Feminist art epistemologies (FAEs) greatly aid the understanding of feminist art, particularly when they serve to illuminate the hidden meanings of an artist's intent. The success of parodic imagery produced by feminist artists (feminist visual parodies, FVPs) necessarily depends upon a viewer's recognition of the original work of art created by a male artist and the realization of the parodist's intent to ridicule and satirize. As Brand shows in this essay, such recognition and realization constitute the knowledge of a well-(in)formed (...) FAE. Without it, misinterpretation is possible and viewers fail to experience and enjoy a full and rewarding encounter with a provocative and subversive work of art. (shrink)

Feminist epistemology and feminist art theory are characterized by an opposition to modernity's separation of art, politics, and knowledge into three autonomous spheres. However, this opposition is not enough to distinguish them from other philosophies. In this paper I examine parallels between the two fields of inquiry in order to discover what makes them distinctively feminist. Feminist epistemology sees interconnections between knowledge and politics, feminist art theory sees connections between art and politics. We need to explore as well connections between (...) art and knowledge. Compared to feminist epistemology, feminist art theory has had much less exposure, and in this paper I emphasize what the former can learn from the latter. In particular, I suggest that feminist art can answer a call made by feminist theories of knowledge for a kind of transformative knowledge. If we focus on the features of activist art explored by feminist art theories, we see that feminist art is particularly suited to engage emotions as well as the intellect. It is an example of nonpropositional knowledge, and is interactive rather than striving to pass down lessons from above. Feminist art celebrates the power of art to “make strange” and to unsettle fixed identities which can transform our understanding of the world. There is a tendency in some feminist art theory to separate the more concrete work (rediscovering women artists, recognizing women's crafts as art forms, and investigating sexist imagery in art), from the theoretical project of reenvisioning the relations of art to its sociopolitical context. I conclude by arguing that without an awareness of the dialectical relationship between the concrete and the theoretical, feminist art theories run the risk of losing their feminist specificity. They would then amount to little more than abstract pronouncements of the interconnections between art, politics, and knowledge. We need to maintain the feminist specificity of feminist politics in our theories of art and knowledge, and I use examples throughout the essay, drawn particularly from feminist activist art, with this goal in mind. (shrink)

Cet article retrace le succès précoce d’une artiste grecque ottomane, Eleni Iliadis, dans le monde artistique d’Istanbul pendant la Première Guerre mondiale et son éviction de l’histoire de l’art turque après la fondation de la République en 1923. En s’inspirant des nouvelles approches féministes de l’histoire de l’art, cet article rend visible l’histoire cachée d’Iliadis : son éducation artistique à Munich, les expositions auxquelles elle participe, les récompenses et le patronage de l’État qu’elle reçoit pendant la guerre à Istanbul, en (...) particulier pour sa peinture récemment redécouverte, Le Joueur de Guitare. J’examine les politiques genrées d’éducation artistique, de production et de réception dans le monde de l’art des débuts des années 1920 et analyse en quoi l’identité d’Iliadis en tant qu’artiste femme et non-musulmane a représenté un défi pour la nouvelle histoire nationale de l’art turque, dominée par les hommes, qui l’a finalement éradiquée de la mémoire culturelle. (shrink)

Feminism compels us to reconceptualize aesthetic inquiries, as it erases the boundaries between the traditional realm of aesthetics-value judgments and personal pleasures-and the historical and social contexts that generate those judgments and pleasures. In the visual arts section of our annotated bibliography, we try to suggest the breadth of feminist interventions in the field of aesthetics in the past twenty years.