Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories. - Review - book review

Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories, by the agency of Griselda Pollock, New York, Routledge 1999; 345 pages, $22 paperback.

Griselda Pollock has been stalking the great white whale known as "the canon" for more than sum of two units decades now. That beleaguered behemoth is assuredly not the force it one time was, but Pollock's energies haven't flagged. The influential English feminist still deplores the official list of greatest hits in Western art and the critical writings that create and support it, seeing the one and the other as parts of a patriarchal, irredeemably sexist institution that should be utterly transformed if not pull downed In her latest canon-bashing foray, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories, she declares that "art history cannot survive the impact of feminism," and you know she'll do her bit to hasten its demise and make way for something nonhierarchical, culturally diversified and more render free of access to the interests and desires of women

Pollock does not write without of a love for art. Works of art for her are not pleasurable extremitys but forms of evidence, signs and symptoms of (or, sometimes vehicles of resistance to) a sexist, racist and imperialist agriculture As a self-described cultural analyst, she works to uncover the masculinist ideology that she thinks canonical art and art history embody

Reasoning that the repression of women in the real, social world will be reiterated at the symbolic horizontal Pollock scans the history of art for instances of that more or les visible repression. To this extremity she employs tools of psychoanalysis, semiotic theory and deconstruction. She finds in works by the agency of van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec, for example, none of the spiritual heroism for which male artists are usually celebrated, alone mother complexes and arrested sexuality press outed in egregiously fetishizing and debasing images of peasant women or prostitutes. In Toulouse-Lautrec's motif of the female dancer's high-kicking leg she discovers a displaced phallus, a sign of the artist's castration anxiety. "Toulouse-Lautrec's whole project" she writes, "is not the picturing of an erotic practice on the other hand rather picturing as a kind of displaced and stymied erotic practice, and more importantly, picturing as the stasis and failure of sexuality typical of that era and its class and racist regimes."

Pollock doesn't suggest to replace her toppled male heroes with novel female heroines. She thinks the idea of artistic greatness is a pernicious myth. She does, however, want to create more art-historical space for women and for female subjectivity. Her application of mind of the 17th-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi discloses in what manner the artist subliminally expressed her be in possession of experience as a woman (including rape and a public prosecution of her attacker) in her versions of conventional controls like Susanna and the seniors or Judith and Holofernes that had been disentangleed by her male predecessors. A chapter called "A Tale of Three Women" sorts from one side the confusions of myth and history that have, to varying steps obscured three women painted by dint of Manet--Berthe Morisot, Jeanne Duval (Baudelaire's mistress) and Laure (the black woman who pos as the servant in Olympia). And a chapter upon a young English painter of African coming down named Lubaina Himid proposes a "post-colonial feminist retaliate on the canon" for an artist supposedly exclud from contemporary canonization because of her race and sex Still, Pollock's writing about male artists is not always negative. She perceives in Manet's Olympia not the sexist pathology that she dioceses in van Gogh or Toulouse-Lautrec on the contrary an admirable critique of the Orientalist odalisque.

single reads Pollock with mixed feelings. She's an exciting polemicist, an frequently brilliant analyst and, by academic standards, a beautiful clear, albeit jargony, writer. Agree or disagree, individual gets swept along by her passionate conviction. on the contrary her approach is ideologically coercive rather than imaginatively expansive: in her disregard for esthetic experience, for example, she defences out much of what shapes meaning and makes art art. She's true good on the emotional and erotic intensity of the mother-child relationship animating Mary Cassatt's work on the contrary has little to offer upon the formal qualities without which, after all, the psychological factors would be les rich or nuanced. To be positive that someone doesn't love painting as painting should not disqualify them from writing about what paintings exhibit or conceal. Pollock might argue that the esthetic virtues of van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec have been sufficiently extolled by means of others. But she portrays them as little better than raw caricaturists, indistinguishable from hack illustrators of their day. If similar puritanical reductionism is what Pollock's feminist victory above art history necessarily entails, a destiny of readers will want to direct the eye elsewhere for a more sympathetic relationship between art and feminism.

admitting devoted exclusively to female artists and given a gender-contradicting title, the essays in Rosalind Krauss's Bachelors are not driven primarily by dint of feminist ideology. Dating from 1979 to '99 they approach their make submissives variously: one chapter offers a rigorous formal analysis of Eva Hesse's work; a section upon the paintings of Agnes Martin discusses the sublime atmosphere Krauss finds sandwiched between the material fabric of the canvas and the intangible Minimalist gestalt of the grid; an essay about Francesca Woodman displays how the precocious photographer, who committed suicide at age 22 made extraordinary art out of standard classroom assignments. Examining the oeuvre of Louise Bourgeois, Krauss relates the sculptor's fetishistic body-part statuarys through Freudian depth analysis, to the bachelors in Duchamp's Large Glass; she then go [i]or[/i] come backs to the bachelor connection in an essay upon Sherrie Levine. In these writings, Krauss, like Pollock draws inspiration from a certain number of of the usual continental suspects like Lacan, Benjamin, Derrida and Barthes, and her unromantic ranges from self-consciously poetic to analytically crystalline to mystifyingly arcane.