Angela Dimitrakaki | University of Edinburgh (original) (raw)
Books by Angela Dimitrakaki
What happened in art following the consolidation of capitalist globalisation after 1989? Drawing ... more What happened in art following the consolidation of capitalist globalisation after 1989? Drawing on work in art history, curating, critical theory, political economy and sociology, essays in Economy: Art, Production and the Subject in the Twenty-First Century frame and substantiate the increasing attendance to economic relations as a defining trend in contemporary art’s history and one that brought to an end the hegemony of the cultural subject encountered in postmodern discourse.
Contributions include reflections on art in its relation to property as well as to speculation and finance, immaterial labour and the avant-garde, the lessons of the past in pursuing an aesthetics of the economy, the ethics of care and the role of the art document, queer politics and class, the new feminist critique of economic subjects, migration, precarity and empowerment, the ambivalence of the commons, and a range of perspectives on the possibility of opposition, in the art world and beyond, to the biopolitical rule of global capital as the arbiter of human relations.
Building on and extending the curatorial project ECONOMY (Edinburgh and Glasgow 2013), the book puts forward a proposition that cuts across a number of ‘turns’ in the art of the past two decades, including socially engaged practices, seeking to connect localised approaches with the broader organisation of production and the unprecedented apparentness of the economy in the passage from the twentieth to the twenty-first century.
Contributors: Massimo de Angelis, Angela Dimitrakaki, Melanie Gilligan, Kirsten Lloyd, Renate Lorenz, Dimitris Papadopoulos & Vassilis Tsianos, Andrea Phillips, John Roberts, Alberto Toscano, Gregory Sholette, Marina Vishmidt
Editors: Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd
Endorsements / Reviews
As postmodernism fades away, capitalism enters a major crisis and hot wars abound, a generation of artists and thinkers turn to political economy. Here is a book that shows why the reorientation is vital and necessary.
Steve Edwards, Professor in Art-History-Materialism, The Open University
In these topsy turvy times, artists have turned their attention to matters economic, looking past the vaunted effects of the art market to an analysis of the workings of the broader society, bringing to bear their hard-won perspectives on labour, gender, identity, power, agency— and aesthetics. This book is an indispensable guide to these urgent debates.
Martha Rosler, artist
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
‘The Last Instance’: The Apparent Economy, Social Struggles and Art in Global Capitalism Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd
PART 1: PRODUCTION
1. Art as Property Andrea Phillips
2. Art and the Problem of Immaterial Labour: Reflections on Its Recent History John Roberts
3. Indifferent Agent: Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital Marina Vishmidt
4. Women’s Lives, Labour, Contracts, Documents: The Biopolitical Tactics of Feminist Art, Act Two and a Half Angela Dimitrakaki
5. Seeing Socialism: On the Aesthetics of the Economy, Production and the Plan Alberto Toscano
PART 2: SUBJECTS
6. DIWY: Precarity in Embodied Capitalism Vassilis Tsianos and Dimitris Papadopoulos
7. Being with, across, over and through: Art’s Caring Subjects, Ethics Debates and Encounters Kirsten Lloyd
8. The Long Working Hours of Normal Love Renate Lorenz
9. Occupy the Art World? Notes on a Potential Artistic Subject Gregory Sholette
10. (Re)Making the World: An Interview with Melanie Gilligan on Capitalist Exchange, Subject Formation and ‘Social Synthesis’ Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd
11. Economy, Capital and the Commons Massimo de Angelis
First edition
Pages: 256
Illustrations: 20 black and white illustrations
234 x 156 mm
© 2014
Hardback
£30.00 Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9781781381380
Apr 2015
"Is gender implicated in how art does its work, or even is defined as work, in global space? Is a... more "Is gender implicated in how art does its work, or even is defined as work, in global space? Is a global imperative exclusive to capitalism’s planetary expansion or also animating oppositional practices in art and curating? And what is new in the gendered paradigms of art after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a persistently divided Europe and elsewhere?
The study addresses these questions through interwoven analyses of travel as artistic labour, the sexualisation of migration as a relationship between Eastern and Western Europe, the post-documentary aesthetic of the feminist video essay, the rise of female art and curatorial collectives, the spectral re-appearance of the male working class in the museum and globalisation’s ‘bad boys’ as well as the need for a renewed materialist feminism. A central aspiration of the book is to demonstrate that contemporary art and theory’s turn to labour and economic relations, around 2000, compels a reviewing of feminism’s attachment to the cultural subject, practices and methodologies privileged by postmodernism. Artists and collectives discussed in the book include, among others, Marina Abramovic, Ursula Biemann, Tracey Emin, Andrea Fraser, Kuratorisk Action, Lin+Lam, Malmö Free University for Women (MFK), Jenny Marketou, Renzo Martens, Dani Marti, Steve McQueen, Mujeres Públicas, Tanja Ostojić, Ann Sofi Siden, Mare Tralla, WHW, Artur Żmijewski.
The book seeks to offer a theoretically astute overview of key developments in art and its contexts since the 1990s and contribute to a critical refocusing of feminist politics in art history in the wake of globalisation as capitalism’s biopolitical arena. It will be of interest to researchers in art history, gender, feminist and globalisation studies, curatorial theory, cultural studies and beyond."
"Contributors include Deborah Cherry, Jo Anna Isaak, Malin Hedlin Hayden, Lubaina Himid, Amelia J... more "Contributors include Deborah Cherry, Jo Anna Isaak, Malin Hedlin Hayden, Lubaina Himid, Amelia Jones, Kati Kivimaa, Alexandra Kokoli, Kuratorisk Aktion, Suzana Milevska, Suzanne Lacy, Lucy Lippard, Sue Malvern, Nancy Proctor, Bojana Pejić, Helena Reckitt, Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, Jeannine Tang and Catherine Wood.
