Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s

Product Description A groundbreaking exploration of how women artists of the 1970s combined art and protest to make sexual violence visible, creating a new kind of art in the presence The 1970s was a time of deep division and newfound freedoms. Galvanized by The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique, the civil rights movement and the March on Washington, a new generation put their bodies on the line to protest injustice. Still, even in the heart of certain resistance movements, sexual violence against women had reached epidemic levels. Initially, it went largely unacknowledged. But some bold women artists and activists, including Yoko Ono, Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramovic, Adrian Piper, Suzanne Lacy, Nancy Spero and Jenny Holzer, fired up by women’s experiences and the climate of revolution, started a conversation about sexual violence that continues today. Some worked unannounced and unheralded, using the street as their theatre. Others managed to draw support from the highest levels of municipal power. Along the way, they changed the course of art, pioneering a form that came to be called simply performance. Award-winning author Nancy Princenthal takes on these enduring issues and weaves together a new history of performance, challenging us to re-examine the relationship between art and activism, and how we can apply the lessons of that turbulent era to today. Review Unspeakable Acts is an important and urgent book. Princenthal's trenchant, honest, complex exploration of the radical representations of sexual violence in the 1970s delineates the upheaval of implicit assumptions about rape, bodies, silence and speech in particular works by individual artists in light of their broader artistic and political meanings and lasting consequences. I read it with breathless, captive attention. --Siri Hustvedt, author of "The Blazing World and Memories of the Future" Nancy Princenthal speaks of the unspeakable brilliantly, bravely, thoroughly, and thoughtfully. She addresses art, literature, theatre, film and video games... and the real life politics they reflect, offering a long overdue look at creative coverage of rape, domestic violence, and other acts. In the process she has also written one of the best recent books on feminist arts. --Lucy R. Lippard, writer and activist Unspeakable Acts is a searching and nuanced account of the women artists who dared to take rape as their subject matter in the 1970s. But it's much more than that: Princenthal, with meticulous grace, illuminates the tumultuous era that gave rise to the groundbreaking performance-based works she discusses, examining representations of sexual violence, feminist and otherwise, in the larger culture. Arriving not a moment too soon, this rich text brings the radical innovations and unfinished business of the second wave to bear upon our present, increasingly high-stakes struggle for bodily autonomy and our vision for art s role in it. --Johanna Fateman Rarely dry and often omniscient, Unspeakable Acts is distinguished by its ability to move seamlessly between numerous rhetorical modes, navigating the subject matter with responsibility --Aesthetica Takes a tangled history and weaves it into an elegant account --International New York Times From the Back Cover The 1970s was a time of deep division and newfound freedoms. Galvanized by The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique, the civil rights movement and the March on Washington, a new generation put their bodies on the line to protest injustice. Still, even in the heart of certain resistance movements, sexual violence against women had reached epidemic levels. Initially, it went largely unacknowledged. But some bold women artists and activists, including Yoko Ono, Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramovic, Adrian Piper, Suzanne Lacy, Nancy Spero and Jenny Holzer, fired up by women’s experiences and the climate of revolution, started a conversation about sexual violence that continues today. Some worked unannounced and unher