Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art by Griselda Pollock

Review by: Carol Zemel

The Art Bulletin, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Jun., 1990), pp. 336-341
Published by: College Art Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3045740 .
Accessed: 14/06/2014 20:49

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art
Bulletin.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.216 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 20:49:14 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
336 THE ART BULLETIN JUNE 1990 VOLUME LXXII NUMBER 2
century Dutch painting was produced for the free market rather
than for particular patrons. Schwartz and Bok seem to hold to
the assumption that the majority of Saenredam's works were pro-
duced on commission. They may be right, but that does not alter
the fact that a portion of his works came into being without pa-
tronage. From the single surviving letter written by Saenredam,
we know that the large Interior of St. Bavo of 1648, now in Edin-
burgh, was offered for sale to the stadholder Willem II. Willem
II did not buy it, and the painting entered the collection of Charles
II as part of the "Dutch Gift" via the collection of the Amsterdam
burgomaster Andries de Graeff. This painting, whose dimensions
alone would have made it a costly piece, was apparently not
painted on commission. His having produced a portion of his
work for the free market may account for the occasionally con-
siderable changes that Saenredam made following the initial com-
pletion of paintings. In the Interior of the Mariakerk in the Rijks-
museum, as also in a painting of the same subject in Kassel, he
overpainted the tapestries executed in gold leaf. In three other
paintings of the interior of the Mariakerk, the tapestries (likewise
executed in gold leaf) have not been altered.10Perhaps he made
these paintings for the free market, then "customized" them after
having found takers. The Amsterdam and Kassel paintings were
presumably sold to Protestant buyers who did not wish to see the
tapestries - relics of the Catholic past of the church. Naturally,
my view is entirely speculative, though that would hardly render
it unsuitable to this monograph; Schwartz and Bok themselves
rarely refrain from far-reaching conjectures.
It is somewhat surprising that the authors remain silent on the
subject of the patronage of the large Interior of St. Bavo in Phil-
adelphia (dated 1631, not 1628). Some years ago, Josua Bruyn
expressed the opinion that the richly clad group populating
the church interior represents Frederik V Palatine and his wife,
Elizabeth Stuart, and their entourage being given a tour of the
church. Might the painting have been a gift from the city of
Haarlem to the "Winter King"and his wife? The fact, in any case,
of its representing a guided tour seems beyond question.
In conclusion, a few words are in order about the organization
of the book. The authors have declined to present a complete
catalogue raisonne. This is understandable, as ninety-five percent
of it would have replicated the catalogue published in 1961. In-
stead, they have preferred to assemble a handlist, assimilating
only the most important publications since 1961. Plans of all of
the churches that appear in Saenredam's work are included, and
the vantage points from which he worked are duly noted. The
book also includes a list of archivalia bearing on Saenredam, and
extensive genealogical charts. An important feature of the book
are the reproductions; all of the paintings but one are reproduced
in color. The single exception is the panel in the collection of the
Institut N6erlandais in Paris, where reproduction rights for an
Ektachrome picture were denied on the grounds that the painting
"has suffered over the years from so many bad and inaccurate
colour reproductions," that they preferred it not be given another
try. The publisher and authors have responded by stating (p. 309):
"Despite the numerous limitations of photography, lithography,
and color printing, we believe our reproductions to be reasonably
accurate in terms of the actual colors of Saenredam's paintings.
When possible, the proofs have been compared with the originals
and corrected." I have taken the occasion to compare the repro-
10 Cf. E Lammertse,"Vanschets tot schilderij,"Bulletinvan het Rijks-
museum, xxxv, 1987, 80-90, esp. n. 14.
This content downloaded from 194.29.185.216 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 20:49:14 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ductions with originals in Amsterdam, Haarlem, The Hague, and
Rotterdam. Of the thirteen plates checked, a mere six could be
said to be reasonably accurate. It is regrettable that current tech-
nical conditions apparently yield no better results. That the index
and the cross-referencing of the book are riddled with so many
mistakes has nothing to do with technical conditions, but rather
reflects a tight schedule and the pressure of deadlines: the book
was presented to the Dutch press on the ninth of June last year,
to coincide with the painter's birthday. The English edition, to
appear this spring, will have suffered less from these pressures.
For other reasons, too, the English version will be superior to the
Dutch; fifteen of the sixteen chapters were originally written in
English and then translated - here too the original may be pref-
erable to the reproduction. This does not mean that the book in
the form reviewed here is not a more than welcome publication.
It is a beautiful book, which contains much new information,
provokes discussion, and will surely stimulate further research.
This is cause for gratitude.
ROB RUURS
Kunsthistorisch Instituut
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
GRISELDA POLLOCK,Vision and Difference: Femininity,
Feminism and the Histories of Art, London and New York,
ills.
