15
Pure. Bold. Clear.
Simply you
PUBLICATIONS
Rose-Anne Gush, Artistic Labour of the Body (Historical Materialism book series, Brill 2026; paperback, Haymarket 2026) https://brill.com/display/title/73360 / https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2918-artistic-labour-of-the-body
Endorsements
This is dazzling—ambitious, theoretically sophisticated, politically acute. This is much more than a reconstruction of Austrian performance art during the 70s and 80s, although Gush captures the excitement and turmoil of this period with a vividness and energy that almost makes you feel you were there. There is an incredible amount going on in this brilliant, passionate book—fine-grained formal analysis, archival reconstruction, and a bold, trenchant argument for the need for a feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytically informed art criticism, all the more urgent at a moment marked by the global resurgence of the far right, with its new forms of racism, gender oppression, and the ruthless drive of capitalism.
Rebecca Comay, co-author of The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing and author of Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution
A masterpiece of social, intellectual and modern art’s history, Gush offers an exhaustive account of VALIE EXPORTS’s articulation of the contradictions within which the socially reproductive body, coded female, is forged in the numerous antagonisms that structure both the traditional patriarchal state, its traditional culture, and its anxious decomposition within capitalist spectacle. Artistic Labour of the Body elegantly demonstrates how EXPORT’s aesthetic intervention through an emergent genre that subsequently came to be called “body art” performs the cultural and material inscriptions of the body either missed by overly concrete empiricist understandings of the body and equally elided by psychoanalytic and post-structuralist accounts. In a stunning demonstration of the capacity of dialectical thinking to cut through this “empirco-transcendental bind” enforced by reified discourses, Gush offers an account of EXPORT, Actionism and significance of post WWII European art to the present across the categories of class, gender and race, presenting instead their imbrication and, therefore, the interstices in which aesthetic production may find any collective capacity in the present.
Jaleh Mansoor, author of Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counter History (Duke University Press, 2025), and Marshall Plan Modernism, Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (Duke University Press, 2016)
In Gush’s book the social abstraction called ‘the body’ materializes as the political site of unfinished transitions. The works, the interventions and the collaborations by VALIE EXPORT and Elfriede Jelinek that lie at the core of Gush’s book, become legible as concrete points of struggles in that she embeds them in the political landscape of post-war Austria. In Artistic Labour of the Body, aesthetic and political theories are not employed to make sense of EXPORT and Jelinek’s work, but, quite the opposite: Theodor W Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Sigmund Freud make more sense due to Gush putting them to feminist work.
Kerstin Stakemeier, Professor of Art Theory and Art Education, Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg, author of Entgrenzter Formalismus, Verfahren einer antimodernen Ästhetik and co-author of Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art
Press
Alexi Kukuljevic, '“The Unhealing Modern World”: A Reading of Artistic Labour of the Body', e-flux, 2026
Book presentations
Invited lecture and workshop, New Approaches to Performance Art, Study Day Program with a focus on Artistic Labour of the Body at the Department of Art History, University of Vienna, organised my Sophia Rohwetter, David Misteli, Christoph Chwatal, and Katrin Pirner. November 2026
