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Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories

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Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories Document generated on 09/26/2021 6:49 p.m. RACAR : Revue d'art canadienne Canadian Art Review Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories. London, Routledge, 1999, xviii+ 345pp., I I I black-and-white illus. Shannon Hunter Hurtado Producing Women Ces femmes qui produisent ... Volume 25, Number 1-2, 1998 URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1071620ar DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/1071620ar See table of contents Publisher(s) UAAC-AAUC (University Art Association of Canada | Association d'art des universités du Canada) ISSN 0315-9906 (print) 1918-4778 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this review Hurtado, S. H. (1998). Review of [Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories. London, Routledge, 1999, xviii+ 345pp., I I I black-and-white illus.] RACAR : Revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review, 25(1-2), 125–129. https://doi.org/10.7202/1071620ar Tous droits réservés © UAAC-AAUC (University Art Association of Canada | This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit Association d'art des universités du Canada), 2001 (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ Comptes-rendus de livres Book Reviews ines aspects of contemporary “Queer sexuality” with the “flam­ from which to penetrate this obscurity and articulate the impor­ boyant and dynamic aid” provided by the example of French tance of this everyday expérience. Rococo silk woven textiles (217). It is the originality of the parallels drawn between fabric and sexuality that makes Maclnnis’ Elaine Cheasley points appealing and thoroughly convincing. Queen’s University Kiku Hawkes’ essay “Skanda” explores the language of textiles as a material form of oral tradition passed along matri- Notes linear lines. This personal account based on her expérience as a mother and a daughter made me consider my own relation- 1 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of ships, with both people and textiles. Hawkes daims that the the Féminine (New York, 1984), 5. 2 Zierdt’s piece is a hand-woven textile, measuring two by four métrés, language of textiles is vivid and mysterious, an evocative ety- consisting of horizontal strips that translate the first four paragraphs mology of ancient knowledge and tradition. Woven into each of the Unabomber’s Manifesto into a pattern. piece are “loyalties and love, political upheaval and intrigue, 3 Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and béatitude and passion” (233). She intersperses lists of materials Ideology (London, 1981), xviii. with text in a unique and engaging style, asking the reader to 4 I am thinking in particular of Susan Leigh Stars “From Hestia to listen to the sounds of tulle, taffeta, gauze, organza, percale, Home Page: Feminism and the Concept of Home in Cyberspace,” pique, linen, triple mousseline. This enticing piece recalls fa- Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations vourite outfits, the particular occasions they were made for, and with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace, Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti, especially the women who made them - mother, grandmother, eds (London, 1996), 30-46. close friend. And now, as I pass my hands along the rows of 5 The three “dressworks” are: Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan’s dresses hanging in boutiques, searching for my own wedding Arborite Housedress: Anne Ramsden’s storefront installation Dress!', dress with my mother, I do hear the sounds of each of the and Buseje Bailey’s little girl’s dress in The Viewing Room. fabrics. This is indeed a language and tradition retold to me by 6 Born in 1963, Windrum grew up in a fundamentalist evangelical Christian family in Lethbridge, Alberta, where his father was a the women in my life. Baptist minister. Since 1989, he has lived in Toronto, Ontario. Out This very individual reaction to Material Matters may seem as a gay man, he has been involved in AIDS activism in the arts surprising, but this book has the potential to stimulate theoreti- community (93-94). cal debates as well as personal reflection. In their introductory 7 For example, Windrum’s Summer Camp/this isparadise (1992); hand- remarks, Bachmann and Scheuing claim textile is a unique embroidered phalluses on Calvin Klein briefs, size 32, worn on medium - ubiquitous, banal, luxurious, celebrated and diverse - mannequin legs. accessing a range of human expériences from the private to the 8 Perron discusses Joan Caplan and Mary Lou Riordon-Sello’s two- public spheres. Everyone has expériences with cloth on multiple part project Current Connection — On the Elbow River and Carrent levels. In this collection