Agata Jakubowska, Feminism in the Time of Transformation. Piotr Piotrowski, Zofia Kulik and the Development of Feminist Art History in Poland (original) (raw)
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New Voices on Women in the History of Philosophy., 2024
Maria Gołaszewska (1926-2015) was a Polish philosopher associated throughout her life with Poland's oldest academic institution, the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. She was a student of the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, himself a student of Edmund Husserl. During the postwar and communist years in Poland, Gołaszewska conducted research focusing on issues related to art and aesthetics. She created her own conception of empirically and anthropologically oriented aesthetics, which I argue is a prime example of a theory that accounts for the perspective of gender, and which should be acknowledged as having anticipated the main postulates of contemporary feminist philosophy. In the article I present Gołaszewska's philosophy as a cognitively valuable response to the search of feminist aesthetics for a suitable description of women's experiences related to art and aesthetic perception. In accordance with this aim, I discuss Gołaszewska's theory of the aesthetic situation, a framework within which she proposed solutions similar to feminist standpoint theories developed primarily on the basis of the feminist philosophy and feminist epistemology (Elizabeth Anderson, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Elizabeth Potter). In recent years they have also found creative applications in feminist aesthetics (Anne Eaton). 13.1 An Undeclared Feminist In the history of Polish culture, very few women have dealt with philosophy, and even fewer have left behind them a lasting and significant contribution to not only domestic but also world philosophical thought. Currently, one important albeit underestimated
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.
Women’s art in Irland and Poland 1970-2010: Experiencing and Experimenting on the Female Body
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Feminism Today, or Re-visiting Polish Feminist Literary Scholarship since 1990s
Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, 2013
Almost every time the gendered perspective on a particular issue (so often called obliquely the woman's voice) appears in the media, it is immediately confronted by the almost formulaic expression "feminism today," which suggests instantaneously that feminism is, in fact, a matter of the past, and that if one needs to return to this phenomenon, then it requires some explanation. Such interconnections between gender, women and feminism are a constant simplifi cation. The article seeks to elaborate this problem of generalization expressed by such formulas as "feminism today." 1 "Feminism today" is a particular notion, which indeed refers to the long political, social, economic and cultural struggles and transformations for equality between the sexes, but also implies the need for its updating. Feminism seems to be constantly asked to supply footnotes as to why the contemporary world might still need it, as though equality had been undeniably achieved. This is the common experience of all researchers and activists who deal with the questioning of the traditional order. Even though the order examined by feminism for over 200 years has been changed almost all over the world to various extents, the level of equality achieved is debatable and may still be improved in all countries. Nevertheless, the word feminism has become an uncomfortable word; hence its usage always requires some justifi cation. During the past few years in Britain, attempts to re-defi ne feminism may be noted in various media. Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune of the Zed Books publication have provided an account of contemporary feminist movements on the global and local levels, elaborating also the level of identity felt among academics or activists with the word feminism or with feminist engagements (Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement, 2010). At the same time, in Spring 2011, a whole issue of Granta: The Magazine of New Writing under the title "The F Word," was devoted to feminism today, in which the British writer Rachel Cusk proposed the following defi nition of today's feminist: She is an autobiographer, an artist of the self. She acts as an interface between private and public, just as women always have, except that the feminist does not reverse. She does not propitiate: she objects. She's a woman turned inside out (Cusk 2011: 115).
The Depoliticization of Czech Female Art
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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.
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?