See Griselda Pollock, “Feminist Interventions in the Histories of Art: An Introduction,” in her landmark study Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, (Routledge, 1988).
For a concise analysis of the public-private circuit in art, see Nizan Shaked, “Art and Value, Reviewed,” Historical Materialism Blog, December 10, 2017 →, offering a review of David Beech, Art and Value (Brill 2015).
Indicatively, see John Roberts, Revolutionary Times and the Avant Garde (Verso, 2015); The Idea of the Avant Garde and What It Means Today, ed. Marc James Léger (Manchester University Press, 2014); Marc James Léger, Brave New Avant Garde (Zero Books 2012); the special issue of New Literary History on the avant-garde: vol. 41, no. 4 (Autumn 2010).
See Gabriele Schor, The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s: Works from the Sammlung Verbund Vienna (Prestel, 2016); Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press, 2004). On the domestication of the avant-garde see Okwui Enwezor, “The Black Box,” in Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition—Catalogue, eds. Okwui Enwezor et al. (Hatje Kantz, 2011), 45. “Today’s avant-garde is so thoroughly displined and domesticated within the scheme of Empire that a whole different set of regulatory and resistance models has to be found to counterbalance Empire’s attempt at totalization,” notes Enwezor.
Boris Groys, “On Art Activism,” e-flux journal 56 (June 2014) →. Emphasis added.
Groys, “On Art Activism.”
Groys, “On Art Activism.”
These debates included, for example, if and how the figurative sign “woman” should be featured in artworks; whether femininity was to be recuperated as an essence suppressed in patriarchy or whether it was wholly constructed in the latter (and so could not be “decolonized”); if feminists should be engaged with painting at all as the flagship practice of patriarchal art or if newer practices and media such as performance and video should be prioritized. Indicatively, see Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–1985, eds. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (Pandora Press, 1987); and Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968–2000, ed. Hilary Robinson (Blackwell, 2001).
The term “feminism” first appeared in French in the first half of the nineteenth century and is attributed to utopian socialist Charles Fourier, but Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, from 1792, takes the origins of modern feminism to the eighteenth century, in the period defined by the French Revolution. Feminism does not appear as a social movement in the eighteenth century in the way that it appears, in some countries, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries or in the 1960s and ’70s. See Karen Offen, “Sur l’origine des mots « féminisme » et « féministe »,” Revue d’ Histoire Moderne & Contemporaine 34, no. 3 (July–September 1987): 492–96. The issue of when feminism has been a social movement is often raised in relation to national and regional contexts. See, for example, Paul Bagguley, “Contemporary British Feminism: A Social Movement in Abeyance?” Social Movement Studies 1, no. 2 (2002): 169–85.
See Angela Davis, Barbara Ransby, Cinzia Arruzza, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Linda Martin Alcoff, Nancy Fraser, Rasmea Yousef Odeh, and Tithi Bhattacharya, “Beyond Lean-In: For a Feminism of the 99% and a Militant International Strike on March 8,” Viewpoint Magazine, February 3, 2017 →.
Indicatively, see Julia Bryan Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam Era (University of California Press, 2009); Art Workers: Material Conditions and Labor Struggles in Contemporary Art Practice, eds. Erik Krikortz, Airi Triisberg, and Minna Henriksson (2015); Angela Dimitrakaki, “What Is an Art Worker? Five Theses on the Complexity of a Struggle,” in Former West: Art and the Contemporary after 1989, eds. Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh (BAK and MIT Press, 2016).
Andrea Fraser, “How to Provide an Artistic Service: An Introduction” (1994) →.
Indicatively, see the special issue of Open! on the theme “A Precarious Existence” (no. 17, 2009); Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art, eds. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle (Sternberg Press, 2011); The Art Factory, eds. Michal Kozlowski, Jan Sowa, and Kuba Szreder, Free/Slow University, Warsaw, 2014.
