Pauline Boty and the Predicament of the Woman Artist in the British Pop Art Movement Suetate Volume One
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GENDERING THE FIELD: PAULINE BOTY AND THE PREDICAMENT OF THE WOMAN ARTIST IN THE BRITISH POP ART MOVEMENT SUETATE VOLUME ONE (of two) A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of the West of England, Bristol for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Bath Spa University College School of English and Creative Studies, Bath Spa University College. November 2004 Volume One Contents Page i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Page ii AUTHOR'S PREFACE Page iii ABSTRACT Page 1 INTRODUCTION (statement of objectives) Page 8 CHAPTER ONE: METHODOLOGY and CRITICAL REVIEW OF LITERATURE page 8 Part One: Methodology page 8 Historiography page 10 A feminist historical materialism page 12 Mapping the dynamics of the field page 13 The artist's biography: the role of the 'life and works' page 16 Discursive shifts : art historical revisionism and problems in feminism page 17 Part Two: A Critical Review of Literature page 19 Ontological insecurity page 26 The myth of the homogeneous audience page 30 The evacuation of meaning page 36 The detached artist page 37 Multifarious yet gender free readings Page 43 CHAPTER TWO: GENDERING THE FIELD OF PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION page 44 The Royal College of Art : a site for investigation page 45 A masculine ethos page 51 Kudos and gender page 56 Distributive apparatus page 57 The non-commercial sites page 58 The John Moores page 60 The ICA page 61 The Young Contemporaries page 66 Private galleries page 70 A comparison with Fluxus Page 76 CHAPTER THREE: PAULINE BOTY, A GLORIOUS EXCEPTION? page 76 Family and childhood page 86 Wimbledon School of Art page 98 Conclusion Page 100 CHAPTER FOUR: POSITION TAKING page 101 The 'prise de position' in the habitas of Pop Bourdieu, Huyssen, Burger, Pollock page 108 The Independent Group, page 111 The RCA, page 113 ARK page 119 Pop Art at the RCA page 122 The Young Contemporaries page 125 Pauline Boty at the RCA page 135 Women artists and position taking page 136 The 'surrogate male' position page 139 The Problem of Pop page 142 Conclusion: the different positioning of women Page 143 CHAPTER FIVE: PERFORMING A POP IDENTITY: PAULINE BOTY IN THE DISCOURSE OF PHOTOGRAPHY page 144 The photographic discourse of the '60s page 147 Establishing the paradigm page 154 Entering the photographic discourse page 160 'Speaking' in the discourse: a radical intentionality page 172 Spoken by the photographic discourse page 184 Pauline Boty:'artist' page 188 Conclusion Page 190 CHAPTER SIX: THE WORK: PICTURING A FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY page 190 Early work page 200 A Pop voice page 210 Sex page 215 Politics/sexual politics page 224 A growing critique page 227 Conclusion Page 230 CHAPTER SEVEN: INTO A FIELD OF EXTERIORITY DEATH, DISAPPEARANCE AND AFTER LIFE page 230 Foucault and 'fields of exteriority' page 232 Depression, death and disappearance page 239 Afterlife page 257 Problems in Feminism page 267 Conclusion Page 271 CONCLUSION page 271 The predicament of the woman Pop artist in '50s and '60s Britain page 275 The predicament of the work page 277 Situated in Pop page 283 Situated in feminist art history, theory and contemporary debates page 296 Entering the debate Page 298 BIBLIOGRAPHY Page 316 UNPUBLISHED MATERIALS Page 318 PAULINE BOTY : LIST OF WORKS Page 328 PAULINE BOTY: LIST OF EXHIBITIONS Page 330 APPENDICES page 330 Appendix 1: students in the RCA School of Painting page 331 Appendix 2 :1C A Exhibitions in the 1950s page 333 Appendix 3 : The Young Contemporaries page 334 Appendix 4 : Rosalyn Drexler C Acknowledgements I have so many people to thank. Bath Spa University College for their financial support, waiving my fees for the duration and providing a bursary for the last year which ensured the completion of my thesis. The Arts Council for a grant to find lost works and have the Boty's extant oeuvre professionally photographed. Althea Greenan of the Women Artists' Library who fascilitated the Arts Council grant and whose enthusiasm for Pauline Boty's work kept my sense of the importance of the project. All my interviewees who generously gave time, attention and access to documentation; notably the Boty family (especially John and Bridget) Jane Percival, Derek Boshier and Gerald Nason. Photographers Roger Mayne, Lewis Morley, Geoff Reeve, Michael Seymour and Michael Ward who gave me permission to use their work here and sent me copies. Caroline Coon, who started as an interviewee but with whom I have conducted an ongoing debate over the years that has challenged and enriched my thinking. Elizabeth Wilson for being on-side throughout. Di Osborne for diligently proofreading, Leslie Trett for her work on the AppleMac, Anna Watling for typing and checking. My family and friends have given me tremendous support and shown great and seemingly unending patience for which I am enduringly grateful. Author's Preface I started this project under the name Sue Watling, and it