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Articles by Rose-Anne Gush

Berlin Review, 2024

>> download to read << «What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off fr... more >> download to read <<

«What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it;
we pretend to be strangers.»

These are the opening lines of Christa Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood, a
novel published in East Germany (German Democratic Republic, or
GDR) in 1976 that considers from where we can remember and how we
might be estranged from our pasts. Wolf was addressing the National
Socialist period of her own childhood and her dissociation from it, from
within a state whose doctrine of «lived anti-fascism» permeated all
areas of public life. The exhibition, Echoes of the Brother Countries,
What is the Price of Memory and What is the Cost of Amnesia? Or:
Visions and Illusions of Anti-Imperialist Solidarities relates in several
ways to these questions of memory in the face of political ruptures, of
the «echo» of past visions of the future, and of the responsibility of the
present towards its own shared or disputed past.

FKW//Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und Visuelle Kultur, 2024

Those who cannot people their solitude can never be alone in a busy crowd. Baudelaire, The Crowd ... more Those who cannot people their solitude can never be alone in a busy crowd. Baudelaire, The Crowd Her obsolescence is indispensable to her work with resistance. She will have become the philosopher of her own ruin, which is also the ruinousness of capital. By entering the theatre of the street each day and displaying the dignity of her irrelevance, she alters the interpretation of necessity.

B-N-L, 2023

In the current conjuncture, the most fertile soil for fascism and its forms of unfreedom and reac... more In the current conjuncture, the most fertile soil for fascism and its forms of unfreedom and reaction is stricken by crisis and concomitant collapse. The poly-crises of liberal (social) democracy are born of capitalist social relations, visible in their various forms not limited to economic, ecological, and social spheres and intensifying globally since 2008. Against the backdrop of insurgent fascist politics across the world, in 2023, the Ludwig Forum, a gigantic former umbrella factory in Aachen, stages the exhibition Illiberal Lives, which seeks to address how unfreedom endures in art, following Illiberal Arts at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2021. The curators of the Illiberal Lives, Eva Birkenstock, Anselm Franke, Holger Otten, and Kerstin Stakemeier, invited ten artists to relate their work to the Ludwig Collection.[1] The history of the collection of Peter and Irene Ludwig-who amassed wealth through chocolate production-goes back to the 1960s when they institutionalized works by artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, before, in the midst of the Cold War, directing their gaze towards Eastern Europe, buying up art, and thus bringing two sides of the iron curtain into contact.[2] Illiberal Lives animates the politics of the collection, reflecting on global shifts and perspectives that it remains witness to.

B-N-L, 2023

I traveled to Amsterdam with a group of students from IZK - Institute for Contemporary Art at Gra... more I traveled to Amsterdam with a group of students from IZK - Institute for Contemporary Art at Graz University of Technology, my colleague Philipp Sattler and friend, curator, Andrea Popelka, to view the exhibition Charging Myths by the artist collective On-Trade-Off and other configurations of artists and scholars critically investigating the energy transition. In our case, this research relates to an exploratory tunnel, dug 1.6km into the Koralm mountain range in the Austrian Alps, where lithium spodumene was found. European Lithium, a company headquartered in Australia, plans to make this mine (among others in the region) operational by early 2025, extracting the spodumene to send it for processing in Saudi Arabia. This review essay addresses the exhibition Charging Myths and its narrative of lithium extraction in relation to the global energy transition, its histories, social and material relations, and its aesthetic and political potential.

Solitude Journal 1 Collective Care & Response-ability, 2020

Marked by the author’s own sociopolitical context and its special urgency, in this essay Rose-Ann... more Marked by the author’s own sociopolitical context and its special urgency,
in this essay Rose-Anne Gush draws connections between the 1970s
feminist movement Wages for Housework and the current crisis in
healthcare in the UK, rendered visible through the Covid-19 outbreak.
She points out the significant connection between the under-resourcing
of the health care sector and the over-resourcing of the state security
apparatus. Security in its very definition refers to an absence of care. To
be secure means to be able to be careless, but this – made horrifically
literal with the lynching of George Floyd and others – is not the case for
many. Quite the contrary, people of color, women, trans people and
the young and old are endangered by securitization and dismantling care

Kunst und Politik. Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft - Keywords for Marxist Art History Today, 2020

