n.paradoxa
international feminist art journal
Anthologies of feminist art
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The anthologies list below is organised by date:-
2023 Jacqueline Francis, Jeanne Gerrity (Eds.) ()
Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage?
(A Series of Open Questions, vol. 4) (USA,Sternberg and CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts )
2023 Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic* ()
Contemporary / Unconscious: Texts by Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic*, Anne Faucheret, Flavia Matei, Sónia Melo, Sara Reisman, Marlène Rigler (Germany, international,Sternberg)
2022 Diana Quinby (ed)
Des femmes dans l'art : hommage à Aline Dallier (1927-2020), historienne d'art, pionnière de la critique d'art féministe en France (France,Paris : Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre)
2022 Basia Sliwinska (ed)
Feminist Visual Activism and the Body (UK, international,Routledge) More
Contents: Essays:
1 Not White, Not Male and Not New York: Race, Feminism and Artists in Pittsburgh
Hilary Robinson
2 Activist Intension: Mona Hatoum and Morehshin Allahyari’s Disruptive Bodies
Astrid N. Korporaal
3 Activating Agential Collective: Anna Baumgart’s Table Talks—Her-Stories, Solidarity and Feminist Corporeal-Materialism
Basia Sliwinska
4 The Absent Image: Resisting the Erosion of Public Trust in Syrian Activists’ Evidential Visuality
Mario Hamad
5 Bodies, Sovereignties, Futurities: On Adelita Husni-Bey’s Practice
Anastasia Murney
6 Domestic Fronts: Arrangements for Feminist Living, or Survival Is Not a Metaphor
Alexandra Kokoli
7 A Care-Full Re-Membering of Australian Settler Colonial Homemaking Traditions
Sera Waters
8 Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance: Activating Feral Materiality
Paula Chambers
9 When Theodorah Met Dolly: Gender and Visual Activism in Works by Senzeni Marasela
Brenda Schmahmann
10 Be-Longing: Filipina Women Artists in Israel Negotiating Self, Body and Place
Tal Dekel
11 Women to the Front: Women’s Participation and Visual Activism in Hong Kong’s Protest Movement 2019
Evelyn Kwok
12 !Madres!: Reconfiguring ‘Abducted Motherhood’ in Mónica Mayer’s Personal and Collective Artwork
Karen Cordero Reiman
13 Corpo-Affective Politics of Anxious Breathing: On the Agential Force of Bodies and Affects in Vulnerable Protest
Magdalena Górska
14 The Revolutionist: Gendered Violence, Black Radical Feminism and the Decolonial Creative Revolution
Nomusa Makhubu
15 Fragmented Traces. . . The Tactile Feminist Un-Monuments of Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Caroline Wallace
2022 Katy Deepwell (ed)
50 Feminist Art Manifestos (international,KT press)
2021 Jacqueline Millner, Gretchen Coombs (eds)
Care ethics and art (Australia, international,Routledge)
2021 Frima Fox Hofrichter, Midori Yoshimoto (eds)
Women, Aging, and Art: A Crosscultural Anthology (UK, USA,Bloomsbury publishing)
2021 Judith Brodsky ()
Dismantling the Patriarchy, Bit by Bit: Art, Feminism, and Digital Technology (USA,Bloomsbury publishing)
2021 Antonia Majaca, Rachel O'Reilly, Jelena Vesic (eds)
Feminist Takes: Early Works by Zelimir Zilnik (Austria,Sternberg Press)
2020 Darren Newbury, Lorena Rizzo and Kylie Thomas (eds)
Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges (Africa, UK, Ghana, South Africa,Routledge)
2019 Heike Munder ()
Producing Futures - An Exhibition on Post-Cyber-Feminisms (16 Feb-12 May) (Switzerland, International,Zurich: Migros Museums fur Gegenwartskunst)
2019 Oksana Briukhovetska and Lesia Kulchynska (eds)
The Right to Truth. Conversations on Art and Feminism (Ukraine, International,Kyiv: Visual Culture Research Center) More
"The Right to Truth. Conversations on Art and Feminism" is the collection of interviews with female artists, curators, activists and thinkers of different generations from 7 countries of East and West Europe (Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Poland, Chzechia, France, U.S.) on the current feminist art practices and activism. They present series of personal experiences and ways of inventing new forms of functioning of institutions, as well as reflections on history of feminist art and women emancipation.
Participants: Valentyna Petrova, Oksana Briukhovetska, Alina Kopytsa, Victoria Lomasko, Zuzanna Janin, Aleka Polis, Alma Lily Rayner, Rébecca Chaillon, ORLAN, Martha Rosler, Geneviève Fraisse, Feminist Workshop, FemSolution, Irina Solomatina, Sylwia Nikko Biernacka, Zuzana Štefková, Feminist (Art) Institution, Morgane Lory, Isabelle Alfonsi, Flora Katz.
Edited by Oksana Briukhovetska and Lesia Kulchynska
Design: Oksana Briukhovetska
Published by Visual Culture Research Center in collaboration with European Alternatives.
