The great fresco painting of the Italian feminist movements (original) (raw)

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi’, edited by Francesco Ventrella and Giovanna Zapperi

Maria Bremer, BOOK REVIEW Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi, Third Text Online, http://www.thirdtext.org/bremer-carlalonzi, 22 October 2021

Responding to specific contemporary challenges posed by ecological threat, decolonial movements, global capitalism, and the ensuing entanglement of gender, ethnicity and class, feminist perspectives have recently integrated notions of intersectionality and positionality, while revising materialist and semiotic trajectories and developing material culture approaches. The expanding spectrum of feminist concerns has concomitantly put the historiography of feminism to the test, leading to the uncovering of blind spots and biases. Under a self-reflexive lens, persisting anglophone and Western foci, as well as universalising presumptions of an undifferentiated gender experience across class, ethnic and national divides, have come to the fore. Against this backdrop, a renewed historiographical engagement with Western second-wave feminism requires a questioning, rather than a replication, of homogenising epistemic categories and comprehensive narratives. 1 It is in this vein of thought that the volume Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi, edited by art historians Francesco Ventrella and

Experience, Subjectivity and Politics in the Italian Feminist Movement

European Journal of Women's …, 2006

This article describes the political practices of a part of the Italian women's movement that, as of the 1980s, gave way to the sexual difference thought. Through a political analysis of their own experience, which removed any humanist identity assumptions, the women's movement generated new practices and discourses. With these, women were able to exert self-criticism, and simultaneously to produce new subjectivities articulated around the sexual difference concept. The difference thought helped highlight the limits of institutional policy, renewing the premises of political analysis and redefining the borders of what was deemed to be 'political'. Intended to foster dialogue with other feminist proposals, the article underlines the situated nature of this political experience and focuses on the method, the political praxis and the process rather than the outcome, the conclusions or the theory.

Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy. The Legacy of Carla Lonzi

2020

For several years now, the name of Carla Lonzi has been breaking out in art history after a comparatively long-time silence. Art critic, poet and feminist, Lonzi’s work evades easy definitions. Renewed interest in her writing led to two major scholarly publications written in Italian, alongside international responses from contemporary art historians, curators, artist exhibitions, conferences and reading groups. This recent attention to Lonzi has instigated new conversations around radical feminism, contributing to the delinking of an Anglo-American canon frequently associated with major accounts of the feminist movement in art. The developing discourse has also, and this is crucial, started to disseminate a feminist vocabulary that produces dissonances within mainstream strategies of presenting the relationship between art and feminism in the contemporary art world across generations and geographies.

Exploring the Body: Women's Art in Italy's 1970s

Deeply linked to the Catholic culture, the Italian society is often characterized as macho, giving only anecdotal space and visibility to women in the public sphere. Such phenomenon is to be equally found in the art world as proven by the quasi-elimination of women artists from the Italian art history, especially in the contemporary period, in spite of attempts lead from the 1970s by feminist artists and scholars to go against this tendency, after the apparition of strong feminist movements in art internationally. This paper aims at identifying the way(s) the Italian feminist art movement tackled the problematic situation of female art in the Italian society and in its institutions, and at defining its success and aporia.