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

A galvanizing work that seems bound toinspire artists for many years to come.? An invaluable, detailed art-historicalaccount of struggles to represent sexualviolence.? A gripping history.? 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. Riveting& A potent study of feminist art and activism of the 1970s& Clearly grasping the scope and complexity of her subject, the author contextualizes the stumbles and stamina of feminism, addressing objectification and exploitation while focusing on artists' pivotal acts of defiance, which brought heightened awareness to taboo or underdiscussed topics& Paying attention to the groundbreaking work of artists giving voice to sexual violence, Princenthal plainly establishes art's significant contributions to social change movements. In this uniquely focused and vitally analytical history, Princenthal recognizes an underappreciated facet of revolutionary art, and dramatically captures the bravura, shocking, at times media-savvy, in other cases stunningly covert performances of Yoko Ono, Suzanne Lacy, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper, and Marina Abramovic, as well as the ferocious pictorial work of Nancy Spero& [An] unprecedented and searing inquiry. Throughout the art-historical record, sexual violence against women was a subject typically rendered by male artists for a male audience. Princenthal shows how that finally changed in the last quarter of the 20th century&women took an experience that had been artistically mined by men for millenniums..and found ways to convey it in their own terms& [She] takes a tangled history and weaves it into an elegant account Nancy Princenthal's?Unspeakabl£,