Feminist Visual Culture

Fiona Carson, Claire Pajaczkowska, Fiona Carson, Claire Pajaczkowska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781136708602
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Visual culture is all around us: television, dance, film, fashion, painting, sculpture, installation and fine art are only a few of its many faces. Feminist Visual Culture looks at feminist theory, the role of women, and the contribution of women artists to the world of visual culture. This substantial introduction provides an overview of visual culture and of the origins of feminist practice. In the volume's three sections--Fine Art, Design, and Mass Media--the authors discuss the visual media specific to that area, incorporating wider issues such as class, culture, and ethnicity. Each chapter is written by a woman working in a different field of visual culture. A topical and comprehensive introduction, Feminist Visual Culture will be a valuable tool for readers and students in women's studies, visual studies, and media studies.

Part I

Fine art

Feminist debate and fine art practices

Fiona Carson

The model and the muse

In the seamless trajectory of Western art history, one might be forgiven for assuming that art is the province of men and that the place of woman is in the picture, as model or muse. The stock-in-trade of art history is the monograph, or specialist study of an individual artist, and most of these are about men. However, the fact that an increasing number are being published about women, and that whole sections of specialist bookshops now address issues of gender and representation, is attributable to the past thirty years of feminist art theory and practice, to which this book is a further contribution.

In 1972, John Berger initiated the debate about the politics of representation and the gaze with his observations on the different ways in which men and women were represented: ‘Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.’¹ In his discussion of the tradition of the Renaissance reclining nude, Berger described the female nude as the objectified possession of the male spectator-owner. However, he saw Manet’s famous nude of 1865, Olympia, as a turning-point: ‘If one compares his Olympia with Titian’s original, one sees a woman, cast in the traditional role, beginning to question that role, somewhat defiantly. The ideal was broken.’ Olympia gazes back at us. For the female art historian Eunice Lipton, writing in 1970, this returned gaze was a defining moment: ‘I saw that the model surveyed the viewer.’ This simple shift of perspective opens up a whole new set of questions that have revolutionised the concept of art history.

It is now rather difficult to imagine art without politics, ideology or social context. However, Lipton reminisces on art history in the 1960s: ‘reading historical events into the style of works of art was forbidden in art history … Abstraction was sacred.’² As a Courtauld Institute student in the mid-1960s, my experience was similar. The list of books not to be read included those by John Berger, along with Hauser’s Social History of Art. Lipton also describes an encounter in 1970 with Linda Nochlin, a female art historian who dared to ask questions about political and social meaning in art history, and one very famous question in particular: ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’

These two issues – the objectification of the female body in art, and the marginalisation of women as artists – have been the most important concerns for feminist theory and practice over the past thirty years.

Marginalisation

Linda Nochlin’s explanation for the lack of female genius in art was two-sided. First, she examined the concept of genius, what she terms the ‘golden nugget’ theory lying at the heart of art historical structures. The idea of artistic genius as a god-given essence, ‘subject of a hundred monographs’, was a myth with its origins in Pliny, reiterated by Vasari about Giotto and Michelangelo, and embodied in modern times by Picasso. It was a male myth, a myth about masculinity, a myth that could be subject to deconstruction. In fact, most male ‘geniuses’ were precocious in their access to intensive training from an early age – Michelangelo and Picasso being good examples. By contrast, until the end of the nineteenth century, women artists were denied access to the training necessary to become professional artists, especially the study of the nude body upon which high-status narrative painting was based. Those few exceptional women – like Artemisia Gentileschi, Rosa Bonheur and Berthe Morisot – who achieved careers as professional artists, tended to be members of artistic families.³

Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock’s book Old Mistresses (1981) went much further in its analysis of why women artists were excluded from the canon of art history. In the book’s devastating conclusion, they propose that women artists ‘are mentioned in order to be categorized, set apart and marginalized’ within the ‘masculine discourses of art history’. This marginalisation functioned to support the centrality and ‘hegemony of men in cultural practice, in art’. Not only were women artists marginalised, they were supposed to be marginalised.

Parker and Pollock also concluded that women artists would be bound up with and discussed in terms of contemporary definitions of femininity and the perpetuation of the feminine stereotype. Individual female artists in turn would negotiate in different ways with these ideologies. Thus, the female Surrealist Leonor Fini engaged wholeheartedly in the role of Surrealist muse, dressing up and being photographed in mythic guises but painting from the perspective of a female consciousness and sexuality. As predatory black sphinx watching over the slight body of her reclining lover, she is ‘the power of woman, the watcher’.⁴

The art/craft dichotomy

Rozsika Parker’s analysis of the art/craft dichotomy underscored another way in which the feminine stereotype was linked to art production.⁵ She traced the privatisation of female embroidery skills and their role in the inculcation of an ideology of femininity as devout, chaste and obedient, which culminated in the Victorian cult of medieval embroidery. During the Renaissance period, fine art was established as a public activity of high status associated with male professionals, while embroidery became a low-status craft associated predominantly with women and domestic spaces. Where it was professionalised, women were excluded.