Book presentation, Artistic Labour of the Body, at Historical Materialism Annual Conference, SOAS, University of London. With discussants: Marija Cetinić, Eunsong Kim, Frida Sandström, Daniel Spaulding, Amy Tobin, Josefine Wikström. 5-8 November, 2026
Book presentation, Artistic Labour of the Body, at Depot, Vienna with IZK. Discussants: Alexi Kukuljević (University of Applied Arts Vienna) Jenni Tischer (University of Applied Arts Vienna) and Sophia Rohwetter (University of Vienna), 28 April 2026; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adaGB6O44aA
Book presentation, Artistic Labour of the Body, at Graz University, with Andreja Hribernik (director of Kunsthaus Graz), 31 March 2026
Book presentation, Artistic Labour of the Body, Marxism in Culture Seminar, Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London, with Larne Abse Gogarty (Slade School of Fine Art, University College London), Jenny Nachtigall (University College London) and Alex Stoffel (Queen Mary, University of London), 20 March 2026; https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/events/2026/mar/book-presentation-rose-anne-gushs-monograph-artistic-labour-body
CO-EDITED VOLUMES
Feminist Political Ecology and Metabolic Commons: Against Entropic Zones and the Ecology That War Built, co-edited special issue with Antonia Majaca (planned for 2027) (peer review)
‘Energy’, special issue of Arts of the Working Class, No. 41, (conference proceedings from ‘What is Infrastructural Critique?’ co-edited by Maria Ines Plaza Lazo, Dalia Maini, Danny Hayward, Rose-Anne Gush, Sofia Bempeza and Annette Krauss), May 2026; https://artsoftheworkingclass.org/edition/arts-of-the-working-class-41
ARTICLES (PEER REVIEW)
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘“The Most Unsettling Reality is Our Own:” Instability of Form After the Global Turn’, in The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, ‘Marxist Aesthetics’, V. 34, No. 70. Eds. Tobias Dias, Louis Hartnoll, Dominique Routhier (2025): 201-227; https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v34i70.163577 (open access)
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘Architectures of Social Crisis in Melanie Gilligan’s Films Against Capitalism’, FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur, no. 73 (2024): 44–59; https://doi.org/10.57871/fkw7320241684 (open access)
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘Negation’, Kunst und Politik. Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft, Keywords for Marxist Art History Today, Bd. 21 Eds. Larne Abse Gogarty, Andrew Hemingway (2020), 97–106
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘Contradictions in Time: Fascism’s use of “Woman” and Feminist Resistance in Austria’, Third Text, 33.3 Eds. Angela Dimitrikaki, Harry Weeks (2019), 355–73; https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2019.1652423
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘Disfiguration, Obliteration: What Remains of the Body in the Works of Unica Zürn and VALIE EXPORT’, Performance Research, 23.8 (2018), 39–48; https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1573059
ESSAYS / BOOK CHAPTERS / ART WRITING
Rose-Anne Gush, commissioned review essay, The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia – In Minor Keys, in Camera Austria International, (forthcoming 2026)
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘On Violence and Form’, in Marina’s Cues, Infrastructures of Disalienation ed. by Kerstin Stakemeier (Berlin: Sternberg Press, (forthcoming 2026)
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘Figures of Entropy as Anchors of Value’, in ‘Energy’, special issue of Arts of the Working Class, No. 41, (conference proceedings from ‘What is Infrastructural Critique?’ co-edited by Maria Ines Plaza Lazo, Dalia Maini, Danny Hayward, Rose-Anne Gush, Sofia Bempeza and Annette Krauss), May 2026; https://artsoftheworkingclass.org/edition/arts-of-the-working-class-41 (English original; available in translation in German)
Dominique Arsenault, Jeff Diamanti, Rose-Anne Gush, Elena Longhin, Critical Raw Cartographies, Casino Display: Space for Artistic Research, 2026.
