Subversive humor: The performance art of Hannah Wilke, Eleanor Antin, and Adrian Piper.
Item
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Title
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Subversive humor: The performance art of Hannah Wilke, Eleanor Antin, and Adrian Piper.
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Identifier
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AAI3083715
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identifier
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3083715
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Creator
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Wacks, Debra.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Sally Webster
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Date
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2003
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Women's Studies | Theater
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Abstract
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The Women's Movement served as a major catalyst for feminist art in the United States during the 1970s. It produced a "carnivalesque" moment when groups of women sought to promote political and social change. Although anger often inspired socio-politically concerned art of the 70s, there were complicated notions of humor operating at the same time. This dissertation emphasizes the humorous, yet serious strategies of American feminist art of the decade.;The first chapter of this dissertation provides an overview of critical issues and contexts relevant to the paper. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival offers a potential site for social and linguistic transgressions, for historically it produced a time when the populace used humor to rebel against established norms and authority of all kinds. The integral concept of the "Carnivalesque Diaspora" is presented and humor is discussed as a strategic tool in the hands of "unruly" women, in particular, feminists. This leads to the key premise: that feminist performance art is carnivalesque and reflects the carnival-like environment of the 70s Women's Movement in general.;The thesis is supported through the examination of the different types of humor at work in the 1970s performance art of Hannah Wilke, Eleanor Antin, and Adrian Piper. The artists serve as case studies, which encourages close analysis of individual pieces. Wilke, Antin, and Piper's comedic strategies are conceptualized along a spectrum: humor moves from Wilke's puns to Antin's masquerade to Piper's sarcasm. All three artists work with levels of gender experimentation and bodily transgression. As this dissertation travels along its spectrum of humor, it simultaneously transverses a body-politic axis: beginning with Wilke's mimesis of the classically beautiful body, to Antin's liminal body, and ending with Piper's purposefully disturbing or grotesque body.;The conclusion briefly looks at feminist art from the 1980s. Linkage of the 70s with more recent artistic production not only removes 1970s feminist work from its artistic ghetto, but also contradicts notions that the tremendously successful, ironic women artists of the 1980s burst onto the art scene without art historical predecessors.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
