Historiography/Feminisms/Strategies
Lisa Tickner once observed that although feminism is a politics, not a methodology, there is nevertheless a feminist problematic in art history, and in work which carries the analyses and goals of political feminism into the realm of cultural inquiry. The questions Hilary Robinson has posed to today's panel challenge all of us to reconsider the literature that has emerged from what is now a thirty year inquiry into the intersections and disjunctions between the terms art, history and feminism. I want to keep my comments today brief and focused on a few observations derived from my own work, and from my ongoing project of interpreting this field to students at a large, diversified public university.
The publication of my Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement in 1985 coincided with the widespread incorporation of post-structuralist based theories into academic discourses, including that of art history. I found myself digging in the archives at a time when there were sexier intellectual things to do, and the publication that resulted raised as many questions as it answered. Among them were the place of recuperative histories within both feminism and art history, the construction of gendered narratives, the question of whether or not it was possible for archival research and theorization to coexist in a meaningful way within the same publication and, if so, what might be the compromises on both sides. And then there remained the thorny issue of how to view the relationship between artistic practices which are not self-consciously critical, but often rest on assumptions of female agency, and current challenges to the very notion of female subjectivity. We are fortunate in possessing a growing body of literature that since the early 1980s has taken up these and related questions with sophistication, albeit with varying degrees of subtlety. Yet many questions remain.
Without getting into the tensions that have arisen as a result of the institutionalisation of feminist practices and feminism's histories in the 1980s and 1990s, I would like to identify a few areas that seem to me particularly problematic as 1 confront feminism's growing body of literature in the area of visual culture. Something is still missing for me in much of the literature that has resulted from the often tense dialogue between attention to individual women's practices and analyses of the social construction of gender and the inscription of sexual difference. I keep waiting for more signs that the same scepticism that has so often been directed against early feminist practices in recent years is also being brought to bear on recent historical, theoretical, political, or ideological formations regardless of how au courant they may be. And why, I ask myself, does it seem that there was so little sustained political analysis of the implications of theorizing away female agency at an historical moment when ever larger numbers of women and artists of colour were emerging from BFA and MFA programs in search of a voice, if not a room, to call their own. Moreover, while it has become fashionable to critique the artist monograph and the survey text, that critique has disrupted neither market forces nor the fact that the majority of undergraduates continue to receive their initial exposure to art history in survey courses and 5 for one, hope that we might build their needs into our history.
Reconsidering the history of feminist critical practices while doing research for a catalogue essay for the exhibition More Than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the 70s (Waltham, Massachussetts: Rose Art Museum : Brandeis University,1996) a few years ago, I was struck again by the fact that despite the intellectual sophistication of much recent writing on gender and representation critical and art historical writing has often failed to engage in an equally complex and challenging way with the issue that dares not speak its name - I mean the question of qualitative evaluation (somehow the argument that quality equals taste has never quite convinced me). And while feminism has contributed much to exploding the fiction of a monolithic mainstream, our literature suggests that we continue to form and reform elites around privileged media and practices without always deconstructing the ideological forces that underlie those formations. Critically surveying the state of literature on gender and post-minimalism, I was surprised to discover how thin was the pile of monographs and scholarly catalogues for a very important group of women artists, when compared to their male colleagues and to theorization's of more contemporary practices. Yet university art museums and galleries remain in the forefront in exposing and documenting the work of women artists , while many other institutions that bowed to social action in the seventies appear to have more or less returned to business as usual, and this seems one area in which the institutionalising of feminism within the academy has effected real change. Working on women artists may not have much intellectual caché at the moment in some quarters, but it seems to me that our failure to attend to the realities of women's production, and to add to its record, risks knocking the history out of feminism and art history.
As we move into a new millennium, the recent past becomes history. At the same time, I personally remain suspicious of histories that periodize feminism, i.e. that map its organisation along a sequence of what Helen Molesworth and Amy Lyfford recently referred to as “progressive moments” - because they at least implicitly privilege developmental paradigms and reinstate notions of “progress” (the latter usually viewed as advancing from states of naive expression to those of critical sophistication). While the jettisoning of historical narrative as totalizing and/or essentializing has led to a few recent publications that are little more than collections of mini-monographs strung together with big words, the generational approach to feminism and art history, or feminism and postfeminism, may result in the same a-historical approach for which many of us have previously criticized the literature on modernism.
Finally, while remaining committed to revisionist impulses, I also remain sceptical of models that propose to reread/reinterpret historical practices exclusively through the lens of current theory. Contradiction, multiplicity, conflict - indeed the ability to navigate between apparently contradictory or mutually exclusive ideas - must remain, I think, central to feminist projects. Friedrich Nietzsche may seem an odd source to invoke in a feminist context, but I can't help but be reminded of the opening lines of The Birth of Tragedy with their call for an acknowledgement of the dynamics of conflict and resolution.
Copyright © :Whitney Chadwick, March 2000
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 12, 2000