Art INSIDE THE VISIBLE An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth-Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine edited by M. Catherine de Zegher Published on the occasion of a major exhibition opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Inside the Visible presents g provocative reading of artwork by over thirty women attists of vastly different back: grounds and experiences. The work of important yet previously “invisible” figures is highlighted alongside that of established artists to create a retheorized interpretation of the art of this century ‘Structured in tems of recurrent historical cycles, Inside the Visible focuses on three periods (the 1930s-40s, the 1960s-70s, and the 199Qs),that antieipated waves of political repression, nationalism, and xenophobia, and in which artistic practice was often redefined. Ilustrated essays document each artist inthe exhibition. In addition five general essays trace connections among the artists, taking up such issues as why artistic recognition eluded certain artists and why theie work is only becoming legible today. They also address overlapping themes such as gender intersected with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of identity, as constituted in different M. Catherine de Zegher is Director of the Kanaal Att Foundation, Kortrijk (Belgium); initiator of the series of exhibitions in the Flemish Béguinage of Kortrik that formed the nucleus of Inside the Visible; and co-curator af the exhibition America: Bride of the Sun, 500 Years of Latin America and the Low Countries (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, 1992). ‘The MIT Press Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 DEZIP swonve-mitpress.mit.edu 0-262-54081-9INSIDE THE VISIBLE in, of, and from the feminine curated and edited by M. Catherine de Zegher The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston The Kanal Art Foundation, Kortrijk, Flanders The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England eeInscriptions in the Feminine riselda Pollock 81971 Bridget Riley sad that women antsts nee ed feminism—"this hysteria’—like they needed a hole in the head. The statement appeared in Art and Sexual Poities, one of the earliest publications to confront this topic.‘ In the climate of a still hegemonic modernism, to conjoin the terms art, sex, and politics was a transgression. In the 1990s, it remains theoreti- cally and critically perplexing yet unquestionably necessary I (On the field of cultural contest in the early 1970s, two historic paradigms met head-on: mod: ‘emism and feminism. Despite institutionelized madernise’s considerable attractions for the many women artists who embraced its aesthetic berties, the movement had performed the liberal lie": in pursuit of universal truths, absolute values, and aesthetic purity, gender and all other forms of social positioning were deemed irrelevant. Yet they remained not only determi nant but structural, valorizing only certain meanings and identities as significantly modern, For Clement Greenberg, a eritie who played a powerful role in defining the central achieve ments of modernism, gender, like class or race, was part of the baggage of ideological conflict in modem societies that must be expunged if ambitious art was to perform its heroie act of self-preservation within capitalism and against fascism. For women, however, burdened by the oppressive weight of gender created in the preceding century, modernists apparent autonomy beckoned, promising a realm of new freedoms For nineteenth-century bourgeois cultures, gender was a central column upholding social hierarchies. Denied access to social and politcal subjecthood, defined as legal minors and ‘economic dependents, condemned to intellectual pauperism, women were, however, allowed a confined sphere of “feminine” influence and moral authority exclusively in the home. This domesticated female mission was nonetheless allowed limited ideological endorsement through a specifically feminine art and literature. The difficulty was that the price of access to. this feminine art was total subjection to the prevailing definition of what it was to be “Woman'—a classed as well as racializing trope.’ Overfeminization re ted from this histor cal development in which the “empire of gender saturated the entirety of one’s being.* All women became but another face ofthe singular abstraction Woman,Modernism, which emerged just as women were politically challenging the bourgeois state for the right to self-representation (at the level of culture as much as of politics), seemed to offer an antidote to this generalizing sexualization through its apparent aesthetic autonomy from the social and its priing of unique—ungendered—ingividuality To be an artist under the modemist dispensation promised women a way to be more than mere ‘women artists” or lady painters. The woman question engaged all of society ina profound debate about enunciations of femininity, which were defined in relation to other key terms: nature or history, the home or the socal, timeless entity or changing possibility* Modernism, identified with progress and the possibilty of socal transformation and with the invention of new identities in opposition to notions of tradition, eternal verity, and the decrees of nature, seemed to offer a space for women to reinvent themselves as “new women,” identified with freedom, progress, and radical change—these figuring an escape from overfeminization But it was a lie. Modernism simply inverted the problem and produced for women a radi- cal underfeminization without altering masculine hegemony. In a founding text of revived fem- inism, published in 1973, Carol Duncan identified early twentieth-century modernism not merely as overtly masculinist—in its continuing preoccupation with white men’s experience but as assertively virle—socially as well as iconographically obsessed with male heterosexuali- ty as the defining trope of artistic ercatvity.” Across Europe in avant-garde centers, male antists depicted the site of modern artiste production, the studio, asthe scene of a dramatic encounter between male creator and his sexual object, woman, the product of which uneven exchange was a virile modern art written on the bodies of working women. His freedom was articulated as sexual, as were the wellsprings ofthis modern creativity. The emergent mythologies of the modem artist produced a specifically gendered concept of the autogenetic artist—the artist who ereates himself—which was initially staged through the