The radical gesture, feminism and performance art in the 1970s

grantor: University of TorontoThis study examines the relationship between the in surgent feminist movement and the development of feminist performance art in North America during the 1970s. The thesis argues that feminist performance was instrumental in challenging the premise that art is an autonomous activity separate from the social and political conditions of everyday life. By adapting the feminist axiom that the personal is political to the practice of art making, feminist artists used performance as a form of cultural intervention in which personal experiences, narratives and representations were drawn upon to contest the prevailing social and political arrangements of gender. In so doing, feminist performance artists played a decisive role in reshaping our understanding of the political and in redefining the relationship between art and politics during this period. This thematic study of the origins and development of North American feminist performance within the larger cultural context begins with an overview of the relationship between art and politics in the twentieth century. It traces the ideological shifts that account for the transformation of avant-garde art from a highly politicized to a primarily aesthetic movement in the two decades after World War II, which in turn resulted in a dilemma for many artists as they questioned whether their art could or should engage with the deepening social and political crises of the 1960s. This study goes on to establish how the rise of the feminist movement provided women artists with a means to re-engage art as a political practice. It explores the relationship between feminist politics and the formulation of performance as an art form particularly suited to the needs of feminist artists to reach new audiences and use their art as a weapon to renegotiate their role within the art world and to confront the oppressive effects of sexism in the larger culture. Through discussion of an extensive range of works by individual artists in relation both to contemporaneous and more recent feminist theory, this study seeks to account for the specific ways in which feminist performance art has fundamentally altered our current understanding of aesthetic practice in relation to the social and cultural conditions in which it is embedded.Ph.D