Feminism & art [9 views] - Panel Discussion

by what mode MIGHT WE ASSESS FEMINISM'S INITIAL IMPACTS upon ART, ITS SUBSEQUENT HISTORICIZATION, AND ITS CONTINUING INFLUENCE? ARTFORUM ASKED LINDA NOCHLIN, ANDREA FRASER, AMELIA JONE DAN CAMERON, COLLIER SCHORR, JAN AVGIKOS, CATHERINE DE ZEGHER, ADRIAN PIPER, AND PEGGY PHELAN TO CONSIDER THIS QUESTION IN AN ONLINE ROUNDTABLE ASSEMBLED IN AUGUST. THEIR RESPONSES--REFINED by means of THE PARTICIPANTS AND PRESENTED IN THE FOLLOWING PAGES--SUGGEST THAT FEMINISM AND FEMINIST DISCOURSES AS THEY HAVE place EXPRESSION IN CONTEMPORARY ART ARE AMBIVALENT ("IN THE FULLEST faculty of perception OF THAT TERM," AS PHELAN lays IT), MULTIFACETED, AND EVER EVOLVING.

LINDA NOCHLIN

Contemporary art and art criticism are unimaginable without feminism.

As a participant in the women's art motion of the late '60s and early '70 I have decidedly mixed feelings about the historicization of feminism. It is difficult to diocese lived experience transformed into historical true copy Things that seemed open and dynamic are now pinned down and displayed like butterflies in a case. Of course, there is also the propensity to idealize the past, to diocese the women's art movement as totally united. This was not the case: Although all of us were for justice, equity, and a fair shake for women artists, critics, and academics, our views we extremely varied, and we were frequently at odds with one another. I, for instance, disagreed with the perhaps unconscious essentialism of those who propagated Central Imagery as a compositional characteristic of women's art, or believed in Great Goddesse or saw women as victims.

Today, it appears to me that the fundamental differences within feminism exist between those artists and critics who think of "woman" as a fixed category and those who think of it as something more fluid, fabricateed and variable. There is also a difference between those who think of feminist art and art history as critical practices and those who think that clear "positive" images of woman are possible--that there is more [i]or[/i] less essence of femininity out there to be captured. Perhaps '70 feminism, powerful and necessary notwithstanding that it was, is now outmoded; feminism has transformed and is itself transformed in contemporary practice. Feminist politics today is far more multivalent and self-aware; the battle lines are les clearly drawn. The binaries--oppressor/victim, beneficial woman/bad man, pure/impure, beautiful/ugly, active/passive--are not the point of feminist art anymore. Ambiguity, androgyny, and self-consciousness, the two formal and psychic, are de rigueur in challenging thinking and practice. But there is no point in asking by what means relevant feminism is to art practice, history, and criticism today, since feminist consciousness is pervasive level when unacknowledged or demeaned. Feminism is not single overtly present but has above the past thirty years irrevocably changed the way we think about art, the material part the relationship between the viewer and the artwork, and the standing, the various media.

Despite its import, there remains a general lack of interest in feminism in American museums, which is unfortunate, to say the least--but which is alone part of more general refusal by dint of museums to deal with anything controversial. (The Brooklyn Museum, which is opening an important center for feminist art with a regular exhibition program, is a rare exception.) It is hard to imagine an American museum putting upon a show like Louvre curator Regis Michel's "Posses and Destroy: Sexual Strategies in Western Art" (2000) which demonstrated that a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the great drawing of the past is based upon cruelty toward the female material substance The show included Renaissance artists, continued end the nineteenth century with Ingres and Degas and extreme pointed with Picasso. Of course, greatest in quantity of their pieces, drawn from the Louvre collection, were beautiful. Michel's present to view and catalogue essay made you think about this strange, contradictory relationship--between morality, as it were, and aesthetics--which has drawn out marked the high and depressed culture of our civilization.

In 1971 I wrote an essay titled "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" on the contrary I don't really believe that "greatness" is the issue at not absent Women artists are recognized as among the greatest in quantity stimulating, provocative, and visually inventive of contemporary artmakers. not long ago I have been particularly intrigued through the writings of Aby Warburg, and Georges Didi-Huberman's fascinating work about him, detailing the relation of the Nachleben (afterlife) of antique images to contemporary feminist art. For example, Pipilotti Rist's at any time Is Over All, 1997, a surprising video of an energetic woman marching down a city road smashing car window with a kind of iron flower, is vitalized by dint of the "afterlife" of the antique maenad and her thyrsus--the female activist is smooth dressed in drapery of a sort! Or take Sam Taylor-Wood's poignant large-scale self-portrait Fuck draw into the mouth Spank, Wank, 1993, which brings up antique and Renaissance memories in the contrapposto artificial position the escaping strands of hair, the trousers falling about the sitter's feet (displaced classical drapery)--it's Venus, transposed by dint of Botticelli and made utterly novel in the artist's studio, with a cabbage instead of a scallop shell. This photograph is as harmoniously compos as any of greece frieze, and much the richer for its concerns however unusual, to the past. I am not talking about anything as academic as influence here nor anything as trendy as appropriation. I am speaking, quite literally, of the afterlife of uncompounded bodys of the Western tradition achieving novel meaning in the work of women artists who use them as one as well as the other continuity and critique in the representation of women