Routledge, 1988. Pp. 239; 53 black-and-white
On the cover of Griselda Pollock's Vision and Difference, Mary
Cassatt's image of a woman looking through opera glasses an-
nounces one pole of the book's discursive terrain. With looking
as its subject, At the Opera stages the activity and conditions of
spectatorship. In the foreground, the woman seen in profile leans
forward, intent; a man in a distant loge watches her; while the
viewer of the painting becomes a passive, third term in a triangle
of intersecting but never interacting gazes. Represented as the
agent of her own visual pleasure, the "subject of her own look,"
as Pollock puts it (pp. 75-76), Cassatt's opera-going matron sur-
veys the world of the modern and confidently joins the masculine
world of spectatorship.
The woman's activity and the painting's emphasis on agency
are central concerns of Pollock's feminist art history. The beau-
tiful faces of models and movie stars in the centerfold photo-essay
(pp. 115-119)is another. Fifteen iconic close-ups expose the 19th-
century origins and the enduring status of an ideal femininity, a
depersonalized configuration whose standard no woman in West-
ern culture can escape. As a group, these pictures set forth another
term of Pollock's project: to demonstrate the construction of fem-
ininity as a particular kind of gender difference - passive, re-
ceptive, seductive. Images like these serve as evidence of the ways
in which women are also "not-women" in representation, but signs
of something else, objectified vehicles of masculine mastery and
desire. Playing ironically on women's "silence"in history, on our
"absence" as signifieds, Pollock lets this collection of beautiful
women "speak for themselves."
I begin with pictures - strategically placed by the author as
signs of the book's activist character. At the heart of Pollock's
approach is the feminist conviction that women's place in history
is always a socially constructed and negotiated condition. Thus,
despite real constraints on their activities, women, in historical
accounts, are not prisoners of social and cultural forces, but active
negotiators of their own lives. That sense of agency enlivens the
text; Pollock's are not only insightful analyses, they are
empowering.

This comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the author's
previous publications. Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology'
reminded us that women artists were not so much hidden from
history as always present but in some secondary status. The task
Pollock suggested was to consider their position structurally and
relationally, to ask how the social categories "women" and "art-
ist" intersect at given moments to allow or inhibit a woman artist's
choices and possibilities. Old Mistresses is virtually a primer on
"how-to-do" feminist art history. The collection of essays (two
previously published) here in review develops approaches initi-
ated there through complex and detailed argument.
Vision and Difference is centered firmly on art-historical prac-
tices seen as coincident with bourgeois, capitalist culture. What
is at issue, however, is not history, but method. "Wecannot ignore
the fact," Pollock writes, "that the terrains of artistic practice and
of art history are structured in and structuring of gender power
relations" (p. 55). In those terms, her book is a model for scholars
of modernism and contemporary art, and a stimulating guide to
problems, issues, and questions for those working in pre-modern
periods. The book is useful as a tool to target art-historical he-
gemonies and to raise crucial questions like: what constitutes evi-
dence7 how do we define art production? who is the art audience
beyond patrons and critics? who looks at art objects? how do
they look?
The title, Vision and Difference, declares the book's purpose
and range: linking constructions of sexual difference to modes of
visuality, and indicating how these have been legitimated within
histories of art. Beginning with a survey of methodological frame-
works, Pollock's chapters move from an examination of femi-
ninity in 19th-century French and British art to consideration of
contemporary feminist art and strategies for change. Each chapter
examines the practices of art history through detailed analyses of
specific art-historical topoi - from modernity's spaces, to beauty
and pleasure, to artists' muses and models, to documentation and
evidence - all of which programmatically define the patriarchal
terms of the discipline. These set a particular agenda. "The po-
litical point of feminist art history," Pollock states emphatically,
"must be to change the present by means of how we re-present
the past" (p. 14).
The project is ambitious and difficult. But as Linda Nochlin
puts it, "Feministart history is there to make trouble. . . . At its
strongest, a feminist art history is a transgressive and anti-
establishment practice, meant to call many of the major precepts
of the discipline into question."2 Many feminist scholars have
called for sweeping changes,3 but it has remained for British
1 Co-authoredwith RoszikaParker,New York,1981. Pollock's
Framing
Feminism,Art and the Women'sMovement,1970-1985,LondonandNew
York,1987,editedwith Parker,is a collectionof criticaltextsby various
feministwriterson contemporaryart.
I want to thank EuniceLiptonand KathleenCorriganfor discussion
and criticismof issues in this review
2 L. Nochlin, "Introduction,"
Women,Art, and Power,New York,1988,
XIII.
3 In one of the first Americancollectionsof feministart history,Norma
Broudeand MaryGarrardsuggestedthe "possibilityof alterationsof art
historyitself,its methodologyandits theory";FeminismandArt History:
Questioningthe Litany,New York,1982,vii.
4 Most recentlyby L. Tickner,"Feminism,Art History,and SexualDif-
ference,"Genders,III, Fall 1988, 92-128.Feministart history is usefully
This content downloaded from 194.29.185.216 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 20:49:14 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
BOOK
REVIEWS 337
women (Pollock, Tickner, Garb, Adler, Nead) to theorize and
frame a comprehensive feminist program.4 If feminist art history
is to undergo any fundamental change, key structures, such as
the centrality of the art object, the fixities of art history's bound-
aries, the privileging of the artist-genius, the invisibility of the
viewer, as Lisa Tickner lists them,5 must be unveiled and exam-
ined. Given both the political character and theoretical complex-
ity of Pollock's project, it would be disingenuous not to see the
contribution of Vision and Difference partially in that light.
