What does it mean to be named and read as a feminist artist or an artist whose work is understood as feminist? To be named as such is neither straightforward nor self-evident, and it is necessary to explain what is meant by this label and the terms of reference employed. I am struck by the fact that Sanja Iveković's work is discussed in these terms. I want to explore how this is understood and to discuss its significance in relation to one of her works, Frauenhaus.

Leonida Kovac, in the exhibition catalogue After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, names Sanja Iveković's practice as 'feminist'. She legitimately insists on it being seen in the context of feminist art practices because it offers 'interventions in the media of mass communications [which] always reflect problem areas in regimes of representation. Indeed, they deconstruct conventional meanings and in doing so indicate the ideological positions from which they stem.'¹ Sanja Iveković made a new version of her work Frauenhaus for the central square Trg Bana Jelacica, Zagreb in 2002, and in this extended form the work can be seen as a series of interventions in representation. It stands in contrast to the work as it was first shown at Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg in 1998, where it took the form of an installation in one room of the Musée d'Histoire de la Ville de Luxembourg. Twenty plinths were arranged in a grid in the centre of the room, each supporting a different plaster-cast mask of a woman's face. On the side of each plinth, in place of the usual label of the artwork, was a sign giving the name of each woman and a short paragraph outlining her story 'in her own words'. On the outside of the museum, on its glass front, the first names of the women were transformed into signs. The 'portraits' of these women were made in women's refuges in Zagreb and Luxembourg, but the context of the museum brought out the archaeological aspect of the piece: the experiences of these women formed scattered parts of an oral history of violence against women in the late 20th century. In Zagreb, four years later, Frauenhaus took on several new forms: the women's names were distributed as interventions in women's magazines, as postcards to be handed out in the street and in advertising spaces in shops and store windows. Directly on the ground of the largest public square in the centre of Zagreb, the floor plan of the local women's refuge was drawn. This refuge was under threat of closure at the time and without sufficient funds to continue. The dispersal of the piece as a single work of art across all these media, as well as the display of more conventional forms of contemporary art in the museum, the sculptural installation and a video documenting the process of making the work and a catalogue, did not diffuse its message. All the elements together formed a multiplicity of artistic and aesthetic strategies, amongst or through which the work and its feminist politics emerged. Bojana Pejic, the curator of 'After the Wall' at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, highlighted in the same exhibition catalogue how attention to the politics of gender in the work of many artists, male and female, is often seen purely in terms of the construction of masculinity and femininity. But she added:

Most of the female photographers and painters [in 'After the Wall'] however

do not see their work as feminist and tend to distance themselves from

western feminist practices; perhaps because of this, feminism in the East has

occasionally been called 'echo feminism'. Most artists have not regarded this

as important because they have been engaged in making a 'universal' - and

therefore 'genderless' - art. ²

Pejic goes on to point out the dismissal of certain 'feminist' themes - prostitution, domestic violence and abortion - which, whether they are tackled by men or women, are seen (ironically to western perspectives) as apolitical in terms of the current postcommunist definitions of 'political' art. The context in which I would like to set the question of feminism and feminist art practice is one that goes beyond the Frauenhaus's use of the 'local' context in its design - the floor plan of the Zagreb's Autonomous Women's House - and beyond an all too easy East/West divide, or rather West as opposed to a post-communist framework of former East European countries. The Frauenhaus is a politically-engaged work of art as well as part of a short and public campaign to raise awareness and funds for women's refuges so that women might have a place of safety to escape to if violence is perpetrated against them. While I'm tempted to read the responses characterised by Bojana Pejic in terms of 'nobody wants to live in a ghetto' - be it created by others or by one's chosen nomenclature, such as 'feminist', 'post-communist', 'genderless' (which I don't believe exists, except in a deliberately constructed ambiguity) - Pejic's words also suggest that every artist wants his/her work to acquire significance, 'portability' and wide appeal to many audiences in different cultures and contexts. Anglo-American accounts of feminism and feminist art practices as a western art movement originating in the 1970s have set certain terms for an account of what feminism is or may be. As a result, many women artists from many parts of the world are marginalised from this history which speaks only in terms of western precedents.

