Pollock, G orcid.org/0000-0002-6752-2554 (2020) Liquid culture, the art of life and dancing with Tracey Emin: A feminist art historian/cultural analyst’s perspective on Bauman’s missing cultural hermeneutics. Thesis Eleven, 156 (1). pp. 10-26. ISSN 0725-5136
Abstract
In this article I chart an indirect if not oblique path through my own theoretical formation as a social and feminist art historian, informed by Marxist cultural studies but deeply engaged with issues of difference and gender, to the response Zygmunt Bauman made to a book I gave him that I had reason to believe would resonate with his work. It did not. Indeed, my kind of theoretically informed visual and cultural analysis was indecipherable despite the influence of his writing after 1989 on my work. Gender was not a topic for Bauman. Feminist theory remained an impenetrable territory. Art (as opposed to culture) was not to be theorized. Yet, in his later work on liquid modernity, Bauman incorporated the idea that we are all now artists of life. Here I recognized an oblique and unjustified if not misdirected dismissal of the working-class British artist Tracey Emin. My article concludes with my reading of her video work, Why I Never Became a Dancer, which poignantly and defiantly exposes the social violence and violations of class, race and gender in British society which she experienced. I seek to demonstrate how Bauman’s acute, but often academically devalued, attentiveness to the vernacular and quotidian forms of cultural experience and its ability to register and reveal changing social forms and forces should have enabled him to see Emin’s work as equally acute and culturally significant.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Editors: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2020. This is an author produced version of a paper published in Thesis Eleven. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications. |
Keywords: | Bauman and feminist theory, gender, social histories of art, class, contemporary art, Tracey Emin |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 09 Aug 2019 13:06 |
Last Modified: | 20 Mar 2020 21:07 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/0725513619898284 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:149510 |