Books
M-Z Katy Deepwell (ed) New Feminist Art Criticism:Critical Strategies (St Martins / Manchester University Press, 1995) ISBN 0-7190-4258-5
The five sections of the book address what have emerged as important areas for feminist criticism and art practice in the late 1980's. Within each section, the contributors foreground a different set of questions for the development of feminist strategies in the 1990's. Different perspectives on the sites, strategies and positions of contemporary women artists emerge as each outlines their own particular position.
The impact of post-structuralist theories has undoubtedly had an effect in transforming the terms of feminist debate since the early 1980's. The majority of the contributors make reference to the ways in which both criticism and the relationships between theory and practice have been transformed by interest in French feminism, deconstruction, theories of the subject, and critiques of narratives of history and the boundaries between disciplines.
In the first section, Between Theory and Practice, Janet Wolff identifies an impasse in feminist art criticism with divisions into essentialist and anti-essentialist camps; for and against theory. She considers the implications of current critical theory for feminist practice in overcoming such binary oppositions and the inadequacy of such binary oppositions to classify and debate women artist's work. Gilane Tawadros analyses how the 'postmodern' analysis of identity is neatly identical to contemporary black women artists' analysis of the narratives of history in their practice. Moira Roth's analysis of Sutapa Biswas' project 'Synapse' offers her own account of the mutual recognition and challenge presented to her by the artist in terms of a post-colonialist encounter. Roth's account seeks to situate and question her own responses to Biswas's work as much as it presents the artist's explanation of her own approach.
In the gap between theory and practice, there is the role played by institutions in validating and maintaining particular ideas, values and beliefs. Frances Borzello examines the institutional constraints upon the appearance and circulation of feminist ideas from a publishers perspective. She examines how little mainstream art writing is devoted to women artists, be it in newspaper reviews, art and literary journals and magazines, catalogue essays, T.V. and Radio etc.. Feminist perspectives,she argues, in art criticism occupy a still smaller area of coverage within these spaces. The period 1985-1988 saw a flurry of publications in Britain on this topic e.g. Gisela Ecker's Feminist Aesthetics (Women's Press,1985);Hilary Robinson's Visibly Female (Camden Press,1987),Rosika Parker & Griselda Pollock's Framing Feminism (Pandora/Routledge,Kegan and Paul,1987); Leslie Saunder's Glancing Fires (Women's Press,1987) and G.Elinor et alWomen and Craft (Women's Press,1988). There have also been two specialist magazines published over this period (1987-1992), Women's Art Magazine (formerly WASL Journal,now Make) and Feminist Art News which have worked hard to initiate new debates about women's art practice. However, since 1988, only three other books on feminist art practice have been published in the UK: Janet Wolff's Feminine Sentences (Routledge,Kegan and Paul,1990); Wendy Beckett's Contemporary Women Artists(Phaidon,1988) and Maud Sulter's Passions (Urban Fox Press,1990). Borzello's argument raises the important questions about access to writing about women in the visual arts as well as the inaccessibility or not of certain forms of academic debate.
The section concludes with two contrasting essays about feminist interventions in the culture of another major institution, the art school. Val Walsh provides an outline of a potential framework for feminist teaching while Pen Dalton's piece questions the underlying models from developmental psychology on which much 'modernist' studio teaching since 1945 is based in an attempt to lay bare the male bias in teaching practices.
In Curatorship and the Art World two gallery directors, Maurenn Paley (Interim Art) and Elizabeth Macgregor (Ikon Gallery) present how they see the pleasures and pitfalls of their respective positions in the commercial and public sectors. The art world and the role of public and commercial exhibitions is a further piece of the institutional structure of the art world. How to intervene as a feminist and initiate change is a question which all the contributors in this section explore.
