Feeling what you see

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Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-Garde

By Susan Best

Have you ever thought about how images address viewers and what kind of feelings they provoke? Does this have anything to do with categories of social differentiation such as sex or race? There has been much research investigating the complex interrelations, which arise from the interplay between images and the senses. Recently, the feminist critiques have addressed the interaction between images and affect across different media and in different cultures. What about past artistic practices? Can art movements, such as Minimalism, Land art or Conceptual art, which are most often characterized as anti-subjective and anti-aesthetic, be approached differently? Can they be made complicated and connected to feeling, emotion and affect?

Susan Best’s Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde, which has won the Art Association of Australia & New Zealand (AAANZ) Best Book Prize 2012, offers art history a window of opportunity to look at the above issues. In the introduction Best quotes Catherine de Zegher, who claims that feminist art critique, whether theory- or practice-led, allows us ‘to see and to focus on what is in eclipse…or has different qualities of perceptibility’. This feminist perspective enables the author to search for new modes of innovation within avant-garde practices and broaden the mainstream art history with new accounts on the role of feeling in the works of avant-garde women artists.

The author explores the interrelations between the late-modern art of the 1960s and 1970s and ‘affect’, marrying art history and psychoanalysis. She gives the reader a thorough examination of the tradition of aesthetics and anti-aesthetics and the relocation of subjectivity connected to the rise of the spectator. She traces the role of feeling in psychoanalysis and aesthetics and introduces the concepts of affect and representation. Even though most suitable for an academic reader, the book is written in a lucid language and is useful for everyone interested in either alternative takes on art of 1960s and 1970s or women’s innovative explorations in the field of aesthetics undermining male supremacy within visual practices.

Best acknowledges the validity of the anti-aesthetic tradition in art but she also explores and highlights the legacy of women artists’ achievements to the development of that aesthetic language. This makes the book a little gem among writings about either the anti-aesthetic art of 1960s ad 1970s and the role of detachment and objectivity or the role of feminist artists of that time. The author allows to reconsider once again the popular myths of (male) divine creativity. She focuses on the works of four women artists aligned with avant-garde. Lygia Clark and Eva Hesse are brought in as artists engaging with questions of interiority in their sculptural practices. Ana Mendieta and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha are selected as they both work with the lens-based media and they explore the different articulations of identity. Best traces their intertwinement with the language of feeling but does not forget about the debates on aesthetics, beauty and the sublime. She also attends to the issue of the different strategies of representation and the arising new perspectives on concepts of gender, race or nationality.

Susan Best aims to highlight the move in feminist art critique towards the development of fresh feminist methods, which could be used to explore the breadth of practices of women artists, acknowledging their investigations into aesthetic possibilities. She gives a fascinating, theoretically rich and in-depth account of the discussed works and the concepts of feeling, affect and emotion. The author not only thoroughly examines the innovations in art practices of the selected avant-garde artists but offers a potentially new tool to explore contemporary works of women artists and stimulate a further discussion on the interplay between visual practices and feeling.

Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-Garde by Susan Best is published by I.B.Tauris 2011. 224 pp. ISBN 9781848858510 (hbk)  9781780767093 (pbk). Paperback price £16.99.