cultural murder of the Mother and of the maternal feminine and through the construction of a masculine subjectivity in relation to the tropes ofa degraded, prostituted, or lesbian sexuality. From Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Rouault through to the definitive icon of early modernism centrally positioned in the Museum of Modern At’ narrative space), Picassols Demoiselles Avignon (1907), this trope of masculine creativity shaped in dramatic encounter witha pri- ‘mal sexuality—figured through an abjeet or monstrous female body—forms a major genealogy of modem art Julia Kristeva writes: "This is why one of the most accurate representations of creation, that is, of {modern] artiste practice, is the series of paintings by Willem de Kooning entitled Woman: savage, explosive, funny inaccessible creatures in spite of the fact they have been massacred by the artist.” Carol Duncan, writing with her coauthor Alan Wallach, ana- Iyzes the narrative enshrined in the Museum of Modern Att that cuns from Demoiselles to Woman Fas the performance of a virile, sexually assertive masculine psyehodrama encounter- ing and mastering the monstrous or Fertile feminine.” Such a history presented specific dilemmas for modernist women artists In what terms could femininity and ereativity be articulated in these modernist spaces and narratives of artistic innovation? How could women artists reclaim their image, their bodies as signs of a different embodiment of cultural agency? Could the body of woman also be the body of ere- ative intellect and sexuality?" An artist like Paula Modersohn Becker, engaged by what she found in Paris on visits between 1900 and 1907, attempted to combine the tropes of untram- meled creativity (nature, the body, paradise, the wild) and female generatvity in her sell-por- trait of 1906, but the iconic load buckled under its contradictory, oF rather culturally unau thorized, connotations.oviptions in the Feminine During the 1920s and 1930s, drawn to the surrealist investigation of sexuality and the unconscious, women artists were confounded by the governing fantasies of a masculine het cerosexual psyche in which woman as muse, femme-enfant, or goddess obstructed any acknowledged articulation of an autonomous feminine subjectivity From the thirties to the fifties women were attracted to the spaces and practices of a more abstract modernism, with its as yet unvitten scripts and its distance from the ideological overload of figurative repre sentation then articulating so crudely the male/female dichotomies, Yet even here women found themselves caught in another deadly paradox. To gain access to more of their humanity, they would be permitted none to their femininity: Any traces of a gendered perspective or ae thetic sensibility would immediately suspend their claims to being considered serious artists, while, of course, any art that cannot call upon the Full range of the producer's material and social experience will feel incomplete, inauthentic, like a masquerade." Ambitious modernist women negotiated this contradiction in constant fear that their modernist credentials would be compromised by the contamination of gender, which official modernist crities never Failed to discern and, detecting, to use to support the continuing hierarchy in which art by men was seen as unmarked, ungendered, universal in its revelations about the human condition while art made by women was always deemed to lack breadth, remaining partial, local, gender- based, and impossible to consider as art pure and simple; it was still, and always, women? art ‘That meant not really art at all. That is why Bridget Riley and her generation viewed femi- nism and its embrace of an avowed woman's perspective with the gravest of suspicions." Femininity, not feminism, is what reveals a “hole” in the “head’—a female body in place of a modernist rationality or cerebral unconscious. Women's art was, therefore, other, and that otherness offered nothing but the signs of whet it lacked vis-a-vis what the masculinist modernist institution found in the art of men. Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers are sexual and feminine, whereas Monet’s or Van Gogh's are ti tumphs of pure color and responses to nature.'* These contradictions never stopped the ‘women producing in any of the moments or movements of twentieth-century modernism and beyond, but they have progressively ensured the invisibility of women artists in the con- solidated narratives and celebratory exhibitions that canonized an institutional and later an academic history of moder art. Inside the Visible challenges that invisibility by proposing to excavate a feminist genealogy of twentieth-century artists who are women, creating other chains of association and dialogues across time and space that frame and examine the con tradictions of sexual difference and cultural positioning, This reveals a consistent history of autistic practices by women that can now cross this threshold of institutional blindness, ere- ating unexpected links and conversations across this century’ artistic moments at the mar- gins as much as in the centers, This is possible because in excavating an erased past we reenvision the prehistory of the present: the modernist moment that is the lost condition of ‘our postmodem situation. The premise of that historical project lies in a theoretical revolu: tion that enables us now to see artists and work that had been made invisible, illegible, irrel- evant. The feminist questioning of the present permits us to decipher the past and thus realign that present through a historically enriched understanding of the interrupted conti- huities of women’s struggles in the modern era. It has taken more than twenty years of con- tinuous theoretical work to imagine other ways to read (for) our histories and thus to situate our presents as something more profound than mere passing novelty or political fashion. The contradictions at the heart of official modernism were retrospectively revealed in the 1970s when a specifically feminist discourse emerged to challenge the liberal lie with a repoliticiza tion of the question of gender: art and sexual politics.Griselda Pollock The repoliticization of gender is a historically new set of theorizations of sexual differ- cence. The aim is to work beyond the opposition—to use a tactical insistence on sexual differ cence in order strategically to rupture the power systems that operate upon this explicit, some- times latent, use of gender as an axis of hierarchy and power. The aim is to