Feminism and Art History Now

Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice

Victoria Horne, Lara Perry, Victoria Horne, Lara Perry

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786722355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte

To what extent have developments in global politics, artworld institutions, and local cultures reshaped the critical directions of feminist art historians? The significant new research gathered here engages with the rich inheritance of feminist historiography since around 1970, and considers how to maintain the forcefulness of its critique while addressing contemporary political struggles. Taking on subjects that reflect the museological, global and materialist trajectories of twenty-first-century art historical scholarship, the chapters address the themes of Invisibility, Temporality, Spatiality and Storytelling. They present new research on a diversity of topics that span political movements in Italy, urban gentrification in New York, community art projects in Scotland and Canada's contemporary indigenous culture. Individual chapter analyses focus on the art of Lee Krasner, The Emily Davison Lodge, Zoe Leonard, Martha Rosler, Carla Lonzi and Womanhouse. Together with a synthesising introductory essay, these studies provide readers with a view of feminist art histories of the past, present and future.

Part I

Writing|Speaking|Storytelling

It has long been noted that the language of ‘universal’ rights espoused during the Enlightenment and its emancipatory projects were, in fact, exclusive of women. This was observed by some of the earliest feminist thinkers, including Olympe de Gouges, whose 1791 text, ‘Declaration of the Rights of Women’, deplored in its very title the undisclosed biases of the French National Assembly’s earlier publication, ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ (1789).¹ Consequently, in the late 1960s, feminism did not abruptly materialise into art-historical discourse from elsewhere. European feminism’s shared genealogy with the discipline of art history – both emerging out of the liberal project of the Enlightenment – ensured that its ethical politics had been an unacknowledged parergon to the discipline, not ‘being a part of it yet without being absolutely extrinsic to it’.² Women and women artists had always functioned negatively as a framing device for masculinist art and its history: that which it is not. Women – both in representation and as cultural producers – had acted as what feminist art historians have termed a ‘site of difference’, that which enables and maintains the hegemony of masculinist culture (understood as ‘universal’ or ‘unmarked’). Since the renewal of the feminist political movement around 1970, and the advent of the feminist art and art history movements, this hierarchising frame has been made visible through a self-reflexive writing practice that reshaped the discipline of art history and its institutions of representation.

Feminist writing therefore targets scripted mechanisms of art history that sustain mythologies around artistic creativity and elide women’s achievements. There are certainly discussions to be had about affect and our embodied response to artworks, but we must begin from an understanding of discourse as a structuring device; language (which is historically and socially constituted) fundamentally shapes our ideas and enables us to communicate these ideas to one another. The feminist critique of art history thus faces a slippery double task: to simultaneously interrogate existing forms of writing and knowledge production, while attempting to develop new and different forms. ‘Feminist art criticism remains criticism with a cause.’ As Katy Deepwell explains, ‘[i]‌t should offer models of women’s art practice to its audiences; provide contexts for interpreting works and language(s) or theoretical frameworks to communicate with one’s peers’.³

Susan Gubar wrote in 1981 that, within Western history, the ‘model of the pen/penis writing on the virgin page participates in a long tradition identifying the author as a male who is primary and the female as his passive creation’. Thus, as she plainly puts it, ‘the female body has been feared for its power to articulate itself’.⁴ This idea had underpinned the influential essays of Hélène Cixous, a French-Algerian philosopher whose theory of écriture féminine urged women’s autonomous self-expression: ‘Woman must write herself: must write about and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, and with the same fatal goal.’⁵ Feminist approaches to history-writing have therefore celebrated the embodied and experiential alongside the intellectual and rational. These investigations have often been structured around fantasies of silence and speaking, absence and presence, with ‘the blank page’ of women’s history providing a space of possibility for women’s creativity.

In 1979, the Women’s Caucus for Art Newsletter endeavoured to expose art history’s ‘blank pages’ in a report showing that six widely used survey textbooks failed to mention a single woman artist.⁶ While we might expect that such a situation is a thing of the past, regrettably it appears otherwise. In March 2010 the Swedish artists Ditte Ejlerskov and Eva-Marie Lindahl embarked on The Blank Pages project, prompted by their realisation that Taschen’s ‘Basic Art Series’ of books consisted of 92 men and 5 women. In an open letter to the company they wrote: ‘we hereby hand over our entire compilation of the nearly 100 missing female artists that we consider qualify’. They also produced a series of glossy book covers in Taschen’s house style for a 2014 exhibition, accompanied with the caustic request: ‘we are now waiting for your expertise to fill the blank pages with content’.⁷

