Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde

Is late modern art ‘anti-aesthetic’? What does it mean to label a piece of art ‘affectless’? These traditional characterisations of 1960s and 1970s art are radically challenged in this subversive art history. By introducing feeling to the analysis of this period, Susan Best acknowledges the radical and exploratory nature of art in late modernism. Her book focuses on four highly influential female artists – Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark, Ana Mendieta and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha – and it explores how their art transformed established avant-garde protocols by introducing an affective dimension. This aspect of their work, while often noted, has never before been analysed in detail. Visualizing Feeling also addresses a methodological blind spot in art history: the interpretation of feeling, emotion and affect. It demonstrates that the affective dimension, alongside other materials and methods of art, is part of the artistic means of production and innovation. This is the first thorough re-appraisal of aesthetic engagement with affect in post-1960s art.

The book also extends and enlarges the applications of psychoanalytic theory to art history. Susan Best draws on a rich array of psychologists and psychoanalytic thinkers such as: André Green, Sarah Kofman, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Ignacio Matte-Blanco, Silvan Tomkins and Daniel Stern. In addition, key aesthetic ideas and concepts are interrogated, including expressive theories of art, beauty and the sublime, and embodied responses to art.

By creatively re-evaluating late modern art, Susan Best offers a new way of thinking about subjectivity and feeling which acknowledges and celebrates the achievements of the feminine avant-garde.

Susan Best

affect and the

feminine avant-garde

‘At last, here is a book that lifts the ban on affect imposed on art criticism and theory by the

“anti-aesthetic” school that has been dominating the scene in the last forty years!’

Thierry de Duve, Professor of Aesthetics and Art History,

Department of Fine Arts, University of Lille 3

‘Her landmark study of four women artists – Hesse, Clark, Mendieta and Cha – rescues both the feminine

and the aesthetic from the ghetto, by an astute combination of psycho-analysis and art history.’

Ann Stephen, Senior Curator, Sydney University Gallery

‘Visualizing Feeling develops a compelling argument for focusing on precisely the centrality of affect and

feeling in any understanding of the art of the1960s and 1970s...’

Elizabeth Grosz, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies,

Rutgers University, author of Chaos, Territory, Art:

Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, 2008

visualizing feelingaffect an

d th

e femin

ine avan

t-gard

eS

usan Best

Susan Best is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History and Theory, University of New South Wales. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on women’s art, conceptual art and South American art.

156mm

www.ibtauris.com

19mm156mm

Cover image: Lygia Clark, Camisa-de-força (Straight Jacket), 1969

Photographer: unknown

Courtesy of ‘The World of Lygia Clark’ Cultural Association

Cover design: Chris Bromley

90mm 9mm 9mm

Visualizing2HB.indd 1 14/06/2011 14:27

Susan Best is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History and Th eory,

University of New South Wales. Her research focuses on modern and con-

temporary art, with a particular emphasis on women’s art, conceptual art and

South American art.

‘At last, here is a book that lifts the ban on aff ect imposed on art criti-

cism and theory by the “anti-aesthetic” school that has been dom-

inating the scene in the last forty years! Taking her clues from four

of the best women artists whose work spans the period, Susan Best

convincingly demonstrates that if you close the door of the house of

art to feelings, they enter through the window. What’s more, this is

valid for the supposedly “anaesthetic” art movements – minimal and

conceptual art – that form the contextual background of her case

studies: they are no less aesthetic than the art of the past or the most

recent present.’

Th ierry de Duve, Professor of Aesthetics and Art History,

Department of Fine Arts, University of Lille 3

‘Susan Best’s remarkably lucid and paradoxical project begins the

process of recovering feeling and emotion in late modern art. Her

landmark study of four women artists – Hesse, Clark, Mendieta and

Cha – rescues both the feminine and the aesthetic from the ghetto,

by an astute combination of psycho-analysis and art history.’

Ann Stephen, Senior Curator, Sydney University Art Gallery

Best_Prelims.indd iBest_Prelims.indd i 6/14/2011 5:02:25 PM6/14/2011 5:02:25 PM

‘Visualizing Feeling develops a compelling argument for focusing on

precisely the centrality of aff ect and feeling in any understanding of

the art of the 1960s and 1970s, where it seemed that aff ect no longer

had a place. In exploring the work of four powerful and sometimes

neglected women artists, she shows how it is paradoxically where

aff ect is consciously minimized that it nevertheless returns to haunt

the art work as its most powerful force. Art works aff ect before they

inform, perform or communicate. Susan Best demonstrates that by

restoring the question of aff ect and emotion to the art work, new

kinds of questions can be asked about the feminine in art, questions

that affi rm the personal and political power of these works of art.’

Elizabeth Grosz, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies,

Rutgers University, author of Chaos, Territory, Art:

Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, 2008

Best_Prelims.indd iiBest_Prelims.indd ii 6/10/2011 5:04:38 PM6/10/2011 5:04:38 PM

visualizing feeling

affectand the

feminineavant-garde

Susan Best

Best_Prelims.indd iiiBest_Prelims.indd iii 6/10/2011 5:04:38 PM6/10/2011 5:04:38 PM

Published in 2011 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd

6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU

175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

www.ibtauris.com

Distributed in the United States and Canada

Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

Copyright © 2011 Susan Best

Th e right of Susan Best to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted

by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof,

may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,

in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 84885 851 0

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress catalog card: available

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham

Camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author

Best_Prelims.indd ivBest_Prelims.indd iv 6/10/2011 5:04:38 PM6/10/2011 5:04:38 PM

v

Contents

List of Illustrations vi

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1

1 Minimalism and Subjectivity: Aesthetics and the

Anti-Aesthetic Tradition 12

2 Feeling and Late Modern Art 29

3 Participation, Aff ect and the Body: Lygia Clark 47

4 Eva Hesse’s Late Sculptures: Elusive Expression

and Unconscious Aff ect 67

5 Ana Mendieta: Aff ect Miniaturization, Emotional Ties

and the Silueta Series 92

6 Th e Dream of the Audience: Th e Moving Images

of Th eresa Hak Kyung Cha 116

Conclusion: Which Anthropomorphism? 137

Notes 146

Bibliography 173

Index 187

Best_Prelims.indd vBest_Prelims.indd v 6/10/2011 5:04:38 PM6/10/2011 5:04:38 PM

1

This book addresses a methodological blindspot in art history: the interpret-

ation of art’s affective dimension. To those interested in art but not involved

in the academic enterprise of art history, this may seem a very strange over-

sight. Surely the arousal of feeling is one of the experiences art is expected to

deliver and therefore something art historians need to consider in the evalu-

ation and interpretation of art?

There are many reasons for this blindspot. In chapter two I consider some

of the specific historical reasons for this lacuna in the interpretation of late

modern art of the 1960s and 1970s – the period I focus upon in this book.

Most notable among them is the deliberate rejection of feeling by key artists

and art movements, such as minimalism, conceptual art, land art and struc-

tural film. Art of this period is generally characterized as anti-aesthetic, anti-

expressive and anti-subjective in approach and tenor.

One of my aims in this book is to revise this characterization by looking

at the way in which art remains subjective and concerned with feeling, even

when artists explicitly reject such qualities and responses. To summarize, my

argument is that art such as minimalism facilitates reflection on feeling and

its complicated role in the reception of art precisely because of the efforts to

expunge it from the work of art. In other words, the desire to withdraw or

withhold feeling inadvertently underscores the question of feeling.

