Kaprow of Hans Namuth's photographs of Jackson Pollock as crucial to the development of Happenings; but this could only happen with the imaginative leap from reading those photographs as indexical of the (unmediated) subject 'behind' the paintings, to reading them as indexical of a possible repertoire of gestures of mediation. Only then can the subjectivity of the artist be constructed as particular and contingent. What is indicated here is that the strategic reading of the documentary photograph is at stake. This could, I think, have been explored in the book; however, this removes little from Jones's overall, and considerable, achievement of shifting the models of thinking about body art away from the prevalent idealist notions of unmediated access to the artist/subject and into a more radical realm which can only be of benefit to developing feminist critical thought.

Review reproduced from Volume 12, n.paradoxa, July 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Amelia Jones (ed)

The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader London: Routledge, 2003

ISBN: 0-415-26706-4

Divided into seven parts with 62 essays or extracts from articles, this book aims to be another definitive reader for feminist teaching. The introduction and the first section Provocation offer six new essays which examine the current state of feminist scholarship for its biases and the relationship of feminism to visual culture. Amelia Jones insists on the intersecting nature of feminism and visual culture, positioning feminism as central rather than an adjunct or specialist area within visual culture. She also draws a distinction between visual culture and cultural studies based on the former's exclusive concern with visuality. Rosemary Betterton discusses the difficulties of students when faced with artworks from the past, in spite of their considerable skills in reading images from popular culture as part of the shift involved in visual culture when moving from a discipline-based study to interdisciplinary analysis. Jennifer Doyle analyses how homophobia and misogyny continue to structure the art world and our knowledge systems; Lisa Bloom considers how feminism must now attend to how (Western) feminist theories may and may not work in different trans-national locations and consider again their own regional context of operation. Judith Wilson considers the semantics involved in thinking about a black feminist visual theory: positioning the first as a social category; the second a political orientation;the third a mode of perception, a category of cultural phenomena. Interestingly, she positions black women artists as ahead of theoretical research in their practice. Faith Wilding discusses cyberfeminist debates and draws attention not only to the bio-tech industry but the pace of modern industrialised life globally. Meiling Chang concludes by discussing a metaphor for feminism as a pool of colours to which ever more pigments are being added.

The book then divides into parts titled: Representation; Difference; Disciplines/Strategies; Mass Culture/Media Interventions; Body; and Technology. In each section eight to ten essays, primarily from the last three decades are included. Amelia Jones based her selection of Anglophone texts (largely US/UK-based) on tracing a history of theory, selecting canonical articles which each represent a shift in methodology, while maintaining overall a heterodoxy of debates and ideas to reveal the intersection between feminist theory and visual culture.

Review reproduced from Volume 20, n.paradoxa, July 2007. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Amelia Jones Self/Image: Technology, Representation and the Contemporary Subject London: Routledge, 2006 ISBN: 978-0-415-34522-4

The contention of this book is that both ideas of a contemporary self and self-image have been reconfigured since the 1970s by the impact of new technologies in the consumer spectacle of late global capitalism. Jones reviews a wide range of film, performance, video and multi-media art projects drawing together her own experiences of the work and a larger conceptual framework about the shifting forms of "self" in post-post-modernist and philosophical terms. An interval in the book introduces the work of Asco, a Los-Angeles based 1970s activist art collective, while Pipilotti Rist, Cindy Sherman and Stellarc provide major case studies within the chapters to emphasise that the body, albeit reconfigured, is not obsolete.

Review reproduced from Volume 22, n.paradoxa, July 2008. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Beatrice Josse and Helene Guenin (eds.)

2 or 3 Things I don't Know about Her: Towards a Post(?)-Feminist Manifesto

Text in English and French Exhibition catalogue

France: Metz, Frac Lorraine ISBN: 978-2-9112-711-44

This exhibition catalogue (from a show of women artists including Natalie LL, Esther Ferrer and Katarzyna Kozyra) contains nineteen short statements from artists, curators, writers, philosophers, social theorists and art historians from Europe examining the state of feminism. These statements are what makes this catalogue so interesting. While there is no consensus offered by both male and female contributors about whether we are in a post-feminist situation, most affirm the necessity of a feminist discourse and practice. In doing so, the essays touch on many issues, globalisation (Juan Vicente Allaga, Ursula Biemann), transgender politics (Stephanie Nicot, Marie-Helene Bourcier), the limits of feminist art histories (Aneta Szylak, Elisabeth Lebovici), definitions of artist and feminist subject(s) (Tania Mouraud, K. Kozyra) - as well as having some light and slightly whimsical touches for example, the curator, Beatrice Josse's glossary of key terms.

Review reproduced from Volume 6, n.paradoxa, July 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Kirsten Justesen Re Kollektion / Re Collection

Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum 17 April - 13 June 1999. Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Aalborg Denmark. Text: Danish and English

ISBN 87-88307-41-7

The most comprehensive exhibition catalogue to date on the pioneering Danish feminist artist Kirsten Justesen work in photography, performance-actions and mixed media/sculpture/ installations since 1968. (See the extensive interview with her in n.paradoxa Vol 3, 1999). Each work is introduced by a critical commentary on the piece or parallel to it by a wide range of authors from Eric Andersen, Lene Burkard, Lars Bang Larsen, Kirstine Roepstorff and Tania Orum to name but a few. The exhibition uniquely re-displayed all Justesen works in a new digital form producing a visual archive rendered as large photographic prints of this wide-ranging body of work. A second book, a collaboration, of photo-text with Alison Knowles was also published to accompany the exhibition.

Review reproduced from Volume 12, n.paradoxa, July 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Kirsten Justesen Melting Time #11

Denmark: Kunstmuseet Brundlund Slot, Aabenraa and Kastrupgardsamlingen,

Kastrup, 2003. Exhibition catalogue and book, 2003. Text in Danish and English.

ISBN 87-90791-06-1

Divided into five parts, this expanded exhibition catalogue maps Kirsten Justesen's Melting Time series from #1 in 1980 to #11 in 2003. The latest installation Melting Time #11 was composed of ice sculptures - which melted each day - large photographs and sound. Part IV reproduces some of the 31 poems selected by Poul Borum about snow for the artist's birthday in 1993, which were read at Smeltetid/Melting Time #5 (Overgaden, 1993). Ice is used by Justesen as more than a material, its metaphorical properties, especially in its transition back to water, its relationship to the body and to heat are all redeployed to speak about the human condition; about the roleof Woman; the myth of the Nordic ice maiden; about folklore; geography; cooking; global differences; communication networks and the contrasts between man-made objects and nature. The incarnations of the works in photographic series, video and multi-media installations, performances and sound pieces are equally diverse.

Review reproduced from Volume 11, n.paradoxa, Jan 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

N. Kamenetskaya and L. Iovleva

(eds) Femme Art: Women Painting in Russia XV-XX centuries

Moscow: INO & State Tretyakov Gallery, 2002. Text in both English and Russian.

Primarily drawing on the State Tretyakov Gallery collection, of which readers may be surprised to learn 30% are works by women artists, this exhibition was organised by the gallery in conjunction with the internationally toured Amazons of the Avant-Garde. The works from five centuries embraces the embroidery craftshops of the early Russian Tsars to video works and installation artists of today. Helena Goscilo and Elena Kornetchuk argue that contemporary women artists in Russia for the last two decades fit into four categories: 1) the selfportrait as a dominant genre; 2) the transvaluation of domestic space and household objects; 3) an ironic distancing from (or interrogation of) traditional gender roles in and beyond Soviet culture and 4) parallels with developments in women's prose, especially the use of role reversal and sexually ambiguous imagery.

Other essays included are by Mila Bredikhina; Ludmila A. Markina; Natalia A, Mayasova; Nadazhda M. Yurassovskaya; Myda Yablonskaya plus the editors. A website of the project is currently being constructed by Natalia Kamenetskaya.

Review reproduced from Volume 27, n.paradoxa, Jan 2011. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Natalya Kamenetskaya and Oksana Sarkisyan Zen d'Art: The History of Gender and Art in Post-Soviet Space Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2010 ISBN: 978-91611-017-3

This large format exhibition catalogue contains unique and important documentation of feminist activities in Russia, largely in the cities of Moscow and St Petersburg, since 1988: and covers over twenty years of exhibitions, events and art works. The cyber-femin-club of Gallery 21; the history of women artists' shows by Russian feminist artists at home and abroad are documented in the photography and descriptions. Essays by Mila Bredikhina; Oleysa Turkina, Margarita Tupitsyn, Anna Alchuk, Alla Mitrofanova and Irina Aktuganova are also included. Many important texts from Russian women about feminist art ,the ambiguities of feminism and its progress / reception in Russia since 1988 are translated into English here for the first time. Recognising this picture as 'non-linear fragments of history from the archives' the exhibition and its catalogue is a bold and magnificent attempt to put contemporary feminist art from Russia on the international map and develops the small late twentieth century part of the previous major exhibition organised by Natalya Kamenetskaya, Femme Art (2002).

Review reproduced from Volume 16, n.paradoxa, July 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Michiko Kasahara Life Actually MOT Annual 2005

exhibition catalogue (Tokyo: Museum of Contemporary Art, 15 Jan.-21 March 2005) Text in Japanese and English

Curated by Michiko Kasahara, who was also curator of the Japanese pavilion in Venice in 2005, this exhibition was the first all female artists' show at Tokyo's Museum of Contemporary Art. Her catalogue essay introduces the work from her own perspective as an independent single woman through a witty comparison with the disasters of Bridget Jones or the explicitness of Sex in the City (both available in Japan), from someone seeking an expression of women's sexual pleasure in contemporary art, when her situation is often seen by other Japanese as either wretched or lonely. Her selection of the abstract and sensual Akiko Mizoguichi's o.i.c.'s work My lover shoots his load inside me. The sperm flows in my body. It is this moment when I feel most alive (2004) is her attempt to address the question of women's sexual subjectivity, as is Hiroko Okada's work Singing in the Pain (2004) about a housewife who through loneliness commits suicide as a demonstration of the failure of this ideal anymore for Japanese women. The legacy of Japan's role in the Second World War and its implications for women was the subject of works by Mako Idemitsu and Yoshiko Shimada (both featured earlier in n.paradoxa Volume 15). The question of subjectivity and individualism emerged in different forms in the photos of Tomoko Sawada (ID 400 (1998) and School Days (2004)) who re-cycles and displaces her own photo-ID as a clone into other group photos; in the word plays and graphic pieces of Hiroko Ichichara; and the fantasy fairy-tale paintings of Tomoko Konoike. This exhibition was a bold attempt to redraw conceptions of women's subjectivity through the display of contemporary Japanese women artists.

