Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference 9781847184054

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Feminism Reframed

Feminism Reframed

Edited by

Alexandra M. Kokoli

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Feminism Reframed, Edited by Alexandra M. Kokoli This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Alexandra M. Kokoli and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-405-7, ISBN (13): 9781847184054

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Looking On, Bouncing Back Alexandra M. Kokoli Section I: On Exhibition(s): Institutions, Curatorship, Representation Chapter One............................................................................................... 20 Women Artists, Feminism and the Museum: Beyond the Blockbuster Retrospective Joanne Heath Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 41 Why Have There Been No Great Women Dadaists? Ruth Hemus Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 61 “Draws Like a Girl”: The Necessity of Old-School Feminist Interventions in the World of Comics and Graphic Novels Alisia Grace Chase Section II: Between Absence and Performance: Rethinking the Subject Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 86 Rethinking Absence: Feminist Legacies, Critical Possibilities Karen Roulstone Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 107 The Chrissy Diaries Anthea Behm

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Section III: Reviews/Revisions Chapter Six.............................................................................................. 138 Queen Seduces Mistress: The Portraiture of Marie Leszczinska and Madame de Pompadour Jennifer G. Germann Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 159 The Uncertain Spectator: Theories of Female Spectatorship and the Work of Anna Gaskell Catherine Grant Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 177 “Forward via a Female Past”: Pauline Boty and the Historiographic Promise of the Woman Pop Artist Sue Tate Section IV: Between History and Theory Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 206 Fetishism and the Stories of Feminist Art Alexandra M. Kokoli Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 227 In the Words of Susan Hiller and Annette Messager: Conceptualism and Feminism in Dialogue Beth Anne Lauritis Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 248 What is it that Feminist Interventions Do? Feminism and Difference in Retrospect and Prospect Griselda Pollock Epilogue .................................................................................................. 281 The Feminist Art Project Anne Swartz Contributors............................................................................................. 289

INTRODUCTION LOOKING ON, BOUNCING BACK ALEXANDRA M. KOKOLI

Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference addresses the ongoing dialogue between feminism, art history and visual culture from contemporary scholarly perspectives. Over the past thirty years, the critical interventions of feminist art historians in the academy, the press and the art world have not only politicised and transformed the themes, methods and conceptual tools of art history, but have also contributed to the emergence of new interdisciplinary areas of investigation, including notably that of visual culture. Although the impact of such fruitful transformations is indisputable, their exact contribution to contemporary scholarship and their changing function within the academy remains a matter for debate, not least because feminism itself has changed significantly since the Women’s Liberation Movement. Side-stepping facile, vague and/or ideologically suspect formulations like “postfeminism”, this collection targets the relationships between past and present as well as among different strands of thought; it aims to offer a complex re-evaluation of different strands in feminist thought and practice around art and visual culture since the 1970s, highlighting continuities as well as points of disjunction. The essays in this volume, all previously unpublished, engage with the interpretative and conceptual models fashioned by feminist art history and visual cultural criticism from both historical and theoretical perspectives. The authors, most of whom are early career academics and emergent practising artists, explore the gaps and omissions of established methodologies and prevalent art historical narratives, while also recovering valuable tools and insights that may be redeployed in contemporary contexts and put to new uses. Inspired by the one-day conference Difference Reframed: Reflections on the Legacies of Feminist Art History and Visual Culture (16 September 2006, University

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of Sussex),1 this is a purposeful selection of considered responses to what the authors view as timely and pressing questions, including: What is the relevance of feminist art history to contemporary scholarship, curating, and art practice? If feminism itself works through/as revision, should second-wave strategies and concerns be further (or newly) revised? What has been the influence of feminist theory—and practice—on key notions like spectatorship, subjectivity, and performativity? Does theory have a history (and vice versa)? What forms do/can feminist politics and practice take?

Trouble: Feminism and/as Risk-taking Feminism Reframed reviews and revises existing feminist art histories but also reasserts the need for continuous feminist interventions in the academy, the art world and beyond. The present book is therefore caught up in its own internal differences and differentiations, if it is not indeed split: it is simultaneously homage and critique; it builds on the long, varied and widely divergent traditions of feminist interventions and revisions, while making such traditions the object of critical analysis and evaluation. As its title suggests, Feminism Reframed situates itself as an assortment of feminist (or at the very least feminism-inspired) approaches to feminism itself.2 The title also deliberately—and somewhat arrogantly—evokes another collection, whose decisive impact on the practice and meaning of feminist art history is beyond doubt: Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, 1970-1985, edited by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock contains a valuable selection of documents on (and constituting an intrinsic part of) feminist interventions in art and visual culture, reproduced in facsimile, thus granting the reader a glimpse of the original aesthetic of the often short-lived, underground publications in which they made their first appearance.3 Framing 1

Not all authors were also speakers: the contributions of Lauritis, Swartz and Tate did not stem from that conference. 2 Pollock, “The Politics of Theory”, 4 and n. 3. Pollock here refers to teaching, but has been putting to practice just such a self-reflective approach in her writing as well, at least since the late 1980s. 3 Some previously unpublished material is also included. The editors’ decision not to typeset the collected texts anew seems even more justified in retrospect and certainly makes up for the poor quality of illustrations and sometimes script, which is exacerbated in the reproduction by facsimile. The original publications have now become very difficult to get hold of, as most of the key archives of the WLM in the UK receive little or no public funding and have consequently had to

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Feminism does not simply bring together writings by art historians, art critics, artists, curators and activists, but crucially blurs the boundaries between such occupations or designations. The editors’ introduction, albeit chronologically organised, presents an image of intersecting and overlapping relationships, interests, practices and debates too complex for any linear narrative to contain. The centrality of Framing Feminism for developing feminist art historians in the UK, but also for anyone with an interest in British feminist art or radical art history in general, cannot be overstated. For me and many of my colleagues, Framing Feminism has been a constant point of reference and inspiration in our attempts to get to grips with the surge of activity, activism and scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s that has come to shape the terrain of academic feminism in the visual arts ever since. The book is unique for the immediacy with which it presents original documentation, as noted above, which it “frames” by a double introduction, a general one by both editors and Pollock’s article “Feminism and Modernism”. While the former starts off as a historical account of various initiatives and their interconnections, it evolves into a theoretical discussion of the different strategies of feminist art and their sometimes tense relationship with the broader political agendas of the movement. This relationship, often translated into a division between textual strategies and emancipatory practices, needs to be mitigated, maintained and explored, and is interestingly conceptualised as a kind of dialectic: There is […] a dialectic to be maintained within feminist art practices between the democratic and enabling activities which encourage more women to make art and exhibit it with confidence simply as women, and the specialised, theoretically developed feminist interventions in the official cultural sites and apparatuses. It should not be a matter of either/or, alternative interventionism, populism or the mainstream. The history of the feminist art movement, and the theory which can now be elaborated for it, reveals a necessary relation and interchange between practical strategies and strategic practices.4

“Feminism and Modernism” picks up where the introduction leaves off by attempting a definition of “feminist art”, to conclude—controversially, at least at the time—that the feminist character of an artwork is not a matter downsize, merge together or, in the best case scenario (that however raises its own problems), donate their collections to larger academic and public libraries. 4 Parker and Pollock, “Fifteen years of feminist action”, 75

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of the gender (woman) or political identity (feminist) of its maker, but of effect: an artwork is feminist (or not) depending on “the way [it] acts upon, makes demands of, and produces positions for its viewers” and whether “it subverts the normal ways in which we view art and usually seduced into a complicity with the meanings of the dominant and oppressive culture.”5 A wide variety of artwork is examined closely in the text to throw into relief the “crucial difference”6 between art by feminists and feminist art, a difference between terms whose boundaries are historically fluid, but which is still bound to raise disagreements. What is more, Pollock recognises that “not all feminist practices contend with [the] dominant discourses and institutions [of modernism] in the manner discussed in this section.”7 An awareness of the imminent danger of causing conflict or displeasure and of the inevitability of doing so inflects much of Framing Feminism. At least this is the impression that I am left with after reading it again in preparation for writing this introduction. The editors admit that in their effort to “reconstruct some of the context in which feminist interventions have functioned”,8 they have consciously de-emphasised the contribution of individual artists: “This may well be read as a betrayal by individual women—as a refusal to provide the kind of critical endorsement which they genuinely need and deserve.”9 Although not noted in the preface, the editors’ choice must also have been necessitated by their dismissal of monographic art historical approaches and their inherently gendered exaltation of individual, individuality and individualism. What is more, some (albeit a minority) of the artists in question have since met with the critical endorsement that they unquestionably deserve, at least to a degree. Regardless of the overwhelmingly favourable evaluation of such editorial choices by most contemporary readers, however, there are many indications, including and beyond those just cited, that Parker and Pollock foresaw the repercussions of framing feminism. Offering up a history—and simultaneously a theory—of art and feminism, feminism in art, and “feminist art” has the significant side-effect of laying the editors, their work and subject matter open to scrutiny and criticism: it paints them into corners that may not have been actively chosen, but which are the perceived consequence of 5

Pollock, “Feminism and Modernism”, 93. Ibid., 94. 7 Ibid., 119. 8 Parker and Pollock, “Preface”, Feminism Reframed, xiv. 9 Ibid., emphasis added. I am correcting the original “woman” to “women”, considering it a typographical error. 6

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specific choices. Various events and reviews following the publication of Framing Feminism highlight this other meaning of framing, and expose its troubling implications.10 As in Poe’s Purloined Letter, the clue is in plain view, in the title and on the cover,11 for all to see and yet, more often than not, miss. While the title of this collection evokes Framing Feminism, this introduction, entitled “Looking On, Bouncing Back”, deliberately alludes to another significant volume edited by Rosemary Betterton, Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media, published twenty years ago in 1987, at the same time and by the same publisher as Framing Feminism. Looking On anthologises debates around the representation of women and femininity in visual art and culture in which feminist analysis had played a pivotal role. Betterton deliberately brings together the high and the low, advertising, pornography, “fine art” and feminist art, to highlight how different areas of cultural production and genres “overlap and intersect in their representations of femininity and feminine sexuality.”12 On the cover of the book Laura Knight’s Self Portrait (1913) is reproduced, showing the artist in the act of painting a female nude in her studio, with the slender body of the naked model (artist Ella Louise Naper, née Champion) dominating the right half of the frame and sketchily repeated on the artist’s canvas on the left. The negative tinge of the title— looking on passively, with no prospect of interacting or reacting—is elaborated through Betterton’s original misreading of this work: Failing to notice the brush in the artist’s right hand, I thought I was seeing a woman looking through the window of a gallery or shop. This mistake seems to me to be revealing of certain cultural assumptions about femininity. While the woman’s narcissistic glance in a mirror or a shop window is socially legitimated, her critical or investigative gaze is not.13

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Such as the discussion at the ICA, London, 21 January 1988, between Lubaina Himid and Griselda Pollock. See Clare Rendell’s review of the discussion and the book published in the W.A.S.L. Journal. 11 About the cover of Framing Feminism see my chapter “Feminism and the Stories of Feminist Art” in this volume. 12 Betterton, “Introduction: Feminism, Femininity and Representation”, 2. 13 Ibid., 4. Betterton proceeds to give a detailed re-interpretation of the painting, focusing on how the artist’s sideways glance disrupts the voyeuristic visual perception of the female nude and, by extension, female beauty and feminine sexuality, in which the gaze adopted by the (male) viewer is normally complicit with that of the (male) artist.

Introduction

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Just as Knight’s Self Portrait, upon closer—feminist—inspection, challenges this gendering of the gaze versus the cursive and/or narcissistic glance, the texts collected in Looking On and the debates of which they are representative examples have since succeeded in completely overhauling critical approaches to the visual representation of gender and sexuality and, to a substantial degree, have seeped into the “everyday practices of looking at, and making sense of”14 media imagery. Nevertheless, Betterton also observes that: the kinds of pleasure offered to women by a variety of cultural forms are so deeply implicated in the way in which femininity is structured that they cannot easily be given up. […] [I]f the task of feminist criticism is to unpick the threads which bind women and men to certain representations of femininity, can it also enable them to reconstruct and redefine that femininity in different and more positive terms?15

While Betterton’s original misreading of Knight’s subversive Self Portrait may seem strange to those of us who have been acquainted with the painting through and thanks to Betterton’s feminist (re)interpretation, this last question seems even stranger due to its familiarity. The combination of its continued relevance and changed meaning is troubling: if in 1987 the question mark stood for hesitant hope, in 2007 it reads more like doubt. Feminism Reframed is marked by the prefix “re-” of repetition, return and re-engagement. It is framed by the fullness of this twenty-year lag, by measures of distance and proximity, successes, failures and persistent questions that are continually recycled and, in the present context, welcomed back. Traces of self-reflection, apprehension and ambivalence have deliberately been chosen to introduce this collection, as a reminder that to frame feminism is always a risky business, likely to make trouble, not least for feminism itself. In the hope that at least some of that trouble will be productive, feminism is here once more reframed.

Strife: Between Difference and Divergence Cornelia Butler, curator of the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 4 March-16

14 15

Ibid., 16. Ibid., 14.

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July),16 admits in her introduction to the catalogue to being initially “surprised at the […] eclecticism” of the essays she commissioned: “I concluded that something about the subject of feminist art inspires a healthy sense of expansiveness, resistance, and subversion”.17 Feminist art history does not seem to be much different. I have not only been surprised by the eclecticism of the commissioned chapters but also by their greatly divergent perspectives, and their politico-aesthetic variety that verges on fundamental differences of opinion. Crucially, not all authors describe themselves as feminist practitioners, whether their practice is fine art, critical writing or both, while even those who do have sometimes significantly different understandings of what it means to be “feminist”. Involving non-feminist contributors has not been an easy decision but one about which I have come to feel strongly. It is very important that nonfeminist responses to feminism are accommodated and, indeed, highlighted in present and future considerations and evaluations of feminism in the arts. Firstly, although the danger of ghettoising feminist activity isn’t perhaps as prominent as in the past, it is still important to foreground the multiple links and wide-ranging influence of feminist cultural input well beyond “the converted”. What is more, feminist critique has rarely limited itself to the work of feminists or even women but took the whole of culture, with all its patriarchal biases, as its object of analysis and target for change. The very nature of feminist intervention is dynamic and expansive: it either brings on a radical reshuffling of social and semiotic systems on the whole, or it is ineffective. In an interview with Rozsika Parker, Susan Hiller instructively relates an episode from a faculty meeting at an art school where she taught in the seventies: A male member of staff […] said he totally agreed with everything I said, he thought we should have at least 50% women teaching at the college and ended up by saying “Of course that would mean the end of art education as we know it.” He’s absolutely right.18

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A few of the contributors mention this exhibition and Lauritis discusses it in some length, so I will not expand on it here. At the time of writing, WACK! is touring across the United States. 17 Butler, “Art and Feminism: An Ideology of Shifting Criteria”, in Mark, WACK!, 23. 18 “Dedicated to the unknown artist”, Framing Feminism, 283. This excerpt is also cited in the editors’ “Preface” to make the same point. An abridged version of this interview is reprinted in Thinking About Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller (2630), but the discussion about feminism’s remit and range has been edited out.

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Finally, I would also like to suggest that, especially since feminism has demonstrably had such a great impact on the practice, history and theory of art, it is not (or no longer) only self-avowed feminists who have a right—or, indeed, a legitimate stake—in exploring and interrogating feminist legacies. After all, feminism does not wholly or exclusively belong to feminists, although whether a profound and earnest engagement with feminism by “non-feminists” could ever leave them unaltered is a different matter. There is another strategic reason why contributions by non-feminists have been included, that became clear to me after visiting the WACK! show. Curator Cornelia Butler’s ambition is stated as follows: to make the case that feminism’s impact on art of the 1970s constitutes the most influential international “movement” of any during the postwar period—in spite or perhaps because of the fact that it seldom cohered, formally or critically, into a movement the way Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, or even Fluxus did.19

It would certainly have been impractical, although perhaps not unreasonable, to expect to see some concrete examples of feminism’s influence, i.e. art that has absolutely no feminist affiliations politically yet displays clear signs of the impact of feminism and feminist art, if not at the exhibition at least in the accompanying catalogue. Even though the variety of work on show was impressive or, according to some, excessive, it was all offered up under the auspices of (a) feminism, even in the case of artists like Marina Abramovic, who has persistently denied any connection to feminism as a movement.20 As the reader will have noticed, the distinctions that I am attempting to draw are already deeply problematic: what is after all political and what is aesthetic? Should work by artists who claim to not be feminist be excluded, even if it interrogates gender and sexuality? But, I would argue, this is the outcome of thinking through Butler’s claim about feminism’s influence. If feminism as a movement has always been so multi-faceted and frayed around the edges, how is one to determine what constitutes feminist art and what feminisminfluenced art? Suspending these conceptual concerns, a likely defence of WACK! would be that it is up to the spectator to figure out where feminism’s influence lies, relying on her own art historical knowledge. 19

Butler, 15. This is admittedly acknowledged in the catalogue, 210. Butler chose on the basis of feminist qualities in the work and not the artists, which is a generally accepted practice and conceptually justified. Still, this show was of feminist art exclusively. 20

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Nevertheless, the success of such an exercise would reveal more about the spectator’s sympathies than her knowledge. If feminism has so much internal variation, its intertextual connections to its successors would in theory be inexhaustible. If (almost) anything can be feminist, (almost) nothing is. Strangely enough, I do not disagree with the proposition that feminist art theory and practice have perhaps been the most influential in the post-war period. But a show (or a book, an institution, etc.) that is wholly “feminist” could never possibly prove the point that feminism has been influential. This is precisely why authors who do not identify as feminist have been included in this volume. In Feminism Reframed, the contributors are not holding on to—or, worse, reviving—divisive distinctions between what/who is feminist and what/who is not for the sake of division, or for lack of awareness of the dangerous role such acts of labelling can play in terms of power. But difference must be tolerated at all costs and, if possible, valued, nurtured and explored. Self-designation isn’t taken at face value, since no statement articulated in language ever is, but it is still acknowledged and respected. The concept and experience of difference is at the centre of the present investigation in more ways than one. Anyone involved in feminist critical practice broadly defined is confronted by at least two sets of differences and, additionally, at least two disparate definitions of “difference”. On the one hand, feminist approaches to art practice, history and theory as well as the expansive field of visual culture are inherently opposed to (or at the very least weighed against) non-feminist approaches, namely those that have either been resistant to the challenges of feminism’s introduction of new objects and methods and its revisions of old ones, or that claim to have already surpassed them.21 This difference is adversarial and for the most part non-dialectic in its rigidity. On the other, there are the important differences “among us”: the internal variation and diversity accommodated (or at least contained) within the history of second-wave feminism is well known to anyone familiar with the history of second21 The former constituency (i.e. those resistant to feminism) represents staunchly unreformed art history as it is still practiced in many educational institutions around the world, and as it is still propagated by numerous art historical publications for some academic but mostly professional and amateur audiences. The latter constituency, which claims to be beyond—and thus over—feminism, stands for “post-feminist” tendencies in their neo-conservative manifestations. Some have persuasively argued that “post-feminism” itself is a neo-conservative phenomenon. See e.g. Jones, “‘Post-feminism’: A Remasculinization of Culture” and also the inaugural issue of the important feminist journal n.paradoxa, edited by Katy Deepwell, no. 1: Feminism/Post-feminism (January 1998).

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wave feminism and its aftermath. These differences are almost always informed by multiple theorisations of “difference”, influenced substantially though not exclusively by poststructuralist re-readings of Freud by Lacan and others.22 Indeed, the very conceptualisation of socalled “sexual difference” came to be used as a virtual litmus test by which feminist factions were defined and through which they surveyed their boundaries and asserted their remits.23 The debates around “sexual difference” have now seemingly been replaced by other significant differences mostly among “generations and geographies”, to evoke the influential collection of the same name, that is to say the histories of questions of difference and issues of cultural difference—“the specificity of location which is cultural and social as well as political”.24 Feminism Reframed takes on generations more directly than geographies, although ultimately the two are more often than not intertwined. The 2006 conference Difference Reframed was originally conceived as a platform for a productive intergenerational dialogue between established and emerging scholars and artists. As Griselda Pollock has often noted herself, however, “generation” should not be interpreted literally in this context: rather than chronological age, it stands for disparate, historically situated chains of investigation, theoretical convergences, personal and political alliances. All the same, issues of status and power should not be overlooked: our placement on one or the other side of real-life binaries like teachers and students, supervisors and supervisees, senior and junior academics, established and new artists, cannot but inform not only our relationships with one another but our understanding of what is at stake in art and feminism, and their reconsiderations.25 As Catherine MacKinnon points out, the use of the 22

For a profoundly informed but also quite critical discussion of the impact of Lacan and his contemporaries, see Mitchell and Rose, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. Feminism’s engagement with Lacan stands out for a number of reasons, not least for its fruitful irreverence, which jars favourably with the surprising orthodoxy of many contemporary Lacanians. See, for example, Grosz’s exemplary Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, and Gallop, Reading Lacan. For a Marxist feminist critique of “French Freuds”, see Clément’s The Weary Sons of Freud. 23 Toril Moi’s writing is very useful in unpicking the workings of “difference” within the second-wave, even if it unavoidably gives a partisan picture of the debates: see “Feminist, Female, Feminine” and, of course, the landmark Sexual/Textual Politics. 24 Pollock, “Preface”, Generations and Geographies, xii. 25 Cf. Mignon Nixon on generational struggle and transference among women, 294.

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term “difference” in reference to gender can seem misleadingly powerneutral, abstract and treacherously symmetrical.26 Generational difference cannot be reduced to inequality as straight-forwardly as gender difference has (strategically) been, but it still partakes in structures of power that need to be recognised and submitted to feminist analysis. As regards geographies, most of the articles collected here do not venture far beyond the “West”. This flies in the face of the increasingly prominent trend to reverse and diversify the unacknowledged (and thus universalising) emphasis of much feminist scholarship on Europe and America, as well as whiteness. This trend is both politically warranted and has often resulted in fascinating interdisciplinary bodies of work, drawing on and contributing to postcolonial theory in social, literary, and art historical scholarship, as well as art practice.27 The value, both intellectual and political of such work is never in question—in fact, the discipline of art history today is already indebted to postcolonial theory—nor is the need to do more in this direction. Yet Feminism Reframed chooses to reframe feminism in a different way: instead of exploring forgotten and neglected ground, it returns to the established and (seemingly) familiar, to review and revise it, and make it strange again. The past is also a foreign land.28 In her chapter for Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts, Griselda Pollock grapples with the question “what is feminism?”.29 Although it is her long personal/political engagement in and contribution to feminism and feminist art history that allows Pollock to undertake such 26

MacKinnon, 8-9. Occasionally, however, the effort to replace Eurocentric historical narratives with “critical cartographies”, an example of which is Marsha Meskimmon’s contribution to the WACK! catalogue, and Peggy Phelan’s “Survey” in Art and Feminism, does not have as a politically challenging an outcome as one might hope. Drawing out “previously occluded affinities” among art, artists, and movements (Meskimmon, 326), without also uncovering pre-existing or establishing new links or coalitions in social, political and economic terms, these intellectual efforts are perhaps of more value to art history and criticism than they are to feminism or even postcolonial critique, and thus their contribution to feminist art history remains problematic to determine. 28 For me so is the UK. One can only hope that “like being a foreigner, being a woman is a great advantage” (Hiller, “Susan Hiller in Conversation with Andrew Renton”, 99). 29 Pollock, “The Politics of Theory”, 5ff. Although this is not the first publication of this text, its inclusion in Generations and Geographies, envisaged as a reflective renewal in the engagement of artists and art historians in the politics of feminism (xii), re-defines “The Politics of Theory” by placing it in this ambitious context. 27

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a daunting enquiry, she also suggests, I think, that to at least pose this difficult question is the duty of any feminist intervention in art, theory, history, particularly in this period of “maturity”, when the fraught and fertile relationship between feminism and the visual arts already has a long and richly documented history of its own. To—at least implicitly—ask “what is feminism?” is perhaps not only a duty but an inevitability for any contemporary intervention that acknowledges its past. Interestingly, Pollock contrasts the question “what is feminism?” to the more often posed and facile “are you a feminist?”, a question that has not been avoided in this book. Both questions seem to me equally difficult to answer, and equally important to ask. The recent history of feminist scholarship is replete with definitions and re-definitions of what feminism is and what a feminist may be (the two overlap but don’t always coincide). The most attractive are usually vague and nearly impossible to contest. Yet, while in the late eighties and nineties such broad redefinitions seemed to offer the opportunity to non-hierarchically accommodate the wide variety of feminist interventions (or perhaps: the variety that always existed but was only acknowledged then), in the noughties feminism is paradoxically both too well-established and too easily marginalised to afford the equivocation and lack of commitment that such open-endedness implies. I would take the chance to propose instead that feminism(s) today need much more concrete shared agendas rather than inclusive, umbrella formulations that are so designed that they can’t go wrong but are not always much help. These agendas have yet to emerge with any clarity, in either feminism or feminist art history:30 Feminism Reframed falls short of putting forward any single unified or coherent agenda, although most of the contributions it brings together both advocate and themselves follow their own agendas, implicitly or explicitly. This is a collection of various, occasionally incommensurable proposals of what the work of feminist art history is, can or should be—or, in the case of the non-feminist contributions, an exposition of what feminist art history and theory have made possible, and of what has now (arguably) exceeded it. Feminism Reframed is by no means comprehensive, but partial and partisan, clearly “of its time”, and consequently vulnerable. It is its very partiality that qualifies it as a document of its time and place, its actual context and chosen contextualisations. Inspired by the one-day conference Difference 30

This is obviously a matter for debate. I have already implied that postcolonial theorisations might prove to be the future for feminist scholarship. As for feminism as a movement, “third-wave feminism” seems to be a contender, but its agenda(s) and impact are yet to be decided.

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Reframed, 16 September 2006, University of Sussex, this book constitutes a kind of historic document. Its usefulness exceeds that of the writings collected in it: it is also, perhaps principally, a snapshot of the impact of feminism on emergent art historical scholarship—or: a single frame in a film that is thankfully still rolling. Feminism Reframed may be deemed off the mark by some or, soon, “out of date”, which is to say that feminism will be considered in need of other or newer reframings. Paradoxically, this is among the aspirations of the book and its contributors. We can only hope that this volume helps fuel many more restorative reframings in the future.

Structure Feminism Reframed has been divided into four sections that are neither chronological nor strictly thematic; the chapters collected under each one do not necessarily share a common methodology or subject matter, nor do they always converge in their approach to feminism, or art, or art history. Additionally, the four sections of the book do not appear to belong to the same order. All the same, the four sections have been so designed to hopefully help guide the reader through four distinct proposed emphases and modes of engagement with the expanded and shifting terrain of feminist art practice, history and theory: the work included under each section tends to conceptualise the task that feminism is faced with differently or, put another way, it tends to privilege different sets of issues, which represents deeper discrepancies than one might first assume. If, as well as a general resistance to the repression of difference through universalisms and universalisations of knowledge (and thus cultural, social and political practice), feminism also “demands that certain issues remain in view”,31 then the book proposes at least four different feminisms, although the engaged reader is bound to discover many more. So the present division is offered up with the awareness that the chapters of this volume could be reshuffled and reclassified into equally plausible categories, following different sets of criteria. Perhaps this is a task that the reader will happily (or automatically) undertake. The first section, “On Exhibition(s): Institutions, Curatorship, Representation” is almost thematic, in so far as all three chapters spring from a feminist critique of recent art shows. Moreover, they also all depressingly affirm how limited feminism’s impact has been on curating—both in terms of exhibition programmes and approaches to 31

Pollock, “The Politics of Theory”, 5.

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Introduction

curating practices. Joanne Heath considers the gender politics of Frida Kahlo and Tamara de Lempicka’s recent blockbuster exhibitions in London, concluding that the increased visibility of women artists should not necessarily be viewed as a feminist victory: the tension between the terms “woman” and “artist” persists and is troublingly exacerbated by curators and art critics alike. Ruth Hemus undertakes a close comparative reading of the installations of the major Dada retrospective (2005-2006) in Paris and New York, in which the women of Dada are marginalised equally albeit in slightly different ways. The current re-evaluation of the legacies of Dada is a great opportunity for much needed feminist revisions of its histories, Hemus argues. Alisia Chase deals with the clearly unreconstructed field of American comics, and calls for a return to “old school” feminist interventions in curating, critical writing, and art practice. Her critical discussion of the show Masters of American Comics and its coverage in the press culminates in a close reading of comics by women about women and womanhood, proving indeed that there are great women artists in the world of comics too. The second section, “Between Absence and Performance: Rethinking the Subject”, includes writing by two practicing artists, who return to the decreasingly popular question of subjectivity, approaching it from two very different angles. Artist and writer Karen Roulstone does not merely challenge the boundary between theory and practice, but eloquently demonstrates how painting can engage and collaborate with philosophy towards a rethinking of absence beyond polarised and hierarchical binaries and, crucially, beyond the metaphysics of presence, in the contestation of which feminism has undeniably a stake. Anthea Behm insightfully locates her Chrissy Diaries, a complex video and scriptovisual installation, in art historical and theoretical context: much more than an alter ego, the persona of Chrissy constitutes the vehicle through which gender stereotypes are explored and feminist theorisations of the visual are revisited. Section III, “Reviews/Revisions” concentrates on art historical, including feminist art historical, assumptions in urgent need of reconsideration. 18th century scholar Jennifer Germann looks at portraits of two greatly influential women of the French court, Marie Leszczinska and Madame de Pompadour, and considers their unequal representation in contemporary academic writing: rather than attempting to merely redress the balance, Germann intriguingly recasts their complex relationship in feminist terms. Through a close reading of installation work by contemporary artist Anna Gaskell, Catherine Grant revises Laura Mulvey’s theory of gendered spectatorship by reframing the discussion

Looking On, Bouncing Back

15

around the structure of adolescence and sibling relations rather than the hierarchical polarity of sexual difference. Sue Tate presents a portion of her on-going research on the strangely neglected Pop artist Pauline Boty; Tate’s emphasis is interestingly not on bringing Boty to the forefront, but on interrogating the reasons for her exclusion from feminist canons and exploring Boty’s possible futures, as well as those of feminism in/and visual culture. The links between the chapters of Section IV, “Between History and Theory”, are more abstract. In my contribution, I revisit the concept of fetishism to examine how it is unexpectedly interwoven in the histories of feminist art and feminist art history. In doing so, I grapple with a series of false and yet operational divisions, such as that between emancipatory practices and textual strategies, evoked earlier in this introduction, and examine their transformations through time. Beth Anne Lauritis also confronts a false division, that between feminist (in the sense of identity politics) and conceptualist practice; her thoughtful interpretations of work by Susan Hiller and Annette Messager successfully deconstruct this distinction. Griselda Pollock critically addresses the recent surge of mainstream—and hegemonic—interest in feminism, concluding that, unfortunately, recognition has been largely tokenistic, and/or has come with suspect and damaging generalisations and misrepresentations. As an alternative to the distracting fanfare of symposia, blockbuster shows, and celebrations, Pollock proposes “the virtual feminist museum”, a space in which previously unthought of encounters could take place. This “museum”, she explains, is: not a cyber museum but a concept which enables me to suggest the kind of journeys through the histories of art and image-making that we might need to undertake to assemble the lines of reference and affinity through which works by artists who are women might become more legible.

As well as demonstrating the deep interconnections between the practice of historiography and that of critical analysis, the three articles of this section target a variety of boundaries and partitions, previously considered sound, to make them permeable, or to suggest that they have always already been so. It would seem forced for such a diverse—or rather divergent— collection to close with any single-authored conclusion. It was fortunate that Anne Swartz agreed to write a postscript about The Feminist Art Project, a research and discussion network for visual arts professionals launched in 2005. Symptomatic of the recent upsurge of interest in art and feminism and foreshadowing many of the events of 2007, The Feminist

16

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Art Project provides a concrete and hopeful example for the possible futures of the practice of feminist art and art history in and beyond the academy.

Acknowledgements Editing this book has been a most instructive and rewarding experience thanks to a series of fascinating exchanges through which drafts were finalised. I would therefore like to thank all the contributors not only for their thought-provoking chapters but also for being such willing and knowledgeable discussants of their own work as well as the wider questions and concerns that have driven this project. I am grateful to the anonymous and not so anonymous referees, especially Susan Hiller, for giving generously of their valuable time and expertise. I would also like to thank my editor at Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Amanda Millar. Although Feminism Reframed is clearly not a collection of conference papers, it wouldn’t have materialised—at least not at this moment and surely not in this exact form—were it not for the conference that inspired it, Difference Reframed: Reflections on the Legacies of Feminist Art History and Visual Culture, University of Sussex, 16 September 2006. I would like to thank Nigel Llewellyn for planting the idea for such a research event and encouraging me to pursue it; Mick O’Malley for her invaluable advice on the practicalities of conference organisation and funding; the AHRC, the Graduate Research Centre for the Humanities, the School of Humanities, and the Department of Art History (University of Sussex), for their financial aid; and, naturally, Liz James, Head of the Department of Art History, for her unreserved endorsement of the conference and its inclusion in the departmental programme of research events. The success of Difference Reframed was as much down to the speakers’ insightful contributions as its informed and engaged audience. I am particularly grateful for the enthusiastic involvement of Griselda Pollock and her unwavering backing of both the conference and this book. It is a privilege to have been offered some of her latest writing to include in this volume, especially as Feminism Reframed is a testament to her ongoing and truly shaping influence to that “oxymoron” of feminist art history.32 32 Pollock refers to feminist art history as an oxymoron in Difference Reframed, 8, and has always treated the discipline of art history with the requisite caution, while working within it. This kind of internal paradox in and of feminist scholarship is one of its own most prominent motifs: see, for example, Cixous’ concept of bodily white-on-white inscription (writing in breast milk) and the ambiguous “voler”,

Looking On, Bouncing Back

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Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge the unflagging support of my father, Xenophon A. Kokolis, my family and friends, and especially Aaron Winter, for letting me rely on his expert assistance, encouragement and kindness.

Works Cited Betterton, Rosemary, “Introduction: Feminism, Femininity and Representation”. In Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media, edited by Rosemary Betterton, 1-17. London: Pandora, 1987. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa”. In New French Feminisms: An Anthology, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Crourtivron, 245-264. Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1981. Clément, Catherine. The Weary Sons of Freud. Trans. Nicole Ball. London: Verso, 1987. Gallop, Jane. Reading Lacan. London: Cornell University Press, 1985. Grosz, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Hiller, Susan. “Dedicated to the Unknown Artist: Interview with Rozsika Parker”. In Framing Feminism, edited by Parker & Pollock, 283-286. —. “Susan Hiller in Conversation with Andrew Renton”. In Adrian Searle (ed.), Talking Art I, edited by Adrian Searle, 85-99. London: ICA, 1993. —. Thinking About Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller, edited by Barbara Einzig. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Jones, Amelia. “‘Post-feminism’: A Remasculinization of Culture”, in Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology, 1968-2000, edited by Hilary Robinson, 496-506. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. MacKinnon, Catherine. Feminism Unmodified. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Mark, Lisa Gabrielle, ed. WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Los Angeles: The Museum of Modern Art & Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Mitchell, Juliet, & Jacqueline Rose, eds. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. New York: Norton, 1985.

simultaneously taking flight from and pillaging (the) Tradition, both discussed in “The Laugh of the Medusa”, among other writings.

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Moi, Toril. “Feminist, Female, Feminine”. In The Feminist Reader, 2nd edition, edited by Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore, 104-116. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. —. Sexual/Textual Politics. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 2002. n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, no. 1: Feminism/PostFeminism (January 1998). Nixon, Mignon. “The She-Fox: Transference and the ‘Woman Artist’”. In Women Artists at the Millennium, edited by Carol Armstrong & Catherine de Zegher, 275-303. London: MIT Press, 2006. Parker, Rozsika & Griselda Pollock, eds. Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, 1970-1985. London: Pandora, 1987. Pollock, Griselda, “The Politics of Theory: Generations and Geographies in Feminist Theory and the Histories of Art Histories”. In Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, edited by Griselda Pollock, 3-21. London: Routledge, 1996. Rendell, Clare. “Framing Feminism”. W.A.S.L. Journal, no. 22 (1988): 1718.

SECTION I: ON EXHIBITION(S): INSTITUTIONS, CURATORSHIP, REPRESENTATION

CHAPTER ONE WOMEN ARTISTS, FEMINISM AND THE MUSEUM: BEYOND THE BLOCKBUSTER RETROSPECTIVE JOANNE HEATH

Looking back over the past thirty-five years of feminist interventions in the fields of art, art criticism and art history, it would now seem that one of the most consistent aspects of that project has been to expose how the institutional structure of the art world has served to marginalise artists who are women. Much of the earliest activism in this respect focused on the issue of the under-representation or even exclusion of women artists from major museums and art galleries. In New York in 1970, groups including Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL) and the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists picketed the Whitney Museum of American Art, demanding parity of representation in its annual shows of contemporary art.1 In Britain, the Women’s Workshop of the Artists’ Union was formed in 1972 in order to campaign for equality in art education and in professional opportunities. Whilst their initial impetus was to foster alternative spaces for the display of art made by women, in 1975 protests were also organised outside the Arts Council and the Hayward Gallery intended to highlight discrimination against women in the realm of publicly funded exhibitions.2 1

Women’s Ad Hoc Committee/Women Artists in Revolution/WSABAL, “To the Viewing Public for the 1970 Whitney Annual Exhibition.” On the history of North American feminist art activism, see also Broude & Garrard, eds., The Power of Feminist Art. 2 These demonstrations were staged in response to the Condition of Sculpture exhibition organised by the Hayward Gallery in 1975, which had shown works by thirty-six men and only four women. In the face of such feminist demands for gender parity, a committee of five women was invited to organise the second Hayward Annual. For a detailed discussion of the debates occasioned by this 1978

Beyond the Blockbuster Retrospective

21

As the ongoing campaigns of the Guerrilla Girls so clearly reveal, the omission of women artists from the official spaces of culture remains even today cause for concern. The Guerrilla Girls were formed in 1985 in order to address what they identified as a backlash against the initial gains made by women and artists of colour during the 1970s.3 Over the past twenty years, they have continued to shock and provoke with their witty posters underscoring the institutional sexism and racism so prevalent within the art world. It would now appear that the Guerrilla Girls themselves are in the paradoxical position of being embraced by the very institutions that they have so consistently critiqued: in 2005 they were invited to contribute to the Venice Biennale (their statistical analysis of the museums of Venice revealed that, out of the 1,238 artworks then on display, fewer than forty were by women),4 while from May 2006, a selection of their work will be on permanent display in the “States of Flux” wing of the newly re-hung Tate Modern. At the same time, however, an updated version of their famous poster Do Women Have to be Naked to get into the Met. Museum? (Fig. 1-1) revealed that the number of women artists represented in the modern art sections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art had in fact declined from less than 5% in 1989 to less than 3% in 2005.

Fig. 1-1: The Guerrilla Girls, Do Women Have to be Naked to get into the Met Museum? (2005). Copyright by Guerrilla Girls, Inc., courtesy of www.guerrillagirls.com.

exhibition, which included the work of seven men and sixteen women, see Griselda Pollock, “Feminism, Femininity and the Hayward Annual Exhibition 1978.” 3 The Guerrilla Girls, “The Guerrilla Girls Bare All: An Interview.” 4 See http://www.guerrillagirls.com/posters/venicewallb.shtml (accessed 27 February 2007).

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Over the past four years, visitors to London’s most prominent public galleries have moreover had the singular opportunity of seeing major exhibitions of works by a number of significant twentieth-century artists who were women: Eva Hesse, curated by Elisabeth Sussman and Renate Petzinger, and installed at Tate Modern by Sheena Wagstaff in the winter of 2002-3; Gwen John (albeit shown jointly with her brother Augustus) in an exhibition at Tate Britain curated by David Fraser Jenkins and Chris Stephens in the autumn of 2004; in the summer of that year, Tamara de Lempicka, curated by Simonetta Fraquelli and Norman Rosenthal at the Royal Academy of Arts and, most recently, Frida Kahlo, curated by Emma Dexter and Tanya Barson at Tate Modern in the summer of 2005. This period has also witnessed a number of significant surveys of the work of contemporary practitioners, including Sam Taylor-Wood and Rebecca Horn at the Hayward Gallery, and Sarah Lucas at Tate Liverpool. With a major retrospective of the work of Louise Bourgeois also due to open at Tate Modern in October 2007, curatorial interest in the work of women artists shows no signs of abating. Does this spate of blockbuster retrospectives therefore signal the belated acknowledgement of the early feminist demands for access to official spaces of display? Has feminism now achieved one of its ostensible aims—that of getting women artists into the museum? Do these exhibitions thus perhaps confirm the suspicions of those who now consider feminism to be a faintly outdated mode of analysis? Or are they in fact to be characterised by a near-total negation of feminism as a potential framework through which to read the work of women artists? In this essay, I want to explore some of the new issues that the museum’s apparent embrace of women artists poses for feminist art history and theory, by looking in detail at the hang, catalogues and critical positioning of two of these recent exhibitions.

Women Artists and the Museum Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon opened at the Royal Academy of Arts on 15 May 2004. The very title of the exhibition indicates a certain ambiguity: is Tamara de Lempicka herself an “Art Deco Icon”, or is it rather her paintings that are to be considered iconic examples of the Art Deco style? The following summer, Tate Modern hosted a retrospective of the work of Frida Kahlo, an artist whose status as an icon is complexly overdetermined. In contrast to Tamara de Lempicka, who had received scant attention until the Royal Academy retrospective, Frida Kahlo may now be considered one of the world’s most famous women artists. Over

Beyond the Blockbuster Retrospective

23

the past twenty-five years, “Frida” has become a veritable cultural commodity, her image having been appropriated by the editors of both fashion and lifestyle magazines, as well as the manufacturers of innumerable kitsch objects.5 How, then, were her artworks packaged to appeal to a gallery-going audience whose appetite for all things Kahloesque had doubtless been further whetted by the release of the 2002 Hollywood biopic Frida, directed by Julie Taymor and starring Salma Hayek?6 The free guide produced to accompany the exhibition begins by posing the question, “Who was Frida Kahlo?”, and answers as follows: “51 years after her death, there are as many answers to the question as there are audiences to ask it. Kahlo is variously enshrined in the popular imagination as a bohemian artist, a victim turned survivor, proto-feminist, sexual adventurer who challenged gender boundaries, and, with her mixed-race parentage, an embodiment of a hybrid, postcolonial world.”7 Frida Kahlo’s complex social positioning and the multi-faceted discourse that has accrued her work is thus neatly condensed into a single sentence, and then as quickly disavowed in favour of more formalist concerns: the guide goes on to emphasise that, “first and foremost Frida Kahlo was a painter, and for this reason Tate Modern’s exhibition focuses upon the frank testimony of the paintings themselves.”8 The organisers of Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon appear to have shared a similar desire to 5

For an extensive analysis of Kahlo’s appropriation by popular culture, see Lindauer, Devouring Frida. The Tate Modern retrospective appears to have revived the popularity of the Kahlo look: one newspaper’s response to the exhibition suggested that, “Disturbing though her use of Surrealist imagery sometimes is—dead foetuses, ripped-out hearts—there is a visual contrast between the more gruesome details and the vividness of her indigenous attire; the unforgettable embroidery of a square-necked dress or an elaborately tassled shawl. Kahlo might have outwardly adopted a serious expression for the camera or her paintbrush, but her outfits capture what is truly desirable about this summer’s fashion influence: the colour, the detail, the free spirit.” “The trick, as ever, is to use her look as a starting point rather than adopting it too literally,” the article helpfully explained, “wear layers and experiment with clashes of texture and print. Above all, wear something because you’re struck by its beauty rather than worrying about whether everything matches. You can bet that’s what Frida would have done.” Asome, “Riding the Crest of the Mexican Wave.” 6 Frida, directed by Julie Taymor (Miramax, 2002). For a critical analysis of the film and the debates which it generated, see Bartra & Mraz, “Los Dos Fridas” and Molina Guzmán, “Mediating Frida.” 7 Burton, Frida Kahlo, 1. 8 Ibid.

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consider de Lempicka on her artistic merits and to allow her artworks to speak for themselves: their stated aim was to bring to public attention paintings “whose extraordinary artistic quality and originality have not been properly appreciated until now.”9 Their exhibition guide argues for de Lempicka’s inclusion in an expanded modernist canon: “Today we are more ready to look at and discuss the figurative and realist movements of the twentieth century. As younger generations take a fresh interest in artists who developed separately and independently from the official avant-garde, Tamara de Lempicka is gradually winning status in the postmodern world. It therefore seems an appropriate time for a comprehensive re-evaluation of this remarkable artist.”10 In accordance with their stated desire to uncover each artist’s hitherto overlooked contribution to the history of twentieth-century painting, both sets of curators followed the established conventions of the monographic retrospective and installed their exhibitions chronologically, thereby creating a seamless narrative of linear artistic development. The format of each exhibition was thus near identical: the visitor was initially steered through a series of smaller rooms containing early works, in which both artists were seen to have experimented with a number of different stylistic influences, before arriving at the main spectacle—those rooms in which they were seen to have established their own unique visual language. We were then hurried swiftly through a number of later artworks, before being disgorged directly into the inevitable gift shop, where we could purchase a variety of beads and bangles that had presumably been selected to help us emulate the look of our artistic heroines, or any number of mugs, magnets and postcards adorned with their image. In the case of the Kahlo exhibition, this broadly chronological survey of an artistic career was also organised thematically. This installation ensured that, for many reviewers, the undoubted highpoint of the exhibition was those rooms which grouped together the large-scale painting The Two Fridas (1939, Museo de Arte Moderno, Conaculta-Inba, Mexico) and a number of Kahlo’s other selfportraits. Whilst the accompanying catalogue tantalisingly promises that the exhibition would delineate “the momentous cultural and political milieu in which Frida Kahlo lived and worked, the key friendships that sustained her, and her passionate life-long engagement with her native Mexico,”11 these concerns did not in fact translate into the visual space of the exhibition itself. Here, although “national identity” was conceded to be a significant concern within Kahlo’s work, it was bracketed off from her 9

Benesch, Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon, n.p. Ibid. 11 Vincente Todoli, “Foreword” in Frida Kahlo, eds. Dexter & Barson, 7. 10

Beyond the Blockbuster Retrospective

25

self-portraiture and instead afforded its own (much smaller) themed room. The exhibition’s hang thus downplayed the extent to which Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits were in themselves intimately concerned with and informed by contemporary Mexican politics and culture, allowing them instead to stand alone as a major “theme” in her work, thereby at once producing and confirming the critical tendency to view Frida Kahlo’s work as largely autobiographical in content. Despite the curators’ avowed intentions to focus solely on the aesthetic qualities of the artworks themselves, it seemed that newspaper art reviewers were able to view the paintings only through the prism of biography. Their reviews thus repetitively rehearsed the more salacious details of both artists’ lives: the tormented marriages, the affairs, the emotional suffering, the physical pain, etc. Frida Kahlo and Tamara de Lempicka’s intrinsically gendered life experiences were, they suggested, clearly writ large in the paintings that they produced, to the extent that, for Adrian Searle at least, artist and artworks appeared to be “almost one and the same.”12 The press coverage of both exhibitions thus provided the viewing public with a familiar tale of individual artistic endeavour, in which shifts in style and subject matter were linked to key incidents in the artist’s personal life. Whilst this narrative is, on the surface at least, given a new and seemingly contemporary gloss by the fact that the artist in question was a woman, for the majority of reviewers, this fact also served to raise serious questions as to the quality of the artworks on display. According to Richard Dorment of The Daily Telegraph, Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon was “an embarrassment, a mistake”: “By exhibiting more than fifty of de Lempicka’s paintings,” he suggested, “the Royal Academy reveals the vacuity of her mind and the limitations of her technique.”13 In The Observer, Laura Cumming suggested that not only was Tamara de Lempicka “casual with her medium,” but also “lousy at anatomy”: “this is not just an attempt at Modernism,” she opined, “it is that she has no idea where a knee joint occurs, how it hinges a leg, how a hand attaches to a wrist, or a neck to a shoulder.”14 Like Cumming, who saw fit to caution her readers that, “the first thing you see [on entering the exhibition] could be a nude so wincingly inept—the body parts contorted in five opposing directions, like a maltreated Barbie—you may wish to cover your eyes,”15 Waldemar Januszczak appeared discomfited by Tamara de Lempicka’s representations of the female nude: writing in The 12

Searle, “Let Fridamania Commence.” Dorment, “Butterflies in a Vacuum.” 14 Cumming, “Tubular Belles and All That Jazz.” 15 Ibid. 13

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Sunday Times, Januszczak confessed that, “a room crowded with these matching ashtray decorations pretending to be women, with their pointy breasts, made me feel as a lump of cheddar must when it finds itself in a cheese grater.”16 Although this extraordinary simile would seem to point to a deep-seated unease around Tamara de Lempicka’s representations of the female nude, Januszczak appeared to lack the critical vocabulary through which to offer any more measured consideration of what in particular it was about her paintings that might have prompted his reaction. His review is thus devoid of any art historical questioning as to the nature of her artistic project, but is instead constructed around what can only be described as a misogynist attack upon the artist herself: “Lempicka was a liar, a snob and a fraud from the off,” he declares. “Nothing this grotesque woman ever said can be trusted. Nor can anything she ever painted.”17 It is particularly telling to compare the critics’ responses to Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon with their reactions to the Edward Hopper retrospective that was running concurrently at Tate Modern. Like Tamara de Lempicka, Edward Hopper has gained widespread popularity owing to the frequent reproduction of a small number of his paintings in poster and postcard form. The reviews of the Tate Modern exhibition provided little biographical information about the artist, other than the fact that he was born in 1882 and earned a living as a commercial illustrator before finding success as a painter. Extravagant claims were, however, made as to Hopper’s significance within the history of art: “Hopper makes us think back to Vermeer and Manet and Courbet, Degas and Adolph von Menzel,” suggested Adrian Searle.18 Rachel Campbell-Johnston’s review for The Times rested on detailed formal analysis of Hopper’s paintings: “His work is not about intricate detail, sensual texture or luminous depth,” she claimed. “Rather, it is a subtle compositional puzzle. It depends on the interlocking patterns of space and shape, of shadow and light.”19 Few critics deemed Tamara de Lempicka’s paintings worthy of any such analysis. Tom Lubbock’s review in The Independent opened with the bald statement, “Tamara de Lempicka is a very bad artist.”20 Over the course of his article, he struggles to find some critical frame for her work, evoking Susan Sontag’s writings on camp. The majority of reviewers, however, quickly dismissed the paintings in order to focus upon biographical 16

Januszczak, “Clumsy, Hollow and Contrived.” Ibid. 18 Searle, “The Irreducible Business of Being.” 19 Campbell-Johnston, “City of Lonely Hearts.” 20 Lubbock, “The Shape of Things.” 17

Beyond the Blockbuster Retrospective

27

anecdote. In contrast to the high-minded tone of her article on Edward Hopper, Rachel Campbell-Johnston informed readers of The Times that de Lempicka “became the embodiment of decadence and glamour, throwing parties at which guests would eat titbits off the bodies of naked servants, snort cocaine by the silver teaspoonful and crumble hash pellets into sloe gin.”21 Andrew Graham-Dixon also detailed the goings on at these parties, and noted that Tamara de Lempicka “created a public image for herself as flawless as the surfaces of her paintings.”22 The slippage between artist and artwork becomes complete, however, in Charles Darwent’s review for The Independent on Sunday: “Lempicka grew more like her subjects with each picture,” he declared.23 The following year, the critical judgement of Frida Kahlo’s technical abilities as an artist was similarly harsh. According to Andrew GrahamDixon, Kahlo’s paintings were “such terminally inept daubs that no amount of supposedly serious content could redeem them,”24 while Rachel Campbell-Johnson professed herself “disappointed” by what she termed Kahlo’s “colour-by-numbers style.”25 Once again, it seemed that the only way in which critics could justify the display of such apparently secondrate paintings was by viewing them as the recognisable products of a woman artist. The canvases on display on Tate Modern appeared to Sean O’Hagan to afford the viewer unmediated access to the tormented psyche of their maker: “Even if you were to enter this show knowing nothing of Frida Kahlo’s life and loves, her near-fatal childhood accident and her brush with polio, her troubled marriage and break-up with Diego Rivera, her miscarriages and traumatic operations, you would come away, just by looking at the paintings alone, intimately aware of the contours of her troubled, self-absorbed existence.”26 In a review entitled “When the Artist is the Canvas,” Richard Dorment summarised the views of many of his colleagues when he suggested that “there was really only one possible subject for a person in Kahlo’s position—her own body.”27 As Mary Kelly so conclusively demonstrated in her analysis of the “effects and limitations of modernist criticism,” the underlying function of such criticism is to produce an artistic subject for the works of art on display.28 Whilst 21

Campbell-Johnston, “A Glossy Queen of the Shallow.” Graham-Dixon, “Amazonian Achievements.” 23 Darwent, “Deco Devil.” 24 Graham-Dixon, “The Best of Me, Myself and I.” 25 Campbell-Johnston, “A Fiery Soul Who Made Suffering Her Soul’s Salve.” 26 O’Hagan, “Tales of Misery and Imagination.” 27 Dorment, “When the Artist is the Canvas.” 28 Kelly, “Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism.” 22

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biographical anecdotes have thus traditionally played a key role in confirming the innate genius of the great male modernists, and hence in securing the aesthetic value of the artworks on display, in the case of women artists, this over-reliance on biography as an explanatory tool would seem to confirm only the age-old stereotype that women artists are incapable of transcending the limitations of their sex and the constraints of their lived experiences in order to make great art. Many of the critics who responded to the Kahlo exhibition drew comparisons in this respect between her work and that of Tracey Emin. For Sean O’Hagan, Kahlo’s paintings constituted the beginning of a “selflacerating art lineage that continues with Tracey Emin.”29 Whilst there does indeed remain much to be said about these two artists’ unflinching exploration of the most culturally taboo aspects of female bodily experience—Frida Kahlo’s unprecedented representation of the traumatic aftermath of miscarriage, Tracey Emin’s courageous decision to take termination as the topic of her art practice—newspaper art reviewers traced instead a direct link between the two artists as the twin exponents of a profoundly personal and confessional brand of “women’s art”. “Kahlo’s eminence,” suggested Brian Sewell, “stems from our regard for Emin. Emin and her sordid autobiographical bed have influenced and formed our view of Kahlo, establishing her as the example and precedent for exposing very private miseries to very public view as a cathartic and therapeutic exercise.”30 In a reversal of the usual chronological narratives of transmission and influence, the example of a contemporary practitioner made notorious by the media hype that continues to surround her work was thus used to lend popular appeal to an artist who worked at an earlier moment, and in a very different cultural context. In a similar vein, reviewers of both exhibitions made much of the fact that Madonna owns several paintings by Frida Kahlo and Tamara de Lempicka. Kahlo’s selfportraits, suggested Andrew Graham-Dixon, “foreshadow the multiple image-shifts of pop stars such as Madonna.”31 Pointing out that de Lempicka’s paintings featured in the videos to “Vogue” and “Open Your Heart,” Charles Darwent suggested that “Lempicka’s polyvalent sexuality—she had affairs with rich women as well as rich men—may

29

O’Hagan, “Tales of Misery and Imagination.” Comparisons between the work of Kahlo and Emin were also made by Dorment, “When the Artist is the Canvas”; Goodwin, “Saint or Sinner?”; Hubbard, “The Art of Self-Exposure”; Searle, “Let Fridamania Commence” and Sewell, “If Only Frida… Had Been Fred.” 30 Sewell, “If Only Frida… Had Been Fred.” 31 Graham-Dixon, “The Best of Me, Myself and I.”

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explain why her pictures are bought by […] women singers who snog other girls to camera.”32 Both Frida Kahlo and Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon were thus positioned by critics as shows of “women’s art”, unworthy of serious consideration by any self-respecting art connoisseur, and instead of interest only to wealthy celebrities, or else to other women, who might hope to find something of their own experiences reflected in the artworks on display. In an article that glibly dismissed the horrific injuries that Frida Kahlo sustained in a trolley bus accident at the age of eighteen as the “ultimate feminist trauma” (the author here makes reference to the fact that, in addition to multiple fractures of her leg, spine and pelvis, Kahlo was impaled on a steel hand-rail that entered her body through her abdomen and exited through her vagina), Christopher Goodwin declared Frida Kahlo “the universal modern symbol for female suffering.”33 To Brian Sewell, it seemed that Frida Kahlo was the subject of a major exhibition at Tate Modern, “not because she was a great painter, but because she revealed a woman’s private world of physical disability, abortion, miscarriage and male dominance that perfectly suits the polemic of the feminist.”34 In contrast to such analyses, poet and novelist Sue Hubbard was one of the only reviewers to acknowledge that Frida Kahlo’s artworks were not simply an unmediated expression of her own personal gendered trauma, but were also engaged in a complex dialogue with a “broader political discourse about the place of women within Mexican society.” Even her review, however, ultimately fell back into a biographical mode of interpretation: repeatedly comparing Frida Kahlo’s paintings to the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Hubbard suggested that, “there is something atavistic about her imagery that continues to speak directly to the most vulnerable and wounded aspects of many women.” Kahlo’s paintings would, she felt, “touch any woman who has ever been betrayed in love.”35

Feminism and the Museum Until the Tate Modern retrospective, I had only ever encountered Frida Kahlo’s work in reproduction form. The paintings were much smaller than I had imagined, and these tiny, jewel-like canvases seemed entirely lost 32

Darwent, “Deco Devil.” Goodwin, “Saint or Sinner.” 34 Sewell, “If Only Frida Had Been Fred.” 35 Hubbard, “The Art of Self-Exposure.” 33

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within the series of cavernous white cubes that comprised the exhibition space. Whilst both curators’ contributions to the accompanying catalogue offered a detailed analysis of Frida Kahlo’s complex borrowings from both ancient Aztec and contemporary Mexican art forms,36 once again this analysis was not carried through into the exhibition’s installation; I longed for the opportunity to see some of this imagery exhibited alongside her paintings. Photographs of the Casa Azul, the house in Coyoacán in which Frida Kahlo lived and worked, moreover reveal a highly cluttered, domestic space, crammed with artefacts and paintings (Fig 1-2). As I craned to see Frida Kahlo’s own diminutive canvases, stuck like postage stamps to the vast white walls of the Tate Modern galleries, I wondered whether a similar, more boldly crowded hang might better have conveyed a sense of the vibrancy and complexity of her imagery. Thinking back to my visit to the Royal Academy’s exhibition of Tamara de Lempicka’s paintings the previous summer, I became increasingly struck by the limitations of these self-contained retrospectives and the critical writings which they generated. Where, for example, was any broader questioning of women artists’ complex relations to femininity, to modernity and to modernism during the early years of the twentieth century? Where was any acknowledgement of the significance of either artist’s attempts to formulate a visual language of the female body? Where was any sustained discussion of the role of class and race, or of gender and sexuality, as determining factors in the production and reception of works of art? Where, in short, was the critical framework that might have been provided by feminism, as a method of working with art that recognises both its historical conditions of emergence and its continuing semantic resonance? In the absence of this vital feminist framing, it is all too easy to trace how discussion of the work of both Tamara de Lempicka and Frida Kahlo rapidly descended into personalised attack, with critics proving singularly incapable of locating the artworks on display in any context beyond that of their own spectatorial discomfort.

36

Emma Dexter, “The Universal Dialectics of Frida Kahlo” and Tanya Barson, “‘All Art is at Once Surface and Symbol’: A Frida Kahlo Glossary” in Frida Kahlo, eds. Dexter & Barson.

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Fig. 1-2: Frida Kahlo in her living room at the Casa Azul (c.1940). Photograph by Bernard G. Silberstein. Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art, New York.

What difference, then, might a curatorial practice that is informed by feminist theory make to the exhibition of works by artists who are women? Although a number of Frida Kahlo’s paintings were included in Art in Latin America: The Modern Era 1820-1920, curated by Dawn Ades at the Hayward Gallery in 1989, the last major exhibition of her work in Britain had taken place at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1982. In contrast to the Tate Modern retrospective, with its traditional museological emphasis upon individual artistic achievement and creative autonomy, organisers Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey here took the bold decision to display Frida Kahlo’s work alongside that of photographer Tina Modotti, and thence to consider each artist in her distinctive relationship to the Mexican Revolution and to the ensuing renaissance of Mexican art during the 1920s. The show thus did not invite simplistic comparisons between the two artists as women, but rather created a dialogical space which ensured that neither could become a representative “woman artist”. In their accompanying catalogue essay, Mulvey and Wollen provided a number of possible frameworks through which to consider the artworks on display,

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including “women, art and politics,” “revolution and renaissance,” “the interior and the exterior” and “the discourse of the body.”37 As Mulvey and Wollen acknowledged, theirs was a show that was consciously shaped by feminist theory, and which was accordingly “designed to raise a series of ideas and arguments that are relevant to questions about women’s art and feminist aesthetics,”38 arguments which were, however, conspicuously absent from the Tate Modern retrospective and its associated field of publication. With hindsight, it is possible to view Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti as forming part of a larger series of overtly feminist exhibitions held during the early 1980s: a selective list might also include the exhibitions Women’s Images of Men (selected by a committee comprising Joyce Agee, Cate Elwes, Jacqueline Morreau and Pat Whiteread), About Time (organised by Cate Elwes and Rose Garrard in conjunction with Sandy Nairne) and Issue: An Exhibition of Social Strategies by Women Artists (curated by Lucy Lippard), all of which were held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1980, Beyond the Purloined Image, organised by Mary Kelly at the Riverside Studios in 1982 and Difference: On Representation and Sexuality, curated by Kate Linker and shown at the New Museum in New York in December 1984 and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in September 1985. As Juli Carson has recently reminded us, such exhibitions must be considered as “discursive sites” that both responded and, as importantly, contributed to the ongoing theorisation of feminist art practice during the 1970s and 1980s.39 Although a more detailed analysis of the specific curatorial strategies adopted within each of these exhibitions would thus form an intrinsic part of any attempt to produce a more comprehensive historiography of the evolution of feminist theory and art practice in Britain in the mid 1970s and early 1980s, within the confines of this essay, it seems possible merely to note that, at that moment at least, it appeared that feminism could have a direct and vital bearing upon the way in which art made by women was displayed and made to signify within the museum and gallery system. Just over twenty years later, however, it was possible for the Royal Academy of Arts to mount a major retrospective of the work of a woman artist without so much as mentioning the impact of feminism. Were the curators of Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon perhaps unaware of the feminist re-envisioning of the modernist moment, or did they simply consider it irrelevant to their endeavours to reclaim de Lempicka as a 37

Wollen & Mulvey, “Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti.” Ibid., 84. 39 Carson, “On Discourse as Monument.” 38

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significant exponent of the Art Deco style? Although the accompanying catalogue does include an excellent essay by Tag Gronberg addressing Tamara de Lempicka’s highly conscious manipulation of existing codes of femininity in producing and promoting a certain image of herself as both modern woman and professional artist,40 such issues did not inform the contributions of either Parisian art dealer Alain Blondel or Ingried Brugger, curator at the Kunstforum Wien, both of whom preferred to rely instead on the time-honoured combination of stylistic analysis and biographical anecdote. The following summer, curators and reviewers alike evinced a desire to rescue Frida Kahlo from the clutches of feminist art historians, who were held responsible for having created what one critic identified as “the feminist myth of Saint Frida, the patron saint of female suffering.”41 To curator Emma Dexter, it seemed that, “recent arthistorical interest in [Kahlo’s] work, which has chimed with the feminist art history movement, has tended to focus on its autobiographical and confessional aspects at the expense of the political,”42 the implication thus being that the Tate Modern exhibition would serve as a valuable corrective to the overly personalised readings of her work favoured by feminist art history. In support of her argument, however, Dexter then goes on to cite none other than feminist art historian Joan Borsa, who argues very precisely against any such reductively biographical interpretation of Frida Kahlo’s work and in favour of an acknowledgement of the specificity of her social and political location.43 While the stated aim of the Tate Modern exhibition was to move beyond any purely biographically based interpretation of Frida Kahlo’s paintings in order to locate them within their broader cultural context, this reclamation was thus seen as occurring in spite of, rather than as enabled by, feminist art history. Although women artists are now—finally—being recognised as major players in the cultural industry, it would accordingly seem that their inclusion in the museum has been contingent upon a more or less explicit exclusion of feminism. Notwithstanding the fact that this recent spate of exhibitions has undoubtedly been enabled by the feminist struggle to reinstate women to the history of art, neither curators nor critics have appeared willing to acknowledge this debt. These shows instead appear to register only the museum’s limited acceptance of a small number of marketable women artists, whose works are then neatly packaged for public consumption in a re-gendered form of the blockbuster retrospective. 40

Gronberg, “‘Le Peintre installé par la femme.’” Goodwin, “Saint or Sinner?” 42 Dexter, “The Universal Dialectics of Frida Kahlo,” 11. 43 Borsa, “Frida Kahlo: Marginalisation and the Critical Female Subject.” 41

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Feminist scholars have long emphasised, however, that it is not possible simply to reinsert women artists back into existing art historical traditions. They have instead argued for a rather more rigorous interrogation of the assumptions underpinning existing conventions of display and interpretation, and have endeavoured to find new ways in which to think about art made by both men and women. In their contributions to this volume, Karen Roulstone and Anthea Behm explore the possibilities of a practice-led research. I want also to insist upon the role that exhibition-making may be able to play both in performing, and indeed in producing, new modes of thinking on art. This notion of a feminist curatorial practice that is in and of itself a form of speculative research necessarily departs from the straightforward model of “celebratory curatorship”44 exemplified by the blockbuster retrospective. It instead acknowledges that, in the unique spatio-temporal disposition of the art exhibition—in the sequencing and distribution of particular works of art, in their hanging and positioning, and, perhaps most crucially, in the encounter between the viewer and those artworks—new kinds of connections and questions can emerge. This approach to exhibitionmaking thus recognises that curatorial practice can itself be a type of “theoretical object”; that it can offer and articulate new ways of thinking about art.45 I am thinking here not only of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s daring juxtaposition of the work of Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, but also more particularly of the 1996 exhibition Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth-Century Art in, of and from the Feminine. Inside the Visible was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston, the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, and included works by thirty-seven women artists from Europe and the Americas. Although the exhibition was thus instrumental in retrieving a remarkable body of art practice that had been largely overlooked in standard art historical accounts of the period in which it had been produced, curator Catherine de Zegher did not attempt simply to produce an alternatively gendered account of the stylistic development of western modernism. Inside the Visible thus differed significantly from other endeavours to re-assess the contribution made by

44

The term was coined by Stephen Deuchar in “Whose Art History?,” 9. For an elaboration of the notion of artwork as “theoretical object”, see Bal, Louise Bourgeois’ Spider. 45

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hitherto neglected women artists to the major artistic movements of the twentieth century.46 As Catherine de Zegher explained: The curatorial procedure may be likened to an excavation of material traces and fragmentary histories, which would then be recombined into new stratigraphies or configurations to produce new meanings and insights of reality. Several recurrent cycles, rather than a linear survey with its investment in artistic originality and genealogies, structure the exhibition. This suggests a hybrid form of modernism not bound “to the progressive and decisive character of avant-gardism: the play of reference, deference and difference.”47

Transcending the dominant narrative of modern art as a teleology of stylistic innovations effected by a nomenclature of individual artistsubjects, Inside the Visible traced different chains of association and created other dialogues across space and time. In the visual space of the exhibition’s installation, new kinds of exchange and encounter began to take place, as it became possible to discern multiple convergences and divergences in the aesthetic practices of three generations of artists who were women. The first section of Inside the Visible, entitled Parts of/for, brought together works from the 1930s and 1940s including the early wood sculptures of Louise Bourgeois, the photomontages of Hannah Höch and the paintings of Carol Rama which, Catherine de Zegher proposed, “articulated the problematics of bodies reduced to pieces, partial objects.”48 These were displayed alongside works made during the late 1960s and early 1970s, which once again raised “questions about the body as commodity, institutional display, industrial obsession and machinic fragmentation,”49 including Yayoi Kusama’s Accumulation and Compulsion pieces, Martha Rosler’s collage series Bringing the War Home and Ana Mendieta’s earth/body works. This section also included the photographic diptychs and triptychs of contemporary practitioners Carrie Mae Weems and Nadine Tasseel, which “staged the self through a series of “masquerades” or tableaux vivants.”50 Questioning phallic norms of fixed identity and fixed boundaries, all of these artworks revealed a play around questions of singularity, plurality and difference. In these 46

For an analysis of the limitations of such a curatorial strategy, see Ruth Hemus’s contribution to this volume. 47 De Zegher, “Introduction: Inside the Visible” in Inside the Visible, 20. 48 Ibid., 24. 49 Ibid., 25. 50 Ibid., 27.

