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165 pages

English

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Since the 1990s, women artists have led the contemporary art world in the creation of art depicting female adolescence, producing challenging, critically debated and avidly collected artworks that are driving the current and momentous shift in the perception of women in art. Girls! Girls! Girls! presents essays from established and up-and-coming scholars who address a variety of themes, including narcissism, nostalgia, post-feminism and fantasy with the goal of approaching the overarching question of why women artists are turning in such numbers to the subject of girls – and what these artistic explorations signify. Artists discussed include Anna Gaskell, Marlene McCarty, Sue de Beer, Miwa Yanagi, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Collier Schorr and more.

Contributors include Lucy Soutter, Harriet Riches, Maud Lavin, Taru Elfving, Kate Random Love, and Carol Mavor.

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Arts visuels

Histoire des Arts

Histoire des arts visuels

Popular Culture

MUSIC

History of art

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General officer

Art

General

Cultural Studies

History

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Publié par	Intellect Books Ltd
Date de parution	27 mai 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781841505282
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Tracking the figure of the girl across the fields of contemporary art and film, this book moves effortlessly between cultural criticism, art history, and feminist theory. Be forewarned, however: the girls in contemporary art are anything but docile or well-behaved. From baby butches to bad girls, from reluctant Lolitas to hysterical orphans, these girls make terrific trouble in the lavishly imagined worlds they inhabit. And the women who do that imagining? They are some of the leading artists and filmmakers of our day. And thanks to Girls! Girls! Girls! in Contemporary Art they get their critical due.
- Richard Meyer, University of Southern California

Girls! Girls! Girls! in Contemporary Art is the missing link in the new feminist art history/criticism. It engages with that crucial and ambiguous period where children become women. In a way, one might say that girlhood lies at the root of Freud s question what do women want? at the same time that it mystifies this originary moment in women s history. These texts hit the crucial questions in girl representation, running the whole gamut from charm to hysteria to murder.
- Linda Nochlin, New York University
Girls! Girls! Girls! in Contemporary Art
Girls! Girls! Girls! in Contemporary Art
Edited by Catherine Grant and Lori Waxman
First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2011 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover design: Holly Rose Typesetting: John Teehan
Cover image: Anna Gaskell, Untitled 30 (override) , 1997, C-print, 15.24 x 18.415 cm, courtesy the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York.
The cost of images for Harriet Riches essay was supported by Kingston University.
Kingston University London
The publication of this volume was supported by a faculty grant from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

ISBN 978-1-84150-348-6
Printed and bound by Cambrian Printers, Aberystwyth, Wales.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Girl in Contemporary Art
Catherine Grant and Lori Waxman
Through the Looking-Glass with Heart-Shaped Sunglasses: Searching for Alice and Lolita in Contemporary Representations of Girls
Lori Waxman
Dial P for Panties: Narrative Photography in the 1990s (with a New Afterword by the Author)
Lucy Soutter
Girlish Games: Playfulness and Drawingness in the Work of Francesca Woodman and Lucy Gunning
Harriet Riches
Marlene McCarty s Murder Girls
Maud Lavin
Haunted: Writing with the Girl
Taru Elfving
Oh Mother Where Art Thou? Sue de Beer s Hysterical Orphan Girls
Kate Random Love
Mi-girl, Mi-kick, Mi-fire, Mi-sin, Mi-soul, MI-WA: A Fairy Tale in Blue
Carol Mavor
Baby Butches and Reluctant Lolitas: Collier Schorr and Hellen van Meene
Catherine Grant
Author Biographies
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Catherine Grant and Lori Waxman
We are grateful to the many friends, family members and colleagues who helped us in countless ways during the long making of this book.
I (Lori) would like to thank the folks at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for their continued support of my work in this area. Dean Lisa Wainwright provided funding for this book at a crucial moment. Maud Lavin oversaw the earliest versions of my Searching for Alice and Lolita essay and was instrumental in pushing me to co-develop this volume, to which she so generously contributed an essay of her own. Stanley Murashige offered me the opportunity to teach an experimental seminar on the representation of girls in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism, a class co-taught with artist Stephanie Knowles, to whom more thanks are due for years of conversation and collaboration on the subject of girls. My thinking on this subject was challenged and expanded by the students in those classes, in particular Anna Wilson, Auden O Connell, Lee Foley, Noe Cuellar, Maria Gaspar and Amber Hawk Swanson. Amber also contributed to an earlier version of this book, along with Melanie Archer, Jenny Gheith, Katrina Kuntz, Lyz Nagan, Hiromi Nakazawa, Britany Salsbury, Nikki Sorg, Jovana Stokic and Michelle Zis, and I thank them all for their efforts.
I (Catherine) would like to thank my colleagues at the Courtauld Institute of Art, particularly my PhD supervisor Mignon Nixon, and fellow researchers who read and commented on various parts of my work on girls. These include Judith Batalion, James Boaden, Sarah James, Dominic Johnson and Kate Random Love. I would also like to thank the following: Althea Greenan of the Women s Art Library and Francis Summers, who have put in many hours of reading and conversing on the topic. Laura Andre, whose session at the CAA Annual Conference in 2005 on Tomboys and Girly Girls brought Lori and I together for the first time, and inspired the title of my essay here. Maud Lavin, whose enthusiasm for this project brought Lori and I together again. The writers in this collection with whom I have had many years worth of conversations about girls, and who have inspired and challenged my own thinking. Lucy Soutter for last-minute funding. The gallerists and archivists who have been generous with their time and images: Bruce Hackney for the Karlheinz Weinberger Estate and Simon Greenberg for 303 Gallery.
Thank you to the many artists whose work appears in these pages, for inspiring the critical thinking that accompanies them but also for allowing us to print their artwork. Thank you especially to Anna Gaskell, for giving us permission to use an image from her override series on the cover of this volume.
Thank you from both of us to the devoted, intelligent editors at Intellect Press, most especially associate publisher May Yao and her predecessor Sam King.
To all of the brilliant, inspired scholars who contributed their essays to this book, thank you.
To our partners, Michael and Francis, thank you for endless support, love, conversation and appreciation.
And finally, to all the very little girls who, believe it or not, were born during the making of this book (in order of birth):