seek ways in which the difference of the feminine might function not merely as an alternative but as the dialectical spring to release us from the binary trap represented by sex/gender. This involves its own creative paradox: to seek articulations of the specifically feminine whose effects upon the totality of culture will be to displace homogeneity in favor of a radical heterogeneity, “Gender’—the division of the world into fixed oppositions anthropomorphically figured as, man and woman—erases many other forms of difference: issues of sexuality and cultural diversity. The “feminine” serves to name its own political constituency and also, beyond the visible forms of gender, to signal a radical alterity in relation to a culture that dominates in the name of Man. Displacing the reign of gender that we have inherited will open doors to critical confrontations with all forms of xenophobia: fears of difference, of the stranger, of the other." a But feminist eriticism is also likely to be complicitous with the institution, and the work of recognising how that may be, is the place where feminist criticism ean move from opposition to critique, and thus to change. Gayatri Spivak, “Imperialism and Sexual Difference" Feminist criticism challenges the liberal lie-—the modemist unconscious of gender—by reasserting the importance of gender in making and analyzing art. Feminism was at first oppo- sitional, celebrating the signs of women’s gender identities and proclivities in a simple reversal of the modemist erasure. An alternative tradition, a neglected history of women artists, was excavated and new organizations and campaigns established to promote and exhibit contem porary art by women. There can be no denying the immense tactical importance of fer nisms explosion onto the art scene since the eatly 1970s. Lucy Lippard has written eloquent: ly of what it meant as a critic to come to a feminist awareness of modernism’s blinkered view of art without a sex."In 1980 Lippard claimed that “feminism’s greatest contribution to the Future of art has probably been precisely its lack of contribution to modernism.” Offering a socially concerned alternative, threading female experience into the fabric of mainstream art through autobiography, narrative, and collage, feminism aimed not to add a new style, or shift the formal trajectory of art. “The goal of feminism is to change the character of art.”" The politicization of gender, for Lippard, participated in a broader project to reconnect artistic practices to communities and social purposes radically opposed to the institutionalized elitism of canonized modemist culture.” In a project as complex as that facing contemporary feminism no strategies are without value and significance, and I do not intend to fall into the usual traps of ereating theoretical orthodoxy. I want to advance another perspective on the problematic of reading the visual arts made by women from an engaged feminist commitment. I draw on a particular set of resources, references, politics, and theories that form one corner of the patchwork of the long-term project that feminism represents in the histories of modemity and in the futures that we are now making.”Inseziptions in the Feminine I want to outline a parallel trajectory that, taking its cue from Gayatri Spivak, represents the critical position, reexamining both the liberal lie and oppositional feminism in a dialectic in which reversal is not the tactic. Intervention is the organizing idea in practices that accept that there is no outside to use as a resource against a dominant inside; there is no elsewhere Ireyond the spaces of discourse, although unrecognized, unspoken elements appear within that discourse once its own contradictions are deconstructed from the intemal altrity of a feminist position. Feminist strategies suich as pivoting the center, reading against the grain, taking the view from elsewhere that is in fuct right here, and s ig with a matrixial gave take us from the certainties of men and women, the logics of sameness (women aiming to be assimilated to the dominant norms of power and social effectivity through economic and social equality with privileged men) and of difference (women asserting their irreducible oth- cemess in opposition to the dominant culture and society through the specificities of their bodies, language, psyches, or maternally defined culture). The construct gender (or "sex" in the many languages that do not have this term) has been shifted by feminism in its perverse alliances with other streams of intellectual and political challenge to Western bourgeois modernity: Feminism has flourished in the poststructuralist universe of textuality, positionali- ty, subjectivity, process, play, and difference. For many this reads as a betrayal of the polities that seem so much more palpable in the discourse and practice of oppositional feminism. Rather politics is critically reframed in another form of the move to challenge the character of existing discursive and institutional definitions of art and, as importantly, of artist by situating polities at the level of representation, cultural institution, signs, and their subjects. The dominant mode of consumption and criticism of twentieth-century artis curatorial The histories of modern art were primarily shaped by the muscum, and its categories contin- ue to define what is studied and how it is studied in colleges, universities, and art publica- tions. Preservation and cataloguing promote divisions between andl hierarchies of painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, collage, photomontage, photography; film, design, and so forth. These produce segregated histories. Cataloguing is by artist, and thus authorship defines the field. ‘This authorship reflects the partnerships among the museum, the academy, and the market by representing the artist in the bourgeois form of creative, autonomous, pro- prietary, and self-possessing subject whose authorizing signature becomes the value-determin ing brand name of a marketable commodity that is culturally consumed and remembered in that personally packaged form.” Finally, periodization classifies these authored, media-defined practices into chapters in the narrative of modern art ~isms plays and chronicled in published surveys ‘The dominance of this curatorial model poses specific problems for any artistic practices that do not easily conform to those modes that already presuppose their content—modes tai- lored to selective practices and their related myths of artistic identity that the museum