Feminism has had a long and complex history across Europe in the last 150 years, touching on and renegotiating many different political movements while simultaneously developing its own strategies and trajectories of thought. Representing the history of women's refuges themselves, one might fall into this western-centric approach. In London, the first refuge for women escaping domestic violence was established in 1972 by Erin Pizzey, and by the late 1970s several houses had opened around the country, often with some state support, in response to the growing social recognition of the levels of violence by men against women, and combined with campaigns for changes in legislation - for example, the legal recognition of rape within marriage. In Croatia, the first SOS telephone line for women victims of domestic violence began in 1986, and the first shelter was set up in 1990 in Zagreb. Growing social awareness of the problem of domestic violence and the need for civil society to address these issues may be the reason for the difference in time, but it is also a sign of the failure of the state to address these issues sufficiently. This failure resulted in the need for independent initiatives, outside the social fabric of state or organised church, to develop their own versions of secular models, often with reference to the West and their own campaigns for legal reforms.

In relation to the visual arts, while artists clearly have distinct genders and gendered perspectives, do the artworks they make merely embody those values or do they present challenges to shared social values? Perhaps we need to recognise more clearly what values are at stake in claims for the universal in art as the highest accolade for an artist, or as a sign of the 'lasting' value of their work. Perhaps today, when someone talks about reaching for the universal in art, we should consider it is not the stakes of modernist Kantian transcendence in the language of art, but only 'acceptability' as the latest hot thing on the international art market. The complex interplay of the local, particular and historically contingent nature of developments is often set against the idea of the transcendent or universal in terms of definitions of art, especially because claims are made that art transcends the social and political, and even occupies its own field.

Feminists and feminist theorists have argued that there is no such thing as the universal, for what we have is a predominantly male-structured account of what 'art' is, just as much as 'politics', and our concept of the universal is built entirely on male models of practice and thought. However, this claim still does not do anything to name the specificity of feminist art practice. The fact that 'this particular woman did these things in this particular way' is never tied back to the universal, and there remains a clash - or a wide gap - between different concepts of the universal and the particular. The creation of an artwork in a public place as an intervention into everyday life is part of the ambition of Iveković's Frauenhaus. It is not a single work for sale as a commodity. Its aesthetic and political message is its most important feature, but it is not propaganda, nor a slogan. This work is not 'site-specific' to the context of Zagreb, as it has been shown in different forms in Luxembourg, Innsbruck and Bangkok. It refers to many different women subjects and tries to reach different audiences in each of these contexts. The Frauenhaus does not address only women as its audience, even though it emerges from a very specific dialogue amongst women: a woman artist and the women in the refuges who participate in the project.

Slavoj Zizek in 'Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism', usefully discusses the paradoxes of political claims to universality in terms of what they exclude.³ His argument is a complex and lengthy one about the construction of different political positions and how claims to multiculturalism and/or feminism often are seen solely as the obverse - the opposite side of the coin - to late capitalism or patriarchy, and as a purely reactive strategy. His essay offers some ideas about how to change or open up a new way of thinking about the relationship of the universal to the particular. He focuses on how the creation of a typical figure - a bogeyman/woman or a scapegoat - emerges in political/ideological discourse as the concrete particularity which justifies the abstract universal schema (the suture) and how it is not enough to draw people's attention to other realities - other players, marginalized groups - in order to counter that fantasmatic structure and undermine its false universality. From Marxist theory he draws on the figure of the 'type' as demonstrating the same trope. How does the woman artist as a 'type' enter into the universal quality of 'art' (as this is also an ideological construction) other than as a symptom or a marginal figure that offers a guarantee to the dominant model (the exception which proves the rule)?

