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Elke Krasny and Lara Perry: Introduction Part I. Caring Curating Françoise Vergès: Curatorial Labour and Decolonial Feminism　　　　　　　　 Bruxas Bruxas Arts Collective: Get Bodied: Inverting the Witch to Summon a New Commons Care beyond Curation: A Conversation with Lauren Craig. Interview by Racha Baraka Pauline 　 De Souza: Transcultural Care and the Cultural Sector in the United Kingdom Helen Kaplinsky: Caring for ‘range-ful’ identities in the work of Danielle Brathwaite Shirley 　　 Mirella Maria: Decolonial and Heritage Practices in the Context of Current Global Challenges. Quilombola Museology and Digital Technologies in Brazilian Community Museums Sophie Lingg: Caring Curating and Social Media　 Berit Fischer: A Laboratory of Care. Active Micropolitics, Joyfulness and Affectivity 　 Joulia Strauss: Avtonomi Akadimia. Curating becomes Curing Alexandra Kokoli: Care, Aftercare, and the Work of Transmission: Learning from Greenham Common 　 Eliana Otta: Caring for Mourning, Working with Loss. Curating, Listening, and Attending to the Sacred in Peruvian Highlands and Forests Elke Krasny: Care, Thought, Being: Curating with a Wounded Planet 　 Part II. Curating Care Caroline Gausden, Kirsten Lloyd, Nat Raha, and Catherine Spencer: Curating Forms of Care in Art and Activism: A Roundtable on Life Support　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 Helena Reckitt: From Coping to Curious: Unlearning and Reimagining Curatorial Habits of Care Sascia Bailer: Care for Caregivers: 　Curating against the Care Crisis Jacqueline Millner and Zsuzsanna Zsoboszlay: Cultivating Care Ethics and the Minor Gesture in Curatorial and Research Practices Jenny Richards: ‘Do what you do best and outsource the rest’ - Curatorial Lessons within Cultures of Outsourcing 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 Katja Kobolt, Petja Grafenauer, and Brigita Miloš: The Platform of Care: Collective Curatorial Modes of the n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fictions platform 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 Claudia Lomoschitz: Curating Queer Nursing: the performance installation PARTUS Gyno Bitch Tits 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 Magdalena Kallenberger (MATERNAL FANTASIES collective): Curating a Collective Body: a Non-Idealized Concept of Care Johanna Braun: Spellbound. Witchcraft Activism as Caring Curatorial Practice Zahra Khan: Curating Aliveness. Engaging with Ecologies Hansel Sato: La escuela del buen vivir/ The school of good life: counteracting the imperial mode of living

Oksana Briukhovetska (Secondary Archive.org), Magdalena Furmanik-Kowalska (The Polish Institute of World Art Studies, Poland; Fundacja Art & Modern), Małgorzata Jankowska (Academy of Fine Arts Gdańsk, Poland), Olga Plakhotnik (Ethnology Institute of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine;Greifswald University, Germany), Maria Mayerchyk (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Ukraine), Svitlana Biedarieva (Kennan Institute Wilson Center; George Washington University), Kateryna Iakovlenko (Suspilne.media; University College London SSEES), Joanna Dobkowska-Kubacka (University of Łódź, Poland), Veranika Laputska (Graduate School for Social Research, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland), Antonina Stebur (Spaika.media; The International Coalition of Cultural Workers Against the War in Ukraine; Universität der Künste Berlin, Germany; European College of Liberal Art, Minsk, Belarus), Nataliya Tchermalykh (University of Geneva, Switzerland), Jessica Zychowicz (Fulbright Ukraine; Institute of International Education Kyiv office, Ukraine), Agnieszka Graff (American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, Poland), Natallia Paulovich (Independent Researcher, Warsaw, Poland), Iryna Shuvalova (University of Oslo, Norway)

Contents: Essays: 1 Not White, Not Male and Not New York: Race, Feminism and Artists in Pittsburgh Hilary Robinson 2 Activist Intension: Mona Hatoum and Morehshin Allahyari’s Disruptive Bodies Astrid N. Korporaal 3 Activating Agential Collective: Anna Baumgart’s Table Talks—Her-Stories, Solidarity and Feminist Corporeal-Materialism Basia Sliwinska 4 The Absent Image: Resisting the Erosion of Public Trust in Syrian Activists’ Evidential Visuality Mario Hamad 5 Bodies, Sovereignties, Futurities: On Adelita Husni-Bey’s Practice Anastasia Murney 6 Domestic Fronts: Arrangements for Feminist Living, or Survival Is Not a Metaphor Alexandra Kokoli 7 A Care-Full Re-Membering of Australian Settler Colonial Homemaking Traditions Sera Waters 8 Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance: Activating Feral Materiality Paula Chambers 9 When Theodorah Met Dolly: Gender and Visual Activism in Works by Senzeni Marasela Brenda Schmahmann 10 Be-Longing: Filipina Women Artists in Israel Negotiating Self, Body and Place Tal Dekel 11 Women to the Front: Women’s Participation and Visual Activism in Hong Kong’s Protest Movement 2019 Evelyn Kwok 12 !Madres!: Reconfiguring ‘Abducted Motherhood’ in Mónica Mayer’s Personal and Collective Artwork Karen Cordero Reiman 13 Corpo-Affective Politics of Anxious Breathing: On the Agential Force of Bodies and Affects in Vulnerable Protest Magdalena Górska 14 The Revolutionist: Gendered Violence, Black Radical Feminism and the Decolonial Creative Revolution Nomusa Makhubu 15 Fragmented Traces. . . The Tactile Feminist Un-Monuments of Sheila Levrant de Bretteville Caroline Wallace

Elke Krasny and Lara Perry　 Part I: Colonial Wounds and Transformative Healing 1. The Museum and the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief, Planetary Mourning, Healing Feminist Curating Elke Krasny 2. Resisting Extractivism of Wisdom in the Feminist Curatorial Exercise Emilia Quiñones-Otal 3. Feminist Curating as Storytelling and Mothering: The Work of D and Kate Harding Tara McDowell 4. Curating Feminine Alterity: Deconstructing Feminist Strategies by Contemporary Iranian Women Artists Katy Shahandeh 5. Geographies of Community Care: Cultural Spaces curated by Black Womxn in Copenhagen and Vienna Teju Adisa-Farrar 6. In the Spirit of Futura: Daily Practices and Challenges of Producing and Maintaining a Feminist Art Space Katharina Koch 7. Rewriting the Manifesto and Filipina Feminist Publishing Faye Cura Part II. State Hegemony and Resistant Communities 8. 　Human Rights, Memory and Contemporary Artistic Practice in Turkey Eylem Ertürk 9. 　 Stretching the Institution, Cultivating Interdependency: Feminist Curating as Political Organizing in the Post-Crisis Spanish State Carlota Mir 10. Radical Geographies of Feminist Curating within the Post-Yugoslav Space Jelena Petrović 11. Summoning the Witches of the Past: Curatorial Research on Witchcraft in Art & Activism Katharina Brandl 12. Encounters with Asian Diasporic Identities: The Exhibition Neither Black / Red / Yellow Nor Woman at the Times Art Center Berlin Julia Hartmann 13. The Vulva Case: Feminist Art, Digital Obscenity, and Censorship in Japan Hitomi Hasegawa 14. On the Production and Challenging of Sexual Norms through the Art Institution: A Viennese Case Study Juliane Saupe 15. Searching for Ann(e) : Digital Fan Curation and the Expansion of the Queer Heritage Landscape Katelyn Williams　 16. 　 On Common Spaces, Affinity and the Problem of a Torn Social Fabric Dana Daymand and Nika Dubrovsky Part III. Labour Injustice and the Politics of Solidarity　 17. 　Curating as a Collective Process: Feminist, Curatorial, and Educational Perspectives Dorothee Richter 18. 　Your Hands in My Shoes: Reorganizing La Galerie, Centre for Contemporary Art in Noisy-le-Sec Émilie Renard and Vanessa Desclaux 19. Objects of Desire: Curating Sex Worker Art in the 21st Century　 Lena Chen 20. Whose Visibility? Labour Divides, Care Politics, and Strategies of Solidarity in the Art Field Angela Dimitrakaki

Editor: Katy Deepwell

Contributors: Linda Aloysius, Marissa Begonia, Sreyashi Tinni Bhattacharyya, Marisa Carnesky, Paula Chambers, Amy Charlesworth, Emma Curd, Katy Deepwell, Tal Dekel, Emma Dick, Lior Elefant, Christine Eyene, Abbe Leigh Fletcher, GraceGraceGrace, Alana Jelinek, Sonja van Kerkhoff, Alexandra Kokoli, Elke Krasny, Loraine Leeson, Laura Malacart, Rosy Martin, Alice Maude-Roxby, Kathleen Mullaniff, Louise O?Hare, Tanja Ostojic, Martina Pachmanová, Gill Park, Pune Parsafar, Roxane Permar, Anne Robinson, Stefanie Seibold, Pam Skelton, Mare Tralla, Christina Vasileiou, Camille Melissa Waring, Michelle Williams Gamaker, Virginia Yiqing Yang

Design: Lotta Lara Schröder

Series: PLURAL

?Feminisms? (as a plural) is widely used today to draw attention to inequalities and to critique the status quo in limiting women?s roles/ positions/ lives/ potential. Art can offer a vision of future worlds, manifesting a desire for projecting change, playing with existing realities and conventions. Feminist Art Artivism and Activism, two sides of the same coin, arise where art approaches, develops or transforms into activism and vice versa, where activisms become artivisms. In both, art emerges in differing forms of political intervention, at both an individual, shared or collective level, apparent in actions, events, identifications and practices. This volume wants to reveal the diversity of these practices and realities. Representing a range of critical insights, perspectives and practices from artists, activists, curators, academics and writers, it explores and reflects on the enormous variety of feminist interventions in the field of contemporary art, social processes, the public sphere and politics. In doing so, Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms touches upon broader questions of cultural difference, history, class, economic position, ecology, politics, sexual orientation, and the ways in which these intersect.

Richly illustrated with c. 300 black and white illustrations and photos.

