In beginning to develop a brief position paper for this panel, I went back to the description Hilary Robinson sent to all participants in order to clarify the aims of the discussion. I was struck by one particular rhetorical question which she set out there: ‘Is work on women artists just not trendy enough?’
This question struck me for two reasons. First, it was clearly provocative; it begs an answer by its very cheek. The second reason I fixed upon this question, however, was that it was recognisable. There is a recalcitrant binary thinking which dogs feminist art history, pitting the ‘untrendy’ reclamation of women artists against ‘trendy’ theoretical revisions of the discipline as two opposing forms of scholarship. In these terms, it is not ‘sexy’ to be in the archives exploring primary material about women’s art long since forgotten and, moreover, it is assumed that such research can only produce additive surveys or basic biographical information. By contrast, the clever working and reworking of sources already known represents the trendy end of feminist interventions even while it signals its own material limits.
The questions which interest me in pursuing research on women’s art, both historical and contemporary, are not contained by this oppositional model. My strategies link primary research and theory at a fundamental level since what I find most fascinating about exploring the art of women are issues of epistemology – what kinds of knowledges are made when women make art and what forms of knowledge am I making in engaging with its presence?
Addressing women’s art, means confronting a paradox: how to acknowledge its historical occlusion without reproducing the paradigms which render it as ‘other’. Scholarship which defines women artists as an homogeneous cohort, irrespective of the dynamics of their histories, or which seeks in women’s art some unified ‘female essence’, preceding specific practices as their knowable ‘origin point’, erases differences between women and reinstates the binary logic through which female subjectivity is rendered invisible, illegible and impossible to articulate. The theoretical task is how to engage with women’s art and radical difference; how to think women’s art ‘otherwise’.
A crucial shift in perspective from object to process helps to move beyond the deadlock of the binary opposition. Rather than seeing women’s art as a category of objects to be defined, it is more useful to explore the processes by which women’s art comes to make meaning. These include the processes by which we, as art historians and critics, make connections and contexts in the present - to paraphrase Rosi Braidotti on the transdisciplinary action of the feminist theorist: ‘creating connections where things were previously disconnected or seemed unrelated, where there seemed to be ‘nothing to see.’ [1]
Such a perspective explores art-making as a performative act through which embodied subjects negotiate their particular material and discursive positions across a variety of historical moments. Thinking women’s art within an intersubjective frame, as instances of articulation, capable of change and reinscription through activities in the present, invites critics to engage in dialogue with works, contexts and ideas. Hence, the very opposition between between ‘additive reclamation’ and ‘theoretical revision’ is rendered redundant.
In fact, I would argue that maintaining this dualist paradigm actually enacts another, more insidious form of exclusion through producing an acceptable ‘alternative canon’. That is, by pitting new primary research against theoretical reconceptions of existing material, we reinforce the ‘catch-22’ of women’s art – either we add their names to the canon and do not question its standards of judgement or we harness all of our most skilful thinking to rework the canonical tradition itself, thereby reinforcing it by default. Significantly, this insight links feminist ethics with feminist interventions into aesthetics.
For example, if we take corporeality and difference (rather than universal laws) to reside at the heart of ethics, then we can situate processes and work toward material change without falsely seeking transcendent, static truths. Here, I am indebted to the insights of such scholars as Moira Gatens and Elizabeth Grosz who, in thinking through becomings, process-based agency and an ethics of sexual difference, speak directly to the role of the feminist art historian/critic as a maker of meanings and knowledges. [2]
While the logic of ‘becoming’ may offer the potential for an infinite variety of constellations, forming and reforming in perpetual change, specific ‘becomings’ are always located and material. Additionally, the elements which have combined in any particular becoming are derived from specific, located and material conditions.
So, in response to the question of the ‘trendiness’ of research into women’s art, and the binary which this traces, the link between corporeality and becoming is crucial – and replicates the link between primary research and theoretical reconception. While it is possible to have any number of theoretical reinterpretations of the canon, for example, these will provide only the ‘becomings’ which are fostered by their particular situation, historically, materially and critically. Without more diverse work entering the sphere of reconnection, making itself available for new and radical combinations with other ideas, objects and images, the results will never wander far from that which we already know. This is at the heart of the theoretical importance of work on women’s art in epistemological terms – it enables and necessitates new ways of making meaning which move beyond the logic of binary historiography to mobilise radical difference for new feminist strategies.
Notes
Copyright © : Marsha Meskimmon, March 2000
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 12, 2000