2019 Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buscek (eds)
A Companion to Feminist Art (UK, USA, International,Wiley Blackwells Companions to Art History series)
2019 Virginie Jourdain (ed)
Ressources Humaine: Féminismes & travail de l’art / Human Resources: Feminisms and the work/labour of art (France,49 Nord 6 Est - Frac Lorraine)
2018 Cornelia Sollfrank (ed)
Die schönen Kriegerinnen: Technofeministische Praxis im 21. Jahrhundert (German only) PDF, Epub
Available Here
English version: The Beautiful Warriors. Technofeminist Practice in the 21st Century (UK, Minor Compositions, 2019) (Austria, International,Austria: transversal texts)
2018 Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore (eds)
Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes (Australia, International,Routledge)
2018 Agata Jakubowska and Katy Deepwell (eds)
All-women art spaces in Europe in the long 1970s (UK, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Portu,Liverpool University Press)
2018 Sarah Werkmeister (ed)
Feminisms (available to download as PDF) website: https://www.internationaleonline.org/library/#feminisms (Belgium, International,KASK / School of Arts of University College Ghent: L'Internationale Online )
2018 Lisa Ryan Musgrave (ed)
Feminist Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art: The Power of Critical Visions and Creative Engagement (USA, UK, International,New York: Springer)
2017 Richard Grusin (ed)
Anthropocene Feminism (USA, International,University of Minnesota Press)
2017 Rosemarie Buikema, and Iris van der Tuin (eds)
Doing gender in media, art and culture (1st ed. 2009) (UK, The Netherlands,Routledge)
2017 Elin Diamond, Denise Varney, Candice Amich (eds)
Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times (International, Australia, Japan, USA,Palgrave MacMillan)
2017 Lara Perry and Victoria Horne (eds)
Feminism and Art History Now: Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice
(UK,IB Tauris)
2017 Félix Boggio Ewanjé-Epée, Stella Magliani-Belkacem, Morgane Merteuil, Frédéric Monferrand (ed)
Pour un féminisme de la totalité (The Netherlands,Paris : Amsterdam)
2017 Amanda Ravetz, Alice Kettle, Helen Felcey (eds)
Collaboration Through Craft (UK, USA,Bloomsbury)
2017 Karine Berges, Florence Binard, Alexandrine Guyard-Nedelec (eds)
Feminismes du XXIe Siecle: une troisieme vague? (France,France: Universitaires de Rennes)
2017 Penny Florence and Nicola Foster (eds)
Differential Aesthetics: art practices, philosophy and feminist understandings (1st ed. Aldershot: Aldgate, 2000) (UK,Routledge)
2016 Monica Mayer ()
Si Tiene Dudas...Pregunte: Una Exposicion Retrocolectiva / When in Doubt...Ask: A Retrocollective Exhibit (Mexico,Mexico: MUAC / UNAM Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo)
2016 Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (eds)
Otherwise : imagining queer feminist art histories (UK, USA,Manchester: Manchester University Press)
2016 Katherine Behar (ed)
Object-Oriented Feminism (USA, International,University of Minnesota Press)
2016 Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe (ed)
Curating Differently: Feminisms, Exhibitions and Curatorial Spaces (Sweden, International,Cambridge Scholars Publishing)
2015 Hilary Robinson (ed)
Feminism Art Theory: An Anthology 1968 - 2014, 2nd Edition (UK, International,Wiley)
2015 Annette Burfoot ()
Visual Culture and Gender (,Routledge)
2015 Maria Walsh, Mo Throp (eds)
Twenty Years of MAKE Magazine: Back to the Future of Women's Art
(UK,IB Tauris)
2015 X Marks the Spot, Joan Anim-Addo, Althea Greenan (eds)
Human Endeavour: a creative finding aid for the Women of Colour Index (UK,London: Goldsmiths College, Women's Art Library)
2015 Nadya Burton (ed)
Natal Signs: Cultural Representations of Pregnancy, Birth and Parenting (Canada, USA,Ontario: Demeter Press)
2015 La Centrale (eds.)
Impact Feministe sur l'art actuel/Feminist Impact on Contemporary Art
(contributions by Nicole Burisch, Barbara Clausen, Jen Leigh Fisher, Anne Golden, k.g. Guttman, Anne-Marie Proulx, Thérèse St-Gelais, Eliana Stratica-Mihail, Tamar Tembeck and Elvan Zabunyan) (Canada,Montreal: La Centrale)
2015 Ilmira Bolotri and Marina Vinnik ()
Art Feminism: Actual Language (Russia,Rosa Luxemberg Foundation)
2015 Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight (eds)
Doing Women's Film History (USA, International,University of Illinois Press)
2014 Catherine de Zegher ()
Women's Work is Never Done: an anthology (Belgium, International,Belgium: AsaMER Publishers)
2014 Katja Kobolt and Lana Zdravkovic (eds)
Performative Gestures, Political Moves (Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Inte,Zagreb: Red Athena University Press, Centre for Women's Studies and City of Women) More
Press release of this book:
'While acknowledging the "problem of performativity",*/Performative Gestures Political Moves/*, however, (still) lingers on the term, exploring its echoing in the research focused on what should thus also be considered as an effect of the performance of power -- on the art and theory production in so-called "Eastern Europe". The book does not(only) represent the research on performance art and performativity in a region denoted as "East European", but also produces positions that go beyond the representation(s) of what performance art, performativity in/and "Post-Socialist Europe" are.
