Art and Art History

Feminists in the 1960s and ‘70s rallied around a host of issues in the United States, including abortion rights, and the 1973 passage of Roe v. Wade was seen as an enormous victory. But in the years following, this momentous legislation was eroded at both the federal and state levels. Several artists and artists’ groups have addressed this situation, yet much of their work has been obscured by what I see as a double veil; feminist art is often marginalized by the canons of art history, and issues surrounding abortion are further obscured by their particularly polarizing nature. Abortion has long been a tendentious, even taboo topic, surrounded by misinformation and ahistorical accounts. The artists who addressed it took an archival approach, giving abortion rights a history. Yet the art historical occlusion of their own projects has re-enacted the very situation that they had hoped to mitigate. By undertaking archival research of my own into their projects, in this paper I address three such works: REPOhistory’s Choice Histories (1992), Kerr + Malley’s Just Call Jane (1992), and Andrea Bower’s Wall of Letters: Necessary Reminders from the Past for a Future of Choice (2006). REPOhistory and Kerr + Malley were both responding to the 1991 case Rust v. Sullivan, which upheld a 1988 “gag rule” that prohibited doctors and counselors at clinics that received federal funding from providing their patients with abortion information and referrals. They considered contemporary restrictions by recalling restrictions past; REPOhistory returning to the site of a nineteenth century New York abortion provider whose clinic was closed with the 1873 Comstock laws, and Kerr + Malley turning to the years directly preceding the Roe v. Wade decision, when a group of women in Chicago organized a group simply called “Jane” to aid women in finding and funding safe abortions. More recently, Bowers too has turned to the pre-Roe v. Wade years, focusing her attention on three women on the West coast working at the same time as Jane, providing women with information on doctors outside the US who would provide safe abortions.
        These projects take different material forms, but all three bring forth productive questions surrounding the intersection of art and activism, the aesthetic and activist potential of the archive, and again, why feminist art historical accounts have been reticent to place abortion squarely within the parameters of academic inquiry.

James Luna's performances interrogate how representations of Native Americans have been made to fit western assumptions about the "real Indian." Using his recognizably Native body as a marker of both presence and endangered existence, Luna links Peggy Phelan's conception of performance as the presence of loss with the centuries-old stereotype of Native Americans as the "vanishing race" — a stereotype that continues to exert influence. In Take a Picture with a Real Indian (performed in 1992, 2001, and 2010), he invites viewers to have their photograph taken with him wearing one of three options: war dance regalia, a loincloth, or khakis and a polo shirt. Few people choose the third option. The performance foregrounds what has become a tradition of Native Americans performing/posing their native-ness as Otherness for the camera, strategically employing imagery that plays to nostalgic Western views of Native peoples as perpetually vanishing. I argue that Luna's performances comment not only upon western preconceptions of Native Americans, but also upon the ways that Native Americans have historically reasserted their agency by manipulating such expectations, staging themselves to fit the stereotype.

RIASSUNTO. Si ritiene che Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli abbia mandato tre lettere in Portogallo tra il 1474 e il 1482: una, comprendente una mappa, indirizzata ad un canonico di Lisbona chiamato Fernando Martins; un'altra, contenente copie della prima lettera e della carta, a Cristoforo Colombo; e una terza ancora a Colombo. Sebbene l'autenticita delle tre lettere sia stata accettata dalla maggior parte degli studiosi colombiani, l'intera corrispondenza e' stata negata da alcuni, e le due lettere a Colombo da altri. In giuoco e' almeno una parte della stima per la scoperta del Mondo Nuovo. Martins e' stato spesso identificato col canonico portoghese Fernando de Roritz, che e' stato testimone al testamento di Niccolo' di Cusa insieme con Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, ma nessun'altra prova della sua conoscenza con Toscanelli e' stata finora conosciuta. Nuovi documenti adesso confermano la presenza del Roritz a Firenze nel 1459, quando egli ha servito accanto al Toscanelli come me...