14

Art Histories and Visual Cultural

Studies

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ANGELICA MICHELIS

This chapter is divided into three sections and will review books published in 1995
and 1996: 1. Surrealism and Modernism; 2. Developments in Cultural Analysis and
Art Theory, 3. Gender Studies and Histories of Art

1. Surrealism and Modernism

Andr6 Breton's The Lost Steps gathers his early critical and polemical writing and,
from an art-theoretical perspective, marks his transition from dada to surrealism.
Part of the University of Nebraska's French Modernist Library Series (which also
published the second volume of Breton's essay, which will be reviewed after this
one), Lost Steps collects his articles composed between 1917 and 1923, his
juvenilia so to speak. The different pieces vary very much in tone and style. Some
of them are already influenced by the 'manifesto-character' of Breton's later criti-
cal writing (Two Dada Manifestos'); others have a more Baudelairian feel as they
explore the urban landscape and its inhabitants ('The New Spirit'). 'Interview with
Doctor Freud' is a rather amusing piece which tells more about Breton's concept
of psychoanalysis and the unconscious than any of the later manifestos of surreal-
ism. Breton's idea of Freud and the psychoanalyst in general seemed to have been
a rather glamorous one, and although the author was clearly offended by Freud's
reluctance to regard his ideas as serious contributions to psychoanalytic theory,
Breton appeared to have been more disappointed by the drab lodgings and unstyl-
ish appearance of his hero: 'I found myself in the presence of a little old man with
no style who receives clients in a shabby office worthy of the neighbourhood OP'
(70). This highly polemical little piece was probably written in revenge for Freud
ignoring the copy of The Magnetic Field, Breton's and Soupault's book entirely
composed of automatic writing, which he had sent to Vienna in 1920 in the hope
of furthering Freud's interest in the psychoanalytic study of literary texts. As will
become obvious later on in Breton's writing, the surrealist concept of the uncon-
scious, which took on such importance for automatism, was never really a Freudian
one since it equated the unconscious simply with that which is repressed and
reduced it merely to the seat of the instincts.
If Lost Steps is read as a volume which gives evidence of Breton's early intel-
lectual and critical battles with fellow thinkers and intellectual movements, it is his
relationship to Tristan Tzara and dadaism which occupies the most prominent posi-
tion amongst all other subjects. There are several articles which show Breton's
changing attitude toward Tzara. which at the beginning of 1920 was one of
 176 ART HISTORIES AND VISUAL CULTURAL STUDIES

friendship and mutual respect for each other's artistic and intellectual activities.
They seemed to have collaborated happily together in their aim to attack French
cultural complacency. However, at the end of 1922 Tiara and Breton went their dif-
ferent ways and their former intellectual companionship ended in bitterness and,
on both sides, in determination to define their respective movements - HnH«i«rn for
Tzara and surrealism for Breton - as the vanguard of intellectual and artistic
progress. The three essays 'After Dada'. 'Leave Everything' and 'Clearly' are fas-

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cinating documents of concern to the emergence of surrealism as well as to the
more general history of modernism and modernist thought in the twentieth century.
Also included in the volume are portraits of Marcel Duchamps. Francis Picabia,
Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico, which present the different artists in relation to
Breton's emerging and consolidating interest in surrealism and modernity. But my
favourite is 'Words without Wrinkles', in which Breton introduces the poet Robert
Desnos's strange word games composed by 'spinning sentence after sentence of
complicated puns, which he claimed were telepathically communicated to him
from New York by Marcel Duchamp' (xix). Breton reflects in his essay on Desnos
on the interdisciplinary relationship between language/poetry and painting, the
arbitrariness of meaning, modernity and bow it creates a new vision:

I ask the reader to be content for now with this initial evidence of an
activity that we had never suspected. Several of us attach extreme
importance to it And let it be quite understood that when we say
'word games', it is our surest reasons for living that are being put
into play. Words, furthermore, have finished playing games. Words
are making love. (102)

This is Breton at his best, idiosyncratic and playful, and quite different from the
author of the later essays, published in Free Rein.
'Art cannot, therefore, without demeaning itself, willingly submit to any outside
directive and ensconce itself obediently within the limits that some people, with
extremely shortsighted pragmatic ends in view, think they can set on its activities'
(31). This quotation from Breton's essay (co-written with Leon Trotsky in 1938)
'Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art', which is included in his collec-
tion Free Rein, gives an indication of what preoccupied Breton and his writing
between the years 1936 and 1957: the position of art in relation to politics, or more
precisely, the question of whether there is an intrinsic element in the concept of art
that makes it elusive to political assimilation, although on a surface level it seems
to lend itself easily to political ends. For Breton this question is inextricably
connected to surrealism, which for him because of its emphasis on automatism
and the liberation of the unconscious, is a more political art than the socialist
realism of Stalinist Communism. His insistence on the power of the unconscious
as the source of creativity as such can be regarded as the fulcrum of his theoretical
concept of the artistic process, which for him always exceeds the simple represen-
tational function of art which underlies a socialist realism vulgarized by 1930s
Stalinist cultural theory. Denounced by the Stalinist regime during the Moscow
trials of 1936, a year which incidentally is also a landmark in the movement of sur-
realism because of the triumphal International Surrealist Exhibition in London,
 ART HISTORIES AND VISUAL CULTURAL STUDIES 177

