Looking Back to the Future

1990-1970

Griselda Pollock, Penny Florence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134393770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte

In this selection of recent essays, Pollock insightfully engages all major areas of contemporary theory, especially focusing on sexed subjectivities, post-colonialism and Marxist-informed history. In her commentary, Penny Florence places Pollock's critique of modernism, art history, and criticism within the context of the social, political, and ideological developments that have taken place since the 1970s. Florence recognizes in Pollock's work a critical model that moves beyond the contradictions that take place within the history of art. Pollock's own essays and Florence's commentary elaborate the complexities in evaluating this prominent theorist and feminist, whose work demands a capacity to sustain contradiction.

part I
critical positions: addressing the now

1
critical positions

griselda pollock

I AM NOT AN ART CRITIC, BY PROFESSION, I do not intend to write art criticism. Yet I find myself compelled to write about the art being made now.

The coming of the Women’s Movement in the early 1970s, however, made all the difference to writing about art. The difference cannot be reduced to adding the auxiliary characters of feminist artist, feminist critic and feminist art historian. “Feminist interventions in art’s histories”—my 1988 neologism—redefine the key characters in the processes of artistic production and consumption—the Artist, the Critic and the Reader/Viewer.

I have taken the abstract figures of Author [Artist], Critic and Reader [Viewer] from Roland Barthes’s overused and misread essay, “The Death of the Author,” published in 1968, in which Barthes theorised how the textual system of “modernist writing” that had replaced the “classic realist text” effectively destroyed the idea of literature as the utterance of an authoritative subject. Barthes argued that modernist writing presents itself to the Reader as a fragmented text whose momentary coherence is only achieved at the destined site called the Reader. Replacing notions of a work of art as expressive, the “text” is no longer conceived as a “single line of words releasing as a single “theological” meaning the message of the Author God but it is a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”¹ Text makes writing (or any other creative activity) a productive space that does not communicate preformed meaning. Text is the play of a writer with the social processes of signification. Abdicating authority, writing acknowledges that subjectivity itself is an effect of signification and textuality.²

It is obvious that women, never admitted fully as candidates for the Godlike space of The Author-Subject, have not mourned his passing. Yet Barthes’ system posits the now enhanced Reader as “without history, biography or psychology,” merely a destination toward which the writing works, where “all traces by which the writing is constituted” are momentarily held together.³ The Reader is thus the bearer of the culture, the site of the play of the multiplicities of which the writing is the parody, citation, contestation. Should we query, in the name of the nameless women, such an abstraction and argue instead that it does matter, always, who is reading, and what structures of power privilege certain readings to the repression of others that are equally possible.

A second fatality of the demise of the Author is the demotion of the Critic, who was, according to Barthes, the chief ideologue and beneficiary of the Author system. Claiming merely to decipher the meanings inherent in the text through the direct deposit of the Author’s presence—the author who served as the “limit on a text, a final signified”—the Critic, in fact, invested the text with his/her own meaning, thus generating his/her authority as the mirror of that borrowed from the Author that the Critic has in effect created. In Barthes’s anatomy of the modernist text, we are all Readers now.

The history of modernism in the visual arts (and in literature too for that matter) has not exactly followed this course. The Critic continues to play a significant role in the determination of preferred or authoritative readings of works of art. We need a more social and historical framework than Barthes’s structural abstractions allow in order to understand this apparent paradox.

Commodification of cultural production in the nineteenth century eroded the public sphere of culture by privatizing it. The typical “private individual” producer, the producer in a capitalist economy always being a private individual, working in the private space of the studio, produced for the competitive market. Distribution was mediated by dealer, curator and gallery, and this gave rise to a modern form of the author system even while the cultural practices being distributed moved towards a modern textual system at the level of their work on representation. The role of the individual producer’s name and career strategy that secured its status as Author became a vital part of brand identity when art entered the open market of cultural commodities. Yet the modernist initiatives had a supra-individual project that created collaborations and a sense of collective identity that we call the avant-garde. Criticism was radically altered in this conjuncture.

At first, artists such as the informal and internally dissonant Impressionist grouping went public by soliciting commentary from the existing critical profession doing their rounds for dailies and periodicals. Soon, however, specialist advocacy emerged, with partisan or specialist journals established, and reasoned, often historically based apologia for this group’s desire both to renovate the great tradition and innovate in order to articulate a sense of modernity. In this new space, the partisan intellectual as critic emerged and set about creating the new terms for recognizing and valorizing the artists’ new programs. A growing stress on formal over communicative or narrative concerns and an emphasis on individuality signalled by singular stylistic signatures developed into the major but contradictory strategies. With the proliferation of factions, the avant-garde became internally competitive and the critic’s new function developed even more into a form of advocacy, advertizing and publicizing a select tendency amidst those vying for leadership within, and status beyond, the subcultural fraction of the avant-garde minority.