"The Right to Truth. Conversations on Art and Feminism" is the collection of interviews with female artists, curators, activists and thinkers of different generations from 7 countries of East and West Europe (Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Poland, Chzechia, France, U.S.) on the current feminist art practices and activism. They present series of personal experiences and ways of inventing new forms of functioning of institutions, as well as reflections on history of feminist art and women emancipation. Participants: Valentyna Petrova, Oksana Briukhovetska, Alina Kopytsa, Victoria Lomasko, Zuzanna Janin, Aleka Polis, Alma Lily Rayner, Rébecca Chaillon, ORLAN, Martha Rosler, Geneviève Fraisse, Feminist Workshop, FemSolution, Irina Solomatina, Sylwia Nikko Biernacka, Zuzana Štefková, Feminist (Art) Institution, Morgane Lory, Isabelle Alfonsi, Flora Katz. Edited by Oksana Briukhovetska and Lesia Kulchynska Design: Oksana Briukhovetska Published by Visual Culture Research Center in collaboration with European Alternatives.

Contributors - Ann Coxon, Victoria Pomery, Sarah Martin, Siri Hustvedt, Marit Paasche, Rosa Martinez, Stina Hogkvist, Anna Ray, Kathryn Lloyd. Artists include Kiki Smith, Susan Hiller, Sheila Hicks, Maureen Hodge, Elisabetta Benassi, Anna Ray, Maria Papadimitriou, Lucy + Jorge Orta, Christiane Lohr and Laura Ford, plus historical artist figures such as Louise Bourgeois, Sonia Delaunay, Anni Albers, Hannah Ryggen, Lenore Tawney and Eva Hesse. Catalogue of Turner Contemporary exhibition, 2017

Contributors: Marina Vishmidt Larne Abse Gogarty & Ellen Feiss Caspar Heinemann Hannah Black Penny Goring Cuntemporary Svenja Bromberg Beatrice Loft Schulz Nasri Shah New Noveta Linda Stupart

Review reproduced from Volume 27, n.paradoxa, Jan 2011. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Vanessa Corby Eva Hesse: longing,belonging and displacement London: IB Tauris, 2010 ISBN: 978-1-84511-544-9

Taking as its point of departure two drawings from 1960/1961, Corby seeks to explore their role as 'bearers of subjectivity' and develop a new reading of Hesse against the climate of her time and the impact of the Holocaust.

Review reproduced from Volume 24, n.paradoxa, July 2009. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Lene Burkard (ed. and curator) Julie Roberts - in retro Odense: Kunsthallen Brandts, 2008 ISBN: 978-8777-66062-7

Lisbeth Bonde, Francis McKee, Lene Burkard and Lars Grambye contribute overviews of Julie Roberts' paintings since the early 1990s when she made her reputation with single, and rather sinister, images - often of hospital equipment - set against large backdrops (reminiscent of the 1990s paintings of Rita Duffy and Lisa Milroy). Since 2000 her painting has looked with increasingly irony at images of The Dead Artist or the Father of Evolution(Darwin); as well as re-examining myths of women's domesticity (1950s style), their nineteenth century art education and their family relationships in two series on the Dysfunctional Family and Girls painting.

Review reproduced from Volume 24, n.paradoxa, July 2009. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Suzanne Treister and Marek Kohn Suzanne Treister: NATO: The Military Codification System for the Ordering of Everything in the World London: Black Dog Publishing, 2008

ISBN: 9-781-906-155 612

This catalogue or extensive album of watercolours, like a mini-enyclopedia, re-deploys NATO bureaucracy's classification of objects in the world around us, as a chilling reminder of our current subjection to C3I, command-control-communcation-intelligence systems (the term used by Donna Haraway in 'Manifesto for Cyborgs'). Treister's project links NATO's codification system with the supply and demand chain of modern consumerism's fetishism for objects and in doing so highlights the origins of many objects as military inventions for a wholly different purpose. However, Treister's work also mimics museum's strategies of collection and display - the built-in obsolence of every "new" design - as each object represented provides sharp historical resonances into different militarised ways of being, dressing, eating, sheltering and caring for or destroying ways of life in the war zones of twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Review reproduced from Volume 20, n.paradoxa, July 2007. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Doina Petrescu (ed) Altering Practices: Feminist Politics and Poetics of Space

London: Routledge, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-41535786-9

This book draws together again contributors from the Alterities conference in Paris in 1999 to offer both reflections on women's practice in architecture and theories of feminine space. Petrescu notes the production of how a new view of women's "altered practices" in these fields has emerged since 1999. The diverse contributors - architects, curators, artists, cultural theorists and architectural historians - discuss the journey to the conference (as a political/ideolgoical conjuncture) as well as the time since in a manner which beings to the fore the shifting definitions and mobilisations of the feminine and feminism(s) in relation to conceptions of space in Europe and the US in the last twenty years. The practices of curating, speaking, writing, drawing, as well as the privileging or prioritising of tasks, or spaces in relationship to practices of the everyday are all discussed in topics as diverse as 'urban curating' (Meike Schalk, Marion von Osten), 'cooking' (Kim Torgal), 'confessional constructions' (Jane Rendall) and 'longing' in the making, planning and building of architectural spaces (in the architectural groups Matrix, muf and Taking Place).

Review reproduced from Volume 22, n.paradoxa, July 2008. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Judith Rugg and Michele Sedgwick (eds.) Issues in Curating Contemporary

Art and Performance Bristol: Intellect, 2007 ISBN: 978-1-84150-162-8

The twelve essays in this book arose from a series of seminars organised by the University College for Creative Arts on the notion of curation as intervention and critical practice. Each contributor offers examples from their own practice while attempting to reflect on more general issues and concerns in curating. While the 'curator's voice' is discussed as a topic by several curators, Liz Wells and Sophia Phoca, generally the essays read as anecdotes and notes about intentions and justifications for curatorial decisions in contrast to the reception of the exhibitions produced. Cate Elwes alone discusses feminist exhibitions but only from her own experiences as an artist-becoming-a- curator (as part of the collective who organised the 1980 ICA shows) to promote her practice alongside that of other women artists. The unevenness of the approaches touch on the problematics of working as a curator funded by the public sector in the UK and the changing goverment imperatives alongside the professionalisation and com-mercialisation of this culture in contrast to that of curators of international biennales, whose work seems to inspire a mixture of awe and jealousy amongst the boys because of its relative absence in this country.

Review reproduced from Volume 20, n.paradoxa, July 2007. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Ruth Ben-Tovim and Trish O'Shea Encounters: The Shop Collections Sheffield, UK: Site Gallery, 2006 ISBN: 1-899926-76-3

This small and interesting catalogue documents the artists' project since 2002 taking over disused shops in Sharrow, and establishing encounters with the local community in an exchange of lost and found objects, memories and organised workshops.

Review reproduced from Volume 19, n.paradoxa, Jan 2007. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Hilary Robinson Reading Art, Reading Irigaray The Politics of Art by Women New York /London: I.B. Tauris, 2006 ISBN: 978-1-86064-953-0

This original and distinctive book outlines the contribution that Irigaray's analyses, structures and strategies can make to rethinking a feminist cultural criticism of contemporary women's art practices. Tropes and strategies from Irigaray's writing are redeployed as potential new frames for reading and understanding a relationship between the properties of physical matter and a sexualised subjective identity. Case studies of individual women artists are built into this analysis, divided as chapters into topics around mimesis; the critique of phallocentrism; morphology; gesture; divine beauty; and mother-daughter genealogies. Artists discussed include: Bridget Riley, Rachel Whiteread, Cynthia Mailman, Yolanda Lopez, Frances Hegarty, Hannah Wilke and Louise Bourgeois.

Review reproduced from Volume 15, n.paradoxa, Jan 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Yve Lomax Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature and Time London: IB Tauris,2005 ISBN: 1 85043 673 8

What constitutes an event? An exploration of this question is the subject of the book. Is an event going to happen, or has it happened already? And did we recognise it as such? Yve Lomax navigates her way through these simple questions, experimenting with voice, situation and dialogue, to more complex theorisations of noise, sound, space, time and modes of recognition; along the way examining statements and theories by Michel Serres, Isabelle Stengers, Maurice Blanchot, Alain Badiou, Jean-Francois Lyotard and others. Her purpose is to reflect on how interpretation operates in photography and how sound, image and text capture an event.

Review reproduced from Volume 16, n.paradoxa, July 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

David Alan Mellor Liliane Lijn: Works, 1959-80 exhibition catalogue Warwick Arts Centre: Mead Gallery, 2005 ISBN: 0-9026837-5-6

This is the first major monograph on Liliane Lijn. Mellor's text focuses on her adult life, outlining the development of her practice as one of Britain's early kinetic sculptors and the circles in which she worked, as well as acting as an extensive and valuable catalogue raisonne.

Review reproduced from Volume 17, n.paradoxa, Jan 2006. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Melanie Keen & Eileen Daly (eds) Necessary Journeys Arts Council of England: Decibel, Blackworld, 2005

ISBN:0-7287-112-5

An arts project about travel and migration in film, photography and writing organised through journeys and residences at the archives of British Film Institute and University of Central England and Birmingham Central Library. New commissions from women artists (33% of those invited) include: Oreet Ashery (Israel/Palestine); Margareta Kern (Bosnia/Herzogovina); Jackie Kay (poet); and susan pui san lok.

Review reproduced from Volume 16, n.paradoxa, July 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Stephen Bode (ed.) Jananne Al-Ani (London: Film and Video Umbrella, 2005) ISBN: 1-90427-014-x

This is a small edition catalogue, published to coincide with the completion of her Film and Video Umbrella commission, Muse (2004) and a touring exhibition of the artist's work. The catalogue documents Al-Ani's practice since 1991 as a photographer and video artist, especially the series of works which feature five women:- the artist, her mother and her three sisters and includes: Echo (1994/2004), A Loving Man (1996/1999), Reel (2001), Cradle (2001), She Said (2000); 1001 Nights (1998); Veil (1997). Against her development of works based around the faces, voices, movement of these five women, Muse initially represents a radical departure as its motif is a single man walking in a desert landscape, but it could also be seen as another extension of her family story - born in Iraq, living in England with an Iraqi father and Irish mother. While Al-Ani's works subtly reference her family history they are never directly autobiographical, they deal instead with the problems of communication; of word-games and story-telling; and of cultural (mis-)representation. The catalogue includes two essays by Angela Weight and Claire Doherty and an interview between the artist and Richard Hylton.