In the case of minimalism, the withdrawal of feeling actually generated a

complex range of affective responses on the part of contemporary critics and

commentators. For example, minimalist art was claimed to be aggressive,

Introduction

Best_Intro.indd 1Best_Intro.indd 1 6/10/2011 5:04:20 PM6/10/2011 5:04:20 PM

2 v isua l i z i ng fe e l i ng

boring and pleasurable. These diverse reactions point to the persistence of

the question of feeling, albeit in a confused and contradictory fashion that

requires further interpretation and analysis. Consideration of the remarkable

range of contemporary responses has now dropped out of the discussion of

minimalist art. By retrieving this lost historical record I question the charac-

terization of the art of this period as affectless and thereby make way for the

particular contributions of the four women artists of this study: Lygia Clark,

Eva Hesse, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Ana Mendieta. All four artists are

aligned with the avant-garde practices of the 1960s and 1970s that are rou-

tinely interpreted as rejecting the expressive or subjective dimensions of art.

Far from conforming to the affectless characterization, these artists, in very

different ways, produced deeply moving work.

There are other women artists who also produced moving or affectively

engaging work at this time – for example, Annette Messager, Francesca

Woodman, Gego and Cecilia Vicuna. Indeed, looking closely at the selection

of works in Catherine de Zegher’s landmark 1996 exhibition Inside the Visible:

An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art, in, of and from the Feminine, I

find that many of the artists chosen for that show could be included in a study

of art that is affectively engaging. De Zegher, however, does not characterize

her choice of artists in terms of affect or feeling. Her selection is framed by

an alignment of the ‘feminine’ with the disruption of meaning, as the cata-

logue’s opening epigraph from Julia Kristeva indicates: ‘I would call “fem-

inine” the moment of rupture and negativity which conditions the newness

of any practice.’1 The types of literary practice Kristeva calls feminine are

formally innovative; they renew literature by a kind of positive destruction –

a dehiscence perhaps – that breaks up established languages, introducing

what she describes as ‘ruptures, blank spaces, and holes into language’.2 For

Kristeva, a ‘feminine’ practice need not be made by a woman; hence her key

examples are male writers, such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Antonin Artaud and

James Joyce.

Aligning the typical innovations expected of avant-garde art or literature

with a feminine position is of course contentious and open to debate, how-

ever what interests me here is de Zegher’s subtle refashioning of this idea

in order to trace a female avant-garde lineage in twentieth-century art. De

Zegher, unlike Kristeva, is interested in the specific contribution of women

artists to the avant-garde tradition. So while de Zegher is not the first to

apply Kristeva’s ideas to women artists, her exhibition was the first large-

scale survey of women’s art to emphasize formal innovation.3 This emphasis


i n t roduc t ion 3

on original experimentation with form and materials is spelt out in one of the

few summative statements about her selection of artists. She explains: ‘One

common property of the works in the exhibition is their allusion to ideas that

do not have material substance but are made material in the work itself; this

work makes palpable the conceptual engagement with “beginnings”.’ 4

Here de Zegher continues the early feminist art-historical concern with

constructing an alternate history of women artists, but adds the more exact-

ing criterion of originality of both materials and ideas. Originality, in turn,

is rethought from a feminist perspective. De Zegher perfectly dovetails fem-

inist theory with careful attention to new modes of innovation, arguing that

feminist art practice and theory enable us ‘to see and to focus on what is

in eclipse ... or has different qualities of perceptibility’.5 In sum, de Zegher’s

achievement is double-edged: the recovery project of feminist art history is

subjected to avant-garde standards and measures and, in turn, ideas of avant-

garde art are reworked by feminist theory. In other words, her approach

to feminist art history involves claiming avant-garde practices for women,

thereby performing an advance on Kristeva’s position at this time, which, at

most, accorded women the feminine role of refusal or opposition to the exist-

ing state of affairs.6

This type of feminist art history stands in marked contrast to the increas-

ingly common practice of creating a separate and separatist history for women

artists. It also means that feminist art history can more directly impact upon

mainstream art history by challenging what constitutes innovation. It is in

the spirit of this kind of feminist art history that I offer a consideration of the

role of feeling in late modern art. The affective dimension of art, alongside its

materials and methods, I contend, is part of the artistic means of production

that is subject to innovation. Indeed, the four artists in this study all produced

art with an affective dimension as intriguing and inchoate as the other ma-

terial and formal means of their invention. In other words, new ‘beginnings’

can involve feeling as well as form – feeling is precisely one of the ‘different

qualities of perceptibility’ that feminist theory should illuminate.

I am agnostic about whether this different quality can be claimed as some

kind of peculiarly feminine artistic characteristic. Without doubt, in the art

of the 1960s and 1970s an affective component is a difference that is mani-

fested most consistently and substantially by women’s art. In contemporary

art, however, one cannot draw such a firm conclusion, although a case could

be made for the facilitatory role played by these earlier women artists: they

showed how to combine the rejection of certain types of expressive means


v i sua l i z i ng fe e l i ng4

(traditional expressionism, for example) with a subtle reinvention of the role

and possibilities of feeling.

Assuming the custodianship of feeling in this fashion might seem in-

evitable or even retrograde given the traditional alignment of femininity

with feeling and emotion as opposed to the masculine domains of thinking

and reason. The stereotype that women are more emotional than men, as

well as the common idea that emotion is a disruption to thinking, must

surely rest upon this familiar binary logic. Why, then, perpetuate or re-

inforce such views? My approach here is to follow the lead of the type of

feminist theory sometimes called ‘strategic essentialism’, an approach that

has sought to illuminate the terms neglected or denigrated as feminine.7

In some instances this feminist gesture is about reclaiming and reworking

these terms in order to think about women differently; in others it is posed

more narrowly as a disruption to received masculinist accounts of value. In

this book I pursue both strategies. I am interested in what distinguishes the

work of four leading women artists at a particular moment in art history,

as well as how a feminist eye, trained to seek out the neglected or subordi-

nated, can illuminate a more general critical and theoretical problem in a

new way. Moreover, by recognizing the gendering of feeling and emotion,

its neglect in art history and other disciplines may be brought more sharply

into focus.

It is worth emphasizing that the neglect of feeling is not specific to art his-

tory. Charles Altieri, in his book The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the

Affects, observes a similar methodological oversight in the study of literature.

He notes that the emphasis on social and historical context rather than the

literary text has led to a ‘tendency to overread for “meaning” while under-

reading the specific modes of affective engagement presented by works of

art.’8 When he explored the work of theorists of emotions he found a similar

eagerness to engage with the ‘cognitive and moral dimensions of the topic’. In

other words, Altieri argues, affects are consistently brought under the sway of

reason; their disruptive power is not investigated.

The disruptive power of affects is beginning to generate a body of writ-

ing in Cultural Studies. In many instances, the opposition between reason

and affect is not only pursued, it is entrenched. As Clare Hemmings notes

in her careful critique of this rhetorical position, there is a persistent adher-

ence to the idea of affects as beyond the social, beyond interpretation, un-

assimilable and so forth, but little by way of extended demonstration of these

assumptions.9


i n t roduc t ion 5

While I am interested in the avant-garde tradition and how experiments

with feeling might contribute to that tradition, my focus is not upon how

affects disrupt meaning. Moreover, I do not subscribe to the view that affects

are beyond interpretation. That said, I am not interested in immediately in-

telligible uses of feeling either. By this I mean, on the one hand, works of art

where feeling is hackneyed, clichéd or sentimental and, on the other, works

that generate a predictable feeling – for example, those that deliberately in-

tend to shock, horrify or disgust. In short, I am not concerned with works

of art that elicit either well-worn responses or easily categorized affects or

emotions. My choice of artists was directed by an interest in what could be

called ‘non-categorical affect’. That is, the particular women artists were

chosen because I found the affective dimension of their work both compel-

ling and yet oddly opaque. In other words, to understand this dimension of

their work requires the kind of attention and analysis usually reserved for

describing the significance of new means for representing or bringing forth

ideas.

