Books
M-Z Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (eds.) , The Power of Feminist Art : Emergence, Impact and Triumph of the American Feminist Art Movement , Harry N.Abrams, New York, 1994. 245 illus. of which 118 in colour.318 ppp. hardback ISBN 9 780500 016435
Anne Marsh , Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia, 1969-1992 , Oxford University Press , Australia ,1993 , c.100 b & w illus. 262 pp. paperback ISBN 0 19 553306 5.
The beautiful colour reproductions and the substantial qualities of this new Broude and Garrard anthology (literally its size and weight) create a totality and ‘seeming’ coherence to art history about the feminist art movement and confirm its importance as an object of study. There is no doubt that here, and not just within the pages of this book, is an important history which needs to be affirmed, celebrated, anthologised and documented. However, much as I and many others might wish to reiterate the importance of feminism, the question remains, what contribution will this book make to shifting the study of feminist art practice from the margins to the centre: from its frequent position as an addendum or one-off topic, into a key subject of study?
A new wave of feminist publications has arrived both this year and last including, in addition to those reviewed here, two new anthologies from Harper Collins by Joanna Frueh, Arlene Raven, Cassandra Langer (Feminist Art Criticism and Feminist Criticism; Art, Identity,Action) and a continuing stream of publications from both Bay Press in Seattle (see below) and MidMarch Arts Press in New York (e.g. Leslie King-Hammond (ed) Gumbo ya ya: Anthology of African American Women Artists and Laura Brunsman and Ruth Askey (ed) Modernism and Beyond: Women Artists of the Northwest). Both Lucy Lippard and Mary Kelly are publishing new editions of collected writings in 1995. The first feminist anthology from Britain on the visual arts since 1987 has just been published containing contributions by 23 different women artists,curators and writers : Katy Deepwell (ed) New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies (Manchester University Press,1995). What, collectively, will the impact of this new wave of publications have on teaching about feminist art practice in art schools and art history departments, even in women’s studies ? Will it offer a means to redefine the curriculum? And, by this I mean, moving the study of feminist theory, criticism and practice out from the occasional guest lecture or one-off seminar tagged on to the end of the programme, into the centre of issues and debates explored within programmes on contemporary art. Perhaps, here, is the other great problem that art history departments in Universities rather than art schools tend towards, the absence of taught programmes about contemporary art practice in the last twenty-five years. What impact also will such books have in redefining the teaching of what constitutes feminist art practice, beyond the often officially-unacknowledged reassurance that such publications, which are typically out from the library, provide for women students of role models or possibilities for a future as practicing artists, art critics and art historians. After twenty five years, it is very clear , if only to those who have been involved, that the feminist art movement is in the process of redefining its own legacy and redrawing the boundaries and emphases of its own history. Overcoming the incredible backlash of the mid-late 1980’s, renewing internal debates and addressing the ‘generation gap’ amongst its practitioners have emerged as key issues. The longstanding questions of feminism’s critique of Greenbergian modernism, its potential interventions in the art world and its new, if tentative, alliances with postmodernism (in addition to its use of post-structuralist theory) remain on the agenda in all the new publications discussed here. Such reassessment is taking place in the context of a renewed interest from a younger generation of women artists in the supposedly brash and deliberately lewd feminist transgressions of the early 1970’s to parallel their own in the guise of postmodern ‘Bad Girls’ or ‘Cyberchics’. The Power of Feminist Art ends , appropriately, with an essay by Laura Cottingham ( a contributor to the ICA’s 1993/1994 Bad Girls catalogue) which stresses a continuum linking ‘Bad Girls’ like Sue Williams, Zoe Leonard or Lorna Simpson to a legacy of feminism dating from the early seventies. The point is reiterated, from a different angle in Mira Schor’s essay on ‘Backlash and Appropriation’, the dual themes of a feminist legacy in postmodern times. Schor contrasts David Salle’s painting ‘Autopsy’(1981) with Kiki Smith’s sculpture/installation ‘Tale’(1992) amongst other examples to demonstrate the casual sexism and discrediting of any feminist critique by the repitition of images of abject, often deliberately humiliated, women in the work of some of the art world’s currently most celebrated ‘golden boys’ and ‘girls’.