was in that name that I wrote the catalogue essay for The Only Blonde in the World, published by the Mayor and Whitford Galleries in 1998. It has been a long and fascinating journey during which I changed my name to Tate. Abstract Abstract This thesis explores the predicament of the woman Pop artist, focussing on British Pop Art and taking as its case study Pauline Boty (1938-66). It considers why so few women artists were involved with the movement, the nature of the contribution they might make and the reasons for their subsequent marginalisation and exclusion from the histories. It then pursues the art historical and theoretical implications of the resulting findings. To achieve these ends a considerable body of completely new empirical evidence is presented. A detailed statistical and discursive analysis of contemporary records (for example convocation lists and other documents from the Royal College of Art and Young Contemporaries exhibition catalogues) exposes the deep gender bias of the institutional and discursive field in which British Pop operated. The very difficult predicament of the woman artist (statistically more extreme than had been anticipated) is revealed: difficulties to which mainstream histories of Pop have remained oblivious. Pauline Boty's life and work , on which nothing had been published, are interrogated through a very wide range of primary evidence : numerous interviews with friends, colleagues, lovers, family members and others, private letters and photographs, media material and other documentation. With the help of an Arts Council grant her oeuvre, much of which had been dispersed and/or lost, was re-assembled, archived and exhibited and is, collectively, available for the first time in these pages. Through this evidence the experience and expression of a female subjectivity within the genre of Pop is brought to light. Boty's discursive absence over the last thirty years and recent re-appearance as an object of discourse are then observed and analysed. iii cont. Abstract Relatively recent discursive shifts have made it possible to 'see' the work of the woman Pop artist in a way that had previously been difficult if not impossible. The cumulative findings of this thesis, informed by postmodern and feminist theory, led to a questioning of feminist and mainstream narratives. The thesis arrives at proposals for a revisionist view of both the Pop Art Movement and of feminist practice. IV Introduction Introduction In 1991, the Royal Academy hosted a major retrospective exhibition of Pop Art. It received considerable media attention but a fact that went largely unnoted was that, while women were repeatedly pictured, out of 202 Pop Art works exhibited only one was by a woman. 1 The few women who had made names for themselves within the movement, Marisol, Pauline Boty, Jann Haworth, Rosalyn Drexler, Evelyne Axell, Chryssa, Marjorie Strider among others, had been excluded.2 The male domination of the history of other modern art movements has been challenged. For example, Whitney Chadwick's research into women artists within Surrealism, published in 1985, has had a significant impact on how that movement has been seen retrospectively. The Tate Modern's Surrealism : Desire Unbound in 2002 gave a prominent place to a range of women artists and the texts, in both the exhibition and catalogue, are consistently informed by a gender awareness. But Pop has not been interrogated in the same way. Its reifying, sexist imagery of women has certainly been lambasted3 but there seems to have been an acceptance of its masculinist ethos in both mainstream and feminist literature. There seemed to be a sense that, if Pop is inevitably masculinist, the absence of women does not really 1 Portrait of My Lover (1961) by Nikki de Saint Phalle. 2 A much heralded show at one of our premier establishment fine art sites, with only one man in it would, of course, have caused a great stir. In fact in 1978 the Hayward Annual exhibition, in which out of 23 works exhibited 'only1 7 were by men (nearly a third) had been greeted with howling headlines: 'Wdmen's Work', 'No Deadlier than the male', 'Distaff Side', 'Ladies Night at the Hayward', 'Ladies First', The female Twist'. 3 Eg MULVEY, Laura 'You don't know what is happening, do you, Mr Jones?', Spare Rib, 1973, no.8, p 13-16,30, reprinted in Framing Feminism, PARKER and POLLOCK (eds) Pandora, 1987, p127. 1 Introduction matter. Yet mass culture, Pop's subject matter, is of huge cultural importance. It is one of the key features of modernity. Its ubiquitous imagery has been, and is, enormously influential in shaping the subjectivities of men and women alike. And it has had a crucial impact on the arts. Varnedoe and Gopnik, in their compendious exploration of popular culture and Modern art, argue convincingly that The story of the interplay between modern art and popular culture is one of the most important aspects of the history of our epoch 4 Huyssen demonstrates the compulsive pas de deux conducted between mass culture (gendered female) and Modernism (gendered male), the latter crucially defining itself against the former.