At the cusp of a new century and at a conference preoccupied with disciplinary boundaries and legitimations I would like address the three issues of the panel, ‘feminism/ historiography/ strategy’ as three concerns about the past, present and future. And they are inter-related, for to talk of one is immediately to talk of the others. To focus on the middle term, historiography, that is, the ways in which history is or has been constituted, is to focus on strategies and on making definitions about something called ‘feminism’.
Although recent literature about feminism and the arts tends to assume that any connections start around 1970, it is I think important to remember that feminism’s encounters with visual media and with their histories are of a much longer duration than the past three decades. Nor have they been confined to the west. Phoebe Farris’s new book is an eloquent testimony to the creative activities by and writings about art and artists of colour in the Americas, south as well as north. Beyond the Anglo-American context as well as within it are uneven developments in which feminism has become feminisms. Healthy and vigorous debates have taken place and are underway to rething and claim feminist practice and theory for culturally diverse constituencies. Feminisms are sites of struggle and contradiction, defined and redefined by movements in and against culture, discourse and the institutions of power.
Convening the panel, Hilary asked us to ponder ‘how feminist analysis in the field of art history has developed.’ In reflecting on this question, I am struck by disjuncture and disagreement, difference and diversity as well as bridge-building and coalitions, and the urgency of historical strategies which encompass these uneven developments and contradictions. As Ella Shohat’s recent account of feminism in a multicultural society indicates, linear histories which begin in the 1970s and which prioritise what is called “second wave feminism” tend to miss much of texture of debate and political activism generated in the civil rights movements while they position women of colour as coming late to debates conceptualised by white women. A multiplicity of interventions into the professional discipline have challenged existing concepts of art and artist, theory, practice and history. They have been shaped by changing agendas in feminisms as well as by a raft of broad cultural changes such as “post-modernism” or “post-coloniality” which have also reshaped art history, its approaches and its objects of concern. Moreover, accounts beginning in 1970s tend to set up comparisons between an early and a later phase, between the recovery of women artists which characterised the first stages and more sophisticated analyses of gender and culture produced in the 1990s. In some versions what’s noticed is a shift from feminism to gender, from women’s studies to gender studies, a move perhaps to “post-feminism”. But it is I think difficult to ascribe historical precedence or to delineate either strand as unitary in their preoccupations. Writings about women artists who have been or are under-represented in the canon are still a priority, and a focus on the monographic or biographic has meant neither the neglect of sophisticated questions about visual representation, complex critical theory , nor indeed the analysis of the cultural formations of gender. Much writing today is not so much prompted by an urgency to add women in – to received histories or the canon – as to radically reformulate a field of enquiry, its priorities and its strategies. As Marsha Meskimmon argues, this reconceptualisation cannot be undertaken without the injection of new material and the new analysis which it demands. In these terms, the monographic approach cannot be abandoned or dismissed as untheorised when so many women and so much work still lies unresearched and un(der)-considered. The address to women artists has also brought to visibility the heterogeneity of femininities, variously formed by ethnicity, class, sexuality, ‘race’ and indeed generation. It has argued for a fissuring of the feminine and a deconstruction of binary opposition which seeks to position the ‘one’ against the ‘other’. Furthermore, what has been or can be defined as feminist has profoundly altered over time and across culture, so much so that there are now considerable difficulties in seeing women of another generation as feminist at all. Coming to terms with feminism’s volatility means acknowledging definitions and understandings of feminism which may be unrecognisable to women of an earlier generation or another cultural constituency. Living in a multi-cultural society means coming to terms with feminism’s heterogeneity, acknowledging and respecting cultural diversity.
A cursory survey of existing literature indicates that neither the study of women artists nor the study of the gendering of culture are exclusively feminist undertakings. For me what differentiates feminist accounts from others is the address to power and power/knowledge. It is feminism’s abilities to analyse power which have profoundly shifted over the past thirty years, and it is the different analyses of power and its social, cultural formatons which demark the varying kinds of feminist analysis. Some sort of self-reflexivity about these issues has been central to a feminist approach.
In conclusion I would say that feminisms’s restlessness, its constant reinvention, has been partnered by its spatial proliferation. Feminism’s encounters with visual media and their histories are by no means delimited by the professional discipline and its institutional locations. This panel brings together women who work in diverse places, spaces and ways: writing essays and studies, curating exhibitions, running journals and galleries. In this feminism differs profoundly to the highly institutionalised “social history of art”, whose demise is the subject of another panel today. If feminism’s activities and interventions have often been contingent and transitory , they have taken place in social formations charged by diversity and difference. How feminism conceptualises relations of power and acknowledges diversity and difference between women as much as in the writing of history or the development of strategy, remain I think, the most urgent issues now and in the future.
Copyright © : Deborah Cherry, March 2000
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 12, 2000