Artists in exhibition: Leiko Ikemura, Nobuko Watabiki; Hiroko Okada; Mako Idemitsu; Yoshiko Shimada; Tomoko Sawada; Hiroko Ichichara; Akiko Mizoguchi o.i.c.; Tomoko Konoike; Yuki Onodera.

Review reproduced from Volume 1, n.paradoxa, Jan 1998. Katy Deepwell 'Short Reviews of New Publications' - Divided into 5 sections, this volume reprints many of Kelly's published writings in a new context allowing a greater insight into her cultural, critical and artistic projects over the last two decades. Her reflections on the direction of feminist art practice since the 1970s; on the politics of modernism; on the representation of femininity in artistic practice ; and on the female/feminist subject in history continue to inspire and provoke feminist debate in the UK and USA.

The 5 sections of the book are :- I.Feminist Interventions; II Unspeakable Subjects; III Postmodern Oppositions ; IV Invisible Bodies; V Gender Hybrids.

Review reproduced from Volume 8, n.paradoxa, July 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Janice Kerbel

15 Lombard St London: Bookworks, 2001 ISBN 1 870699 45 9

Two fantasies sustain this artist's project, the fantasy of absolute control by a bank in maintaining the security of its money and the fantasy of robbing the bank in a classic well-calculated heist. The artist dissects both genres with the precision of the all-seeing, all-knowing detective whose research succeeds in plotting every action, every role and every split second of timing. In clipped and factual report language the actions, diversions and escape plans of the thieves and the security measures of the bank are laid bare. The language, like a court report, is supported by the surveillance-type photos documenting the bank, the guards, the "scene of crime". Is this a capricious reconstruction of what might be, a systems analysis or a master plan? Is the artist a social researcher or an imaginative script-writer for a great escape to the Costa del Sol, home to many famous UK armed robbers?Ah, the seduction of a single "job" (or work of art) which will bring total fame and fortune!

Review reproduced from Volume 5, n.paradoxa, Jan 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Joan Kerr and Jo Holder Past Present: The National Women's Art Anthology

Craftsman House, an imprint of G+B, 1999

ISBN 90-5704-141-3

A long awaited and invaluable publication which revisits the work of the 1995 National Women's Art Exhibition; an event comprising 150 separate exhibitions of across Australia. This volume concentrates on contemporary women artists and is a companion to the first publication Heritage (1995). Brilliant case studies and polemical critical essays from Australia's leading feminists and reviews of the legacy of the 1970s into the late 1990s !

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Katalin Keseru (ed. /curator) Women's Art in Hungary 1960-2000

(exhibition catalogue, English text)

Budapest, Ernst Museum, September 20-October 11, 2000

ISBN 963 00 4379 3

This exhibition catalogue is from one of the first exhibitions to show the work of women artists from the last forty years in Hungary. This broad span embraces sculpture, textiles, painting, performance and installation and touches on the work of Erzsebet Schaar, Julia Vajda (1960s), Dora Maurer, Ilona Novas (1980s) to Ilona Nemeth and Emese Benczur (1990s). The text, however, struggles to define the work of these women in relation to their male peers in terms of either their feminine or individual contribution, trying to combat the charge of being the "second sex" when judged against a neutral universal standard, maintained by modernist art history. Three categories are set out : the creation of self-identities (1960s); female experience in art (1970s/1980s) and a female voice (1990s). While well illustrated, it lacks much valuable supporting information, including CV's of the artists or extensive bibliographies.

Review reproduced from Volume 11, n.paradoxa, Jan 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews: Artist's Books'

Lucy Kimbell Audit London: Bookworks, 2002. ISBN 1-870699-60-2

This witty and intriguing artist's project is based on an audit of the artist's value to friends, family and acquaintances. Sections from the 56 responses to her original questionnaire are Review reproduced, alongside her own analysis of the results. These and her interactions with the respondents are presented in a neat and very polished graphic form. Her own approach is further "audited" by comments from and interviews with official auditors and social analysts. While value is rated primarily in monetary terms, she does attempt to consider her community and environmental worth in the opinions of others. Is this a parable of modern life?

Review reproduced from Volume 9, n.paradoxa, Jan 2002. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Wendy Kirkup Echo catalogue and CD-Rom Newcastle: Locus +, 2001

9-781899-377121

Initally presented as a live satellite broadcast at the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow and the Center for Life, Newcastle upon Tyne, this project, re-presented as a CD-Rom, uses the technology of ultra-sound to map the artist's body and reconsider its internal spaces as a revised atlas of the body. While the piece was being made, the artist became pregnant and her position under ultrasound oscillated between "patient" and "artist", linking as she suggests the realms of semiotic, corporeal and libidinal layers within this work. The catalogue includes essays by the artist, Tom Shakespeare, Eric Laurier and Renee Baert.

Review reproduced from Volume 17, n.paradoxa, Jan 2006. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Japanese Women Artists in Avantgarde Movements, 1950-1975

Exhibition Catalogue. curated by Kokatsu Reiko

Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts (Japanese/ English text)

This is the second exhibition in a series organised by this museum on the history of Japanese women artists. The ambition to conduct a comprehensive survey of all women artists associated with avantgarde movements in Japan was curtailed but it is nevertheless an impressive account of women artists since the 1950s in Demokrato, Gutai, Kyushu School, neo-Dada and Fluxus, as well as many independent art exhibitions examining their critical reception by both sceptical and sympathetic male critics of the time. Essays and research by Reiko Kokatsu and Midori Yoshimoto.

Review reproduced from Volume 16, n.paradoxa, July 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Silvia Kolbowski inadequate...Like...Power exhibition catalogue Vienna:

Secession, 17 Sept.-11 Nov. 2004: Koln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2004 ISBN: 3-88375-894-9

Three projects, as installations with video, form the basis of this artist's exhibition. The first, an inadequate history of conceptual art, offers a counter history to the re-evaluation of conceptual art in the 1990s and combines 22 recordings of artists discussing their experience of an exhibition or performance of conceptual art between 1965-1975. The soundtracks are accompanied by videos of the hands of the anonymous interviewees as they speak. The second work, Like Looking Away focuses on the experience of shopping as understood through 10 women aged 18-34. Their words are retold by one actress, imitating the timbre and accent of their different voices. Photos of the women themselves looking away were also shown.The final piece, Proximity to Power, juxtaposes interviews with men who support and work for "powerful" men - politicians, investors, or power brokers - as they analyse their relation to power with images based on the representation of power as understood from 40 boys aged 7-11. The catalogue contains analytical essays about these works by Rosalyn Deutsche, Mignon Nixon and Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, and an interview between the artist and Hal Foster.

Review reproduced from Volume 22, n.paradoxa, July 2008. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Susan Kozel Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology

MIT: Leonardo series, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-262-11310-6

Part academic treatise, part documentation of a ten years of practice, Kozel analyses Merleau-Ponty's theory of phenomenology in relationship to approaches and methods she has developed in dance, performance and to the applications both real and virtual of wearable technologies in performances. The book represents an interesting approach because it mirrors the processes currently conducted by a considerable number of PhD students in the UK as practice-based research but this does not seem to have been the impetus behind the book, rather the establishment of a new form of interdisciplinary discourse.

Review reproduced from Volume 15, n.paradoxa, Jan 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Chris Kraus Video Green: Los Angeles Art and The Triumph of Nothingness

Mass.: Cambridge, MIT/Semiotext(e) Active Agents Series, 2004 ISBN: 1 584 35022 9

The many short chapters of this book incorporate diary-writing, reflection on art, artists, the local architecture of LA and what it means to write and teach. Originally written as a column called 'Torpor' in Artext and then C Magazine International, the material is focused on LA in the late 1990s. Loaning money, S/M relationships, using phone sex and personal ads in a variety of sexual encounters and exchanges, and following other people's desparate stories of poverty, homelessness and inadequate access to health-care all emerge as part of the narrative in the reflections about the emptiness and potential of being creative in LA.

This review was first published by Katy Deepwell in Women's Art Magazine July/August 1993 No.53 --- This is a difficult, provocative and challenging book. Its central themes emerge slowly as one familiarises oneself with the subtle crosscutting of voices, diary quotations, anecdotes, theoretical explorations and close readings which it offers. This "polyvalence" is central to Krauss's project, opening up the possibilities for re-reading modernism "from the inside"

Krauss re-examines what is at stake in the claims and counterclaims concerning some of modernism's heroes and bête noires, its championing critics and dissenting figures. Krauss reads against the grain of Greenbergian modernism, juxtaposing readings of John Ruskin on nature to Mondrian's grid,; of Duchamp on and against Fry; Ernst in relation to Freud; Dali against Bataille and Caillois; Helene Parmelin on Picasso; Twombly, Warhol and Hesse on Pollock. Remapping the structuralist graph which she has previously used so effectively in "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" (reprinted in Hal Foster Postmodern Culture,1985), to delineate the modernist vision of figure against ground, across Lacan's L-schema of a psychoanalytic theory of the subject, with its imaginary relations in the real and the unconscious repression of the Other, Krauss begins to define modernism's optical unconscious. The term borrowed and redeployed from Walter Benjamin's Small History of Photography (1931) refers to that which is externalised within the visual field, not simply in terms of modernism's scientific-technological games with the visual, but what it can reveal of the unconscious conflicts of makers and readers. Sexuality, specifically the carnality of vision, emerges centre-stage disavowing modernism's claims for the visual as autonomous, disinterested and transcendent.