Review reproduced from Volume 15, n.paradoxa, Jan 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Barbara Bolt Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image London: IB Tauris, 2004 ISBN: 1 85043 411 5

This book, by an Australian based writer, is an enquiry into what happens in practice, in the heat of practice as experienced in painting,and sometimes writing, when the work takes on a life of its own. Questioning the interpretative framework in which visual art is only seen as representation, the book mounts a critique of representationalism to try and speak of other qualities in art: light, vision, execution, embodiment, ritual and transference. The ambition is to move towards a materialist ontology about practice, especially the experience where there is an exchange between imaging and reality. To this end she redeploys Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, CS Pierce and Judith Butler, and Paul Carter into her use of the term methexis for practice (to signal something of and beyond the radical material performativity of Indigenous Australian cultural productions).

Review reproduced from Volume 14, n.paradoxa, July 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Rosemary Betterton (ed.) Unframed: Practices and Politics of Women's Contemporary Painting

London: IB Tauris, 2004

ISBN: 1-86064-722-3

An anthology which incorporates artists' perspectives (primarily UK-based) as well as critical readings of some contemporary women's painting practices by UK-based and one Canadian writer.

Contents: Rosemary Betterton: introduction 'Unframing' and an essay on the work of Susan Hiller; Alison Rowley on Virginia Woolf's fictional character, painter Lily Briscoe; Marsha Meskimmon on Judy Watson (from Australia); Joan Borsa on Ann Harbuz (both from Canada). Contributions from artists on their own work include: Barbara Bolt, Partou,Rebecca Fortnum, Pam Skelton, Lubaina Himid, and a dialogue with Rose Lee, Jo Bruton, Beth Harland, Nicky May and Katie Pratt.

Review reproduced from Volume 15, n.paradoxa, Jan 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Penny Florence Sexed Universals in Contemporary Art New York: Allworth Press, 2004 ISBN: 158115 313 9

Focusing on close readings and comparisons of traits in both male and female artists, this book is best summed up by one of its quotations: Penelope Deutscher's 'The point of some contradictory positions is their contradictory status'. The concept of a sexed universal is itself paradoxical and the interpretation slips between concepts of a universal (acknowledged as male, with a view to feminist critique), and Irigaray's ideas of sexual difference (which are not wholly embraced), becoming occasionally a female universal, a feminine universal and sexed as both male and female, with full acknowledgement of social.cultural belief systems. The routes discussed as well as the choices of examples are interesting: Barbara Hepworth is juxtaposed with Constantin Brancusi , Anish Kapoor and Liz Larner; Lynn Lapointe with Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe.

Review reproduced from Volume 14, n.paradoxa, July 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Alicia Foster

Tate Women Artists London: Tate Publishing, 2004 ISBN: 1-85437-311-0

The Tate Collection currently owns works by 316 women artists (11%) compared to the 2,600 men. Very few of these women are represented by more than one work and their works form only 7% of the collection's total. When the Tate opened in 1897 only five of the 253 pictures in the new gallery were by women. Women artists are proportionately better represented in the twentieth century, although the collection has works dating from the seventeenth century. This book documents the presence of women in the collection and offers 250 short portraits of the women artists and their work in this major collection.

Review reproduced from Volume 15, n.paradoxa, Jan 2005. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Natalie Jeremijenko and Eugene Thacker (Biotech Hobbyist)

Creative Biotechnology: A User's Manual Newcastle: Locus +, 2004

ISBN:1 899377 22 0

Divided into two parts, with each contributor framing their own approach to the subject, this is both an instructional manual and an operator warning system for biotech hobbyists. Jeremijenko's discussions are framed by the strange arrest and ongoing prosecution of Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble by US authorities under the mail and wire fraud act, and not anti-terror laws, and what it means for an artist to experiment with "innocent" bio-technological materials in the US, given the current wave of cultural panic about terrorism. While Thacker documents his own biomolecular practice and experiments with language, Jeremijenko seeks to provide a context for working with biological experiments. Her own work includes experiments with artificial skin grafts, micropropogation, test equipment for Milgram's mice, and genetic horoscopes.

Review reproduced from Volume 14, n.paradoxa, July 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Gill Perry (ed.) Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women's Practice

Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. ISBN: 1-4051-1202-6

A new anthology exploring women artists' work, largely in an Anglo-American context, and offering detailed readings and critical analysis of individual projects.

Contents: Gill Perry on 'Visibility, Difference and Excess'; David Hopkins on Martha Rosler and Gillian Wearing; Lisa Tickner on Cornelia Parker; Sue Malvern on Rachel Whiteread; Fionna Barber interviews Alice Maher; Michael Corris and Robert Hobbs discuss Kara Walker; Marsha Meskimmon on Christine Borland; Dorothy Rowe on the performance group, moti roti; Jane Beckett on Lubaina Himid.

Review reproduced from Volume 14, n.paradoxa, July 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Luciana Parisi Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire London: Continuum, 2004 ISBN: 0-8264-6990-6

Abstract sex is proposed as a new model in a bio-digital age for considering the relations between conceptions of sex, femininity and desire. Drawing heavily on the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, Parisi considers the stratification of abstract sex in bio-digital (late twentieth century); bio-cultural (nineteenth century) and bio-physical (3,900 million years ago) layers. Each layer has a corresponding set of definitions and constituent elements: cloning, sexual reproduction and bacterial sex; recombinant desire, pleasure and trading; egg, fluids and mitochondria. The book discusses the impact of bio-technologies in changing how we think of sex and reproduction; disembodiment and embodiment; passive and active roles; mind and body and moves towards a third way out of these dualities, conceiving the autonomy of feminine desire through a thousand modes in a dynamic between and beyond order and mutation.

Review reproduced from Volume 12, n.paradoxa, July 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Marsha Meskimmon Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity,Aesthetics

London: Routledge, 2003 ISBN 0-415-24278-9

The three parts of this book, History, Subjectivity and Aesthetics, present specific case studies of a wide range of women artists/art practices in the context of a general argument about the importance of women's art practice to major themes in art historical/cultural analysis. Although this is clearly a feminist analysis, drawing on a range of theoretical work identified as feminist, the word feminism and any overt mention of feminist reading(s) is underplayed throughout the book and instead the study of women artists is presented as an exhilaration and a danger, providing new epistemes in culture. The book presents some strong comparisons between women artists approaches in different countries to certain themes: for example, in the representations Vietnam in America (Maya Lin, Martha Rosler, Trinh T. Minh-ha); women artists of the Anglophone Africa Diaspora (Faith Ringgold and Sokari Douglas Camp); Janet Lawrence and Fiona Foley and Joan Brassil (Australia); Claude Cahun, Rosy Martin and Cathy de Monchaux. A context for a trans-national comparisons or reference to the specific art world context for the work as it rises to become an object of study for the art historian is not developed. The work is instead located in relation to theoretical propositions and specific histories through detailed readings of certain works.

Review reproduced from Volume 13, n.paradoxa, Jan 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Kate Newton & Christine Rolph Masquerade: Women's Contemporary Portrait Photography Ellipsis Vol. 2: Cardiff: Ffotogallery,

2003. ISBN 1-872771-36-X

The latest photography project from IRIS: International Centre for Women in Photography at Staffordshire University. Contents includes: newly commissioned texts by Mark Durden, Jane Fletcher, Rachel Gear, Paul Jobling, Sandra Matthews, Jane Tormey and Caryn Faure Walker and ten photographic portfolios from the following women artists: Beth Yarnelle Edwards, Catriona Grant, Kathe Kowalski, Laurie Long, Trish Morrisey, Magali Nougarede, Sarah Pucill, Zineb Sedira, Marla Sweeney and Miranda Walker.

Review reproduced from Volume 12, n.paradoxa, July 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Amelia Jones (ed)

The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader London: Routledge, 2003

ISBN: 0-415-26706-4

Divided into seven parts with 62 essays or extracts from articles, this book aims to be another definitive reader for feminist teaching. The introduction and the first section Provocation offer six new essays which examine the current state of feminist scholarship for its biases and the relationship of feminism to visual culture. Amelia Jones insists on the intersecting nature of feminism and visual culture, positioning feminism as central rather than an adjunct or specialist area within visual culture. She also draws a distinction between visual culture and cultural studies based on the former's exclusive concern with visuality. Rosemary Betterton discusses the difficulties of students when faced with artworks from the past, in spite of their considerable skills in reading images from popular culture as part of the shift involved in visual culture when moving from a discipline-based study to interdisciplinary analysis. Jennifer Doyle analyses how homophobia and misogyny continue to structure the art world and our knowledge systems; Lisa Bloom considers how feminism must now attend to how (Western) feminist theories may and may not work in different trans-national locations and consider again their own regional context of operation. Judith Wilson considers the semantics involved in thinking about a black feminist visual theory: positioning the first as a social category; the second a political orientation;the third a mode of perception, a category of cultural phenomena. Interestingly, she positions black women artists as ahead of theoretical research in their practice. Faith Wilding discusses cyberfeminist debates and draws attention not only to the bio-tech industry but the pace of modern industrialised life globally. Meiling Chang concludes by discussing a metaphor for feminism as a pool of colours to which ever more pigments are being added.

The book then divides into parts titled: Representation; Difference; Disciplines/Strategies; Mass Culture/Media Interventions; Body; and Technology. In each section eight to ten essays, primarily from the last three decades are included. Amelia Jones based her selection of Anglophone texts (largely US/UK-based) on tracing a history of theory, selecting canonical articles which each represent a shift in methodology, while maintaining overall a heterodoxy of debates and ideas to reveal the intersection between feminist theory and visual culture.

Review reproduced from Volume 14, n.paradoxa, July 2004. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Robert Pinto, Nicolas Bourriaud, Maia Damianovic Lucy Orta London: Phaidon, 2003 ISBN: 0-7148-4300-8

A new monograph from Phaidon incorporating the usual mixture of essays (including the authors above and Jorge Orta, the artist's husband), interviews (with Paul Virilio), artist's writings and numerous colour photographs. Lucy Orta is a British artist, based in Paris whose work, exhibited mainly in the last decade, crosses the boundaries of public performance, fashion and architecture. Her first major work, Refuge Wear (1992-1996), was launched under the Louvre Pyramid in Paris Fashion Week. Subsequent works offer inter-connecting suits for large scale performances, meals, tents, ambulances and a horti-recycling enterprise, echoing elements from Lygia Clark and Krystof Wodzjicko.

