On women artists in general
Women artists are rarely exploited as key characters in literature. The last 20 years have seen an enormous amount of revelatory work in art criticism, rather than in fiction on women artists between the 18th and 20th centuries. Despite the art world’s pride in progressive thinking art history moves slowly: it took a long time before a major revaluation of entrenched attitudes towards women artists gained momentum. The galvanising event for many was the publication of the distinguished art historian Linda Nochlin’s 'seminal' essay ‘We Have There Been No Great Woman Artist?’(1971). Although opposed to the ways in which the lone male genius has been mythologised, Nochlin is in favour of developing research upon the women artists who have been consigned to the shadow of history, as long as they are put in the context of their time: ‘And we are certainly finding there are many more important women painters than we once thought.’ [Nochlin 1971] But despite the increased scholarly, curatorial, market and popular interest the fictional, narrative world of women artists is barely nascent. We can only speculate that women artists are going to be much written about and acknowledged in current literature with the ever growing interest in their historical visibility. This does not mean canonical studies are not important but the present rise in women’s stories and autobiographies indicates that there is a terrible potential for women artists to ‘impose’ their own subjectivity in the narratives[Slapsak 1995], often without due attention to research.
Women artists today are still discriminated against as are women in virtually every area of contemporary American society. Women still earn less than two-thirds as much as men do, they own less than one percent of the property in this country, and they constitute the smallest minority in the government at large. Yet, even in the arts, women have not achieved as much as has been claimed. The larger statistics still tell the same story: in terms of museum and gallery representation, sales, major articles, important grants , commissions, and tenured teaching positions, and in many areas women artists do not seem comparably better off today than in 1970.
Part of the reason that so little substantive change has taken place is that once again we are living in a politically conservative climate. In the 1970s many American women ’cleaned house’, reordering priorities and relationships in a struggle to achieve power and autonomy in the home, the workplace, and the political sphere. Early feminists felt victimized by the authority and power of an entrenched patriarchy and reacted against ‘the enemy’ with a moral fervour comparable with that of the civil rights and antiwar activities of the 1960s. This is why the early women’s movement is now viewed as all practice and no theory. [Tucker 1989]
Today, with the exception of a few individuals and an occasional group effort (like that of the Guerrilla Girls), most feminist efforts now appear to take place in criticism and theory. No wonder that Erica Jong seems to follow consistently this critical and theorizing mode of expression in her narrative, which allows her to be very perceptive about the situation of contemporry women artists.
Perhaps it is also an effect of postmodernism today, with its emphasis on the problems of marginalisation in general, that has helped us to think not in simple dichotomies of right and wrong, male and female, dominant and dominated, but in terms of how discourse operates in a way which precludes such polarization and instead raises issues of hegemony and difference - cultural, racial, and sexual, among others. Although more women are visible now than in 1970, and while the rare woman artist (without exception white) may even be highly visible, practice and theory - in the arts as elsewhere - have to meet more closely in our century to provide the equity that might lead to real social change. Contemporary women’s culture still needs to be a consistent fight for redefining, rethinking and destroying stereotypes and myths about women. Unfortunately the wheel metaphor which Erica Jong applies to this issue is still valid:
A woman writer must not only invent the wheel, she must grow the tree and chop it down, whittle it round, and learn to make it roll. Then she must clear a path for herself.[Jong 1994/a]
This is not an exaggeration in respect of the price of the female creativity. In a patriarchal society, that rushes, with astonishing rapidity, into conservatism and into the resurrection of traditional roles, feminism keeps getting buried. It then has to be rediscovered as if for the first time. The whole history of English poetry, for example, stressed man as creator and woman as nature. From Shakespeare to Wordsworth to Yeats and Graves, male poets ploughed female Nature into a seemingly androgynous fruition. The female was the muse and muses were supposed to be silent. While a man who writes is not automatically considered a usurper. A male writer surely has to find his voice, but does he also have to first convince the world that he should have a right to find his voice?
A creative woman could be compared to a hunted Jew, eternally positioned as the outsider. She is asked first to disguise her sex, change her name, blend into the approved art of male supremacy. People who suffer discrimination make up new names (so does Leila Sand), bleach their skin, bob their noses, deny who they are in order to survive. As a consequence many women still make literature in the mode that men consider important. Hence the literary focus on ‘love’, because in any love relationship men are at the centre and they do not like to be reminded that there is any other part of a woman’s life in which they are not central. I was therefore interested to find out how her personal and sexual life affects Leila Sand and her creative aspirations in order to compile the profile of the contemporary women artists myth.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998