Books
M-Z Rosemary Betterton An Intimate Distance: Women Artists and the Body (London: Routledge,1996) ISBN 0-415-11085-8
This book brings together ten years of Rosemary Betterton's writing on women artists : including conference papers, catalogue essays and articles. She describes the process of constructing the book as a 'gathering and reusing' of ideas : setting up an opposition between women's processes of working (parallel to their practice of patchwork) and the masculine model of academic 'mastery'. Feminism's 'central project of reframing and re-fashioning the body within a feminist politics of sexual difference' is, in her own words, central to the diverse areas she explores across the 20th Century. The idea of 'embodiment' plays a central role in the analysis she adopts, located at different historical moments and mapped in terms of conflicting ideologies in specific debates.
Chapters : 1. 'An Intimate Distance: Women,Artists and the Body'; 2. 'Mother Figures:The Maternal Nude in Kathe Kollwitz & Paula Modersohn-Becker' ; 3. ' "A Perfect Woman" : The Political Body of Suffrage ; 4. 'Bodies in the Work :The Aesthetics and Politicis of Women's Non-Representational Painting' : 5. 'Life and A.R.T:Methaphors of Motherhood and Assisted Reproductive Technologies': 6. 'Body Horror? Food (and Sex and Death) in Women's Art' : 7. 'Identities,Memories & Desires: The Body in History'.
Dinah Dysart & Hannah Fink Asian Women Artists (Australia: Craftsman House, 1996) ISBN 976-6410-10-0
This book attempts to cover aspects of women artist's work in China, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, India, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam. This is a tall order given the range of work and the numbers of women artists in Asia. The essays vary widely between analyses of the emergence of feminism (often identified and described through theoretical models of Western feminism with the occasional references to post-colonial and post-structuralist theories) and case studies of individual women artists. The book is beautifully illustrated and reproduces an incredible diversity of work. Where it is frustrating is in its omission of details and footnotes and bibliographic references which would encourage greater research. Nevertheless the material is fascinating including a description of the only women's art gallery in Asia: the Senwati Gallery in Bali,Indonesia founded in 1991(but no address!) ; and the feminist groups called 'Hyung'sang' and '30 Carat' in Korea (no contact or details of joint exhibitions or work!). Many of the women artists discussed are starting to be shown in international biennals (from Venice to the Asia-Pacific triennal,Australia) and major group exhibitions, such publications can only fuel this development and the dissemination of knowledge about their work.
Essays include:- Jane Chia 'Trouble at Hand: Singapore Women Artists' ; Xu Hong 'Dialogue: The Awakening of Chinese Women's Consciousness' ; Kim Hong Hee 'Sex and Sensibility: Women's Art & Feminism in Korea' ; James B.Lee 'Yi Bul :The Korean Installation Artist'; Yang Wen-I 'A Banana is not A Banana: The New Women Artists of Taiwan' ; Anna Kirker 'Poised in Equilibrium: Irene Chou' ; Yuri Mitsuda 'Flowers for Wounds: Contemporary Japanese Women Artists' ; Helen Michaelson 'Traces of Memory: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook' ; Ana P.Labrador 'Beyond the Fringe: Making it as a Contemporary Filipina Artist' ; Astri Wright 'Undermining the order of the Javanese Universe: the self-portraits of Kartika Affandi-Koberl' and 'A Woman's Place: the Senwati Gallery in Bali' ; Martinus Dwi Marianto 'Srikandi,Marsinah & Megawati: Lucia Hartini' ; Nora Taylor 'Invisible Painters: North Vietnamese artists from the revolution to Doi Moi' ; Gayatri Sinha 'Indian Women Artists' ; Nilima Shekh 'Materialising Dream: Arpita Singh'.
Susan Hiller (ed.& introduced by Barbara Einzig.Preface.Lucy Lippard) Thinking About Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller (Manchester : Manchester University Press,1996) 0-7190-4565-7
This book contains documentation and interviews about Susan Hiller's work as a multi-media artist from 1973 to the present. The book has been produced through a collaboration between Susan Hiller and Barbara Einzig and foregrounds the idea of art as epistemology : a lens through which we can view the grounds of culture and knowledge formations. Hiller's interests and her work as an anthropologist are discussed ; alongside her interest in automatism, shamanism : language, sex and death against the legacy of conceptualism, a critique of representation and specifically scientific forms of empiricism.
1. Inside all Activities: The Artist as Anthropologist ; 2.Within and Against : Women Being Artists; 3.Fragments of A Forgotten Language:Automatism,Dream,Collective Reveries; 4. Working Through Culture: Convetions of Seeing; 5.Objects as Events Extended Over Time:Nature as Representation 6.Art and Knowledge: A Critique of Empiricism.
