When the call for papers went out after the last College Art Association Conference, I was surprised to notice that out of 129 proposed panels on Historiography at that stage, only one or two of them were from a feminist perspective, and that none of them actually addressed the issue of feminist historiography as such. I was quite surprised by this and raised the question in an email to the Feminist Art History Listserve and this generated some fierce and fast discussion.
My question was basically why had no one proposed a panel on feminist historiography? It seems to me that after thirty years of feminist work in art history we are actually at a crucial stage. Amongst the students that I was teaching in Belfast, the early women's movement for them is like the 1940s for me, it is real history, it happened before they were born. I was trying to raise the question of feminist historiography in terms of how we approach something in which we have a vested interest. This is a period which we have lived and are living through; how do we reassess this in a way which both honours that personal investment and actually works as some kind of feminist art history and a history of feminist art. I did wonder if assumptions are now being made about feminism in this kind of environment - the CAA. Has feminism been incorporated, has it been depoliticised or is it seen to be self evident? Has it been reduced to an acceptable academic style, or methodology or set of methodologies rather than operating as an expanded grouping of political positions?
So I wrote a paragraph with some questions and sent it to the various women who agreed to participate. I thought this would be published in the programme but as it is not I will read it out to you. I asked: what are the intersections between feminist politics and historiographical practices? What constitutes feminist historiography? Given that the women’s movement in art and art writing is now three decades old, and a new generation of artists and writers have emerged for whom much of the movement is historically situated rather then in living memory. How will the movement itself be historicised? How will the art works of the 1970s be written about? How will the early feminist art histories be re-visited? How will this feminist analysis of the field of art history develop? How can we maintain feminism as a political practice in art writing and not allow it to collapse into style, methodology or a sub category of the discipline.
My aim was to have people giving very short papers followed by open discussion. I am at present working on a book, an anthology called Feminism/Art/Theory which is to be published by Blackwells this time next year (early 2001). While doing my archival work on that I realised that what I have now assumed is the history of feminist art history and art practice can actually be disproved within the archives. The time I spent at Rutgers University , for example, looking at the Heresies collective archives, looking at the other art papers collected there, I found a lot more diversity in the strands of what was happening than is now accepted as the “history” of feminist art and feminist art history. Our differing histories, allegiances and political engagements (inside and beyond the academic and art worlds) may spur us to develop differing strategies as feminists and as 'historiographers', in response to recognition of the same events/symptoms.
So my question here will be: how do we write the history of a movement of which we have been part? How do we relate personal experiences to the wider picture? How do we reference, what Mira Schor has termed, our “matrilineage”? How do we teach/write the history of the movement and at the same time develop our particular passions? (why do I hate mentioning certain artworks to students?). Is some of the impulse towards discovering/assessing the work of “forgotten” women no longer seen as urgent? Or is it just not “hip” enough? Is there now a case for doing some of this work on the 1970s as well as on work from earlier centuries? etc.
I didn't expect the panellists to provide answers to those questions but I released that as a background to their papers and asked them for six minute presentations, short and to the point. The session was called Historiography/Feminism/Strategy and I'm particularly keen on that word strategy and on asking, what are the strategies that we will be using in the future. The panellists will be speaking in alphabetical order starting with Renée Baert...
Copyright © : Hilary Robinson, March 2000
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 12, 2000