Angela Dimitrakaki, “Curatorial Collectives and Feminist Politics in 21st Century Europe: An Interview with Kuratorisk Aktion,” 2010 →.
See CAMP’s website →.
Some of the issues are addressed by Lucy R. Lippard in her essay “The Anatomy of an Annual,” in Hayward Annual ’78, Exhibition Catalogue (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978). The essay was reprinted in Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions, eds. Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry (Liverpool University Press, 2013).
See Angela Dimitrakaki, “What Is It that Feminism Is up against? Preliminary Notes on Separatism,” paper presented at a panel discussion among Catherine Elwes, Margaret Harrison, Johanna Gustavsson, and the author as part of Women Working Collectively, What Is Your Value?, organized by The Temporary Separatists at ICA London, July 9, 2015. The paper can be accessed at →.
Irene Moss and and Lila Katzen, “Separatism: The New Rip-Off,” Feminist Art Journal 2, no. 2 (1973): 7+. See also the short note on this article in Linda Krumholz and Estella Lauter, “Annotated Bibliography on Feminist Aesthetics in the Visual Arts,” Hypatia 5, no. 2 (1990): 158–72, where the assumed universality of aesthetics is also mentioned as an argument against separatism.
MFK was founded by Johanna Gustavsson and Lisa Nyberg and was active between 2006 and 2011. The collective’s inspiring practice, and the contradictions it faced, are discussed in their manual Do the Right Thing! which can be downloaded in English and Swedish at →. I am grateful to MFK for providing me with a hard copy.
Studies and projects on women as human capital abound. Indicatively, see “Countries commit to strong action on human capital to drive economic growth,” The World Bank, October 20, 2017 →, where the Netherlands’ Minister of Foreign Trade and Development Lilianne Ploumen stated: “The Netherlands will continue to be committed to women’s sexual and reproductive health, without which human capital cannot be built.”
On feminism’s relationship to capitalism in the late twentieth century, see indicatively Hester Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women's Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Paradigm, 2009); Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History,” New Left Review 56 (March–April 2009): 97–117; and, largely focused on “the institutionalization of the US women’s movement” but also the neoliberal ties of “global feminism,” Susan Watkins, “Which Feminisms?” New Left Review 108 (January–February 2018): 5–76.
This marginalization was concurrent with the dominance of postmodernism as the hegemonic cultural discourse in the last quarter of the twentieth century and was to an extent retracted from the mid-1990s onwards when “globalization” emerged as a critical term in the analysis of art and beyond. See Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd, “‘The Last Instance’: The Apparent Economy, Social Struggles and Art in Global Capitalism,” in Economy: Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century, eds. Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd (Liverpool University Press, 2015).
It was striking to see a Hauser & Wirth London ad of a show (March 30—May 5, 2007) of Lee Lozano (1930–99), a female artist noted for her critical withdrawal from the art world, in the first few pages of Frieze 105 (March 2007), the magazine’s issue dedicated to “feminism.”
Data concerning women’s presence in the art institution are fragmented, incomplete, and do not correspond to a global picture. See, however, Maura Reilly, “Taking the Measure of Sexism: Facts, Figures and Fixes,” ARTNEWS, June 2015, 39–46, also available online at →.
Indicatively, see Molly Casey, “Gender in the Art World, a Look at the Numbers,” Nine Dot Arts, May 31, 2016 →.
Silvia Federici, “Foreword,” in Precarious Workers Brigade, Training for Exploitation? Politicising Employability and Reclaiming Education (Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, 2017), 3.
A very useful database of feminist exhibitions is provided by n.paradoxa: international feminist journal at →.
Indicatively, see n.paradoxa: international feminist journal 18 (July 2006), a special issue on curatorial strategies; Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference, ed. Alexandra Kokoli (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008); Feminisms Is still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices, eds. Malin Hedlin Haydn and Jessica Sjohol Skrubbe (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010); Dimitrakaki and Perry (eds.), Politics in a Glass Case.