Third Text, 2019

Taking as its starting point Ingeborg Bachmann’s comments that the National Socialist ‘virus of c... more Taking as its starting point Ingeborg Bachmann’s comments that the National Socialist ‘virus of crime’ was not surpassed, but merely retreated into the fabric of society’s moral codes, this article examines how non-synchronous notions of time (Bloch, 1935) are engaged with, in art in the aftermath of National Socialism in Austria. Austria, a context which was both first to embrace National Socialism in 1938, and first to be ‘freed’ from dealing with this history in 1943, saw protest and political action most often led by artists and artistic forms. The most incisive political and social critique appeared in the realm of art and literature. By looking to the work of artist and filmmaker VALIE EXPORT and novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, this article asks how film and literature – specifically, works that address gender relations critically – follow in Bachmann’s footsteps and engage with a notion of para-history. Moreover, I argue that such works help us to understand residual tendencies and continuities in relation to both media and gender, in resurgent fascism today. By looking to the film, theatre-texts and essays by EXPORT and Jelinek I situate them in their historical context, and reread them as a history of feminist resistance to, and urgent critique of contradictory forces which make fascism appealing, both in the decades following World War II and again today.

Performance Research, 2018

This essay explores the place of the body in the work of VALIE EXPORT and Unica Zürn through the ... more This essay explores the place of the body in the work of VALIE EXPORT and Unica Zürn through the notion of ‘disfiguration’, a notion which connotes an undoing, a deformation. In considering the political implications of artistic practices which disfigure, or deform the body, this essay reflects on the historical significance and conceptual underpinning of this practice. By tracing the history of the cut, as both injury and technique in EXPORT’s work, I show that the Riß (a word that gives meanings that encompass tear, rent, crack, split, rip, break, gap and laceration, and which emerges from the cut), should be understood as both, a technique in art, and the result of societal disfiguration or distortion. Through analysing EXPORT’s Expanded Cinema works, performances, texts and unfinished films, by tracing the transmutation of writing and drawing to media such as video and photography this essay explores the methodological and historical influence of Unica Zürn on EXPORT’s work. Through their disfiguration, I argue these works figure an ‘underground history’, and as such a (return of the repressed) temporally placed para-present of the body, where instincts and passions are understood as deformed and dis-figured (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947). By reading EXPORT and Zürn back onto this ‘underground history’ I want to ask how this distortion is gendered. How and why do they disfigure the body anagrammatically through image and language to its eventual obliteration? What are the conditions of possibility for these practices? And considering these practices, which tend towards their own break (Riß), what is left of the body in art?

Dans les thèses de VALIE EXPORT, cette histoire n'est pas celle d'une psychologie des sexes, mais... more Dans les thèses de VALIE EXPORT, cette histoire n'est pas celle d'une psychologie des sexes, mais renvoie plutôt aux dimensions de l'existence qui sont produites par les dynamiques sociétales et par l'éducation. Considérons, à titre d'exemple, la régression enregistrée au sein du foyer après la Seconde Guerre mondiale : il y avait là un effet du fascisme, agissant comme un repli violemment conservateur, venu s'imposer dans la vie quotidienne. S'agissait-il dès lors d'une bataille perdue par les femmes, comme certains ont pu le prétendre, ou plutôt d'une victoire et d'une avancée du fascisme lui-même, de la violence et de l'autoritarisme virilisés ? Quelle était l'orientation directionnelle du phénomène ? Comment le genre est-il configuré dans l'oeuvre de VALIE EXPORT ? Quelle est la nature de la violence qui est à l'oeuvre ? VALIE EXPORT est artiste, auteure et cinéaste. À travers la reproduction de ses performances, par leur fixation dans un format de film ou de vidéo, elle a procédé à une forme de « re-médiation » de l'actionnisme. Utilisant ce format comme une sorte de correctif féministe apporté à « l'art direct », elle écrit dans son manifeste : « L'actionnisme féministe vise à transformer l'objet d'une histoire naturelle masculine, la « femme » dans sa matérialité, asservie et réduite à l'état d'esclave par son mâle démiurge, pour en faire une actrice et créatrice indépendante, sujet de sa propre histoire. »Pour l'artiste, c'est bien l'histoire de l'expérience féminine qui constitue la source première de l'actionnisme féministe.

Book chapters by Rose-Anne Gush

Essay included in the volume Objects of Feminism, edited by Maija Timonen and Josefine Wikström

Reviews by Rose-Anne Gush

Brand-New-Life, 2022

The «Potosí-Prinzip» was a touring exhibition project curated by Alice Creischer, Max Jorge Hinde... more The «Potosí-Prinzip» was a touring exhibition project curated by Alice Creischer, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, and Andreas Siekmann that looked at how European Capitalism could not be thought of without the exploitation of humans and nature in Latin America during Colonialism. In their show «Potosí-Prinzip-Archiv,» currently presented at Kunstraum Schwaz in Tyrol, Austria, they revisited the project and outlined blind spots and pressure points.