His suggestion for rethinking this problem is to identify with the symptom not as the point of inherent exception/exclusion - the 'abject' - of the concrete positive order, but as the only point of true universality, and the moment through which reflective knowledge about social conflict and structures in culture are known. This effectively acts as a reversal of the typical logic, identifying the symptom at the limit of discourse as that which reveals the true point of universality. Sanja Iveković's Frauenhaus offers two distinct types which could be usefully rethought in this way: the figure of the woman artist who now becomes the universal figure for 'art', and the figure of the woman victim - the subjects in her work - who now becomes a typical case for what is wrong with society today.

How could the universal characteristics of the woman artist who develops a feminist art practice be identified, since, according to this logic, these characteristics are not separate from any definition of art but rather define what contemporary art is today? My purpose is to try and identify the common features of feminist activist art and its relation to broader feminist ideas, as I believe they are broadly understood 'globally', albeit in many different local and particular contexts.

The catalogue of 'Mind and Spirit', the first major exhibition of 20th-century Taiwanese women artists that took place in Taipei in 1998, was an attempt to define a Taiwanese national identity separate from mainland China through a history of the island's women artists. The English abstract of Yako Wang's paper usefully suggests that the four major aspects of feminist art are:

1) its concentration on things ignored by male artists;

2) its view of creative statement as an educative consciousness-raising process;

3) its highlighting of women's positions and circumstances;

4) its emphasis on the relationship between the work, the artist and society - through the work's purpose and meaning.⁴

I would like to claim these neat and rather brilliant, short definitions capriciously define the 'universal' of feminist art practices, especially activist practices. This universal is defined by commonly shared assumptions emerging across different cultural contexts but identified as feminist - a 'transcendent' definition of typically feminist art. These qualities are all present in Iveković's Frauenhaus, both in the finished work and in the process of its making.

One problem with the analysis of the politics of gender or of gender construction referred to by Pejic above is that this alone does not necessarily mean that a feminist perspective emerges from the way the work is read. Attention to the construction of the gender order - as Theresa de Lauretis calls it in her book Technologies of Gender - has been a persistent theme in contemporary art by both male and female artists.⁵ Making a work about a woman as a victim does not change anything. Critiques of social stereotypes, and parodic works that play and reformulate the meanings of masculinity and femininity in terms of representation are a more recent phenomenon in contemporary art practice. However, this fashion for 'gender-bending' or 'gender critique' as it is popularly called is not confined to the work of women artists nor is it reserved for feminist politics. There are many works which could be considered this type that reinforce the most sexist or pornographic stereotypes about women - nothing in this approach alone should be regarded as liberating. The real question is its effect and not the category. In the general discussion of 'gender' politics, what we have lost is the sense of transforming relations and modes of representation that is so important to defining a feminist praxis. When I, as a feminist critic, try and define feminist practices, I am pointing to this more specific quality of transformation in thought and action.

A more expanded definition of these concerns involves the recognition of a calculated intervention in socio-political issues as addressed by the work by a female feminist subject. Rosi Braidotti's book Nomadic Subjects defines the idea of a female feminist subject and updates two older ideas from 1970s cultural feminism: the role of the personal as political and a view of feminism as generated by women, for women and about women.⁶ She emphasises the value of the link between the sex of this subject and the political perspective of feminism. A feminist model is also concerned to identify where there is a feminist perspective in the work on social issues concerning women in the political agenda - be it issues identified with this agenda, abortion rights, campaigns against violence against women, women's perspectives on motherhood or womenspecific illnesses such as breast cancer. But it is not just a matter of women making work about these issues, it is also about prioritising the voices of women in a new way and demonstrating how these are at odds with contemporary or current understandings of the social problem. Sanja Iveković's work represents the 'feminist problematic' defined by Mary Kelly in Imaging Desire by way of her specific attention to sexuality, materiality and sociality in a feminist work of art.⁷ Mary Kelly's attention to this question resulted in her strategy of representing the women's body (or that of her child) not through visual representations of the body but through a displacement onto objects, fetishised or not, which signalled affective and empathetic relationships and socio-cultural, psychic and political formations. This category of critique of representation may also include deconstructive strategies in which the women's body is not represented at all, or only represented by fragmented views, in order to transform understanding of the representation and the position of women. Too often the discussion of feminist art practices has centred in a body politic which has involved attention to the physical representation of the women's body and her sex-specific organs - breasts, vulva/vagina, womb - when set against the terms of 'normative' current or historical social, scientific or media representations. This focus on visual representation has often displaced the question of the gap between representation and women's experiences that both Kelly and Iveković tackle to great effect. Iveković's strategy is feminist because it works with this broader discussion of feminist ideas and issues of representation, and at the same time seeks to transform social, political relations alongside its 'revised' representations of women.

