Defining feminist art criticism….
The following quotes examine what the task(s) for a feminist art criticism should be – by women who identify themselves as feminists and are writing feminist art criticism and history. They span the last forty years because what feminist art criticism is or should be has been defined and redefined over this period.
As I wrote in the introduction to New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies (Manchester University Press, 1995) p.7
‘Feminist art criticism should be, like all good criticism, “an invitation to dialogue”, not just between the spectator and the work, the reader and the text, but specifically in opening up questions about the way social/ political issues and ideas are addressed through particular artworks, events and the position or representation of women offered. In this sense, feminist art criticism engages not just with art practice but with questions of audience, building and sustaining debates about the representation of women and their diverse activities inside and outside the art world. Feminist art criticism charts the shifts and changes in the arguments, issues and theories it addresses as much as it intervenes to outline positions, give voice to experience and identify the relative, complex, often contradictory positions of women as artists, curators, critics, teachers and viewers.’
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Without models, it’s hard to work; without a context, difficult to evaluate; without peers, nearly impossible to speak
Joanna Russ How to Suppress Women’s Writing (London: Women’s press, 1983) p.95.
I know that a certain kind of fragmentation, certain rhythms, are wholly sensible to me even if I can’t analyze them. I find that fragmentation more and more often in art – written and visual – of women who are willing to risk something, willing to let more of themselves out, let more of themselves be subject to ridicule according to the prevailing systems. Part of the energy that emerges from that impetus is sexual. Part is intellectual in a new way. Of course there’s still an endless stream of art by women who are copying the old way, who are scared to alter the mathematics or geometry or logic or whatever it is they’re interested in towards a new and perhaps more vulnerable model. I’m certainly not saying that any of those things should be tabu for women’s art. But I’m convinved that women feel them differently and that either does come out or should come out in the art.
Lucy Lippard ‘Six’ Studio International (Feb 1974), reproduced in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: EP Dutton, 1976) p.94
‘How are we as feminists, to reformulate an agenda for feminist art criticism in the 1990s: an agenda which draws on a rich heritage of two decades of sustained feminist art practice, criticism and history? Has feminism succeeded in being the catalyst for an analysis of critical practices and critical values in the same way that Linda Nochlin suggested feminism would challenge art history in 1971? Or has it remained locked within the terms of debates initiated in the early 1980s which privilege deconstruction over essentialism, theory over experience, and criticises the personal for its failure to address the political?’
Katy Deepwell ‘Time Ladies’ Women’s Art Magazine (May/June 1992) p.6
I want to write about recent feminist art that uses theory as a genre to parody or subvert theory itself. The goal of such subversion is often to critique the elitist institutions that academicize art.
Christine Tamblyn ‘The Hair of the Dog that Bit us: Theory in Recent Feminist art’ (1992) in J. Frueh, Cassandra Langer, Arlene Raven New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action (Harper Collins, 1994)
‘The very concept of a dominant aesthetic and the hierarchical thinking that fuels it must be relinquished. The current dominant aesthetic is a narrow view that reflects the cultural values and goals of only a small part of the world body. Rather than a mainstream, it is a small tributary that wields a disproportional amount of power because of its unequal share of economic and political resources garnered through hundreds of years of cultural imperialism…..
….Stop lobbying for inclusion in the mainstream. Instead, question and undermine the legitimacy of the very concept of the mainstream art world. Infiltrate and change from within mainstream art institutions to truly reflect the diversity of world artmakers. Research and write world art history to reflect the contribution of artists of all colors and both sexes.’
Charleen Touchette ‘Multicultural Strategies for Aesthetic Revolution’ in J. Frueh, Cassandra Langer, Arlene Raven New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action (Harper Collins, 1994)
‘Only through a debate capable of questioning the idealistic-bourgeois assumption of aesthetics as the pure disinterested contemplation of beauty – a debate waged in the name of a critical materialist conception of art as a ‘practice of signs’ inserted into the antagonistic and confrontational plots of the social – can the feminine exercise its transformative potential. That is, exercise its political-discursive power to disorganize cultural messages, those messages that totalize the masculine perspective as an absolute vantage point from which the revision and supervision of history and meaning can take place’
Nelly Richard ‘Politics and Aesthetics of the Sign’ (2004) from Masculine/Feminine: Practices of Difference(s) (2004) pp.29-42.