Krauss' writing problematises the relationships between theory and an object; the procedures of art-making and reading; post-structuralist thought, modernism and Lacanian forms of psychoanalysis As Krauss herself says of Eva Hesse's work, the process aims to sap "from its very centre" modernism's "bachelor machine", logic and law in her ambition, its high seriousness, its engagement with visual experience and insistent female "Other" voice, striking parallels are constructed between Virginia Woolf (whose observations of Roger Fry delivering a lecture are quoted) and Krauss' own style (specifically her recollections of audiences with Michael [Fried] and Clem [Greenberg] )

The feminism underlying such a perspective remains implicit . For Krauss, like Woolf has an insider's view of what it is to be an Outsider; as a professional woman in a male club. As young initiate, Krauss laughed complicitly at Greenberg's jokes about "nice Jewish girls with typewriters" as she worked to become a "Clemberger" ; now as a mature writer, she freezes the underlying logic within its problematic and clinically and revealingly examines what remains of the corpse

Unlike Lucy Lippard, Krauss' recognition of the sexism within modernism, has not led to determined rejection of its critical apparatus via new definitions of value and a deliberate engagement with the large constituencies of politically engaged practitioners which modernism's narrow perspective refused to acknowledge. Or should, I say, yet. For illuminating and original as this book is about the limitations of Greenbergian modernism's logic seen from a post-structuralist perspective and suggestive as it is about psychoanalytic perspectives, it begs the question, can these tools also prove useful in the examination of that which is still truly repressed within modernist discourse, the work of women artists?

Review reproduced from Volume 15, n.paradoxa, Jan 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Claudia Reiche and Verena Kuni (eds.) c y b e r f e m i n i s m: next protocols New York: Autonomedia, 2004 ISBN: 1 57027 149 6

A new production, originated through a call for contributions to the Old Boys Network,the first international cyberfeminist alliance. Their definition of cyberfeminism is that it 'carries the fem in its center - fem which hints politically at gender and the female sex, yet exceeds, enjoys, and remodels this relation.' This book contains protocols for the future in the sense that these are both documents and coded commands for digital and human procedures of communication. Contributors include: Marie-Luise Angerer 'Cyber@rexia. Anorexia and Cyberspace'; Irina Aristarkhova 'Femininity, Community, Hospitality: Towards a Cyberethics'; Andrea Sick 'Dream-Machine: Cyberfeminism'; Helene von Oldenburg 'IF [ x ] ... THEN [ y] ...ELSE [XXn]'; Ephemera/Discordia/ Liquid_Nation / Plastique /Efemera_Clone_2 'Thoughts on Submission: Glances from the Warriors of Perception';Yvonne Volkart 'The Cyberfeminist Fantasy of the Pleasure of the Cyborg'; Anne-Marie Schleiner 'Female-Bobs Arrive at Dusk'; Verena Kuni 'Frame/Work'; Shu Lea Cheang 'I.K.U. Seven Pages'; Claudia Reiche 'On/Off-scenity: Medical and Erotic Couplings in the Context of the Visible Human Project'; Julie Doyle/ Kate O'Riordan 'Virtual Ideals: Art, Science and Gendered Cyberbodies'; Prema Murthy 'Ito Ay Panaginip Sa Ibang Pangungusap'; Marina Grzinic 'Monstrous Bodies and Subversive Errors'; Ingeborg Reichle 'Remaking Eden: On the reproducibility of images and the body in the age of virtual reality and genetic engineering' ; Ulrike Bergermann 'Analogue Trees, Genetics, and Digital Diving. Pictures of Human and Reproduction'; Christina Goestl 'If Cyberfeminism is a Monster... then Clitoris Visibility = true'; and Elisabeth Strowick 'Cyberfeminist Rhetoric, or Digital Act and Interfaced Bodies'.

Review reproduced from Volume 3, n.paradoxa, Jan 1999. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Farvens Krop/The Body of Colour: Nina Roos & Paula Modersohn-Becker

Denmark: Odense: Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik

28 Aug-1 Nov. 1998. ISBN 87-7766-074-9

This exhibition of Nina Roos' oil paintings made on acrylic sheets show her fascination with colour in Paula Modersohn-Becker's works. The relationship between the abstraction from the source was made all the more acute by the presentation of Paul Modersohn's original works (which were not available) in photographic lightboxes and the hanging arrangement in the galleries.

Review reproduced from Volume 24, n.paradoxa, July 2009. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Rudolfine Lackner (ed) Names are Shaping up nicely! Gendered nomenclature: in Art, Language and Philosophy Vienna: Vereinigung bildender Kunstlerinnen Osterreichs, 2008 ISBN: 978-3-200-01425-1

What is in a name for an artist? How do the names for objects, facts and people identify how we construct the reality of the world around us? How do women artists deal with changes to their name on marriage, after divorce or to create their professional identity, using pseudonyms? Is feminism a name for a movement, an all-encompassing ideology, the name given to an attitude or a means to signal political change? These are some of the intriguing questions tackled by the discussions in this publication which arose from several panel discussions organised by VBKO on art, cyberfeminism and the question of naming: interestingly, strongly influenced by Wittgenstein (e.g. Anna Aloisia Moser's essay). Contributors include academics, artists and writers from Austria, Mexico, Germany and Serbia, Netherlands and USA.

Review reproduced from Volume 27, n.paradoxa, Jan 2011. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Suzanne Lacy Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics and Publics, 1974-2007 Duke University Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-8223-4569-5

This new anthology of 30 texts by Suzanne Lacy written since 1974 will become an important point of reference to contemporary artists and theorists engaged in considering public art projects with social and political commitment. Her work for a long time has stood as an exemplar of strategies for worthwhile and productive forms of social engagement through art with a wide range of local community groups: as summarised in her book Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Bay press, 1995).

This new book offers insights into her own theorisation of events and works and the contexts which produced and framed her work. It will provoke new scholarship on her work and act as an ideal complement to the new monograph on her work which has just been produced.

Review reproduced from Volume 3, n.paradoxa, Jan 1999. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Mind and Spirit: Women's Art in Taiwan

Taiwan: Taipei Fine Arts Museum,

18 April-9 Sept 1998. ISBN 957-02-1501-1

A major exhibition of the history of Taiwanese Women Artists in the Twentieth Century. Curator Ying-Ying Lai. Catalogue in Chinese with English summaries. see full English text of curator Ying-Ying Lai's essay on n.paradoxa.

Review reproduced from Volume 12, n.paradoxa, July 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Michele Le Doeuff

The Philosophical Imaginary London: Continuum, 2002. ISBN 0-8264-5991-9

This important book analyses the manner in which philosophers "think in images", revealing the political unconscious at work in the philosophical tradition, in contrast to any claim to a collective imaginary. Instead Le Doeuff argues that images "cope" with problems in philosophy and the use of these images requires theorisation, in spite of philosophy's own claims about such illustrations as incidental and peripheral to thought. This was LeDoeuff's first book, and although two of its chapters have appeared before as articles in journals, this is the first full translation of the work into English. Le Doeuff, like Koyre and Bachelard, can be considered a critical epistemologist, working through rational critique to dissect philosophy's blind spots, its closures and aporias, especially with regard to its treatment of women. Philosophy's creation of Woman-as-Other implicit in its models and masculinist tropes is part and parcel of this analysis. So too is Le Doeuff's steady and careful unveiling of philosophy's own constructions in thought, especially its belief it can offer one reason or one imaginary and establish itself as hegemonic among disciplines, closing down on emerging domains and enforcing particular orthodoxies in its meta-discourse on itself. Le Doeuff also argues for women doing philosophy, acquiring a voice in the discourse, and not just providing commentaries as mediators of the tradition. [This book is a reprint of The Athlone Press 1989 edition. Trans. Colin Gordon. First published in French as L'Imaginaire Philosophique Paris: Editions Payot, 1980.]

Review reproduced from Volume 22, n.paradoxa, July 2008. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Zoe Leonard: Analogue Exhibition catalogue MIT/Wexner Center for the Arts, 2007. Curator: Helen Molesworth

ISBN: 978-0-262-12295-5

This book publishes some of the 400 photographs within this epic series (produced between 1998-2007) part-shown at documenta XII (2007), of shop fronts and displays of goods in mainly the streets of New York but expanded over the years to other cities in the world, Warsaw, Kampala, Jerusalem. The book contains an interesting essay of excerpts and quotations from other photographers, philosophers and writers, assembled by the artist, as an indication of her philosophy and approach.

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Lucy Lippard On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place

New York: New Press/ London: IB Tauris, 2000. ISBN 1 56584 454 8

What turns the place where you live, into the place which other people travel to come to see? Tourism, perhaps. Lippard's attention to the local and how it is transformed into an object of tourism is combined with a close examination of artworks which critically examine these very processes in operation. With the exception of one section on the Holocaust Memorial sites, the tourism she explores in centred in the US's own tourist industry, colonisation and pioneer/settler culture, moving south to Mexico and north to Canada. Tourism's role as a cultural industry is analysed throughout in relation to fine art's attention to the contradictions and politics of tourism in objectifying the local people as "Others" - socially, culturally, or historically - to satisfy the consumerism of the tourist. In the process she raises many procative questions about how we look at the world around us.

Review reproduced from Volume 24, n.paradoxa, July 2009. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Andrea Liss Feminist Art and the Maternal University of Minnesota Press, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-8166-4623-4

I am certain this book will become a valuable "must-read" for students and artists to break down the mythology of the separation between art and motherhood. Liss' book focuses on the very different models of motherhood projected in the work of some contemporary women artists from its repetitions in numerous chores and labour in Mierle Ukeles' Maintenance Art pieces to the poignancy of two mothers' grief in the collaboration between May Stevens and Civia Rosenberg. Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx and Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document are considered as well as work by Ellen McMahon, Gail Rebhan, M.A.M.A., Catherine Opie, Renee Cox, Susan Hiller and Ngozi Onwurah. The book's strength is its attempt to diversify "motherhood" into a plethora of attitudes to "good-enough mothers", embracing the ambivalences between mothers and their daughters and sons, the stresses, pains and pleasures, while all the time mixing in the text the biographical with the analytical. This is a thoughtful exploration of what feminists have brought to this question over several generations of art production.

