INFORMATION TO USERS The most advanced technology has been used to photo­ graph and reproduce this manuscript from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are re­ produced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. These are also available as one exposure on a standard 35mm slide or as a 17" x 23" black and white photographic print for an additional charge. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order.

University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9011173

Feminist polyphony: A conceptual understanding of feminist art criticism in the 1080s

Garber, Elizabeth Jessie, Ph.D.

The Ohio State University, 1989

Copyright ©1989 by Garber, Elizabeth Jessie. All rights reserved.

UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 FEMINIST POLYPHONY:

A CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING OF FEMINIST ART CRITICISM

IN THE 1980S

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Elizabeth Jessie Garber, B.A., M.F.A.

* * * *

The Ohio State University

1989

Dissertation Committee: Approved by

Kathleen Desmond Easter

E. Louis Lankford

Kenneth A. Marantz Adviser

Patricia L. Stuhr Department of Art Education Copyright by izabeth Jessie Garber 1989 TO Granny, Erin, Greta, Johannah, Mom, Alyne, Molly, Aunt Floyd, Roy, Dad, Douglass

To May Stevens whose commitment to art, politics, and feminism is a model of inspiration ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As preface to the acknowledgements for this dissertation, I should like to disclaim any hierarchy of organization for what follows. Intellectual and emotional support have made this document rewarding to write, and the study leading up to it more pleasurable than encumbering. Erin, Greta, and johannah have not only put up with "Mama's Room" (which used to be their playroom) and the long hours I have spent in that room, they have offered their uncompromised support to someone they love. Roy has lent ear and mind to protracted discussions on art criticism and art education in addition to overtime in parenting and housekeeping roles. Kathleen Desmond Easter provided the essential reminder to pursue this topic, along with flexibility, patient support, and reading and re-reading, even when her own commitments grew thirsty.

Kenneth Marantz has mentored my thinking, offering difficult conceptual questions and extensions of thoughts. Patricia Stuhr and Louis Lankford have made close and intelligent readers. Together, these

i i i people have made a perfect committee, combining

insights, concern, and even humor. Clark Magruder

prodded me to get on with it, and has backed those

gentle words with hours of reading and many a

thoughtful comment. Terry Barrett gave hours of

invaluable counsel and advice. May Stevens sent

articles and located photographs for reproductions.

Other artists and critics mentioned in this document

have lent photographs and information: Arlene Raven,

Cindy Sherman, Suzanne Lacy, Tom Knechtel. The nurturing, safe environment provided by people at OSU

Childcare - especially by Elizabeth, Barb, Debbie,

Javon, and Erika - has been indispensible. The support

of my peers is gratefully acknowledged - especially

Kim, Elizabeth, and Paul S. Alyne, Molly, and Aunt

Floyd are inspiration. And Lydia and Jay. My

stepfather, Douglass, has supported each hurtle with a parent's satisfaction and pride. My parents and grandmother, though not able to be part of this process, taught me to believe in myself. VITA

October 1951...... Born - Washington, D.C.

1973...... B. A. , University of Arizona

1981-83...... Instructor, Cochise College, Sierra Vista, Arizona

1984...... Teaching Associate, University of Arizona

1975-1984...... Exhibiting and Professional Artist

1984...... M.F.A., University of Arizona

1985-198 9 ...... Graduate Associateships, The Ohio State University

1986-198 9...... Managing Editor, Columbus Art

1987-198 9...... Editorial Assistant, Studies in Art Education

1988-198 9...... Managing Editor, The Arts Education Review of Books

PUBLICATIONS

"Live from Canada," Ceramics Monthly (Summer 1989).

"Tom Kreager: Absence of Conscience," [co-author with Roy Pearson] Dialogue: An Art Journal (1989).

Outside/Inside: Sculpture by Marilyn Poeppelmeyer and Jeff Raymond [exhibition catalog], Gund Gallery, Ohio Arts Council (1988).

