This essay reads the work of two experimental feminist video and performance artists in the 1960s and ’70s (Yoko Ono and VALIE EXPORT) alongside concurrent transformations taking place within their urban landscapes, in particular the widespread emergence of pornographic media arcades. The sets of practices examined here are situated within mutually implicated urban economies, systems of exchange that were undergoing unprecedented renegotiation during this period. Within the ecosystem of the 1960s metropolis, public sexuality served as a mobile force that shifted the aesthetics and traffic of city life. Mapping these shifts sheds new light on the material conditions that engendered feminist approaches to media, performance, and site specificity. Resonant between each phenomenon is a burgeoning affective economy that rewrote the architectures of commerce in the city, creating entirely new systems of service labor and amplifying the circulation of images, particularly images of women, as privileged commodities. Reexamining Ono's and EXPORT's performances in this context, this essay suggests that vulnerability and risk provide artistic and political strategies for negotiating shifting cultural terrain.
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
Summer 2015
Research Article|
July 01 2015
Architectures of Exchange: Feminism, Public Space, and the Politics of Vulnerability Available to Purchase
Amy Herzog
Amy Herzog
Amy Herzog is associate professor of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York, and coordinator of the Film Studies Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film (2009) and coeditor, with Carol Vernallis and John Richardson, of The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (2013).
Search for other works by this author on:
Feminist Media Histories (2015) 1 (3): 66–94.
Citation
Amy Herzog; Architectures of Exchange: Feminism, Public Space, and the Politics of Vulnerability. Feminist Media Histories 1 July 2015; 1 (3): 66–94. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2015.1.3.66
Download citation file:
Sign in
Don't already have an account? Register
Client Account
You could not be signed in. Please check your email address / username and password and try again.
Could not validate captcha. Please try again.