Books shown in image, clockwise: Eugenia Maximova Silent River, Laia Abril On Rape, Donna Ferrato Holy, Poloumi Basu Centralia
25th November is the start of 16 days of activism against gender-based violence and the start of chapter 2 of our MALEVOLENCE initiative. Each day, we’ll be featuring a book by a woman artist and encouraging readers to ask their local library to add these books to their collections.
Nancy Princenthal
Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s
- Year of Publication: 2019
- Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
- ISBN: 978-0500023051
- RRP: £24.95
Day 1 : Nancy Princenthal
‘What if,’ Suzanne Lacy asked Judy Chicago in 1970, ‘we brought an audience into a theater, lowered the lights, and simply played audio tapes of women recounting, in elaborate detail, the story of their rape?’
So run the opening lines of Unspeakable Acts. Award-winning author, Nancy Princenthal, traces the history of performance art as a feminist activist tool, exploring how artists from the 1970s to the current day have transformed taboo subjects into public discourse. She offers an overview of how different artists and curators have handled the theme of sexual violence – some more successfully than others – but all adding to the heroinic conversation that started in the 1970s and continues to grow. And yes, Suzanne Lacy and Judy Chicago did realise their “what if” scenario as Ablutions (1972) – a collaborative performance between them, Sandra Orgel and Aviva Rahmani.