A glance at American publications and academic programs tells
us that feminist art history in this country lags well behind fem-
inism in literary criticism and the social sciences.6 Save for recent
volumes of October and interdisciplinary journals like Genders
and Representations, there is hardly a hospitable scholarly forum
for deconstructive feminist approaches to the visual arts to com-
pare with British publications like Block, Oxford Art Journal, or
Art History. And beyond the orthodoxies of our academic com-
munity, feminist art history must contend with the machismo of
America's cultural "triumph"and criticism since World War II.7
Seen through our journals, scholarly presses, and granting agen-
cies, feminist art history has engaged in largely reformist or cor-
rective activity. The American-British distinction is perhaps best
described by the literary scholar Carolyn Heilbrun's account of
American and French feminist critical practice. American fem-
inism, she writes, is developed around an experiential model of
women in the social or political arena - women left out or denied
access to education, institutions, jobs - while French (and in our
context, British) feminism is based on the notion of language as
a male construct in which women are silenced, unable to find
expression within the patriarchal structures of language, and of
representation. Heilbrun quotes the critic Elaine Marks: "Amer-
ican feminist critics see women as oppressed by sexism, 'their
voices unheard within the dominant culture,' whereas for French
critics women are repressed, equivalent to the unconscious and
therefore not representable in language."8 Broadly put in these
terms, we can understand our efforts to change art history by
correcting the canon; we have had more difficulty changing the
codes. American feminists have been readier to insert gender into
traditional iconographic and stylistic frameworks, or to provide
"background" data on woman's history rather than develop a
methodological critique. Notwithstanding the contributions of
Nochlin, Duncan, Lipton, and Lippard, much of our important
work floats unanchored as singular studies, and too often these
are accommodated at the margins of an accretive liberal history.
By now, the lack of theoretical framework has resulted in a scat-
mappedby T. Gouma-Peterson
and P. Mathews,'"TheFeministCritique
of Art History," Art Bulletin, LXIx,1987, 326-357.
5 Tickner,94.
6LindaNochlincalls for analysisof thatlag. See Women,Art andPower,
xvi, n. 2.
7 Feministanalysesof Americanmodernism's"highmasculinities"-Ab-
andMinimalism- areunderwayin theworkof Ann
stract-Expressionism
Gibsonand Anna Chave. See Chave's"Minimalismand the Rhetoricof
Power,"Arts Magazine,January1990, 44-63. Significantly,this article
appearedin a non-academicjournal,gearedto contemporaryart and art
criticism.
8E. Marks,quotedin CarolynG. Heilbrun,Writinga Woman'sLife,New
York, 1988, 42-43.
338 THE ART BULLETIN JUNE 1990 VOLUME LXXII NUMBER 2
tered revisionism rather than a problematizing of feminist pro-
cedures and concerns.
It is here that Vision and Difference makes a ground-breaking
contribution to the field. Though the text does not presume a
reader familiar with theoretical literature or principles, these es-
says set feminist art history and contemporary feminist art firmly
in an interdisciplinary theoretical framework. Theory is essential
for any activist practice, Pollock argues, because theoretical par-
adigms that include gender as a structuring principle offer path-
ways through the revisionist habit of recovery and absorption.
Reminding readers of "the political responsibility of working for
the liberation of women," Pollock asks rhetorically: "What sense
are we to make of information without a theoretical framework
through which to discern the particularity of women's work?"
(pp. 14, 55).
At times this makes for a bumpy ride. Vision and Difference
negotiates the confluence of theory, specific analyses, and feminist
practice with some awkwardness of language. But feminism is an
embattled practice, and at its most elaborate, Pollock's is the lan-
guage of political parti pris. While some readers will find the tone
bossy and the syntax prolix, others no doubt will find her writing
an audacious1and thrilling call to arms.
Beginning with a survey of effective theoretical frameworks and
methodologies, Pollock targets two bastions of resistance to fem-
inism within contemporary art history: bourgeois liberalism and
the progressive left. The structures of mainstream art history are
familiar: the narrow focus on the art object, the valorization of
the artist-genius and his creative processes, and the invisibility of
the spectator. But the omission of consideration of gender from
most "progressive"art history and its formulations of modernity
raises the ante and the heat of Pollock's arguments. Her pointed
example is T.J. Clark's now infamous call for a social history of
art which nonetheless dismissed feminism as a "cheerful diver-
sification" or gadfly methodology that is "hot-foot [along with
other approaches] in the pursuit of the new."9
Indeed, Pollock's approach is enthusiastically diversified.
