Publications
This publication follows a conference that took place on May 14th, 2018 at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Entitled, “La performance : un espace de visibilité pour les femmes artistes ?” [Performance: a place of visibility for female artists?], the conference was part of the interdisciplinary research programme “Visibilité et invisibilité des savoirs des femmes : les créations, les savoirs et leur circulation, XVIe-XXIe siècles” [Visibility and Invisibility of Women’s Knowledge: Creations, Knowledge and Circulation, 16th-21st century]. Led by Caroline Trotot in the heart of the Littératures, Savoirs et Arts (LISAA) research lab at the Université Paris-Est – Marne-la- Vallée from 2017-2018, this programme benefited from the support and active collaboration with the association AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, for both the conference and the present publication. One of the objectives was to study how creative work or the use of the body can give way to strategies of diversion allowing to question mechanisms of visibility and invisibility that regulate women’s knowledge. As a result, performance has become a field interweaving these aspects of the body and of the work of art, particularly since it has been largely invested by women throughout its history.
Contents
Articles
- “Cleaning is working” Camille Paulhan
- Beyond the Frame: Feminist Strategies in the Expanded Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s Maud Jacquin
- The Body in Performance: The Impossible Quest for Identity Thérèse St-Gelais
- Suffering Bodies and Transgressive Femininity in the Performative Works of Yvonne Rainer, Jo Spence and Hannah Wilke Johanna Renard
- The Performances of Gina Pane through the Prism of Apulian Tarantism: Between the Repressive Economy of Blood and the Visibility of Popular Feminine Rituals Janig Bégoc
- Counter Archives: Archaeological Ficttion of Embedded Submission Laboratoire de la contreperformance
Suffering Bodies and Transgressive Femininity in the Performative Works of Yvonne Rainer, Jo Spence and Hannah Wilke
Johanna Renard
Abstract
Suffering bodies, vulnerable bodies, dying bodies: body impairments and alterations related to illness were an important field of exploration for female performance artists in the 1980s and 1990s. Contrary to the standard representations of femininity that combined beauty, seduction, vigour and youth, their works revealed the body in socially unacceptable states, usually hidden or censored. Suffering from different types of cancer, Yvonne Rainer, Jo Spence and Hannah Wilke developed performative and documentary explorations which made the pathologized body a place for questioning representation and resistance. How can one perform their sexual identity when they have lost their basic features (breasts, hair, beauty)? How can the sick body help to foil the masquerade of femininity? From body-objects to bodysubjects, this article reveals how the exhibition and experimentation of the suffering corporeality participates in a process of feminist subjectivisation.
Johanna Renard holds a doctorate in art history and criticism from the Université Rennes 2. She is the author of the dissertation entitled Poétique et politique de l’ennui dans la danse et le cinema d’Yvonne Rainer, to be published in 2020 by éditions De l’incidence. A regular contributor to the magazine Critique d’art, she has also published articles in other journals such as the Cahiers du genre, Cahiers de narratologie, and Agôn. She is co-editor of the publication of the proceedings of the international conference Constellations subjectives : pour une histoire féministe de l’art, published in 2020 by éditions iXe. Covering performance, dance, experimental cinema and video art, her research is part of a historical and social approach to contemporary art since the 1960s with a specific interest in feminist and queer artistic practices.
