Books
M-Z Norma Broude and Mary D Garrard The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History(eds) IconHarperCollins, 1992 ISBN 0-060430391-8
A decade ago Norma Broude and Mary Garrard published Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (Icon,1982) one of the first anthologies of feminist art history in America. The Expanding Discourse maps the progress and diversity of feminist art history debates through 29 essays written in the 1980s.
In the introduction they outline how the encounter with post-modern Theory has literally expanded and diversified the discourses of feminist art historians producing what they define as 'neo-Marxist'; 'constructivist' and 'poststructuralist' accounts in addition to their own "liberal feminist" project. While they still maintain feminist art history should raise "fundamental questions for art history as a humanist discipline" they do not believe feminist art history should be confined to the documentation of women artists (as a form of additive history). Nor does their selection preclude the work of male writers eg Craig Owens whose classic essay "The Discourse Of Others Feminists and Postmodernism" is included.
The editors argue there are three dominant tropes in feminist an history in the first decade: the female body and the male gaze; femininity as a social construct ; and feminist critiques of essentialism, postmodemism and the woman artist. Under the first category come some trenchant analyses of images of women in "great" male artists' work including Leonardo da Vinci (Mary D Garrard's essay in the book) Botticelli (Lilian Zirpolo); Titian (Rona Goffen); Degas (Norma Broude); Matisse (Marilynn Lincoln Bernard); Renoir (Tamar Garb) and Gauguin exploring his "Invention of Primitivist Modernism'' (Abigail Solomon-Godeau) ; and constructions of a "Tahitian Body" (Peter Brooks)
Mary Ann Caws' illuminating essay on the depiction of women in Surrealist art "Ladies Shot and Painted" is also included. Yael Even examines the images of women's subjugation on the ''Loggia dei Lanzi" sculpture court in Florence. While Carol Duncan's "MoMa's Hot Mamas" explores how the modern (male artists heroic struggle over the body of woman structures the visitor's experience at New York's Museum of Modern Art).
Femininity as a social construct is explored through an analysis of largely 19th century themes - another feature of feminist an history in the 1980s. These include Griselda Pollock's essay which redefines "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity" through an analysis of the spaces selected for representation in male/female Impressionists' works and Tamar Garb's analysis of a critical category "L'Art Feminin" used to pigeonhole women's work. Linda Nochlin argues that Berthe Morisot's "Wet Nurse" renegotiates the construction of work and leisure in impressionist painting while James Saslow's essay discusses the construction of a lesbian body in Rosa Bonheur's painting "The Horse Fair". Anne Higonnet's essay on 19th century women's "Secluded Vision'' in contrast with the former analyses of women's professional practice explores images of feminine experience in women's albums and "amateur" paintings.
Outside the research on the 19th century is Margaret Miles' study of the "Virgin's One Bare Breasts" which analyses nudity, gender and religion in Tuscan Early Renaissance culture and Natalie Kampen's "The Muted Other: Gender and Morality in Augustan Rome and 18th Century Europe". Helen Langa explores the work of women artists in America's New Deal arts projects of the 1930s. Langa contrasts the rhetoric of an "egalitarian vision" with the gendered experience of identity/difference across a male/public female/private political division.
The volume also includes some valuable studies of individual women artists which discuss the negotiation of feminine/ feminist identities and experiences Frida Kahlo (Janice Helland's essay); Lee Krasner as ''LK" (Anne M Wagner) and Georgia O'Keefe (Barbara Buhler Lynes). Explorations of contemporary feminist artists include Josephine Wither's on Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party" and two essays on Faith Ringgold on her observations of America in the 1960s (Lowery Sims) the other on Afrocentrism in Ringgold's and Elizabeth Catlett's work (Frieda Tesfagiorgis in line with poststructuralist debates about identity and subjectivity femininity is not assumed but explored as contradictory, strategic and fragmentary.
"Along with the dominance of a masculine value system in art and art history has often come a blindness to female existence even when the reality of women's roles is well documented by the art of a given place or period " (Broude and Garrard 1982)
Anyone involved with the teaching of art history today will understand the importance of Broude and Garrard's suggestion that feminist art history will continue to serve "a corrective need" in the next decade until the "values, categories and conceptual structures of our field" are profoundly rearranged
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Rosalind E Krauss The Optical Unconscious MIT Press, 1993 ISBN 0-262-11173-X
This is a difficult, provocative and challenging book. Its central themes emerge slowly as one familiarises oneself with the subtle crosscutting of voices, diary quotations, anecdotes, theoretical explorations and close readings which it offers. This "polyvalence" is central to Krauss's project, opening up the possibilities for re-reading modernism "from the inside"
Krauss re-examines what is at stake in the claims and counterclaims concerning some of modernism's heroes and bête noires, its championing critics and dissenting figures. Krauss reads against the grain of Greenbergian modernism, juxtaposing readings of John Ruskin on nature to Mondrian's grid,; of Duchamp on and against Fry; Ernst in relation to Freud; Dali against Bataille and Caillois; Helene Parmelin on Picasso; Twombly, Warhol and Hesse on Pollock. Remapping the structuralist graph which she has previously used so effectively in "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" (reprinted in Hal Foster Postmodern Culture,1985), to delineate the modernist vision of figure against ground, across Lacan's L-schema of a psychoanalytic theory of the subject, with its imaginary relations in the real and the unconscious repression of the Other, Krauss begins to define modernism's optical unconscious. The term borrowed and redeployed from Walter Benjamin's Small History of Photography (1931) refers to that which is externalised within the visual field, not simply in terms of modernism's scientific-technological games with the visual, but what it can reveal of the unconscious conflicts of makers and readers. Sexuality, specifically the carnality of vision, emerges centre-stage disavowing modernism's claims for the visual as autonomous, disinterested and transcendent.
Krauss' writing problematises the relationships between theory and an object; the procedures of art-making and reading; post-structuralist thought, modernism and Lacanian forms of psychoanalysis As Krauss herself says of Eva Hesse's work, the process aims to sap "from its very centre" modernism's "bachelor machine", logic and law in her ambition, its high seriousness, its engagement with visual experience and insistent female "Other" voice, striking parallels are constructed between Virginia Woolf (whose observations of Roger Fry delivering a lecture are quoted) and Krauss' own style (specifically her recollections of audiences with Michael [Fried] and Clem [Greenberg] )
The feminism underlying such a perspective remains implicit . For Krauss, like Woolf has an insider's view of what it is to be an Outsider; as a professional woman in a male club. As young initiate, Krauss laughed complicitly at Greenberg's jokes about "nice Jewish girls with typewriters" as she worked to become a "Clemberger" ; now as a mature writer, she freezes the underlying logic within its problematic and clinically and revealingly examines what remains of the corpse
Unlike Lucy Lippard, Krauss' recognition of the sexism within modernism, has not led to determined rejection of its critical apparatus via new definitions of value and a deliberate engagement with the large constituencies of politically engaged practitioners which modernism's narrow perspective refused to acknowledge. Or should, I say, yet. For illuminating and original as this book is about the limitations of Greenbergian modernism's logic seen from a post-structuralist perspective and suggestive as it is about psychoanalytic perspectives, it begs the question, can these tools also prove useful in the examination of that which is still truly repressed within modernist discourse, the work of women artists?
Copyright © : Katy Deepwell,1997
N.Paradoxa: May 1997.