Francesca Hughes (ed) The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice (Boston: MIT Press,1996) ISBN 0-262-08245-4
This book addresses the question of gender in architectural practice. Touching on familiar questions for women practitioners : Do women design differently from men? Is there a feminine architecture? What does it look like? and at the same time trying to move beyond these into more complex questions of the problem of 'Woman' already-inscribed in language in its contradictory even opposition placement against the work of real women architects. The aim is to produce a collective autobiography of practice : one which multiplies that sense of possibility in gender beyond simple binary oppositions of male/female. As one reviewer put it, the book is collected 'with cunning and tact', essays are linked in a tangential but flowing manner.
Contents and Authors:
Beatriz Colomina discusses Eileen Gray's house E.1027 at Cap Martin and
the contradictory place of Le Corbusier's gift mural within it. Martine De
Maesener's essay plays on the conflicts in language and spatial design
embodied in the notion of form and function : a play between up and side,
'Op-Zij' (in Dutch) inside/outside in 'Rear Window'. Francoise-Helene
Jourda describes her architectural practice (and collaborations) in terms
of principles specifically exploiting contradictory principles. Elizabeth
Diller moves from an analysis of time-motion efficency in 1950s Taylorism
to a clever pun on the pyschology of housewives dis-/mal-content in
pressing the perfect shirt. Dagmar Richter, inspired by Cixous' challenge
to put into words the unthinkable/unthought offers reflections on 'A
Practice of One's Own' from building the Century City to using 'irony' as
a method to redesign Beirut. Nasrine Seraji-Bozorgzad's reflections
presented in image/text forms present reflections on territories and
models of architectural practice in order to illuminate her own position.
Catherine Ingraham takes up Francesca Hughes' suggestion of women
operating as both insiders and outsiders in architecture language and its
objects: as a site for a lament. Christine Hawley presents aspects of her
own practice and offers ideas and salutary warnings about challenging the
norms of architecture. Merrill Elam discusses some of her own projects and
recollections ; Diana Agrest 'The Return of (the Repressed) Nature in the
China Basin project; Magret HarOardottir discusses her design of City
Hall, Reyjavick,Iceland and work in Wiesbaden; and Jennifer Bloomer the
principles of composition and fascination in still life in her work.
Jo Anna Isaak Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter (London: Routledge,1996) ISBN 0-415-08015-0
Jo Anna Isaak analyses and presents the work of women artists from the U.S., the former Soviet Union; the United Kingdom and Canada in this book, beginning with the work from her 1982 exhibition 'The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter' and its 1992 sequel 'Laughter Ten Years After'. Two chapters engage with her work on Freud and feminist readings 'Art History and Its Discontents' and 'Encore'; and on Cixous in 'Mapping the Imaginary'. There are many insights and ideas presented for feminist analysis within this book. What is immediately striking is the move towards an international appraisal of parallels within feminism and the importance of 'heteroglossia'.
Chapters : The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter ; Art History and Its (Dis)Contents ; Reflections of Resistance: Women Artists on the Other Side of the Mir; Mothers of Invention ; Mapping the Imaginary ; Encore.
Mary Kelly Imaging Desire: Mary Kelly:Selected Writings (MIT Press,1997) ISBN 0-262-11214-0 Divided into 5 sections, this volume reprints many of Kelly's published writings in a new context allowing a greater insight into her cultural, critical and artistic projects over the last two decades. Her reflections on the direction of feminist art practice since the 1970s; on the politics of modernism; on the representation of femininity in artistic practice ; and on the female/feminist subject in history continue to inspire and provoke feminist debate in the UK and USA.
The 5 sections of the book are :- I.Feminist Interventions; II Unspeakable Subjects; III Postmodern Oppositions ; IV Invisible Bodies; V Gender Hybrids.
Adrian Piper Out of Order,Out of Sight (2 Vols) (Boston,Mass: MIT,1996) ISBN 0-262-16163-X
This collection of writings by Adrian Piper brings together what might first appear as the two divergent strands in her creative work: her art and her engagement with philosophy,specifically her writings on Kant. However her work in art criticism, on Xenophobia and on the concept of 'meta-art' has many direct links with her art production in performance, photography and installation since the late 1960s. This method of publication offers great insight into these connections and the overall approach in Piper's work. For these two volumes also form a beautifully produced documentation of over three decades of work and creative politcally-engaged thought : a body of work which was designed to challenge, to provoke and to question collective understandings of identity, of racist attitudes and Xenophobia in American society.
Vol 1 : Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968-1992 :
35 essays and statements divided into 4 Sections: 'The Metaphysics of
Conceptual Art'; 'Performance Catalysis on the Street and in the World' ;
'Object Catalysis and Political Self-Awareness'; 'Racism, Racial
Stereotyping and Xenophobia'.
