In the 1960s, the fascination with erotic art generated a wave of exhibitions and critical discussion on sexual freedom, visual pleasure, and the nude in contemporary art. Radical Eroticism examines the importance of women's contributions in fundamentally reconfiguring representations of sexuality across several areas of advanced art-performance, pop, postminimalism, and beyond. This study shows that erotic art made by women was integral to the profound changes that took place in American art during the sixties, from the crumbling of modernist aesthetics and the expanding field of art practice to the emergence of the feminist art movement. The works of Carolee Schneemann, Martha Edelheit, Marjorie Strider, Hannah Wilke, and Anita Steckel exemplify the innovative approaches to the erotic that explored female sexual subjectivities and destabilized assumptions about gender. Rachel Middleman reveals these artists' radical interventions in both aesthetic conventions and social norms.
Rachel Middleman is Assistant Professor of Art History at California State University, Chico.
Title: Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s
Author: Middleman, Rachel
ISBN: 9780520294585
Binding:
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication Date: 2018-02-13
Number of Pages: 280
Weight: 0.9074 kg
Rather than calling for a new aesthetic category of the erotic, Middleman's study identifies the use of diverse erotic aesthetics in art produced by women as a means of political action. In so doing, Radical Eroticism amounts to a political act in its own right. * ASAP/J *
...Middleman provides an insightful examination of the exhibition and critical reception of erotic art, laying the groundwork for understanding the social context and political stakes of the approaches of women artists to eroticism in a decade of expanding forms of artistic practice, the demise of modernist aesthetics, and the rise of the feminist art movement. * Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art *