Feminist substances by Charlotte Matter

Feminist substances by Charlotte Matter

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.

'Feminist substances is a thrilling, but also disturbing (!), study of the use of plastics in early feminist artCharlotte 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. The case studies take the reader from the U.S. to Argentina, Italy and Poland showing how the globalization of feminist art collided with this postwar substance, for better and for worse. 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

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

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781526193575
ISBN 10	1526193574
Title	Feminist substances
Author	Charlotte Matter
Series	Rethinking Art's Histories
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Manchester University Press
Year published	2026-05-05
Number of pages	328
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.