Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics

241 Pages·2003·2.24 MB·English

by  Marsha Meskimmon

Women Making Art
Women Making Art engages with complementary feminist thinking on history,
subjectivity and aesthetics to rework those conventions which have occluded
women’s cultural agency and defined art made by women as a derivative version
of a masculine norm. Rather than providing an inclusive survey of women artists,
Marsha Meskimmon examines women’s art practice across five continents and in
a wide range of media at a number of key moments in the twentieth century to
give an understanding of the intersections of history and culture, art practice, and
theoretical issues.
Examining the ways in which women artists have reclaimed, expressed and
defined personal and political histories, challenged conventional western notions
of dichotomous sexed subjectivity, and opened out the relationships of pleasure/
knowledge, word/flesh and space/time to new ways of thinking against the grain,
Meskimmon discusses the work of artists such as Deborah Lefkowitz, Trinh T.
Minh-ha, Cornelia Parker, Faith Ringgold, Mona Hatoum and Maria Helena
Vieira da Silva, as well as other, less well-known artists from around the world.
Focusing on historical, theoretical and aesthetic moments in the twentieth cen-
tury such as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the African diaspora, Queer Theory
and cyberculture, Meskimmon illustrates the importance of women artists in
rethinking dominant traditions and assumptions at times of cultural, political and
technological change.
Marsha Meskimmon is Reader in Art History and Theory at Loughborough
University. She is the author of The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self-
Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (1996), Engendering the City: Women Art-
ists and Urban Space (1997), and We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and
the Limits of German Modernism (1999).

Women Making Art
History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics
Marsha Meskimmon
First published 2003
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
Transferred to Digital Printing 2005
© 2003 Marsha Meskimmon
Typeset in Galliard by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0–415–24277–0 (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–24278–9 (pbk)
For Mark T. Shutes (1947–2001) – my beloved brother,
my inspiring teacher and my trusted friend.

Contents
List of illustrations ix
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction: women making art 1
Exhilaration and danger 1
The work of art 4
New epistemes 7
PART I
History 11
Introduction 13
1 Exiled histories: Holocaust and Heimat 17
Home, covenant and the profundity of the everyday 21
High culture, assimilation and modernity 27
2 Corporeal cartography: women artists of the anglophone
African diaspora 35
Dancers, mothers and modernity 38
Dancing: place and ethnography 44
3 Re-inscribing histories: Viet Nam and representation 50
Mass media, documentary and reportage 55
Nation, difference and bodies politic 60
PART II
Subjectivity 69
Introduction 71
viii Contents
4 Embodiment: space and situated knowledge 75
Embodying the woman artist 75
Embodied vision: situation(ism), the library and the
studio 81
Skin, borderlands and mestiza knowledge 85
5 Performativity: desire and the inscribed body 91
From the performed to the materialised 91
Inside/outside 97
Erotic surfaces 105
6 Becoming: individuals, collectives and wondrous machines 110
Flower painters and feminist figurations 110
Figuring the body in the virtual machine 119
Transindividuality and the loop of becoming 124
PART III
Aesthetics 129
Introduction 131
7 Pleasure and knowledge: ‘Orientalism’ and filmic vision 135
Aesthetics: pleasure and the voice 139
Aesthetics: pleasure and the embodied eye 144
Aesthetics: pleasure and ‘inter’ space of corporeal theory 148
8 The word and the flesh: text/image re-made 151
Reading matter 154
The book in the expanded field 160
9 The place of time: Australian feminist art and theory 168
A glance at (ec)centric histories 171
Hesitation, elaboration and the emergent subject 178
Afterword – On Wonder 185
Notes 186
Bibliography 209
Index 223
Illustrations
0.1 Cornelia Parker, The Negatives of Words (silver residue from
engraving words), 1996 5
copyright, Cornelia Parker; photograph, Frith Street Gallery,
London
1.1 Deborah Lefkowitz, still from Intervals of Silence: Being Jewish
in Germany, 1990 22
courtesy of Deborah Lefkowitz
1.2 Deborah Lefkowitz, still from Intervals of Silence: Being Jewish
in Germany, 1990 24
courtesy of Deborah Lefkowitz
1.3 Kitty Klaidman, Hidden Memories: Attic in Humence (triptych),
1991 27
copyright, Kitty Klaidman; photograph, Marsha Mateyka
Gallery, Washington, DC
1.4 Rebecca Horn, Concert for Buchenwald, 1999, Part 1: Tram
Depot 29
copyright Rebecca Horn, DACS; photograph from the book
Concert for Buchenwald by Rebecca Horn, Scalo Publishers,
Zürich
1.5 Rebecca Horn, Concert for Buchenwald, 1999, Part 2: Schloss
Ettersburg 30
copyright Rebecca Horn, DACS; photograph from the book
Concert for Buchenwald by Rebecca Horn, Scalo Publishers,
Zürich
1.6 Rachel Whiteread, Holocaust Memorial, 1996–2000 32
copyright, Rachel Whiteread; photograph, Anthony d’Offay
Gallery, London
2.1 Faith Ringgold, Dancing at the Louvre, Part 1, no. 1, from The
French Collection, 1991 40
courtesy of Faith Ringgold
2.2 Sokari Douglas Camp, Small Iriabo (Girl Clapping),
1984 45
courtesy of Sokari Douglas Camp