In order to interpret the affective dimension of these artists’ work, I mainly

draw upon psychoanalytic theory, which accounts for my use of the term

‘affect’ rather than ‘emotion’. A word on terminology is perhaps needed here.

There is an enormous range of conflicting usages of the terms affect, feeling

and emotion in the psychological and psychoanalytic literature, as well as

in more interdisciplinary studies. Taking just two contrasting examples, the

definitions of these three terms supplied by the psychoanalyst Iréne Matthis

and the literary theorist Charles Altieri easily demonstrate the current con-

fusion about them. Matthis, for example, defines emotion as akin to uncon-

scious material; for her it refers to ‘affective manifestations to which we do

not have direct conscious access, but which can be inferred from behavioural

clues’.10 In contrast, feelings for Matthis are ‘affective phenomena to which

we have direct conscious access’. Affect, then, is the collective term that

encompasses both emotions and feelings: ‘Affect will be the generalized con-

cept for all those embodied processes that, when they reach consciousness,

can be perceived on the one hand as feelings and on the other as emotionally

charged physical concomitants’.11

Charles Altieri also takes affect to be the ‘umbrella’ term, although for

him, feelings are ‘elemental affective states characterized by an imaginative

engagement in the immediate processes of sensation’.12 Emotions are more

complex and cognitive in orientation: they are, says Altieri, ‘affects involving

the construction of attitudes that typically establish a particular cause and



so situate the agent within a narrative and generates some kind of action of

identification’.13

Given these kinds of terminological variations and reversals, some authors

choose to make little distinction between the terms. For example, Ruth Stein,

in her book Psychoanalytic Theories of Affect, decides on this basis to ‘make lit-

tle effort to distinguish among feelings as awareness of affect, affect as a

more comprehensive term including all the thinkable components belonging

to this domain, and emotion as the complex mixture of affect and our pre-

vious experience with a particular affect, as a strongly felt feeling, or as just

a feeling’.14 I have tended to follow Stein’s example, however throughout this

book I will specify which account or accounts of affect I am drawing upon in

the case of particular works of art.

The key theorists I use include Freud, of course, as well as a broad spec-

trum of psychoanalytic thinkers and psychologists, such as André Green,

Joyce McDougall, Daniel Stern, Ignacio Matte-Blanco, Donald Winnicott,

Silvan Tomkins, Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein. While at a theoretical or

metapsychological level there are conflicts between these different accounts

of affect, at the level of application this kind of eclecticism best serves the in-

terpretative demands of different kinds of art practice. Indeed, combing dif-

ferent psychoanalytic theories is a very common approach in contemporary

psychotherapy.

Marrying psychoanalysis with art history has been facilitated by inte-

grating the analysis of affect with the traditional art-historical problem of

expression. Of the many and varied accounts of artistic expression, the most

useful for my purposes is provided by the philosopher Edward Casey. His

account explicitly rejects the idea of expression as the direct communication

of the artist’s feelings – a very common view of the meaning of expression

in art history. Casey’s approach has particular purchase for the period I am

examining because it matches the broad-scale denunciation by many artists

in the 1960s and 1970s of the direct communication model of expression. In

contrast, expression for Casey is a property of the aesthetic object. He argues

against the idea that the aesthetic object conveys feeling or thought; these are

ingredients of the object itself.

Casey breaks expression down into three components: the affective qual-

ities of an aesthetic object, its perceptual qualities, and its import or mean-

ing. The affective dimension of a work of art, he argues, accounts for the

cohesiveness of expression and the continuity between subject and object. I

will return to this assigned role for affect several times in the course of this


i n t roduc t ion 7

book; at times the role will be confirmed, at others contested. Casey does not

give a detailed account of what affect is; for him it is simply the felt dimen-

sion of art. His model will be supplemented by more detailed descriptions of

the operation and nature of affect from the psychoanalytic and psychological

literature.

Another useful parallel between psychoanalysis and art history is sug-

gested by Leo Steinberg’s art-historical version of the psychoanalyst’s dis-

passionate but engaged mode of listening – what is commonly called ‘evenly

spaced attention’. Steinberg’s 1972 book Other Criteria: Confrontations with

Twentieth-Century Art is best known for its critique of formalism, however it

also contains a useful method for engaging with the affective challenges of

modern and contemporary art. He suggests that the first response to new art

should be to suspend judgment, holding in reserve criteria and taste based on

art of the past in order to give the intentions of the new work the space to

emerge and become perceptible. He describes this response as ‘sym-pathetic’,

which, as he explains, does not mean the work is immediately endorsed or

approved; rather, the aim is ‘to feel along with it as with a thing that is like

no other’.15

In Steinberg’s advocacy for a sympathetic response to modern art, feel-

ing is an essential part of receptivity to the new and innovative. But is such

attunement to the feeling of a work of art easily attainted? Responsive feeling

is often posited as automatic and immediate and yet paradoxically it is also

assumed to be obscure and private. Having spent many days, if not weeks and

months, trying to figure out what I feel about many of the works in this study,

I have to agree that feeling is at once spontaneous and obscure. By this I mean

the affective dimension of art may be apprehended or felt fairly immediately,

but its meaning is not so readily apparent. This may be because this aspect of

art is not part of any of the key methodologies that art history deploys. Hence

we have a limited vocabulary to describe artistic feeling and no seasoned ex-

perience of detecting and thinking about it. My aim is to redress this poverty

of means to discuss affect.

* * *

I begin this task by unpicking the received wisdom about what has been called

the ‘anti-aesthetic tradition’. Chapter one seeks to question the idea that min-

imalism rejected or suppressed subjectivity and expression. It examines an

early essay by Rosalind Krauss linking minimalism to a phenomenological



model of subjectivity. This link between phenomenology and minimalism

is now very familiar, however the idea that minimalism provided a model

for thinking about subjectivity has dropped out of the current literature on

post-1960s art. Krauss’ model is contrasted with a critique of this position in

a little-known article by Thierry de Duve. Krauss and de Duve do not agree

on the theory of the subject that minimalism enacts, despite agreeing that a

model of subjectivity is what is at stake in minimalist art. Each produces an

account of subjectivity that is both embedded in the work and yet produced

by the viewer’s interaction with it. This peculiar entanglement of beholder

and work of art is crucial for an understanding of minimalist art and it is clas-

sical aesthetics that enables this entanglement to be most clearly perceived.

Thus, although minimalism is often argued to mark the beginning of an

anti-aesthetic tradition in art practice and art criticism, its radical achieve-

ments are best understood through aesthetics. The chapter thus breaks with

the established interpretations of post-1960s art and opens the way for an

alternative account of the art of this period that explores how the subjective

dimension of art is refigured rather than rejected.