When this subcultural formation was appropriated to become the dominant cultural tendency of modernizing Western bourgeoisies in the early twentieth century, criticism functioned to secure the equation between a particular interpretation of the pre-history and trajectory of the modernist project and Modern Art (as in the founding of and publishing activities of the Museum of Modern Art). The writings of the interwar period exhibit a strongly historicist and teleological tendency, while framing modernism in highly individuated forms denotated by the proper Author names, Picasso, Matisse, Pollock. Clement Greenberg clearly stated the case, concluding his review of the history of modern painting from Courbet to the late 1930s by saying that he found himself merely producing a historical apology for abstract art—the logical rather than historically inevitable conclusion to its own pre-history.⁴

I would not wish to suggest that so magisterial a critic as Greenberg should be dismissed with easy skepticism. In the end, I might find that his strategy may also be my own.⁵ To engage with contemporary practice from the inevitably Baudelairean position of partisanship is always to engage with questions of historical possibility and contemporary significance. Any writing about contemporary practices will find itself structurally defined by the conditions of marketable artistic production and the power of the institutions and discourses which define artistic practices social spaces and cultural valuations. The important point is that these never exhaust the meanings or effects of any one of culture’s products.⁶

Museums and magazines serve, as the Vancouver Art Gallery so bravely stated in its mission statement in the early 1990s, “the purposes of art.” They are not merely fooling themselves that they are concerned with making a “living culture.” But making culture, like history, does not occur in circumstances of our own choosing, but in “circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”⁷ Those who write about this process find themselves forced in two directions at once—advocacy and perspective, appreciation and analysis, partisanship and explanation.

If modernism can be understood as the coming of a radical yet creative doubt about the possibility of meaning, throwing off the fixity of authority for the pleasures of reading, the critical management of modernism has, however, confidently re-attributed meaning and recreated canonical authorities. Raymond Williams named this process the making of a “selective tradition,” “an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification.”⁸ The selective tradition based upon a litany of proper names that singularize and Westernize the complex and diverse projects of modernity in culture becomes through this re-fathering of the Author an element in the constitution of domination, of cultural hegemony, working always in the interests of a specific constituency, “the privileged male of the white race.”⁹

The Women’s Movement involved a commitment to the critique of that dominance and the contestation of those interests. As a feminist, working on and against the discourses of art and artist which figure symbolically in that hegemony, I look back to recover forgotten and effaced histories of artists who were women in order to position and understand the stakes for women as artists in practice today. I have learned from the work of women artists in the present what might have been the stakes for those working at the initiation of the modernist project and before, in other configurations of sexual difference, power and representation. The main difference is the stories I tell are not, cannot be teleological. They do not add up to what Williams defined as “a sense of predisposed continuity.” They are the contribution to the production of a counterhegemony.

The result is a certain irony. To achieve discursive and theoretical space in which to speak of that which has been repressed in modernist critical and art historical discourse, I have utilized the writings of Roland Barthes that effectively assassinate the Author and the Critic. Yet the urgency of the situation for women artists requires a highly articulated advocacy of the work of named individuals. To survive in a market economy, artists who are women need publicity and the legitimation of a supportive discourse that creates a social image of their intervention. Yet the work in question may in fact propose a critique of social, economic and cultural power vicariously sustained in the symbolic realm of culture by the very practices they need in order to be heard or seen as artists. These artist are engaged in a struggle that has to take place in the arenas of culture, determined but never entirely defined by its capitalist economics.

Let me be clearer. Such a project as I am envisaging is not merely the invention of a compensatory, all-women canon. It does not imply discovering a “single, theological meaning” in the statements made by artists as women, easing Woman into the recently vacated God-spot that Barthes discerns as the guarantor of the Author. This would be to assume that a signifying space is already simply there, waiting to be filled with feminine/feminist enunciations. Such a signifying space has to be produced in the crossover between traditional boundaries and disciplines, in the exchange between critical theory, critical writing, critical practice that produce dissident knowledge in and beyond their productive critique of existing structures and sign systems.¹⁰ As a writer, like the intellectuals historically associated with the first competitive avant-garde formation in the later nineteenth century, I share a political and theoretical context with feminists who are artists, a sense of common experiences in both personal and political histories. Collectively, we are producing a distinctive textuality through which to signify and enunciate a critical, historically self-reflexive, feminist subject.¹¹

