Publications | Roseannegush

Artistic Labour of the Body (forthcoming, Historical Materialism Book Series, Brill/Haymarket)

Artistic Labour of the Body examines VALIE EXPORT’s and Elfriede Jelinek’s use of the body and psyche - literally and metaphorically - as artistic material to explore Theodor Adorno’s concept of artistic labour. Analyzing how the body functions within their artistic and literary works, the book reveals how it critiques society ruled by exchange value and social disavowal - where unprocessed legacies of Nazism perpetuated Austria’s victim doctrine. New interpretations demonstrate how these works analyze the body as resisting women’s reduction to reproductive function or sexual object, thereby articulating a feminism against ‘innocence’ and pure Otherness. By shifting focus to labour, the psycho-social, and media in practices that expanded art, the book deepens our understanding of postwar artistic transformation. Ultimately, it argues that this art reflects on - and works against - the reduction of the human body to material (both in the economic process and in relation to the past), offering a new understanding of the body’s artistic use under patriarchal capitalism in postwar art.

‘Architectures of Social Crisis in Melanie Gilligan’s Films Against Capitalism’, FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur, no. 73 (2024): 44–59

This article takes as its principle subject the work of artist Melanie Gilligan, in particular two serial-films that comprise part of her recent project, Films Against Capitalism. These films address capitalism’s polycrisis - its economic, social, and health crises - through its manifestations in the present. Gilligan’s films investigate how housing, infrastructure, care, and community - areas of reproduction, and their representations - are inscribed socially, economically, and politically in a system mediated by capitalist social relations that evades its real function. In this article I suggest that Crowds and Home Together allegorize architectural representation and its concomitant social ordering. As well as reading these works in their social and historical context, this article investigates allegory as a tool to illuminate capitalist social relations and its relevance for (militant) artistic research, which is the context in which this body of Gilligan’s work was produced. Specifically, these works, along with an accompanying book, formed the qualifying materials for Gilligan’s art-practice PhD. In her PhD book, Gilligan lays out “provisional directions for filmmakers interested in reflecting on capital as a social form, using film as part of the struggle to fight against it”. The article addresses this context of artistic research as a framework governing much artistic production today, within which Films Against Capitalism makes a critical intervention.

‘How Does One Get to Own a Mountain’, review essay, Potosi Prinzip Archiv at Kunstraum Schwaz, in Brand-New-Life Magazine, August 2022

The «Potosí-Prinzip» was a touring exhibition project curated by Alice Creischer, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, and Andreas Siekmann that looked at how European Capitalism could not be thought of without the exploitation of men and nature in Latin America during Colonialism. In their show «Potosí-Prinzip-Archiv,» currently presented at Kunstraum Schwaz in Tyrol, Austria, they revisited the project and outlined blind spots and pressure points.

‘Contradictions in Time: Fascism’s use of “Woman” and Feminist Resistance in Austria’, Third Text, 33.3 (2019), 355–73

Taking as its starting point Ingeborg Bachmann’s comments that the National Socialist ‘virus of crime’ was not surpassed, but merely retreated into the fabric of society’s moral codes, this article examines how non-synchronous notions of time (Bloch, 1935) are engaged with in art in the aftermath of National Socialism in Austria. Austria, a context which was both first to embrace National Socialism in 1938, and first to be ‘freed’ from dealing with this history in 1943, saw protest and political action most often led by artists and artistic forms. The most incisive political and social critique appeared in the realm of art and literature. By looking to the work of artist and filmmaker VALIE EXPORT and novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, this article asks how film and literature – specifically, works that address gender relations critically – follow in Bachmann’s footsteps and engage with a notion of para-history. Moreover, I argue that such works help us to understand residual tendencies and continuities in relation to both media and gender, in resurgent fascism today. By looking to the film, theatre-texts and essays by EXPORT and Jelinek I situate them in their historical context, and reread them as a history of feminist resistance to and urgent critique of contradictory forces which make fascism appealing, both in the decades following World War II and again today.

‘Disfiguration, Obliteration: What Remains of the Body in the Works of Unica Zürn and VALIE EXPORT’, Performance Research, 23.8 (2018), 39–48

This essay explores the place of the body in the work of VALIE EXPORT and Unica Zürn through the notion of ‘disfiguration’, a notion which connotes an undoing, a deformation. In considering the political implications of artistic practices which disfigure, or deform the body, this essay reflects on the historical significance and conceptual underpinning of this practice. By tracing the history of the cut, as both injury and technique in EXPORT’s work, I show that the Riß (a word that gives meanings that encompass tear, rent, crack, split, rip, break, gap and laceration, and which emerges from the cut), should be understood as both, a technique in art, and the result of societal disfiguration or distortion. Through analysing EXPORT’s Expanded Cinema works, performances, texts and unfinished films, by tracing the transmutation of writing and drawing to media such as video and photography this essay explores the methodological and historical influence of Unica Zürn on EXPORT’s work. Through their disfiguration, I argue these works figure an ‘underground history’, and as such a (return of the repressed) temporally placed para-present of the body, where instincts and passions are understood as deformed and dis-figured (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947). By reading EXPORT and Zürn back onto this ‘underground history’ I want to ask how this distortion is gendered. How and why do they disfigure the body anagrammatically through image and language to its eventual obliteration? What are the conditions of possibility for these practices? And considering these practices, which tend towards their own break (Riß), what is left of the body in art?