Artistic Labour of the Body

Artistic Labour of the Body examines VALIE EXPORT’s and Elfriede Jelinek’s use of the body and psyche as artistic material to explore Adorno’s concept of artistic labour. By deploying the body as artistic material, their works challenge women’s reduction to reproductive function or sexual object, articulating a feminism beyond “innocence”. Gush demonstrates how their art critiqued postwar Austria’s culture of disavowal, where unprocessed legacies of Nazism perpetuated Austria’s victimhood myth, while also exploring the complex identifications within this critique. The book reframes postwar artistic practices that revealed the body as both a site of patriarchal-capitalist violence and of resistance.

Author Biography

Rose-Anne Gush is an art historian and theorist whose work explores the political aesthetics of the body and notions of artistic labour, gender and feminism(s), and theories of “global art”. Her research engages with the spatial politics of capitalism, geographies of extraction, and questions of form. She is currently Assistant Professor at IZK – Institute for Contemporary Art at TU Graz.