Lesson 8, Part 3
Local/Global in Feminist Thought
Discussion about feminist curating is often embroiled in debates from feminist theory about the question of representation and at the same time how local trends or tendencies are recognisable or not in terms of global or international exchanges.
As feminism pays attention to the relationships between power/knowledge, who is represented in exhibitions – even feminist exhibitions – needs to be subject to careful analysis and scrutiny.
Tokenism in representation or “proportionality”?
The representation of one artist to represent a country, a “people”, a “race” or because of their sexual preference is typically regarded as an instance of “tokenism” – whether that artist is male or female. If one woman artist is selected and shown in a group show as the only woman, she may equally be subject to “tokenism” – the tokenism of limited inclusion.
Many large-scale exhibitions are easy subjects for the criticism of “tokenism” because of their selection processes and/or the representation of particular groups of artists or types of artists or kinds of art practices. Selection on the grounds of gender/race/ethnicity etc are equally part of this mix that takes place, either to demonstrate “inclusiveness” or to show or model “diversity” and “globalisation”.
Women artists have collectively picketed and protested the absence of women artists from major exhibitions at museums and art spaces since the late 1960s. The “token” woman in a group exhibition is seen much less rarely today, but it still exists.
Exhibitions of women artists were and are an attempt to “redress” omissions in the past history of artists. They are generally designed to give new kinds of visibility to artists and areas of practice which have been given little national or international attention. Women artists are not “rare” and there are many types of art practice with which they have engaged.
It is only possible to see the absence or the lack of shows of women artists in the overall picture of exhibitions of art, if you compare it to the repeated and regular national or international exhibitions organised about the same few great male artists. The question of the absence or presence of women artists on the “global stage” is a question about the relative proportions of exhibitions in the programmes of particular venues or in a city or across a country. It is not possibile to overcome this by a single presentation of a woman artists’ work within a solo exhibition. As reviews of art exhibitions focus generally only on one show, this emphasis in how exhibitions are discussed tends to distort a much larger understanding of how limited the visibility of women artists really is. Such reviews frequently stress how “neglected” women are, how this might be the “first” show of this artist or “the most extensive look” at forgotten or long-hidden works. Maybe to assess the presence/absence of women artists, locally/globally we need to pay more attention to the mapping of exhibitions across programmes and museums and the clear preferences that museums show towards particular artists or types of artwork. Very little statistical work exists which does this, as was pointed out in Lesson 2.
What is the relationship between “art history” and the organising of particular exhibitions?
Modernist art history (developed since the 1960s) has encouraged a split between “international views of art movements” and “local” views of art arising within national states in the work of major museum exhibitions.
It is possible to insert women artists into either model and this practice of “redressing the balance” has been attempted by many major historical exhibitions of women artists that have been organised. However, adding women artists to this picture, does not change the picture or approach of these exhibitions.
There is a long history of large international shows of women artists and locally-focused nation-based exhibitions about artists living and working in a particular country. This is not a model arising only in the USA or Europe.
There are also accounts of art as arising from a specific place (a city/a region) which have come to stand for a particular nation state.
Artists are often shown in relation to an import/export model: ‘Women Artists from Poland’ shown in New York or “American Women Artists” shown in Paris. Women artists are no exception to this tendency. The nation state, continents of the world, or different geo-political regions have all been the basis for exhibitions of women artists and these have been organised nationally and internationally in many countries.
