Art And Feminism

by Phelan, Peggy; Reckitt, Helena; Stein, Karen

• ISBN13: 9780714847023
• ISBN10: 071484702X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-09-07
• Publisher: Phaidon Press

Summary

No question about it, Art and Feminism is the basic reference book for feminist art. Part of Phaidon's excellent Themes and Movements series, it surveys three decades of a tumultuous history with a brief but inclusive essay, reproductions of works by 155 artists, and lengthy excerpts from groundbreaking texts by artists and theorists. The challenge posed by a movement that spans several artistic generations and includes many contentious players is ably met by essayist Peggy Phelan, professor of performance studies at New York University. She illuminates the intertwined workings of feminist politics and literary criticism, psychoanalysis, race and queer theory with clarity and a refreshing absence of doctrinaire pronouncements. The illustrations are organized chronologically under sometimes quirky headings, beginning with "Too Much" (late-'60s performance pieces by such pioneering figures as Carolee Schneemann, Miriam Schapiro, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, and Yayoi Kusama). The final section, "Femmes de Si+¿cle," contains work from the '90s by Coco Fusco, Kara Walker, Mona Hatoum, Jenny Saville, and others exploring "collective memories ... and traumas." Essays range from the raw invective of Valerie Solanas's "Scum Manifesto" (1967) to the reasoned arguments of Adrian Piper's "The Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists" (1990). While some may argue that the book could be more inclusive--it deals overwhelmingly with women artists who exhibit in major Western cultural centers--it offers an unparalleled breadth of reference. Irked by the perfect bodies of many feminist artists who use nudity in their work, I was struck by the poignancy and honesty of Hannah Wilke--a glamorous figure in '70s and '80s performance art--who chose to memorialize her bald, bloated self in photographs months before her untimely death from cancer in 1993. --Cathy Curtis

Author Biography

Helena Reckitt is an independent writer and arts organizer with a long-standing critical research interest in feminist art and theory. A former commissioning editor at Routledge, and head of talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Reckitt was Curator at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Georgia 2002–2005. She was co-editor, with Joel Oppenheimer, of Acting on AIDS: Sex, Drugs, and Politics (1998) and curated the exhibition 'Found Wanting' (Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, 2000).

Peggy Phelan, a leading feminist theorist of contemporary art and performance, has written extensively on contemporary visual arts and performance from feminist pscyhoanalytic perspectives. Phelan taught in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University from 1985 to 2002 and is currently the Ann O'Day Maples Chair in the Arts and Professor of Drama and English at Stanford University. She is the auhtor of Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), Mourning Sex (1997) and co-editor of The Ends of Performance (1998). From 1997-99 Phelan was the recipient of a project fellowship from the Open Society Institute of the Soros Foundataion's Project on Death in America.