Chapter two sets forth a method for thinking about the affective dimen-

sion of art through the combination of psychoanalysis and art history. My

approach departs from the two dominant modes of psychoanalytic art his-

tory: the psychobiographical approach, which aims to link the biography of

the artist with his or her art production, and the analysis of the work of art

itself as a psychical event. In both instances the art historian takes up a pos-

ition of mastery – emulating the role of the analyst relative to the analysand

or analysed material. Elements of this position are probably ineradicable; in-

terpretation is premised upon this kind of disjuncture. The analysis of feeling

rather than form, however, complicates the clear separation of interpreting

subject and interpreted object that vision and the analysis of appearances at

least promise. The affective dimension is a feature of both subject and ob-

ject. Put very simply, this can be phrased as ‘when a work of art is moving,

I am moved’ – affect permeates the aesthetic encounter. There are instances

when the response of the viewer matches the tone of the work of art, and

communication – or ‘transmission’ of affect, to use Teresa Brennan’s term – is

straightforward, however there are also instances such as affectless art when

tone and reception are at variance.16 Showing how affect is a feature of even

so-called affectless late modern art demonstrates the pertinence of psycho-

analysis beyond the typical methodological applications to surrealist art or art

indebted to that legacy.


i n t roduc t ion 9

Each of the following four chapters focuses on one of the chosen artists.

Each artist I examine raises a different problem for interpreting affect in the

late modern period. The artists bridge the period of study and cover a range

of practices: painting, sculpture, video, film, photography, performance and

participatory art. Two of the artists, Eva Hesse and Ana Mendieta, are, of

course, very well known and have had numerous well-documented survey

exhibitions devoted to their work. Lygia Clark and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,

however, will be less familiar to many readers.

Lygia Clark’s work has proved to be the most straightforward to analyse

in affective terms, not because of the nature of her work – which is actually

very challenging – but because her own writings point in the direction of the

most pertinent theories for analysing her practice. In chapter three I examine

the extraordinary trajectory of Clark’s work from geometric abstraction in

the late 1950s through to her participatory works of the 1960s and 1970s and

her final series, which takes the form of a therapeutic practice akin to body

therapy.

Clark’s work is central to accounts of Brazilian Neo-concretism, however

more recently her work has also been repositioned within western art-histor-

ical accounts of conceptual art, performance art and kinetic art.17 According

to Yve-Alain Bois, Clark violently disagreed with her positioning within per-

formance art because her work from 1966 onwards totally rejected the idea

of a spectator; instead, it only existed in direct contact with the body of the

participant-beholders.18 Her works and group actions required the corporeal

support of the participants: she constructed objects to be worn and held and

devised collective actions that involved everyday objects (cotton, fabric tubes

and so forth).

The affective dimension of Clark’s work is most evident in her amplifi-

cation and intensification of the body’s sensorial capacities. The importance

of the kinetic senses of touch and movement in thinking about affect is em-

bedded in our language: being touched, being moved, carried away or trans-

ported. Indeed, touch is caught in a whole web of associations of receptivity,

understanding and sympathy: a fine touch, in touch with, great tact. This

chapter will argue that the important linkage between movement and affect

can be understood with reference to Daniel Stern’s concept of vitality affects,

which relate to speed, intensity and rhythm.19

In chapter four I examine the late sculptural work of Eva Hesse in rela-

tion to the idea of unconscious affect. The possibility of unconscious affect is

disputed by many psychoanalysts, starting with Freud, who thought that the



nature of affect was to be expressed and felt. Against this view, Chilean psy-

choanalyst Ignacio Matte-Blanco argues that affects are continuous with the

unconscious; in particular, they share with the unconscious the characteristic

of indivisibility, one of the features of which is the absence of contradictions.

An absence of contradictions is an apt way to describe the affective tone of

many of Hesse’s works. Such works bring together contradictory or ambiva-

lent feelings. Her abstract sculptures, for example, are referred to as funereal

and funny, erotic and yet evocative of both petrifaction and disintegration.20

This ambivalence makes Hesse’s expression highly allusive and elusive – one

cannot resolve the contradictory feelings into a cohesive expression.

Despite the acknowledgment of the expressive and affective qualities

of Hesse’s work by writers such as Rosalind Krauss, Briony Fer and Lucy

Lippard, there is no extended analysis of this aspect of her work. Krauss,

for example, notes the expressive and affective qualities of Hesse’s work but

her focus is on how this is paradoxical given her location within the min-

imalist discourse of the 1960s.21 Hesse is the only artist in this study whose

work is consistently expected to fit within, even as it challenges, the preva-

lent American art-historical discourses of the 1960s. Her work has thus been

identified as a kind of exception to the rule, a status that should be shared by

all four artists I examine.

The focus of chapter five is Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series. The series fo-

cuses on Mendieta’s lone body or its form or outline embedded directly in

the landscape. The images (films and photographs) are often tightly framed

around the figure so that the usual sense of the landscape as a capacious set-

ting or the backdrop for the figure’s actions is disallowed. Instead, the earth

and its processes come to the fore, thereby meeting the figures’ gestures of

salutation and communion.

Mendieta’s stated intention was to visualize ‘the body as an extension of

nature and nature as an extension of the body’.22 Examining this dynamic re-

lationship, and the role played within it by affect, is the focus of the chapter.

Mendieta’s affirmation of the traditional alignment of the female body with

nature has led to accusations that her work is essentialist. Recent criticism

has tended to concentrate on defending Mendieta against this charge, using

the idea of performative identity derived from the work of feminist philoso-

pher Judith Butler.23 Focusing on the affective dimension of Mendieta’s work

reveals that her practice combines and complicates these two polarized posi-

tions: she wants to claim territory for herself and to objectify her existence,

but this is coupled with other opposing desires. She wants to merge with


i n t roduc t ion 11

the earth and to represent the living earth, where her body in the landscape

recalls or stands for Mother Nature. The slippages between these different

spatial possibilities make her work more complicated than a clash between

identitarian feminist propositions and the desire to eschew such foundational

necessities. Instead, Mendieta’s work can be tracked and placed in art history

as a curious combination of expressive and non-expressive languages. The

Silueta Series is at once deeply personal, addressing her sense of exile and her

deep desire for permanent connection to land and place, as well as deploying

conceptual-art strategies to mute any sentimentality or nostalgia such long-

ing might be expected to call up.

Debates about ethnicity, race and gender identity come much more to

the fore with the work of both Mendieta and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Mendieta’s art, for example, has been interpreted in terms of self-portrai-

ture, female identity and subjectivity, as well as Cuban identity. Similarly,

Cha’s work has been examined in terms of its capacity to demonstrate an in-

between or hybrid identity. She, like Mendieta, migrated to the United States

as a young teenager (Cha was 12 years old, Mendieta was 13).

In contrast to Mendieta, Cha’s art is about the undoing of identity. Critics

have repeatedly noted not only Cha’s express intention ‘to be the dream of

the audience’ but also that they experienced her work in precisely this way.24

Robert Atkins puts this most directly when he reports leaving one perform-

ance feeling ‘suspended between consciousness and unconsciousness, as if I

had been dreaming someone else’s dreams’.25 What all of the reports suggest

is a pleasurable experience of losing one’s self or being in some way cast adrift

from normal existence. This suspended or decentred feeling of Cha’s work has

an anaesthetic effect, so that the work has a lulling or soothing quality along-

side the registration of sadness and melancholy. The chapter concentrates on

her video installation Passages, Paysages (1978), and considers how Cha com-

bines feeling with adherence to conceptual-art tenets of impersonality.