Given the increasing number of substantial publications on feminist art practice, isn’t it now time to reassess how feminist art practice since the 1970s is now taught or even communicated to succesively younger generations of art students ? Art school culture still does not seem to have updated its ideas of feminism from either the stigmatising of everything feminist (particularly from the 1970’s) as essentialist, even more perversely as ‘sexist’, or the attempt to bury feminism under the prefix of ‘post’-feminism by the lads of the new academy.
In this respect it is significant that feminist interventions in teaching form such a central part of the material discussed in The Power of Feminist Art, specifically the impact of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s feminist art program at Cal Arts and Fresno in the early 1970’s (in interviews with both artists) and Linda Nochlin’s own recollections of her early feminist teaching programs at Vassar and the vast expansion of work on women artists since the early 1970’s. These women’s interventions as teachers have had a significant impact as feminist role models, the former in a new focus on women’s experience and perspectives as subject matter for works of art; the latter in switching the emphasis away from studying women as bearers of man’s meaning into their significant contribution as makers of meaning. Nochlin’s emphasis upon analyses of the representations of women ( coupled with developments in cultural studies) have achieved a limited orthodoxy as an appropriate ‘academic’ approach in many art history departments though they are not always accompanied by the groundswell of research into the work of women artists which developed from this work. I am still amazed at how few students have actually read her pioneering essay ‘Why have there Been No Great Women Artists?’ and been encouraged to apply her insights to new research on women artists.(The project of recovery is far from exhausted, even as methodologies change). The description of the feminist art program by former students, in Faith Wilding’s account, and of the significance of the Womanhouse project which emerged from the work (Arlene Raven) , make exceptionally interesting reading for lecturers. Chicago and Schapiro’s use of both a separate teaching space for women students and the intensive use of consciousness-raising techniques as the basis for issue-based work continue to inspire as well as suggest ways to problematise feminist approaches and methodologies.
To a British audience, clear theoretical differences remain in the reception of this American re-assessment of its own legacy. Firstly, the emphasis upon celebration. This appears as an, at times, uncritical celebration of women’s creativity and connections within the mainstream, an ‘art-world feminism’ , which the British art scene has until recently apparently lacked. For we too, now have ‘Bad Girls’ and a new generation of women sculptors ‘making it in the mainstream’, e.g. Rachel Whiteread, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Helen Chadwick. What this celebratory element provides cannot be too quickly dismissed , however critical we might remain of the terms of some affirmations of all women’s work as feminist statements , particularly those working within mainstream and well-established practices. Affirmation, at least, has the advantage of providing important documentation of works which have rarely been seen over here and a large number of extremely useful descriptive passages about the staging or content of the individual artworks, even while it provides little analytical commentary about the context in which such works were produced or received. It may appear to a more sceptical British audience, that the affirmation of women artist’s activities per se is equivalent to all or any feminism, but what is actually being presented in this anthology is a quite well established canon of feminist practitioners, a great and good accounting of the visibility of feminism in the art world since the seventies. This is not to dismiss the usual complaints about the selection of writers and artists represented and its resulting exclusions and emphases. The book has provoked complaints in America because of its lack of representation of certain sections of the feminist art movement (literally its heterodoxy and its East coast/West coast emphasis) but it is certainly no less than the complaints of British feminist practitioners on the publication of Rosika Parker and Griselda Pollock’s Framing Feminism: the Women’s Art Movement 1970-1985 for its inclusions, exclusions and emphases. The mistake is in assuming that either book is definitive, the only possible account , and that the presentation consists of only those artists worth studying or even, in these cynical times, worth knowing about . For those who have well-established collections of feminist magazines or who have followed the major feminist exhibitions in America, there are no new surprises in this book , but what there is is a vast array of photographs reproduced in colour which had previously only been frequently known in black and white. The documentation of the Womanhouse project and photographs of early performance work are but two good examples.
