Laura Cottingham

Claude Cahun

Dirk Snauwaert

Bilder

In recent years, Laura Cottingham has emerged as one of the most visible feminist critics of the so-called post-feminist generation. Following a social-political approach to art history and criticism that accepts visual culture as part of a larger social reality, Cottingham's writings investigate central tensions currently operative in the production, distribution and evaluation of art, especially those related to cultural production by and about women. Seeing Through the Seventies: Essays on Feminism and Art gathers together Cottingham's key essays from the 1990's. These include an appraisal of Lucy R. Lippard, the most influential feminist art critic of the1970's; a critique of the masculinist bias implicit to modernism and explicitly recuperated by commercially successful artists during the 1980s; an exhaustive analysis of the curatorial failures operative in the "Bad Girls" museum exhibitions of the early 1990s; surveys of feminist-influenced art practices during the women's liberationist period; speculations on the current possibilities and obstacles that attend efforts to recover lesbian cultural history; and an examination of the life, work and obscuration of the early twentieth-century French photographer Claude Cahun.

Essays on Feminism and Art

Seeing Through the Seventies

In Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul (Angst Essen Seele Auf, 1974) an ageing cleaning woman, Emmi (Brigitte Mira), marries a much younger, immigrant Moroccan mechanic, Ali (El Hedi ben Salem). Set in Munich during the 1970s, Fear Eats the Soul melds the conventions of melodrama with a radical sensibility in order to present a portrait of racism and everyday hypocrisy in post-war Germany. Emmi's family (including her slovenly and spiteful son-in-law Eugen, played by Fassbinder himself), neighbours and workmates turn against her viciously. It is a film about the way conventional society detests anything and anybody unfamiliar - but also a film about the hopes and limits of love. Intricately directed and designed to show Munich life in all its shabby kitchiness, and beautifully performed, Fear Eats the Soul may be Fassbinder's finest film. Laura Cottingham celebrates Fassbinder's achievement, placing Fear Eats the Soul in relation to his extraordinarily prolific career in theatre, film and television. Her analysis pulls back the thin curtain that separated his work from his tumultuous life. She also explores the director's debt to the lush Hollywood melodramas made by fellow-German Douglas Sirk, especially All That Heaven Allows (1955). In a detailed scene-by-scene analysis of Fear Eats the Soul, Cottingham shows how Fassbinder managed to combine beauty and tenderness with fierce political critique.

Fear Eats the Soul: ("Angst Essen Seele Auf")

In Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul (Angst Essen Seele Auf, 1974) Emma (Brigitte Mira), a working-class widow and former member of the Nazi party, marries Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a much younger Moroccan migrant worker. Set in Munich during the 1970s, the film melds the conventions of melodrama with a radical sensibility to present a portrait of racism and everyday hypocrisy in post-war Germany. It is a film about the way conventional society detests anything and anybody unfamiliar - but also a film about the hopes and limits of love. Intricately directed, beautifully performed, and designed to show Munich life in all its shabby kitschiness, Fear Eats the Soul may be Fassbinder's finest film. Laura Cottingham celebrates Fassbinder's achievement, placing Fear Eats the Soul in relation to his extraordinarily prolific career in theatre, film and television. Her analysis pulls back the thin curtain that separated his work from his tumultuous life. She also explores the director's debt to the lush Hollywood melodramas made by fellow German Douglas Sirk, especially All That Heaven Allows (1955). In a detailed scene-by-scene analysis, Cottingham shows how Fassbinder managed to combine beauty and tenderness with fierce political critique.

Fear Eats the Soul (Angst Essen Seele Auf)

Adrian Piper

A Retrospective, 1965-2000 (Issues in Cultural Theory)

E. Ann Kaplan

Mary Beth Edelson

Alissa Rame Friedman

From 70s ritural performances to the post-feminism of a new century, Mary Beth Edelson has been destabilizing preexisting representations of women. Whether in her version of the Last Supper, in which Georgia O'Keeffe plays Christ to disciples Lee Krasner, Nancy Graves, Louise Bourgeois, and Yoko Ono; or in her isolation and re-narrativization of stereotypical images of Hollywood femmes fatales, Edelson never loses sight of what is at stake in her work: the construction, representation, and consumption of images of women. This book, a virtual scrapbook of the feminism movement, includes coversations between Edelson and such seminal feminist figures as Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero, and Miriam Schapiro. Designed by the artist and full of 30 years worth of her multidisciplinary feminist and community-based work, The Art of Mary Beth Edelson offers Edelson the ultimate control over the construction of her own image in the present and the opportunity to recontextualize her past.

Laura Cottingham

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