Art's intervention: activating cultural memory for social change

This dissertation develops a socialist feminist aesthetic theory that brings an intersectional and anti-capitalist analysis of aesthetics to art criticism, museum studies and cultural policy. It begins by positing the social value of the arts in terms of their relationship to social change, which is catalyzed by cultural memory. This argument proceeds by developing the concept of cultural memory through keystone texts in aesthetic theory, which it redeploys to explain how cultural memory operates through the arts. The dissertation then outlines a socialist feminist politics that distinguishes cultural memory from discourse and explains the mutual impact of discursive and material conditions through the mechanism of cultural memory.

This theoretical construct is applied to a case study of Charlotte Salomon's massive and multidisciplinary Life? or Theatre?. The case study attends to the socialist feminist dimension of the work, which has otherwise been underrepresented. The dissertation further applies a socialist feminist theory of art as cultural memory to its analysis of problems in the work's exhibition at the Art Galley of Toronto in 2000. This analysis reveals the ways in which the work's political content was circumscribed by the exhibition. It also explores the political and economic climate of patriarchal capitalism impinging on the gallery to describe how this circumscription was preconditioned. By developing the concept of cultural memory in this way, the dissertation makes a contribution to the study of Salomon's work, as well as debates on art's social value and political effects, feminist art history, and the sociology of art.