Review reproduced from Volume 6, n.paradoxa, July 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Yve Lomax Writing the Image: An Adventure with Art and Theory

New York: I.B.Tauris, 2000

ISBN 1-86064-474-0

Part experiment in prose/poetry, part theoretical investigation of Michel Serres, Deleuze, Benjamin and theories of representation, vision and ideology, Yve Lomax's book reads like an artist's notebook or a diary and a treatise. Her writing practice closely mirrors her work and it is unfortunate that so few - and such poor - reproductions were included, though those that were, form important visual interludes within the space of the book. Irit Rogoff introduces and then intervenes to break up Yve Lomax's considered and intriguing mediations on the problems of representation, the artistic/ personal quest for knowledge and understanding, the attempts to develop critique within feminist practice and the frustrations and intellectual challenges of such work. This is an important book for artists and theorists as it reveals much about how theory mixed with experience becomes slowly absorbed into an individual's thought processes.

Review reproduced from Volume 15, n.paradoxa, Jan 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Yve Lomax Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature and Time London: IB Tauris,2005 ISBN: 1 85043 673 8

What constitutes an event? An exploration of this question is the subject of the book. Is an event going to happen, or has it happened already? And did we recognise it as such? Yve Lomax navigates her way through these simple questions, experimenting with voice, situation and dialogue, to more complex theorisations of noise, sound, space, time and modes of recognition; along the way examining statements and theories by Michel Serres, Isabelle Stengers, Maurice Blanchot, Alain Badiou, Jean-Francois Lyotard and others. Her purpose is to reflect on how interpretation operates in photography and how sound, image and text capture an event.

Review reproduced from Volume 5, n.paradoxa, Jan 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Anne Lydiat lost for words...

UK: Artists' Publication, 1999. ISBN 0-9535604-0-6

Orders: Tel: + 44 (0) 114 2517334.

Inspired by a quote from Maurice Blanchot's Traces/ L'Amitie, the pages of this artist designed book open up a space for reflection, meditation. The promise remains Blanchot's 'space of reserve and friendship.' And it's up to the audience to chose its uses. - Review reproduced from Volume 5, n.paradoxa, Jan 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Anne Lydiat Without

UK: Artists' Publication, 1999 ISBN 0-9535604-0-7

Published on the occasion of her recent exhibition at Sint Elisabeth Begijnhof, Kortrijk, this limited edition was integral to the organisation of the exhibition. Playing on negative and positive marking of space - the theme of her exhibition as a whole - the pages are marked by a cutout of a single Acer leaf found at the Beguinage in the preparation for the exhibition, echoing the contemplative silence of the place itself.

Review reproduced from Volume 24, n.paradoxa, July 2009. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Margo Machida Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American artists and the social imaginary Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0822-342-45

This is a fascinating and remarkable collection of essays documenting the work of Asian American artists since the 1990s - with a strong focus on women artists. Machida analyses and unpicks the shifting meanings of 'Asian ' identities in and through her discussion of contemporary American art practices focusing on key themes: questions of position/positionality in identity politics; representations of the Other; social memory and trauma, and migration, diaspora and sense of place. Ten interviews are the focus of the book's research. Women artists featured in depth include: Tommie Arai, Kristine Aono, Yong Soon Min, Hanh Thi Pham, Ming Fay and Zarina.

Review reproduced from Volume 13, n.paradoxa, Jan 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Judy Malloy (ed) Women, Art and Technology Foreword by Pat Bentson.

Massachusetts: Cambridge, MIT press, 2003. ISBN: 0-262-13424-1

This book is an invaluable compendium from Leonardo, whose project of the same name was designed to increase the contributions by women to the journal and to document women artists' long-standing involvement with new technologies/new media . Gendered differences to the dominant debates in this field and critiques of masculine biases are addressed but the book refreshingly focuses on women artists' production, offering overviews of genres, artists' perspectives and issue-based or region-based essays. New media embraces work which interfaces with science, computer art, telecommunications tools, video and new modes of interactivity in installations.

Contributors include: Patric D. Prince, Margaret Morse, Sheila Pinkel, Anna Couey, Kathy Brew, Steina, Joan Jonas, Dara Birnbaum, Jo Hanson, Helen Mayer/Newton Harrison, Sonya Rapoport, Lynn Hershman, Nancy Paterson, Pauline Oliveros, Rebecca Allen/Erkki Huhtamo, Donna J. Cox, Agnes Hegedis, Judith Barry, Jennifer Hall/Blyth Hazen, Brenda Laurel, Monika Flesichmann/Wolfgang Strauss, Char Davies, Cecile Le Pardo, Pamela Z, Nell Tenhaaf, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Valerie Soe, Kathy Rae Huffman, Diane Fenster/ Celia Rabinovitch, Linda Austin/Leslie Ross,Dawn Stoppiello/Mark Coniglio, Jaishree K.Odin, Simone Oudhoff, Martha Burkle Bonecchi, Carol Stakenas and Zoe Sofia.

Review reproduced from Volume 2, n.paradoxa, July 1998. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Alison Marchant Living Room London:Working Press, 1998 ISBN 1 870736 40 0

This artist's book, dedicated to the people of Holly Street in East London, contains interviews and documentation of the changing face of this large housing estate since it was built in the late1950s and redeveloped in the late 1960s. However, it is far from a straightforward oral history of a place nor is it a simple tale of urban regeneration given further change in the 1990s and its impact on a population. Holly Street Estate is a one of the largest housing estates in East London, which is at a new moment of transition in a redevelopment to give one of the horrors of mass building, its "snake blocks"of corridorsand walkways which became increasingly identified with crime and deprivation, a new face lift for the next century. The juxtaposition of the voices of those in their 80s who remember the estate as it was first built, which they felt offered dreamhousing when compared to Victorian tenant housing or slums, to the voices of relative new immigrants to the estate whose lives are about to be marked by 'decanting' and rehousing is very poignant in the cross-section of residents interviewed. Holly Street because of the notorious collapse of Rowan Point one of the four large tower blocks which occupy the heart of the estate has been the subject of over 100 oral history books-produced through the project Centreprise- in the last thirty years. The book's overlaying of images of the council plans, of family photographs, of corners within the estate highlight the shifting face of the estate in a different register. Conceived as an artist's book rather than a piece of oral 'history' Marchant attempts to shift the gaze from social problems and into an exploration of space and its negotation implicit in the title 'Living Room'.

This review by Katy Deepwell was first published in Oxford Art Journal 1995 Vol 18 No. 2 p.119-122 --- A more familiar theoretical overview to exploring performance art through a critique of the subject (both feminist and Lacanian psychoanalytic perspectives) informs Anne Marsh's very interesting account of developments and sites for performance art in Australia, 1969-1982. Here, a sharp distinction is drawn between women practitioner's use of their own bodies in performance work outlining its relationship to the development of body art and those performances which are informed by feminist critique and response. Marsh also provides very important and interesting documentation of performance work over this period, although I often wished for more information to illuminate what was visible in the photographs.

Her discussion of women performance artists like Jill Orr, Jane Kent, Lyndal Jones, Ann Fogarty, Karen Finley to mention a few, provides a very interesting counterpoint to the performance work of Carolee Schneemann, Adrian Piper, Hannah Wilkes amongst others discussed by Jo Withers and Suzanne Lacy or the discussion of Ana Mendieta and Mary Beth Edelson by Gloria Feman Orenstein in The Power of Feminist Art . The former analysis (Withers,Lacy) references Moira Roth's research on Californian performance art (The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America,1970-1980 , Astro Artz, Los Angeles,1983) and the use made of Allan Kaprow's approach transformed by an engaged feminist politics introduced by Judy Chicago , while the latter, (Feman Orenstein) discusses artists in the context of Jungian as opposed to archeologically-inspired feminist interest in the archetype of the Great Goddess. Hopefully, the possibility of more accesible material from these books will also enable greater international comparisons in feminist art and encourage more courses and seminars on contemporary feminist art practice in art and art history.

Review reproduced from Volume 22, n.paradoxa, July 2008. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Carol Mavor Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J M Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartique, Marcel Proust and DW Winnicott. Duke University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3962-5

Described on the bookjacket as a 'meditation on the threads that unite mothers and sons' this book looks again at four key writers and their self- representation, bringing to light the idea of reading boyishly as a means to examine again their approaches and how mother-child relationships function and figure in their work. The writing style is elliptical, playful - even hedonistic - and full of associative leaps while trying to reveal the pleasures mined genealogically within the text.

Review reproduced from Volume 16, n.paradoxa, July 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

David Alan Mellor Liliane Lijn: Works, 1959-80 exhibition catalogue Warwick Arts Centre: Mead Gallery, 2005 ISBN: 0-9026837-5-6

This is the first major monograph on Liliane Lijn. Mellor's text focuses on her adult life, outlining the development of her practice as one of Britain's early kinetic sculptors and the circles in which she worked, as well as acting as an extensive and valuable catalogue raisonne.

Review reproduced from Volume 12, n.paradoxa, July 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Marsha Meskimmon Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity,Aesthetics

London: Routledge, 2003 ISBN 0-415-24278-9

The three parts of this book, History, Subjectivity and Aesthetics, present specific case studies of a wide range of women artists/art practices in the context of a general argument about the importance of women's art practice to major themes in art historical/cultural analysis. Although this is clearly a feminist analysis, drawing on a range of theoretical work identified as feminist, the word feminism and any overt mention of feminist reading(s) is underplayed throughout the book and instead the study of women artists is presented as an exhilaration and a danger, providing new epistemes in culture. The book presents some strong comparisons between women artists approaches in different countries to certain themes: for example, in the representations Vietnam in America (Maya Lin, Martha Rosler, Trinh T. Minh-ha); women artists of the Anglophone Africa Diaspora (Faith Ringgold and Sokari Douglas Camp); Janet Lawrence and Fiona Foley and Joan Brassil (Australia); Claude Cahun, Rosy Martin and Cathy de Monchaux. A context for a trans-national comparisons or reference to the specific art world context for the work as it rises to become an object of study for the art historian is not developed. The work is instead located in relation to theoretical propositions and specific histories through detailed readings of certain works.