antict pates and then confirms as a continuing history of great male individuals grouped into a tele logy of innovative movements. Practices and identities other than these cannot be placed in this model that presents itself merely as the mirror of a spontaneously produced, selfcanoniz- ing culture. Oppositional criticism leaves this structuce in place while inadvertently conficm- ing that what is outside its remit is outsider art, even when the published aim is assimilation ‘Thus, feminism has needed to develop forms of analysis that can confront the difference of women as other than what is other to this masculine order while exposing the sexual pol- ties of dominant discourses and institutions. Attempts to write histories of the last twenty years have yielded too easily to the curatorial model, turning politics and debates into camps and positions: essentialism versus (de}constructionism, politics versus theory, painting versus made conerete in museum dis-seripto-visual media, American versus European, These are dangerous disfigurements and forms of internal alienation that we eannot afford, want to do a litle archaeology into the moment of feminism confrontation with mod. temism and its unconscious in order to offer a particular, provisional, but I hope productive contribution to what must remain an expanded and complex Feld of possibilities all motivated by the need to confront the dilemmas and horrors of late twentieth-century societies with a feminist commitment. Feminism must begin to consider its own histories without murdering its mothers or falling into the postmodern trap of neotribalism. 1 Certain contemporary thinkers, as is well known, consider that modernity ig the characterised as the first epoch in human history in which human beings attempt to live without religion. In its present form, is not feminism in the process of becoming one? Oris it, on the contrary and as avant-garde fem nists hope, that having started with the idea of difference, feminist willbe able to break ree ofits belief in Woman, Her power, Her writin, so as to channel this demand for difference into each and every element of the female whole, and finaly, to bring out the singularity of each woman, and beyond this, her multiplicities, her plural languages, beyond the horizon, beyond sight, beyond faith itself ~Julia Kristeva, "Women’s Time In 1977 the artist Mary Kelly gave a paper at a conference entitled “Art and Sexual Politics As an intervention in the developing discourse of feminist criticism, the paper alerted its readers to the curatorial model: "First of all, 'd like to make a distinction between ‘feminist practice’ and ‘the feminist problematic’ in art (problematic in the sense that a concept cannot be isolated from the general theoretical or ideological framework in which it is used). For one aspect of ‘the problematic’ is the absence of a notion of ‘practice’ in the way it is currently being phrased i.e., ‘What is feminist art? This provokes moralistic answers like ‘It is this, and not this. wing on Louis Althusser's radical redefinition of “the ideological” as a “nonunitary complex of social practices and systems of representation which have political conse quences,” Kelly shifted from the terrain of art discourse, that is, artists expressing them- selves, which feminism had taken over, to validate women as artists expressing theit women selves to produce a “feminist art.” The adjective feminist designates neither the author and her intentions, nor the active reference to the gender experience of the artist or her art's con tent, nor a new curatorial -ism. Rather it attaches here to interventions on the bases of their effects in rupturing existing regimes of power and ideological meaning, sexual and other forms of social difference.” Althusser's theory of ideology is premised on an intervention into Marxism by another rev olutionary force in twentieth-century thought: psychoanalysis. There is no ideology without a subject, claimed Althusser, making subjectivity a necessary element in social theories of power, Critical feminism can be defined precisely through its long-term and conflicted engagement with the notion of the subject and available theorizations of subjectivity” Kellys "Sexual written while she was making the The Post Partum Document (1975-83), sympto- matically refers to its moment of production in London in the mid-1970s.”” Out of that critical, politcal, and theoretical juncture she developed a way of theorizing woman as artist through the simultaneous formation of the subject in ideology, language, and sexual difference.Inscriptions in the Peninine Poststructural psychoanalysis here supplied feminism with a path through the thickets and Fiddles of women’s dilemmas under patriarchy: How are we made into the masculine and feminine ereatures of this regime ruled by the father? What happens to the mother in this ‘order? What excess is created by the submission to the law of castration? What aspeets of that excess, difference, cannot be articulated in its phallic signifying systems, and how can we access what the culture represses and renders unconscious or unsignified? How can we read the traces of feminine otherness that lack signifiers in @ phallocentric system but that press upon the feminine subject in fantasy, dream, hysteria, hallucination, and even madness? Could a psychoanalytically tuned theory of reading allow us to recover feminine meanings deposited in artistie practices that hitherto fell below the threshold of intelligibility and visibility? Kelly drew on a Freudian theory of narcissism and its related concept of identification to suggest ways to decipher the traces of this complex in the art currently being made by feminists. Underlying her analysis are two related ideas. The body—so often a key referent in feminist politics—is understood as a fantastic image of the imaginary ego, itself com- posed of identifications. This mocks any idea of a fixed identity or one based in a physical, anatomically defined body. Yet it does not deny the importance of a specifically feminine corporeality created through the impact of the maternal imago, voice, physical presence, and form and through later experiences of sexualities and reproduction, Equally, subjectivity is imagined as a perpetual flow of fantastic identifications that traverse empirically given genders or categories, Thus certain classic binary oppositions are instantly displaced: inside (the body) and outside (the world, society), imaginary and real, fantastie and empirical, individual and