Aina Ruth Elfving, born to Taru Elfving
Maud Maria Grant Summers, born to Catherine Grant
Ren e Sunny Waxman Rakowitz, born to Lori Waxman
Vita Seabright Random Love, born to Kate Random Love
Violet Virginia Barber, born to Lucy Soutter
This book is dedicated to the five of you.
I NTRODUCTION: T HE G IRL IN C ONTEMPORARY A RT
Catherine Grant and Lori Waxman
Since the mid-1990s, the subject of girls, girlhood and girlishness has provided a focal point for a wide range of aesthetically and affectively acclaimed art. But while critical controversy has surrounded much of this work, rarely has it penetrated more than skin deep. Critics have debated the use of girls-as images and as artist personas-in the work of contemporary artists, from Anna Gaskell to Sue de Beer to Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Corresponding career rises have been noted. However, while the proliferation of images of girls has been commented on widely in newspapers and the art press, and often tied to debates about third-wave feminism, more complex issues such as maturation, same-sex fantasy and gender flux have been largely ignored. The seductiveness and ambiguous criticality that defines much artwork dealing with girls has meant that most analysis has focused on it as a hot new trend, one that will be replaced and forgotten as soon as a new fad arrives. Yet over a decade has passed since the eruption of girls in contemporary art, and the subject no longer qualifies as a passing phase . The representation of girls and girlhood by women artists is a phenomenon that continues to provoke questions about the state of feminism, sexuality and identity in Western culture, articulated by a diverse range of contemporary artists for whom politics are ambiguously blended alongside the associations of girlhood with spectacular consumer culture. The essays in this book reflect on the range of artists engaging with the girl, providing a variety of critical and historical contexts that take seriously the presence of girls in contemporary art.
Central to many of the essays in Girls! Girls! Girls! is a consideration of how a focus on girls can expand the discourse on gender. Rather than simply replaying stereotypes of femininity, the figure of the girl has been used by many contemporary artists to question the stability of sexual and gendered identity. As Taru Elfving explores in her essay on film and video artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila, for Freud the little girl does not exist, with femininity being learned in the passage towards womanhood. 1 The figure of the girl, then, stands in for an identity that is defined as being in progress, not quite one thing or another. This gender ambiguity is made explicit in the work of Collier Schorr, in which she pictures butch girls and boys as the mirror, rather than the opposite, of each other. When asked about her concentration on adolescent male models, Schorr recounts, You know, people say, How come you don t take pictures of girls? And I say, Well I do, I just use boys to do them. 2
As feminist cultural critic and philosopher Judith Butler has argued so emphatically, It becomes impossible to separate out gender from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained. 3 These intersections, though, do not fix the meaning of the feminine but instead work with and against the performative agency of subjects who speak and act gender in process. In the artworks under consideration here, a wide variety of girl images become th