Decades ago, Yoko Ono invited an audience to use a pair of scissors to cut the clothing she wore, later telling a curator, “I wanted to see what they would take.” Ana Mendieta tested the boundaries of her own body against the world she inhabited, once creating a shallow grave for herself where her silhouette could still be seen, rising and falling with her breaths. Amanda Fortini considers the resurgent interest in female performance artists—Ono, Mendieta, Marina Abramović, Carolee Schneemann, and more—whose work “was not salable, collectible or tied to the market in any way.”
Curators have made it their mission to rescue subversive feminist performance work from the purgatory where it’s long dwelled. At a time when manosphere podcasters extolling the virtues of female subservience are increasingly influential in public discourse, the constitutional right to abortion has been overturned and social media is rife with a kind of emboldened misogyny I thought we’d left in a bygone era, what could feel more apt than a group of pioneering feminist artists who confronted exasperatingly similar issues in their own lives?
A few more surprising picks about artists
Who Is Black Comedy For?
“A new book is nostalgic for the ’90s. But the era of crossover success was not necessarily the pinnacle of Black comedic achievement.”
The Hiding Man of Griffith Park
“A guerrilla artist has made the Eastside his canvas. His medium: Strange signs.”
A Portrait of the Artist as an Amazon Reviewer
“Between 2003 and 2019, Kevin Killian published almost twenty-four hundred reviews on the site. Can they be considered literature?”