I am suggesting, therefore, that certain practices fulfill the kinds of textuality which Barthes defines as the distinctive character of modernism.¹² Perhaps those practices associated with the feminist avant-garde fulfill the project of modernism better than Modernist art criticism itself. To avoid misunderstanding here, let me be clear. Feminism has earned some currency by being positioned as either an instance of, or the exemplary moment of, post-modernism. True as this may be in some ways, it is also a stumbling block. While post-modernity undoubtedly defines our current horizons, we may be premature in abandoning the modernist project tout court. I am still very much a modernist, in some significant respects, though not in the obvious and very limited terms associated with the hegemony of a certain kind of American abstract painting delivered to us through the curatorial strategies of MOMA: what is usually taken on board by the shorthand term Modernism. Difficult and betrayed as the modernist project has been in its larger cultural frame, since its uneasy birth in the revolutions and betrayals of the late eighteenth century where rationality and slavery coincided with the abolition of the residual rights of women, I cannot see that feminists can abandon the hope of change that was modernity’s corrupted legacy, nor the belief in the need to struggle for change, nor the need to offer a critique of power and to seek for an ethics of responsibility and a commitment to the dislocation or reallocation of power and knowledge.¹³ The emergence onto the political and cultural stage of the twentieth century of many groups, peoples and minorities resisting their oppression within the still racist, sexist and homophobic terms of imperial modernity has condemned the universalist claims of modernism, and spiked its blind faith in rationality as the sole determinant of so-called progress. Yet these same constituencies have used the dreams of modernity and its forms to voice their demands for what else—freedom, equality and self-determination. Their critique is directed at the distributions of power based on the continuing social contradictions we call class, race and gender. The political analysis and critical theorization of class, race and gender are, however, themselves by-products of the contradictions within modernity. Contradictions are to be overcome; they are not superseded by invented terminologies. Terms such as “post” (post-Feminism, post-Modernism, post-industrial) can easily lull us into a false sense of historical advance, when no change has fundamentally taken place, and the dominant systems have merely adapted faster than we have to the ever-shifting plays of power and resistance.

At the specific level of cultural practice, feminist interventions can be understood using Barthess propositions about a new kind of readership, not because we wish absolutely to destroy all authority, but rather because we aim to locate it, critique it, disperse and as importantly to claim and qualify some aspects of its voice for the hitherto dispossessed and masquerading. This generates a distinct and emphatic textuality in which manufacture of certain kinds of objects functions as part of a larger strategic intervention, the production of signifying space. This Kristevan term can be taken in several ways. It corresponds to Barthes’s notion of the text as the space for a reader to activate its semiotic and psychic traces into meaning. It also encompasses the social and ideological space of the sites of cultural practice—exhibition galleries and the pages of magazines and catalogues, books and articles. We have known for a long time that the museum and gallery are not merely the neutral housing for art objects. They too perform a kind of textual space, written with object-like signs that direct the viewer/reader in space as if through a narrative in a book. The kinds of art practices which interest me are those which use things, objects, forms and spaces to generate multiple textualities. They, nonetheless, accept the necessity to write the space of the reader by the way the things they put in the gallery define its spaces as something quite other than the typical capitalist spectacle of exhibition as consumption. Thus the formal presence of the aesthetically vivid works becomes the tokens of exchange between cooperating partners—producer and reader.¹⁴ These two figures—structural positions—mediate the social production of meanings within explicit historical, biographical and psychological positionalities.

It is by stressing readership as part of production rather than its substitute, and readership as critical for a formerly excluded or occluded community of readers/viewers that an expanded sense of public is produced. We are all readers now, says Barthes. So why would we still need special advocacy for the producers and their productive texts? In fact, there is none, in the sense of promotion of marketable commodities. There is commitment on behalf of the readership to which I belong to create the possibilities of readings by those in it and beyond it through a reflexive production of a social image of the initiative and intervention the artists’ work proposes or produces. Critical writing is thus but another operation co-producing the signifying space. I write to clear a space for feminist textualities to function—not because they lack a historical context, or a place in the trajectories of modern culture. Rather, those lineages have been violently and systematically disrupted or repressed. Instead of being able to note the historical position of feminism, taken for granted and inserted into common knowledge, each time we speak, we need to contest the continuing policing by the selective tradition which distorts feminist words by representing feminism as the tedious Voice of the Other to that history of Modernism, feminism as the monster from outside the city of culture.¹⁵

Thus my practice as a writer on contemporary artistic practices is concerned to refashion the historical knowledge of modern cultures. I want to comprehend in one dialectical movement the specificity of a range of different and singular women’s participation in its production and the conditions of the repression of the knowledge of that involvement and refraction. T...