Through looking carefully at these four artists and their different ways of

generating feeling, a new way of thinking about this period and the contribu-

tion of women artists is opened up. The development of an affective dimen-

sion to their work is a courageous contribution to the art of the 1960s and

1970s, an era when there was such sustained opposition to the traditionally

feminine qualities of feeling and emotion. Understanding the creative ways

in which women artists reinvented this aspect of art practice, in line with the

advanced art methods and protocols of the time, shows another side of the

‘feminine’ avant-garde tradition.


187

Abraham, Karl, 73

Abramovic, Marina, 93

Abstract Expressionism, 16

Acconci, Vito, 93

Adams, Parveen, 153

Ader, Bas Jan, 94, 110

I’m too Sad to Tell You, 110–11

romantic conceptualism, 110

aesthetics, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17,28, 29, 30, 31, 32,

33, 90, 114, 120, 124, 136, 149, 150

and the location of affect, 33, 35, 44

as body-to-body encounter, 48

classical, 8, 15, 16, 113

do-it-yourself. See conceptual art

formalist, 35

German Idealism, 15, 18, 26, 149

of administration. See Buchloh, Benjamin

of indifference. See Roth, Moira

of impersonality, 116–18

of production, 17, 21, 28

of reception, 17, 20−22, 28, 150

of the 1950s, 119

of the work, 22, 28

shifts in, 17−18, 20, 28, 29−30, 40

transcendental. See Kant, Immanuel

affect

affective responses to artworks, 1,7, 8,

38−39, 43−46, 57, 63, 65, 72, 112

as anticipation. See Green, André

affective tone of artworks. See art, affective

dimensions

and representation, 35, 43, 44

as anticipation. See Green, André

corporeality of, 5, 9, 10, 37, 44, 61, 69

disruptive power, 4

evolutionary accounts of, 39

function, 32

in minimalism. See minimalism

negative, 42, 45, 46, 88, 112

non-categorical, 5, 58, 84

positive, 42, 45, 63, 88, 113

startle-surprise, 43, 47−48, 57, 88, 139

theories of, 6, 31, 34−35, 71, 88

unconscious, 9, 67, 71, 87

use of term, 5–6

vitality affects. See Stern, Daniel

Alberro, Alexander, 12, 13, 20, 27

Alloway, Lawrence, 42

Altieri, Charles, 4

definition of emotion, 5–6

analytic philosophy, 122, 169

Andre, Carl, 13, 41, 42, 137

anthropomorphism, 16, 21−28, 45, 69, 78, 87,

91, 94, 137−139

Antin, Eleanor, 122, 123

art

abstract, 9, 10, 16, 41, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54,

69, 78

history of, 49, 52

affective dimensions, 1−11, 22, 30−35, 41,

49, 69, 84, 90, 93, 138, 139

affectless, 2, 8, 21, 32, 41, 42, 139

anaesthetic, 30, 114, 115, 120, 135

and expression, See expression

and feminism, See feminist art

and politics, 14, 33, 35, 106, 139

and subjectivity. See subjectivity

anthropomorphism in. See

anthropomorphism

anti-aesthetic tradition, 1, 2, 7−8, 12, 14−16,

27, 113−114, 118, 121, 138−139, 172

as a living thing, 52, 53, 55, 58

Index

Best_Index.indd 187Best_Index.indd 187 6/10/2011 5:04:12 PM6/10/2011 5:04:12 PM

188 v isua l i z i ng fe e l i ng

art – continued

classical, 93

contemporary. See contemporary art

criticism, 8, 15, 16, 22, 28, 39, 71, 119

critics, 1, 17, 35, 37, 42, 119, 172

as analysts, 35–36, 38

expressive theory of art. See expression

function of, 15, 25

materials, 3, 12, 41, 48, 64, 89, 99, 109, 139

meaning of, 2, 4−5, 6−7, 13, 21−22, 25,

27−28, 32, 35, 63, 68, 84

methods, 3, 41, 63, 108

of the 1950s, 41, 56, 73, 119

of the 1960s, 68, 73

of the 1960s and 70s, 1, 3, 6, 48, 93, 107,

114, 138, 144

of the 1970s, 106

post-1960s, 8, 13, 34, 67

production of, 3, 8, 21, 28, 65, 67, 72, 90,

93, 117, 172

aestheticization. See aesthetics

representation in, 23, 31, 35, 36, 40, 43−44,

73−74, 101, 103, 106, 121, 123, 134,

143, 144

self-representation, 11, 99

and the unrepresentable, 118, 124, 136

cross-cultural, 124

response to, 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 12, 17, 18,20−22,

24, 26, 28, 31−33, 35, 39, 43, 45, 56, 63,

92, 107, 111−113, 121, 134−135, 149,

150, 153

ethics of reception, 116

twentieth century, 2, 27, 144−145

women's. See women’s art

art history, 1, 3, 4, 14, 15, 24, 27, 43, 106, 107,

122, 145

and expression, 6, 12, 21, 32, 52

and psychoanalytic theory, 6, 7, 8, 30

art as psychical event, 8

psychobiographical approach, 8, 36, 72

art historians, 35, 36, 37, 170

role of, 8

feminist approaches to, 3, 106, 108, 114,

118−119, 138, 144−145, 149

late modern, 15

neglect of affect in, 39

neglect of feeling in , 1–4, 30

orthodoxy, 43

art informel, 119

art practices, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 24, 28, 41, 43,

44, 49, 52, 55, 66, 100, 112, 118, 143

American post-war, 15

historical shifts in, 15, 17, 27

Artaud, Antonin, 2

arte povera, 52

artistic intention, 7, 12, 13, 19, 22, 28, 30, 35,

46, 67, 68, 93

negation of, 13, 19, 21, 30, 35, 67−68

artists, 1, 6, 36, 39, 42, 46, 49, 71,93,109−110,

116, 118−119, 121, 122, 123, 138,

143−145,149, 156, 172

myths about, 120, 138

subjectivity of, 55, 116, 139

Atkins, Robert, 11

avant-garde, 2, 5, 11

art, 2, 34, 124

female lineage, 2

literature, 2

of the 1920s and 30s, 52

of the 1960s, 52

practices, 3, 43, 52

standards, 3

Bachelard, Gaston

rhythmanalysis, 58–59

Balint, Michael

fragmentation in art, 74

Barrette, Bill, 76

Barry, Judith, 148

analysis of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 134

Barthes, Roland, 17, 108, 139, 149

colourless writing, 154

writing degree zero, 41

Bataille, Georges, 40

Battersby, Christine, 149

Baudry, Jean-Louis

film as dream-like, 134

beauty, 14, 29, 31, 43, 52, 76, 106, 112, 113,

119, 135, 144

and truth. See Scarry, Elaine

critical debates, 112–14

return to, 16

Beckley, Bill, 16

Benjamin, Walter, 113

Berger, Maurice, 71

Bill, Max, 56


189index

Bion, Wilfred

part-objects, 73

Blocker, Jane, 147

Bochner, Mel, 108

Measurement Room, 108

body, the, 36, 45, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 65, 66, 69,