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aesthetic practices, Catherine de Zegher thus identified a diverse yet recurrent “challenge to disrupt the signifying continuity, to disturb identity, system and order, and to problematise representational authority.”51 Informed and enabled by the long-term, critical engagement of feminism with post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, de Zegher proposed that this “radical poetics of alterity” arose not from the shared gender of the artists in question, but was rather to be considered an effect of psycho-linguistic positioning, as, therefore, structurally “in, of and from the feminine.” Back in 1996, Inside the Visible signalled the potential of a curatorial practice that is informed by an explicitly feminist attention to the effects of cultural, racial and sexual difference to enrich and transform our understanding of the contribution made by artists who are women to twentieth-century art practice. Over the intervening decade, however, it would seem that the structural possibilities represented by such an intervention appear to have vanished from the cultural agenda, to be replaced by the easy viewing pleasures of the blockbuster retrospective. As many commentators have noted, museum professionals, forced to operate under increasingly commercial constraints, have come to adopt an overtly populist approach to exhibition-making and have by and large proved hesitant to embrace the critical questions posed by the revisionist art history that has so transformed the discipline within its university setting.52 The museum’s attempts to pay lip service to feminism are perhaps thus destined to end in uneasy compromise. Although the recent spate of temporary loan exhibitions focusing on the work of individual women artists may at first glance seem to represent the culmination of the feminist struggle to make visible the work of women artists, a closer examination of those shows reveals how critics and curators have in fact either ruthlessly ignored or wilfully misunderstood the nature of the feminist challenge to existing histories of art. Beneath their slick merchandising, shows such as Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon and Frida Kahlo appear rather to register the art establishment’s underlying uncertainty as to how to accommodate the work of artists who are women: 51

Ibid., 26. The opening salvos of the debate between the two main branches of the discipline were fired in the pages of the Art Bulletin. See “Art History and the ‘Blockbuster’ Exhibition” and the ensuing discussion by Freedberg, Jackson-Steps & Spear, “On Art History and the ‘Blockbuster’ Exhibition.” On the widening divide between art history as it is practised by academics and by museum professionals, see also Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction and Haxthausen, ed., The Two Art Histories. 52

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an uncertainty which is ultimately reflected in the tension between, on the one hand, the curatorial desire to present their work according to established museological conventions of display and interpretation and, on the other hand, the critical insistence on viewing this work as a category apart—as a visible manifestation of the innate difference of the “woman artist”.

Works Cited “Art History and the ‘Blockbuster’ Exhibition.” Art Bulletin, no. 68:3 (September 1986): 358-9. Asome, Carolyn. “Riding the Crest of the Mexican Wave.” The Times, 6 June 2005 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). Bal, Mieke. Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Bartra, Eli, and John Mraz. “Las Dos Fridas: History and Transcultural Identities.” Rethinking History, no. 9:4 (December 2005): 449-57. Benesch, Evelyn. Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon [exhibition leaflet]. London: Royal Academy Publications, 2004. Borsa, Joan. “Frida Kahlo: Marginalisation and the Critical Female Subject.” Third Text, no. 12 (Autumn 1990): 21-40. Broude, Norma, and Mary Garrard. The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact. New York: Harry N Abrams, 1994. Burton, Jane. Frida Kahlo [exhibition leaflet]. London: Tate Publishing, 2005. Campbell-Johnston, Rachel. “A Fiery Soul Who Made Suffering Her Soul’s Salve.” The Times, 6 June 2005 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). —. “City of Lonely Hearts.” The Times, 26 May 2004 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). —. “A Glossy Queen of the Shallow.” The Times, 12 May 2004 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). Carson, Juli. “On Discourse as Monument: Institutional Spaces and Feminist Problematics.” In Museums After Modernism: Strategies of

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Engagement, edited by Griselda Pollock & Joyce Zemans, 190-224. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Cumming, Laura. “Tubular Belles and All That Jazz.” The Observer, 16 May 2004 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). Darwent, Charles. “Deco Devil.” The Independent on Sunday, 25 April 2004 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). De Zegher, Catherine, ed. Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth-Century Art In, Of and From the Feminine. Cambridge MA & London: MIT Press, 1996. Deuchar, Stephen. “Whose Art History? Curators, Academics, and the Museum Visitor in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s.” In The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University, edited by Charles W. Haxthausen. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002. Dexter, Emma, and Tanya Barson. Frida Kahlo. London: Tate Publishing, 2005. Dorment, Richard. “When the Artist is the Canvas.” The Daily Telegraph, 8 June 2005 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). —. “Butterflies in a Vacuum.” The Daily Telegraph, 19 May 2004 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). Freedberg, S. J., Gervase Jackson-Steps, and Richard E. Spear. “On Art History and the ‘Blockbuster’ Exhibition.” Art Bulletin, no. 69:2 (June 1987): 295-98. Goodwin, Christopher. “Saint or Sinner?” The Sunday Times, 5 June 2005 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). Graham-Dixon, Andrew. “The Best of Me, Myself and I.” The Sunday Telegraph, 12 June 2005 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). —. “Amazonian Achievements.” The Sunday Telegraph, 16 May 2004 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). Gronberg, Tag. “‘Le Peintre installé par la femme’: Femininity and the Woman Painter. In Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon. London: Royal Academy Publications, 2004. Guerrilla Girls. “The Guerrilla Girls Bare All: An Interview.” In Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls. London: Pandora, 1995.

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Haxthausen, Charles W., ed. The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002. Hubbard, Sue. “The Art of Self-Exposure.” The Independent, 24 May 2005 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). Januszczak, Waldemar. “Clumsy, Hollow and Contrived.” The Sunday Times, 17 May 2004 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). Kelly, Mary. “Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism.” In Mary Kelly, Imaging Desire. Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press, 1996. Originally published in Screen, no. 22:3 (1981): 41-62. Lindauer, Margaret A. Devouring Frida: The Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999. Lubbock, Tom. “The Shape of Things.” The Independent, 18 May 2004 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). Molina Guzmán, Isabel. “Mediating Frida: Negotiating Discourses of Latina/o Authenticity in Global Media Representations of Ethnic Identity.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, no. 23:3 (August 2006): 232-51. O’Hagan, Sean. “Tales of Misery and Imagination.” The Observer, 12 June 2005 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). Pollock, Griselda. “Feminism, Femininity and the Hayward Annual Exhibition 1978.” In Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-85, edited by Rozsika Parker & Griselda Pollock. London: Pandora, 1987. Originally published in Feminist Review, no. 2 (1979): 33-54. Searle, Adrian. “Let Fridamania Commence.” The Guardian, 7 June 2005, G2 Arts Section (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). —. “The Irreducible Business of Being.” The Guardian, 25 May 2004 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006).

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Sewell, Brian. “If Only Frida… Had Been Fred.” The Evening Standard, 10 June 2005 (Newsbank Access UK & Ireland Newspapers , accessed 6 February 2006). Wallach, Allan. Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Wollen, Peter, and Laura Mulvey. “Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti.” In Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Women’s Ad Hoc Committee/Women Artists in Revolution/WSABAL. “To the Viewing Public for the 1970 Whitney Annual Exhibition.” In Feminism—Art—Theory, edited by Hilary Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Originally self-published, 1970.

CHAPTER TWO WHY HAVE THERE BEEN NO GREAT WOMEN DADAISTS? RUTH HEMUS

The question “Why have there been no great women Dadaists?” selfconsciously pays homage to the classic enquiry “Why have there been no great women artists?” posed by Linda Nochlin in her essay of the same name over thirty-five years ago.1 Since then, feminist art historians have produced a bank of biographies and critical analyses of individual women artists, as well as wide-ranging surveys of women’s work across historical periods and geographical contexts, exemplary among which are publications by Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker. In tandem, these scholars have confronted core ideological questions underlying Nochlin’s enquiry, concerning the relationships between women artists and the institutions of the arts, including the practical and financial restrictions experienced by women and their effect on their production; the reception of their artworks by museums, collectors and the public; and the unfavourable categorization and underestimation of women’s artworks in cultural histories. Finally, feminist scholars have challenged the ideological bases and genealogies of art history itself, and interrogated the limits of its usefulness as a framework for women artists. To echo Nochlin’s question from 1971 in 2007 may be deemed a regressive gesture. The preliminary task of rediscovering women artists, and the zealous mission to restore them to the canon, has already been consigned to the past as an exhausted “first wave” of feminism. Subsequently, vigorous and intense arguments about how to best study women artists have raged—from a sustained emphasis on gender-based creativity, to refusals of separation on account of gender, to calls for a revolution of the mechanisms of cultural institutions. Given that both 1

Originally published in Art News, no. 69 (January 1971). Reprinted in Nochlin, “Women, Art, and Power” and Other Essays, 145-178.

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contemporary feminism and postmodernism have interrogated accepted notions of history, art history, the canon, greatness and genius—actions and reactions that Nochlin anticipated—a repetition of her question at this juncture is vulnerable to accusations of atavism. Yet, as scholars find themselves entangled in progressively complex discourses around gender, subjectivity and identity, they continue to identify lacunae in our knowledge of some individuals or groups of women artists, suggesting that Nochlin’s motivating question has lost none of its potency. In these cases, the question remains relevant, pertinent and compelling on every level. The title of this essay is inspired not only by Nochlin but by contemporary anecdotal experience. Mention of women in Dada as a research focus is not infrequently met with the retort: “Were there any women Dadaists?” This question betrays all that is still implied by Nochlin’s question: both a fundamental lack of knowledge about individual women artists, and evidence of a cultural consciousness shaped by the discriminatory mechanisms of the institutions of the arts. The level of incredulity suggests how an initial impetus to “discover” women artists goes hand in hand with examining the mechanics behind their invisibility, and that this driving impetus itself is, in some cases, still legitimate and pressing, historical and timely. Women Dadaists do not register, let alone great women Dadaists. Far from being admitted into Dada’s mythical landscape, the term “Dada Women” does not even qualify as a meaningful sign. The continuing invisibility of Dada women lays bare the “many naïve, distorted, uncritical assumptions about the making of art” that Nochlin identified thirty-five years ago.2 The question “Why have there been no great women Dadaists?” is here notionally posed to two addressees: firstly, to existing art historical discourse around Dada, and secondly, to the curators of the large-scale Dada exhibition, which toured the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Musée National d’Art Moderne (Centre Pompidou) in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, between October 2005 and September 2006. The discussion in reference to the first addressee will act as context, consisting of a brief critical sketch of the treatment of Dada women in art historical publications, from primary accounts to relatively recent feminist interventions. The latter more concentrated focus will be on the presence and visibility of Dada women’s work in the Dada exhibition space(s) in France and the U.S. Evaluating structural layout, information panels and audio guides, it will ask whether these instances of 2

Ibid., 153.

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contemporary curatorial practice get any closer to answering the fundamental question that is the title of this essay or, indeed, whether they even address that question. In both cases, it remains to be seen whether Nochlin’s enquiry still resonates in the case of Dada or whether, in this socalled post-feminist era, feminist practice and considerations are being bypassed altogether. In general, art historical discourse on Dada has made little accommodation for women participants. Where their names appear, they are often anchored to scant biographical points of interest, with little or even no analysis of the qualities and impact of their work. As many women artists were involved in personal relationships with Dada’s men, they surface within the pages of art historical accounts predominantly in relation to their more famous male counterparts: as wives, girlfriends, mistresses or sisters. To put it another way: it was the husbands, boyfriends, lovers or brothers of Dada women who wrote accounts of the movement. Subjective and often self-promoting in nature, memoirs tend towards selective omissions. In the case of attitudes towards women, the grounds may not be so much fear of competition as sheer blindness. In the long term, art historical accounts perpetuate these narratives, resulting in a tradition of exclusion of “minor” figures (“minor” being a term that is often synonymous with “female”). This is at best lazy and at worst an indication of patriarchal ideologies at play not only within Dada, in the early part of the century, but also in later art historical discourse. So, for example, Sophie Taeuber is sometimes referred to as “the wife of Jean Arp”; Hannah Höch as “the girlfriend, or mistress, of Raoul Hausmann”, and Suzanne Duchamp variously as “the sister of Marcel Duchamp”, “sister of Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon”, and “wife of Jean Crotti”. Nochlin was aware that her question challenged “the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing substructure upon which the profession of art history is based.”3 Leah Dickerman (National Gallery of Art, Washington), who curated the U.S. Dada exhibitions in association with Anne Umland (MOMA, New York), hints at this phenomenon in the Dada context, in her introduction to a book of seminar papers published in 2005, but does not tackle the question of gender explicitly. She writes: “By and large […] Dada works of art and the careers of Dada artists have been examined from a monographic perspective, focusing on a small range of dominant figures.”4 With the 3 4

Ibid., 153. Dickerman and Witovsky, The Dada Seminars, 1.

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notable exception of Maud Lavin’s excellent study on Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife (1993), which situates her work both in relation to Dada aesthetics and a socio-historical context undergoing rapid change, the monographs have been squarely focused on men. Dickerman adds that “the narrative of Dada that has been written so far is largely an anecdotal one, full of tales of drinking, sex, scandal and games.”5 She stops short of mentioning gender in these analyses, but her choice of words implicitly reflects prevalent perceptions of Dada as a men’s club. How might the “small range of dominant figures” that Dickerman highlights be expanded? It must take women into account. A handful of scholars have begun to assert their opposition to a purely masculinist conception of the movement over recent years. In a Germanlanguage essay collection Etwas Wasser in der Seife (1999), which provides short overviews of ten Dada women, editor Britta Jürgs declares: “Dada was not purely a man’s thing!” and even “Dada is feminine”.6 A second essay collection, Women in Dada (2001), edited by Nadia Sawelson-Gorse, confronts and explores issues around identity and gender within Dada, and asks searching feminist questions about Dada’s credentials as an open, radical and socially-engaged movement. Chiefly concerned with artists based in New York, it underscores a lack of comparable research into women working in other cities, including the hubs Zurich, Berlin and Paris. Only three of nineteen essays focus on artists in Europe.7 In addition, two publications, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Modernity (2002) by Irene Gammel, and Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (2004) by Amelia Jones, focus on the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a German-born artist, poet and performer based in New York. Both publications take up the feminist project of foregrounding a largely overlooked woman artist, examine the socio-political context in which she worked, and place particular emphasis on gender. Jones, in particular, proposes not only radical reframings of Dada but new approaches to the methodologies of art history: I am interested in […] challenging the very rationalism of art history itself by using the Baroness’s disruptive, irrational example as a way of looking at the canonical works from a different, resolutely feminist point of view. In so doing, I hope to begin to question […] the very ways in which art 5

Ibid. Jürgs, Etwas Wasser in der Seife, 7 and 10. Orginal German: “Dada war keine reine Männersache!”; “Dada ist weiblich”. My translations. 7 Sawelson-Gorse is well aware of this focus, and points it out in footnote 10, pp. vii-viii. 6

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histories of this movement and the avant-gardes in general have been written.8

Her analysis aims not simply to insert the Baroness into a notional canon, but to stimulate wider reappraisals of Dada, the avant-garde and the writing of art history. The nature of the task that Jones takes on exemplifies the quagmire of theoretical approaches facing the feminist art historian in the twenty-first century. Jones seeks to resist the dominant practice of focusing on “major” male figures, choosing instead to focus on a woman who has been sidelined, yet ultimately she too grants prominence to a single figure. She challenges the privileging of Marcel Duchamp that is ubiquitous in art historical discourse and yet, even in so doing, cannot escape recourse to Duchamp as reference point. Jones confronts and foregrounds these complexities in a highly conscious and self-reflexive way, discussing these difficulties explicitly, and employing an inventive approach and style that resist conformity. These interventions take their place in a trajectory of feminist analyses of avant-garde movements published since the 1980s. Two influential books authored and edited respectively by Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1985, 1991) and Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-representation (1998), as well as Surrealism and Women (1991), edited by Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg, serve to highlight the role of women artists in Surrealism. Shulamith Behr’s comprehensive study Women Expressionists was published in 1988. More recently, John E. Bowlt and Matthew Drutt produced Amazons of the Avant-Garde (2000), to accompany an exhibition on six women artists associated with Russian Cubo-Futurism. These successful publications highlight the relative neglect of women in Dada. In response to the interest in Russian avant-garde women, Marjorie Perloff has written in The Futurist Movement, Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (2003), “women artists […] made a much greater contribution to Futurist painting, collage, and book illustration than did […] women artists to Dada. Why this was the case remains to be investigated.”9 Perloff’s statement comes close to the question “Why have there been no great women Dadaists?” but it wonders at a lack of participation by women in Dada—at least in comparison to women’s participation in Futurism, which of course is her emphasis in this instance—rather than at limits and limitations at the level of art historical discourse. My explicit echo of Nochlin’s question is by now determinedly 8 9

Jones, Irrational Modernism, 12-13. Preface, xxxvii.

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rhetorical: women did participate in Dada, as poets and piano players, critics and chroniclers, dancers and diseuses, sponsors and singers. They also count amongst Dada’s painters, sculptors and “monteurs”; they revisited handicrafts and exploited technology, took up new techniques and interrogated tradition, made aesthetic innovations and questioned conventions. Three of these women are Sophie Taeuber, Hannah Höch and Suzanne Duchamp. Their work comprises a wide range of visual art forms and techniques, including paintings, collages, photomontages, textiles, embroideries, sculptures, assemblages, dolls and puppets. Based in Zurich, Berlin and Paris respectively, they represent examples of women working in three key geographical centres of the Dada movement. The selection of these three as focal points, for the purposes of this essay, obviously entails omissions of other women, not least since my emphasis here is on visual art. Suffice to say that women writers and performers in Dada offer equally fertile bodies of work that have been even more roundly overlooked in discourses around Dada, their prominence suffering both from a less pronounced interest, in general, in Dada texts and performance, and from their entrenched status as “minor” players. Examples include the Paris-based poet Céline Arnauld, and the musician sisters Marguerite and Gabrielle Buffet. Equally, there remains plenty of scope for focus on women in other geographical locations including, for example, the artist Angelika Hoerle in Cologne, not to mention women in less well-known constellations including Barcelona, Belgium, the Netherlands, former Yugoslavia and Japan, which merit further research. Taking Taeuber, Höch and Duchamp as case studies, this analysis asks questions about the place of women in the recent Dada exhibition(s). Opening in Paris in October 2005, Dada moved on to Washington from February 2006 until May, and then to New York in June, where it closed in September 2006. An extraordinary number of objects were on display in Paris, as many as 1,200, whilst in the American locations the total number was between 400 and 500. Whilst previous exhibitions in the United States have dealt with Dada and Surrealism together, notably Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism (MOMA, 1936, curated by Alfred Barr) and Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage (MOMA, 1938, curated by William S. Rubin), the recent exhibition was the first major museum undertaking to explore Dada alone and in-depth. It was also the first in France to devote itself to Dada in forty years, the last being an exhibition held at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in 1966. The exhibition was widely reported in the United Kingdom, Europe and the U.S., resulting in increased media, scholarly and popular attention for the movement. Dada attracted a total of

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almost 875,000 visitors across its three venues, drawing in some 350,000 visitors to its three-month run at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the same number to the MOMA in New York, and close to 175,000 to the NGA in Washington. The potential for immediate and far-reaching impact was enormous, as was the opportunity to refigure and reformulate the Dada landscape, fissures and all. I will compare and contrast the show in France with one show in the U.S., i.e. the MOMA show, noting that the Washington and New York shows shared much common ground, and that there was one lead U.S. curator, Leah Dickerman from Washington NGA, who worked in association with Anne Umland at MOMA. In Paris, the exhibition was curated by Laurent le Bon. The exhibition organizers articulated a view shared by many Dada scholars that Dada was in urgent need of a review. Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, stated in a press release (3 January 2006): A re-evaluation of international Dada is long overdue. This exhibition enables the National Gallery of Art and its partner institutions the rare opportunity to define, for the first time, a major movement of the historical avant-garde.

The MOMA press releases hailed it as “one of the most influential avantgarde movements of the twentieth century” (17 May and 13 June 2006). The English-language introductory placard at the front of the Paris exhibition went so far as to speculate: “And what if it was now clear that Dada was the most important avant-garde movement of the whole century, or at least the most fertile?”10 This occasion for re-evaluation, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, offered an excellent opportunity to spotlight women’s roles and contributions. Terms such as “major”, “important”, “influential” and even “fertile”, used liberally in the press releases and information panels quoted above, could be interrogated, and their suitability for embracing “great” women Dadaists tested. The question remains whether the opportunity for profound investigation of Dada’s female aspect was seized, either in France or in the U.S. The Paris exhibition was staggering in scale. As the Paris curator Laurent Le Bon notes in a magazine interview in Le magazine littéraire (October 2005), “We came down on the side of profusion rather than

10 French version: “Et si Dada était le mouvement d’avant-garde le plus important du vingtième siècle, en tout cas le plus fécond?”

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selection.”11 The floor space of 2,220 square metres was organized into forty small rooms, each devoted to an artist, technique, place, theme or event, and each opening into further spaces, in an open gridwork. The organizers used the term “cellule” (“cell”), bringing to mind a network of activists, or an organic, reproductive and reproducing set of connections. Structurally, the exhibition sought to remain open and fluid, eschewing prescriptive guidance to visitors and facilitating countless pathways through the displays. Laid out like a chess board, an overt reference to a Dada interest in the game, it was designed to encourage innumerable moves or routes. In this way, it confronted the question of how an avantgarde movement like Dada, with its conflict of rigour and randomness, might be most appropriately represented within the walls of the museum. It also, in theory, allowed for multiple connections to be made by visitors themselves and a rejection of specific emphases or hierarchies. However, a certain amount of selection and privileging was unavoidable, of course, and curatorial choices—even in the most apparently comprehensive exhibition—represent a critical framing that is inevitably vulnerable to critique. The most conspicuous aspect of layout, with regard to the question of Dada women, is that only two cells were allocated to individual women artists. One was devoted to Sophie Taeuber, a Swiss-born artist active in the Zurich group from an early stage, together with her husband Jean Arp. Her remarkable eclecticism in both approach and materials was reflected in the display of nearly twenty objects in her dedicated room, including geometric paintings, collages, wooden heads and puppets. Hannah Höch, the only woman to gain access to the Berlin Dada circle—and whose membership of the “Dada Club” was variously facilitated and hampered by her relationship with the artist and poet Raoul Hausmann—was also allocated her own room, containing some twenty photomontages and collages. In addition, a further cell was given over to the Paris-based painter Suzanne Duchamp (“Marcel’s sister”) shared with her husband Jean Crotti, which was based around their breakaway movement “Tabu”, and which showed seven key works by her that have seldom been displayed in public and rarely reproduced. In a magazine interview in L’Objet d’Art (October 2005), Le Bon underscores the flexibility of the exhibition by underlining the fact that one could choose to enter it either via New York, and via Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, or “towards Switzerland and the presentation of 11

Cerf. “Entretien avec Laurent le Bon: Exposer Dada”, 39-40. Original French: “Nous avons pris le parti du foisonnement plus que de la sélection.” My translation.

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an essential female personality in Dada: Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Dada is one of the rare avant-garde movements that gave credit to women, and the exhibition underlines that.”12 After the first “Introduction” room, there were, in fact, six possible entry-points to the rest of the exhibition space. The visitor could turn left into “Before Dada”, right into “Cabaret Voltaire”, or take one of four entry-points straight ahead to: “New York”, “Readymade”, “Duchamp/Picabia”, “Taeuber-Arp” or “Zurich”, which together with a cell on Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling accessed via Zurich, constituted the second row of cells in the grid layout. The location of the Taeuber room towards the front edge of the exhibition space placed some emphasis on her, then, but not as effectively or as pointedly as the curator claims. After all, the visitor might take any number of directions, and come across her at any point in his/her journey though the grid. Meanwhile, Le Bon’s assertion that the Dada movement “gave credit” to its women participants is neither proven, discussed, nor even approached within the exhibition, and thus remains highly questionable. Likewise, his conviction that the exhibition underscores women’s participation is debatable. This abundant show almost inevitably includes examples of women’s work, within this vast collection of Dada artworks, but were women’s contributions underscored in any way? Was any attention drawn to women’s participation in a movement hitherto mapped mainly through its male figures? In fact there was scarcely any explicit engagement with the question of women in Dada—be it the circumstances of their participation, reception or the impact of gender on their productions—within the exhibition display. The single exception was the information panel in the Höch room which read, in full: The photomontages of Hannah Höch, the only woman in the Dada club and the partner of Raoul Hausmann, take their inspiration from the political and artistic events surrounding Berlin Dada. Whilst they are devoid of the sometimes political activism of certain works produced by the movement, this does not take away from the fact that they are genuinely hostile to the Weimar Republic and attest to the artist’s feminist convictions. Her “ladies’ work” pieces are more intimate, consisting of

12

Interview with Marie-Jo Vidalinc, 12. Original French: “vers la Suisse et la présentation d’une personnalité féminine essentielle du dadaïsme: Sophie TaeuberArp. Dada est un des rares mouvements d’avant-garde mettant les femmes à l’honneur, et l’exposition le souligne.” My translation.

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Chapter Two montages of sewing patterns and lace, an indication of the artist’s desire to break down the frontiers between art forms.13

The wording of the commentary is problematic. Firstly, there is the passivity implied in the suggestion that Höch “takes inspiration from […] artistic events”. Might it not be the case that she, along with the men in Berlin Dada, rather created her own inspirational artistic events? The argument is complicated here by the discrepancies between the French and English versions of the panel. The French version uses the verb “s’inscrire”, suggesting that Höch’s works “are inscribed”, or “take their place within” the political and artistic framework of Dada, which is a more positive pronouncement. Secondly, the comments play down the political aspect of Höch’s works. They are “devoid of the sometimes political activism” of certain other Dada works. Instead, they are deemed to be, at least, “genuinely hostile”. Again, the French version is slightly different, indicating that Höch’s works do not share the “sometimes aggressive militancy” of some other works. Both play down Höch’s political import, situating her in a more passive, conventional, feminised role and also ascribe to her resentment (hostility), instead of active, outwardly expressed anger, whereas many of Höch’s photomontages are exemplary satirical, oppositional and radical works. What is distinct about her work is that it includes—rather than omits—images of women, brings the domestic into the political sphere, and implicitly asserts that the personal is political. The photomontage Staatshäupter (Heads of State) (1918-20), for example, takes a photograph of two politicians of the time, President Ebert and Army Minister Noske, in their bathing suits, and sets it against the backdrop of an overtly feminine sewing pattern, ridiculing them in this meeting of two apparently polarised worlds. Staatshäupter was one of the few of Höch’s works to appear outside her dedicated room, in this case in the “Berlin” room. Perhaps it was seen to be appropriate to the grand themes of politics in that it features two male politicians, rather than the female figures that Höch often represents. The Berlin room, and an adjacent room, “Social Criticism/Grosz”, 13

English version, cell C4. French version: “Les photomontages d’Hannah Höch, unique femme au sein du Club dada et compagne de Raoul Hausmann, s’inscrivent dans l’actualité politique et artistique de Dada Berlin. Sans le militantisme parfois aggressif de certaines autres oeuvres du mouvement, ils n’en sont pas moins de réels pamphlets contre la République de Weimar et attestent des convictions féministes de l’artiste. Plus intimes sont les «ouvrages de dames», montages de patrons de couture et de dentelles qui témoignent de la volonté de l’artiste de faire disparaître les frontières entre les arts.”

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emphasize the Berlin Dadaists’ social and political critique. Both cells offered an opportunity to comment on the rapidly changing gender roles of the time, and to integrate gender, exemplified by Höch’s work, within the broader political context of the movement, but they fail to make connections. On a related point, none of Höch’s work was selected for the “Photomontage” room, in spite of the fact that she shared in the moment of the technique’s discovery with Hausmann, produced prolifically, was exhibited in the most important and infamous exhibition held by the Berlin Dada group, the Berlin Dada-Messe (Dada International Fair) in 1920, and counts amongst only a handful of artists to exploit the aesthetic, formal and thematic potential of the new art form. The layout of the Paris space is innovative, intended to represent Dada’s multiplicity and eclecticism, but the selection and organization of artworks into small cells can also, nevertheless, function divisively. A more positive aspect of the commentary on Höch is the mention of the word “feminist”, the only reference to feminism in the exhibition which, alongside observations about Höch’s use of lace and sewing patterns, seeks to demonstrate some of the qualities particular to her oeuvre. The phrase “ladies’ work”, which takes its cue from “ouvrages de dames” in French, is an odd, atavistic choice of term, but the use of quotation marks suggests that it is used knowingly, at least. Nevertheless, the commentary could usefully have drawn more explicit attention to the breakdown in barriers not only in terms of art forms but in terms of the ways in which gender works on and through these forms, shaping expectations, stereotypes and reception. Höch calls upon traditional women’s occupations and handicrafts, and transfers them into the public space. She refigures the patterns into jagged, geometric shapes that at once recall the domestic arena and scientific and industrial design. Recourse to the adjective “intimate”, in the commentary, neutralizes this effect. It is a typical characteristic of critiques of women’s work, akin to the ubiquitous terms “personal” or “feminine”. In fact, Höch’s work could equally be described as “political”, “large-scale” or “socially-engaged”. It is the combination of everyday, familiar detail and materials, and far-ranging, media-driven images and information that characterises her work. It might be argued that the absence of any sustained thematic engagement with the question of women in Dada throughout the rest of the exhibition is typical of a non-didactic approach, and of a desire to leave the vast range of materials to speak for themselves. However, the exhibition does use some of the cells to address and highlight selected thematic concerns. For example, it includes a cell named “Identity”, the placard of which reads:

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Chapter Two In New York, a place that was conducive to the declaration of differences, Marcel Duchamp created Rrose Sélavy, his feminine double. In Germany, Kurt Schwitters identified himself with Anna Blume in his poems. Theo van Doesburg […] took on the name I. K. Bonset when he was Dada.14

In addressing “Identity”, the curators opted to highlight the phenomenon of men appropriating female identities through cross-dressing and pseudonyms, but make no mention of women’s approaches to identity. Even then, this theme could have been enhanced by the inclusion of Höch’s photomontage Da Dandy (1919), which featured in her dedicated cell. In it, fragments of body images almost morph into one another. The figures display the accessories of femininity—pearl necklaces, lipstick, bangles, heeled shoes, a hat and a handbag. Four female faces and a man’s face overlap at the head of the figure(s), with eyes closed, obscured or replaced with cutouts, giving the impression of a single figure made up of many disparate parts. The title, bringing together dandy and Dada, could refer to the group’s eccentricity, its non-conformism and refusal of social norms, to Höch herself as a woman (a feminising influence) within the male-dominated Dada group, or—as Brigid Doherty has suggested—to the male Dadaist, specifically Hausmann, as dandy. Doherty writes of this photomontage: “it is a witty image of his [Hausmann’s] identification with fashionable ladies, an image that at the same time takes its own ironic distance from the dandy’s fantasy.”15 To give another example, the curators fail also to draw on the recent work by Amelia Jones, which examines the figure of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in relation to sexuality, gender constructs and feminism. The Dada years were a period of massive social and political upheaval, in terms of women’s—and men’s—roles, yet the “Identity” room excludes explorations of women’s subjectivity and femininity altogether. Here is an instance of a contemporary, even fashionable, gender-inflected analysis that draws attention to a spectrum of masculine identities, but that bypasses not only feminist approaches but women altogether. The Paris exhibition was so abundant, in terms of the number of exhibits it brought together, that it could not fail to be rated as inclusive in a purely quantative sense. In terms of the positioning of individuals’ work, both Höch and Taeuber were given appropriate emphasis through the 14

French version: “A New York, dans un climat propice à l’affirmation des différences, Marcel Duchamp crée Rrose Sélavy, son double féminin. En Allemagne, Kurt Schwitters s’identifie dans ses poésies à Anna Blume. Et lorsqu’il est dada, Theo van Doesburg […] est I. K. Bonset.”

15

Doherty, “Fashionable ladies, dada dandies.”

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allocation to each of a cell, and even the work of the lesser-known artist Suzanne Duchamp was incorporated. However, the organizers in Paris missed the opportunity to draw attention to a salient issue that could have been fruitfully tackled at this new juncture. It did not engage with the question of women’s roles and interventions in Dada in any sustained way, either on an individual or broader thematic basis. If this approach represented a post-feminist choice, a rejection of the relevance of gender on art production, then it is undermined by the engagement with constructions of masculinity in the “Identity” room. Was it perhaps simply an oversight? David Hopkins, in Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (2004), discusses the Dada movement’s discrepancies, including gaps between theory and action, which he calls “ideological blindspots”. One of these, he notes, is attitudes towards women.16 Arguably, this exhibition shares a similar blindspot, or at least does nothing to confront or discuss the issue of women’s roles within Dada. In this respect, we might draw an analogy with Dada itself, as a whole: it declared itself non-programmatic and unregulated, which was one of its appeals, but ultimately it failed to engage with, call for or act out radical change on a social level. Just as the ideological blindspot carried over from primary Dada accounts to critical literature since the end of the movement, so the blindspot in the Paris exhibition might be said to have been transmitted to and perpetrated by the media that have responded to it. An analysis of the coverage of the exhibition would require more in-depth study than is possible here, but there is room for one telling example. The French monthly Le magazine littéraire printed a thirty-eight page dossier on Dada in October 2005 to coincide with the exhibition opening in Paris. Of its approximately thirty-five featured images, including reproductions of artworks, pamphlets, and photographs, there is not a single image of, or by, a woman Dadaist. Meanwhile, of fifteen freshly-written articles, none deals with a woman Dadaist. Within the entire magazine, Sophie Taeuber’s name is mentioned just three times, Hannah Höch’s three times, and Suzanne Duchamp’s not at all. Le Bon’s comment quoted above, which appeared in L’Objet d’Art (October 2005) appears to be a rare, if not the sole, comment by the curator on women in Dada. There is scarcely any evidence in some publications that women participated in Dada at all (“Were there any women Dadaists?”), let alone any engagement with the issue of gender relations within the group, or the treatment of women in the Dada canon (“Why have there been no great women Dadaists?”). 16

Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism, 123. See Chapter 5, in particular, on gender.

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Would the U.S. context prove any different? The less extensive exhibition at the MOMA in New York was laid out differently to the Paris show, namely divided according to cities: Zurich, Paris, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne and New York. Its more conventional design is vulnerable to critique, as being overly concerned with neat geographic divisions, but there was, again, an attempt to reflect fluidity and flux: the visitor could enter either via New York, or via Zurich, the layout described in a press release (13 June 2006) as “a choice reflecting Dada’s dual points of origin”. An information panel offered a summary of activity for each city, and smaller information panels, alongside selected works throughout the exhibition space, sketched out individual biographies, formal and thematic issues. In addition, there was an audio guide to accompany the exhibition. Entering via Zurich, the visitor was immediately confronted by Sophie Taeuber’s work: a cabinet of twelve puppets, against a partition wall, in direct line of sight. Passing into the Zurich room, the visitor was met with a central glass cabinet containing eight of Taeuber’s wooden sculpted Dada heads, flanked by her paintings and collages hung on the walls. The positioning and number of her artworks (some thirty) afforded her maximum visibility and signalled that she was a prominent and prolific figure in Zurich. An information panel next to Untitled (Duo-Collage) (1918), one of the many collages that Taeuber produced in collaboration with her husband Jean Arp, stressed both her particular contribution to this partnership, and her individual importance to the innovation of geometric painting: [Untitled (Duo-Collage)] is among the earliest to employ a rigorous grid structure. For Taeuber, the overall abstract pattern of the grid was ingrained in the tradition of weaving, and it provided the artists with a predetermined structure of regular horizontal and vertical units, minimizing the need for subjective decision making.

The attention given to her arts and crafts background is continued in a commentary on the audio guide, which offers further information on one of Taeuber’s wooden heads, Untitled (Dada Head) (1920). It begins by underscoring her unusual position as a woman in a mostly male group, noting that the object “was made by Sophie Taeuber, who was one of the only female participants in Zurich Dada.” It adds, “She was one of the first amongst the Zurich Dadaists to very clearly demonstrate the way that the applied arts could contribute to the development of abstract art.” In this way, it aptly both emphasizes her more traditional (female) training, and the contribution of that experience to the (male) bastion of abstract art. The commentary offers a starting-point from which to consider notions of

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marginality in relation to avant-garde arts, applied arts and crafts, and women’s contributions and roles in both areas. It goes on to link Taeuber’s object to additional, broad aesthetic concerns: portraiture, non-Western art, and the rejection of straightforward mimesis. The Berlin room, meanwhile, included some twelve photomontages and collages by Hannah Höch, as well as replicas of two dolls, the originals of which were displayed at the Dada International Fair in 1920. The panel next to the dolls read: “Höch regularly included dolls and mannequins in her work to reflect on women’s roles in society. Her handsewn ‘Dada Dolls’ recall her formal training in schools of the applied arts, where she was recognised for her needlework.” Again, the reference to handicrafts is an important one. It is generally neglected, in discussions about Dada production, in favour of a more standard focus on machine production and technology. Höch, too, responded to the challenges that mechanical reproduction placed on artistic production by using readymade photomatter in her photomontages, and including images of machinery, transport and industry. However, she also continued to experiment with more traditional manual production methods to examine and transgress the boundaries between handicraft and machine production. This choice also makes reference to creative activities traditionally associated with women, pushing the boundaries between art and handicrafts, work and hobbies, and old and new technologies. In fact, both Höch and Taeuber earned a living through their handicraft skills: Taeuber was a textiles teacher, and Höch produced fabric designs, as well as dress and embroidery patterns, for the Ullstein publishing house. The impact of handicrafts on women’s artworks, as evident in both these Dada women’s work, has of course been explored extensively by feminist art historians in many other cases and contexts.17 Another work from the Dada International Fair featured in the exhibition, and which benefits from both an information panel and audio guide commentary, is Höch’s best-known photomontage, the large-scale Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands) (1919-1920).18 Crucially, the audio guide was used, like the panel relating to the dolls, to discuss core Dada ideas and gender-related issues in conjunction to each 17 See, for example: Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 1984; Elinor et al., Women and Craft, 1987. 18 Neither the dolls nor Cut with the Kitchen Knife were included in the Paris exhibition. The reason for this is not clear but, since they are included in the catalogue, their omission is likely to have been practical, rather than ideological.

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other. In the first place, it highlights Dada’s insistence on engagement with the world, the rejection of dominant artistic techniques and media, and the development of the technique of photomontage itself. This places Höch firmly within the framework of stock Dada approaches, rather than isolating her from them, and contrasts favourably with her absence, in Paris, from the photomontage room. The commentary also draws attention to the kitchen knife in the title as “referring both to stereotypical roles of women in society and to [Höch’s] own artistic process.” It thus neatly encompasses both thematic concerns (the feminine instrument inflicting violence on the male-ruled Weimar state) and formal concerns (Höch’s cutting process to produce the work). Additionally, it makes reference to the array of women figures that appear in the work (dancers, athletes, gymnasts), claiming the subtext of the work as the “new role of women in postwar Germany.” Finally, it highlights the inclusion of a map of places where women had won the right to vote by 1920, included in the bottom right-hand corner of the work, combined with Höch’s self-portrait, calling it “an emphatic recognition of women as a vehicle for change.” Here is a reading that does not shy away from feminist interpretations. With only three works by Suzanne Duchamp in the exhibition, it is gratifying to witness her work highlighted by the treatment of one of her pieces on the audio guide. Broken and Re-Established Multiplication (Multiplication brisée et rétablie) (1918-19) is a complex work that combines painting and words. The audio guide refers to Duchamp as “the younger sister of Marcel Duchamp” without labouring the biographical connection, but concerns itself mainly with the formal and thematic aspects of the poem-painting. It underlines the ways in which Duchamp’s composition weaves text and image, painting and language, to produce layering and a metaphorical subtext that require an active reading from the viewer. Given that this work is little known and rarely discussed in literature on Dada, its emphasis here is notable. It affords a focus on Suzanne Duchamp as a “minor” figure, and expands on the typical Dada canon. The commentary on this work completes a total of three on works by women, amongst a total number of nineteen discussions of individual works by twelve different artists. More important than the proportions is the qualitative nature of the commentaries. Rather than focusing only on biographical details or thematic concerns—as so often happens in reductive accounts of women’s work—they consistently encompass formal concerns too. In two cases, and where appropriate, the commentaries explicitly tackle gender, thus casting a spotlight on women in Dada. The content of the audio guide, its selections and approaches, indicate a consciousness about women in Dada, on the part of the curators,

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that is not made evident in the Paris show. The New York exhibition at least begins to draw attention to the particular contributions and contexts of women in Dada, specifically on the cultural and socio-political context of their production, but leaves the way open for a focused and thorough investigation. The different curatorial and educational approaches of the blockbuster Dada exhibition throw into relief the debate on whether feminism still has a role to play in illuminating art practise and in providing alternative approaches to understandings of art history. The final section of this essay turns attention to a further exhibition which, though smaller in scale, adds fuel to that debate. Dada’s Boys was held at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh from May to July 2006, during which time it attracted nearly 25,000 visitors. Accompanied by a book-length essay, Dada’s Boys: Identity and Play in Contemporary Art (2006), its thematic basis was the ways in which masculine subjectivity is played out both in Dada art, and in the work of later and contemporary artists. Its curator, David Hopkins, writes: Dada’s Boys deals with dada in historical terms […] and the way in which the witty gestures and provocations of […] artists have provided the impetus for artistic explorations of male identity or subjectivity in the last quarter of a century.19

Like the “Identity” room in the Paris show, Dada’s Boys highlights more than ever the fact that the particular circumstances of women in Dada have scarcely been approached, even as the notion of Dada as a men’s club is being reiterated and expanded. In one obvious respect, Hopkins’s venture represents the opposite side of the coin to the theme of women in Dada, emphasising as it does a pervasive strand of maleness as characteristic of Dada. Art as male? Dada as male? These are scarcely surprising concepts, at one level, and in some sense might even be perceived as reactionary. On the other hand, building on the broadening church of recent gender and identity studies, Dada’s Boys treats male identity as nuanced and shifting. It draws attention to appropriations of feminine identities, for example, and does so in a more in-depth and considered way than the “Identity” room could, but—also like that space—it begs the question “Were there any women Dadaists?” With its insistence on gender as a vital factor in the development of certain aesthetic techniques and themes, and as crucial to the dynamics of the Dada group, Dada’s Boys is yet another trigger to undertake a full scrutiny of women’s production and status within Dada. 19

Hopkins, Dada’s Boys, 15.

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This exploration of male identity and subjectivity reminds us that the question of female identity and subjectivity in art is far from worn-out. In this so-called post-feminist era, the exploration of the full spectrum of gender and sexuality constructions (masculine, feminine, lesbian, bisexual, homosexual and transgender) should not replace and extinguish feminist concerns, but should take place alongside a continued exploration of, and advocacy for, the struggle for the status and identity of women artists, whose work is bypassed again and again, even in the twenty-first century. Dada offers one case in point. Any large-scale re-evaluations of that movement that fail to make use of, or at least discuss, feminist theoretical approaches developed over the last decades, and which fail to wonder at women’s particular contributions to Dada, leave hanging an increasingly evident question mark. In the new introduction to her classic text Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art, first published in 1988 and reissued in 2003, Griselda Pollock states: “The work of feminist theory is a radical questioning, a way of thinking and not just a short-lived partisan advocacy.”20 Questions about the ways in which women’s work is produced, received, presented and discussed in the museum space and in art historical discourse persist more than thirty years on. The dismissal of feminism as unfashionable, not only in cultural but also social and political terms, only makes these questions more pressing. “Why have there been no great women artists?” should and must be asked again and again, in each time period, with each new publication and at each new exhibition. Whilst Dada was on show at the MOMA, the Francis M. Naumann Gallery in New York took a welcome step by hosting the exhibition Daughters of New York Dada for a brief period of time (8 June28 July 2006). This small showcase of six New York artists—Florine Stettheimer, Clara Tice, Mina Loy, Katherine S. Dreier, Beatrice Wood and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven—was hailed by the New York Times (6 July 2006) as constituting “a crucial chapter”, added to the MOMA show. Women in Dada, overlooked throughout the chronicles of Dada, have indeed become a missing chapter. The increasing amount of attention recently paid to Dada must be seized upon. Stimulated by Dada the blockbuster, and provoked by Dada’s Boys, it is surely time to underscore and showcase the part women played in Dada both in the U.S. and across Europe.

20

Pollock, Vision and Difference, xx.

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Works Cited Behr, Shulamith. Women Expressionists. Oxford: Phaidon, 1988. Le Bon, Laurent, ed. Dada [catalogue for the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, 5 October 2005-9 January 2006]. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2005. Bowlt, John E. and Matthew Drutt. Amazons of the Avant-Garde: Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2000. Caws, Mary Ann, Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg, eds. Surrealism and Women. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991. Chadwick, Whitney. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. London: Thames & Hudson, 1991. —. ed. Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-representation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Cotter, Holland. “Dada’s Women, Ahead of Their Time.” The New York Times Arts Review (July 6, 2006). “Dada: L’Esprit de la Révolte de Tristan Tzara à Guy Debord.” Dossier in Le magazine littéraire, no. 446 (October 2005). “Dada: Exposition au Centre Pompidou.” Special edition of L’Objet d’Art, no. 19 (October 2005). Dickerman, Leah, ed. Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York, Paris [catalogue to accompany the exhibitions in Paris, Washington and New York]. Washington: National Gallery of Art and New York: DAP, 2005. Dickerman, Leah with Matthew S. Witovsky. The Dada Seminars. Washington: National Gallery of Art and DAP, 2005. Dickerman, Leah, Lowry, Glenn, and Umland, Anne. Dada [audio guide for exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 16 June-11 September 2006]. . Doherty, Brigid. “Fashionable ladies, dada dandies.” Art Journal (Spring 1995).

Elinor, Gillian et al., eds. Women and Craft. London: Virago, 1987. Gammel, Irene. Baroness Elsa. Gender, Dada and Modernity: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Hopkins, David. Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

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—. Dada’s Boys: Identity and Play in Contemporary Art. Edinburgh: The Fruitmarket Gallery, 2006. Jones, Amelia, ed. The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. —. Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2004. Jürgs, Britta, ed. Etwas Wasser in der Seife: Portraits dadaistischer Künstlerinnen und Schrifstellerinnen. Grambin and Berlin: Aviva, 1999. Lavin, Maud. Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1993. Museum of Modern Art, NY, Press releases: “Dada comes to the Museum of Modern Art” (13 June 2006); “Dada comes to MOMA for last stop on tour” (17 May 2006). . National Gallery of Art, Washington, Press release: “First Major International Dada Museum Exhibition in the United States Opens at the National Gallery of Art.” (3 January 2006). . Nochlin, Linda. “Why have there been no great women artists?” Originally published in Art News, no. 69 (January 1971). Reprinted in: “Women, Art, and Power” and Other Essays, Linda Nochlin, 145-178. London: Thames & Hudson, 1989. Parker, Rozsika and Griselda Pollock. Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. London: HarperCollins, 1981. Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the making of the feminine. London, The Women’s Press, 1984. Perloff, Marjorie. The Futurist Movement, Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pollock, Griselda. Vision & Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. London and New York: Routledge, 2003 (1st ed. 1988). —. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. London: Thames & Hudson, 1999. Sawelson-Gorse, Nadia, ed. Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender and Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

CHAPTER THREE “DRAWS LIKE A GIRL”: THE NECESSITY OF OLD-SCHOOL FEMINIST INTERVENTIONS IN THE WORLD OF COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS ALISIA GRACE CHASE

Nowhere was Griselda Pollock’s understanding that the canon “contributes to the legitimation of masculinity’s excusive identification with creativity and with culture” more recently apparent than in the exhibition Masters of American Comics, jointly organized by the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.1 Even aside from the 2005 exhibition’s almost laughably démodé title, which is at once reminiscent of the Masters of the Universe animated series and the most atavistic art historical mythos, the attempt of the two male curators to “establish a canon of fifteen of the most influential artists working in the medium [of comics and graphic novels] throughout the twentieth century” without including a single female was not so much alarmingly anachronistic as completely normative within the supposedly “postfeminist,” “post-punk,” “post-Riot Grrrl” cultural discourse of new millennium America. In this discourse, largely constructed by the popular media and further perpetuated by it, feminism (and other movements that challenge hegemonic thought) is variably purported to be dead, unnecessary, or completed, and protesting against gender discrimination from one’s own place of privilege—in the style of the Guerilla Girls—is quickly derided, not only by the mainstream press and pop culture industries, but even, at times, by contemporary young women who have been born and raised with societal freedoms heretofore unimaginable to the second-wave generation. To revisit the basic feminist understanding 1

Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 9.

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that one’s gender may still provide a stumbling block to parity is often viewed as archaically tiresome, and one risks being labelled by one’s own peers as “a completely obnoxious, shrill, annoying, outdated old-school feminist” (to use the exact wording of one young female cartoonist).2 Within such a linear construction of the feminist movement—in which vociferous protest is seen as “old-school”—the fallacious notion of a postfeminist age is nonetheless a persuasive and conveniently malleable concept that speaks directly to and about white, middle-class women, those who have seemingly benefited most from the early gains in opportunity and advancement, as it subliminally reassures them that progress has indeed been made, even as statistics suggest otherwise.3 This is a point which is entirely relevant within a discussion of comics and graphics novels in the U.S., as being a predominantly white and middleclass field, it provides an excellent area in which to demonstrate that the gains are not as widespread as post-feminist discourses would lead one to believe. It might not be surprising in such an era, then, that as a response to the ultimate selection of predominantly white, middle-class, male artists who were chosen for the Masters show, some industry bloggers pointed out that there have never been as many women working in comics and graphic novels as there are now.4 Offered as a rejoinder, however, this fact is 2

It is important to clarify here that my conscientious use of such terms as “parity” and “equitable representation” is done to expediently point out that what postfeminist cultural discourses perpetuate as being achieved should not be taken as such. I recognize, like Luce Irigaray, that claims to equality “at the level of superficial cultural critique […] as a means of liberating women are utopian,” and perhaps dangerous to women, as well. The cartoonist I spoke with about sexism in the field asked to remain anonymous, as the field is so small, but not surprisingly, she says she pretty “much fell into that ‘everything’s equal” mindset for quite a long period, particularly at the beginning of her career. Now that she has faced more than a decade of subtle and not-so-subtle sexism, she sees things differently. 3 In terms of economic parity, as recently as 2006, the New York Times reported that a working woman only earns 75 cents to her male counterpart’s dollar. See David Leonhardt, “Scant Progress on Closing Gap in Women’s Pay,” New York Times, December 24, 2006. With regards to the art field, a self-published study from 2005 by Eleanor Dickinson on gender discrimination in the art world, showed that although the number of male and female artists in the United States is fairly equal (54.5% male, 44.5% female), when it comes to invited exhibitions, men are still overwhelmingly chosen (77% to 23%). 4 Berwick, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Comic-Book Artists?” Here, one of the curators, John Carlin, himself defined the Masters artists as such: white, middle-class, and male. One of the fifteen cartoonists, however, George Herriman, is African-American.

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redolent of what Sarah Projansky terms the “equality and choice postfeminism” rebuttals surrounding the place of all working women in early twenty-first century America, and the erroneous presumption that sheer numbers are proof of equitable representation, remuneration, and opportunities for advancement and recognition.5 In both instances, what is too often deduced from such protests is the more insidious falsehood that if women had the talent, desire to succeed, or in this case, the artistic respect of their peers, they’d be breaking right through that glass ceiling or hanging right up on that museum wall too. Such evaluative claims were only further bolstered when shortly after the Masters show opened, editors of Comic Art Magazine organized an exhibition “to celebrate the current golden age of North American comics” at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery in New York City. Although the gallery’s press release for Speak: Nine Cartoonists stated that the group of exhibiting artists was “diverse,” gender didn’t seem to be a consideration in their definition of this too easily depoliticized word; as in the aforementioned exhibition in Los Angeles, not one female artist was included, despite the fact that during the “current golden age” there are more women creating comics and graphic novels than ever before. As the Los Angeles museum and New York gallery shows manifest, at least within the “comics as fine art” environs, real-world acculturation seems to have trumped what were presumed to be the most basic feminist art historical advancements made within the last three decades, and one is forced to admit, as Mira Schor has in support of the continued relevancy of feminism, “that we have a problem even if no one wants to think so.”6 It is my intention in this 5

As Projansky and others have pointed out, the polymorphous nature of postfeminism is what makes it both culturally pervasive and academically problematic. In Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture, she outlines five categories of post-feminism, of which “equality and choice postfeminism” is the third. Projanksy suggests that this strain sees feminism as having accomplished its goals so thoroughly that it is no longer needed. I share Projanksy’s belief, however, that this view is perilous, as it naively presumes we have reached a point of emancipation in all fields for all women, 67. 6 Mira Schor, “Email to a Young Female Artist”, Gloria: Another Look at the Feminist Art of the 1970s, 9. Schor, one of the first students in Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro’s Feminist Art Program, as well as a collaborator in creating Womanhouse, writes: “I have no idea what it would be like to be 21 now, in a world with Madonna, J.Lo. and Buffy, Venus and Serena, the Frida Kahlo industry, GRRLL this and that, kick ass female rock stars, and 1000s of other famous, powerful, talented business- and media-savvy women, when the glass ceiling is high and made of verilux, transparent and invisible. Young women artists can feel a sense of entitlement unimaginable to the seventies generation. But just

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chapter (as “old-school” as this might make me sound) to outline some of the rudimentary ways in which choices made by the Masters curators not only culturally erase female artists’ contribution to the field of comics and graphic novels, but also ignore feminist methodologies, and thus, not surprisingly, recycle totally antediluvian notions about art and artists. I hope to simultaneously illustrate how the denigration implicit in the descriptive “draws like a girl” (a phrase which comics scholar Trina Robbins has suggested accounts for the omission of women in these exhibitions and elsewhere) is not so much a gendered aesthetic bias as it is the comics world version of the continued prejudice against subject matter that pertains to female experience, desire, and fantasy as inscribed by a woman. Towards the close of the chapter, I examine ways in which select female cartoonists and curators have intervened by reclaiming the phrase’s suggestion of difference and using it to their advantage, as well as by employing what Pollock calls “a matrixial model,” composed of woman to woman moments, both in practice and in theory. It should come as no surprise that the “first official canon of comic art” in America failed to include women, particularly if one accepts Pollock’s proposal that a canon “should be understood as both a discursive structure and a structure of masculine narcissism within the exercise of cultural hegemony.”7 Even aside from its popular reputation as a place where men are egocentrically viewed as buff, brave superheroes, and women can still be visually represented as large-breasted bimbos without much objection, the ninth art was, until very recently, one of the last pop culture holdouts against feminist interventions, and its lineages are indisputably patriarchal. When one discovers how few women have won the major Eisner or Harvey award categories (more or less the comics world equivalent of the Oscars and Emmy awards) over the seventeen years since their inception, and then notices the even smaller number that were nominated, it is difficult not to attribute such absences to “old-school” sexism. Particularly when the field’s most notable feminist, the aforementioned Robbins, has stated that many critics of her feminist revisions of comic history have called her “vicious, nasty, sour, and humorless,” among other insults, and the writers of such blogs as Girls Read Comics Too And They’re Pissed are continually subjected to juvenile goading, anti-feminist slurs, and misogynistic epithets. Certainly, advancements in gender parity have been check out some of the statistics of the international art market and the glass ceiling drops a bit. And as long as being naked is still one of the best ways for a— young—woman to get ahead […] and when in so many other countries and cultures, women remain chattel, we have a problem even if no wants to think so.” 7 Pollock, xiv.

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made in what has always been a notoriously male-dominated arena in the United States, but they are by and large exceptional and incremental in the popular realm, or limited to the growing subgenre of literary comics.8 To wit: Persepolis, a graphic novel about growing up female in revolutionary seventies Tehran by the Iranian-French cartoonist Marjane Satrapi, reaped reams of national, mainstream press, as did its sequel, but one might legitimately question if these texts would have been quite as successful prior to 9-11, before many American publishers recognized that there was a growing market for stories about the Middle East, particularly those which decry fundamentalist Islam. Similarly exceptional, it is primarily avant-garde “art” comics publishers such as Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly, which consistently publish work that could be termed “femalecentric” in content. It is an irrefutably frustrating moment in comics history: although the work of female artists is highly visible at such international comic conferences as Comic Con in San Diego, CA, or Angouleme in France, when one examines the graphic novel and comics section of most Barnes & Noble’s or Borders bookstores, the number of texts written by male authors swamps the number written by women, further perpetuating the popular misconception that comics are mainly by, about, and for men. Not only are men the only ones in the big museums, they are also the ones making the majority of the admittedly little money to be made from publishing. Certainly, it seems as if some of those slogans from twenty-year old Guerilla Girls posters are as appropriate now as ever.9 The fact that seemingly rudimentary concerns raised by second-wave feminist art historians and artists are still critically relevant and necessary within the comics world was confirmed by such immediate responses to the Masters show as the ARTNews Online article that ran shortly after the show opened. The commentary, “Why Have There Been No Great 8

Tom Spurgeon argued otherwise in his Comics Reporter blog discussing the omission of women in the Masters show, giving what he opined was contemporary evidence that women are as well-respected in the field of comics as are men. Nevertheless, he contradicted himself at the close by concluding that there needs to be “a greater appreciation of female cartoonists.” (19 May 2006). 9 Two come immediately to mind. The first, from 1985, states: “Women in America Earn only 2/3 of What Men Do/Women Artists Earn Only 1/3 of What Men Do.” The second, from the renowned Advantages of Being a Female Artist (1989), satirically states that one of these advantages is “Not Having to be in Shows with Men.”

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Women Comic Book Artists?” initially promised to reassert some of the same valid socio-political inquiries found in Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking 1971 essay. Unfortunately, author Carly Berwick accomplished little more than a titular co-option of Nochlin’s radical query, and egregiously pandered to the notion that anyone who may take issue with the fact that the first museum-sanctioned canon that leaves out “half of the population” must be a “querulous feminist.” Perhaps even more perilously, the only cartoonist of the current post-feminist generation featured in the article, the prolific and critically lauded Jessica Abel, is quoted as saying, “There were women comics artists, but they were not as important.”10 It is difficult to believe that Berwick would not have foreseen how this quote, without one to counterbalance it, might be conveniently used to dismiss any curatorial protests made by “feminazi comic book geeks,” as one male blogger called them.11 To her credit, however, Berwick did conclude with the assertion that the continued omission of female artists within the canon looks like a bias that must make it harder for women to break through the field than men. Robbins, a practicing cartoonist and tireless spokeswoman for equitable representation in the field, summed up this prejudice in her comments to Berwick as a “pervasive esthetic mindset” that demotes comics by women to the nebulous category of “draws like a girl.” 12 The medium of comics (at least in the States) has traditionally been linked to the look of its most dominant, and narratively masculinist, genre—the heavily inked, cleanlined style of DC and Marvel superhero comics. Although one would be hard-pressed to suggest that many, or even the majority, of women artists have a “wobbly” or “slightly harried” hand, this overt gendering of style, as feminist art historians would term it, seems as ubiquitous in the comics realm as it has been in other fine art disciplines throughout history.13 One of the obvious problems with the Masters exhibition is that the curators claimed to have selected the artists in order to “showcase the 10

Cited in Berwick. Ibid. An anecdote regarding the influence of Abel’s remarks: When I visited the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art to see the She Draws Comics exhibition, the director asked why I was there. When I answered that I was critiquing the omission of women from the Masters show, he immediately responded, “Did you read what Jessica Abel said?” clearly under the impression that if a successful female artist like Abel could state that the majority of women cartoonists in the twentieth century weren’t worthy of inclusion, then he could, too. 12 Ibid. 13 Broude and Garrard, Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism, 15-16. 11

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mastery and formal innovations they brought to bear on the tradition,” a statement which only begs such seemingly basic feminist art historical questions as whose tradition it is and who defines it. That they can posit such an erroneous claim in the year 2005 at a major art institution, however, perpetuates the more troubling prevarication that the feminist battle was already waged and lost by women cartoonists because none of their contributions were significant enough to be included. By its very nature, as Nanette Salomon has pointed out, an art historical canon results in an “unrepresentative and distort[ed] notion of who has contributed” to a field, and the Masters canon is no exception.14 John Carlin partially attributed the omission of women to a limitation in the number of artists able to be exhibited, but the catalogue betrays him. When one examines the survey-like, nearly 170-page-long curatorial essay subtitled “An Art History of Twentieth-Century American Comic Strips and Books”, and finds absolutely no mention of female artists until the final nine-page section on the present era, one could readily deduce that there simply were no women drawing comics within the first three-quarters of the last century.15 To add insult to injury, the entire contribution and influence of the Wimmen’s Comix cartoonists of the 1970s has literally been reduced to the curator’s penultimate footnote. But even prior to reading the essay, the enlarged frame of a male hand firing a pistol from Will Eisner’s serial The Spirit, which faces the title page, should subtly function to remind readers that what follows will be a very phallic history. Granted, such an image is hardly the only smoking gun, if you can pardon an irresistible pun. As it has been throughout much of the history of Western art, women are represented within the exhibition, and thus in some of the catalogue plates, but only through the eyes, minds, and hands of male artists. The curators’ introductory statement to the exhibition asserts that “Comics serve as a mirror in which we can view the central concerns of American life,” but if this were true one would surmise that the major concerns of women throughout the last century have been limited to preventing babies from falling out of bed, squelching childhood adventures, obsessing about weight, and hitting their husbands over the head with a rolling pin. Almost without exception, the pig-faced villainesses, sinister aunts, and docile mammies drawn by the Masters artists serve little purpose save to reduce females to unflattering stereotypes. As Sarah Boxer’s sharp critique in Artforum pointed out: 14

Salomon, “The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission,” 222. Berwick. She writes, “[Carlin] readily admitted that women artists got cut as the list narrowed from 40 to 15 artists.” 15

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Chapter Three [Women here are the] perpetual underclass. Every high must have its low, and the unspoken mastery in “Masters of American Comics” is, it turns out, over women. The misogyny in comics is no big secret, but rather than reflect on it, the curators have simply picked comics entirely by and mostly about males. As a result, viewers may find themselves wondering whether there is something about the very will to fantasize and draw comics that is bound up with antipathy toward women.16

Scholars like myself, weaned on the last three decades of feminist art historical critique, cannot help but find in such obviously sexist subject matter and problematic curatorial absences the lingering echoes of such privileged, and—we now know—biased scholarship as that of H.W. Janson, who, in 1979, cavalierly claimed that he had not been able to find a woman artist who belonged in a one-volume history of art.17 As I remarked earlier, the field is one in which lineages are presumed to be male, and the language within the catalogue evinces the presumption that the aesthetic history of comics is not unlike the original Vasarian model, one in which sons metaphorically “kill the father,” as Picasso infamously remarked, by means of artistic besting, or work to reassert the greatness of their own stylistic fathers posthumously by declaring them “masters.” Within the catalogue, male cartoonists are compared not only to one another but also to male geniuses in other disciplines, with Leonardo da Vinci and Alfred Hitchcock being two of the most obvious examples.18 But the remainder of Janson’s response when pressed on what would qualify an artist for inclusion in the canon is revealingly similar to the spoken (and perhaps unspoken) claims of the Masters curators: The works that I have put into the book are representative of achievements of the imagination […] that have in one way or another changed the history of art. Now I have yet to hear a convincing case made for the claim that Mary Cassatt has changed the history of art.19

I believe it could go without saying that Janson’s use of Cassatt was shrewd and intentional, given that she was best known for her paintings of women and children, and even within her time, male critics insinuated that art about women for women by a woman was “too trivial” to warrant 16

Boxer, “Masters of American Comics.” Cited in Salomon, 225. 18 Carlin, Masters of American Comics. See pages 42 and 85 respectively. Daumier, Hogarth, Warhol, and Jasper Johns are among others mentioned as points of comparison. 19 Cited in Salomon, 225. 17

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critical success.20 Despite the historical existence of such popular female artists as Nell Brinkley, whose proto-flappers were ubiquitous in the early years of the twentieth century; or Marjorie Henderson Buell, whose heroine, Little Lulu, was at one time “second only to [Walt] Disney in terms of sales and visibility”; or Dale Messick, whose syndicated Brenda Starr strip began in 1940 and continues to run in many major American newspapers, female cartoonists’ contributions until the 1980s are all but erased in this “Art History,” and even then, comprise a mere three names listed with other artists working within the last decade.21 By creating a modernist lineage based on innovation in draughtsmanship, composition, and radical usage of the comic frame, the curators of the Masters show were conveniently able to sidestep any criticism that their canon should have included such women, who, like Cassatt, were believed to have towed the line in terms of their period’s respective styles. As the above case illustrates, the perception of an artist’s style is inextricably linked to his or her content, despite declarations to the contrary, and it became my conviction that the phrase “draws like a girl” was not so much an aesthetic bias regarding the shaky line, or intentionally naïve quaver that could be formally designated as feminine, as it was a derogation regarding subject matter pertaining to female experience, desire, or fantasy as inscribed by a woman.22 The omission of all of the aforementioned female cartoonists from the curatorial essay could stand as proof. The typical Brinkley heroine was a saucy, sassy, 20 See Broude, “Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman or the Cult of True Womanhood?” Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism, 261, in which she recounts a contemporary critic’s comments about Cassatt’s World’s Columbian Exposition mural, Modern Woman, which only featured images of women. 21 Gewertz, “Little Lulu Comes to Harvard.” 22 Although one might not believe it be so, it is necessary to further delineate that if one is considering subject matter about the female experience as a possible reason for critical disregard, in the contemporary era, it is only so if the cartoonist “drawing like a girl” happens to be a woman. It is more than a rich irony that despite the plethora of female cartoonists writing about what it means to be a young woman today, it was male artist Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World, and his two female teenage protagonists, that garnered enough publicity, and consequently, enough critical acclaim, to be made into an independent film by Hollywood director Terry Zwigoff, who also directed Crumb. I would also suggest that Clowes’ choice of flat colour and clean lines are derivative of the superhero tradition and therefore, even if quoted ironically, visually bespeak of the dominant genre—which is also evidenced in the bat-mask-like violet hat that one heroine wears on one cover of the comic.

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single gal: in a comic from 1931, called “Christmas Male,” one such independent working girl confidently wields her scissors as she prepares to unwrap what is seemingly her gift to herself—a handsome new beau—and while perhaps not terribly progressive from our vantage point, the comic does suggest a modicum of control over one’s economic and love lives. Buell’s beloved heroine was a feisty prankster who continuously outwitted the boys in caper after caper. Messick’s heroine, Brenda Starr, was a glamorously dressed, globe-trotting reporter, and in that sense, a more culturally iconoclastic figure than Brinkley’s or Buell’s, but the strip’s peripheral subject matter no less frequently mirrored the commonplace concerns of women throughout the twentieth century, a period of extreme flux in regards to female roles and responsibilities. One exemplary comic reflects the century’s ongoing debate concerning career women with families, as Brenda’s young daughter, Starr Twinkle, admonishes her already guilt-ridden mother for working too much. When Brenda asks Starr, “Don’t you want to be a reporter like your mommy?” the precocious daughter answers, “No! Cause then I would be gone all day and leave my little girl home alone!” As part of their desire to legitimize comics as an “official art form,” the curators have not only constructed a Vasarian-type canon that perpetuates male lineages, but apes outdated art historical methodologies like that of Clement Greenberg’s pre-feminist modernism, which privileges innovation in style over that of subject matter and avoids considering issues of gender, race, and class within the images themselves. As Lucy Lippard has so succinctly phrased it: “Feminism’s greatest contribution to the future of art has probably been its lack of contribution to modernism.”23 By overtly rejecting what Lippard calls “the art world’s linear I-did-it-firstism,” and continuously “prioritizing experience and meaning over form and style,” feminist art practices and theories of the 70s reinforced the critical importance of subject matter (and it should be stressed, subject matter by artists of diverse gender, race, sexuality, and class), and ultimately helped to usher in postmodern art historical and curatorial practices in which it was a given that the personal is political and that all artistic creation is ultimately shaped by an artist’s acculturated experiences.24 My contention that “draws like a girl” really refers to a prejudice against female-centred subject matter as inscribed by a woman could be 23

Lippard, “Sweeping Exchanges: The Contributions of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s,” 362. 24 Ibid. See also Broude and Garrard, Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism, 10.

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further debated on one point alone in regards to the Masters exhibition— the undeniable fact that the curators neglected to place the widely revered Lynda Barry within their final selection of fifteen, and added insult to injury by relegating her to simply another name within a list of seventeen “younger” artists, the implicit suggestion being that these creators have not yet come into their own. On the contrary, Barry has been drawing comics for over thirty years and has an indisputably unique style and voice. Furthermore, her Ernie Pook’s Comeek strips have been regular staples within countless independent weeklies across North America throughout the last quarter of a century, and many esteemed cartoonists, including such artists as Matt Groening of The Simpsons fame, and Chris Ware, winner of the Guardian First Book Award, have publicly acknowledged how deeply Barry’s crudely drawn, neurosis-baring characters influenced their own work.25 Why wasn’t Barry chosen then? Perhaps it is because her major protagonist is Marlys Mullen, a freckled, bespectacled, and highly outspoken adolescent girl. Marlys’ lower-class, middle-of-nowhere American life, with its seemingly quotidian passions and the mundane worries typical of an adolescent, comprises much of the strip’s focus, but Barry’s sagacious overlaying of adult women’s voices and problems (those of Marlys’ mother and aunt) cause the reader/viewer to reconsider what may initially seem trivial. Barry’s brilliance in rendering the personal as political and offering up the individual as a possible example of shared experience—undeniably similar artistic goals to those of second-wave feminists—is epitomized in her poetically terse but terribly potent comic Ugliful from 1989. (Fig. 3-1) In the first frame, Maybonne (Marlys’ older sister) listens to her mother, once a dead-ringer for the Hollywood star Ava Gardner, regale her for the ten-thousandth time about how beautiful she was when she was young. The text above, lined like a girlhood school notebook, betrays the heavily wrinkled, floral mumu-wearing mother below, whose horsy overbite 25

In the March 1999 issue of Mother Jones magazine, Groening is quoted as follows: “When I met Lynda Barry, she, by work she was doing, showed me that you could do anything, that you could really play with convention and with structure, and at the time I was very much influenced by underground comics, by Robert Crumb and all those guys, and what Lynda did I thought was more personal and funnier and not quite as—it didn’t fight the same battles the underground cartoonists were fighting, and she was probably my biggest inspiration.” [sic] When the Masters show opened on the east coast, Ware was interviewed by Time Out magazine about the exhibition, where he opines that Barry was overlooked: “Her semiautobiographical experiments were pretty much responsible for the maturation comics experienced in the ’90s.”

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clenches a cigarette as she declares, “Well, it’s all gone to hell, now. Wasted. Shows you what having kids can do to you.” In the second frame, the mother dreamily recalls the “the five guys [who] asked her to marry them” before she picked their father. Among them are Peter Ferrara, who could really dance, and Wilber Brutout, a bit brutish, but now the wealthy owner of a Texaco gas station. In the third frame, prior to the parents’ divorce, the mother is drawn as thin, long-lashed and prettily coiffed; both girls, however, have inherited their father’s spotty, four-eyed homeliness. That Barry is intentionally underscoring this point is confirmed by the fact that Marlys, while no more than an infant in this drawing, also wears glasses. The final frame further affirms that their mother now sees nothing but her own ruin in ever getting married and having children. Above the three women (Marlys eating a large bowl of ice cream, Maybonne biting her nails, and their mother lighting up yet another smoke), the text reads: “You got your Father’s looks. The both of you.” She says to me and my sister when she gets in that one talking mood about her mistakes in life. And she tells me I had better get working on my charm. “Well, be grateful you don’t have a weight problem.” She says, then looks straight at my sister.

Barry’s subtly ingenious combination of text and image illustrates how women are socially conditioned to want more from life, but can expect less; how they are maternally schooled to be paranoid and insecure about their own bodies; and how they are culturally primed to fear their futures, and by inference, to ultimately regret their pasts. But Barry’s inscription of a suffering mother as an artistic device may serve a wider purpose, as well, that of reaching out to an audience of women. As Luce Irigaray has remarked, “The portrayal of suffering is [...] for women an act of truthfulness […] akin to an individual and collective catharsis.”26 It is a means by which female truths, often socially repressed, are finally allowed to surface, and certainly, this story is one that resonates within multitudes of women; such female to female moments, in which acculturated selfloathing is passed down to the next generation, are how one can learn to feel “ugliful.” Furthermore, I would propose that Barry’s continual emphasis on the non-heroic, the pedestrian in-betweens of a beleaguered, nicotine-addicted mother raising two girls, is her individual attempt to show that these humbling moments can be as comically spectacular as world-saving feats of physical daring and geopolitical intrigue. Barry, 26

Irigaray, je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference, 108.

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then, might be said to “draw like a girl” in every sense: one, she’s a woman; two, her scratchy, doodles-in-a-notebook style is visually antithetical to the declarative “Splat Bam Boom!” streamlined action of superhero comic books; and three, she intentionally writes about female characters and snippets of their supposedly unremarkable lives.

Fig. 3-1: Lynda Barry, “Ugliful” (1989). Copyright Lynda Barry, reprinted courtesy of Darhansoff, Verrill, Feldman Literary Agents, New York.

Barry has never been shy about her motivation in privileging the female experience and voice. In doing so, she gives sound to the typically silenced moments many women share. As she stated: I think a lot about what are things women need to hear, how do women feel about life, what do they think about it? And relationships, endlessly,

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Barry’s voice, and by extension, her accompanying drawn visions, are undeniably what Susan Hardy Aiken calls “the lingua materna,” that which provides the cultural stories of woman.28 Her omission, then, from this first canon of comics, one constructed by men, of men, and largely about men, might be best comprehended through Aiken’s definition of the canon as a hegemonic structure that preserves the “pure and noble lineage of male textuality,” and the lone female that breaks and enters as the ultimate transgressor.29 To include Barry would not only have disrupted the flow of the father-son lineage established by the comics canon thus far, but it would have legitimized the cultural stories of women that have otherwise been disregarded throughout. However, Barry’s remarks about feminism, given the subject matter that privileges what she calls “being female in a real average way,” reveal feminism’s problematic status within the contemporary popular culture of the U.S., and are thus relevant to envisioning what Pollock calls “[a longterm] feminism,” one driven by the continual “desire to find stories that will sustain those called or prepared to identify with women.”30 As Barry replied when asked if she defines herself as a feminist: I don’t know what the goal is or the definition of feminism is right now so it's hard to say. But in terms of being a woman I’d say my work is almost exclusively about being female in a real average way, a way that isn’t more or less enlightened than the going norm. I’m interested in looking at it that way because those are the people I want to talk to, the regular women. So I would want to say, “Yes, I am a feminist,” but I think The Feminists would say I was out of my mind.31

Barry understands intuitively that the feminism left in the wake of the hair-splitting identity politics of the late 70s and early 80s—“the more enlightened”, as she says, academic feminism—those who know the politics, the jargon, the theory—might readily discount her claim that her comics address the more universal experience of being a woman in late

27

Hambly, “An Interview with Lynda Barry.” Aiken, “Women and the Question of Canonicity,” 297. 29 Ibid, 294. 30 Pollock, 36. 31 Hambly. 28

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twentieth century North America.32 And it is this fear of presuming to speak for other women, for what she herself calls “regular women” (those she clearly identifies with) that then engenders the hesitancy to define oneself as a “feminist artist or feminist” at all. Such hesitancy also signals the need to redefine “feminism” from the manner in which it is often presently comprehended—so antagonistically multi-vocal that one woman cannot presume to speak for another—to, this time knowingly, a unifying force that recognizes our physical bodies as the primary site of difference and elects to make affiliations based on the very power of that difference and its acculturated experiences. I would also posit that this obvious diffidence to claiming oneself a “feminist artist” as a means to empowerment is doubly exacerbated when you are a woman working within such a male-dominated field as comics and graphic novels, and even more so within the sub-genre of “comix,” as Barry does, primarily on account of the way in which one of its most cultish and presently revered figures laid down the gauntlet regarding feminism in 1971. In both written and unwritten trajectories of twentieth century comics, the vast majority of artists, writers, and critics would confidently state that Robert Crumb (R. Crumb) carved out an indelibly influential place within the medium for the divulgence of one’s deepest fears and fantasies, and many contemporary female cartoonists will admit that it was this predisposition towards the confessional voice that drew them to Crumb’s work.33 But in what has become one of his more disputed comics pages, “A Word to You Feminist Women,” the idolized master of phobic, self-obsessed characters ultimately asked audiences to choose between political correctness and the freedom of artistic self-expression.34 The sixteen-frame comic begins with Crumb’s usual conceit—a 32

It is important to note that Barry herself is partially of Filipino descent, something of which “many of her fans are unaware,” as Melinda Luisa de Jesus has pointed out in her article “Of Monsters and Mothers: Filipina American Identity and Maternal Legacies,” 1. I would say, however, that Barry’s two plus decades of cartoons prior to One Hundred Demons illustrates her ability to speak with a universal female voice, unbound in the mainstream by particulars. I am not unaware, however, that this might only be my perception from a place of white privilege, in which I always assumed Marlys, Barry’s comic alter ego, was “just like I (am).” 33 Crumb became widely infamous in the U.S. after the success of Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary Crumb. Unfortunately, it solidified the widespread belief that he alone was responsible for the style of all underground comics, or “comix,” as they are referred to in the field. 34 All best attempts were made to procure permissions rights for this image, but to no avail.

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monopolizing rant that lays bare his own shortcomings and issues, readily confessing that he is a “male chauvinist pig” within the title frame. From there, however, Crumb sets up his position so that no matter how one argues against what he himself defines as the “hostile and oft times brutal acts against women” shown in his artwork, to do so is to “insist that an artist stifle his or her, [he is careful to add] own instincts and draw only that which is prescribed by some movement.” This, he continues, would be no better than the totalitarian dictators who have censored “freedom of expression.” Crumb’s ego-driven, selfishly indulgent need to “be true to himself,” as he writes, finally results in a two-frame tirade in which he declares, Would you like me to stop venting my rage on paper? Is that what you’d like me to do, all you self-righteous, indignant females? All you poor persecuted downtrodden cunts? Would you rather I went out and raped twelve-year old girls? Would that be an improvement? Well, listen, you dumb-assed broads, I’m gonna fucking well draw what I please to draw and if you don’t like it, fuck you!

I cannot believe it was coincidental that this comic was chosen out of Crumb’s vast oeuvre to be part of the exhibition, nor mere chance that it is one of the five comic panels the curators of the Masters show chose to feature in their catalogue essay about him. I also refuse to regard it as anything less than deliberate that one of the few powerful women in comics, Françoise Mouly, was selected to write a catalogue essay on his work, in which she defends his right to draw as many “Vulture Demonesses” and headless women as he pleases. Such provocations as offered up in “A Word To You Feminist Women” are dangerous stuff, but however repugnant and loathsome his opinions, Crumb is unassailable. Not only on account of his perversely clever baiting of feminists, nor because a well-respected, female art director has seemingly espoused such diatribes by virtue of parsing them, but because in most young artists’ minds—male or female—artistic freedom almost always trumps culturally sanctioned boundaries of decorum, particularly in the wake of censorship issues with the National Endowment for the Arts in the 80s and the resulting uproar over revoking grants on the basis of indecent subject matter. Understandably, it has become de facto practice for a young artist in the States to defend such “liberties” at all costs, and thus to take issue with a comic such as Crumb’s is to be marked as culturally conservative and against artistic freedom. Additionally, if such a seminal figure is constantly goading feminists and belittling their concerns, it is fairly safe to deduce that female cartoonists would feel uncomfortable protesting his

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invective-hurling misogyny, for fear that Crumb might aim it right back in their direction. As the anonymous young woman I previously quoted said, “Crumb did a good job of constantly referencing and speaking directly to feminists (defensively) in his comics, which made it so that any critique of the misogyny of his work is a direct personal attack. Who would attack such a humble, self-loathing, shrunken little weakling?” Only, as she pointed out, “Feminist BULLIES!” That encountering sexism is part and parcel of the experience of young women when they enter a largely male-dominated field would seem to be a given, and the overt sexualisation and resulting disrespect of young female cartoonists is plainly displayed in a one-page comic by Joyce Chin from the female comics anthology, Secession: She Draws Comics. When a young female artist brings her portfolio to a convention, the only thing the male reviewer can see in front of him are her breasts (as he envisions them, barely covered by a bikini top); much the same happens when she brings her comics to a comic book store, despite the fact that in both instances the woman in question is dressed modestly in long jeans and a heavy shirt. But the attention given to a young woman based on her physical attractiveness also takes more insidious forms, as evidenced in Crumb’s public fostering of talented young women like Phoebe Gloeckner. An introduction or foreword from Crumb guarantees that one’s comics will receive far greater publicity and sales, as the cover of the text will then bear his name as well. But Crumb’s method of promotion in his introduction to her anthology, A Child’s Life (on one of the very first pages), presents Gloeckner as an object of sexual desire, and thus shapes the reader’s comprehension of her semi-autobiographical comics as ones written and drawn for the pleasure of men. Within the first paragraph, long before he ever addresses her skills as an artist, he admits how he once “lusted after the young, budding, woman when she was 16 or 17 years old.” “I, too,” he writes, “desired to subject this beautiful, intense young girl to all sorts of degrading and perverse sexual acts […] Oh how I lusted after the young Phoebe in my heart! Did I get a blow job offa her? Not even once.”35 Here, Crumb adds insult to injury by presenting himself as virtuous, and then reveals that although he never took advantage of Gloeckner, the young artist gave herself over to many other, in his opinion—more ignoble and lascivious—men. As Mary Garrard has astutely theorized, such “exaggerated sexualizing of intellectual or creative women” is an ages-old masculine defensive strategy that works to

35

Gloeckner, A Child’s Life, 5.

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dis-empower the female artist and contain her prodigious talent.36 Not surprisingly, Crumb yet again disingenuously uses honesty as a pretext, by further reinforcing that the only way he could write about Gloeckner’s work “and be truthful” is to conclude his foreword with a postscript that brings the reader right back to the male cartoonist’s self-indulgent lust. One could declare the need for “old-school” feminist interventions based solely on the aforementioned discriminations and biases; as Boxer writes, “the misogyny in comics is no big secret. As if it were the early seventies again, but only in a different field, critics and historians must respond to these omissions in museums and galleries, seriously consider the updated take on Nochlin’s initial query, and continue to difference the canon. In the same way that scholars resuscitated Artemisia from the sidelines of Renaissance art history to reconsider her legacy in alternate ways aside from innovation and mastery, comics historians will hopefully revisit Dale Messick’s massive output and recognize how it spoke to many female—and male—readers. I would be remiss here if I did not attribute the groundbreaking work that has already been accomplished in this field to Trina Robbins, who has truly been a one-woman female cartoonists’ history project. She has authored books about Nell Brinkley, women cartoonists, comics for and about girls, and women superheroes, among many others. These texts, and her travelling exhibition, She Draws Comics: 100 Years of America’s Women Cartoonists (the title of which clearly refutes the derogatory associations of “drawing like a girl” and declares it irreversible and empowering), provided me with the knowledge to scrutinize the absences, to read between the lines of that supposedly, as Aiken remarks, “pure and noble lineage of male textuality” and cry foul. Certainly Robbins has been attempting to difference the canon since she began her thirty-year career as both a cartoonist and writer, and she stands as an her-storian to emulate. Countless other women of the contemporary generation are also, like Robbins, steadfastly embracing what they perceive as notions of “difference” in work created by female cartoonists. Megan Kelso, cartoonist and curator, has produced astonishingly powerful “matrixial moments,” (in both her Queen of the Black Black and The Squirrel Mother), as has Ellen Lindner, with whom she co-curated Letters from a Small Room: Contemporary Sequential Art by Women, held at Smith College’s Jannotta Gallery in 2005 (Fig. 3-2). Linder’s premise for the show was partially based on second-wave theoretical understandings that 36

Garrard, “Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist,” Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism, 36.

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women’s work spaces (bedroom studios, kitchen tables or tiny rented apartments) tend to be much smaller than men’s, and affirmed that, depending on how you skew it, working in a small space and on a small scale can encourage and heighten intimacy in a work of art, rather than inhibit “greatness.” Likewise, the introduction to Kelso’s anthology Scheherazade: Comics About Love, Treachery, Mothers, and Monsters, in which she featured only women artists and confidently posited that “just as women speak differently from men, move differently, play basketball, sing, write and relate to others differently, it stands to reason that we make marks differently—and make different marks,” models how women can be gathered together by virtue of their shared gender that makes them different from men, as well as by what makes them different from each other.37 As she further stated, “[A] woman’s anthology doesn’t have to argue for equality or credibility; today it gets to be a heart-stopping chorus sung by all female voices—legitimate and gorgeously different.”38

Fig. 3-2: An example of Megan Kelso’s “different marks.” Reprinted by permission of the artist. 37

Megan Kelso, Introduction to Scheherazade: Comics About Love, Treachery, Mothers, and Monsters, 9. 38 Ibid.

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One of the artists featured in both the Small Rooms exhibition and the Scheherazade anthology, Ariel Bordeaux, has recently organized a series of readings by women cartoonists, The Grace Comic Series in Manhattan, and her own work is frequently a model of woman-to-woman address.39 This is epitomized in her piece Tit Chat, a comic plea in which she admonishes all women to stop judging themselves and each other by the size of their breasts (Fig. 3-3). Her ability to re-envision the female outside of the male gaze is exemplified in the first frame, in which she has placed the heart of a woman directly between her breasts. The text above reads: “I shall begin with the BREAST ISSUE, because although on the surface it may seem like the most utterly ridiculous, weak-foundationed phenomenon of psychological self-torture… the breasts lie right above the heart, and affect the life force deeply.”

Fig. 3-3: “Woman to woman” address: A frame from Ariel Bordeaux’s Tit Chat, 2000. Reprinted with permission of the artist. 39 Bordeaux’s series, which ran in the fall of 2006, was part of The Grace Reading Series, organized by Elizabeth Merrick.

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The interconnectedness of body to the heart, and thus, according to a dominant metaphor, to emotions, is magnified in Bordeaux’s drawing of the heart’s many arteries, which spill out, over, and into the veins that traverse the breasts. By placing this pulsing organ where the obdurate sternum usually lies, and forgoing the skin and flesh that normally obscures the network of blood-filled lines, Bordeaux quite beautifully emphasizes the centrality of the heart in a woman’s imagined, if not actual, physiognomy. Body, heart and mind create a web that cannot be unravelled. My burgeoning research in this field arose from my recognition that many comics created by contemporary women such as Kelso and Bordeaux were closer in subject and meaning to much of the radical “essentialist” artwork of the early 1970s than to anything from the later postmodern period. Themes of menstruation, unbounded female sexual desire, the goddess, and maternity; a narrative predilection for the diary form; and a blatant embrace of that which is hand-crafted, all suggested to me that, whether or not these artists were willing to call themselves “feminists,” what was being created by women working in independent comics paralleled similar issues from some thirty years ago in the visual arts. Their focus on experiences of the acculturated female psyche and body, and their undoubtedly deliberate decision to “draw like a girl,” resembled a return to “old-school” feminist art tactics. The 2006 exhibition at SUNY Brockport’s Tower Gallery, which I organized to showcase such work, Alternative Girlhood: Diaristic Indulgence and Contemporary Female Artists, paid homage to those “differing” aspects of women’s art as Carolee Schneemann unforgettably named them—“the personal clutter, the persistence of feelings, the hand-touch sensibility, the diaristic indulgence”—tendencies that exalted such difference and revelled in its polyvocal messages.40 To a certain extent, I would propose that the omission of women from the Masters show be viewed as a positive catalyst, analogous to another moment more than three decades past: The Whitney Museum’s 1969 Annual, which featured only 8 women out of the total 143 artists. Female artists’ realization that it would take a great deal more than just making art to get into the museums was one of the critical sparks that started a feminist fire in the 1970s.41 Although the venues that hosted the Masters 40

Schneemann, text of “Scroll 2: From Kitsch’s Last Meal” in Imaging Her Erotics, 159. 41 Broude and Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art, 90. While I am by no means pointing to the 1969 exhibition as the sole impetus for the Feminist Art Movement that began shortly afterward, the low percentage of women is generally

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exhibition all arranged events focusing on the place of women in comics, inviting Robbins, Lauren Weinstein, and others to speak, another Guerilla Girls’ slogan from 1995 bears repeating here. One of their “Top Ten Signs That You’re An Art World Token” is when “a museum that won’t show your work gives you a prominent place in its lecture series.” Now, perhaps, more young women in comics and graphic novels can acknowledge that they could only afford to be post-feminist in a postpatriarchal era, and that despite pacification, placation, and enormous numbers of them working in the field, “old-school” sexism necessitates “old-school” feminism—for what is erased is bound to be forgotten.

Works Cited Aiken, Susan Hardy. “Women and the Question of Canonicity.” College English, Vol. 48. no. 3 (March, 1986): 288-301. Berwick, Carly. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Comic-Book Artists?” ARTnews ONLINE, (November 2005),

(20 January 2006). Boxer, Sarah. “Masters of American Comics,” Artforum (April 2006), (10 October 2006). Broude, Norma. “Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman or the Cult of True Womanhood?” In Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, 259-276. California: University of California Press, 2005. Broude, Norma and Mary D. Garrard, eds. The Power of Feminist Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994. Broude, Norma and Mary D. Garrard, eds. Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. Carlin, John, Paul Karasik, and Brian Walker, eds. Masters of American Comics. Los Angeles: The Regents of the University of California and the Museum of Contemporary Art in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2005. Garrard, Mary D. “Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist.” In Reclaiming Female Agency: acknowledged as one of the reasons that a group of female artists within the Art Workers’ Coalition formed the group Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), which then demanded that the museums restructure their policies. It is demoralizing and pitiful to think that the Whitney’s 5.5 percentage in 1969 is higher than that of a museum in 2006.

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Feminist Art History After Postmodernism, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, 27-47. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. Gewertz, Ken. “Little Lulu Comes to Harvard.” Harvard Gazette Online. (12 November 2006). Gloeckner, Phoebe. A Child’s Life. California: Frog, Ltd./North Atlantic Books, 2000. Hambly, Mary. “An Interview with Lynda Barry.” Originally printed in Backbone 4: Humor by Northwest Women. California: The Seal Press, 1982. (1 September 2006). Irigaray, Luce. je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Kelso, Megan, ed. Scheherazade: Comics About Love, Treachery, Mothers, and Monsters. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2004. Lippard, Lucy. “Sweeping Exchanges: The Contributions of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s.” Art Journal, Vol. 40. (Autumn/Winter, 1980): 362-365. Luisa de Jesus, Melinda. “Of Monsters and Mothers: Filipina American Identity and Maternal Legacies”. In Lynda J. Barry, “One Hundred Demons,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism Vol.5, no. 1 (2004): 1-12. Pollock, Griselda. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. London: Routledge, 1999. Projansky, Sarah. Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture. New York: NYUP, 2001. Schneemann, Carolee. Imaging Her Erotics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Schor, Mira. “Email to a Young Female Artist.” In Gloria: Another Look at the Feminist Art of the 1970s, 9. New York: White Columns Gallery, 2002. Salomon, Nanette. “The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission.” In (En)gendering Knowledge: Feminists in Academe, edited by Joan E. Hartman and Ellen Messer-Davidow, 222-236. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

SECTION II: BETWEEN ABSENCE AND PERFORMANCE: RETHINKING THE SUBJECT

CHAPTER FOUR RETHINKING ABSENCE: FEMINIST LEGACIES, CRITICAL POSSIBILITIES KAREN ROULSTONE

Introduction The shift from artwork as object to that of interlocutor takes place in the demise of a perception of the artwork finished at its point of origination and going beyond the notion of reception in which meanings are completed through encounters with different subjectivities. In the processes of interlocution we may shift from the critical analysis which stands outside, to a participation in which we transform that which we are 1 taking part in. —Irit Rogoff

In describing the shift in understanding an artwork from the interpretative and the analytical model to that of interlocution, Irit Rogoff neatly delineates the need to acknowledge the performative and active dimensions of thinking through art.2 Interlocution suggests a conversation which is participatory, involving thinking and speaking within and beyond an artwork rather than a purely external analysis of it. The activity of this thinking is also suggestive of a dialogical exchange that resonates with the complex processes of research through art, and the tensions between it and

1

Rogoff, “Art as Interlocutor”, 47. The idea of “thinking through art” is an expression that is ubiquitous in practiceled research at doctoral level. In the foreword to Macleod and Holdridge, Thinking Through Art, xiv, Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, Rector of the Royal College of Art, suggests that the editors have “stolen his title” but qualifies this statement by admitting that he himself stole it from Herbert Read. The phrase suggests a complex process of thinking that is not easily contained within conventional applications of academic evaluative methods.

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the academic context in which it takes place.3 Such tensions, coming out of the differences between distinct approaches to thinking within academic institutions and how these approaches are understood, prompt questions relating to how validated bodies of knowledge contain and structure thinking. Moreover, it is useful to ask how that which exceeds these structures might be understood.4 Rogoff, for example, critically challenges the binary structure of presence and absence constructed around commemorative artworks and considers whether absence might possibly “become a structure of difference”.5 Through this thinking she challenges oppositional presuppositions and the way in which absence might be seen to signify. Held within this consideration is a critical encounter with what constitutes the limits of engagement and, crucially, how the present meaning of a term might be rethought. It is within the locus of these concerns that I want to position the focus of this chapter “Rethinking absence: feminist legacies, critical possibilities”. My interest in rethinking how absence might signify initially came out of my painting practice and was later developed in the context of practicebased doctoral research. The research was organised around two axes which were related to, firstly, an understanding of how and why we might categorise something as being constitutive of, or generative of an absence in the visual arts, and secondly, the way in which we organise or structure this placement through specific ways of “knowing”. The latter part of this consideration has resonance with issues raised by Rosemary Betterton relating to women’s contemporary painting practice. Acknowledging the critique of painting as “reactionary masculinist discourse”6 by secondwave feminist thought, Betterton asserts the need to reconsider and 3

The term “dialogical” in this context has resonance with Bakhtin’s proposition of the dialogical quality of meaning in discourse; all thoughts, meanings and words are inextricably linked to each other in a dialogical exchange (“dialogichekii”). Understanding is based on the premise that “utterances are always in complex ways responses to other utterances”, Morris, The Bakhtin Reader, 13. This proposition has political resonance as silencing or a denial of the dialogical is symptomatic of dictatorial thinking, ibid., 247. 4 In this regard, see Rowley in Pollock, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts, 107. Rowley refers to Mary Kelly’s article: “Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism”, in Screen, vol. 22, no. 3 (1981), 41 and suggests that “the problem of how to circulate painting as a generator of ideas (as a practice/theory, theory/practice activity) remains as the ‘question of institutions, of the conditions which determine the reading of artistic texts and the strategies which would be appropriate for interventions.’ ” 5 Rogoff , 50. 6 Betterton, Unframed. Practices & Politics of Women’s Contemporary Painting, 2.

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“reclaim” different spaces for women’s painting practice as a retort to the claims that painting and feminism are dead. Betterton remarks that contemporary women painters seek to “explore different potentialities for painting”, namely possibilities that go beyond the modernist concerns of “purity, unity and disembodiment of vision”.7 However, whilst my concerns were connected with going beyond the precepts of modernism and establishing a critical positioning in relation to painting practice, they were also focused on the uneasy alliance between an understanding of how absence might signify and the discourses constructed around absence and the visual arts. I found that the disjunction between, on the one hand, an analysis of the visual and its actual possibilities for absence, and on the other, the conceptual frameworks used to negotiate an understanding of absence in the visual arts held some critical force. As an artist researcher,8 I thought that the interpretative frameworks used to understand the complexities of visual art translated into a partial curtailment of its possibilities.9 Rather than allowing for an opening out of thought that I believe thinking through art can provide, these modes of understanding seemed to flatten and contain the possibilities connected to the intellectual scope of art practice, leaving important, active parts inert and silent. My approach to this problem resided in adopting a methodological strategy which positioned concepts of absence alongside each other. The concepts included: absence and the Lacanian real; absence and the visual arts; Derrida’s proposition of différance; painting as a flawed vehicle for absence and my painting practice. I intend to pull through some of the threads of the last four concepts in this chapter. In exploring the gaps and incommensurabilities between the different orders of absence, I found visual art to offer a strange intellectual excess, namely going beyond the discourses constructed around it. I was able to consider how limits are inscribed and might be re-inscribed in thinking. It is within this idea of reframing, excess and re-inscription, which is suggestive of 7

Ibid. The term “artist researcher” is taken from Macleod & Holdridge, Thinking Through Art, and is used in reference to practice-based doctorates where the artwork is presented as research and constitutes part of the body of the doctoral submission. 9 Questions relating to the value of the “interpretative” are also brought up by Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation, 3-14. She posits that the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation has left a deep residual mark on the way in which Western thinking engages with understanding art. She suggests that there is an emphasis on content and this frequently determines the reception and possibilities of the work. 8

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feminist methodologies reworked, that the critical tools for rethinking absence surface. However, whilst these critical tools might have resonance with feminist methodologies, I want to suggest that the processes of rethinking absence through art practice positions a criticality that points to the need for a reconsideration of the gaps and incommensurabilities in our frameworks of knowledge, including feminism. I would suggest that a repositioning of thinking for feminism finds resonance in the processes of thinking through visual art. In reframing terms and rethinking the way in which they might signify, we can come back at the way in which they are currently understood and consider where the silences or gaps reside.

Absence and the visual arts: the metaphysics of presence The conceptual frameworks relating to absence in the visual arts frequently carry the weight of discourses that share the same ubiquitous assumptions of interpretation linked to the opposition of presence and absence. Critiques of artworks tend to focus on an a priori understanding of what constitutes absence rather than a critical engagement with the meaning of the term and how it might signify. The methodologies and strategies used by artists frequently confound the opposition of presence and absence, complicating and exceeding this understanding. For example, Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures are often described as “recording” or “marking absence” through her use of everyday objects and sites. Whilst her methodology, which is articulated through the casting process, would seem to lend itself to a binary interpretative frame of interiority/exteriority, presence/absence, the strategies she employs complicate this suggestion. Ghost (1990) for example, a chalky white block sculpture cast from the interior of an empty house, initially gives the impression of being an overbearing tomb or monument. However, on closer inspection, the sculpture reveals traces of the impression of a house interior. Oddly, the structures within the interior of the house which would normally protrude are impressions working their way inwards. A strange inverse materiality is proposed by Whiteread’s methodology, which awkwardly slips past a complete match of the object cast, producing an unnerving mimetic jolt. There is a disparity between what is there and what we think should be there which creates an interpretative slippage and complexity. Although her practical methodology, realised through the casting process, invokes an oppositional presence/absence interpretation, her strategies put this opposition into question at every turn. It is the

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“ontological slipperiness”10 of artwork that challenges the binary of presence and absence and suggests that interpretative frames work on assumptions that should be critically rethought. This positioning can be linked to a critical engagement with what Jacques Derrida would consider to be the precepts of Western metaphysical thinking. The term “metaphysics” is from the Greek ta meta ta phusika—the thing after the physics, which is from Aristotle. It is used to refer to any exploration into the dimensions of reality that reside outside of scientific methodologies. For example, what do we understand by reality or indeed God? Metaphysics as an inquiry has generated many questions including those relating to the nature of presence, the mind, knowing, the existence of God, truth and being. Within metaphysical thinking there is a desire to find a focal point or truth of origin on which to found these questions. Metaphysics is described as: That speculative inquiry which treats of the first principles of things, including such concepts as being, substance, essence, time, space, cause, identity, etc.; theoretical philosophy as the ultimate science of Being and 11 Knowing.

Derrida views the Western metaphysical approach to understanding as logocentric,12 a term derived from the Greek logos, which might be understood as the word, reason, unquestionable authority, God. Derrida critically engages with the tenets of Western metaphysics, which, he suggests, seek to establish particular foundations for truth or origin, the logos. In particular, he posits that these foundations achieve an alleged truth through establishing binary oppositions which privilege one term over the other, with the first given full presence and the second cast as inferior and, crucially, negative, subordinated and understood in relation to absence. The understanding of meaning as determined by the principles of metaphysical thinking, Derrida argues, is backed up by the authority of reason and is reflected in language. He suggests that Western metaphysics confers primary importance on the significance of presence, indeed, it is dominated by it. He posits that metaphysics is structured by oppositional terms which are dependent on one position being set up against another. 10

This expression is taken from Best, “The Trace and the Body” in Trace exhibition catalogue, 177, in reference to the works of Doris Salcedo. 11 Oxford English Dictionary (1933). 12 See Derrida, Positions, 51, for a consideration of logocentrism. Derrida suggests that it may be seen in part as “the matrix of idealism”, but its complexities exceed this frame.

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For example, presence is set up against absence, speech against writing and interiority against exteriority. The dominant term in this configuration, Derrida suggests, is always infused with the weight of presence and through this, connected to immediacy, consciousness and Being. In this regard, he picks up certain conceptual threads of Martin Heidegger’s thought and develops them, particularly in relation to “Being”, presence and the importance of language.13 Crucially, in making a distinction between how beings are defined and categorised on the one hand, and the way in which they might occur or “be” on the other, Heidegger is differentiating between the ontic and the ontological. Derrida suggests that as Heidegger is marking the difference between “Being and beings” he is engaging with “the forgotten of metaphysics”, that which has “disappeared without a trace.”14 Such thinking delineates what Derrida refers to as “the erasure of the early trace” (die frühe Spur).15 Through the logic of Western metaphysical thinking, Derrida posits that presence is linked to Being and consciousness and absence is hierarchically structured in negative, inferior opposition. In an absolute sense, absence might be read as non-presence and non-being, with negative implications for that which is understood within the remit of absence. To unfold the implications of this proposition, it is useful to 13 In the initial phase of his thinking, Heidegger’s concern was with fundamental ontology and revealing the structures of “being”. Inherent in this thinking was the presupposition of an underlying foundational aspect to “being” which tied into metaphysical precepts. He focused on human centred-ness and conscious centred philosophy which cast Dasein or “there-being” (da-there, sein-being) as the focal point for the disclosure of beings. Heidegger referred to this space of disclosure as the clearing. After 1927, Heidegger challenges the traditional approach of hermeneutics by suggesting that rather than understanding being as derived from knowledge, the reverse is possible; that knowledge might be derived from understanding. After his “hermeneutic turn”, he posits that Dasein and the world must be understood as part of a “circle of understanding” replacing his earlier focus on Dasein as the locus for the disclosure of beings. The clearing is a space where the presencing and absencing of being can occur. He later describes this process as the “unconcealment-concealment” or “disclosure-undisclosure”. Here entities come forth and are disclosed (presencing), whilst others are concealed through this coming forth (absencing). This thinking allows for an understanding of “being” to be challenged because Heidegger is making a distinction between how beings are defined and categorised on the one hand, and the way in which they might occur or “be” on the other. See Guignon, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, 172. 14 See Derrida, The Margins of Philosophy, 23-25. 15 Ibid.

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consider what gets associated with, and structured through absence when understood in this context. In The Newly Born Woman, Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément posit that hierarchical oppositions inform all thought and that they are longstanding culturally determined positions. Organization by hierarchy makes all conceptual organization subject to man. Male privilege, shown in the opposition between activity and passivity, which he uses to sustain himself. Traditionally, the question of sexual difference is treated by coupling it with the opposition: 16 activity/passivity.

Cixous and Clément remark that sexual difference in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, for example, centres on the association of absence and the position of the female through its conceptualisation of sexuality and subjectivity. Freudian analysis reduces the difference between the sexes to an anatomical fact, focusing entirely on whether a person is in possession of a phallus or not.17 The recognition of this absence, or the possibility of it occurring, is part of a wider structure which positions woman’s difference as lack. Freud’s theories are later developed by Jacques Lacan who positions the phallus as a symbolic marker of power.18 Derrida’s proposition of différance is crucial in this regard because it provides the possibility to rethink the way in which meaning is understood. With regard to the psychoanalytical framing of absence, Derrida engages with the position established by Lacan’s interpretation: For Derrida, Lacan’s “topology of castration,” which assigns the “hole” or lack to a place—“a hole with determinable borders”—repeats the metaphysical gesture (albeit a negative one) of making absence, the lack, the hole, a transcendental principle that can be pinned down as such, and therefore can govern a theoretical discourse.19

Derrida views this approach as metaphysical because it contains absence. His proposition of différance challenges this approach.

16

Cixous & Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 64. Ibid., 82. 18 For an excellent feminist engagement with Lacanian thought, see Grosz, Jacques Lacan. A Feminist Introduction. 19 Alan Bass, “Introduction”, Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 6, n. 5. 17

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Différance/difference Derrida achieves a radical challenge to metaphysical assumptions relating to the status of being and its relationship to presence through his proposition of différance. Extraordinarily, différance is expressed as something that would seem to name nothing, have no weight and exceeds conventional linguistic definition. It cannot be confined to one singular word or name. Etymologically speaking, différance is not a word as such but is suggestive of other words and meanings. Derrida describes it as combining the two senses of the French verb différer “to differ” and “to defer or postpone”, into a noun “designating active non-self presence in both time and space”.20 It consequently resists confinement to an active or passive role and generates a differential play of meaning. From a semantic perspective différance might be understood to function in a way which motions towards a general combination of meanings and concepts, however, it is held within a certain set of conditions described by Derrida as “systematic” and “irreducible”.21 First différance refers to the (active and passive) movement that consists in deferring by means of delay, delegation, reprieve, referral, detour, 22 postponement, reserving.

Différance is referred to by Derrida as a “sheaf” and he proposes that it must be understood as part of what he presents as “the general system of this economy”.23 Différance constitutes a sort of vibrant semantic locus because it is one of a number of terms including: trace, supplement, hymen, parergon, pharmakon, dissemination, which are presented as being interchangeable but not synonymous with each other. These interchangeable terms prevent différance from being understood as a “master-word” or concept. Anchored by a thread of imagined meaning, each term also resonates with the possibility of deferral of that possible meaning. The proposition of deferral of meaning presents the effect of conceptual disjunction in motion, in that the terms align for a hesitant moment and then separate, caught in a process of repetitive displacement. The non-synonymous substitutions do not name anything specific so they cannot be pinned down, contained or closed off. These terms are not concepts, nor do they belong to a class of ideas defining différance, as it 20

Derrida, Positions, 5, n. 3. Ibid., 7. 22 Ibid., 8. 23 Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 3. 21

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too is neither a concept nor an entity. The play of meaning that différance effects allows for a conceptual unravelling, and the possibility of undecidability at the “origin” of the structure of meaning. Différance articulates a differential understanding between terms and presents a challenge to full and present meaning based on the oppositional logic determined by what Derrida refers to as “the metaphysics of presence”. 24 As the status of presence in metaphysical thought is established in an oppositional and hierarchical way against absence, Derrida’s challenge shakes up the assumptions of the metaphysics of presence in a manner which has repercussions for the way in which we might understand absence to signify. Through its effects, the proposition of différance forcefully articulates a challenge to the metaphysical idea of absence as an absolute, oppositional and subsidiary condition. Indeed, it demonstrates that absence is not containable and can never be a complete proposition in spite of the fact that it is often presented as being so. [E]ach of the terms must appear as the différance of the other, as the other different and deferred in the economy of the same (the intelligible as differing-deferring the sensible, as the sensible different and deferred; differing-deferring intuition; culture as nature different and deferred, differing-deferring; all the others of physis-techné, nomos, thesis, society, freedom, history, mind, etc.—as physis different and deferred, or as physis 25 in différance.

Crucially, therefore, différance remains at times dynamic and at times passive. Its changing character allows for conceptual openness to be maintained, and indeed, exceeds a conventional notion of concept. The possibility for the provisionality of meaning within thought, which is manifest in language, is articulated through the effect of différance, the trace. Further to this, the resistant tension that différance creates is dynamic, playing across different registers, but it is, however, neither suggestive of a theoretical rubric, nor does it lend itself to any sense of “taxonomical closure.”26 It alludes to something that must be thought of as exceeding signification. Importantly, this consideration has resonance for the way in which an understanding of absence might be re-inscribed and rethought because différance effects a differential understanding between 24

As Gayatri Spivak states, “Derrida uses the word ‘metaphysics’ very simply as shorthand for any science of presence”. Derrida refers to this “science of presence” as “the metaphysics of presence” throughout his thought. Spivak, “Translator’s Preface” Derrida, Of Grammatology, xix. 25 Derrida, Positions, 17. 26 Ibid., 40.

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terms, which in turn, is carried through the processes of deferral and displacement. This process precipitates a conceptual unravelling resulting in the possibilities for the play of meaning to remain in motion. Through the proposition of différence, Derrida disrupts Western metaphysical precepts: “it is the determination of Being as presence or as beingness that is interrogated by the thought of différance.”27 In proposing that terms are illuminated through their differences to each other, Derrida puts forward the idea of meaning being deferred and displaced rather than central and determining. This has implications for the way in which the “authority of truth”, “logos” (that which is seen to constitute meaning, ideas) is understood. Meaning is, however, always necessarily functioning in relation to, and acknowledging metaphysical thought. Whatever gets formulated in language is already laced with “presuppositions inseparable from metaphysics”.28 Meaning is at once conditioned by spaces, tensions and disparities of theoretical intent. Therefore, it is not a question of replacing one approach to thinking with another, but of demonstrating the unravelling of meaning that can occur in the contradictions, gaps and incommensurabilities within and alongside ways of thinking. With regard to rethinking the way in which absence might signify, the idea of difference finds much resonance in feminist discursive thought, specifically in work carried out by Griselda Pollock and Irit Rogoff, which unfolds alongside Derrida’s proposition of différance. Whilst Griselda Pollock’s wide-ranging and in-depth explorations of frameworks of knowledge and signification have included a complex interweaving of gender, psychoanalysis, and the effects of trauma, these considerations have all been weighted with a critical engagement with the way in which absence might signify. A recent example of such scholarship is articulated through Encountering Eva Hesse (2006).29 Taking into account her status as a Jewish woman artist in the 60s and issues of trauma in relation to the Holocaust, each encounter presented positions a different engagement with the artist and her work. This structuring process not only acknowledges what has already been contributed, but what has been overlooked or silenced by previous interpretative frames. Thereby absence is understood in terms of difference, but also in relation to the wider capacity of established critical frameworks to deal with this understanding. 27

Derrida, The Margins of Philosophy, 21. Derrida, Positions, 19. See also Spivak, “Translator’s Preface” Derrida, Of Grammatology, xix, where she suggests that “Derrida’s philosopher” acknowledges that there is “no tool that does not belong to the metaphysical box”. 29 Pollock & Corby, Encountering Eva Hesse. 28

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In the case of Irit Rogoff, an important practical encounter with the problematic of the absence/presence binary and its need to be rethought is conveyed through her exploration of Canadian artist Vera Frenkel’s work Body Missing (1994).30 Body Missing is a six-channel video installation which took the Kunstraub (art theft) carried out by the Third Reich as a point from which to explore issues ranging from “collective madness to the nature of memory”.31 The work was a complex interactive piece posted on the worldwide web. The web posting allowed for diverse offsite artistic contributions from other artists to unfold around fictional and real documents relating to the missing art works. The journey and installation of Body Missing in cities around the world facilitated its evolution in an active and multidimensional way. Importantly, coming out of a critical engagement with absence Rogoff describes the need to engage with the process of working within an artwork, which she views in a peformative way: In turn my theoretical articulations locate the artists’ work within a set of cultural debates in which the visual arts rarely find representation. It assumes the form of a practice, of a “writing with” an artist’s work rather than about it, a dehierarchization of the question of whether the artist, the critic or the historian, the advertising copy writer or the commercial sponsor, the studio or the director, have the final word in determining the meaning of a work in visual culture. 32

In order to move beyond certain structures of thinking specifically relating to the binary of absence and presence, Rogoff puts forward the idea of the past being mediated through different orders of absence, “cultural hauntings” which are articulated through the fictional and the real.33 Through this, absence becomes a structure of difference, transformed into a possibility of multiple intersections and differential narratives.

30

See Rogoff, 48-50. Description cited from Institute of Contemporary Arts conference and AHRB Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (Centre CATH), The University of Leeds, archived on http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cath/ahrc/press/2003. 32 Rogoff, 48. 33 Ibid., 50. 31

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Painting as a flawed vehicle for absence Painting would seem to be an ironic and somewhat misplaced choice of vehicle for a critical engagement with absence, offering a rather flawed, contradictory theoretical alignment.34 This awkwardness is largely due to the fact that painting has been weighted with commanding a specific authority and, through its material status, has a sense of “presence” conferred on it.35 An understanding of how painting might signify has inevitably, in part, been bound to inherited connections to the wellestablished modernist rubric of the “primacy of the visual” and the specificity of medium. These frames of engagement offer containment for the possibilities of meaning for painting and what is understood by “medium”. Rosalind Krauss argues forcefully against the use of the term “medium” in her preface to A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (1999).36 Krauss expresses her desire to bury the term “medium” like “so much toxic critical waste”, so heavily weighted it has become with its inextricable links to Clement Greenberg and a reductive interpretative model of high modernism. Krauss argues for a critical distance from the subsequent received meaning of “medium”, whilst justifying its retention as it opens up to the discursive field considered in the book. The thrust of her argument is held within the notion of “constitutive heterogeneity” for the aesthetic medium, whereby the specificity of “medium” is understood as a complex set of differential relations rather than one that is reducible to, for example, the flatness of the surface in the case of painting. Moreover, in a broad sense, I would suggest that “constitutive heterogeneity” flags up the importance of revisiting terms of engagement to keep them active. Crucially, within the dynamic of this complicated engagement is a reflection of both the need to acknowledge the way in which bodies of knowledge signify and their limitations and the need to rethink the possibilities that they currently provide for thought. In other words, there is a need to consider what 34

See Green in Harris, Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Painting, 81-107, where he points out that painting is largely considered in relation to the “precepts of theories of modernist art” as it tends to be understood in relation to “singularity, specificity and autonomy”. 35 In Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 11, Derrida posits that “discourses on painting are perhaps destined to reproduce the limit which constitutes them, whatever they do and whatever they say: there is for them an inside and an outside of the work as soon as there is work.” 36 Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, 5-7.

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hinges on the retention of a term. It is important to consider its reception and whether it might have indeed fallen under some kind of theoretical stasis. The relationship of painting to certain implications of presence is well worn theoretical territory in that it is largely marked out by Greenberg’s formalist concerns relating to shape, support and the flatness of the surface of work (which might be said to be prescriptive in terms of the authoritative presence of painting), and Michael Fried’s positioning of the “presentness” in modernist art.37 Fried, in his oft cited seminal text “Art and Objecthood”, posits that the mediums of painting (and sculpture, for that matter), provide the possibility for what he refers to as a “continuous and perpetual present” through its constitutive parts, declaring that “presentness is grace”.38 This critical framing accounts for a specific kind of containment or positioning of ideas which is focused on the “purely visual”.39 In this context, the “immediacy” of the visual is connected to a metaphysical understanding of presence which is in turn informed by temporality.40 Although it has come under repeated challenges, the thinking informed by Greenberg and Fried has surely left a rather deep residual impression on the possibilities of painting, as well as its status as a medium. In fact, these frames of thinking might be said to have some impact on a contemporary engagement with painting, albeit, for the most part, one which is critically and often purposefully distanced from its precepts. Consequently, it could be said that whether critically positioned in relation 37

See Greenberg, “Modernist Painting”, 5-10. See Fried, Art and Objecthood, 167-168. The problematic of “presentness” is also explored by Catsou Roberts in the catalogue Presentness is Grace: Experiencing the Suspended Moment, Arnolfini, Bristol, 2001. With reference to Fried’s text “Art and Objecthood”, first published in Artforum, no. 5 (10 June 1967), which was viewed as positioning “presentness” as a retort to minimalism, Roberts considers Fried’s use of the term to assert its connection to “the sublime, eternity, transcendence and instantaneousness.” Importantly, the issues surrounding “presentness” unfold around the idea of all temporal states being held within that suspended moment of “presentness.” As Roberts suggests, the term “presentness” was used by Fried to “emphasise temporality, in contradistinction to the physicality implied in the word “presence.” 39 Of particular relevance to a critical rethinking of the issue of presence and painting is found in Pollock and Rowley, Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Painting, 37-79, where they discuss painting as the site/sight of self-presence with implications for the artist and the person viewing the work. 40 See section “Absence and the visual arts: the metaphysics of presence” in this chapter. 38

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to Greenberg and Fried’s thinking or not, their scholarship has become a part of understanding painting’s possibilities and limitations because it still retains a theoretical shadow over proceedings.41 This shadow is doubly cast. Firstly, through the act of research in an academic context which, in part, retains the interpretative and analytical approach towards artwork outlined by Rogoff. Secondly, through positioning artistic practice as a space in which these frameworks have to be negotiated. As a result, this understanding of the dialectic of practice and theory underpins the way in which painting is received. Consequently, I was faced with some particular problems which included, firstly, how exactly I was to approach rethinking absence through the visual arts, negotiating painting’s problematic implications, and secondly, how this might be undertaken without falling under the weight of previous conceptualisations of absence. My approach to this problem resided in rethinking these frames of engagement from within, through and against the space of painting. How we speak and write about painting must be a catching of precisely that divergence, that tension between the visible and the readable that painting generates, not to return it to the work as interpretation, but to free 42 it as an independent complex of ideas.

This process involved a pushing against boundaries that were both lexical and pragmatic. In other words, my engagement was with the discursive and linguistic limits constructed around absence and how they might inform an understanding of how absence might be rethought in the visual arts, specifically in relation to painting practice. To be continually drawn back into models of thinking that deal with painting in an interpretative way creates a certain impasse which is indicated by the disparity between the possibilities of painting and the limits imposed on it. This impasse is informed broadly by a specific expectation of what painting can do, which, in turn, is bound into an analytical and interpretative approach. However, woven into this understanding is also the suggestion of a kind of persistent demand to be accountable for the privileged status of painting, which from a gendered perspective creates an ironic and double occlusion. Women painters have to take critical responsibility for using painting as a practice, in spite of the fact that they have been largely excluded from the frameworks of engagement that 41

Interestingly, the article “Art and Objecthood” by Michael Fried was published in the same year (1967) as Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag. 42 Rowley, “Rethinking a feminist practice of painting”, 107.

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generated and enjoyed its privilege, and continue to work in a way that goes beyond this understanding.43

Spaces of indeterminacy In considering the thinking engendered by the visual in a methodological and practical way, I was able to position my research Rethinking Absence as a series of propositions around the idea of absence. Visual art proposes it own thinking; I was not concerned with attempting to depict what might constitute absence, but to work through the proposition of absence, to explore the way in which it might be thought to signify and why. This process pivoted on an exchange between images and ideas, not a compare and contrast, but an active dialogical interaction and positioning of ideas executed through painting and its processes. Effectively, this was a process of hitting against limits. Something surfaced out of the exploration of the moving edges of the discourses constructed around absence that put another set of questions into motion. There was a certain intellectual force coming out of thinking through art practice that exceeded these discourses in terms of rethinking how absence might signify. Thinking through the visual offers up a distinctly different proposition because it holds the possibility of creating a space of indeterminacy; a non-containable, nonresolvable set of ideas emerging out of what is known. These spaces oscillate at once between the theoretical positioning of ideas and the play of what the artwork can position. I want to suggest that it is in the very nature of what artwork can challenge through its positioning that the most forceful grasp of signification relating to rethinking absence might lie. The visual posits an intellectual possibility that always exceeds the discourses constructed around it. This is crucial because, in the explication of visual art, the workings of the theoretical concepts used to contain it are revealed. However, the inadequacies of these frames to completely contain their object let a kind of different thinking slip through the gaps and spill over as possibility. This idea might suggest a gap between what we see and can describe or understand, but this does not do justice to the possibilities of visual art. I would suggest that we need the awkward coupling of that which is discernible and that which is not, and that this coupling is not simply reducible to the dynamic between the written and the visual. This strange space marks something that is beyond this dynamic, namely, what 43

See especially Betterton, Unframed. Practices & Politics of Women’s Contemporary Painting, for an exploration of these ideas.

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might be understood as the potential intellectual wildness of visual art. It provides an unfolding space of intelligibility that is contingent on the complex process of thinking through art practice. It allows for the articulation of thought between ideas to surface, thought that is subject to a fugitive stability occurring on the edges of what can be controlled. These limits are simultaneously, curiously bound by, yet outside of the specific epistemological frameworks that govern the reception of artwork in the context of academic research. In terms of signifying structures, this thinking gestures towards Derrida’s proposition that whatever gets formulated in language is already laced with “presuppositions inseparable from metaphysics.”44 It is not simply a question of how absence is understood to be manifesting through or in relation to visual art, but also of the interpretative limits that research around concepts of absence seems to generate. Such limits are frequently characterised by a specifically metaphysical understanding of absence.

Conclusion In Breaking the Disciplines: Reconceptions in Knowledge, Art and Culture, Marsha Meskimmon refers to the “creative activity of thought”, suggesting that knowledge is a practice. Bringing together diverse ideas with different points of overlapping interest can be generative of productive collisions of different knowledges.45 She posits the idea of resonance as a political strategy that allows for difference because it accommodates intersecting commonalities but does not try to contain and homogenise these points of connection. Moving beyond the remit of dissonance in intellectual and political terms, resonance does not just point to that which is occluded within a consonant mode and reverse its terms while reinforcing its negative power. It is a positive action of difference, a way to think multiply instead of through 46 binary codes.

It has been my aim in this chapter to consider how “thinking through visual art” precipitates the need for rethinking signifying practices and the 44

See Derrida, Positions, 19. See also Spivak “Translator’s Preface” in Derrida, Of Grammatology, xix, where she suggests that “Derrida’s philosopher” acknowledges there is “no tool that does not belong to the metaphysical box.” 45 Meskimmon in Meskimmon and Davies, Breaking the Disciplines. Reconceptions in Knowledge, Art and Culture, 223-244. 46 Ibid., 238.

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way in which terms are understood. Through this thinking, disparities and differences in theoretical frames surface and visual art gives rise to the possibility of thinking that occurs as an intellectual excess. This excess has resonance with the remit of certain feminist methodologies, demanding a critical rethinking of different knowledges to reconsider and acknowledge difference. In considering the way in which absence might signify and the way in which painting might be understood, I have hit against certain critical limits. In drawing back what we understand by “feminism” or “feminist” now, I would suggest that the same criticality must be in action. Have terms relating to feminism been worn into a kind of staid complacency, their meanings held within a particular interpretative moment? What is now understood by the term “feminism” and how does this differ from past understandings? Crucially, consideration must be given to these questions if the activity of all this long-standing, farreaching work might be pulled through and an interest in its worth reactivated. It is perhaps in the tension between the political intent of a feminist-centred thinking and the received ideas of what the term “feminism” now invokes that work must be done. Somewhere within that gap resides both the need to reassert difference in a multi-positioned and active way and to critically evaluate any position held in relation to it. In this context, thinking through art practice has provided the possibility for a revisiting of terms of engagement. It has allowed for ideas to surface which hit against boundaries of conventional uses of theory. In working through and across bodies of knowledge, points of disjunction and points of commonality have arisen. Some of the paintings produced as part of this project, and reproduced at the end of this chapter, have been the synthesis and condition of all these tensions. In thinking through the dynamic and fraught collisions of meaning, spaces have arisen that are strangely indeterminate. In pushing against containment, these spaces have been constitutive of an absence of sorts, held in tension with what we think we know. A critical concurrent engagement with the intersecting axes of how and why we might describe something as suggestive of absence, and how this understanding might be structured or organised through ways of knowing, has helped sketch inadequacies and limitations. It has also helped shape possibilities. These axes have been fused with critical uncertainty and tension. In putting forward the proposition of rethinking absence through a series of dialogical tensions, which are, in effect, the play of different orders of absence, I have attempted to suggest that a possibility for reinscription resonates with and across all the orders of absence. It is in the tensions and disjunctions of signification that the critical force of a

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proposition is rethought. Working through propositions in a way that sets them up against each other reveals the limits and silences held within and between discourses and the way in which they are understood. We need to reconsider feminism in such a way. We need this active, participatory and dialogical exchange in and between feminist discourses within visual culture and art history to ask where the silences and points of indeterminacy reside. With the evocation of the participatory and dialogical in mind, I want to present five visual motions of “rethinking absence”. This series of images constitutes thinking through my art practice and a critical response to perceived limits on thinking. The visual marks its own différance. It serves as a residual note reminding us that the critical force of ideas held within texts and inscriptions of all kinds can always exceed their frames of containment.

Rethinking Absence: five motions

Fig. 4-1: Karen Roulstone. Untitled. Acrylic on board. 91 x 122 x 3cm. (2006).

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Figs. 4-2 to 4-5: Karen Roulstone, Untitled. Acrylic on board. 61 x 81 x 5cm. (2006). All works courtesy of the artist.

Works Cited Best, Susan. “The Trace and the Body”. In The International Exhibition Trace [exhibition catalogue], 172-176. Liverpool Biennal of Contemporary Art and Tate Gallery, Liverpool, 1999. Betterton, Rosemary, ed. Unframed: Practices and Politics of Women’s Contemporary Painting. London: IB Tauris, 2004. Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman, translated by Betsy Wing. London: IB Tauris, 1996.

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Derrida, Jacques. Positions, translated by Alan Bass. London: Althone Press, 1981. —. The Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982. —. The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. —. Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997. Elam, Diane. Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms en Abyme. London: Routledge, 1994. Fried, Michael. Art and Objecthood. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998. Green, David. “Painting as Aporia”. In Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Painting: Hybridity, Hegemony, Historicism, edited by Jonathan Harris. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003. Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” In Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, edited by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison. London: Harper & Row and Open University, 1982. Grosz, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London: Routledge, 1990. Guignon, Charles. The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Krauss, Rosalind. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the PostMedium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson, 1999. Macleod, Katy and Lin Holdridge, eds. Thinking Through Art, Reflections on Art as Research. London: Routledge, 2006. Meskimmon, Marsha and Michael Davies, eds. Breaking the Disciplines: Reconceptions in Knowledge, Art and Culture. London: IB Tauris, 2003. Morris, P. ed. The Bakhtin Reader. London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1994. Pollock, Griselda and Vanessa Corby, eds. Encountering Eva Hesse. Prestel, 2006. Roberts, Catsou. Presentness is Grace: Experiencing the Suspended Moment [catalogue]. Bristol: Arnolfini, 2001. Rogoff, Irit. “Art as Interlocutor—The Flight Lines of Address.” In Re:Trace Dialogues. Essays on Contemporary Art and Culture, edited by Jagjit Chuhan, Angela Dimitrakaki, and Emma Thomas, 46-51. Liverpool: Liverpool School of Art and Design, 2002.

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Rowley, Alison “Rethinking a feminist practice of painting”. In Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts, edited by Griselda Pollock. London: Routledge, 1996. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. London: Eyre and Spottiswode, 1967.

CHAPTER FIVE THE CHRISSY DIARIES ANTHEA BEHM

For my nona Mia Downer Hi. My name is Anthea. I’m 27 years old and I’m a Virgo. I have brown hair, green eyes and I’m 167cm tall. My ambition in life is to be an artist. My greatest achievement is my next show. True success to me would be receiving funding for “The Chrissy Research Foundation”. I grew up in Sydney where I attended a Private School for Girls. At school I was directed towards academic achievement which seemed to conflict with conservative notions of a woman’s place in the world—notions which were continuously reinforced. Lacking any sort of role models at school, I unconsciously sought an alternative. At this time, the most attractive and accessible alternative was mass media. Like my new found role models from movies and magazines, I dreamt about being “discovered”, falling in love with Prince Charming and travelling the world in search of fame and fortune. In order to achieve these aspirations, deluded as they were, I began miming the gestures, language and appearance of these identity models. From copying a gesture off Janey in Girls Just Want to Have Fun,1 to miming a pose I wish to thank: Tasha Davis, Meike Davis, David Wild, Lauren Horton, Gotaro Uematsu, Jess Olivieri and Sara Oscar from Parachutes for Ladies, Maureen Burns, Lynne Roberts-Goodwin, Pete Volich, Christopher Hanrahan, Criena Court, Cameron Baird, Njick Levey, The Mad Dog Gang, and my family, John, Paula and Ariane Behm—without you this project would not have been possible. I also wish to thank Amanda Rowell, Nikki S. Lee and Leslie Tonkonow, Artworks

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featured in the latest issue of Cosmopolitan, these actions formed a part of my daily routine. —Excerpt from The Chrissy Anthea Diaries, 2005 As a woman deeply affected by idealised notions of female identity, my practice is the ensuing artistic representation of an attempt to confront these issues. My practice has provided me with a way in which to digest the effects of this conditioning, and in doing so, aims to highlight current issues for women living in capitalist society. As my work is based upon personal experience, I utilise my own body as the major vehicle for artistic expression, making performance the central discipline of my practice. This discipline is explored in conjunction with the mediums of photography, video and installation, all of which are not only utilised as documents of performance, but as mediums through which I can investigate the central themes of my work. My most recent body of work to date, The Chrissy Diaries (TCD), 2005, examines bastions of idealised femininity which have been preserved by mass media and scrutinised by a traditional feminist discourse. This body of work aims to critique the representation of idealised definitions of women in mass media, and examine how this affects women in contemporary society. Through this critique, TCD aims to reassess and extend beyond the traditional feminist discourse embedded in these issues. Within an historical and contemporary context, the mass media—that is the media of broadcast television, print, advertising, still photography and cinema—has channelled meaning in such a way that it has formed a plethora of stereotypes. Through a barrage of continuous re-presentation, certain styles, morals, gestures and aspirations have become idealised and are as such synonymous with being a woman. As mass media has come to play and increasingly dominant role in contemporary society, TCD aims to examine the extent to which the values “sold to us” by mass media shape society. + Projects NY, Candice Breitz and White Cube, London, Pipilotti Rist and Hauser & Wirth Zürich London, and acknowledge the support of The Chrissy Diaries by the Samstag Program. 1 In Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Janey (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) wants nothing more than to dance on “Dance TV”. She deceives her father by entering a competition which prized the winner with a regular position on the show. The movie concludes with Janey winning the competition, getting the boy and even receiving her father’s admiration and blessing.

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In a constantly changing society, this work focuses on four stereotypes of women: The Princess, The Airhostess, The Cheerleader, and The Bikini Model. TCD aims to critique the way in which these stereotypes have become idealised role models for women, through addressing questions such as: to what extent does the representation of these stereotypes in mass media affect the way in which women think, act, dress and behave? And what does this mean for young women growing up in contemporary society?

Process and public performance My central aim in this critique was to avoid analysing issues which I had not directly experienced. Subsequently, and in the tradition of utilising my body as a vehicle for artistic expression, I participated in the activities constituting each stereotype. In turn, this afforded an understanding of the contemporary issues surrounding each group and enabled research into their respective affectations—that is their styles, morals, gestures and aspirations—at an experiential level. In order to create a comfortable distance between myself and my work, I performed these activities through the persona of a character called Chrissy.2 As Chrissy, I entered the Miss East Coast Bikini Competition, registered with Virgin Airlines, applied to the reality TV show Australian Princess, and was a member of the Parramatta Eels Cheerleading PreSquad. Exploring these issues through the persona of Chrissy provided a platform on which I could re-construct each of her characters based upon their media re-presentation. In preparing to perform the activities, I took my cues—both existing and learnt—from affectations of each stereotype as perpetuated in mass media. In the case of The Cheerleader, for example, this was from movies such as Bring It On, Can’t Buy Me Love and Gwen Stefani’s music video clip for Hollaback Girl.3 2

The name Chrissy was taken from my middle name Christina, which could be used in the case of signing legally binding documents, if/when I was faced with this situation as part of the public performances. 3 Bring It On is a recent Hollywood movie about a cheerleading competition starring Kirsten Dunst as the captain. Although she is nearly overruled, Dunst recruits a new girl, trains her and attempts to lead her team to victory in the national titles. In Can’t Buy Me Love, the main character is a cheerleader, she is the “coolest” girl at school and if a boy is with her he reaches “legendary status”. In order to gain this status a boy pays her $1,000 to befriend him for one month. Stefani’s music video clip depicts a team of cheerleaders performing routines and

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This source material was used as the point of departure for Cheerleader Chrissy before entering and participating in her activity—or performance, as it came to be—by becoming a member of the Parramatta Eels Cheerleading Pre-Squad. Through this process, I was attempting to research the gap between the media representation of each stereotype and the actual experience of “being” one. In turn, this process enabled a comparison between these experiences and the traditional feminist analysis of these activities.

Anthropology and Nikki S. Lee Participating in social activities, as the basis for artwork, has been undertaken by Nikki S. Lee in her series of Projects. Similar to the process adopted for TCD, Lee studied the language, gestures, speech and codes of style of groups such as the elderly, “yuppies”, swingers and punks. Taking on their characteristics, she then entered each specific group, and announced her intentions as an artist: to befriend and function within the group as a temporary member. During this period of time—which lasted from anywhere between a couple of weeks to a few months—she had a friend photograph her performance. These photographs then become the series for each specific group, such as The Seniors Project, 1999.4 Similarly to Lee’s series of Projects, TCD aims to research how “our social identity is forged from a collection of bodily tics, facial expressions, and sartorial habits”.5 Unlike Lee’s groups, however, those selected for TCD all have one thing in common: an aspiration. Be it The Princess, The Airhostess, The Cheerleader or The Bikini Model, the participants in these activities are all there in order to become something. And in attempting to completely assimilate with the process of “becoming”, my intentions as an artist remain undisclosed. When I entered a given group as Chrissy, I remained as Chrissy. Lee’s performances have been likened to the work of an anthropologist. Like an anthropologist, Lee inevitably remains an outsider: “she can always be identified as an outsider, as not truly part of the group, no matter how well-defined her costume and manner”.6 However, through functioning within each group as the persona of Chrissy, I was aiming to lessen the gap between artist and anthropologist, and gain direct lifts. In the context of the clip, against the music and lyrics of her song, the girls are empowered. 4 Harris, “When in Rome”, 44–7. 5 Momin, “Nikki S. Lee”, 68. 6 Ibid.

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experience of the operating systems that contribute to constructing the stereotypes, without receiving any different treatment from the group.

Mass Media and Candice Breitz The way in which mainstream media contributes to shaping our society has been analysed by video artist Candice Breitz. In dealing with these issues, Breitz believes that “it is necessary to invade the operating system that designed the landscape—to inject oneself into the media as a viral presence”,7 and she does so in Mother + Father (2005), through directly quoting specific characters from Hollywood movies (Fig. 5-1). The work comprises an installation of two sets of plasma screens. Set opposite each other, the screens are divided into gender groups and reveal six Hollywood actors and actresses performing the roles of parenthood.8 Sampling short scenes from blockbuster films, Breitz singles out each actor and actress, and in placing them on a black background, repositions them under her own direction.9 Through this process, Breitz reveals how Hollywood cinema has constructed idealised notions of how to be a parent and uses “parenthood as a metaphor between star and fan.”10 By reinforcing these idealised forms of behaviour, Breitz suggests that the Hollywood star has come to emulate the role of a parent offering the fan—or child—a model to base themselves on: “more and more we learn who we are […] not only from our parents and from our immediate social contexts, but also from the culture industry.”11 Rather than directly quoting mass media, however, as with Breitz’s work, TCD seeks a similar analysis through the process of preparing for and undertaking the public performances as Chrissy. In terms of how far I assimilated into each group, these performances—which were documented visually and through keeping a diary—had varying degrees of success. Regardless of this, the documentation of these public performances was utilised as primary research. This material, rather than being presented as the work, such as with Lee’s Projects, informed the culmination of TCD: a synchronised four channel video installation, depicting performative reconstructions of Chrissy’s endeavours (Figs. 5-3 to 5-10).

7

Candice Breitz, quoted in Chambers, “Mother + Father”, 12. Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid.,15. 8

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Fig. 5-1: Candice Breitz, Mother + Father (2005), two six-channel installations, Mother (13 minutes, 15 seconds), Father (11 minutes). Installation views, Castello di Rivoli, Turin. Photograph: Paolo Pellion, ed. 5 + A.P. Courtesy of the artist and White Cube, London.

The moving image As evident in Breitz’s work, the conceptual nature of TCD lent itself to the medium of video installation, due to the integral relationship the moving image has with the construction of identity. From early cinema through to Hollywood movies and MTV culture, the moving image has perpetuated affectations pertaining to female identity. This relationship has been thoroughly explored by theorists such as Laura Mulvey and Stephen Heath. In her critical essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), Mulvey uses psychoanalysis to articulate how cinema has come to portray woman as passive “barer not maker of meaning”.12 Heath asserts that it is through this kind of recurring representation of women that cinema has reproduced a social currency of femininity: “from genre to genre, film to film, the same spectacle of woman, her body

12

Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, 15.

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highlighted in the unity of its image […] set out with all the signs of femininity (all the dress and behaviour)”.13 As an antidote to the problem of the scopophilic objectification of women in narrative cinema, Mulvey presents avant-garde non-narrative film. Two of the first female video artists—Joan Jonas and Hannah Wilke—used non-narrative film to explore the construction of female identity in relationship to the moving image. Jonas and Wilke also used their own bodies: in Vertical Role (1972), Jonas used a distorted signal of video to disrupt the image of her body, while Gestures (1974), reveals Wilke manipulating her face in sexually suggestive ways in order to denaturalise sexualised representation of her body in this way.14

Fig. 5-2: The Chrissy Diaries (2005), synchronised four channel installation, 36 minutes 56 seconds. Installation view, The College of Fine Arts, Sydney.

Sherman and de-naturalisation Despite Jonas and Wilke having used their own bodies and nonnarrative film to critique the construction of female identity, it has been the work of photo-artist Cindy Sherman that has remained influential to 13 14

Heath, “Joan Rivière and The Masquerade”, 57. Rush, New Media in late 20th Century Art, 102-104.

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my practice to date. In Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), Sherman reveals the way in which cinema “in the unity of its image”15 has come to naturalise the image of woman. Drawing on representations of woman in mass media—particularly 1950s cinema—Sherman reconstructs film scenes in which she plays a plethora of characters. In her reconstructions there is no “original” film. However, through drawing on the bank of represented images in cinema, her characters are immediately recognisable to the average film consumer. In her images, Sherman the artist remains a mystery: from character to character, scene to scene, Sherman draws the viewer’s attention to the way in which lighting, framing, setting, costume, makeup and gesture are used in her photographs—as they are in film—to construct female identity. Working within this discourse, TCD’s four channel video installation is of a non-narrative format, with each of the channels representing one of the four case studies. Acknowledging the work of artists such as Sherman, Jonas and Wilke towards the critique of female identity construction, TCD seeks to denaturalise the representation of each chosen stereotype—not through make-up or lighting, distorted video signals, or manipulation of the body—but rather through a performative action. In the four channels of the installation, each stereotype is depicted performing a repetitive action pertaining to Chrissy’s profession within a related situation: Princess Chrissy is depicted wandering backwards and forwards in a dead forest, Airhostess Chrissy is in the desert struggling with a parachute, while Cheerleader Chrissy is depicted on a football field at night practicing her routine, and Bikini Chrissy is seen rising up and down out of a body of water (Figs. 5-3 to 5-6). The synchronisation of the four channels allowed me to orchestrate the body of work, so at times all the stereotypes are performing together, while at other moments only one channel may be on. The video installation runs on a loop, with the duration of one loop lasting twentyeight minutes. The performative actions of each stereotype are not only repeated through the looping of the media, but also within the performance itself. The purpose of this was to create an installation where the viewer may experience the nuances of Chrissy’s actions, such as the level of endurance required for each performance.

15

Heath, “Joan Rivière and The Masquerade”, 57.

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Figs. 5-3 to 5-6: Stills from The Chrissy Diaries (2005), synchronised four channel video installation. Clockwise from top left: The Princess, The Airhostess, The Bikini Model, The Cheerleader.

Masquerade It is through her process of drawing the viewer’s attention to the way lighting, make-up and the like are used to construct female identity, that Sherman reveals identity construction as a myth. In his critical text “Myth Today” (1957), Roland Barthes puts forward the idea of the relationship between a photograph and what is being depicted, or the sign and the referent, as a statement that “imposes […] on us”16 the way things are, that implicates representation with a natural way of being. This is crucial in understanding the significance of Sherman’s Film Stills, as they reveal how the relationship between sign and referent has been used to naturalise the multiple identities of her characters. Furthermore, it is Sherman’s act

16

Barthes, “Myth Today”, 102.

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of “putting on”—the make-up and costume, pose and gesture of women in cinema—that reveals (certain kinds of) femininity as masquerade.17 Similarly to the way in which Sherman uses her body in Film Stills, Chrissy’s video-based performance of a repetitive action equates to masquerade. For Chrissy, this is an act of “putting on” styles, morals, gestures and aspirations—based upon her public performances—in an attempt to conform to each stereotype. Within each video performance, this repetitive action is further illuminated through the utilisation of an object pertaining to each stereotype. For example, The Cheerleader channel depicts Chrissy struggling with a set of heavy and over-sized pompoms while attempting to perfect her routine. This action, as with all the stereotypes, is interrupted by lengths of time when Chrissy is “switched off” and waiting (Figs. 5-7 to 5-10). The “switched off” periods elevate the performative actions to the performativity of masquerade: a switch-on of attitudes, gestures and ambitions of The Cheerleader inevitably results in a struggle represented in Chrissy’s performance.

Figs. 5-7 to 5-10: Stills from The Chrissy Diaries (2005), with Chrissy “switched off”. 17

On myth see Krauss, “Untitled: Cindy Sherman”, 105-118. On masquerade see Mulvey, “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The work of Cindy Sherman”, 141.

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Integral to the relationship the moving image has to the construction of female identity is the way “cinema has played to the maximum with masquerade”.18 Historically linked to the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Joan Rivière, female masquerade has been defined in relation to the lack of the phallus.19 This understanding suggests that while woman performs masquerade in order to mask her “lack”, it is this very lack which defines her being, making “genuine womanliness and masquerade the same thing.”20 If masquerade and “genuine” womanliness are the same thing, does this mean that mimicking the gestures, attitudes and actions of female identity—as perpetuated in the moving image—present a “successful” contemporary model of how to be a woman? In regards to masquerade, Joan Rivière suggests that to be a woman is to masquerade. She writes: “[One] may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the ‘masquerade’. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference.”21 So for Rivière, all women perform a masquerade simply by “being” women. What I learnt through Chrissy’s public performances, however, is that many women can do it—or perform masquerade—but that does not mean they are it. This is represented in each channel of TCD installation when Chrissy is “switched off” and waiting. During this period of time all gestures, aspirations and behaviours of each stereotype “turn off” or stop. In addition to this, Chrissy is at times seen to be “fixing” herself, by adjusting her dress, checking her bikini or rearranging her hair. These incidental actions further illuminate the notion of masquerade as being something that may be turned off or on, as Chrissy once again readies herself to perform.

Pipilotti Rist and video performance In her response to the question of female identity, the renowned artist Pipilotti Rist also uses video performance to represent a woman’s struggle in (Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler/ (Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes (1988). In the Football Field Series for example, a female figure is depicted walking across a field and intermittently fainting. Similarly, the Submerged Series reveals a woman’s head being repeatedly plunged into 18

Heath, “Joan Rivière and The Masquerade”, 52. Ibid., 51-4. 20 Ibid., 52. 21 Rivière, “Womanliness as a Masquerade”, 38. 19

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water. The identity of the person inflicting this force remains a mystery. Rist illustrates her women as “actively seeking release from clearly unbearable situations”22 from either an internal or external force. Unlike the women in Rist’s work, in the TCD installation Chrissy is primarily seen as attempting to conform to the ideals of her stereotype within each given situation: The Princess’ never-ending search in the woods, The Cheerleader’s continuous practice, and The Bikini Model’s attempts to strike the perfect pose in her rock pool. The performance of The Airhostess, however, suggests an attempt to leave or escape her current situation, which is represented through Chrissy’s struggle with the object of the parachute. Although the parachute—made from silk and ribbon—is an object which will never “save” her, Chrissy is depicted in a perpetual struggle to inflate and control it. Thus The Airhostess may be seen as a metaphor for the more theoretical approach employed in the research of this stereotype, as the public performance of registering with Virgin Airlines did not develop beyond this initial action. Just as Chrissy experiences a period of time when she is “switched off” and waiting, Rist depicts moments in her work when the struggle is alleviated—if only for a moment—e.g. when her women are walking or breathing. In TCD, it is these moments when Chrissy is “switched off” and not performing that illuminates the represented action as (a) masquerade. On the other hand, through depicting an action which fluctuates between walking/fainting or breathing/drowning, Rist draws upon traditional notions of hysteria: “Her contractures were unpredictable: her neck would suddenly twist […] her leg would suddenly stiffen […] her two arms would suddenly bend backwards”.23 Through the representation of these actions, Rist’s work extends towards a social commentary suggesting “that exoneration is possible only to a degree; that a trace of guilt, a mark of imperfection will always remain, marring any drive towards a perfect, flawless and unblemished state of being in the world.”24 In reconsidering the masquerade through Rivière and Lacan, Heath concludes that despite the woman’s desire to reject her “lack” in the quest for wholeness, it is this very lack which makes up her being. Thus “nothing can make up the division, no object can satisfy the desire—what is wanting is always wanting”.25 Although this theory may be considered phallocentric, the action represented in TCD, as that in the work of Rist, 22

Bronfen, “(Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler/ (Absulutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes”, 80. Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere, 122. 24 Bronfen, “(Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler/ (Absulutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes”, 80. 25 Heath, “Joan Rivière and The Masquerade”, 52. 23

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suggests that while assimilation has been possible to a certain extent, a struggle to aspire to the “flawless”, idealised images of femininity presented by the media—and based upon myth—will always prevail. The attempt to sustain the masquerade will result in a struggle. “And hysteria is what? Failed masquerade. The hysteric will not play the game”.26 However, in order to question the construction of each stereotype represented by mass media, Chrissy did play the game and played to her upmost ability. The following sections of this chapter deal with the research stages of the work and their resulting documentation.

The Bikini Model Hi. My name is Chrissy. I’m 27 years old and I’m a Virgo. I have brown hair, green eyes and I’m 167cm tall. My ambition in life is to be a famous model. My greatest achievement was being a Grand Finalist in the Miss East Coast Bikini Competition. True success to me would be winning a contract. In 1970 a group from the Women’s Liberation Movement staged a demonstration during the Miss World Competition. Laura Mulvey was a part of this group, and in commenting on the demonstration she wrote: “to take violent action, interrupting a carefully ordered spectacle […] was something that we had all previously thought to be personally impossible for us, inhibited both by our conditioning as women, and our acceptance of bourgeois norms of correct behaviour.”27 For Mulvey and the group the demonstration was a strike “against passivity”.28 Over thirty years later, I did my first public performance as Chrissy by entering Miss East Coast Bikini Competition, held at the Newport Arms in Sydney, Australia. I found the experience to be terrifying: It was my turn to go on stage. The music was blaring… with the chorus line of a pop song ironically singing “I like you just the way you are”… And I was off, walking the stage while my statistics were being read out by none other than Tim Bailey29… I made a mistake on the catwalk, despite 26

Ibid. Mulvey, “The Spectacle is Vulnerable: Miss World, 1970”, 3–4. 28 Ibid. 29 Tim Bailey is the weather presenter on the Australian commercial television station Channel Ten News. Alongside national and international current affairs, 27

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having practiced the walk a million times backstage… At this point in time all my energy was being directed towards suppressing a panic attack I could feel creeping on: I was standing in front of over one thousand clothed people, while wearing a bikini. I was about to be asked a list of questions by Tim Bailey, while wearing a bikini. And I was trying to appear happy and confident while doing so, and wearing a bikini. —Excerpt from The Chrissy Diaries, Bikini Chrissy, 2003 In analysing this emotional response, I discovered that the mindset that led to my fear was a mindset learnt from feminist predecessors—like Mulvey—in thinking that these competitions were “wrong” and should be demonstrated against, not entered into. While I shy away from being called a feminist artist for these very reasons, looking at the issues which arose from the demonstration posed by the Women’s Liberation and Chrissy’s participation in Miss East Coast Girl makes for an interesting comparison. While the approaches taken by the Women’s Liberation Movement and myself are opposed, the motivation behind each action is the same. For the Women’s Liberation this involved—or indeed required—a violent reaction. Over thirty years later, however, posing a reaction of this kind would be unsuccessful in shifting anything except the comfort levels of the other competitors. Endorsing passivity for me would have meant not entering the competition. So instead of re-action I chose a performative action, in order to digest my own condition and to experientially research the area on which my work comments. Both the demonstration posed by the Women’s Liberation Movement and the performance of Bikini Chrissy were a strike against passivity, against conditioning, and a spectacle which relied upon judging women on their physical attributes (Fig. 5-11). Back in the change room, I could hear myself reflected in what the other girls were saying… About their nerves of going on stage… questioning why they were doing this and suggesting they couldn’t be bothered and would rather be doing something else. Although the reasons behind the questions were different, the questions I was asking myself were basically the same…. But I know why I was doing this… So why were they? —Excerpt from The Chrissy Diaries, Bikini Chrissy, 2006

this news programme headlines celebrity news and information about Australian Idol and Big Brother, which also show on Channel Ten.

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This dialogue revealed the cracks in the masquerade. On stage these girls appeared confident, sexy and desirable—attributes synonymous with The Bikini Model stereotype. Backstage, however, the girls were questioning why they were a part of this spectacle. The smiles vanished and the boredom and frustration set in. So are these girls being exploited? Chrissy felt exploited. In the very act of being on stage, dressed in a bikini to be judged on physical appearance, the girls and Chrissy were required to “put on” a masquerade in order to be a part of the spectacle. Fig. 5-11: Bikini Chrissy, video still from Miss East Coast Bikini Competition, 2003, performance documentation, Newport Arms, Sydney.30

According to Luce Irigaray “the masquerade […] is what women do […] in order to participate in man’s desire, but at the cost of giving up theirs”.31 From this research, however, I have no doubt that this activity gave the girls a sense of power over the audience. A sense of power which they gained through using their physical attributes, without giving up their “desire”. Additionally, at the end of the competition one girl attained her aspiration of receiving a modelling contract. Nevertheless, being a part of this Bikini Competition meant being a part of a spectacle which supports the traditional male/subject women/object relationship, and functions for the pleasure of the audience and profit for the establishment. These issues are represented in TCD through a performative reconstruction of Bikini Chrissy’s experience. Chrissy is depicted in a pink bikini with a frill around her waist, rising up and down out of a rock pool with waves crashing in the background. Through her gestures, style, appearance and direct eye contact with the viewer, Chrissy uses her physical attributes to illustrate the way in which this stereotype can attract the sexual desire of her audience. No matter how many times Chrissy performs this action, however, she never actually gets anywhere, and through repetition the action itself becomes almost absurd and her attempt humorous. When Chrissy’s performance stops, the confident, sexy and desirable attributes disappear—a metaphor for the “backstage experience”

30 31

In this image Tim Bailey’s face has been blacked out for legal reasons. Luce Irigaray, quoted in Heath, “Joan Rivière and The Masquerade”, 53.

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of the bikini models, when no-one is watching. In TCD, the masquerade, and Chrissy’s attempt at it, unravels and is revealed to the audience.

The Airhostess Hi. My name is Chrissy. I’m 27 years old and I’m a Virgo. I have brown hair, green eyes and I’m 167cm tall. My ambition in life is to have a career. My greatest achievement has been applying to be an Airhostess. True success to me would be flying for Virgin Airlines. As my first departure point from Bikini Chrissy, The Airhostess made her debut performance at the opening of The Containers Project at Next Wave Festival in Melbourne, Australia. This project involved over ten shipping containers located in Federation Square car park, with each container representing the work of Artist-Run Initiatives from around the country. As part of a collaborative work with my colleagues at Firstdraft Gallery, the installation consisted of a video projection, the parachute and a performance by Airhostess Chrissy.32 Representing Firstdraft on the opening night, Airhostess Chrissy was “the face” of the gallery, meeting and greeting viewers and answering any questions about the gallery and the installation. In wanting to further research this stereotype as part of TCD project, I registered an application with Virgin Airlines. Due to time limitations, however, the registration did not develop beyond this initial action. As a result, a more theoretical approach towards researching The Airhostess stereotype was adopted. Despite this differing approach, Airhostess Chrissy remained an integral part of the work, as she came to represent the way in which idealised notions of the female body have been perpetuated in the work force and used as a marketing tool. This theoretical approach also highlights important issues which were omitted from The Bikini Model research, such as that to even qualify for a Bikini Competition, one needs to have achieved and maintained a physically conditioned body. As a performance clearly defined by time and place, Bikini Chrissy’s experience did not lead to a dialogue which 32

Firstdraft Gallery is an artist-run initiative in Sydney, Australia, which runs on a rotating directorship. I was director for 2003-2004. The Next Wave Festival Project—Parachutes for Ladies (2004)—was a collaboration with my colleagues Jessica Olivieri, Sara Oscar and Harley Ives.

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included the enduring conditions of stereotypical femininity and their operating systems, such as diet, physical activity and grooming. Through researching the way in which the affectations pertaining to The Airhostess have been developed and maintained by the airline industry, the enduring conditions of this stereotype are revealed. Soon after the occupation of The Airhostess developed in the 1950s, the airline industry tapped into her image as a resource for marketing. As the airline industry arguably “came to rely on female sexuality to sell seats”,33 The Airhostess image changed in accordance with changing ideas around femininity and feminine beauty. Perpetuated through these advertising campaigns, The Airhostess stereotype became synonymous with glamour, beauty and style. In contemporary mass media, this stereotypical construction has been reinforced in movies such as View from the Top34 and—on a local level—through the marketing campaign of the Australian domestic carrier Virgin Blue, which promotes itself as youthful, fun and attractive.35 Even though anti-discrimination laws have been set in place since the 1950s, a recent court case involving Virgin Blue suggests that an applicant’s success is still largely dependant on her physical appearance. In October 2005, the Anti-discrimination Tribunal “ruled that the carrier directly discriminated against the women […] aged between 36 and 56, on the basis of their age during job interviews”.36 The prosecution claimed that the assessors favoured “young, beautiful women” over those with experience.37 Despite this, the Tribunal Member “found the hiring procedures were not in themselves biased”,38 but rather that the young recruitment team unconsciously identified with people closer to their age and demeanour.39 This recruitment process, where assessors unconsciously identify with women who uphold attributes assigned to The Airhostess stereotype, is also evident on an international level. A recent dissertational study 33

Cobble, “A Spontaneous Loss of Enthusiasm: Workplace Feminism and the Transformation of Women’s Service Jobs in the 1970’s”, 28. 34 In View From The Top the central character, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, escapes her dead end situation by becoming an airhostess and acquiring a lifestyle that includes international travel, expensive clothes and social status. 35 A recent advertising image promoting Virgin Blue depicts Richard Branson with a group of young girls wearing bikinis on a beach. 36 Todd, “Not given a flair go: flying high in win against Virgin”, 2. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Meade, “Women win age case against Virgin”, 2.

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conducted on a number of undisclosed international airline recruitment procedures, indicated that while there is no written material stating the requisite of certain physical attributes, during the interview process applicants were judged on their physical appearance and were rejected for reasons including: “[their] hair was too short […] nails were bitten […] posture was poor or […] legs were too chubby.”40 In addition to this, “applicants were selected on the basis of their being capable to follow stage directions, particularly those on how to project an [organisational] image or ‘look’. […] As one interviewed recruitment officer put it ‘female flight attendants should have poise, they should be elegant… they should be… well sort of feminine… they should have a charm that comes naturally to them’.”41 Based upon this research, the potential aptitude of The Airhostess is evaluated in terms of whether her appearance conforms to current feminine ideology and her ability to perform traditional notions associated with femininity such as poise, grace and natural charm. In other words, the applicants are assessed on their potential to perform female masquerade. In support of the theories surrounding masquerade, the conclusion of this study noted that “the labour which is involved in performing and maintaining the appearance of a flight attendant is not perceived as work, but as an aspect of just ‘being a woman’, from which women are deemed to derive both pleasure and a sense of identity”.42 The physical attributes favoured by the airline industries are thus deemed as being inherent female qualities and are considered as something “women are rather than what women do.”43 It is in this sense that the airline industry perpetuates ideological notions of femininity, by inadvertently forcing their flight attendants to participate in female masquerade. In TCD, Airhostess Chrissy is depicted in a desert. As an attempt to conform to and uphold the characteristics contained within this stereotype, she continues to wear her high heels and regulation uniform, despite the struggle this brings given her harsh surroundings. This struggle is further illuminated through her action of attempting to inflate and control the parachute, suggesting an attempt to escape the bind of the masquerade she finds herself in.

40

Abbot and Tyler, “Chocs Away: Weight Watching in the Contemporary Airline Industry”, 441-2. 41 Ibid., 442. From an interview with female recruitment interviewer and flight attendant, November 1994. 42 Ibid., 434. 43 Ibid.

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The Princess Hi. My name us Chrissy. I’m 27 years old and I’m a Virgo. I have brown hair, green eyes and I’m 167cm tall. My ambition in life is to become a Princess. My greatest achievement has been applying for Australian Princess. True success to me would be having the chance to be crowned Australian Princess. “Have you ever dreamt about becoming a Princess?”44 Australian Princess is a reality TV show which made its debut on Australian free-to-air television in 2005. The structure of the programme involves following a group of finalists through step by step training in etiquette, deportment, grooming, and public speaking, taught by “experts” such as Paul Burrell, former butler to Princess Diana. The finale of the series involves flying the finalists to England where they complete their formal training amongst European royalty. When Granada Productions put out a call for women between the ages of eighteen and thirty to take part in Australian Princess in 2005, over four thousand women applied.45 Chrissy was one of them. The application process was thorough and included a sixteen-page questionnaire, a video and/or three of the applicant’s favourite portraits (Fig. 5-12).46 From movies such as The Princess Diaries47 to the modern-day fairy story of Australia’s own Princess Mary—wooed by and then wed to the Danish Prince Frederick after meeting at a bar during the 2000 Sydney Olympics—The Princess stereotype is constantly being re-presented in popular culture as an ideal to aspire to. Thanks to on-going media coverage of Princess Mary’s story, this ideal has swiftly emerged as an 44

Australian Princess , September 2005. All references are to Series One of the show. 45 Moses, “Princess Power”, 6. 46 Australian Princess website. 47 The central character of The Princess Diaries discovers she has a royal heritage. In turn, she is transformed, through the training from her grandmother, the queen, into a princess. The title of this film is similar to The Chrissy Diaries, as a reference to the way in which different forms of mass media were utilised in preparation for the performances of Chrissy, but also for the ensuing documentation and diary, that was central in informing the four channel video installation.

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aspiration which is attainable by the average Australian woman. In regards to my life, mass media has certainly played a major role in shaping who I am today, and on a wider social scale, from Reality TV programmes such as Australian Idol to Big Brother, one need only turn on the television to see the way in which mainstream media and celebrity culture shapes the way in which people think, behave and what they aspire to. Judging from the number of applicants to Australian Princess, being trained in the areas of deportment, grooming and etiquette in front of millions of viewers, appears to be something many women in Australia wish to be a part of. The approach taken for the construction of Princess Chrissy, and subsequent application to Australian Princess, involved modelling Chrissy on such aspirations as represented in the media: wanting to change oneself, wanting to look beautiful, wanting to meet a Prince, and wanting to create a difference in the world. Through this process, the clichés of The Princess stereotype were reinforced. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve always dreamed about becoming a Princess… I think it would be the most fantastic job in the world— seeing new places, meeting new people, and helping people, wearing amazing clothes—it’s just the ultimate! I think my favourite princess would have to be Princess Diana, because she has made a difference in the world and always looked amazing while doing it. I think that if I became Australian Princess that I would like to make some changes for the better in the world… I think I’m just ready for more and to start realising my dreams and I think that this show would be the most amazing opportunity to do that… I hope you consider my application because it really would make all my dreams come true. Thank you [curtsey]. —Excerpts from The Chrissy Diaries, Australian Princess Application Video, 2005 Although Princess Chrissy did not make the cut, the reinforcement of The Princess clichés revealed the power of the construction which has been perpetuated throughout commercial society. This was also exemplified in the social commentary surrounding the show prior to its airing. Executive producer Hillary Innes was quoted as saying that the applicants “genuinely felt they wanted change. They felt it might give them a platform to make a difference.”48 In considering this statement and the process of the construction of Princess Chrissy, one could conclude 48

Quoted in Moses, “Princess Power”, 6.

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that The Modern Day Princess stereotype contains both a desire for personal transformation and a desire to make a difference in the world. In an article aptly titled “Princess Power”, Alexa Moses affirms this notion of personal transformation as lying at the heart of The Princess myth.49

Fig. 5-12: Princess Chrissy, photograph from Australian Princess Application (2005).

This idea of personal transformation was at the very crux of the programme. Initially, this was evident in the contestants who were chosen for the show, who ranged from “farm girl” to “surfer chick”. In retrospect, Chrissy could not have been a contender as she was already too “Princessy”, leaving less room for a transformation to be watched across the duration of the television series.50 Personal transformation as attainable through modelling oneself on The Princess stereotype raises three key issues. Firstly, the very desire for transformation renders the current self inferior. On becoming a finalist, Ruthy Anscombe said: “I guess I believe 49

Ibid. There was already one “Princess” selected for the group, who did not so much act like the Princess stereotype being discussed in this paper but rather in the slang definition of the term—as someone who has a precious opinion about themselves. She was evicted early in the series. 50

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in myself as a princess in a way. Not royalty or blood, but I know the woman inside of me and I desire the opportunity to shine.”51 Secondly, the idea that a transformation can be attained through reconstructing oneself based upon The Princess stereotype—learning to walk, talk, behave and look a certain way—takes away any chance for originality. The danger in this exchange of originality for a reconstruction—or conformity—is that it has the potential to take away self-expression, an expression which may be in itself empowering. As Dr. Catherine Cole (University of Technology, Australia) states, “turning into well-behaved, well-mannered princesses seems to be running against the notion of being yourself.”52 Thirdly, “that wannabe princesses, deportment teachers and even entertainment companies […] describe [this] transformation [as] ‘power’”53 is problematic. The idea that power can be attained through the process of being on a Reality TV show is a contradiction in terms. To even be considered for going on the show, applicants are required to sign a number of documents which, for the most part, hand all power over to the producers. The Release and Waiver, for example, assigns the “Producers all right, title and interest in and to any material submitted […] and grant […] the Producers the right to use, edit and alter such Materials in all media throughout the world in perpetuality.”54 Despite this, the show rolled on and as it unfolded, the contestants appeared to be touched by some of the issues surrounding The Princess stereotype and the programme. One of the first evictees described her experience on the show as a game where one must sustain a “lie”.55 In terms of research for TCD project, it is the perpetuation of this performance—this lie—which constitutes the masquerade. The realisation of this “lie”, however, did not stop the tears of no longer being a part of the Australian Princess quest.56 51

Quoted in Moses, 6. Quoted in ibid., 7. 53 Ibid., 6. 54 Australian Princess website, Australian Princess Application, “Release and Waiver”, 15 September 2005. 55 Zeena Moussa, quoted from Australian Princess, Channel Ten, Friday 7 October, 2005. 56 As the show continued to unfold the competition became fierce, especially when the time came for a select group of finalists to fly to the UK. At the end of the competition, which was held at a ball, the winner—Ally Mansell—was crowned The Princess and then danced with a “real” Prince. Since the completion of the show I have not heard or seen anything about the winner in the media. 52

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In TCD, Princess Chrissy is depicted in a dark, dead forest, wearing a pink gown with gold high-heels and a long sash. Walking away from the camera, Princess Chrissy disappears into the distance, before walking back again. She appears lost or as if she is looking for something, which may be seen as a metaphor for The Princess seeking a path of personal transformation. Princess Chrissy’s struggle is not only represented through her attempt to conform to the affectations pertaining to her stereotype while performing her repetitive action, but also through having to constantly keep her sash in check. Princess Chrissy’s search appears to be futile but nevertheless remains an ongoing quest.

The Cheerleader Hi. My name is Chrissy. I’m 27 years old and I’m a Virgo. I have brown hair, green eyes and I’m 167cm tall. My ambition in life is to be a professional Cheerleader. My greatest achievement is that I’m part of a Cheerleading Pre-Squad. True success to me would be making it to the main squad. The experience of cheerleading with the Parramatta Eels Cheerleading Pre-Squad has been my longest running performance to date. I expected the experience to be terrifying, wholly objectifying and the girls to fit the stereotype. From the moment I started, however, my expectations were completely subverted. Following are a selection of entries from the diary I kept during this time.57 Tuesday 12th April 2005 Tonight I attended my first class. Term one classes had started about four weeks ago and I was nervous about being behind and joining an already formed group. All my expectations of what the class would be like were wrong. There was no pompom throwing or chanting of letters58… this was a hard-core dance class with a routine like something out of a Jennifer Lopez video clip. And it didn’t take me very long to work out I was the worst in the class. This was hard. I can’t believe I expected it to be so easy.

57

The names of the members in the pre-squad have been changed. Based upon movies such as Can’t Buy Me Love and Bring It On. See section “Process and Public Performance”, n. 3. 58

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Tuesday 10th May 2005 Tonight I ran into Kelly59 on the way to class and we walked together. She showed me a safer route to walk, which was great cause the way I had been walking was pretty creepy. Kelly talked the whole way—she told me about her job at a childcare facility, and although she loved the kids, she was experiencing a problem with her colleagues. She described them as over-weight, middle-aged women who were anti-cheerleading and who threw comments at her such as “you’re just a stupid cheerleader.” I couldn’t help but wonder—were these women being mean to Kelly because they were jealous she was a cheerleader? Tuesday 17th May 2005 Tonight Anna60 bought in some photos of a performance the squad did last weekend at a fate (I couldn’t make it). We all poured over them. In asking about the day, they told me it went really well. After doing the performance, they went around and had their photo taken with firemen, the police and other fate-day attractions. There were fire hoses held in provocative ways, police hats worn, cleavage everywhere and sexy smiles. Phrases such as “we look so hot” were flying out left, right and centre. In seeing the photos, I couldn’t help but cringe. Despite having had the uniform—cum one-piece swimming suit with plastic trimmings—in my possession for some time now, I still hadn’t the chutzpah to try it on. Tuesday 9th August 2005 Tonight I found the work to be raising some moral issues. I feel horrible that I could be perceived as to be lying about what I am doing. I’m having nightmares about it. In one particular dream, when Anna found out that this is the basis of an artwork I am doing, in my defence I claimed that it wasn’t like that: I am really enjoying the classes and really want to do this… In dealing with this, I have now started to give all of myself except for the art aspect of my life. By this I mean they know where I work and where I live. Also, I have realised that the work is not about this particular squad or its members, but rather of my experience during this time. I hope this stops the nightmares.

59

I had met Kelly last year at Heat #1 of the Smirnoff Ice Swimsuit Model of the Year Search, Rouges Night Club, Sydney. This meant we were instantly friends. 60 A member of the pre-squad.

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Sunday 28th August 2005 Today I did my first game. Sasha61 was meeting me at the stadium two hours early to go through the line out62—which I still didn’t know—then hopefully an opportunity to go through a few of the sideline routines and what to do between scoring and conversion63… What? I know. In the train on the way to the stadium, two fans got on at Central. It occurred to me at this point, that not only was this my first official game as a cheerleader, but the first football game I have ever been to. Needless to say I started freaking out. SHIT! I though I was getting there early. Here were two middle-aged people, dressed in their blue and gold’s on the way to supporting something they obviously considered to be very important. The pressure was on. I met Sasha outside the corporate entrance and as soon as we arrived we went through the gates like VIP. In the change rooms I was confronted with the moment I had been dreading all season—putting on the uniform— but I did it and I was getting ready the girls started drifting in, dressing up and putting makeup on. Within this context, of all of us wearing the uniform together, surprisingly I felt completely fine. No, actually I felt great. This was kind of fun… Despite making a million mistakes the girls were really supportive and the game was great fun. I enjoyed myself immensely. We all left each other after the game smiling, laughing and on a complete high. And this high stayed with me on my way home and over the next couple of days: I felt confident, even sexy and… “Ohmygod… I am a cheerleader!” Friday 2nd September 2005 Tonight I was extremely excited about doing another game, and the “Friday night finals” at that. I thought I was nervous last week though: times this by a thousand, as tonight we were doing a half-time routine. Learning this routine had been a nightmare because in the end we only had two lessons to practice the completed routine. Considering the routine was for the whole duration of the song I Love the Way You Move, we had to go into overdrive. I was terrified of letting Sasha and the rest of the

61 Sasha was the teacher of the squad. This was her last season as she was about to graduate from law school. 62 The line out is the routine performed out of the tunnel which the players go through as they run out onto the field. 63 When a player scores we stand up and do eight counts of a routine. We then stand there as a player converts the score by kicking a goal. If the player gets the conversion, we do another routine, if not we take our seats.

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team down so I practiced for hours in the week leading up to the game and listened to the song a million times over. This time we all got there early to have as much time to practice on the field as possible, and, although I had done last week’s game this experience was completely different. It’s one thing to practice a full length dance routine inside with bare feet and your hair up, but today it was windy, our hair had to be down, I was wearing heels and dancing on grass. My nerves were almost nauseating. To make things worse there was a group of boys on the side of the field drinking beer and heckling us. It was very intimidating. This game was off to a very hard start. The routine ended up being a small disaster… they didn’t get the music right… half of us started at the wrong time… the lifts went wrong… and half way through a woman wearing a head set told us to stop because half-time was nearly over. About six of us—myself included— stopped. Realising that the rest of the girls kept on going, we were forced to continue and having less experience than the others meant I was completely out of time. With a few minutes to go the football players were already on the field and from the VIP treatment of last week, we had suddenly become just cheerleaders; cheerleaders who were in the way of starting the second half of the game.

Figs.5-13 and 5-14: Cheerleader Chrissy, video stills from Parramatta Eels Cheerleading Pre-squad performance documentation, Parramatta Stadium (2005).

Finally we finished and filed—or almost ran—off the field. When we got back to the tunnel Sasha was in tears and we were all extremely upset. Sasha said she wasn’t crying because of our performance, but because “they” never get the music right and despite practicing so hard, “they” made it a disaster. The performance was so off-putting though that I think I made a mistake in every sideline routine that was to follow. When the game finally ended and we were getting changed Kelly had a fight with one of the other girls who was accusing her of being completely dominating and ruining the fun. The high from last week had been

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replaced with a complete low. There were tears, fighting and frustration. That was horrible. Afterthought Despite having moments such as the Friday night finals which were almost humiliating, the experience of being a cheerleader has overall been extremely positive, going against all my prior expectations. I have made friends with the girls, and found the experience confidence-boosting, challenging and enjoyable. In TCD, Cheerleader Chrissy is depicted on a football field at night practicing her routines with the made object, comprising a set of oversized and seemingly heavy pompoms. She does not wear the uniform but rather is dressed in a traditional outfit, as represented in source material such as the movie Can’t Buy Me Love and Gwen Stefani’s video clip for Hollaback Girl. By Chrissy not wearing the uniform, the work attempts to represent The Cheerleader archetype on a broader scale, rather than a direct critique of this specific squad and the other members. Chrissy’s experience in the cheerleading pre-squad is highlighted in her struggle to manage her pompoms and attempt to perfect the routine. The period when she is “switched off” and waiting highlights her repetitive action as a masquerade, and while Chrissy performs her masquerade there are also moments when she thoroughly enjoys it.

Works Cited Abbot, Pamela & Melissa Tyler. “Chocs Away: Weight Watching in the Contemporary Airline Industry”. In Sociology, vol. 32, no. 3 (August 1998): 443–450. Australian Princess, Granada Productions, September 2005 . Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today”. In A Roland Barthes Reader, edited by Susan Sontag, 93-149. London: Vintage, 2000. Bronfen, Elisabeth. “(Entlastugen) Pipilottis Fehler/ (Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes”. In Pipilotti Rist, edited by Peggy Phelan, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Elisabeth Bronfen, 78-91. London: Phaidon Press, 2001. Camhi, Leslie. “A Forgotten Gender Bender”. Artnews, vol. 98, no. 10 (November 1999): 168-170. Chambers, Nicholas. “Mother + Father”. In Artlines: Art and People/2, 12-15. Queensland: Queensland Art Gallery, 2005.

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Cindy Sherman. London: Serpentine Gallery, 2003. —. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1982. Clifford, James. Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Clifford, Katie. “Nikki S. Lee: Leslie Tonkonow Artworks and Projects”. Artnews, vol. 101, no. 3 (March 2002): 121. Cobble, Dorothy Sue. “A Spontaneous Loss of Enthusiasm: Workplace Feminism and the Transformation of Women’s Service Jobs in the 1970’s”. International Labour and Working Class History, no. 56 (Fall 1999): 23–44. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere, translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989. Heath, Stephen. “Joan Rivière and The Masquerade”. In Formations of Fantasy, edited by Victor Burgin, James Donald & Cora Kaplan, 4561. London: Routledge, 1986. Irigaray, Luce. Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un. Paris, Minuit, 1977. Keesing, Roger & Andrew Strathern. Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective, 3rd edition. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998. Krauss, Rosalind. Bachelors. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin Books, 1977. Louks, Cathleen M. Battle In The Skies: Sex Discrimination in the United StatesAirline Industry, 1930 to 1978. Las Vegas: University of Nevada, 1995. Meade, Kevin. “Women Win age case against Virgin”. The Australian (Tuesday, October 11, 2005): 2. Momin, Shamim. “Nikki S. Lee”. Art Asia Pacific, no. 37 (2003): 68. Moses, Alexa. “Princess Power”. Sydney Morning Herald/ Spectrum (August 6-7 2005): 6-7. Mulvey, Laura. “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The work of Cindy Sherman”. New Left Review, no. 88 (July/August 1991): 136150. —. Visual and Other Pleasures. Houndsmills; Basingstoke; Hampshire: Macmillan, 1989. Rivière, Joan. “Womanliness as a Masquerade” (1929). In Formations of Fantasy, edited by Victor Burgin, James Donald & Cora Kaplan, 3544. London: Routledge, 1986.

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Rush, Michael. New Media in late 20th Century Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Small, Irene V. “The Photography of Tseng Kwong Chi and Nikki S. Lee”. Art Asia Pacific, no. 28 (2000): 52. Strathen, Marilyn. “The limits of auto-anthropology”. In Anthropology at Home, edited by Anthony Jackson. London & New York: Tavistock Publications, 1987. Todd, Mark. “Not given a flair go: flying high in win against Virgin”. Sydney Morning Herald, (Tuesday, October 11, 2005): 2.

SECTION III: REVIEWS/REVISIONS

CHAPTER SIX QUEEN SEDUCES MISTRESS: THE PORTRAITURE OF MARIE LESZCZINSKA AND MADAME DE POMPADOUR JENNIFER G. GERMANN

Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Madame de Pompadour (1721-1764), mistress of Louis XV (1710-1774), has become the most recognisable historical figure of Louis XV’s court, including no doubt the king himself. The diversity and richness of her art patronage has been the focus of a major exhibition with venues in Munich, Versailles, and London, along with two accompanying texts, a massive catalogue, and an illustrated biography.1 Other new biographies, scholarly monographs, and journal articles have appeared before and since these exhibits, each presenting varied interpretations of Pompadour as patron, artist, self-fashioner, and feminist.2 From this exciting body of work, Pompadour emerges as an Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2006 CAA Annual Meeting in Boston and at the Difference Reframed conference at the University of Sussex. I wish to thank Alexandra Kokoli, Andrew McClellan, the panelists and the participants at both conferences for their comments and observations. I would also like to thank Dr. Kokoli, Keely Meehan, Elizabeth Hudson, and the anonymous reader for their comments. 1 Salmon, Seifert, and Wine, eds., Madame de Pompadour et les arts, and exhibitions at Versailles and in Munich of the same name; Jones, Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress, and an exhibition in London of the same name. See also Gordon, “Searching for the Elusive Madame de Pompadour,” for his discussion of 2002 as an “Année Pompadour.” 2 These works include Goodman, The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour: Celebrating the Femme Savante; Hyde, “The ‘Makeup’ of the Mistress: Boucher’s Portrait of Pompadour at Her Toilette,” and, more recently, “The Makeup of the Marquise,”; Gordon and Hensick, “The Picture within the Picture: Boucher’s 1750 Portrait of Madame de Pompadour Identified”; Salmon, et al., Madame de

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independent, intelligent, and attractive woman who, through a combination of her savoir-faire and her sexuality, climbed to the top of the cultural, economic, and political hierarchy to become the most influential woman in France at mid-century. Needless to say, Marie Leszczinska (1703-1768), the queen of France and consort to Louis XV, has remained in Madame de Pompadour’s scholarly shadow.3 Yet, Marie Leszczinska’s portraiture was highly visible during the eighteenth century, even more so than Pompadour’s. Portraits of Marie Leszczinska by Louis Tocqué (1740, Musée du Louvre, Paris), Carle Van Loo (1747, Musée et Château de Versailles, Versailles), Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1748, Musée du Louvre, Paris), and JeanMarc Nattier (1748, Musée et Château de Versailles, Versailles) appeared in Salon exhibitions at least four times in the 1740s alone. In contrast, portraits of Pompadour were only exhibited in three Salons spread over two decades. These included portraits by La Tour (1755, Musée du Louvre, Paris) and François Boucher (1757, Alte Pinakothek, Munich), and posthumously, a portrait by François-Hubert Drouais (1764, National Gallery, London). If we reexamine Pompadour’s portraits from the perspective that the queen’s image was at least as visible as the “images of a mistress” during their lifetime, what is immediately striking is that Pompadour’s portraits cannot be understood without considering Marie Leszczinska’s. In this chapter, I will focus on two portraits: Nattier’s 1748 Portrait of Marie Leszczinska (Fig. 6-1),4 and La Tour’s 1755 Portrait of

Pompadour et les arts; and Lajer-Burcharth, “Pompadour’s Touch: Difference in Representation”. 3 The bibliography on Marie Leszczinska is much shorter than that on Pompadour. Liévin-Bonaventurer Proyart, Vie de Marie Leckzinska. Princesse de Pologne, Reine de France; de Nolhac, Louis XV et Marie Lescinska d’Après Nouveaux Documents; Jallut, “Marie Leczinska et la peinture”; John Rogister, “Queen Marie LeszczyĔska and Faction at the French Court, 1725-1768”; Cosandey, “L’effacement d’un modèle”; Germann, “Figuring Marie Leszczinska (17031768): Representing Queenship in Eighteenth-Century France,” PhD diss.; and, most recently, Germann, “Fecund Fathers and Missing Mothers: Louis XV, Marie Leszczinska, and the Politics of Royal Parentage in the 1720s”. 4 Marie Leszczinska had Nattier paint two copies after the original portrait, believed to be the Versailles version reproduced here. One version, which may be one of the two autograph copies, is at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Dijon (CA 413). According to the museum’s records, this painting is from the collection of the Bishop of Chalons, Monseigneur Nicholas Saulx-Tavernes, the queen’s Grand Almoner. Xavier Salmon rejects this as one of the three autograph versions in Jean-Marc Nattier, 1685-1766, 200. In the early twentieth century, Pierre de

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Madame de Pompadour (Fig. 6-2). I will argue that Marie Leszczinska’s image was the source for the iconography and setting of the La Tour portrait and that this formal relationship signals an intersubjective relationship between these two women as actors in the French royal court and as art patrons.5 This chapter has three related though different points. First, I will consider the relationship between Marie Leszczinska and Madame de Pompadour. While it is clear that the basis of their relationship produced conflicts, the striking similarities between their life histories and, indeed, their generally considerate attitude towards one another, merits reconsideration. Second, I will turn to the formal relationship between the two portraits to demonstrate that Nattier’s portrait of the queen sets a key formal precedent for Pompadour’s portrait by La Tour. La Tour’s 1755 Portrait of Madame de Pompadour, and Pompadour’s learned woman iconography in general, draws directly on Marie Leszczinska’s portrait by Nattier, which represented a new vision of noble femininity that seduced the king’s mistress.6 Viewing these portraits as related makes apparent the lines of vision connecting one woman to the other. More importantly, perhaps, this view shifts our focus away from the problematics of malefemale, subject-object looking by placing a woman in the role of desiring subject who looks at and to another woman. Third, I will address the significance of this intersubjective approach for illuminating the life history and representational practices of women at the eighteenth-century Nolhac identified a potential autograph copy in the collection of the Duke de Fezenac. Nolhac, J.-M. Nattier, Peintre de la Cour de Louis XV, 81. 5 The exploration of intersubjective art making and patronage has been a focus of recent studies. Whitney Davis and Isabelle de Courtivron focused on sexual relationships at the heart of artistic production in Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership. Sheila ffolliott analyzed the art patronage of Catherine de’Medici and Diane de Poitiers as fundamentally interrelated yet competitive, in “Casting a Rival into the Shade: Catherine de’Medici and Diane de Poitiers”. Carol Ockman investigated the ties between female patrons in Napoleonic Europe. Her account demonstrates that the formal connections between images can reveal significant social ties between female patrons. See Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line. Jennifer Milam and Melissa Hyde have both explored the interrelationship between portraits of the Mesdames de France. See Milam, “Matronage and the Direction of Sisterhood: Portraits of Madame Adélaïde,” and Hyde, “Under the Sign of Minerva: Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Portrait of Madame Adélaïde”. 6 Elise Goodman argues that La Tour’s portrait is the culmination of Pompadour’s femme savante imagery, developed to refute intense criticism against her, which I will discuss in more detail below. See Goodman, especially 19-21, 30-31, 118-137.

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French court. To read the portraits of Marie Leszczinska and Madame de Pompadour as images of semblance requires breaking down the conventional view of these two women as opposites in terms of personality and character or, even more strongly, as antagonistic to each other, embedded in most art historical and historical literature. Doing so raises the issue of what feminist scholarship loses when it focuses on one “hero,” which I will address in my conclusion, rather than expanding our field of vision to include other women operating in the same milieu at the same time. I argue that as a strategy for recouping the activity of women in the art world, the focus on relations between and among women as art patrons is a significant area in need of exploration.

Relating Queen and Mistress A reconsideration of the biographies of Marie Leszczinska and Madame de Pompadour reveals significant similarities and deeply intertwined lives. While generally overlooked, this is a significant point. The parallels in their life histories and in their roles as queen and mistress ultimately made Marie Leszczinska a useful model for Madame de Pompadour.7 Marie Leszczinska was born in Wrocáaw (Breslau), Poland in 1703, the daughter of Stanislas Leszczinski and Catherine Opalinska. She married Louis XV in 1725, though not to universal acclaim. Chosen because she was unmarried, Catholic, and old enough to bear children, she came from a less-than-distinguished pedigree—her father was the elected and deposed King of Poland. Although the earliest years of their marriage were reportedly happy, the king took his first mistress by 1733.8 Even with the arrival of the royal favourites, however, the queen retained “potential power,” in John Rogister’s terms.9 In case of the king’s death, the queen could become Regent or, at her son’s majority, one of his most important advisors. In other words, Marie Leszczinska, though sidelined at court, retained her importance both as a political power and symbolically. Madame de Pompadour became royal mistress in 1745. Born of questionable parentage, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson married the nephew of the wealthy financier Lenormant de Tournehem in 1741. She had great 7

As Goodman has demonstrated, Pompadour was knowledgeable about seventeenthcentury court history and sought to utilize it for her own advantage. It seems logical that she was also well-versed in more recent history. Goodman, 50-79. 8 Louis XV’s first publicly acknowledged mistress was Louise-Julie, Comtesse de Mailly. After her, one (or possibly two) of her sisters became acknowledged favourites in turn. Antoine, Louis XV, 485-492. Rogister, 203-206. 9 Rogister, 202-203, 211.

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success in Parisian salons but had reportedly set her sights on becoming royal mistress early in her life.10 She placed herself in the king’s path by watching his hunt in the forest near her château at Étoiles. After a carefully orchestrated encounter at a ball celebrating the Dauphin’s marriage in 1745, she became official mistress and the Marquise de Pompadour, and was presented to the queen. She successfully lobbied the king to become a lady-in-waiting to the queen, which occurred in 1756. She attended the queen regularly, rode in her carriage, and lived at Versailles for almost twenty years until her death in 1764.11 More strikingly, each woman’s rise to prominence was conducted under the guidance of the Pâris brothers, financiers and royal provisioners for the army.12 Marie Leszczinska’s candidacy for queenship was championed by Joseph Pâris du Verney, through the Duc de Bourbon, Louis XV’s prime minister. Pompadour may have been the daughter of a different Pâris brother, Jean-Pâris de Montmartel, who was her godfather and purchased the marquisate of Pompadour for her.13 At the time of their arrival at court, both women were seen as parvenus. Traditionally, queens of France were foreign-born, Catholic, and drawn from the great monarchies of Europe; during the Bourbon dynasty, both Louis XIV’s mother and wife were Infantas of Spain and Hapsburgs (as well as aunt and niece). Marie Antoinette was also of Hapsburg extraction, although from the Austrian branch. Marie Leszczinska and Marie de’Medici were the only Bourbon queens perceived as being from significantly less- or non-noble backgrounds. At the time of Marie Leszczinska’s marriage, the duchess of Lorraine complained, “It appears that mésalliances [marriage between people of unequal rank] are very à la mode in France, since they now go up to the sacred person of the King. He will be, I believe, the first of our kings who will have married a simple young lady!”14 Mistresses, like queens, were traditionally from the highest ranks of the nobility, 10

Apparently, a fortune teller had predicted that Pompadour would eventually become the king’s mistress. Pompadour’s will included a gift to a “Dame LeBon,” who may have been the fortune teller. Jones, 21. 11 Rogister, 190-197. 12 There is a surprising lack of research on the Pâris family. See Peter Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720-1745, 67-70, 87-92. 13 Salmon, Madame de Pompadour et les arts, 67-69. 14 “Il me paraît que les mésalliances sont bien à la mode en France, puisqu’elles vont à present jusqu’à la personne sacrée du Roie. Il sera, à ce que je crois, le premier de nos rois qui auru épousé une simple demoiselle!” [sic]. Quoted in Pierre de Nolhac, Louis XV et Marie Lescinska d’Après Nouveaux Documents, 42, my translation. For additional discussion of mésalliances, see Brunelle, “Dangerous Liaisons: Mésalliance and Early Modern French Noblewomen.”

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although these women were French. Prior to Madame de Pompadour, all of Louis XV’s publicly acknowledged mistresses came from the MaillyNesle family. After Pompadour appeared to have established herself as official mistress, complaints about her focused on her class origins not on the presence of a mistress within the royal household, recalling complaints made about Marie Leszczinska at the time of her engagement and marriage to Louis XV.15 Both women were well-educated (in the case of the queen, her education was conducted under the guidance of Polish Jesuits at her parent’s court), literate, and both had contacts within Parisian salon society. Marie Leszczinska, like Madame de Pompadour, owned an extensive library.16 Both women were amateur artists. While Madame de Pompadour’s talents for acting, singing, and printmaking are well known, Marie Leszczinska is credited with maintaining the regular tradition of musical performance at Versailles during her forty-two year reign.17 The queen was also an amateur painter and, with the assistance of professional artists, painted floor-to-ceiling panels for her Cabinet des Chinois at Versailles.18 Both queen and mistress were aware of the others’ artistic activities and intellectual interests. In addition, Marie Leszczinska and Madame de Pompadour were significant art patrons who both worked with the most prominent artists in mid-eighteenth-century France, including François Boucher, Carle Van Loo, Jean-Marc Nattier, and Maurice Quentin de La Tour. The specifics of the queen’s patronage activity remains unclear because her expenditures were under the aegis of the king’s household and needed his approval.19

15

Criticism of Pompadour in regards to her subversion of the ‘natural order of rank’ is discussed by Thomas Kaiser. See “Madame de Pompadour and the Theaters of Power,” 1027, 1034, 1039. 16 While the contents of Madame de Pompadour’s library are known in detail, Marie Leszczinska’s library was integrated into the king’s at her death and no inventory was made. There are accounts of what Marie Leszczinska read, particularly by the Duc de Mouchy and scattered references in her surviving correspondence. 17 Goodman, 112-113. See also Marcelle Benoit, Versailles et les musiciens du roi, 1661-1733; Étude institutionnelle et sociale, 68-69, 77. 18 Germann, “Spaces of Difference: The Queen’s Cabinet des Chinois at Versailles,” 109-151; Jallut, “Marie Lecsinka et la peinture,” 305-322. 19 In contrast to the queen, Pompadour managed her own fortune which derived from a combination of sources including her dowry, gifts from the king, real estate transactions, her factories, and other investments. Therefore Pompadour’s patronage is more easily tracked and was, as it appears, more extensive. For a

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Fig. 6-1: Jean-Marc Nattier, Portrait of Marie Lecszinska, Queen of France (17031768), 1748. Photo courtesty of Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource.

discussion of Pompadour’s finances, see Jean Cordey, “Introduction,” Inventaire des biens de Madame de Pompadour rédigé après son décès, viii-xxi.

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Fig. 6-2: Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Portrait of the Marquise de Pompadour (1721-1764), 1755. Photo courtesy of Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource.

Yet both women commissioned portraits, historical and religious paintings, works of decorative art, and large-scale architectural projects. This type of activity puts them in company with a very select group of early modern patrons, male and female alike. Marie Leszczinska and Madame de Pompadour offer a useful example of an intense relationship between two women, which can be used as a basis for investigating their art patronage and active self-fashioning in the 1740s and 1750s. A rigorous analysis of this relationship—one forged in conflict, community, and, perhaps even at times, cooperatively (as in

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Madame de Pompadour’s presentation at court)20—entails investigating their images and identities as intersubjective productions. While this is not a new direction for feminist or art historical investigation, it is not an approach that has been taken in relation to their commissions. The portraiture of queen and mistress provides an excellent means to chart the relationship between them and to consider how their representational practices are related. Madame de Pompadour’s first portrait as the king’s mistress was painted in 1746, by Jean-Marc Nattier.21 In 1748, Nattier produced an abbreviated version of this portrait.22 That same year, Nattier painted the striking portrait of Marie Leszczinska, versions of which are now at Versailles and Dijon, and which was the last completed portrait of the queen during her lifetime.23 In 1755—the same year the engraver Tardieu reproduced Nattier’s by-then famous portrait of the queen—Maurice Quentin de La Tour painted his celebrated pastel portrait of Pompadour, now at the Louvre. Pompadour commissioned this work herself in 1750, following Marie Leszczinska’s 1748 portrait and during the period that Pompadour’s sexual relationship with the king ended. Indeed, even the choice of La Tour returns us to the queen’s portraiture. The pastellist had gained considerable acclaim after he painted a portrait of the queen between 1744 and 1748, which was displayed in the Salon of 1748 and considered one of his masterpieces.24 And while various portraits of both queen and mistress visually incorporate the king’s image, their portraits continually allude to the presence of the other woman in their lives. Nattier’s 1748 portrait and La Tour’s 1755 portrait are closely comparable not only because both artists painted both women, but also 20

Nancy Mitford describes Pompadour’s presentation to the queen, in which Marie Leszczinska actively engaged Pompadour in a conversation of “twelve sentences,” in other words, an extended dialogue, thereby taking control of an otherwise difficult situation. Mitford, Madame de Pompadour, 62-64. 21 Pompadour was depicted as the goddess Diana, a reference to encounters between the king and future mistress during the king’s hunts. In the same period, Madame Adélaïde was also depicted as Diana by Nattier (1745), so Pompadour’s portrait was a way to visually elevate the mistress’s status. Milam, “Matronage,” 135. 22 Salmon, Madame de Pompadour et les arts, 142. 23 Carle Van Loo painted a sketch called “Marie Lescinska recevant l’hommage de la France,” that was sold in a sale of the effects of Jean-François de Troy in 1764. Sahut, Carle Vanloo: Premier Peintre du Roi (Nice, 1705-Paris, 1765), 106. In addition, Augustin Pajou sculpted a memorial for her, displayed in the Salon of 1769. See Draper and Scherf, Augustin Pajou: Royal Sculptor, 1730-1809, 143-147. 24 Monnier, Pastels: Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins, XVIIéme et XVIIIéme Siècles, vol. 1, catalogue number 68.

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because their portraits are of similar vintage, made within just a few years of each other. Both women were deeply involved with the creation of their images, both chose to have them publicly exhibited in the venue of the Salon, and both images share a similar format and pose. Neither is a traditional, formal court portrait; rather, both women are engaged in reading—one a literary text, the other a musical one. It is my contention that Madame de Pompadour looked to Marie Leszczinska’s 1748 portrait as a model for her own image after the end of her sexual relationship with Louis XV.

Looking at the Queen Jean-Marc Nattier’s 1748 Portrait of Marie Leszczinska is a warm, inviting, and sensuous image. This portrait, an active collaboration between patron and artist, represented an extraordinary revision of the queen’s image. That this portrait was, in fact, the queen’s commission has never been disputed. It was created in her apartments at Versailles, where it was likely displayed.25 She gave permission for it to be hung at the Salon and ordered two autograph copies: one was given as a gift to the Comte de Maurepas, an intimate of the queen’s and perhaps more importantly, a Pompadour enemy,26 and the other to Joseph Pâris du Verney, a Parisian financier, a member of the queen’s household in the 1720s, and a Pompadour ally. In 1755, she permitted an engraving to be made after this portrait, which was dedicated to her. Her promotion of this image was successful and it was adapted by later queens and empresses into the nineteenth century.27 To commission a portrait, to grant permission for it to be displayed and distributed, and to have copies created and gifted to prominent people both in and out of the court

25 Inventory records indicate that the painting was placed in the Hôtel de Surintendant by 1760, suggesting that prior to this it was displayed somewhere at Versailles though the precise location is unknown. Salmon, Jean-Marc Nattier, 197. 26 Maurepas is considered by many historians as the likely author of the Poissonades. He certainly took the blame for them and was dismissed from court. Antoine, 613. Kaiser, 1031. 27 For example, see Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s Portrait of Marie Antoinette with her Children (1787, Musée et Château de Versailles, Versailles); Adélaïde LabilleGuiard’s Portrait of Madame Adélaïde (1787, Musée et Château de Versailles, Versailles), and Franz-Xavier Winterhalter’s The Empress Eugénie Holding LouisNapoleon The Prince Imperial on Her Knees (1857, Château de Prangins, Prangins).

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demonstrates that the queen wanted her portrait to be seen by a wide audience. Nattier’s portrayal of Marie Leszczinska presents her as a strikingly visceral figure. The artist has pushed her close to the picture plane in a luscious red dress with rich brown fur trim and copious amounts of lace. On her head, she wears a white lace cap and a black scarf tied loosely at her chin with a fichu, a neckerchief, tucked into the front of her gown. She is seated at a console, looking over her right shoulder while her fingers play in the pages of the book before her. What frankly attracts the eye of most non-specialist viewers is not the painter’s skills nor the luxuriousness of the queen’s dress, but her pose. The queen seems to lean onto her console, shoulders relaxed. Her legs fall open with a trail of fur leading the viewer’s eye directly to her hand nestled in her lap. The unusual pose is emphasized by the artist’s decision to cut the queen’s body just below her knees, placing her hands at the centre of the image.28 While Nattier’s representation of the queen’s separated legs could be viewed as an artistic failure, at best immodest and at worst, insulting, it was not commented on by Salon critics and has not been noted by contemporary art historians. Yet this unusual pose can be read as a sign within this portrait and it functions through the visualization of touch, a visual manifestation of the queen’s desire. It is a sign of the queen’s engagement with her portrait and its creation, a sign of her desire to be seen, figured in the representation of her body and as an assertion of its physicality.29 One of the pictorial strategies that make the image so powerful is its apparent intimacy. Marie Leszczinska is shown in three-quarter length and she is brought up to the picture plane, a greenish-blue curtain draped over the back of her chair. This is a traditional “cloth of honour,” revealing a few golden fleur-de-lis indicating her rank, but also intensifying the sense 28 The three-quarter length format was used for queens and queen consorts. Anthonis Mor famously portrayed Mary Tudor (c.1554, Museo de Prado, Madrid) in a similar pose, as did Pierre Mignard, in his portrait of Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon, the morganatic wife of Louis XIV (1694, Musée et Château de Versailles, Versailles). 29 My analysis of this portrait is related to Lajer-Burcharth’s interest in touch, discussed in her essay “Pompadour’s Touch.” In it, she states, “I want to explore the possibility of regarding the doubling aspect of touch as the means of a woman’s extension within the sign of the artist and thus also of both material and imaginary revision, however subtle it may be, of his [the artist’s] means of figuring her self.” Lajer-Burcharth, 58. Lajer-Burcharth describes a disconnect between the visible parts of the mistress’s body and those covered by her gowns as portrayed by Boucher and La Tour (60, 64-67), something that I would argue is strikingly different than Marie Leszczinska’s representation by Nattier.