Rose-Anne Gush and Danny Hayward, ‘What Is Infrastructural Critique? A Conference Report’, in e-flux Notes, December 2025; https://www.e-flux.com/notes/6783427/what-is-infrastructural-critique-a-conference-report
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘Report from Bergen Assembly’, Art Monthly, AM490, October 2025, pp. 37-39
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘Hidden Messages: Maryam Jafri’, feature in Camera Austria International 170, 2025, pp. 47-58 (English original; available in translation in German)
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘Brothers in Arms’, Berlin Review, March 2024; https://blnreview.de/en/ausgaben/2024-04/rose-anne-gush-hkw-echos-der-bruderlaender
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘Autonomy's Double Bind’, Brand-New-Life Magazine, (online journal), December 2023; doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13929955 (open access)
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘Sacrificial Energy’ Brand-New-Life Magazine, (online journal), June 2023; doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13929963 (open access)
Rose-Anne Gush, review of ‘The Other: Reimagine the Future’ at Kunsthaus Graz, in Camera Austria, November 2023, pp. 69-71
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘How Does One Get to Own a Mountain’, Brand-New-Life Magazine, (online journal), August 2022; doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13929990 (open access)
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘Sandra Lahire, Celeste Burlina’ at Grazer Kunstverein in Artforum, 2022; https://www.artforum.com/events/sandra-lahire-celeste-burlina-249978/
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘The Vanishing of the Family in Plumes of Smoke’, in Feminist Takes: Early Works, eds. by Antonia Majaca, Rachel O’Reilly and Jelena Vesic, (Berlin: Sternberg Press 2021), pp. 210-225
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘Howardena Pindell’, in Feminist Avant-Garde, ed. by., Gabriele Schor, (Prestel 2021), pp. 149-151; reprinted 2025
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘Notes on Care in Light of Securitization’. Akademie Schloss Solitude Journal Collective Care and Response-ability, no. 1 (2020), 42–47; https://www.akademie-solitude.de/de/online-publications/notes-on-care-in-light-of-securitization-2/
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘A Letter from Vienna’, Tribune Magazine (2019), 25-27; https://www.tribunemag.co.uk/2019/07/a-letter-from-vienna
Rose-Anne Gush, Review of ‘Antarctica, an exhibition on Alienation’, at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, in Art Monthly, AM422, December 2018, pp. 23-24
Rose-Anne Gush, Review of ‘Donna Huanca: Piedra Quemada’ at Lower Belvedere, Vienna, in art-agenda, December 2018, https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/250269/donna-huanca-s-piedra-quemada
Rose-Anne Gush, Review of ‘Barbara Kapusta, The Giant’ at Gianni Manhatten, Vienna, in Flash Art, November 2018
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘The Fate of Labour in Love’, in Objects of Feminism, Art theoretical writings from the Academy of Fine Arts 10, eds. by., Maija Timonen and Josefine Wiström (Helsinki: The Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki, 2017), pp. 75-95
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘Fraternising in Austria’, feature in Art Monthly 410 (2017), pp. 41-42
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘VALIE EXPORT: Image and Body Space’, in AWARE Archives of Women Artists Research & Exhibitions, November 2017; https://awarewomenartists.com/en/magazine/valie-export-image-espace-corps/ (English original; available in translation in French)
Alex Fletcher, Rose-Anne Gush and Sebastian Truskolaski, ‘From Berg to Beyoncé,’ review of Adorno and Politics: 1st Istanbul Critical Theory Conference, Boğaziçi University, Radical Philosophy 199 (September – October 2016), pp. 65-67
Rose-Anne Gush, ‘War by any Means’, review of Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s Second Sex War, at Gasworks, in Mute Magazine, May 2016, https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/war-any-means
BOOK REVIEWS
Rose-Anne Gush, Review – Daniel Spaulding, Joseph Beuys and History (Princeton University Press, 2026), Oxford Art Journal (forthcoming 2026)
Rose-Anne Gush, Review – Jaleh Mansoor, Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory (Duke University Press, 2025) in Philosophy, Politics and Critique (forthcoming 2026)
Rose-Anne Gush, Review – Caroline Lillian Schopp, In-action: Viennese Actionism and the Passivities of Performance Art (University of Chicago Press, 2025), e-flux Notes, May 2026; https://www.e-flux.com/notes/6783496/review-of-in-action-viennese-actionism-and-the-passivities-of-performance-art
Rose-Anne Gush, Review - Radical Eroticism: Women, Art and Sex in the 1960s (University of California Press), Sculpture Journal 30, Issue 1 (2021), pp. 96–100
Rose-Anne Gush, Review of On Photography, Walter Benjamin, ed. and trans. by Esther Leslie (Reaktion Books) in Philosophy of Photography Vol. 7, Issue 1 – 2 (2016), pp. 171-183
