Autobiographical Fantasy and the Feminist Archive

Bradnock, Lucy

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: May 1, 2022
• 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