Feminist Performance Art

This essay discusses a selection of burlesque and cabaret shows made in Ljubljana, Slovenia between 2011 and 2014: Cirkus Kabare (Circus Cabaret), Fem TV, Rdeči Kabare (Red Cabaret), Cabaret Lounge Rouge, Tatovi podob (Image Snatchers) and Somrak bleščečih sprevržencev (Twilight of the Glittery Perverts) among others. I focus on performance troupes whose production mode positions them either in the alternative or the independent class of culture. I describe and analyze only those acts that visualize the work required to perform specific femininities and masculinities: they were staged as part of the above-mentioned shows or public presentations of workshops organised by the Emanat Institute, the City of Women festival and the Red Dawns festival. The main features of burlesque and cabaret shows in Ljubljana as well as their possible sources of inspiration, both historic and cultural, are discussed vis-à-vis recent feminist debates on new burlesque in North America and Western Europe.

First published in: Katja Kobolt, Lana Zdravković (eds.): Performative Gestures Political Moves, City of Women / Red Athena Press, Ljubljana / Zagreb, 2014.

Introduction to the book (PDF): https://www.academia.edu/26950854/Performative_Gestures_Political_Moves_2014

At the launch of the twenty-first century, the online pornographic photographs of Natacha Merritt, a young American woman (twenty-three years old at the time of her rise to fame), were categorised as art in two publications by art publisher Taschen, precipitating a critical acceptance of her work as such. This particular foray of pornography into an art context was briefly contested by one art critic (Mey, 2007), however, this relatively rare example of misclassification warrants further investigation in order to better understand the role played by what had, by the late twentieth century, become a pervasive postfeminist culture.

Drawing on feminist media studies writing (Diane Negra, 2009; Angela McRobbie, 2007; Melanie Walters, 2007), that analyses postfeminist modes of ‘self-exploration,’ and feminist art criticism (Lucy Lippard, 1976; Whitney Chadwick, 2013; Amelia Jones, 2010) on women’s body art, this paper argues that Merritt’s ‘adult-oriented’ online digital photographs of herself and others, which claim to portray authentic sexual encounters in Merritt’s real life are more persuasively situated within the increasingly prevalent online genres of the intimate blog and amateur porn.  In addition, it seeks to analyse the role of postfeminist rhetoric, in the media and increasingly in criticism, in legitimising women’s engagement with pornography.

Hannah Wilke: Sculpture in the Landscape highlights a selection of photographs by the feminist icon Hannah Wilke that were never printed or shown in the artist's lifetime including her 'Gum in Landscape' series, as well as her ceramic and bronze sculpture maquettes for large-scale public art. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Hannah Wilke : Sculpture in the Landscape, organized by Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, April 25, 2019-July 12, 2019.

Since 1998, the performance artist Regina José Galindo has dedicated herself to carrying out painstaking work using her own body, something that is rare in the artistic tradition of her country. Over the years, she has performed various kinds of aggressions against herself, sometimes on her own and sometimes with occasional collaborators who tend to be defined as “volunteers”. To bring the omnipresent violence that exists beyond artistic spaces to the insides of their very walls is one of her expressed intentions.
Through her work, documented by photographs and videos, Galindo carries out a kind of inventory of torment, which makes sense in the context of one of the countries in the world where it is most dangerous to be born a woman. This article explores the work of Regina José Galindo in relation to “femicide”, or the extreme violence that is directed at women for the simple fact of being so. In this sense, we suggest here that her work should be read in light of a sort of national tradition of actual male violence against women.

The unfinished feminist revolution is at the heart of this essay. Globally, social reproduction remains a challenge to the feminist revolutionary project. The continuation of life, human and planetary survival, depends on caring labor. Today, caring in common is the new frontier of capitalist enclosure with care injustice deepening. The struggles for freedom to care and for social reproduction justice continue. They are connected to the deep wounds of coloniality within feminism with its painful conflicts among women over race, class, and reproduction. They are owed to the damaging neoliberal erosion of solidarity. Committed to advancing feminist politics that keep alive the feminist revolution and  to connecting art to the social and economic conditions of the world at large, the analysis focuses on a critical constellation of three feminist performances: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’  Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance (Outside and Inside) at the Woodsworth Atheneum in Hartford...