What happens to art when feminism grips the curatorial imagination? How do sexual politics become realised as exhibits? Is the struggle against gender discrimination compatible with the aspirations of museums led by market values? Beginning with the feminist critique of the art exhibition in the 1970s and concluding with reflections on intersectional curating and globalisation after 2000, this pioneering collection offers an alternative narrative of feminism’s impact on art. The essays provide rigorous accounts of developments in Scandinavia, Eastern and Southern Europe as well as the UK and US, framed by an introduction that offers a politically engaging navigation of historical and current positions. Delivered through essays, memoirs and interviews, discussion highlights include the Tate Modern hang, relational aesthetics, the global exhibition, feminism and technology in the museum, the rise of curatorial collectivism and insights into major exhibitions such
as Gender Check on Eastern Europe. Bringing together two generations of curators, artists and historians to rethink distinct and unresolved moments in the feminist re-modelling of art contexts, this volume dares to ask: is there a history of feminist art or one of feminist presentations of artworks?"
![Research paper thumbnail of Τέχνη και παγκοσμιοποίηση: Από το μεταμοντέρνο σημείο στη βιοπολιτική αρένα [Art and globalisation: From the postmodern sign to the biopolitical arena]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/32354089/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This is a study of globalisation's impact on contemporary art, centering on the transition from a... more This is a study of globalisation's impact on contemporary art, centering on the transition from a hegemonic postmodern paradigm (1980s) to a new relationship with the materiality of space from the 1990s onwards. Defined by socio-economic relations, this new materiality is often approached through a biopolitical practice. Topics examined in the study include the 1990s as a transition decade, the social practice of the lens, the labour turn in recent art, feminism & the video essay, the challenges of socially useful art, the confict between the display of art and its paradigms of production. It is the first book-length study of globalisation and art to appear in Greek. The full Introduction is uploaded on this site with the permission of the publisher.
Papers by Angela Dimitrakaki
ΚΡΙΣΗ / KRISI, 2023
Opening with a discussion of the relationship and tension between Marxism and feminism, the artic... more Opening with a discussion of the relationship and tension between Marxism and feminism, the article argues for the specificity of Marxist feminist analysis in relation to other currents of feminism on the left. Drawing on Susan Watkins, the article contends that capitalist strategy has contributed to shaping the intellectual trajectory of feminism as known today. This trajectory developed under a complex hegemony that entailed, among other things, the Cold War and the end of Bretton Woods in relation to postmodernism and cultural imperialism, ideological uses of the 'middle class' , and technologies that increasingly challenge the clear distinction between production and reproduction. The analysis is specifically concerned with (a) how histories of reactionary but also progressive ideas formed under this hegemony (b) the pull of/ to immateriality in a perceived 'post-industrial' society, and the relevance of both to feminism. The article revisits the debate of Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser from 1997 as encapsulating the roots of a divide within left feminism-one related to understandings of intersectionality, a popular concept also in Marxist feminism. Intersectionality brings together salient political categories (such as gender, race, class), the question for Marxist feminism being: how? It is argued that intersectionality, coined at a specific moment of American cultural history and in relation to postmodernism's spatialising imaginary, is not always and necessarily compatible with Marxist feminism's focus on a social totality forming out of a mode of production and reproduction. To demonstrate this, the article concludes by considering Ashley Bohrer's influential interpretation of intersectionality. Overall, the article argues for a Marxist feminism that attends closely to the key tendencies, possibilities and contradictions of 21st-century capitalism and what hegemony consists of-as a first step towards re/thinking the priorities and specificity of struggle.
Reference: Κρίση 13-2023/1, 9-44
Journal: ΚΡΙΣΗ - Εξαμηνιαία Επιστημονική Επιθεώρηση / KRISI - Biannual Scientific Review
The 2011 Historical Materialism Conference in London saw the launch of a Marxist Feminist set of ... more The 2011 Historical Materialism Conference in London saw the launch of a Marxist Feminist set of panels. This issue is inspired by the success of those panels, and the remarkably sustained interest in reviving and moving beyond older debates and discussions. Its focus, social reproduction feminism, reflects the ongoing work and engagement with that thematic that has threaded through the conferences since 2011. This Introduction provides a summary overview of the social reproduction feminism framework, situating it within Marxist Feminist thinking and politics more generally, and calls on readers to consider its promise as an historical materialist approach to understanding capitalist social relations as an integrated totality.
Feminism and Art History Now, 2017
This is an introduction to an edited book, and develops insights that arise from the new research... more This is an introduction to an edited book, and develops insights that arise from the new research collected in the book as well as a critical reading of feminist literature on contemporary art practice and museum studies. One of the defining features of this introduction (and the whole book) is that it eschews the categorization of feminist criticism/practice into questions of 'generation' or 'geography' which has dominated accounts of feminism and art since the 1990s, and instead identifies a series of problems that have structured engagements between feminism and art exhibition across time and space. The text suggests that we should analyse exhibitions as instances of encounters between feminists and institutions; and/or as an aspect of feminist practice that has tried to realize a particular and distinctive form of exhibition; and/or as a dynamic of 'othering' that calls the one (and the other) into existence through the curatorial process. A defining and ...
It’s the Political Economy, Stupid
A term that emerged in feminist thinking in the 1970s, ‘social reproduction’ refers to the ‘labou... more A term that emerged in feminist thinking in the 1970s, ‘social reproduction’ refers to the ‘labour of love’ traditionally performed for free by women in the home. Despite the crucial role it plays in sustaining and replenishing the working population, this work is usually excluded from accounts of ‘production proper’ and the economy at large. In viewing its worth as other than economic, this labour of love connects with accounts of artistic labour which is also seen as simply ‘selfrewarding’.
A critique of democracy in the EU and neoliberal governance at large, in relation to a deficit of... more A critique of democracy in the EU and neoliberal governance at large, in relation to a deficit of mechanisms for evaluating social demands. Arguing against the 'crisis' discourse that occludes from view the reproduction of capitalist relations of production, the article concludes with a call to revisit the early (and Marxist) Clement Greenberg in his distinction between quality and quantity. Commissioned by documenta 14 and published in South as a State of Mind magazine in October 2015. Available in English, German and Greek.