Review reproduced from Volume 9, n.paradoxa, Jan 2002. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Suzana Milevska (ed/curator) Capital and Gender: international project for art and theory (English and Macedonian texts) Museum of the City of Skopje, 2001

9989-612-64-1

This is an exhibition catalogue from a public art project which took place in a shopping mall in Skopje. The artists were invited to consider the topic of capital and gender, in terms of a Perfect Match between men and women, given the current economy and problems presented by a new consumerism, "white slavery"/ prostitution, new attitudes to marriage and changing concepts of love and identity in a post-communist country. The artists (both male and female) came from several republics of the former Yugoslavia as well as Bulgaria, Turkey and Estonia. The works were many and highly varied in their methods and means of engaging the public but included, as some examples: Marina Grzinic/Aina Smid's interactive CD-rom, Troubles with Sex, Theory and History; Maja Bajevic's consumer objects Kit for the Gloves to Save a Marriage; Danica Dakic's/ Sandra Sterle's billboard Go-Home, Violeta Capovska's video project Mother's Group (2000), Kai Kaljo's video Love Letter to Myself, Slavica Janeslieva's photo-text installation Love and Interest and Hristina Ivanoska/ Yane Calovski's company product, a prototype Blanket for Fun and/or Emergency. The book also contains essays by Suzana Milevska, Marina Grzinic, Dorothee Bauerie-Willert, Katalin Timar, Despina Angelovska and Zaneta Vangeli - some of the contributors to the conference organised alongside the project.

Review reproduced from Volume 19, n.paradoxa, Jan 2007. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Helen Molesworth (ed) Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (looking back) Louise Lawler London, The MIT Press, 2006. Wexner Art Centre, Ohio ISBN: 978-0-262-62206-6

With essays by Rosalyn Deutsche, Ann Goldstein and Helen Molesworth, this catalogue from a survey exhibition presents a reconsideration of Lawler's method of appropriation: literally, photographing the work of others. Deutsche outlines and attempts to situate her feminist politics, while Molesworth emphasises Lawler's pointed institutional critique, partic-ularly how the art world treats art, identifying its photographic poignancy through the framing of the small details of power, ownership and display. Goldstein considers Lawler's feminist critique of authorship and her collaborations with other artists.

Review reproduced from Volume 8, n.paradoxa, July 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Molly H. Mullin Culture in the Marketplace: Gender Art and Value in the American Southwest Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. ISBN 0 8223 2610 8

An in-depth analysis of a group of elite East Coast US women collectors and the influence of their work in generating a market for Native American art. An analysis of the redrawing of questions about "culture", "tourism" and "authenticity" in early 20th century and its impact today.

Review reproduced from Volume 8, n.paradoxa, July 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Liz Wells, Kate Newton & Catherine Fehily Shifting Horizons: Women's

Landscape Photography Now London: IB Tauris, 2000 ISBN: 1 86064 635 2

The first in a series of 5 planned volumes on women and contemporary photography, under the series title Ellipsis, from Iris, Women's Photography project at Staffordshire University, building on the work undertaken already in I Spy (I.B.Tauris) and Nexus (Scarlet Press, six volumes 1997-1999) and their website. Includes short essays by Liz Wells, John Stathatos, David Bate, Stevie Bezencenet, Martha Langford, Roberta McGrath, Sue Swingler on 12 women contemporary photographers whose theme is landscape. Includes artists' statements and is lavishly illustrated in colour.

Review reproduced from Volume 13, n.paradoxa, Jan 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Kate Newton & Christine Rolph Masquerade: Women's Contemporary Portrait Photography Ellipsis Vol. 2: Cardiff: Ffotogallery,

2003. ISBN 1-872771-36-X

The latest photography project from IRIS: International Centre for Women in Photography at Staffordshire University. Contents includes: newly commissioned texts by Mark Durden, Jane Fletcher, Rachel Gear, Paul Jobling, Sandra Matthews, Jane Tormey and Caryn Faure Walker and ten photographic portfolios from the following women artists: Beth Yarnelle Edwards, Catriona Grant, Kathe Kowalski, Laurie Long, Trish Morrisey, Magali Nougarede, Sarah Pucill, Zineb Sedira, Marla Sweeney and Miranda Walker.

Review reproduced from Volume 16, n.paradoxa, July 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Mignon Nixon Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art

Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005. An October book ISBN: 0-262-14089-6

The author approaches the 'fantastic reality' (Bourgeois's own term) of this artist's work through psychoanalysis, unpicking her work through a critique of Freud and the embrace of Melanie Klein as well as the artist's articulation of female subjectivity, psycho-sexual conflicts and/or anxieties in her sculptures. Bourgeois's sculptures in this framework represent part-objects or an object of the drives. Nixon has published several significant essays on Bourgeois before but this book represents the larger part of her research on the artist and is a substantial and considered study. Given the all too frequent reading of Bourgeois through her biography, this book seeks to 'demonstrate that her challenge to the Oedipal narratives of late modernism is grounded in a distinctive psychoanalytic feminism - with its own historical bases', namely a dissident logic of both 'deference and difference' derived from art circles, including Surrealism, in Paris in the 1930s and New York in the 1940s-1970s.

Review reproduced from Volume 11, n.paradoxa, Jan 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Mignon Nixon (ed) Eva Hesse

Boston: MIT press: October Files, 3 2002. ISBN 0-262-14080-2

This volume brings together several important interviews and essays on Eva Hesse already published elsewhere: e.g Cindy Nemser's 1970 interview with the artist in the year she died; Mel Bochner's retrospective discussion of her in 1992; two of Rosalind Krauss's essays on her work; an essay by Briony Fer from Art History and Anne Wagner's essay from her Three Artists (Three Women). Mignon Nixon's own essay 'Ringaround Arose: 2 in 1' represents the "new" scholarship and takes up the theme of the artist's self-representation in photographs posing with her artworks. Lucy Lippard's authoritative Eva Hesse (1976) as well as the value placed upon Hesse's own story of her life and work found in her journals emerge as repeated concerns throughout this volume, raising the question again of whether the facts of her biography have overshadowed discussion of her art. A new exhibition of her work at the Tate Modern alongside more scholarship presented through a conference at Leeds University in the UK will no doubt continue this debate.

Review reproduced from Volume 20, n.paradoxa, July 2007. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly Global Feminisms London & New York, Merrell and Brooklyn Museum, 2007 ISBN: 978-1-8589-4390-9

The exhibition which launched the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Musuem is described by its curators as an example of 'intergenerational feminist approaches'. Thirty years on from Nochlin's and Ann Sutherland Harris' exhibition Women Artists 1550-1950 , Nochlin collaborates with a former student on an international contemporary art show in which none of the selected artists were born before 1960. While transnationalism - understood as post-colonial, anti-racist and feminist - is the stated aim of Reilly's introduction, the selection emerged in a dialogue between the two curators about feminist work as critique and this has informed the result. The four sections of the exhibition, Life Cycles, Identities, Politics and Emotions, are not mirrored in the catalogue. A decision which tends to reinforce the idea that feminism is solely centred in a nuanced "differentiated" body politics about representation of women bodies (rather than particular ideological-social-cultural politics to change women's situation). Essays offering an overview of the show by the curators Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly are presented alongside some very general assessments of different "regions" in the world: N'Gone Fall (on women artists from Africa), Michiko Kasahara (women artists from Japan), Joan Kee (Asian women artists), Virginia Perez-Ratton (Central American women artists), Elisabeth Lebovici (Western European women), Charlotte Kotik (Eastern and Central European women) and Geeta Kapur (whose essay's focus on five women artists in India escapes this level of generality). Significantly the curatorial argument stresses the 'new global imperative' for feminist curating to encourage the inclusion of non-Western and "minority" women's voices. The disconnect within the catalogue from references to the emergence of feminist art practices in the 1960s in many parts of the world might encourage the rather lazy assumption that feminism did not operate prior to the 1980s or 1990s in many of the regions discussed. But also, the "absent centre", the US, needs its own explanation. Perhaps a clearer comparative account of what "minority" means in America is needed and the recognition that the multicultural politics practiced there is different in kind from those in operation in Japan, Australia or different parts of Europe and Africa or Latin America, where different configurations and histories of racial, ethnic and religious groups have been constructed into either "marginal" or "mainstream" . Feminism's role as a discourse against power, as Geeta Kapur suggests, will then start to frame the effectiveness of feminist interventions in the discourses of art, art history, the museum and cultural politics.

Review reproduced from Volume 20, n.paradoxa, July 2007. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Sarah Nuttal (ed) Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics

Durham, North Carolina & London: Duke University Press, 2006 ISBN: 0-8223-3918-8

This book is one of the projects on definitions of beauty supported by the Prince Claus Foundation which draws the perspectives of writers, critics and artists, largely from Africa, on the question of African and Diasporan aesthetics. While there are many interesting arguments about beauty (in public art, posters, literature, sculpture and children's projects and cooking) and many women writers, cultural theorists and art historians within the book, women's cultural production as artists, literary figures, the makers of music and dance in Africa are not discussed. The book leaves the impression that their absence might be due to the presence of their bodies as a topic for discussion but the book also shifts the gaze to queer politics and to looking at representations of African men as much as women.

Review reproduced from Volume 16, n.paradoxa, July 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

C. Jill O'Bryan Carnal Art: Orlan's Refacing

University of Minnesota Press, 2005. ISBN: 0-8166-4323-7

Another study analysing the work of Orlan! This is not a token essay about feminist politics but a lengthy analysis, drawn from a PhD, which focuses on Orlan's writing as much as her oeuvre as a whole and her strategies as a postmodern feminist. C.Jill O'Bryan analyses and employs a wide range of tools from poststructuralist theory in her discussion, including Derrida's concept of auto-affection in which self-presence is lost; performativity; the carnivalesque and how Orlan's work negotiates, explodes and challenges binary oppositions of interiority/exteriority; self/other; beauty/monstrous femininity in her concept of 'woman-to-woman transsexuality'. The book concludes with a performative dialogue which draws on and amplifies interviews with the artist from 2000-2001 conducted with Tanya Augsburg. What is refreshing about O'Bryan's account is the priority given to the artist's voice and strategy as an artist in contrast to so many texts on Orlan which have emphasised the body (as if it were a generic category) or the author's direct reaction to the work as image alone.

