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Autobiographical Fantasy and the Feminist Archive

Bradnock, Lucy

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Authors

Lucy Bradnock



Abstract

In the mid-1970s a number of artists in Southern California made works that merged self-portraiture, material documents, life narrative, and fiction or fantasy. The 1976 exhibition Autobiographical Fantasies, Lowell Darling’s This Is Your Life (1973-1976), and Eleanor Antin’s The Angel of Mercy (1977) related to feminist consciousness-raising strategies and to the presentation of identity as contingent and unstable. In emphasizing the materials of personal life narrative, they also raised questions about the critical potential of archival practices in art and art history, troubling ideas of authenticity, documentation, and the archive’s ability to construct a coherent subject. Such ontological and methodological challenges situate the archive as performative rather than constative, with critical feminist implications. In the form of deliberately unreliable archives, artists such as Ilene Segalove, Eleanor Antin, Alexis Smith, and Lowell Darling proposed the archive as a space of fantasy that demands a performative engagement and retains its feminist potential.

Citation

Bradnock, L. (2021). Autobiographical Fantasy and the Feminist Archive. Archives of American Art Journal, 60(1), 44-61. https://doi.org/10.1086/714301

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jan 17, 2020
Publication Date 2021-04
Deposit Date Jan 20, 2020
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Archives of American Art Journal
Print ISSN 0003-9853
Electronic ISSN 2327-0667
Publisher University of Chicago Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 60
Issue 1
Pages 44-61
DOI https://doi.org/10.1086/714301
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3685031
Publisher URL https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/714301
Additional Information © 2021 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved. Accepted for publication to Archives of American Art Journal 17/1/2020

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