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Art labor, sex politics : feminist effects in 1970s British art and performance / Siona Wilson.

By: Publisher: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2015]Description: xxix, 288 pages : illustrations ; 21 cmContent type:
  • text
  • still image
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780816685738
  • 0816685738
  • 9780816685752
  • 0816685754
Subject(s):
Contents:
Introduction: sex politics -- Nightcleaners: the ambiguities of activism and the limits of production -- The spectator as reproducer: Mary Kelly's early films -- Prostitution and the problem of feminist art: the emergent queer aesthetic of COUM transmissions -- Revolting photographs: proletarian amateurism in Jo Spence and Terry Dennett's photography workshop.
Summary: Contrary to critics who have called it the "undecade," the 1970s were a time of risky, innovative art-and nowhere more so than in Britain, where the forces of feminism and labor politics merged in a radical new aesthetic. In Art Labor, Sex Politics Siona Wilson investigates the charged relationship of sex and labor politics as it played out in the making of feminist art in 1970s Britain. Her sustained exploration of works of experimental film, installation, performance, and photography maps the intersection of feminist and leftist projects in the artistic practices of this heady period.

Outgrowth of the author's thesis (Ph. D.--Columbia University, 2005).

Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-265) and index.

Introduction: sex politics -- Nightcleaners: the ambiguities of activism and the limits of production -- The spectator as reproducer: Mary Kelly's early films -- Prostitution and the problem of feminist art: the emergent queer aesthetic of COUM transmissions -- Revolting photographs: proletarian amateurism in Jo Spence and Terry Dennett's photography workshop.

Contrary to critics who have called it the "undecade," the 1970s were a time of risky, innovative art-and nowhere more so than in Britain, where the forces of feminism and labor politics merged in a radical new aesthetic. In Art Labor, Sex Politics Siona Wilson investigates the charged relationship of sex and labor politics as it played out in the making of feminist art in 1970s Britain. Her sustained exploration of works of experimental film, installation, performance, and photography maps the intersection of feminist and leftist projects in the artistic practices of this heady period.