Griselda Pollock Feminist Interventions in Art's Histories* Is

Griselda Pollock Feminist Interventions in Art's Histories* 1 * Der Beitrag ist eine Is adding women to art history the same as producing feminist art history? Deman gekiirzte Fassung des ding that women be considered, not only changes what is studied and what becomes Vorworteszu dem Buch: Griselda Pollock (Hrsg.), relevant to investigate, but it challenges the existing disciplines politically. Women Vision and Difference. have not been omitted through forgetfulness or mere prejudice. The structural Feminism, Feminity and sexism of most academic disciplines contributes actively to the production and per Histories of Art, Methuen, 1987. petuation of a gender hierarchy. What we learn about the world and its peoples is ideologically patterned in conformity with the social order within which it is produ ced. Women's studies are not just about women but about the social systems and ideological schemas which sustain the domination of men over women within the other mutually inflecting regimes of power in the world, namely those of class and those of race.2 Feminist art history, however, began inside art history. The first question was »Have there been women artists?« We initially thought about women artists in terms of art history's typical procedures and protocols studies of artists (the mono graph) , collections of works to make an oeuvre (catalogues raisonnes), questions of style and iconography, membership of movements and artists' groups, and of course the question of quality. It soon became clear that this would be a straitjacket in which our studies of women artists would reproduce and secure the normative status of men artists and men's art whose superiority was unquestioned in its dis 1 Freely paraphrased from guise as Art and the Artist. As early as 1971 Linda Nochlin warned us against get Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, ting into a nowin game trying to name female Michelangelos. The criteria of great Placing Women's History in ness was already male defined. The question »Why are there no Great Women History, New Left Review, 1982, no. 133, p. 6. Artists?« simply would not be answered to anything but women's disadvantage if 2 For the founding analysis we remained tied to the categories of art history. These specified in advance the in this area which has much kind of answers such a question would merit. Women were not historically signifi to teach feminist studies cant artists (they could never deny their existence once we began to unearth the evi while demanding feminist studies comprehend dence again) because they did not have the innate nuggett of genius (the phallus) deconstructions of imperia which is the natural property of men. So she wrote: »A Feminist critique of the dis list discourse and practice cipline is needed which can pierce culturalideological limitations, to reveal biases see Edward Said, Orienta lism, London, Routledge and and inadequacies not merely in regard to the question of women artists, but in the for Kegan Paul 1978. mulation of the crucial questions of the discipline as a whole. Thus the socalled 3 Linda Nochlin, Why Have woman question far from being a peripheral subissue, can become a catalyst, a There Been No great Women potent intellectual instrument, probing the most basic and >natural< assumptions, Artists? in ed. Elizabeth Baker and Thomas B. Hess, providing a paradigm for other kinds of internal questioning, and providing links 3 Art and Sexual Politics, with paradigms established by radical approaches in other fields.« London Collier Macmillan In effect Linda Nochlin called for a paradigm shift. The notion of a paradigm 1973, p. 2. See also the article in which she poses has become quite popular amongst social historians of art who borrow from Tho the corollary question, Why mas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions in order to articulate the crisis in art have there been Great Male history which overturned its existing certainties and conventions in the early 1970s.4 ones?, The DePoliticisation ofCourbet..., October, 1982 A paradigm defines the objectives shared within a scientific community, what it no 22. aims to research and explain, its procedures and its boundaries. It is the disciplinary 4 Thomas Kuhn, The matrix. A paradigm shift occurs when the dominant mode of investigation and Structure of Scientific explanation is found to be unable satisfactorily to explain the phenomenon which is Revolutions, Chicago, Chicago University Press, that science's or discipline's job to analyse. In dealing with the study of the history 1962. of nineteenth and twentieth century art the dominant paradigm has been identified kritische berichte 1/88 5 as modernist art history. It is not so much that it is defective but that it can be shown to work ideologically to constrain what can and cannot be discussed in relation to the creation and reception of art. Indeed modernist art history shares with other established modes of art history certain key conceptions about creativity and the suprasocial qualities of the aesthetic realm.5 Indicative of the potency of the ideo logy is the fact that when, in 1974 the social historian of art T.J. Clark in an article in the Times Literary Supplement threw down the gauntlet from a marxist position he still entitled the essay »on the Conditions of Artistic Creations .6 Within a few years the term »production« would have been inevitable and »consumption« has come to replace »reception«.7 This reflects the dissemination from the social history of art of categories of analysis derived from Karl Marx's Grundrisse. The introduction to this text which only became known in the mid 1950s has been a central resource for rethinking a social analysis of culture. In the opening section Marx tries to think about how he can conceptualize the totality of social forces each of which has its own distinctive conditions of existence and effects yet none the less relies on others in the whole. His objective is political economy and so he analyzes the relations between production, consumption, distribution and exchange breaking down the separateness of each activity so that he can compre hend each as a distinct moment within a differentiated and structural totality. Each is mediated by the other moments, i.e. cannot exist or complete its purpose without the others in a system in which production has priority as it sets all in motion. Yet each also has its own specifity, its own distinctiveness within this nonorganic tota lity. Marx gives the example of art in order to explain how the production of an object generates and conditions its consumption and vice versa: »Production not only supplies a material for a need, but also supplies a need for the material. As soon as consumption emerges from its initial natural state of crudity and imme diacy. .. it becomes itself mediated as a drive by the object. The need which con sumption feels for the object is created by the perception of it. The object of art like every other product creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object. Thus production produces consumption 1. by creating the material for it; 2. by determining the manner of consumption; 3. by creating the products initially posited as objects, in the form of a need felt by the consumer. It thus produ ces the object of consumption, the manner of consumption and the motive of con sumption. Consumption likewise produces the producer's inclination by beckoning 5 For a classic statement 8 see Mark Ftoskill, What is Art to him as an aimdetermining need.« History? London, Thames This formulation banishes the typical art historical narrative of a gifted indivi and Hudson, 1976. dual creating out of his (sic) personal necessity a discrete work of art which then 6 T.J. Clark, On the goes out from its private place of creation into a world where it will be admired and Conditions of Artistic Creation, Times Literary cherished by art lovers expressing a human capacity for valuing beautiful objects. Supplement 24 May 1974, p. The discipline of art history like literary criticism works to naturalise these assump 561-3. tions. What we are taught is how to appreciate the greatness of the artist and quality 7 For example see the title of art objects. and the currency thereby afforded to The Social This ideology is contested by the argument that we should be studying the Production of Art, Janet totality of social relations which form the conditions of the production and con Wolff, London, Maomillan sumption of objects designated in that process as art. Writing of the shift in a related Press, 1981. discipline of literary criticism, Raymond Williams has observed: »What seems to 8 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1857-8) translated Martin me very striking is that nearly all forms of contemporary critical theory are theories Nicolaus, London Penguin of consumption. That is to say, that they are concerned with understanding an Books, 1973, p. 92. 6 kritische berichte 1/88 object in such a way that it can be profitably and correctly consumed.«9 The alterna tive approach is not to treat the work of art as object but to consider art as practice. Williams advocates analysing first the nature and then the conditions of a practice. Thus we will address the general conditions of social production and consumption prevailing in a particular society which ultimately determine the conditions of a spe cific form of social acitivity and production, cultural practice. But then since all the component activities of social formation are practices we can move with considera ble sophistication from the crude marxist fomulation of all cultural practices being dependent upon and reducible to economic practices (the famous base/superstruc tureidea) towards an conception of a complex social totality with many interrela ting practices constitutive of and ultimately determined within the matrix of that social formation, which Marx formulated as the mode of production.

Load more