Vol 2 : Selected Writings in Art Criticism 1967-1992 :
Twenty-Four essays divided into three Sections : 'Conceptualizing
Conceptual Art'; 'Art-World Politics'; 'Art-World Practice and Real-World
Politics'
Griselda Pollock (ed) Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts : Feminist Readings (London:Routledge,1996) ISBN 0-415-14128-1
The fifteen essays in this book highlight the question of difference - social, sexual, cultural, political differences - experienced both generationally and geographically in the work of women artists and the attention to difference in feminist readings of women's work.
Contents: Mieke Bal essay is called 'Reading Art?', Elisabeth Bronfen writes on Hysteria, Irma & Cindy Sherman', Irit Rogoff on 'Gossip as Testimony', Nanette Salomon on Hidden agendas and 'The Venus Pudica', Alison Rowley on Jenney Saville as feminist painting practice, Michelle Hirshhorn on the French artist Orlan, Judith Mastai on 'The Anorexic Body' in Canadian installation art, Lubaina Himid (artist's pages), Rosemary Betterton on Paula Modersohn-Becker and Kather Kollwitz (also in Betterton above), Young-Paik Chun on the work of Re-Hyun Park, Catherine de Zegher on Cecilia Vicuna, Brenda LaFleur on Jin-Me Yoon, Anna Raine on Ana Mendieta, Hagiwara Hiroko on Shimado Yoshiko, Griselda Pollock on Bracha Lictenberg Ettinger.
Gayatri Sinha (ed) Expressions & Evocations: Contemporary Women Artists of India (India: Marg Publications, 1997) ISBN 81-85026-34-3
This book is lavishly illustrated and a beautifully produced insight into the work of ten leading women artists in India over the past 50 years. Although it stands in its own right as a volume, it also functions as a catalogue to a recent exhibition and is a celebratory volume to mark the first 50 years of Marg Publishing. Each essay approaches its subject in a different and interesting way and attempting to move beyond a descriptive or narrative account of the artist's life and work to highlight the broader context of their work and its concerns.
Contents : The following writers are included: each discussing one woman artist:- Nilima Sheikh on 'Amrita Sher-Gil' ; Kashav Malik on 'Devayani Krishna' ; Anahite Contractor on 'Pilloo Pockhanawala'; Geeta Kapur on 'Nasreen Mohamedi'; Yashodhara Dalmia 'Arpita Singh' ; Rupika Chala 'Anjolie Ele Menon'; Pranabranjan Ray 'Madhvi Parekh' ; Geeti Sen 'Anupam Sud'; Mala Marwah 'Nilima Sheikh' ; Uma Nair 'Gogi Saroj Pal'; Kamala Kapoor 'Nalini Malani' ; Amit Mukhopadhyay 'Latika Katt' ; Chaitanya Sambrani 'Navjot' ; Gayatri Sinha on 'Arpana Caur'.
Anna Voigt New Visions,New Perspectives: Voices of Contemporary Australian Women Artists (Australia: Craftsman House, 1996) ISBN 976-8097-92-2
This volume was produced by asking the same questions about the life experiences, creative processes, and artistic struggles and philosophical approaches of 34 Australian women artists. What emerges as a result of the questionnaire is the variety of different approaches these women have with regard to their chosen media, in what forms their worldviews, and their very different aesthetic, political and social concerns. The book's author introduces these approaches through an appeal to hear women's voices and dedicates the volume to 'the feminine principle in Nature as expressed in Art'. While the introduction highlights the author/editor's search for explanation and 'origins' to overcome sexism and the suppression of women's culture through a return to considering the Great Mother Creatrix, the work of women artists featured in the book, which is lavishly illustrated, always manages to exceed and question this framework.
The artists / respondents whose work and views are featured include: Davida Allen, Annette Bezor, Marion Borgelt, Joan Brassil, Kate Briscoe, Heather Ellyard, Merilyn Fairskye, Jutta Feddersen, Fiona Foley, Gabriela Frutos, Elizabeth Gower, Pat Hoffie, Inga Hunter, Anne Judell, Hanna Kay, Lindy Lee, Barbara Licha, anne MacDonald, Lucille Martin, Mandy Martin, Matingali Bridget Matjital, Mirlkitjungu Millie Skeen, Lyndall Milani, Gloria Temarre Petyarre, Lyn Plummer, Mona Ryder, Anneke Silver, Judi Singleton, Wendy Stavrianos, Lezlie Tilley, Aida Tomescu, Vicki Varvaressos, Liz Williams.
Copyright © : Katy Deepwell,1997
N.Paradoxa : May 1997