Suchergebnisse

Catherine Hoffmann'sFree Lunch with the Stench Wenchis a performance of abjection and self‐abjection through poverty with an apotropaic aspiration: to shed the shame through sharing, and to create opportunities for a common social subjectivity that refuses to be silent about the struggle of its own creation and maintenance. Despite its title,Free Lunchdoes not come with a free lunch for the audience but creates an olfactory situation, through the onstage cooking of hot chocolate and the presence of a dead rat, which complements Hoffmann's narration and stage presence into a synaesthetic portrait of poverty and its psychosocial fallout. Drawing on the psychological foundations of shame studies, sociological approaches and social‐theoretical responses to austerity and social division, I propose to examine the gendered embodiment of shame and its exorcism in Hoffmann's performance, focusing on its physical codification in and beyond the visual. I explore the potential of shame to be re‐weaponized against those who originally inflict it, and consider the shame that haunts every creative act, especially those with high political stakes: the failure to make a connection, the fear of being misunderstood.

In response to Rozsika Parker's (2010:xi-xxii) preoccupation with charting continuity and change in both the gendered meanings of craft and the work of women artists employing craft techniques and materials, in this article, I reflect on my experience of curating a retrospective exhibition of crochet and mixed media works by Su Richardson, a participant in the collaborative mail art (1975-1977) and installation project Feministo (various venues, including the ICA, 1977). Superficially, Richardson's domestic iconography has grown in mainstream popularity, as has the use of craft, yet the political, aesthetic and historical specificity of her oeuvre should not be misrecognised: these self-reflectively home-made objects stir the unconscious of domesticity, femininity and their mutual implication from decidedly feminist perspectives. Following Parker (2010:xxi), I argue that threads of influence and dialogue in textiles informed by feminism are often oblique, broken and unexpectedly tangled. If Richardson's retrospective aimed to forge links not only between past and contemporary feminisms but also with current DIY aesthetics and countercultural practices, contemporary artists working with textiles mine a wealth of cultural and artistic references, suggesting complex and transgressive webs of kinship. Bronwyn Platten's quilted homage to Mike Kelley, For more and more love hours (R.I.P. Mike Kelley 1954-2012) (1973-2013), is an example of a work in which such cultural and artistic references are brought to the fore. In it, Platten questions Faith Wilding's dismissal of his work as an abject reification of 'bad boy masculinity' (Wilding 2000:94), to propose feminist and gender-critical alliances across genders and generations.

Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference addresses the ongoing dialogue between feminism, art history and visual culture from contemporary scholarly perspectives. Over the past thirty years, the critical interventions of feminist art historians in the academy, the press and the art world have not only politicised and transformed the themes, methods and conceptual tools of art history, but have also contributed to the emergence of new interdisciplinary areas of investigation, including notably that of visual culture. Although the impact of such fruitful transformations is indisputable, their exact contribution to contemporary scholarship and their changing function within the academy remains a matter for debate, not least because feminism itself has changed significantly since the Womens Liberation Movement. Side-stepping facile, vague and/or ideologically suspect formulations like postfeminism, this collection targets the relationships between past and present as well as among different strands of thought; it aims to offer a complex re-evaluation of different strands in feminist thought and practice around art and visual culture since the 1970s, highlighting continuities as well as points of disjunction. The essays in this volume, all previously unpublished, engage with the interpretative and conceptual models fashioned by feminist art history and visual cultural criticism from both historical and theoretical perspectives. The authors, most of whom are early career academics and emergent practising artists, explore the gaps and omissions of established methodologies and prevalent art historical narratives, while also recovering valuable tools and insights that may be redeployed in contemporary contexts and put to new uses. Inspired by the one-day conference Difference Reframed: Reflections on the Legacies of Feminist Art History and Visual Culture (16 September 2006, University of Sussex),1 this is a purposeful selection of considered responses to what the authors view as timely and pressing ...

In this dialogic chapter, we reflect on our collaborative curation of an exhibition that explored domesticity from feminist dissident perspectives. Featuring work protesting the changes to policy concerning domestic violence in Poland (Malgorzata Markiewicz), subverting, through craft, women's maintenance of the home as both dwelling and ideal (Su Richardson), unpicking maternal subjectivities while staging a confrontation between feminist and modernist approaches to art history (CANAN), and unsettlingly recasting the home as a site of violence and resistance (Paula Chambers), Home Strike (l'étrangère, 2018) is revisited as both an unfinished inter-generational and transnational project critiquing and defamiliarising the home, and an opportunity for reflection and exchange on the curators' own lived experiences of migration and patriarchal regimes of space. Personal meditations on (un)belonging, temporary habitats and object attachments are interspersed with critical observations on migration, xenophobia and the neoliberal demand for mobility, particularly in the case of cultural workers. As well as (a) correspondence and dialogic reflection on shared preoccupations, what follows is an exchange of letters working through the aftershocks of our co-curation of an exhibition and opening up new strands of thinking and research into projects yet unrealised. The epistolary form was adopted as a practical and equitable record-keeping of our exchange, but also for its rich tradition in feminist politics and thought: as Margaretta Jolly (2008) eloquently demonstrates, in the Women's Liberation Movement correspondence both charted the emergence of a new consciousness and sisterly alliances, and became a lab for the development of alternative ways of thinking and engaging with one another. Following recent feminist experimentation, we aspire to occupy the space between 'letter-writing as a formal convention' (Meskimmon, 2014, 31) and a dialogical critical feminist methodology of 'engaged essay-making' (ibid, 29).