Breton's work and writing are dedicated to the exploration and development of a
dialectical unity of art and revolution that can avoid the artistic and theoretical
pitfalls of the Stalinist doctrine of socialist realism.
In Free Rein this problematic relationship between reality, politics, representa-
tion and artistic creation is ubiquitous, even in essays whose preoccupation is not
foremost with art historical questions. 'Memory of Mexico', for example, attempts
to capture the spirit of Mexico, which for Breton can be found in its paintings and

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architecture, its people and its landscapes; Mexico itself is rendered as a surrealist
painting, a dreamland, where Breton hoped to find the 'point of intersection
between the political and the artistic lines beyond which we hope that they may
unite in a single revolutionary consciousness while still preserving intact the iden-
tities of the separate motivating forces that run through them' (54). as he wrote in
his essay 'Frida Kahlo de Rivera', collected in his 1945-published book Surrealism
and Painting. But this point of intersection is for Breton, of course, also at the heart
of surrealism, its theory and its artistic practice, and it therefore represents for him
a political alternative to the 1930s socialist realism based on a crude reflectionist
relationship between base and superstructure. Breton argues for a relative auton-
omy of art, and, together with Trotsky, condemns subservience to party politics
and, simultaneously, rejects the advocacy of art for art's sake: his political concept
of art is thus closer to the original discussions of the relationship between base and
superstructure in the works of Marx and Engels, which allowed for mediation and
critical interaction. But it is the unique combination of Marxism and psychoanaly-
sis which determines Breton's view of art as ultimately out of social control, and
as simultaneously that which can liberate the human being restricted by capitalism
and totalitarianism. The free rein of the mind is for Breton the result of the revol-
utionary force* of the unconscious, which consequently guarantee that political
movements as well as art based on force and coercion can never succeed and will
eventually have to submit to 'the emancipation of man'.
Life as art and art as life is the underlying motto of the essays in Free Rein. But
art has to be seen here in a broad, interdisciplinary sense, since many of the essays
do also feature other than art historical questions. Breton shows that his insights
and ideas are deeply influenced by drama and literature, and here in particular
poetry, when be celebrates the anti-rationalist and ana'-dualisdc tendencies in the
works of artists such as Artaud, Rimbaud, Lautremont, Roussel and others. Other
essays reflect on music, cinema and education, but all of them share Breton's pas-
sionate desire to move away from a thinking based on antinomies in order to credit
what he regards as one of the most important aspects of art its ethical function,
which for him is synonymous with its revolutionary function. Thus for Breton art
is ultimately a liberating force precisely because it escapes the regulatory process-
es of society; automatism as the source and primary tool of artistic expression
guarantees a truly social art which cannot be reduced to any conscious intentions
of the artist; art can never be purely representational but has to be conceived of as
that which gives shape to the social and individual unconscious, and is therefore,
literally, out of control.
Free Rein is a volume which is of particular interest in relation to the history of
art and art theory in the United States, since the articles cover the period which
experienced what Serge Guilbaut, in his essay 'The New Adventures of the Avant-
 178 ART HISTORIES AND VISUAL CULTURAL STUDIES

Garde in America' (in Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris (eds). Art in Modem
Culture, Phaidon, 1992.239-52), called the de-Marxification of the New York
intelligentsia' (239) and the emergence of Greenbergian formalism. Interestingly,
Breton himself, at least in the essays in this volume, does not comment at all on the
'American scene', although be spent the war years in exile in New York. There is
no mentioning of the political art and art theory of the Popular Front, of the
Stalinist-Trotskyite ideological battles which paved the way for Greenbergian for-

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malism and its concept of avant-garde abstract art. This is particularly interesting
since Greenberg, as well as Breton and Trotsky, regarded the'independent artist as
the one who would be able to lead the cultural crisis to a productive solution.
However, Greenberg abandoned Trotsky's critical position of eclectic action and
the Bretonian-Trotskyist idea that art is free of partisanship but nevertheless intrin-
sically political and ultimately revolutionary; Greenberg's concept of the avant-
garde left politics and political commitment behind it by defining the critical func-
tion of art as a predominantly self-referential one. The result, an elitist modernism
which functioned as the theoretical background to the postwar thriving of the
American art market, is a far cry from the complex theories and ideas underlying
Breton's artistic meditations in his essays in Free Rein.
(Catherine Conley's book Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in
Surrealism takes issue with Breton's ideas from a different point of view by trac-
ing the history of the surrealist movement and its relationship to women artists and
the feminine, when she critically questions the still prevalent idea that surrealism
was intrinsically misogynist, as is obvious from Simone de Beauvoir's comment
on the artistic movement: woman in surrealism is 'Everything ... Everything but
herself' (21). Although the book focuses mainly on the literary work of Leonora
Carrington and Unica Zurn and how their texts intersect with Breton's literary and
theoretical writing, this volume is also interesting from an art historical point of
view, since a large part of the text is devoted to the impact the image and the
moment of looking have on notions of the identity and creativity of the female
artist/writer. Conley argues that 'surrealism itself as an avant-garde movement
anticipated some of the tenets of French feminism, a 1970s avant-garde movement
in its own right' (xiii). By reading the writings of Carrington and Zurn, (quasi-
autobiographical/literary) accounts of the time the two authors spent in mental
institutions, in the light of the aims and underlying theories of the surrealist move-
ment, Conley sets their work as a link between the two avant-garde movements, a
link which for her is most apparent in the similarities between the surrealist icrit-
ure automatique and the feminist icriture fiminine. Surrealist concepts of writing
and creativity and the idea of an icriture fiminine as developed mainly in the
works of Hfilene Cixous and Luce Irigaray share, according to Conley, similar
ideals, such as 'the importance of openness to the unconscious; the rejection of any
kind of censorship; the privileged place of collaboration, of the collective experi-
ence; the role of chance in surprising us into seeing the marvellous in everyday
objects and occurrences, an acknowledgement of the significance of associating art
with political and social life' (xv).
But it is not only these shared ideas which lead Conley to a feminist re-evalua-
tion of surrealism: although there were no women amongst the founders of the
surrealist movement, women should be regarded as integral to it since so many
 ART HISTORIES AND VISUAL CULTURAL STUDIES 179

