Susan Best is an art historian with expertise in critical theory and modern and contemporary art. Best is a Professor at the , Griffith University. Her book, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde focuses on four artists of the 1960s and 70s: Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark, Ana Mendieta and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. It shows how their work transforms the avant-garde protocols of the period by introducing an affective dimension to late modern art. According to Suzannah Biernoff Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde "should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in psychoanalytic approaches to art." The project was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant.
Awards
In 2017, Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography was the joint winner of the best book prize awarded by the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, an organisation with over three hundred members. In 2017, she was elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2012, her book Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde won the best book prize awarded by the .
Selected Books
Best SM, 2016, Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography, Bloosmbury Academic, London.
Best SM, 2011, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde, I B Tauris, London.
Selected Book Chapters
Best SM, 2014, 'Anne Ferran: Histories of Women and Other Blind Spots', in Anne Ferran: Shadow Land, Power Publications, Sydney.
Best SM, 2013, 'Lygia Clark, the Paris Years: The Body as Medium and Material', in Posman S; Reverseau A; Ayers D; Bru S; Hjartarson B, The Aesthetics of Matter. Modernism, the Avant-Garde, and Material Exchange, edn. 1st ed., Walter de Grutyer, Berlin, pp. 292 – 301.
Best SM, 2011, 'Rivane Neuenschwander and the Legacy of Tropicalia', in McNamara A, Sweat: The Subtropical Imaginary, edn. 1, IMA, Brisbane and Urban Modernities Research Group, QUT, Brisbane, pp. 28 – 43
Best SM, 2009, 'Relational Art, Identification and the Social Bond', in Gonçalves LR, The Institutionalization of Contemporary Art: Art criticism, museums, biennials and the art market., Museu de Arte Contemporânea, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, pp. 217 – 225.
Best SM, 2004, 'Joan Grounds & Sherre DeLys Tickled Pink Laughter as Intitutional Critique', in Carlos I, Biennale of Sydney 2004 On Reason and Emotion, Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, pp. 98 – 99.
Best SM, 2001, 'You are on Aboriginal Land: Landscape after Land Rights', in Green C, Postcolonialism + Art Where Now?, Artspace Visual Art Centre, Sydney.
Best SM, 2001, 'Elemental Constructions:Women Artists and Sculpture in the Expanded Field', in Getczy A; Genocchio B, What Is Installation?, Power Publications, Sydney, pp. 185 – 205.