Performative Gestures Political Moves/therefore also raises questions of historisation(s) and their ideological positioning. Especially within feminist art history but also in feminist curating, the question of labelling art production as feminist has been till today a burning subject. How, what, when, why, where, by whom and for whom is(performance) art feminist, obviously does not have an unambiguous answer. The same is true for art and feminism as such. Therefore, the publication has aimed to foster a reflection on research positions and theoretical considerations of performativity, performance art, feminism, historisation and, above all, their political implications in/and/for the "continental Post-Socialist" condition.
/With contributions by//
//Angela Dimitrakaki, Ana Peraica, Barbara Orel, Dunja Kukovec, Grupa Spomenik and DeLVe, Marija Ratkovic', Marina Grz(inic', Martina Pachmanová, Milijana Babic', Suzana Milevska, Tea Hvala, Waldemar Tatarczuk// // //Edited by// //Katja Kobolt and Lana Zdravkovic'// // //The Performative Gestures Political Moves has been published by the City of Women, Ljubljana and Red Athena University Press, a collaborative publishing project by the Centre for Women's Studies Zagreb and trans-Yugoslav feminist scholars./'
2014 Bettina Knaup and Beatrice Ellen Stammer (eds)
Re.Act.Feminism: A performing archive (International, Germany,London: Live Art Development Agency and Nuremberg: Verlag fuer Moderne Kunst)
2014 Binna Choi, Maiko Tanaka (eds)
The Grand Domestic Revolution Handbook (Spain, International,Amsterdam: Valiz)
2014 Maria Ioannou and Maria Kyriakidou (eds)
Female beauty in art : history, feminism, women artists (UK,Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K. : Cambridge Scholars)
2013 Vivian Ziherl (ed)
LIP Anthology: An Australian Feminist Art Journal, 1976-1984 (Australia, International,Australia: Macmillan Art Publ. and Kunstverein Milan)
2013 Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy Rowe (eds)
Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience (UK, International,Manchester University Press)
2013 Elke Krasny + Frauenmuseum Meran (eds)
Women's: museum : curatorial politics in feminism, education, history, and art = Frauen:Museum : Politiken des Kuratorischen in Feminismus, Bildung, Geschichte und Kunst (Germany, Austria, International,Wien: Locker)
2013 Diana Almeida (eds)
Women and the Arts Dialogues in Female Creativity (Portugal, international, USA,Blackwells)
2013 Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry (eds)
Politics in a Glass Case (UK,Liverpool University Press)
2013 Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan Duong, Mariam B. Lam and Kathy L. Nguyen (eds)
Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora (USA, Vietnam, Asia,USA: University of Washington Press)
2013 Katrin Kivimaa (ed)
Working with Feminism: Curating and Exhibitions in Eastern Europe (Estonia, Latvia, Macedonia, Poland, International,Talin: ACTA Universitatis Tallinnensis)
2013 Miriam Solá y Elena Urko (eds)
Transfeminismos: epistemes, fricciones y flujos (Spanish) (Spain,Spain: Txalaparta, S.L.)
2013 Domingo Pujante González (ed)
Ob-scena: l'obscène au féminin au tournant du XXIe siècle (France,Paris : Éd. l'Improviste)
2012 Rachel Epp Buller (ed)
Reconciling Art and Mothering (UK, USA, Singapore, Poland,UK; Ashgate Publishing)
2012 Leila Pourtavaf (ed)
Féminismes Électriques (Canada, USA,Montreal: La Centrale and Les Éditions du rémue-ménage) More
Feminismes Electriques documents the evolution of feminist artistic practices over the last decade at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, a feminist artist-run center in Montreal, with a 40 year history of exhibiting local, national and international feminist and women artists.
Additional information: Essays by Helena Reckitt, Therese St-Gelais, Trish Salah, Bernadette Houde, and Aneessa Hashmi, as well as a series of artist texts: Manon Tourigny in conversation with Stephanie Chabot and Dominique Petrin, Reena Katz with Jumana Manna and Onya Hogan-Finlay with Chris Kraus. The publication includes an artist poster by G.B. Jones as well a detailed programming history of a decade of the La Centrale's programming by Roxanne Arsenault. Book design by Cecilia Berkovic.
2012 Catherine Morris and Vincent Bonin (eds)
Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art (USA,Boston: MIT Press)
2012 Elke Zobl, Ricarda Drüeke (eds)
Feminist Media: Participatory Spaces, Networks and Cultural Citizenship (Austria,Reihe Critical Media Studies) More
Transcript available http://www.transcript-verlag.de/ts2157/ts2157_1.pdf
2012 FAK Feministisches Arbeits-Kollektiv ()
Body of Work (Germany,FAK)
2011 Nancy Princenthal (ed)
The deconstructive impulse : women artists reconfigure the signs of power, 1973-1991 (USA, International,New York : Munich ; New York : Neuberger Museum of Art , DelMonico Books/Prestel)
2011 Valie Export ()
Valie Export: Time and Countertime (Austria,Cologne: Walther Koenig) More
Foreword: Agnes Hussein-Arco and Stella Rollig. Introduction Angelika Nollert. Anthology of essays by many writers. This book is also the exhibition catalogue for an exhibition at Lentos Museum, Linz and Belverdere Gallery, Vienna.
