Emancipation Despite Circumstances: The Prague Spring, (Dis)engagement on the Art Scene and the Emergence of Feminist Consciousness among Women Artists (original) (raw)
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The article deals with the legacy of state socialist women’s emancipation in Czech sociological discourse and on the art scene of the 1990s and the reasons why women artists refused to identify with feminism, which gradually penetrated Czech society after 1989. The main argument of the article is that the non-identification of local women artists with feminism was not a matter of gender blindness. On the contrary, it was a rejection of “Western” liberal feminism, whose values, based on individualism and career success, conflicted with the women artists’ positive relationship to family, motherhood and “femininity”.
The Depoliticization of Czech Female Art
2004
Contemporary Czech art is heavily influenced by a history of Communism, the 1989 transition to capitalism, and the impact had on visual culture by the political and economic changes after the Velvet Revolution. Czech female art, defined as art made by women that is informed by themes of female identity, image, the body, sexuality, feminism, sexual identity, and gender theory, responds to how female identity has been affected by these social changes. This essay argues that Czech female art is depoliticized by its artists, through either neglect or resistance to political connotations and ramifications, but that it is simultaneously engaged with broad social issues through a unique synthesis of personal and public identity. Depoliticization is also discussed in terms of how it actually affects politics, including feminism, lesbianism, and corporeality, and how it reveals social and cultural relationships to political ideologies.
Who won in 1989? Approaching the canon of Czech art history from a feminist perspective
Slavic Review, 2024
Drawing on the classic question of feminist art history, this article asks how and by whom the contemporary canon of Czech art history was constructed, and when the exclusion of women artists of the 1980s generation from it took place. It shows that the 1960s generation of women artists emerged from the disruption of the traditional gender order in the Stalinist era. In contrast, the generation of women artists who entered the art scene in the 1980s was disadvantaged by the declining power of art institutional structures and the growing importance of informal networks for career success in late socialism. Their lack of social capital, combined with the re-emergence of macho culture in the 1980s art scene, the persistence of traditional gender roles in the home, and the loss of more substantial state support for artistic production after 1989, led to their “invisible” role in the post-1989 art world.
Art and the Question of Gender in Slovak Art
Identical features have appeared in several articles that try to reflect feminist art in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. 1 These features have repeated themselves whether their subject is art from Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic or Slovakia. The first shared element is the political context, which had a remarkably negative impact on the history of feminism in these countries not only before 1989, but the consequences of this can be perceived to the present day.
Analize: Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies, 2017
This paper addresses a lacuna in the history and memory of (post-) communist women's labour. It aims to investigate how and to what ends the artistic production from Romania and the former Czechoslovakia illuminate " forgotten " histories of women's labour, reclaiming at the same time a public sphere where " Her-stories " and labour-related memories can be materialized for critical-political ends. In the cultural memory of the transition from communism to democracy and capitalism, certain lieux de mémoire (places of memory) have been preserved and materialized in official cultural formats, whereas other places of memory (both physical and mental) are disregarded and condemned to become lieux d'oubli (sites of forgetting). More often than not, both in the Romanian and the former Czechoslovakian context, the histories and memories of women's labour are deemed " unworthy " of remembrance and tend to be obscured from the official cultures of remembrance and their institutions. As this paper argues, although the official narratives of various work environments from Eastern European regions tend to conceal the presence of women and lack a comprehensive historiography on women and gender some artistic productions enact " feminist counter-narratives " and counter-memories for political ends. We claim that the political dimension of these artistic productions should not be underestimated. These feminist artworks attempt to combine a politics of memory, activism, a history from below, and artistry to reach political ambitions. At a theoretical level, this paper is informed by Amy Mullin's considerations on feminist artistic production and the political imagination. In feminist art, which attempts to revive the memory of women's labour, the political imagination plays a crucial role in fostering community knowledge and experiential knowledge through simultaneously envisioning more equitable futures (economical, political, social) for both men and women.
