Cutting Up Men

Abstract The starting point of the article is the observation that feminist art practices are often directed towards political change and include provocations of society and art’s institutions, thus matching a broad and transhistorical concept of the avant-garde. With case studies on Valerie Solanas, Gabriele Goettle, and Patricia Rozema, this article focuses on the period from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, which has already been described as “feminist avant-garde” in regard to visual arts. The thread that weaves the three case studies together is the metaphor of the cut. In all three cases, the metaphor of ‘cutting’ refers to this destructive attitude towards tradition, but it actually implies a productive continuity: after cutting up the pieces of tradition, they are mixed, rearranged, put into new contexts—collaged. By analyzing the artists’ respective positioning within their artistic and economic fields, the article shows how reference to the canon of male avant-garde artists secures their position in the artistic field while jeopardizing the successful establishment of explicitly female canons.