Reviewing 1970s and 1980s Feminist Art Practices in
the 1990s:
Three Major Exhibitions on Judy Chicago, Eleanor Antin and Martha Rosler
Opening Remarks by Lisa Bloom
Dealing publically with the changing generational concerns and passions amongst feminist artists, art critics and art historians has been a difficult task both in the U.S and Japan, two places where I have been active as a feminist art critic and university professor. This is in part due to different ways that feminist artists, critic, and historians in the late 1990s have been ghettoized and marginalized. In the U.S., as many readers may well know, it has taken the following form: within the academy and some parts of the art world, some feminists have rightly challenged the prevailing Euro-American terms of feminist art and art history as well as its normative heterosexual script to acknowledge how race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and colonialism structure feminist ways of seeing. Indeed this was the subject of an anthology that I published in 1999 titled With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture. However, as the debates around feminism have become more inclusive and opened, venues for feminist exhibitions that deal with such issues have narrowed in many ways due to the withdrawal of state and federal sponsorship of the arts, and the Culture Wars coming out of the late 1980s beginning with queer activist art related to the HIV pandemic. As a result, the boom in the contemporary art market near the end of the 21st century did not extend to such artists, critics, or to art historians who displayed a commitment to such politics and issues in their work. Indeed, what kind of art and criticism is considered desirable seemed to mirror the values and general consumerism of the bubble economy culture at large. Universities, university presses and museums in some cases for better or worse have turned into refuges of sorts for more intellectually and politically oriented working artists and critics, even more than before in the U.S. What little support art schools have had for feminist projects that have been informed by the shift in feminist consciousness that has taken place with the past fifteen years, prompted by recent writings and art by women of color on race and lesbianism as well as recent work on whiteness and Jewishness, has now dwindled. The narrowing of these contexts has sometimes imposed a defensive posture and rhetoric that has further isolated women from each other and has left little room outside of a few protected university contexts for lively public discussions, exhibitions, and debates.
Therefore, my interest in organising this panel is to debate a set of exhibitions which serve as opportunities to reassess feminist art from the perspective of the present moment, although no claim is being made that the work of the artists' chosen is fully representative of the U.S. feminist art practices of that period. Indeed, I would have liked to have extended the discussion to include the recent retrospectives of Adrian Piper, Barbara Kruger and Yoko Ono, as well as the mid-career exhibition of the works of Deborah Kass, and invite the panelists and the audience to do so during the question period.
There has been much discussion over the past 25 years regarding the institutionalization of women's studies, but less discussion about the institutional conditions of feminist art, both within the museum and the academy. Both these sites have had a crucial role in introducing a younger generation of women to the works of these artists. These recent exhibitions are also important in the way that they changed the frame by which we view the contribution of these feminist artists, and this is particularly crucial for those who have never encountered their work in the community based context for which much of it was originally intended.
What has happened within the academy to define and reconceptualize feminist art has been crucial because this has been an area that has kept critical feminist thought alive at a time where there is a dwindling of general interest in feminist art, and feminist art criticism and theory. The fact is that feminist art history and feminist art practitioners, are very different now than they were in the mid-1970s. Among the changes that have been crucial are the growing awareness of the diversity among women; the significance of groundbreaking conceptual philosophies of difference and postmodernism on feminist art history; feminist art's intersection with models emerging from Jewish studies, gay and lesbian studies, as well as the postcolonial and antiracist debates. Despite the positive changes over the past two decades, there have also been signs of the demise of feminism as a political movement in the arts. In the past decade, for example, we have seen the emergence of “postfeminism” and the backlash against feminist art in the media; the attack and dismantlement of affirmative action in public universities; and the end of a feminist art movement that was oriented primarily toward concerted public action.
My particular interest in feminist art that deals with gender, racial, ethnic, and generational differences has led me to revisit the work of Judy Chicago, Eleanor Antin, and Martha Rosler in my own work to provide a critical account of the different ethnically marked practices in it. One of the purposes of my own scholarship has been to make feminist art history more responsive to these discourses, and the issue specifically of how Jewish identities operates as a category within them. Indeed, the idea for this panel grew out of the writing I had done on these three artists, as well as the work of Julia Scher, Deborah Kass, Ruth Weisberg, Susan Mogul, Elaine Reichek, Mierle Ukeles, among others. However, I felt my chances of getting a panel accepted on the vexed question of the historical place of Jewish ethnicity within 1970s feminist art practices slim, given the College Art Association's reluctance to accept panels on the issue of both gender and Jewishness unless it deals in some way with either the holocaust or Jewishness as a religion rather than as a self-consciously inscribed ethnicity. A critical gender perspective has also vanished from the CAA, since this year this is only 1 of 2 panels that even addresses directly the issue of feminism in the arts. In a certain way then, this is that other Jewish panel, though the relationship between gender, sexuality, and Jewishness will remain undeveloped in this context.
