WRITING / CURATING / MAKING FEMINIST ART HISTORIES Edinburgh College of Art Evolution House (Board Room), 78 Westport, EH1 2LE

Home , Lee Krasner

DAY ONE: Thursday 27th March

10:30 coffee/tea

11:00 Introductions

11:30 PANEL 1: Jo Applin (session keynote), Marking Mid-20thC Europe Time/Making Time

Giovanna Zapperi, Challenging Feminist Art History: Carla Lonzi’s Divergent Paths

Francesco Ventrella, The Temporalities of the ‘Feminaissance’

13:00 Lunch break

14:00 PANEL 2: Hilary Robinson (session keynote) US-UK Contexts Andrew Hardman, Lee Krasner and the Pollock-Krasner Studio

Amy Tobin, A Group Show of Our Own: Collaboration and Exchange in Womanhouse (Los Angeles) and A Woman’s Place (London)

Becky Bivens, The V-Girls, 1989-1996

16:00 Short Break

16:30 PANEL 3: Chair: Kuang (Vivian) Sheng Interdisciplinary Practices Suzanne van Rossenberg, Queer art is about creating the possibility to say no to the dominant hetero-normative economic and political structures of art. Or yes. But to at least write a story about it that replaces an older one.

Rachel Lyon, Empathetic Embodiment: A Response to the Proposals of Lygia Clark

17:30 Wine reception and book Angela Dimitrakaki, Gender, ArtWork and launch the Global Imperative (Manchester of University Press, 2013)

19:30 End of Day 1

DAY TWO: Friday 28th March

10:30 coffee/tea

11:00 PANEL 4: Katja Kobolt (session keynote), The Curating: Practice & Living Archive and facets of feminist curating Theory I Ceren Ozpinar, The Art Historical Dynamics of Gender: An Exhibition of ‘Women Artists’

Victoria Horne, Spotlight: Tate

12:00 Lunch break

13:00 PANEL 5: Lara Perry (session keynote), The Curating: Practice & Visibility of the Feminist Curator Theory II Elke Krasny, Curator-as-Carer: Towards a Feminist Historiography of Curating

Georgiana Uhlyarik, Introducing Suzy Lake: The Self in the Age of Selfies

14:30 Short break

15:00 ROUNDTABLE Chaired by Angela Dimitrakaki & Victoria Horne

16.30 Conference Closes

Registration Details

Please note that spaces at this conference are limited and that registration on Eventbrite is therefore essential. Morning and afternoon refreshments/lunch are available on both days for fee of £20.00, which can be paid online in advance (also at Eventbrite). Alternatively, delegates are invited to bring a packed lunch or visit one of the many cafes in the surrounding Grassmarket area.

Please also note that a conference dinner is not being officially organised due to funding limitations. If people wish to continue discussion I can suggest local restaurants, including: Spoon (http://www.spoonedinburgh.co.uk/) Maison Bleue (http://www.maisonbleuerestaurant.com/)

If you have any further questions please contact: [email protected]

ABSTRACTS & BIOGRAPHIES

SESSION KEYNOTES

Katja Kobolt is a feminist cultural producer, curator and theorist from Ljubljana but living and working in Germany. She holds a MA in comparative literature and journalism of the University from Ljubljana and a PhD in interdisciplinary literary studies from University Ludwig-Maximilian Munich (Frauen Schreiben Geschichte(n): Krieg, Geschlecht und Erinnern im ehemaligen Jugoslawien, 2009). Her articles and essays on literature and art have been published internationally (her recent texts are to be found in publications e.g. Working with Feminism: Curating and Exhibitions in Eastern Europe, ed. Katrin Kivimaa and Performative Gestures Political Moves, in print co-edited with Lana Zdravković). She has (co)curated and (co)produced various cultural projects in Ljubljana, Munich, Zagreb, Bratislava, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Berlin, Vienna and else where. Between 2000-2008 she was collaborating with the Festival City of Women, where she finally worked as an artistic co-director together with Dunja Kukovec. She is currently lecturing art and/in politics at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany (Department for Slavic Languages and Literature). Next to her work with a feminist curatorial collective Red Min(e)d on a continuous Living Archive project (bringintakeout.wordpress.com) some of her recent collaborations are: A Space Called Public, public art project in Munich, curated by Elmgreen & Dragset; Cross Border Experience project, organized by The Peace Institute, Ljubljana and Donumenta 14x14 in Regensburg.