female artists in their own right were attached to the group. Furthermore, it is
above all in the female figure in surrealist art and its role of representing inspira-
tion - that which facilitates the male artist's access to his unconscious, his source
of creativity - where Conley sees surrealism's potential importance for feminism.
According to her, the surrealist female muse, the 'Automatic Woman', although
ambiguous for the female artist, represents ultimately many more positive than
negative qualities and can therefore be seen as encouraging women to become

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artists in their own rights.
Conley's book is interestingly written and the author gives a fascinating account
of the development of the surrealist movement, in particular of Breton's contribu-
tion to it, and how its concepts and theories are linked to questions of gender and
the self-understanding of the female artist in the twentieth century. The compari-
son between surrealist and gender-specific concepts of creativity as developed in
feminist criticism, here in particular icriture ftminine, leads to an interesting
exploration of surrealism from the point of view of gender, which cannot be con-
tent any more with the simplistic notion of surrealism as mysogynistic. This is a
feminist re-evaluation of surrealism which has long been overdue. However,
Conley could have been more discerning in her definition of feminine creativity,
particularly concerning the concept of (criture fiminine. Although she refers to
some of the controversies surrounding the concept, she does not allow them to
influence her approach to female subjectivity in relation to creativity. Also, as
much as Cixous's and Irigaray's critical and theoretical work has in common, there
are also major methodological differences, in particular concerning the subjects of
gender and writing/creativity. Furthermore, Breton's and, if such a generalization
is possible, surrealism's notion of the unconscious varies a great deal from that in
1970s French feminism, especially in relation to the meaning of desire and jouis-
sance at influenced by lacanian psychoanalysis. Although Conley criticizes
Breton's idea of creativity as still privileging mind over body, she herself is also
very indebted to an analysis which is based on the binary oppositions of mind/
body, malt/female and automatic writing/bodily writing. A more Foucauldian
perspective, and a reading of 'automatique' in relation to Deleuze's and Guattari's
concept of the body as desiring machine, could have produced a more complex
analysis of the relationship between surrealism and gender. Still, Automatic Woman
is a book of great interest, in particular for interdisciplinary studies, and its account
of Carrington's and Zttrn's work is fascinating as an introduction to the writings of
two authors who have been neglected for too long by mainstream criticism.
In their Bison Books Edition, the University of Nebraska Press published in
1996 a new edition of Leo Stein's Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose, a col-
lection which was first published in 1947, a few days before Stein's death. The
brother of the better-known modernist writer Gertrude Stein lived with his sister in
Paris from 1902 onwards (until they stopped talking to each other because of their
disagreeing opinions on her work and on Cubism), and their apartment at 27 rue
de Fleurus, with its paintings by Cizanne, Picasso, Gaugin, Toulouse-Lautrec,
Manet. Vuillard, Van Gogh, Degas, Bonnard and others, was an important land-
mark on the map of modernism. Stein collected modern art at a time when many
of the aforementioned artists were shunned by the more public exhibitions, and his
apartment became a private museum which welcomed the public to appreciate the
 180 ART HISTORIES AND VISUAL CULTURAL STUDIES

exhibited canvasses. One of the earliest admirers of Picasso, Stein later on dis-
missed not only Cubism but also the literary work of bii sister as artistic solipsism
which had lost touch with both the onlooker/reader and the object
In 1913 Stein, increasingly isolated because of his criticism of Picasso and
Cubism, 'retired' from the art world, leaving the life of the American in Paris
behind for the idyll of a small, picturesque Italian hill, which be returned to in the
late 1920s after having spent the war years in the United States. And it was in Italy

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where he wrote Appreciation, after having fallen silent as a writer for twenty years
because of the dismissive comments accompanying the critical reception of his
1927-published book The A-B-C of Aesthetics. In the essays gathered in
Appreciation Stein develops his own idiosyncratic views of art literature and aes-
thetics, an interdisciplinary tour de force, partly criticism, partly autobiography.
Although Stein states in the introduction that Appreciation is a book about 'Prose
and Poetry', which for him 'belong to the world of vital interests' (26), this is also
a very personal introduction to modem art and, more importantly, to the modernist
scene in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century. His thoughts on literature
and art are organized around his argument that the 'poetic and prosaic have both
always been present in all literature' (64), which becomes the ground for develop-
ing an art criticism that is based on the dichotomy of science and appreciation, the
latter meaning 'taking things for values found in them directly, and not as the result
of analysis' (66-7). But these ideas are not part of precise definition or pro-
grammes-William James's influence on Stein can still be felt in these essays - the
different texts form a loose gathering of thoughts on aesthetic issues as they pre-
occupied Stein all Ms life. Of course, this dismissive attitude towards structure is
not accidental, considering Stein's rejection of Cubism and bis sister's writing
because he found both too programmatic and hyperintellectualized.
Although captivating, it is not the art criticism in Appreciation which is of fore-
most interest in this volume, but the personal thoughts and memories the essays are
interspersed with. The descriptions of the salons, the meetings with painters and
writers, and Stein's witty and sometimes rather acerbic comments on paintings and
artistic ideas (particularly in relation to the young Picasso) create a colourful pic-
ture of the modernist scene in Paris and allow the reader to view modernism from
a different perspective. What Stein attempts is to explore the conditions of
modernism from an aesthetic and from a personal point of view in order to make
sense of his life and of himself, or, as he put it in the last chapter, 'Appreciation and
Education': 'It is not really difficult to understand the past if we remember the
simple fact that the differences between us and them are differences of condition'
(211). To understand the conditions of modernism, the subject of his writings,
contributes in his opinion to an understanding of the past, his own as well as that
of modem art