social, natural and cultural, In the Freudian theoretical frame, the notion of gender and its underpinning in any concept of nature or an actual, singular, anatomical body becomes impossible while the impact of the uneven and asymmetrical processes of sexual and social differentiation and related fantasies are paramount. Representation is not treated as the externalization of what is inside a coherent and discrete subject but defined as an imprecise domain permeating the purely imaginary boundaries of self and-other, inside and out, private and public, body and object, and so forth. The work of art ceases to be a fetishized object, the deposit of a coherent, autonomous subject/author. It is theorized as a text, a site of a working through culturaly.as well as personally freighted materials. Art practice, in addition to the meanings that the artist actively calculates and manufactures, registers traces of the processes of subjectivity that are always both conscious and uncon- scious at the level of a productive semiosis—a production of meaning via signs in which the culture of reception, the reader, is as vital as the process of producing, Kelly addressed a number of practices currently characteristic of an avowed feminist art ‘movement, Far from offering iconographic or overtly political interpretations of individual pieces, she read the works symptomatically for unconscious investment as a way of indexing fantasies and desires of socially and culturally specific feminine subjectivities. She identified four tendencies based on Freud's theories of narcissism: female culture (mother art)—identi- fication with the woman who feeds you: female anatomy (body art)—identification with her- self; feminine experience (ego art)—identification with an image of what she would like to be; and feminine discourse (other art), which articulates intersubjective relationships that ‘constitute her asa feminine subject, not object. This approach refused, therefore, to read {nto artwork known habits of women (central cores, typical colors, favored themes); indeed, to analyze at by interpreting symptoms at the level of psychic structures is a journey of dis ‘0very. The feminine (woman) is in many ways as unknown to those of us shaped within itsterms as it was to the analytical community that turned off the lights of interested knowledge Kelly read for what she called “feminine inscriptions In summary, [ 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 on absences as much as on presences; that such a reading suggests the way in which heterogeneous signilying processes underlie and olten erupt into signifying prac tice; that because of the coincidence of language and patriarchy the “Feminine” is (metaphorically) set on the side of the heterogeneous, the unnameable, the unsaid; and that in so far as the feminine is said, articulated in language, itis profoundly subversive. The phrase, “inscriptions in the feminine,” has an archaeological ring to it. As if decipher- ing an ancient culture whose language is lost while its strange monuments remain to puzzle and provoke our curiosity, we must assume that we do not yet know what is being traced upon the surfaces of culture by artists speaking in, from, or of the feminine. A feminist read ing for the inscriptions of the feminine means listening for the traces of a subjectivity formed in the feminine within and in conflict with a phallocentric system. Beyond that, it implies fig: tring out whae working fram that place, however unconsciously, might be producing, as yet tunarticulated, unrepresented, unsignified, unrecognized The feminine is both the repressed of patriarchal culture and its excess, beyond yet inside its limits, that which will radically alter the system by emerging into signification, Woman has already been posed as a riddle and an enigma by Freud himself in his lectures on femininity 1 do not mean to compound that myth of feminine indecipherability. | am arguing that there exist other, feminine, heterogeneous meanings whose outlines we trace in current regimes of sense merely as otherness, In a phallocentric culture such meanings are denied a scheme of signs to acknowledge them in the Symbolic, and so they do not appear to make sense—or they are treated merely as signs confirming the stereotype of feminine difference, lack, insuffi ciency. Yet at some level this feminine other is always being used by masculine culture as its material support, a resource, a negated excess critical to the arrangements of the current sym- bolic order and its hierarchies. We need not invent a whole new language to speak the always already known feminine that this culture has repressed like an ice block in its deep freeze. Rather, the model of excavation and decipherment offers a way to explode the simultaneous, abuse of women's inscriptions in culture as the negative cipher of masculine dominance and the negation of this alterity through cultural inattention to its specificities. am reminded here of Isak Dinesen’s short story “The Blank Page.” In a convent high in the hills above fields blue with flax seeded from the Holy Land, nuns spin and weave linen for the nuptial beds of royalty and nobility. Treasured in the same convent are small cuttings from these noble beds, bearing the stains of vieginity-proving blood, each framed and mount- ed with its dynastic armorial bearings and a name. A procession of elderly, mantilla-clad women makes regular pilgrimage to this “museum” of “women’s art” to read upon each blood- ed page stories of marriages, intrigues, children, alliances, the rise and fall of famous houses. One canvas merits special notice, attracts more gazes, incites the most profound contempla tion. “The frame is as fine as any, and as proudly carties the golden plate with the royal crown, But on this plate no name is inscribed and the linen within the frame is snow-white from comer to corner—a blank page.” Susan Gubar has used this story as a metaphor for women modernists’ complex relation to creativity and its sexed bodies." She sees the royal princesses framed within the narrativesof patriarchal society: bodies used and claimed as objects of kinship exchange. The blood is both the sign of that exchange and the trace of women’s only way into culture: bleeding into art, painting with their bodies. Within such a gallery, that which does not enter signification ‘in blood’ via such circuits of woman as object appears blank. Yet by the unswerving loyalty to that truth women are moved to greatest contemplation of another story—one that might be traced