The body politics of decoration and handicraft: Re -visioning 1970s feminist art.
Item
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Title
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The body politics of decoration and handicraft: Re -visioning 1970s feminist art.
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Identifier
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AAI3115268
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identifier
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3115268
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Creator
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Lien, Fu Chia-Wen.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Mona Hadler
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Date
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2004
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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
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Abstract
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In the 1970s, the burgeoning of feminist art presented a challenge to mainstream Modernism that transformed the art world radically. One of the most interesting phenomena of this early generation of feminist art was the exploration of "decoration" and "handicraft," such as quilting, embroidery, crocheting, patterned tile painting, and china painting, which were formerly considered by modernists to be "low" art with derogatory connotations. Through a discussion of this issue, I hope to clarify how the use of decoration and handicraft constituted formal and political strategies. Through these strategies, women artists developed what Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro have characterized as the "female" style. I argue that decoration and handicraft, though varying in form, technique, and material, reflected a particular phase of the body politics of early feminist art. The fantasy, desire, eroticism, and sensual pleasure associated with decoration and the tactile experience of the hands-on process involved in handicraft constitute a corporeal dimension in feminist art.;In my dissertation, I focus on three artists whose works consciously address decoration and handicraft. While stressing female experience and sensibility, Judy Chicago applied female traditional crafts, such as embroidery and china painting, in her collaborative political project The Dinner Party . Miriam Schapiro turned decoration and handicraft into collage works emphasizing a "female style" that she called "femmage." Joyce Kozloff reinstated decoration into architectural spaces through installations and public murals. These diverse approaches reflect different levels of conceptualization of decoration and handicraft, and serve to describe various aspects of feminist art's revolt against the modernist establishment.;The study of the artistic development of Chicago, Schapiro, and Kozloff reveals their interest in and concern with body images and female identification, which corresponds to the body politics of decoration and handicraft expressed in their full-fledged feminist works. Chicago uses bodily images to directly express female sexuality with women's traditional practices of handicraft. Schapiro has a more intimate and personal take on decoration, presented in bodily-related images of eggs, shrines, houses, fans, hearts, and costumes. Imbued by the fantasy and desire evoked by decoration, Kozloff attempts to humanize the pictorial (and later, public) space with a feminized bodily experience and sensibility in her various works.
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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.