2. Developments In Cultural Analysis and Art Theory

Mieke Bal's Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis is a fascinating

account of the culture of looking, how conventions of display structure the gaze
and what and how we 'see'. The study is an investigation of the various meanings
of the term 'exposure' itself, particularly in respect of the way it positions private
 ART HISTORIES AND VISUAL CULTURAL STUDIES 181

and public. Bal is interested in exposure as a performative act, how it makes its
objects culturally visible and to what extent the moment and act of exposition is
also always an exposure of the self, and therefore part of the cultural production of
subjectivity. Her range of presentations includes, amongst others, museum dis-
plays, paintings, narratives, literary criticism and anthropological studies, and by
exploring how these different discourses encourage specific kinds of looking, Bal
shows how forms of cultural communication and information are modified by dif-

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ferent semiotic and epistemological habits. But it is the museum and the way it
exhibits its displays which are of central interest for Bal, and her analysis of ges-
tures of showing as that which specifies the discursive act of museal communica-
tion makes compelling reading indeed.
From a semiotic point of view Bal's argument draws very much on the work of
Peirce and Barthes when she suggests:

The discourse surrounding the exposition, or, more precisely, the

discourse that is the exposition, is 'constative': informative and af-
firmative. The discourse has a truth value: the proposition it conveys
is either true or false. It is apo-deictic in that sense of affirmation. In
expositions a 'first person', the exposer, tells a 'second person', the
visitor, about a 'third person', the object on display, who does not
participate in the conversation. But unlike many other constative
speech acts, the object although mute, is present (3—4)

If this sounds rather dry and dense, Bal's argument will come much more to life in
the following chapters, where she discusses, for example, how the museum
through its specific discourse of exposition/exposure positions itself as a space in
and of culture, and how, by filling the gaps between the three persons, the subjec-
tivity of the visitor is dialectically involved in this act, is produced by this culture
of looking.
In her first chapter Telling, Showing, Showing Off1, Bal demonstrates how
space is never neutral when she compares the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the
American Museum of Natural History, both in New York, and argues that their
respective cultural position is a result of a geographical (the Met on the classy, elit-
ist East Side and the other on the more scruffy, dubious West Side of the city) as
well as of a philosophical mapping (culture versus nature). This division is far
reaching in many terms: art and its meaning becomes inextricably linked to the
West and 'civilization', whereas the artistic products of the large majority of the
world's population, exhibited in the Natural History Museum, are predominantly
significant only in an anthropological sense (if their artefacts classify as art at all,
than only in the meaning of 'exotic'); the latter play the part of supplementary
'nature' to the Met's main act as the treasury of 'culture'. Bal discusses the
Museum here in relation to colonialism and postcolonialism by exposing the spe-
cific rhetoric of the museums(s), revealing their different fictions and bow they are
constructively involved in the discourse of Western domination: 'Showing, it
refrains from telling its own story, becomes showing off' (53).
Double Exposures is a fascinating book which discusses a wide range of cul-
tural representations in a highly complex and truly interdisciplinary mode. The
 182 ART HISTORIES AND VISUAL CULTURAL STUDIES

final chapter, which deals with the story of Judith and its representations in visual
art and art history (focusing on Caravaggio's and Oentileschi's paintings), is again
an investigation of the interactive processes instigated by cultural activity as such,
and thus also a reflection on the intellectual position of cultural studies. By draw-
ing on Freudian and Lacaoian psychoanalysis and various feminist approaches, Bal
not only contributes to the art historical debate of these paintings but simul-
taneously provides an analysis of how history of art as an academic discourse of