2011 Rudolfine Lackner (ed)
100 Jahre VBKO/ VBKO
Festschrift / 100 Years of the
Austrian Association of Women
Artists (Austria,Austria: Vienna: VBKO)
2011 Frédérique Bergholtz (ed)
If I can´t dance I don´t want to be a part of the revolution: Conversation Pieces (Germany, The Netherlands, International,Berlin: Revolver) More
In Conversation Pieces, twelve critical thinkers confront twelve artists from the perspective of historical and present-day feminism in art, drawing from the exhibitions and performances presented by If I Can?t Dance during Edition II.
With contributions by Dieter Roelstraete & Alexandra Bachzetsis, Vanessa Desclaux & Will Holder, Lisette Smits & Karl Holmqvist, Peio Aguirre & Jutta Koether, Diana McCarty & The Otolith Group, Emily Pethick & Maria Pask, Pádraic Moore & Sarah Pierce, Paul O?Neill & Falke Pisano, Patricia Grzonka & Stefanie Seibold, Jan Verwoert & Frances Stark, Binna Choi & Haegue Yang, and Frédérique Bergholtz & Katarina Zdjelar.
2011 Lourdes Mendez and Xabier Arakistain (eds)
Artistic Production and the
Feminist Theory of Art:
New Debates IV (Spain, International,Centro Cultural Monthermoso)
2011 Lisa Pearson (ed)
It is Almost That: A Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists and Writers (USA, UK,Siglio)
2011 Sondra Hale and Terry Wolverton (eds)
From Site to Vision: The Woman's Building in Contemporary Culture (USA,Los Angeles: Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design)
2010 Eimear O'Connor (ed)
Irish women artists, 1800-2009: familiar but unknown (Ireland,Dublin: Four Courts (TRIARC research studies in Irish art, n°3))
2010 Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjoholm Skrubbe (eds)
Feminisms is Still our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial practices (Sweden, International,UK: Cambridge Scolars Publishing)
2010 Fabienne Dumont (ed)
La rebellion du deuxieme sexe - L'histoire de l'art au crible des theories feministes anglo-americaines (1970-2000) (USA, UK, France,Dijon: Les presses du reel)
2010 Deborah Willis ()
Black Venus 2010: They Called Her "Hottentot" (USA,Temple University Press)
2010 Angela Steif (ed)
Power Up: Female Pop Art (Germany, USA, UK,DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag GmbH & Co KG)
2010 Lourdes Mendez and Xabier Arakistain (eds)
Artistic Production and the
Feminist Theory of Art:
New Debates III (Spain, International,Centro Cultural Monthermoso)
2010 Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz (eds)
Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art (International,New York: MoMA) More
Introductory essays by Cornelia Butler, Griselda Pollock and Aruna D'Souza plus 50 other contributors.
2010 h.arta (eds)
FEMINISME. Recapituland concepte si afirmand noi pozitii/ FEMINISMS. Reviewing concepts and affirming new positions (Romania,Timisoara: h.arta) More
Book available:
FEMINISME. Website link currently down (May 2020).
2010 Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar (eds)
Critical transnational feminist praxis (USA, International,Albany : State University of New York Press)
2010 Bojana Pejic (ed)
The Gender Check Reader (Austria, International,Vienna: MUMOK and Erste Foundation) More
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.
2009 Lourdes Mendez and Xabier Arakistain (ed)
Artistic Production and the
Feminist Theory of Art:
New Debates II (Spain, International,Spain: Vitoria-Gasteiz, Montehermoso)
2009 Muriel Andrin (et al) (eds)
Femmes et critique(s): lettres, arts, cinéma (France,Namur : Presses universitaires de Namur)
2008 Lourdes Mendez and Xabier Arakistain (ed)
Artistic Production and the
Feminist Theory of Art:
New Debates I (Spain, International,Spain: Vitoria-Gasteiz, Montehermoso)
2008 Marina Gržinić and Rosa Reitsamer (eds)
New Feminism: Worlds of Feminism, Queer and Networking Conditions. (International,Löcker Verlag, Vienna )
2008 Rudolfine Lackner (ed)
Names are Shaping up nicely! Gendered nomenclature: in Art, Language and Philosophy (Austria,Vienna: VBKO) More
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.
2008 Beatrice Josse and Helene Guenin ()
2 ou 3 Choses Que Je ignore d'elles: pour un manifeste POST (?)- FEMINISTE (France,Frac Lorraine, (Text in English and French)) More
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.
2008 Yvonne Rainer, Carrie Lambert, Catherine Lord, Catherine Queloz (editor) (ed)
Une femme qui...Ecrits, entretiens, essais critiques (French edition) (USA, Switzerland,JRP Ringier)
2008 Araceli Barbosa Sanchez ()
Arte Feminista en los ochenta en Mexico: una perspectiva de genero (Mexico,Mexico: Casa Juan Pablos Centro Cultural, Universidad Autonoma de Estado de Morelos)
2008 Producciones de Arte y Pensamiento, S.L. (eds)
EXIT Book #9. Feminismo y Arte de género (Spain, International,Arte y Pensamiento, S.L.)