upon an only apparently uninseribed surface, one that might be projected upon its jopen screen. The story does not celebrate silence as a female cultural virtue: it brilliantly eve ates a double image, hinged both to the blankness ascribed to female dissidence in a phallo centric text and to the possibility of meanings “otherwise” that press upon its heterogeneous surface.” The multifaceted image of the blank page complements the theme “inside the vis- ble.” It marks the spot where women’s cultures appear unreadable according to the dominant narratives of art, at history, modernity, and modernism, while to a different eye that seeks beyond the visible for the index to other meanings, lives, traces of other configurations of the subject and the body, the surface is tich in possibilities for those desiring to decipher inserip- tions of the feminine as dissidence, difference, and heterogeneity. Here arguments proposed by Luce Irigaray and Héléne Cixous speak eloquently of our need t0 imagine new signifiers, co generate the signifying system that would allow a feminine imaginary and a feminine symbolic to be an effective part of the culture that at present leaves women in exile, in dereliction, in the wilderness of the enforced blanked-out page. While both writers have been assumed to be positing a feminine essence in the body of women from which these new metaphors would stem, I hear them ealling for new semiotic relations between the corporeality of the subject and the filters or signs through which meanings that might articulate otherwise what feminine subjects now are forced to experience hysterically ‘or psychotically because there are na metaphors to accommodate their own psychic, fantas- tic, and sewual lives. Such positions accept the body as an irreducible materiality for experi= ence always semiotically mediated, unconsciously imagined, lived, experienced through the defiles of significations, from the most archaie pictograms up through fantasy to fully symbol ic, linguistic thought." The problematic is, as Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger argues, at the level of the filters, the signifiers, the symbols, which do not fully exist for feminine otherness with- in a system exclusively signified by the phallus.” The feminist problematic might be thought ‘of as the inventing of such semiotic resources in order that our corporeal drives and the Far tasies through which they are experienced might be signifiable for us, to us, and to our there: by radically altered culture. At present, women’s culture suffers unbearably from too much “reading in.” Crities appear confident in their interpretations of artwork by women: it means this; she is saying that; iis feminist because she shows this .. . Apparently, we already know what women are, feel, expe- tience as women. The work remains tied in a loop of current ideological constructions of femn- ininties. This denies the radical unknownness of the unconscious and the depth and profun- dity of the alterty to which patriarchal cultures condemn those it calls “woman.” Thus the feminine ceases to function as a radical rupture of patriarchy, and we produce an idealized femininity based on the identification with the good mother to the exclusion of female aggres sion and other sadistic impulses or the ambivalence at the heat of all subjectivity." This exhibition realizes what it has taken, historically, theoretically, aesthetically, to ere ate the spaces within which marginalized work that addresses the effaced codes of feminine difference and feminine inscription in culture from socially, sexually, and culturally oppressed and liminal spaces can be brought into intelligibility. The exhibition proposes a different way of reading the history via periodizations that mimic historic shifts in socialGriselda Pollock alignments, fascism, the cold war, and postmodernity all revealed to have crucial subtexts related to the histories of sexual difference. In the conjunetion of work on a specifically femi nist problematic in the present and a revisioned prehistory of that moment, the radical shift from curatorial and modernist narrative is achieved; work by contemporary artists sharing this project in turn becomes legible and affective. Across that field we can work less as historians than as archaeologists—reading the dis- carded, ignored, or recently recovered monuments of women’s revolutionary poetics for the inscriptions in the feminine that articulate their own moments—politicaly, socially, sexually, semiotically—yet also constitute a chapter in a longer durée, a different temporality of the feminine within phallocentric cultures of which we are witnessing but the latest chapter. In “Women’s Time,” Julia Kristeva suggests that women are caught in varying time sys. tems: the historical challenge for emancipation reflected a desire to become a part of linear, historical time associated with the bourgeois nation-state and its political identities. ‘This was the time of political campaigns for equality and participation, of the desire to escape absolute difference and join the same, the one, the masculine. Distinct from that expression is the embrace of feminine difference, which operates within the rhythms and eycles of female sex- uality and the archaic organizations of reproduction: the time of body and sex. ‘To this ‘moment belongs the French writing of Cixous and the publishing house des femmes. This sec ond feminism, associated with psychoanalysis and literature, the time of the unconscious, is, no less historical: it operates on the longer temporality of the institution of sexual difference, the time of reproduction, which differs from the epochs that Marx theorized as the modes of production in which nations and classes operate. In a dialectical resolution of this opposition, Kristeva calls for a third space, rather than time: naming the women’s movement a signifying space that must both aceept the symbolic law—sacrifice of something of our materiality to language in order to be a signifying, nonpsychotic subject in social history—and transcend anthropomorphism: that is, representation of sacrifice and difference only in the figures of man and woman, Gender contains us within its fictions, and it needs to be disrupted. This does not imply some futuristic androgyny that will erase sexual specificity. It sets us on a path to imagine ourselves outside of sexual dimorphism. It is in this sense that the feminine can function of and for itself, and also as the dissidence that disturbs the rule of phallocentrism, radically