Contemporary feminist art: between identity and becoming-imperceptible

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Feministinis menas; Į identitetą orientuotas menas; Nepastebimumo estetika; Feminist art; Identity oriented art; Aesthetics of imperceptibility.

ENFeminist art in Eastern Europe is a strange Chimera, like the mythological creature composed of a lion, a goat, and a serpent. Usually feminism is regarded as a historical phenomenon, consisting of three waves. The first wave can be described as a struggle for equality and emancipation. The second wave questions this striving for equality and asks with whom do women want to be equal? With whom do they want to identify? It appears that usually women want to identify with privileged men and not-with underprivileged women of a different race, ethnicity, or social class. This approach implies that identity is not a neutral term and is always deeply interwoven with different aspects of race, class, or ethnicity, and is related to such political states as migration, or precarity. In this sense second wave feminism is split between different identitarian positions and has to wait for social recognition. However, third wave feminism is even more complicated: instead of seeking a specific identity, someone can define herself through becoming and agency, through material and immaterial forces. As such, third wave feminism is defined not by identity but by agency, not by recognition and visibility but by imperceptibility and invisibility. Consequently, every feminist artist living in Eastern Europe has to make an impossible choice between or a combination of the politics of emancipation, the politics of identity (or visibility), and the politics of imperceptibility (or invisibility). Having these issues in mind I would like to discuss the tension between identity oriented art and another artistic strategy, which, following Elizabeth Grosz, could be named as an "aesthetics of the imperceptible".In contrast to the modernist aesthetics of the unrepresentable, which is openly or secretly longing for the sublime, becoming imperceptible has no theological or teleological centre and is dispersed into continuous becoming. [...]. [Extract, p. 134-135]