Jo Applin is a senior lecturer in modern and contemporary art at the University of York, currently on leave until 2015 as the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize. She is the author of Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America (Yale University Press, 2012) and Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field (Afterall and MIT Press, 2012). Jo has also published articles on artists including Claes Oldenburg, Lee Bontecou, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Lozano, Eva Lofdahl, HC Westermann and Bruce McLean in journals such as Art History, Art Journal, Tate Papers, Sculpture Journal, Source,and parallax, and her essays have appeared in exhibition catalogues published by Tate, Moderna Museet, Victoria Miro Gallery, Firstsite, and the Yale Center for British Art. Her reviews and criticism have appeared in Artforum, Oxford Art Journal, Modernism/Modernity, Sculpture Journal, and Map. Jo is currently completing a new book titled Not Working: Lee Lozano versus the Art World.

Lara Perry is a researcher in the history of British art and art museums at The University of Brighton. Trained as a feminist and women's historian, she studied for her MA at the University of British Columbia, Canada and for a DPhil from the University of York, UK, as a Commonwealth Scholar. Lara is interested in the interactions between artists, art institutions, and the broader frameworks within which their work might be understood. She has been stimulated by working with students and colleagues from museums, humanities, and fine art backgrounds, and is interested in working across these disciplines. Recent publications have included the co-edited volume Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, exhibition cultures and curatorial transgressions (2013) and an article, published in Art History (2012), on the nineteenth-century carte-de-visite. Lara is currently working on a project which investigates aspects of popular and 'collective' portrait practice, including photographs and public sculpture.

Hilary Robinson is Dean of the School of Art and Design and Professor of Visual Culture at Middlesex University, appointed January 2013. Her teaching and research focus on feminist art theory. Initially she trained as a painter, graduating with a BA Fine Art, University of Newcastle upon Tyne; she also has an MA by thesis in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art, London, and a PhD in Art Theory from the University of Leeds. Previous publications include Visibly Female: Feminism and Art Today (1987); Feminism-Art-Theory 1968-2000 (2001); Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (2006). Hilary is currently working on a new edition of Feminism-Art-Theory, as well as two further books about feminist art and its history.

PANEL PARTICIPANTS

The V-Girls, 1989-1996 Becky Bivens, University of Illinois

The V-Girls, a feminist performance troupe composed of Marianne Weems, Martha Baer, Jessica Chalmers, Erin Cramer and Andrea Fraser used jokes to explore the mechanisms of social identification and exclusion endemic to humour in two of their performances: ‘Manet’s Olympia: Posed and Skirted’ (1989-92) and ‘The V-Girls: Daughters of the ReVolution’ (1993-96). In ‘Manet’s Olympia’ the V-Girls staged a spoof academic panel rife with gendered humour that scrambles the distinction between a joke’s teller, its object and its audience. As a result, the Vs not only represent the self and other as impossibly abstract, impersonal categories whose discrete existence can be exposed as farce, they also suggest that the poststructuralist academic is a highly impersonal figure who aims for ‘nothing but distance’ at the expense of those ‘who, in all sincerity, aspired to do or say something,’ as Chalmers put it in 2010. In addition to ‘Manet’s Olympia’ I examine the V-Girls’ later performance, “The V-Girls: Daughters of the ReVolution’ (1993-96), a faux consciousness-raising session in which the Vs mine the legacy of second-wave feminism in hopes of both establishing a group bond as women and finding a way out of post-structuralism’s debilitating distance. Here, as in ‘Manet’s Olympia’, the Vs use jokes to disrupt the possibility of social identification and cohesion but not without painting a picture of what the second-wave’s collectivist, activist orientation can offer the academy in the era after poststructuralism.

