Female Self-Portraiture: Imprisoned Spaces and Minds (original) (raw)
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"In this paper I follow nomadic passages in the memoir of Sofia Laskaridou, a Greek woman artist. I am interested into how her dislocation from familiar places and spaces in the beginning of the twentieth century opened up unforeseen territories for her self to be constituted as a travel logbook, a chart tracing paths of becoming. As a writer and painter of her own modernity, Laskaridou reconstitutes herself in retracing her paths in the cities she lived as a young art student. However in writing herself in space, she also rewrites the city, offering insights in the experience of the spaces of modernity from a range of marginalised subject positions, in terms of gender and geography. In observing modern life within the discourse of the aesthetic and the limitations of her own time, class, culture and geographies, Laskaridou’s memoir becomes a site of contestation and her autobiographical map rather chaotic. What I argue is that as she moves on, she leaves herself behind, continuously becoming-other as she creates real-and-imaginary connections with the spaces she temporarily inhabits. In this light, nomadism becomes an effective conceptual tool for making cartographies of gendered spatial practices in becoming a woman and an artist."
Avant: The Journal of the Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Vanguard, 2017
In the House and Space2 photographic series, Francesca Woodman captures the environments that may be considered disruptive; still, it is a female model-in her inconstant poses, always partially blurred or hidden-that holds the viewer's attention. The pictures therefore evoke a twofold sense of obscurity, since their unfriendly interiors are occupied by the uncanny, semi-absent yet ceaselessly present, disappearing woman, who turns out to be Woodman herself. Woodman's spectral presence and the unhomely locations she haunts-being simultaneously the photographer and the object of her photographs-are examined in this article by means of Bracha L. Ettinger's matrixial theory. Ettingerian psychoanalysis, juxtaposed with Roland Barthes, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan, provides the tools to challenge the dominant non-affirmative understanding of Woodman's self-portraits as works of disappearing and failing subjectivity: an understanding whose obvious point of support is found in the artist's biography. Instead, Ettinger's system makes it possible to look at this oeuvre through the prisms of fragility, homeliness, and the potential emergence of blurry, ghostly subjectivity. Moreover, the article examines the ways in which Woodman resists the divisions imposed on her and the medium she uses (such as the Barthesian triad of Operator, Spectator, and Spectrum, and the dichotomies of me / the Other and subject / object).
Thresholds of Being: Phenomenology and the Art of Francesca Woodman
Long, 2 "Entrapped in being, we shall always have to come out of it. And when we are hardly outside of being, we always have to go back into it. Thus, in being, everything is circuitous, roundabout, recurrent, so much talk; a chaplet of sojournings, a refrain with endless verses." 1 -Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Empty Space: Creativity, Femininity, Reparation, Justice
Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics, 2019
In this article, I take up Klein’s theorization of creativity through reparation to consider how this principally psychological formulation articulates a relationship between aesthetics and politics. Much scholarship on Klein, like that by Leo Bersani (1990), Lyndsey Stonebridge (1998), Esther Sánchez-Pardo (2003), and Mary Jacobus (2005) has rightly called attention to the central function of creativity in her work, showing how her narrative of the psychic impulse to create opens onto a broader theory of aesthetics. Yet, for all this attention to aesthetics, few psychoanalysts or scholars have considered how, through the language of “reparation,” Klein’s psychoanalytic theory sutures aesthetics to a thoroughly political grappling with the limits of justice. In this article, I therefore re-orient previous critical engagements with Kleinian psychoanalysis and aesthetics by locating reparation as a critical axis within Klein’s work that bridges aesthetic and political concerns, thereby bringing aesthetic scholarship on Klein into conversation with incisive political readings of her work by critics like Jacqueline Rose (1994), Eli Zaretsky (1998), and Michal Shapira (2013). As a distinctly twentieth-century framework for negotiating global, political claims to and for justice, “reparation” is far from simply—or indeed originally—a psychological operation. Thus, that Klein would adopt the language of “reparation” to name the psychic process she understood as paramount to creativity is not only aesthetically but, I argue, politically salient.
(2010) Charting Cartographies of Resistance: Line of Flight in Women Artists’ Narratives.
In this paper I chart lines of flight in women artist's narratives. In focusing on the complex interrelations between the social milieus of education and art, what I suggest is that they should be analysed as an assemblage where power relations and forces of desire are constantly at play in creating conditions of possibility for women to resist, imagine themselves becoming other and for new possibilities in their lives to be actualised. As a novel approach to social ontology the theory of assemblages offers an analytics of social complexity that accounts for open configurations, continuous connections and unstable hierarchies, structures and axes of difference. In reconsidering resistance as immanent in dispositifs of power and assemblages of desire, what I finally argue is that women artists' narratives contribute to the constitution of minor knowledges and create archives of radical futurity. Keywords: art education; assemblage theories; lines of flight; minor knowledges; narratives; resistance
Body of Work: Deploying Feminist Phenomenology in Gender Based Art
takes as its premise distinctive aspects of female embodiment that yield particular ways of being in and perceiving the world, informing subjectivity and identity as well as the creative process and approaches to art-making. This paper is part of an ongoing series of projects which aim to provide a variety of platforms to critically explore the practices and production of women artists who work in a variety of media to re-imagine the body as gendered, sexed, raced or living within specific cultural situations and environments. 1 Feminist theorists and philosophers such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Gayatri Spivak, along with critical race theorists and LGBT theorists, have found embodiment, as it interacts with social and cultural variables, to be central to identity formation: an embodied self embedded within dynamic environments. The formation of embodied subjectivity as constitutive of notions of self, and the persistent interrogation analyzing biological, social and cultural embodiment, are critical concepts informing the art work of the five artists I discuss here. Samira Abbassy, Maria Brito, Kate Gilmore, Julia Kunin, and Anahita Vossoughi imagine, visualize and stage what historically had been the narrative domain of masculinist metaphysics and artistic values. Informed by feminist and postcolonial discourses, these artists create objects and spaces where new social orders and alternative histories can be manifest. Feminist philosophy and phenomenology employ useful methodologies to uncover hidden presuppositions which underlie taken-for-granted notions of human experience, with the aim of offering more comprehensive descriptions of experience. Phenomenology, as articulated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone