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Griselda Pollock Feminist Intervention in Art History 1988 PDF
Griselda Pollock Feminist Intervention in Art History 1988 PDF
* Der Beitrag ist eine Is adding women to art history the same as producing feminist art history? 1 Deman
gekiirzte Fassung des ding that women be considered, not only changes what is studied and what becomes
Vorworteszu dem Buch:
Griselda Pollock (Hrsg.), releva nt to investigate, but it challenges the existing disciplines politically. Women
Vision and Difference. ha ve not been omitted through forgetfulness or mere prejudice. The structura l
Feminism, Feminity and sexism of most academic disciplines contributes actively to the production a nd per
Histories of Art, Methuen,
1987. petua tion of a gender hiera rchy. Wha t we learn a bout the world a nd its peoples is
ideologica lly patterned in conformity with the social order within which it is produ
ced. Women's studies a re not just a bout women but a bout the socia l systems a nd
ideologica l schema s which susta in the domina tion of men over women within the
other mutua lly inflecting regimes of power in the world, na mely those of cla ss a nd
those of ra ce. 2
Feminist art history, however, began inside art history. The first question was
»Have there been women a rtists?« We initia lly thought a bout women a rtists in
terms of art history's typical procedures a nd protocols studies of artists (the mono
graph) , collections of works to make an oeuvre (catalogues raisonnes), questions of
style a nd iconogra phy, membership of movements a nd a rtists' groups, a nd of
course the question of quality. It soon became clear that this would be a straitjacket
in which our studies of women a rtists would reproduce a nd secure the norma tive
sta tus of men a rtists a nd men's a rt whose superiority wa s unquestioned in its dis
1 Freely paraphrased from
guise as Art a nd the Artist. As early a s 1971 Linda Nochlin wa rned us against get
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, ting into a nowin game trying to name female Michelangelos. The criteria of great
Placing Women's History in ness wa s a lrea dy ma le defined. The question »Why a re there no Grea t Women
History, New Left Review,
1982, no. 133, p. 6.
Artists?« simply would not be a nswered to a nything but women's disa dva nta ge if
2 For the founding analysis
we rema ined tied to the ca tegories of a rt history. These specified in a dva nce the
in this area which has much kind of a nswers such a question would merit. Women were not historica lly signifi
to teach feminist studies ca nt artists (they could never deny their existence once we began to unearth the evi
while demanding feminist
studies comprehend
dence a ga in) beca use they did not ha ve the inna te nuggett of genius (the pha llus)
deconstructions of imperia which is the natural property of men. So she wrote: »A Feminist critique of the dis
list discourse and practice cipline is needed which can pierce cultura lideologica l limita tions, to reveal bia ses
see Edward Said, Orienta
lism, London, Routledge and
a nd inadequacies not merely in regard to the question of women artists, but in the for
Kegan Paul 1978. mulation of the crucial questions of the discipline as a whole. Thus the soca lled
3 Linda Nochlin, Why Have woma n question fa r from being a periphera l subissue, ca n become a ca ta lyst, a
There Been No great Women potent intellectua l instrument, probing the most ba sic a nd >na tura l< a ssumptions,
Artists? in ed. Elizabeth
Baker and Thomas B. Hess,
providing a pa ra digm for other kinds of interna l questioning, a nd providing links
Art and Sexual Politics, with paradigms established by radical a pproa ches in other fields.« 3
London Collier Macmillan In effect Linda Nochlin ca lled for a paradigm shift. The notion of a paradigm
1973, p. 2. See also the
article in which she poses
has become quite popula r a mongst socia l historia ns of a rt who borrow from Tho
the corollary question, Why ma s Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions in order to articulate the crisis in a rt
have there been Great Male history which overturned its existing certainties and conventions in the early 1970s.4
ones?, The DePoliticisation
ofCourbet..., October, 1982
A pa ra digm defines the objectives sha red within a scientific community, wha t it
no 22. a ims to research and explain, its procedures and its boundaries. It is the disciplina ry
4 Thomas Kuhn, The ma trix. A pa ra digm shift occurs when the domina nt mode of investiga tion a nd
Structure of Scientific expla na tion is found to be unable satisfactorily to explain the phenomenon which is
Revolutions, Chicago,
Chicago University Press,
tha t science's or discipline's job to a na lyse. In dea ling with the study of the history
1962. of nineteenth a nd twentieth century art the dominant pa ra digm has been identified
discipline of literary criticism, Raymond Williams has observed: »What seems to 8 Karl Marx, Grundrisse
(1857-8) translated Martin
me very striking is that nearly all forms of contemporary critical theory are theories Nicolaus, London Penguin
of consumption. That is to say, that they are concerned with understanding an Books, 1973, p. 92.
quently. Cultural practice as a site of such representation has been analysed in 13 K.Marx, The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,
terms d erived from Marx's initial insights about the relation between the political (1852) in K. MarxundF.
and economic levels.13 Finally representation involves a third inflection, for it signi Engels, Selected Works on
fies something represented to, addressed to a read er/viewer/consumer. One Volume, London,
Lawrence and Wishart,
Theories of representation have been elaborated in relation to Marxist d eba 1970. For discussion see
tes about ideology. Ideology does not merely refer to a collection of ideas or belief. also S. Hall, The ..Political.,
It is d efined as a systematic ord ering of a hierarchy of meanings and a setting in and the ..Economic., in
Marx's Theory of Classes, in
place of positions for the assimilation of those meanings. It refers to material practi ed. A. Hunt Class and Class
ces embodied in concrete social institutions by which the social systems, their con Structure, London, Law
flicts and contradictions are negotiated in terms of the struggles within social forma rence Wishart, 1977.
kritischeberichte1/88 11
sent configuration of sexual politics and power relations. Art History is not just
indifferent to women; it is a masculinist discourse, party to the social construction
of sexual difference. As an ideological discourse it is composed of procedures and
techniques by which a specific representation of art is manufactured. That repres
entation is secured around the primary figure of the artist as individual creator. No
doubt theories of the social production of art combined with the structuralist assas
sination of the author would also lead to a denunciation of the archaic individualism
at the heart of art historical discourse. But it is only feminists who have nothing to
lose with the desecration of Genius. The individualism of which the artist is a prime
symbol is gender exclusive.19 The artist is one major articulation of the contradic
tory natur of bourgeois ideals of masculinity. 20 T he figure remains firmly entren 19 Griseld a Pollock, Art, Ar:
ched in marxist art history witness the work of T .J. Clark, the Modern Art and School and Culture -
Ind ivid ualism after the death
Modernism course at the Open University and even Louis Althusser on Cremo of the artist, Block, 1985/6
nini. 21 It has become imperative to deconstruct the ideological manufacture of this no 11 and Exposure (USA)
priveleged masculine individual in art historical discourse. 1986 vol 24 no 3.
Complementing the task of deconstruction, is feminist rewriting of the history 20 For fuller discussion of
this point see Griselda
of art in terms which firmly locate gender relations as a determining factor in cul Pollock, The History and
tural production and in signification. This involves feminist readings, a term borro Position of the Contempo
wed from literary and film theory. Feminist readings involve texts often produced rary Woman Artist, Aspects,
1984, no 28.
by men and with no conscious feminist concern or design which are susceptible to
21 The point was made in a
new understanding through feminist perceptions. Psychoanalysis has been a major seminar by Adrian Rivkin at
force in European and British feminist studies despite widespread feminist suspi the University of Leeds in
cion of the sexist applications of Freudian theory in this century. As Juliet Mitchell 1985. See also Simon
Watney, Modernist Studies:
commented in her important book challenging feminist critiques, Psychoanalysis The Class of'83, Art History,
and Feminism, Freudian theory offers not a prescription for a patriarchal society 1984, vol 7. no.LOn
but a description of one which we can use to understand its functionings. In her Althusser see Louis Althus
ser, Cremonini, Painter of the
introduction she referred to the Parisian feminist group »Psychanalyse et Politique« Abstract, and A Letter on
and explained their interest in psychoanalysis. Art... in Lenin and Philosophy
»Influericed, but critcally, by the particular interpretation of Freud offered by and other Essays, trans. Ben
Brewster, New Left Books,
Jacques Lacan, >Psychanalyse et Politique< would use psychoanalysis for an under 1971.
standing of the operations of the unconscious... T heir concern is to analyse how 22 Juliet Mitchell, Psycho
men and women live as men and women within the material conditions of their exi analysis and Feminism,
stence both general and specific. They argue that psychoanalysis gives us the con London, Allen Lane, 1974, p
xxii.
cepts with which we can comprehend how ideology functions; closely connected
23 The quotation is from
with this, it further offers analysis of the place and meaning of sexuality and gender Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics
differences within society. So where Marxist theory explains the historical and eco and Society. The Regulation
nomic situation, psychoanalysis, in conjunction with notions of ideology already of Sexuality since 1800,
London Longman, 1981, p.
gained in dialectical materiaism, is the way of understanding ideology and sexua 33. Foucault elaborates the
lity.*22 case in The History of
Foucault has provided a social account of the discursive construction of Sexuality (La Volontede
Savoir 1976), London, Allen
sexuality and he argued that in some critical sense »sexuality« is fundamentally Lane, 1978, p.127.»We
bourgeois in origin. »It was in the great middle classes that sexuality albeit in a must say that there is a
morally restricted and sharply defined form, first became of major ideological signi bourgeois sexuality, and that
there are class sexualities.
ficance. «23 Foucault identifies psychoanalysis as itself a product of the will to know, Or rather, that sexuality is
the construction and subjection of the sexualised body of the bourgeoisie. 24 T he originally, historically
deployment of psychoanalytical theory by contemporary feminists is not a flight bourgeois, and that, in its
successive shifts and
from historical analysis into some universalistic theory. Rooted historically on the transpositions, it induces
mode of analysis (and a technique for relieving the extreme effects) of the social class specific effects."
relations, practices and institutions which produced and regulated bourgeois sexua 24 Foucault, op. cit., p. 129.