The Inside is the Outside: The Relational as the (Feminine) Space of the Radical

It may seem precursory to begin my essay with an image that has been haunting me since September 11, but in a concise way it prefigures many issues I will write about. It is an image of a work by the Chilean artist and poet, Cecilia Vicuna, who has been living in New York for many years. The work dates from 1981 and shows a word drawn in three colors of pigment (white, blue, and red—also the colors of the American flag) on the pavement of the West Side Highway with the World Trade Center on the horizon. It reads in Spanish: Parti si passion (Participation), which Vicuna unravels as “to say yes in passion, or to partake of suffering.” Revealing aspects of connectivity and compassion, the word spelled out on the road was as ephemeral as its meaning remained for the art world. Unnoticed and unacknowledged, it disappeared in dust, but becomes intelligible in the present. This precarious work tells us how certain art practices, in their continuous effort to press forward a different perception of the world, have a visionary content that is marginalized because of fixed conventional readings of art, but nevertheless is bound to be recognized. My essay will seek to uncover the latency of this kind of work in the second half of the twentieth century, which is slowly coming into being today and can be understood because of feminist practice, but also perhaps because of an abruptly changed reality. Focusing on the work of two South- American artists—Lygia Clark (1920-1988) and Anna Maria Maiolino (born in 1942), both from Brazil—I will address the topic of “the relational as the radical.

Alternative New York, 1965-1985 : A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective

"This book of essays and images is the long-awaited volume extending from the exhibition Cultural Economies: Histories from the Alternative Arts Movement, NYC, shown at The Drawing Center from February 26 through April 6, 1996." -- p. vii

Inside the Visible : An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine

This exhibition catalogue, edited by the curator, De Zheger, surveys the contribution of women to 20th century art through the work of 37 artists, splitting the contents into four thematic sections, each of which are divided into three periods: the 1930s-40s, the 1960s-70s, and the 1990s. The four sections address, respectively, feminine plurality and difference, the poetics of alterity, the interweaving of language and space, and finally, materiality and embodiment. Index, 4 p. List of works. Biographical notes. Bibliography 8 p. Circa 660 bibl. ref