Occupying the ‘blank page’ which is created by the privileging of masculine creativity requires that the space be claimed on behalf of ‘women’, or ‘the feminine’. Making such a claim runs the risk of imposing on all women a single identity, or appearing to do so, at the expense of acknowledging the differences among and between women. Many feminists have argued that, whether or not one endorses the ‘essentialist’ notion of women which is prescribed by patriarchy, it is at times strategically necessary to occupy that position in order to speak to power.⁸ But equally generative in feminism has been resistance to the unifying effects of the category of ‘women’ who are separated by as many or more circumstances as those which unite them. In 1989 the legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw proposed that we view discrimination as intersectional, in attempt to foreground the distinctive experiences of women who are enmeshed differently in systems of power relations such as race, as well as gender.⁹ The imperative to appreciate the differentiated experiences of gender inequality has been exacerbated by the political and economic processes of neoliberalism, whose increasingly global operations have impacted unequally on populations marginalised in different ways. How feminist solidarity can operate in such a climate is a challenge with which feminists – especially those within the privileged world of academic study – continue to grapple, more and less successfully.¹⁰

One strategy for fostering a feminism that is alert to the varied and sometimes incommensurable lives of ‘women’ is to turn the debate away from the question of categories of identity, in favour of attending more fully to the individuals who embody them. Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero invites us to privilege considerations of the embodiment of individual and unique ‘voices’ – the corporeal rather than abstract and universal element of our words – to evade the ontological violence of reducing lived experience to categories. She explained in a 2008 interview: ‘My challenge consists of clearing out the philosophical ontology that takes “being” to be an abstract and universal category and replacing it with an ontology that instead signifies being with every human being in her/his corporal and unrepeatable uniqueness.’¹¹ To emphasise the unique aspects of the speech of individual and vulnerable persons, speaking either individually or in unison, is an implicit critique of reductive identity categories.

In this section we have invited writers to fill the blank page not with reflections on ‘women’ but with unique and individual voices that bear witness to the insufficiency of terms like ‘feminine’ or ‘woman’, ‘queer’ or ‘of colour’. The opening chapter consists of a reprinted essay from the journal Feminist Review, written by Victoria Horne and Amy Tobin following the first workshop of ‘Writing Feminist Art Histories’ in October 2012. The two met there as PhD students and decided to write together about the history of collaboration and collective research in UK feminist art history from the 1970s onwards. This was a meaningful choice given the institutional demands of individual professionalism that inflexibly shape the doctoral process. As an early outcome of the research network the ideas explored around neoliberal research agendas and historical narrative remained central to its development, including this current volume.

Collectivity and particularly the importance of the collective voice emerges forcefully in the second chapter, although here the emphasis is on tracing momentary resurfacings of the collective across time and space, rather than the shared material spaces of feminist reading groups alluded to in Chapter 1. Laura Guy considers the manifesto a powerful mechanism through which to concentrate multiple voices through a single text, communally reading aloud as a political speech act. The replaying of manifestos, as Guy demonstrates, expresses the importance for feminism of identifying affirmative relationships with art and artists of the past; relationships that go beyond progressive generational logic. By borrowing other voices – in this case, the artist Zoe Leonard’s 1992 text demanding better political representation of victimisation, poverty and disability – one might find an expression of one’s own discontent as well as a mechanism for addressing situations that, in spite of occurring in a different time and place, demonstrate many of the same problems. The ‘time of the manifesto’ is therefore complex, as the text falters, dips and resurfaces. Ultimately, however, Guy contends that the shared time of the manifesto ‘allows persons to stake a claim to forms of political subjectivity, even as certain cultural, economic and socio-political forces work to limit that very claim’.

Cherry Smiley writes from her position as a North American First Nations woman (Nlaka’pamux/Thompson and Diné/Navajo) about making art that responds to the particular demands of speaking within a hostile culture. Drawing on the resources of her own aboriginal culture, particularly storytelling as a device for affirming connections with history and identity, Smiley explains how the structuring of her art production through storytelling allows her to maintain a sense of her own unique concerns and experiences in her work. This connection is crucial for sustaining her First Nations identity within a field which has often been defined in opposition to the work of First Nations producers. Smiley also elaborates how her concept of storytelling has allowed her to conceive relationships of solidarity with other marginalised women, and her chapter presents the possibility of a genealogy of feminist art practice which emphasises its intersectional concerns with First Nations political movements against dispossession, incarceration and violence against women.

Smiley has illustrated her chapter with her own works, and they are not the only evidence of an artist’s visual work in our volume. As art historians we recognise that the corporeal voice may emerge not only through the sonic but also the vibrations that occur as lines and form on paper. Throughout the volume we have introduced illustrations by the artist and doctoral researcher Suzanne van Rossenberg. These cartoons engage with ideas about art, feminism and queer politics, presenting irreverent observations that cut to the heart of some of the illogic and confusion of contemporary academic practice. In counterpoint to the seemingly indestructible image of the ‘feminist killjoy’ (as Sara Ahmed has phrased it), humour has featured prominently in the activities of many women artists.¹² A recent issue of the feminist art journal n.paradoxa, themed around humour, describes how ‘the light-hearted, one could even say the facetious, is used to send up social expectations and norms as regards the body, gender and social and cultural constraints’.¹³ Disrespecting the ‘disciplining’ boundaries of society and art, through expressive textual and visual works, feminists have produced powerful correctives to the coercive categories of identity with which we are forced to work.

Notes

1.‘Les Droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, Dédie a la Reine’. For an introduction in English to Olympe de Gouges and he...