The question of feminism and the avantgarde cannot be solved by simply adding more women artists to the conventional canon of art. The terms of its discourses need to be changed as they continually install male dominance in the guise of “major” and “minor”; “leading” and “following” artists.
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, there were always many women artists, working alongside their male peers, who had attended art school and then exhibited in the same exhibitions as their male colleagues, assisted in making avant-garde publications and in this way made a distinctive contribution to art. Our understanding of Modernism as well as the notion of the avantgarde requires revision.
But it is not simply attention to women artists’ work that is needed. It is how we construct a narrative of their work as a contribution to avantgardism or modernism which needs to change.
It is also necessary to move away from a picture of “Otherness”, “under-representation” and “marginalisation” as the only ways in which we can recover or consider their contribution to art, alongside a focused attention to how the gendered stereotypes in the discourse have been produced and reproduced. This is not to deny that many stereotyped and marginalising statements have been made about their work and qualities within it – at the time their works were first shown and subsequently. These need to be analysed. But the greatest problem that women artists have faced is the lack of attention or complete silence in art criticism and art history in the face of their achievements. This has led to their neglect in terms of publications or acquisitions in collections.
In her essay ‘Reviewing Modernism Criticism’ Mary Kelly makes the following argument:
Following the paradoxical logic of modernism’s demand for objective purposes as well as transcendental truths, avant-garde practices between 1965 and the mid-1970s initiated areas of work that divided the very field of which they were an effect. The potential of that divergence has not been completely realized. First, the materiality of the practice: initially defined in terms of the constraints of a particular medium, it must now be redefined as a specific production of meaning. Second, sociality, raised as the question of context, is the gallery system (inside versus outside), and the commodification of art (object versus process, action, idea, etc). This must be reconsidered as the question of institutions, of the conditions which determine the reading of artistic texts and strategies which would be appropriate for interventions (rather than alternatives) in that context. Third, sexuality, posed as the problem of images of women and how to change them, must be reformulated as a concern with positionality, with the production of readers as well as authors for artistic texts and crucially, with the sexual overdetermination of meaning which takes place in that process.
Mary Kelly Imaging Desire (MIT press, 1996) (p.98)
Mary Kelly suggests here that postmodern or late modern avantgardes have rethought modernism’s concentration on the medium (in terms of materiality); sociality (in terms of institutional critique and the role of context inside and outside the gallery); and sexuality (determining location of the artist/spectator in relation to how artworks convey their effects in a world where meaning already seems “overdetermined”).
Feminism has contributed to the construction of interventions in/through art and participated extensively in this outline of the avantgarde’s project. It is not separate from these developments.
