Leah Modigliani 
Engendering an avant-garde 
The unsettled landscapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism

Engendering an avant-garde is the first book to comprehensively examine the origins of Vancouver photo-conceptualism in its regional context between 1968 and 1990. Employing discourse analysis of texts written by and about artists, feminist critique and settler-colonial theory, the book discusses the historical transition from artists’ creation of ‘defeatured landscapes’ between 1968–71 to their cinematographic photographs of the late 1970s and the backlash against such work by other artists in the late 1980s. It is the first study to provide a structural account for why the group remains all-male. It accomplishes this by demonstrating that the importation of a European discourse of avant-garde activity, which assumed masculine social privilege and public activity, effectively excluded women artists from membership.

Inhoudsopgave

Introduction
1 Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women (1979) and The Destroyed Room (1978): colonizing the space of gendered discourse
2 Emily Carr and the legacy of Commonwealth modernism
3 Myth and the ‘home culture concept’
4 Establishing the theory and practice of a defeatured landscape
5 1970s and the gendered spaces of the counter tradition
6 Feminist theoretical and visual challenges to modernist representation
Conclusion
Index

Over de auteur

Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor of Art and Design and Vice Dean of Critical Studies at the Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California