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of physical closeness. The intimacy within the space of the portrait is enhanced by the queen’s contemplative air. Her attention is drawn inward and she is represented in a state of reverie. Her pose is relaxed and unselfconscious. Her head turns over her right shoulder while her body leans in towards her book set on a console.30 While impossible to determine the identity of the book with any certainty, it is usually described as a Bible, although one version of the portrait reportedly showed the queen reading a philosophical text.31 The queen’s attention, directed internally, both recalls images of saints as well as images of male intellectuals, and is an unusual pictorial strategy for a woman, especially for a living queen of France.32 Rather than reading this portrait as a “true” picture of Marie Leszczinska, we should recognize in it the queen’s attempt to fashion a new image. In fact, this portrait can be read as encoding a criticism of the relationship between the king and Madame de Pompadour. Under all of the queen’s lace, she wears a heavily jeweled broach with the figure of St. John Nepomuk, a late-fourteenth-century Bohemian priest canonized in 1729, the year the Dauphin was born.33 St. John Nepomuk was the confessor of Queen Joanna of Bohemia. He was executed by her dissolute husband, King Wenceslaus IV, when he refused to reveal the contents of the queen’s confession. The broach links Marie Leszczinska to the earlier, devout, Eastern European queen and can be seen as pinning the blame for the decline of court morals on Louis XV and his mistress at a time when their relationship was facing intense public critique. The timing of the portrait supports just such a reading. Commissioned in April of 1748 and displayed in August of that year, it appeared in the same year that Poissonades about Madame de Pompadour were launched. The Poissonades were satirical verses that harshly criticized the royal mistress’s appearance, health, intellect and spending. These attacks have been read as thinly disguised assaults on the king, since he was seen as 30

The Chambre de la reine at Versailles, where Madame Tocqué claims the portrait was painted, contained such a console. See Kisluk-Grosheide, “French Royal Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum,” 10-11, for a colour photograph of the remnants of this console. 31 Nolhac, J.-M. Nattier, 81. 32 An example of a portrait of a contemporary male intellectual, see Louis-Michel Van Loo’s Portrait of Denis Diderot (1767, Musée du Louvre, Paris). 33 The broach is on her left shoulder, partially covered by her fichu. Xavier Salmon identifies the broach as one in Marie Leszczinska’s personal collection and inventoried in her will. See Salmon, Trésors cachés: Chefs-d’oeuvre du cabinet d’Arts graphiques du château de Versailles, 138-139.

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controlled by his low-born mistress.34 The queen undoubtedly knew of this criticism—some of which was attributed to the Comte de Maurepas—and she perhaps took this as an opportunity to launch her own campaign of self-fashioning. In so doing, she used the Salon as an alternative “theatre of power” against the royal mistress. Seen in this light, Marie Leszczinska’s portrait seems to craft her as a modest and sympathetic figure specifically for public consumption.35 Rather than being seen as deferential, Nattier’s portrait of the queen should be seen as an emphatically public image. In her account of the portrait’s creation, Marie-Catherine Tocqué, Nattier’s daughter, does not mention the queen’s activity or her book. Instead, she specifically discusses the queen’s clothing, stating that her father “received from the queen the express order to paint her only in her habit de ville.”36 The queen’s habit de ville, her red dress, takes up almost the entire lower half of the painting, spreading out and over her chair. Its dramatic red colouring offers a strong contrast to the green of the drapery behind her and, one can imagine, to the green walls of the Salon itself. Costume was a subject of intense interest and the clothing of both male and female sitters was frequently discussed in Salon reviews of portraiture. Indeed, one Salon critic observed that thanks to La Tour, it was generally agreed that sitters should be shown in their everyday clothing.37 However, Madame Tocqué attributes the “noble simplicity” of the image to the queen’s direct request and not to the intentions of the artist. I believe that the queen’s dress in Nattier’s portrait is a sign of her will—her desire. Indeed, Nattier draws attention to the queen’s desire by 34

Thomas Kaiser analyzes public reaction to Madame de Pompadour’s activities at court, including her establishment of and performance in a theatre at court. Kaiser argues her “theatrical activities” produced “an abiding representation of Pompadour as a seductive ‘actress mistress’ that was used by her political rivals and the public to explain and to condemn her imputed emasculation of the king.” 1027. 35 This is particularly significant in relation to Madame de Pompadour, whose portraits were largely meant for display within her homes and so visible to a very select audience, rather than available for public critique. 36 The term “habit de ville,” as used by Madame Tocqué, describes what is most likely a fairly typical robe à la française, not something that was necessarily noble or bourgeois, but distinctly different from formal court dress, though still luxurious. Tocqué, “Abrégé de la vie de M. Nattier, peintre et professeur de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture par sa fille, Mlle Nattier l’ainée, épouse de M. Tocqué,” 358. 37 Gourgenot, Lettre sur la peinture, sculture, et architecture, 115.

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picturing her touch. The feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young proposes to rethink the relationship between women and clothing by focusing on the feel of fabric and the cut of clothing, arguing that such a move challenges the construction of a passive female object.38 Marie Leszczinska can be seen as actively engaging with this image and its display. The alternative image Marie Leszczinska and Jean-Marc Nattier craft focuses on touch. Young describes how touch blurs the “border between self and other,” placing the subject in a relationship of continuity with the object rather than in a position of mastery.39 We can imagine that the feel of the velvet, lace, and fur was a key factor in the queen’s choice of gown. In her portrait, we see the queen brush the soft fur and sensuous velvet with the fingers on her right hand while flipping the pages of her book with those of her left. Touch is something that we, as viewers, are excluded from and recalls to us that the queen also excludes us and remains withdrawn in her own reflections. This gown, which she expressly ordered, is a signal to notice the difference embodied in this image of herself as queen. In this portrait, the queen’s absorption and her touch present an image that both transcended the perception of child-bearing consort and long-suffering wife, and manipulated it for her advantage. For Marie Leszczinska, noble femininity was a strategy by which she could both cloak her criticism of king and royal favourite while presenting her preferred image to a wide public. By asking what the queen wished to see in her portrait, we reinsert her back into this commission as an agent, an actor, and a subject rather than as a passive object on display.

Looking at the Mistress Looking at the Queen I opened this chapter with a discussion of the similarities between these two women, yet I am specifically situating Marie Leszczinska’s portrait as an adversarial representation. For Madame de Pompadour this portrait of the queen provided a new version of noble femininity, one that fit her changing circumstances at court, as well as suggesting a location— the biennial Salon—to launch her own pictorial re-fashioning. Indeed, Pompadour is a supreme example of pictorial self-fashioning, as the work of Melissa Hyde, Elise Goodman, and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has amply demonstrated.40 The performative nature of identity is a main feature of 38

Young, “Women Recovering Our Clothes,” 177-188. Ibid., 182. 40 See note 2 in this chapter. 39

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Pompadour’s portraits and can be seen in her self-identification as a learned woman, a “femme savante,” as Goodman styles her. Maurice Quentin de La Tour’s triumphant pastel portrait, displayed at the Salon of 1755, is the capstone of the learned woman imagery. According to Goodman, this imagery was designed both to counteract the Poissonades, and to reinvent Pompadour as the king’s counselor following the end of their sexual relationship.41 The creation of these portraits began in 1750, both in response to the Poissonades and, I would argue, in the wake of the success of the queen’s 1748 portrait. In La Tour’s portrait, Pompadour is depicted full-length, seated, and leaning back in her chair. She delicately holds a musical score, pausing while she reflects. There is a consistent iconography in the learned woman portraiture, which La Tour also employs: there is a globe on the desk, architectural plans, drawing tools, musical instruments, scores, and books. Unlike the Boucher or Nattier portraits, La Tour carefully identifies the books. There is the fourth volume of Diderot’s Encyclopedia, the play Il Pastor Fido, Voltaire’s La Henriade, and Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, indicating Pompadour’s erudite reading and enlightened philosophical preferences. In this portrait, Pompadour’s intellectual achievements are displaced onto the objects around her. One Salon commentator complained that Pompadour was presented as both a beautiful woman and a philosophe, although, for him, the combination was difficult to resolve. The portrait as representation of brains and beauty combined was clearly legible, if not preferable, in the eighteenth century.42 The portraiture of earlier mistresses and queens of France was an important source for Pompadour’s iconography of the learned woman, though these earlier sources do not answer the question why she chose to define herself as an intellectual woman at this time. Prior to this imagery, there is little visual evidence to indicate that her intellectual or artistic interests were an important aspect of the iconography of her self-representation. The success of Nattier’s portrait of Marie Leszczinska may have spurred Pompadour to develop this imagery, which played less on the perception of her desirability and more on the presentation of her talents and abilities. Visually, La Tour’s portrait of Pompadour and Nattier’s portrait of the queen are not immediately similar. Pompadour’s portrait is dominated by silvery-blue tones with touches of warm pink and gold, but the colour never reaches the intensity of the queen’s red gown. The queen’s portrait is intimate, whereas Pompadour’s is remote. In 41

I am indebted to Goodman’s careful discussion of this portrait, its historical context, and her enumeration of the myriad details within it. Goodman, 132-137. 42 Goodman, 32-34.

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Pompadour’s image, the visible carpet marks the distance between the viewer and the sitter, and the viewer is forced to look up to Pompadour. And while the accoutrements of Pompadour’s learning are clearly visualized in this painting, the queen’s portrait with its open but illegible text invites the viewer to speculate. Looking past these differences, it must be acknowledged that the key to both portraits is the relationship between the sitter, a text, and each woman’s contemplative manner. Both portraits feature women engaged in an intellectual activity—whether reading literary texts or musical ones— and both are caught at a moment of absorption. The pose that they adopt— seated, twisted, head turned—is similar to that seen in portraits of male intellectuals, deriving ultimately from the iconography of the gospel writers, whose inspiration it signified. If Marie Leszczinska’s portrait represents a new ideal of noble femininity, one is justified in imagining that it resonated with Pompadour, who at that point in time needed to figure herself in a new guise to fit a new role at court. It is unlikely that she would have been unaware of the success of the queen’s imagery in two successive Salons. Seen in the light of Marie Leszczinska’s 1748 portrait, Pompadour’s imagery seems, in Melissa Hyde’s terms, decidedly “made up.”

Feminist Heroes and Difficult Women The formal correspondences between these portraits indicate that Madame de Pompadour looked at Marie Leszczinska’s image and that Maurice Quentin de La Tour looked at Jean-Marc Nattier’s painting. Further, it is worth noting that both Marie Leszczinska and Madame de Pompadour commissioned their portraits to be looked at.43 This circuit of looking, this exchange of gazes, can be pursued within the art historical tradition of influence, but rather than making this the end of the story, I would like to set it at the beginning: it is not just that Marie Leszczinska’s portrait was influential, it is not just that Pompadour sought a model. Rather, what is significant for my purposes is that both queen and mistress are in the position of actively producing pictorial identities and that the circuits of looking can be traced from one woman to the other. And whereas Pompadour has been credited with being an “active looker,” her looking is typically not framed in terms of her relationship with other women at the court. 43 We could also consider Nattier and La Tour in similar terms: both artists created the portraits with the intention of their display at the Salon.

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In Differencing the Canon, Griselda Pollock writes: “Feminism creates the conditions of our wanting stories of ourselves, stories of women, of seeking clues to feminine traces in the dominant metaphors of sexuality in our varied cultures.”44 She has related this feminist desire to the figure of the female hero as a space of possibility, the gap between masculine meanings and the meanings that the masculine has decreed are feminine.45 This desire empowers viewers to challenge the patriarchal norms of art historical interpretation. This vision calls to mind Terry Eagleton’s poetics of possibility, a poetics that allowed for the creative invention by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers of a historical space for lesbians through the figure of Marie Antoinette.46 Feminist art historical literature on Pompadour seems to exist in the gap that Pollock identifies; yet her elevation to a female hero also seems to cause Marie Leszczinska, and the numerous other women at the royal court, to fall through. My desire to address this issue is conditioned by the fact that Marie Leszczinska is a difficult feminist subject. She rejected most progressive thinking during her lifetime and she allied herself with the positions of the anti-philosophes, the so-called CounterEnlightenment.47 She particularly disliked Lovisa Ulrike (1720-1782), queen of Sweden, who was too much of a public intellectual for her taste.48 Madame de Pompadour seems to better fit the needs of feminists, as she consciously and repeatedly both challenged the social and gender hierarchies of the society of the ancien régime, and manipulated her image to push the frontiers of her identity. Pompadour embodies the myth of the feminist hero for those who study the art and history of the eighteenthcentury. Indeed, the focus on Pompadour has left very little attention for even a consideration of the significance of the activity of the numerous women present in Louis XV’s court at its uppermost echelons. By the 1740s, Marie Leszczinska was a leader of this group, by default, as the mother of the politically and artistically active royal daughters and the mother-in-law 44

Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories, 112. 45 Ibid., 115. 46 Castle, “Marie-Antoinette Obsession”. 47 For an analysis of conservative responses to the Enlightenment, see McMahon’s Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. 48 See Marie Leszczinska’s letters to the Président Hénault in Marie Leszczinska et al., Lettres inédites de la Reine Marie Leckzinska et de la duchesse de Luynes au président Hénault.

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to the prominent and popular dauphine, despite years of eclipse due to child-bearing and aggressive prior mistresses. Marie Leszczinska was not, and perhaps is not, a feminist hero, yet without understanding her, her image, and her activity at court, we fundamentally misunderstand something about the experience of elite women and their representation in eighteenth-century France. In looking at Marie Leszczinska’s portrait by Jean-Marc Nattier, I wish to consider what she desired to see in her portrait. In other words, I wish to represent her as a desiring subject rather than as a passive object of display. Indeed, considering the portraits of both Marie Leszczinska and Madame de Pompadour from this perspective, it seems more likely to imagine the mistress seduced by the queen’s image, calling to mind the close, if not friendly, relationship they shared.

Works Cited Antoine, Michel. Louis XV. Paris: Fayard, 1989. Benoit, Marcelle. Versailles et les musiciens du roi, 1661-1733; Étude institutionnelle et sociale. Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1971. Brunelle, Gayle. “Dangerous Liaisons: Mésalliance and Early Modern French Noblewomen.” French Historical Studies, no. 19:1 (1995): 75103. Campbell, Peter. Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720-1745. London: Routledge, 1996. Castle, Terry. “Marie-Antoinette Obsession.” Representations, no. 38 (Spring 1992): 1-38. Cordey, Jean. Inventaire des biens de Madame de Pompadour rédigé après son décès. Paris: Société des Bibliophiles Franc޽ois; F. Lefranc޽ois, 1939. Cosandey, Fanny. La reine de France: symbole et pouvoir, XVe-XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. Davis, Whitney, and Isabelle de Courtivron. Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993. Diguieres, Victor des. Lettres inédites de la reine Marie Leczinska et de la duchesse de Luynes au Président Hénault. Paris, 1886. Draper, James David, and Guilhem Scherf. Augustin Pajou: Royal Sculptor, 1730-1809. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997. ffolliott, Sheila. “Casting a Rival into the Shade: Catherine de’Medici and Diane de Poitiers.” Art Journal, no. 48:2 (Summer 1989): 138-43.

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Germann, Jennifer G. “Figuring Marie Leszczinska (1703-1768): Representing Queenship in Eighteenth-Century France.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 2002. —. “Fecund Fathers and Missing Mothers: Louis XV, Marie Leszczinska, and the Politics of Royal Parentage in the 1720s.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, no. 36 (2007): 1-21. Goodman, Elise. The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour: Celebrating the Femme Savante. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Gordon, Alden, and Teri Hensick. “The Picture within the Picture: Boucher’s 1750 Portrait of Madame de Pompadour Identified.” Apollo, no. 155:480 (February 2002): 21-30. Gordon, Alden. “Searching for the Elusive Madame de Pompadour.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, no. 37:1 (Fall 2003): 91-111. Gougenot, Abbé. Lettre sur la peinture, sculpture, et architecture. Paris, 1748. Hyde, Melissa. “The Makeup of the Marquise.” In Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher and His Critics, edited by Melissa Hyde, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006. —. “The ‘Makeup’ of the Mistress: Boucher’s Portrait of Pompadour at Her Toilette.” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 3 (September 2000): 453-475. —. “Under the Sign of Minerva: Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Portrait of Madame Adélaïde.” In Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe, edited by Melissa Hyde and Jennifer Milam, 139-163. Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. Jallut, Marguerite. “Marie Lecsinka et la peinture.” Gazette des BeauxArts 6th ser., no. 73 (1969): 305-322. Jones, Colin. Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress. London: National Gallery, 2002. Kaiser, Thomas. “Madame de Pompadour and the Theaters of Power.” French Historical Studies, no. 19:4 (Autumn 1996): 1025-1044. Kisluk-Grosheide, Daniëlle O. “French Royal Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (Winter 2006): 10-11. Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa. “Pompadour’s Touch: Difference in Representation.” Representations, no. 73 (Winter 2001): 54-88. Liévin-Bonaventurer Proyart, Abbé. Vie de Marie Leckzinska. Princesse de Pologne, Reine de France. Lille: L. Lefort, 1825. McClellan, Andrew. Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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McMahon, Darrin M. Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French CounterEnlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Milam, Jennifer. “Matronage and the Direction of Sisterhood: Portraits of Madame Adélaïde.” In Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe, edited by Melissa Hyde and Jennifer Milam, 115-138. Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. Mitford, Nancy. Madame de Pompadour. London: The Reprint Society, 1955. Monnier, Geneviève. Pastels: Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins, XVIIéme et XVIIIéme Siècles. Paris: Éditions des Musées Nationaux, 1972. Nolhac, Pierre de. J.-M. Nattier, Peintre de la Cour de Louis XV. Paris: Goupil, 1905. —. Louis XV et Marie Lescinska d’Après Nouveaux Documents. Paris: Manzi, Joyant, & Cie, 1900. Ockman, Carol. Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Pollock, Griselda. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. New York: Routledge, 1999. Rogister, John. “Queen Marie LeszczyĔska and Faction at the French Court, 1725-1768.” In Queenship in Europe, 1660-1815: The Role of the Consort, edited by Clarissa Campbell-Orr, 186-219. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Sahut, Marie-Catherine. Carle Vanloo: Premier Peintre du Roi (Nice, 1705-Paris, 1765). Ivry: Serg, 1977. Salmon, Xavier, Helge Seifert, and Humphrey Wine, eds. Madame de Pompadour et les arts. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2002. Salmon, Xavier. Jean-Marc Nattier, 1685-1766. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1999. —. Trésors cachés: Chefs-d’oeuvre du cabinet d’Arts graphiques du château de Versailles. Paris: Somogy éditions d’art, 2001. Tocqué, Marie-Catherine. “Abrégé de la vie de M. Nattier, peintre et professeur de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture par sa fille, Mlle Nattier l’ainée, épouse de M. Tocqué.” In Mémoires inédits sur la vie et les ouvrages des members de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture publiés d’après les manuscripts conserves à l’École impériale des Beaux-Arts, by L. Dussieux, et al., vol. II: 358, Paris: J.B. Dumoulin, 1854.

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Young, Iris Marion. “Women Recovering Our Clothes.” In Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE UNCERTAIN SPECTATOR: THEORIES OF FEMALE SPECTATORSHIP AND THE WORK OF ANNA GASKELL CATHERINE GRANT

How to theorise the female spectator? More particularly, how to theorise the female spectator looking at the female subject? Laura Mulvey concludes her essay “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’” (1982) with the uncomfortable image of this character remaining “restless in its transvestite clothes”, whilst Mary Ann Doane leaves her suspended between “the masochism of over-identification or the narcissism entailed in becoming one’s own object of desire”.1 While Mulvey and Doane address specific viewing situations in relation to classic Hollywood cinema, their theorisations of the female spectator have dominated interpretations of images that evoke voyeuristic or fetishistic visual pleasure. Whilst Mulvey has theorised other ways of approaching spectatorship that do not rely on this male-identified model,2 the evocation of the voyeuristic and fetishistic relation to the woman as the object of desire has returned in a number of works by contemporary women artists, such as the American artist Anna Gaskell, whose work I focus on in this chapter.3 The polarised spectator positions outlined in feminist theorising on voyeurism and cinema in the late seventies and early eighties provides the starting point for my consideration of a more ambiguous set of terms 1

Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative’”, 37. Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator” (1982), 32. 2 See, for example, Mulvey’s 1996 book Fetishism and Curiosity. 3 This text comes from a longer study of the depiction of the adolescent model in photographic portraits. Other examples could include the work of Hellen van Meene, Sarah Jones and Collier Schorr. An early discussion of this material is published in n.paradoxa as “Performativity: Collier Schorr, Anna Gaskell, Sarah Jones”.

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through which to consider spectatorship. Rather than the active male gaze and the passive female object, I am going to consider the ways in which spectatorship is constructed through a complex of identifications with, and desires for, the model and the constructor of the scene—whether this is the narrator, photographer or director. Rather than the controlled space of the cinema theatre and the illusion of seamless narrative found in many Hollywood films, my discussion will focus on installations of photographs by Gaskell, with their emphasis on the viewer’s body within the gallery space and their fragmented narratives.

Fig. 7-1: Anna Gaskell, installation view of wonder, 14 November-20 December 1997, Casey Kaplan, New York. Reproduced with the permission of the artist, image courtesy Yvon Lambert, New York.

Gaskell’s series wonder, 1996, consists of 20 photographs staging moments from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland played out by adolescent twin sisters (Fig. 7-1). In Gaskell’s work, the seductive woman of Hollywood cinema is transformed into the adolescent girl, inserting identifications based on age as well as gender. The installation of her photographs, with prints of differing sizes hung unframed on the walls, creates a viewing space that evokes the telescoping of Alice’s body and surroundings that dominate Carroll’s story. Gaskell has described the structure of her work saying: “I want viewers to be seduced into a scenario or story in which they find themselves suddenly caught up in the same trap

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as that of the character they are watching.”4 Her comment focuses on the spectator’s position echoing those of the model, rather than maintaining a distance from the performances presented. The movement required to look at the different images, and construct narrative links between them reminds the spectator of his or her position in constructing the scenes that are presented, and consequently of Gaskell’s role as the maker of the images, and her relationship to the models. In this way, the spectator is constantly aware of the variety of identifications that are possible, left in an uncertainty that can be seen as productive since it breaks down the binaries presented in the early theorising around the female spectator. Talking about the series wonder, Gaskell said: “I wanted Alice to rewrite her own story the way she wanted it to be.”5 Whilst Gaskell’s comment might seem to neatly sum up the series, I want to complicate the identifications that take place by bringing in Lewis Carroll as an important site of identification in wonder. Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of Charles Dodgson, the Oxford don who photographed young girls, creating a photographic archive that complements his literary fantasies. As is wellknown, the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was initially told to Alice Liddell and her sisters in 1862, which Carroll then wrote up as Alice’s Adventures Under Ground in 1864 as a present for Alice. The fame of the published version masks the story’s origin as an oral, personal communication, and the link with Carroll’s photographic portraits of his “child-friends”. Compared to Carroll’s book, his portraits of children have experienced uneven popularity until recently, with many considered to be examples of Victorian whimsy, rather than an archive worthy of serious study.6 With the publication of four nude portraits of girls in the 1970s, the response to Carroll’s photographs has been coloured by his strange relationship to the child-models, whilst his insistence on the proprietary of his images is recorded in his diaries and letters. In the first monograph on Carroll, published before the appearance of the nude photographs, Helmut Gernsheim notes: … we must be grateful to him for having stipulated that after his death [the nude photographs] should be returned to the sitters or their parents, or else 4

Gaskell interviewed by Drutt, Anna Gaskell: Half Life, 71. Gaskell quoted in Squiers, “Anna in Wonderland”, 34. 6 See Gernsheim, Lewis Carroll. Gernsheim dismisses aspects of Carroll’s photography, particularly his theatrical photographs, as unworthy of consideration. Recent publications have reconsidered Carroll’s photographic oeuvre, including Nickel, Dreaming in pictures: The photography of Lewis Carroll and Taylor et al., Lewis Carroll, photographer: The Princeton University Library albums. 5

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Whilst Gernsheim defends the innocence of Carroll’s nude portraits, he is also at pains to distance them from the rest of his photography. Carroll’s ambivalence towards his nude photographs as both sexualised and innocent can be seen in this quote: “I wish I could dispense with all costume. Naked children are so perfectly pure and lovely; but Mrs Grundy would be furious—it would never do.”8 Lindsay Smith has argued that at the core of Carroll’s desire was an obsession with the miniature, with the little girl standing in as a kind of fetish object, containable in the photographic frame, encased in a photo album.9 This fetishisation of the young model correlates with one mode of male-identified spectatorship as explored by Mulvey, in which the beautiful woman becomes a fetishised object. In Carroll’s fascination with the miniature, it is as if the smallness of the girl allows him to doubly disavow the castration anxiety evoked by the adult woman. In Gaskell’s appropriation of Alice, she also appropriates the position of the fetishist and voyeur, but not the controlled, disembodied spectator invoked in Laura Mulvey’s consideration of Hollywood cinema. Carroll appears as an uncertain spectator who both identifies with his child models, as well as representing a suppressed desire for them. Rather than the slick fantasy space of cinema, Carroll’s portraits often reveal the uncertain collaboration between himself and his models. In the pair of photographs of Alice Liddell, titled Alice Liddell as “The Beggar Maid”, and Alice Liddell Dressed in Her Best Outfit, taken in the summer of 1858, the cool gaze of Liddell is held in tension with the provocatively torn “Beggar Maid” outfit, which appears to be a product of Carroll’s manipulations of the scene rather than a young girl playing at dressing up. This evidence of the photographer’s presence exposes the strategy Carroll employs in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where the grown narrator speaks in the child’s voice, creating a fictional interior space for Alice. Carroll’s position as an uncertain spectator can be explored further through a strategy that is found in much nineteenth-century fiction: that of the unreliable narrator. Presented with fictional narratives in formats such as letters, diaries or oral histories, the reader is encouraged to believe in the source’s “reality”, to suspend disbelief and read the fiction as fact, 7

Gernsheim, Lewis Carroll Photographer, 21. Carroll in a letter to Harry Furniss, quoted in Gernsheim, Lewis Carroll, 21. 9 Smith, The Politics of Focus: Women, Children and Nineteenth Century Photography. 8

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whilst becoming increasingly aware of the subjectivity implied by such formats. For example, in Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw”, 1898, a source for Gaskell’s series half life, 2002, discussed below, the narrative told by the governess is unverifiable: the story can be read as either a recounting of ghostly presences or as the rantings of a “hysterical” woman. The account of the governess is embedded in yet another narration in which the story is told, by the fireside, many years after its occurrence, read from the governess’s manuscript. “The Turn of the Screw” shows how the tension is dependent on the reader’s seduction into the story within a story, even as they are fully aware that what they are reading is a work of fiction. Carroll’s literary and photographic narratives are seductive fantasies which he appears to want to believe in as well as compelling the viewer or reader to view them as documented encounters rather than staged moments. Gaskell takes on the role of the unreliable narrator in her use of photography as a format which invites the suspension of disbelief, with her codings and fragmentations of the frames exposing the viewer to the inconsistencies and assumptions that are held in place by realist photographic as well as narrative conventions. Gaskell’s position within the work is left unclear—should she be read as identifying with her models, or with the narrators of her source material; is she presenting these performances as a voyeur or as a participant? These uncertainties make the viewer’s position equally unstable, calling into question the modes of identification that operate around each series.

Figs. 7-2 and 7-3: Anna Gaskell, Untitled #1 (wonder) and Untitled #2 (wonder), 1996, c-prints, 16” x 20” and 50” x 40”. Reproduced with the permission of the artist, images courtesy Yvon Lambert, New York.

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In Untitled #1 (wonder), Alice swims in the pool of her own tears, her body distorted under the water (Fig. 7-2). Her mary-jane shoes are enlarged, and her yellow dress and blue pinafore shrink, replicating the telescoping of the literary Alice’s body as she samples various cakes and potions. In Untitled #2 (wonder), one Alice leans over the other, squeezing her nose, mouth open, apparently ready to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (Fig. 7-3). The single Alice of Carroll’s story has been duplicated in this photograph, a device that recurs across Gaskell’s series. Both Alices have wet hair and faces, as if they were both the Alice swimming in the pool of tears, but now one has to save the other. In Untitled #3 (wonder), Alice is lying at the base of a flight of stone steps, with only her legs and arm visible. The perspective of the picture makes it unclear at first whether Alice is about to fall or has fallen. It appears that Alice has fallen not down the rabbit hole, but down the garden steps. These descriptions of the photographs somehow turn them into illustrations, albeit not always faithful to the story of Alice. When catalogued as series of actions, however, the mouth, teeth, hair and legs of the models take on symbolic functions in their own right. If the series of images is thought of as performance documentation, then what is shown is a series of twenty key moments in a larger event—as in the illustrations of a story, or stills from a film. The glimpse of an unfinished hem in one photograph lingers as a reminder of the site of documentation, the performance being enacted for the camera, undermining the slicker, more filmic cropping and lighting of other images. Whilst each photograph contributes something different to the fragmented narrative, I am going to focus on just two images for my analysis of the identifications that take place: the resuscitation image, Untitled #2 (wonder), and Untitled #13 (wonder), in which Alice holds false teeth on her lap. Out of the five photographs featuring both Alices, Untitled #2 (wonder) is the most ambiguous in its tone. Three of the other images are pictures of violation: Alice is made to eat soap in Untitled #17 (wonder), one Alice holds another’s head on the ground in Untitled #18 (wonder), and in Untitled #15 (wonder) the hair of one Alice is grasped in the mouth of the other. The last doubled image, Untitled #8 (wonder), shows the two Alices lying side by side, eyes shut, perhaps dreaming the dream of wonderland. Untitled #2 (wonder), which seems to be a companion piece to Alice swimming in the pool of tears, sees Alice bringing herself back to life. Just as in a filmic close up, the lighting in this image hits the sides of both girls’ faces, the point of highlight drawing attention to the prone Alice’s open mouth. It is as if the two Alices are looking in a mirror at each other—except that their eyes are closed in anticipation of the

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embrace that is just about to come. Like the cut to fade in old movies where the hero and heroine embrace and the light dims, this shot incorporates an anticipated kiss that is coded to be more than a simple resuscitation. Here the kiss of life is layered with the sexuality of the photograph’s lighting and framing; the focus on the girls’ perfect skin with its glistening wetness, is too redolent of pornographic images to be written off as accidental. Just as children play doctors and nurses, here these two teenage Alices appear to play children’s games that take on a tone of sexual ambiguity in the sensuality of their enactment. If the Alices are read as sisters or friends rather than fragments of the same person, then the scene has the mock-seriousness of pre-adolescents “practising” kissing on each other. However, the sexualisation of the Alices marks the performance with an exploration of sexual intimacy that is not just a childish game, anymore than the fantasy of Carroll’s narrative is only a nonsense tale. Gaskell contains a number of contradictory narratives in her doubled Alice images, layering homoeroticism with autoeroticism, complicating the girls’ status as two separate characters or fantasised aspects of one. The uncertainty of the scene’s interpretation creates an uncertainty in the spectator, who can only oscillate between a series of potential narratives, from reading the two models as lovers to friends playing to fantasised doubles of each other.

Fig. 7-4: Anna Gaskell, Untitled #13 (wonder), 1996, c-print, 11” x 14”. Fig. 7-5: Anna Gaskell, Untitled #19, 1997-1998, ink on paper, 14” x 16”. Reproduced with the permission of the artist, images courtesy Yvon Lambert, New York.

In Untitled #13 (wonder), the sexualised vocabulary widens to incorporate the symbolism of the mouth and teeth, a recurring image in the

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series (Fig. 7-4). A pair of false teeth are held on Alice’s lap, as if she is making the plastic mouth talk to her, or as an echo of the resuscitation scene. In a drawing by Gaskell, a group of girls peer into the enlarged mouth of another girl, as if trying to find what is kept inside (Fig. 7-5).10 Other images in the series that use the mouth as a focal point are Untitled #10 (wonder) in which Alice puts a hard boiled egg in her mouth; Untitled #15 (wonder) where one Alice chews on the other’s hair, her bottom row of teeth jutting out from the mane held across her face; and Untitled #12 (wonder) in which Alice has her head held back, eyes closed, a single strand of hair pressing against her top lip. Here the themes in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland of eating and drinking things to change size, as well as the mysterious Cheshire Cat’s grin are condensed into the image of the toothy mouth, which is both aggressive and seductive. The positioning of the false teeth in Alice’s lap underlines the connection between the teeth and the vagina dentata, with the orality of this series of images being linked to an aggressive sexuality, based on incorporation and destruction. By presenting the false teeth in Untitled #13 (wonder), the difference of this set is put into play with the doubling of the Alices, so that here the teeth are not part of Alice, but a prop or screen through which she can literally talk to herself.11 In Gaskell’s images, the mouth becomes not only a receptacle for the cakes and potions that change Alice, but a symbol of both the vagina and a destructive orality that wishes to consume everything in its path. This is compounded by the image of Alice about to eat a boiled egg, which does not appear in Carroll’s story, but within the chain of signification that connects the mouth with sexuality, cannot help in my mind but link with the image of the egg in Bataille’s Story of the Eye, which is part of a metaphoric and metonymic chain of objects and associations, including eyes, eggs, balls, milk, urine and tears. Whereas Bataille uses extremely explicit sexual and violent images, Gaskell’s photographs bear sexual connotations in the picturing of the mouth and 10

Gaskell sometimes publishes sketches along with her photographs. As preparatory material, these drawings map out the manipulations of bodies and outfits that are then enacted in her photographic work. 11 As Nina Auerbach has explored, the Cheshire Cat is the only character in Wonderland who is aware of his own madness, with the focus on the mouth throughout the story providing an alternative sexual frame from the equation of Alice with the phallus: “By a subtle dramatisation of Alice’s attitudes toward animals and toward the animal in herself, by his final resting on the symbol of her mouth, Carroll probed in all its complexity the underground world within the little girl’s pinafore.” Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts, 148.

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hair. Alice is not just swallowing a potion to make herself bigger or smaller, she is demonstrating a consuming sexuality and aggression, with her body fragmenting, represented by false teeth, an egg, strands of hair, a twin. The use of objects or body parts at the boundary of the body focuses attention on the relationships between the models, photographer and viewer, as well as creating associations as in Bataille’s text. Gaskell’s use of these boundary objects echoes Roland Barthes’s discussion of Story of the Eye, where he explores how Bataille’s metaphorical chains are crossed: demolishing the usual contiguities of objects and substituting fresh encounters that are nevertheless limited by the persistence of a single theme within each metaphor, the result is a kind of general contagion of qualities and actions…12

Gaskell appears to take metonyms for the female body—“a bit of skirt”, “hole”, and render them more animated than the models themselves. Gaskell’s position in these scenes, as viewer and narrator, takes up the position of the male author who uses the precocious, attractive girl as a site of identification and a performance of a perverse sexuality. However, her quotation of the male author is not that of a “restless transvestite”,13 but instead a transforming habitation, in which the original desires and intentions of Carroll are reworked into a female imaginary space in which desire and agency are pictured through the adolescent girls’ bodies. Whereas in the literary format of children’s fiction, the author can pretend to enter the persona of the girl, in Gaskell’s photographs the character(s) of Alice remain suspended in uncertain territory—between evocative symbols in a fantasy and actors in a documented performance. **** In Gaskell’s work, the uncertain spectator is created to some extent by the ambiguous signification of model, narrator and photographer. Rather than the object of a controlling, male-identified gaze, the adolescent models in her photographs exceed the grammar of what Mulvey has described as the woman’s “to-be-looked-at-ness”.14 Gaskell’s replaying of Carroll’s story with adolescent girls transforms the story of puberty that can be seen to reside in the fantasies of growing and shrinking in Alice’s Adventures in 12

Barthes, “The Metaphor of the Eye”, 125. Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative’”, 37. 14 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, 19. 13

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Wonderland. Rather than a narrative progression through the state of adolescence, in Gaskell’s photographs the viewer enters an adolescent space. In psychoanalysis, adolescence is seen as a state of transition, characterised by a confusion between self and others. Helene Deutsch presents the two main problems of adolescence as follows: 1. the conflict between reality and fantasy—that is, between external and internal reality—and the ways in which the adolescent tried to solve that conflict; and 2. the balance between narcissism and object relationship and how it is maintained.15

Viewing Gaskell’s photographs in light of Deutsch’s comments, what seems to be described is the complex of narratives and identifications that take place across the series. The metaphoric and metonymic associations that occur across the images blur any clear reading of the scenes depicted, mixing fantasy and reality. The relation of the models to each other as parts of the same person, or two characters caught in an exchange, upsets the balance between narcissism and object relation in a constantly oscillating manner. In relation to the description by Mary Ann Doane of the predicament of the female spectator (quoted at the beginning of the chapter), here the either/or of over-identification or narcissism is combined to produce a more ambiguous set of positions. Rather than seeing this combination of narcissism and object-love as an unresolved tension, as in the Oedipal account of identity, desire based on identification as well as possession allows for a reading of these images that does not stop at a critique of their voyeuristic quotations. If Deutsch’s comments are read not as presenting the problems of adolescence but its possibilities, then the structure of adolescence can be used alongside the radical rethinking of psychoanalytic concepts that Juliet Mitchell has theorised as sibling or lateral relations. As even Deutsch admits, adolescence is a psychic position that is only ever partially resolved, so it is one to which the subject returns to again and again.16 This 15

Deutsch, Selected Problems of Adolescence with Special Emphasis on Group Formation, 42. 16 “Under normal conditions we may expect adolescence successfully to complete its specific tasks… But even under the most favourable conditions, this function of adolescence is performed only to a limited extent. The ‘end of adolescence’ is thus a relative concept, and the phase it represents varies greatly among individuals. Many adolescent features are carried over to the years of maturity, and this is especially true of women.” Deutsch, The Psychology of Women, 185. The narrative of Deutsch’s theorisation presupposes that there is a preferred progression within

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conceptualisation of adolescence as a structure is explored by Julia Kristeva, who sees adolescence as an open psychic structure, one that is constantly available to the subject: “Just as biologists speak of the ‘open structure’ of living organisms that renew their identity by interacting with another identity, it could be said that the adolescent structure opens itself to that which has been repressed.”17 This idea of an open psychic structure is given definition by focusing on lateral relationships between siblings and peers, which have been sidelined in the Freudian model of identity formation based on the vertical relationship between parents and child. Mitchell argues that, alongside the threat of castration that marks the Oedipal complex, there is the threat to a subject’s uniqueness that is presented by the sibling. By refocusing on sibling relations, Mitchell discusses their potential for a postmodern understanding of identity and sexuality: “Sibling and peer cohorts are the personnel of postmodernism with its focus on sameness and difference, its concern with ‘time present’ rather than ‘time past’.”18 She links the discussion around gender to constructions of identity that focus on lateral rather than vertical relationships, which she sees as describing the “minimal difference of sibling sexual relations” rather than the “maximal difference between mothers and fathers”, suggesting that gender cannot be considered a binary.19 These comments reframe a discussion of gendered positions in terms of a seriality that is not dictated by a heterosexual/homosexual split, or by a polarised male or female subject position. In terms of Gaskell’s work, this focus on seriality and minimal difference provides a way into the ambiguous narratives presented, which can allow for different identifications and desires to take place simultaneously.

psychic life, whilst admitting that this progression is only ever partial, and complete resolution an ideal, rather than a reality. Thus, within even this fairly conservative psychoanalytic framework, the period of adolescence opens up a contemplation of identifications and desires that do not conform to the normative heterosexual construction of gendered identity and sexuality. Deutsch’s comment that women are particularly prone to carrying over “adolescent features” into adulthood corresponds with Freud’s linking of femininity with narcissism and infantile identities. See Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction”, 73102. In my consideration of adolescence as a structure rather than a period of transition, the movement towards a normative heterosexuality and a conception of femininity as passive, infantile and narcissistic can be reconfigured as a set of identifications to be explored. 17 Julia Kristeva, “The Adolescent Novel”, 136. 18 Mitchell, Siblings: Sex and Violence, 31. 19 Ibid., 111.

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To continue my discussion of the uncertain spectator, focusing on the structure of adolescence and sibling relations, I will consider Gaskell’s series half life, 2002. Talking about the genesis of the photographs, she said: “I prefer the idea that you or I, or any viewer, might imagine numerous faces or bodies that could inhabit the ghostlike figures in the photographs.”20 Like the two Alices embracing in the wonder series, the emphasis is on the viewer creating multiple narratives for the performances presented. The source material for this series also explores the notion of characters that only exist in the imagination and the power of identification. In the story of Rebecca, the young wife of Mr DeWinter imagines the presence of the dead Rebecca as creating a mocking, judgemental context for her own attempts at being the new Mrs DeWinter. In “The Turn of the Screw”, the governess sees or appears to see the demonic ghosts of her predecessor and her lover. In both stories young women are left in a state of crisis when faced with their predecessors, who are pictured as rival, powerful presences. In these ambiguous relationships—created through projection—the confusion between self and other found in sibling relations is played out as the protagonists search for or seek to affirm their own identity. In both stories the heroines are motherless, so there is also an identification with these strong women as ghostly maternal figures who are threatening rather than comforting. The dead women figure as characters that the heroines have to both live up to and somehow overthrow. In Rebecca and “The Turn of the Screw”, one of the subtexts is the implication that these dead women are the creations of the heroines, forming imagined rather than actual threats to them. The adoration and fear that both the young Mrs DeWinter and the young governess feel towards their predecessors are compounded by the latter’s older female accomplices in the creation of their fantasies: Mrs Danvers, the devoted servant of Rebecca in du Maurier’s novel, and Mrs Grose, the housekeeper in “The Turn of the Screw”. Both older women operate within the stories as the imparter of knowledge, feeding the heroines’ growing paranoia in the face of their ghosts. Here, again, is the theme of identities merging and struggling, with an identification between the heroine and her imagined rival/predecessor forming the central tension within the narratives. There is also a homoerotic component to the women’s fantasies, so that in Rebecca the identification with the dead Mrs DeWinter is overlaid with a desire for her.21 This homoeroticism echoes 20

Gaskell interviewed by Drutt, Anna Gaskell: Half Life, 72. See Berenstein, “‘I’m not the sort of person men marry’: Monsters, Queers, and Hitchcock’s Rebecca” for a discussion of the different levels of desire and identification in Rebecca. See also White, “Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter”. 21

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the missed component of Dora’s homosexual desire for Frau K in Freud’s famous case study of hysteria, which Freud acknowledges in a footnote written after the text was completed.22 This overlap between identification and desire is a central motif in the performances of Gaskell’s models, queering and externalising the internal search for identity that characterises many of her source stories. Whilst both the new Mrs DeWinter and the governess are women in their early twenties, their positions within the stories are that of emerging characters, which is in line with an adolescent, struggling to assert her own identity in the face of parental and societal norms. In terms of Rebecca, the object of the new Mrs DeWinter’s heterosexual desire, her husband, is absent for much of the story, with the real focus being on her engagement with Mrs Danvers and the “ghost” of Rebecca.

Fig. 7-6: Anna Gaskell, installation view of half life, 27 September-12 January 2003, The Menil Collection, Houston, TX. Reproduced with the permission of the artist, image courtesy Yvon Lambert, New York.

Rather than the figure of Lewis Carroll appearing as a space of identification for the artist and viewer, in half life it is a complex of female 22

“I failed to discover in time and to inform the patient that her homosexual (gynaecophilic) love for Frau K was the strongest unconscious current in her mental life.” Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”, 120.

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characters and narrators that occupy the place of the spectator. The dynamic across the series is one of shifting vantage points, as it is uncertain who is meant to be looking at whom: are we in the role of the dead Rebecca observing her replacement, are we the ghosts haunting the hysterical governess, or vice versa? The photographs give only small clues, depicting a single model within a series of grand interiors, with the focus being on the peripheral presence of the body, including shadows, clothing and hair (Fig. 7-6). The series was installed in the Menil Collection, Houston, with Gaskell being inspired by the “presence” of the collection’s founder, Dominique de Menil: I like the idea of Dominique de Menil still being very present, somehow lurking around, manipulating the board members, and influencing curators and anyone in power… There may also be an undercurrent of fear in this scenario, as Dominique watches over people padding carefully around her space—aware of her vibrating presence, larger than they are, larger than life.23

Rather than the uncertain male voyeur, as with Lewis Carroll in wonder, Gaskell’s comments focus on the older female characters. The viewer is bound up in this performance as it is left ambiguous which place he or she should take up—an identification with the model performing, or the photographer constructing the fantasy, or the imagined all-powerful ghostly presence, which seems to merge with the position of an implied narrator, who directs the narrative and holds its secrets. In Mitchell’s consideration of sibling relations, the threat of annihilation takes precedence over the threat of castration. In defining identity, there has to be a coming to terms with the seriality of peers; that one is not unique, but is one in a series. In sibling relations love and hate are closely related, as Mitchell explains: “Sibling sex and death then are intricately entwined. The narcissistic love of the-other-as-the-self explodes in murderousness once it is realised that there cannot be another self, but once the murder is resisted the love comes back in a new form.”24 This “love of the-other-as-the-self” helps to explain the identifications that take place in Gaskell’s photographs, in which the agency of the model is often evacuated in favour of body parts that are echoed in the surrounding architecture. One of the reoccurring symbols is the use of the model’s long hair as a kind of living, sexualised presence. Continuing the symbolic vocabulary in the wonder series, in half life it appears that the model’s hair 23 24

Gaskell interviewed by Drutt, Anna Gaskell: Half Life, 72. Mitchell, Siblings, 30.

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and clothing are more alive than she is. Here the emphasis on objects at the boundary of the body takes on a more ghostly, deathly aspect. The boundaries are blurred between self and other, animate and inanimate, so that the sexualised violence described by Mitchell appears to take place in Gaskell’s photographic encounters.

Fig. 7-7: Anna Gaskell, Untitled #90 (half life), 2002, c-print, 50” by 48”. Reproduced with the permission of the artist, image courtesy Yvon Lambert, New York.

In half life, the model’s hair is focused on to the extent that in Untitled #90 (half life) the only part of the model that is within the frame is a tangled hank of curly dark hair (Fig. 7-7). Hair becomes an important part of the model’s bodily presence, the long skeins used as a signifier of a young, attractive girl, as well as a disruptive, subversive, sexual presence. Whereas in wonder the model’s hair was combined with the mouth, an egg, a twin, in half life a variety of dark spaces take on these metonymic functions. In Gaskell’s drawings the dark space up the girls’ skirts is represented by a curly, pubic mass of pen strokes, linking adult sexuality and maturity with the long hair of her models. In the photographs, it is as if the doorways and shadows in the buildings themselves take on the ghostly presence of an imagined other, an “other-as-the-self” to be both feared and sought out. Gaskell’s use of these boundary objects constructs a vocabulary of female sexuality, with the uncannily vital presence of the

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model’s hair and costume combining with her use of the mouth, skirt and shadows as consuming orifices. Here aggressive sexuality does not figure as masculine. Just as the models act as something in between objects of desire and subjects of identification, hair is situated between being dead and alive, attached to the head but unable to convey any feeling, except at its roots. It is as if the ghostly presences that may or may not be a figment of the protagonists’ imagination in Rebecca and “The Turn of the Screw” are animated in these photographs, daring the viewer to be tempted by these strangely activated objects and vacated subjects. In her installations Gaskell constructs a photographic space in which the viewer is left uncertain, following chains of identification and signification that circulate around the source material without ever cohering into a linear narrative. It is as if Gaskell has frozen her narratives and models in the space of adolescence, an “open psychic structure” in which reality and fantasy blur, and objects become subjects, and subjects are emptied of vitality. Unlike the passive objects of earlier feminist theorising, Gaskell’s models’ deadened performances in half life and their aggressively eroticised performances in wonder challenge the viewer to find a position of domination or containment. Rather than remaining in a position of mastery, the viewer is left uncertain as to whose place he or she inhabits, whether to try and identify with Gaskell, who already is taking on the persona of a range of narrators and observers, or to try to make sense of the range of relationships played out, from the disavowal of Lewis Carroll’s eroticised gaze to the fantasised persona of Rebecca, conveyed through her home, possessions and the reminiscences of those who knew her. In Gaskell’s photographs, identity is only ever a combination of relationships with others, a series of quotations and poses. The re-symbolisation of the models’ bodies allows Gaskell to explore alternative narratives within her source material that focus on the doubling and merging of identities and identifications, with the unreliability of the texts being reflected in the malleability of the interaction and identifications between the models, the artist, and the spectators. Here the female body appears as one that is sexualised not around a phallic lack, but by an oscillating set of objects which appear as aggressive, sexual, maternal and child-like, just as the adolescent girl is used as a site that signifies a state between child and adult, a site of uncertainty and excess that is not limited to a nostalgic identification, but appears as a wider rebellion against conventional sexuality and identity. The viewer’s position is one that is equally implicated in this chain of signification, leaving him or her unable to safely side with either the model or artist. In Gaskell’s photographs, the female spectator is exposed as a fiction, since

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all gendered positions are made as uncertain as the boundaries between self and other, object and subject. The person who is left, the uncertain spectator, does not deny gender, nor simply collapse identities. Rather the photographic performances insist on a movement between identifications and desires that expose each position as being just as restless as the next.

Works Cited Auerbach, Nina. Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Barthes, Roland. “The Metaphor of the Eye” (1963). In Georges Bataille. Story of the Eye (1928), translated by Joachim Neugroschal, 119-127. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Bataille, Georges. Story of the Eye (1928). Translated by Joachim Neugroschal. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Berenstein, Rhona J. “‘I’m not the sort of person men marry’: Monsters, Queers, and Hitchcock’s Rebecca”. In Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, edited by Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty, 239-269. London: Cassell, 1995. Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator” (1982). In Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1991. Deutsch, Helene. The Psychology of Women, vol. I. New York: Grune and Stratton, 1944. —. Selected Problems of Adolescence with Special Emphasis on Group Formation. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1968. Drutt, Matthew, Francis McKee, and Niall MacKenzie. Anna Gaskell: Half Life. Houston, TX: The Menil Collection. 2002. Freud, Sigmund. “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” ([1901] 1905). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. vii, edited and translated by James Strachey with Anna Freud, 7-122. Vintage: London, 2001. —. “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. xiv, edited and translated by James Strachey with Anna Freud, Vintage: London, 2001. Gernsheim, Helmut. Lewis Carroll Photographer (1949). New York: Dover Publications, 1969. Grant, Catherine. “Performativity: Collier Schorr, Anna Gaskell, Sarah Jones”. n.paradoxa, no. 6 (July 2000): 88-92.

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Kristeva, Julia. “The Adolescent Novel”. In New Maladies of the Soul, translated by Ross Guberman, 135-153. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Originally published as Les Nouvelles maladies de l’âme, Libraire Artheme Fayard, 1993. Mitchell, Juliet. Siblings: Sex and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). In Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 14-26. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989. —. “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946)” (1981). In Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 29-38. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989. —. Fetishism and Curiosity, Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: BFI Publishing, 1996. Nickel, Douglas R. Dreaming in pictures: The photography of Lewis Carroll. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Squiers, Carol. “Anna in Wonderland”. American Photo, vol. 10, no. 1, (January-February 1999): 34, 36. Smith, Lindsay. The Politics of Focus: Women, Children and Nineteenth Century Photography. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Taylor, Roger, Edward Wakeling, introduction by Peter C. Bunnell. Lewis Carroll, photographer: The Princeton University Library albums. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. White, Patricia. “Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter”. In Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999.

CHAPTER EIGHT “FORWARD VIA A FEMALE PAST”: PAULINE BOTY AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHIC PROMISE OF THE WOMAN POP ARTIST SUE TATE

In 1991 the Royal Academy held a major retrospective exhibition of Pop Art in which, although women were obsessively pictured, only one out of two hundred and two Pop works was by a woman: My Lover by Nikki de Saint Phalle. A number of women had made names for themselves as Pop artists at the time (Marisol, Jann Haworth, Evelyne Axell, Rosalyn Drexler, Chryssa, Marjory Strider and Pauline Boty, among others) and while their exclusion from a male dominated movement might be expected, what is more surprising was that this gross gender imbalance was not taken up as a feminist cause celèbre. There seemed to be an assumption that Pop was irredeemably masculinist, if not misogynist, so the exclusion of the women artists did not really matter. Yet surely, coming from a differently gendered cultural position in relation to mass culture, women would offer a distinct and differently gendered contribution that needed to be given cultural visibility. My case study, the British Pop artist Pauline Boty (1938-1966), was one of those excluded without feminist comment. A student at the Royal College of Art, friend and colleague of Peter Blake and David Hockney, she was active and recognised on the Pop Art scene before her tragically early death from cancer aged only 28. Although dying young, beautiful and talented, she did not become an iconic figure and disappeared, almost entirely, from cultural view for nearly three decades. In 1993 David Alan Mellor located some of her paintings mouldering in a outhouse on her brother’s farm, and restored and exhibited them in his Barbican show the sixties art scene in london, the first time any of her work had been seen in public since 1966. He recognised that she was engaged with issues of “[i]dentity, pleasure, critiques of patriarchy, and the problematic task of

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the establishment of a distinctly female iconographic programme”, and described It’s a Man’s World I and II, taken as a diptych, as “one of the most important (and prophetic for the course of feminist art) paintings produced in London in the decade.”1 I was intrigued by Mellor’s framing of a practice still notable by its absence from the feminist art historical canon and began researching Boty’s life and work. With the support of an Arts Council grant I tracked lost works and had them photographed for an archive in the Women Artists’ and Arts Council libraries and, in 1998, co-curated with Mellor a retrospective exhibition in London.2 Gathered together for the first time ever, the vibrant, colourful and witty collection of paintings and collages could be seen to give expression to a female response to mass culture, finding form for a woman’s affective experience and celebrating an autonomous female sexuality whilst also offering a cognitive engagement with the politics of gender and a gendered politics. Informed by an awareness of the way in which desire, pleasure and subjectivity are constructed within the representations of mass culture, it seemed extraordinary that this radical combination of celebration and critique, that might be read as a “feminist Pop”, was not embraced by feminist art historians and has continued to be problematic to established feminist art historical understandings. Recently Boty’s work has made a historiographical return, but as a divided oeuvre, split between Pop and feminist histories in a manner that prevents its truly radical potential from being appreciated. In this chapter I will consider why feminist art history, understood as part of a historically located political project negotiating the cultural field of the last third of the 20th century, has been unwilling (or unable) to offer visibility to Pauline Boty and other women Pop artists. I will then explore the ways in which Boty’s work, as an integrated oeuvre, positioned within certain reconfigured art historical genealogies, enables a re-framing of women’s problematic relationship with mass culture and addresses feminism’s current needs.3

1

Mellor, the sixties art scene in london, 136. The Only Blonde in the World, 23 November-18 December 1998, jointly hosted by The Major Gallery and Whitford Fine Art; catalogue essays by the author under my previous name, Sue Watling, and by David Mellor. 3 An argument that develops and reframes, in a broader theoretical and historiographic context, ideas raised here in Tate, “Re-Occupying the erotic Body: the paintings and ‘performance’ of Pauline Boty”, which focussed specifically on issues of sexuality. 2

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Negotiating the Great Divide Pop Art straddled what Huyssen has termed the Great Divide between high art and mass culture: defined in “categorical distinction” to each other the volatile relationship between the two, he argues, has characterised the culture of modernity.4 Significantly, he demonstrates, in a chapter entitled “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other”,5 that this was an absolutely gendered dynamic. The masses and mass culture (inferior, hysterical, engulfing, destabilising) were consistently gendered feminine, a gendering that “goes hand in hand with the emergence of a male mystique in Modernism (especially in painting)”;6 the core features of the Modernist aesthetic7 he describes as anxious “warding off gestures” against the contamination of this feminine mass culture. Until relatively recently the discourse of the Great Divide has fundamentally informed the debate of Pop itself and, more particularly, the predicament of the woman Pop artist. Although Pop quickly gained commercial success, in the context of the Modernist strictures of Greenbergian formalism that were dominant in the 60s, its relatively unmediated use of vulgar, mass cultural imagery (gendered female and described as “despised” and “a most soiled and damaged currency” even in its own literature) caused problems with critical reception. Many critics wondered if it was art at all, Greenberg himself dismissed it as trivial, Kossloff wrote of delinquents invading the galleries. In order to achieve a firm foothold in the institutions of high art, Pop needed to gain distance from its (feminine) mass cultural sources and it is fascinating, historiographically, to observe the “warding off gestures” conducted in the literature. The formal qualities of the work were, for example, fore-grounded,8 often with almost laughable disingenuity, as when Melville asks his readers to see Allen Jones’ Chair (made from the sadomasochistically contorted body of a woman) as “pure sculptural invention.”9 There was also an insistence on a cool “detachment”10 which 4

Huyssen, After the Great Divide, vii. Ibid. 44-64. 6 Ibid. 50. 7 I.e. the “autonomy” of the artwork, privileging form over content, the pseudoscientific characterisation of “experimentation”, etc. 8 For example, Lucy Lippard in Pop Art, 9, argued for Pop’s “formal validity”, “heir more to an abstract than a figurative tradition”. Russell and Gablik’s “primary intention” (in Pop Art Redefined, 1969) was “to assert the stylistic affinities of Pop Art with certain contemporary abstract art.” 9 Melville, “English Pop Art”, 190. 10 Livingstone, Pop Art: A Continuing History. 5

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remained the key defining characteristic for Livingstone (the curator of the RA show) as recently as 1990. In fact, the only possible explanation he can see for the absence of women from Pop is their inability to maintain the required detached stance. In this (gendered) context, women artists were either excluded from the narratives of Pop or used to define a stridently male core.11 The feminist art history that emerged in the 70s also had to negotiate the cultural territory informed by the values of the Great Divide. Part of a feminist political project that confronted the extreme cultural marginalisation of women, and that needed to gain acceptance and respect in academe and elsewhere, it was more deeply invested than Pop historians in gaining distance from the de-privileged side of the mass culture/Modernist divide into which, because of its gendered nature, there was the ever present risk of being subsumed. There was an acute political need, met in a number of 80s texts and artworks, to expose and subvert the ideologically influential and detrimental effects of demeaning, trivialising mass cultural representations of women. As Griselda Pollock asserted in Framing Feminism (a defining text for the second wave, published in 1987, to which this volume is a response), artwork “is feminist when it subverts the normal ways in which we view art and are usually seduced into a complicity with the meanings of the dominant and oppressive culture.”12 Feminist art history’s “warding off gesture” against mass culture was the insistence on subversion rather than anything else, which, in the harsh terrain of the Great Divide, risked being complicitous. Pop Art’s constant reiteration of reified, objectified and commodified images of sexualised women (the rawest markers of woman’s deprivileged position as mass culture) was an obvious target and, led by Laura Mulvey’s devastating attack on Allen Jones’ portrayals of leather clad fetishised women, it was anathematised and dismissed as irredeemably misogynist. However, the problem with this blanket opprobrium was that artwork, like that of the women Pop artists, that engaged with and explored women’s subjective, lived, and often pleasurable experience within mass culture was placed beyond discursive visibility. In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault argues that “objects of discourse” are formed within delimiting “grids of specification”, provided by defining authorities,13 for example medicine, the law, or art criticism. It is only when something conforms to the given “grid” that it is visible as an 11

See Whiting, A Taste for Pop, the only sustained feminist analysis of Pop to date. 12 Pollock, Framing Feminism, 93. 13 Foucault, Part I.3 “The Formation of Objects”.

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object of discourse and, “placed in a field of exteriority”, can become “manifest, nameable, describable”. Second-wave feminism’s “grid of specification”, particularly when dealing with mass culture, was predicated on and shaped by the need to challenge and subvert the phallocentric imagery within which women conducted their lives, and only work that conformed to this specification became manifest. The operation of this “grid” can be seen in Whitney Chadwick’s authoritative Women, Art and Society, published in 1990. Marisol and Nikki de Saint Phalle were already “objects of discourse” in Pop, but, in order to register in feminist discourse, they are “described” in contradistinction to it, being seen “in retrospect” as “pointedly at odds with […] the slick mediaderived female imagery of Pop art”. Marisol, Chadwick acknowledges, was “immediately linked to Pop Art, but her work in fact has sources in Pre-Columbian art, early American folk carving and Surrealist dream images”. Nikki de Saint Phalle, the only woman in the 1991 Pop show, is described as making work that “ran counter to…Pop art[’s]… slick nudes, pin ups and sex objects”.14 Safely defined as “not-Pop”, their work can then be described in terms of a disruption of patriarchal ideology that fitted the feminist grid of specification: Marisol’s attack on “stereotypical representations of women living our circumscribed roles” offered a “chilling picture”,15 and Saint Phalle “refused the myths and romantic fantasies projected by men onto women”.16 The ways in which the work of these two artists engaged with women’s subjective experience of mass culture, however, could not be considered,17 and other women Pop artists are not mentioned at all: there is a blank space, where the expression of a female subjectivity might potentially reside. Pauline Boty and Evelyn Axell, who, among other things, explored female sexual pleasure, Rosalyn Drexler, whose edgy acerbic wit was hard to place, or Jann Haworth, with her delight in pop cultural pleasures, expressed for example in her hugely enlarged charm bracelet, or 3D rendering in cloth of a hunky cowboy, are all excluded from Chadwick’s account. Destabilizing to the second-wave political project, they were not given a “field of exteriority”. Pauline Boty’s own espousal of the term and her historiographical presence in Pop (she was one of four artists featured

14

My italics. Similarly, Parker and Pollock in Old Mistresses make a point of contrasting Pop’s celebration of consumer society to Marisol’s “searing commentary”, 151. 16 Chadwick, Women Art and Society, 310-12. 17 See, for example, Whiting, 187-230, on Marisol’s exploration of the identity of the fashionable woman. 15

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in Ken Russell’s innovative film Pop Goes the Easel,18 a definitive document for British Pop which is always listed in Pop Art literature) made her particularly difficult to define as “not-Pop”; 19 until recently she has not been taken up as a subject for feminist research and is only just becoming “nameable and describable” within feminist discourse. In the historical circumstances of the emergence of feminist art history, this shaping of the discursive field is understandable and might, indeed, be seen as a political necessity, but it came at a high price. In abandoning Pop to a monocular male vision it wrote women out of one of the key episodes in what Varndoe and Gopnik convincingly argue is “one of the most important aspects of the history of our epoch”, that is “the story of the interplay between modern art and mass culture”.20 The distinct contribution that women could make from their differently gendered cultural position was excised. Furthermore, women’s subjectivities and desires have always been shaped within mass culture’s tropes and representations, and their lived experience of it often was, and is, pleasurable, even erotic. The insistence on subversion and critique disallows an exploration of the expression of the affective and the pleasurable, and thus of the contradictory complexity of the relationship of women with mass culture, the derogatory effects of which cannot be ignored. Engagement with this complexity, I will argue, has now, in changed circumstances, become not only possible but also politically necessary for women, and can be approached “via female past” through the work the woman Pop artist.

A Feminist Pop Pauline Boty makes an illuminating case study. She was a welleducated, knowing and sophisticated artist who, as a beautiful and sensuous woman, found pleasure in embracing and performing a pop culture identity. She danced on Ready Steady Go (a generation-defining pop music TV programme), was an habituée of trendy Portobello Road haunts and the satirical club ‘The Establishment’. She read Genet, Proust and de Beauvoir and was highly knowledgeable about both New Wave and Hollywood cinema. She was also politically active and highly aware,

18

Made for BBC Monitor series in 1962. The other artists featured were Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips. 19 She was also briefly discussed by Livingstone, 49. 20 Varnedoe and Gopnik, High and Low: Modern art, Popular culture, 19.

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in a remarkably prescient manner, of issues of sexual politics.21After her appearance in Pop Goes the Easel she was drawn into acting roles in TV thrillers and on stage: literally performing a mass cultural role she was featured in the popular press as a “starlet” in the mass media. However, in 1963, the year of her solo exhibition in London, posing for top photographers Lewis Morley and Michael Ward, she took over and managed the sessions22 to produce images that explore issues of cultural identity in a manner that allows me to treat them as “work” along with her paintings and collages to support the claim that her oeuvre offers a “feminist Pop”. In student work, Boty can be seen experimenting with avant garde Modernist styles in painting whilst also exploring her mass cultural sensibilities in collages: concerns she was to bring together in confident colour-saturated abstracts whose sweeping curves were designed to echo the shapes of extravagant ’30s musicals.23 In these works, the mass cultural allusion is cryptic, but as she found her mature Pop voice in works like The Only Blonde in the World (Fig. 8-1) she overtly breeched the Great Divide: appearing to split open a “flat” Modernist abstract painting she reveals Marilyn Monroe, the archetypical icon of “feminine”, sexualised mass culture, shimmying across the space in a PR photograph from Some Like to Hot. A number of witty plays on Modernist strategies around the depiction of pictorial space and the representation of the figure demonstrate the knowingness of her gleeful transgression of Greenbergian aesthetic certainties and are also used to communicate something of the affective experience of the movie fan. For example, a tiny trompe l’oeil corner on the upper edge of the top diagonal band on the right is peeled away to reveal raw canvas (a reminder that this is just paint on cloth) and an arc of grey, in the lower centre, conducts a cubist “passage” confusing the spatial relationship between foreground abstract and the illusion of depth beyond. These devices make a play on pictorial space that reflect the ambiguous relationship between fantasy and reality, encouraged by the mass media and indulged in by the fan. The Futurist technique of multiple outlines animates the black and white still from which the image 21

Her proto-feminist awareness is evidenced in both a long interview with Nell Dunn, published in Women Talking in 1965, and in a series of witty, often scathing monologues that she wrote for and delivered on a fortnightly BBC magazine-style radio programme, The Public Ear, between October 1963 and March 1964. 22 Evidenced in interviews with both photographers. 23 E.g. Gershwin and two other untitled works, discussed in Pop Goes the Easel and shown at the AIA gallery in London in 1961, in a group show that included Peter Blake.

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of Monroe is derived: using a painterly style and further enlivening the figure with touches of colour to flesh and hair, Boty offers an empathetic tactility. The figure is partly obscured by the abstract panels to utilise the Impressionist cut off technique, suggesting the flow of time and space beyond pictorial view: the illusory world of Hollywood glamour which the desiring imagination of the movie fan strains to reach.