Review reproduced from Volume 11, n.paradoxa, Jan 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Joanna Zylinska (ed) The Cyborg Experiments:the Extensions of the Body in the Media Age London: Continuum, 2002 ISBN: 0-8264-5903-X

Focused on the work of Orlan and Stelarc, (with one essay dedicated to Gillian Wearing), this book offers thirteen different readings of these two artists' work, alongside some comparative analysis of the cyborg, the obsolete body, questions of aesthetics/ethics and self-hybridisation. A short statement on the 'Virtual And/Or Real' by Orlan is also included, alongside essays on her work by Rachel Armstrong, Fred Botting with Scott Wilson, Julie Clarke and Meridith Jones with Zoe Sofia.

Review reproduced from Volume 11, n.paradoxa, Jan 2003. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews: Artist's Books'

Lucy Kimbell Audit London: Bookworks, 2002. ISBN 1-870699-60-2

This witty and intriguing artist's project is based on an audit of the artist's value to friends, family and acquaintances. Sections from the 56 responses to her original questionnaire are Review reproduced, alongside her own analysis of the results. These and her interactions with the respondents are presented in a neat and very polished graphic form. Her own approach is further "audited" by comments from and interviews with official auditors and social analysts. While value is rated primarily in monetary terms, she does attempt to consider her community and environmental worth in the opinions of others. Is this a parable of modern life?

Review reproduced from Volume 9, n.paradoxa, Jan 2002. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Hilary Robinson (ed) Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968-2000 Oxford: Blackwells, 2001 0-631-20850-X

Over 706 pages, with 101 texts by different authors, nine themed and sub-divided chapters and extensive bibliographies, this book is designed as a core text book for anyone researching feminism, feminist theory and feminist art practices in the visual arts. Without any illustrations, it is organised to retrace feminist histories, feminist discourse and the legacy of the women's art movement in a number of countries and to provide valuable teaching material. In this, it will undoubtedly succeed. Hilary Robinson announces the composition of material within the book as 50% from the USA, 25% from UK, 12.5% from Canada, with the remaining texts from Ireland, Australia and previously translated material from Western Europe. The selection concentrates on republishing material from diverse and small publications but includes some key texts which, although they may have been republished before, are included to frame and organise the different sections. The bibliographies point to the many further articles in this field and open up the possibilities for numerous other avenues of research to be pursued in relation to feminist theory and the visual arts in other countries. This academic text book is undoubtedly the most comprehensive anthology of feminist theory/ feminist art criticism about the visual arts to date and, given the publisher, a fitting complement to the marginalisation of feminist ideas in the C. Harrison and P. Wood anthology Art Theory 1900-1990. This publication will do much to establish and secure feminism's contribution to the field of art criticism and art theory in the academy.

Review reproduced from Volume 9, n.paradoxa, Jan 2002. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Uta Grosenick (ed) Women Artists in the 20th and 21st Century

(separate German and English editions) Koln & London: Taschen, 2001 3-8228-5854-4

93 women artists are featured in this book, each with a short profile, a photograph and four or five images of their work. The hidden selection criteria mirrors the other two anthologies discussed (Art and Feminism and Feminism-Art-Theory) in so far as 46 live or work in America, 10 in the UK, 14 in Germany, 17 in other European centres and a further 6 in total from South America, Australia and Japan. As a German book, the inclusion of more German women from both past and present should I hope underline the specific location and histories offered by all three anthologies. The book aims to negotiate the stereotypes of "feminist" and "feminine" and point to a wide-ranging cross-section of different art practices from women artists but does not identify the nature of the feminism in particular artists' projects. The majority of artists chosen have worked in the last twenty years of the twentieth century, with the notable exceptions of some "great women artists": Sonia Delaunay, Natalia Goncharova, Hannah Hoch, Barbara Hepworth, Georgia O'Keefe, Germaine Richier, Frida Kahlo and Lee Krasner. The selection appears premised on a museum and market-led assessment of the value of particular women artists currently. The relationship of their practice to any feminist legacy or art movement is played down. The introduction acknowledges dis-crimination through the last century but paints an uncritical picture of a triumphant chronological march towards increasing numbers of women artists and recognition of their strength and individualism in the twenty-first century.

Review reproduced from Volume 8, n.paradoxa, July 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Germaine Greer The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and their Work London: IB Tauris, 2001 reprint, 1979 ISBN 1 86064 677 8

The republication of this feminist classic is worth noting. While the scholarship in the intervening years has often challenged or expanded its theses on the "obstacles" facing women artists as more in-depth studies of some women discussed from the 10th-early 20th centuries have been undertaken, it nevertheless remains an informative, thought-provoking introduction to the question of women artists' lives and the challenges they faced.

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Home presents Home 2

A DVD published by Jordan UK and Home. A DVD. Artists' performances in the second exhibition/presentation at home, a space in South London set up and run by the artist Laura Godfrey-Isaacs. This DVD features performances, scripts, images & introductory texts from: Bobby Baker, Helena Bryant, Michelle Griffiths, Anna O (Janet Hand & Tessa Speak), Hayley Newman, Clare Roberts, Joshua Sofaer, Gary Stevens, John Seth & Anne Tallentire, Julian Woropay.

Review reproduced from Volume 9, n.paradoxa, Jan 2002. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Klaus Honnef (ed) Melanie Manchot: Love is a Stranger: Photographs 1998-2001

Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2001

3-7913-2532-9

Lavishly and generously illustrated in colour, this book documents several major series by the artist and includes short statements by her on the work. These include Liminal Portraits, frank and beautiful photos of the artist's mother positioned naked against the landscape; For a Moment Between Strangers; The LA Pictures; Gestures of Demarcation; The Fountainbleau Series - a series of double portraits of women based on a painting and several billboard projects. Essays by Janet Hand, Klaus Honnef and Stuart Horodner.

Review reproduced from Volume 9, n.paradoxa, Jan 2002. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Wendy Kirkup Echo catalogue and CD-Rom Newcastle: Locus +, 2001

9-781899-377121

Initally presented as a live satellite broadcast at the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow and the Center for Life, Newcastle upon Tyne, this project, re-presented as a CD-Rom, uses the technology of ultra-sound to map the artist's body and reconsider its internal spaces as a revised atlas of the body. While the piece was being made, the artist became pregnant and her position under ultrasound oscillated between "patient" and "artist", linking as she suggests the realms of semiotic, corporeal and libidinal layers within this work. The catalogue includes essays by the artist, Tom Shakespeare, Eric Laurier and Renee Baert.

Review reproduced from Volume 9, n.paradoxa, Jan 2002. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Pen Dalton

The Gendering of Art Education: Modernism, Identity and Critical Feminism

Buckingham, Philadelphia: Open University, 2001

0-335-19648-9

This is a thoughtful and engaging book for art educators, especially for feminist practitioners trying to re-consider the legacy of modernist practices in the art school and find other models in art education. Retracing the history of modernist art education with a critical feminist perspective and close attention to its gendering of disciplines and practices, Pen Dalton exposes its production of a division of labour in creativity and design methods and approaches. Her reassessment of these strategies and outline of other potential directions, given postmodernism, offers new lines of enquiry and practical ideas for women lecturers teaching in the studio.

Review reproduced from Volume 8, n.paradoxa, July 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Janice Kerbel

15 Lombard St London: Bookworks, 2001 ISBN 1 870699 45 9

Two fantasies sustain this artist's project, the fantasy of absolute control by a bank in maintaining the security of its money and the fantasy of robbing the bank in a classic well-calculated heist. The artist dissects both genres with the precision of the all-seeing, all-knowing detective whose research succeeds in plotting every action, every role and every split second of timing. In clipped and factual report language the actions, diversions and escape plans of the thieves and the security measures of the bank are laid bare. The language, like a court report, is supported by the surveillance-type photos documenting the bank, the guards, the "scene of crime". Is this a capricious reconstruction of what might be, a systems analysis or a master plan? Is the artist a social researcher or an imaginative script-writer for a great escape to the Costa del Sol, home to many famous UK armed robbers?Ah, the seduction of a single "job" (or work of art) which will bring total fame and fortune!

Review reproduced from Volume 8, n.paradoxa, July 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Monica Ross Valentine London: Milch, 2001. ISBN 1 901832 10 4

Part inventory, part dictionary of quotations, this inventive book, with 18 short discreet chapters, interweaves a tale of responses to Raphael's Sistine Madonna (Sistina) with Freud's account of "Dora" (Ida Bauer); women's fascination with images of women with artists' representation of idealised leadership in the Socialist Realism of Soviet Russia. It is a Valentine, a love poem proclaiming desire, in the sense that it attempts to offer a new structure for that desire, through running together and juxtaposing many sources: Walter Benjamin, Lewis Caroll, Magritte, emails and telephone call comments from friends and colleagues. The artist's fascination is mirrored by that of other commentators, psychoanalysts and art historians. The origin of the work of art, the Sistina's impact seemingly undimished by popular reproduction, is mixed with its history in the Soviet Bloc, located in a Dresden collection. While the book is a new work, contained within it, is also another tale, Monica Ross's own fascination and reproduction of motifs from the Sistina in performance and photography, exploring desire, the reproduction of femininity and the question of identification mechanisms.

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Cutting Edge Women's Research Group

Digital Desires: Language, Identity and New Technologies London: IB Tauris, 2000 ISBN 1 86064 575 5

Cyberbodies,cyborgs, cyberfeminism, women's work in/using computers, virtual spaces, artificial life and gendered language/ identities in the digital domain are some of the issues tackled by this book and its numerous contributors. Cutting Edge is based at Westminster University (London) and these papers were given at one of their conferences.

Review reproduced from Volume 3, n.paradoxa, Jan 1999. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Cutting Edge: Women's Research Group (eds) Desire by Design: Body, Territories and New Technologies

London: I B Tauris, 1999 ISBN 1-86064-280-2

A new collection of critical essays by artists, designers, lecturers,curators and critics on women artist's uses of technology and body politics. The book arose from a Cutting Edge conference at University of Westminister.

Contents: Alexa Wright 'Partial Bodies'; Sarah Hember 'Nits and NRTS'; Jane Prophet 'Imag(in)ing the Cyborg'; Jackie Hatfield 'Imaging the Unseeable'; Nicky West 'The Body & the Machine'; Katy Deepwell 'Digital Sampling'; Erica Matlow 'Escape from the Flatlands'; Rosie Higgins,Estella Rushaija,Angela Medhurst 'Technowhores'; Helen Coxall 'Representing Marginalized Groups in Museums'; Uma Patel, Erica Matlow 'What have Science,Design & Technology got to do with Gender?'; Danielle Eubank 'Accumulation of Subleties'; Janice Cheddie 'From Slaveship to Mothership'; Gail Pearce 'A Reflection on Mirror,Mirror'; Jos Boys 'Positions in the Landscape?'; Alex Warwick 'Bodies of Glass'; Marion Roberts 'City Futures'.

