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In recent years, Laura Cottingham has emerged as one of the most visible feminist critics of the so-called post-feminist generation. Following a social-political approach to art history and criticism that accepts visual culture as part of a larger social reality, Cottingham's writings investigate central tensions currently operative in the production, distribution and evaluation of art, especially those related to cultural production by and about women. Seeing Through the Seventies: Essays on Feminism and Art gathers together Cottingham's key essays from the 1990's. These include an appraisal of Lucy R. Lippard, the most influential feminist art critic of the1970's; a critique of the masculi...
In Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul (Angst Essen Seele Auf, 1974) Emma (Brigitte Mira), a working-class widow and former member of the Nazi party, marries Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a much younger Moroccan migrant worker. Set in Munich during the 1970s, the film melds the conventions of melodrama with a radical sensibility to present a portrait of racism and everyday hypocrisy in post-war Germany. It is a film about the way conventional society detests anything and anybody unfamiliar - but also a film about the hopes and limits of love. Intricately directed, beautifully performed, and designed to show Munich life in all its shabby kitschiness, Fear Eats the Soul may be Fassbinder'...
Uncomfortable close encounters with 'real' lesbians such as k.d. or Martina, the production of absolutely fake lesbianism a la Madonna, the life and death of Beth from Brookside, the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't lesbian relationship in Eastenders, Roseanne's quick affirmation of her heterosexuality following 'the lesbian kiss', the overt heterosexualization of the lesbian narrative in Thelma and Louise or Fried Green Tomatoes and the cooptation of the 'lesbian look' on the streets and catwalks of Paris, London and New York all attest to the superficiality of dominant media's mis-representation of lesbians and lesbianism. Cottingham contests the lesbian significance of the mainstream media's 'lesbian chic' phenomenon which, she argues, is less a manifestation of lesbian cultural power than a commodification of lesbianism whose primary purpose is to disempower and marginalize lesbians, and all women, who threaten the existing political structure. The author suggests that the threat actual lesbians (as opposed to their mass media simulacra) pose to the social and sexual economy of contemporary society should be refocused into a radical new definition of feminist politics.
In recent years, Laura Cottingham has emerged as one of the most visible feminist critics of the so-called post-feminist generation. Following a social-political approach to art history and criticism that accepts visual culture as part of a larger social reality, Cottingham's writings investigate central tensions currently operative in the production, distribution and evaluation of art, especially those related to cultural production by and about women. Seeing Through the Seventies: Essays on Feminism and Art gathers together Cottingham's key essays from the 1990's. These include an appraisal of Lucy R. Lippard, the most influential feminist art critic of the1970's; a critique of the masculi...
DIVA collection of writings from the influential feminist art journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G, with a forward by Johanna Drucker./div
From 70s ritural performances to the post-feminism of a new century, Mary Beth Edelson has been destabilizing preexisting representations of women. Whether in her version of the Last Supper, in which Georgia O'Keeffe plays Christ to disciples Lee Krasner, Nancy Graves, Louise Bourgeois, and Yoko Ono; or in her isolation and re-narrativization of stereotypical images of Hollywood femmes fatales, Edelson never loses sight of what is at stake in her work: the construction, representation, and consumption of images of women. This book, a virtual scrapbook of the feminism movement, includes coversations between Edelson and such seminal feminist figures as Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero, and Miriam Schapiro. Designed by the artist and full of 30 years worth of her multidisciplinary feminist and community-based work, The Art of Mary Beth Edelson offers Edelson the ultimate control over the construction of her own image in the present and the opportunity to recontextualize her past.
In Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul (Angst Essen Seele Auf, 1974) an ageing cleaning woman, Emmi (Brigitte Mira), marries a much younger, immigrant Moroccan mechanic, Ali (El Hedi ben Salem). Set in Munich during the 1970s, Fear Eats the Soul melds the conventions of melodrama with a radical sensibility in order to present a portrait of racism and everyday hypocrisy in post-war Germany. Emmi's family (including her slovenly and spiteful son-in-law Eugen, played by Fassbinder himself), neighbours and workmates turn against her viciously. It is a film about the way conventional society detests anything and anybody unfamiliar - but also a film about the hopes and limits of love. In...
"The work of the sculptor Rachel Harrison is both the zeitgeist and the least digestible in contemporary art. It may also be the most important, owing to an originality that breaks a prevalent spell in an art world of recycled genres, styles, and ideas."--Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker In her sculptures, room-sized installations, drawings, photographs, and artist's books, Rachel Harrison (b. 1966) delves into themes of celebrity culture, pop psychology, history, and politics. This publication, created in close collaboration with the artist, explores twenty-five years of her practice and is the first comprehensive monograph on Harrison in nearly a decade. Its centerpiece is an in-depth plat...
Writing in Space, 1973-2019 gathers the writings of conceptual artist Lorraine O'Grady, who for over forty years has investigated the complicated relationship between text and image. A firsthand account of O'Grady's wide-ranging practice, this volume contains statements, scripts, and previously unpublished notes charting the development of her performance work and conceptual photography; her art and music criticism that appeared in the Village Voice and Artforum; critical and theoretical essays on art and culture, including her classic "Olympia's Maid"; and interviews in which O'Grady maps, expands, and complicates the intellectual terrain of her work. She examines issues ranging from black female subjectivity to diaspora and race and representation in contemporary art, exploring both their personal and their institutional implications. O'Grady's writings—introduced in this collection by critic and curator Aruna D'Souza—offer a unique window into her artistic and intellectual evolution while consistently plumbing the political possibilities of art.
Encompassing movements from post-impressionism to post-modernism, eminent and widely published art historian Bernard Smith has written a sweeping history, a reformulation of art history in the twentieth century.