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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

For the past five decades, feminist conceptual artist Eleanor Antin has created an anti-essentialist chronicle of herself Working within a range of media – including photography, film, writing and installation – Antin has explored a stream of selves, influenced by everything from Yiddish theatre to European cinema As she has commented: ‘I’ve always been addicted to masking, to the slipperiness of genre I despise purity It’s so boring What the hell, it doesn’t exist, anyway’   During her rise to prominence in New York’s downtown art scene of the late 1960s, when women artists and feminist themes were routinely excluded from gallery programming, Antin’s work presented female subjects with bare-knuckles chutzpah, depriving the viewer of the easy consolations of pathos or titillation A recent reappraisal of feminist art from this period, such as the showcase Sex Work: Feminist Art & Radical Politics at Frieze London – featuring the libidinal, uninhibited work of artists such as Marilyn Minter (sucking, rhinestone-studded mouths) and Renate Bertlmann (cacti sprouting hot pink dildos) – shows how defiantly these second-wave feminists exploded taboos around female sexuality and the body It also shows an establishment ready, 50 years on, to welcome them with open arms   But the current popularity of second-wave feminism comes with questions of how to read and receive the politics of these works today, and how to negotiate the way in which their former riotous, outsider charge is inevitably dampened by the embrace of the market   As Antin’s work comes back into the spotlight, how do her expressions of 1970s feminism come into conflict with contemporary identity politics? At a recent performance at the Serpentine gallery, Antin was grilled by an audience member about her use of blackface when inhabiting her persona of Eleanora Antinova, whom she invented in the early 1980s At the time, as Antin explained in a New York Times interview, the persona was an intended expression of solidarity with those caught within the intersecting oppressions of race and gender: ‘She’s an outsider, like women and blacks in our society… Antinova is

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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Art

May 2017

Francis Upritchard

Filipa Ramos

Art

May 2017

Where do anthropology and archaeology meet? Do the study of humankind and the research of its material culture share...

Prize Entry

April 2017

The Bad Thing

Annie Julia Wyman

Prize Entry

April 2017

1.   It must have been around the same time she decided that she really was using all the...

poetry

September 2012

Moscow - Petrozavodsk

Maxim Osipov

Anne Marie Jackson

poetry

September 2012

  Mark well, O Job, hold thy peace, and I will speak. Job 33:31     To deliver man...

 

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