Rose-Anne Gush: Artistic Labour of the Body

In this lecture, Rose-Anne Gush examines the use of body and psyche as artistic material in the work of VALIE EXPORT and Elfriede Jelinek, in light of Adorno's concept of artistic labour. By using the body as material, their works call into question the reduction of women to their reproductive function or to a sex object, and articulate a feminism beyond "innocence". The lecture shows how EXPORT and Jelinek criticised the culture of repression in postwar Austria, in which the unprocessed legacy of National Socialism perpetuated the Austrian victim myth, and at the same time considers the complex identifications inscribed in this critique. Drawing on her recently published book Artistic Labour of the Body, Gush reinterprets postwar artistic practices that made the body visible both as a site of patriarchal-capitalist violence and as a site of resistance.