2007 Karen Frostig and Kathy A. Halainka (eds)
Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women and Feminism (USA,US: Cambridge Scholar) More
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)
2007 Martha Rosler and Jesus Carrillo Castillo (eds)
Imagenes publicas.La funcion politica de la imagen (Spain,Dialnet, University of Rioja)
2007 Lorena Zamora Betancourt ()
El imaginario femenino en el arte: Monica Mayer, Rowena Morales y Carla Rippey (Mexico,Mexico: Conesjo Nacional para la cultura y les artes)
2007 Karen Cordero Reiman and Inda Saenz (ed)
Critica feminista en la teoria e historia del arte (Mexico,Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericano)
2007 Eleanor Heartney, Helaine
Posner, Nancy Princenthal
and Sue Scott ()
After the Revolution: Women Who
Transformed Contemporary Art (USA,Munich, Berlin, London and New
York: Prestel)
2007 Margarita Aizpuru and S. Moreno Parrado ()
La Feminidad Craquelada: meros comportamientos y reestructuraciones genericas (Spain,Spain: Diputacio de Malaga)
2007 Agnese Fidecaro and Stephanie Lachat (eds)
Profession : créatrice: la place des femmes dans le champ artistique (Switzerland,Switzerland: Lausanne : Éd. Antipodes/ Universite de Geneve)
2007 Rhea Anastas, Michael Brenson (eds)
Witness to Her Art: Art and Writings by Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell and Eau de Cologne (USA, UK, Germany,Bard College)
2007 Elinor Gadon, Wendy Tarlow Kaplan, Roobina Karode ()
Tiger by the Tail! Women Artists of India Transforming Culture (India, USA,Massachusetts: Women's Studies Research Center - Brandeis University; New Delhi: Indian Council for Cultural Relations )
2007 Brigitte Rollet and Delphine Naudier (eds)
Genre et légitimité culturelle: quelle reconnaissance pour les femmes ? (France,Paris : L'Harmattan)
2007 VietNamNetBridge ()
Women Paint and Painting on Women (Vietnam,Hanoi: Vietnam Fine Arts Museum)
2007 Victoria Vesna (ed)
Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age
of Information Overflow (USA,Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press)
2006 Noel Burch and Helene Marquie (eds)
Emancipation sexuelle ou contrainte des corps ? (France,Paris : L'Harmattan)
2006 Suzanne Van Hagen ()
Art'Fab;l'art, la femme, l'Europe (France, International,Paris: Terrail\(exhibition, Saint Tropez))
2006 Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (eds)
Women Artists at the Millennium (USA,Cambridge: MIT Press) More
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.
2006 Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumarkt (eds)
At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet (USA International,Boston: MIT Press) More
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.
2006 Sarah Nuttal (ed)
Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics (USA,Durham, North Carolina & London: Duke University Press) More
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.
2005 Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (eds)
Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art After Postmodernism (USA,University of California Press) More
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).
2005 Rochit I Tamedo and Rosario Cruz Lucero, Imelda Cajipe-Endaya (eds)
Who Owns Women's Bodies? (2001-2004) (Philippines,Philippines: Quezon City: Creative Collective Center. Inc.)
2005 Mila Bredikhina and Katy Deepwell (eds)
Gender, Theory and Contemporary Art Anthology, 1970-2000 (English title of Russian text) (Russia, International,Moscow: Rosspen)
2005 Alexander Alberro (ed)
Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (USA,Boston: MIT) More
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.
2004 Rosemary Betterton (ed)
Unframed: Practices and Politics of Women's Contemporary Painting (UK,London: IB Tauris) More
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.
2004 Johanna Householder and Tanya Mars (eds)
Caught in the Act: an Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (Canada,Toronto:YYZ Books) More
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.
2004 Gill Perry (ed)
Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women's Practice (UK,Oxford: Blackwell Publishing) More
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.
2004 Verena Kuni and Claudia Reiche (eds)
Cyberfeminism: Next Protocols (USA, International,New York: Autonomedia) More
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'.
2004 Nguyen Haiyen (intro) ()
Vietnamese Women Artists (Vietnam,Cultur-Information Publishing House)
2004 Women Down the Pub: N.Debois Buhl, L.Strombeck, A.Sonjasdotter ()
Udsigt - Feministiske Strategier i Dansk Billedkunst / View - Feminist Strategies in Danish Visual Art (Denmark,Denmark: Informations Vorla)
2004 Paul Chike Dike and Patricia Oyelola (eds)
Nigerian Women in Visual Art: History, Aesthetics and Interpretation (Nigeria,Lagos: National Gallery of Art)
2003 Izabela Kowalczyk and Edyta Zierkiewicz (eds)
W poszukiwaniu malej dziewczynki (Poland,[Wroclaw] : Stowarzyszenie Kobiet )
2003 Århus Universitet ()
Køn & identitet
(Denmark, International,Institut for Æstetiske Fag, Afdeling for Kunsthistorie, Århus Universitet)
2002 Branislava Andelkovic (ed)
Uvod u Feministicke Teorije Slike (Serbia,Belgrade: Centar za Savremenu Umetnost)
2002 Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (eds)
Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture
(USA,MIT press)
2002 Maria Fernandez and Faith Wilding, Michelle M. Wright (eds)
Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist practices (USA, International,New York: Autonomedia) More
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.
2001 Imelda Cajipe-Endaya (eds)
Who Owns Women's Bodies? (Philippines,Philippines: Quezon City: Creative Collective Center. Inc.)
2001 Hilary Robinson (ed)
Feminism - Art - Theory: An Anthology, 1968-2000 (UK, International,Oxford: Blackwells) More
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.