71, 73, 78, 93, 99, 103, 105, 109, 112,

114, 122, 139, 140, 143, 159, 164

and affect, 37, 69, 112, 160

and feeling, 48, 65, 139

collective. See Clark, Lygia

crying, 110–11

female, 10, 94, 101, 106, 123, 144

fragmentation in modern art, 73–74

gesture, 64, 93, 106

in participatory art, 9, 47, 57

revitalization of. See Clark, Lygia

therapy. See Clark, Lygia

Bois, Yve-Alain, 9, 49, 52, 59, 72, 76, 117, 156

critique of Eva Hesse,

bodily allusion in, 84

repetition in, 74

disappearance in the work of Lygia Clark,

139

Bollas, Christopher:, 65

Bond, Katherine Russell, 135

Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 105

Bourgeois, Louise, 73

Bourriaud, Nicolas, 171

Brecht, Bertolt, 120

alienation effect, 118, 120−121, 123, 168,

169

empathy vs. feeling, 121

Brett, Guy, 60, 93, 107, 159

Brisley, Stuart, 110

British Art & Language group, 122

Buchloh, Benjamin, 108, 114

Bürger, Peter, 51

Burgin, Victor, 123

Butler, Judith

performativity, 10, 106

Camnitzer, Luis, 99, 107

Caruth, Cathy, 170

Casey, Edward, 6, 32

aesthetics of the work, 22

on expression, 6–7, 21–22, 32, 84

Cézanne, Paul, 47

Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, 2, 9, 11, 107,

116−136, 138, 143, 144,148,167

affective tone in artworks, 118, 120, 128,

135

and feeling, 11, 120−121, 135−136,138, 144

and the untransmittable, 124, 133, 136

and the sublime, 136,144

Apparatus, 124

critical reception, 2, 11, 107, 122–23

decentred subject,11, 123−124,144

Dictée, 122, 124, 134

displacement, 118, 135

dream motif, 117, 133, 134−5, 144

Exilée, 125

ideal of shared communication, 120

impersonality, 116, 118, 120, 134, 136

investigtions into language, 118, 122, 125,

126−128, 144

Mouth to Mouth, 130–31

Passages, Paysages, 117, 123, 125−136

Permutations, 130–31

realization of theory in practice, 124

Videodème, 126–28

Chang, Juliana, 116

Chave, Anna, 68, 148

vividness of associations in the work of Eva

Hesse, 86

Clark, Lygia, 2, 9, 46−66, 107, 119, 138, 140,

142, 143, 155, 156, 157, 159

and the body

as an instrument for expression, 48, 52

collective, 48, 63

therapy, 155

body-to-body relationship to art, 54

Air and Stone, 58

art as a living thing, 52, 53, 55, 58

Beasts, 53–55, 157

Biological Architecture Birth, 64

Cannibalism, 65, 159

Cannibalistic Slobber, 65

critical reception, 9, 52, 54−55, 57−58, 139

fantasmic experience, 140

final works, 48, 65–66

geometric abstraction in artworks, 9, 48, 51,

52, 54, 56

infinite tissue, 63, 159

organic line, 50

parallels with minimalism, 50–52, 156



Clark, Lygia – continued

participatory art, 9, 47, 48, 53, 55, 139,

156–57

rejection of the spectator, 9, 66, 156

revitalization, 48

rhythm, 58

sculpture, 54, 55

Sensorial Hoods, 60–61

The Body is the House, 63

The House is the Body, 59–60, 63

The I and the You, 61–63

therapeutic intent, 49, 65–66, 140, 155

Trailings, 55–57

use of startle and surprise, 47, 57

Clark, T.J., 119

class, 21, 119

Colpitt, Frances, 42

conceptual art, 1, 9, 11, 12, 30, 41, 55, 94, 107,

108, 120, 144, 170, 172

anti-aesthetic, 114

anti-expressive, 110, 111, 121

do-it-yourself aesthetic in, 109

emotion in, 94

inf luence of analytic philosophy, 169

romantic conceptualism. See Ader, Bas Jan

San Francisco accounts of, 122, 125

seriality, 110, 108–10, 116

as means of suppressing subjectivity and

feeling, 109

unity with minimalism, 109

use of photography in, 114

constructivism, 49, 54, 55, 56

contemporary art, 15, 16, 18, 39, 66, 144, 152,

172

Copjec, Joan

attention to the inarticulable in art, 68

Cultural Studies, 4

culture, 90, 92, 124, 134

ancient, 100, 143

conventions in, 123

modern, 41

production of, 38, 68

de Duve, Thierry, 8, 12, 13, 15, 16, 21, 22, 28, 39

critique of minimalism, 139

temporal dimension of 22−23

minimalist anthropomorphism, 23–26

on history of contemporary art, 152

on subjectivity, 12–14, 66

parallelism, 34, 36


reprise of Hegelian aesthetics, 18

de Zegher, Catherine, 2−3, 146

death drive, the, 41

Deleuze, Gilles, 32, 147

Derrida, Jacques, 16, 138

Deutsche, Rosalyn, 33

Dewey, John, 32

Difference: on Representation and Sexuality, 123

Duchamp, Marcel, 12, 40, 114

readymade art, 29−30, 120

Dufrenne, Mikel, 32

Edelson, Mary Beth, 100

embodiment, 21, 37, 43

emotion, 4, 5, 69, 87, 92, 94, 112, 120, 121,

125, 138, 145

ambiguity, 115

gendering of, 4, 11

theories of, 4, 73, 88

empathy theory, 30

ethnicity, 11, 143

experience, 1, 6, 11, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 45, 50,

55, 59, 60, 61, 118, 124, 134, 136, 139,

151, 167

aesthetic experience, 14, 17, 46, 47, 84

and feeling, 29

bodily, 47

perception, 19, 21, 39, 45, 46, 47, 52, 57,

125, 133, 139, 144

pleasure, 14, 16, 31, 42, 43, 45, 125, 144

in rhythm, 58

of bonding and binding, 63

visual, 121

sensation, 5, 56, 61, 65, 144

bodily, 47, 48

inner and outer, 24, 61

sensuousness, 13, 14, 16

expression, 6–7, 12, 14, 17, 28, 32, 35, 40, 46, 48,

50, 52, 61, 67, 68, 93, 108, 110, 112, 114

as a phenomenon of art, 21–22, 32

cohesiveness in, 6, 10

expressive theory of art, 4, 6, 13, 17, 19, 21,

28, 32, 34, 40, 109, 119, 138

rejection of, 67–68, 116, 118, 138

privacy of. See Krauss, Rosalind


i ndex 191

faces, 37, 111

facial expression, 111, 112

Farver, Jane, 107

feeling, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 12, 21, 24, 29, 30, 32,

