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Artistic Labour of the Body

Buy hardcover (Brill)
Published Nov 2025

Rose-Anne Gush

Author: Rose-Anne Gush
Artistic Labour of the Body examines VALIE EXPORT’s and Elfriede Jelinek’s use of the body and psyche as artistic material to explore Adorno’s concept of artistic labour. By deploying the body as artistic material, their works challenge women’s reduction to reproductive function or sexual object, articulating a feminism beyond “innocence”. Gush demonstrates how their art critiqued postwar Austria’s culture of disavowal, where unprocessed legacies of Nazism perpetuated Austria’s victimhood myth, while also exploring the complex identifications within this critique. The book reframes postwar artistic practices that revealed the body as both a site of patriarchal-capitalist violence and of resistance.

Biographical Note

Rose-Anne Gush is an art historian and theorist whose work explores the political aesthetics of the body and notions of artistic labour, gender and feminism(s), and theories of “global art”. Her research engages with the spatial politics of capitalism, geographies of extraction, and questions of form. She is currently Assistant Professor at IZK – Institute for Contemporary Art at TU Graz.

Readership

The book is relevant for post-graduate students and scholars in Art History and Theory, Fine Art Practice, Critical Theory, Literary Theory, Cultural History, Gender and Feminism Studies, Continental Philosophy, German Studies, Austrian Studies.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Translation and Style

Introduction: Artistic Labour of the Body
1 The Body-Politic
2 Vienna – A Primal Scene
3 Failures of Resistance
4 A Beneficiary Society, or, Continuities
5 The Contradictions between Action and Reality
6 Ambiguity of the Body
7 Dialectics of the Body

1 Exhibitionist
1 A Subhistory of Film
2 Touched by the Crowds
3 Aktionshose: Genitalpanik: Planned
4 Fetishes, Taboos and Entertainers

2 Escape into Illness
1 Material Thinking, Feminist Actionism
2 Pathologies: Kausalgie, Hyperbulie, Asemie
3 Escape into Illness
4 Action – Praxis

3 The Language of Wounds
1 Body Writing
2 Body Language
3 Wounds of Modernity
4 An Archive of Body Postures
5 Silence over the Body

4 Petrified Memory
1 Media Regimes
2 Subject, City and Image
3 Monologue

5 Against Innocence, or, on Fascism’s Use of Women
1 Obscenity Repetitions
2 The Family as Factory of Image and Ideology
3 A Transactional Unit
4 Gender and Fascism
5 The Dialectics of Language
6 Against Innocence

6 Working Through a Mountain of History
1 Four Scenes
2 Fear of Technology
3 What Hides in Language?
4 Heimat
5 Home World

Coda

Bibliography
Index