What happened in art following the consolidation of capitalist globalisation after 1989? Drawing ... more What happened in art following the consolidation of capitalist globalisation after 1989? Drawing on work in art history, curating, critical theory, political economy and sociology, essays in Economy: Art, Production and the Subject in the Twenty-First Century frame and substantiate the increasing attendance to economic relations as a defining trend in contemporary art’s history and one that brought to an end the hegemony of the cultural subject encountered in postmodern discourse.
Contributions include reflections on art in its relation to property as well as to speculation and finance, immaterial labour and the avant-garde, the lessons of the past in pursuing an aesthetics of the economy, the ethics of care and the role of the art document, queer politics and class, the new feminist critique of economic subjects, migration, precarity and empowerment, the ambivalence of the commons, and a range of perspectives on the possibility of opposition, in the art world and beyond, to the biopolitical rule of global capital as the arbiter of human relations.
Building on and extending the curatorial project ECONOMY (Edinburgh and Glasgow 2013), the book puts forward a proposition that cuts across a number of ‘turns’ in the art of the past two decades, including socially engaged practices, seeking to connect localised approaches with the broader organisation of production and the unprecedented apparentness of the economy in the passage from the twentieth to the twenty-first century.
Contributors: Massimo de Angelis, Angela Dimitrakaki, Melanie Gilligan, Kirsten Lloyd, Renate Lorenz, Dimitris Papadopoulos & Vassilis Tsianos, Andrea Phillips, John Roberts, Alberto Toscano, Gregory Sholette, Marina Vishmidt
Editors: Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd
Endorsements / Reviews
As postmodernism fades away, capitalism enters a major crisis and hot wars abound, a generation of artists and thinkers turn to political economy. Here is a book that shows why the reorientation is vital and necessary.
Steve Edwards, Professor in Art-History-Materialism, The Open University
In these topsy turvy times, artists have turned their attention to matters economic, looking past the vaunted effects of the art market to an analysis of the workings of the broader society, bringing to bear their hard-won perspectives on labour, gender, identity, power, agency— and aesthetics. This book is an indispensable guide to these urgent debates.
Martha Rosler, artist
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
‘The Last Instance’: The Apparent Economy, Social Struggles and Art in Global Capitalism Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd
PART 1: PRODUCTION
1. Art as Property Andrea Phillips
2. Art and the Problem of Immaterial Labour: Reflections on Its Recent History John Roberts
3. Indifferent Agent: Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital Marina Vishmidt
4. Women’s Lives, Labour, Contracts, Documents: The Biopolitical Tactics of Feminist Art, Act Two and a Half Angela Dimitrakaki
5. Seeing Socialism: On the Aesthetics of the Economy, Production and the Plan Alberto Toscano
PART 2: SUBJECTS
6. DIWY: Precarity in Embodied Capitalism Vassilis Tsianos and Dimitris Papadopoulos
7. Being with, across, over and through: Art’s Caring Subjects, Ethics Debates and Encounters Kirsten Lloyd
8. The Long Working Hours of Normal Love Renate Lorenz
9. Occupy the Art World? Notes on a Potential Artistic Subject Gregory Sholette
10. (Re)Making the World: An Interview with Melanie Gilligan on Capitalist Exchange, Subject Formation and ‘Social Synthesis’ Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd
11. Economy, Capital and the Commons Massimo de Angelis
First edition
Pages: 256
Illustrations: 20 black and white illustrations
234 x 156 mm
© 2014
Hardback
£30.00 Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9781781381380
Apr 2015
"Is gender implicated in how art does its work, or even is defined as work, in global space? Is a... more "Is gender implicated in how art does its work, or even is defined as work, in global space? Is a global imperative exclusive to capitalism’s planetary expansion or also animating oppositional practices in art and curating? And what is new in the gendered paradigms of art after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a persistently divided Europe and elsewhere?
The study addresses these questions through interwoven analyses of travel as artistic labour, the sexualisation of migration as a relationship between Eastern and Western Europe, the post-documentary aesthetic of the feminist video essay, the rise of female art and curatorial collectives, the spectral re-appearance of the male working class in the museum and globalisation’s ‘bad boys’ as well as the need for a renewed materialist feminism. A central aspiration of the book is to demonstrate that contemporary art and theory’s turn to labour and economic relations, around 2000, compels a reviewing of feminism’s attachment to the cultural subject, practices and methodologies privileged by postmodernism. Artists and collectives discussed in the book include, among others, Marina Abramovic, Ursula Biemann, Tracey Emin, Andrea Fraser, Kuratorisk Action, Lin+Lam, Malmö Free University for Women (MFK), Jenny Marketou, Renzo Martens, Dani Marti, Steve McQueen, Mujeres Públicas, Tanja Ostojić, Ann Sofi Siden, Mare Tralla, WHW, Artur Żmijewski.
The book seeks to offer a theoretically astute overview of key developments in art and its contexts since the 1990s and contribute to a critical refocusing of feminist politics in art history in the wake of globalisation as capitalism’s biopolitical arena. It will be of interest to researchers in art history, gender, feminist and globalisation studies, curatorial theory, cultural studies and beyond."
"Contributors include Deborah Cherry, Jo Anna Isaak, Malin Hedlin Hayden, Lubaina Himid, Amelia J... more "Contributors include Deborah Cherry, Jo Anna Isaak, Malin Hedlin Hayden, Lubaina Himid, Amelia Jones, Kati Kivimaa, Alexandra Kokoli, Kuratorisk Aktion, Suzana Milevska, Suzanne Lacy, Lucy Lippard, Sue Malvern, Nancy Proctor, Bojana Pejić, Helena Reckitt, Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, Jeannine Tang and Catherine Wood.