2001 Danielle Cliche and Ritva Mitchell, Andreas Joh. Weisand (eds)
Pyramid or Pillars: Unveiling the Status of Women in Arts and Media Professions in Europe (Germany, International,Germany: ARCult Media/ERICarts/ZfKf)
2001 Annette Brinkmann and Andreas Joh Weisand ()
Frauen im Kultur- und Medienbetrieb III: Fakten zu Berufssituation und Qualifizierung / Women in the Arts and Media: Qualification and Professional Outlook (Germany,Zentrums Fur Kulturforschung)
2001 Jacqueline Bobo ()
Black feminist cultural criticism (USA,Malden, Mass. ; Oxford : Blackwell)
2001 Aruna D'Souza (ed)
Self and History: A Tribute to Linda Nochlin (USA,London: Thames and Hudson) More
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.
2000 Alicia Craig Faxon and Liana De Girolami Cheney, Kathleen Russo (eds)
Self-Portraits by Women Painters (USA, UK,London: Ashgate) More
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.
2000 Emanuela de Cecco and Gianni Romano (eds)
Contemporanee: Percorsi, lavoir e poetiche della artiste dagli anni Ottanta a Oggi (Italy, International,Milan: Editori Associati) More
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.
2000 Susan Bee and Mira Schor (eds)
M/e/a/n/i/n/g : an anthology of artists' writings, theory, and criticism (USA,Durham, NC : Duke University Press)
2000 Cutting Edge Women's Research Group (eds)
Desire by Design: Body, Territories and New Technologies (UK,London, IB Tauris) More
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'.
2000 Fiona Carson and Claire Pajaczkowska ()
Feminist Visual Culture (UK,Edinburgh Univ Press) More
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.
2000 Anna Alchuk (ed)
Women and Visual Marks (English title of Russian book) (Russia,Moscow: Idea) More
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.'
2000 Beatrice Roschanzamir (ed)
Künstlerinnen in Europa : spartenübergreifend - grenzenlos ; Dokumentation ; [zum Symposion "Künstlerinnen in Europa - Spartenübergreifend - Grenzenlos", Berlin 1999] (Germany,GEDOK)
2000 Louise May (ed)
The feminist reconstruction of space (Essays from a symposium entitled Arch '96 held at the St. Norbert Arts and Cultural Centre, Sept. 27-29, 1999) (Canada,St. Norbert, Man. : St. Norbert Arts and Cultural Centre)
2000 Ingrid Straube (ed)
Kreativ, dekorativ : Reflexionen uber Kunst und Aesthetik (Germany,Köln : Verein Beitr. zur Feministischen Theorie und Praxis )
2000 Deanna Hearst and Nat Muller (eds)
Ctrl+shift art - ctrl+shift gender: Convergences of Gender, New Media and Art (The Netherlands,Netherlands; Amsterdam, Axis Bureau voor de Kunsten V/M) More
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.
2000 Peggy Z. Brand (ed)
Beauty Matters (USA,USA: Indiana University Press) More
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.
1999 Thelma B. Kinatar and Sylvia Mendez Ventura (eds)
Self-Portraits: Twelve Filipina Artists Speak (The Phillippines,Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press)
1999 Deirdre E. Heddon ()
In search of the subject : locating the shifting politics of women's performance art (UK,University of Glasgow)
1999 Coco Fusco (ed)
Corpus Delecti: Performance Art in the Americas (USA,Routledge) More
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.
1999 Jorn Merkert and Felicitas Rink (eds)
Zauberei und Zähneklappern : Texte und Reden zu Künstlerinnen 1973 - 1999 (Germany,Berlin : Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen, 1867 )
1998 Katy Deepwell (ed)
Women Artists and Modernism (UK,Manchester University Press/St Martins) More
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.'
1998 Katy Deepwell (ed)
Nuevo Critica Feminista de Arte (Spain, UK, USA,Ediciones Cathedra,Universitat de Valencia/Instituto de la Mujer)
1998 Kunstverein WAS (Women's Art Support) Eva Ursprung (eds)
Women beyond borders, Austria (Austria,Wien : Triton )
1998 Ella Shohat (ed)
Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (USA,Cambridge, Mass: MIT)
1998 Alison Beale and Annette Van Den Bosch (eds)
Ghosts in the Machine: Women and Cultural Policy in Canada and Australia (Canada, Australia,Toronto: Garamond Press)
1998 Heidi Richter and Adelheid Sievert-Staudte (ed)
Eine Tulpe ist eine Tulpe ist eine Tulpe : Frauen, Kunst und neue Medien (Germany,Königstein/Taunus : Helmer )
1998 Annette Van Den Bosch and Alison Beale (eds)
Ghosts in the Machine: Women and Cultural Policy in Canada and Australia (Canada,Toronto: Garamond Press) More
Review reproduced from Volume 3, n.paradoxa, Jan 1999. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'
Alison Beale & Annette Van Den Bosch (eds) Ghosts in the Machine: Women and Cultual policy in Canada and Australia
Toronto: Garamond Press,1998 ISBN 0-920059-29-5
A rare and serious feminist analysis of cultural policy in Canada and Australia, which begins with a comparative study of these two respective countries since the 1960s, comparing the legal, administrative and social infrastructure in which women in the arts work. The essays offer some very thought-provoking and specific case studies on anti-racist initiatives (Monica Kin Gagnon,Canada); cultural planning (Deborah Stevenson, Australia); community, public, audience (Jennifer Barratt, Australia); value (Barbara Godard, Canada); queer politics and film (Brenda Longfellow, Canada); women artist's careers (Annette Van Den Bosch, Australia) and women composers (Andra McCartney, Canada).Further analysis of cultural policy in each country is offered by Andrea Hull, Alison Beale and Patricia Gillard.