Becky Bivens is a PhD student at the University of Illinois, Chicago and a lecturer at Columbia College, Chicago. Her academic interests include affect, the historiography of aesthetics, and 20th century abstraction and performance art. She earned an MA in the humanities from the University of Chicago (2009) and a BA in studio art from Agnes Scott College (2007). She has also held positions at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum and taught women’s studies and interdisciplinary humanities courses for the City Colleges of Chicago. Her book review of Eve Meltzer’s Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Anti- Humanist Turn is forthcoming in InVisible Culture.

Remembering Practices: Lee Krasner and The Pollock-Krasner Studio Andrew Hardman, University of Manchester

This paper locates the writing (and rewriting) of conflicting histories at The Pollock-Krasner House and Studio, near Easthampton, Long Island, NY, with regard to its former occupant, the American abstract painter, Lee Krasner (1908-1984). Now a US national monument, the house and its famous studio-barn are split, seemingly along gendered lines, into separate domains. The domestic sphere of the shingle-boarded house is maintained, as much as is possible, in the style in which Krasner left it in; however, the studio, in which famous photographs of her husband, Jackson Pollock, at work were staged in the 1950s, is skewed towards his memory. Traces of Krasner's 30- year long occupation of the studio-barn after Pollock's death were removed in order to reveal splatters of paint that evocatively mark his time in that space. However, though the artist's legacy is de-privileged in this space account needs to be made for her instrumental role in beginning its preservation and memorialisation. Thus controversy over the decision to privilege Pollock's occupation of the studio will be addressed together with more recent efforts to compensate for this imbalance and, crucially, Krasner's role in drafting mid-twentieth century art histories and, perhaps, writing herself out of them.

Andrew Hardman is a post-doctoral researcher and teaching assistant at the University of Manchester. His doctoral thesis, Studio Habits, concerned the ways in which modernist mythologies, and the gendered inequalities they promote, persist through the circulation of images of the artist's studio in photographs, films and the posthumous archivisation and exhibition of studio spaces. Andrew is also a filmmaker whose production company, Belle Vue, uses film as a 4 research tool. Recent collaborators include Battersea Arts Centre, Grizedale Arts, Tate and the Institute for Cultural Practices at the University of Manchester.

Spotlight: Tate Victoria Horne, University of Edinburgh

Replacement paper, details TBC.

Victoria Horne is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her thesis examines the impact of feminist politics upon the production of art historical knowledge and is entitled A History of Feminist Art History: Remaking a Discipline and its Institutions. Victoria has organised a workshop and conference as part of the ‘Writing Feminist Art Histories’ research initiative and is co-organising (with Harry Weeks) a series of Keyword events in Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh in September/October 2014. An article examining feminist art and the archive is forthcoming in Feminist Review.

Curator-as-Carer: Towards a Feminist Historiography of Curating Elke Krasny, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Recent scholarship has drawn up both historiographic genealogies and critical analyses of curatorship based upon the position of the curator-as-auteur. This is evident in the work of Beatrice von Bismarck; Paul O'Neill; Hans Ulrich Obrist; Dorothee Richter; Terry Smith. My proposition of an alternative historiography of curatorship introduces the position of the curator-as-carer. In following the etymological root of caring in curating, I investigate a radical dimension of caring within the curatorial role. I will sketch out a genealogy that starts with the position of the salonière, who came into her own in the eighteenth century, leading up to feminist art practices of the 1970s, such as Suzanne Lacy's, and contemporary examples such as Collective Care or Queering Yerevan. Changing spatial relations between the domestic and the public, private homes and public museums, were and are radically reconfigured through these curators-as-carers, both in the past and today. I will turn to the work of Tony Bennett to parallel his exhibitionary complex with a conversational complex through Grant H. Kester's Conversation Pieces. Leela Gandhi's work is important for drawing out the difference between governing and conversing as constitutive for theoretically establishing the curator-as-carer. Sociability, emancipation, conviviality, solidarity, and hospitality mark the aesthetic strategies which often take on the forms of salons, get-togethers, or dinners. At the core of my alternative genealogy lies the question of how curating as caring changes the relations between the social politics of activism and the aesthetic strategies of art.