What happens to art when feminism grips the curatorial imagination? How do sexual politics become realised as exhibits? Is the struggle against gender discrimination compatible with the aspirations of museums led by market values? Beginning with the feminist critique of the art exhibition in the 1970s and concluding with reflections on intersectional curating and globalisation after 2000, this pioneering collection offers an alternative narrative of feminism’s impact on art. The essays provide rigorous accounts of developments in Scandinavia, Eastern and Southern Europe as well as the UK and US, framed by an introduction that offers a politically engaging navigation of historical and current positions. Delivered through essays, memoirs and interviews, discussion highlights include the Tate Modern hang, relational aesthetics, the global exhibition, feminism and technology in the museum, the rise of curatorial collectivism and insights into major exhibitions such
as Gender Check on Eastern Europe. Bringing together two generations of curators, artists and historians to rethink distinct and unresolved moments in the feminist re-modelling of art contexts, this volume dares to ask: is there a history of feminist art or one of feminist presentations of artworks?"
This is a study of globalisation's impact on contemporary art, centering on the transition from a... more This is a study of globalisation's impact on contemporary art, centering on the transition from a hegemonic postmodern paradigm (1980s) to a new relationship with the materiality of space from the 1990s onwards. Defined by socio-economic relations, this new materiality is often approached through a biopolitical practice. Topics examined in the study include the 1990s as a transition decade, the social practice of the lens, the labour turn in recent art, feminism & the video essay, the challenges of socially useful art, the confict between the display of art and its paradigms of production. It is the first book-length study of globalisation and art to appear in Greek. The full Introduction is uploaded on this site with the permission of the publisher.
ΚΡΙΣΗ / KRISI, 2023
Opening with a discussion of the relationship and tension between Marxism and feminism, the artic... more Opening with a discussion of the relationship and tension between Marxism and feminism, the article argues for the specificity of Marxist feminist analysis in relation to other currents of feminism on the left. Drawing on Susan Watkins, the article contends that capitalist strategy has contributed to shaping the intellectual trajectory of feminism as known today. This trajectory developed under a complex hegemony that entailed, among other things, the Cold War and the end of Bretton Woods in relation to postmodernism and cultural imperialism, ideological uses of the 'middle class' , and technologies that increasingly challenge the clear distinction between production and reproduction. The analysis is specifically concerned with (a) how histories of reactionary but also progressive ideas formed under this hegemony (b) the pull of/ to immateriality in a perceived 'post-industrial' society, and the relevance of both to feminism. The article revisits the debate of Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser from 1997 as encapsulating the roots of a divide within left feminism-one related to understandings of intersectionality, a popular concept also in Marxist feminism. Intersectionality brings together salient political categories (such as gender, race, class), the question for Marxist feminism being: how? It is argued that intersectionality, coined at a specific moment of American cultural history and in relation to postmodernism's spatialising imaginary, is not always and necessarily compatible with Marxist feminism's focus on a social totality forming out of a mode of production and reproduction. To demonstrate this, the article concludes by considering Ashley Bohrer's influential interpretation of intersectionality. Overall, the article argues for a Marxist feminism that attends closely to the key tendencies, possibilities and contradictions of 21st-century capitalism and what hegemony consists of-as a first step towards re/thinking the priorities and specificity of struggle.
Reference: Κρίση 13-2023/1, 9-44
Journal: ΚΡΙΣΗ - Εξαμηνιαία Επιστημονική Επιθεώρηση / KRISI - Biannual Scientific Review
The 2011 Historical Materialism Conference in London saw the launch of a Marxist Feminist set of ... more The 2011 Historical Materialism Conference in London saw the launch of a Marxist Feminist set of panels. This issue is inspired by the success of those panels, and the remarkably sustained interest in reviving and moving beyond older debates and discussions. Its focus, social reproduction feminism, reflects the ongoing work and engagement with that thematic that has threaded through the conferences since 2011. This Introduction provides a summary overview of the social reproduction feminism framework, situating it within Marxist Feminist thinking and politics more generally, and calls on readers to consider its promise as an historical materialist approach to understanding capitalist social relations as an integrated totality.
Feminism and Art History Now, 2017
This is an introduction to an edited book, and develops insights that arise from the new research... more This is an introduction to an edited book, and develops insights that arise from the new research collected in the book as well as a critical reading of feminist literature on contemporary art practice and museum studies. One of the defining features of this introduction (and the whole book) is that it eschews the categorization of feminist criticism/practice into questions of 'generation' or 'geography' which has dominated accounts of feminism and art since the 1990s, and instead identifies a series of problems that have structured engagements between feminism and art exhibition across time and space. The text suggests that we should analyse exhibitions as instances of encounters between feminists and institutions; and/or as an aspect of feminist practice that has tried to realize a particular and distinctive form of exhibition; and/or as a dynamic of 'othering' that calls the one (and the other) into existence through the curatorial process. A defining and ...
It’s the Political Economy, Stupid
A term that emerged in feminist thinking in the 1970s, ‘social reproduction’ refers to the ‘labou... more A term that emerged in feminist thinking in the 1970s, ‘social reproduction’ refers to the ‘labour of love’ traditionally performed for free by women in the home. Despite the crucial role it plays in sustaining and replenishing the working population, this work is usually excluded from accounts of ‘production proper’ and the economy at large. In viewing its worth as other than economic, this labour of love connects with accounts of artistic labour which is also seen as simply ‘selfrewarding’.
A critique of democracy in the EU and neoliberal governance at large, in relation to a deficit of... more A critique of democracy in the EU and neoliberal governance at large, in relation to a deficit of mechanisms for evaluating social demands. Arguing against the 'crisis' discourse that occludes from view the reproduction of capitalist relations of production, the article concludes with a call to revisit the early (and Marxist) Clement Greenberg in his distinction between quality and quantity. Commissioned by documenta 14 and published in South as a State of Mind magazine in October 2015. Available in English, German and Greek.