Much of ‘The Power’ in the title brings into view the activism of American feminists in the art world, both protests against the status quo from Whitney demos to Guerilla Girls to Women’s Art Coalition (WAC) as well as the more organised side of the women’s art movement through the Women’s Caucus for Arts (WCA) and the Coalition of Women’s Organisations and the establishment of a variety of feminist publications and exhibition spaces for women. The broader picture of women artists’ activism in terms of political engagement from street theatre to large scale collaborative projects enable links to be seen between the women’s movement and content-based work. Overall the book stresses the centrality of activism to the individual and general level of public consciousness-raising about issues like violence against women, the peace movement, enviromental and health issues, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), levels of institutionalised discrimination in the art world , analysis of attitudes towards women’s bodies and change for women in the workplace. The Power of Feminist Art also supports and enables connections to be seen between feminist practice over the last twenty five years and its centrality to the emergence of ‘New Genre Public Art’ which form the subject of both Suzanne Lacy’s Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art and Nina Felshin’s But Is It Art?: The Spirit of Art as Activism (both titles from Bay Press,1995). Activism within a recognised community in these three books provides an argument for overcoming standard oppositional definitions of public art as ‘the turd in the plaza’ and the incredibly diverse category called ‘community arts’ by foregrounding a definition of socially engaged and committed practice outside conventional gallery spaces with a specific constituency as both audience and participants. Collaboration (between artists and co-workers as much as the use of non-art audiences as participants in public artworks) becomes the key to challenging modernism’s emhpasis on individualism and models of isolated art production as artworks travel from studio to gallery.
Underlying these comments about activism , however, is an important issue which the book does seek to address in a variety of ways, namely the question of the exclusions within feminism and whether or not feminism can be all-inclusive. This debate has a particular character in America which complaints about exclusivity, particularly debates about racism or the Eurocentrism of white feminists here, only superficially share. Firstly, this is because the make-up of constituencies in terms of ethnic and racial backgrounds and their colonial inheritances amongst feminists is different on either side of the Atlantic (see,for example, Lucy Lippard’s Mixed Blessings: Art in Multi-Cultural America Panetheon,New York,1990). Secondly, as a consequence, this produces a variety of different emphases in how these factors affect both what constitutes the areas of activism as well as the levels of recognition possible within particular constituencies, specifically feminist, black and hispanic, both inside and outside the art world. In stressing engagement, via consciousness-raising, collaboration, community and activism, Broude and Garrard’s anthology presents in a new light what had become a dividing issue amongst feminist constituencies: the question of essentialism versus anti-essentialism. There are side-swipes at recognisably anti-essentialist practices which engage directly at the level of Theory and refutations of the attacks or identification of certain feminist positions as essentialist throughout the book. However, rather than adopting the theoretical ground for a discussion of these issues (a debate here which can be seen in the arguments presented by Barry / Flitterman-Lewis as opposed to A.Partington in Hilary Robinson’s Visibly Female Camden Press,London, 1987), this book stresses activism as a means to re-read the question of what makes a work a feminist intervention. Suzanne Lacy, for example, argues that ‘deconstruction was tied to an activist project of shifting power relationships in daily life, rather than a theoretical exercise in rarifed language addressed to an art-world viewership’ (p.264) and Judy Chicago states that the essentialist/anti-essentialist debate closes down on the real project, feminism’s ongoing critique of patriarchy : ‘The thing about essentialism is that it’s being used by women to attack women . . . and to discredit their foremothers’ (p.71). While ‘activism’ has the effect of foregrounding feminist practice as diverse and manifest in different levels of practical engagement from teaching to participation in feminist publications, street demonstrations or work with particular constituencies and communities, it also short-circuits the much more difficult theoretical questions of ‘Woman/women’ and analyses of the complexities of racism and multi-culturalism in relation to gender (particularly given the enterprises of feminist post-structuralist approaches in criticism and practice).