36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 57,

58, 61, 63, 65, 69, 71, 74, 84, 88, 89, 90,

92, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114,

115, 120, 136, 138, 139, 144, 145, 152

ambiguity, 10, 48

and subjectivity in art, 14, 120

as bodily sensation and emotion, 48

communicative function, 30, 39

gendering of, 4, 11

miniaturization. See Tomkins, Silvan

revitalization. See Clark, Lygia

feminine, 2, 3, 4, 11, 146

feminine genius. See Kristeva, Julia

femininity, 4, 106

feminism, 82, 134, 138, 145

theory, 3, 4

strategic essentialism, 4, 146

feminist art

and identity, 123

and new models for subjectivity. See

subjectivity

of the 1970s and 80s, 118, 138

postmodern def lation in. See Iverson,

Margaret

practices, 3, 82, 106, 118, 119, 123

Fer, Briony, 10, 68, 69, 72

blankness in the work of Eva Hesse, 69

film, 9, 10, 93, 95, 100, 101, 109, 118,122, 125

film theory, 121, 131, 134

alienation, 118

French, 124

history, 131

historians, 170

structural, 1, 130−131, 170

anti-expressiveness of, 121

Brechtian alienation. See Brecht, Bertolt

Flavin, Dan, 41

Fluxus, 16, 52

formalism, 7,35, 119

Foster, Hal, 17, 21, 152

Foucault, Michel, 137–38

Frank, Adam, 88

Freud, Sigmund, 6, 9, 42, 87

affect versus representation, 44

anxiety, 30–31

consciousness of affect, 88

French Freudianism, 118

interpretation vs. construction, 36

kettle logic, 42, 154

limits of construction with artworks,

37

on affect, 9–10, 31, 44

on beauty, 29

on jokes, 90, 127

on pleasure, 113

on oneness with the earth, 103–4

on rhythm, 58

primary identification, 105, 164–65

psychobiographical approach to art. See art

history

sublimation, 90

Fried, Michael, 17, 22, 23, 150

critique of minimalism, 17, 23–25, 27, 32,

42, 73, 156

temporality of art, 167

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 17, 32

radical subjectivization, 17

Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt) 2

gender, 11, 73, 100, 106, 123, 143

Godfrey, Mark, 109, 110, 166

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von,

61

Green, André, 6, 43, 46, 88

affect and representation, 31, 44

affect as anticipation, 31, 45, 46

affect, the body, and language, 31

Greenberg, Clement, 152

Griggs, Russell, 127

Guattari, Félix, 32, 147

Gullar, Ferreira, 49, 156

non-objects, 52, 157

Haacke, Hans, 32−33, 35, 110

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 15

Idealist aesthetics, 18

Heidegger, Martin, 26

Heiser, Jörg

romantic conceptualism, 94,

166

Hemmings, Clare, 4

Herkenhoff, Paulo, 156, 157



Hesse, Eva, 2, 9−10, 67−91, 138, 139,140,

141,143, 147, 159, 160, 163

absurdity in work, 74–76, 90−91

affective tone of artworks, 10, 69, 72, 74, 76,

78, 82, 84, 87, 89, 90

alignment with minimalism, 10, 67, 140

and unconscious affect, 9, 91, 143

anthropomorphism in, 69, 78, 87, 91

Accession series, 140

biography, 72, 90

Contingent, 87

contradictory associations in work, 10,

69–71,74, 82, 86, 89, 143

critical reception, 10, 67−69, 71−72, 74,

81−83, 86−87, 143

expressiveness, 10, 67−69, 90, 140

geometric quality of work, 81, 91

Hang Up, 74–77

Ingeminate, 78–81

repetition in, 74

Repetition Nineteen III, 77–84

sculpture, 67, 69

seriality in, 82, 84

similarity to work of Lygia Clark, 140

Several, 78–81

Tori, 82–84

Untitled or Not Yet, 140

viewer’s affective response to, 72, 78, 82, 88, 90

Hinshelwood, R.D., 151

part-objects, 73

identity, 11, 123, 124, 134, 143

as a construct, 123

gender, 11, 143

intercultural, 107, 143

performative, 10, 106

politics, 106

relational, 99, 143

Inside the Visible, 2

installation art, 24, 27

video, 27

Iverson, Margaret

critique of the sublime, 118–20

deflationary impulse in feminist art, 118–20,

138

Jameson, Fredric

waning of affect, 40

Jay, Martin

critique of modernist excision of feeling,

40–41

Jena Romanticism, 15

Johns, Jasper, 41, 154

Jonas, Joan, 122, 131

Joyce, James, 2

Judd, Donald, 12, 108, 150

critique of Lygia Clark, 53–55

“one thing after another”, 12, 108

specific objects, 52

Kant, Immanuel, 15, 20, 23, 26, 31, 39

sublime, the, 124−125

taste, 17, 39, 120, 128, 149, 152

thing-in-itself, the, 46

transcendental aesthetics, 19, 31,120, 124,

128, 149, 150, 151, 152, 166

Kelly, Mary, 123

kinetic art, 9, 54

Klein, Melanie, 6, 24, 89, 146, 151

object relations, 48, 73

part-objects, 72, 74

oral phantasies of infancy, 65, 73, 159

Klein, Yves, 107

critique of art informel, 119

Kofman, Sarah, 36, 37, 38

universality of affective response, 38–39

Kolbowski, Silvia, 123

Kosuth, Joseph, 122

Kozloff, Max

zombie art, 42, 139

Krauss, Rosalind, 7, 13, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22,

27, 28, 68, 151

critique of Eva Hesse, 10, 67, 143

phenomenological account of subjectivity,

13–14, 18–20, 22, 26

privacy of expression, 21−22, 25, 68, 143

Kristeva, Julia, 2−3

feminine genius, 146

Kruger, Barbara, 123

Kwon, Miwon, 147, 172

Lacan, Jacques, 6, 44, 124

dreams, 134

“lalangue”, 127

land art, 1, 52

Langer, Susanne, 32, 50, 58


i ndex 193

language, 21, 44, 123, 134, 144

and affect, 31

displacement of the subject by, 118

Laplanche, Jean

trauma, 135

late modern art, 1, 3, 9, 14, 15, 39, 40, 108,

118, 138

affective response to, 43

affectless, 8, 21

anaesthetic sensibility in, 41

and expression, 138

and feeling, 30, 42

and subjectivity, 14, 27, 138

anti-aesthetic, 1, 14, 15, 138, 172

anti-expressive, 1, 25, 35, 67, 116

anti-subjective, 1, 40

avant-garde practices, 2

ethic of impersonality, 116, 117

other-oriented, 116–17

Lee, Min Jung

critique of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

communication in, 124

subjectivity in, 133–34

Levinas, Emmanuel, 138

ethics, 117, 167

Levine, Sherrie, 123

LeWitt, Sol, 40, 73, 106, 108

de-emphasis on materials in art production,

109−110

Linker, Kate, 123

Lippard, Lucy, 10, 69, 100, 147

critique of Eva Hesse

animation in, 71–72

contradiction in, 86

eccentric abstraction in, 82, 87

humour as incongruity, 76

Lyotard, Jean-François

on avant-garde art, 124

sublime, the, 118–19, 124

summary of psychoanalytic approaches to

art, 36

Mallarmé, Stéphane, 2, 128

Manet, Edouard, 40

Marker, Chris, 128, 170

Markus, Gyorgy, 35, 149

aesthetic schema, 15

Matte-Blanco, Ignacio, 6

affect and the unconscious, 10, 71, 88,

89, 91

memories in feelings, 89

Matthis, Iréne, 5

McDougall, Joyce, 6, 45

elements of psychic structure, 34

Medalla, David

on Lygia Clark’s Beasts, 53–55

Mendieta, Ana, 2, 9−11, 92−115, 138, 139,

143, 144, 163

accusations of essentialism, 10–11, 106

affective tone, 94, 99, 105, 110, 111, 114,

115, 163−164

and conceptual art, 94, 107, 112,

114, 115

Birth in Mud, 101–3

blankness of figures, 99