Helena Reckitt contributed to the breakout session ‘The art field,’ moderated by Angela Dimitraka... more Helena Reckitt contributed to the breakout session ‘The art field,’ moderated by Angela Dimitrakaki (Edinburgh College of Art) and moderated by Kirsten Lloyd, as part of the three-day Feminist emergency conference at Birkbeck, University of London, 22nd – 24th June 2017. Other instigators were Kerri Jefferis (artist), Lara Perry (University of Brighton), and Hilary Robinson (Middlesex University). Panel convenor Angela Dimitrakaki framed the session by noting how, as elsewhere under neoliberal governance, the art field is affected by the normalisation of precarity and austerity and the ‘feminisation’ of labour, even if art is still seen as a terrain for the privileged or, ultimately, of marginal relevance to ‘real world’ emergencies. Art workers are accustomed to suppressed or missing wages and reside at the bottom of the art pyramid; over 3/4 of art students, but 1/2 of art school lecturers, 1/3 of professors, and 1/3 of exhibiting artists; we legitimise antagonism in supporting bu...
What happened in art following the consolidation of capitalist globalisation after 1989? Drawing ... more What happened in art following the consolidation of capitalist globalisation after 1989? Drawing on work in art history, curating, critical theory, political economy and sociology, essays in Economy: Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century frame and substantiate the increasing attendance to economic relations as a defining trend in contemporary art’s history and one that brought to an end the hegemony of the cultural subject encountered in postmodern discourse. Contributions include reflections on art in its relation to property as well as to speculation and finance, immaterial labour and the avant-garde, the lessons of the past in pursuing an aesthetics of the economy, the ethics of care and the role of the art document, queer politics and class, the new feminist critique of economic subjects, migration, precarity and empowerment, the ambivalence of the commons, and a range of perspectives on the possibility of opposition, in the art world and beyond, to the biopolitical rule of global capital as the arbiter of human relations. Building on, extending and querying the curatorial project ECONOMY (Edinburgh and Glasgow 2013), the book puts forward a proposition that cuts across a number of ‘turns’ in the art of the past two decades, including socially engaged practices, seeking to connect localised approaches with the broader organisation of production and the unprecedented apparentness of the economy in the passage from the 20th to the 21st century. Contributors: Massimo de Angelis, Angela Dimitrakaki, Melanie Gilligan, Kirsten Lloyd, Renate Lorenz, Dimitris Papadopoulos & Vassilis Tsianos, Andrea Phillips, John Roberts, Alberto Toscano, Gregory Sholette, Marina Vishmidt. Editors: Angela Dimitrakaki is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Edinburgh Kirsten Lloyd is Teaching Fellow in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh and Associate Curator at Stills, Edinburgh
Third Text, 2017
Marina Vishmidt offers a careful and illuminating account of the histories of the debates on soci... more Marina Vishmidt offers a careful and illuminating account of the histories of the debates on social reproduction in her article included here. Beth Capper then expands on Vishmidt's account, attending to the racialised division of labour specifically in relation to the perspective of Black Women for Wages for Housework.
Art and Criticism Theories Methodologies and Critical Tools, 2009
Response to questions concerning art and revolution today issued by the Center of Creative Ecolog... more Response to questions concerning art and revolution today issued by the Center of Creative Ecologies in November 2017, at the centenary of the October Revolution.
Audio interview to radio program SON[I]A for the MACBA oral archive, set up in 2006. Conducted in... more Audio interview to radio program SON[I]A for the MACBA oral archive, set up in 2006. Conducted in situ in October 2015, published December 2015. 'Deleted scenes' published January 2016. Description on site: "SON[I]A talks to Angela Dimitrakaki about the new feminist critique, the limits of democracy, the wiles of post-capitalism, and the ambivalence of the commons. We also touch on the notions of radical curating and collaborative practices." SON[I]A also
H καμένη γη είναι πάντα μια αξιόπιστη αρχή» γράφει η Άντζελα Δημητρακάκη λίγο μετά τη μέση του Αε... more H καμένη γη είναι πάντα μια αξιόπιστη αρχή» γράφει η Άντζελα Δημητρακάκη λίγο μετά τη μέση του Αεροπλάστ και είναι ακριβώς η συγκεκριμένη φράση, περισσότερο και από τις λίγες «μιλημένες» αναφορές σε αυτό, που αυτοστιγμεί και ολίγον τι απρόσμενα με έκανε να αναζητήσω μετά από καιρό στη βιβλιοθήκη μου την Ανταρκτική της (Οξύ, 1997), και μέσα σε αυτή μία άλλη, παλιά φράση της συγγραφέως που θα ήθελα να μην είχα ξεχάσει: «Από κοινού αποφασίσαμε να ξεμυτίσουμε από τις σκοτεινές γωνίες κι αρχίσαμε γι' αυτό να ντυνόμαστε ανάλογα».
Future State http://www.thefuturestate.org.uk , Aug 18, 2013
The interview addresses issues ranging from the relation between capitalism and the periodisation... more The interview addresses issues ranging from the relation between capitalism and the periodisation of contemporary art; the public's response to collaborative, socially-minded art practice; women in globalisation; contemporary fiction and the international market's expectations; capitalism's departure from democracy.
Art History in the Age of Global Trump Politics Amelia Jones with Angela Dimitrakaki and Tamara ... more Art History in the Age of Global Trump Politics
Amelia Jones with Angela Dimitrakaki and Tamara Trodd
Free and open to all
30 November, 2017, 7:00pm
Room 5.21, 5th Floor, Evolution House, 78 West Port, Edinburgh, EH1 2LE
In the late 20th century, the New Art History enacted a deconstruction and reconstruction of the discipline of art history in a rigorous dialogue with social movements that encompassed feminism, post-colonial critique, questions on class as key vectors of consciousness-raising that often took for granted an exchange with the social system carried out in good faith and in a democratic context. The 21st century, especially since the financial crisis of 2008, has demolished these certainties, demonstrating the precariousness of gains claimed by progressive identity politics and opening a vista of post-democracy, affective response to non-facts, technology-driven manipulation of data, subjects and electorates, the ascent of right-wing populism, and capitalism as an economy that is not just the economy but rather the ground of covert civil wars. The roundtable will discuss how the political impulses having so far animated the discipline of art history are challenged in this new terrain of ideological confusion as capitalism is becoming disassociated from democracy. Do we need a new New Art History in terms of methodologies, practices, values, pedagogies to combat the new forces operating largely and specifically against the right to critique?