Review reproduced from Volume 5, n.paradoxa, Jan 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Old Boys Network next Cyberfeminist International, Rotterdam, March 8-11 1999. ISBN 3-933557-14-3 The second indispensible publication from Old Boys Network mapping Cyber-feminism and the work of 20+ participants at their second major meeting in 1999. Continuing the dialogue about the relationship between feminism/ cyberculture; touching on networks in global capitalism; the body from gene to medical imaging on the net; and new strategies for transformation offered by new technologies, democracies on the net and feminism.

Just received: Stephen Kovats (ed) Media-Revolution: Ost-West Internet Dessau: Edition Bauhaus,1999. ISBN 3-593-36365-8. Invaluable documentation of the Ostranenie Festivals.

Review reproduced from Volume 9, n.paradoxa, Jan 2002. reviewed by <waanja> 'Short Book Reviews'

Martina Pachmanova Vìrnost v pohybu / Mobile Fidelity (text in Czech only)

Prague, One Woman Press, 2001 ISBN 80-86356-10-8 A feminist viewpoint is still not frequently used in the Czech art criticism. Martina Pachmanova, a major supporter of feminist approaches in the field of art history, has decided to provide especially the younger generation of both critics and artists with a dozen views on feminism and its role in art and visual culture.

Pachmanova's searching for a less academic form and a theoretically less structured interview seems to be an ideal vehicle for this purpose. The flow of spoken words makes more visible the general fields of interest of the inteviewees who represent diverse branches of feminist cultural practice. Next to those who helped to shape feminism more than thirty years ago (Linda Nochlin, Martha Rosler) there are the younger academicians or artists (Amelia Jones, Mira Schor) whose attitudes have refreshed feminism and adapted it to current developments in visual culture. The discussed topics are art history, subjectivity and identity, aesthetics, sexual politics, public space and art institutions, However, a thin red line links all the interviews and is formed by a few recurring questions: Is it possible to redefine feminist art history? If yes, then how? Should feminist artists work within or outside the current art institutional structures? How can women be represented in art? Is the social and political involvement of artists, a dated practice? And last but not least, is American feminist practice valid in the new democracies of the Central and Eastern Europe? The book does not provide the reader with clear answers but is definitely food for thought.

Martina interviews Linda Nochlin, Natalie Boymel Kampen, Kaja Silverman, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Amelia Jones, Mira Schor, Jo Anna Isaak, Janet Wolff, Martha Rosler, Marcia Tucker and Carol Duncan.

Editor's note: Martina Pachmanova's interview with Kaja Silverman was Review reproduced in English in n.paradoxa Vol. 6, July 2000.

This book is available in English as a free download on www.ktpress.co.uk, look in "books"

Review reproduced from Volume 14, n.paradoxa, July 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Luciana Parisi Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire London: Continuum, 2004 ISBN: 0-8264-6990-6

Abstract sex is proposed as a new model in a bio-digital age for considering the relations between conceptions of sex, femininity and desire. Drawing heavily on the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, Parisi considers the stratification of abstract sex in bio-digital (late twentieth century); bio-cultural (nineteenth century) and bio-physical (3,900 million years ago) layers. Each layer has a corresponding set of definitions and constituent elements: cloning, sexual reproduction and bacterial sex; recombinant desire, pleasure and trading; egg, fluids and mitochondria. The book discusses the impact of bio-technologies in changing how we think of sex and reproduction; disembodiment and embodiment; passive and active roles; mind and body and moves towards a third way out of these dualities, conceiving the autonomy of feminine desire through a thousand modes in a dynamic between and beyond order and mutation.

Review reproduced from Volume 27, n.paradoxa, Jan 2011. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Bojana Pejic, Erste Foundation, MUMOK, Vienna (eds)

Gender Check Reader: Art and Theory in Eastern Europe Koln: Walter Konig, 2010 ISBN: 978-3-86560-883-3 ISBN:978-3-902490-71-1

The Gender Check exhibition (2009-2010) was the result of Erste's substantial research project across the countries of (former) Eastern/Central Europe. This reader of previously published materials is an additional and highly valuable accompaniment to the large-scale telephone directory of the exhibition catalogue which commissioned new essays (See also n.paradoxa vol. 25 p.90-93). While the focus of the reader is an examination of gender theory in Eastern Europe and looks at both masculinity and feminity, feminist art produced by women artists is well-represented. Six essays first published in n.paradoxa have been included.

Review reproduced from Volume 14, n.paradoxa, July 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Gill Perry (ed.) Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women's Practice

Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. ISBN: 1-4051-1202-6

A new anthology exploring women artists' work, largely in an Anglo-American context, and offering detailed readings and critical analysis of individual projects.

Contents: Gill Perry on 'Visibility, Difference and Excess'; David Hopkins on Martha Rosler and Gillian Wearing; Lisa Tickner on Cornelia Parker; Sue Malvern on Rachel Whiteread; Fionna Barber interviews Alice Maher; Michael Corris and Robert Hobbs discuss Kara Walker; Marsha Meskimmon on Christine Borland; Dorothy Rowe on the performance group, moti roti; Jane Beckett on Lubaina Himid.

Review reproduced from Volume 20, n.paradoxa, July 2007. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Doina Petrescu (ed) Altering Practices: Feminist Politics and Poetics of Space

London: Routledge, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-41535786-9

This book draws together again contributors from the Alterities conference in Paris in 1999 to offer both reflections on women's practice in architecture and theories of feminine space. Petrescu notes the production of how a new view of women's "altered practices" in these fields has emerged since 1999. The diverse contributors - architects, curators, artists, cultural theorists and architectural historians - discuss the journey to the conference (as a political/ideolgoical conjuncture) as well as the time since in a manner which beings to the fore the shifting definitions and mobilisations of the feminine and feminism(s) in relation to conceptions of space in Europe and the US in the last twenty years. The practices of curating, speaking, writing, drawing, as well as the privileging or prioritising of tasks, or spaces in relationship to practices of the everyday are all discussed in topics as diverse as 'urban curating' (Meike Schalk, Marion von Osten), 'cooking' (Kim Torgal), 'confessional constructions' (Jane Rendall) and 'longing' in the making, planning and building of architectural spaces (in the architectural groups Matrix, muf and Taking Place).

Review reproduced from Volume 18, n.paradoxa, July 2006. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Praba Pilar Cyberlabia: Gendered Thoughts and Conversations on Cyberspace California: Tela Press, 2005 www.prabapilar.com

In this book and DVD, Praba Pilar, a performance artist based in California, profiles some of her own work, notably her rendition of Computers are a Girl's Best Friend, and discusses the place of women in cyberworld with four academics, cyberworkers and activists. The interviews examine how race and gender inequalities are Review reproduced in cyberspace not only through problems of access and literacy, but also through the control or monopolisation of software/hardware in corporations and government. Contesting the idea that cyberspace is neutral or individual, the discussions reference a wide range of different forms of collective activist interventions against capitalism, racism and patriarchy.

Review reproduced from Volume 14, n.paradoxa, July 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Robert Pinto, Nicolas Bourriaud, Maia Damianovic Lucy Orta London: Phaidon, 2003 ISBN: 0-7148-4300-8

A new monograph from Phaidon incorporating the usual mixture of essays (including the authors above and Jorge Orta, the artist's husband), interviews (with Paul Virilio), artist's writings and numerous colour photographs. Lucy Orta is a British artist, based in Paris whose work, exhibited mainly in the last decade, crosses the boundaries of public performance, fashion and architecture. Her first major work, Refuge Wear (1992-1996), was launched under the Louvre Pyramid in Paris Fashion Week. Subsequent works offer inter-connecting suits for large scale performances, meals, tents, ambulances and a horti-recycling enterprise, echoing elements from Lygia Clark and Krystof Wodzjicko.

Review reproduced from Volume 1, n.paradoxa, Jan 1998. Katy Deepwell 'Short Reviews of New Publications' - This collection of writings by Adrian Piper brings together what might first appear as the two divergent strands in her creative work: her art and her engagement with philosophy,specifically her writings on Kant. However her work in art criticism, on Xenophobia and on the concept of 'meta-art' has many direct links with her art production in performance, photography and installation since the late 1960s. This method of publication offers great insight into these connections and the overall approach in Piper's work. For these two volumes also form a beautifully produced documentation of over three decades of work and creative politcally-engaged thought : a body of work which was designed to challenge, to provoke and to question collective understandings of identity, of racist attitudes and Xenophobia in American society.

Vol 1 : Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968-1992 :

35 essays and statements divided into 4 Sections: 'The Metaphysics of Conceptual Art'; 'Performance Catalysis on the Street and in the World' ; 'Object Catalysis and Political Self-Awareness'; 'Racism, Racial Stereotyping and Xenophobia'.

Vol 2 : Selected Writings in Art Criticism 1967-1992 :

Twenty-Four essays divided into three Sections : 'Conceptualizing Conceptual Art'; 'Art-World Politics'; 'Art-World Practice and Real-World Politics'

Review reproduced from Volume 1, n.paradoxa, Jan 1998. Katy Deepwell 'Short Reviews of New Publications' - The fifteen essays in this book highlight the question of difference - social, sexual, cultural, political differences - experienced both generationally and geographically in the work of women artists and the attention to difference in feminist readings of women's work.

Contents: Mieke Bal essay is called 'Reading Art?', Elisabeth Bronfen writes on Hysteria, Irma & Cindy Sherman', Irit Rogoff on 'Gossip as Testimony', Nanette Salomon on Hidden agendas and 'The Venus Pudica', Alison Rowley on Jenney Saville as feminist painting practice, Michelle Hirshhorn on the French artist Orlan, Judith Mastai on 'The Anorexic Body' in Canadian installation art, Lubaina Himid (artist's pages), Rosemary Betterton on Paula Modersohn-Becker and Kather Kollwitz (also in Betterton above), Young-Paik Chun on the work of Re-Hyun Park, Catherine de Zegher on Cecilia Vicuna, Brenda LaFleur on Jin-Me Yoon, Anna Raine on Ana Mendieta, Hagiwara Hiroko on Shimado Yoshiko, Griselda Pollock on Bracha Lictenberg Ettinger.

Review reproduced from Volume 15, n.paradoxa, Jan 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Louise Pouissant and Ernestine Daubner (eds.)

