The Treatment of Rape in Women's Performance Art and Sarah Kane's 'Blasted'. Feb 2008, Master's Thesis. (original) (raw)

This paper addresses the issue of rape focusing on three performances held in the 2010s. In If I Wanted Your Opinion, I’d Remove the Duct Tape, poet, performer, and criminal appellate attorney Vanessa Place presents over 200 rape jokes. The Clifford Owens episode, during the Anthology exhibition held by MoMA PS1 from November 2011 to May 2012, involves a performance proposal written by Kara Walker that entailed the threat of forced sex. Elegy, by Gabrielle Goliath, honors one or more raped and murdered women through a chorus of lyric singers who, one after another, sustain a single musical note for one hour.

In this paper, I show how contemporary feminist artists whose works concern femicides address three senses of the term ‘to disappear’. These works can be particularly disturbing, along the lines of Danto’s notion of disturbatory art, since these kinds of works use artistic means to unveil the social and subjective implications of gender crimes.

Performance is not a difficult concept to us [women]. We're on stage every moment of our lives. Acting like women. Performance is a declaration of self-who one is…. And in performance we found an art form that was young, without the tradition of painting or sculpture. Without the traditions governed by men. The shoe fit, and so, like cinderella, we ran with it. Cheri Gaulke, Performance Artist Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

The wide subject of violence in art presents the scholar of today with a whole range of theoretical possibilities in the treatment of the chosen topic. The change of major aesthetical concepts in the period of modernism, post-modern aesthetic egalitarianism with levelling of traditionally high and traditionally low genres, new treatment of identity issues, cultural relativism, and other symptoms of post-modernity have brought about new narrative strategies, causing dramatic change in all aesthetical concepts, offering new perspective to old ideas such as the idea of empathy. The main ambition behind this text is to analyze some recent works on the crossroad of art intervention and performance, and to point to the difference between ideas- based conceptual subversion on the one hand, and body-based transgression in the performance that involves physical pain.

This article describes the event entitled 'Once More with Feeling' at Tate Modern on 27 June 2009, which was the culmination of the Women's Art Library/ Feminist Review Art in the Archive' bursary. The event responded to The Women's Art Library based at Goldsmiths University of London, by performing an abbreviated history of feminist performance art through playful and unorthodox reenactments of works originally created in the late 1960s to the 1990s by contemporary practitioners including Oreet Ashery, Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, Caroline Smith, Katherine Araniello, Davina Drummond, Nadine Jarvis, Lucy Thane and the author. The article explains each artwork and the overarching premise of the project to not only celebrate feminist art but to locate intergenerational points of connection.