of works, such an everyday practice no Connection — At the Deane House as well as Karen Elizabeth longer appears as the obscure background of social activity.9 Ail McLaughlin’s Remnants: A Videotext, Part I (1992). of the essays in this collection are excellent work offering a body 9 This concept of the “politics of the everyday” cornes from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1984). of theoretical questions, methods, categories and perspectives Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and endeavours creating a separatist world of female artists and the Writing of Arts Historiés. London, Routledge, 1999, xviii+ female art forms. Cognizant of the need filled by, yet serious 345pp., I I I black-and-white illus. limitations in either the theoretical sophistication or political effectiveness of these approaches, and aware that a concerted Griselda Pollock, a seasoned participant in the “culture wars,” challenge to the practice of canon formation and perpétuation returns to the fray with a new strategy for engaging the chief must be launched, Pollock offers a third way. opponent of female and minority group artists — the canon of Her strategy, which she calls differencing, involves rwo ac­ Western art. Beginning with a keen critique of the canon as a tions. The first is to reject the phallocentric concept of binary gendered and gendering institution intent on excluding those gender différence while simultaneously using this very structure who differ from its hégémonie structure of European male of différence as a means by which to locate, within the domi­ power, Pollock goes on to evaluate the feminist responses to it. nant cultures visual and/or written texts, traces of the unac- These fall into two categories: attempts to annex women artists knowledged other. Pollock chooses the verb form differencing so to the existing canon and projects which valorize féminine as “to stress the active re-reading and reworking of that which is 125 RACAR. / XXV, I & 2 / 1998 visible and authorised in the spaces of représentation in order to discourse will likely find their way through this section with articulate that which, while repressed, is always présent as its comparative ease. Others may find it a demanding read. structuring other” (8). The remaining four parts are comprised of a sériés of case Pollock’s second move is to examine the desire that moti­ studies - in imitation of the clinical model of psychoanalysis - vâtes the construction of canons and alternative historiés and to which Pollock applies her theory, with further élaborations ensures their perpétuation. She argues that there is a “psycho- pertinent to the individual cases. Half of the studies are “re- symbolic dimension to the hold of the canon, its masculine views” of art produced during a critical period in the fixing of ideals and not so much its intolérance of femininity as a the canon - the rise of modernist culture in France. The rest masculinist boredom with and indifférence to femininity’s pleas- deal with Baroque and contemporary works. ures and resources as a possible and expanded way of relating to In chapters three and four Pollock introduces différence and representing the world” (8). To get at this dimension of into the canon by examining works by Van Gogh and Toulouse- desire, Pollock employs Freudian psychoanalytic theory vari- Lautrec respectively. Drawing upon Sarah Kofman’s interpréta­ ously interpreted by Sarah Kofman, Julia Kristeva and Jacques tion of Freud’s aesthetics, in which the “artist functions as a Lacan. heroic object of narcissistic fantasy, inheriting the adoration By treating the sélective tradition of the canon as a discur­ accorded to the father,” Pollock reads these artists’ works against sive formation which can be re-read for the encoding of the the grain to expose the indications of unconscious desire em- féminine in the interstices of its texts, rather than at the mar- bedded in them (14). gins, Pollock avoids the difficulty of being an outsider looking Van Gogh has often been cast in the rôle of a misunder- in and of assigning women a position on the edges of culture. stood Christ figure, virtually devoid of sexuality. However, Moreover, instead of being constrained to reiterate the “unre- Pollock’s analysis of his drawing, Pensant Woman Stooping, Seen lenting critique of masculine culture,” Pollock’s project of from Behind (1885), creatively reveals his repressed sexual desire differencing enables her to “read some art by artist-men with a for working-class women. By rotating the image of the peasant merciful irony, which is also self-irony, in order to establish the woman and tilting her back, Pollock présents the reader with a way consciously feminist, as well as unconscious féminine, desire seated woman upon whose ample lap Van Gogh, the child of a can reconfigure canonical texts for other readings” (xiv).
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