From her experience as curator of touring exhibition The Subversive Stitch Pennina Barnett analyses audience reaction to the contemporary work selected. She argues that although the show attempted to renegotiate definitions of art/craft, feminine/feminist, much of the press reception and audience reaction remained trapped within more conventional critical categories, closing down on the debates which the exhibition aimed to initiate. How women negotiate making and exhibiting their work in gallery and non-gallery settings is explored by Debbie Duffin's analysis of her own and other artist's exhibiting strategies. Both Debbie Duffin and Fran Cottell argue against the idea that the artist waits to be discovered by the dealer but must actively seek and make choices about the context and display of their work. Fran Cottell's piece offers her own experience of exhibition across painting,performance and installation, highlighting the ways in which she renegotiated her practice to meet new audiences.
The marginalisation of women's concerns and the handling of the presentation of their work when it deals with controversial subjects are analysed by the three contributors in On the Question of Censorship. Anna Douglas's discussion of the pre-emptive removal of one of Deanna Petherbridge's works from a solo exhibition highlights the misconceived pressures of institutional prejudices in the public sector by employing Annette Kuhn's theorisation of censorship as regulation. In Douglas's argument the actual content of the work made by the artist becomes an irrelevance because of the troubled reception of the 'politically' charged signifier in its title when the work travels from a private gallery to a public gallery. By contrast, in Naomi Salaman's chosen examples it is purportedly the 'sexual' content of the work which underlies the removal of works from sale or exhibition in her three case studies. Sally Dawson pursues a very different argument, aligning censorship with the taboo on women's perspectives which discrimination in our culture enforces, she presents the work of four women who address different aspects of women's experience and history. These works are not 'censored' in the conventional sense of removed, not displayed, not seen but they address areas of women's social and political experience which appear 'censored' by a patriarchal culture.
The Engagement with Psychoanalysis addresses the impact of one of the most powerful influences on feminist art practice here in the late 1980's. The legacy of Lacan is surplanted by the impact of Irigaray and Kristeva. As Christine Battersby's piece argues the adoption of psychoanalytic terms and models,specifically from Luce Irigaray, may prove fraught for feminist art practice if we do not address these writers' own analyses of the place of painting. Hilary Robinson enthusiastically demonstrates how critical terms from psychoanalysis have enabled a rethinking of representation of the body and how it has been used as the starting point for a broad range of women artists producing work in the late 1980's as well as for new critical readings of their work. Joan Key with reference to her own practice presents how pyschoanalysis, particularly Kristeva's discusssion of the abject and the repression of the maternal body, provides a position for painting which addresses the physicality of colour. A very different approach is offered by Mary Kelly who provides a discussion of 'Historia' the fourth and last section of her project Interim which analyses the attitudes of women aged 45-55 to their body,money,power and history as the 1968 generation involved in women's liberation. In this section of 'Interim',Kelly questions what is at stake in how a subject positions itself historically: particularly how a feminist identifies a particular 'ideal' moment of radicalism (1968) only to be challenged by the different perspectives of a younger generation. Kelly approaches Kristeva's analysis of 'Women's Time' and redeploys Foucauldian ideas of history as a form of genealogy and archeology in relation to her continuing critique and dialogue with Lacan concerning femininity and the construction of women's identity, evident in the other sections of both Interim ('Corpus','Pecunia', and 'Potestas') and Post-Partum Document.
The shifting definitions of practice and the employment of new theoretical frameworks from 'post-stucturalist' theories of language, deconstruction and decoding are taken up again in Janis Jefferies piece which introduces the last section, Textiles,linking it back to but extending in a different direction the analyses provided by J.Wolff, G.Tawadros, and H.Robinson. Textiles situation on the boundaries, at the margins, as a 'hybrid', in the relationship between text/textile and the use of metaphors from embroidery and weaving provides the diversity of practices within this field with a specific relationship to postmodern debates. The position of textiles both in and out of the fine art or craft arenas (see P.Barnett also), crossing and at the same time challenging hierarchies and definitions, myths and ideologies, in both theory and practice are explored here in relation to the work of individual women artists and debates from the 1970's on the revaluation and transformation of 'traditional crafts' with radical feminist messages. Ann Newdigate, Dinah Prentice and Ruth Scheuing each present their own practice in the context of these debates, demonstrating how through tapestry, piecing, and weaving respectively, the artist works to undo politics and patriarchal myth-making while creating feminist work.
Copyright © : Katy Deepwell,1995
N.Paradoxa: May 1997.