Fig. 8-1: The Only Blonde in the World, 1963. Oil on canvas, 127cms x 158cms. Tate, London 2007.

Boty always stressed the affirmative quality of the shared experience that popular culture offered. “Our fears, hopes, frustrations and dreams” she asserted in one of the witty radio monologues she delivered on The Public Ear, “we can pin them on a star who shows them to millions, and if we can do that we’re no longer alone”.24 And as a sophisticated artist she was clear of her role: Films stars [...] are the 20th century gods and goddesses. People need them, and the myths that surround them, because their own lives are enriched by them. Pop Art colours those myths.25

24 25

The Public Ear, broadcast 17 November 1963 (unpublished transcript). Men Only, March 1963, 98.

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Boty herself deeply identified with Monroe26 and while most women artists shied away from Pop’s problematic subject matter, she worked with rather than against the over-identification of women with mass culture, eschewing the detachment so highly valued by the literature of Pop. This is not the cool, detached exploration of a media sign with its slick closed surface that typifies much male Pop (for example Gerald Laing’s rendering of Brigit Bardot using black and white benday dots or Joe Tilson’s Diapositive Lips), but the picturing of the affective experience of mass cultural pleasures is testament to Boty’s refusal to relinquish either her pleasure in a mass cultural identity or her serious intention as an artist. In a number of works Boty found affective expression for the pleasures that women did (and do) experience within mass culture. These pleasures might be melancholic, as are captured in My Colouring Book (a line by line visualisation of a song about lost love covered by Dusty Springfield in 1963), but are also erotic as in the sexual arousal experienced dancing to the latest pop music on Ready Steady Go. Below cheerful Pop fairground lettering in 5-4-3-2-1 (Fig. 8-2) (the title of the programme’s Manfred Man theme tune) a girl, possibly Cathy Magowan the programme presenter, throws her head back in abandoned, Dionysian laughter: behind her, further into the pictorial space, a tactile, painterly swirl of pink and black that might be a rose and a fur coat. Throughout her work Boty used the red rose as a symbol for female arousal and sensuality, but here, the flesh tones that she has deliberately over-painted on the red combined with the elongated form bring the (pleasurable) shock of realisation that this rose is vulvic: surely labia, clitoris and pubic hair are suggested, the smooth areas of the canvas left and right the thighs, the thrusting head of the girl taking on phallic implications. In case there is any doubt about the sexual connotations, a bright yellow banner to the left transgressively declares “O for a Fu…”.27 As a desiring sexual subject, and in a reversal of the usual sexual economy of Pop, Boty turned her attentions to (male) objects of desire, notably in With Love to Jean Paul Belmondo. Describing this new wave French film star in a letter to a friend as “the dish with a ravey navel” she crowns him with a huge, quivering red rose of her lust, surrounding, almost submerging, the grisaille of his PR image (a knowing engagement with mass cultural sources) with bold strokes of saturated red. Gleefully she posed naked, for Lewis Morley, with this depiction of the 26 Evidenced in interviews with friends, her memorable performance as Monroe in RCA student reviews, and a number of photographs in which she adopts Monroesque poses. 27 A very real transgression: when Tynan used the ‘f’ word on TV two years later, questions were asked in the House.

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object of her own desire. Mimicking famous nude poses (the Rokeby Venus, or Louise Murphy in Boucher’s painting of Louis VX’s mistress) she disrupts the established art historical understandings of the female nude to collapse the normatively opposed subject positions of sexual woman and artist and to occupy the stereotype of artist as sexually energetic being, which had been the prerogative of men.28 Fig. 8-2: 5-4-3-2-1, 1963. Oil on canvas. 125cms x 100 cms. Courtesy of the Pauline Boty Estate.

Reified depictions of the commodified, sexualised woman were to be the central reason for feminist art history’s unconditional anathematisation of Pop, but in fact, in the early 60s Boty had already broken the debate wide open, reoccupying the sexual body as artist and circumventing male scopic demands to find a visual language to express the subjective experience of an autonomous female sexual pleasure and arousal within the tropes and representations of mass culture. For Boty the suppression of women’s sexuality was an integral part of their social and political oppression29 and re-inscribing “woman” into the visual economy of mass culture as active sexual subject, rather than passive object, is hugely important—reason enough to make a claim for a feminist Pop.30 However, while she flamboyantly enjoyed her upfront performance of a sexual identity,31 she was well aware of the dangers. Student friends remember that, even as a teenager, “she was aware of being a thing to men, not a soul, brain, potential”,32 and was “often saddened by the way men seemed to forget the person behind the looks”.33 She believed, however, that 28

See Pollock, Vision and Difference, 48. On The Public Ear, 9 February 1964. Also in anecdotal evidence in interviews with friends. 30 For a fuller consideration of the exploration of female sexuality in Boty’s work and the implications of the issues raised for feminist art theory, see Tate, 2007. 31 Evidenced in a number of interviews with teachers, colleagues and friends. 32 Beryl Cotton, Boty’s student colleague at Wimbledon Art School, interview with the author, January 1997. 33 Jennifer Carey, friend and wife of Boty’s Wimbledon tutor Charles Carey, interview with the author, June 1998. 29

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“women should fight back”, and rather than denying her sexuality she explored the problematics it presented, demonstrating that it was possible for a woman artist to be simultaneously a sensuous and an intellectual being. In 1962, before the celebratory works discussed thus far, Boty chose to make stage designs for Genet’s The Balcony,34 in which she engaged with a gendered politics and the politics of gender. Genet’s play is a searing articulation of issues of sexuality, duplicity, performativity and power that takes place in a brothel at the time of revolutionary unrest. In the designs, Boty juxtaposed images of political uprising and male military power, on vertical panels at the side of the stage, with horizontal banners, sometimes almost choked in swathes of lace, depicting the pouting faces of models taken from the media. The following year, astutely recognising the interplay between party and sexual politics in the Profumo affair, she painted Scandal 63. Christine Keeler dominates the composition while, in a panel at the top of the picture, two lesser known black protagonists, falsely accused of assault, are given the same weight as Profumo himself: issues of power, race, gender and class are all addressed.

Fig. 8-3: Pauline Boty with work in progress. Photograph Lewis Morley, 1963.

Boty conducted these critiques not from a detached position outside mass culture but, believing that the “dolly bird” role had truly radical potential, from within. On The Public Ear she argued that the new 34

For submission to an Arts Council competition.

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generation of young women in their bold, attention-grabbing, provocative fashions, would break up the old, sexually repressed, male dominated order: “A revolution is on the way […] All over the country young girls are starting and shaking and if they terrify you, they mean to and they’re beginning to impress the world.”35 She occupied the “dolly bird” identity with relish exploring it her in performance to camera while always posing, as “artist”, with her own work. For Morley, wearing a flowery dress and white ankle boots (Fig. 8-3), she arranged herself in her studio, with the tools of her trade and artwork in progress around her, Scandal 63 in one hand, 5-4-3-2-1 in the other: the identities of mass culture model girl and serious artist, commenting on mass culture and contemporary politics, are compounded, high and low meshing with a grinding of semiotic gears. Working with Ward, she also posed with her paintings: she reclines by July 27, or mimics the subject matter of other work, for example lifting her blouse as does the woman in a rather disturbing painting, Tom’s Dream. Fig. 8-4: Pauline Boty with Celia and her heroes. Photograph Michael Ward, 1963.

Standing with Celia with some of her heroes (Fig. 8-4), surrounded by collaged mass media sources, she conducts a subject/object conflation that exposes and explores the construction of identity, comparable to and no less effective than the Untitled Film Still series produced by Cindy Sherman nearly two decades later. In knickers and knee-high boots, a lacy blouse open to expose an uplift bra, a red rose of desire held casually against her naked thigh, Boty the artist looks remarkably like the subject of her painting, Celia Birtwell, the textile designer. A rich layering of levels and sources of representation reverberate against each other: the actual collage on the wall, the painted collage in the painting, the magazines spilling over the floor, some with pages already cut out and ready to collage. In her studio, with her brushes in view (indexical signs for the artist) Boty knowingly inscribes herself 35

The Public Ear, 15 December 1963.

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into the operation of visual discourse and exposes the construction of a sexualised female identity in popular culture. In 1963 Boty was also working on It’s a Man’s World I (Fig. 8-5), the title anchoring its feminist intent, in which a range of masculinities are depicted in a grid of painted and actual collage, some in grisaille, some in full colour, drawn from mass media imagery. They include the intellectual (Proust, Einstein, Engels), the sexy and glamorous (Elvis, The Beatles, the matador known as El Beatle) the strong and idealised (Muhammad Ali and a classical sculpture) and among them her red rose of desire (its clitoral bud prominent) finds a place. Playing on shifting levels of representation, the grid is set against the grand palaces and bombers of male public power and, in the lower centre of it, Kennedy’s assassination is pictured—a paradigm moment in the violence of that world. Despite the declamatory title there is ambivalence; an acknowledgement of intellectual respect and sexual desire residing with a gendered political critique.

Fig. 8-5: Its a Man’s World I, 1964, 153cms x 122cms. Courtesy of the Pauline Boty Estate.

Boty was politically active in a number of ways: she was the secretary of The Anti-Ugly Campaign (demonstrating against the aesthetic poverty of post-war architecture), went on nuclear disarmament Aldermaston

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marches and was keenly concerned about political developments in Vietnam and Cuba (the latter the subject matter for two paintings in 1963, Cuba Si and July 27th). Count Down to Violence (Fig. 8-6) uses a Pop iconography to respond to contemporary politics and conduct a searing, gendered, attack on male violence. Within a proscenium arch stark numerals count down, not to the release of the weekend (as in 5-4-3-2-1, to which this painting might be seen as a dark partner) nor the ejaculatory lift-off of space travel, but to the ground “ZERO” of male violence operating across time (the assassinations of both Lincoln and Kennedy) and space—a Buddhist monk burns in Vietnam, a grisaille rendering of a newspaper image depicts racist violence in Alabama, USA. Dealing with the same issue that Warhol addressed in his Race Riot screenprints, Boty makes it clear this is a gendered critique: in the very centre of the composition a beautifully manicured female hand wielding secateurs (an image drawn from an earlier collage) is about to sever a red rose, Boty’s emblem of female sensuality. Fig. 8-6: Count Down to Violence, 1964, 98cms x 83cms. Courtesy of the Pauline Boty Estate.

Within the lexicon of mass cultural imagery, Pauline Boty gave expression to a female subjectivity and autonomous sexuality, explored the complexities of the construction of identity within mass culture and articulated a gendered politics. Expressive of both the affective and the cognitive, her oeuvre might be seen as transcending the Cartesian mind/body binary, so damaging to women, and long of concern to feminist cultural studies. A feminist Pop, surely, articulated not from a detached position of subversion but from a subject position within mass culture. Considering the use of “the explicit body” in feminist performance Rebecca Schneider employs the term “binary terror”: “the terror that

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accompanies the dissolution of a binary habit of sense making”;36 binary oppositions that are not merely identified and exposed but collapsed, are too threatening to the signifying system to be accommodated. Boty’s transgressive practice might be seen as provoking this kind of “binary terror”. When, for example, she posed for Ward and Morley with her own work she did so with radical, liberational intent, challenging the gendered terms of the Great Divide by collapsing the binary oppositions between mass and high culture and between sexual woman and serious artist. But Morley’s photographs were not used and, falling outside feminism’s grid of specification, until now no feminist scholar was motivated to track them down. And when Ward’s pictures did get published in 1965 (without his knowledge, after he had placed them with a picture agency) it was in mass culture soft porn magazines of the day, Men Only and Tit Bits. In Men Only there is no text to anchor Boty’s identity as an artist, and in Tit Bits (Fig. 8-7) the picture editor has sliced the paintings out of the photographs: in this way Boty could be safely subsumed back into the deprivileged side of the Great Divide as no more than a sexy pop culture girl performing for the titillation of the magazines’ male audience. Fig. 8-7: Page from Tit Bits c. 1965. © IPC+Syndication.

The Tit Bits images alone demonstrate the necessity to critique the operation, in visual culture, of phallocentric discourse, and, in the year the article appeared, Boty painted It’s a Man’s World II: unambiguously critical, the red rose of female desire is banished and nudes, appropriated from soft porn and the life class, are boxed in a phallic, upright space, within the landscaped estate, with classical follies of the “the man’s” land. But there was no discursive visibility for this statement either. It is a large, eye-catching painting (1.25 meters square), the pubic hair of a standing woman, her head obscured so she is reduced to no more than her sexual parts, is demandingly placed at the very centre of the composition. Although exhibited in 1966,37 no critical comment was 36 37

Schneider, The Explicit Body In Performance, 13. Spring Exhibition, April/June, 1966, Cartwright Memorial Hall, Bradford.

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made on it and, perhaps even more significantly, in the dozens of interviews I have conducted with Boty’s friends, colleagues and acquaintances, no-one remembers this piece or any discussion of its radical sexual politics. Boty was discursively silenced and became very depressed in the year or two before her diagnosis with cancer. Her very last painting, however, was BUM, made for Kenneth Tynan for his taboobreaking stage show O Calcutta!, a play on the French pronunciation meaning “O what an arse you have”. A delicately rendered woman’s bum is pictured within a proscenium arch painted in vibrant colours straight from the tube. Although very ill by this point, Boty was still at the heart of Swinging London zeitgeist and, as ever, the celebration continued along with the critique. On her death there was talk of an exhibition but it came to nothing, and a further twenty-seven years passed before any of her work was exhibited.

The Historiographic Return In the 1990s the shift into a postmodern episteme redrew the gendered boundaries between high and low culture reconfiguring the landscape of the Great Divide to open up new understandings of Pop38 within which the work of women Pop artists might be seen. Furthermore, the impact of feminism had left historians and the institutions with a queasy awareness of the male domination of Pop39 that needed addressing. The Barbican show of 1993 had brought media and art journal attention to Boty’s work:40 she was becoming an object of discourse and the Tate were quick to reserve three pieces from the retrospective exhibition I cocurated in 1998. Being given a “field of exteriority” in the major institution of British modern art was a vital turning point in Boty’s historiographical return, but the final choice of work purchased raised the issue of how she was to be “named and described”. It’s a Man’s World I 38

In the forum during the Royal Academy 1991 show, Livingstone reassessed his earlier insistence on detachment, finding “tragedy” in Warhol’s work, “humanity and intimacy” in that of Oldenburg. In The Return of the Real, Hal Forster highlights Crow’s identification of “the realities of suffering and death” in Warhol’s work and writes of traumatic realism. In 2002 David Hopkins asked, in Art Monthly, “What if Warhol really cared?”. 39 In the 1990s both Madoff (Pop Art : A Critical History, xvii) and Livingstone (Pop Art: A Continuing History, 13) noted the absence of women, but are at a loss to understand or explain it. 40 See e.g. Sabine Durrant in The Independent on Sunday, and Thomas Crow in Artforum.

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and With Love to Jean Paul Belmondo, which reversed the gendering of the desiring gaze and suggested a feminist critique, were reserved but not, in the event, purchased: it was The Only Blonde in the World, celebrating that most established of Pop icons, Marilyn Monroe, that joined the collection. When petitioned to buy the other works, the curators justified their choice on the grounds of “the context in which it could be shown”:41 presumably the established narrative of Pop into which The Only Blonde in the World fitted most comfortably, placed in Tate Liverpool’s permanent display. In Artforum in 1993 Thomas Crow had noted the “silent demolition” that It’s a Man’s World II has dealt to adjacent Pop pieces by Blake and Jones in the Barbican show. Works that expressed such a gendered and disruptive radicality fell outside the Tate’s authoritative “grid of specification” and the opportunity to bring this “other” voice into the institution was lost. In the last decade Boty has become “naturalised” in accounts and exhibitions of Pop and British art in the 60s, but almost exclusively through the works that offer a celebration rather than a critique of (gendered) mass culture.42 For example, The Only Blonde in the World has been shown in special exhibitions at Tate Liverpool and Tate Britain43 and will appear in a National Portrait Gallery exhibition on Pop Portraits in 2007; 5-4-3-2-1 was used to represent the 60s “youth quake” in the Imperial War Museum’s 1999 exhibition From the Bomb to the Beatles; and it was these two works that were, in 2000, reproduced in colour in Tate Publishing’s book on Pop in their Movements in Modern Art. Feminist art history, with more at stake in the treacherous territory of mass culture, has been slower to embrace Boty. In 1997, forty-one years after her death, Sarah Wilson finally brought a serious, but ambivalent, feminist attention to her work. Her understanding of it is set firmly within the terms of second-wave feminism’s “grid of specification”, as is clear when she wonders “[t]o what extent was [Boty] genuinely subversive—to what extent complicitous with the essentially phallocentric constructions of Pop Art.” It is a debate still shaped by the gendered dynamics of the Great Divide: “[t]he raw material of Pop Art itself was of course the world of mass culture”, the reader is reminded, “for which woman herself 41

Letter to the author in response to my petitioning them to buy more than The Only Blonde, 22 February, 1999. 42 Livingstone now includes women, e.g. Boty, my Colouring Book exhibited in British Pop, Bilbao, October 2005- February 2006 (Haworth also included). 43 Pin-up Glamour and Celebrity Since the Sixties, Tate Liverpool, March 2002January 2003. Art and the Sixties This Was Tomorrow Tate Britain, October 2004April 2005.

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functioned as the impotent sign”. Within this framing of the field, as Wilson succinctly notes, “the ‘liberated’ woman was caught in an impossible dilemma. As participant in the carnival, she enjoyed the masquerade that signified her own subjection”.44 The 1998 retrospective show allowed the full range of Boty’s work to be seen. In the catalogue, I argued that perhaps now “we can fully appreciate the unique contribution made by Boty in her brief but vibrant life”.45 However, when she finally entered the feminist art historical canon in Phelan and Rickett’s compendious Art and Feminism, published by Phaidon in 2001, it was still within the imperative to subvert and critique mass culture that the work is “named and described”. Pieces that explore and celebrate the affective pleasures women experience within mass culture are given no space, as those reproduced are It’s a Man’s World I and II, which, echoing Chadwick’s framing of Marisol and St Phalle, are sternly described as “a critical portrayal of the spaces of male power”.46 They appear on a double page spread opposite Nikki de Saint Phalle’s Hon and Monica Sjoo’s God Giving Birth, well-established as canonical feminist works of the decade, where they fit as comfortably as The Only Blonde in the World does in the Tate Liverpool, or in the pages of the Tate’s Pop Art alongside work by Warhol and Hamilton: very different bed fellows. Finally “an object of discourse”, Boty’s oeuvre has found a “field of exteriority”, but only as a divided oeuvre. It is split between the mainstream, in works that celebrate mass cultural experience and allow Pop to tick the equality box, and a feminist art history that can only really give discursive space to a critique, that is to works that fit a “grid of specification” established in response to the political needs of the 70s and 80s.

A role for contemporary feminist art history Foucault argues that objects of discourse exist under “the positive conditions of a complex group of relations […] established between institutions, economic and social processes, behavioural patterns, systems of norms”.47 Over the last 40 years there have been very real changes in that complex group of relations. Legislative, institutional, social and discursive shifts, instigated by second wave feminism, have radically 44

Wilson, “Daughters of Albion: Greer, sex and the Sixties”, 78. My italics. Watling, The Only Blonde in the World, 18. 46 Phelan and Reckitt, Art and Feminism, 54. 47 Foucault, 45. 45

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altered gendered relations bringing real change to lived experience. The redrawing of high/low cultural boundaries, undermining the gendered investments of the Great Divide, also provides an opportunity to reconfigure the problematics of the relationship between women and mass culture, reframing the debate. A younger generation of women, therefore, move in a very different cultural landscape from their feminist mothers: taking hard won victories for granted, they are increasingly occupying public spaces as of right and have changed expectations of how they might perform their personal and sexual identities. However, they are also living under the ideological pressures of an ever greater media saturation of society which presents very real difficulties and dilemmas. An acute awareness of the way in which gendered identity, subjectivity and desire are constructed within the representations of mass culture and of the dangers of the constant reiteration of an impossible idealisation of the female form are staples of my undergraduate Art and Design students’ essays. Yet, unwilling to relinquish mass cultural pleasures and unable to step outside the regime of representation, they can feel helpless in the face of these understandings. Ariel Levy has highlighted the detrimental effects for young women of the increasing sexualization of society; although wishing to achieve sexual enfranchisement, under a bombardment of images designed to fulfil male fantasies they are unable to identify, and become alienated from, their own desires and perform affectless rituals of sexual behaviour. Angela McRobbie has recently exposed and poignantly enumerated “young women’s post-feminist disorders” (self harm, low self esteem, eating disorders, etc.) which she characterises as the manifestation of an “illegible rage” at a time when feminist gender understandings are normalised yet seen as superseded. “[C]onfined to the topographies of an unsustainable selfhood”, enforced by the mass media that only offers individualised solutions (try harder, get thinner), she sees young women as “deprived of the possibility of feminist sociality.”48 However, second-wave feminism might be seen as partially culpable in rendering that rage “illegible”, the performance of female sexuality “affectless.” “Warding off” mass culture by shaping the response to it around the subversive/complicit binary, with its insistence on critique, severs women from an exploration of the affective, lived experience within it: a kind of self harm that blocks the occupation of an integrated (if contradictory) subjectivity and occludes the possibility of women 48 McRobbie, “Illegible Rage: Reflections on Young Women's Post-Feminist Disorders”, paper given at the London School of Economics, 25 January 2007.

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identifying and enacting their own needs and desires. Boty, fully occupying and celebrating a mass cultural identity while conducting a critique and a gendered politics from that cultural locus provides a very different model; one that offers “the possibility of a feminist sociality.” It is time to look into the dark heart of Wilson’s “impossible dilemma” where Boty’s work resides and grapple with the complexity and contradiction to be found there. Certainly Boty’s work is already striking a chord with a younger generation. She is, for example, cited as an influence by Stella Vine and is referenced as a “hero” 12 times on MySpace. 19-year-old Angie asserted, in e-mail correspondence with me, that Boty has an “undeniable message and appeal to young women”, an appeal elaborated on by Christina, a 20year-old art student at Kingston University. Citing both fashion and dancing and reading Kundera and Camus as her interests, clearly a woman in Boty’s mould, she is drawn to Boty’s ability to combine an “It girl image, being beautiful and hanging out with rock stars, with being a critically acclaimed and extremely talented artist. That is why she is my hero! I want to be both of those things too!”49 Some of the My Space hits were triggered by a lead feature on Boty in Latest Art,50 which describes itself as “the UK’s newest and hippest art magazine”. It’s a Man’s World II was the cover image of an issue dedicated to women artists, but while giving this visibility and recognition to Boty’s work is to be applauded, there are problems with the article by Bill Smith. While nodding to the concept of feminism, much of the text is given to an account of her looks and lifestyle and to an unproblematised, neo-liberal acclamation of celebrity culture in her work. The import of It’s a Man’s World II and the complexity of her engagement with a gendered politics and the construction of mass cultural identity are not discussed at all, leaving young women like Christiana with no more than the (constructed) pleasure of the It girl image, severed from the “possibility of a feminist sociality”. Furthermore, the whole issue of Latest Art, despite wanting to bring women artists to public attention, reflects the problematic relationship that younger women have with second-wave feminist art practice, characterized (and rejected) by one writer in terms of “disturbing images of yoni worshipping earth mothers, moulding vagina shaped teapots from menstrual laced clay”.51 In order to address Wilson’s “impossible dilemma” and be useful to young women, a properly feminist reading of Boty’s work, reaching 49

E-mail correspondence with the author, 14 January 2007. Latest Art February 2006, 10-14. 51 Katie Glass, ibid., 7. 50

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across the generational divide, needs to be articulated. To do this, it must be historiographically re-framed as a re-integrated oeuvre. In Gender and Genius, Christine Battersby considers how a feminist aesthetics might be achieved and argues that the woman artist must be “positioned in two different, but overlapping patterns: the matrilineal and patrilineal line of influence and response”. She “needs to be slotted into the context of male traditions. But to understand what that artist is doing […] she will also have to be located in a separate female pattern that, so to speak, runs through the first in a kind of contrapuntal way.”52 So far, Boty has been “slotted into” the male line of Pop and into an established feminist canon, but to really “understand what the artist is doing” she needs to be located in other “contrapuntal” patterns of women’s work that are yet to be fully identified and explored. First, there is the pattern of women working within Pop, until now denied visibility in feminist art history. Their work is heterogeneous, yet, produced from a differently gendered cultural position, it collectively articulates that “other” voice within Pop, the missing expression of a female subjectivity that, once fully recognised, will challenge and broaden Pop’s limited monocular male view. Looking closer, a feminist politics can be found in the Pop work of both Nikki de Saint Phalle and Rosalyn Drexler which, with Boty’s political work, forms a critical mass that dislodges both mainstream and current feminist art historical understandings. However, perhaps the notion of an expanded Pop is too sanguine; the work of these women exceeds Pop’s male defined borders and points to other lines of enquiry to be pursued. Boty, for example, can be placed in another synchronic pattern that could include the Fluxus women (notably Carolee Schneeman and Yoko Ono), Jay de Feo, the Beat artist, and Yayoi Kusama, only tangentially connected with Pop, all of whom (in Schneeman’s words) “used the nude as myself—the artist”53 with or as their work in order to challenge the male gendering of the paradigm of “the artist”. Located in this contrapuntal pattern, her engagement with gender politics is thrown into higher relief. Penny Sparke, at least in part in response to Huyssen’s view of the postmodern reconfiguration of high/low boundaries, has argued, in the context of material and popular culture, for the recognition and validation of a “feminine culture formed over the last century and a half […] linked with the everyday, the commercial and the aesthetically ‘impure’ [that] had been relegated to the margins”,54 and trivialised by masculine culture. 52

Battersby, Gender and Genius, 152. Schneeman, More Than Meat Joy, 52. 54 Penny Sparke, As long As It’s Pink: The sexual politics of taste, ix. 53

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In this way women might “at least experience the pleasure of being at one with their constructed tastes”.55 Concomitantly, a similar continuity needs to be brought to light in fine art in a third, diachronic, pattern of women artists who engaged with mass culture, in which Boty and the other Pop women would be pivotal. Battersby makes a call to feminist art history to go “forward via a female past”56 by “trac[ing] new patterns of inheritance” in order to “construct a new tradition”.57 Such a pattern might be traced from Hannah Hoch, via the Pop work, through Sherman, Kruger and Sylvie Fleury in the 80s and 90s to the contemporary practice of artists like Stella Vine, Ghadar Amer, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas. Heterogeneous in style, medium and intentionality, this body of work would offer a female response to Varnedoe and Gopnik’s “most important issue of our era”, namely the relationship between art and mass culture, which would look very different from the one they offer. This art historical work would facilitate the construction of a new feminist tradition, providing a matrilineal continuity to which the present generation could turn. There is, currently, (as could be seen in Latest Art) a very real danger of a generational divide, risking a rupture in what is clearly the unfinished project of feminism. In “Undutiful Daughters”, published in 2000, Betterton recognises an ambivalence in the changing relationship of younger women with mass culture which is more complex than a simple opposition of complicity to subversion, yet concludes, critically, that Emin’s work, which “draws on an affective experience largely shaped in mass culture”, “does not change the sexual politics it lays bare”: an undutiful daughter indeed.58 However, re-working the article in 2002,59 she notes that “conventional wisdom”60 has placed Emin, among others, in a generational opposition, at the opposite end of the artistic spectrum from the critical, deconstructivist work typified by Mary Kelly. Constructed in terms of feminism versus post-feminism, this opposition implies that the feminist political project is either achieved or no longer relevant to 55

Ibid., 235. The title of a chapter in Battersby, Gender and Genius (155-162), to which this essay is responding. 57 Battersby, 161. 58 Betterton, “Undutiful Daughters: Avant-gardism and Gendered Consumption in Recent British Art”, 27. 59 “Why is my art not as good as me? Femininity, Feminism and ‘Life-Drawing’ in Tracey Emin’s Art”. 60 Typified by a long article on the “young British Artists” by John Roberts, “Mad For It! Philistinism, the Everyday and the New British Art”, 1996. 56

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“‘ordinary’ women”. Betterton rejects this positing of Emin against “a negative stereotype of feminist political rectitude” and cogently demonstrates resonances in her work with ’70s feminist art practice, finding in it a sexual politics, which would not have been possible “without the histories of feminist debate and practices proceeding it”.61 But the difference in strategy, the challenge and subversion of ’70s work versus the experiential and “affective” style of Emin’s, remains problematic. However, there are marked congruencies between Boty’s and Emin’s work. Both display a “loss of guilt in front of popular culture”,62 which has been seen as definitive in British art of the 1990s. Both artists identify positively with its values, draw on affective experiences shaped within it to perform an artistic identity constructed within its gendered experiences. They express a female subjectivity, embedding/embodying it in their handling of their different but equally considered and conscious use of media, style and iconography. A feminist reading, placing both in a reshaped feminist art history, can bring their work together, closing the generational gap to mutual advantage: isolated from a feminist continuity artists like Emin are vulnerable to misogynist attack, while her work can give Boty’s retrospective visibility. Significantly, though, Boty went on to use that subjective position to explore a gendered politics, which Emin has been castigated for eschewing and, by refusing to relinquish the affective, perhaps offers the current generation a way into a critical analysis.63 Paulina Olowska is a young Polish artist making her name on the international biennial scene with recent solo exhibitions in London and at Metro Pictures in New York. Growing up in Poland with extended visits to the USA, she is keenly aware of the intersection of politics and identity and has explored in her work constructions of fashion identity and her relationship with a range of 20th century women artists and writers. Drawn to Boty’s work, which she discovered through a piece held at the Lodz museum, she visited me, as the art historian, in the UK to learn more and we collaborated on an article in Swingset (a trendy New York arts magazine). In Hidden Treasure, Olowska conducts a complex layering and relayering of collaged elements from It’s a Man’s World II with her 61

Betterton, “Why is my art not as good as me?”, 26. Roberts identifies this as the key change in 1990s culture, 30. 63 More recently, however, Emin has proclaimed her self a feminist and used her celebrity status to expose the (ongoing) exclusion of women artists, (cf., for example, in What Price Art?, Channel 4, 15 March 2006) further closing the gap between the two artists and indicating that a current audience might be ready for Boty’s mix of pleasure and politics. 62

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own appropriation of mass cultural images, the title suggesting that Boty, historiographically buried, is a bounty ripe for rediscovery. For another piece, Pauline Boty Poses for a Popular Magazine, 2006 (see book cover), Olowska re-appropriates, hugely enlarged in this ten-foot high work, the already appropriated and mediated Tit Bits spread in front of which she places a young, fashionably dressed and coifed woman artist, palette and brushes in hand, straddling an anonymous modern city. Calmly and competently, the figure applies strokes of white paint to obliterate all but the nearly life sized, smiling image of Boty, liberating her from the magazine’s phallocentric mediation into a vivid new dialogue with a contemporary audience.

Conclusion Women are not just outside cultural traditions. They structure the spaces that lie between the bold lines picked out by previous generations of art critics [...] we are at last learning to see the depth of those spaces.64

Boty’s work, and that of other women Pop artists, structures one of those deep (and deeply problematic) spaces, and this is the nature of their historiographic promise. However, to recognise and appreciate their achievement requires what Battersby calls a “switch in perspective”—in the terms of this argument, a shift in feminist art history’s “grid of specification”. In the ’70s and ’80s, subversion and deconstruction of mass cultural imagery was an urgent political necessity in the negotiation of a cultural field shaped by the gendered investments of the Great Divide. But it placed an exploration of women’s affective, lived experience beyond discursive visibility, blocking an engagement with the “impossible dilemma” that Wilson so cogently identified. However, as Griselda Pollock pointed out in 1996, feminism is “a critical practice not a doxa; a dynamic and self-critical response and intervention.”65 To widen the “grid of specification” beyond the imperative to subvert and thus transcend the complicit/subversive binary, is not to renege on hard won understandings and positions (subversion must remain a tool in feminism’s armoury); rather it is to recognise that changed circumstances require a changed response. And indeed the discursive field is already changing: in 2003 , for example, Sarah Wilson threw off her doubts to claim that, in the

64 65

Battersby, 152. Pollock, “The Politics of Theory”, 5.

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celebratory and overtly sexual work of Belgian Pop artist Evelyn Axell, “[w]e have a feminist artist here, without a doubt.”66 In 1961 David Hockney’s confidence was undermined by the hostility his proto-Pop work was receiving in the RCA School of Painting, where he was a student. Then Richard Hamilton, a “father of Pop” and at the time a tutor in a different school at the RCA, paid a visit to the studio to offer encouragement and advice, and with huge relief Hockney thought “O, it is alright what I am doing, it is an interesting thing and I should do it.”67 Boty’s work, in which she demonstrated that, as a sexual woman, she could be intellectually potent from a subject position within mass culture, can offer just such an affirmation to a current generation of women as they confront current political needs. In her re-integrated oeuvre, critique and affirmation of mass culture are inextricable, and an embodied, affective picturing of female subjectivity is inseparable from an awareness and critique of its cultural construction and the exploration of a gendered politics; as such, it allows an engagement with the contradiction and complexity that are in the very nature of lived experience. Returned by feminist art history to discursive visibility, it re-frames understandings of the relationship women have with mass culture and allows us, in Battersby’s words, to “go forward via a female past”.

Works Cited Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. London: The Women’s Press, 1989. Betterton, Rosemary. “Undutiful Daughters: Avant-gardism and Gendered Consumption in Recent British Art”. In Visual Culture in Britain (U.K.), vol. 1, no. 1 (2000): 13-29. —. “Why is my art not as good as me? Femininity, Feminism and ‘LifeDrawing’ in Tracey Emin’s Art”. In The Art of Tracey Emin, edited by Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend, 22-39. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002. Chadwick, Whitney. Women Art and Society. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1990. Crow, Thomas. “London Calling”, Artforum, vol. 31 (Summer 1993): 813. Durrant, Sabine. “The Darling of Her Generation”. The Independent on Sunday, 7 March 1993, 13-15. 66 67

Wilson, Erotomobiles, 5. Stangos, N David Hockney By David Hockney 34.

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Dunn, Nell. Talking to Women. London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1965. Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The avant garde at the end of the century. Cambridge, MA, and London : MIT Press, 1996. Foucault, Michel. “The Formation of Objects”. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, 40-50. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Greenberg, Clement. Avant Garde Attitudes: New Art in the 60s. Sidney: Power Institute of Fine Arts University of Sydney, 1969. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide. Basingstoke : Macmillan, 1986. Kossloff, Max. “Pop Culture, Metaphysical Discussed, and the New Vulgarians”, Art International (March 1962): 35-36. Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. New York, London , Toronto, Sydney: Free Press, 2005. Lippard, Lucy. Pop Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1966. Livingstone, Marco. Pop Art: A Continuing History. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1990. Madoff, Steven, ed. Pop Art: A Critical History. Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1997. McCarthy, David. Pop Art. London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2000. McRobbie, Angela. “Illegible Rage: Reflections on Young Women’s PostFeminist Disorders”. Paper given at LSE, 25 January 2007, during New femininities: An International Conference, LSE and the British Library, 25-26 January, 2007. The paper was based on the chapters “Illegible Rage” and “Art of Survival”, to be published in forthcoming book Post-Feminist Disorders: Gender, Culture and Social Change (2007). Mellor, David A. The Sixties Art Scene in London. London: Phaidon/Barbican, 1993. Melville, Robert. “English Pop Art”. In Figurative Art Since 1945, edited by J. P. Hodin. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference. London: Routledge, 1988. —. “The Politics of Theory”. In Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts, edited by Griselda Pollock. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Parker, Rozsika and Pollock, Griselda. Old Mistresses Women, Art and Ideology. London and Henley: Routeldge & Kegan Paul, 1981. —. Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, 1970-85. London and New York: Pandora, 1987. The Public Ear, BBC radio programme broadcast October 1963 to March 1964. Reckitt, Helena and Peggy Phelan, eds. Art and Feminism. London and New York: Phaidon, 2001.

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Roberts, John. “Mad For It! Philistinism, the Everyday and the New British Art”, Third Text 35 (Summer 1996): 29-42. Russell, John, and Suzi Gablik. Pop Art Redefined. London: Thames and Hudson, 1969. Schneeman, Carolee, More Than Meat Joy: Performance works and selected writings, edited by Bruce R. McPherson. Kingston, New York: McPherson & Co., 1997. Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Smith, Bill. “The Only Blonde in the World”. Latest Art (February 2006): 10-14. Sparke, Penny. As Long As Its Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste. London: Pandora Press, 1995. Stangos, Nikos, ed. David Hockney By David Hockney. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1976. Tate, Sue. ‘Gender & Genius’. Swingset, no. 7 (2006): 42-46. —. “Re-Occupying the erotic Body: the paintings and ‘performance’ of Pauline Boty, British Pop Artist”. In Sexual Politics of Desire and Belonging, edited by Nick Rumens and Alejandro Cervantes-Carson. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. Varnedoe, K and Gopnik, A. High and Low: Modern art, Popular culture. New York: Museum of Modern Art; London: distributed by Thames and Hudson, 1990. Watling, Sue and David A Mellor. Pauline Boty: The Only Blonde in the World. London: Mayor and Whitford Fine Art Galleries, 1998. Wilson, Sarah. “Daughters of Albion: Greer, sex and the Sixties”. In The Sixties, edited by Mellor and Gervereau, 74-85. Philip Wilson Publishers, 1997. —. Erotomobiles: Evelyne Axel, 1935-1972. London: The Mayor Gallery, 2003. Whiting, Cecile. A Taste for Pop. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

SECTION IV: BETWEEN HISTORY AND THEORY

CHAPTER NINE FETISHISM AND THE STORIES OF FEMINIST ART ALEXANDRA M. KOKOLI

[E]very image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the moment he opens his mouth.) 1 —Walter Benjamin

Is Feminism History?2 Feminism in art history finds itself at an interesting intersection. Having long lost its links to activism, and with much of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory (on which it drew, and which it irreversibly transformed) now seemingly depleted of their radical potential, feminism in art history—and art— takes stock and looks to the future. If the mostly justifiably maligned prefix “post-” before feminism3 is to be redeemed for the present, it would have to be redefined as an internal break within feminist thinking that allows feminism itself to become the object of historical and theoretical investigations, even revisions. If feminist thought and action are, at their best, critique and not doxa,4 then now might be an 1

“Theses on the Philosophy of History”, 247. I owe this phrase to Elena Gualtieri, though it has very likely been used by others. Its ambiguity, as I suggest in this chapter, informs most self-reflective feminist writing after the second wave. 3 For an influential discussion of the sexual politics of American art discourse in the 1980s, see Amelia Jones, “‘Post-feminism’: A Remasculinization of Culture” (1990), where she describes “post-feminism” as “the insidious project currently at work to dis-arm feminists, coaxing us into sympathy with the broad postmodernist project by flattery, then extinguishing our tracks behind us”, 504. 4 Pollock, “The Politics of Theory”, 5. 2

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opportune time to turn this sharp, sophisticated and eclectic feminist critique on feminism itself. Yet, the internal break that allows for this kind of introspection is as much an opportunity as a site of danger; beneath any effort to review past feminisms lies the punning question “is feminism history?” This should not be treated as a rhetorical question, as its ambiguity sheds light on the intricacies of self-examination for a movement that has all but been absorbed in scholarship and, perhaps, some art practice. Even the most positive interpretation, that feminism is finally part of history, that it has made it into (its own and other) “history books”, is not without its problems. Like all programmatically dissenting voices, feminism is familiar with the anxiety of the revolutionary outsider that any ground gained in the academy, museums, the art markets – what has been termed “visibility”—is lost in the stakes of radicalism and the exhilarating potential of intervening from “the elsewhere”, which is however implied by representation by being excluded from, or rather repressed by it.5 On the other hand, a great (and perhaps growing) number of events, symposia and publications belie any suggestion of an ending. In 2006, the annual conference of the British Association of Art Historians (AAH) hosted the academic session “Whither Feminist Art History?”, convened by Francesca Berry and Amy Mechowski, which was extremely wellattended and critically praised. The College Art Association annual conference of 2006 included six sessions on evolving feminist perspectives (e.g. “Impact of New Feminisms”; “Between Feminisms”) and many more that featured gender prominently. In January 2007, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, hosted the two-day symposium The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts, which aimed to address the prospects of feminism in the arts through the assessment of its past: panels included “Writing the History of Feminism”, with presentations by Ute Meta Bauer, Connie Butler, David Joselit and Griselda Pollock.6 In 2005, Norma Broude and Mary Garrard published the third volume of their on-going anthologisation of feminist art historical writing, in which they advocate a return to real world issues, arguing that decades of theoretical engagement have led feminism to an intellectual (specifically but not exclusively art historical) but also political impasse.7 5

De Lauretis, “The Technology of Gender”, 25. The symposium schedule is available on the MoMA website, from which audio and video recordings also be downloaded . 7 Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism; on the editors stance on theory, see my forthcoming review in Art History (2008). This volume was preceded by Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany 6

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As its title suggests, Women Artists at the Millennium, edited by Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, published in 2006 and based on a conference of the same name held at Princeton in 2001, proposes to combine retrospection with looking to the future. In her preface, Armstrong underlines the interconnectedness of the two with a rumination on the ethical purpose of art, which she describes as follows: “to make you see, think, and feel anew—not ‘new’ in the sense of modernist novelty, but ‘anew’ in the generative sense, which is to say again but as if for the first time”.8 2001 saw the publication of the first and only, as far as I know, coffee table book on art and feminism, thoughtfully edited by Helena Reckitt and Peggy Phelan. Art and Feminism is extremely prepossessing and richly illustrated, as one would expect, but also more scholarly than most in its genre, containing a selection of writings on feminism and/or art (190-287) and a “Survey” (14-49) by Phelan in lieu of an introduction, where she attacks the “theoretical condensations of feminist art” in favour of “the possibilities of romancing feminism and art”.9 Such “romancing” opens the way for unlikely encounters, e.g. between Aboriginal dot paintings and Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills, and allows for the alphabetical listing of all featured artists and writers on the cover, crowded under a detail from Geneviève Cadieux’s photographic installation Hear me with your Eyes (1989), a pair of sensually parted female lips in extreme close-up. The list is inspiring for its nonhierarchical inclusiveness, efficiently demonstrating the breadth and variety of women’s work in the visual arts. At the same time, however, the proximity of artists as politically and aesthetically disparate as Vanessa Beecroft and Jo Spence, or Nancy Spero and Annie Sprinkle, can be disorienting if not misleading, especially to those less familiar with feminism (and/or art). And whereas the fact that “success”, however this may be measured, professional status or institutional and commercial affiliations are rightly not among the selection criteria for the showcased artists, the resulting equation between the influential and the marginalised, those who are taught in Art History and Visual Arts programmes in higher education and those who aren’t, those who manage to live off their art and those who don’t, displays a disregard of pragmatic and material(ist) considerations that could be deemed ideological.

(1982), charting the beginnings of a feminist problematic in art history in the 1970s, while The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (1992) interrogated feminist art history’s engagement with theory. 8 Armstrong, “Preface”, Women Artists at the Millennium, xiii. 9 Phelan, “Survey”, Art and Feminism, 17.

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The ambiguity of the question “is feminism history?” runs through and is transformed by each of these disparate events and publications, each of which is in and of itself valuable and encouraging. There is, I think, an underlying acknowledgement that for feminism to survive, it needs to (also) become history, it needs to become the object of its own historicisation. Each in their own way, these events and publications interrogate how and to what extent should dealing with the feminist past inform, or rather be part of, the making of feminist futures. Responses often take the form of pessimistic evaluations of the (limited) impact of political feminisms in society, the mixed blessings of feminist theory and institutionalisation, and unproductive (if not destructive) internal disputes. Sometimes they lead to proposals for the reinvention of feminism in the new century, not only acknowledging the mistakes of the past, but affirming and celebrating its on-going interventions in critical thinking, academic work, interdisciplinarity, and championing the continued relevance of staple concerns, questions, and methodologies.10 Writing anew on Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973-78)11 in 1999, Griselda Pollock argues for contextually cultural re-readings of key feminist work that become possible only in retrospection, and which could: address the conditions of possibility that were articulated into a project, whose full legibility and significance requires the distance of time to identify not so much what existed at its point of origin, to enable such an intervention to be conceived, but how it belongs symptomatically to a wider picture that will now reveal its fuller historical meaning.12

In search of fertile futures, the histories of feminism are being cast anew; the stories of feminist art—and feminist art history—are now being written, with all the advantages and disadvantages of distance. It is precisely distance and its interpretations that are the crux of the endeavour 10

The essay collection Feminist Consequences, edited by Elizabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka, is a thoughtful example of such considerations. See esp. Kavka’s “Introduction”, ix-xxvi, and the contributions to Part 4 “Where to Feminism?”, 321-454. 11 Dating artwork is always complicated, and even more so in the case of installation, which is only/best constituted in exhibitions. Here I am using the dates of Documentations I (1973) to VI (1978) to define the chronological limits of the whole work, with the caveat that each exhibition is a re-creation. The Post-Partum Document has also been “translated” into book form. 12 Pollock, “Still Working on the Subject: Feminist Poetics at its Avant-Garde Moment”, 249-250.

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of self-historicisation, and the upsetting punctum in the ambiguity of “is feminism history?”. Despite the benefits and even the necessity of distance, an acknowledgement of involvement is also required, as Benjamin suggests in the fifth of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: every “image” of the past must be “recognised by the present as one of its own concerns”, if it’s not to “disappear irretrievably”. So this needs to be a balancing act, made all the more difficult by the expectation of a continued alliance between the generations of feminism. Benjamin’s words are haunted by the intimation of filiation—“one of its own”—which has also been a prominent feminist concern. Although the fraught “mother-daughter plot” has always been much more than just a metaphor,13 it takes a pressingly literal form as “the discourses of feminism and postfeminism are now contested among generations of women”.14 Distance can protect against slippages between feminism’s pasts and futures, often made in an effort to reconcile the rapture of the seventies with the modest gains of the new century. Although such slippages may be politically justified, they remain theoretically problematic. For, if the past must be recognised by the present as one of its own (concerns), it still needs to remain separate from it, just like for a mother-daughter sociality to finally come into being any over-identification between the two must be given up.15 To put it differently, if the image of the past is allowed to blend into the landscape of the present, it might still be camouflaged out of sight. This blending of past and present is not necessarily the result of insisting on continuities, but can also be the side-effect of a dialectical perception of the history of the feminist movement. For example, in “Women’s Time”, Julia Kristeva envisages a future generation of feminists that reconciles maternal time (a combination of “cyclical” and “monumental time”) with the “linear time” of history and political change. Even as the author tries “to emphasise the multiplicity of female expressions and preoccupations so as not to homogenise ‘woman’”,16 the text concludes with an assimilation of disparate positions into the diversity of “the signifying space” of the then new feminist generation.17 Thus, if 13

Cf. Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. 14 Mignon Nixon, “The She-Fox: Transference and the ‘Woman Artist’”, in Armstrong and de Zegher, Women Artists at the Millenium, 283. 15 Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous, 48. 16 Toril Moi, introduction to “Women’s Time”, 187. 17 Kristeva, 209. Admittedly, Kristeva’s complex essay does much more than anticipate a moment of feminist maturity and assimilation of past phases, and

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the present is the culmination of past theses and antitheses, then although the past is obviously and by definition the concern of the present, it is only so in light of its contribution to the present and hence is implicitly shaped in the image of the present. Although one cannot speak of any autonomy of past moments without entering the realm of metaphysics, I support the preservation of the inassimilable moments, those that have remained unresolved, or that have been dealt with only partially, or in unsatisfactory ways; in simpler terms, I propose that it is worth interrogating what happens to the past that has been thwarted. This is hardly a new idea. In Pollock’s words, “[f]eminism has to confront the question of strangeness, difference and violence within itself”.18 This chapter has two aims. Firstly, to contribute to the exploration of the “strangeness and difference” within feminist art history, by foregrounding unresolved issues that have been passed on to new generations in the sense in which Kristeva uses the term, i.e. issues that have been translated into new signifying spaces. I will suggest that what is seemingly ancient history cannot but be repeated; what is forgotten is bound to return. Secondly, I propose to do so through interrogating the uses of “fetishism”, a privileged term of analysis for reasons that will be explained. This discussion will hopefully point in the direction of a more general proposition: that theory has its own history, and at times, its own baggage; and that, moreover, working through such baggage should be the business of contemporary feminist theory, in and beyond its engagement with the visual.

Stories from Elsewhere The exploration of “strangeness, difference and violence” within feminism had already begun in the early days of the second wave, from the marginal position of women of colour in the women’s movement. In the important essay “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood” (1982), Hazel Carby addresses her contemporary white raises some very intriguing questions that feminist theory continues to grapple with, notably about the future of identity politics after the dismantling of sexual difference (209-211). However, the essay is often read, not least by Moi herself, in terms of a Hegelian dialectic, with the emergent “generation” of feminism (at the time of writing in 1979) as representing the most “advanced” stage. Moreover, the utopian impetus of “Women’s Time” strongly evokes a linear narrative progression through and beyond feminism, with no acknowledgement of the possibility of backtracking, obstacles, or the very real backlashes of the 1990s. 18 Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 193.

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British feminists and presents them with the demanding task of examining their own biases, by focusing on the role of white women in colonialism and by interrogating the unacknowledged whiteness of the second wave. In this early analysis of the triple oppression of gender, race and class, which has since been termed “intersectionality”, the author concludes that white feminists need not try to write the “herstories” of and for women of colour, but rather focus on the ways in which race had been written out of the feminist project.19 Carby’s inferred separatism (that blackwomen’s herstories should only be written by blackwomen) and her insistence on this “negative” work for white feminists should be read in the context of a certain polemics of its time. If it had been followed to the letter, we would have been deprived of much valuable intellectual input, notably in art history, such as the insightful readings of Faith Ringgold’s work by Moira Roth, or Lubaina Himid by Griselda Pollock, or Sutapa Biswas’ by both. Scrutinising absences and focusing on lags and omissions has without doubt been a big part of what feminism does, both at the moment of its emergence and in its self-reflective development. The emphasis on the unsaid is informed if not necessitated by the configuration of the feminine subject as the subject against all odds—written out of the symbolic and yet still stealing through. The discourse of/from the feminine, as Hélène Cixous among others has so eloquently conveyed,20 is profoundly influenced by the unlikelihood of its existence and marked by the epistemic violence that had heretofore kept it repressed. So “feminine writing”, this umbrella term for the cultural production of the systemically repressed, does not only come into existence against the odds but is strange in and of itself for being at odds with the Symbolic, on which it must draw. This representation of the liminal position of the feminine subject of feminism has been extremely influential both in the second wave moment of the women’s movement as well as in explorations of what lay beyond the second wave, particularly from queer (“odd” and deliberately disorderly) perspectives.21 A strategically centrifugal tendency 19 Carby, “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood”, 88. 20 On Cixous, see the introduction and Lauritis’s chapter in this volume. For a theoretical discussion of the strangeness and marginality of the “feminine” in postmodern discourse outside feminism, see Alice Jardine, Gynesis. 21 I’m here evoking Alexander Doty’s reprise of dictionary definitions of “queer” in “There’s Something Queer Here” to exploit their destabilising potential. As well as being differentiated from simply “non-, anti-, or contrastraight” positions (73), it is worth noting that queer theory spells out what for some second-wave feminists was a liberating truism and for others a sign of dangerous relativism, namely that

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has been constant in feminist counterculture and is evident in many key metaphors for feminist interventions, such as Teresa de Lauretis’ “view from elsewhere”, which is revisited in Differencing the Canon. Griselda Pollock’s formulation of “differencing” takes this metaphorical decentring one step further, by “deconstruct[ing] the oppositions inside/outside, norm/difference which ultimately condense on to the binary man/woman for which the others become related metaphors. The question is how to make a difference, by analysing this structuring of difference […]”.22 Thanks to its constitutive marginality, feminism seems particularly wellsuited for the continuous work of self-examination and self-critique; at the same time, however, it makes a particularly slippery subject for historiography, even for the writing of its own (hi)stories, since it is under an on-going process of redefinition that involves a constant selfdecentring. According to Pollock, feminist art history is an oxymoron, since “feminism is already posited as the difference”, external to and excluded from the “inevitable logic” of the discipline.23 Yet, as Pollock’s work in art history—rather, towards the radicalisation of art history— demonstrates, this is an oxymoron worth grappling with: feminism in art history stands for the “strangeness, difference and violence” within the discipline of art history, which feminist art history exposes. This does not mean, however, that feminist art history is itself immune to creating its own strangeness and perpetrating its own acts of violence. In a talk at the conference 347 minutes held in conjunction with the Whitechapel exhibition Live in your Head (2000), a retrospective of conceptualism in Britain, Monica Ross pinpoints some instances of art historical violence: We are considering art history today and yet …. We are and we are not… I have enjoyed “Live or Live in your head” immensely and yet … there are […] these distances … these not enoughs, these invisible gaps between what is there and what is not there, the what that cannot be there of several works in the show and works which were there in the past but are not there in this [sic] present. So.. it’s history and it isn’t…24

sexual identities—and, of course, sexual difference—do not pre-exist but are a function of representations. 22 Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 6. 23 Ibid., 8 24 Ross, “History of Not”.

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Ross’s talk focused on one of the omissions in that exhibition, namely the collaborative Women’s Postal Art Event, a.k.a. Feministo, in which she participated.25 Feministo consisted of postal exchange of small handcrafted objects between trained and untrained artists that where exhibited in travelling installations. The most prominent and best developed installation was Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife at the ICA in the summer of 1977, an uncanny mimicry of domestic space, including a kitchen and a bedroom, but also a memory room and a rape room. The Women’s Postal Art Event was hailed at the time of its exhibition and shortly after as an inclusive and accessible antidote to daunting feminist conceptualism, or the alienating complexities of the engagement of some feminist artists with poststructuralist psychoanalysis. However, the recognition of its accessibility and its proximity to traditional women’s crafts (crocheting, embroidery, etc.) had a less positive flipside: by implication, if not always explicitly, Feministo came to stand for a slightly ambivalent celebration of female culture that was affirmative but also problematic. “Mother art”26 is subject to the limitations of any “form of self-contained subcultural resistance”, edging on “the ghettoisation of women’s art in an alternative tradition.”27 As I have suggested elsewhere, Feministo can and deserves to be (re)read as an incisive visual contribution to the feminist critique of domesticity, and particularly Luce Irigaray’s explication of the metaphorical interconnections between dwelling and the feminine.28 It also deserves a place in a retrospective of British conceptualism, as Ross argues. Crucially, nevertheless, these are not terms of interpretation which the work or its contributors invited, or in which it had ever been interpreted until very recently. The omission of Feministo from Live in Your Head could only partly be explained as an example of patriarchal prejudice, still going strong within conceptualism. What is particularly challenging about the evocation of Feministo in Monica Ross’s talk is that it brings up (and brings back) a division within feminist art history that pivots on the role 25 Along with Angela Amesbury, Penny Booth, Tricia Davis, Philippa Goodall, Pam Holt, Chick Hull, Kaye Lynch, Liz Musiatec, Kathy Nicholson, Su Richardson, Kate Walker, and many others. 26 According to Mary Kelly’s four-part division of feminist art practice: “mother art”, “body art”, “ego art”, “‘Other’ art”. Kelly, “On sexual politics and art” (1980), reprinted in Parker & Pollock, Framing Feminism, 303-312. 27 Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman, “Textual strategies: The politics of art making”, ibid., 316. 28 Kokoli, “Undoing ‘homeliness’ in feminist art: Feministo: Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife (1975-7)”.

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ascribed to critical theory in art practice. One the one side, there were projects like the Women’s Postal Event, classified as celebratory, either seemingly untheorised or staunchly anti-theoretical art projects that aimed to be inclusive of non-professional artists (Feministo openly invited the participation of untrained amateurs through the feminist press), and/or fed off consciousness raising groups (as did Feministo), and/or privileged traditionally “feminine” skills, media and imagery. On the other side of the divide, there is theoretically informed conceptualist and postminimalist practice, that does not indulge or seduce the gaze, and which is often scriptovisual. It has often been argued that this division between humanist and deconstructive feminist art practice is not only misleadingly schematic, but also retrospective, having only been articulated as such in the late eighties for the first time, although it does appear in a rudimentary form much earlier. For example, writing in 1980, Mary Kelly deploys a four-part classification of feminist art practice, as do Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman in an article published in Screen in the same year,29 but they all (especially the latter two) operate along a binary opposition between feminist art that evokes and celebrates female culture and a practice that engages with existing artistic and philosophical traditions in their own terms (to a degree), to uncover and disrupt the semiotic production of “femininity”. Interestingly, in both Kelly’s, and Barry and Flitterman’s texts, theory-based practice is discussed last, as the conclusion or culmination of their narrative. Although the division in question may not have been codified in the forms in which it later became familiar, it was not only operative but also often politically divisive within the movement. Following Mary Kelly’s 1976 exhibition of the Post-Partum Document at the ICA and the publication of a thoughtful and positive review by Laura Mulvey in Spare Rib, a heated debate ensued in the correspondence pages of the same magazine, not only about the role of art in feminism, but also that of psychoanalytic theory in art.30 Margot Waddell and Michelene Wandor argued that Mary Kelly’s work ran the risk of provoking philistine dismissals that wouldn’t be confined to that style of art practice or the theory with which it was in dialogue, but would extend to all feminist issues and threaten their political legitimacy.31 In their response, Parveen Adams, Rosalind Delmar and Sue Lipshitz rightly pointed out

29

Barry and Flitterman, “Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art Making”, reprinted in Framing Feminism, 313-321. 30 Reprinted in ibid., 203-205. 31 Ibid., 204.

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that it is (also) by provoking such reactions that Kelly’s work makes a statement.32 Ultimately, the division between “humanist” and “deconstructive” art practice does not stand up to critical scrutiny, especially with the benefit of historical distance. I would strongly contest the point that the kind of art practice that necessitated no prior knowledge of e.g. Lacanian psychoanalysis or poststructuralism on the part of the viewer is immanently untheorisable, i.e. averse to readings informed by abstract thought, let alone that it is obvious, in no need of interpretation or, crucially, reinterpetation thirty years on. My re-reading of Feministo was motivated by the wish to overcome the divide by showing its contingency. Yet pointing out, in retrospect, that the division is flawed does not mean that it has not been in operation and has not helped shape the field of feminist art. Since the mid-eighties, the changing terrain of British visual culture has indeed rendered this division irrelevant for the time being, replacing it with others yet without actually resolving it. The practice of “women artists of colour”,33 such as Sonya Boyce, Sutapa Biswas, Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter, as discussed very eloquently by themselves and art historians like Moira Roth, Jane Beckett and Gilane Tawadros, invented strategies of sublating the opposition between the postmodern condition of fragmentation and dissemination, and celebratory (or at least affirmative) representations of identity. Not only had certain formats and media gradually lost their exclusive association with particular aesthetic movements and discourses, but the theorisation and representation of diaspora, and the types of identification that it fostered, pre-empted the theoretical breakthroughs of postmodernism and deconstruction. As Stuart Hall put it, in an intriguing inversion of the centrifugal metaphors of the second wave, “now […] that you all feel so dispersed, I become centred.”34 The intersection of race and gender as both a condition and prevalent concern of art practice acted as a conduit between strands that previously seemed irreconcilable if not incommensurable. The reemergence of painting as a legitimate, no longer irretrievably tainted medium is typical of this radical reshuffling of the aesthetic and conceptual terrain of feminist art practice. As the subject positions, perspectives and practices that had until then been marginalised in the already marginal feminist movement slowly began to gain long-overdue 32

Ibid., 205. These terms are of course themselves outdated—they are monuments to the exclusions that they targeted and, to a degree, overcome. 34 Hall, “Minimal Selves”, 45. 33

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recognition, the dilemmas and divisions of the very recent past over the role of critical theory in art practice were themselves de-centred. For instance, the intense scepticism of visual pleasure that not only typified influential feminist analyses of cinema but also informed the avoidance of representing the female body in much feminist practice is no longer relevant. Biswas’ use of photographic negatives in the installation Infestations of the Aorta—Shrine to a Distant Relative (1989) are indeed in dialogue with theoretical investigations into photography and myth, but in a distinctly visual way that engages the viewer irrespective of their familiarity with critical theory. In Revenge, a series of five paintings, Lubaina Himid sidesteps the law of the mother: “thou shalt not paint”,35 since it is through her appropriation of the medium of painting, and specifically the genre of history painting, that she invents the narratives that colonialism has censored and casts them in the highbrow aesthetic visual languages of the coloniser.36 With photography thus employed in neither left-wing realist nor scriptovisual terms (in the style of e.g. Victor Burgin, Marie Yates, Yves Lomax) and the cultural meanings of painting negotiated and eroded from within, binaries that previously ruled no longer seem so instrumental. Such transitions—from the “displeasurable poetics” of theoretically engaged art to a politically inspired practice that has surpassed the choice between celebration and deconstruction—bear witness to the achievements of the artists involved in this moment of British art practice, and of the writers who revised the terms of analysis honed by second-wave feminism in response. These transitions, moreover, could not but be embedded in the history of feminist art historical publishing. In the next section, I will consider which “images of the past” are lost in the reshuffling, and in what shape they return.

(Re)Framings Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, 1970-1985, edited by Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, is a valuable collection of documents from the transformative interventions of feminism in the visual arts in Britain. The volume opens with two lengthy introductory texts, a historical account of feminist action by both editors and a theoretical investigation into the meanings of “feminist art” by Pollock. The cover image of its first edition in 1987, seems, at first sight, to be a black and 35

Judith Mastai, “Thou Shalt Not… The Law of the Mother”. I am here indebted to Griselda Pollock’s reading of Revenge in Differencing the Canon, 169-198, to which this very brief summary does not do justice. 36

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white photographic portrait of a white woman in grainy close-up, until it is identified as a panel from the section “Gaze” of The Only Woman (1985), a scriptovisual treatment of the stages of mourning according to Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) of a mother by her daughter.37 The work, which was included in the landmark exhibition Difference: On Representation and Sexuality (1985), is clearly situated in the deconstructive-theoretical side of the divide. Parker and Pollock end their informative introduction with a discussion of the exhibition Difference, for reasons of chronology but also because it appears to stand for the latest (then), most evolved stage in “the dialectic of strategic practices and the politics of a broadened Women’s Movement.”38

Figs. 9-1 and 9-2: The two covers of Framing Feminism. Reproduced by permission from HarperCollins Publishers.

Undated reprints of Framing Feminism replace the cover image with Himid’s 1991 painting Between the Two My Heart is Balanced, from the series Revenge. The new image falls outside the chronological limits of the collection, and clearly aims to address developments in feminism’s engagement with the visual arts since the first publication of the book. It must also be a response to the criticisms that Framing Feminism received 37

For a detailed reading of the work, see Pollock, Vision and Difference, 181-187. Parker and Pollock, “Fifteen Years of Feminist Action: From Practical Strategies to Strategic Practices”, Framing Feminism, 74. 38

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for its limited coverage of women artists of colour, which does seem poor, with only two documents on shows by black artists, out of a total of fiftyeight anthologised documents. The editors’ introductions devote more attention to such shows as well as to individual black women artists.39 As time goes on, however, Framing Feminism acquires different meanings, which may not render such criticisms invalid or irrelevant, but which do shift the focus of interpretation: the editors’ decision, for example, not to have the collected documents reset but to reproduce them photographically, exactly as they appeared in their original publication, gives the contemporary reader a glimpse of the print aesthetics of the time. The documents of Framing Feminism are not only about feminist art but also an example of feminist countercultural visual trends in publishing. Framing Feminism is second-wave feminist art, and its omissions or shortcomings are representative of the cultural circumstances from which it emerged. The new cover of the reprint makes up for previous omissions, but also aims to break the “deafening silence” with which Revenge was often met in the 1990s, as Pollock notes. It offers itself as reparation, but also a new intervention in its current—then—cultural/racial/sexual politics. But unless we make the two covers and their significant distance into the object of investigation, what effect does this substitution have? An informal survey among artists and art historians with an interest in gender and/or feminism revealed that most had not given the new cover much thought. I wonder whether, however unwittingly, this new cover deflects from the now acknowledged Eurocentric bias of feminism in Britain in the seventies and eighties, which Carby took pains to point out. Does the cover suture this wound, or does it cover it up? The content of Framing Feminism remained unchanged in the reprint. It is not simply the presence of Himid’s painting on the new cover that signifies, but the removal of Marie Yates’ image from her scriptovisual installation The Only Woman has its own distinct meaning. What is the effect of its absence on the “not enoughs” that Monica Ross mentioned in reference to Feministo, and on the possibility of addressing and redressing them? By removing the reminder of a division which, albeit conceptually flawed, managed to favour some types of practice and disadvantage others, in terms of cultural visibility, access to institutions, academic attention, are we not in danger of missing the opportunity to actually redraft the stories of feminist art and artists, rather than simply deconstruct the principles that shaped existing narratives, while leaving such narratives largely untouched? Himid’s 39

Ibid., 64-68.

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painting speaks eloquently of the systemic exclusions of many stories of feminist art, including those told by Framing Feminism, but does not— and cannot—comment on the internal politics of these stories, precisely because it had been systemically excluded from them. The presence of Between the Two My Heart is Balanced on the cover repairs this exclusion—or rather acknowledges its existence and injustice: it’s a protest against and, simultaneously, a monument to uncomfortable truths. The way in which the politically justified substitution of the cover of Framing Feminism papers over some important cracks is reminiscent of fetishism, in the sense (or some of the senses) in which it was deployed, at times with magnificent sharpness, by feminist theorists and practitioners. According to Laura Mulvey, whose engagement with the term is longstanding and well-documented, fetishism emerged as a key concept in leftwing politics and counter-aesthetics because it provided the “alchemical link” between Marx and Freud, the two main thinkers with whom the Left and, subsequently, feminism negotiated its analytical tools.40 In both Marx and Freud, fetishism is called on to explain a blockage “or phobic inability” “in the social or sexual psyche”:41 instances of fetishism are symptomatic of blindspots and thus, although and while they actually help preserve these blindspots, they also flag them as troubled and potentially vulnerable areas, where ideology is more likely to become unstuck.42 For Marx, commodity fetishism bestows an apparently innate value on a commodity, while disavowing the real source of its value that is labour power. For Freud, sexual fetishism, a consequence of and coping strategy for castration anxiety, bestows the Mother with substitutes for the phallus that she lacks, thus disavowing her imaginary lack and sexual difference in one stroke. Feminism’s wary but productive dialogue with psychoanalysis in the work of Jane Gallop, Jacqueline Rose and Emily Apter demonstrates how the Freudian account of femininity amounts to the disavowal of sexual difference. First, the feminine sex is interpreted in reference to the male as a lack and, in fantasy, the result of punishment for the child’s desire to possess the maternal body, projected onto that body; however, the fear of castration has to be managed for desire to be sustainable (in anticipation of a more appropriate object) and, specifically, so that women can remain adequate love objects and male heterosexuality 40

Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, 1. On the different sources and associations of fetishism in the 1970s, see also Mulvey, “Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture”. 41 Ibid., 2. 42 Mulvey explains that fetishes are “always haunted by the fragility of the mechanisms that sustain [them]”, ibid., 8.