The implications of this social stratification are still in place. Sculptural fibre art, for example, is exhibited as craft. Therefore, Magdalena Abakanowicz, a sculptor working in fibre, was never discussed in art magazines until she began to sculpt in bronze or wood. Eva Hesse, who pushed sculpture to its limits in tenuous fibrous forms like Ennead (1966) and Right After (1969), came from a fine art background and was discussed as a Minimalist sculptor, making ‘vulnerable’and ‘feminine’ forms in contrast to Sol Le Witt’s mathematical grids. Context was everything in terms of how these two artists’ work was exhibited and reviewed, and consequently, Abakanowicz’s powerful work remains relatively unknown.

The personal as political

The early 1970s saw the political explosion known as the Women’s Liberation Movement. Fine art, like other cultural forms, was used as a medium for the expression of feminist politics. One of its most enduring slogans was ‘the personal as political’, described by Laura Mulvey in her catalogue entry for the Whitechapel Gallery’s 1982 exhibition of Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti as ‘the political nature of women’s private individualised oppression’.⁶ The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo became an early heroine of the Women’s Movement because of her ability to express powerful emotional experiences graphically, and to exorcise traumatic events in paint. It was in Kahlo’s work that we first see the inner and tabooed aspects of the female body revealed in order to express such events. Her paintings, which show graphic depictions of physical injury to the body, imagery of birth, abortion and wounding, and the breaking-open of the body surface to reveal a dripping heart or a fractured spine, portray physical and emotional pain intertwined.

Goddess culture

Feminist art of the 1970s is characterised with hindsight as monocultural and essentialist, dominated by a preoccupation with goddess culture and vaginal iconography, which came to be viewed as anathema from the 1980s perspective of deconstruction and multiculturalism. By the 1990s, this polarisation had begun to acquire a historical perspective.

The idea of a ‘utopian vision of lost maternal power regained’⁷ perhaps explains part of the appeal of 1970s goddess culture and its fascination with myths of ancient matriarchy, which even led artists like Mary Beth Edelson to perform goddess rituals at ancient sites and declare that patriarchy’s 5,000 years were over.⁸ The Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, explaining the reasons for making the Silhueta series in 1981, stated, ‘My art … is a return to the maternal source. Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth.’⁹

The Dinner Party

The most famous and controversial icon of 1970s feminist art, Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, brought together a number of contemporary concerns. This large triangular table, set with embroidered runners and vaginal plates, aimed to rescue female achievement in history from invisibility and to celebrate it – it was a dinner party for those ‘consumed by history’. Chicago’s use of craft skills associated with domestic femininity in a high art context challenged the traditional hierarchy of art and craft and drew attention to its gender politics. The overtly ‘high church’ atmosphere of the display with its female Last Supper connotations and goddess numerology imbued it with a religious atmosphere. But it was the use of vaginal imagery for the place settings of women as diverse as Virginia Woolf and Sacajawea that gave The Dinner Party its lasting place in controversy. Condemned in the United States Congress as ‘pornography on plates’ and criticised by 1980s feminists as essentialist, The Dinner Party remains homeless twenty years after its creation. Amelia Jones, attempting a critical rehabilitation of the piece, discusses Chicago’s intentions in her use of vaginal imagery to portray an active and creative sexual energy: ‘the vagina as temple, tomb, cave, flower, [or] the Butterfly Vagina which gets to be an active vaginal form’.

Jones notes how, when a ‘paradigm shift’ to a poststructuralist feminist art theory occurred in the 1980s, an opposition was set up against the ‘body-oriented, utopian, transformative art of the 70s’. The range and challenge of this art tended, she claimed, to be ‘collapsed into The Dinner Party, which was then cited as exemplary of its problems’. Mira Schor, meanwhile, observed that the label of ‘essentialism’ conferred on the work was a term created by its opposition.¹⁰

Deconstruction

An influential article by Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman categorised women’s art practices, only to condemn those that did not promote social analysis.¹¹ The ‘celebratory’ strategies of 1970s feminist aesthetics were compared unfavourably with ‘deconstructive’ strategies that used Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalytic theories of the gaze to unpick dominant representations of women and reveal the workings of ideology. Such strategies saw the dominance of theory over making processes, and of photography over fine art media, and the development of a hegemonic ‘scriptovisual’ style in which text was often as important as image. The psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan elaborated by Laura Mulvey in relation to the gaze had a strong influence on this type of work, which dominated the early 1980s in a series of exhibitions such as ‘Issues’ (Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1980), ‘Sense and Sensibility’ (Nottingham, 1982), and ‘Beyond the Purloined Image’ (Riverside, 1983).

In 1987, Griselda Pollock lent weight to this paradigm in her introduction to Framing Feminism, a compilation documenting the course of feminist art in Britain over the period 1970–85, by discussing Mary Kelly’s Lacanian analysis of motherhood, Post-Partum Document (1975–8), as an illustration of Barry and Flitterman’s thesis. She cites their view that artistic activity is a ‘textual practice which exploits the existing social contradictions [in patriarchy] towards productive ends’. Kelly’s work documented the mother-child relationship as a gendere...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Issues in feminist visual culture
• Part I Fine art
• Part II Design
• Part III Mass media
• Notes on Contributors
• Index