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Valie Export, Gina Pane, and Orlan: Pain, Body Art, and the Question of the Feminine

Voss, Kelly
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1397477278

Abstract Details

2014, MA, University of Cincinnati, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Art History.
The thesis deals with the work of a number of feminist European performance artists, Valie Export, Gina Pane, and Orlan, who started their careers in the 1960s and 1970s, challenged society’s disavowal of pain, and embraced the reality of pain as an inescapable part of the human experience. In the first chapter, I examine how the work of Austrian performance and video artist Valie Export (b. 1940) subverts traditional depictions of the female body in visual culture, and how her work shows that society, especially post-war Austrian society, is structured around that which it rejects: violence and pain. In the second chapter, I explore how the work of French-Italian performance artist Gina Pane (1939-1990) uses physical pain to address issues of social and psychological exclusion. In the third chapter, I examine how French performance artist Orlan deconstructs ideals of feminine beauty in the Western canon of art history in addition to criticizing Western science and medical technology. The thesis contributes to the body of scholarship by exploring how methods of self-inflicted pain allowed these artists not only to acknowledge the feminine, but also to broaden their critique to larger social concerns.
Morgan Thomas, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Mikiko Hirayama, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Stephanie Sadre-Orafai, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
89 p.
Art History
body art; feminism; orlan; gina pane; valie export; pain

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Voss, K. (2014). Valie Export, Gina Pane, and Orlan: Pain, Body Art, and the Question of the Feminine [Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1397477278

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Voss, Kelly. Valie Export, Gina Pane, and Orlan: Pain, Body Art, and the Question of the Feminine. 2014. University of Cincinnati, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1397477278.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Voss, Kelly. "Valie Export, Gina Pane, and Orlan: Pain, Body Art, and the Question of the Feminine." Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1397477278

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1397477278
2,458
© 2014, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Valie Export, Gina Pane, and Orlan: Pain, Body Art, and the Question of the Feminine by Kelly Voss is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.