"Feministinterventions in the histories of art," the opening chap-
ter argues, are best served when problematized through a range
of theoretical models - Marxist formulations of class and ide-
ology, Foucauldian discursive structures, linguistic theories of sig-
nification, and psychoanalytic models of the development of sex-
uality and subjectivity. With visual art construed as a signifying
practice, as a fluid, constructive force rather than a reflection of
an already existing reality, and with the psychodynamics of the
gaze proposed as a structuring matrix for gender identities, the
field for intervention broadens, with more avenues for action and
more possibilities for change.
After suggesting their promise for feminist art history, Pollock
demonstrates these approaches in four closely argued chapters.
"Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity" uses gender and class
9 T.J. Clark, "On the Conditionsof ArtisticCreation,"TimesLiterary
Supplement,24 May 1974, 562. Feminismis dismissedalong with "for-
[sic], filmic,and 'radical'" approaches.
malist, 'modernist,'sub-Freudian
Clark'smasculinistMarxismis a recurrentfocus of Pollock'scritique,
elaboratedmost explicitlyin chaps. 2, 3, and 7.
10T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and
His Followers,New York,1985. Foran earlierformulationof class and
the visual coherenceof the modernizingcity, see G. Pollock, "StarkEn-
counters:ModernLifeand UrbanWorkin Van Gogh'sDrawingsof the
Hague, 1881-83," Art History, vi, 330-358.
11Foran analogousaccountof thisterrain,see L. Nochlin,"Morisot'sWet
This content downloaded from 194.29.185.216 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 20:49:14 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
frameworks as well as discursive positionality and models of the
gaze to reconsider Impressionism as modernity's founding terrain.
Building on T.J. Clark's mapping of modern Paris and its rep-
resentations as a zone of leisure and shifting class identities,10Pol-
lock returns to Baudelaire's "The Painter of Modern Life" (1859)
and his account there of modernity construed through eroticized
urban spaces-boulevards, bars, cafes, and popular entertain-
ments. Yet, Pollock contends:
The significant spaces of modernity are neither simply those of
masculinity, nor are they those of femininity, which are as much
the spaces of modernity for being the negative of the streets
and bars. They are . . . the marginal or interstitial spaces [the
theater, the garden, the park, the brothel] where the masculine
and feminine intersect and structure sexuality within a classed
order (p. 70).
In two remarkably telling grids, Pollock diagrams the public
and domestic zones represented in Impressionist painting, and dif-
ferentiates the representation of theater and home in paintings by
bourgeois women like Cassatt and Morisot from those by Monet
or Renoir. What made such pictures compelling icons was not the
social modernity they "reflected,"or even the sexual promise they
displayed, but the sexualities and social differences they encoded
and defined. Pollock extends her analysis to show that the central
terrain of the modern, the site of masculine power and viewing
pleasure, was not only staged through the sexual presence of
working-class women, but also through the presence of bourgeois
women shown at home or in public as domestic or maternal fig-
ures, effectively de-sexed (pp. 69f).11
This may be hard stuff to swallow, even in a revisionist frame-
work. As Pollock's appearance in a recent television series made
clear, liberal art history is readier to acknowledge bourgeois wom-
en's limited access and confinements than it is to admit that def-
initions of modernity are grounded in women's position as sig-
nifiers of powerlessness and difference, or that modernism's major
victories, from Manet to Picasso, were won "across the bodies of
women."12What Pollock's analysis discloses is the patriarchal ma-
neuvers of modern bourgeois culture, how the very definition -
the experience and the image - of modernity crucially depended
on dual axes of difference: separate spheres and restricted spaces
to confine bourgeois women and to define their femininity, and
a further consolidation of difference through class, that consol-
idation centered on working women's sexuality.
With the focus of the argument on space, production and con-
sumption figure here as well. Here, Pollock's remapping of
modernity updates what we may call "traditional"feminist read-
ings, namely that the limitations of education and activity im-
posed on bourgeois women artists necessarily affected the kinds
of pictures they produced,"13 and that the Impressionist enthusiasm
Nurse:The Constructionof Workand Leisurein ImpressionistPainting,"
Women, Art, and Power, 37-56.
12Pollock'sdeclarationof this positionin the segmenton Impressionism
andPost-Impressionism in the PublicTelevisionseries"Artof theWestern
World"was immediatelyfollowedby an announcement,in an unknown
woman'svoice, relativizingthe opinionsof all art historiansand effec-
tively disavowingthis disturbingstatement.
13A positionrightlyderivedfromNochlin'sground-breaking article,"Why
HaveThereBeenNo GreatWomenArtists?"(1971),reprintedin Women,
Art, and Power, 145-178.

for quotidian subjects created a hospitable space for pictures of
domesticity by Morisot and Cassatt.14Revising her own analyses
of the oblique spaces depicted in Morisot's and Cassatt's pictures
as metaphors of women's social confinement or marginality, Pol-
lock cautions against homologous arguments in which style is
read as a reflection of experience. Such a reading, in this context,
suggests an essentialized, female authorship, as if women nec-
essarily represented their social experience. Though her argument
is somewhat cryptic here, Pollock offers the notion of a constantly
negotiated positionality,15 that is, women working, shaping, and
being shaped by the terms of professional practice. This view of
art production avoids a sort of squeeze play between the exag-
gerated subjectivity of the artist-genius, on the one hand, and the
"death of the author/artist" position, on the other, whereby the
woman artist loses her distinctive place as subject, so to speak,
and instead functions as a conduit of discursive codes. In this way,
a historical producer, whether Suzanne Valadon, Berthe Morisot,
or Auguste Renoir, positioned through specific discourses of
class and gender, replaces the transhistorical persona of a
mythic creator.