1998 Cornelia Sollfrank (ed)
First Cyberfeminist International Reader (Germany, International,Hamburg: Old Boys Network) More
Review reproduced from Volume 3, n.paradoxa, Jan 1999. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'
Cornelia Sollfrank (ed) First Cyberfeminist International Reader Hamburg: Old Boys Network,1998.
The reader includes excellent documentation, interesting papers, artist's projects and presentations from the First Cyberfeminist International September 20-28 1997, Hybrid Workspace, Kassel. The developing international network of women whose work is represented here exchange information through the (ironically titled) Old Boy's Network; PopTarts on Telepolis and the FACES e-mail list and many participated in the FACES conference in Forum Stadtpark in July 1998. (See also: Vol 2, n.paradoxa :Women and New Media.) Topics covered range from data DJ's and data-avatars, fan and e-zines, hacking, art/video projects on the net; definitions of cyber-feminism, fe-mail culture, and what constitutes feminist counter-strategies in cyber-culture.
1998 Katy Deepwell (ed)
Nuevo Critica Feminista de Arte (UK, USA,Ediciones Cathedra,Universitat de Valencia/Instituto de la Mujer)
1997 Ilse Nagelschmidt (ed)
Frauenleben - Frauenliteratur - Frauenkultur in der DDR der 70er und 80er Jahre (Germany,Leipzig : Leipziger Univ.-Verl. )
1996 Betty Ann Brown (ed)
Expanding Circles: Women, Art & Community (USA,New York: Midmarch Arts Press) More
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.
1996 Georgia Collins and Renee Sandell (eds)
Gender issues in art education : content, contexts, and strategies (USA,Reston, Va. : National Art Education Association)
1996 Maya Angelou, Theresa Robinson et al (ed)
Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists (USA, Africa,New York, Rizzoli)
1996 Agnes Etherington Centre, Kingston ()
Femscript : transcript of the proceedings of the Symposium on Feminist Art Practice, 1995 (Canada,Symposium on Feminist Art Practice, Kingston, Ont. Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario, Organization of Kingston Women Artists)
1996 Beate Söntgen (ed)
Rahmenwechsel : Kunstgeschichte als feministische Kulturwissenschaft Beate Söntgen (Germany,Berlin : Akad.-Verl. )
1996 Griselda Pollock (ed)
Generations and Geographies (UK,London: Routledge) More
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.
1996 Tove Beate Pedersen and Elin Svenneby (eds)
Kunsthistorie, kvinners kunst, kunstkritikk (Norway, Sweden, Denmark,Norges forskningsråd, Sekretariatet for kvinneforskning)
1995 Peggy Z. Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer (eds)
Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics (USA,Pennsylvanian: Penn State Press)
1995 Beverley Skeggs (ed)
Feminist Cultural Theory: Process & Production (UK,Manchester: Manchester University Press)
1995 Leslie King-Hammond (ed)
Gumbo Ya Ya: Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists (USA, Africa,New York: Midmarch Press)
1995 Diane Apostolos-Cappadonna and Lucinda Ebersole (eds)
Women Creativity and the Arts: Critical & Autbiographical Perspectives (USA,New York: Continuum)
1995 Whitney Chadwick (ed)
Confessions of the Guerilla Girls: How a Bunch of Masked Avengers Fight Sexism and Racism in the Art World with Facts, Humor and Fake Fur (USA,London: Harper Collins)
1995 Katy Deepwell (ed)
New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies (UK,St Martins/ Manchester University Press) More
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.
1995 Verein Frauenstadtrundgang Basel (ed)
Blickwechsel (Switzerland,Basel : Verl. Frauenstadtrundgang )
1995 Penny Florence and Dee Reynolds ()
Feminist Subjects: Multi-Media (UK,Manchester University Press / St Martins)
1995 Carolyn Korsmeyer and Peggy Z. Brand (eds)
Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics (USA,Pennsylvanian: Penn State Press)
1994 Joanna Frueh and C. Langer, A.Raven ()
Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action (USA,Icon/Harper Collins)
1994 Norma Broude and Mary Garrard ()
The Power of Feminist Art : Emergence,Impact and Triumph of the American Feminist Art Movement (USA,New York: Harry N. Abrams) More
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.
1994 Jane Brettle and Sally Rice ()
Public Bodies/Private States: New Views on Photography, Representation and Gender (UK,St Martins/ Manchester University Press)
1994 Jane R. Glaser and Artemis A.Zentou (eds)
Gender Perspectives: Essays on Women in Museums (USA,Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press)
1994 E. Bornay (ed)
La Cabellera Fememina (Spain,Madrid: Libreria Mujeres)
1993 Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan (eds)
Acting out : feminist performances (USA,Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press)
1993 Mieke Bal and Anneke Smelik, Rosemarie Buikema (eds)
Vrouwenstudies in de Cultuurwetenschappen (Germany, The Netherlands,Germany, Muiderberg: Coninho)
1993 Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer (eds)
Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective (USA,Indiana University Press/Hypatia Inc.)