Una mujer anciana que decide quemar todas sus posesiones (memorias) y empezar de nuevo. Una niña que es raptada y asesinada. Una robot sometida a la esclavitud sexual y doméstica, que toma conciencia de sí, y se revela asumiendo el dolor como su arma de libertad. Ellas son las tres protagonistas de este oratorio, el cual concluye con un réquiem dedicado a la compositora Pauline Oliveros (1932-2006)

El título del oratorio, 'A Woman of No Importance', es tomado de la pieza teatral de Oscar Wilde 'The Importance of Being Earnest', 1895 . La propuesta narrativa que estructura el oratorio incluye un estudio de 'Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus`, de Mary Shelley (1818), 'The Left Hand of Darkness' de Ursula K. Le Guin (1969), y 'The Memoirs of a Survivor' de Doris Lessing (1974), con el objetivo de que la investigación artística, realizada en la composición y el diseño sonoro de la obra, reflexione también desde los paradigmas de una ciencia ficción creada por mujeres, combinando Noise analógico y electrónico, espectralismo, técnicas de improvisación inspiradas en el minimalismo, la música algorítmica, el free jazz y el death metal. El oratorio sólo existe como obra grabada, fue producido por el sello discográfico neoyorkino Irreverence Group Music, y presentado en plataformas digitales el de mayo de 2018.

NOTE: This document accompanies the practice-research performance project, goo:ga (2016).  Watch it here: https://vimeo.com/174036595

goo:ga (2016) is a performance practice research project within the
discipline of stand-up comedy that investigates the potential of a
dissonant manifestation of the comic and the erotic by pregnant
artists to challenge heteronormative, postfeminist and patriarchal
configurations of ‘funniness’ vis-à-vis ‘sexiness’. It was also a feminist
reclamation of fertility-as-spectacle, a queer resistance to the guilty
pleasure of binary foetal gendering, and a neo-burlesque attempt to
exploit multiple aesthetic modes of sexiness (Lintott and Irvin, 2016),
while harnessing the comic abjection of pregnancy. It investigates
pregnant embodiment and subjectivity in the context of live comic
performance. The comic novelty in the unconventional approach
to prurience staged by a pregnant performer allows the practice to
intervene in a wider discourse around the comic and the maternal
that mainstream stand-up comedy is only beginning to address; for
example, the commercial success of Ali Wong’s two stand-up specials
that coincided with the late stages of her pregnancies. goo:ga (2016)
pre-dates the release of Wong’s work and draws upon additional
disciplines to investigate further the potential for pregnant comedians
to deploy the erotic in service of the comic; neo-burlesque, alt-cabaret,
and live art form a lineage for the work. The praxis also articulates new
devising methods, as the artist grapples with what Iris Marion Young
termed the ‘doubling’ of the pregnant subject. Devising performance
with/about a body that is rapidly changing affords complex insights
into the lingering embodied practitioner knowledge of the pre-pregnant
body, as a heavily pregnant artist attempts to access comic/erotic
proposals in the studio and on stage.

(English below)
L’universel comme valeur esthétique explose sous le double effet de la performance comme forme critique de la représentation, et du genre comme contenu voilé à la base de processus d’exclusion qui ont actualisé cette valeur. Mais l’action de ces deux facteurs varie, comme le montre l’examen de performances masculines. La radicalité formelle peut par exemple conforter les représentations de genre et faire du masculin l’unique source de valeur artistique ; quand d’autres performances déforment au contraire le masculin en manifestant toute sa plasticité. Au final, plutôt que considérer le genre comme un contenu critique à révéler, on est conduit à l’aborder comme une forme que la performance produit. À ce titre, la valeur esthétique de l’universel ne fait pas qu’exploser, elle est libérée de certaines représentations exclusives pour acquérir elle aussi de nouvelles potentialités formelles.

The universal as an aesthetic value explodes under the double effect of performance as a form of critical representation, and gender as veiled content at the base of the process of exclusion which brings out this value. But the action of these two factors varies, as the examination of male performances shows. Formal radicality can for example consolidate the representation of gender and make the masculine the single source of artistic value; while other performances on the contrary deform the masculine by expressing all its plasticity. In the end, rather than considering gender as a critical content to be revealed, we are led to approach it as a form that performance produces. From this point of view, the aesthetic value of universal does not only explode, it is released from certain exclusive representations to acquire new potentialities.