Elke Krasny is Senior Lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She was Guest Professor at the University of Bremen in 2006, at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg in 2013, and at the Vienna University of Technology in 2014. She received the Austrian Outstanding Artist Award for Women’s Culture in 2011. In 2012 she was Visiting Scholar at the CCA, Canadian Centre for Architecture, in Montréal. Her work as a curator, critic, cultural theorist and urban researcher clearly shows her interest in urban transformation processes, the critical history of architecture, the politics of history, and the historiography of feminist curatorial practices. The edited book on the history of self-organization Hands-On Urbanism 1850-2012. The Right to Green appeared in 2012 and her exhibition by the same name was shown at the Architecture Centre Vienna, the Museum for Contemporary Art Leipzig and included in the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2012. She curated the discursive event Women’s Movements: Feminist Agency. Intersections of Activism, Archiving, Art, Art History, Critical Research and Curating at rotor association for contemporary art Graz. She co-edited the 2013 volume Women's:Museum. Curatorial Politics in Feminism, Education, History, and Art.

Empathetic Embodiment: A Response to the Proposals of Lygia Clark Rachel Lyon, University of Glasgow

This paper will respond to the experimental practice of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, focusing on two key series, Nostalgia do Corpo (Nostalgia for the Body), 1966-69 and Fantasmatica do Corpo (Phantasmagorics of the Body), 1972-75. I will discuss the centrality of concepts of interconnectivity, intersubjectivity and intercorporeality to Clark's work, and suggest that her practice engages a radically decentred and open conception of the subject, which calls for a similarly radical engagement from the art historian or critic. In attempting to answer the question of how engagement with Clark's practice might be approached, this paper will address my conviction that one powerful method of performing feminist art history and art writing lies in what I have termed 'empathetic embodiment' between artist and critic. It will be my contention that the reciprocity of the empathetic relation between the body of the spectator, the body of the artist and the bodies of others who have encountered the work forges a phenomenological connection between our present-day experience of an artwork and its past incarnations, or present existence as historical document. With this in mind, this paper will end by proposing some practical engagement with some of Clark's proposals, using educational replicas I have made of works from Nostalgia for the Body, in an attempt to re-charge Clark's practice with our own subjectivity, and to explore our own embodied relationships to the objects we encounter, to our own bodies, and to Lygia Clark's body of work.

Rachel Lyon is an MLitt student at the University of Glasgow, on the programme 'Art; Politics; Transgression: 20th Century Avant-Gardes'. Her research interests centre around the intersection between feminist and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and on the viability of embodied empathy as an approach to writing art history.

The Future of ‘Feminist’ Histories of Art: Working towards a ‘Shared Art History’ Ella S Mills

Cancelled

The Art Historical Dynamics of Gender: An Exhibition of ‘Women Artists’ Ceren Özpınar, University of Leeds

The exhibition entitled ‘Dream and Reality: Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey’ opened in late 2011 at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, displaying works only by Turkish women artists from the long 20th century, late 19th century and today. A total of seventy- four artists were chosen for this major exhibition. Coining its name from a 19th century Turkish novel, co-authored by a man and a woman writer, the exhibition not only appropriated a problematic gender construction from the 19th century but also raised questions on the ways in which the gender is recognised in today’s Turkey. Looking at the past exhibitions of the Museum, it is not surprising to see that the one- person shows were awarded to male artists while the ‘others’ got to be exhibited only in a group show under the label of ‘woman’. The catalogue of the exhibition gives a clear history of Turkish ‘women artists’ from the 19th century onwards, apart from the fact that the texts included do not seem to be concerned with the immanent issues that such an exhibition contains. This paper seeks to analyse the catalogue texts of this particular exhibition and highlight the discourse in use, in

6 order to reveal the art historical dynamics of gender in Turkey, while drawing on the works on display and the approach taken to curating.