1993 Forschung Marburg ()
FrauenKunstGeschichte - Forschung Marburg Feministische Bibliographie zur Frauenforschung in der Kunstgeschichte (Germany,Germany: Pfaffenweiler)
1993 ()
Feministische Interventionen (Germany,Marburg : Jonas-Verl. für Kunst und Literatur )
1992 Judy Seigel ()
Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk that Changed Art,1975-1990 (USA,New York:Midmarsh Arts Press)
1992 Norma Broude and Mary Garrard ()
The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (USA,New York: Icon Harper Collins) More
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.
1992 Susan Bowers and Ronad DoHerer (eds)
Sexuality, the Female Gaze and the Arts: Women, the Arts & Society (USA,Selinsgrove, Susquehanna University Press)
1991 Joanna Frueh and C. Langer, A.Raven (eds)
Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology (USA,Icon Edition)
1991 Lucy Lim ()
Six Contemporary Chinese Women Artists (USA, China,San Francisco: Chinese Culture Center)
1990 Margarethe Jochimsen (ed)
Dokumentation des Symposiums Feministische Erneuerung von Wissenschaft und Kunst : [vom 16. bis 18. Februar 1989 im Rahmen der Ausstellung "Das Verhaltnis der Geschlechter" im Bonner Kunstverein] / Arbeitsgemeinschaft Interdisziplinäre Frauenforschung und -studien] (Germany,Pfaffenweiler : Centaurus-Verl.-Ges. )
1989 Betty Ann Brown and Arlene Raven, Kenna Love, Alessandra Comini ()
Exposures : women & their art (USA,Pasadena, Calif.: NewSage Press)
1989 Ines Lindner and Sigrid Schade,Silke Wenk,Gabriele Werner ()
Blick Wechsel: Konstructuionen von Mannlichkeit und Weiblichkeit un Kunst und Kunstgeschichte : 4.Kunsthistorikerinnin-Tagung in Berlin (Germany,Berlin: Dietrich Remier Verlag)
1988 Gillian Elinor and S. Richardson, S. Scott, A. Thomas and K. Walker (eds)
Women and Craft (UK,London: Women's Press)
1988 Ditta Behrens (eds)
Frauenkunst oder Kunst von Frauen, Kunstlerinnen in den 70er Jahren: Der Grosse Unterschied. Die Neue Frauenbewegung der Siebziger Jahre (Germany,Berlin: Elefanten Press)
1987 Rosemary Betterton (ed)
Looking On: Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media (UK,Pandora/RKP)
1987 I. Barta and and Z. Breu, D. Hammer-Tugendhat, U. Jenni, I. Neirhaus, J. Schobel (eds)
Frauen: Bilder: Manner: Mythen: Kunsthistoriche Beitrage: Kunsthistorikerinnin-Tagung in Wein (Germany,Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag)
1987 Hilary Robinson (ed)
Visibly Female (UK, USA,Camden Press)
1987 R. Parker and G. Pollock ()
Framing Feminism: The Women's Art Movement, 1970-1985 (UK,Pandora/RKP)
1987 Cecilia Prado Villarmarzo and Werther O.Bodden Hernandez (ed)
La Produccion Feminina en las Artes Plasticas Latinoamericans,1980-1987 (Puerto Rico,Pio Piedra: Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Rio Piedras, Sistema de Bibliotecas,Coleccion de las Artes)
1987 Leslie Saunders (ed)
Glancing Fires:An Investigation into Women's Creativity (UK,London: Women's Press)
1985 People's Art Association ()
From Half to Whole (Korea,Korea: People's Art Association)
1985 Gisela Ecker (ed)
Feminist Aesthetics (Germany,London: Women's Press)
1984 Diane L. Fowlkes and Charlotte S. McClure (eds)
Feminist visions : towards a transformation of the liberal arts curriculum (Papers from "A fabric of our own making" : southern scholars on women, held Mar. 4-7, 1981, at Georgia State University, Atlanta) (USA,University of Alabama Press)
1983 Jenny Boult and Tess Brady (eds)
After the rage : South Australian women's art and writing (Australia,Clarence Park South Australia : Tutu Press)
1982 Julia Church and Alison Ader (eds)
True Bird Grit: A Book About Canberra Women in the Arts, 1982-1983 (Australia,Canberra, Australia: Acme Ink)
1981 Christiane Schmerl and Veronika Radulovic, Thekia Sondermeier, Regina van Laak-Berenger ()
Frauenfeindliche Werbung: Sexusmus als heimlicher Lehrplan (Germany,Berlin: Elefanten Press)
1980 Peter Gorsen and Gislind Nabakowski, Sander Helke ()
Frauen in der Kunst (Germany,(2 Vols.) Frankfurt,Suhrkamp)
1980 Elaine Hedges and Ingrid Wendt (eds)
In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts (USA,New York: Feminist Press)
1979 Judy Loeb (ed)
Feminist Collage: Educating Women in the Visual Arts (USA,USA: Columbia University:Teachers College Press)
1975 Feminist Art Program ()
Art: A Woman's Sensibility (USA,Valencia: California Institute of the Arts)