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Kate Davis: re-visioning art history after modernism and postmodernism

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Feminist Review

Abstract

This article engages with the work of Scotland-based artist Kate Davis (b.1977). The discussion begins to articulate a framework for understanding Davis’s work within a feminist logic of re-visioning and re-citing, strategies that are explicated and suggested as paradigmatic to feminist art production since 1970. Fundamentally, the article explores Davis’s complex strategies for adopting and adapting motifs from within the archives of art history, arguing that her work constitutes a mode of visual research and historiography.

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Notes

  1. See, for instance, Bourriaud, ed. (2009), Kirby (2011) and Neolon (2012).

  2. For more information on Kate Davis, she is represented by Galerie Kamm, Berlin.

  3. Back to the Future, Whitney Museum New York, February 2009. At the event an invited audience purposefully disengaged the vocabulary of feminism from its lexical history in order to test a ‘Dictionary of Temporary Approximations’; this suspensive conversation ultimately concluded by returning to and rejuvenating the historical terms from which it had departed, thereby marking and making visible the linguistic assumptions that can linger through reiteration rather than contestation.

  4. This discrepancy was highlighted by Tracey Emin’s documentary for Channel 4 Art Shock: What Price Art? Aired 15 March 2006.

  5. Verwoert (2007b) has written elsewhere on the importance of historical legacies and narratives specifically for the woman artist Michaela Melian, but he does not fully engage a feminist perspective.

  6. This expanded term is borrowed from Dimitrakaki (2013b,p. 2), ‘since art history played a major role in the movement’s claims and direction’.

  7. I employ the term ‘imaginary’ quite loosely in reference to Luce Irigaray, whose theories have posited a ‘feminist imaginary’ as that which is not the public, masculine space of language and institutions (the symbolic), but is closer to an embodied unconscious wherein desire and affect play out.

  8. Artist’s quotes are all excerpted from an unrecorded lecture given by Kate Davis at Edinburgh College of Art on 11 October 2013.

  9. For more information on these various artists, see Nead (1995), Wilson (1996) and Butler and Mark (2007).

  10. Peace At Last! Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow: 13 July–16 October 2010. Not Just the Perfect Moments, The Drawing Room, London: 4 December 2012–3 February 2013.

  11. Kate Davis, personal email, 2 April 2014. I should add that I had not spoken to the artist before writing this article but felt compelled to in order to resolve this question.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Tamara Trodd and Angela Dimitrakaki for their thoughtful suggestions on an earlier presentation of this research. And my deepest thanks go to Kate Davis, who so generously responded to my requests for information, and whose work continues to be both a challenge and a great source of pleasure.

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Horne, V. Kate Davis: re-visioning art history after modernism and postmodernism. Fem Rev 110, 34–54 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2015.12

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