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Frances Borzello A World of Our Own: Women as Artists

Thames and Hudson, 2000 ISBN 0 500 23776X

Divided into 6 chapters, each introduced by a 'cast of characters' - either prominent women artists of the day or the subjects of feminist art history and recovery - Borzello spans 500 years of women's art production and examines a wide range of questions about women's self-identity as artists, their survival strategies, issues of representation and changing subject-matter, training and methods. Lavishly illustrated, it is written as an uplifting text of struggle, enthusiasm and enjoyment in their art, against the odds of financial hardship, indifference and discrimination. Given its breadth, it can offer only a limited selection of women, and as a history of women artists it bears comparison with Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race or Linda Nochlin's and Ann Sutherland Harris's Women Artists 1550-1950.

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Liana de Girolami Cheney, Alicia Craig Faxon, Kathleen Russo Self-Portraits by Women Painters

London: Ashgate, 2000

ISBN 1 85928 424 8

The list of "most significant" or interesting women's self-portraits attended to in this book, overlaps the European/American story presented in Borzello's above. The 3 scholars' approach, while less passionate, examine questions of interpretation, identification and attribution in art history from antiquity to the present day.

Review reproduced from Volume 8, n.paradoxa, July 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Fiona Carson and Claire Pajaczkowska Feminist Visual Culture

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000 ISBN 0 7486 1046 4

The 15 chapters of this book point to a range of issues in the UK in fine art, design and mass media. It is a taster to these debates, given the short and very generalised approach and summaries offered and the often unacknowledged and uncritical Anglo-American bias of most arguments presented. It may be ideal for a foundation/first year student entering a degree course in the UK but it is disappointing for fellow professionals. The history of feminism in the UK has been re-routed through the yBA and the subtlety of the distinction between feminist readings and "histories" eroded. This stress may be symptomatic of the UK's current art school culture but it is not enough to argue for the value of the "visual" to feminism nor to launch a new area in what is still known as cultural studies/visual culture.

Review reproduced from Volume 6, n.paradoxa, July 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Catherine Fehily, Jane Fletcher and Kate Newton

I Spy: Representations of Childhood

London: I.B. Tauris, 2000

ISBN 1-86064-384-1

IRIS, the women's photography project at Staffordshire University co-ordinated and developed this lavishly produced and well-illustrated publication with essays by Val Williams, Melissa Benn, Jane Fletcher and Patricia Holland. The work of professional women photographers from the US, UK and Ireland, Caroline Molloy, Cath Pearson, Catherine Fehily and Wendy Ewald, is Review reproduced alongside photographs by children from the Holly Street Public Art Trust where children document their own experience of childhood alongside the adult view of either a remembered childhood or their own children. The essays in the book touch on the controversy surrounding Sally Mann's photographs; the work of women and feminist photographers in their real and reconstructed photographs of childhood and the problematic questions surrounding distinguishing a paedophilic gaze or exploitation of children from a more positive representation of children's lives in photography, given the widespread concern today about child abuse.

Review reproduced from Volume 6, n.paradoxa, July 2000. Elaine Kowalsky 'Book Reviews'

Video Loupe: a collection of essays by and about the videomaker and critic Catherine Elwes KT press, 2000 ISBN 0 9536541 0 9

When there is currently a renewed attempt in the UK to bring to a new audience/generation the ideas and work from the 1970s, as evident in the Whitechapel exhibition Live in Your Head, the publication of Video Loupe is apt and timely. It is significant in two respects: firstly, because we still have a society, that for all its liberal ideology, finds issues raised from the feminist perspective both marginal and irksome - in fact, not just the issues but the very idea of feminism itself - and secondly, because it is a small one-woman publisher who offers us the republished works of this feminist artist/writer.

Years ago, realising that nobody was going to review her work with any clarity and understanding the issues raised in her work and others like her, Catherine Elwes began to write about video and performance work,in particular, that of women. Elwes sets the agenda herself with the statement:

'Performance, independent film and video all contributed to the critical, counter-culture environment of the 1970s and the early 1980s, but it was the existence of feminist politics as an active force within society that convinced me I could exploit video as a vehicle for my creativity from a gendered position.'

Her first published letter to Art Monthly in 1981, for example, outlines the failings in a review of two shows by women, Women's Images of Men, and the show of women artists at the ACME gallery in Shelton Street, and is a brilliant and systematic criticism of the lack of any understanding about what was actual being shown. From then on, one notes that Elwes's own writing was published more often in the magazine. How could they refuse? She said it all so clearly and the questions, raised in her reviews and essays, still need to be asked today.

The strength in Elwes' writing comes from her ability to locate the work she reviews in a broader context, outlining its historical background and contrasting it with other works to bring out many pertinent issues and ideas, especially in relation to a feminist schedule. In her reviews of primarily video works, she notes quite clearly the pitfalls of narcissism inherent in the medium and the lack of any political agenda in many of today's artists' work. She is able to negotiate with some clarity the work of the new generation of yBa's (young British artists) performance work and installations in relation to the previous generation. It is the lack of a political agenda, she notes, that sets the work of older women artists apart and gives their work bite. The message is simple "Know your history! Or we are doomed to keep reinventing the wheel!"

I often look at young women artists today, as a teacher and as an older woman, and I am proud of their confidence and the ideas in the work that they do, but I am aware how few reviews of their work link it to women's art history or a feminist perspective. Too often women artists start discussions around relevant issues with the opening statement 'I am not a feminist but…' in order to distance themselves from the negative associations that have been placed on feminism. However despite my enjoyment of her writing, I am critical of how the book is constructed, as it would have flowed better without the reviews of Elwes' 'wn video work which the book also documents. These selected reviews do not enhance her reputation as an artist or add to what she has to say as a critic. With the exception of the commissioned introduction essays that frame the context of the book, the writing on her work is redundant and does her no favours. If anything it muddies the waters and weakens the overall structure and flow. In contrast the essays by Lisa Steele, Jeremy Welsh and Julia Knight have an intellectual weight and clarity that compliment and extend an understanding of her work.

I read sections of the book to my evening students. A good thought provoker for them was 'Women and Technoculture','first published in Variant. The excitement of the ensuing discussions and debate amongst them was revealing. They also enjoyed her analysis with Jacqueline Morreau of the show Women's'Images of Men. I dug out the catalogue of the show from my collection and brought it to the next class. It was well received. But the longest debate and ensuing discussion came out of her letter to Art Monthly called 'Feminism & Political Elitism' 'p. 43). Too often when feminist ideals are mentioned, minds are turned off. The popular press in the UK has done a very good job of trivialising the whole feminist agenda. Yet the same issues are still very alive, as was illustrated by my evening students, who from their diverse social and economic backgrounds, debated and understood quite clearly what she had to say. They found the ideas exciting, pertinent and applicable to their own life experiences. I say this in all seriousness, for after reading this new book on her writings and her work, one is left with the desire that more people should know about it.

Review reproduced from Volume 6, n.paradoxa, July 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Yve Lomax Writing the Image: An Adventure with Art and Theory

New York: I.B.Tauris, 2000

ISBN 1-86064-474-0

Part experiment in prose/poetry, part theoretical investigation of Michel Serres, Deleuze, Benjamin and theories of representation, vision and ideology, Yve Lomax's book reads like an artist's notebook or a diary and a treatise. Her writing practice closely mirrors her work and it is unfortunate that so few - and such poor - reproductions were included, though those that were, form important visual interludes within the space of the book. Irit Rogoff introduces and then intervenes to break up Yve Lomax's considered and intriguing mediations on the problems of representation, the artistic/ personal quest for knowledge and understanding, the attempts to develop critique within feminist practice and the frustrations and intellectual challenges of such work. This is an important book for artists and theorists as it reveals much about how theory mixed with experience becomes slowly absorbed into an individual's thought processes.

Review reproduced from Volume 8, n.paradoxa, July 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Liz Wells, Kate Newton & Catherine Fehily Shifting Horizons: Women's

Landscape Photography Now London: IB Tauris, 2000 ISBN: 1 86064 635 2

The first in a series of 5 planned volumes on women and contemporary photography, under the series title Ellipsis, from Iris, Women's Photography project at Staffordshire University, building on the work undertaken already in I Spy (I.B.Tauris) and Nexus (Scarlet Press, six volumes 1997-1999) and their website. Includes short essays by Liz Wells, John Stathatos, David Bate, Stevie Bezencenet, Martha Langford, Roberta McGrath, Sue Swingler on 12 women contemporary photographers whose theme is landscape. Includes artists' statements and is lavishly illustrated in colour.

Review reproduced from Volume 7, n.paradoxa, Jan 2001. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Angela Dimitrakaki, Pam Skelton, Mare Tralla (eds)

Private Views: Spaces and gender in contemporary art from Britain and Estonia

London: Women's Art Library, 2000

This forthcoming publication extends the issues explored in the British /Estonian exhibition held in 1999 called Private Views. Essays by the editors, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Barbi Pilvre, Aoife MacNamara, Katrin Kivmaa, Joanne P Sharp and Tiziana Terranova explore the impact of new media, feminism in and across an East/West divide and art education.

Review reproduced from Volume 5, n.paradoxa, Jan 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Valerie Connor (ed) Anne Tallentire

Dublin: Project Press,1999. ISBN 1-872-493-14-9

Anne Tallentire represented Ireland at Venice this year. This book, commissioned by the Project Centre, Dublin, offers through interesting essays and documentation, a view of her past 10 years work as a photographer/video artist. Contributors include Jean Fisher, Sabina Sharkey and Tallentire's occasional collaborator, John Seth.

Review reproduced from Volume 5, n.paradoxa, Jan 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Verdi Yahooda Principle of Uncertainty

Cardiff: Howard Gardens Gallery, 1999. ISBN 0-9515777-3-5

A juxtaposition, a diptych, a re-alignment of different viewpoints - these are some of the ways Verdi Yahooda plays with the space of the page and photographic viewpoints in this artist's book/exhibition catalogue. The subject is an archaeology of history and memory guided by the questions: what does the photo of a place, a face from the past, an uncovering of the past reveal for the present?