Equally enmeshed in the spaces of femininity is the issue of
spectatorship. Art-historical accounts of a public rarely extend
beyond critics and patrons. Pollock enlarges the art audience to
consider women as lookers and consumers. Her discussion of
works like Cassatt's At the Opera or possible responses to Manet's
Olympia uncovers the ways in which the (bourgeois) woman
spectator is un-imaged and un-imagined, and becomes, ironically,
a sort of agent of image control.16 Perhaps no document of the
period bears this out more poignantly than Berthe Morisot's letter
to her sister reporting her sense of uncertain identity and con-
fusion at the Salon of 1869, where Manet's Balcony, for which
she posed, was on display.17Unlike the woman reading, conven-
tionally an image of eroticized feminine reverie, the woman look-
ing is a disruptive figure whose activity illuminates the sexual
positionalities assigned to spectatorship and objects of spectacle.18
This is an important question, announced years ago in Carol
Duncan's speculations on the responses of a bourgeois collector's
wife to her husband's Fauve and Expressionist pictures of lower-
class nudes.19In this instance, Pollock relies on a reading of pic-
torial spaces to elaborate the position of the female gaze. She
proceeds from a psychoanalytic framework frequently used in
feminist film criticism.20In that model, a woman spectator's ex-
perience is split between masochistic identification with the female
figures objectified in an image and a sort of spectatorial transves-
tism through which we assume the mastering positions of the male
gaze, which deliver visual pleasure in this culture. Deftly playing
14See Pollock's Mary Cassatt, London, 1980. We know that the critical
and art-historicalemphaseson these painters'"femininity"limitedand
shapedtheirsuccess.See T. Garb, " 1' Art f6minin':The Formationof a
CriticalCategoryin LateNineteenthCenturyFrance,"Art History,xii,
March, 1989, 39-65.
15Fora fullerdiscussionof experientialandpositionaldifference,seeTick-
ner, "Feminism,Art History,and SexualDifference,"99-110.
16See hercommenton the presenceof bourgeoiswomenspectatorsat the
Salon as exacerbatingOlympia'sscandalousimpact(n. on p. 54).
17Correspondence de Berthe Morisot, ed. D. Rouart, Paris, 1950, 47.
18The genderedconditionsof spectatorshipin 19th-centuryart are taken
up by E. LiptonandR. Bettertonin theiranalysesof DegasandValadon,
as well as Nochlin, in Women, Art, and Power. See Lipton, Looking into
Degas, Los Angeles, 1987; R. Betterton,"How do WomenLook?The
FemaleNude in the Workof SuzanneValadon,"in LookingOn: Images
of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media, London, 1987, 217-234.
19C. Duncan,"Virilityand Dominationin EarlyTwentiethCenturyVan-
This content downloaded from 194.29.185.216 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 20:49:14 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
BOOK REVIEWS 339
with this paradigm, Pollock argues that the spatial manipulations
in pictures by Morisot or Cassatt, like At the Opera, escape the
trajectories of mastering gaze, and become instead "the locus of
relationships" (p. 87).21 The argument closes the chapter, but it is
a promising breakthrough for further investigation and analysis.
For rather than "naturalizing"the female gaze as an essential part
of women's experience and art production (the homologous
argument), Pollock's argument avoids the trap of binary oppo-
sition - men look one way, women another - and suggestively
demonstrates the possibilities of theorizing and locating the gaze
and spectatorship outside the desire for mastery.
After a chapter charting the spaces of femininity and feminine
agency, two chapters on 19th-century British painting explicate
its objectifications. What used to be called the image of woman
is effectively reformulated as "woman as image."22Chapter Iv
takes Elizabeth Cowie's Post-structuralist essay, "Woman as
Sign,"23 as a model to demonstrate that "woman" is not a bio-
logical or "natural"condition, but a category formulated in dis-
course. Accordingly, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's pictures of Eliza-
beth Siddall and the texts written about her do not represent an
existing person; rather, "Lizzie Siddal" is formed within this "re-
gime of representation" as an embodiment of the feminine, a cat-
egory of difference that serves to refine another category - mas-
culinity. The chapter underscores the character of that historically
constructed femininity: frailty, passivity, purity for bourgeois
women; for working-class women, unbridled or unsocialized sex-
uality. Pollock describes the ways in which the figure "Siddal"is
bolstered and authenticated by our belief in various kinds of evi-
dence - letters, memoirs, archives, and a succession of art-his-
torical texts. Cautioning against the search for the "real"Siddall,
and the impossibility of finding the "reality"behind the sign (the
social historian's impulse, after all), the analysis reminds us that
all forms of authenticating evidence - from the archival docu-
ments to memoirs - are themselves discursively formed and
ideologically framed.