The roundtable guest, Amelia Jones, is Robert A. Day Professor in Art and Design and Vice-Dean of Critical Studies at the Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California. A leading feminist art historian, she is the author of numerous articles and books, including Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012), Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (2006), Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (2004), and Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998), and the editor or co-editor of anthologies including the Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (new edition 2010), Sexuality (2014) in the Whitechapel “Documents” series and Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (2015).
Angela Dimitrakaki and Tamara Trodd teach at the University of Edinburgh and are members of the Global Contemporary Research Group at History of Art.
Organised by The Global Contemporary Research Group, History of Art, ECA
Twitter: @globalcontemp
https://www.facebook.com/events/303762983452818/
The conference is organised by and held at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, on October 19, 20... more The conference is organised by and held at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, on October 19, 2016. For the conference abstracts and further details on the programme please visit http://www.wlv.ac.uk/about-us/our-schools-and-institutes/faculty-of-arts/agency-and-crisis-scenes-from-political-philosophy-and-contemporary-art-conference-2016/ For my title abstract, see below:
Title: Feminism, Art, Capitalism
Abstract: This paper seeks to articulate the connection between the title’s three referents. In principle, the paper asks, first, what are the differences between the 1970s and now in how feminism views the problem of capitalism in relation to art? And, second, how can contemporary Marxist feminism in art history begin to make sense of this (rather fragmented and discontinuous) history of critique and its impact on art. In this analysis, ‘art’ does not refer to artworks, as the material, immaterial or composite outputs of artistic production, but to a complexly defined practice claiming a position in, and an affinity to, a range of spaces: the economy, culture, social movements, professional contexts, institutions, and so on. The positions on the problem of capitalism for feminist politics are impossible to summarise in a short paper. Rather, the analysis will focus on selected critical instances in theory and practice that may be seen to articulate a possible history of ‘feminism, art, capitalism’. The two terms – agency and crisis- on which the conference focuses find multiple investments in narrativising such a possible history. First, ‘agency’ was a demand of second wave feminism (in its various strands and languages) of immense impact in feminist theory and practice – including that theory and practice that did not prioritise capitalism but rather patriarchy as the real issue for women in art. How ‘agency’ is to be understood when attention shifts from patriarchy to capitalism remains an open question, as much as whether this shift (witnessed, in part, today) can help revive a militant left feminism in the art field. In this sense, we can legitimately speak of feminism in art as always somehow in ‘crisis’. The transition from ‘feminism’ to ‘feminisms’, witnessed in the 1990s and with us since, is symptomatic of this. At the same time, globalisation as crisis has generated new priorities for feminism in art. Yet the accelerated political developments of recent years call for urgent revisions, and working towards a possible history of feminism, art, capitalism must be seen as a necessary first step towards grasping the requirements of a contemporary critique.
A three-day workshop on art and economy, at the National School of Fine Art, Athens, organised by... more A three-day workshop on art and economy, at the National School of Fine Art, Athens, organised by Hans Abbing and Georgios Papadopoulos. For further information and to participate, please see attached PDF.
5 DAYS OF PUBLIC DISCUSSIONS ON AESTHETICS, INSTITUTION, REALISM, CONTEMPORARY, POLITICS Edinburg... more 5 DAYS OF PUBLIC DISCUSSIONS ON AESTHETICS, INSTITUTION, REALISM, CONTEMPORARY, POLITICS
Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee September-October 2014
For details on dates, speakers, content, see attached PDF.
The Historical Materialism annual conference in London has emerged as a pivotal site for critical... more The Historical Materialism annual conference in London has emerged as a pivotal site for critical, engaged, constructive, and provocative scholarship, activism and networking internationally. This is a fitting place for focusing the (re)emergence of feminist-Marxist historical materialist analysis. Now in our third year at HM, the 2014 feminist-Marxist stream of the conference is seeking contributions that continue in the tradition of dynamic and original reflections of previous years, and also those that press the boundaries and take on the bold challenges posed by debates old and new.
The question ‘how capitalism survives?’ resonates strongly with a range of feminist critiques on the Left, preoccupying those involved in theoretical investigations and activism. In the 21st century this question invites the revisiting of the history of capitalism and patriarchy in their myriad entanglements as well as analyses that concern the daily (re)construction of a globally dominant socio-economic model that thrives particularly on gendered and racial asymmetries. The Marxist and feminist stream this year wishes to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms that make the reproduction of capitalism possible in the very sites that constitute an ‘everyday life’ where exploitation and struggle are actualised and/or forestalled. We are also interested in analysing the historically deep continuities, slow or abrupt discontinuities and mutations of the capitalism & patriarchy nexus from the age of imperialisms all the way to current and possibly more elusive colonialisms. Notably, such colonial projects may involve anything from territorially-based extraction of surplus value to the production of individual and collective subjectivities. Moreover, this year’s conference theme can provide an opportunity to think in truly interdisciplinary fashion about how ‘we’ (a designation strongly problematised in feminist thought but that requires historical materialist analysis) participate in sustaining capitalism as a reality of intersecting modalities of exploitation. To offer an obvious example, today the exploitation of women by women has become a necessity for sustaining contemporary capitalism as a global and biopolitical economy. By ‘contemporary’ capitalism we mean not only the one challenged by, and also possibly strengthened, through the financial crisis, but the broader socio-economic paradigm marking the transition from the 20th to the 21st century.