realigning culture and its relations of difference. Much of the historical work exhibited in this show is both interesting and difficult to decipher because it operates on this edge, dispersing identity, inventing more bodies and masks, hybridizing the genders, in a radical poetics of difference that is ferninine not through depositing some gendered essence but through rupturing the phallic norms of fixed gender, fixed identity, fixed sexualities, fixed boundaries. Hannah Héch’s photomontages from the exotic wonderland of mass-produced media culture produce a constant stream of shocks and disturbances where hybrids do not relax into fixed meanings. Claude Cahun’s collaboration with Suzanne Malherbes produced a series of haunting images of the Jewish, lesbian, surreal- ist artist, multiplying the inventive possibilities of feminine imaginary beings through the poetics of photomontage, collage, and photographie fantasy and the dissipation of self-porteai- ture, No simple, reassuring positivity haunts these images: shocking, confusing, interrogative, perverse, they mark the site of feminine inscription as challenge to the certainties of the con: temporary feminist movement as much as of the dominant culturetions in the Feminine wv Marr is an unconscious space of simultaneous emergence and fading ofthe J and the unknown wox-1 which is neither fused, nor rejected. Matri is based on feminine/ore-natal interelations and exhibits shared borderspace in which I call differentiation-in-co-emergence and distance-in proximity are continu: ‘ously rehoned and reorganized by metramorphosis created by-—and further creating —relations without relating on the borders of absence and presence, object and subject, me and the stranger —Bracha Lichtenberg Extinger™ Significant as are Kristeva’s theses for a radical feminist signifying practice, she remains bound within an imaginary that only partially conceives how to distupt the law of subjectivity ruled by the phallus. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, painter, psychoanalyst, and feminist theo- rist, further develops feminist theorization of subjectivity and representation in ways sugges- tive for visual inscriptions by women artists Feminism has been waging a war on the myths, legends, texts, and canons of what it names patriarchal culture. Using poststructuralist theory, such a culture is defined as phallo centric, not only ruled by the name of the father but semantically organized around the privi- leged signifier the Phallus, in whose sovereign andl single image being and meaning are said to be exclusively constituted by oppositions: love/hate, one/Other, presence/absence, incorpo- ration/tejection, Even feminist attempts to critique phallocentrism have found themselves caught in its conceptual confines, defined relative to dominant phallic binarism Lichtenberg Ettinger, through an artistic practice dealing with heavily freighted materials that bear the wounds and scars of Europe's horrendous tragedy carved upon her own famili tet, began to intimate another dimension ofthis ferninist project to see through what struc tures the phallic system to something that is not phallic but resides with it, at times an alter native, at times a supplement, always a relief, sub- rather than presymbolic.* She names this siratum of subjectivization—this level at which subjectivity is forged and we become sub- jects—matrixial. The matrix is linked to “the feminine,” but by this concept neither a biologi cal nor an anatomical description is intended. The matrix refers to the subjectivities associat- cd with invisible feminine sexual specificity raised to the level of a symbol—that is, i is afi ter for archaic sensations and the most archaic form of meaning, the pictogram, which relates toa moment when the earliest processes of subjectivization occur between at least two partial subjecivities, This matrixial possibility can be discerned in texts, signifiers, legends, paint ings, ourselves, and for the artis its recognition and theorization arase out of daily reflection on the very processes of her own absorption in and obligation to the traces of historical sub- jectivties erased in the horrors of fascist modernity yet daily companions in the continuing “besideness” of the survivors’ child Certain psychoanalytical perspectives and processes may offer the way to understand and “work through’ a phenomenon that, because the history that it memorializes was so horrf cally deviant, must be grasped as rupturing the temporal finiteness that the word history typi «ally conveys. This happened, but itis not in the past. We therefore live in @ moment both “after history” yet continuously “beside™ history, which may correspond to what Freud uncovered in his archaeology of the split subject. The human subject is not the end product ofa narrative development called maturation but a discontinuous layering and sedimentation of always active elements that filter through from archaic moments and strata via the uncon- ‘cious to form a continuous consciousness of “beside,” to use the artis’s vocabulary, rather than of “under.” In this perspective, painting may be, as Lichtenberg Ettinger describes i,symbologenic. [t may generate not an image of the trauma but a symbol that allows the fore cluded the relief of signification, a pathway into language Many of the artist's works are possessed by an image and a process of working with it that reveal what I call “after painting” in the “after history.” The use of found photographs links this project with the Duchampian tradition of the readymade. Lichtenberg Ettinger’ use of the readymade launches us into a radically different sphere beyond the conceptually informed feminist art moment of the 1970s~80s, passing through psychoanalysis to the unconscious. and fantasy via the touch of painting, a less frequent site of feminist intervention. Distinct from the highly motivated and often hard-hitting confrontation between art practice and the popular cultures here ap- or depropriated, this project keeps to the margins and thresholds where another process of meaning is glimpsed: what the artist calls metransorphoss. Metramorphosis is the process of change in borderlines and thresholds between being and absence, memory and oblivion, | and non-I, a process of transgression and fading, away. The metramorphic consciousness has no center, cannot hold a fixed gaze—or, if it has a center, constantly slides to the borderline, to the margins. Its gaze escapes the m. gins and returns to the margins. Through this process the limits, borderlines, and thi colds conceived are continually transgressed or dissolved, thus allowing the creation of A great deal of feminist theorization and artistic practice has identified the gaze as a key issue.