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knowledge is always already involved in the visual experience, making the point
that there is no such thing as an innocent looking. Double Exposures is an import-
ant, witty and superbly written book which will be welcomed by students and
scholars who are involved in cultural studies and art history and art theory. It
certainly comes with my highest recommendations.
Gunther Kress's and Theo van Leeuwen's Reading Images: The Grammar of
Visual Design fuses ideas influenced by social semiotics and socio-linguistics with
theories of design and structure in order to develop what the authors call a gram-
mar of visual design. Such a grammar, Kress and van Leeuwen point out, is of
great importance, since we are moving from a culture dominated by language to
one in which visual literacy gains increasing relevance. Thus Reading Images, by
looking at colour, perspective, framing and composition, attempts to provide a sys-
tematic and comprehensive account of how images communicate meaning. This
account, however, cannot be regarded as universal, and the authors make it clear
that the grammar they refer to is not one of Chomskyan universality, nor do they
understand visual language itself as transparent and universal. Their study is
restricted to Western visual communication, whereby the unity of Western design
is regarded as being derived from the position of global power held by Western
mass media and culture industries. The aim of the book is, on the one hand, to
describe the current state of the structural make-up of visual design and, on the
other, to discuss simultaneously the historical, social and cultural conditions that
have a determining impact on bow images communicate meaning.
From a critical perspective Reading Images can be situated in the field of social
semiotics and interdisciplinary studies. Thus the book draws on a very wide range
of examples, including advertisements, children's drawings, textbook illustrations,
paintings and sculpture, photo-journalism and many more, in order to show that
visual communication is not simply an alternative means of representing the same
object as verbal communication. By referring to Michael Halliday's concept of
grammar as a means of representing patterns of experience, the authors suggest
that what images convey is deeply related to the medium of visuality itself, and that
therefore a culture which is dominated by visual signs will communicate a differ-
ent reality to one in which language is the predominant medium. By doing so the
authors move away from Barthes's hierarchical model of the relationship between
verbal and visual texts, which regards the latter always as dependent on and there-
fore to a certain extent inferior to the former. For Kress and van Leeuwen 'the
visual component of a text is an independently organised and structured message
- connected with the verbal text, but in no way dependant on it: and similarly the
other way round' (17). Thus, as the authors explain, Reading Images does not
import linguistic theories into the domain of the visual but argues that images con-
stitute and construct a specific cultural reality, whose meaning is inextricably
 . ART HISTORIES AND VISUAL CULTURAL STUDIES 183

linked with and cannot be separated from the visual form itself. Kress's and van
Leeuwen's main interest is the process of (visual) sign-making itself, which for
them is an act creative and productive not only of meaning but also of the subject
itself; sign-making is therefore an active process which allows the sign-maker to
work through problems connected with identity and subjectivity and renders him
or her socially visible and meaningful
By emphasizing that the production and communication of meaning is always

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affective and constitutive of subjectivities, Reading Images becomes an important
book for art historians, since it is able, by referring to the connections between
theory of language and history of art, to endow the study of visual communication
with a social and historical dimension. The visual part of the book with its wide
range of material, from children's drawings to three-dimensional images of sculp-
tures and toys, helps one to pbugh through the sometimes rather densely written
textual explanations. This is an extremely interesting book for anybody involved in
the visual arts, and one has to congratulate the authors on their accomplishment in
providing an original and helpful analysis of the critical relationship between lin-
guistic theories and images.
Fred Orton's and Griselda Pollock's collection Avant-Gardes and Partisans
Reviewed is reviewed under this section because, in my opinion, it provides an
interesting resume' of the development of art history in the direction of cultural
studies. The volume consists of a collection of essays by Pollock and Orton from
the late seventies to the early nineties, five of them written collaboratively, and is
divided into three parts. Part one takes issue with late nineteenth-century French
painting, with the main focus on Van Gogh and the problem of the avant-garde;
part two moves on to a critical discussion of (mostly Greenbergian) modernism in
the context of avant-garde art in 1930s and postwar American painting; the circle
closes with part three, which refers back to the beginning of the collection, dis-
cussing agency and avant-garde in relation to Van Gogh. All essays present in this
volume have been published before, and although the individual texts themselves
are still of great art historical interest, it is the way the different articles and
chapters are critically contextualized in the introduction that is truly captivating.
In the introduction Orton and Pollock not only give an account of the history
and mode of production of the various texts, they also provide a critical narrative
of the development of art history as an academic discipline from the 1970s
onwards, as well as of the politics of academic publishing as such. Writing about
Van Gogh differently, contesting the dominant interpretation of his paintings as
artistic products of a mad genius - the project of Pollock's and Orton's first col-
laboration - cannot be easily accommodated by the discipline of history of art, as
the authors experience when their publishing house does not agree with the title
and cover they have chosen for their book. 'Rooted in the Earth: A Van Gogh
Primer' as well as other essays gathered in this volume, gives evidence of how the
academic discourse of art history has been challenged and changed by critical
investigations questioning the discipline's bermeneutical tradition.
Focusing on late nineteenth-century French paintings, both Orton and Pollock
wanted to develop 'ways of close reading verbal and visual texts and analysing the
relations between current art historical practices and other representations of the
past, not as a way of offering a programme for doing art history but of showing
 184 ART HISTORIES AND VISUAL CULTURAL STUDIES

what might be involved in producing a social history of art' (vi). This questioning
of the underlying political frameworks of art historical practice provides the criti-
cal and theoretical background for the essays selected for the first part of this vol-
ume. Considering the anti-bourgeois trajectory of Orton's and Pollock's critical
approach, it is not by accident that the emphasis is on the nineteenth-century move-
ment of impressionism, radical at its time, but appropriated by a twentieth-century
middle class with its living room walls tastefully decorated with impressionist