Art & Documentation, 2020
My research method connects my theoretical background on art history studies and my practical experience as a female artist in Polish social, political and artistic realities. I focus on the position of women artists and their artistic activity in the contexts of the changing political situation. I intend to introduce Polish women artists who were active on the art scene from the seventies until today in the field of performance art and to answer the question what the women artists of my generation have in common with their 'artistic grandmothers.' The aim of this article is also to familiarize foreign readers with the specific status of women in the process of the changing of the political situation in Poland that took place before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. I begin from recollection of my video-installation Fading Traces. Women in Polish Art of the Seventies (2010). In my project I have interviewed seven women artists dealing with feminist topics. For all of them, the period of the 1970s was an early stage of their careers. It was also the decade when I was born, and this personal link that created a sort of time loop was significant for me. As it turned out, most of them created performance art pieces, so their testimonies are important for the topic of this article. In my project, the following female artists took part: Natalia LL, Ewa PARTUM, Anna KUTERA, Izabella GUSTOWSKA, Krystyna PIOTROWSKA, Teresa MURAK and Teresa TYSZKIEWICZ. In the period of the new democracy, especially during last two decades, performance art pieces by Polish women artists became more rebellious. Since 2016, the course of Polish politics has become more populistic, conservative and democracy is in danger again, and this also badly affects women’s rights and their position in the society. But at the same time, thanks to democracy and the financial support of the European Union, the grass-root women’s initiatives have appeared and are getting stronger. The collaboration of women from different branches of public life seems to be organised well enough to defend women’s rights and make the country more friendly to women and all discriminated people in the future.
Ikonotheka, 2023
There have been some attempts in recent years to construct a global history of allwomen art initiatives, including those undertaken in Eastern Europe. These have succeeded in-slowly-redrawing a map of all-women art activities, and yet have revealed numerous limitations of revisionist attempts. In this text, we demonstrate how art historiography has developed in Eastern Europe after the political transformation in 1989 and how its anti-communist bias has contributed to the erasure of all-women art activities related to the socialist states' politics from social memory and feminist art history. In the second part of the text, we develop parallel narratives-on Polish, Czech and Croatian/Yugoslav art scenes, respectively-about how this tendency is to be seen in the research on all-women exhibitions. These observations are a starting point for our histories of all-women exhibitions that include the activities of women artists and women's organisations so far neglected in postsocialist feminist art historiography.
institutions showing a particular interest in the early feminist practices of women artists from this region. Are Eastern European feminist conceptual practices "returning" to the Western map as just another commodified art practice within late capitalism or is the introduction of an Eastern European artist here and there into major overview exhibitions simply a way of fulfilling a quota of political correctness? Will such an approach contribute to the absorption of Eastern European practices and narratives of art history into the "big narrative of twentieth century Western art history"? Where, in your opinion, is this impulse coming from? What is the role played by "nostalgia" in this and how has this retroactive "historicisation" influenced a general perception of early feminist practices?
AGAINST THEORY: SELECTED "GIRLHOOD" FEMINIST ARTISTIC PRACTICES IN POLAND
Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, 2019
The mass public protests against introduction of further limitations on women's reproductive rights in 2016 become important moment for the Polish feminist movement. Yet, the movement's structure and semiotic reservoir of justifi cations has visibly changed in the recent years. The young Polish feminism has become more "girlish" than "womanly". In our paper, we analyze how the "girlhood" artistic practices fi t into the renewal of contemporary refl ection on the gender roles of women and the Polish feminist movement. We analyzed practices of young Polish artivists, involved in girlhood-feminist collectives, and compared their cultural tactics with those of selfi e feminism. The paper focuses on girlhood practices as activities which take place across the individual and collective divide and redefi ne the public sphere. Demonstrating how these initiatives negotiate the normative cultural system, we present expressions of the girlhood experience and describe its social and structural conditions. We analyze feminist artistic practices as expressible and language-based feminine emancipatory practices, using tools typical of analysis of discourse and, predominantly, linguistic performance.
2021
This article is based on the belief that the hierarchy of Ukrainian artistic community was mainly male-centred, while female artists had to work much harder than their male colleagues just to be recognised as artists. Therefore, artistic talent was generally associated with personal characteristics rather than artistic skills. In the 1960s, manliness became one of the important features of art and the intelligentsia in general, which adhered to the ideas of human rights and justice. According to the artists’ ideas, the same qualities – manliness, courage, honesty, and willpower – should manifest themselves in the artworks. The crisis of the Soviet Union and its artistic structures, the subsequent Perestroika, and the independence of Ukraine brought fundamental economic and social changes putting this activist tradition of nonconformist female art on hold. The above-mentioned trends re-emerged after 2004, when a new generation of artists, who successfully incorporated elements of the tradition of social activism, was born. In my paper, I will talk about the continuity of the tradition of female artists’ activism, about its features in Ukraine from the 1960s to the present day. I will try to answer the question: what is the role of the idea of manliness in Soviet and Ukrainian art, and what is the role of female artists and their artistic practice in fighting for political and social justice. URL: https://www.doi.org/10.48285/ASPWAW.24501611.MCE.2021.7.5