About

Womens Work [sic] is a rare collection of performance scores* by 14 women, edited and published by Fluxus artist Alison Knowles and sound artist Annea Lockwood in New York City in 1975. It includes some prominent figures (composer Pauline Oliveros, choreographer Simone Forti) but many contributors remain little known, and this multidisciplinary publication has been rarely referenced and never considered in its own right. Yet it offers an invaluable counterpoint to the male avant-garde canon, evidencing a network of diverse artists relating their practices to the feminist art movement of the 1970s.  My research will use this unique book, alongside contemporary feminist theory, in particular post-humanist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad, to create an understanding of the feminist performance score that not only foregrounds this historical network, but resonates with contemporary practices to address and extend key notions of autonomy, agency and collaboration.  I will conduct an historical analysis of Womens Work, its works and artists, and in parallel convene an interdisciplinary performance group who will negotiate the performance of each work and reflect on the process. This will culminate in my curating a programme of historical and contemporary works that opens my research to a wider public.  My methodology focuses on embodied experiences of performance, and reacts to museological tendencies to treat such scores as objects of visual fetishisation. It also draws heavily on, and extends, my own feminist curating practice that spans more than ten years across visual art, sound and performance, coupled uniquely with a Master’s degree in Women’s Studies and prior study of Physics, underscored by twenty years of involvement in queer feminist cultural activism. *Within the term ‘performance score’ I include event, instruction, text, graphic scores and those using other non-conventional notation.