In 1927 Kazimir Malevich stated that ‘a bishop is nothing but an actor’ who stands on a ‘“dressed” stage’, in an attempt to portray feelings of religious sublimity . This essay questions whether priests can be considered performance artists in relation to feminist performance art. Historically, various “feminisms” developed in the 1980s, progressing from the Fluxus movement and Conceptual Art in the 1960s with artists like Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneemann creating performances that subverted the institutionalised art canon by using explicit and dynamic methods of art production . This essay will focus on such feminist performance that has been practiced as ‘anti-entertainment, anti-institutional, and noncommodifiable’  to examine issues of body politics and female subjectivity . I will consider live performance art as a platform to examine the priest’s role when presiding at Mass, allowing for the investigation to centre on the performer and the priest as they are situated in public.

Portafolio de obras (resumen): bio cv, statement, obra gráfica (dibujo, pintura), arte de acción e instalaciones realizadas entre los años 2005-actual (2023).

IMPORTANTE: Por favor considere que la interfaz de Academia.edu altera algunos textos diagramados y traduce algunas palabrasy conceptos presentes en el documento, por lo que es mejor descargar el Dossier para verlo (y leerlo) sin errores.

Desde los años 90 el "cine de exposición" ha ganado presencia en las instituciones del arte contemporáneo, confluyendo intereses y planteamientos de artistas y cineastas cuyos trabajos, hasta entonces, habían discurrido por canales paralelos.

En este artículo serán examinadas aquellas confluencias que suponen importantes aportaciones feministas al cine de exposición. Específicamente, las contribuciones de autoras del campo cinematográfico y del campo del arte al desarrollo del “cine de los cuerpos” y a la revisión crítica del documental etnográfico.

Retomamos el término "cine de los cuerpos" de Deleuze para referirnos a un gestus feminista que localizamos en las obras de cineastas como Agnès Varda y Chantal Akerman, de performers como VALIE EXPORT, Faith Wilding o Martha Rosler y en el más reciente cine de exposición de autoras como Pipilotti Rist, Eija-Liisa Ahtila o Tracey Moffatt.

En cuanto a las revisiones del documental etnográfico, establecemos nexos entre obras performáticas de Ana Mendieta, Ana Bella Geiger, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper o Coco Fusco, de las cineastas Chick Strand, Trin T. Minh-ha o Ulrike Ottinger,  y la presencia de elementos etnográficos en el cine de exposición de Ursula Biemann, Zineb Sedira, Sharon Lockhart o Emily Jacir.

The unfinished feminist revolution is at the heart of this essay. Globally, social reproduction remains a challenge to the feminist revolutionary project. The continuation of life, human and planetary survival, depends on caring labor. Today, caring in common is the new frontier of capitalist enclosure with care injustice deepening. The struggles for freedom to care and for social reproduction justice continue. They are connected to the deep wounds of coloniality within feminism with its painful conflicts among women over race, class, and reproduction. They are owed to the damaging neoliberal erosion of solidarity. Committed to advancing feminist politics that keep alive the feminist revolution and  to connecting art to the social and economic conditions of the world at large, the analysis focuses on a critical constellation of three feminist performances: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’  Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance (Outside and Inside) at the Woodsworth Atheneum in Hartford Connecticut in 1973; Suzanne Lacy’s Cleaning Conditions at the Manchester Art Gallery and Manchester Arts Festival in 2013, and Patricia Kaersenhout’s The Clean Up Woman at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2016. These performances make public the issue of social reproduction, in particular maintenance and cleaning, in the public sphere of the museum space.

This essay examines Redress (2010-2012), a recent series of performances by Irish artist Aine Phillips that interrogate the legacy of abuse perpetrated in Irish residential institutions in the 20th century and the official efforts to compensate abuse survivors. These powerful performances are imbued with simple, yet compelling bodily gestures informed by spectatorship, memory and representation. Redress embodies the marginalised memories of abuse survivors, revealing the deliberate gaps and silences in Irish hegemonic narratives.

