Feminist Activist Art: Losing the Edge?

Abstract

Not only does the phrase activist not appear in these three books about the visual and performing arts at the turn of the twenty-first century, but, except for a handful of essays in Goodman and de Gay and a scattering of images from the 1960s through the 1990s in McQuiston, feminist thought is not prominent and feminist artworks are not reproduced. While not overtly feminist, most, though not all, of the texts collected in these volumes, do show signs of having been influenced by feminist theory and feminist achievements in the arts but, in general, the feminist movement in art of the past 30 years is a ghostly presence. Although this lack of emphasis in books purporting to address art and social change is troubling, there are aspects of each book that could be useful to teachers and students of Women's Studies who want to consider activism in conjunction with both feminism and the practice of art. Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay's The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance is intended to complement Goodman's earlier anthology, Reader in Gender and Performance (1998), which directly and extensively addressed feminist approaches to performance. Billed as the first comprehensive collection of selected texts that range across politics, ideology, and performance, the reader begins with the writings of early twentiethcentury theater giants such as Artaud, Grotoski, Stanislavski, and Brecht. The book then traces seven currents in theater, performance art, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, sexuality, and gender studies through the mid-1990s (the book went to press in 1999). Goodman, Director of the Institute for New Media Performance Studies at the University of Surrey and author of Contemporary Feminist Theatres (1993), invited eight practitioner-scholars to edit and introduce the texts within thematic sections