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Many creative intellectuals have written or spoken of their pilgrimage to meet the English/Mexican, surrealist-associated artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) as being a profound encounter. Since her death in May 2011, there have been a profusion of creative responses to her and her work, from theatrical productions to experimental performances, from electronica to folk music, and from fashion photography to curatorial projects.
This survey or curating of Carrington unpicks why artists, writers and performers, especially creative women, have become preoccupied with making work in her legacy. Such fixations and fandom move beyond mere influence, offering a way of approaching art-making and political themes as an attitude or Zeitgeist. The study focuses on the ways in which Carrington is recycled, in the writing of Chloe Aridjis and Heidi Sopinka, the conceptual art of Lucy Skaer and Tilda Swinton, and the performative practice of Samantha Sweeting, Lynn Lu, and Double Edge Theatre in order to speak to current feminist and eco-critical campaigns such as #MeToo and Writers Rebel.
The book’s feminist-surrealist emphasis proposes that it is Carrington, and not one of the central players in surrealism like André Breton and Max Ernst, who is chief in keeping the surrealist message alive today.
The monument debates of the past decade, together with concerns over systemic injustice, extraction economies, and ecological disaster, as well as phenomena of global migrations and tourism, and the interleaving of live and mediated images and experience on social media, have given rise to new practices of public art and commemoration. Artists often strive to represent not specific events, persons, or points of agreement, but vast contentious problems—for publics at home and abroad, on the ground and online. A new site-specificity and media-friendly approaches to conveying it, sometimes via objects, sometimes through ‘transparent’ photographic mediums, come to the fore in recent monumental art, but also in debates about what to do with older monuments and architecture in urban space, particularly when these are the products of terror that require removal, modification, or other forms or recontextualization. Taking case studies ranging from Chicago and Berlin to Oslo, Bucharest, and Hong Kong, in media ranging from marble and glass to cardboard boxes, graffiti, and the re-enactment of historical documents, the book argues that history is being materialized by contemporary artists and activists in a register that harks back to the engaged realism of nineteenth-century art, updated to do justice both to embodied experiences of caring, and also to vaster, less tangible systems of power and information.
This book represents the first attempt to write a comprehensive account of performance art in Eastern Europe – the former communist, socialist and Soviet countries of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe – since the 1960s. It is indebted to groundbreaking studies on the subject such as Zdenka Badovinac’s Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present (1998), the first exhibition to examine body art practices in the region, which was accompanied by a catalogue that serves as a precursor to the present volume. As this book will demonstrate
Legacies of the Magdalen Laundries brings together a range of perspectives on Magdalen history, experience, and representation and, indeed, institutionalisation in Ireland. It attends to many different manifestations of the lives and afterlives of institutional systems. The contributors seek to understand how these systems operated and how, after their closure, they have been remembered by varied stakeholders from survivors to artists to politicians. The Magdalen Laundries provide a focus for the volume as they potently illuminate the distinct social experience for vulnerable women in modern Ireland. Magdalen history brings to the fore the contested nature of institutional history, the particular attitudes towards women that saw them incarcerated (many for life), and the equally gendered attitudes that underpin the ways this history was first repressed then, more recently, commemorated. The laundries did not exist in a vacuum: they were part of a network that included Industrial Schools and Mother and Child Institutions. Given the proliferation of institutions, it is startling to note that investigations of Irish institutional history have lacked intersectionality – so alongside an examination of the history and remembrance of the Laundries, this volume considers the wider institutional context to demonstrate the broader dimensions of Ireland’s postcolonial carceral history. To understand this history we must see these institutions, and the women and children incarcerated in them, not as exceptional cases but as expressions of social attitudes that viewed vulnerable members of the population as morally suspect, a ‘problem’ to which the state, church, and citizenry responded through mass institutionalisation.