Ceren Özpınar is a scholar of contemporary art, history and historiography of art, based in Istanbul, Turkey. For the 2013-2014 academic year, Özpınar holds the position of Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Özpınar has been teaching since 2007 in undergraduate and graduate levels, in both Turkish and English, in the fields of art history, art management and visual culture. Özpınar is currently working towards the completion of her PhD in History of Art at Istanbul Technical University. Her dissertation is on the historiography of contemporary art in Turkey. Özpınar is among the authors of Turkish Cultural Policy Report: A Civil Perspective (Bilgi Uni. Publications, 2011). Her articles have been published in refereed academic journals as well as national art magazines and daily newspapers. She has presented papers in several symposiums and conferences in Turkey and abroad, including UK and USA. She is a member of The Turkish Section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA Turkey) and The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA).

Queer art is about creating the possibility to say no to the dominant hetero-normative economic and political structures of art. Or yes. But to at least write a story about it that replaces an older one. Suzanne van Rossenberg, University of Middlesex

I propose a presentation about my own transdisciplinary practice of feminist art, research and activism. The slide-show presentation consists of drawings, fragments of written fiction, documentation of collaborative projects and quotes by feminist and queer theorists. The paper explicitly makes a link between the political and economic structures of feminist art works or artist collectives. It seeks to explore the relation between everyday feminisms, its economic structures and the function of feminist art practices by deliberately intersecting with LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex) activism, emancipation and human rights advocacy. This strategy builds upon my experiences and ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway, 1988; republished 1991) as a manager within LGBTI activism and as a feminist artist. The presentation can be experienced as a performative lecture — the feminist artwork as the production of knowledge. Conclusively, stepping in and out of artistic, theoretical and activist structures informs the (fragmented) creation of feminist or queer art spaces on either side; spaces that take political and economic structures of art, art theory and feminisms into account. This might be a way to ‘unwrite’ previous historical models, relating to queer/feminist methodologies and epistemologies such as “queering the archives” or “the queer art of failure” (Halberstam, 2011), but also one that attempts (or makes a beginning to attempt) to incorporate a discussion about queer and feminist art economies.

Suzanne van Rossenberg (b. 1977, NL) recently started a MPhil/PhD research studentship at the School of Art and Design of Middlesex University, London. Previously Suzanne worked as the managing director of Transgender Network Netherlands (2011-2012) and a project manager at COC Netherlands (2012-2013), the Dutch LGBT organisation. In 2004 she received an MA in Fine Art (Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam/Plymouth University) with honours for a research project called “A Room with a Lesbian View”, consisting of drawings and paintings and short fictive stories. In 2009 her art was part of the feminist exhibition “Rebelle” in the MMKA in Arnhem (NL) (curator Mirjam Westen). It also included the call “What could a feminist art currency look like?”, a collaborative initiative with Francesco Ventrella, Carla Cruz, Nina Höchtl within a structure called the European Feminist Forum (2006-2009). Suzanne’s work consists of drawings, water colours, cartoons, short stories, performative lectures, curating, art reviews and research. In 2012 she was shortlisted for the Dutch Price for Young Art Critics, category Internet Critique.

A Group Show of Our Own: Collaboration and Exchange in Womanhouse (Los Angeles) and A Woman’s Place (London) Amy Tobin, University of York