"Sue Coe: Police State and Jerri Allyn: The Waitresses, A Working Woman's Moment," Columbus Art (May-June 1989) .

v "Verbal mediation effects on comprehending works of art in multi-cultural educational settings" [secondary author with Judith Koroscik and Laurie R. Baxter], Journal of Multi-cultural and Cross-cultural Research in Art Education (Fall 1987).

"Alfred Quiroz: Medal of Honor," Columbus Art (January-February 1987).

"Establishing a Position for Ceramics in Contemporary Criticism," Abstracts of Research Presentations, National Art Education Association Conference, New Orleans, La., 1986

"Barbara Vogel and Marian Murphy: Ladies of Our Club," Columbus Art (October-November 1986).

"Robert Studzinski: Photographs of Nicaragua," Columbus Art (June-July 1986).

"Family Photographs: Judy Spence and John Gelles," Columbus Art (April-May 1986).

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Art Education

Studies in Art Criticism in Art Education. Professors Terry Barrett and Louis Lankford,

Studies in Photographic Communication and History of Photography. Professors Clayton Lowe and Clyde Dilley.

Women's Studies. Professors Joanna Frueh, Lynette Molnar, and Marlene Longnecker. TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS i i i

VITA...... V

LIST OF FIGURES...... ix

LIST OF PLATES...... X

CHAPTER PAGE

I. INTRODUCTION...... 1

About the Study...... 1 A Definition...... 3 Lirai tat ions...... 7 About Feminist Art Criticism...... 8 Early Commentators: the 1970s...... 9 Commentators in the 1980s...... 15 Reference Notes...... 28

II. A CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING OF FEMINIST ART CRITICISM IN THE 1980S...... 41

Contemporary Projects...... 43 Self-Knowledge and Subjectivity...... 43 Political Consciousness Raising...... 45 Social Analysis...... 47 Woman-Centered Feminist Art Criticism: Celebrating Women, Self-Knowledge, and Subjectivity...... 49 Activist Feminist Art Criticism: Working to Raise the Political Consciousness of Audiences...... 55 Social Analysis and Feminist Art Criticism: "The Fault Lies Not in Our Stars, Our Hormones, Our Menstrual Cycles, or Our Empty Internal Spaces, but in Our Institutions and Our Education"...... 61 Discussion...... 72 Reference Notes...... 82

vi i CHAPTER PAGE

III. FEMINIST ART CRITICISM AND MAY STEVENS' ORDINARY. EXTRAORDINARY SERIES...... 91

Background to the Series and the Artist ...... 91 Selected Woman-Centered Interpretations 99 Selected Activist Interpretations...... 115 Selected Postmodern Interpretations...... 126 Summary and Discussion...... 135 Reference Notes...... 146

IV. IMPLICATIONS OF FEMINIST ART CRITICISM FOR ART EDUCATION...... 155

The Context: Women and Art...... 156 The Context: Art Education...... 159 The Context: Art Criticism in Art Education...... 160 Feminism, Art Education, and Feminist Art Criticism...... 165 Reference Notes...... 174

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 180

vi i i LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE PAGE

1. May Stevens, The Second International, photomural, 11' x 17', 1988...... 120

2. May Stevens, Eden Hotel, photomural, 11' x 17', 1988 ...... 120

ix LIST OF PLATES

PLATE PAGE

I. Tom Knechtel, Progeny, gouache on paper, 14 3/8" x 14 3/.". 1981...... 52

II. Suzanne Lacy, Guerilla Action on Sidewalks, in Three Weeks in May, May 1977...... 53

III. Suzanne Lacy, Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, performance, 1985...... 57

IV. COULD THIS WOMAN BE AN ARTIST?...... 58

V. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still # 48, photograph, 1979...... 69

