(Ebook) Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art: Activism in The Work of Nancy Spero by Rachel Warriner ISBN 9781788312608, 9781501365065, 1788312600, 1501365061

(Ebook) Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art: Activism in The Work of Nancy Spero by Rachel Warriner ISBN 9781788312608, 9781501365065, 1788312600, 1501365061

In the late 1960s and 1970s America was a maelstrom of violence and unrest. Protestors surged onto the streets and abroad the country was embroiled in Vietnam. This discontent sparked Nancy Spero's most blatantly political work and her pieces began to represent a wider rejection of American military aggression overseas and social injustice at home. Spero wanted to explore how politics felt and in this book, Rachel Warriner concludes that it was painful. Warriner devotes each chapter to a single work or series of works and traces how the concept of pain evolved through this period of Spero's oeuvre. From damaged bodies attacked by sexualised bombs in the War Series, to isolated and symbolic paper scrolls in Codex Artaud, Warriner argues that for Spero, pain was a metaphor that allowed emotion into politics and challenged contemporary narratives surrounding war and women. This is the first publication to consider Spero's specific activist context and suggests powerful new ways of understanding this increasingly important figure in twentieth-century art.