and colonization, 143

contradictory qualities of work, 93

critical reception, 11, 106–10, 114, 164

disappearance of the body, 95

earthbody sculptures, 93, 94

relations of body and earth, 10, 94−100,

103, 104, 105, 109

expressiveness, 93, 107, 111, 114, 115

links to minimalism, 1–2

miniaturization of feeling, 112

objectification in, 99

on Mother Earth, 11

relational identity, 143

serial method, 77–84, 107, 109

Silueta Series, 10, 92, 93, 115, 143

means of addressing viewers, 99

poses, 100

territorial impulse, 100

themes, 94, 101

disappearance of the body, 95–100

Merewether, Charles, 163

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 18, 21, 52, 138

intertwining of body and the world, 44, 56,

57, 63, 159

primordial perception, 47, 48

primordial spatiality, 20, 23

Messager, Annette, 2

Meyer, James, 148, 150, 152, 172

Michelson, Annette, 73

Milliet, Maria Alice, 56

Min, Yong Soon, 135



minimalism, 1–2, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 27, 30,

34, 39, 46, 50, 52, 67, 108, 109, 111,

112, 120, 144, 156, 172

affective response to, 43, 44

affectlessness, 32, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 109

aggressiveness of, 1, 24, 27, 32, 33, 42, 43,

45, 73

and aesthetics, 14–18

and dismantling subjectivity, 7, 12–13

and phenomenology, 7–8

anthropomophism in, 23–26, 138

blankness in, 45, 46

boredom in, 2, 42, 43, 45

contingency, 20–21, 26

early critical response, 41–42

entanglement of beholder and works of art,

8, 24, 28, 138, 156

geometric abstraction, 19, 22–23, 110

industrial logic, 12

industrial materials, 12, 41

new model for subjectivity. See subjectivity

phenomenological readings. See Krauss,

Rosalind; de Duve, Thierry

repositioning of affect, 46

sculptural works, 18, 23, 24, 32

suppression of expression, 7, 17, 67, 121

temporal dimensions, 22–23

Mitchell, Juliet, 73

modern art, 1

anaesthetic sensibility, 40

impersonal urge in, 117, 120

modernism, 65, 93, 119

Molesworth, Helen, 109

Morris, Robert, 12, 16, 18, 22, 50, 77, 150, 151

aesthetic dispersion, 12−13, 22

Mulvey, Laura

critique of visual pleasure, 121

nature, 10, 92, 94, 99, 125, 143

earth, 10, 92, 93, 94, 95, 103, 143

feminization of, 93, 106

landscape, 11, 93, 94, 99, 109, 125

Mother Earth, 10–11

Mother Nature, 101

relationship with the body. See Mendieta,

Ana

seasons, 94

neo-concretism, 9, 48, 49, 57

manifesto, 49–50, 52, 66, 156

Neo-Dada, 16

neo-expressionism, 119

Nixon, Mignon

fragmentation in the work of Eva Hesse, 73

Oiticia, Hélio, 57, 61, 140

painting, 9, 13, 40, 41, 42, 50, 51, 52, 67, 76,

86,119, 128, 133

participatory art, 9, 47−48, 54, 139, 171

Pedrosa, Mario, 57, 156

performance art, 9, 37, 114, 122


Perrault, John, 107

phenomenology, 8, 13, 18, 26, 43, 45, 49, 52,

148

photography, 9, 10, 33, 93, 100, 101, 107, 108,

109, 113, 114, 128, 133

in minimalist art. See minimalism

Photography and Language group, 122

Piper, Adrian, 122

Pollock, Griselda

emancipatory pleasures, 121

Pop art, 16

postmodern art, 124

deflationary impulse in, 118

postmodernism, 20, 21, 22

theory, 124

poststructuralism, 30

Potts, Alex, 149

Proust, Marcel, 128, 132

psychoanalytic practice, 30, 34, 36, 49, 89

and affect, 34–35

psychoanalytic theory, 5, 6, 24, 29, 40, 48, 49, 122

and affect, 5, 6, 7, 9−10, 31, 34−35, 40, 41,

43, 44, 45−46, 48−49, 58, 59,71, 88−89,

91,111, 113, 139

and feeling, 29−33, 34, 88−89

and unconscious affect, 9−10, 71, 87−91

application in art history. See art history

dreams, 127, 135

identification, 105, 121, 164−165

introjection, 82

limits of reason, 124

object relations, 48

depressive position, 73

paranoid-schizoid position, 24, 73


i ndex 195

psychoanalytic theory – continued

part-objects, 24, 72, 91

transitional objects, 59

projection, 73, 159

sublimation, 90

transference, 34, 37, 38, 39, 44, 89

counter-transference, 65

trauma, 135–36

unconscious, the, 10, 37, 44, 68, 71, 76, 87,

116, 127, 134, 136, 143, 144

race, 11, 21, 143

Ramirez, Mari Carmen, 172

religion, 59, 92, 103

representation, 23, 31, 35, 36, 40, 144

and affect, 43, 44

critical debates, 143

Rinder, Lawrence, 127

Rolnik, Suely, 57, 155

Rose, Barbara, 41, 45

Rosler, Martha, 122, 123

Roth, Moira

aesthetics of indifference, 41

Rubin, William

transformation of negative affect through

artworks, 42

Ruscha, Ed

Every Building on Sunset Strip, 108

Sabbatino, Mary, 93

Scarry, Elaine

beauty and truth, 113

Schneemann, Carolee, 100

sculpture, 9, 10, 22, 52, 54, 56, 57, 67, 69, 72,

76, 143

ancient, 100

constructivist, 55

minimalist, 18, 23, 24, 32

post-1960s, 13, 67

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 88

Sekula, Allan, 33, 114

Sitney, Adams, 170

Smith, Tony, 24, 25

Smithson, Robert, 39

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 123

Spector, Jack, 36

Spector, Nancy, 93, 114

Spivak, Gayatri

strategic essentialism, 146

Stein, Ruth, 6

Steinberg, Leo

ascetic passion, 41, 154

on Jasper Johns, 154

Stella, Frank, 13

Stern, Daniel, 6

vitality affects, 9, 48, 58

strategic essentialism, 4, 146

subjectivity, 8, 12, 14, 16, 25−28, 35, 40, 55,

116, 122, 123, 139, 144, 150

and trauma, 135−136

as a construct, 144

contemporary state, 18, 25, 27, 66,139

contingent, 20

elimination of, 12−13, 117

female, 11

models of, 7−8, 13−14, 19, 25, 26, 143

postmodern, 123

suppression of, 7−8, 40, 108−109

surrealism, 8, 71, 76

taste, 14, 17, 29, 30, 39, 40, 119,120, 149,152

technology, 101

Tomkins, Silvan, 6, 43, 153

affect theory, 48, 88, 111, 113

affect miniaturization, 111–12

maximizing positive affect, 45

negative affects, 88

positive affects, 88

resetting affects, 48, 57, 88

claustral joy, 63, 105, 139

claustrophobic wishes, 159

desire for remedial action, 111

startle and surprise, 43

Vicuña, Cecilia, 2

Verwoert, Jan, 110

video, 9, 27, 118, 122, 125, 126, 131, 144

Viso, Olga, 100, 107

Wagner, Anne, 69

imagery in work of Eva Hesse, 72

on contradictory critiques of Eva Hesse, 86

Warburg, Aby, 30

Weiss, Rachel, 107

Wilson, William

critique of works of Eva Hesse, 82



Winnicott, Donald, 6

art as intermediary in experience, 59

unintegration, 61, 139

vitality, 48, 59, 139

Wollen, Peter, 170

women artists, 2, 3, 4, 5, 119, 122, 144−145

contributions, 11, 122, 138, 144−145

women’s art, 2, 3, 114, 122, 146

avant-garde practices. See avant-garde

challenge to art history, 114–15

innovations of, 2−3, 139, 143,

144−145

Woodman, Francesca, 2

Woolf, Susan, 170

Worringer, Wilhelm

urge toward abstraction in art, 41

Zelevansky, Lynn, 172

Zimmer, William, 164

Zizek, Slavoj, 150


Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde

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