Review reproduced from Volume 6, n.paradoxa, July 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Short Book Reviews'

Suzanne Treister No Other Symptoms: Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky London: Black Dog Publishing, 1999 ISBN 1-901033-66-X

The pleasure of this publication lies in exploring the CD-Rom included with the book, an artwork, developed in Australia and the UK, which has also been exhibited in various forms as a multimedia installation. While the book prompts the viewer to track down all the multiple layers of this work, in its many unforeseen and surprising links, video-clips and virtual spaces and to trace the intriguing story of Treister's fantasy character Rosalind Brodsky. Her scientific experimentation in time travel was developed at the fictional IMATI (the Institute of Milltronics and Advanced Time Interventionality in South London) and is sparked by her encounter with Kristeva. As a consequence of her work she can travel to meet Freud, Klein, Lacan and Jung, while developing her innovative vibrators for a variety of ideological tastes. Bodsky's intervention in history occurs as she participates in the Russian Revolution and returns to Poland in the 1940s trying to trace Treister's real grandmother, Rosalind Blom. The viewer locked into Brodsky's study by a protest outside the institute has no option but to explore the space, browse her diary and personal effects, and operate the time machine to follow Brodsky on her adventures…

Review reproduced from Volume 5, n.paradoxa, Jan 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Anne Lydiat lost for words...

UK: Artists' Publication, 1999. ISBN 0-9535604-0-6

Orders: Tel: + 44 (0) 114 2517334.

Inspired by a quote from Maurice Blanchot's Traces/ L'Amitie, the pages of this artist designed book open up a space for reflection, meditation. The promise remains Blanchot's 'space of reserve and friendship.' And it's up to the audience to chose its uses. - Review reproduced from Volume 5, n.paradoxa, Jan 2000. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Anne Lydiat Without

UK: Artists' Publication, 1999 ISBN 0-9535604-0-7

Published on the occasion of her recent exhibition at Sint Elisabeth Begijnhof, Kortrijk, this limited edition was integral to the organisation of the exhibition. Playing on negative and positive marking of space - the theme of her exhibition as a whole - the pages are marked by a cutout of a single Acer leaf found at the Beguinage in the preparation for the exhibition, echoing the contemplative silence of the place itself.

Review reproduced from Volume 2, n.paradoxa, July 1998. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Alison Marchant Living Room London:Working Press, 1998 ISBN 1 870736 40 0

This artist's book, dedicated to the people of Holly Street in East London, contains interviews and documentation of the changing face of this large housing estate since it was built in the late1950s and redeveloped in the late 1960s. However, it is far from a straightforward oral history of a place nor is it a simple tale of urban regeneration given further change in the 1990s and its impact on a population. Holly Street Estate is a one of the largest housing estates in East London, which is at a new moment of transition in a redevelopment to give one of the horrors of mass building, its "snake blocks"of corridorsand walkways which became increasingly identified with crime and deprivation, a new face lift for the next century. The juxtaposition of the voices of those in their 80s who remember the estate as it was first built, which they felt offered dreamhousing when compared to Victorian tenant housing or slums, to the voices of relative new immigrants to the estate whose lives are about to be marked by 'decanting' and rehousing is very poignant in the cross-section of residents interviewed. Holly Street because of the notorious collapse of Rowan Point one of the four large tower blocks which occupy the heart of the estate has been the subject of over 100 oral history books-produced through the project Centreprise- in the last thirty years. The book's overlaying of images of the council plans, of family photographs, of corners within the estate highlight the shifting face of the estate in a different register. Conceived as an artist's book rather than a piece of oral 'history' Marchant attempts to shift the gaze from social problems and into an exploration of space and its negotation implicit in the title 'Living Room'.

Review reproduced from Volume 3, n.paradoxa, Jan 1999. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Katy Deepwell (ed) Women Artists and Modernism Manchester: Manchester University Press,1998.

USA: St Martin's Press. ISBN 0-7190-5082-0

A new anthology in which each essay offers a different feminist methodology through which to explore questions concerning women artists and modernist art histories.

Contents: Rosemary Betterton on women artists, modernity and suffrage, in UK and Germany, 1890-1920; Jane Beckett & Deborah Cherry on women, metropolitan culture and vorticism; Pauline de Souza on gender and representation in the Harlem Renaissance; Bridget Elliott on Romaine Brooks and Gluck's 1923 portraits of eachother; Susan Platt on Elsabeth MacCausland; Katy Deepwell on Hepworth and her critics; Nedira Yakir on women in the St Ives Group; Moira Roth 'Talking Back' with Marcel Duchamp; Joanna Frueh on 'Women's Bane,Women's pleasure' ; Hilary Robinson on Irigaray's re-valuings; Renee Baert on 'Desiring Daughters.'

Review reproduced from Volume 2, n.paradoxa, July 1998. Katy Deepwell 'Book Reviews'

Derek Birdsall & Bruce Bernard (eds) intro: John McEwen.

Evelyn Williams:Works and Words London: Omnific,1998. ISBN 0 9532316 0 7

In spite of the introduction, and its two male editors, this book is dominated by the juxtaposition of Evelyn Williams' own words - drawn from her writings since 1990 - and large good-quality reproductions of her figurative sculptures, reliefs, drawings and paintings in the last twenty-six years. John McEwen seeks to position her solely in a long line of humanist, expressionist, figurative (all male) painters, poets and sculptors. It is as if, apart from one mention of the novelist Fay Weldon because it is the title of one of her paintings, women artists or feminism had no impact on this artist's life or the decisions she has taken and the what she treats her subjects. Yet, Evelyn Williams' subject is, in the tradition of expressionism coupled with a visionary tradition from Blake, the relationship of the artist to society, the individual to the mass and it is centred in a projection of that vision to the world through witnessing exterior emotion in physical gestures. In Evelyn's world, close interpersonal relationships of mother to daughter, and between lovers and friends form a major thread in her work. But there is another side to her work, that of the large group drawings of the mid-1980s where oppression, torture, imprisonment, images of mass demonstrations or repetitive conformity dominate. It is these qualities which make for a remarkable body of work and provide the interest in her accounts of incidents, decisions and objectives found in her work and words.

Review reproduced from Volume 1, n.paradoxa, Jan 1998. Katy Deepwell 'Short Reviews of New Publications' - The fifteen essays in this book highlight the question of difference - social, sexual, cultural, political differences - experienced both generationally and geographically in the work of women artists and the attention to difference in feminist readings of women's work.

Contents: Mieke Bal essay is called 'Reading Art?', Elisabeth Bronfen writes on Hysteria, Irma & Cindy Sherman', Irit Rogoff on 'Gossip as Testimony', Nanette Salomon on Hidden agendas and 'The Venus Pudica', Alison Rowley on Jenney Saville as feminist painting practice, Michelle Hirshhorn on the French artist Orlan, Judith Mastai on 'The Anorexic Body' in Canadian installation art, Lubaina Himid (artist's pages), Rosemary Betterton on Paula Modersohn-Becker and Kather Kollwitz (also in Betterton above), Young-Paik Chun on the work of Re-Hyun Park, Catherine de Zegher on Cecilia Vicuna, Brenda LaFleur on Jin-Me Yoon, Anna Raine on Ana Mendieta, Hagiwara Hiroko on Shimado Yoshiko, Griselda Pollock on Bracha Lictenberg Ettinger.

Review reproduced from Volume 1, n.paradoxa, Jan 1998. Katy Deepwell 'Short Reviews of New Publications' - This book contains documentation and interviews about Susan Hiller's work as a multi-media artist from 1973 to the present. The book has been produced through a collaboration between Susan Hiller and Barbara Einzig and foregrounds the idea of art as epistemology : a lens through which we can view the grounds of culture and knowledge formations. Hiller's interests and her work as an anthropologist are discussed ; alongside her interest in automatism, shamanism : language, sex and death against the legacy of conceptualism, a critique of representation and specifically scientific forms of empiricism.

1. Inside all Activities: The Artist as Anthropologist ; 2.Within and Against : Women Being Artists; 3.Fragments of A Forgotten Language:Automatism,Dream,Collective Reveries; 4. Working Through Culture: Convetions of Seeing; 5.Objects as Events Extended Over Time:Nature as Representation 6.Art and Knowledge: A Critique of Empiricism.

Review reproduced from Volume 1, n.paradoxa, Jan 1998. Katy Deepwell 'Short Reviews of New Publications' --- This book brings together ten years of Rosemary Betterton's writing on women artists : including conference papers, catalogue essays and articles. She describes the process of constructing the book as a 'gathering and reusing' of ideas : setting up an opposition between women's processes of working (parallel to their practice of patchwork) and the masculine model of academic 'mastery'. Feminism's 'central project of reframing and re-fashioning the body within a feminist politics of sexual difference' is, in her own words, central to the diverse areas she explores across the 20th Century. The idea of 'embodiment' plays a central role in the analysis she adopts, located at different historical moments and mapped in terms of conflicting ideologies in specific debates.

Chapters : 1. 'An Intimate Distance: Women,Artists and the Body'; 2. 'Mother Figures:The Maternal Nude in Kathe Kollwitz & Paula Modersohn-Becker' ; 3. ' "A Perfect Woman" : The Political Body of Suffrage ; 4. 'Bodies in the Work :The Aesthetics and Politicis of Women's Non-Representational Painting' : 5. 'Life and A.R.T:Methaphors of Motherhood and Assisted Reproductive Technologies': 6. 'Body Horror? Food (and Sex and Death) in Women's Art' : 7. 'Identities,Memories & Desires: The Body in History'.

This over-view of the book is an extract from the general introduction of New Feminist Art Criticism : Critical Strategies (St Martins / Manchester University Press, 1995) by Katy Deepwell - The five sections of the book address what have emerged as important areas for feminist criticism and art practice in the late 1980's. Within each section, the contributors foreground a different set of questions for the development of feminist strategies in the 1990's. Different perspectives on the sites, strategies and positions of contemporary women artists emerge as each outlines their own particular position.

The impact of post-structuralist theories has undoubtedly had an effect in transforming the terms of feminist debate since the early 1980's. The majority of the contributors make reference to the ways in which both criticism and the relationships between theory and practice have been transformed by interest in French feminism, deconstruction, theories of the subject, and critiques of narratives of history and the boundaries between disciplines.