Art & Biotechnologies: 2 volumes plus A DVD Anthology of Biotech & A-Life Artworks Montreal: Presses de l'Universite du Quebec, 2005 ISBN: 2 7605 1328 9

The Groupe de recherche en arts mediatiques (GRAM) at Universite du Quebec is finalising a DVD which will be an extensive compilation of documents of bio-(tech) and a-life artworks to accompany this new book. Over 100 international artists working in the area of biotechnology (i.e. genetic art, transgenic art, clone art) and other related areas (such as artificial life, e-volve, etc.) have been invited to submit up to 12 digital images or other visual documents (videos, etc) of one or more of their artworks for inclusion in this anthology. Women contributors include: Art Oriente Objet (Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoit Mangin); Heather Barnett; Shannon Bell;Laura Beloff and Erich Berger; Bioteknica (Jennifer Willet & Shawn Bailey); Dalia Chauveau; Laura Cinti; Justine Cooper; Gina Czarnecki; Marta de Menezes; Sara Diamond; Diana Dominiguez; Helen Donis-Keller; Anne Esperet; Hanna Haaslahti; Kathy High; Aniko Meszaros; Nancy Nisbet; Christine Palmieri; Jane Prophet; Melinda Rackham; Sonya Rapoport; Julia Roedica; Susan Robb; Nina Sobell; subRosa (Faith Wilding); Tissue Culture & Art Project (Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr);Nell Tenhaaf; Annie Thibault; Catherine Wagner; Amy Youngs; Janet Zweig.

Review reproduced from Volume 6, n.paradoxa, July 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Kathy Prendergast The End and the Beginning

London: Merrell Publishers and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 1999

ISBN 1-85894-096-6

This beautifully illustrated catalogue was published to coincide with a major solo exhibition of Kathy Prendergast's at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. The acquisition of the 113 City Drawings - soft delicate pencil drawings which render again the aerial-view street maps of 113 different cities in the world - by IMMA was the principle reason for the exhibition. The exhibition also included Prendergast's sculptures, which employ thread, hair wool and cloth with found and domestic materials to create strange and wondrous sculptures which verge towards the surreal in their explorations of sexuality and sensuality. The main essay in the book is written by Francis McKee.

Review reproduced from Volume 24, n.paradoxa, July 2009. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Nancy Prinsenthal and Phillip Earenflight (ed.) Joyce Kozloff: Co+ordinates

Pennsylvania: Carlisle, Trout Gallery, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-9768488-8-2

Beautifully illustrated, this book and exhibition catalogue surveys Joyce Kozloff's rich and decorative series of works in the last decade. The essays compare and consider these works in relation to her last two decades of work of public art, her feminist and anti-war protests from the 1970s to the present and her role in the pattern and decoration movement in the USA. Works discussed like Targets, Rocking the Cradle, Knowledge and Boy's Art are particularly striking for the ways in which they overlay and juxtapose maps to reimagine the complexities of geo-political conflicts as a clash of cultural forms and knowledge constructions.

Review reproduced from Volume 5, n.paradoxa, Jan 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Performance: The Project Papers

Dublin: Project Arts Centre/Dog and Bones publishing 1998

ISBN 1-872493-11-4

From a conference in 1996, this publication contains five insightful essays into live art/performance - three of specific interest to feminists by Claire MacDonald; Catherine Ugwu and Elaine Sisson which explore the questions of internationalism; gender as performance and the nature of writing about performance.

Review reproduced from Volume 18, n.paradoxa, July 2006. Caterina Nobiloni 'Short Book Reviews'

Yvonne Rainer Feeling are facts: a life Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. ISBN: 0-262-18251-3

Having performed at the World Trade Centre just three days before 9/11, Yvonne Ranier was shocked at the events as they unfolded but then became involved campaigning against the war in Iraq, an indication of her strong political commitments have been centered in women's rights and feminist politics. This is how and why she began this highly introspective ironic and humorous memoir that covers her contradictory and difficult childhood, her personal and sentimental life and a successful career that spans from her studies with Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham to the creation of her own choreographies and dances.

In telling her story, Rainer recurs to every possible means of communication speaking not only throughout words but also through snapshots taken during rehearsals and performances, extracts from her diary, pictures of her family and friends, stills from her movies etc.

All these elements give the book great depth which allows the reader to follow a story that unravels on three different levels: her personal growth; her development as a talented and successful choreographer and dancer, and finally, how the USA has itself changed since the 1920s.

Review reproduced from Volume 17, n.paradoxa, Jan 2006. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Erica Rand The Ellis Island Snow Globe Duke University Press, 2005 ISBN:0-8223-3591-3

Discovering a snow globe as a souvenir available from the Ellis Island gift shop is the trigger for this book's engaging analysis of sexual politics, cultural representations, notions of cultural diversity, history and heritage. Rand mixes biographical narratives with political analysis about histories, power and social representation, to explore the histories of immigration / deportation and the politics of "passing" in the legal and social processes of America in the early 20th century.

Review reproduced from Volume 9, n.paradoxa, Jan 2002. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Helen Reckitt (ed) Peggy Phelan (Survey) Art and Feminism Phaidon, 2001 0-7148-3529-3

This book is part of a series by Phaidon on themes and movements in contemporary art. The lavishly illustrated format includes a long introductory survey-type essay, accompanied by extracts from other writers which are designed to contextualise the assembled material in terms of feminist theory. Presenting itself as the first fully illustrated and comprehensive survey of art and feminism from the 1960s to the present (a highly dubious claim given the 1994 anthology by Norma Broude and Mary Garrard The Power of Feminist Art and many other catalogues of feminist art practices!) the book presents over 300 colour plates from 150 artists, including 'rarely published installation shots' and 'previously unpublished artists' statements' (Press Release). On closer examination, the previously unpublished material proves to be one statement by Coco Fusco - and possibly, a little-known pamphlet by Su Richardson, Monica Ross and Kate Walker.

Peggy Phelan's text, albeit enjoyable to read and skillfully crafted with numerous insights, concentrates on only the American version of feminist strategies, key works and models, with occasional nods towards Britain as 'the well-rehearsed plot' of the history and the rise of the women's art movement. This emphasis is further reinforced in the unannounced selection of works: 85 of the artists live/work in the US, 50 in Europe (22 of whom are in the UK) with a further 10 who live/work in Canada, South America, Japan and Australia. While the "image" of the woman artist and the role of re-presentational and aesthetic strategies is discussed in relation to the problems of essentialism, multi-cultural politics (in the US), queer theory and shifts in feminist art history and theory, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Sophie Calle, Helen Chadwick, Cecile Edefalk, Jenny Saville and Denise Stoklos are the only artists living outside the US whose work is briefly discussed outside the "familiar"account of American feminism.

Review reproduced from Volume 14, n.paradoxa, July 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Susan R. Ressler (ed.) Women Artists of the American West

Jefferson, North Carolina & London, McFarland, 2003 ISBN: 0-7864-1054-X

This book is presented in two parts, a diverse anthology of 15 essays, and an alphabetical directory of 150 women artists, from the nineteenth and twentieth century, who live or once lived west of the Mississippi River. As a resource book on women artists it will prove invaluable. The essays tend to focus on profiling the work and lives of the individuals and the communities they discuss but the range included is significant: from lesbian photography to the Pueblo Indian arts and crafts movement; from Asian American Women Artists to Quiltmaking; 100 years of Californian photography to Laura Gilpin and American landscape photography. Terri Cohn discusses contemporary art projects in public spaces; while Tiska Blankenship focuses on the relationship between Agnes Pelton and Florence Miller Pierce (1938-1945) and Betty LaDuke provides an autobiography.

Other contributors: Dorothy R. Zopf; Kate M. O'Neill; Susan R. Ressler; Margaret D. Jacobs, Susan Peterson; Tee A. Corinne; Gail E. Tremblay; Peter E. Palmquist; Martha A.Sandweiss; Joan M. Jensen; Corinne Whitaker and Phoebe Farris.

Review reproduced from Volume 16, n.paradoxa, July 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Faith Ringgold we flew over the bridge: the memoirs of Faith Ringgold (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) ISBN: 0-8223-3564-6

This is a frank, and sometimes lyrical, account of Faith Ringgold's life in her own words, focusing on her education, activism, the development of her work and her life as an artist, mother and teacher. She discusses her strategies for moving ahead as an ambitious young artist, making contacts with artists, gallery directors and curators and how she sought recognition for herself and others from the 1960s to 1990s in campaigns, protests and self-organised initiatives. She remarks on her own ambivalence towards the emerging (white) feminist art movement as well as the hostility to feminism from sections of the black community. Her activism, cultural politics and teaching have been a feminist re-negotiation of simultaneously anti-sexist and anti-racist positions as a black woman artist in America. Her transition as an artist producing figurative paintings then soft sculptures (drawing on African masks) to performance and story quilts is mapped and illustrated in this book. The book was edited by Moira Roth and first published by Bulfinch Press in 1995. This reprint of the original edition does not update the book and add in more reflections or work from the intervening 10 years but it remains an engaging autobiography of an important artist as well as a revealing slice of oral history.

Review reproduced from Volume 9, n.paradoxa, Jan 2002. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Hilary Robinson (ed) Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968-2000 Oxford: Blackwells, 2001 0-631-20850-X

Over 706 pages, with 101 texts by different authors, nine themed and sub-divided chapters and extensive bibliographies, this book is designed as a core text book for anyone researching feminism, feminist theory and feminist art practices in the visual arts. Without any illustrations, it is organised to retrace feminist histories, feminist discourse and the legacy of the women's art movement in a number of countries and to provide valuable teaching material. In this, it will undoubtedly succeed. Hilary Robinson announces the composition of material within the book as 50% from the USA, 25% from UK, 12.5% from Canada, with the remaining texts from Ireland, Australia and previously translated material from Western Europe. The selection concentrates on republishing material from diverse and small publications but includes some key texts which, although they may have been republished before, are included to frame and organise the different sections. The bibliographies point to the many further articles in this field and open up the possibilities for numerous other avenues of research to be pursued in relation to feminist theory and the visual arts in other countries. This academic text book is undoubtedly the most comprehensive anthology of feminist theory/ feminist art criticism about the visual arts to date and, given the publisher, a fitting complement to the marginalisation of feminist ideas in the C. Harrison and P. Wood anthology Art Theory 1900-1990. This publication will do much to establish and secure feminism's contribution to the field of art criticism and art theory in the academy.