The panel's title is Re-Viewing 1970s and1980s Feminist Art Practices in the 1990s: Three Major Exhibitions on Judy Chicago, Eleanor Antin, and Martha Rosler. The session examines the conceptualization and reception of three major exhibits and catalogues on these three feminist artists. Two of the exhibitions are retrospectives: Eleanor Antin (accompanying publication by Howard Fox, Eleanor Antin, and Lisa Bloom, Eleanor Antin, New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1999) and Martha Rosler (accompanying publication by Catherine de Zegher, editor, Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World, Massachusetts and London, MIT Press, 1999). The third exhibit on Judy Chicago's iconic piece The Dinner Party is presented in relation to feminist artists' work both past and present (accompanying publication Amelia Jones, editor, Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). These three exhibitions and their catalogues are especially deserving of attention and discussion in relation to each other because they focus on revisiting the work of living women artists, and are redefining the ways that feminist art work from the 1970s and 1980s is being framed publically now. Since much of these women's work challenged the perameters of the modernist canon and the commercial art world to varying degrees, it is important to question the terms of these women's acceptance into the art historical canon
The speakers are Alison Rowley, Lucy Soutter, Catherine Caesar, Ruth Wallen, and the respondent is Alexander Alberro.
Bios of the chair and the panelists:
Lisa Bloom teaches Women's Studies and Visual Cultural Studies at Josai International University in the Chiba Prefecture of Japan and is currently a visiting scholar in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, San Diego in the U.S.. She is the editor of both the English and Japanese version of With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) published into Japanese by Tokyo based Saiki-sha Press in 2000, and is the author of Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Alison Rowley was recently appointed lecturer in Art History, Theory and Fine Art in the School of Fine Art, History and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. She has just completed a PhD, ‘Notes on the Case of Mountains and Sea: History, Poeisis, Memory, on the work of Helen Frankenthaler in the 1950s’. In 1996 she published the first critical study of the work of Jenny Saville and its reception in Britain, and has written articles on Dorothea Tanning and Bridget Riley. She was an editor of the Cultural Studies journal parallax from 1997-99, and is co-director of ‘Translating Class’ the first conference of the newly instituted AHRB Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (centre CATH) based at the University of Leeds, to be held in April 2002.
Cathy Caesar earned an MA in art history at Tulane University and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Emory University. She is currently living in New York and conducting research for her dissertation, ‘Towards a History of Feminist Conceptual Art: The Work of Martha Rosler, Eleanor Antin and Adrian Piper, 1968-1977’, which examines feminist conceptual art by situating it within the feminist art discourse of the 1960s and 1970s.
Ruth Wallen is an artist and critic whose work is dedicated to encouraging dialogue and ecological issues in the broadest sense of the term. Her multilayered installations, performances and artists books have been widely exhibited. She has had solo exhibitions at Franklin Furnace (NYC), New Langton Arts (San Francisco), the Exploratorium (San Francisco) and Sushi Gallery (San Diego). Ruth Wallen teaches photography and contemporary art criticism at the University of California, San Diego, and Goddard College in Vermont.
Lucy Soutter holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and is currently completing a PHD at Yale University. Her dissertation entitled, ‘The Visual Idea’ addresses the various uses of photography by conceptual artists between 1966 and 1972. She has lectured and published on subjects ranging from 18th Century French Wallpaper to 1990s narrative photography. She is currently based in London.
Alex Alberro is Assistant Professor of Modern Art at the University of Florida. His recent books include Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology co-edited with Blake Stimson for MIT Press, Two Way Mirror Power for MIT Press, and Recording Conceptual Art, co-edited with Patricia Norvell for University of California Press.
These papers were presented at the 89th College Art Association conference in Chicago, February 28-March 3 2001.
Copyright © : Lisa Bloom, February 2001
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 14, 2001