What is unsettling here is not only the elusiveness of the "truth,"
or the fact that we can never "get to" the figure within the sign.
It is the realization that such pictures are not simply images of
women but signs of difference, and so markers or negative tem-
plates of masculinity. The implication that women in such in-
stances are not actually "visible" in representation, and that our
real selves are always somehow negotiated through figures in
masque, seems to leave women captive, with no way to escape
the masculine discourses of femininity, to take charge or to for-
mulate ourselves through the obscuring network of signs. This,
for example, is the artist Cindy Sherman's project when, making
guardPainting,"Artforum,1973,repr.in Broudeand Garrard,Feminism
and Art History, 293-314.
20Thefundamentaltexts are L. Mulvey,"VisualPleasureand Narrative
Cinema,"(1975),and a modifiedversion of that position in idem, "Af-
terthoughtson VisualPleasureand NarrativeCinema,"(1981),both re-
printed in Visual and Other Pleasures, Bloomington, 1989, 14-28, 29-38;
and M.A. Doane "Filmand Masquerade- Theorisingthe FemaleSpec-
tator, Screen, xxiim, 1982, 74-88.
21Forexplorationsof this issue in televisionand film that are usefulfor
art history,see L. Gammon,"Watchingthe Detectives:The Enigmaof
theFemaleGaze,"andJ. Stacey,"Desperately SeekingDifference,"in The
Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture, ed. L. Gammon
and M. Mashment, Seattle, 1989, 8-26, 112-129.
22See Pollock's1977 reformulationof the image of woman as sign, re-
printed in Framing Feminism, 132-138.
23Cowie, M/F,1, 1978, 49-63.
340 THE ART BULLETIN JUNE 1990 VOLUME LXXII NUMBER 2
that positional difference ironic, she masquerades her "selves"
through mocking photographic scenarios of melodrama, carnival,
and art-historical "master-pieces." The process produces a slip-
page, a glimpse of a place beyond the charade. If women are such
"mimes"or such ironic players of femininity, the French feminist
Luce Irigary suggests, "it is because they are not simply resorbed
in this function. They also remain elsewhere. .,24
Chapter vi extends the issue of woman as ... sign to the repre-
sentation of a woman's face as a fetishized icon of desire and
difference. Proceeding again from Laura Mulvey's account of fet-
ishistic scopophilia (pleasure in looking) in narrative cinema, Pol-
lock brings these terms to bear on Rossetti's images of large-
headed, female figures in bowers. These iconic pictures of an ideal
of feminine "beauty"both arouse and allay anxieties about sexual
difference in the masculine spectator. Such pictures, Pollock ar-
gues in "A Photo-essay: Signs of Femininity" (Chap. v), were ob-
sessively repeated by Rossetti, but they are everywhere in the
culture as screens for a fetishized articulation of bourgeois sexual
difference and masculinity. Again, femininity is unveiled as a sig-
nifying mechanism through which sexual difference is demar-
cated, managed, and controlled. The argument winds through an
elaborate network of psychoanalytic paradigms from Freud to
Lacan on looking, fetishism, and the gaze, as Pollock uses the
theoretical structure to deconstruct one of the central mystifica-
tions of art history and femininity - beauty and the pleasures of
mastery it provides.
A final, stirring chapter on British feminist art and its strategies
takes visual pleasure as a central concern. The importance of the
issue is announced early in the book:
If Marxist studies rightly privilege ideology, feminist analyses
focus on pleasure, on the mechanisms and managements of sex-
ualized pleasures which the major ideological apparatuses or-
ganize none more potently than those involved with visual rep-
resentation (p. 14).
Pollock acknowledges that pleasure is a "problematic concept"
for feminists. Indeed, an ambivalence about pleasure haunts
Vision and Difference, as it does many feminist texts. When Laura
Mulvey proposed "the destruction of pleasure as a radical
weapon," she called for an end to the narcotic "ease and pleni-
tude" of narrative cinema, whose visual formulations (like those
of many paintings and photographs) reinscribe the visual objec-
tifications of the male gaze. For most of us, this was a liberating
and inspiring call.25 Much of the pleasure in visual representation,
after all, as the previous chapters have shown, is the pleasure of
male mastery and involves the objectification and demeaning of
women. The issue, then, invites two sorts of concern. First, what
is the place of pleasure in a critical feminist practice? Second, and
far more problematic, is what pleasure means for women, and
how we can use those meanings to reformulate desire.
Pollock turns to the strategies of "distantiation" and pleasure
24L. Irigary,"ThePowerof Discourse,"ThisSex WhichIs Not One, trans.
C. Porter,Ithaca,1985, 75. See also T. Garb'sdiscussionof femininity
and masquerade in "Unpicking the Seams of Her Disguise . . . Self-Rep-
resentationin the Case of MarieBashkirtseff,"Block, Winter1987/88,
79-86.
