Feminist Perspectives in Art Productions and Theories of Art

A three-day workshop - or 'course' - entitled ’Feminist pers- pectives in art productions and theories of art’, directed by Lourdes Méndez, senior lecturer in Anthropology of Art at the Basque Public University (UPV/EHU); and Xabier Arakistain, independent curator, held at Alhondiga Bilbao. Its aim was to contribute to the dissemination of critical knowledge about what is happening in the fields of artistic production in contemporary societies. Under construction since the middle of the 20th century, like all critical knowledge, feminist knowledge proves uncomfortable. And it does so because it reveals the mystification of the fields of artistic production;because it visualises its sexist structures; because it analyses the impact gender, ethnicity, race and social class have; because it places artists in the web of social gender relationships which enables us to understand the reasons for our asymmetric knowledge of them; because it denounces the imposition, at all levels of teaching- learning, of narratives on art that are antro-centrically and enthno-centrically biased;because it combats the false beliefs about fields of artistic production that are pristine in their ideals. Structured into two blocks, the course addresses both the theoretical and structural problems which feminist researchers come up against to continue building non-sexist knowledge; such as those artistic practices which question the different dimensions of the ’art’ institution, emphasising their criticism of hegemonic representations of the difference betweengenders. The first block, entitled ’Social dimensions of art: Artists, art works and contexts’, brings together lectures by Amelia Valcár- cel, Yvonne P.Doderer, Mónica Mayer and Guerrilla Girls. The second block, ’Construction of the Feminist History of art’, will involve the historian Maite Garbayo, Brigid Doherty and Helena Reckitt. The course papers will be compiled into a trilingual publication (Euskera, Spanish and English) which, to date, is the only project which disseminates this debate in Euskera and one of the few doing so in Castilian Spanish. • Helena Reckitt presented her paper 'Forgotten Relations: Feminist Artists and Relational Aesthetics'