Review reproduced from Volume 19, n.paradoxa, Jan 2007. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Hilary Robinson Reading Art, Reading Irigaray The Politics of Art by Women New York /London: I.B. Tauris, 2006 ISBN: 978-1-86064-953-0

This original and distinctive book outlines the contribution that Irigaray's analyses, structures and strategies can make to rethinking a feminist cultural criticism of contemporary women's art practices. Tropes and strategies from Irigaray's writing are redeployed as potential new frames for reading and understanding a relationship between the properties of physical matter and a sexualised subjective identity. Case studies of individual women artists are built into this analysis, divided as chapters into topics around mimesis; the critique of phallocentrism; morphology; gesture; divine beauty; and mother-daughter genealogies. Artists discussed include: Bridget Riley, Rachel Whiteread, Cynthia Mailman, Yolanda Lopez, Frances Hegarty, Hannah Wilke and Louise Bourgeois.

Review reproduced from Volume 16, n.paradoxa, July 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Martha Rosler Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001

Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004. A co-publication with

International Center of Photography and October books ISBN: 0-262-18231-9

Bringing together many key essays/lectures produced since 1979, this book will be an invaluable resource for artists and photographers alike for its cogent and challenging analyses of art practices, documentary photography and art world vs. life world politics. As she writes in the introduction: 'collective transformation requires communication' and this has been central to Rosler's strategies as an artist, intellectual, activist and lecturer. The title aptly summaries her approach in essays like 'Theses on Defunding' or 'In, Around and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography)'.

Review reproduced from Volume 4, n.paradoxa, July 1999. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Martha Rosler Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World Massachusetts MIT press/ Ikon Gallery, Birmingham/Generali Foundation, Vienna,1998. ISBN 0-262-04174-X

This book offers the most comprehensive view of Rosler's work, accompanied by an interview with Benjamin Buchloh, and stimulating essays by Alexander Alberro, Silvia Eiblmayr, Annette Michelson, Jodi Hauptman and Catherine de Zegher. Its publication accompanies the international touring exhibition of Rosler's work, culminating in the USA in 2000.

Review reproduced from Volume 8, n.paradoxa, July 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Monica Ross Valentine London: Milch, 2001. ISBN 1 901832 10 4

Part inventory, part dictionary of quotations, this inventive book, with 18 short discreet chapters, interweaves a tale of responses to Raphael's Sistine Madonna (Sistina) with Freud's account of "Dora" (Ida Bauer); women's fascination with images of women with artists' representation of idealised leadership in the Socialist Realism of Soviet Russia. It is a Valentine, a love poem proclaiming desire, in the sense that it attempts to offer a new structure for that desire, through running together and juxtaposing many sources: Walter Benjamin, Lewis Caroll, Magritte, emails and telephone call comments from friends and colleagues. The artist's fascination is mirrored by that of other commentators, psychoanalysts and art historians. The origin of the work of art, the Sistina's impact seemingly undimished by popular reproduction, is mixed with its history in the Soviet Bloc, located in a Dresden collection. While the book is a new work, contained within it, is also another tale, Monica Ross's own fascination and reproduction of motifs from the Sistina in performance and photography, exploring desire, the reproduction of femininity and the question of identification mechanisms.

Review reproduced from Volume 1, n.paradoxa, Jan 1998. Katy Deepwell 'Short Reviews of New Publications'

Moira Roth (ed) Rachel Rosenthal ( PAJ Books ,Art + Performance: John Hopkins University Press, 1997) ISBN 0-8018-5629-9

The introductory essay to this collection of material by and about the performance artist Rachel Rosenthal offers an artistic autobiography. Roth traces events in Rachel Rosenthal's life from her childhood to the present day and draws out their significance for recurrent themes in her performances. She outlines Rosenthal's work in Instant Theatre, the importance of Antonin Artaud to her devlepoment and the unusual letters with Barbara T.Smith which prompted a change in direction for Rosenthal in 1975/6. The book also includes transcripts of interviews, a cross-section of reviews of performances by a wide rang eof authors, extracts from the artist's writings and the script for Rachel's Brain.

Review reproduced from Volume 22, n.paradoxa, July 2008. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Judith Rugg and Michele Sedgwick (eds.) Issues in Curating Contemporary

Art and Performance Bristol: Intellect, 2007 ISBN: 978-1-84150-162-8

The twelve essays in this book arose from a series of seminars organised by the University College for Creative Arts on the notion of curation as intervention and critical practice. Each contributor offers examples from their own practice while attempting to reflect on more general issues and concerns in curating. While the 'curator's voice' is discussed as a topic by several curators, Liz Wells and Sophia Phoca, generally the essays read as anecdotes and notes about intentions and justifications for curatorial decisions in contrast to the reception of the exhibitions produced. Cate Elwes alone discusses feminist exhibitions but only from her own experiences as an artist-becoming-a- curator (as part of the collective who organised the 1980 ICA shows) to promote her practice alongside that of other women artists. The unevenness of the approaches touch on the problematics of working as a curator funded by the public sector in the UK and the changing goverment imperatives alongside the professionalisation and com-mercialisation of this culture in contrast to that of curators of international biennales, whose work seems to inspire a mixture of awe and jealousy amongst the boys because of its relative absence in this country.

Review reproduced from Volume 11, n.paradoxa, Jan 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Carolee Schneemann Imaging Her Erotics:Essays, Interviews, Projects (London & Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 2001) ISBN: 0-262-19459-7

Mapping four decades of work, this book presents a wide range of material from Carolee Schneemann's oeuvre dispersed across journals, magazines, artist's exhibition notes for projects, performance texts and lectures.

Like the other books produced by MIT on Adrian Piper and on Mary Kelly, this book functions both as a monograph and an anthology on the work of one artist. Interviews with Linda Montano, Aviva Rahmani, Carl Heyward, Willima Peterson, are Review reproduced alongside writing by Jay Murphy, Robert Riley and David Levi-Strauss, Eleanor Heartney, ND (Austin, Texas), Thomas McEvilley and Robert C. Morgan.

Kristine Stiles's introductory essay offers a new view of Schneemann's work, positioning the role of her painting in relation to her performance work and her installations.

The documentation of different projects and performances is extensive and the text by the artist as well as the other writers offers new insights into works like Sexual Parameters, Fuses, Eye Body, Vesper's Pool, Vulva's Morphia and Meat Joy to reveal the intelligence, philosophy and approach of this unique and highly significant artist.

Review reproduced from Volume 24, n.paradoxa, July 2009. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Mary Schoeser Rozanne Hawksley: Offerings

USA: Lund Humphries and Ruthin Craft Centre, Wales,2009 ISBN: 978-1-84822-026-3

Offering a chronological picture of the life and art of Rozanne Hawksley, each chapter in this book offers insights into either a different time period or group of works. The front cover reproduces a fragment of her most well-known work Pale Armistice, made from a circle of white leather gloves and shown in the exhibition The Subversive Stitch (1988) before being purchased for the Imperial War Museum in London. The reproductions document Hawksley's work in objects/sculptures and installations often using fabric, embroidery or textiles and examining, in more recent times, her family histories, memento mori and human suffering.

Review reproduced from Volume 2, n.paradoxa, July 1998. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Mira Schor Wet, On Painting, Feminism and Art Culture USA: Durham, Duke University Press,1996. ISBN 0 8223 1915 2

This anthology of the New York critic artist and editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G/S is a fascinating collection of her best writings. It includes her essay on Ida Applebroog,'Medusa Redux', which I have long admired for its arguments about postmodern possibilities in painting which retain a historical and critical edge. Reading her work together puts these arguments into context as they focus on her analyses of masculinity and power; teaching practice and an attempt to extend the discussion of what painting is, does and what it can signify away from the narrow definitions of modernism which have for several decades dominated Anglo-American teaching practice.

Her essay 'From Liberation to Lack' 'Patrilineage' and her proposals for new approaches to teaching painting provide valuable food for thought. Her description of the power politics between teacher and student are pertinent to many women's experience of art school, including my own nearly a decade after hers. Her questioning of the relationships between authority and learning and the approaches within feminist art theory will continue to provide salutory warnings and a necessary problematisation of the field for those wishing to argue for a contemporary feminist art practice in which painting plays some role amongst other media.

Review reproduced from Volume 12, n.paradoxa, July 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Jill Scott Coded Characters: Media Art by Jill Scott

Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2003

Text in English and German.

Includes DVD.

ISBN 3-7757-1272-0

This major and beautifully produced catalogue provides an overview of 28 years of Jill Scott's art practice in new media, performance and installation tracing her movements from the Bay Area, San Francisco to Australia and then to the UK, Germany and Switzerland. Divided roughly into decades and documenting her early performance works from 1975 to her use of video installations using surveillance/interactivity in the 1980s and her move to fully interactive computerised multi-media installations in the 1990s, the artist's own commentaries are Review reproduced alongside new interviews and articles. Jill Scott is a pioneer in many techniques as well as a committed feminist who has produced some impressive interactive multi-media installations on women's historical role and changing lives in the twentieth century e.g. Machine Dreams (1991); Frontiers of Utopia (1995); Immortal Duality(1997); Beyond Heirarchy?(2000)

Introduction by Roy Ascott; Interview by Robert Atkins; Essays by Anne Marsh; Yvonne Spielmann and Robert Atkins.

KT press

n.paradoxa

n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal

Books on feminist art and women artists

Below are all books, listed alphabetical by author's last name.

© Copyright KT press, 2011. Registered Co. no. 3492334. ktpress@ktpress.co.uk
Website design: adapted from wfiedler open source design

KT press

n.paradoxa

n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal Books on feminist art and women artists

Below are all books, listed alphabetical by author's last name.

© Copyright KT press, 2011. Registered Co. no. 3492334. ktpress@ktpress.co.uk Website design: adapted from wfiedler open source design

n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal

Books on feminist art and women artists

© Copyright KT press, 2011. Registered Co. no. 3492334. ktpress@ktpress.co.uk
Website design: adapted from wfiedler open source design