VI. May Stevens, Two Women, mixed- media collage, 10.5" x 13.5", 1976...... 92

VII. May Stevens, Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg, mixed media collage, 16.5" x 10", 1976...... 94

VIII. May Stevens, Big Three, acrylic on canvas, 72" x 90", 1975...... 96

IX. May Stevens, Mysteries and Politics, acrylic on canvas, 78" x 142", 1978...... 97

X. May Stevens, Fore River, oil on canvas, 78" x 120", 1983...... 102

XI. May Stevens, Voices, acrylic on canvas, 79" x 118", 1983...... 105

XII. May Stevens, Go Gentle, acrylic on canvas, 78" x 142", 1983...... 106

XIII. May Stevens, Forming the Fifth International, acrylic on canvas, 78" x 115", 1985...... 109

x PLATE PAGE

XIV. May Stevens, The Murderers of Rosa Luxemburg, acrylic on canvas, 78" x 129", 1986...... 112

XV. May Stevens, Ordinary. Extraordinary, detail image from artist's book, 1980...... 113

XVI. May Stevens, Procession, acrylic on canvas, 78" x 120", 1983...... 118

XVII. May Stevens, Demonstration, acrylic on canvas, 78" x 120", 1982...... 129

x i CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

About the Study

The subject of this document is feminist art criticism and its implications for art education. I present categories for understanding the varieties of feminist art criticism, demonstrate how they stimulate different interpretations through a case study, and offer an explanation of them as simultaneously valid and valuable methods in working towards the social goals of feminism. Implications of feminist art criticism for the study of art criticism in art education are drawn in the concluding chapter.

"Feminist Polyphony: A Conceptual Understanding of

Feminist Art Criticism in the 1980s" is the product of a long process leading from experiences and intellectual curiosity to concentrated study and conceptualization. My introduction to feminism came after years of studying, practicing, thinking about, and teaching art. The scope of inquiry in studio and art history courses I took was narrow, its basis built 2

on a set of assumptions that were never stated. Art

was presented as a valuing exercise, its formal and

expressive criteria were examined only within

guidelines set by others. How criteria for formal and

expressive greatness were determined was not discussed,

not even when the sublime in art shifted from beautiful

to innovative. How did certain themes, media, and

styles warrant critical attention while others didn't?

I often asked. Why was Renaissance art "better" because reality was better mimicked, and abstract expressionism "better" because paint reflected the

flatness inherent to it? Why was needlework in a cathedral minor art and the paintings above major?

These questions took on an air of urgency when I began

to teach. How could I define art to my students? How could I talk sensitively to them about their work and what definition of art did my comments reflect?

Feminism eventually provided a framework for understanding what the years of study and questioning had not. Initially, I was a skeptical feminist of the sort Janet Radcliffe identifies in her book of the same title. (1) My skepticism led to questioning and prolonged investigation, that have undergirded my academic affair with art.

My interest in art criticism was initiated by this ongoing quest to understand how society defines and 3 values art (kindled by Joanna Frueh who taught a course

in feminist art criticism at the University of Arizona, and reaffirmed once doctoral studies were underway at

Ohio State). Understanding criticism has led me, in my academic work, through interdisciplinary studies in feminism, photography, history of art, and art criticism in art education. The synthesis of feminist criticism and art education has come to seem especially relevant as a system through which a contextual understanding of art can be reached, for feminist criticism is a "network of possibilities"(2) sensitive to differences among people of varying genders, races, ethnicities, classes, ages, sizes, and shapes.

Feminist art criticism is an area not well mined by art educators who teach art criticism, although there exists apparent interest. I posit my last chapter, that explores the implications of the union, as a threshold on which to build practice.

A Definition

There is no single authoritative or basic feminist criticism against which others can be measured.(3)

Feminist art criticism is a set of perspectives that, as Suzanne Lacy has written, "show a consciousness of women's social and economic position in the world" or that reflect a woman's consciousness about women.(4) 4

These consciousnesses reflect advocacy of women's rights and an implicit challenge to their oppression.

