Feminist Avant-Garde : Art of the 1970s in the Verbund Collection, Vienna

Now available again in an expanded edition and featuring a variety of work from artists both well-known and under the radar, this volume explores the pioneering achievements of the Feminist Avant-Garde.

For art history, the 1970s represent the beginning of women subverting culturally and socially established constructions and traditional norms. Second-wave feminism, with its slogan “The personal is political”, challenged the one-dimensional roles assigned to women—mother, housewife, and spouse.

During this period, women artists radically questioned their duties and created a plurality of self-determined representations of themselves. Rejecting traditional male-dominated techniques, such as painting, these artists made use of new media, such as photography, film, video, and performance. The outcome was artwork which was radical, poetic, ironic, bitter, cynical, and heartfelt.

This book features more than seventy international female artists, including works by Martha Rosler, Mary Beth Edelson, Ana Mendieta, Nil Yalter, and Ulrike Rosenbach. Editor Gabriele Schor used the term Feminist Avant-Garde in order to emphasize the role that these artists played in the last four decades. This new edition has been enriched with twenty-five new artists—Emma Amos, Dara Birnbaum, Rose English, Natalia LL, among others—as well as up-to-date research on feminist exhibitions, catalogues, and periodicals. Each artist is introduced by an essay and the book also includes fascinating texts by leading scholars.

Now available again in an expanded edition and featuring a variety of work from artists both well-known and under the radar, this volume explores the pioneering achievements of the Feminist Avantgarde. Historically, women have been depicted as a projection of male fantasies, prejudices, and relationships. However in the 1970s, there was a tectonic change in the way women portray themselves in art. For the first time, female artists began to investigate visual representations of their own selves. They studied their own bodies and created the alternative views of feminine identity. Editor Gabriele Schor explores the Feminist Avant-Garde to emphasise the role that these artists played for the last four decades. The results are provocative, radical, poetic, ironic, angry, cynical, and heartfelt. Most of all they are honest, sharing a collective consciousness that reassessed, and even rejected, what came before by turning to new ways of expression in the fields of photography, performance, film, and video. Included here are works by Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta, Nil Yalter, Ketty La Rocca, Birgit Jürgenssen, Renate Bertlmann, Francesca Woodman, and other fearless female artists from around the world. Their work explored the female experience in all its dimensions including pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, sexuality, partnership, beauty standards, rape, and the female body. Each artist is introduced by an essay and the book also includes fascinating interviews with leading curators in the field of feminist art. This groundbreaking book emphasises the accomplishments of women artists who have made a name for themselves while encouraging and inspiring those who have come after them.