Jennie Klein on Dimple B Shah

During the seventies, feminist artists turned to performance art in order to make ritualistic pieces that invoked a non-patriarchal religious spirituality. At the time, invoking a mother goddess to counteract 50,000 years of patriarchal rule seemed like a radical act. Just ten years later, invoking the mother goddess and using ritual was no longer viewed as being so radical. In fact, western feminist scholars and critics, many of whom were being appointed to positions within the academy, were somewhat embarrassed by cultural feminist art, which they saw as essentially flipping the patriarchal binary hierarchy of male/culture/language vs. women/nature/the body without questioning what it meant to embrace that binary, and why it was embraced in the first place. What had previously been radical was seen as hopelessly naive, simplistic, and guilty of cultural appropriation. Thus the critic Craig Owens, in his much cited two part article “The Discourse of Others,” published in The Anti-Aesthetic (edited by Hal Foster) in 1983, did not mention any artists who were working with images of the goddess, even though artist such as Marybeth Edelson and Betsy Damon were working in New York City, where Owens was based.