Marsha Meskimmon - Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics

Women Making Art engages with complementary feminist thinking on history, subjectivity and aesthetics to rework those conventions which have occluded women's cultural agency and defined art made by women as a derivative version of a masculine norm. Rather than providing an inclusive survey of women artists, Marsha Meskimmon examines women's art practice across five continents and in a wide range of media at a number of key moments in the twentieth century to give an understanding of the intersections of history and culture, art practice, and theoretical issues.

Examining the ways in which women artists have reclaimed, expressed and defined personal and political histories, challenged conventional western notions of dichotomous sexed subjectivity, and opened out the relationships of pleasure/knowledge, word/flesh and space/time to new ways of thinking against the grain, Meskimmon discusses the work of artists such as Deborah Lefkowitz, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cornelia Parker, Faith Ringgold, Mona Hatoum and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, as well as other, less well-known artists from around the world. Focusing on historical, theoretical and aesthetic moments in the twentieth century such as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the African diaspora, Queer Theory and cyberculture, Meskimmon illustrates the importance of women artists in rethinking dominant traditions and assumptions at times of cultural, political and technological change.

Marsha Meskimmon is Reader in Art History and Theory at Loughborough University. She is the author of The Art of Reflection: Women Artists Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (1996), Engendering the City: Women Artists and Urban Space (1997), and We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism (1999).

History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics

Marsha Meskimmon

First published 2003

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

Transferred to Digital Printing 2005

2003 Marsha Meskimmon

Typeset in Galliard by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0415242770 (hbk)

ISBN 0415242789 (pbk)

For Mark T. Shutes (19472001) my beloved brother,
my inspiring teacher and my trusted friend.

PART I
History

PART II
Subjectivity

PART III
Aesthetics

0.1 Cornelia Parker, The Negatives of Words (silver residue from engraving words), 1996
copyright, Cornelia Parker; photograph, Frith Street Gallery, London

1.1 Deborah Lefkowitz, still from Intervals of Silence: Being Jewish in Germany, 1990
courtesy of Deborah Lefkowitz

1.2 Deborah Lefkowitz, still from Intervals of Silence: Being Jewish in Germany, 1990
courtesy of Deborah Lefkowitz

1.3 Kitty Klaidman, Hidden Memories: Attic in Humence (triptych), 1991
copyright, Kitty Klaidman; photograph, Marsha Mateyka Gallery, Washington, DC

: Tram Depot
copyright Rebecca Horn, DACS; photograph from the book Concert for Buchenwald by Rebecca Horn, Scalo Publishers, Zrich

: Schloss Ettersburg
copyright Rebecca Horn, DACS; photograph from the book Concert for Buchenwald by Rebecca Horn, Scalo Publishers, Zrich

1.6 Rachel Whiteread, Holocaust Memorial, 19962000
copyright, Rachel Whiteread; photograph, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London

, no. 1, from The French Collection, 1991
courtesy of Faith Ringgold

2.2 Sokari Douglas Camp, Small Iriabo (Girl Clapping), 1984
courtesy of Sokari Douglas Camp

3.1 Trinh T. Minh-ha, still from Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 1989
courtesy of Trinh T. Minh-ha

3.2 Martha Rosler, Balloons, from Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, 196772
courtesy of Martha Rosler

3.3 Trinh T. Minh-ha, still from Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 1989
courtesy of Trinh T. Minh-ha

3.4 Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982
copyright, Maya Lin; photograph, National Parks Service, Washington, DC

3.5 Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982
copyright, Maya Lin; photograph copyright Christopher Lark

3.6 Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1867
courtesy of Howard University Gallery, Washington, DC

3.7 Elizabeth Catlett, Homage to My Young Black Sisters, 1968
copyright, Elizabeth Catlett; photograph June Kelly Gallery

4.1 Emily Mary Osborn, Nameless and Friendless, 1857
Private Collection. Photograph: Photographic Survey, Courtauld Institute of Art

4.2 Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, The Library, 1949
copyright DACS; photograph L'Agence Photographique de la R.M.N., Paris

4.3 Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy Chapter II: The Harem and Other Enclosures, The Library of Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz, 1994
Collection: Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; reproduced courtesy of Amalia Mesa-Bains

5.1 Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Moi-mme, Montage II, from Aveux non Avenus, 1930
ditions du Carrefour, Paris

5.2 Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, N.O.N., Montage IX, from Aveux non Avenus, 1930
ditions du Carrefour, Paris

5.3 Rosy Martin (with Jo Spence), Unwind the Lies that Bind, 1988
courtesy of Rosy Martin

5.4 Rosy Martin (with Kay Goodridge) Outrageous Agers, 2000
courtesy of Rosy Martin and Kay Goodridge

5.5 Cathy de Monchaux, Cruising Disaster, 1996
courtesy of Cathy de Monchaux

5.6 Cathy de Monchaux, Evidently Not, 1995
courtesy of Cathy de Monchaux

6.1 Maria Sybilla Merian, Manihot from Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensium, 1705
photograph and copyright, British Library, London

6.2 Rachel Ruysch, Woodland Still-Life with Milk Thistles, Flowers, Insects, a Frog and a Lizard, 1694
courtesy of the Gemldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

6.3 Anna Munster, Wundernet (http://wundernet.cofa.unsw.edu.au/), uploaded in 2000
courtesy of Anna Munster

7.1 Moufida Tlatli, still from Silences of the Palace, 1994
copyright Moufida Tlatli; photograph, British Film Institute

7.2 Mona Hatoum, still from Measures of Distance, 1988
copyright Mona Hatoum; photograph, Tate Modern, London

7.3 Shirin Neshat, stills from Turbulent, 1998
video stills, copyright Shirin Neshat; photograph, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York

8.1 Ann Hamilton, lineament, detail, balls of wound text, 1994
copyright Ann Hamilton; photograph, Robert Wedemeyer, courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

8.2 Svetlana Kopystiansky,