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can be protected. Secondly (and consequently), in Freudian theory according to feminist readings, there is a single proper—whole—sex and that is male:43 thus sexual difference itself is disavowed. Disavowal privileges belief over knowledge, notes Mulvey,44 and, I would add, assimilation over differences, let alone differencing. In the 1970s, Mulvey did not only work towards the theorisation of fetishism but also, in her films, against it. In avant-garde art practice, the dismantling of the double fetishism on which viewing pleasure relied was at the top of the agenda: sexual fetishism, which made the woman on screen into an object of scopophilic contemplation, suturing patriarchy’s fear and loathing of women off screen; and commodity fetishism, which through the creation of the realist narrative illusion of mainstream film fudged the ideological function of the medium.45 At the same time, Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document set off to interrogate the possibility of the woman fetishist who, in Freudian terms would be an aberration, if not an impossibility. The work acts out the trauma of psychoanalytic motherhood but also embodies an instance of its reparation, in and beyond the field of psychoanalytic theory. In the PPD, Kelly documents the preordained separation of the—male—child from the mother through a combination of meticulous collection and detailed production of documentation in six parts, ranging from analysed faecal stains and feeding charts (Documentation I) to the child’s first attempts to form letters, accompanied by the mother’s diary and exergue (VI). In collecting and manufacturing this material, and, significantly, making it into a work of art, Kelly attempts to investigate the possibility for a female and specifically maternal fetishism. For the mother, having a child is in a sense equal to acquiring the Phallus, and thus postpones the acknowledgement of (her) lack. Like the male (archetypical) fetishist, who is aware of and yet disavows the fact that mother is already castrated, the female/maternal fetishist disavows the loss of the symbolic plenitude that was for her embodied in the child, as he/she overcomes (through repression) the Oedipal complex. For the mother, the loss of the child is disavowed 43

Hence the punning title of Irigaray’s Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un [This Sex Which is not One]: the female sex is not one but multiple, not monistic but innately plural; and it isn’t really a sex at all, in so far as it refuses to play the symmetrical “other” to the male. 44 Ibid., xi. 45 As well as her landmark essays “Fears, Fantasies and the Male Unconscious”, 613, and “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, 14-26, see also “Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde”, 111-126, all reprinted in Visual and Other Pleasures. The latter two elaborate on the mutual implication of sexual and commodity fetishism.

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through the fetishisation of the child him-/herself (or sometimes simply of “child”), by dressing him/her up, having another baby, etc. Kelly boldly (and, I think, playfully) casts the collection of memorabilia for the mother fetishist as an equivalent to pornography for the male fetishist: first shoes, school reports and drawings become for the mother, in Lacanian terms, emblems of desire.46 For the artist/mother, however, the loss of the child may also be made up for by the art object, or the making of the art work, as a process and an intervention in space.47 Finally, fetishism appears to be the litmus test for categorisation in the taxonomies of feminist art. According to Kelly’s four-part classification, “mother art” fetishises, while “‘Other’ art” thematises, analyses and ultimately challenges the workings of fetishism. Writing in 1995, Janet Wolff turns to the division between so-called humanism and so-called deconstruction in feminist art history, to discover that it continuously returns under different guises: as scripto-visual work vs. painting; theory vs. experience; elitism vs. accessibility; and even UK vs. America, which is the guise it assumed in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism, the last of three collections of feminist art historical writing edited by Norma Broude and Mary Garrard. Divisions survive fetishistic glosses and can only get worked through by curiosity, Mulvey’s antidote to fetishism. Both curiosity and courage are required at present, when “the relation between representation and historical events becomes increasingly dislocated”.48 The “not enoughs” of feminist art history are not merely the traces of past divisions, but left unexamined, they can also become the supports for present and future misreadings, or worse, failures to read. Addressing and redressing the “not enoughs” is virtually a matter of life and death: to paraphrase Pollock, in the persistently sexist and racist context of contemporary culture, a failure to read the hidden fissures in the stories of feminist art is cultural murder.49

46

Kelly, Post-Partum Document, xix-xx. PPD was originally an installation work, which was first published in book form in 1983, five years after the exhibition of its final instalment. Kelly addresses the implications of this transition (from installation to book) in her preface, xx-xxi. 47 Mulvey, “Post-Partum Document Review”, originally published in Spare Rib, no. 40 (1976), reprinted ibid., 202. 48 Fetishism and Curiosity, 15. 49 Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 189.

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Coda: Returns At the beginning of Differencing the Canon, Pollock outlines the three main feminist positions on the question—or rather the problem—of the canon, in an evolutionary schema: the first aims to expand it “so that it will include what it hitherto refused—women, for instance, and minority cultures”;50 the second sees it as “a structure of subordination and domination which marginalises women”;51 while the third treats it as “a discursive strategy in the production and reproduction of sexual difference”.52 The first model, deemed in danger of ghettoisation, is illustrated by Faith Ringgold’s Dancing in the Louvre, the first instalment in The French Collection, a series of quilted paintings accompanied by text. The third is implicitly represented by Himid’s oeuvre, among others. Another reading of Ringgold’s work is possible, one that does not contrast it unfavourably to Himid’s practice, but foregrounds their significant similarities.53 The French Collection is an investigation into the colour and sex of the Parisian art scene at the turn of the 20th c. from the point of view of the excluded.54 It is the result of substantial research into the racial and sexual politics of European art, framed as the autobiographical narrative of a fictional character (who is arguably also the artist’s alter ego), Willia Marie Simone, who travelled from Atlanta, Georgia, to Paris to be an artist. Instead, Willia Marie finds herself getting married immediately upon arrival (tries to escape but soon has children), is simultaneously delighted and frustrated by her encounters with the modernist masters for whom she models out of necessity, manages her husband’s café after his death, and occasionally does some painting as well. The French Collection pays homage to historical figures through portraits, including writers and artists, political activists and feminist intellectuals, but also highlights the paucity (or rather the suppression) of a female African American heritage. The driving question behind the series is: how can one be a serious artist in the absence of a tradition that recognises her as one? Or, more pertinently: how can one be an artist when she has historically been misrecognised, ignored or misconstrued as anything but? Very pretty, but primitive; valued as a model for the 50

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 24. 52 Ibid., 26. 53 Dancing in the Louvre is evoked again to offset Himid’s attitude towards hegemonic historical narratives, Differencing the Canon, 188. 54 The texts of the story quilts are reprinted in Dan Cameron et al., Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold’s French Collection and Other Story Quilts. 51

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European primitivist/modernist master, but not as an artist in her own right. Thus, The French Collection simultaneously gives a historical and critical account of exclusion and undertakes the work of reparation in fiction and in visual representation. In her interpretation of another quilt from the French Collection, Picasso’s Studio, Ann Gibson comments on the self-reflexivity of the series: it is about the canon of European Modernism, while simultaneously “rewriting” it: to borrow Pollock’s incisive phrase from her discussion of Himid, Ringgold’s quilted canvases strike their difference within the canon by the representation of Willia Marie, a young black woman artist, as a great Modernist mistress.55

Works Cited Armstrong, Carol & Catherine de Zegher, eds. Women Artists at the Millennium. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Benjamin, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Illuminations, 245-55. London: Pimlico, 1999. Broude, Norma and Mary Garrard, eds. Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Cameron, Dan et al. Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold’s French Collection and Other Story Quilts. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art & Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Carby, Hazel. “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood” (1982). In Cultures of Babylon, 67-92. London: Verso, 1999. Doty, Alexander. “There’s Something Queer Here”. In Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, edited by Corey K. Creekmyr and Alexander Doty, 71-90. London: Duke University Press, 1995. Hall, Stuart. “Minimal Selves”. In Identity: The Real Me, ICA Documents, n. 6: 44-46. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1987. Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Irigaray, Luce. Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, translated by Alison Martin. London: Routledge, 1993. 55

Differencing the Canon, 182. The compromised character of the designation “mistress”, discussed at length in Parker and Pollock’s influential study Old Mistresses, is wholly intended and, I think, appropriate: to call Willia Marie a Modernist master would erase the gender and racial discrimination she is shown to face in the scriptovisual narrative of The French Collection.

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Jardine, Alice. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. London: Cornell University Press, 1985. Jones, Amelia. “‘Post-feminism’: A Remasculinization of Culture” (1990), in Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology, 1968-2000, edited by Hilary Robinson, 496-506. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Kelly, Mary, Post-Partum Document. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. Kokoli, Alexandra M. “Undoing ‘homeliness’ in feminist art: Feministo: Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife (1975-7)”. n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, no. 13: Domestic Politics (January 2004): 75-83. Lauretis, Teresa de. “The Technology of Gender”. In Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction, 1-30. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987. Museum of Modern Art, NY. Schedule, The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts, 2-day symposium, 26-27 January 2007. , accessed 26 January 2007. Mastai, Judith. “Thou Shalt Not… The Law of the Mother”. In Women and Paint, 8-14. Saskatoon: Mendel Art Gallery, 1995. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. —. “Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture”. October, no. 65 (Summer, 1993): 3-20. —. Fetishism and Curiosity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press & London: BFI, 1996. —. “Post-Partum Document Review” (1976). In Post-Partum Document by Mary Kelly, 201-202. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. Parker, Rozsika & Griselda Pollock, eds. Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, 1970-1985. London: Pandora, 1987. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. London: Routledge, 1988. —. “The Politics of Theory: Generations and Geographies in Feminist Theory and the Histories of Art Histories”. In Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, edited by Griselda Pollock, 3-21. London: Routledge, 1996. —. “Still Working on the Subject: Feminist Poetics at its Avant-Garde Moment”. In, Reading the Post-Partum Document: Mary Kelly, edited by Sabine Breitwieser, 236-260. Vienna: Generali Foundation, 1999.

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—. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. London: Routledge, 1999. Reckitt, Helena and Peggy Phelan, eds. Art and Feminism. London; New York: Phaidon, 2001. Ross, Monica. “History or Not”. Unpublished paper presented at 347 minutes, in conjunction with the exhibition Live in your Head. Whitechapel, London, 2000.

CHAPTER TEN IN THE WORDS OF SUSAN HILLER AND ANNETTE MESSAGER: CONCEPTUALISM AND FEMINISM IN DIALOGUE BETH ANNE LAURITIS

Terms of Engagement Really, all these debates about definition, about art “isms,” are just ways of hiving off territory and giving some folks jurisdiction, the power to say “Yes, you are making feminist art” or “No, you are not making feminist art.” It’s a shame for women to fall victim to this kind of divisiveness that mirrors the categorizing that goes on in The Establishment, and that is always used to exclude some people on theoretical grounds, from the ranks of the privileged. Let’s realize there is always something to be gained from this kind of distinction—power, prestige, the right to dominate, the right to exclude.1 —Susan Hiller Conceptual art, strictly speaking, did not exist in France. This mixing and hybridization comes to us from May 1968. Conceptual art interests me in the same way art brut, astrology, and religious art do. I am not so interested in the ideologies these realms perpetuate: I mostly consider them repertories of forms.2 —Annette Messager

Given that today the very notion of identity inspires rigorous debate and discrete stylistic categories hold diminished art historical currency, the terms “conceptual” and “feminist” are complicated when mobilized to describe artistic practices that productively mine their conjuncture. 1 2

Hiller, “Interviews: Susan Hiller and Suzanne Lacy,” 258. Messager, “Interview by Bernard Marcadé (1989),” 404.

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Considered in fruitful tension, however, feminism and conceptualism inform art uniquely suited to interrogate the authority of language, both as a mode of classification and discursive production, on the one hand, and as a mode of aesthetic intervention and critique, on the other. Conventionally understood, conceptual artists efface identity whereas feminist artists enunciate identity. The distinct “stories” of conceptual and feminist art remain influential. As subsequent decades of art production and reception attest, conceptualist idioms often lend critical distinction when appropriated by new generations of artists, this despite the professed opposition to the art market and its institutions by early adherents. Feminist art of the 1970s, by contrast, invites less overt citation due in part to artists’ reluctance to identify with an art movement variously reviled as essentialist, populist, heterosexist, implicitly racist, and occasionally classist. Sources for the pejorative cast accruing to the designation “feminist art” are legion, the enumeration and repudiation of which it is not this essay’s goal to pursue. However justified certain accusations may be, the contentious tenor of much feminist art discourse often tends to exacerbate rather than remedy the situation. Yet nearly a decade into the 21st century, the prevailing dialogue should—in some senses, has—moved beyond the perpetual essentialism/anti-essentialism debates demoting much 1970s women’s art in favour of constructivist variants associated with the 1980s, or pitting American versus British, East Coast (New York) versus West Coast (Los Angeles), and so forth.3 Such schisms not only oversimplify or even occlude the great multiplicity and complexity of women’s art that emerged during the 1970s, an era marked by profound sociopolitical upheaval and radical experimentation in the arts, but also become untenable in recognition of global practices engaging inclusive and intersectional, rather than exclusive and divisive feminisms. Attempts to explore these depths and circumvent unproductive antinomies are evidenced in the 2007 spate of exhibitions and symposia focused on feminism and art. Events at major U.S. venues alone generated heightened responses. Improbable host to a January 2007 symposium, The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York witnessed a surge of interest in such feminist programming despite an exhibition history troubled by 3

Striking evidence of this tendency exists in a 1994 survey conducted by Silvia Kolbowski in the journal October. An artist whose own work intervenes in historic conceptual art, Kolbowski sustains this divide in questions posed to twenty-five women artists, art historians, and critics. This turn in Kolbowski’s questioning clearly elicits consternation among some respondents. See “Introduction: Questions of Feminism: 25 Responses,” October, no. 71 (Winter 1995): 3-48.

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exclusionary politics. The Brooklyn Museum’s new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art showcased Judy Chicago’s iconic Dinner Party (1974-79) (now part of the permanent collection) alongside Global Feminisms, an exhibition foregrounding multiple feminisms in art worldwide from the 1990s forward. Expanding on MOMA’s gesture, the Sackler makes space for a feminist past and future, but has nonetheless generated much discord. The crucial question, then, is: do these events portend a vitalization of feminist art discourse into the millennium or, more disturbingly, the institutionalization of a movement based on thoroughly anti-establishment ideals? More proximate to the present discussion given its 1965-80 focus, the ambitious WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, an exceedingly openended survey of international women’s art at the Geffen Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles (4 March-16 July 2007), aims to “make the case that feminism’s impact on art of the 1970s constitutes the most influential international ‘movement’ of any during the postwar period,” according to curator Cornelia Butler.4 WACK! is striking due to its sheer volume, but also due to its discontinuities; arranged according to vague themes with limited explanatory wall texts or geographic coordinates, each piece is left to speak for itself, with varying degrees of success, and further, to converse in a vacuum with works with which it presumably shares some oblique relation. The fluid format arguably avoids common hierarchies and established affinities, and thus expands interpretation in a laudably progressive feminist vein, but in so doing, often manages to dislocate and de-historicize the “revolutionary” feminist impulse that presumably informs and is informed by the conception, production, or reception of a given work. Nonetheless, the exhibition does point to the 1970s legacy of feminism in the visual arts as one rich in contradictions and innovations that extend, in many instances, to strategies associated with conceptual art.5 What I contend that this exhibition and more recent scholarship suggests, then, is that the many dichotomies that we apprehend as a discursive inheritance—dichotomies both within feminist art practice and in its relation to coterminous spheres of art activity—are more diffuse than dominant accounts hold, and therefore warrant serious reappraisal. So how 4

Butler, “Art and Feminism: An Ideology of Shifting Criteria,” 15. For Butler, conceptual artists with “feminist concerns” in WACK! include: VALIE EXPORT, Mary Kelly, Lee Lozano, Ewa Partum, Adrian Piper, Ketty La Rocca, Martha Rosler, and Sturtevant (22). WACK! also features Susan Hiller’s Sisters of Menon (1972-79) and 10 Months (1977-79), as well as Annette Messager’s Les tortures volontaires, album-collection no. 18 (1972). 5

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do artists working at the crux of historically divergent conceptual and feminist art produce such a discursive dissonance, and to what ambition might such interventions tend? Lucy Lippard, the American art critic and activist foundational to both conceptual and feminist art discourse, who controversially advocated art’s “dematerialization” before taking up feminist art, described aspects of conceptualism specifically adapted or developed by women artists in her 1995 essay “Escape Attempts” as follows: The inexpensive, ephemeral, unintimidating character of the Conceptual mediums themselves (video, performance, photography, narrative, text, actions) encouraged women to participate, to move through this crack in the art world’s walls. With the public introduction of younger women artists into Conceptual art, a number of new subjects and approaches appeared: narrative, role-playing, guise and disguise, body and beauty issues; a focus on fragmentation, interrelationships, autobiography, performance, daily life, and, of course, feminist politics.6

Lippard suggests that conceptualism’s accessible media made the art world more vulnerable to women whose practice foregrounded issues related to gender. Due in part to such innovations by women artists, conceptual art progressed from a dominant early rhetoric of objectivity to more socially trenchant practices in the 1970s. In other words, the intersection of these two seemingly discordant tendencies arguably propelled art in a direction more attuned to the social and, hence, to constructions of difference. Adopting language, specifically, as one formal or rhetorical device to intervene in the art establishment is obviously not unique to conceptual artists. After all, the integration of text and image has a well-known legacy in histories of the avant-garde. As Stephen C. Foster persuasively contends, “the avant-gardes must be given credit for understanding that it was the text that carried with it the concept of culture, indeed, its very prerequisite conditions, and not the ‘things’ and ‘events’ that the text addressed as its subjects.”7 Granted, the deployment of text in art practices informed by conceptualism and feminism expose divergent ambitions and sympathies, and accordingly differ in both the manner and degree to which the cultural authority (and subsequent gender, race, class bias) of language is leveraged and critiqued. For linguistic strands of early conceptual art, for instance, words may serve as a vehicle for knowledge, a means by 6 7

Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” 23. Foster, “The Prerequisite Text,” 321; emphasis in the original.

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which information is relayed or logic unfolds, whereas in feminist practice such standard uses of language are tied to patriarchy: language is regarded as neither gender- nor politically neutral. Returning to the functionality of language as a mode of classification and discursive production, I take the terms of conceptual and feminist art to be inherently compromised and engaged in a dialogic relation despite the stakes involved in sustaining their fixed separation. This chapter primarily seeks to ascertain the extent to which artistic strategies might ground subjectivity within concrete existence (within the everyday world) yet accomplish this without essentialising that existence. At stake in various theories of identity, and especially in feminism, is the question of essence. If politics rely on naming shared qualities that unite a group, then can coalitional efforts be reconciled with the rejection of essentialism espoused in much contemporary theory? Do artistic attempts that merge self-assertion and self-displacement accomplish or undermine the political aims to which they aspire? Because the early, text-based projects of Susan Hiller and Annette Messager raise but do not necessarily answer such questions, their work engenders an open and productive field of inquiry.

Systemic Fragments I present the idiosyncratic nature of each individual unit as a sign […] I deal with fragments of everyday life, and I’m suggesting that a fragmented view of the world is all we’ve got.8 —Susan Hiller I always feel that my identity as a woman and as an artist is divided, disintegrated, fragmented, and never linear, always multifaceted […] I always perceive the body in fragments.9 —Annette Messager

Notable in their equivocal relation to canonical conceptual and feminist art, both Susan Hiller and Annette Messager developed their artistic careers in the 1970s: Hiller in Great Britain and Messager in France. Hiller was academically trained in social anthropology in the U.S. but shifted to visual art practice on relocating to Britain in 1967. Though American, Hiller is commonly linked to British artists and early on became active in groups such as the Women’s Workshop of the Artists’ Union in London, a collective informed by Marxist, psychoanalytic, 8 9

Hiller, “Dedicated to the Unknown Artists,” 285. Messager, “Annette Messager: My Work Speaks Simply of the Body,” 12.

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feminist, and semiotic theory. French-born and educated at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Messager remains based near Paris. The late 1960s climate of insurgency that launched critiques of dogmatic philosophico-political positions in France, including feminism, deeply affected Messager and partly explains her reluctance to describe herself or her work as feminist. From the outset, however, both artists took their experiences as women to be a chief artistic concern. Their case underscores disparate allegiances toward feminism held by women artists working within a western context in which dominant art discourse is produced, and challenges bifurcations of 1970s art informed by feminism along typical axes, such as U.S./U.K. Acknowledging a shared western context (that which situates these artists and myself, albeit from a critical remove), I admit this study looks to fissures within established art histories from a privileged and conflicted position; as such, it does not propose a revisionist account of conceptual and feminist art, nor does it advance a set of criteria that would enable such invested categories to function unproblematically. In subsequent discussion of the systems of identification these artists deployed early on, such designations primarily serve as initial reference points for three interrelated themes: a questioning of conventional notions of authorship, the paradoxical avowal and disavowal of categories of identity, and an investigation into the powers and instabilities of language. I suggest that systemic fragmentation approximates structures of the self as figured within a broader socio-cultural matrix, a condition Hiller and Messager provocatively index in collections of common ephemera. Despite the title’s gravity, Susan Hiller’s Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972-76) originates from a seemingly banal series of British seaside postcards. Starting with single postcard from Brighton captioned “Rough Sea,” Hiller’s extensive collection assumes a sharp critical dimension, for these material artefacts assume greater cultural significance as components in a system evoking curatorial or scientific methods. While these miniature episodes of sublime portent may commemorate different coastal locales, they tend to bear the same “Rough Sea” inscription. The ubiquitous motif of turbulent surf typically threatening some beachside edifice encourages a more clinical mode of scrutiny once removed from popular circulation and arrayed like specimens onto larger panels, with or without charted notations. First exhibited in 1976, the assorted groupings variously include maps locating each postcard’s purchase and tabulations of shared pictorial or handwritten content, the sum of which reflects Hiller’s careful examination and documentation of the procedures involved in collecting and analyzing more than three hundred postcards.

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Myriad associations inevitably spin off from juxtapositions of text and image, the proliferation of which Hiller seems to encourage and critique. The viewer, confronted with a complex set of artefacts culled from popular culture, must visually and cognitively process the information.

Fig. 10-1: Susan Hiller, Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972-76), detail. Photo courtesy of the artist and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London.

Although Hiller’s recontextualization disrupts the circuits in which such postcards communicate in a non-art realm, residues of socio-cultural import remain. As Hiller puts it, artists “are experts in their own cultures.”10 Dedicated merges the artist’s role with that of the anthropologist, the collector, the curator, but in engineering this merger, Hiller’s identification as an artist fails to square with traditional criteria. Her main contribution, after all, is in the organization and exposition of material culture, not in endowing unique objects with her authenticating gesture. The title only enunciates this fact. The “unknown artists” to whom she “dedicate[s]” her collection refers not to photographers but to those who retouch, print, and reprint the photos.11 The disparate artefacts and persons involved in both production and dissemination fail to congeal into a coherent picture, visually or conceptually. Contrasting her own 10 11

Hiller, “Art and Anthropology/Anthropology and Art,” 24. Hiller, “Dedicated to the Unknown Artists,” 285.

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strategic use of fragments to that of male artists, who tend to construct “new wholes,” Hiller observed in a 1978 interview: “I present the idiosyncratic nature of each individual unit as a sign. Without being sentimental, I think it’s a kind of cherishing of things as they are, rather than trying to make them into other things.”12 Hiller’s fidelity to the fragmented state of material objects must be considered alongside her deliberate parsing of the idea or classification “artist,” both in her own practice, as elucidated above, or as spelled out in the title. I suggest that her linguistic gesture elevates those who elude visibility as artists and empowers her as the one designating their collective output as “art.” Such nominalism recalls Marcel Duchamp’s radical claims on the status of art and artist: in short, the notion that meaning does not inhere in the properties of a thing but depends upon context and spectator participation. By emphasizing ideas rather than aesthetic value or artistic skill, Hiller underlines a core conceptualist strategy interrogating notions of the artist/author historically construed within art discourse as an original and originary creative genius. Such strategies indeed participate in late 1960s and 70s critiques of authorship conventions in art and literature that would seemingly diversify the canon. However, authorship discourses coming out of poststructuralism have, in hastening the author’s demise, arguably compromised the politics of identity. Along this line, Nancy K. Miller asserts that “the removal of the Author has not so much made room for a revision of the concept of authorship as it has, through a series of rhetorical moves, repressed and inhibited discussion of any writing identity in favour of the (new) monolith of anonymous textuality.”13 While Dedicated obviously troubles the artist’s role as producer, does this system of fragments contain the self-referential coordinates that conceivably ground such a project in Hiller’s experience as a woman and thus serve a feminist mandate for personal specificity? This of course begs the question: which feminist mandate? Or, more pointedly, at what stage might a workable mandate exist? Recalling the British art climate in which Hiller was immersed, it is worth noting an early collectivist undercurrent suggestive of a socialist feminist impulse. While Hiller acknowledges socialism’s influence on her peers, she resists classification of their various strategies as socialist, given the term’s mobilization in Great Britain as “justification for self-interest at all levels.”14 Socialism is less

12

Ibid. Miller, “Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing, and the Reader,” 104. 14 Hiller considers conditions for feminist art in London and LA in LA/London Lab, a 1981 series of performances, installations by various artists, and discussions 13

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efficacious as a category when discursive misrepresentations and distortions occur, a problematic that brings to mind the beleaguered status of the label “feminism” in art today. Hiller’s work actively engages information circulating within culture and asserts her own ideas as constituted by and constitutive of this circulation. She seems to suggest, moreover, that the culture producing ideas and images likewise produces her as a subject in discourse, as a woman for whom categorical “otherness” limits the capacity to speak. For Hiller, text-based projects enabled women artists to “seize the ‘privilege’ of speech” in order to subvert established systems of knowledge.15 While Dedicated may indirectly map Hiller’s actions and localize her practice, the material does not concretely register her identity as a woman. Akin to psychoanalytically-informed strategies of contemporaries such as Mary Kelly and Alexis Hunter, Hiller’s work thwarts viewers’ desire to secure an authorial presence reducible to universalizing conceptions of woman, often by recourse to language and avoidance of figurative representation. Rather than acting in opposition to mechanisms of power, particularly language, many women artists sought to disrupt these systems from within, often by ironically duplicating their own subordination rather than colluding in their wholesale absence as subjects. As common accounts now hold, canon formation often has the appearance of being a natural function of criticism, rather than a system structured through and in the interests of masculine privilege; as such, a normative authorial voice appears gender-neutral when, in actuality, it only legitimates a male creator. Therefore, the refusal to attempt a normative position of mastery (an enterprise doomed to failure) and to instead accentuate one’s nonnormative status, potentially reorganizes understandings of patriarchal authority. Hiller considers such marginality advantageous: When I speak of being a woman artist, I’m suggesting a position of marginality is privileged. If you’re marginal, you know two languages, not just one, and you can translate and bring into language insights that have been previously unarticulated. So I consider, like being a foreigner, being a woman is a great advantage.16

Granted, such positioning may appear to reinforce notions of women as marginal or absent, but I contend that assuming an equivocal subject status that she co-organized with Suzanne Lacy at the Franklin Furnace Archive in New York. See “Interviews with the curators: Susan Hiller and Suzanne Lacy,” 259. 15 Ibid. 16 Hiller, “Susan Hiller in conversation with Andrew Renton,” 99.

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through manipulating ambiguities of language itself serves to allow and amplify rather than elide difference. In this active equivocation, I suggest that Hiller’s practice finds a formal and conceptual counterpart in the early work of Annette Messager. Both artists represent an experience of female subjectivity as multiple and contingent, and both reject explanatory modes of thought that announce closure and ostensibly bind a text to its “proper” place in the field of discourse. Acknowledging that differences between these artists are productive in generating dialogue, I also seek to facilitate a conversation between Hiller and Messager by mapping out some critical and aesthetic strategies they share. My interest in doing so is not simply to find affinities, of which there are several, but rather to formulate some provisional questions concerning the efficacy of such strategies for a feminist project today.

Fig. 10-2: Annette Messsager, 2007 installation of Album-collections, Centre Pompidou. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris.

Similar to Hiller’s practice, one of Messager’s earliest aesthetic interventions capitalized on the conflicted position that women occupy as cultural producers. Messager enunciated the arbitrary dichotomy between public and private to highlight the separation between so-called masculine spaces and marginalized spaces associated with femininity. In the early 1970s, she bisected her small Parisian apartment to distinguish work

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produced in her bedroom under the guise “Annette Messager, Collectionneuse,” from that produced in her dining room-cum-“studio” as “Annette Messager, Artiste.” This spatial divide reflecting a division of labour confounds traditional assumptions that artists—presumably male— create in an atelier, while women must submit to organizing the materials of domestic life. Because collecting presumably requires no autonomous creativity in the process of assembling extant matter, the activity commands neither the space nor the title demarcating artistic privilege. Messager’s art purposely complicates such issues. In a 1984 interview with Robert Storr, Messager acknowledges: I was devalued as an artist because I was a woman […]. In the world of literature, women writers are more readily accepted: all they need is a table, it doesn’t take up much space, so it’s allowed. But for a woman to be a painter with a studio is much harder for people to accept. In fact I really don’t like that word, “studio”—it’s too pompous, too heavy. That’s why I wanted to use it, because it’s a word which is traditionally associated with the vocabulary of the true artist, the easel painter, whereas [in] my “studio” I just wanted to limit myself to seemingly simple actions and to sit pretty as a picture.17

A construction of art discourse, the fine artist is decidedly male. As a contemporary woman artist devalued by this same discourse, Messager makes the decision to remain at home, to immerse herself in the mundane activity of collecting, “to sit pretty as a picture”—in a sense, to perversely occupy the space conventionally allotted the female subject in life and in art. Between 1971 and 1974, Messager as “Collector” assembled Collection Albums, an archive comprising hundreds of handmade books and framed selections exhibited in varied formats and fragments, including a 1974 exhibition in vitrines reminiscent of ethnographic display.18 Drawing, photography, collage, and text convey subjects ranging from intimate meditations on marriage, happiness, and jealousy to meticulously recopied recipes, do-it-yourself instructions, and descriptions of bodily functions. Together, the materials obsessively document the daily preoccupations and experiences of a woman loosely approximating the artist herself, for although autobiographical traces appear in photographic detail and diaristic, handwritten inscription, the exhaustive inventories 17

Messager, “Interview with Robert Storr (1995),” 407. See the 1974 exhibition Annette Messager collectionneuse at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. 18

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frequently contain spurious information masquerading as fact. For example, in The Marriage of Miss Annette Messager (1971), Collection Album no. 1, newspaper marriage clippings contain Messager’s name pasted in as bride and in My Illustrated Life (1973), Collection Album no. 39, fictional scenarios redrawn from pulp pornography cast multiple femmes fatales. Indeed, throughout her corpus, Messager applies a possessive pronoun to works containing reproduced or found ephemera of dubious biographical content, all of which frustrates the viewers’ access to supposed truths. Refuting aesthetic standards of authenticity, the collection’s integrity as a whole becomes suspect along with the selves that Messager playfully asserts. Vulnerabilities of language become exposed, as in the hundreds of handwritten variations on Messager’s name comprising Collection to Find My Best Signature (1972), Collection Album no. 24. Typically, her full name appears in different scripts, but occasionally a first initial masks meaning, since “A. Messager” obscures gender, or anonymously designates “a (in English) messenger (in French).” By manipulating linguistic fragments in this wry and simple manner, Messager challenges the function of words as reliable conduits of information. Though Messager’s strategy in the Collection Albums clearly undoes efforts to assemble a clear artistic identity despite the appearance of excessively personal content, there is no mistaking that much of her source material speaks to a specific society—1970s France—and draws upon centuries of behavioural protocol for young women. Rebecca J. DeRoo convincingly describes the project’s mode of cultural critique: Rather than simply depicting everyday activities and chores in the abstract, Messager’s work documented the ways that these everyday labours were taught exclusively to girls in the national education curriculum and then reinforced in mass cultural products, such as in magazines that were aimed at the female market.19

DeRoo thus distinguishes Messager’s work from that of her male contemporaries in France (notably Christian Boltanski, Jean-Marie Bertholin, Joel Fisher, and Thomas Kovachevich) who likewise demonstrate a post-1968 engagement in cultures of the everyday but, unsurprisingly, garnered greater institutional support from the start.20 19

DeRoo, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art, 129. Ibid, 158-165. Messager exhibited with these artists in the 1973, Cinq Musées personnels, at the Musée de Grenoble.

20

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Messager participated in her generation’s critiques of established dogmas, including those relating to subjectivity, language, gender, desire, and, more generally, any form of thought perceived to be stratified. Because she associates signifiers such as “feminism” and “feminist” with groups and schools of thought that she views as prescriptive, she disidentifies with traditions of feminism in France even as her practice definitively takes up women’s oppression. Along with humble household materials, Messager incorporated clichéd images from fashion or domestic magazines referencing a French feminine quotidian. Whether foregrounding banal or provocative subjects, the collections presume a personal dimension that is partially contrived but definitively suggests the work of a woman. Products of one’s art and life, Messager suggests, do not necessarily entail radically different working methods. Overlap occurs. Conventionally speaking, Messager is an unfit collector of objects unworthy of artistic status. Historically, women have been subordinated as mere consumers during the modern era; women collectors, subsequently, were either dismissed as such or accused of possessing “masculine” ambitions.21 And gender stereotypes only complicate matters: so-called masculine traits (assertiveness, erudition) ostensibly assist one in acquiring a collection and refining its scope, whereas feminine traits (patience, caretaking) help in maintaining it. Messager trespasses circumscribed boundaries in her motivation to collect, for she retains the authority to take possession of objects, but only does so from within the home, where she carefully monitors their organization. Like Hiller, Messager exploits the powers and limits of language to index socio-cultural specificities and to facilitate movements of ideas and identifications across a span of assorted, though by no means arbitrary, fragments. As documents, Hiller’s Dedicated to the Unknown Artists and Messager’s Collection Albums surely differ in conception, organization, and visual vocabulary. But rather than propose that attempts to order, classify, and assign value to constituent parts can in any way explain the whole, both provoke the realization that mastery over any singular aspect is only an illusion to be dismantled by those attuned to instabilities that inhere in every system. And this includes, significantly, cultural systems of signification that produce individuals as social subjects. In what follows, I propose that each artist further complicates the very concept of woman, of identity, by writing in a plural, provisional voice.

21 Belk and Wallendorf discuss such stratification in “Of mice and men: gender identity in collecting.”

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Fig. 10-3: Susan Hiller, Sisters of Menon (1972-79). Courtesy of the artist and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London.

Stealing Speech A woman is mute within our culture in that when she speaks she speaks as a man.22 —Susan Hiller I am a word thief.23 —Annette Messager

By chance and design, Sisters of Menon (1972-1979) interpolates the individual and the collective. Consider the composition: a script twenty pages in length featuring automatic writing that Hiller produced in 1972 and later recovered and accompanied by a typed transcription and four pages of analyses designated as Notes. Completed as such in 1979 and published as an artist’s book in 1983, Sisters of Menon stands as a 22 23

Hiller in Lippard, “Out of Bounds,” unpaginated. Messager, “Artist’s Notes, 2000,” 380.

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centrepiece of Hiller’s early oeuvre. In the cruciform installation, the centralized pages of script and peripheral annotations obey a formal order and contain legible linguistic form, but advance a text that resists containment within an established system; the verbal excess disobeys rules of logic and linear narrative. Hiller herself observes: “‘at a certain point I realized that the scripts were a fragment and an irrational production; you could spend your life interpreting it but you wouldn’t get anywhere. It was a question of accepting this production as a drawing as well as an utterance.’”24 Automatism is, by definition, cryptic, although such penned utterances are meant to reveal the writer’s unmediated mental activity. Or so the Surrealists would have it. Likewise interested in states of altered consciousness, especially dreams, Hiller viewed automatism as a means by which to explore the cultural unconscious. Hiller experienced automatic writing during a 1972 stay in Loupien, a village in the Cathar region of France where, in some Gnostic traditions, women held an elevated role in social and devotional life. Through spontaneous dictation, the singular, plural, and multiple voices of those whom Hiller calls the “Sisters of Menon” found written form. Worth noting is Lucy Lippard’s observation that “Menon” forms the anagram “no men,” or the Latin “nomen,” meaning “name.”25 The “author” of Hiller’s text alternates between “I” and “we,” individual and collective, but also solicits an identification, a name, querying: “who is this one?” Identifying Menon’s source is a fraught yet illuminating project. Alexandra Kokoli concedes as much by expanding in persuasive detail on Hiller’s conflicting references to both Oedipal myth and the Memnon Colossi at Thebes and by situating the work within a “paraconceptual” mode that she describes as “just sideways of conceptualism and neighboring the paranormal, a devalued site of culture where women and the feminine have been conversely privileged.”26 Rather than suggesting that Sisters of Menon evokes a liminality too easily hijacked by theories denying women presence and agency, this notion of occupying a strategic intersection in cultural formations so as to highlight nodes of difference seems especially powerful, given the current plight of feminist and identity discourses. In contrast to first generation conceptualists whose 24

Hiller quoted in Grayson, Lucid Dreams, 15. Lippard, “Out of Bounds,” unpaginated. 26 Kokoli, “Susan Hiller’s Paraconceptualism,” 120. Kokoli quotes Hiller’s mention of the “paraconceptual” from Hiller’s “Women, Language and Truth,” reprinted in Einzig, 43-4. 25

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work involved a “negation of the idea of the unconscious,” Hiller allies her own practice with subsequent artists engaging social and psychological concerns.27 While Dedicated to the Unknown Artists alludes to conceptualism’s characteristic detachment, Sisters of Menon likewise employs linguistic documentation, but more emphatically situates Hiller’s practice within—and about—language. The bare fact of labour in producing the automatic script is also significant here, for regardless of the text’s poetic and historic trajectory, the fact remains that Hiller’s is a body that writes. To arbitrarily produce a graphic trace of one’s material presence is obviously not inherently subversive. But to represent that which is unspoken in hegemonic discourse from a position of marginality connotes a particular order of dissidence. To combat the notion that a woman is silenced in our culture because “when she speaks she speaks as a man,” Hiller embodies words that in their aphoristic quality and sheer momentum seem to orbit off the page. The typewritten Notes bracketing the elusive text provide limited objectivity to contain the “irrational” incantations and betray the assumption that words must describe or explain. Hiller tries the viewers’ visual and cognitive acuity, and simultaneously cultivates identification and dislocation thanks to the handwritten text’s shifting “I/we/you” mode of address. That the words unequivocally issue from one woman’s physical exertion incites recognition, if not understanding, that texts both inscribe and get inscribed by the bodies of multiple others. As this discussion seeks to convey, autobiographical echoes locate the work of Hiller and Messager historically, politically, even bodily. But authorship—if apprehended as the activity and ensuing property of a singular creating subject—is for both a vexed term. For Sisters of Menon, the question “who is this one?” discourages a response that identifies by name, poses limits, or points to shared essences. The text speaks of selves irreducible to sovereign authorship or atomistic individuality—selves characterized by their kinship to and interactions with others. In a similar vein, Hélène Cixous proposes the condition of an expenditure of self that does not necessitate the drive to destroy, assimilate, or sustain the logic of coherent selfhood. Envisioning political potential in the process of “writing the self,” or écriture féminine, Cixous mimes Hiller’s practice in proclaiming: “Hélène Cixous isn’t me but those who are sung in my text, because their lives, their pains, their force, demand that it resound.”28 Though the body has primacy in écriture féminine, such theories should 27 28

Hiller, “Dedicated to the Unknown Artists,” 99. Cixous, “Coming to Writing,” 47.

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not be read as making claims about the way women are and men are not by nature. Cixous, for one, describes a possible way of being, of relating to others, that is not gender-specific; by referring to the feminine, she claims that this possibility is more likely for women.29 Because feminine writing arises from a desire that is deregulated and decentralized—that involves risk—it exists in tension rather than in conformity with the law.

Fig. 10-4: Annette Messager, My Collection of Proverbs (1974) detail. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris.

Licentious uses of language likewise characterize Annette Messager’s 1974 series My Collection of Proverbs. Referring to herself in the third person as one of presumably multiple self-constructions, Messager affirms: The Annette Messager Practical Woman of the 1970s was a combative woman. Embroidering 200 proverbs about women, for example, was not 29

Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 245-264.

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Messager appends her name with a “Practical Woman” title to designate a combative persona of the 1970s and, in so doing, locates the particulars of one identity formation among many, each conditioned by the language of the artist and society. Calling attention to the vehicle through which language is inscribed, in this case a woman repeatedly embroidering, recalls another mode of “feminine writing” resistant to standard conceptualist rubrics. Messager’s use of craft is especially compelling in that she does not work within a marginalized genre in order to essentialise a limited aspect of womanhood: rather, she connects needlepoint, a socalled “feminine technique,” to male hegemony. Irony becomes insurgency, for she accentuates difference by appropriating and overturning language that insistently positions woman as inferior. Embroidered in French onto handkerchiefs are folk sayings such as: “Beware of bad women, and don’t trust good ones.” Or, “Women are taught by nature, men by books.” Although these adages are hardly benign when verbally circulating within cultural consciousness, they obviously perform a different critical function when realized in thread and positioned as art objects. A layering of texts occurs in alternation here—the authoritative, anonymous, yet distinctly male voice is perhaps rendered mute only when the suppressed woman’s voice, upon entry into language, becomes audible. Put differently, the derisive masculinist tone, precisely if rather inexpertly rendered in needlepoint, is in part divested of its potency and becomes in itself an object of mockery since it is written out, as it were, by a woman’s craft. Rather than aspiring toward parity allowing women to assume the voice of a masculine or universal subject, Luce Irigaray encouraged women to speak in a register consistent with the feminine, to take up mimicry, in order to expose the gender bias naturalized in dominant culture. In parodying sexist discourse through amplification and rearticulation, Irigaray’s mimicry entails a reappropriation of the feminine, what Naomi Schor aptly describes as a “difference within difference.”31 Irigaray explains:

30

Messager, “Interview with Robert Storr, 1995,” 418. Schor, “This Essentialism Which Is Not One: Coming to Grips with Irigaray,” 50-51. 31

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To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. I mean to resubmit herself—inasmuch as she is on the side of the “perceptible”, of “matter”—to “ideas”, in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make “visible”, by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language.32

Disavowals of feminism aside, Messager’s practice aligns, in this instance, with Irigaray’s theorization. Messager locates “the place of her exploitation by discourse” and “playfully repeats” defamatory language. Recognition of the idea of woman’s subordination in culture leads to recognition that such words, in Messager’s hands, do not simply offend. Strategically recast, they become defensive and offensive. They are stolen from their masculinist origin in order to expose and activate the feminine in language; difference gains both visibility and power through the very system structuring its absence. Messager again references a wider community of women (and men) subject to sexist codes of behaviour, but locates herself in an embroidered record that reprises and defies linguistic methods associated with conceptualism. While this discussion acknowledges the limitations of established affinities, it imagines a conversation between Hiller and Messager that renegotiates histories of conceptualism and feminism in order to exploit rather than obscure their joint potential in art. Whether designated feminist or not, both Hiller and Messager critique patriarchy and make us aware of its operation through language. Both recognize the violence inherent in using certain categories to the extent that they reduce difference and are tied to established ways of living, thinking, feeling, and desiring. Whether the disruption of categories alone constitutes effective criticism remains debatable, especially given the celebration of heterogeneity and hybridity in much recent critical discourse and the related pluralist tendency evidenced in art exhibitions purporting to advance specific political investments. However troubled various boundaries become in the works selected here, such analyses assist in visualizing a feminist future by providing relevant and particularized coordinates of dissent from the past. The extent to which such strategies offer a viable model of resistance depends in part upon recognition of the aesthetic and ideological terms with which these artists were engaged as cultural producers of the 1970s. 32 Irigaray, “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine,” 124125.

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Chapter Ten The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible.33

By focusing on the words of Hiller and Messager, both within and about their work, my intent is to situate discourses of difference within the historical specificities in which deeply personal, conceptual practices are embodied. Early work by these artists bears a contemporary feminist resonance in simultaneously defining and blurring various contours of identity, and in reframing dialogues that, on the current wave of belated institutional regard, mitigate a sense of optimism with the need for vigilance.

Works Cited Belk, Russel W. and Melanie Wallendorf. “Of mice and men: gender identity in collecting.” In Interpreting Objects and Collections, edited by Susan M. Pearce, 240-253. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Butler, Cornelia. “Art and Feminism: An Ideology of Shifting Criteria.” In WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, 14-23. Los Angeles: The Museum of Modern Art & Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Cixous, Hélène. “Coming to Writing.” In “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, edited by Deborah Jenson and translated by Sarah Cornell et. al, 1-58. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991. DeRoo, Rebecca J. The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France After 1968. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Foster, Stephen C. “The Prerequisite Text.” Visible Language XXI, no. 3/4, Providence, RI: RISD, (Summer/Autumn 1987): 321. Grayson, Richard. Untitled essay. In Susan Hiller: Lucid Dreams, 14-15. (Oslo: Henie-Onstad kunstsenter, 1999). Hiller, Susan. “Art and Anthropology/Anthropology and Art” (1977). In Thinking About Art Conversations with Susan Hiller, edited by Barbara Einzig, 16-25. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. —. “Dedicated to the Unknown Artists,” An interview with Rozsika Parker. In Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, edited 33

Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 19.

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by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, 283-286. London: HarperCollins, 1987. —. “Interviews with the curators: Susan Hiller and Suzanne Lacy.” FUSE V, nos. 8 & 9 (November/December 1981): 258-259. —. “Susan Hiller in conversation with Andrew Renton” (October 1991). In Talking Art 1, edited by Adrian Searle, 85-99. ICA Documents no. 12. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1993. Irigaray, Luce. “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine.” In The Irigaray Reader, edited by Margaret Whitford, 118132. Cambridge, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Kokoli, Alexandra M. “Susan Hiller’s Paraconceptualism.” In Technologies of Intuition, edited by Jennifer Fisher, 119-139. Toronto: YYZ Books/MAWA/Display Cult, 2006. Lippard, Lucy. “Escape Attempts.” In Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975, edited by Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, 16-38. Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and MIT Press, 1995. Messager, Annette. “Diverse Notes, 2000-05” and “Interview by Bernard Marcadé, 1989.” In Annette Messager, Word for Word: Texts, Writings, and Interviews, edited by Marie-Laure Bernadac and translated by Vivian Rehberg, 380-381 and 397-406. New York: D.A.P., 2006. —. Letter to Marion de Zanger (December 1988). “Annette Messager: My Work Speaks Simply of the Body.” Ruimte 6, no. 1 (January 1989): 10-19. Miller, Nancy K. “Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing, and the Reader.” In Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Theories in Contemporary Culture, Vol. 8), edited by Teresa de Lauretis, 102-120. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics, edited by Slavoj Zizek. London: Continuum, 2004. Schor, Naomi. “This Essentialism Which Is Not One: Coming to Grips with Irigaray.” In The Essential Difference, edited by Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed, 50-51. Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1994.

CHAPTER ELEVEN WHAT IS IT THAT FEMINIST INTERVENTIONS DO? FEMINISM AND DIFFERENCE IN RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT GRISELDA POLLOCK

I started this paper in 2006. I was a little depressed, to say the least. I had just fired off a long and unanswered letter of protest at BBC Television’s docu-drama The Impressionists, aired April-May, 2006. After thirty years of the steady drip of social and feminist revisionist scholarship that reinserted the many women involved in this movement, how could an arts TV series, with respected art historians as advisors and a woman producer, serve us up a picture of “Boys’ Own Impressionism”? Read the press release: The Impressionists, a three-part factual drama for BBC ONE, vividly reconstructs the movement’s remarkable story. Based on archive letters, records and interviews from the time, the series records the lives of the artists who were to transform the art world. It is a tale of poverty and of a struggle for recognition, set against a backdrop of war and revolution. [...] But at the heart is the brotherhood of artists, bound by enduring friendships and their commitment to a new type of art which survived rows, rivalries, duels and crises. The story is led by the paintings. Some of the world’s most memorable art works are recreated here following the same techniques that the artists used at the time.

Poverty, adversity, brotherhood—all the standard elements of the old plot of a heroic avant-garde—resurfaced in 2006, unabashed by any of the critical social, feminist or Jewish art historical studies that have reshaped our understanding of Parisian modernism ca. 1870-1880 (Clark, Pollock, Mirzoeff, Callen, Garb, Nochlin, Brettell, Thomson to name but a few). The concept of a brotherhood—borrowing the medieval concept used by their contemporary Pre-Raphaelites in Britain in the 1850s—is

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inappropriate to what the Impressionist group was, namely, a joint stock company venture led by Camille Pissarro who actually wanted a cooperative, set up by a squabbling and politically divided group of at least eight core members and about twenty-five regular but fluctuating exhibitors from several different countries and ethnicities at a time when the new liberal capitalist government of France were fostering such independent commercial ventures as part of political and economic liberalisation.1 There were, of course, also women involved, and significantly very active women members of this group, who were key to its politics, finance and aesthetics. More serious, therefore, than merely rehashing the old, thoroughly out-dated story of heroic artists battling incomprehension and poverty was the fact that the BBC focussed only on four artists, all men. Was the BBC so short on budget that they could only afford four actors to play Manet, not a member of the group by the way, Monet, Degas and Renoir? Where were Mary Cassatt or Berthe Morisot, Marie Bracquemond or Eva Gonzales, and what about the absolutely central figure of Camille Pissarro? His exclusion made me ask: was he too Jewish? Or perhaps his long beard would confuse viewers of a programme organised around the memoirs of a very old and heavily bearded Monet telling the great story to a young reporter. The phrase that kept running through my mind for the opening sentence of a lecture I was preparing at the time on Difference Reframed ran like this: “Why have we failed?” Why, after thirty years does it seem that feminism in art/art history has succeeded so little while it has been so focussed, engaged, innovative and specific in its critiques and propositions for change? Why do we as feminists seem to be institutionally stymied and discarded yet intellectually so productive and creative? Why has what we do been effectively restricted by being inadequately categorized when the nature of the feminist critique of art historical practice since its very formulation has called for radical, paradigm-shifting, inclusive, and continuous self-critical change?2 Why is feminism being blocked by misrepresentation as a petty, localized and now irrelevant or finished minority topic so that its engagement with difference, plurality and a call for structural enlargement is “disappeared” into the falsehood of postfeminism, while post-colonial or queer theory and deconstruction, its onetime companions in intellectual struggle, continue to be respected and expanded?

1 2

Green, “‘All the Flowers of the Field’”. Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” 2.

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See what I mean about being discouraged. I am revising the lecture for publication in 2007 which seems set to be a year which is much more encouraging in ways that we could have hardly anticipated just twelve months ago: two major feminist exhibitions, one in Los Angeles and another in New York, the first ever symposium on feminism and art at the Museum of Modern Art, the Feminist Project at Rutgers hosting a major panel at CAA providing an on-line listing of many other exhibitions, and events that indicate a rise in interest, historical re-appraisal and recognition that feminism is to be taken seriously and taken into the curatorial and art historical record of the later twentieth century. But... there is always a qualification... what is really happening in this flurry of activity and why is it happening now? Are these events the hopeful harbinger of revival of interest or do they index feminism’s retrospective internment in a musealised curatorial art history? Do we need this distance to return to the historical event of feminist interventions in art and art’s histories with the insights created by the effects they themselves generated in a culture that only now, belatedly, recognizes their enormous significance in changing the landscape of art and culture?

Past or Future In January 2007, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, hosted an international symposium, The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts, which can still be virtually attended via its audio webcast. It generated huge interest and was sold out within days of the press-release, leading the organisers to create a second video-linked auditorium and finally a simultaneous audio-cast.3 The title, originally Feminist Futures (a touch too—Wall Street perhaps), fascinated me. It projected feminism into the future, suggesting not only that feminism had a future but that the future of art history, at MoMA at any rate, would include a feminism that it had so far resolutely failed to embrace. Founded in 1929 by three women, this Museum did not mount a retrospective exhibition of an artist who is a woman until Deborah Wye, now leading the research group “The Modern Woman project at MoMA”, curated the first major retrospective of the work of Louise Bourgeois in 1982. MoMA’s collecting of works by women is also lamentably poor although what holdings it does have across its many departments are now, as a result of this new externally funded impetus, being collated and researched for a publication of women in modernism. 3

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But did the symposium simply find the famous and conservative museum belatedly catching up with a historical event, waking up to the necessity of a more progressive attitude to gender in art, or was it initiating a renewed interest in feminism? Did it understand that feminism is not synonymous with simply collecting and exhibiting works by women artists and that it also implies a shifting of paradigms, including going beyond notions of gender (men and women artists) and engaging with difference: sexual ethnic, cultural, geographical, generational, orientational and so on? Framing the two days between veteran American feminist art critic Lucy Lippard and founding American feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, with a mid-point keynote by American Anne Wagner, and a response by Belgian curator and writer Cathérine de Zegher, the symposium was clearly rooted in a local American history of feminism and the arts. Subtitled “Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts”, the organisers had identified four panels: Activism/Race/Geopolitics, Body/Sexuality/Identity, Writing the History of Feminism, The Institutionalisation of Feminism, as the vehicles for plotting out what was clearly a project of historical retrospect despite the prospective titling. Formally researched, the panels combined papers by artists, curators, critics, and art historians that were intended to paint a picture of the key elements of feminism’s historic significance as primarily activist in its engagements with the world, but also significantly focussed on issues of the body and identity. Feminism = politics in art and feminism = sex in art would be an unkind reduction of the underlying assumptions. The two panels with feminism in their title indicated, however, another more ambiguous trend towards historicization rather than projection into a continuing future. Thus a Museum of Modern Art, identified by many of us with the image of art history created for the cover of an exhibition of Cubism and Abstract Art in 1936 by Alfred H. Barr that had plotted out an autonomous flow-chart of modernist art movements, each stylistic innovation reflecting earlier influence and set into a chronological grid (that, therefore, made no reference to major historical events or ruptures), seemed merely to be adding a new –ism, feminism, to its ahistorical curatorial model of art as a matter of periods, movements, styles, and masters. Thus feminism could be embraced, at last, but reduced to being just another art movement, starting around 1970s, characterized by its activist politics in the 1970s and questions of sexuality and identity in the 1980s, and... petering out into its general dissemination into postmodern art? Lucy Lippard’s opening keynote address, warmly received by an audience full of loving admiration and excitement that certainly gave to

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the opening day the feeling of a reunion of women who had so long been “out in the cold,” recapitulated a long history of “feminist art” from the activist beginnings of women’s picketing outside the very museum in the early 1970s, protesting against almost completely exclusionary practices, to the high points of projects and exhibitions that showed feminist expansion into current concerns with environmental issues. I do not aim to quibble with the narrative Lucy Lippard provided; the problem for me is that it is almost too well-known, too often rehearsed, too little subjected to a critical re-assessment that might enable us to see something more in that history than the story we have been telling ourselves from the inside. My point is that if we wish to use historical retrospect in order to sustain and enliven a feminist prospect for continuing into the future and impacting on that future, we might need to do more than tell the familiar tale with its classic but contested contrasts of activism and theoreticism, American and British, first and second generation and so forth. That story is frankly far too nationalistic, parochial, Anglo-American centred, and, in many cases, imprecise if not misleading. In a famous article for the prestigious Art Bulletin, published in 1989, Patricia Mathews and Thalia Gouma Peterson plotted out “The Feminist Critique of Art History” in terms of two generations: American (1970s) and British (1980s), on which were superimposed further theoreticalmethodological distinctions between originating American positivistactivist artists and art historians and post-structuralist-Marxistpsychoanalytical British artists and art historians.4 Amongst many feminist art historians who engaged in debate about this representation of the history of feminism in art history (which has now acquired the authority of truth by virtue of repetition), I wrote a lengthy reply in 1990 to this mapping of our shared history in an essay entitled “The Politics of Theory: Generations and Geographies in feminist theories of the histories of art histories.”5 In that article, then introduction to a series of international feminist essays published in 1996, I explored a range of other perspectives which firstly repositioned the emergence and shape of feminist thought in the later twentieth century historically in relation to the legacies of the Cold War (the hegemony of apolitical formalism in art criticism and art history challenged by Marxist social history of art), new social movements of the 1960s (civil rights, anti-racism, new nationalist liberation struggles and the women’s movement), and what can only be considered a major intellectual revolution in the humanities post-1968 that also involved the 4 5

Mathews and Gouma-Peterson, “The Feminist Critique of Art History,” 124-27. Pollock, “The Politics of Theory”.

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intellectual formations we call international feminist theory and critical practice. Complementing such a historical framing, I called upon Julia Kristeva’s analysis, in her essay “Women’s Time”, of the three generations of feminism (egalitarian campaigning for women’s social and political rights from suffragism to the present, the more recent cultural exploration of sexual difference in art, film and literature, and a third [to be outlined below]) to introduce a theoretical dialectic. Although different moments and intellectual communities have highlighted various facets of the fundamental struggle in feminism between the competing claims of equality (at the level of the immediate social, economic and political rights of women which occurs in the linear time of history) and difference (at the level of epistemic and psycho-symbolic analysis of subjectivity and language which runs according to a much more monumental durée of the “time of reproduction”), Julia Kristeva seeks in a Hegelian Aufhebung, or overcoming of the contradiction between the first two, to propose a third generation that she names a signifying space which suspends the apparent contradiction between assimilating women to standard, apparently genderfree civil and political rights and insisting on the separate value and specific meaning created by women’s psycho-sexual (but not biological) difference.6 While accepting the absolute necessity for campaigns for social, economic and personal rights for women such as control over fertility and equal employment and pay, Kristeva also warns against the potential for turning feminism into a new religion in a defensive reaction formation that makes women compensate for historical exclusion by currently over-valuing aspects notably associated with the maternalfeminine or their own feminine bodies, either in American engagement with the goddess or in French feminist culture of écriture féminine. Kristeva’s psychoanalytical sensitivity to what fantasies are activated in our political and intellectual negotiation of the changing condition of women is reminiscent of Mary Kelly’s analysis in 1977 of various trends she discerned in women’s feminist-inspired practices in art, which she read symptomatically. That is, Kelly situated features of emerging women’s practice in art in an already pre-determining phallocentric imaginary and symbolic structure in which women have to negotiate a construction of femininity as marked by lack. To make good this lack— which is one of the psychic motivations of the emergence of feminism as a social as well as a cultural force—women, she argues, “carve out the characteristic features of female narcissism, i.e. the need to be loved and

6

Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” 187-213.

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the fear of losing loved objects.”7 Carefully and critically drawing on Freud’s most challenging and difficult paper “On Narcissism” [1914], Kelly suggested four symptomatic sites in contemporary women’s art practice: Female culture (mother art), female anatomy (body art), feminine experience (ego art), and feminine discourse (other art). In summary, I think that feminine narcissism is an essential component of the feminist problematic in so far as it includes a symptomatic reading of our visual inscriptions, a reading based as much on absences as presences; that such a reading suggests the way in which heterogeneous signifying processes underlie and often erupt into signifying practices; that because of the coincidence of language and patriarchy the “feminine” is (metaphorically) set on the side of the heterogeneous, the unnameable and the unsaid; and that in so far as the feminine is said, or articulated in language, it is profoundly subversive.8

Two very different models, therefore, exist. One is the curatorial model in which the curator or art historian imposes a grid of meaning, in retrospect on a cultural phenomenon, naming it a movement, identifying its defining characteristics of theme, medium, and representative artists, placing it chronologically, and thereby classifying it, making it capable of being properly filed in the historical archive.9 The other, clearly exhibiting its engagements with post-structuralist thought in its semiotic and psychoanalytical vocabulary, seeks to “read” feminine “inscriptions” produced in and through artistic practices, stressing the radical difference between creating a category of “feminist art”—making feminist like any other art historical adjective (minimalist, surrealist, expressionist) applied to an unchanging concept of art—and analysing what Mary Kelly insists on naming “a feminist problematic in art.” To the question, what is feminist art, she argues, we can only give moralistic or essentialising definitions as answers. Instead, thinking about a problematic, she suggests that we can only analyze feminism in its unpredictable and variously achieved effects as a strategic intervention in current practices, social institutions, discourses, debates, political configurations and so forth. Thus in the mid 1970s, an American artist, Kelly, living and working in the specific socio-political and institutional conditions of Britain was already offering, through theoretical engagement with socialist theory, 7

Kelly, “Art and Sexual Politics,” 304. Ibid., 310. She footnotes Kristeva, “Signifying Practice and the Mode of Production.” 9 On the feminist critique of the curatorial model see Pollock, “Inscriptions in the Feminine.” 8

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national liberation movements, emerging film theory and active avantgarde film practice, psychoanalysis and semiotics (themselves being reconfigured and explored under the impact of social and intellectual movements in France and the rest of Europe), an extended method of critical analysis of aesthetic and cultural practices whose effects, rather than their origins in their intending authors’ politics or personal commitments, could be read as feminist. It was this argument that I explored in my essay on “Feminism and Modernism” in Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-1985, edited with Rozsika Parker as a politically generated archive of a range of tactical strategies and strategic practices. I have taken space to revisit Mary Kelly’s paper, taken up by Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman in Screen magazine in 1980, and fully explored in Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, in 1987 and again in a major article I wrote, “Inscriptions in the feminine” which appeared in MoMA respondent Cathérine de Zegher’s monumentally important Inside the Visible: an elliptical traverse of twentieth-century art in, of and from the feminine in 1996. Why? Because it is clear that what is now being positioned as feminism in the arts since the 1970s does not include this kind of critique and theorization. What is happening appears to be a hapless cauterisation of feminist intellectual and theoretical work in favour of a non-feminist move, belatedly, to accommodate to a critically unchallenged curatorial art history the category of feminist art, already resisted and deconstructed as early as 1977, as an art movement not a problematic, a series of interventions in art’s histories and practices that will necessitate careful analytical reading for their effects. As a series of interlocking practices of making, analysis, historical revision, theoretical expansion, and astute and continuing analysis of ever changing socio-political and cultural situations in which we work, overdetermined by forces beyond ourselves, feminist work is transgressive of existing institutions and structures in which it nonetheless has to intervene, and to which it should make a radical difference. The question is indeed how to reframe that difference so that the price of “institutionalisation” of feminism, or the “writing of feminism’s history” does not effectively erase the feminist effect, or render invisible, through a polite and disfiguring inclusion, the radical disturbance to the existing phallocentric structures that are implied in the historic confrontation with those structures that the term, movement and theory of feminism mounts on a range of interlocking fronts. What was evident at The Feminist Future symposium was how little feminist theory had actually been taken on board over the last thirty years

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by those working in art and art history, notably in the museums. The model outlined above allowed feminist theory to be a historical attribute of the British contingent of artists and art historians, rather than a necessary resource for understanding the challenge to ways of thinking culture of which art/art history was a component, not a discrete island. Feminist theory, as part of a major cultural revolution in the arts and humanities, has been developed across the arts, humanities and social sciences, richly working in sociology, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, politics, history, philosophy, literary theory—and art and art history. Without opening up from within art and art history to this larger movement’s intellectual wealth of analysis and remodelling of our ways of thinking about key issues such as subjectivity, authorship, rhetoric, language, meaning-production, politics, social relations, institutions, creativity, and without reconnecting the analysis of culture to the full resources of contemporary cultural revolutions in thought, the new engagement with a feminist art moment in the later twentieth century by major museums will only be a deadly institutionalisation, a placing of a prematurely closed past event into its filing cabinets, rather than an engagement with a constantly changing feminist problematic that promises a perpetual poeisis to come; a feminist future. One of the speakers at the symposium was Connie Butler, who is the curator of a large exhibition titled WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2007, showing 117 artists from 21 countries and covering a period from 1970–1985. At the same time, the Brooklyn Museum of Art launched its Elizabeth A. Sackler Centre for Feminist Art with a show curated by Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly called Global Feminisms, which focuses its attention on feminist engagements world-wide since 1990. Both of these events are historic in their significance. While taking place in the USA, they present an extended picture of both the global impact of feminism and the ways in which the challenges by women worldwide to global patriarchies of historically, economically and culturally different kinds, mounted through art practice, radically expand and render more complex what we understand to be the meaning and the effects of feminism. Their work adds even more weight to my critique of the simple retelling and recycling of tired, divisive Anglo-American-centred histories of “feminist art and art history” that prevent us from feeling that we are collectively generating feminism as an open and constantly changing international signifying space, with entry from all parts and points in time and space. The reason why I reject the divided Anglo/American and chronologically sequential designation of the waves is that it erases the vast international diversity of

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feminist activity in art and art history which has occurred at different moments according to complex conjunctions of local social, cultural and political histories. The lights of feminist engagement have flashed on in different places and at different times according to these contingencies that collectively weave a global text of international feminist work. Thus, feminists emerging in post-1989 Eastern Europe, post-Franco Spain, postMartial Law Taiwan, post-emergency Korea, post-apartheid South Africa, meet feminists who were long since shaped in the resistance to fascist dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, to feminists in former West Germany—where since the 1970s an annual conference of women art historians regularly attracted 800 participants—and long-standing feminist communities in Scandinavia or Italy, while only recently has France become a fledgling site of a feminist discourse in art. In 2005 I attended the annual conference of the Association of Swiss Art Historians, when for the first time in its history gender was the conference theme. The conference, however, was directed by one of the founding figures of feminist art history studies in Germany, Sigrid Schade, now working in Zurich where one of the first German speaking feminist art history conferences had taken place twenty years before. 10 Our first obligation to the future is to write with an expanded international perspective (which is different from the notion of the global which may re-inflict the central viewpoint of the hegemonic economies and political nations effectively directing globalizing capitalism), grounded in the historical conditions in which feminist discourse and practice has emerged worldwide, linking up the dots on a global but nonNATO oriented map, drawing strength from the early starters, while enriching all of our practices by their continuous co-emergence and the unrolling of feminist thought and practice across significant differences— hence in Asia feminists encounter, in their own region, major ideological and cultural divisions between their countries, negotiating dominant ideologies shaped by Catholicism in the Philippines versus Buddhism in Thailand, Confucianism in Korea or China, Hindu and Muslim differences within India, and all working through different traumas of modernisation, colonisation and war. Two events of the year 2006 will serve here as case-studies for yet a third aspect of feminist interventions I wish to address. How does the accumulation of feminist practice and theory in the visual arts cause us to rethink or understand differently, as a result of that accumulation of work, 10 For the publication of the 5th Congress, see Baumgart, Denkräume zwischem Kunst und Wissenschaft.