“ In necessarily deconstructing the politics of vision by defining the gaze within a phal: lic regime of sexual difference, feminists have equally been trapped within a scopic regime that can only imagine the gaze in terms of mastery and sadism or as, in psychoanalytical terms, a phallic objet «, the lost object defined by castration (i.e., separation, rejection, hate).” Lichtenberg Ettinger's method permits a glimpse of another kind of vanishing point— ‘@ matrixial gaze, beyond appearance—not locked into this logic of subject/object, presence/absence, see/seer, same (self)/different (other). The matrixial gaze emerges by a simultaneous reversal of with-in and with-out (and does not represent the eternal inside), by a transgression of borderlinks manifested in the con tact with-in/-out an art work by a transcendence of the subject-object interval which is, not a fusion, since it is based on a-priori shareability in difference. In the matrixial aesthetic experience, relations without relating transform the unknown, Other into a still unknown partial-subject within an encounter. The subject’s relations with the Other do not turn it into a known object, swallowed or fused, rejected or abject- ed. The non-I as subject changes me while the I changes it; all the participants are receiving and investing libido with-in and with-out the joint process of change itself —the metramorphosis, with-in and with-out their common borderspace.* Metramorphosis gives us access to another kind of sense-making and a route for the feminine to filter into the symbolic, into meaning. This feminine is thus not specular, and can only be murdered by being trapped in a phallic gaze. Strategies of representation in the visual arts, from painting to photography and film, have been institutionalized to lure our gaze and suture our desire to that to which the culture «wishes to fix us, Feminist interventions in the visual of arts have, therefore, of necessity had to negotiate the gaze, desire, suture, and spectatorship. For a period during the 1970s, thisInseriptions in the Feminine produced a “negative aesthetics” among certain feminists, a radical distanciation from any aspect of the spectacle and visual pleasure, a distrust of the visual image, of the iconicity especially of women. The necessary work of ground clearing has been done, and those artists associated most strongly with such moves, such as Mary Kelly and Laura Mulvey, have them- selves reclaimed the territories of desire in the field of vision, Lichtenberg Ettinger’s place in this feminist genealogy emerges via the conjugation of feminist interventions in the polities of representation and sexual difference with modernity’s genocidal horror. She argues that, one level of the image is that which is beyond appearance: thus loss, objet a, nonsymbolized fragments of the bods, and traces of the archaic maternal body-~"that aspect or element which is severed from the subject and cannot become a visible object on the level of specu lar imaginary recognition. Objet « is the invisible par excellence, it is a remnant of the signi fied which cannot appear in representation”’—may in art achieve a borderline visibility Because of the connections between woman in phallocentric culture and objet a, woman and Other, this beyond appearance connects to the feminine, and this borderline visibility that an ‘excess in art achieves may be a means to access it and theorize it—not just for women but as ‘a means of realigning all subjects in relation to elements of the unconscious that have not been allowed to filter into the symbolic, which yet insist through what Freud called the expe- rience of the “uncanny."* In the post-Holocaust era, Europe and America are once again breeding its fascisms and racisms, targeted now on other Others. In such a phallic structure, any group can find itself victimized as the Other that must be destroyed or repressed. There can be a future but only through creative alliance, through covenant, through what the artist calls a coemergence in difference. But the philosophical and political legacies of modernity provide neither a social nor a psychic model for such unfamiliar proximities and covenantal differences. In the appar- ently unlikely spaces of feminist artistic practice in all ofits difference from crude notions of art versus society, theory versus practice, we find an understanding of subjectivity that pro- vides such a nonphallic and nonfascist model for relations between subjectivities, Neither in its relation to feminism nor to the issues of racism and postcolonial practice does the matrix offer cozy plurality or compromised coexistence. The matrix is one of the most challenging new theorizations to emerge, allied with the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the ‘anti-Oedipal psychoanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari in arguing that the very forms of our curent thinking imprison us in models of subjectivity that sustain and prolong social horrors, that threaten our survival and have already compromised our humanity. Lichtenberg Ettinger theorizes a way to imagine the Symbolic expanded to contain more than one symbol—maore than one “signifier of signifies’ for subjectivity. Neither replacing nor merely supplementing the phallus, itself the signifier for subjectivity based on the opposition ‘of on/off, absencerpresence, and all related binaries of assimilation versus rejection, she pro- ‘poses the matrix, a symbol of coexisting and coemerging part-subjectivities that holds special promise for women, for whom this aspect has particular and profound resonance in allowing elements of their feminine but invisible bodily specificity and the fantasies to which it gives tise to filter into signification. But the matrix, while a distinctly feminine symbol theoretically premised on the idea of the coterminous existence of two mutually affecting part-subjectivi ties that cohabit one imaginary space in late pregnancy, is, like the phallus, in effect a neutral symbol. Its, therefore, as relevant for the realignment of masculine subjectivity that also shares in the stratum of subjectivity on this matriial, borderline space of the several that pre- ates and thus preconditions the moment of the One—that is, the point from which orthodox ‘psychoanalysis dates the commencement of subjectivity