Pre-Emptive Mourning Against the Bomb: Exploded Domesticities in Art Informed by Feminism and Anti-Nuclear Activism

Abstract

Art informed by feminism explored and exploited the ambivalence teased out in second-wave debates about the uses of domestic crafts to their aesthetic and activist limits. Some of the most iconic artworks associated with the Women’s Liberation Movement, such as The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago and others, not only reference domesticity but do so through the use of craft techniques, which come with their own associations of amateurship, matrilineality, and use (as opposed to purely aesthetic) value, all of which were significant points of discussion in feminism’s critique of art history, theory, and practice. Over the past twenty years a now well-established area of feminist scholarship emerged, devoted to the exploration of the artistic manifestations of a feminist critique of domesticity as an overdetermined space both physically and symbolically connected to a sexual division of labour. This division is held responsible for taking women out of the labour market and ideologically binding them to an idealised reproductive function, in terms both of procreation and the perpetuation of normative sexual and gender arrangements. As others, including myself, have previously argued, the mimicry of domesticity in installation art with the intention of challenging and subverting it has been a major strategy in feminist art practice.1 In this context, mimicry should be understood in its anti-colonial definition: the feminist artistic challenge to domesticity does not manifest as a departure from the home but through a repeated performance (in a variety of media) of patriarchal domesticity as contradictory, fragile, and frayed at the edges.2 (Pseudo-)domestic art installations became the vehicle for the uncanny return of the repressed of patriarchal domesticity. The power of such installations consisted of their striking closeness to their ‘originals’: they were still home interiors but not quite. These treacherous feminist ‘homes’ were modelled on the Freudian uncanny in more ways than one. In addition to offering a material manifestation of the Unheimliche (unhomely) in the almost literal sense, they teased out the subtle but crucial unhomeliness already present in the home. If ‘un-’, the uncanny’s prefix of negation, is the mark of repression, pseudo-domestic art installations bring social oppression home by materialising and embedding its symbols in simulated domestic interiors.3 Still, the significance of domesticity for such practices was not limited to a critical mobilisation of domesticity as sign, nor the use of the domestic interior as a formal framing device with the potential to disrupt the pristineness of the white cube. The DIY ethos of domestic crafts supported inclusivity and celebrated creative practices with little attachment to originality and individual authorship, which for related reasons had long been excluded from the mainstream artworld.4