Feminist art criticism is part of the feminist program to "educate and ultimately transform"(5) aesthetic, economic, social, political, and cultural norms by bringing to the consciousness of society ways women are oppressed and arguments against these inequities. It is, in this sense, a political act, meant as a

"cultural intervention."(6) Feminist cultural inventions must be based in "a commitment to collective action for [the] radical transformation" of

"structural, economic, political and ideological critiques of the power relations of society."(7)

Feminist criticism questions the values implicit in our acculturated ways of knowing, and connects these values with the dominant ideology of the modernist traditions.(8) "It is alert to the omissions, gaps, partial truths, and contradictions which idoleogy masks."(9)

The issues germaine to feminist art criticism overlap with those of feminist art history, feminist art, and feminist studies.(10) All call into question the traditional pursuits of historians and critics: the objectivity each purports, the exclusions each makes, and the formal analyses central to the study of each.

Concepts of genius, an artistic canon, historical 5

continuity through modernism, and the separation of art

from social issues and life are calied into question.

The projects of feminist artists, art critics, and

historians alike are resurrections of lost and ignored

women artists of past and present, recognition of

women's artistic expressions in marginalized media such

as crafts, analysis of factors that result in a

heirarchy of art subjects - those more commonly

represented by women artists being .less valued - and

analysis of ideologies underlying the values of the art

world. Through these projects are accomplished a simultaneous historical and contemporary questioning of

notions that artistic activity in any interval of time

is homogenous, that solitary genius exists, and that

there is an intrinsic value distinction between

"lesser" and "greater" arts. Through the perspectives

of feminism, old questions are pursued in new ways to

find overlooked meanings, unacknowledged assumptions, and new ways to write about art. (11)

In this document, art history is understood to be written about the past and criticism about issues of

its contemporary context. Feminist art history is

included when criticism is inferred. Feminist art and feminist art criticism are distinguished from each other as visual objects and written interpretation, respectively. When criticism is inferred as the 6 subject in a discussion of feminist art, comments about feminist art are included in this study.

Feminist art criticism, in this document, is restricted to writing that accomplishes the aims described above. The author may be female or male.

Not all art criticism written by women reflects the feminist perspectives set out above, that is to say that not all woman-authored art criticism is feminist art criticism. Some criticism by men meets this definition, and will be considered as feminist. I am not unaware of, nor insensitive to, reservations some women feminists have towards males practicing feminist criticism.(12) The position I take is motivated by attempts to circumvent divisions of the sexes when indication of such division is not biologically proven, and by desire not to perpetuate "ghettoization" of feminist criticism as an activity of "others" outside mainstream thought.(13)

Feminist criticism should further not be understood as a methodology. In the words of Elaine

Showalter,

We do not derive our charter from a single authority or a body of sacred theoretical texts... Feminist criticism has been rather a powerful movement than a unified theory, a community of women with a shared set of concerns but with a complex and resourceful variety of methodological practices and theoretical affiliations.(14) 7

Some feminist art critics utilize the methods of cultural critiques that are currently underway in postmodernist criticism.(15) The feminist use of these critical strategies should be distinguished by their evolving adaptation to the goals of feminism. In this study many practices of feminist art criticism are recognized, with the proscription of none singly in exclusion of others.

Limitations

Feminist art criticism considered here is limited to that of the Western middle-class white feminist community, and predominantly the United States.

British feminist critics such as Griselda Pollock and

Rozsika Parker have had important influences on

American feminist thought and are included when relevant. French feminist thought has had a limited influence on American feminist thought; therefore, the

French are cited with less frequency. Many of the feminist critics discussed are, in their writing and personally, sensitive to and involved in issues of race and class.(16)

Feminist criticism of film and performance art is not part of this analysis. This is not because these formats and media are not artforms, nor is it because I want to perpetuate formalist categories of art. (17) 8

The issues and the structure of their analyses differ enough in character that they warrant a separate study,(18) just as feminist literary criticism is different and has not been included as a topic of the study.

