Carol Rhodes and What Some Women Did

The feminist and activist life of the artist Carol Rhodes supposedly existed only prior to her art practice. This raises important questions concerning the relations between art, life and politics, and how these are represented in feminist historiography. This article explores these issues by recounting the making and enacting of the performance What Some Women Did, which was performed in various iterations in 2024. This article weaves the scripts used in the performances, together with historical, theoretical and artistic context, to give an overview of the infrastructures acting on the inside and outside of Rhodes’s painting practice, offering a counter-narrative which problematizes the linear binary of her before and after. It uses a political performance practice to approach discourses of topographical realism as abstraction in Rhodes’s work, providing a dialectical feminist methodology of embodying the language of painting criticism, in various tropes of objectification of the female body, in order to argue for a feminist performativity through Rhodes’s painting practice.