Outside of one's own room. Female artistic activities in London, 1979-1997
The paper focuses on female artistic activities in London between 1979 and 1997, the time when British politics was dominated by the Thatcherism ideology that reflected the uncompromising style and radicalism of the Iron Lady and that consequently had an irreversible impact on the sphere of visual culture. The paper considers various female artistic attitudes expressed in the cityscape, where both politically engaged manifestos and strategies of escaping political context coexisted. In the article I try to take a closer look at female artistic movements that flourished mostly in abandoned spaces of eastern and southern parts of London, at the anarchistic tradition of running independent print shops of which several had survived until the 1990s, but also at examples of more conceptualized post-studio pieces executed as a form of ‘anti-monuments’. All of those activities had a common denominator, which was the practice of an ordinary life that eventually happened to be also a safety valve of normatively projected city space of London.
