Interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson

Art History, 2002

Book reviews are always late. Rushing for the deadline, you are already behind time ± the book was conceived, written, designed, printed and published long before you reached it and whatever you write follows on, belatedly. Mieke Bal's Quoting Caravaggio first appeared in hardback in 1999 and so this review is particularly belated in one sense. Yet perhaps this is strangely fitting for a volume which counters any sense of self-assured linear chronology through a sustained engagement with time, quotation, duration and art. If, as Martin Davies argued, the end of the twentieth century was marked by a tragic, selfimposed lateness, a perpetual sense of coming after the event and being left in its wake, 1 Bal's volume provides a strategy for moving beyond belatedness towards a material encounter with history and cultural memory which thinks of temporality as the entanglement of subject and object. Reading this book, you are invited to participate in histories, to make present connections with the past, in and of the spatial and bodily movement of time. What is especially significant for art historians in this encounter is the fact that Quoting Caravaggio enables its readers to engage in its arguments by taking art, history and the histories of art seriously. Quoting Caravaggio focuses on the work of art, attending closely to what art does, rather than what it is. This subtle shift of emphasis has far-reaching ramifications both within the book and beyond its borders. For instance, Bal's volume is beautifully illustrated, yet it is not an illustrated history, if what is meant by that is a text-based thesis on space, time, subjects and objects, lavishly`decorated' by pictures, themselves reduced to texts and`read' in support of abstract arguments. Neither Bal's emphasis upon semiotics, nor her careful visual analysis, suggest that art might be subsumed by text; her argument is far more compelling, pointing towards a position beyond the binary logic which sets word and image apart, and calling for a fuller recognition of the knowledges which are produced by the materiality of art. This stronger position is mapped early in the work, when Bal argues that art works need to be understood as`theoretical objects':`I wish to suggest that such works can be construed as theoretical objects that``theorize'' cultural history. This theorizing makes them such instances of cultural philosophy that they deserve the name theoretical objects.' (p. 5) Quoting Caravaggio unfolds over eight chapters, each tackling a complex conceptual problem around histories, time and the meanings materialized by art. Throughout the volume, art works ± in the stronger sense of the term. Art is never the mute hand-maiden of theory, awaiting the voice of an empowered interpreter to bring it to life; in every configuration of ideas, images and texts, the material call to the sensory, corporeal roots of subjectivity and cognition are brought to bear upon the structure of the argument. Conceived as a theoretical object, art is demonstrated to have an extraordinary capacity to make ideas, and make them. Thinking through and with art renegotiates the parameters of meaning so that spatial embodiment in the world can be seen as a critical precondition of knowledge and the communication of ideas. As Bal writes in the fourth chapter of the volume, meaningful spatiality is intimately entwined with corporeality and location; the embodied subject of history and knowledge does not exist in an empty space, but in a meaningful world: REVIEWS

kritische berichte - Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften, 2013

Given the recent interest in developing archives to recover the contributions of Latin American pioneers in digital arts, in this paper I take issue with the lack of attention given to female artists born or working in Latin America. I argue that the process of recovery needed to build such archives needs to adopt a feminist lens that speaks to particular conditions of production and unpacks the local and international mechanisms of exclusion that have hindered the recognition of female artists. It should also consider debates on Latin American art and the recent contributions of media historians who have opened up art history to understand the shared histories of art, science, and technology. Finally, I give a brief overview of the work of three female artists working in Mexico who anticipated features of digital art by experimenting with publishing networks, broadcasting technology , and kinetic art.

The new art history arises, from an interdisciplinary view, theoretical and practical embodiment issues related with contemporary art and its inclusion and development in college. At the same time, gender studies have been incorporated into the development of postgraduate curriculum, placing value on the art work of women, continuing the contestation to the canon already started in the twentieth century. These gender discourses have assumed new technologies as the most versatile media format with unlimited field for image dissemination. Consequently, in the context of globalization, the intangible and digital formats have become priority means when developing feminist and post-feminist theories in the arts. These speeches, located on the theory and practice of postmodernism, focus on queer, postcolonial and eco-feminist ideas.

Anales de Historia del Arte

This article analyses the conceptions of identity in contemporary times by delving into art practices from the 1970s onwards that deal with topics such as the construction of the self, identity as simulacrum, gender as masquerade, cyberfeminism, the cyborg, the techno-medical body or online identity fluidity. In the information and digital era, new technological, medical and scientific developments like genetic engineering, biotechnology, surgical and hormonal procedures and the Internet permeate our lives, affecting the perception, representation and understanding of the self. Through the analysis of the work of Lynn Hershman Leeson, ORLAN and Francesca da Rimini, this article examines contemporary art practices that reflect on these current issues, mirroring contemporary changes, subverting homogenising and repressive articulations of identity, and considering the new malleability, reproducibility and plurality of the self. These art practices ultimately represent the merging of h...