My biases should be understood to lie in support of the social causes of the feminist movement: in its reasons for existence and its basic goals for fundamental social change. And while I identify with materialist feminist criticism that tries to account

for the material, historical specifity of experiences and belief systems,(19) I am sympathetic to other

feminist perspectives.

What I have tried to present is an open structure

for understanding feminist art criticism at this historical moment within the limitations I have adumbrated, and to sketch out the implications of such understanding for the study of art criticism in art educat ion.

About Feminist Art Criticism

As of this writing, analyses of feminist art criticism are few. This does not mean that feminist art criticism is not being written, nor that there are not scholars interested in interpreting and describing 9 its nature. I suspect such analyses will multiply in the next ten years. In literature, the feminist critics' arguments are more evolved.(20) There are more voices and more avenues for publication and more forums of discussion for literary feminists. The appearance of anthologies on the subject and collected essays by feminist literary critics and theorists numbers several each year in feminist literary criticism. Scores of essays appear in journals yearly.

The topic occupies a separate section in the each year's edition of the MLA Bibliography. "Feminist literary theory" is a field of study well apparent in print and at several universities.(21)

In the next few pages is an account of comments by feminist art critics and theorists about the relationship of feminism to art that bear on the understanding of feminist art criticism. This is not a comprehensive overview. It is a synopsis of the development of trends and ideas specifically about criticism.(22)

Early Commentators: the 1970s

"Why Are There No Great Women Artists?" Linda

Nochlin's essay first published in a 1971 anthology and later reprinted in somewhat modified and shortened form as "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" is an 10

early inroad into feminism and art. It is a critique

of the social structures that determine women's

inferior positions in society. Nochlin identified

institutions over individuals as determinants of this

condition.

The question "Why the [sic] there no great women artists?" has so far led to the conclusion that art is not a free, autonomous activity of a superendowed individual, "influenced" by previous artists, and, more vaguely and superficially, by "social forces," but rather, that art making, both in terms of the development of the art maker and the nature and quality of the work of art itself, occurs in a social situation, is an integral element of the social structure, and is mediated and determined by specific and definable social institutions, be they art academies, systems of patronage, mythologies of the divine creator and artist as he-man or social outcast.(23)

Examples of social factors influencing women's role in art given by Nochlin include the concept of artist as

individualized genius, objectification of women in art, and a cultural emphasis on women's art as a proper amateur accomplishment of persons whose real work was nurturance. She highlights a few women artists whom she considers "great." Although Nochlin's essay was about feminism and art history, it is important as an

initial signal in the direction of contemporary feminist art criticism in building a case for the social critique.(24) 11

Another early analysis that is important to understanding contemporary feminist art criticism is

Lise Vogel's "Fine Arts and Feminism: The Awakening

Consciousness." The relationship of feminism to art, she argued, was at the time unevolved, for the efforts of feminists in art (critics were one group implicated) centered around naming inequalities and posing calls for equal opportunity. Vogel placed cause for this unevolved state in the system of art, that separates social and aesthetic realms, is controlled by a monied elite, and exists in a "fetishized" "ideological insularity."(25) What feminist art criticism existed during this period did not break out of the limited sphere of activity in which the feminist art movement then engaged, she argued. It "tend[s] variously and contradictorily toward reformism, unrealistic utopianism, and what I would call cultural feminism."(26) Throughout her analysis, Vogel stressed the influence of class and race compounded with sexuality in determining a person's character and her or his experience. She also emphasized that the experience of race, class, and sexuality occurs in a specific historical moment and is of a continually evolving nature. This perspective is often understood as a characteristic of feminism in the 1980s, making

Vogel's essay an important precedent. Like Nochlin, 12

Vogel called for feminist critical analyses of the art world whose object would be to place art within a social and historical context.