An exhibition of the artist, writer, and activist Kate Millett’s furniture pieces is on view at New York City's Salon 94 through March 5. Titled Fantasy Furniture, 1967, the presentation recreates Millett’s first solo exhibition in New York City, which took place at the Judson Gallery, located in the basement of the iconic Judson Church, in 1967. Installed together for the first time in 50 years, the exhibition sheds light on Millett’s largely unknown and understudied artistic practice. Ksenia M. Soboleva,  Andrew W. Mellon Gender and LGBTQ+ History Fellow, spoke with William J. Simmons, a longtime admirer, scholar, and advocate of Millett’s work—and former Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for Women’s History!

My postgraduate thesis deals with comparing the use of the body in Mexican-American performance artist Nao Bustamante's works to the ways that bodies are treated on the US-Mexico border, arguing that through her performances Bustamante succeeds in 'performing the borderland'.

En este artículo examinaremos prácticas artísticas feministas que, en su confrontación con lo real, han indagando en formas de contar desde el cuerpo, retomando la herencia del ges-tus del teatro brechtiano. Son prácticas que no sólo procuran conocimientos, sino que los produ-cen. Se trata de trabajos que han politizado el cuerpo y los espacios privado y público desde el terreno de lo performativo; pertenezcan por definición al ámbito de la performance o del arte de acción, o se hayan materializado en otros medios, como el fotográfico o el fílmico. Indicaremos una genealogía de obras feministas realizadas en los años 70 y desde los 90 cuya búsqueda común es revelar un gestus social a partir de los cuerpos. Ambos periodos son ricos en prácticas artísticas comprometidas en lo social y en lo político; tras el solipsismo de cierta cultura posmo-derna, el activismo del 68 resurgirá en los 90 buscando el reencuentro con la intersubjetividad y con la realidad social (Sánchez 2007).

This paper examines feminist artistic practices that confront the real investigating ways of relating with the body. These practices receive the legacy of the Brecht's theater gestus. They are practices that produce knowledge. These performative artworks have politicized the body and the private and public spaces; they can be performances or action art, or they can use another medium, like photography or film. We note a genealogy of feminist artworks made in the 70's and from the 90's whose common search is the revelation of a social gestus from the bodies. Both periods are productive in artistic practices socially and politically committed. After solipsism reinforced by postmodern culture, 1968 activism reappears in the 90's and the search for a reunion with intersubjectivity and social reality (Sánchez 2007).

For the Blood of Gaia: Betsy Damon’s Quest for Living Water
Christine Filippone

Applying feminist strategies of collaboration, consciousness-raising, and activism honed through her early career in the Feminist Art Movement, artist Betsy Damon addresses human-caused water scarcity through art as social practice.  Her prints, performances, installations, and eco art works made since 1991, including Living Water Garden (fig.1) and Living Waters of Larimer (figs.2, 3) convey the importance of restoring sustainable systems, which, she believes, requires communities to take control of their water.    She approaches the problem from the position of eco-justice, arguing that the privatization of natural resources is incompatible with the universal right of all life to clean water.

Evocative of Damon’s concerns over the control and commodification of water, our current geological epoch has been preliminarily designated the Anthropocene, defined by human impact on the global environment so profound that it rivals the forces of nature.  Most definitions of the Anthropocene arise from Earth systems science, which views the Earth as a total entity whose physical, chemical and biological global-scale cycles provide the support system for life.  This conception of the Earth as a total entity in constant, cyclic flux affirms the Gaia Hypothesis proposed in the early 1970s by chemist James Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis, which asserted that biological life, with its ingestions, excretions, and biotic decomposition, have been essential to the maintenance of an atmosphere conducive to life.  Within the system exist servomechanisms that sense chemical and physical tendencies adverse to life, enabling adjustments to be made. Thus, if all human and nonhuman components of the earth compose a single homeostatic system, a meta-organism or living planet, then its streams and rivers constitute its circulatory system, its blood.

