The Art of Maximal Ventriloquy: Femininity as Labour in the Films of Rachel Maclean
- Submitting institution
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Glasgow School of Art
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 5133
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image: Context and Practices
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Academic
- ISBN
- 9781784537005
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- August
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- This book chapter is part of an edited collection, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019, titled Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image: Contexts and Practices, edited by Dr Lucy Reynolds (Westminster). The book is divided into three parts and includes chapters by leading scholars on feminist film and artists’ moving image and a foreword by Professor Laura Mulvey.
The book investigates both how women artists have challenged narratives of gender discrimination through their work and how this same discrimination has rendered that work invisible or marginal in both contemporary art and art historical contexts. Following the positive reception of the original hardback and e-book editions, Bloomsbury released a paperback in Autumn 2020.
Co-authored with Sarah Neely (Glasgow), the chapter brings together our shared expertise on experimental film and moving image art. Research comprised literature surveys of feminist art history press and art journalism on Maclean, first-hand analysis of the works in various exhibition contexts over a six-year period and subsequent online viewings accessed directly from Maclean and LUX Scotland.
The chapter positions Maclean’s work for the first time within a history of feminist art, particularly performance and body art in relation to women’s labour. We argue that Maclean’s work presents a 21st century iteration of feminist performance art within an era of social media and smart phones. Rooted in the contemporary, through its critique of social media pressures on women to perform ‘aesthetic labour,’ the work broadly connects to themes of bodily labour and oppression that preoccupied feminist artists of the 1970s and 80s. Making this link explicit through the historicisation of Maclean’s work, our chapter demonstrates that the core concerns of early feminist art remain pertinent to a younger generation of women artists and contributes to research on new directions in feminist art.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
