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
“Cleaning is working”
Camille Paulhan
Abstract
This text reflects upon performative actions by artists relevant to issues related to hygiene, cleaning and cleanliness. Addressing the work of male artists (Ben Vautier, Hi-Red Center, Joseph Beuys, Robert Filliou), as well as female artists (ORLAN, Chris Rush and Sandra Orgel, Martha Rosler, Letícia Parente), this text attempts to reveal that which differentiates cleaning seen from the female perspective and cleaning seen from the male perspective in the public eye. In order to do so, the text is supported by feminist debates—contemporary to the productions of the artists mentioned—about domestic work. However, what is most widely cited throughout this essay is the work and theoretical thinking of American artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, notably her Manifesto! Maintenance Art (1969), as well as several of her performances from the 1970s, addressing the notions of legitimacy and domination in the institutional artistic framework.
Camille Paulhan is an art historian, art critic and teacher. She completed her doctoral dissertation in 2014 on the perishable in art from the 1960s and 1970s at the Université Paris 1 — Panthéon-Sorbonne. She teaches at the École supérieure d’art Pays Basque. Her latest publications include, “‘La société se détériore’: Gustav Metzger et l’art autodestructif,” in Barde Cyril, et al. (eds.), Fin-de-siècle, fin de l’art? Destins de l’art dans les discours de la fin des XIXe et XXe siècles, conference proceedings (Paris, Presses Sorbonne nouvelle, 2018) and “Daniel Spoerri et la Eat Art Galerie,” in Csergo Julia and Desbuissons Frédérique, Le Cuisinier et l’art (Paris, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Menu fretin, 2018).