Sculpture Journal, 2021

In Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s Rachel Middleman names 'erotic art' as a n... more In Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s Rachel Middleman names 'erotic art' as a new category of 'advanced art' which cuts across several sub-categories including pop, performance and minimalism during the 1960s. Her study spans five chapters which focus on the erotic in the work of Carolee Schneeman, Martha Edelheit, Marjorie Strider, Hannah Wilke and Anita Steckel. According to Middleman, each artist's practice contributed to the erosion of the boundaries between art's traditional genres, including sculpture and painting, thus expanding their parameters. While the 1960s are considered 'prefeminist' with feminist Front cover of Mariano Benlliure y Nueva York (photo: courtesy CEEH)

Conference Report: Adorno and Politics: 1st Istanbul Critical Theory Conference, Boğaziçi Univers... more Conference Report: Adorno and Politics: 1st Istanbul Critical Theory Conference, Boğaziçi University

By Sebastian Truskolaski, Rose-Anne Gush and Alex Fletcher
RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 199 Sept/Oct 2016)

Events by Rose-Anne Gush

A two-day conference to be held at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, U... more A two-day conference to be held at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds.

Keynote speakers: Martha Rosler, Marina Vishmidt

Speak, body: Art, the Reproduction of Capital and the Reproduction of Life will address the juncture of the ‘body’ in art in relation to feminism(s) and capitalism, through the period 1960–1980. The ‘body’ is taken to be a historically contingent concept, up for contestation. Today we are witnessing a massive conservative retrenchment in the political and legal spheres concerning images of the body, from anti-woman bans on images of female ejaculation in pornography to the far-right deployment of racist iconography in the mass media coverage of Brexit and the Trump campaign. We want to challenge the hyper-mediated landscape that has propelled the global right, by considering how a previous generation of artists, who focused on the body in their works, responded to dominant social conditions. Speak, body sets out to investigate artworks that emerged coincident with the crisis of capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s in order to consider what they can tell us about contemporary transformations in art and politics.

http://www.fine-art.leeds.ac.uk/events/speak-body-art-the-reproduction-of-capital-and-the-reproduction-of-life/

Berlin Review, 2024

>> download to read << «What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off fr... more >> download to read <<

«What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it;
we pretend to be strangers.»

FKW//Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und Visuelle Kultur, 2024

B-N-L, 2023

Solitude Journal 1 Collective Care & Response-ability, 2020

Kunst und Politik. Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft - Keywords for Marxist Art History Today, 2020

Third Text, 2019

Performance Research, 2018

Essay included in the volume Objects of Feminism, edited by Maija Timonen and Josefine Wikström

Brand-New-Life, 2022

Sculpture Journal, 2021

By Sebastian Truskolaski, Rose-Anne Gush and Alex Fletcher
RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 199 Sept/Oct 2016)

Keynote speakers: Martha Rosler, Marina Vishmidt

http://www.fine-art.leeds.ac.uk/events/speak-body-art-the-reproduction-of-capital-and-the-reproduction-of-life/

21-23 April 2017

Keynote speakers (tbc): Martha Rosler, Marina Vishmidt

Deadline for abstracts: 30 January 2017

Speak, body: Art, the Reproduction of Capital and the Reproduction of Life, will address the juncture of the " body " in art in relation to feminism(s) and capitalism, through the period 1960–1980. The " body " is taken to be a historically contingent concept, up for contestation. Today we are witnessing a massive conservative retrenchment in the political and legal spheres concerning images of the body, from anti-woman bans on images of female ejaculation in pornography to the far-right deployment of racist iconography in the mass media coverage of Brexit and the Trump campaign. We want to challenge the hyper-mediated landscape that has propelled the global right, by considering how a previous generation of artists, who focused on the body in their works, responded to dominant social conditions. Speak, body sets out to investigate artworks that emerged coincident with the crisis of capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s in order to consider what they can tell us about contemporary transformations in art and politics. Through an intense and sustained period of engagement, the body was explored by artists such as among others. We are especially interested in artworks that counter the museal tendency to appropriate feminist art practices within conventional art-historical categories of movements, iconographies or styles; that is, we want to solicit papers that track the social implications of feminist investigation and critique conducted through a range of media (performance, photography, video, film, etc.). Speak, body aims to reconnect artistic practices with feminism as a historic social movement, and to query its consolidation into an academic "-ism " .

