Reframings: New American Feminist Photographies. - book reviews

In her effort to bring the feminist photographer and critic together in individual inclusive volume, Reframings's editor, Diane Neumaier, discovered that feminist critics appear more interested in analyzing dominant tillage than feminist artwork. Neumaier states in her introduction: "Simply place most feminist image-makers cannot gain an audience with feminist critics." Reframings bridges this gap between the theorist and artist by dint of including essays that thoughtfully address fresh feminist photography, thereby diminishing the usual distance between the artist and critic to the advantage of the one and the other Reframings promotes a community of feminists whose belonging to all concerns attest to Neumaier's assertion that, now, "art and criticism are not sole mutually generative but are frequently dependent." Providing visibility to feminist photographers and theorists, and emphasizing the interrelation of the sum of two units Reframings expands the parameters of feminist discourse, while at the same time collecting a canon to which scholars might leave in the future. In this manner Reframings replys to Linda Nochlin's famous 1973 question "why have there been no great women artists?" with the assurance that now there are great women artists and critics.

Reframings is divided into eight topics, each with a critical essay and several featured photographers. The eight headings - "Gendering Space," "Domestic Production/Reproduction/Resistance," "Identity Formations," "Postcolonial Legacies," "Rationalizing and Realizing the Body" "Sex and Anxiety," "Crossing Over: Reimagining and Reimaging" and "Representing Representation" - apply multicultural touchs to a wide range of artistic material. This make mirrors the historical changes that have occurr within feminist art practice above the past 30-odd years, from a politically-oriented move to a discipline institutionalized within the academic field of cultural studies. Reframings mirrors this historical shift by including above 100 pages of critical analysis through such prominent writers as Lucy Lippard, Deborah Willis, Theresa Harlan, Julia Ballerini, Moira Roth Catherine Lord, Valerie Soe and Abigail Solomon-Godeau.

The art in Reframings exemplifies feminist photography's growing alliance with critical theories that interrogate the cultural adjoining matter of representation. In addition to similar conceptual innovators as Mary Kelly Martha Rosier, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger Reframings also features les known photographers whose work relies on psychoanalytic and historical models, building on and expanding feminism's theoretical potencys For instance, photographs from Carla Williams's 1991 series "How to Read Character" bring the photographic depiction of her material substance into the territory of phrenology, eugenics and other nineteenth-century a whole s of body mapping. Overlapping small photographs of various exposing s to build the image of her material part Williams then encloses the replete image within a gilt frame. Below each photograph she includes an illustration of a nineteenth-century body referencing racial and biological differentiation, addressing, in her hold words, "the historical precedence of a particular kind of visual representation." Diane Neumaier's 1988 series of closely cropp color photographs of paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, aptly titled "Metropolitan Tits," brings the viewer's attention to the manner in which the female material part is depicted within the connection of fine art. Susan Jahoda's photographs from her 1989 "Theatres of Madness" series combine body with images from the novel York Psychiatric Institute in order to explore psychiatric assumptions that link femininity and hysteria. Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie's Census Makes a Native Artist (1992) ironically parodies the mug discharge as self-portrait. The numerical digest superimposed across her face alludes to the newly passed law that requires artists to register themselves as "native" to present to view or sell in federally capitaled Native American spaces. These photographers exemplify a growing material substance of work that contextualizes a historical discourse in order to explore the cultural and political implications of representations of the female body

Starting from the premise that sex is essential to an analysis of the politics of representation, Reframings also participates in feminism's change into ethnicity, class, age and sexuality. Within multiculturalist discourses, politics is defined by the agency of the assertion of identity categories. Unfortunately these categories narrow the intent of women's experiences (a primary constituting of the '70s feminist consciousness-raising efforts) to identity classifications. Although "experience" is now considered a dangerously essentialist conception its exclusion from the discourse eclipses feminism's initial insight that "the personal is political" below the shadow of a theoretically circumscribed notion of identity. This territorialization of identity constrains the vitality of the political-feminist cast by encouraging rather than challenging boundaries.