Kathryn McFadden

What is unpresentable in art? This paper considers VALIE EXPORT’s feminist exhibitionism in her 1968 performance artwork Genital Panic, which took place in a Munich cinema. EXPORT’s transgressive display of her genitals, which finds art-historical precedents in medieval sheela na gigs and Courbet’s Origin of the World, established a paradigm for a kind of feminist art collision that continues today, – for instance in Deborah de Robertis’ 2014 unauthorized performance at the Musée d’Orsay. EXPORT’s staged presentation and representation of blatant power and sexuality contradicts the lack postulated in Freud’s castration complex. At the same time, it raises the question of the unpresentable, a notion taken up by Jean-François Lyotard’s The Inhuman, which explores concepts of representation and the unpresentable. The latter he defines as an expression of an “Idea of reason,”, an absolute. I reflect on how this concept applies to EXPORT’s marker for the use of the body in feminist art

In the New Testament the early Christians adopted the notion of absolute, creative and excessive love—agape—as a comprehensive fatherly love that God possesses for mankind, which as a consequence extends to a love of one’s fellow man. This paper is an investigation of agape and its relevance in contemporary art. Like a work of art, agape has an immanent creative component in that it generates value in its object. Agapic art is largely activated in the space of community. I unpack my thesis examining several contemporary artworks beginning with a public installation in 2010 commissioned after the murder of a student at the University of Virginia. I deploy my research through multiple lenses, including the thinking of Arendt, Freud, Heidegger, Lewis and Nancy. Art provides the Heideggerian clearing of light in a world that is witness to the darkness of terroristic threats, domestic violence and ethnic hatred. The list goes on, because now—as in all of history—the human instinct for aggression sees no end in sight. Works of art that express agape are gifts of optimism to the living.