KATY DEEPWELL.

Katy Deepwell is founder and commissioning editor of n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal (since 1996). She is Reader in Contemporary Art, Theory and Criticism,and Head of Research Training, University of the Arts, London. Her books include: Dialogues: Women Artists from Ireland. (London: IB Tauris, 2005); (co-edited with Mila Bredikhina) The Gender, Theory and Art Anthology, 1970-2000  (Moscow: Rosspen Publishing House, 2005) English title of Russian Book; (ed)Women Artists and Modernism (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1998);  (ed) New Feminist Art Criticism (edited) (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1995).

Katy is represented here by the abstract of her keynote, access to her writing can be accessed through n.paradoxa website

‘Reading through Repetition(s):feminist art practices’ periodic re-emergence at the centre of  discourses of contemporary art ‘
How often does the distinction in art criticism marking “art now” as opposed to “art then” rely on the absence of any identifiable repetition, which can then be expressed as its opposite, the recognition of “something new”? This idea of newness (so key to modernist approaches which persist in the culture industry) is also frequently expressed in generational terms, as the work of an emerging or “new” generation of artists. These two related ideas of “a new art” and “a new generation” mark out how “new tendencies” in contemporary art are often promoted.
This paper will explore how these common approaches occur and reoccur in some key feminist exhibitions in mainstream venues (in the last two decades). What interests me is how they do not work given the breadth of feminist art practices, which do not conform to an avant garde movement in conventional art terms - defined by style or approach - nor are the repetition(s) of either techniques or representational strategies easily reducible to generational differences, since they are often made in different geo-political locations and informed by different social and political ideas. Instead, how repetition figures as the legacy of feminist strategies from the 1970s, sometimes referred to as forms of “echo feminism”, is my concern both in how curatorial arguments are advanced and in the subsequent critical reception of such exhibitions or artists. Underlying this examination is a key question about how this legacy is constructed, since its mono-dimensional character often serves as a simplistic means of dismissing feminism as “done and dusted” and without relevance to “art now”.
Alternative histories and approaches could lead us to quite different conclusions….