Womanhouse, a large-scale art environment installed in a Los Angeles mansion for one month in early 1972, has passed into the history of 1970s art as iconic. It is iconic of a feminist politics in art practice, as well as a shift in media (installation), in production (collaboration) and content (woman’s domestic life). Womanhouse has come to stand for an egalitarian, democratic practice associated with feminism’s non-hierarchical politics. Yet its reception in the history of art and in histories of feminism often overshadow other works influenced by and experimenting with feminist politics and the complexity of the installation itself. This paper seeks to trouble the association of Womanhouse with a ‘containable’ idea of Feminist Art by situating it within the larger context of its production and reception. I will foreground the importance of the Women’s Liberation Movement in directly effecting women’s (and men’s) conception of artistic practice, both through personal empowerment and the sharing of ideas. I argue that the emphasis on the group and the local in feminist politics fostered an alternative network of artistic exchange in which the object or idea moves between social groupings. This will not be read as a straightforward mimicking of consciousness-raising (Judy Chicago acknowledges her ignorance of the concept at the time) but as an articulation of collaboration and collectivity in artistic practice as a political tool. The paper will consider two levels of collaboration. Firstly, in Womanhouse, which combined the collective work of renovating the dilapidated building with individual authorship (Judy Chicago’s Menstruation Bathroom or Faith Wilding’s Crocheted Environment). And, secondly, in the dissemination of Womanhouse, through Johanna Demetrakas’ film, to a UK audience and its subsequent re-working as A Woman’s Place (14 Radnor Terrace) in South London. I aim to map characteristics of feminist political organisation onto this exchange, analysing the context of both installations and noticing their differences and similarities. As such I propose a feminist model of artistic interaction, not dependent on hierarchies of influence but on the constant and cyclical motion of the gift.

Amy Tobin is a PhD candidate in the department of History of Art at the University of York, UK. Her research, supervised by Dr. Jo Applin, is focused on the intersections and creative exchanges between feminist artists internationally in the 1970s and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK. In 2013, Amy co-organised ‘Feminist Object(ive)s: Writing Art Histories’ a workshop at the University of York, with Kuang Sheng, Catherine Spencer and Kostas Stasinopolous. She is part of a collaborative working group between the Courtauld Institute of Art (London) and CUNY Graduate School (New York) and also holds a place on the Library of Congress’ International Placement Scheme (2013-2014).

Introducing Suzy Lake: The Self in the Age of Selfies Georgiana Uhlyarik, Art Gallery of Ontario

‘Self-awareness is self-empowering,’ said Suzy Lake in 1994. I am interested in considering her work, especially her early 1970s feminist work, in our current age of selfies overflow, in preparation for Introducing Suzy Lake, her career-spanning exhibition set to open in November 2014 at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Since the late 1960s, Lake, born in Detroit, Michigan in 1947, has established herself as an intelligent and influential artist who examines and critiques ideals of the body, gender and identity in photographs, videos and performances. Since then Lake has continued to address the relationship of the individual to larger societal forces and to break down and reveal the constructions and restraints built into our culture. All the works in the exhibition feature the artist’s image. Indeed, it will be quite a unique proposition for visitors to encounter Lake’s recurring face as it ages over 45 years. As a curator, I am interested in how this work can be understood once more as revolutionary, as a radical act, in a time when we are repeatedly and relentlessly asked to sign in, sign up, join in, post, share and update! How can we recover the effrontery of Lake’s work when we have been co-opted to shape 8 our social networked identities as though it was an act of self-awareness or self-empowerment? How can we understand how radical and audacious these images are, decades later, in the deluge of apparently daring self-expression? In my paper I would like to explore these issues in the larger context of the questions raised by the conference call for papers. In particular, how can the art museum, the most enduring conservative institution, be an effective site for feminist activism?

Georgiana Uhlyarik is Associate Curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Her online art book Kathleen Munn: Life & Work will be launched by the Art Canada Institute in February. Her recent curatorial projects include: Nicole Collins: Giotto’s O; The Passion of Kathleen Munn; Betty Goodwin: Work Notes; and Michael Snow: Objects of Vision. Uhlyarik is currently developing an exhibition on the pan-American landscape tradition from 1830 to 1930, with the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, as well as a career-spanning exhibition of the work of Suzy Lake. Uhlyarik participated in an international research network exploring feminism and curating, funded by the Leverhulme Trust International Networks and led by Professor Lara Perry, University of Brighton (2010–12). She serves on the Board of the Association of Art Museum Curators. Uhlyarik received her Honours BA from the University of Toronto and her MA in Art History from York University in 1998, where she is now Adjunct Faculty. Originally from Romania, she lives in Toronto with her twin sons.