Necessary for the creation of sustainable water systems, Damon has long claimed, is living water, which continually flows, moves, has oxygen, an open system akin to a circulatory system.  Living water is sensitive and responsive, possessing the properties of life to which it also gives rise, distinct from dead or stagnant water confined in reservoirs and dammed lakes, which deteriorates.  A foundational source for her concept of living water was the book Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms for Water and Air (1965), by German scientist Theodor Schwenk.  Anticipating the Gaia Hypothesis, Schwenk wrote, “Water is always on its way somewhere at some point in one of its great or small circulatory systems... Together earth, plant world and atmosphere form a single great organism, in which water streams like living blood.”    Issued seven years before the Gaia Hypothesis, Sensitive Chaos was published by the Anthroposophical Society of which Schwenk was a lifelong member. Schwenk’s belief in the Earth as an open system, a complex web of interconnected processes, was informed by the spiritual science of Rudolph Steiner, founder of the Anthroposophical Society.  Natural science editor of the scientific writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Steiner’s pantheistic belief in the Earth as a physical, biochemical and spiritual unity has its roots in the work of Geothe and in that of his friend, 18th century Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt who first considered the name Gaia for his magnum opus Cosmos.  Steiner named the Anthroposophical Society’s headquarters, which he designed and built himself in 1919 after Goethe.  Evidence of the synergy (to use Buckminster Fuller’s term) between Schwenk’s beliefs and the Gaia Hypothesis is Schwenk’s inclusion of a testimonial by James Lovelock, author of the Gaia Hypothesis, on the book jacket of later editions of Sensitive Chaos. Damon described her quest to release the blood of Gaia:  “Water comprises the miraculous molecules that shape and sustain all life on earth. Water is the connective tissue of all living systems. It forms the veins of the earth, the blood vessels in the human body.”

In Living Waters of Larimer and Living Water Garden and in her current project with the Lakota, Damon continues to implement strategies of consciousness-raising, community-building inspired by feminism, using principles of connection learned from water. Her social practice dedicated to eco justice is consistent with philosophical approaches of ecofeminism, deep ecology, and strands of posthumanism that afford essential rights to nature, or Gaia.

Communicating mostly through the media of film by way of an appeal to the spectacular in the cinematic, Jesse Jones’ artistic practice has often been interpreted as a political intervention in those social discourses that impinge upon and reproduce the subject in this tirelessly unending modernity. Always refusing the careless instrumentalisation of any specific political theory or ideology, Jones’ work probes lost or discarded political possibilities which have been occluded by history, clouded by rhetoric and generally subject to sustained erasure under the logic of late capitalism. This gesturing towards the past to reimagine emancipatory potentialities for our contemporary moment is a refusal of nostalgia. Rather, Jones’ archaeological manoeuvres through political potentialities lying dormant in the past invites the viewer-as-participator to inhabit the present as a space and place from which a politics for the future can be imagined and invented.
The body is always central to Jones’ practice, being acknowledged as both a site of political imposition but also a field from which a politics might yet emerge. Evoking the pre-Oedipal soma that is prior to language, before the imposition of Law, Tremble, Tremble (2017) poses the maternal body as a locus from which latent alternative political imaginaries may now be harvested and made manifest ...

O texto identifica e analisa duas ações cênicas ativistas do Coletivo Rubro Obsceno: Eu abortei (2014) e O que te prende, mulher? (2014-2016), ambas apresentadas como intervenção urbana na cidade de São Paulo. Considerando a análise e cartografia dessas ações - que lançam posicionamentos políticos na construção de poéticas cênicas, e cujas premissas giram em torno de visibilizar as subjetividades das mulheres -, enfatizo a importância da reflexão crítica a partir do próprio fazer artístico. Compartilho a experiência de atuação enquanto artista das artes cênicas e, acima de tudo, identifico os motivos pelos quais ainda se faz necessário promover ativismos feministas.
Palavras-chave: Ativismo feminista; performance feminista; teatro de mulheres.

A detailed analysis of several early works by Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT, such as Tapp- and Tastkino (Touch Cinema), and Aktionshose Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic) from the Catalogue The Feminist Avant-garde. Art of the 1970s, 2016, ed. Gabriele Schor.

En julio de 2021, a propósito de la conmemoración de los 200 años de la Proclamación de la Independencia del Perú, La Plaza Media lanzó el proyecto Bicentenaria, el cual está integrado por productoras, dramaturgas, cineastas, curadoras y actrices de diversas partes del país que han participado en la realización de más de treinta cortometrajes. Las obras audiovisuales han sido agrupadas en tres series y emitidas a través de la televisión estatal, las redes sociales y la página web del proyecto. El objetivo de esta propuesta es reflexionar sobre el rol y la situación de las mujeres a lo largo de nuestra historia republicana. En el presente artículo, nos enfocaremos en el análisis de la primera serie titulada «El discurso oficial».