A programme of artists’ films from the 1970s and '80s and the present day, exploring gender, the ... more A programme of artists’ films from the 1970s and '80s and the present day, exploring gender, the body, subjectivity and technology

Organised by Rose-Anne Gush and Gill Park
Supported by the Centre for Practice-led Research in the Arts

Conference presentation at Groundings // December 1-2, 2022 // Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden... more Conference presentation at Groundings // December 1-2, 2022 // Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden

"We must not tell ourselves that the indeterminate, the uncertain, the un-obvious, is a weakness. We must say to ourselves that it opens our minds to unexpected forms of complexities. The Tremulous (sic!) thought is not a thought out of fear, scared thinking, it is thought that is opposed to systematic thinking. All the poets have said it. The gasping, the breathing, the pulse, the misfortunes, the fears, the insane hopes, and the sterile obsessions. All of these need to be relearned and remixed. The poetics of this endeavour seems more important than the categories of quick thinking, that lead to definitive and fixed conclusions. We understand the world better if we tremble with it. Because the world trembles in every which way, it trembles organically and geologically. It also trembles with the climate, alas, that we know. But the world also trembles through the relations that we have with each other. Because the rapports between different nations, just like between individuals are always complex, difficult and inextricable."
- Manthia Diawara, The tremor of the world, citing Édouard Glissant, One World in Relation (2010)

"If one picks up German soil, it turns to ashes in one’s hand. That is my eternal theme. It is completely compulsive. I have the feeling that when one lives here — that is this Adorno quote — of course poetry after Auschwitz is possible, but no poetry without Auschwitz is possible. […] I have the feeling I actually have to speak about it always."
- Elfriede Jelinek

A mountain is a complex entity, within which multiple scales of time and matter converge. Born from geological processes and the movement of the Earth’s crust, it inhabits the critical zone (Lovelock, Margulis, Latour), the thin layer of our planet in which life can both thrive, and in which it is under constant threat by human intervention. A mountain is home to countless living and non-living beings and the webs of relations, a bioinfrastructure (Bellacasa) that binds them together. This performance lecture, developed by Rose-Anne Gush and Philipp Sattler, unfolds new research grounded within the complex mountain relations emerging from the site of a proposed lithium mine that has been tunnelled into the Koralm mountain range in Carinthia, Austria. Taking an experimental approach this work will be composed of seven movements created by the two co-authors that resonate through the site and engage as Mountain, Lithium, Glock, Forest, Farm, Soil and Memory.

The results of fieldwork as well as theoretical and historical research undertaken on and in relation to the site, will be the basis of this lecture. By departing from the question, how on Earth does one get to own a mountain, this performance lecture will narrate the (in)visible and (un)conscious landscape, exploring the societal and spatial transformations brought to the site through a long history of mining. It stretches from the strategically important iron ore mining of the Austro-Hungarian empire (Rady), to the history of coal mining that furnaced an accelerating industrialisation in the valley from 1845 well into the twentieth-century. It brought and supported new energy paradigms for the production of petroleum and electricity - a transformation that conceptually continues with the role of lithium for the realisation of the European Green New Deal. Following the material relations of lithium mining brings into question the dialectic of periphery and center in neo-colonial modes of extraction coming to European soil. While at the same time evoking environmentalist protests, as well as sparking eco-nationalist, eco-fascist tendencies against the project today, the site conjures longer histories of fascism and colonialism found in its imperial and National Socialist past and present. The question of agricultural property - central for the ideology of Blood and Soil (Sattler), concerns the site as much as Partisan resistance that found refuge on the mountain (Rettl/Blohberger). The relation to the weapons manufacturer Glock who owns part of the mountain is another surreal, yet deadly serious afterlife of these histories. For the lecture performance we will follow the mountain - from its contours and shadows, into the tunnels, out into the forest, and into the depths of soil, tracing the impact of human and more-than-human entities. Through socially embedded fieldwork, as well as theoretical and historical research, we attempt to formulate an investigative approach into such traces of history and memory (Benjamin) and question its representations, looking for a collaborative praxis of art-based research that we will bring to the conference.

Paper at the 5 year anniversary of the VALIE EXPORT Centre in Linz

Conference paper for Historical Materialism, London, 2022 Returning to the advent of art’s hybri... more Conference paper for Historical Materialism, London, 2022

Returning to the advent of art’s hybridisation, this paper aims to supplement dominant art historical and theoretical understanding of this process in the 1960s, by looking to a longer history of women surrealist or surrealist adjacent artists (including but not limited to Suzanne Césaire, Alina Szapocznikow, Unica Zürn) in Europe and the Caribbean between the 1930s–70s. It will use this body of work to investigate Theodor Adorno’s perspicacious concept of „Verfransung“, the fraying of the boundaries between the art genres, explicated in „Art and the Arts“ (1967), arguing for its relevance in resituating „global art“ in the present.