25Foranotherview, see F.Jameson's"Pleasure,A PoliticalIssue,"where
he setsMulvey'sargumentasideas positingsometranshistorical (because
psychoanalytic)inevitabilityin its formationsof pleasure,and therefore
producingat bestonly "guilttrips"for "menof good will"andseparatism
for women. The Ideologies of Theory; Essays 1971-1986, ii, Minneapolis,
1988, 61-74.
This content downloaded from 194.29.185.216 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 20:49:14 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
advocated by the German poet and playwright Bertolt
Brecht26to address the first issue and to characterize the art of
British feminists. Unlike traditional realism - the kind whose
spaces and spectators are manipulated by Cassatt and Morisot -
Brechtian modernism depends on disjunctive effects (like those of
collage, montage, or image-text combinations), which interrupt
passive, voyeuristic satisfaction in the image, and instead demand
engaged self-reflection from the viewer and awareness of con-
tending registers of form and meaning. Through these techniques,
the wholeness of an image shatters, and its seamless perfection
or single point of view appears illusory and contrived. For the
viewer, this critical "distantiation"or "making strange"of familiar
cultural fragments results in a "displacement of ideology" (p. 170)
and, in the feminist project, a disruption of formations of femi-
ninity. Pleasure, Brecht counseled, is crucial to this enterprise.
Pollock quotes the artist Mary Kelly on its effects.
This [pleasure] acts as a kind of "capture"of the viewer which
precedes recognition of the analytical texts. For me it's abso-
lutely crucial that this kind of pleasure in the texts, in the ob-
jects, should engage the viewer, because there is no point at
which it can be a deconstructed critical engagement if the viewer
is not - immediately and affectively - drawn into the work
(p. 180).
Rather than lulling and soothing, or simply affirming well-
being, pleasure here paradoxically carries and helps perform a
distancing critique. In Kelly's Post-Partum Document, for ex-
ample, the range of assembled materials - from stained diapers
(for many critics, the shocker in the show), to a child's scribbles
and typed diary log of the child's development - are remarkably
engaging when set beside abstruse Lacanian diagrams and ar-
ranged in the pristine spaces of an art gallery. Pleasure in this
sense seduces us for a higher purpose or cause: Post-Partum Doc-
ument deconstructs motherhood; Kelly's Interim takes on wom-
en's middle age. Effective as it is critically, this is pleasure as a
kind of "bait."
But what of the second concern, pleasure itself and its visual
meanings? "Daring to break with normal [sic] pleasurable expec-
tations in order to conceive a new language of desire,"27as Mul-
vey's call continued, is difficult and daunting. The pleasures of
the body always seem to trap women in naturalized binary op-
positions or as objectifications of masculine desire. In the effort
to avoid representations of a "vanilla-sex" idealism or essential-
izing celebrations of "the feminine" - women's nurturing, pacific
natures, intuition and emotionality, or even the dispersed sexual
pleasures of the female body theorized by French feminists Hd14ne
Cixous and Luce Irigary28- feminists have had to face the per-
plexing question: must all of our pleasures be guilty ones? If the
primary zone of pleasure is the body, how might representation
of the (female) body deliver pleasure and escape the fall into
patriarchal signification and voyeurism?
26B. Brecht,"Theatrefor Pleasureor Theatrefor Instruction,"
Brechton
Theatre,ed. J. Willett,London,1978,69-76.Pollockdrawson theoretical
debatesthat appearedthroughthe 1970sin the BritishmagazineScreen.
Brecht'spositionsare usefullysummarizedby S. Henry,"WhoseBrecht?
Memories for the Eighties," Screen, xIx, 1982, 45-59.
27Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure," 15-16.
28 L.
Irigary,"WhenOur LipsSpeakTogether,"This Sex Which Is Not
One, 205-218.

Pollock's argument turns again to paradigms of signification
and positionality. Taking the body as a sign, she writes, it can be
manipulated from that level. Thus, Kelly's Interim heightens the
range and variety of negotiated positionalities of the sexual
woman. Through pictures of fetishized objects of clothing, dia-
ries, fashion and romance magazines, and medical illustrations,
she articulates the body and discloses the ambivalence, anxieties,
and pleasures of middle age. But Interim's images of pleasure are
never delivered without the "distantiating" counterpoint. Like
many pleasures for women, they are mixtures - combinations
of humor, fantasy, sensuality, anxiety, and loss. This is also the
case, I would argue, for Sherman's masquerade: a lush, costumed
photo-drama renders old roles ironic and uses their familiar pleas-
ures to develop new combinations of visual play and risk. Even
Cassatt's At the Opera is not without wit, as it playfully sets the
woman spectator's activity against a belittled masculine voyeur.
These works propose women whose pleasure and sense of agency
is signified as complex, multiple, proliferative - not simply as
castrating threats to masculine mastery.
