Maggie Hire

Creating Common Meaning: VALIE EXPORT, Ulrike Rosenbach, Natalia LL, and Feminism in Central Europe

This dissertation provides a new account of collaboration among artists engaged in what they, as historical actors in Central Europe in the 1970s, called feminist projects. The first of three interrelated case studies focuses on Austrian performance and multi-media artist VALIE EXPORT’s MAGNA. FEMINISMUS: KUNST UND KREATIVITÄT (MAGNA. FEMINISM: ART AND CREATIVITY) exhibition and symposium held in Vienna in 1975. This dissertation next moves to West German video and performance artist Ulrike Rosenbach’s Schule für kreativen Feminismus (School for Creative Feminism), operational between 1976 and 1982 in Cologne. Polish conceptual artist Natalia LL’s Women’s Art exhibition, and her efforts to determine the viability of feminism within Wroclaw, in and around 1978, provides a concluding episode. Though it is broadly recognized that EXPORT, Rosenbach, and LL all sought to place their work in dialogue with others, and though various encounters between the three also have been documented, there have been no scholarly accounts probing the nature and extent of the interconnectedness. With an attention to contemporaneous developments within Central European sociology, communication studies, and political theory, the individual artistic practices of EXPORT, Rosenbach, and LL are interpreted by focusing on their concurrent and overlapping work planning exhibitions, organizing workshops, teaching, and traveling internationally to interact with one another and with other artists, gallerists, writers, and critics. Though some of these activities are not normally seen as artistic, this dissertation argues they were essential to developing the theoretical framework, political stakes, and aesthetics of a feminist art defined by conditions of transnationality, intersubjectivity, and mobility.

Biography

Maggie Hire is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, where she specializes in modern and contemporary art of Central and Eastern Europe. Maggie received a B.A. in the history of art and architecture and German studies from Brown University and an M.A. in the humanities program at the University of Chicago. Prior to her graduate studies, she taught English for a year in Berlin through Fulbright Germany. Her research has been supported by The Robert V. Storr Research and Travel Fund, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), and a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education. Beyond her academic work, she has held positions at various museums and institutions, including, most recently, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she worked as a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Drawings and Prints.