In the first section, Between Theory and Practice, Janet Wolff identifies an impasse in feminist art criticism with divisions into essentialist and anti-essentialist camps; for and against theory. She considers the implications of current critical theory for feminist practice in overcoming such binary oppositions and the inadequacy of such binary oppositions to classify and debate women artist's work. Gilane Tawadros analyses how the 'postmodern' analysis of identity is neatly identical to contemporary black women artists' analysis of the narratives of history in their practice. Moira Roth's analysis of Sutapa Biswas' project 'Synapse' offers her own account of the mutual recognition and challenge presented to her by the artist in terms of a post-colonialist encounter. Roth's account seeks to situate and question her own responses to Biswas's work as much as it presents the artist's explanation of her own approach.

In the gap between theory and practice, there is the role played by institutions in validating and maintaining particular ideas, values and beliefs. Frances Borzello examines the institutional constraints upon the appearance and circulation of feminist ideas from a publishers perspective. She examines how little mainstream art writing is devoted to women artists, be it in newspaper reviews, art and literary journals and magazines, catalogue essays, T.V. and Radio etc.. Feminist perspectives,she argues, in art criticism occupy a still smaller area of coverage within these spaces. The period 1985-1988 saw a flurry of publications in Britain on this topic e.g. Gisela Ecker's Feminist Aesthetics (Women's Press,1985);Hilary Robinson's Visibly Female (Camden Press,1987),Rosika Parker & Griselda Pollock's Framing Feminism (Pandora/Routledge,Kegan and Paul,1987); Leslie Saunder's Glancing Fires (Women's Press,1987) and G.Elinor et alWomen and Craft (Women's Press,1988). There have also been two specialist magazines published over this period (1987-1992), Women's Art Magazine (formerly WASL Journal,now Make) and Feminist Art News which have worked hard to initiate new debates about women's art practice. However, since 1988, only three other books on feminist art practice have been published in the UK: Janet Wolff's Feminine Sentences (Routledge,Kegan and Paul,1990); Wendy Beckett's Contemporary Women Artists(Phaidon,1988) and Maud Sulter's Passions (Urban Fox Press,1990). Borzello's argument raises the important questions about access to writing about women in the visual arts as well as the inaccessibility or not of certain forms of academic debate.

The section concludes with two contrasting essays about feminist interventions in the culture of another major institution, the art school. Val Walsh provides an outline of a potential framework for feminist teaching while Pen Dalton's piece questions the underlying models from developmental psychology on which much 'modernist' studio teaching since 1945 is based in an attempt to lay bare the male bias in teaching practices.

In Curatorship and the Art World two gallery directors, Maurenn Paley (Interim Art) and Elizabeth Macgregor (Ikon Gallery) present how they see the pleasures and pitfalls of their respective positions in the commercial and public sectors. The art world and the role of public and commercial exhibitions is a further piece of the institutional structure of the art world. How to intervene as a feminist and initiate change is a question which all the contributors in this section explore.

From her experience as curator of touring exhibition The Subversive Stitch Pennina Barnett analyses audience reaction to the contemporary work selected. She argues that although the show attempted to renegotiate definitions of art/craft, feminine/feminist, much of the press reception and audience reaction remained trapped within more conventional critical categories, closing down on the debates which the exhibition aimed to initiate. How women negotiate making and exhibiting their work in gallery and non-gallery settings is explored by Debbie Duffin's analysis of her own and other artist's exhibiting strategies. Both Debbie Duffin and Fran Cottell argue against the idea that the artist waits to be discovered by the dealer but must actively seek and make choices about the context and display of their work. Fran Cottell's piece offers her own experience of exhibition across painting,performance and installation, highlighting the ways in which she renegotiated her practice to meet new audiences.

The marginalisation of women's concerns and the handling of the presentation of their work when it deals with controversial subjects are analysed by the three contributors in On the Question of Censorship. Anna Douglas's discussion of the pre-emptive removal of one of Deanna Petherbridge's works from a solo exhibition highlights the misconceived pressures of institutional prejudices in the public sector by employing Annette Kuhn's theorisation of censorship as regulation. In Douglas's argument the actual content of the work made by the artist becomes an irrelevance because of the troubled reception of the 'politically' charged signifier in its title when the work travels from a private gallery to a public gallery. By contrast, in Naomi Salaman's chosen examples it is purportedly the 'sexual' content of the work which underlies the removal of works from sale or exhibition in her three case studies. Sally Dawson pursues a very different argument, aligning censorship with the taboo on women's perspectives which discrimination in our culture enforces, she presents the work of four women who address different aspects of women's experience and history. These works are not 'censored' in the conventional sense of removed, not displayed, not seen but they address areas of women's social and political experience which appear 'censored' by a patriarchal culture.

The Engagement with Psychoanalysis addresses the impact of one of the most powerful influences on feminist art practice here in the late 1980's. The legacy of Lacan is surplanted by the impact of Irigaray and Kristeva. As Christine Battersby's piece argues the adoption of psychoanalytic terms and models,specifically from Luce Irigaray, may prove fraught for feminist art practice if we do not address these writers' own analyses of the place of painting. Hilary Robinson enthusiastically demonstrates how critical terms from psychoanalysis have enabled a rethinking of representation of the body and how it has been used as the starting point for a broad range of women artists producing work in the late 1980's as well as for new critical readings of their work. Joan Key with reference to her own practice presents how pyschoanalysis, particularly Kristeva's discusssion of the abject and the repression of the maternal body, provides a position for painting which addresses the physicality of colour. A very different approach is offered by Mary Kelly who provides a discussion of 'Historia' the fourth and last section of her project Interim which analyses the attitudes of women aged 45-55 to their body,money,power and history as the 1968 generation involved in women's liberation. In this section of 'Interim',Kelly questions what is at stake in how a subject positions itself historically: particularly how a feminist identifies a particular 'ideal' moment of radicalism (1968) only to be challenged by the different perspectives of a younger generation. Kelly approaches Kristeva's analysis of 'Women's Time' and redeploys Foucauldian ideas of history as a form of genealogy and archeology in relation to her continuing critique and dialogue with Lacan concerning femininity and the construction of women's identity, evident in the other sections of both Interim ('Corpus','Pecunia', and 'Potestas') and Post-Partum Document.

The shifting definitions of practice and the employment of new theoretical frameworks from 'post-stucturalist' theories of language, deconstruction and decoding are taken up again in Janis Jefferies piece which introduces the last section, Textiles,linking it back to but extending in a different direction the analyses provided by J.Wolff, G.Tawadros, and H.Robinson. Textiles situation on the boundaries, at the margins, as a 'hybrid', in the relationship between text/textile and the use of metaphors from embroidery and weaving provides the diversity of practices within this field with a specific relationship to postmodern debates. The position of textiles both in and out of the fine art or craft arenas (see P.Barnett also), crossing and at the same time challenging hierarchies and definitions, myths and ideologies, in both theory and practice are explored here in relation to the work of individual women artists and debates from the 1970's on the revaluation and transformation of 'traditional crafts' with radical feminist messages. Ann Newdigate, Dinah Prentice and Ruth Scheuing each present their own practice in the context of these debates, demonstrating how through tapestry, piecing, and weaving respectively, the artist works to undo politics and patriarchal myth-making while creating feminist work.

This article was first published by Katy Deepwell in Women's Art Magazine, April/May 1996. p.29-30 and discusses Parveen Adams The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Difference (London & New York: Routledge, 1996) ISBN 0-415 04622-X and Liz Wells (editor) Viewfindings: Women Photographers:'Landscape' and Environment (W.England: AvailableLight,1994) ISBN 1-899457-00-3

These two books provide an opportunity to discuss and compare two divergent trends within feminist art criticism : one, the presentation of contemporary women artist's work and the other, the feminist critique of the mechanisms at stake in the representation of gendered representations (not necessarily or exclusively produced by women). What interests me is the contrast represented by these two approaches : Liz Wells foregrounds women artists' actual work, the photographs themselves, emphasising women's political and multicultural diversity ; Parveen Adams offers a singular and consistent feminist critique within a primarily Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, a perspective developed and revised in relation to an encounter with specific artworks. The Emptiness of the Image presents papers written by Parveen Adams since 1987 and offers a very specific feminist critique of psychoanalytic concepts (e.g. hysteria, identification,voyeurism, castration) in order to discuss how psychoanalysis might by applied to analyse individual artworks by both male and female artists, including Francis Bacon, Della Grace, Mary Kelly and Orlan. Liz Wells' Viewfindings is a very different kind of book which presents the work of 13 women photographers to demonstrate the diversity of contemporary approaches to the questions of woman, 'nature'; landscape and enviroment. It is framed by a short, albeit revised and extended, essay offering a social-historical context by Liz Wells entitled 'Reframing Landscape' which was published in a different form by Women's Art Magazine in 1993/4. Although the strength of Liz Wells' book is invested in the visual reproductions in colour of the photographic work and complemented by short statements and one interview with one of the artists, this is not the case in Parveen Adams' book where reproductions are few and far between and confined to black and white. Does the presentation itself indicate two divergent audiences for these books? Strong visual images often attract artists to borrow, read or buy books where the artwork is mainly presented rather than books where verbal analysis is the principal issue and the books 'look' academic. This is not to say that either book falls into the trap of presuming the works 'speak for themselves' nor the opposite where the analysis is so overdetermined as to limit any other form of possible enagagement in the work, but it is to point to a common split reproduced in art publishing where books of art criticism , which are neither catalogues from exhibitions nor monographs, have generally poor reproductions, particularly those with feminist content. Liz Wells' book was made with the assistance of the Arts Council in order to develop the generally high production values, whereas Routledge, Parveen Adams' publisher, rarely publishes colour plates in its art history series, even as it maintains an orthodox stranglehold on publication of certain forms of academic research.

As a feminist strategy for making women's work more visible and to frame it within a coherent and graspable way in a new field of enquiry where little has been published, Liz Well's book is highly effective but I regret that each artist does not receive a more detailed critical analysis even as I recognise the role of the book in distributing women's photography to a wider audience. Women's work needs not just physical visibility but also the assistance of extended critical discussion. While Liz Wells properly seeks to problematise 'landscape' as a category, I wanted to read more in-depth analysis of how particular women photographer's had in the late 20th Century defined their subjects' relationship to property, territory, entrepreneurship, class, racism, Imperialism, and patriarchy (like Ingrid Pollard's Pastoral Interlude or Stevie Bezencenet Right of Passage or Roshini Kempadoo's Trans-formations portfolio which are reproduced). In a world where women's activities are almost 'automatically' subject to a failure to recognise the positions from which women speak or to give credibility to anything they have to say, the need for commentary becomes all the more important. Contrary to the frequent misapprehension that this detracts from the work, or that critical analysis may destroy the work, in-depth criticism may actually provide a means of access to the project of the artist. Comparisons between artists may also offer a means to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the work itself and this is the very difficulty and tension between representing the necessary diversity of women's art practice in relation to the questions of photography and landscape and framing adequately beyond the categories of 'Margins'; 'Territories'; 'Image, Metaphor, Myth' which Liz Wells offers. Liz Wells is also the editor of Photography: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 1996 ISBN 0-415-12559-6) : a valuable teaching text to introduce photography's history and theory.

