Lifework as Feminist Practice: Against Cultural Capitalism

A talk by art historian Amelia Jones, USC Roski School of Art and Design, Los Angeles, U.S.

Drawing on her current book, Lifework, this paper focuses on the examples Jones addresses of feminists who came of age as creators in the late 1960s and 1970s. She addresses how they built creative practices against the grain of what she calls “cultural capitalism,” or the capitalisation and neoliberalization of cultural institutions, including the university, art school, and art museums and galleries in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. Feminism, she argues, offered not only strategies but motivation for refusing competitive individualism and soul-crushing managerialism– living/creating otherwise and working collectively – in late capitalist societies.

A reception will follow the talk.

About

Amelia Jones is the Robert A. Day Professor at the USC Roski School of Art and Design in Los Angeles. She has taught and lectured internationally at institutions such as the University of Manchester, the Sorbonne in Paris, the University of Auckland in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and McGill University in Montréal, Canada. She has researched, curated, and written about modern and contemporary art and performance from a queer feminist theoretical framework since the early 1990s and is an expert on art history, visual theory, performance studies, performance art, and queer/trans/feminist theory and art. Recent publications include the catalogue Queer Communion: Ron Athey (2020), co-edited with Andy Campbell and In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (2021).