Subversive Syntax. Critique of language as an artistic method in Feminist Art of the mid-1970s

During the 1970s, several attacks have been launched onto articulate language by feminist thinkers, writers, film-makers, and, not least, visual artists. However, the artistic strategies of the latter have been remotely investigated in the past and today still remain hardly known. The paper centers this very research gap by crystalizing some of the methods artists have deployed in dealing with the realization that there is no language outside of patriarchal ideologies. For the purpose of typologically mapping this diverse field of feminist action, the article will discuss three particular positions: Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT, Italian artist Ketty La Rocca, and, as a major voice of contemporary feminist theory, French psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Luce Irigaray. Through this case study triad, spread across different geographies and languages, the subject of the feminist critique of language in the visual arts of the 1970s will be approached by means of a comparative methodology. In order to uncover the common practices as well as the diverging ideologies nurturing those practices, the article will elaborate on how syntactical irregularities have become instruments for the artistic organization of visual as well as textual material. The use of literary figures as a way of disclosing oppressed content was proposed by Irigaray, while simultaneously already being used miles away by the two artists as strategies for the subversion of linguistic properties that were considered ‘patriarchal,’ such as objectivity and rationality. At the same time, the material body is staged as something that is always inevitably ‘coded’ by the phallocentric “Symbolic.”