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prints. By politicizing late nineteenth-century French art, Orton and Pollock not
only attacked traditional forms of art historical evaluation by introducing concepts,
theories and methods developed within other disciplines, they also showed how
dominant culture appropriates art and defuses its potential radicality.
Whereas the first third of the collection draws theoretically mainly on re-
readings of Marx and Engels in order to show bow art history produces particular
representations of 'art' and 'the artist' within a specific discourse, the essays
gathered in the second part introduce an art historical debate which is to a great
extent informed by structuralist, Althusserian, psychoanalytical and feminist
discourses. In the main, these essays take issue with Greenberg's art criticism and
his concept of avant-garde in relation to art produced in New York in the late 1930s
and 1940s; other essays deal with the impact of the Cold War on definitions of art
and the art scene in general in the 1950s. Pollock's excellent feminist investigation
of 1950s American culture, 'Killing Men and Dying Women: A Woman's Touch in
the Cold Zone of American Painting in the 1950s', is still a fascinating critical tour
de force which draws on Denida's concept of diffirance and psychoanalytically
informed theories (mainly l,acan, Irigaray and Kristeva) in order to 'gender* the
concept of modernism, particularly the (still) dominant Greenbergian version,
which so conveniently excludes gender and sexuality asrelevantdeterminants from
itself as a theoretical discourse.
This is a very successful compilation of essays, especially with the newly edited
first essay on Van Gogh and the introductory chapter 'Memories Still to Come'. Art
history has come a long way, as this volume shows.
Although The Postmodern Arts: An Introductory Reader, edited by Nigel
Wheale, does not discuss exclusively art and art history, the volume, which is part
of Routledge's Critical Readers in Theory and Practice series, is nevertheless of
interest for art history, film theory and visual culture in general. 'Postmodernism:
A New Representation?' starts off the first part of the volume, in which the editor,
by engaging with the contradictions and inconsistencies underlying the term 'post-
modernism', presents a critical overview of the history of the term and its place in
contemporary culture so far. Although this is a useful and certainly thorough intro-
duction to the debate on postmodernism, the constant urge of the author to
structure the text and to guide the reader can be a bit annoying, since it puts too
much stress on the didactic intentions, which sometimes distract from the text as
such. On the other hand, presenting the introductory part as a schematic survey of
the major themes and positions in the postmodernist debate makes this a useful
book for students and newcomers to the subject Additionally, the extensive glos-
saries and bibliographies will be very welcome to readers who want to gain an
overview of the postmodernist debate in the various disciplines and fields.
Part II, entitled 'Essays on Postmodernism', discusses the usefulness of the
 ART HISTORIES AND VISUAL CULTURAL STUDIES 185

critical concept by applying it to the four different discourses of popular culture,

architecture and visual arts, literature, and documentary films. Each of the four
chapters consists of a general introduction, which presents the state of the current
debate, and one or more specialized essays discussing subjects such as: popular
music, science fiction (film and literature), architecture, photography, television,
John Ashbcrry's poetry, Rushdie's Satanic Verses (discussed by Spivak) and docu-
mentary films (with an essay by Trinh T. Minh-Ha). The different pieces cover a

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wide range of material and provide an excellent introduction to the discussion of
postmodernism in relation to various forms of art and disciplines.
The chapter 'Architecture and Visual Arts', divided into three parts (two essays
and an interview with the photographer Yve Lomax), explores the following
problems:

Was there an architectural postmodernism? Has postmodernism

contributed to art from the women's movement? How does theory
inform contemporary creativity? What uses are made of the interplay
between verbal and visual meaning in contemporary art? Is there a
place for traditional, painterly skills in contemporary art, when the
use of technology is becoming so pervasive? (117-18)

In the light of these questions and by referring back to the modernism-postmod-

ernism debate introduced in the first part of the volume, the critical investigation
shifts now to architecture, painting and visual art, and the impact the postmodernist
debate has bad on the development in these fields.
Wheale's essay on Tom Phillips's painting and print-making, in conjunction
with his collaborative work with the film-maker Peter Greenaway, is a lively and
interesting piece, which discusses interrelations between visual imagery and verbal
text, as well as the subject of interdisciplinarity in general by situating the issues
in the modernist-postmodernist debate. The author suggests that the self-referen-
tiality of Phillips "s and Greenaway's art is not predominantly proof of their alliance
with postmodernism, but should be understood as pointing to a pre-Romantic
attitude as a result of a return to earlier forms of signification, such as allegory.
However, as Wheale himself has pointed out earlier, there is no fixed definition of
the meaning of 'postmodern', and postmodernism can easily accommodate alle-
gorical exegesis as one of its specific forms of signification; indeed, the artistic
exploitation of the aUegorical form can easily be identified as a specific gesture of
postmodernist art as such.
Julian Roberts, in his essay 'Melancholy Meanings: Architecture, Post-
modernity and Philosophy', is equally determined to save modernism from the
presumed onslaught of its successor when he explores the relationship between
modernism and postmodernism in relation to architecture, focusing on Le
Corbusier. By introducing Walter Benjamin's concept of melancholy and by fusing
it with constructivism, the author attempts to develop the latter as a 'stronger' form
of modernism that is more than just blind technological optimism. This is an inter-
esting argument which contributes new ideas and critical aspects to the postmodern
debate on architecture, leading it away from the gratuitous 'either modemist/or
postmodernist' categorization of twentieth-century architecture.
 186 ART HISTORIES AND VISUAL CULTURAL STUDIES

In summary, The Postmodern Arts is a valuable introduction to the debate,

particularly because of its interdisciplinary approach and the variety of the subjects
covered.