Traditional pleasures are a high-stakes investment, not easily
relinquished. As things stand, we need to be mindful of their com-
plexity and of the threat a new language of desire signals to the
old utopian story of pure delight. If the central domain of pleasure
is sexuality and the body, the task for feminist art and art history
is to destabilize the fixed visual categories of difference, to rein-
scribe women's sexuality where it has been erased, and to visualize
signifying systems of sexual agency and relationship in that
eroticized field. Pollock's essays organize the project with theo-
retical frameworks, analytic models, and usable strategies. Vision
and Difference is a needed and major contribution to feminism
and art history.
CAROL ZEMEL
State University of New York
Buffalo, NY 14260
DAVID FREEDBERG, The Power of Images: Studies in the
History and Theory of Response, Chicago, The University
of Chicago Press, 1989. Pp. 560; 189 black-and-white ills.
$39.95
It is widely accepted that Eastern Europeans recently became dis-
contented with their own lives in part because of the steady flow
of televised images of a certain unrehearsed material abundance
in the daily lives of Western countries. It is no less widely believed
that the American South modulated its resistance to political
change because of its revulsion against the way it was perceived
in the North, as seen in televised images of spontaneous violence
against blacks demanding their civil rights. These are examples,
among countless others, of the power of images to change human
reality. Nor can it be doubted that the power was exercized by
images, rather than descriptions of conditions coveted or con-
demned: it was "seeing with their own eyes" that conveyed per-
ceived truth to consciousness and brought changes to the way
viewers decided they must live. These are vast and complex var-
iations on a theme set by Rilke in a famous poetic response to an
archaic torso of Apollo. And changing lives in this and similar
ways have been among the motives of artists in many different
times. William Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience surely
was intended to awaken, or at the very least to strengthen, moral
consciousness in its viewers. Guernica no less surely was con-
ceived as a transformative image, meant to cause shock and in-
This content downloaded from 194.29.185.216 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 20:49:14 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
BOOK REVIEWS 341
dignation toward the perpetrators of the outrage it memorializes.
It goes some distance toward understanding the title of David
Freedberg'sremarkable study (or, really, his set of linked studies)
that he has in mind by the power of images nothing so com-
monplace as any of these examples. His subject is the power cred-
ited to images felt literally to have a life of their own-images
felt, though all the while recognized to be painted or drawn or
molded or carved, to behave or to be capable of behaving as if
alive. Some of these powers are of an uncanny order, as when
we feel that the eyes in a painted image literally follow us as we
traverse the room, and sometimes of a spectacularly uncanny or-
der, as when tears are believed to flow down the painted cheeks
of saints or blood from painted wounds or milk from the painted
breasts of a wooden virgin into the rapt mouth of Saint Bernard.
Votive offerings and voodoo fetishes - where operating on the
image is felt ipso facto to be operating upon the things represented
by the image - are further cases of empowered images, as Freed-
berg uses this concept. It is his thesis that the relationship of viewer
to power-possessing image is virtually universal; that this rela-
tionship forms a natural component in our overall relationship
to images even today; and that this mode of experiencing images
has been lost sight of, to the detriment of our understanding of
art, by art historians and aestheticians and critics who tend to
discriminate sharply between high and low art, and to understand
high art strictly in terms of formalist criteria. He repeatedly asserts
these theses, though with very little advance in argument, as he
instead places before our gaze group after group of empowered
images from various cultures and various times.
This is a fascinating, important, and at the same time a frus-
trating book, largely in consequence of the powers that images
have, but that fall somewhere in the vast space between the some-
what spooky powers dwelt upon by the author, and the formal
organization of works of art, which Freedberg takes as the only
alternative to images seen as if virtually alive. None of the powers
sketched in my opening paragraph, for example, play any role at
all in Freedberg'sconsiderations. Nor, for those of us who believe
in the artistic importance of content, do the powers Freedberg
defends so fiercely have much to do with our interchanges with
works of art. (Thomas Nast's caricatures of Boss Tweed brought
down a corrupt government, but not because they winked,
grinned, or stuck their tongues out.) The frustration of the book
lies in its disjunction - either you relate to images claimed to
possess such powers as lacrimation and lactation, or you are some
kind of formalist, numb to the magical power of art. But almost
everything interesting about art lies somewhere between these
disjuncts.
In an attempt to clarify the kind of pictorial representation I
believe Freedberghas undertaken to address in this book, I would
distinguish it as one of two possible conceptions that, borrowing
a distinction from the Scholastics, I shall designate immanent and
transeunt representation. The Scholastic distinction was between
two orders of causation: it is transeunt causation when cause and
effect are separated as distinct events, as in the classroom example
of the concussion of billiard balls. In recent decades, the distinc-
tion has been revived because it is felt that the power we have
over our own bodies exemplifies another kind of causation al-
together: it is immanent causation when an agent raises his arm,
not by doing something that causes it to rise, but directly, simply
by raising it. The idea of immanent causation was introduced to
block infinite regressions, and it is the kind of causal power that
"first causes" are supposed to have. In parallel with this, a tran-
seunt representation is one in which the subject is distinct from
the image representing it, as in simple, unmanipulated photog-
raphy or eidetic imagery. It is transeunt representation when, at