Overall The Power of Feminist Art maintains a vital emphasis upon the diversity of positions and perspectives in two and a half decades of feminist art practice but this diversity is stressed in and through a representational politics of identity rather than by sustained argument or dialogue. Two artists quoted within the book show the difficulty of arguing for the centrality of their own position in terms of identity politics which may leave different constitutencies isolated and without dialogue between them. Judith Baca states that feminism (since the 1970’s) remains an important body of knowledge and a resource, but that ‘Ethnicity won’t join a white feminist agenda. It will transform it. It will become the central agenda of feminism, as rightly it should, because we are the majority’(p.274). While Ruth Iskin, in a different essay, argues equally for the centrality of a lesbian perspective, ‘The lesbian relationship as metaphor stands at the heart of feminist art and has on some level affected every feminist’s work’ (p.202), thus echoing Adrienne Rich’s arguments prioritising a lesbian continuum precisely for the importance attached to all woman-to-woman relationships. While critiques of the ethnocentrism and the ‘invisibility’ of lesbian perspectives are acknowledged by this approach which seeks to represent constituencies with equal weight, the arguments are rarely made in full, which may lead toonly tokenistic acknowledgement of their importance for all women.
This model of cultural diversity is, however, extremely useful precisely because it is so easily assimilable into teaching practice, providing a great number of examples for discussion while it at the same time leaving a lot of questions unanswered and a great number of future possibilities to be explored. Certainly this is the important challenge that a book like this offers readers and lecturers who adopt it as core teaching material and it underlines the importance of feminism as a politics and not an artworld style or art historical movement . While The Power of Feminist Art possesses the authority of grounding a potential field it also begs for further research to be undertaken. Hopefully, this publication will go a long way to overcoming the repetitive foregrounding of only Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger or Mary Kelly as worthy objects of study, (often as the acceptable face of anti-essentialist feminism in the postmodern art world via Craig Owens essay ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism ’) and the positioning of Judy Chicago as representative of the ‘bad’ essentialist camp because of her revival of craft or use of core imagery. For, in spite of its celebration of the latter’s work, it at least foregrounds a large number of women artists as alternative objects of study and points again to the importance of performance work for feminists from the seventies. There are also frequent references to the use of masquerade and transformative performances and photowork in representation as ‘forerunners’ of Cindy Sherman. Miriam Schapiro suggests that it is an ‘absence of representations, of icons, of memory’ (a lack in education as much as in art historical and critical discussion ) which leads contemporary women artists to ‘endlessly repeat’ images and signs of ‘the ills of survival in patriarchy’ (p.83). However, as Griselda Pollock, pointed out in her review of the book in Women’s Art Magazine (Jan/ Feb 1995) such comments continue to muddy the waters by inaccurately failing to acknowledge the significance of the attribution of feminist readings of images of women produced by Cindy Sherman’s work as if that were either the politics of the artist or an internal quality of the work.
By contrast a more familiar theoretical overview to exploring performance art through a critique of the subject (both feminist and Lacanian psychoanalytic perspectives) informs Anne Marsh’s very interesting account of developments and sites for performance art in Australia, 1969-1982. Here, a sharp distinction is drawn between women practitioner’s use of their own bodies in performance work outlining its relationship to the development of body art and those performances which are informed by feminist critique and response. Marsh also provides very important and interesting documentation of performance work over this period, although I often wished for more information to illuminate what was visible in the photographs.
Her discussion of women performance artists like Jill Orr, Jane Kent, Lyndal Jones, Ann Fogarty, Karen Finley to mention a few, provides a very interesting counterpoint to the performance work of Carolee Schneemann, Adrian Piper, Hannah Wilkes amongst others discussed by Jo Withers and Suzanne Lacy or the discussion of Ana Mendieta and Mary Beth Edelson by Gloria Feman Orenstein in The Power of Feminist Art . The former analysis (Withers,Lacy) references Moira Roth’s research on Californian performance art (The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America,1970-1980 , Astro Artz, Los Angeles,1983) and the use made of Allan Kaprow’s approach transformed by an engaged feminist politics introduced by Judy Chicago , while the latter, (Feman Orenstein) discusses artists in the context of Jungian as opposed to archeologically-inspired feminist interest in the archetype of the Great Goddess. Hopefully, the possibility of more accesible material from these books will also enable greater international comparisons in feminist art and encourage more courses and seminars on contemporary feminist art practice in art and art history.
Copyright © : Katy Deepwell,1995.
N.Paradoxa : May 1997