3. Gender Studies and Histories of Art

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Gill Perry's Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde is not just an unearthing
of women artists and an examination of mainstream and marginalized artistic cul-
ture in France in the early twentieth century, more importantly, it represents an
investigation into the discursive field of history of art as an academic discipline,
and bow it is intertwined with the construction and cultural dissemination of the
meaning of femininity and masculinity in relation to art. Her study can be regarded
as contributing to a feminist questioning of established categories of art history, in
particular those of avant-garde and modernism. Feminist an history dealing with
late nineteenth-century French female painters, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt
being the most prominent, has argued that modernist art history privileges a par-
ticular and gendered set of practices which excludes the works of these painters
from the modernist category. Perry's study is part of this particular feminist criti-
cal tradition, which is not just interested in examining the social position of women
artists, but also pays attention to the ways in which sexuality and gender cannot be
separated from modes of representation and from the perspective of the spectator
as produced by gender, class, ethnicity, etc.
Perry's book engages with the work - and to a certain extent with the lives - of
Suzanne Valadon, Marie Laurencin, Emilie Cbarmy, Maria Blanchard, Marvena,
Alice Halicka and Jacqueline Marval, all acknowledged artists in early twentieth-
century France, whose works were widely exhibited and reviewed at the time. That
this venture does not result in just producing a series of biographical monographs
which simply celebrate the works of these artists is thanks to the critical awareness
of the author, who is rightly suspicious of the biographical mode, which, accord-
ing to her, 'has become increasingly devalued with the growth of social histories
of art and post-structuralist approaches to visual imagery, in which the meanings
of art works are seen as part of a broader network of representational practices and
visual ideologies' (11). Thus Perry's own approach to the artistic works of Us
femmes peintres is informed by a variety of critical discourses, including social
history, psychoanalysis and feminist art history, which all contribute to challenge
'the dominance of a canonical modernist narrative which either cannot accommo-
date women's art or relegates it to marginal positions' (9).
Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde attempts to explain the absence of
women's art from the major modernist movements, with a particular emphasis on
fauvism and Cubism. Although Perry does refer to the by now well-known argu-
ments based on women's restricted access to education and professions, domestic
pressures, etc., for her, an explanation purely based on social and cultural disad-
vantages is not satisfactory. In her opinion it is the discourse of history of art itself,
and the way its categories are inextricably linked with gendered notions of artistic
expression, which are responsible for producing an art criticism which is based on
hierarchically organized criteria when it comes to the evaluation of the works of
male and female painters. Thus Perry shows bow, on the one hand, traditional
 ART HISTORIES AND VISUAL CULTURAL STUDIES 187

divisions of art into intellectual 'masculine' genres, as against 'feminine', more

decorative, superficial forms of artistic expressions, can be traced back to the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries, but how, on the other hand, these categories have
been questioned and changed by the works of women artists, who practised their
art on the fringes of the dominant modernist exhibiting groups. By focusing on the
changing conditions and circumstances of women's artistic production and how
they were art historically evaluated from the beginning of the twentieth century, up
to the postwar era. Perry explores the artistic, personal and professional relation-

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ships of the aforementioned artists with the modernist movement and the avant-
garde. By doing so, she not only makes visually available artistic material which
deserves to be 'rediscovered', but is also able to further the discussion of mod-
ernism and the avant-garde in relation to issues of gender and sexuality, by show-
ing that existing art historical narratives cannot easily accommodate these painters
and their artistic production precisely because they defy a categorization based on
the dichotomy of 'feminine' and 'masculine'.
Perry argues for a critical exploration of women's art beyond explanations
based on marginalization and exclusion, and thus propagates a feminist history of
art which constantly questions its own disciplinary foundations. Thus Women
Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde not only presents an extremely interesting
discussion of the works of several outstanding women artists, but also engages with
the complex problems of how history of art is written, whom it can remember and
how it forgets.
Feminist interventions into art history - from the point of view of theory as well
as of artistic practice - have produced some of the most radical and far-reaching
challenges of history of art as an academic discipline. Generations and
Geographies in the Visual Arts, edited by Griselda Pollock, is part of this tradition,
gathering a wide range of voices discussing issues of sexual, cultural and social
difference in relation to artistic and art theoretical production. The volume is
divided into seven parts ('Stagesetting', "Thinking Theory', The Body', 'Artist's
Pages', The Maternal1, The Land' and 'History'), the different titles being a
direct reference to the issues of generation and geographies, which provide the
spatial and temporal axes along which questions of identity, subjectivity, sexuality,
representation, etc., will be discussed.
Giving the book this kind of structure not only reflects the current state of the
debate about gender, but also allows the different contributors to take issue with the
history of the relationship between feminism and art/art history, and the theoreti-
cal and practical implications it has brought about for both discourses.
Additionally, the meanings of 'generation' and 'geographies' are also explored in
a more personal way, when Pollock, in The Politics of Theory: Generations and
Geographies in Feminist Theory and the Histories of Art and Art Histories', gives
a generic account of her own experiences as a feminist in history of art and as an
art historian in feminism. By doing so, Pollock refers critically to the various
stages of f«nini«Tn, how the discourse has developed and interacted with other
critical and theoretical fields, and stresses the need to identify still with the term
'feminism' in order to emphasize the political aspect of the movement.
Concurrently she argues for the need within feminism for analysis and debate, and
by doing so, points out the politics which motivate feminism: 'the conflict from
 188 AFT HISTORIES AND VISUAL CULTURAL STUDIES

which feminism is generated and which it continuously challenges precisely

through its "lli«P"'« with anti-bourgeois positions of historical materialism, social-
ism, anti-racism and lesbian and gay polities'(16). It is this complex and conflict-
ual balance of the desire to 'take up a position and argue it' without, at the same
time, annihilating the dynamics of difference that all essays gathered in this
volume engage with and discuss, each in its own distinctive manner.
Mieke Bal contributes to this discussion by theorizing the act of reading art,