Through the author’s invocation of the figure Jugoslovenka (Yugoslav woman), this book reveals feminist performance politics in art and culture to be central to socialist Yugoslavia and traces that feminist legacy to the contemporary post-socialist era. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945–1992) provides one of the most intriguing examples of women’s emancipatory power during twentieth-century socialism. The most politically West-leaning of all the socialist countries during the Cold War, Yugoslavia became a place where women enjoyed extraordinary legal rights and social mobility, including access to education and labor mobility. The book tells this remarkable story of women’s emancipation during socialism, and also highlights its importance during and after the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. Theorizing the concept of Jugoslovenka as the radical embodiment of Yugoslavia’s antifascist, transnational, and feminist legacies, this book offers analyses of celebrated and lesser-known artists from the 1970s until today, including the now legendary performance artist Marina Abramović, along with stories of female snipers, music legends Lepa Brena and Esma Redžepova, and contemporary feminist artists forced to live in the Yugoslav diaspora during/after the wars. Based on archival work, interviews, and in-depth visual analyses, this book tells the unique story of Yugoslav women’s resistance through the intersection of feminism, socialism, and patriarchy in visual culture. Discussing multiple media, such as war photographs, music videos, samizdat publications, performance and conceptual art, along with traditional paintings and film, the book will serve as an invaluable resource for researchers of women’s cultural work in the region.
, and how they assemble with other machine-actants, steering the narrative of everyday life towards unpredictable outcomes. These performative machinic assemblages are representative of the potential of performance art to probe, reconfigure and enable reflection on the social and spatial exchanges in the machinic city. No matter how controlled (or not) your experience of the city turns out to be, your mode of engagement with it is a unique performance and an interpretation of it. This performance consists of an assemblage where agency is distributed across its
Thank god for the so-called Iron Curtain … this perfect isolation meant that we did not degenerate as swiftly or as tragically as the rest of Europe. There, art became titillation, a delicacy, a topic of conversation. Our activities are not experimental art, but necessary activity. – Milan Knížák, 1966 Pre-history In Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present , Roselee Goldberg outlines the development of performance in Western Europe and North America, pointing to its origins in Futurism and Dada in the early years of the twentieth century. From
man in Bangladesh. Gibson’s argument suggests that we should consider how certain practices, territorial arrangements, technologies, biotechnological developments, visionary concepts and alternative modes of living can provide us with a fragmented vision of the future and unequal access to its potential benefits. Many of the performance art projects that I have analysed so far reflect on how digital communication technologies are reconfiguring current modes of social engagement with the machinic city. However, an important role that performance art can fulfil is
Participation in digitally mediated environments In order to analyse how participation unfolds through digitally mediated performance art events, I turn back to Dixon’s argument (discussed in Chapter 1 ) about the introversion of the computer paradigm. In his comparison of the Futurist movement and contemporary digital performance, Dixon ( 2007 : 64) highlights the futurists’ extreme enthusiasm for the technologies that were emerging at the time. As he points out, the futurists appropriated them in expressive performances, as they singled out machines
Staging art and Chineseness is about the politics of borders ascribed to Chinese contemporary art and the identification of artists by locations and exhibitions. The paradoxical subject of Chineseness is central to this inquiry, which begins with the question, what does the term Chinese Art mean in the aftermath of the globalized shift in art? Through an exploration of embodied and performative representations (including eco-feminist performances) by artists from China and diasporic locations, the case studies in this book put to the test the very premise of the genealogical inscription for cultural objects attributed to the residency, homeland, or citizenship of the Chinese artist. Acknowledging the orientalist assumptions and appropriations that Chineseness also signifies, this study connects the artistic performance to the greater historical scope of ‘geographical consciousness’ envisioned by past and present global expositions. The emergence of China’s shiyan meishu experimental art movement in the 1980s–1990s has largely been the defining focus for ‘global art’ during the period when artfairs, biennials, and triennials also came into prominence as the new globalized art institution (exemplified by China’s first biennial in Guangzhou). The political aim is to recognize the multiple contradictions and repetitions of history engendered by art, nationalism, and capital in the legacy of Althusserian/Maoist interpellations – the reifications of global capitalist illusions in the twenty-first century are conveyed in this book by performative artistic expressions and the temporal space of the exposition.