Band 87, Heft 4 - Thematischer Schwerpunkt: Care Work as a Global Issue in Contemporary Art, Gastherausgeber: Friederike Sigler und Änne Soll

This paper confronts two traditions that seem to complement each other: the sociohistorical tradition of women as reproductive and care workers lacking public visibility, and the art-historical tradition of women as images, as silent and fixed show objects. This combination of women’s work made invisible and their objectifying hyperexposure, which in turn relies on the invisibilization of the media and ideological dispositive, is addressed in a 1975 film by Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles , in a particularly eloquent way. The paper places this film, a time-based portrait of a woman and her work, at the center of the investigation and takes it as a model of showing how the systemic determination of maintenance work – to maintain the status quo – can be overcome by making this work visible. By demanding our physical presence and endurance in facing and caring about another, this film enables us to perceive the details that make the difference and shows how maintenance (art)work can bring about change. It pointedly emphasizes the notion of the contemporary and allows us to ask the question of what is contemporary art once again.

This essay revisits the 1978 Venice Biennale, titled From Nature to Art, from Art to Nature , to discuss the “gender neutral” use of both notions within the exhibition’s official discourse at the time. Against the backdrop of the 1970s, amid the momentum of second-wave feminism, initiatives concomitant to the exhibition discerned and challenged the persisting, though implicit, gendered implications of both art and nature, complicating the Biennale’s main narrative. These initiatives included self-organized shows by feminist collectives, namely the Gruppo Femminista Immagine from Varese and Donne/Immagine/Creatività from Naples. Informed by a Marxist perspective, both exhibitions, I argue, engaged with reproductive labor in original ways to contest and dismantle traditional assumptions of an inherent connection between women and nature.

As a central concept of Western Marxist theory, alienation is conceived from the perspective of the male industrial worker, while the predominantly female care worker was given little consideration. The alienation of female workers was first thematized in the women’s movement of the 1970s and even became the focus of both West and East German photography that visualized women as factory and care workers. This essay examines the staging of female workers’ alienation in these images from the perspective of materialist feminism. Further, a critique of representation and analysis of the photographs in their various contexts demonstrate how the (women) workers themselves employed the photographs to raise social awareness of their condition.

This essay examines the photographic contributions to Entwicklungswunder Mensch , a book published in 1980 in the German Democratic Republic, edited by photographer Evelyn Richter together with text author Hans-Dieter Schmidt. The publication was meant to address everybody interested in raising children and understanding their psychological development. Examining its representation of care work, this essay shows that the book’s authors tried to convey the image of a loving approach to the child while insisting on the priorization of children’s needs. This demand is put in the context of the sociopolitical background of the late GDR, and it becomes clear that the book set out as a counter proposal to the status of care work in socialist East Germany.

In ecofeminist contemporary art, the role of women in patriarchal societies and the paradigm of wounded nature in need of care are closely connected. Referring to Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s concepts of ecological care and soil time, I explore three artistic strategies by Marwa Arsanios, Cecylia Malik, and Diana Lelonek, dealing with seed conservation, protests against deforestation, and the collective harvesting of post-industrial landscapes. On the basis of these forms of women’s ecological care between mother, land cultivator, caregiver, and “maintenance provider,” it is worth asking which layers of the work are visible. How is the critique of the gendered division of labor expressed and does it go beyond the established narratives of the connection between woman, earth, and fertility

Visibility has been a key battleground for social movements such as feminism since the 1970s. In a socioeconomic landscape where the value and purpose of visibility vary according to gender, class, and race, it becomes even more urgent to critically investigate the mechanisms that organise it. By drawing from feminist and postcolonial theories, the article examines the negotiation of visibility in the artworks of Daniela Ortiz, Mayo Pimentel, and Liryc Dela Cruz. Through their work, these artists provide valuable insights into the aesthetic and political implications of in/visibility, particularly in relation to maintenance work, identified as a domain where these contradictions are most pronounced.

When high-end block buster venues are the primary focus of curatorial reflections, even for feminist writers, what does the poor feminist curator have to say? What does curatorial “care work” look like from a different place? One semester the gallery budget was slashed so brutally, we had to give up the insurance. So, I co-wrote a two act play about Joseph Beuys’s first trip to the US, in 1974, when he asked to meet with “American feminists.” I Like Feminism and Feminism Likes Me (2020) was part slapstick, part exaggerated amateur dramatics, part allegorical attack on male charisma in the New York City borough that elected Trump (Staten Island), and part feminist revenge tragedy. In this paper I reanimate the project through the affective scrim of my experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is an experiment in teaching and writing art history through the body: mine, theirs, maybe yours as well.