Perhaps these comments about further critical work are also prompted by the contrast with Parveen Adams' work, where a very different strategy is operating. Here an individual artists' work acts as a prompt, a vehicle for elaborate investigations about pyschoanalytic concepts and their adequacy to address fully how identificatory mechanisms within artworks produce meaning. Her enquiries are refreshingly readable amongst work in this field. What is productive here is the way that both the operations of artwork and / or text and the psychoanalytic concepts themselves are subjects of her questioning. For, Parveen Adams has generally avoided what has become an unfortunate tendency in some art historical texts which employ psychoanalysis is that the artwork is discussed only where it fits a pre-existing pyschoanalytic framework without subjecting that framework to any questioning. Parveen Adams has instead opened up how an encounter with a work might prompt reflection of both psychoanalysis and artistic strategies. However, there is one essay where this is not the case, and this concerns the analysis of Catherine Mackinnon's text on pornography in terms of sadism. The possibility of this as a deliberate polemical strategy in political life is dismissed in order to demonstrate the violence inflicted on the reader by the text itself . The comparison of this strategy to those of other pornographic or sadistic writers strikes me as hopelessly inadequate as a means of critiquing the logic of the text and its accurately observed conflation of reality and representation. This is not to say, I support Mackinnon's position but my criticisms of it arise because of the civil legislation which follow from her critique and whether or not these are workable in any state. This is where the more subtle and absorbing sense of possibilities and rereadings offered in the other essays (like chapters on 'Of female bondage' and 'Per (os)cillation') dissolves into a very specific problem for feminists : i.e. how social and political demands for social change can be critiqued by psychoanalytic processes which reflect upon actions and events to reveal and revise psychoanalysis itself rather than to structure new forms of political or social activity. Is it coincidence that this is the only essay jointly written in the book, and with Mark Cousins? By contrast, her reading of Mary Kelly's Interim is really intriguing and insightful in terms of the ways in Lacan's ideas about discourse (including the discourses of Master, University, Hysteric, and Analyst) are deployed to reflect upon the relation of textuality and interpretation: specifically how the same question can mean and imply different things in different situations. Parveen Adams explores how 'Interim gives us the place of the object petit a at the limit of the image' (p.84) , representations which both interrogate the object of desire and interrupt the movement of desire on the part of the spectator in his/her misrecognition of the object : a relation of transference which refuses the discourse of the Master. The essays on the horror provoked by the operations of the French performance artist Orlan and her analysis of Della Grace's 'The Three Graces' in relationship to a lesbian Phallus are also thought-provoking readings.

While these two books may represent two divergent trends in feminist publishing , they nevertheless are both significant and desirable books to read.

This article was first published by Katy Deepwell in Women's Art Magazine, April/May 1996. p.29-30 and discusses Parveen Adams The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Difference (London & New York: Routledge, 1996) ISBN 0-415 04622-X and Liz Wells (editor) Viewfindings: Women Photographers:'Landscape' and Environment (W.England: AvailableLight,1994) ISBN 1-899457-00-3

These two books provide an opportunity to discuss and compare two divergent trends within feminist art criticism : one, the presentation of contemporary women artist's work and the other, the feminist critique of the mechanisms at stake in the representation of gendered representations (not necessarily or exclusively produced by women). What interests me is the contrast represented by these two approaches : Liz Wells foregrounds women artists' actual work, the photographs themselves, emphasising women's political and multicultural diversity ; Parveen Adams offers a singular and consistent feminist critique within a primarily Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, a perspective developed and revised in relation to an encounter with specific artworks. The Emptiness of the Image presents papers written by Parveen Adams since 1987 and offers a very specific feminist critique of psychoanalytic concepts (e.g. hysteria, identification,voyeurism, castration) in order to discuss how psychoanalysis might by applied to analyse individual artworks by both male and female artists, including Francis Bacon, Della Grace, Mary Kelly and Orlan. Liz Wells' Viewfindings is a very different kind of book which presents the work of 13 women photographers to demonstrate the diversity of contemporary approaches to the questions of woman, 'nature'; landscape and enviroment. It is framed by a short, albeit revised and extended, essay offering a social-historical context by Liz Wells entitled 'Reframing Landscape' which was published in a different form by Women's Art Magazine in 1993/4. Although the strength of Liz Wells' book is invested in the visual reproductions in colour of the photographic work and complemented by short statements and one interview with one of the artists, this is not the case in Parveen Adams' book where reproductions are few and far between and confined to black and white. Does the presentation itself indicate two divergent audiences for these books? Strong visual images often attract artists to borrow, read or buy books where the artwork is mainly presented rather than books where verbal analysis is the principal issue and the books 'look' academic. This is not to say that either book falls into the trap of presuming the works 'speak for themselves' nor the opposite where the analysis is so overdetermined as to limit any other form of possible enagagement in the work, but it is to point to a common split reproduced in art publishing where books of art criticism , which are neither catalogues from exhibitions nor monographs, have generally poor reproductions, particularly those with feminist content. Liz Wells' book was made with the assistance of the Arts Council in order to develop the generally high production values, whereas Routledge, Parveen Adams' publisher, rarely publishes colour plates in its art history series, even as it maintains an orthodox stranglehold on publication of certain forms of academic research.

As a feminist strategy for making women's work more visible and to frame it within a coherent and graspable way in a new field of enquiry where little has been published, Liz Well's book is highly effective but I regret that each artist does not receive a more detailed critical analysis even as I recognise the role of the book in distributing women's photography to a wider audience. Women's work needs not just physical visibility but also the assistance of extended critical discussion. While Liz Wells properly seeks to problematise 'landscape' as a category, I wanted to read more in-depth analysis of how particular women photographer's had in the late 20th Century defined their subjects' relationship to property, territory, entrepreneurship, class, racism, Imperialism, and patriarchy (like Ingrid Pollard's Pastoral Interlude or Stevie Bezencenet Right of Passage or Roshini Kempadoo's Trans-formations portfolio which are reproduced). In a world where women's activities are almost 'automatically' subject to a failure to recognise the positions from which women speak or to give credibility to anything they have to say, the need for commentary becomes all the more important. Contrary to the frequent misapprehension that this detracts from the work, or that critical analysis may destroy the work, in-depth criticism may actually provide a means of access to the project of the artist. Comparisons between artists may also offer a means to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the work itself and this is the very difficulty and tension between representing the necessary diversity of women's art practice in relation to the questions of photography and landscape and framing adequately beyond the categories of 'Margins'; 'Territories'; 'Image, Metaphor, Myth' which Liz Wells offers. Liz Wells is also the editor of Photography: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 1996 ISBN 0-415-12559-6) : a valuable teaching text to introduce photography's history and theory.

Perhaps these comments about further critical work are also prompted by the contrast with Parveen Adams' work, where a very different strategy is operating. Here an individual artists' work acts as a prompt, a vehicle for elaborate investigations about pyschoanalytic concepts and their adequacy to address fully how identificatory mechanisms within artworks produce meaning. Her enquiries are refreshingly readable amongst work in this field. What is productive here is the way that both the operations of artwork and / or text and the psychoanalytic concepts themselves are subjects of her questioning. For, Parveen Adams has generally avoided what has become an unfortunate tendency in some art historical texts which employ psychoanalysis is that the artwork is discussed only where it fits a pre-existing pyschoanalytic framework without subjecting that framework to any questioning. Parveen Adams has instead opened up how an encounter with a work might prompt reflection of both psychoanalysis and artistic strategies. However, there is one essay where this is not the case, and this concerns the analysis of Catherine Mackinnon's text on pornography in terms of sadism. The possibility of this as a deliberate polemical strategy in political life is dismissed in order to demonstrate the violence inflicted on the reader by the text itself . The comparison of this strategy to those of other pornographic or sadistic writers strikes me as hopelessly inadequate as a means of critiquing the logic of the text and its accurately observed conflation of reality and representation. This is not to say, I support Mackinnon's position but my criticisms of it arise because of the civil legislation which follow from her critique and whether or not these are workable in any state. This is where the more subtle and absorbing sense of possibilities and rereadings offered in the other essays (like chapters on 'Of female bondage' and 'Per (os)cillation') dissolves into a very specific problem for feminists : i.e. how social and political demands for social change can be critiqued by psychoanalytic processes which reflect upon actions and events to reveal and revise psychoanalysis itself rather than to structure new forms of political or social activity. Is it coincidence that this is the only essay jointly written in the book, and with Mark Cousins? By contrast, her reading of Mary Kelly's Interim is really intriguing and insightful in terms of the ways in Lacan's ideas about discourse (including the discourses of Master, University, Hysteric, and Analyst) are deployed to reflect upon the relation of textuality and interpretation: specifically how the same question can mean and imply different things in different situations. Parveen Adams explores how 'Interim gives us the place of the object petit a at the limit of the image' (p.84) , representations which both interrogate the object of desire and interrupt the movement of desire on the part of the spectator in his/her misrecognition of the object : a relation of transference which refuses the discourse of the Master. The essays on the horror provoked by the operations of the French performance artist Orlan and her analysis of Della Grace's 'The Three Graces' in relationship to a lesbian Phallus are also thought-provoking readings.

While these two books may represent two divergent trends in feminist publishing , they nevertheless are both significant and desirable books to read.

founded in May 2022, through an Open Call, a network of practitioners based in the UK, Central Eastern Europe and beyond, gathering five reading groups from September 2023 – February 2024. Research Group of the British Art Network (BAN). Bogana Ababii, Holly Antrum, Laura Bivolaru, Diana Damian, Lina Džuverović, Sabrina Fuller, Vanessa Giorgio, Markéta Hašková, Jessie Krish, Marta Marsicka, Adomas Narkevičius, Maja Ngom, Helena Reckitt, Marta Zboralska, and others who wish to remain uncredited.

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