ABSTRACT
Nancy Spero's work celebrates women, but as her parades of figures leap and dance, fly and tumble she breaks away from the beaten path and reworks the aesthetic in order to undo the conventions of representation. Spero's appropriation of images can easily be read as an exploration of the myriad and conflicting representations of women and as a chronicle of the multiple role of woman as the malleable other—virgin and whore, goddess and demon. Spero looks to gesture and movement in order to experiment with an alternative language for women. Gilles Deleuze's insistence on 'superior empiricism' and its chaotic movement takes aesthetics beyond the form of identity and the domain of representation. Indeed, Spero makes a mockery of the conventional distance between work, gallery and viewer. All are interconnected, but all relations are ephemeral. In Spero's work, art is experimentation and, if philosophy is to work alongside art, philosophy find that same indefinition and break through the strictures of representation.