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defining the image as an intersubjective meeting ground of cultural processes.
Elisabeth Bronfen refers to Cindy Sherman's self-representations in relation to
Freud's concept of hysteria, in order to discuss what she calls 'the knotted subject'
which balances integration and dissolution, coherence and difference. In 'Gossip
as Testimony' Irit Rogoff examines gossip as a feminiit counter-historical narra-
tive, which is able to destabilize the claims that art historical discourse has made
to historical realism. RogofTs subject is the representation of German modernist
art, on the one hand, and the media sensationalization of the death of the Cuban
artist Ana Mendieta (whose artistic work is discussed later in an essay by Anne
Raine in part six: 'The Land'), on the other. Rogoff thus focuses on bow rumours
and gossip about the lives of the pre-war artists, and about the events which led to
Mendieta's death, constitute modes of relational knowledge which question and
dis/inter-rupt the idea of art history as a master narrative. Part III takes issue with
representations of the female body, in particular the nude, discussing the Venus
Pudica (Nanette Salomon), contemporary paintings by women, especially Jenny
Saville (Alison Rowley) and the work of the French multimedia/performance artist
Orlan, who utilizes the technology of plastic surgery as a medium with which to
articulate self-transformation (Michelle Hirschhorn), and establishes a relation
between the anorexic body and installations art as the predominant form of
women's work exhibited in Canada (Judith Mastai).
In part V the representation of the female body features again as a major
subject, but the focus has now shifted on to the maternal body. Rosemary Betterton
situates the discussion of Kline KoHwitz and Paula Modersohn-Becker in the
social politics of early twentieth-century Germany, referring to mainstream and
communist/socialist constructions of the maternal body, and, furthermore, by link-
ing the artists' work with Kristeva's theoretical account of the maternal, concludes
that the figure of the maternal nude enabled Kollwitz and Modersohn-Becker 'to
develop an iconography which avoided the conventional voyeurism of the nude and
could offer a metaphor for a specifically female model creativity' (175). The sub-
ject of the maternal is also taken up by Young-Paik Chun, who discusses the work
of the Korean artists Hae-Sug Na and Re-Hyun Park as a point of intersection
between the Korean concept of maternity and the Western discourse of modernity,
a conjunction which, according to her, enabled the artists to explore their feminin-
ity as a negotiation of Western with traditional Korean forms of representation.
The following part discusses the work of the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuna
(Catherine de Zegher) and the Canadian Jin-me Yoon (Brenda Lafleur) in relation
to questions of national tnd cultural identity and colonial history. In the last sec-
tion, 'History', Hagiwara Hiroko deals with the work of the contemporary mini-
malist artist Shimada Yoshiko, who, in her prints, installations and performances,
comments on Japan's war crimes in Asia, on its impact on the lives of Japanese and
 ART HISTORIES AND VISUAL CULTURAL STUDIES 189

Asian women and their notions of national identity, and on the position of Japan in
Asia in general. The last essay, by Griselda Pollock, looks at the artistic and theo-
retical work of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, which Pollock regards as being the
'product of a specific historical conjuncture: The atrocity known in Europe as the
Holocaust... meets a new turn in feminist interventions in psychoanalysis to track
an unexpected covenant between the Jewish experience of modernity and the
predicament - as well as the promise - of the feminine* (266).

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Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts is a well-structured collection
of essays which coven a wide range of issues in relation to the production of art,
art histories, and feminist and gender theory. The different contributions explore
their subjects and themes from a variety of perspectives and thus not only further
the feminist theorization of the cultural production of art, but, by introducing and
discussing the work of many non-Western artists, also challenge Western notions •
of art history and historiography. This is a remarkable selection of feminist inter-
ventions into the field of history of art, and is of great interest for feminist and
gender studies as well as for the study of visual arts.

Books Reviewed

Bal, Mieke. Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis. Routledge. pp.
338. pb £15.99. ISBN 0 415 91704 2.
Breton, Andrf. Free Rein {La Cli des champs), tr. Michael Parmentier and
Jacqueline d'Amboise. French Modernist Library. University of Nebraska Press.
pp. 291. ISBN 0 8032 12410.
Breton, Andrf. The Lost Steps (Les Pas Perdus). tr. Mark Polizzotti. French
Modernist Library. University of Nebraska Press, pp. 133. ISBN 0 8032 1241 9.
Conley, Katherine. Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in
Surrealism. University of Nebraska Press, pp. 179. hb £32.95. ISBN 0 8032
1474 X.
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual
Design. Routledge. pp. 288. hb £49.99, pb £14.99. ISBN 0 415 10599 4, 0 415
10600 1.
Orton, Fred, and Griselda Pollock, eds. Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed.
Manchester University Press, pp. 362. hb £40.00, pb £16.99. ISBN 0 7190 4398
0, 0 7190 4399 9.
Perry, Gill. Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde. Manchester University
Press (1995). pp. 186. ISBN 0 7190 4165 1.
Pollock, Griselda, ed. Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist
Readings. Routledge. pp. 300. hb £45.00. ISBN 0 415 14127 3.
Stein, Leo. Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose, intro. Brenda Wineapple.
Bison Books. University of Nebraska Press, pp. 230. pb $10.00. ISBN 0 8032
9236 8.
Wheale, NigeL ed. The Postmodern Arts: An Introductory Reader. Critical Readers
in Theory and Practice. Routledge (1995). pp. 295. hb £50.00. ISBN 0 415
07776 1.