Suzanne Lacy between Kaprow and Chicago

Social practice and dematerialization are often cited as the most radical innovations in Euro-American contemporary art since the late 1960s, but rarely have historians acknowledged the crucial role of experimental pedagogy in this shift of art towards performance, conceptualism, and activism. The practice of Los Angeles–based performance artist Suzanne Lacy radically extended the ideas of her teachers and mentors Allan Kaprow and Judy Chicago into revised structures of artmaking towards activist social practice performances driven by conceptual, political, and embodied concerns.

Woolfian Afterlives

This chapter explores Virginia Woolf’s catalysing role for artists working in non-verbal media, including the visual arts, music, dance, and design. An analysis of Woolf’s impact beyond the medium of her writing allows for a trans-historic and international study of her legacy, charting her influence from, for example, landscape painting in Cornwall to Japanese Butoh; and from North American opera to the Ballet Russes. The chapter will trace many of the vital and fluid connections between Woolf, her contemporaries, and those whose work she has inspired. In the visual arts, case studies include: Sara Barker, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Judy Chicago, Aleana Egan, Rebecca Horn, Laura Owens, and Patti Smith. The music of Edith Sitwell, Ethel Smyth, Dominick Argento, Indigo Girls, The Smiths, and Patrick Wolf is discussed alongside dance by Lydia Lopokova, Wayne McGregor, and Setsuko Yamada.

El arte como tributo y reconocimiento a la lucha de las mujeres. Sobre la exposición

This text is a description of the largest feminist installation of the last decades: The Dinner party, by the artist and activist Judy Chicago. Its objective is to present and describe the author's intentions, as well as to point out the value that it has in areas such as the social and the intellectual, insofar as her proposal corresponds to and understands the practices of postmodernity.

POÉTICA FEMINISTA NA ARTE CONTEMPORÂNEA: UMA ANALISE DE PRODUÇÕES DE MULHERES ARTISTAS NOS ANOS 60, 70, 80 E 90

Este estudo tem por objetivo compreender a produção artística feminista contemporânea a partir do conceito de poética. Partindo de conceitualizações em Aristóteles e Valéry, buscamos analisar quatro artistas: Barbara Kruger, Judy Chicago, Betye Saar e Rosana Paulino. A proposta visa compreender os eixos de intersecção da arte contemporânea feminista com as vivências das autoras e o contexto de suas épocas. Como resultados observamos um denominador comum às obras: sua estreita ligação com os avanços e entraves do movimento feminista de cada década e a possibilidade de utilização do conceito de poética para o entendimento de obras de arte.

Camouflaged Histories

Lei Yan 雷燕, whose artistic practice was shaped by a decades-long career in the Chinese military, began a period of transition through participation in a 2002 restaging of the Communist Red Army’s 1934 Long March as a multi-sited international art project. Her resulting encounter with US feminist art icon Judy Chicago raised questions about the potential neocolonial influence of global feminist art. The work Lei subsequently produced performs an autoethnographic excavation of the sociohistorical categories—woman soldier, military artist, and woman artist—that made her as both artist and woman. She works from within a national representational corpus, subjecting it to various experiments to reveal the fields of violence it has enacted from the Sino-Vietnamese War to the Great Sichuan earthquake. Lei Yan’s meditation through photography upon national, revolutionary iconography evolved into soft sculpture objects in cloth and paper. Their arrested ephemerality decenters the human subject, drawing attention to haunting absences in conventional stories of art, feminism, and nation. In comparison with the monumental work of Ai Weiwei 艾未未, who also created pieces in response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Lei’s art serves not to admonish but to bring back into consciousness lost lives and camouflaged histories.