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practices in the historical past that can now be “read” as effectively creating feminist inscriptions? My reasons for not being depressed in 2006, despite what appeared then to be such a low-point in feminist fortunes, included two events, one concerning a centenary celebration of Josephine Baker, the other an exhibition on Art Feminism in Sweden, a country and culture with a very early and vivid feminist art culture, marginalized, however, in international histories of feminism by the exclusive focus on USA/UK rivalries.

Josephine Baker 1906-2006: A feminist re-reading of the modernist archive In April 2006, the Sheldon Art Museum St Louis, Missouri staged a centenary exhibition and conference on the dancer, singer, civil rights activist and theorist of post-racist society, Josephine Baker, who was born in poverty in East St Louis in 1906 but died honoured with the Legion of Honour awarded by the French State and a state funeral that attracted hundreds of thousands of mourners to the street in her adopted country when she died in 1975.11 As a result of my own research on Josephine Baker for my book Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum, I was invited to speak at this conference.12 My starting point in St Louis was a painting, Five, (1992, Leeds City Art Gallery) by Lubaina Himid, born in Zanzibar now living in Britain, about whose artistic refashioning of history for the black feminist subject I have written in the past.13 Five was part of a series of large paintings about history using colour (in both its modernist aesthetic and racialising senses), exhibited in 1993 under the collective title Revenge: A Masque in Five Tableaux (Rochdale Art Gallery and South Bank, London). Several paintings in the series stage two black women undertaking voyages, going to the theatre and socialising at a modernist café, one of which was selected as the cover for a revised edition of Framing Feminism as result of its purchase by the Tate Gallery.14 Five is thus described by the exhibition’s curator Jill Morgan: Five represents two Black women sitting at a table in a domestic interior, the style of their clothes and the reference to modernist interiors suggests Paris in the 1920s. The table is the arena for their strategy to be worked 11

Lahs-Gonzales, Josephine Baker. Pollock, Encounters in a Virtual Feminist Museum. 13 Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 169-200. 14 See Kokoli in this volume. 12

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out, across the plates, recalling the plates tumbling down the wall (in an earlier project for a monument to the memory of slavery). Different strategies are debated, the atmosphere is highly charged and reflected in an avant-garde yellow. Looking into the eyes of the flowers on the table we see they are Egyptian, African depictions, so the yellow becomes a colour of Africa, an interior constructed in the manner of the modernist painters, but with the fabric of Africa acknowledged. The two Black women, in their different ways, throw away, or casually discard the shredded maps of white, imperialist, patriarchal history. Like the modernist women, Lubaina Himid depicts Black women who are her friends, artists, not anonymous models. In opposition to the patriarchal canon of modernism, where women have been objectified for the masculine gaze, women have sought to address the equality of relationships, to represent other women to themselves, to acknowledge friendships and networks in their paintings. 15

Two Black women confidently share a table in a mythical Paris in the 1920s inflected with another geography and history by colour. Who could these symbolic modern women be in Himid’s historical feminist work? The coat of the figure on the right in her otherwise turquoise dress forges a link with a famous Jewish lesbian writer in Paris—Gertrude Stein—while the close-cropped helmet of shiny black hair and profile might suggest this figure as an evocation of the great dancer, singer and anti-racist activist, Josephine Baker herself. In the symbolic space of Parisian Modernity, Lubaina Himid thus places centrally two figures often rendered invisible in the white patriarchal narratives of Paris as the capital of the Modern. As Sheri Benstock has written in her study of Women of the Left Bank: The roots of the misogyny, homophobia [racism] and anti-Semitism that indelibly mark Modernism are to be found in the subterrain of changing sexual and political mores that constituted the belle époque Faubourg society [...] [My] story […] writes the underside of the cultural canvas, offering itself as a countersignature to the published modernist manifestos and calls to the cultural revolution. This female subtext exposes all that Modernism has repressed, put aside, or attempted to deny. 16

But Lubaina Himid does more that reverse this historic erasure, since even in the newly feminist-oriented revisions of Paris in the 1920s, such as Benstock’s and Andrea Weiss’ Paris was a Woman, we do not find equal documentation of the African and African-American women let alone the 15 16

Morgan, Revenge, 22. Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, ii.

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Japanese, Chinese and Korean, Indian and other women who were part of this moment’s enormous cultural creativity, seeking in the capital of France new ways to experience a freedom of creative purpose and their own sexualities.17 To place a Josephine Baker figure beside a lesbian Jewish Gertrude Stein appropriated for a transgressive black women’s modernity is to forge a new space in which intellectual and performer, from different places in American culture, become part of a network of strategic resistance to both historical invisibility and the maps of meaning created in political, imperial power that first did them epistemological violence—as Gayatri Spivak will name the process of forcing people to recognise themselves only in the deformed imagery offered to them by a dominant culture.18 The languages and instruments of representation of a dominant culture incorporate the subordinated negatively, simultaneously depriving the subordinated of knowledge of themselves and of the means to reframe the imposed formulations of their identities. Yet, of course, this kind of negative vision of the oppressed is in itself false. Instead, we must trace the multiple ways in which, even despite oppressive structures, creative artists did find ways to sustain their artistic and even political agency: this is certainly what we learn from the complex personality and history of Josephine Baker.19 Some will say that the issue with regard to Josephine Baker was not one of invisibility but perhaps of excessive even exploitative visibility—her image archive includes an extensive array of photographs of the artist exposed, often in the most potentially sexualised and exploitative ways— in the nude, and both before photographers’ cameras and on stage in the colonialist fantasies in which she performed in French musical theatre; her sexual body was displayed for a colonialist eroticism heavy with its disfiguring fantasies of African physicality and sexuality. Writing of the negative vision of all things African in the European imagination, Cameroonian post-colonial theorist Achille Mbembe reminds us of the meaning of this exoticist linking of the black body, sexuality and animality and how it functions to negate the possibility of anything significant about the human condition emerging from that which is specifically rooted in African cultural history or tradition.20 How are we to read the moment of Josephine Baker’s emergence as an internationally acclaimed musical star in 1925 within the context of the peculiarly painful convergence of the colonialist and a masculine eroticising gaze at the spectacularised black 17

Weiss, Paris was a Woman. Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” 247-272. 19 Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: the Icon and the Image. 20 Mmembe, “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony, 3-37. 18

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female body? Was there, however, another script, lodged inside, yet working against the grain, that could allow women access to sexualities that might be the basis of self-realization? How did this unpromising situation in the French entertainment industry paradoxically provide Baker with access to a creative authoring of her performing body by means of which she could conjugate musicality, sexuality and political irony? Writing in 1984 in the context of feminist debates about sexuality and femininity, Hortense Spillers identified “black women as the beached whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced, mis-seen, not doing, awaiting their verb. Their sexual experiences are depicted, but not often by them, and if, and when by the subject herself, often in the guise of vocal music, often in the self-contained accent and sheer romance of the blues.”21 Spillers sees this as a historical legacy of slavery which “relegated [blackwomen] to the marketplace of the flesh, an act of commodifying so thorough-going that the daughters labor even now under the outcome.”22 Spillers tellingly critiques white feminist artist Judy Chicago. In her mammoth Dinner Party (now the centrepiece of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum), Chicago did set a place for the black nineteenth-century abolitionist campaigner Sojourner Truth at the table of women’s history, but only at the price of neutering her. Chicago symbolically erased the sexuality of this historic black woman, a sexuality that was the chosen signifier for all the other women at the dinner. Sojourner Truth alone was not symbolised by the controversial vaginal symbolism Chicago daringly used as doubled metaphor to embody and sexually specify women’s speech and creation.23 Lubaina Himid’s representation of the Baker figure in stylish contemporary dress as a modern African-American intellectual and political, anti-racist strategist—rather than the Africanised nude dancer— also marks its own intervention into the iconography we inherit of Josephine Baker. By setting her at the table with fellow Jewish, Cubist lesbian poet Gertrude Stein, Baker takes her place as one of the avantgarde strategists for radical resistance to the interlaced white, imperialist, racist, homophobic patriarchy. What these two historic figures shared, however, which is perhaps still tricky for women to deal with today, is their daring practices in art with regard to female sexualities and its modernist representations that cut across hierarchies and genres. In rethinking the historical place of Josephine Baker, we struggle to understand the ways in which the black working class girl from East St 21

Spillers, “Interstices: a Small Drama of Words”, 74; my emphasis. Ibid., 76 23 Ibid., 77-78 22

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Louis, both similar to and different from the “Two Girls from Little Rock” (I am thinking of the opening number in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) who came “from the wrong side of the tracks” made herself somebody through the entertainment industry. This industry is built on a patriarchal structure of masculinized, often privileged, classed audiences consuming the spectacularized bodies of working class women, rarely of colour, whose access to any part of the so-called American dream passed through a deeply ambivalent commodification and eroticisation.24 It is my contention that this did not mean that the women performers in question were entirely without agency in the matter of performance and meaning. Rather we must read the archive for the imprint they made, even if they were never in complete control of situations largely run by and for the profits of white men. In the TV biopic rendering of her autobiography The Josephine Baker Story (1991), produced by David Putnam and starring Lynn Whitfield, Josephine Baker, newly arrived in Paris is invited to model for a French painter, Paul Colin, in order to prepare posters. After modelling and disrobing has led to sex, Baker sneaks from Colin’s couch to contemplate herself, alone, in a mirror, looking back down her own gaze, to enjoy the beauty of her body and recognise a powerful sexuality seemingly released in this ambivalent encounter, and now available for her to mobilise in her art form in dance—a sexuality and aesthetic hitherto masked by a masquerade in defensive comic parody of blackness. In the film text, drawn from her autobiographical statements, Baker recalls this moment of revelation of finding this “her” she had not known, coming to know her own sexual and physical beauty for herself, a woman hitherto alienated in the abusive effects of American racism and its internalisation. Could we read this paradoxical moment, however banal it seems in this narrative, in relation to Hortense Spillers’ notion of a black woman’s finding her own verb—her own means of signifying herself as a sexual subject, looking down the borrowed gaze of the desiring white male other to claim back a means to become the author of her own artistic self as a dancer, in which she claimed the musicality of her athletic, agile and creative dancer’s body for a sexuality focused on her ownership of her own desirability and its activation in modern African American dance, knowingly using doubly freighted tropes of that dance’s ancient heritage and its contemporary colonialist currency in negrophiliac Paris?25 Josephine Baker’s career and the cultural meaning she built for herself 24 25

Mulvey, “Close Ups and Commodities,” 40-52. Archer-Shaw, Negrophilia.

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in the struggle against racism by means of her stage and film performances in Europe has been researched in the context of African-American studies which have established the extent of the impact of African-American culture on Parisian modernism in the 1920s. These studies provide Josephine Baker’s rise to stardom with an extended context of other stars, performers, cultural entrepreneurs and writers.26 Yet has that research reshaped the way art historical studies of Paris in the 1920s is undertaken? Do we breach the invisible frontiers between academic divisions between art history and African-American studies? Can we project an internationalising feminist project that defies the barriers between high and low, between national schools, art and popular culture, and mainstream stories and the exploration of difference. What are the ethics of attempting to undo what I have called the “colour of art history?”27 The colour of art history structurally predetermines the overlooking of women artists of colour and non-European nationalities, who also made Paris the international capital of modernism. It also manifests itself in the ways in which racist ideologies pre-determine how we write, the use of metaphors of colour, the failure to centre even for a moment in a world of meaning generated in and for a different place, body, person, sexuality, subjectivity. Furthermore, “Gender and the Colour of Art History” are interwoven at so many levels, and feminist scholarship committed to exploring issues of difference is challenged at all times to negotiate their dialectics. This has indeed been a long and painful struggle to work against the combination of racism and sexism, the former even unconsciously performed by those who critiqued the latter, and to work for a feminist practice that is the site of perpetual self-provocation to respond to the challenge of reconfiguring the ways in which we think, write and study histories of art and contemporary practices that are always at the same time weaving many strands of difference. Working to bring Josephine Baker into view as a significant figure of that struggle during the twentieth century, a figure who contested the hegemonies of heterosexism as well as class, racism and gender, is not a too-little, too-late acknowledgement of racism inside hegemonic white feminism. It acknowledges the dynamic politics of historical movements and their imperative to work constantly to change the very terrain of our studies, to intervene, to set perpetual demands upon ourselves to make a difference, to make difference visible, to celebrate difference and to allow the encounter with differentially 26

Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light, and Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writer’s Landscape. 27 Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits: Gender and the Colour of Art History.

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constituted subjectivities and practices to remake us, to make us different, to pivot the centre.28

Art Feminism in Sweden: Learning from the past and noting what is missing in the present My second case-study would appear to foreclose on precisely that struggle. It concerns an exhibition mounted in Europe, but in Scandinavia, that was curated by legendary Swedish feminist Barbro Werkmäster and the curator Niclas Ostlind at Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm’s most prestigious venue for exhibitions of contemporary art. Focused on Sweden with its relatively homogeneous population, unmarked by histories of slavery and colonialism in the ways that shape other European and American histories, Sweden is, nonetheless, significant in histories of feminist interventions for being so early engaged with a feminist problematic in art making, that was, however, more powerfully shaped by issues such as socialism and opposition to the Vietnam War. The proposition of Konstfeminism (2006-07) was to bring back into contemporary view a virtually forgotten and almost unknown generation of artists who had produced the first feminist interventions around 1970, while at the same time, tracking the legacies of their interventions in the work of younger artists over the subsequent years to see how influential those early works had been culturally, even while official art histories had omitted them from curating as history. Not limiting feminism to the period 1970-1985, nor segregating that moment from a neo-feminism of the 1990s onwards (as appears to be occurring in the two American examples cited above), we can ask whether such a project reveals the liberatory nature of the initial feminist gestures in opening up issues of the body, sexuality, identity, the everyday to art and documents their continuity. Would we be able to track a genealogy feeding into more mainstream postmodern art that, nonetheless, so often disowns its debt to earlier feminist interventions as the very condition of its own freedoms of materials, themes, issues, and practices? What kinds of critical methods could we use to discern what a feminist intervention is/does in contradistinction to its neutralising institutionalisation or depoliticized appropriation in art that is now so readily accepted by the dealers and museums by forestalling any acknowledgement of its feminist heritage or debt and losing all sense of the politics of representation?

28

Barkley Brown, “African-American Women’s Quilting”, 10.

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In the context of this publication, I cannot illustrate all the works that might be necessary to demonstrate the nature of the initial feminist practices ca.1970 in Sweden and then analyse the difference between them and their apparent successors. I recommend readers to seek out the catalogue for Konstfeminism. But I can make a number of key points. The work of the original moment of art feminism in Sweden demonstrated three important shifts. A radical extension of materials and processes for making art broke through various divisions in avant-garde art to use photography, weaving, ceramics, collage, textiles, and found objects as well as painting and sculpture: now the everyday language of contemporary art, but then absolutely transgressive in an art world dominated by traditional hierarchies that elevated painting and sculpture over these other forms. Maria Adlercreutz made large scale monochrome weavings of photographs of child victims of the Vietnam War in 1970. Anna Sjödahl did a “dinner party” setting in pristine black and white acrylic plaster (1967-69, Moderna Museet) in which the white napkins abstractly evoked a sense of women and their bodily morphology. Secondly, a strong reclamation of figurative representation predominated, itself inspired by excavating beyond formalism what we have come to know as the other avant-garde, namely the politically engaged avant-garde repressed by that which was privileged by the Museum of Modern Art, New York’s historical telling of an inevitable telos in modernism towards varied forms of abstraction then endorsed by formalist criticism.29 Thus social and even socialist realist traditions from Mexico to the Soviet Union and China were mobilised alongside feminist appropriations of equally out of favour Expressionism and Surrealism to find a visual rhetoric in which to explore the class-gender intersections that shaped the socio-economic reality of women in contemporary society. Historical re-appropriation was not merely stylistic (borrowing a visual style); it was semiotic and hence intertextual. Bringing into play the historical valency of artistic references that were being mobilised to add levels of meaning to the work meant that, when their referencing was recognized, their differencing would be activated. Thus in Var i Hallonbergen (Life in Hallobergen) (1972, Boras Konstmuseum) Anna Sjödahl painted a room in which a picture book baby sits playing alone. A window is punched into the back wall, through which we see (although it looks like a painting on the wall of the cell-like room) a typical post-Le Corbusier tower-block of modernist apartments. In the foreground, in black and white, the artist places a drawing after Edvard Munch’s famous 29

Wollen, “The Two Avant-Gardes.”

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figure performing a silent cry from The Scream. The imprisonment of working class mothers in the deadly environment of modernist housing estates is thereby evoked by means of the clashing juxtaposition of these cited elements which, while made through painting, already expand the vocabulary of art making to a cultural assemblage of signs, while also insisting on a displacement of masculine existential angst for the daily struggle of a classed woman in everyday domesticity. A second mode of transgression of the dominant aesthetics of Western art ca.1970 was evident in the use of colour: drained away in the minimalist decades refined to single-colour uses, in the works of many Swedish women artists at this time colour was visually riotous in their reclamation of local colour, and their political use of highly symbolic colours such as red and pink. In tracking the genealogy of feminist practices into the postmodern, post-feminist 1990s, neither of these trends persists. The continuity, such as it is, can only be discerned if we note the third trend: the exploration of identity and sexuality through representations of the female body. The scandalously brave interruption by early feminist practices of the dominant modes of artistic appropriation and representation of the female body in western art still remain shocking to this day. It is my experience that fine art students in the 1990s and early 2000s, working on women’s body art as a resource for their own practice, regularly confide in me that they are still shocked and even distressed by some of the images that were produced in the 1970s–80s by artists such as Carolee Schneeman, Suzanne Santoro, Hannah Wilke, Lynda Benglis and Judy Chicago down to Annie Sprinkle. Insisting in a variety of ways on the existence of the vagina or the actual configuration of women’s sexual anatomy that includes labia and clitoris, fearlessly reminding the viewer of the menstruating and birthing body, or in the case of Jo Spence, the ageing and even mortally ill body, and challenging art’s normalised dispossession of feminine subjectivity by using the female body as its object and not allowing woman embodied subjecthood, art practices by women explored a myriad of processes, imageries, materialities and scales that are still uncomfortable because of the deep contradictions involved in this project. In 1976 Lucy Lippard declared that “it is a narrow abyss that separates men’s use of women for sexual titillation from women’s use of women to expose that insult.”30 The jury is still out on how far women can negotiate the inherited freight loaded onto the sign of the female body in art without finding themselves recaptured in exposure of the body to eroticising or

30

Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth,” 125.

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voyeuristic appropriations. Generations have struggled with this necessity that is so beset with potential pitfalls. Using ceramics, weaving, enlarged photography, graphic media, painting to represent their own bodies or aspects of female sexualities artists of the early feminist moment in Sweden worked knowingly and strategically. Their “liberation” of the female body, reclaimed that sign from art and from pornography, giving the body a lived, political, socialised and sexual history. In the sections in Konstfeminism that appeared to plot out the legacy of these fearless early feminists into now well-accepted younger artists, something significant appeared to be lost. Firstly the majority of works dating to the later 1980s and 1990s were almost uniformly “photographic”: particularly large, intensely coloured and visually alluring C-prints. Often staged photographs, several of these works were physically explicit. One series by Gisela Schink titled, Oh It’s a beaver! provided close-up shots of women performing various bodily functions such as peeing. The final shot in the series places the viewer in a position to see a woman’s buttocks and opened legs revealing what may be a menstruating vagina. Another C-print series by Anika von Hausswolff Return to Nature (1993) places half-naked female bodies in various natural settings. The work is apparently based on a series of police photographs of raped and murdered women found in landscape settings. Again the viewer is positioned with a certain kind of gaze—perpetrator or forensic—that presents a vulnerably exposed female body, in the aftermath of supposed sexual violation, unconscious and often with the head or face invisible. A single large-scale C-print by Cecilia Parsberg I can see you but you can’t see me (1999) places a single female figure in a greenhouse filled with lush vegetation. Dressed only in a tight-fitting jumpsuit from which a rectangle has been removed to expose the crotch, the figure is kneeling but leaning back to arch her back. She is holding a mirror above her invisible head directed towards the viewer. It is true that were the viewer to be in the space with the figure, her holding the mirror thus would enable her to see that viewer while the viewer could not see her face, but could still clearly “see her”, in so far as what is visibly presented to sight are the exposed genitals of this awkwardly and painfully posed woman. But from the perspective of the viewer of this C-print photograph, the mirror will always be blank, unreflecting, and what is there to see is precisely a very uncomfortable but nonetheless uninterrupted view of the woman’s sex. None of these three works seem to have taken on board the history of feminist analysis of the institutionalised structures of the gaze and spectatorship which are the result of a study of cinema and visual culture

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in general. They act as if earlier feminist work merely gave permission to a kind of culture of frank sexual exposure—in your face physicality— without a politics of representation, without a sense of understanding of how images work within systems and structures of viewing that are both structured by the relations of viewer to work and what it presents for seeing and the overall patterns that pre-frame both in terms of histories and contexts. Let me contrast Parsberg’s piece to the famous work by VALIE EXPORT Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1968, which was performed in a Munich cinema. The artist moved about the cinema wearing trousers with the crotch removed and she invited the mostly male audience to have a look at a “real woman’s body” rather than engaging voyeuristically and passively with highly contrived and aestheticised naked female bodies on screen. Thus the performance as an action targeted a specific institutional site of production of the sexual objectification of the female body by inserting herself, a real woman, into that cultural space to bring about a dissonance that required the fantasising customers to confront a living, embodied, acting and contesting woman as a subject. The work’s significance lies in the “effect” it can produce in a strategically planned situation. The “borrowing” of the cut-way costume by Parsberg and its transposition into a highly glossy, visually alluring photographic print that is available for exhibition in galleries and homes completely misses the political effect of VALIE EXPORT’s action which was then disseminated in a poster format the artist seated, open legged, now armed with a phallic gun, looking away from the camera under her massively teased hair. The image itself is susceptible to symptomatic reading—the combination of the visible female sex and the accompanying, fetishistically re-phallicising gun produces both the shock of vision and a compensatory fetish, while the distracted gaze prevents this figure having any kind of Medusan power.

A sketch of a journey through a room in the virtual feminist museum One of the most infamous paintings on show at Konstfeminism was God Giving Birth (1968, Skellefteå, Anna Nordlander Museum) by Monica Sjöö. This painting has a special place in the foundations of British feminist art historical work, since it was at a meeting in 1973 called to defend this painting against charges of obscenity, when exhibited in a show called Womanpower at Swiss Cottage Library, that the five members of the original Women’s Art History Collective first met and

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decided on a joint strategy for analysis, research and teaching which culminated eight years later in Rozsika Parker’s and my book Old Mistresses (written in 1979 and published 1981). Anti-Vietnam leftist activist in Sweden in the 1970s, Monica Sjöö, who died in 2005, was the feminist artist most associated with reviving the imagery of the Neolithic worship of the great Mother long before most people recognised the genuine scholarship of archaeologist of the Old European gylandric cultures, Marija Gimbutas, on which it was founded. Latterly her position began to be associated with the Gaia concept, the notion of the earth as a living entity and, in the last decade, her work has been linked up with the campaigns for feminist ecology and environmental survival, for sustainable living premised on the respect for the earth signified in relation to metaphors of sustaining, cyclical and beneficent femininity. There was a small Sjöö retrospective in Stockholm in 2006 and a conference organised at the Workers’ Educational Committee—outside the gallery and museum world. In terms of the generational model critiqued at the beginning of this chapter, Sjöö and I would belong in radically different theoretical and even generational camps. I was, however, happy to speak at this conference in order to argue for a different kind of retrospect that could show how our current moment can be used to open up the past to new understanding. Thus I gave a lecture titled Remembering and Revising. The act of remembering is not simply one of recall: it is more productive as it brings into the present a past—hence different—moment reconfigured by being reviewed by that present, which is, in effect, the product or effect of work done by what is being remembered. The remembered past has actively projected itself into a future—the present—that is now looking back. My basic propositions were these: that the effect of the art works made by the initial generation of feminists who worked their feminist ideas and feelings through aesthetic practices is only now beginning to be understood in terms of its impact as opposed to its emergence. In their own moment of emergence, their radicalism outran and outstripped our terms of analysis, terms forged still in the world before such art interventions existed to challenge our ways of knowing and seeing. Traumatic—that is ungraspable—at their point of emergence, such interruptions of art business as usual, and patriarchal art business in particular, fertilised the culture into which they emerged, continuously working to alter habits of thought. In remembering the moment around 1968-1973, I am inevitably revising even my own thoughts on the matter, as a renewed encounter is being staged by a retrospective exhibition and its invitation to re-encounter the work now. What did Monica Sjöö’s work

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put into culture and how do we receive it now that the work has been “working” in that culture for three decades? When it first appeared, officially trained, pre-feminist art historians like myself had had an education which involved no information about any women artists and certainly very little study of Neolithic art, socialist realism, Mexican muralism or the work of Frida Kahlo. Thus aspects of the artistic vocabulary on which Sjöö was drawing, or with which her independent creations were potentially to be aligned to create a genealogical context for them, were not situated as they are now in our expanded post-colonial and feminist stories of art. Thus the second proposition is a vital area for feminist studies. Because we receive the traumatically new art works without the terms created by their interruptions of business as usual, criticism contemporary with the work’s emergence often remains confined by existing discourses and frames of reference that are already out of date by virtue of the newness the work is putting into culture. Thus the history of feminist debate about work like that of Monica Sjöö (or of Judy Chicago) which easily divides feminist thought into oppositional camps of goddessworshipping essentialists and cerebral post-structuralists cannot remain itself unchallenged. I want to use our current retrospective vantage point now to reconsider some of the extreme polarisations that have occurred in feminist criticism and art history, and to re-assess the ways we could receive and position work both within and beyond its own terms. This is where my latest project “The Virtual Feminist Museum” would come into play as a means to create the kind of expanded genealogy of art works and images through which to position the work done by Sjöö’s painting. The Virtual Feminist Museum is not a cyber museum but a concept which enables me to suggest the kind of journeys through the histories of art and image-making that we might need to undertake to assemble the lines of reference and affinity through which works by artists who are women might become more legible (in contrast to the existing curatorial models of nation, period, movement, style, oeuvre and artist). The Virtual Feminist Museum aims draws upon a Warburgian methodology to trace the persistence and variation of certain thematics encoded in art forms and images. To make a new space for Monica Sjöö’s work I started with more recent scandals involving the exhibition of the pregnant or birthing female body. In April 2006 at the Capla Kesting Fine Art Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, a life-sized marble sculpture of American singer Britney Spears giving birth in the kneeling position, titled Monument to Pro-Life: the Birth of Sean Preston was exhibited by Daniel Edwards. Another scandal was created in the summer of 2005, when

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British artist Marc Quinn placed a larger than life-size marble carving of another artist Alison Lapper, naked and 8.5 months pregnant on the socalled Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. The combination of nudity, pregnancy and a physical condition which denied Alison full length limbs challenged the public’s tolerance. Quinn defended himself by claiming to be fearlessly making disability visible in this prime site of British public consciousness alongside another disabled national hero, Admiral Nelson who was blind in one eye. These two examples remind us that the issue of “publishing” that is, making public the body of a woman in either the state of advanced pregnancy or in the act of giving birth remains a deep challenge for any artist as for the publics who encounter the work. But it is the unstable politics of the project’s conception, realisation, positioning and reception rather than pure iconography itself, that makes all the difference. Another step back in time takes us to the controversy surrounding the exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery of the work of Jenny Saville in 1995. Here Saville showed an impressive sequence of vast canvases painted in dry and decidedly unluscious oil that explored the fantasies of body size in contemporary western culture through a series of composite paintings of nude women. The scandal that erupted around these works in the mid1990s seemed for the male critics as ever to concern their anxiety before these mountains of female flesh. Confusing the distinction between size and scale, and between painting as effect and the effect of the real in a painting, critics cowered before the monumental subjects of the diminutive and feminist Jenny Saville, while feminist critics began to draw out the missing genealogies that took us back to the founding mothers of artistic scandal in the women’s art movements of the 1970s. Alison Rowley linked Saville’s interventions to the work of photo-artist Jo Spence whose taboo-breaking work included a series of images based on her own middle-aged working class body and its fight against breast cancer, notably her works Colonisation and Monster.31 Perhaps, one of the first works to cause such an uproar was Monica Sjöö’s God Giving Birth of 1968. The ideological purpose of her iconographic programme was, it must be emphasised, as radically different from Daniel Edwards’ as it could be, although both apparently visualise the same event. The gap between the specific words, the actual works, and the project of each artist opens up onto the problem posed for feminist theory by the relations of the sacred and the feminine in human thought and its cultural imaginaries. Within 31

Rowley, “On Viewing Three Paintings by Jenny Saville.”

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feminist thought this issue of the sacred and the feminine has been variously contested on the one hand by the attempted revival of Neolithic goddess culture associated with Wicca, neo-pagan and eco-feminist movements and, on the other hand by post-structuralist philosophers, anthropologists and psychoanalysts such as Irigaray, Kristeva and Clément.32 The interest in the feminine sacred or even the feminine deity pre-dated Monica Sjöö’s painting God Giving Birth—as we can see it surfacing in paintings of the 1950s. In de Kooning’s combination of the modern mask (cosmetics, glamour stills and advertising) with the grandiose monumentality of Picasso’s flirtations with Iberian and African sculpture, Woman (1951, Museum of Modern Art, New York), the feminine sacred was placed firmly on the agenda. I have elsewhere argued that, like or not, de Kooning and behind him Picasso had to be dealt with by women painters of that American moment: Frankenthaler’s Rubensian Nude (1958) could well be paired with the ebullient and joyous works of Lee Krasner, such as Sun Woman (1957), that she made when she worked through the dire burden of de Kooning and Pollock. Krasner’s paintings of the late 1950s link with Kahlo’s imagery of the sun but were inspired by two new elements: Krasner was at the time reading the work of the feminist classicist Jane Harrison, whose feminist re-reading of classical myth influenced Virginia Woolf in her novels, notably To the Lighthouse. Jane Harrison’s anti-patriarchal ritualist research revealed the deep symbolic role of woman in the origins of western culture in her books Themis and Art and Ancient Ritual read by Krasner in 1957-9.33 The most reductive and oppressive version of the linking of the feminine with the sacred, that is with life, death and meaning, is the most modern: the bourgeois identification of women with the bio-politics of motherhood, which is, in effect, a reduction of women to a bio-politically managed function—what Spivak has called the “uterine social organization”.34 This economy is originally patriarchal-pastoral, based on the appropriation of the uterus as a site of patriarchal production which necessitates a concurrent denial of both the subjecthood—the subject status—and the autonomous sexuality of women. This can be associated with many forms of genital mutilation of women that reconfigure their sexual anatomy to emphasise their uterine function as well as enclosure, and veiling which also metaphorically connect woman and house, container and enclosure. Woman then signifies, as we have so endlessly 32

Clément and Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred and Irigaray, “Divine Women.” 33 Pollock, “Killing Men and Dying Women.” 34 Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame,” 152.

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established, the empty locus of a negative difference, a lacking, wounded yet curiously productive container fantasised contradictorily as the lost home and threateningly engulfing vagina dentata. Feminist scholars have, of course, challenged this patriarchal vision, reminding us of the much richer range of metaphors associated with and occasioned by the creative and desiring body of women in ancient cultures. In her amazing study of ancient Greek literature and ritual, Page Dubois refutes phallocentric ideas of woman as lacking and castrated.35 But she has also tracked the gradual loss of this rich repertoire of ideas associating woman with field, furrow, stone and oven, until woman is represented as merely a tablet on which the phallus writes itself, or the emptiness that only the phallus can fill. As Anne Wagner has shown, the theme of the maternal body simultaneously swelling with its growing contents and subjectively vacuous became widespread in early twentieth century modernist sculpture of Jacob Epstein and Henry Moore.36 In Epstein’s unfinished sculpture Maternity (1910, Leeds Art Gallery) the interiority of the pregnant woman dreaming while touching her rounded form is contradicted by the intense carving of her protuberant breasts that draws the viewer back to an erotic vision rather than empathy with the woman’s inwardness and meditation on her severality. Epstein’s Genesis (1929-30, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester) makes this alienation from subjectivity even more marked by his overt use of the features of an African mask which reminds us of colonialist misappropriations of African aesthetic-symbolic models. It is also used to distance the work from sentimentality of bourgeois maternalist ideologies, while nonetheless underscoring shared ideas about women as outside/ beyond/ on the edges of the human and the inhuman. The work of Epstein can be constructively contrasted to a pregnant self portrait by the artist Ghislaine Howard who worked in a maternity hospital exploring the embodied experiences of women like herself involved in various stages of pregnancy and birthgiving. Repeating the pose of the hand draped across the pregnant bulge, Howard uses the smudged charcoal to create a sense of her own subjectivity without sliding into realistic self-portraiture. Can the artist herself mark her difference across a shared iconography by such material manipulations? In Sjöö’s work, we can now recognize a relation to the Mexican muralist movement’s creation of a monumental socialist imagery in work by Diego Rivera, which also used a degree of stylisation borrowed from 35 36

Dubois, Sowing Bodies. Wagner, Mother Stone.

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non-Western aesthetics, not as primitivisation, but as a means to generate a visual rhetoric for class and indigeneity, and a different political sense of international worker culture. There is also undoubtedly a relation to the work of Frida Kahlo, who would be recovered and re-integrated into the history of art through intense feminist interest during the 1970s. Kahlo’s My Nurse and I (1937, Mexico City, Museo Dolores Olmedo) like Sjöö’s painting, replaces the face of the nursing woman with a mask associated with a Mexican deity, while her work the Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth, Me and Diego with Mr. Xótolt (1949, Cuernavaca, Vergel Foundation) makes visible the symbolic distinctions between dark and light, growing and dying, milk, blood and tears, day and night, rootedness and the celestial, which is also mobilised in Sjöö’s imagery. Frida Kahlo, however, is significant in the context of the Mexican muralists on the one hand and the Surrealists on the other, both of whom allowed themselves what we can call symbolic representation, in contrast even to Cubism and Dadaist realism. Kahlo breached the association of the symbolic with the public by utilising the language of Mexican pre-Columbian ritual and sacred imagery for everyday experience and for her own psychic fantasies such as My Birth (1932, Madonna). Kahlo places the viewer of this tiny work at the end of the bed, in a position of both outsider viewing and reception, as the baby emerges from the vagina of a hooded woman—a body not given the features of herself or her own mother whose privacy such an image might contravene. Instead, the catholic Mater Dolorosa weeps above the bed, bearing her offspring in tears and pain of anticipation at its future sufferings. This image is often related in art history books to images of the Aztec goddess Tlazoteotl in the act of giving birth from the early 16th century, which also captures the moment of parturition when the miniaturised human springs forth from the vagina of the anguished mother, her teeth bared in the effort of expulsion and the pain of her stretched body. The face of Monica Sjöö’s painting is impassive and mask-like, neither grimacing in agony nor veiled (or even dead) as in Kahlo’s vision of her own almost autonomous delivery. The face of the emerging child in Sjoo’s work is also impassive and mask-like, but not divided into dark and light as is the figuration of the deity from which it—the earth—emerges. We could then further contrast Sjoo’s use of the mask with Dadaist Hannah Höch’s daring montage in her Mutter: aus einem Ethnographischen Museum (1930, Collection Musée Nationale d’art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou) of an African mask replacing the face of the pregnant working class woman forced to become a mere producer of battlefield fodder by the fascist regime under which she lived.

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In Sjöö’s image, the trope of the extremely swollen, rounded body is not invoked in pain and pressure, although a slight indication is marked in paint on the bump of the pregnant woman. Crucially, her figure is upright at the point of birth, neither crouched nor reclining, and the arch formally created by the opened legs draws on yet other cultural traditions, in which the relation between the woman’s birthing body and the architectural structure of the vault created by opened legs has been taken up in Hinduism as well as Pre-Columbian sculptural traditions. In Sjöö’s painting, the body of the woman is opened to produce a child. This references the invisible sexual specificity of the woman: the womb and the vagina. As we know from psychoanalytical theory, the female body apparently presents “nothing to see” and registers in the phallocentric psyche, therefore, as the voided site of absence rather than the threshold of an invisible potency, a generative interiority. Most pre- or anti-patriarchal cultures did not register the female body as castrated and hence monstrous (signified so often through the image of the Gorgon-Medusa). Two antiMedusan traditions play into contemporary culture. One is the 16th century Sheela-na Gigs of Ireland, which appear on portals and doorways suggesting the idea of the female sexual body as a threshold, an image of passage between two worlds and an image therefore of change and movement, transformation and possibility.37 American artist Nancy Spero’s humourously appropriated the Sheela-na-Gig in her counter-image to the fetishism of The Chorus Line (1985). Less familiar will be the figure of Baubo—in myth, the innkeeper’s wife who tried to console the desolate Demeter as she hunted for her abducted daughter Persephone. To cheer her up and remind Demeter of her motherhood, Baubo lifted her skirts and pointed to her vagina. South African Greek artist Penny Siopis discovered a Baubo in Freud’s collection of antiquities, and used the statue as a basis for her installation, Three Essays on Shame at the Freud Museum (2005). She linked this particular and often hidden sculpture with the political stand taken by a group of African married women who took off their clothes in an act of sacred defiance before the bulldozers of the fascist Apartheid regime that had come to destroy their fragile homes in a shantytown outside Cape Town. For a married woman to expose her body, the body of the mother, is an extreme act in African society, full of power resulting precisely from the attribution of meaning to its potency and from which men must be protected. How different is this idea of screening from view the power attributed to women’s sex from the kind of pornographically exposing gaze which even in Courbet’s perplexing 37

Karkov, “Sheela-na-gigs”.

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Origine du Monde, once owned and secreted behind a second painting by Jacques Lacan, is evident. Yet even what degrades into the so-called “beaver-shot” could be reclaimed, as we have seen by German artist VALIE EXPORT in which the fetishistic isolation of female sexual zone and the associated voyeuristic gaze was challenged by an exposure, by means of a removed segment of the artist’s clothing—thus not allowing total nudity and by the direct gaze of the woman whose body is now claimed by her. She links her sex and her subjective identity while the gun she holds, in some photographs of this performance, might be said to appropriate the phallus for the woman-gaze-body and use it as a threat to menace the intrusive gaze—discomforting the very masculinity invoked and repudiated in this gesture. In so much of Neolithic culture the invisible interior of the generative female body is imagined by emphasising the pubic triangle that can be inscribed on the outside. This triangle as symbol of feminine sexual specificity formed the structure for the work by Judy Chicago that then made a complete aesthetic statement of the exposed genitalia in the thirtysix place settings named after mythic and historical women that was The Dinner Party. While most theoretically engaged feminist critics decried with some anxiety what appeared to be a reduction of woman to vagina and hence sex, I think it fair to suggest that this work aesthetically forged in its critical intervention in minimalist art language a similar kind of interruption as did VALIE EXPORT, by connecting the sexual morphology of feminine sexuality to the double site of production of speech—hence thought and culture—and life. In the terms available around 1968, these artists made the first direct interventions through image-making and performances often using their own bodies to breach the proscription of certain kinds of representation. Two of the most forbidden were menstruation, radically confronted by Judy Chicago in two works: Flag of 1971 and Menstruation Bathroom from Womanhouse 1972 also confronted in performances at Womanhouse and ultimately in Dinner Party in 1979. Between these two lay the question of the image of birth— of parturition, to which Chicago would belatedly come with her Birth Project.

A brief conclusion In her famous “Cyborg Manifesto” of 1984 that explored a poetics of socialist feminism in the age of globalizing capitalism and its military technologies, Donna Haraway infamously concluded: “Though both are

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bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”38 For most socialist, materialist and later post-structuralist feminists, the engagement with ideas of the goddess associated with Sjöö and her group are anathema. Haraway links the goddess with ultimately anti-feminist ideas of unity, origin, identity and the dangers of religion as an orthodoxy, which is all that her cyborg playfully and creatively undoes, in a dangerous dialectical relationship with science, technology and modern power systems. Yet she allows both her fragmented, regenerating, polyvocal cyborg and the goddess to be joined in the spiral dance. This is an invocation of a mythic dimension—the spiral and the dance—that allow us to open up the space marked by the term goddess, not to a feminist pseudo-religious nostalgia, but to a kind of questioning: of what it might mean to allow into cultural play other imaginative and mytho-poetic resources that we understand not as truths but as modes of human negotiation of their condition and the condition of their knowledge. I personally have no investment in the goddess element in feminism; indeed my roots in Marxism and psychoanalysis aim precisely at its analytical deconstruction. But this does not make me blind to the complex webs of imaginative engagements with the deep issues of bodies, life, death, meaning and time that I have very briefly suggested in the above traverse of the image archive prompted by having to remember and revision the work of one early feminist artist. Thus, to complement this virtual exhibition, I would need to take a further detour through feminist theory to show precisely how what the painting by Sjöö visually provokes me to think about has been “otherwise” thought through by a socialist feminist like Donna Haraway, a philosopher of sexual difference like Luce Irigaray and a psychoanalytical Marxist semiotician like Julia Kristeva. We might track forward the lines of feminist theoretical debate to include the work of feminist psychoanalysts on the troubled issues of the mother in feminist theory and practice. But that is a whole other story. What I hope I have suggested here is but an indication of the vitality of feminist analysis in art and culture in its doubled movement as historical retrospect and a constant projection of feminism as poeisis to come, a becoming, for which we have in the last thirty years barely made a start. Let reframing be the open search for ways in which we can ethically and politically grasp the importance of difference as it structures our lives and thoughts, images and fantasies, politics and aspirations, while also

38

Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto,” 181.

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allowing ourselves to maintain fidelity with the necessity of feminist interventions to make a difference.

Works Cited Ankori, Gannit. Imagining her Selves: Frida Kahlo’s Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation. Westport, CT. and London: Greenwood Press, 2002. Archer-Shaw, Petrine. Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Barkley Brown, Elsa. “African-American Women’s Quilting: A Framework for Conceptualising and Teaching African-American Women’s History.” In Black Women In America: Social Science Perspectives edited by Micheline Malson et al, 8-18. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Barry, Judith and Flitterman, Sandy. “Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art making,” Screen, 21:4 (1980): 35-48. Baumgart, Sylvia, et al., eds. Denkräume zwishcen Kunst und Wissenschaft: 5th Kunsthistorikerinner Tagung im Hamburg. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1993. Benstock, Sheri. Women of the Left Bank. London: Virago Press, 1987. Butler, Connie, ed. WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2007. Clark, T.J. The Painter of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers. London: Thames and Hudson, 1985. Clément, Cathérine and Julia Kristeva. The Feminine and the Sacred [1998] translated by Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Dubois, Page. Sowing Bodies: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Foster, Alicia. Tate Women Artists. London: Tate Publishing, 2004. Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989 and 2001. Green, Nicholas. “‘All the Flowers of the Field’: The State, Liberalism and Art under the Early Third Republic,” Oxford Art Journal, 10:1 (1987): 71-84. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149-182. London: Free Association Books, 1991.

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Irigaray, Luce. “Divine Women” [1984]. In Sexes and Genealogies, translated by Gillian C. Gill, 55-72. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Jules-Rosette, Benetta. Black Paris: The African Writer’s Landscape. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998. —. Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Karkov, Catherine “Sheela-na-gigs and Other Unruly Women: Images of Land and Gender in Medieval Ireland.” In From Ireland Coming: Irish Art from the Early Christian to the Late Gothic Period and Its European Context, edited by Colum Hourihane, 313-31. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Kelly, Mary. “Art and Sexual Politics.” In Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, edited by Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, 303-312. London: Pandora Books, 1987. Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s Time.” In The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, 187-213. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. —. “Signifying Practice and the Mode of Production,” translated by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Edinburgh Magazine, 1 (1976): 64-76. Lahs-Gonzales, Olivia, ed. Josephine Baker: Image and Icon. St. Louis MI.: Reedy Press, 2006. Lippard, Lucy. “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: European and American Women’s Body Art.” In From the Centre: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, 121-138. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1976. Mathews, Patricia and Thalia Gouma-Peterson. “The Feminist Critique of Art History,” Art Bulletin, 71:2 (1989): 124-27. Mmembe, Achille. “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony.” Africa, 62:1 (1992): 3-37. Morgan, Jill. Revenge. Rochdale: Rochdale Art Gallery, 1992. Mulvey, Laura. “Close Ups and Commodities.” In Fetishism and Curiosity, 40-52. London: BFI, 1996. Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In Art and Sexual Politics: Women’s Liberation, Women Artists and Art History, edited by Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth C. Baker, 1-44. New York: Collier Books, 1973. Parker, Rozsika and Pollock, Griselda, eds. Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-1985. London: Pandora Books, 1987. Pollock, Griselda, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity.” In Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, 50-90. London: Routledge, 1988; Classic Edition, 70-127. London: Routledge, 2003.

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—. “The Politics of Theory: Generations and Geographies in feminist theory and the histories of art histories,” Genders, 17 (1993): 97-120. —. Avant-Garde Gambits: Gender and the Colour of Art History. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993. —. “Inscriptions in the Feminine.” In Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of and from the feminine, edited by Cathérine de Zegher, 67-88. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1996. —. “‘Killing Men and Dying Women’: A Woman’s Touch in the Cold Zone of American Painting.” In Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed, by Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, 219-294. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. —. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. London: Routledge, 1999. —. Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum. London: Routledge, 2007. Pollock, Griselda, ed.Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, London: Routledge, 1996. Rowley, Alison, “On Viewing Three Paintings by Jenny Saville: Rethinking a Feminist Practice of Painting.” In Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, edited by Griselda Pollock, 88-109. London: Routledge, 1996. Spillers, Hortense. “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words.” In Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, edited by Carol Vance, 70100. London: Routledge, 1984, new edition, Pandora Press, 1992. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives.” History and Theory, 24: 3 (1985): 247-272. —. “French Feminism in an International Frame.” In In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 134-153. London and New York: Methuen, 1987. Stovall, Tyler. Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light. Houghton Tiffin, 1999. Wagner, Anne M. Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture. London: Paul Mellon Centre for British Sculpture, 2005. Weiss, Andrea. Paris was a Woman. London: Pandora Press, 2005. Werckmäster, Barbro and Ostlind, Niclas, eds. Konstfeminism. Stockholm: Atlas, 2006. Wollen, Peter. “The Two Avant-Gardes.” Edinburgh Magazine, 1 (1976): 77-86. Zegher, Cathérine de, ed. Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of, and from the feminine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.

EPILOGUE THE FEMINIST ART PROJECT ANNE SWARTZ

Second-wave theorists had the advantage of clear boundaries between their predecessors’ experiences and their situation, as opposed to what some call a lack of clarity in boundaries today; they also had to tackle questions like “am I a cultural feminist or a political feminist?,” which are distinctions no longer in circulation permitting other questions to come to the fore.1 Analysis of the feminine and feminized body, celebration of womanhood, critiques of gender, the liminal space of transexuality, potentials/possibilities for feminist utopias and dystopias, and the consequence or lack thereof of feminist interventions are all at issue today, as well as some of the persistent issues from the second-wave and the lack of consistency in use of third-wave terminology. This discussion was most sharply brought into focus in early 2007 in America with two conferences, one held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, called The Feminist Future, and the other held as part of the College Art Association’s annual conference (CAA 2007) under the aegis of The Feminist Art Project (TFAP).2 Both series of panels included a wide variety of visual arts professionals—historians, critics, and artists. I was directly involved in creating the latter sessions and want to address how they evolved, finally reflecting on how the experience relates to pertinent questions and issues in feminist art, many of which this text has explored. I bring to the reader’s attention the history of TFAP as an initiative, up to CAA 2007, to showcase a specific set of circumstances that reveal one bridge between second- and third-wave feminist art history, to document 1

“Arlene Raven interview by Cheri Gaulke,” 13. Recent exhibitions have also raised these issues about feminism and art: WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, curated by Connie Butler, which originated at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and Global Feminisms, curated by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, which originated at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. 2

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that important historical series of panels, and to conclude this book with a primary account of feminist art history. Above all, I want to indicate that the merging of theory and practice can, ultimately, beget activism, which is the strongest outcome of any discussion surrounding feminist art. The relationships between theory and practice are integral to any history of feminism in contemporary art, since the artist now has available many systems—methods, techniques—to expose the privileging social and critical structures defining woman’s relationship to the world. But these same systems have often resulted in many women not having opportunities to participate in exhibitions, having work collected by private patrons or by museums, and generally, not seeing their work get much attention. Groups like the Guerilla Girls and the Brainstormers have devoted much time and effort to performing and documenting the biases in the artworld against women, which disproportionately leave them out of the market and the dialogue. Rather than getting depressed or abandoning their art, most feminist artists and visual arts professionals try and find ways to work from within the system to counter the prejudice and dismissals they experience or witness, or they get angry and then try and get involved. Token efforts such as the announcement that the Tate will endeavour to increase its holdings of art by women are welcomed, but more is needed to correct the unevenness in their collections.3 As a result, feminism remains much-needed in the international art scene. How it exists and what feminist art is, though, are difficult to categorize and comprehend because of the many different interpretations of what it is or can be, and the different forms it may take. My feminism has focused on access—that women should have equal opportunity—and on realities—that women have not had equal opportunities.4 In relation to the world of art and the dialogue around it, I have been most interested in the ways women’s psychological lives exist in their art and the archetypal imagery women seem to share in their work. I learned a great deal about my feminism and understanding of art by reading the work of American art critic Arlene Raven.5 We became friends when I was first researching 3

Akbar, “Tate admits need to buy more works by women artists.” The title of this article seems a bit tabloid in tone for the content, as if the museum had taken an active role in some kind of philandering, like a wayward politician admitting to theft or infidelity. 4 I have written elsewhere about my perspective: see Swartz, “Feminist Art: A Reassessment.” 5 Arlene’s life and work is the subject of a volume I co-edited with Johanna Burton, for which I also wrote a critical biographical essay on Arlene. See Swartz, “She Is Who She Wants To Be.”

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the work of artist Nancy Grossman, her longtime partner about whom she had written a monograph. In 2005, we got involved in planning the day of panels and exhibitions that would become The Feminist Art Project events at CAA 2007. Arlene died from cancer in August of 2006, months before CAA 2007. But we discussed and laboured over every detail of these panels and events until two weeks before she died. Ever committed to feminism and contemporary art, she worked on them when most people would have abandoned any public activity. These events began as a result of a conversation we had in the spring of 2005. Arlene and I were having lunch in New York City’s Chelsea gallery district. We were discussing the situation for women artists in the artworld, a topic we often considered. She said “You should get involved in this idea that Judy [Chicago] and I are developing.” She had been friends with Judy since they first met when Judy spoke at the First National Conference for Women in the Visual Arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, April 20-22, 1972, an event organized by artist Mary Beth Edelson. Though Arlene had been involved in feminist and feminist art activities, the conference radicalized her on the spot and she decided to head to Los Angeles, first for research purposes, then she was decided to remain to get involved in the burgeoning Women’s Movement, which was particularly focused on art there. In 2005, Arlene and Judy were talking about the sudden groundswell of interest in feminist art, as represented by several exhibitions of feminist art in 2007, including WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, curated by Connie Butler at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the installation of Judy’s multi-media work The Dinner Party at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art alongside Global Feminisms, an exhibition curated by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin. Susan Fisher Sterling at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. became involved in that discussion and the three of them came up with the idea for a devoted approach, or initiative, to capitalize on all the activity around feminist art in 2007 to focus attention on ways to extend the dialogue beyond these shows and beyond that year. I attended the first meeting in May 2005 at art historian Gail Levin’s house, which Judy facilitated, where the collected group was asked to develop ways to broaden the scope of activities. Some of the women present left, never to be heard from again. I worked closely with Judy and Arlene that summer to develop the ideas into a formal entity. But personal obligations forced me to have to step down from much involvement. So, it was with much interest that I approached Ferris Olin and Judy Brodsky

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at Rutgers University about participating in the project, after Dena Muller, then-director of A.I.R. Gallery, suggested I speak to them about it. Judy Chicago remarked on how Ferris and Judy Brodsky were “our kind of gals” and Arlene noted how impressive they were as organizers. Ferris and Judy Brodsky took that idea and put the full force of their institutional building acumen behind it. They got telephone lines, a website,6 assistants, publicity, and so much more for TFAP. Judy Chicago, Arlene, and Susan all remained involved. Arlene’s health was declining rapidly, yet she was thoroughly committed. She was dying and she was participating completely. Others, like me, became entranced by the possibilities of this opportunity. I mentioned to Arlene the idea of a panel at the annual conference of the College Art Association (CAA), which would meet in New York in 2007. Her reply was a classic example of her grand vision. She said, “a panel, how about a whole day?” And so, Arlene and I set about developing a day of panels, along with two exhibitions, for CAA 2007.7 The preparations for those panels, which included both established and emerging scholars, artists, and museum professionals, gave Arlene and me the unique opportunity to discuss her involvement in the history of feminist art. She told me endless details about her life, the people she had met and with whom feminist artists, art historians, and critics were involved, and why certain events had mattered to her. The experience was unprecedented for me, as we spoke or wrote several times a week for the last year of her life. Arlene was so committed to realizing the panels and so many people were energized to realize them, I felt I must continue to plan them, despite my reticence. Ferris Olin and Judy Brodsky are institution builders, by any measure. The Feminist Art Project has chapters in many cities and its website lists hundreds of events happening internationally, a fitting legacy of her more recent commitment to women in the visual arts. Many feminist organizations have chapters, dispersed around America, such as Planned Parenthood or the National Organization for Women. Many feminist art organizations that Judy Brodsky has led, such as the Women’s Caucus for Art and ArtTable, went from being national organizations with a single 6

The two exhibitions were a show of Daria Dorosh’s art at A.I.R. Gallery and a group exhibition curated by Leslie King-Hammond at Ceres Gallery, which she discusses in an essay for Critical Matrix, volume 17 (Fall 2007). A third exhibition, a group show of gallery artists, curated by Dena Muller, at A.I.R. Gallery also emerged. These events, along with many others, are discussed in Yoshimoto and Swartz, “Feminist Art Events at Conference.”

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entity of members to a national leadership with local chapters. The idea is simple; local leadership means that programming locally offers more direct opportunities for involvement and provides more explicitly for the needs of its membership within its community. However, I argued, such a structure would disenfranchise participants, a lesson learned from my decade living in Savannah, Georgia, a small southeastern American city, which is a long distance culturally and geographically from the predominant urban art centres. Those outside of the major cities want access to the national organization for the connection and the prestige. But, my words fell on deaf ears and the organization was arranged with a national committee and local chapters. Much activity is centred at Rutgers University, though certainly exhibitions, panels, conferences, lectures, classes, and symposia are happening elsewhere with vigour. The scale of The Feminist Art Project at CAA 2007 was impressive, the coalescence of feminists remarkable. Hundreds of people attended what evolved into about twenty different events.8 Many described the experiences as exactly the kind of discussion/dialogue visual arts professionals need to have in the art world. When Arlene and I conceived of the day of panels, we immediately set upon trying to define the panel chairs. 9 We were successful in securing participation of women who fit our desire for a broad range of interests. However, we tried to be mindful of different voices in terms of profession, ethnicity, age, ideology, and activism. While we were successful in securing the involvement of important women scholars, artists, and writers, they are all white. The final roster of chairs didn’t represent the whole scope of people we approached, which was really the only complaint I had following the day; that is, more women of colour should have been involved. What I learned in the process of approaching people, especially women of colour, is that if you are a brilliant woman of colour in the art world, you are busy and overbooked.10 Ditto the situation for international women in the American art world. I tried to remedy this situation in the panel Arlene and I organized, but, again, I was only somewhat successful. I then decided to 8

The panel chairs were myself, Elizabeth Mansfield, Suzanne Lacy, Helena Reckitt, Joanna Frueh, Mira Schor, and Vivien Fryd. 9 We asked friends, colleagues, peers, people we know well and people whose work or reputations preceded them. Arlene and I made a list of people whose work we admired but neither of us knew personally, in the hopes that we would interest them. 10 I hope that feminist women of colour and international feminists who write and speak in English and are involved in the art world will contact me so I may become more familiar with their work for my future projects.

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accompany my introduction to the day of panels (and to my own panel) with a slide show. I contacted all the women whose art currently interests me. Some artists were quite open to having their work shown in this way, while others were cautious. One young Latina artist kept asking me why I wanted to use her work in my presentation, since she hadn’t ever had her work shown in this way. Eventually, I was successful in getting her permission. That slide show of one hundred artists became a subject of much interest, as I was approached by several people who wanted copies to show to their classes, at a conference, and just simply to have for reference. Arlene and I wanted to have a panel that included discussion of the different generations of feminism. She came up with the idea for a speakout. Our panel was called “Are We There Yet? The Status and Impact of Second- and Third-Wave Feminism, Women’s Art, the Women’s Art Movement, and ‘Feminist Art’”. In my introduction, I spoke about how the panels were an exciting day of dialogue about feminism, art, the market, the academy, artists, and the art world.11 I came of age in the second wave of feminist thought and am now integrating the theories of the third wave, such as waves as historical rather than generational eras, which extend many of the issues around enfranchisement, and how they relate to art, artists, and activism. I have discovered that I need to offer my students feminist values, even if they can’t necessarily receive them at the moment we discuss them in class. I have been asking my students about feminism and art for several years now and they have surprised me with both the depth of their interest in feminism and their lack of knowledge about its history in the art world. When I ask if they know any feminist artists, they often tell me “Cindy Sherman.” But when we continue the discussion, the students offer incredible insights such as the response of one student to a comment from another who said “all feminists are angry”: “You are right, she said, “while anger solves nothing by itself, it can be a great motivator in pushing people to fight for more equality.” I continued by discussing my various roles and my impact as a feminist. As a writer and thinker who works in various arenas—speaking to students and academic colleagues, speaking in the scholarly and mainstream art 11 I am grateful to Emmanuel Lemakis and his staff at CAA, as well as Judy Brodsky, Ferris Olin, Tiffany Calvert, and Nicole Plett at Rutgers who provided many kinds of support and assistance in developing the events. Additionally, I must thank Dena Muller, Midori Yoshimoto, and Joan Snitzer for their help. And finally, I acknowledge the kind assistance of the panel chairs who helped shape this day, in addition to managing their own panels. Joanna Frueh and Suzanne Lacy offered me particular advice and help for which I am most thankful.

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press, speaking to artists, museum professionals, and their audiences—I have learned that all of my practices are directly related to the success of women artists, to their critical and market reception. Often overlooked in the discussion in America is the consideration of the market. My insight here is that the market and criticism are essential to the success of individual artists and to feminism. There is an intergenerational disconnect in feminism today; activism has to take a more assertive role in our dialogues, our writing, and our teaching. It is important to realize that we have spent decades articulating the problems facing feminist art, now we have to speak about what we will do next. We need to take advantage of our opportunities to discuss feminist issues, artists, and art on every level, from the “do-it-yourself” culture of blogs and zines to our classrooms, tours, acquisitions, exhibitions, articles, and books. I have learned as a feminist art historian that I have a responsibility to look at both the institutionally ratified artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Nancy Grossman, and Judy Chicago, among others, alongside established artists deserving a retrospective and a monograph, like Rosemarie Castoro, Maren Hassinger, and Mimi Gross, and the rising artists gaining newfound currency in the artworld, such as Mickalene Thomas, Sungmi Lee, and Deidre Houget. It is incumbent upon me to write about their work in an effort to promote its circulation and institutional validation. Historical significance comes through sharing of the privilege to speak authoritatively as a contemporary specialist about their work and to create a critical paradigm that fosters the success of women artists. When I consider the state of feminism and art today, I am filled with wonder. Ever optimistic, I cling to my early impressions of art as offering the joyful, pleasureful experience that, at its most interesting, makes me think about my world or understand someone else’s world. Feminist art has helped me personally make sense of my world and my experiences. Through the range of discourses in which we participate, we have power. Notwithstanding the complexities of the market, feminism has had and will continue to have an important impact on the reach of art and art history.

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Fig. 12-1: Mimi Gross, Arlene Raven and Her Artgroup Women, 2006. Oil and oil crayon on canvas, 114 x 159 inches. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, NYC, and Salander-O’Reilly Gallery, NYC.

Works Cited Akbar, Arifa. “Tate admits need to buy more works by women artists,” The Independent, 26 March 2007. “Arlene Raven interview by Cheri Gaulke,” September 19, 1992, New York, Woman’s Building Oral History Project. King-Hammond, Leslie. “Agents of Change: Women, Art and Intellect,” Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender, and Culture, edited by Johanna Burton and Anne Swartz, no. 17 (Fall 2007). Swartz, Anne. “Feminist Art: A Reassessment.” In M/E/A/N/I/N/G, edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor, no. 4, 2007, . —. “She Is Who She Wants To Be,” Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender, and Culture, edited by Johanna Burton and Anne Swart z, no. 17 (Fall 2007). Yoshimoto, Midori and Anne Swartz, “Feminist Art Events at Conference,” CAA News (May 2007): 5.

CONTRIBUTORS

Anthea Behm is a visual artist working with performance, video and photography, to explore contemporary culture and identity. Currently, she is studying for an MFA at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. Recent awards include the 2007 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship and the University Postgraduate Award from the University of New South Wales, Australia. Exhibitions to date include Identity Thieves, 4A Gallery, Sydney; Projector, Back Loft Gallery, Dublin; Sold Out, Truck Art, London; and forthcoming: Girl Parade, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. Alisia Grace Chase is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture in the Art Department of SUNY College at Brockport. Her research focuses on the visual representation of women in American cinema, contemporary art, and comics. Her essays are included in the following publications: The Great American Makeover: Television, History, Nation; the graphic novels AYA and Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip (Vols. 1-V); Abito E Indetita: Recherché de Storia Letteraria e Culturale (Vol. V), as well as the forthcoming Virgin Territory. She has also published a number of reviews in both Film Quarterly and Afterimage: Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism. Jennifer G. Germann is Assistant Professor of Art History at Ithaca College, where she teaches visual culture and art history. She specializes in the art and architecture of eighteenth-century France. Most recently, she published “Fecund Fathers and Missing Mothers: Louis XV, Marie Leszczinska, and the Politics of Royal Parentage in the 1720s” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, no. 36 (2007). She is currently completing a book-length study on the representation of Queen Marie Leszczinska in relation to the image of the French monarchy in the eighteenth century. Catherine Grant is the Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She finished her PhD, entitled “Different Girls: Performances of adolescence in contemporary photographic portraits”, at the Courtauld in 2006. Her research interests are currently focused on developing her PhD work on the representation of

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adolescence in contemporary art, and the importance of gesture and pose in the photographic portrait. Joanne Heath is a doctoral candidate in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Her research emerged out of an initial interest in the correspondences between medical and artistic representations of the female body in fin-de-siècle France. Her PhD thesis is structured around the dual scenarios of doctor/patient and artist/model relations, and examines how women came to re-negotiate the boundaries of these symbolically classed and gendered relationships. Her contribution to this volume forms part of her broader research and teaching interests in the field of feminist art history and visual culture. Ruth Hemus completed her PhD at The University of Edinburgh, where she held a post as research assistant on a three-year project examining the European avant-garde. Both were funded by the AHRC. She currently teaches at The Open University and at Royal Holloway (University of London), and also works as a freelance translator, specializing in art texts for monographs, catalogues and exhibitions. Her interests span fine art, performance, literature, and gender studies, with an emphasis on modernist and avant-garde movements. She has published several articles on women’s interventions within Dada, and is currently working on a book, entitled Dada’s Women. Alexandra M. Kokoli (MA Warwick, DPhil Sussex) is Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University. She has published on Angela Carter, the women’s postal art event Feministo: Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife (1975-77), Susan Hiller, and other contemporary artists. Her research interests are widely interdisciplinary, spanning the Freudian uncanny, feminist and postcolonial critiques of language and representation, and the legacies of second-wave feminism in the visual arts. She is currently researching the critical reception of Tracey Emin and preparing a monograph on feminism and the uncanny. Beth Anne Lauritis is a PhD candidate in Contemporary Art and Critical Theory in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation focuses on the problematic of identity within conceptual and feminist art discourse. This study concentrates on the period 1965-1980, but extends as well to the contemporary legacy of this conjuncture.

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Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of CentreCATH at the University of Leeds. Author of many works on international feminist cultural theory and visual analysis, including Old Mistresses (1981), Vision and Difference (1988), Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts (1996), Differencing the Canon (1999), she is currently working on trauma, catastrophe and cultural memory, psychoanalysis and aesthetics, and the concentrationary imaginary in culture. Recent books include: Psychoanalysis and the Image (2006), Museums after Modernism (2007) and Encountering Eva Hesse (2006). Forthcoming are Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Routledge, 2007), Theatre of Memory: Charlotte Salomon and Allothanatography (Yale, 2008) and The Case Against "van Gogh" (2008). Karen Roulstone is an artist and writer. Her solo exhibitions include: Stasis, Larson Art Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Decipher, ARC Gallery, Chicago, Illinois; Reconfiguring Absence, Robert Langen Gallery, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada; as well as contributions to numerous group shows. Her research centres on issues of painting, concepts of absence (rethinking the way in which absence might signify), and the possibilities of practice-led research. She has recently completed a practice-led PhD at the University of Plymouth and is a Visiting Lecturer at the Bristol School of Art Media and Design, University of the West of England. Anne Swartz is Professor of Art History at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She is currently completing a book on new media art for Prentice Hall and is guest-curating an exhibition on Pattern and Decoration for the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York. She recently co-edited a volume on art critic Arlene Raven’s legacy for Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender, and Culture, to which she also contributed a critical biographical essay on Raven. She is the honours awards chair for the Women’s Caucus for Art. She writes and lectures widely on contemporary art and feminism. Sue Tate is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Under her former name, Sue Watling, she cocurated a retrospective exhibition of Pauline Boty’s work in London, jointly hosted by the Whitford Fine Art and the Mayor galleries, and contributed an essay (“Pauline Boty: Pop Artist”) to the catalogue, The Only Blonde in the World.