On the basis of the above, we invite papers that may address (but are not limited to) the following themes and/or questions, here presented in random order:
• Critical descriptions of capitalism across Marxism and feminism from feminism’s ‘first wave’ to the present
• Social reproduction and capitalist transformation: micro and macro-analyses
• Instances of success and failure in Marxist-feminist struggles from the 19th to the 21st centuries
• In what particular ways does the ‘feminisation’ of labour help capitalism survive?
• Are new concepts and methodologies needed to understand women’s roles in capitalism’s ways of overcoming the recent crisis?
• How do the crises of capitalism help generate or overcome otherness (understood in gendered and/or racial terms)?
• Women and queer subjects’ roles in the rise of new capitalist economies and in the assumed decline of Western capitalism
• Homophobia and homonationalism before and after 9/11
• Moving borders, regenerating boundaries: states, bodies, temporality
• Ecosocialism, ecofeminism, ecology: narratives of change or scripts of subjugation?
• Revolution and reform in the theories of Marxist-feminism
• Racism, femonationalism, Islamophobia: the bigger picture
• Intersections of Marxism, feminism, critical race and postcolonial theories
• Sexual assault, rape and resistance
• Women in contemporary liberation struggles
• Marxist feminism and intersectionality theories
• Women’s art, film, music, literature: subversion or reproduction of capitalist relations of production?
• Feminism and the reproduction of the capitalist art world
• Women in the communist/socialist tradition: Luxemburg, Zetkin, Kollontai, and others
• Welfare and the political economy of care
• Contemporary sexual politics: resistance to or empowerment of capitalism?
• Violence, fascism, Marxism and feminism
• Separatism or participation? The case for the 21st century
• Feminism and the institutions of capitalism
• Gender, race and international migration
• Uniting forces: what does an interdisciplinary Marxist feminist theory would look like?
Paper proposals should be max 200 words. All submissions will be peer reviewed. When submitting your proposal, please indicate the theme to which your paper could contribute.
Please note that we welcome panel proposals. When you submit a panel proposal, please send an abstract of the general theme of the panel (max 300 words) together with the abstracts of the individual papers in the panel. For individual paper proposals, it is helpful to indicate the theme (above) to which your paper could contribute. This will help us to compose the panels. Panels and individual papers should be submitted by June 1st to: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences/annual10/submit
The Marxist-feminist stream organisers:
Abigail Bakan, Angela Dimitrakaki, Sara Farris, Sue Ferguson, Genevieve Le Baron, Nina Power
"[T]he production of work on women artists requires the unwriting of patriarchal structures of ar... more "[T]he production of work on women artists requires the unwriting of patriarchal structures of art history.
Hilary Robinson (2001)
Since the late 1960s, a renewed ‘second-wave’ of Euro-American feminist political organising has mounted a sustained intellectual enquiry that radically reconceived art and art historical knowledge. This two-day conference seeks to investigate the epistemological questions raised by feminist scholars when we claim to write, curate, or make feminist art and art history. Open to researchers across every field of arts production, it is hoped that this conference will allow scholars to share the questions, doubts, and successes encountered in their own practice, as well as fundamentally interrogating the notion of feminism as a tool of intellectual activism: What is a feminist art history, or art historical intervention? Where is feminist art history produced? What could a feminist art history look like? If, as Robinson suggests, feminist historiography requires the unwriting of previous historical models, how should we produce art and its histories today?
The conference comprises a series of 5 panel sessions, each session featuring a keynote speaker alongside open-submission papers. Session keynotes include: Dr Jo Applin (University of York), Dr Katja Kobolt (Humboldt University Berlin), Dr Lara Perry (University of Brighton), and Prof Hilary Robinson (University of Middlesex). The conference will conclude with an extensive roundtable discussion on the second afternoon, chaired by Dr Angela Dimitrakaki (University of Edinburgh) and Victoria Horne (University of Edinburgh). Extending earlier debates that took place as part of research workshops organised in 2012 and 2013, the roundtable event is designed to foster less formal dialogue around the issues of producing feminist art histories.
Paper Submission
Hosted by The University of Edinburgh, this two-day conference will be held on 27-28 March 2014, and we warmly invite curators, artists, writers, and art historians to suggest research papers relating to the conference themes of writing, curating or making art and its histories. We also encourage collaborative papers, or presentations that otherwise deviate from a conventional scholarly format. The selected speakers will be asked to present for 30 minutes and participate in discussion afterwards. Paper topics could include:
- Art historiography
- Feminist curatorial strategies
- Museums and the politics of collecting
- Collectivism and separatism
- Modernism, postmodernism and the contemporary
- The resurgence of materialist and marxist-feminist perspectives
- Feminism and globalisation
- Art institutions and feminism
- Limits to feminist research
- Queer intersections
- Art-making as research
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words and a brief biography to feministarthistories@gmail.com by 17th January 2014. If you have any queries regarding your research proposal please feel free to get in touch with the organisers before this deadline.
If you are planning on attending the conference as an audience member you can book a place here before 1st March 2014.
Conference organised by Vicky Horne, History of Art, University of Edinburgh"
Program 6.00 pm Welcome by Ulrich Wilmes 6.15 pm Introducti... more Program
6.00 pm
Welcome by Ulrich Wilmes
6.15 pm
Introduction by Lara Demori
6.30 pm
Griselda Pollock
Lecture: “Action, Activism and Art and/as Thought: A dialogue with the artworking of Sonia Khurana and Sutapa Biswas and the political theory of Hannah Arendt.”
7.00 pm
Angela Dimitrakaki
Lecture: "Feminism and the Critique of the Political Economy of Art"
7.30 pm
Panel Discussion with Grisleda Pollock and Angela Dimitrakaki, moderated by Lara Demori.