The subject of Frauenhaus is the experiences of women whose lives have been torn apart by the violence against them and who have escaped to the woman's house, or refuges in three different cities, first Zagreb then Luxembourg and Bangkok, following Iveković's participation in Womanifesto II in 1999 (printed as artist's pages in n.paradoxa).⁸ The project started in Croatia, and the background of rape that occurred during the war in the former Yugoslavia lies behind this exploration of men's general violence against women. It was significantly made in 1998, when the use of rape as a weapon of war to terrorise the civilian population was first recognised by the United Nations as an international war crime. The creation of the work alongside the campaign for this recognition, as well as the artist's own activism, are important elements of the context in which the work was made. The sex industry in Bangkok forms the background to the stories of the women told there, while the level of domestic violence amongst all classes within the affluent liberal democracy in Luxembourg provides another kind of story. The installation was made in cooperation with women who were living in women's refuges as a result of the violence they had experienced. They are not just subjects of the work, but participants within it. It would not exist without their cooperation in the workshops, the making of their faces as masks and the telling of their individual stories.

In each of these sites, Frauenhaus bears witness to the continued and unceasing level of violence by men against women in our societies, West and East, North and South. The cases may have a 'local' character but the 'universal' is the level of violence. Violence against women is regrettably a 'universal' - not in the sense of a 'transcendent' characteristic since the reasons for this violence are hugely varied, but in terms of a common condition which women experience in patriarchal societies. Violence against women is not confined to any class, race or creed. It is the major form of violence experienced in the home or household. As Charles Fourier suggested in 1841, the degree of emancipation of women in any society is the degree of the emancipation of that society. Focusing on the injustices against women should encourage us to think about the general state of our society and its own measure of civilisation. There is no just society if women have no security in their homes, and equally if the men who perpetrate such acts against them escape punishment under the law.

There are numerous tensions, even dialectics, in operation in Iveković's Frauenhaus between the material and the message, and this marks the work's aesthetic strategies. It documents the women's lives from a place of safety - the women's refuge - and their stories explain the violence that resulted in their arrival there. The fact they survived and are trying to rebuild their lives should not be forgotten. The masks refer to this dual quality. Their fragility suggests the vulnerability of these women, whose cooperation with the production is a testament not only to their reality but also to their survival. The texts tell different and individual stories; they do not allow us to point to any single reason or motivation linking these women's distinct and separate experiences. Yet their names used as a single logo on the postcards remind us of the interchangeability of women, the possibility of any woman suffering their fate. At the same time these logos create new symbols or representations for us to remember what they individually suffered. Overall, through all these elements, the work expresses one clear consciousness-raising goal, namely, to have an effect upon us as an audience and make us aware of the exchange between women participants and the artist as an intermediary. The rebuilding of these women's lives and the care of their children continues because of the international outcry against men who abuse women, and the work highlights the need for continued economic support of shelters for these women, both from the state and private citizens.

It is in this work that Sanja Iveković has redrawn the 'universal' in such a way that we still see the particular, but are also forced to reflect on the values in our own culture and society, and not be allowed to distance this problem as something that happens to 'others' or in 'other cultures'. We need to recognise that this social problem - men's violence against women - is not going to disappear overnight in the societies in which we live, be they in transition to liberal democracies or not, post-communist or not. The stark reality of the need for a place of safety for women because of men's continued violence against them remains the ultimate feminist message of Sanja Iveković's Frauenhaus.

This article was first published in Sanja Iveković's Frauenhaus, Zagreb: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003, n.p. An earlier version of this paper was published in Zarez, July 2001.

- Katy Deepwell