See the “Thin Black Line(s)” exhibition catalogue available at →. See also Julia Halperin, “Turner Prize-Winner Lubaina Himid Is a Star at Art Basel—and She’s Getting a Solo Show at the New Museum,” Artnet News, June 12, 2018 →. Himid is referred to in the article as the first black woman and the oldest artist to win the Turner Prize but also as an artist who “did not have consisent commercial representation until 2013.” Himid has been a pioneering artist and curator of black and Asian women artists in Britain since the 1980s; she organized the landmark show “The Thin Black Line” at ICA London in 1985.
See Victoria Horne, “BP Spotlight: Sylvia Pankhurst & Women and Work—Tate Britain, 16 September 2013—6 April 2014,” Radical Philosophy 186 (July–August 2014) →.
See Nadia Khomani, “BP to End Tate Sponsorship after 26 Years,” The Guardian, March 11, 2016 →.
BP features frequently on the Multinational Monitor website, often as the target of anti-Apartheid activists. A search on the site brings up 119 mentions of BP, all of them negative. See →.
See Julie Gorecki, “How Did This Happen? Capitalism’s Double Subordination of Women and Nature,” The Feminist Wire, May 1, 2015 →.
Joanna Walters, “Artist Nan Goldin Stages Opioids Protest at Metropolitian Museum’s Sackler Wing,” The Guardian, March 11, 2018 →.
Liberal critics focused on the unethical marketing of a highly addictive medicine rather than the human hell created by the for-profit pharmaceutical industry, and so it was possible to defend Elizabeth Sackler as an individual. See Natalie Frank, “In the Discussion About the Sacklers and Oxycontin, It’s Important to Get the Facts Right,” Artnet News, January 22, 2018 →.
Christy Lange, “7th Berlin Biennial,” Frieze, June 1, 2012 →.
Frank, “In the Discussion About the Sacklers and Oxycontin.” Emphasis added.
Kate Brown, “These Four Artists Were Nominated for Germany’s Foremost Art Prize—and Now They’re Denouncing It,” Artnet News, November 10, 2017 →.
The open letter was published as a petition on May 12, 2018 →.
Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution: A History Of Women And Revolution In The Modern World (Verso, 2004/1974), 50. Emphasis added.
Griselda Pollock, “Vision, Voice and Power: Feminist Art Histories and Marxism,” in her Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (Routledge, 1988), 34. The specific essay was first published in Block 6 (1982).
Pollock, “Vision, Voice and Power,” 49.
Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman, “Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art Making,” Screen 21, no. 2 (1980): 35–48.
Griselda Pollock, “Screening the Seventies,” in Vision and Difference, 151–99.
Mark Brown, “Tracey Emin: ‘Tories are only hope for the arts,’” The Guardian, May 16, 2011 →.
For a selective yet invaluable documentation see Robinson (ed.), Feminism-Art-Theory.
On this, see Michael Denning, “Wageless Life,” New Left Review 66 (November–December 2010): 79–97, where it is stated: “We must insist that ‘proletarian’ is not a synonym for ‘wage laborer’ but for dispossession, expropriation and radical dependence on the market. You don’t need a job to be a proletarian: wageless life, not wage labor, is the starting point in understanding the free market” (81).
The articles comprising Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution were first published together in 1900 and, in revised edition, in 1908. Here I have used the 1900 version available at the Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archive, transl. Integer →. See also The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Helen Scott (Haymarket, 2008).
“The question of how art is recognized as feminist—and the potential of misrecognizing feminism—requires acknowledging the multiples axes of transnational and queer feminism today, as such feminist projects intersect issues of war, law, immigration, human rights, antiracist, economic, urban and rural justice projects, propelled towards uncoercive rearrangements of masculinity and femininity beyond the limits of woman, as a project of decolonizing feminism.” See Jeannine Tang, “The Problem of Equality, or Translating ‘Woman’ in the Age of Global Exhibitions,” in Dimitrakaki and Perry (eds.), Politics in a Glass Case, 253.
