On the Cusp of Feminism: Women Artists in the Sixties (original) (raw)

Feminism AND Art: A Review Essay

Australian Feminist Studies, 2015

Since the revolutions of the 1960s, feminism and art have created spaces for thinking and rethinking the links between gender and creativity. Art has been challenged both within and without the frame, as artists and feminists disrupt and complicate pre-established modes of production and representation. Feminism in turn has been challenged by art that asks: what does a feminist subject look like? What does she read? Think? Feel? Make? Amidst the constant questioning some unexpected encounters occur: art made by women is not necessarily feminist art; patriarchal logics continue to dominate the ongoing boundaries of canon formation; and, it remains necessary to examine gender in all its potentialities. As Susan Best writes, it continues to be our job as feminist artists and art historians to address ‘the refraction of the question of the subject through the lens of gender’ (2013, p.143). Subsequently, this review asks: What do you feel when you encounter feminist art? And, who is art AND feminism for? We pursue these questions through five new or recently updated titles broadly collected under the heading of contemporary feminist art history and theory.

Feminism And Art: Unexpected Encounters

A Multiple Book Review Essay: Susan Best, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde. I. B. Tauris: London and New York, 2013. . Katy Deepwell (ed.), Feminist Art Manifestos: An Anthology. KT Press: London, 2014. . Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal and Sue Scott, The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium, Prestel: Munich, London, New York, 2013. . Amelia Jones (ed.), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, (2nd edition) Routledge: New York and London, 2010. . Helena Reckitt (ed.), Art and Feminism, (Abr Rev Up edition,) Peggy Phelan (survey) Phaidon Press: New York, 2012.

A Time of One's Own: Histories of Feminism in Contemporary Art

2022

In A Time of One’s Own Catherine Grant examines how contemporary feminist artists are turning to broad histories of feminism ranging from political organizing and artworks from the 1970s to queer art and activism in the 1990s. Exploring artworks from 2002 to 2017 by artists including Sharon Hayes, Mary Kelly, Allyson Mitchell, Deirdre Logue, Lubaina Himid, Pauline Boudry, and Renate Lorenz, Grant maps a revival of feminism that takes up the creative and political implications of forging feminist communities across time and space. Grant characterizes these artists’ engagement with feminism as a fannish, autodidactic, and collective form of learning from history. This fandom of feminism allows artists to build relationships with previous feminist ideas, artworks, and communities that reject a generational model and embrace aspects of feminism that might be seen as embarrassing, queer, or anachronistic. Accounting for the growing interest in feminist art, politics, and ideas across generations, Grant demonstrates that for many contemporary feminist artists, the present moment can only be understood through an embodied engagement with history in which feminist pasts are reinhabited and reimagined.

The Legacy of 1970s Feminist Artistic Practices on Contemporary Activist Art

2011

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Redefinition of the Body in Feminist Art (1960s and 1970s)

Bagh- e Nazar, 2017

In the contemporary era, the body has been the focus of attention of different human life aspects and has been one of the issues undergoing serious critical rethinking. In the past few decades, contemporary art has witnessed transformation of artworks revolving around the body. The presence of the body in these works is set predominantly in opposition to the Western aesthetic discourse until the end of modern art period. The feminist art emerging in the late 1960s, through anti-war, civil and feminist movements, is regarded as one of the most important origins of changes in the status of the body in contemporary art. The present research aims to study feminist body art in the 1960s and 70s and examine its theoretical and social context, as one of the major origins of changes in the meaning and status of the body in the contemporary Western art. The assumption of this research is the transformation in the meaning and status of the body in connection with changes in the social configuration and theoretical foundations of feminist artworks, which shows a position in contrast to traditional (and modern) representations of the body in Western art. For this purpose, first the relationship between key concepts and categories, as concurrent theoretical trends, is analyzed based the post-structuralist approach and ideas of feminist theorists. Then, the transformations in the status and presence of the body in the selected feminist artworks as compared to previous eras, are explained and analyzed. This study, which is of qualitative type, has been conducted using descriptive-analytical methodology, and the library method has been utilized to collect data. The findings of the study indicate that the representation of the body in feminist art (in the period in question) has been in contrast with the aesthetic norms of the body dominant in Western art up to the end of modernist art period. In these works, body is depicted as an active, dynamic agency in interaction with the audience and social issues, with an emphasis on the process rather than the end product of art. From this point of view, the most important transformation in the status of the body in the works of feminist artists is the metamorphosis of the status of traditional body from an objectivized and metaphorical image into a self-conscious subject in connection with identity categories.