Feminist Substances: Plastics in Art of the 1960s and 1970s - Hardcover

by Charlotte Matter (Author)

In the art of the 1960s and 1970s, many women artists worked extensively with industrial materials such as plastics, challenging assumptions shaped by the dominant discourse of the period. Feminist Substances shows how their practices offered distinct, gender-aware approaches to synthetic materials, generating new meanings through a feminist lens. Focusing on Europe and Latin America, the book examines the work of Carla Accardi, Lea Lublin and Alina Szapocznikow, combining close analyses of selected artworks with broader reflections on their social contexts. It explores their use of Sicofoil, plexiglass, plastic inflatables, polyester resin and polyurethane foam to address themes central to feminist thought, including social reproduction, motherhood, memory, desire and illness. Moving beyond clichés about plastics as inherently 'bad' materials, Feminist Substances considers more complex, entangled ways of engaging with synthetic matter.

Back Jacket

'Matter shows us how plastics changed the affective terrain of the art world and yielded a new lexicon for the expression of embodied experience and material conditions. For this generation of artists, critics and curators, the stakes of materialist criticism are high and could even have fatal consequences. We should all pay attention to this aesthetic history.'
--Amanda Boetzkes, Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste

Feminist substances explores how artists used plastics to challenge normative ideas and sexist discourses in 1960s and 1970s art, and in society at large. Contesting the notion that industrial materials were primarily the domain of men artists, it considers how women engaged with plastics to address issues of social reproduction, motherhood, memory, desire and illness. The book argues that synthetic substances were uniquely suited to materialise feminist concerns because they were relatively new - and thus not predetermined by normative conventions - and related to the everyday.

Structured around case studies of Carla Accardi, Lea Lublin and Alina Szapocznikow, it combines close readings of artworks with broader reflections on their social contexts in Italy, Argentina and France. Feminist substances makes a valuable contribution to the study of materiality in art, reconsidered through the lens of gender. Attending to questions of labour, value, and the hierarchies between art and commodities, it also examines the intersection of material and class.

This richly illustrated book offers a singular look at materials that continue to shape and affect our everyday lives. It focuses on a period when plastics still held great promise, shortly before their demise in the wake of the oil price crises and growing awareness of their harmfulness. Discussing artworks and exhibitions as well as phenomena from everyday life, the book sheds light on the ambivalent meanings of plastics that still inform our often contradictory relationship with these substances.

Author Biography

Charlotte Matter is Laurenz Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Basel, Switzerland