Keynote lecture: The Gesturally Expanded Field of (Proto-Feminist) Conceptual Art: The Artistic Practices of Blythe Bohnen and Rosemarie Castoro with Sabeth Buchmann

Contrary to the assumption that nothing could be further removed from Conceptual Art than the brushstroke, the planned lecture examines the painterly practices of two artists who belong to the "expanded field" of an artistic movement that sought to break the dominance of the visual—previously the defining paradigm of the visual arts. The artists in question are Blythe Bohnen (1940–2022) and Rosemarie Castoro (1939–2015). Despite their programmatic affinity with US Minimal and Conceptual Art, they persisted in using painterly expression—a mode of representation often disparaged for its fixation on the retinal and the individual. The central thesis is that the practice of the brushstroke—considered obsolete at the time—enabled them to (re-)define optical perception as a socially coded embodiment of language, consciousness, and memory. The lecture will therefore focus on the ways in which these two artists transformed the linguistic, serial, and cybernetic procedures characteristic of canonical Conceptual Art works into gender-reflexive iterations of gestural abstraction. Furthermore, it will be demonstrated how the works of Bohnen and Castoro—situated at the intersection of Expressionist painting, Minimal dance, and Conceptual Art—integrated the infrastructures of everyday labor into artistic (re)production and realized the principles of (proto-)feminist self-organization, such as through the New York-based A.I.R. Gallery, at the level of formal aesthetics.

Veranstaltung übernehmen als iCal