Recent developments in art history and theory have focused on contemporary art’s situatedness, its praxis and urgency under globalisation (Roberts 2015; Osborne 2018). Under the rubric of the ‘global turn’, art historians and theorists have explored the expansion of modern art’s historical centres (Paris, the Weimar Republic, the Soviet Union during the 1920s, and New York after 1945), with the rise of Biennial cultures and art fairs, these hubs expanded to become global (Edwards and Day 2013). A broad decentring and disconnection between Western modernism and art’s geo-historical ‘extensity’ has been diagnosed, art’s ‘respatialization’, since the 1970s shows a move in focus from the imperial centres to the ‘unmarked’ peripheries, which have galvanised the ‘imaginative insertion of the art of the peripheries into the timelines and spaces of the imperialist centre’ (Roberts 2015).

By considering how and where this corpus of work (mentioned above) emerged and how it was shaped by mobility, I aim to recontextualise „global art“ in order to show how global resonances within twentieth-century anti- or a-formal art practices register or manifest the unevenness of capitalist modernity. With a commitment to understanding this work immanent to its historical context and genealogy, and drawing on methods developed in social and feminist art history and aesthetics, the paper will analyse the works in light of their navigation of spatial, temporal, material and corporeal boundaries in light of art’s globalisation.

Kunsthalle Wien: 13-14 February, 2020

In his famous essay Discourse on Colonialism, the poet Aimé Césaire argued that what in Europe is... more In his famous essay Discourse on Colonialism, the poet Aimé Césaire argued that what in Europe is called ‘fascism’ is just colonial violence finding its way back home. But his warnings went unheeded. More widely read was The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno et al. Published in 1950, the same year as Discourse on Colonialism, it developed the F scale (F for fascist) in order to gauge the psychological predisposition for fascism among the democratic citizenry, leaving the post-war consensus to settle on the notion that fascism was a personality trait, resulting from the devolution of the individuated liberal subject. Still dominant today, this tendency to psychologize fascism fails to incorporate the colonial dimension, obscuring the continuities between fascism and the biopolitics of empire, and ultimately depoliticizes both.
Seventy-five years later, while the West indulges in fantasies of reverse colonization involving the subjugation of white people, the process of recolonization has been renewed with increased ferocity. Recent events in Bolivia, driven by the hunger for lithium, commonly used for mobile devices or electric vehicles, make apparent the structuring force of race in geopolitics, as well as the role of the digital economy in the production and reproduction of a new settler frontier.
The White West III: Automating Apartheid contends that without the will to confront the role of race in the production and reproduction of global wealth differentials, the question of the good life can only be raised in distorted form, under the guise of welfare chauvinism or the tech industry’s cargo cult, promising that a cornucopia of goods will be supplied magically—weak utopias whose structural inconsistencies open up an ambiguous space in which a critique or disruption of capitalism can be inflected in the direction of fascism.

This paper will address the ways in which violence (systemic, gestural and symbolic) mediates the... more This paper will address the ways in which violence (systemic, gestural and symbolic) mediates the relations between artistic and political autonomy, and artistic and political engagement in the work of VALIE EXPORT, by focusing on a contradiction in the way that gender and violence are figured. In her expanded cinema works, such as Cutting, Tapp und Tastkino and Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (performed 1967-1970), EXPORT intervened in the cinema as a space of consumption, and the cinema as material and method to transform physically, to move the “art-space/cinema” into the street. In Eros/ion (1971) as well as the trilogy of body-material actions: Kausalgie, Hyperbulie and Asemie (1971 - 1973), EXPORT poses distinct temporary spaces, or frameworks, in which the artist inhabits and renders visible psychic and physical manifestations of societal and gendered oppression and pathology. By exploring EXPORT’s own texts, sources and the larger political, theoretical and artistic exigencies that gave rise to them, this paper examines how gender is constituted through violent processes within these “body” and “image” works. EXPORT’s practice posits identity as a negative and destabilizing category, rather than an ontological category, which insinuates a “dread” of femininity. By working through form and subject, the structure and space (both physical and metaphorical) of the artworks, this paper will raise questions of how gender is configured through violent processes within the image and body space, and presses on the implications of a feminist art practice that is negatively posited rather than merely affirmative of already existing categories of gender.