Visualizing Feeling

At last, here is, a book that lifts the ban on affect imposed on art criticism and theory by the 'anti-aesthetic' school that has been dominating the scene in the last forty years! Taking her clues from four of the best women artists whose work spans the period, Susan Best convincingly demonstrates that if you close the door of the house of art to feelings, they enter through the window. What's more, this is valid for the supposedly 'anaesthetic' art movements - minimal and conceptual art - that form the contextual background of her case studies: they are no less aesthetic than the art of the past or the most recent present. - Thierry de Duve, Historian and Theorist of contemporary art and Professor at University of Lille Susan Best's remarkably lucid and paradoxical project begins the process of recovering feeling and emotion in late modern art. Her landmark study of four women artists - Hesse, Clark, Mendieta and Cha - rescues both the feminine and the aesthetic from the ghetto, by an astute combination of psycho-analysis and art history. - Dr. Ann Stephen, Senior Curator, Sydney University Museums Visualizing Feeling develops a compelling argument for focusing on precisely the centrality of affect and feeling in any understanding of the art of the 1960s and 1970s, where it seemed that affect no longer had a place. In exploring the work of four powerful and sometimes neglected women artists, she shows how it is paradoxically where affect is consciously minimized that it nevertheless returns to haunt the art work as its most powerful force. Art works affect before they inform, perform or communicate. Sue Best demonstrates that by restoring the question of affect and emotion to the art work, new kinds of questions can be asked about the feminine in art, questions that affirm the personal and political power of these works of art. - Elizabeth Grosz, Rutgers University, author of Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, Columbia University Pres