The declaration started on November 7, 2017 as a petition (now closed) here →. The full text can now be accessed at →. I have consulted the English translation (by Jane Brodie) available at the site, which includes thirty-eight propositions, divided into five sections: Concerning the Structure of the Art World, Concerning Behaviors in the Art World, Concerning the Artistic Career and Creativity, Concerning Artistic Feminism and Feminist Art History, Concerning the Inclusive Nature of This Statement.
Hito Steyerl, “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy,” e-flux journal 21 (December 2010) →.
John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: The Globalization of Production, Super-Exploitation, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 2016).
Relevant data is available on many sites, including the World Bank and ILO. For a quick overview see Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Sandra Tzvetkova, “Working women: Key facts and trends in female labor force participation,” Our World in Data, October 16, 2017 →. The blog is part of the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development at the University of Oxford.
Tithi Bhattacharya, “How Not to Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class,” Viewpoint Magazine 5 (2015) →.
See in particular “Introduction: The Problem with Work” in Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2011).
Weeks, The Problem with Work, 7.
On how the art field inscribes the “labor of love” ideology, see Danielle Childs, Helena Reckitt, and Jenny Richards, “Labors of Love: A Conversation on Art, Gender and Social Reproduction,” Third Text 31, no. 1 (2017): 147–68.
Marion von Osten, “Irene ist Viele! Or What We Call “Productive” Forces,” e-flux journal 8 (September 2009) →. Emphasis added.
Mary Kelly’s Post-partum Document (1973–79) and the collective project Feministo (1975–77) remain emblematic works, in different ways. On the first see Mary Kelly, Post-partum Document (University of California Press, 1999); on the second see Alexandra Kokoli, “Undoing ‘homeliness’ in feminist art: Feministo: Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife (1975–7),” n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal 13 (2004): 75–83. See also Andrea Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal (University of Minnesota, 2009).
“Art is an occupation,” Steyerl contends, “in that it keeps people busy—spectators and many others. In many rich countries art denotes a quite popular occupational scheme. The idea that it contains its own gratification and needs no remuneration is quite accepted in the cultural workplace … Additionally, there are now occupational schemes in the guise of art education.” See Hito Steyerl, “Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life,” e-flux journal 30 (December 2011) →. Regarding the relationship of domestic space to art, research has revealed that the home was significantly present in the professional activities of artists in the nineteenth century too, inviting us to pay closer attention to possibly hidden yet lasting trends shaping art in capitalism in gendered terms. On this, see Lara Perry, “The Artist’s Household: On Gender and the Division of Artistic and Domestic Labor in Nineteenth-Century London,” Third Text 31, no. 1 (2017): 15–29.
See the detailed project description and outputs at →.
The division of labor among women (rather than between women and men) is, as one might surmise, typically, if not exclusively, instituted as a racial and class divide.
See Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto, 2010). See also Farah Joan Fard, “Women Outnumber Men At Art Schools — So Why Isn’t Their Work Being Shown In Galleries Once They Graduate?” Bustle, May 18, 2017 →.
See the chapter “Travel as (gendered) work: global space, mobility and the ‘woman artist,’” in Angela Dimitrakaki, Gender, ArtWork and the Global Imperative (Manchester University Press, 2013).
See Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (MIT Press, 2004).
Henri Neuendorf, “Marina Abramović Says Children Hold Back Female Artists,” Artnet News, July 25, 2016 →.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Women’s Autonomy and Remuneration for Care Work in the New Emergencies,” November 2010 →.
See the chapter “The Gender Issue: Lessons from Post-socialist Europe” in Dimitrakaki, Gender, ArtWork and the Global Imperative, 2013.
Jerry Saltz, “Super Theory Woman,” Artnet Magazine, July 2004 →.
On May 25, 2018, Ireland’s abortion referendum achieved a breakthrough in ending the abortion ban.