sehepunkte 26 (2026), Nr. 7/8

Rachel Warriner: Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art

The cover of Rachel Warriner's book Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art: Activism in the Work of Nancy Spero is a detail of the titular artist's 1968 work Helicopter Blinding Victims. Disembodied heads painted in black gouache stud the warped paper, their eyes dashed with smears of blood-red pigment. Their mouths, crudely formed, gape open in a silent scream. This haunting image visually identifies the book's primary areas of focus: artistic interpretation of pain and violence, experiences of alienation, and demands for empathy.

Pain and Politics is a major new monographic study of Nancy Spero's artistic and political engagements. A key figure in the feminist art movement, Spero (1926-2009) spent most of her career in New York City, where she was involved in the Art Workers' Coalition, Women Artists in Revolution, and protests against the Vietnam War. In 1972 she co-founded the city's first all-women cooperative gallery A.I.R., which became a locus for feminist art and politics during a time when women were largely excluded from mainstream venues. Instead of offering an expansive account of Spero's career, the book focuses on the decade between 1966 and 1976, during which Spero produced several series and large-scale artworks that Warriner argues propose "a visual language of pain as a physiological and emotional metaphor" (2). At that time, Spero was involved in anti-war and feminist organizing, commitments reflected in the artworks Warriner examines. This body of work - primarily works on paper - articulates pain's visceral intensity through experiments with figuration, collage, and text.

The book is comprised of an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion, which unfold in chronological order. The introduction provides a new critical framework for interpreting this pivotal period in Spero's practice, centered around the artist's treatment of pain in her politically engaged artworks. Warriner argues that "pain is used as a force for political action in Spero's work," advancing feminist ideology by grappling with the blurred boundaries between the personal, social, and political (9). Yet this body of work also raises ethical challenges, and Warriner acknowledges both the limitations and possibilities of contesting pain's systemic silencing through metaphor and metonymy.

The book's first chapter continues this discussion, focusing on the historical and political context informing Spero's artistic production in the 1960s and 70s, when new understandings of pain were emerging from scientific research and activist movements. At this time, argues Warriner, "the conceptual stakes of being seen as emotional changed" (26). Pain and emotion were strategically engaged by Spero and other leftist artists to express outrage at the Vietnam War, and later by feminists who sought to consolidate "intimate publics" around women's issues.

Chapter two turns attention toward Spero's War Series (1966-70) and Artaud Paintings (1969-70) to consider how these bodies of work intervene in the language of pain through the symbolic register. Warriner traces how Spero's development across both series reflects her involvement in Vietnam War protest movements and her early investments in feminist activism. In these works, the individual experience of pain echoes broader struggles against imperialist and patriarchal violence.

The third chapter discusses the tension between silence and speech in Spero's Codex Artaud (1971-72), a series of thirty-seven panels combining excerpts of the dramatist Antonin Artaud's writings with figurative representations of humans, mythological beings, and monstrous creatures. Warriner reads this work through its intersections with hysteria, a historical medical concept that was the subject of feminist critiques in the 1970s, which reverberates in Spero's practice.

In the book's fourth chapter, Warriner examines Spero's monumental artwork Torture of Women (1976), comprised of panels reproducing real accounts of torture drawn from the news. A departure from earlier works like Codex Artaud (1971) that centered subjectivity and symbolism, Torture of Women relies on "a language of fact" to articulate an explicitly feminist perspective (147). Warriner argues that the artwork marks "a significant shift from individual pain [...] to focusing on the suffering of political prisoners and violence in the name of ideology" (147). Here, torture becomes a metaphor for patriarchal violence, raising questions about Spero's universalization of suffering and her own point of view as a white American artist - issues that Warriner carefully unpacks. The book concludes by connecting Spero's work to contemporary practices of artists such as Sondra Perry (1986-).

Situated within feminist art history, the book is an important contribution to debates about artistic representations of gendered experience, violence, and embodiment. Since the 1970s, Spero's work has been embroiled in feminist disputes about essentialism, especially during the 1980s, when film and art historians including Griselda Pollock, Lisa Tickner, and Laura Mulvey situated figuration and the female nude as problematic. Spero's depictions of female deities and mythological figures positioned her within a "goddess art" movement that was seen as out of step with post-structuralist approaches, though both were engaged in deconstructing signs and symbols. Warriner's book complicates this narrative, evidencing how Spero's work - and feminist art more broadly - eludes easy categorization.

While pushing back against Spero's critics, the book remains attentive to the ethical challenges the artist's work introduces, principally its struggle to communicate the pain of others, including the victims of American imperialist wars. Warriner argues that Spero's work aims at "connecting bodies in visceral and political empathy" (187). Yet, as the author notes, questions of appropriation, uneasy solidarities, speaking on behalf of others, and universalizing suffering remain unresolved. Spero's work developed in response to her belief that minimalism, then the predominant mode, was insufficient for responding to and protesting state-sanctioned and gendered violence. Alternative methodologies were urgently necessary, and Spero sought formats that would empower her to express a political position, activating an audience of other women and inspiring societal change. Working on paper allowed her to express bodily vulnerability materially, connecting the fragility of the medium with the skin. This body of work represents an effort to recenter the marginalized, victimized, silenced, and disenfranchised during an era of intense ideological contestation.

The book's primary theoretical advancement is its reconceptualization of pain and emotion in feminist artistic practice. While not a central focus of the book, Spero's own experience of rheumatoid arthritis simmers in the background, informing the artist's practice and her approach to making pain "speak" through a visual medium. An exciting contribution to the history of postwar art, Pain and Politics will also prove useful to scholars of disability studies, twentieth-century social history, and gender studies. Warriner's research sits in productive dialogue with other recent publications that reexamine American art, feminism, and political engagement, such as Amy Tobin's Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women's Liberation and Katie Anania's Out of Paper: Drawing, Environment, and the Body in 1960s America. [1] Pain and Politics is a much-needed intervention into Spero's practice, with significant implications for the study of feminist art and activism more broadly.

Note:

[1] Amy Tobin: Women Artists Together. Art in the Age of Women's Liberation, New Haven / London 2023; Katie Anania: Out of Paper. Drawing, Environment, and the Body in 1960s America, New Haven / London 2024 .