In 1971, Linda Nochlin published the ground-breaking essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’; she analysed how gender influenced the production and reception of art, investigating the predominance of white male artists in the Western art world and the status of women artists whom have been historically prevented from gaining an equal education and developing their talent. Both Nochlin and Griselda Pollock have further questioned the label of ‘Genius’ as constantly associated to white male artists, unfolding the privileges inherent to the use of this terminology. In mid-eighties scholars like Audre Lorde and Bell Hooks addressed the absence of women of colour in feminist art discourses, calling for the importance of intersectionality in such discussions. Likewise Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak, and Gloria E. Anzaldúa among others advocated for a more comprehensive feminist analysis, capable of taking into account women from postcolonial countries, doubly colonized by both imperial and patriarchal ideologies. Current state of feminist criticism appears as crossed by different narratives, to the point that Pollock compares the relation between third wave and second wave feminism as the one between the ‘mother’ and the ‘envious daughter’ – understood in Oedipal terms. She therefore observes: ‘To create transregional democratic space for the continuing virtuality of feminism, we need historical understanding of feminism itself that is different from the currently fracturing caricature of generations at war and waves of novelty’. On this matter, recent literature (Dimitrakaki, Lloyd) exploring approaches to social reproduction in art history has challenged the presence of multiple feminisms ‘to invite some sort of compromise, some sort of accommodation of the diversity of positions in order to forge inclusivity’. Coinciding with the exhibition ‘Kiki Smith: Procession’ - whose art often focuses on a visceral and almost disturbed representation of biblical or mythological heroines - this talk aims to put in conversation different generations of feminist art historians discussing contemporary approaches of feminist art criticism and its relation to the ‘story’ of feminism and feminist art itself.
For further details, please follow the link.
Publication launch, University of Edinburgh, 25 Edinburgh 2017
16th Annual Historical Materialism Conference, SOAS, London, 7- 10 Nov 2019 'Claps of Thunder: Di... more 16th Annual Historical Materialism Conference, SOAS, London, 7- 10 Nov 2019 'Claps of Thunder: Disaster Communism, Extinction Capitalism and How to Survive Tomorrow'. Paper presented at the Marxist Feminist Stream semi-plenary, Thursday, 7 Nov 2019, With Tithi Bhattacharya, Angela Dimitrakaki, Sue Ferguson, chaired by Sanja Bromberg.
The question of class has been complicated by feminist critique on the left throughout modernity.... more The question of class has been complicated by feminist critique on the left throughout modernity. From Alexandra Kollontai’s ‘Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle’ (1921) to Cinzia Arruzza’s ‘From Women’s Struggles to a New Class Movement: The Third Feminist Wave’ (2018) the key complication introduced by feminism is the relationship of production to reproduction. As social reproduction feminism has argued, in Marx’s time, the private sphere versus a public sphere dynamic was crucial for installing a regime of accumulation where a number of tasks essential for the reproduction of the capitalist economy were perceived as non-work and thus fell out of the analysis of the class relation, which was emphatically associated with work. That these tasks were defined as women’s ‘natural’ domain was important for limiting class representation to men’s work and its relative visibility. If Marx wrote about the male-defined worker and his predicament in the ‘hidden abode of production’, women’s non-work was effectively explicated by social reproduction feminism in terms of the - twice removed from sight - hidden abode of reproduction. This binary was upset at various moments in capital’s history, including when women entered the workforce in great masses in the 1960s and 1970s, but has so far not been eclipsed. How art has addressed this binary, embedded in the political imaginary that seeks to define the class relation, remains a question. This paper will consider specific moments in art that has grappled with this binary since the emergence of feminism’s second wave. Jo Spence’s ‘The Highest Product of Capitalism’ (1979) and Melanie Gilligan’s ‘The Common Sense’ (2016) are highlighted in this analysis as is the formation of a social reproduction consciousness across political systems. The main proposition of this paper is that a feminist history of art addressing the binary of production-reproduction can contribute to expanding the political imaginary of the class relation today, when women’s strikes are evolving into both symbolic events and concrete action against the ravages of capitalism. Piecing together such a history, vertically and horizontally, is what feminism in art can contribute to the reproduction of feminism as a social movement.
A short paper presented at Art History in the Age of Global Trump Politics: A Roundtable with Ame... more A short paper presented at Art History in the Age of Global Trump Politics: A Roundtable with Amelia Jones, Angela Dimitrakaki and Tamara Trodd, University of Edinburgh, 30 November 2017. Event organised by the Global Contemporary Research Group at History of Art, University of Edinburgh (web page: https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/research/global-contemporary-research-group).
Join us at the Marxist Feminist stream of this year's HM London conference. Panels include: Ro... more Join us at the Marxist Feminist stream of this year's HM London conference. Panels include:
Roundtable for the Marxist Feminist stream - Marxist Feminism today: Revolution, Reproduction and Resistance. Tithi Bhattacharya, Angela Dimitrakaki, Sara Salem, Sara Farris. Chair: Svenja Bromberg. The roundtable brings together most of the current members of the Marxist Feminist sub-committee and seeks to initiate a public discussion on the present and future of our struggles. This discussion with delegates has been long overdue. For the Marxist Feminist stream history see http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/marxist-feminist-stream Note also the Book launch Social Reproduction Theory, Recentering Oppression by Tithi Bhattacharya (editor). Panel: Angela Dimitrakaki, Hester Eisenstein, Colin Barker, Tithi Bhattacharya, Chair: Sara Farris.
Further information here: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences/fourteenth-annual-conference
Historical Materialism Athens Conference 2019, 2019
Paper presented at the Historical Materialism Athens Conference 2019, as part of the plenary Soci... more Paper presented at the Historical Materialism Athens Conference 2019, as part of the plenary Social Reproduction and Marxist Feminism for the 21st Century, May 5, 2019. Plenary speakers: Ankica Cakardic, Angela Dimitrakaki, Holly Lewis, Lynne Segal