Books
M-Z Parveen Adams The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Difference (London & New York: Routledge, 1996) ISBN 0-415 04622-X
Liz Wells (editor) Viewfindings: Women Photographers:’Landscape’ and Environment (W.England: AvailableLight,1994) ISBN 1-899457-00-3
These two books provide an opportunity to discuss and compare two divergent trends within feminist art criticism : one, the presentation of contemporary women artist’s work and the other, the feminist critique of the mechanisms at stake in the representation of gendered representations (not necessarily or exclusively produced by women). What interests me is the contrast represented by these two approaches : Liz Wells foregrounds women artists’ actual work, the photographs themselves, emphasising women’s political and multicultural diversity ; Parveen Adams offers a singular and consistent feminist critique within a primarily Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, a perspective developed and revised in relation to an encounter with specific artworks. The Emptiness of the Image presents papers written by Parveen Adams since 1987 and offers a very specific feminist critique of psychoanalytic concepts (e.g. hysteria, identification,voyeurism, castration) in order to discuss how psychoanalysis might by applied to analyse individual artworks by both male and female artists, including Francis Bacon, Della Grace, Mary Kelly and Orlan. Liz Wells’ Viewfindings is a very different kind of book which presents the work of 13 women photographers to demonstrate the diversity of contemporary approaches to the questions of woman, ‘nature’; landscape and enviroment. It is framed by a short, albeit revised and extended, essay offering a social-historical context by Liz Wells entitled ‘Reframing Landscape’ which was published in a different form by Women’s Art Magazine in 1993/4. Although the strength of Liz Wells’ book is invested in the visual reproductions in colour of the photographic work and complemented by short statements and one interview with one of the artists, this is not the case in Parveen Adams’ book where reproductions are few and far between and confined to black and white. Does the presentation itself indicate two divergent audiences for these books? Strong visual images often attract artists to borrow, read or buy books where the artwork is mainly presented rather than books where verbal analysis is the principal issue and the books ‘look’ academic. This is not to say that either book falls into the trap of presuming the works ‘speak for themselves’ nor the opposite where the analysis is so overdetermined as to limit any other form of possible enagagement in the work, but it is to point to a common split reproduced in art publishing where books of art criticism , which are neither catalogues from exhibitions nor monographs, have generally poor reproductions, particularly those with feminist content. Liz Wells’ book was made with the assistance of the Arts Council in order to develop the generally high production values, whereas Routledge, Parveen Adams’ publisher, rarely publishes colour plates in its art history series, even as it maintains an orthodox stranglehold on publication of certain forms of academic research.
As a feminist strategy for making women’s work more visible and to frame it within a coherent and graspable way in a new field of enquiry where little has been published, Liz Well’s book is highly effective but I regret that each artist does not receive a more detailed critical analysis even as I recognise the role of the book in distributing women’s photography to a wider audience. Women’s work needs not just physical visibility but also the assistance of extended critical discussion. While Liz Wells properly seeks to problematise ‘landscape’ as a category, I wanted to read more in-depth analysis of how particular women photographer’s had in the late 20th Century defined their subjects’ relationship to property, territory, entrepreneurship, class, racism, Imperialism, and patriarchy (like Ingrid Pollard’s Pastoral Interlude or Stevie Bezencenet Right of Passage or Roshini Kempadoo’s Trans-formations portfolio which are reproduced). In a world where women’s activities are almost ‘automatically’ subject to a failure to recognise the positions from which women speak or to give credibility to anything they have to say, the need for commentary becomes all the more important. Contrary to the frequent misapprehension that this detracts from the work, or that critical analysis may destroy the work, in-depth criticism may actually provide a means of access to the project of the artist. Comparisons between artists may also offer a means to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the work itself and this is the very difficulty and tension between representing the necessary diversity of women’s art practice in relation to the questions of photography and landscape and framing adequately beyond the categories of ‘Margins’; ‘Territories’; ‘Image, Metaphor, Myth’ which Liz Wells offers. Liz Wells is also the editor of Photography: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 1996 ISBN 0-415-12559-6) : a valuable teaching text to introduce photography's history and theory.
Perhaps these comments about further critical work are also prompted by the contrast with Parveen Adams’ work, where a very different strategy is operating. Here an individual artists’ work acts as a prompt, a vehicle for elaborate investigations about pyschoanalytic concepts and their adequacy to address fully how identificatory mechanisms within artworks produce meaning. Her enquiries are refreshingly readable amongst work in this field. What is productive here is the way that both the operations of artwork and / or text and the psychoanalytic concepts themselves are subjects of her questioning. For, Parveen Adams has generally avoided what has become an unfortunate tendency in some art historical texts which employ psychoanalysis is that the artwork is discussed only where it fits a pre-existing pyschoanalytic framework without subjecting that framework to any questioning. Parveen Adams has instead opened up how an encounter with a work might prompt reflection of both psychoanalysis and artistic strategies. However, there is one essay where this is not the case, and this concerns the analysis of Catherine Mackinnon’s text on pornography in terms of sadism. The possibility of this as a deliberate polemical strategy in political life is dismissed in order to demonstrate the violence inflicted on the reader by the text itself . The comparison of this strategy to those of other pornographic or sadistic writers strikes me as hopelessly inadequate as a means of critiquing the logic of the text and its accurately observed conflation of reality and representation. This is not to say, I support Mackinnon’s position but my criticisms of it arise because of the civil legislation which follow from her critique and whether or not these are workable in any state. This is where the more subtle and absorbing sense of possibilities and rereadings offered in the other essays (like chapters on ‘Of female bondage’ and ‘Per (os)cillation’) dissolves into a very specific problem for feminists : i.e. how social and political demands for social change can be critiqued by psychoanalytic processes which reflect upon actions and events to reveal and revise psychoanalysis itself rather than to structure new forms of political or social activity. Is it coincidence that this is the only essay jointly written in the book, and with Mark Cousins? By contrast, her reading of Mary Kelly’s Interim is really intriguing and insightful in terms of the ways in Lacan’s ideas about discourse (including the discourses of Master, University, Hysteric, and Analyst) are deployed to reflect upon the relation of textuality and interpretation: specifically how the same question can mean and imply different things in different situations. Parveen Adams explores how ‘Interim gives us the place of the object petit a at the limit of the image’ (p.84) , representations which both interrogate the object of desire and interrupt the movement of desire on the part of the spectator in his/her misrecognition of the object : a relation of transference which refuses the discourse of the Master. The essays on the horror provoked by the operations of the French performance artist Orlan and her analysis of Della Grace’s ‘The Three Graces’ in relationship to a lesbian Phallus are also thought-provoking readings.
While these two books may represent two divergent trends in feminist publishing , they nevertheless are both significant and desirable books to read.
Copyright © : Katy Deepwell ,1996.
N.Paradoxa : May 1997