‘For Black women artists the contradiction between their material culture and their configurated negation, complementarity and/or marginality in discourses on art constitutes the crisis that they consistently resist: one that must be vehemently confronted in the 1990s and beyond if history’s given course is to be altered. A discourse that would prioritize the lives and concerns of Black women artists is urgently needed.’
Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis ‘In search of a Discourse and Critique/s that Center the Art of Black Women Artists’ from S.M. James and A. P.A.Busia (eds) Theorizing Black Feminisms (1993) pp.228-66.
‘We do not need to find a new homogenizing mechanism but to address the difference between us, the specific social and political conditions that surround a particular author or reader where we move beyond the shift from Author to Reader [suggested by Roland Barthes], from Authority to performance, to acknowledge the significance of subjectivity, identity and difference. If the debates on authorship continually generate references to the significance of the non-universal, to the destabilizing of master narratives, then it seems crucial that issues of authorship specific to peripheral locations are on the agenda. Much of what the specialized postmodernist debates address point to the theorization of the politics of location, something that the subjects living and producing within ‘peripheries’ have attempted to articulate for a very long time.’
Joan Borsa ‘Frida Kahlo, Marginalization and the Critical Female Subject’ Third Text 12 Autumn 1990 pp.21-40.
‘Personal narrative entered women’s visual vocabulary as expression and public disclosure of the great rush of speech which women exchanged privately when they broke their silent isolation within home, studio or workplace to gather for consciousness-raising conversations. These expressions eventually took many creative forms within visual arts – visual “speech”, inventive linguistics, diaristic and imaginative narratives, words with and as images…Hearing stories over time, we have a sense of the continuum of women speaking, even across geography and history.’
Arlene Raven ‘The New Culture: Women Artists of the Seventies’ in her book Crossing Over: Feminism and the Art of Social Concern (UMI: 1988) p.8
‘We all need to do a lot of work. We – in the East [Eastern Europe] – should learn how to speak for ourselves on the global level instead of either conforming to the Western feminist ‘idiom’ (and thus playing the role of belated yet teachable “sisters”) or maintaining the notion of art as a genderless, universal, and almost divine activity. They – in the West – should, once again, question the sustainability of their privileged ‘West-centric’ feminisms and of their distorted image of Eastern European women generated by the Cold War. When the work is done, perhaps it will be time to start thinking about “us” without geographically differentiating pronouns….feminism should not become a homogenous category.’
Martina Pachmanova ‘In? Out? In Between? Some Notes on the Invisibility of a Nascent Eastern European Feminist and Gender Discourse in Contemporary Art Theory’ (2009) in Bojana Pejic Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (2009) p.241-248.
In her book, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Duke University Press, 2011), Clare Hemmings suggests that there are three common characteristics of feminism (as the subject of narratives about feminism appears in many feminist journals).
These different narratives prioritise stories of
- Progress (towards a feminist future),
- Loss (in the sense of a feminist past)
and - Return (in a recovery of the past for a feminist future).
What she means by this characterisation is that feminists today, no longer think of ‘woman’ or feminism as a unified category. There are many feminisms. While the ways in which we talk about what feminism has become more complex in how it critiques/analyses/conceives itself and its objectives, we need to acknowledge how definitions of feminism(s) produce ways of speaking about what feminism which have the effect of including or excluding different political subjects.
This plurality of ideas about feminisms often seems confusing and difficult, and carries with it the risk of the fragmentation into many different “camps” of feminist thought who rarely speak to eachother. This fragmentation “depoliticises” feminism and is in part due to the difficulty of providing a simple/simplistic explanation of “unity” for “women” which can overcome this sense of “loss” or “failure” in feminism’s earlier goals – and this is how they are relegated to the past (1960s/1970s). The idea of feminism as having failed (remember) chimes beautifully with the general public negativity about feminism in much popular culture.
There are other consequences however to fragmentation because it installs conceptual differences between women: labelling someone, for example, positively as “queer” or negatively as “cis-heteronormative” and not working with them on political issues is just as limiting as tokenising an individual woman as the representative of a particular racial or ethnic group.
Building alliances across different groups of women for specific political ends remains important as a means to move forward.
As Hemmings then suggests about “return”, there are plenty of illusions we still need to overcome and reconsider:-
“We may have been convinced by the turn to language, a poststructuralist capacity to deconstruct power and value difference, but we know better now. We know now that critique does not alter power relations and indeed that these have endured and strengthened. We know now that postmodern feminism leads to relativism and political incapacity, while women everywhere remain disadvantaged.”