The Temporalities of the ‘Feminaissance’ Francesco Ventrella, University of Sussex

In a book that discusses the histories of second-wave feminist theories and their political grammar, Claire Hemmings identified three narratives through which the feminist past has been archived: progress, loss, and return. I will refer to these three temporalities as a blueprint to analyse three feminist curatorial projects which pose the question of the recuperation, visibility, and political agency of women’s art practices. The ‘feminist’ Venice Biennale of 2005 has been noticeable for signalling the reappearance of feminism and gender as curatorial ‘topics’. The exhibition Donna: Avanguardia Femminista negli anni Settanta (Rome, 2010) showcased the works of women artists from the 1970s as part of a corporate historical collection. The project Autoritratti: Iscrizioni del femminile nell’arte contemporanea italiana (2013) has recently brought back the issue of separatism in women’s art practice. These three case studies will be discussed in the context of the transnational feminaissance (Mirjam Westen) of women’s art in contemporary art curating, and the problems this term poses in relation to fantasies of progress, loss and return that have shaped the archive of ‘feminist art’ and its exclusions. What role do generations play in the formation of this archive? How does the desire for a feminist and queer art history translate into a language that is not English? How are feminist and queer memories intersected with geographies, generations, and translations? Starting from my three case studies (and taking into account their linguistic marginalities), I will try to read the tempos and temporalities that they enact, in order to explore how the relationship between art and feminism can be read in its own difference, rather than by amalgamation with the globalized language of contemporary art practice.

Francesco Ventrella received a PhD from the University of Leeds over a year ago, with a thesis titled The Body of Art History. Writing, Embodiment and the Connoisseurial Imagination. Francesco is currently Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, where he is working on a project on the sexual politics of empathy theories and physiological aesthetics in art historiography at the fin de siècle. With his colleague Dr Meaghan Clarke Francesco is co- organising a round table in 2015 on the role of women connoisseurs in the formation art history. His research is also engaged with the relationship between art, feminism and corporeality, particularly in the context of Arte Povera and the visual politics of AIDS. A short article on Italian feminist and art writer Carla Lonzi and the politics of separatism will appear later this year in the European Journal of Women’s Studies.

Challenging Feminist Art History: Carla Lonzi’s Divergent Paths Giovanna Zapperi, Fellow at Villa Medici, French Academy in Rome

In 1969, Italian art critic Carla Lonzi published Self-portrait [Autoritratto], a montage of a series of conversations she recorded with fourteen artists (all male except Carla Accardi). The book is also a farewell: in 1970, together with Accardi, she founded ‘Rivolta Femminile’ – one of the first feminist collectives in Italy – and never came back to art criticism. For Lonzi there was no possible reconciliation between her activity as an art critic and her subsequent feminist engagement, and this has contributed to the representation of her trajectory as dramatically bifurcated. Lonzi quickly became one of the founding figures of Italian second-wave feminism and the author of a number of provocative texts. In this paper I will go back to this moment of rupture in order to stress the significance of Lonzi’s writings in the framework of a feminist critique of art history. I will focus on two interrelated issues that will help reconsider her activity within the international context of the relations between art and feminism. The first issue concerns Lonzi’s refusal to engage as a feminist art critic and her critique of the art world, considered as a sum of institutions, sites, languages, as well as forms of sociability, life and labour. The second point interrogates the challenges that Lonzi’s ambivalent position towards art poses to the attempt to re-inscribe her into a feminist art history. The radical nature of Lonzi’s rupture still remains to be interrogated in order to open up new paths for feminist art history and theory.

Giovanna Zapperi teaches at Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art Bourges (France) and is currently a fellow of Villa Medici, French Academy in Rome, working on a book about Carla Lonzi. She is the author of several essays and two books (L’artiste est une femme. La modernité de Marcel Duchamp, PUF 2012; Lo schermo del potere. Femminismo e regime della visibilità, written with Alessandra Gribaldo, Ombre Corte 2012), and is part of “Travelling féministe”, a research laboratory for feminist, queer and postcolonial uses of audio-visual archives, working with the resources of the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir in Paris.