In 1975, for the second issue of the journal

Signs, Gloria Feman Orenstein reviewed scholarship

(publications and presentations) pertaining to feminism and art. Her focus was on the discoveries, accomplishments, and the perspective of the feminist movement in art. She saw the feminist art project in a more positive light than had Vogel: "The feminist perspective forces the woman critic to abandon all culturally induced prejudices and to question the facts underlying all seemingly objective observations," she stated. (27) (Orenstein often did not make a distinction between feminist art historians and critics in this essay, using the terms interchangeably.) She identified several issues extant in feminist scholarship in art (including criticism). These were the discovery of lost and unknown women artists past and present, exposure and denunciation of the system of art that has held women to the status of object rather than maker or audience, analysis of why women artists have been left out of the historical record, (28) denunciation of stereotypes of women artists, and characterization of a female sensibility.(29)

Orenstein called for feminist critics and artists to "pressure museums and galleries" to include women, and for feminist art historians to write women's art history and to re-write the discipline of art history.

Her measure of success was the inclusion of women artists in art history books and courses. Upon this success, she claimed, "we will know that women have made a significant revolution in intellectual and cultural history."(30) Orenstein saw feminist critics as instruments of this change. This measure is not the fundamental change in the conceptualization of art and society Vogel and Nochlin argued for, but rather an expansion of the definition and valuing of art.

Lawrence Alloway devoted a section to feminist criticism in "Women's Art in the '70s" (1976), reviewing what had been written in the first half of the decade. Articles were divided into two categories, the "polemical-documentary approach" and "revisionary art history." The difference between the two approaches, Alloway reflected, was their tone: the former's "accusatory," the latter's "analytical." He characterized the writing as "propaganda and reassurance,"(31) noting especially the absence of manifestos indicating future courses of action.

Alloway criticized feminist art writers for failing "to develop or discuss ideas germane to its constituency."(32) As example, he claimed that 14 although women artists were exploring female sensibility, feminist critics had failed to develop the issue. (33) The lack of ideas worthy of development characterized feminist criticism, from his perspective.

Alloway called for a feminist art criticism that would develop hypotheses and definitions of women's art.

At the conclusion of the 1970s, Lucy Lippard's

"Sweeping Exchanges: The contribution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s" offered an overview of feminist art and its achievements. "Feminism's greatest contribution to the future of art," she claimed,

has probably been precisely its lack of contribution to modernism. Feminist methods and theories have instead offered a socially concerned alternative to the increasingly mechanical "evolution" of art about art. The 1970s might not have been "pluralist" at all if women artists had not emerged... the feminist insistence that the personal (and thereby art itself) is political has, like a serious flood, interrupted the mainstream's flow, sending it off into hundreds of tributaries.(34)

The feminist rupture with high art that Lippard identified is the integration of art with life: art about life. And Lippard claimed the influence of this rupture on the art world was due to feminism.

Influential feminist practices she identified were ritual, social art that aimed at public consciousness-raising, and collaborative artmaking.

Although Lippard did not touch on feminist criticism in 15 this essay, it is important background in understanding comments she made about feminist criticism in other essays of the same time period. She linked feminist art and criticism in their life/social basis in "Hot

P o t a t o e s (35) In "Some Questions They Raise About Art and Politics," she noted with urgency the need for feminist critics to produce new criteria to express value in the relationship of art to life. (36)

What these five essays illustrate is that some writers felt the outcome of feminist criticism should be the addition of women to the art world and an expansion of artistic themes and media to include, on equal par, those traditionally associated with women; while others called for an overhaul of how art is understood, making it a social contextual issue.

Commentators in the 1980s

Analyses of feminist art criticism in this decade are often intertwined with what is termed "theory."

These analyses utilize a body of interdisciplinary studies on women from the fields of sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.

Moira Roth's comments on the state of the feminist art movement at the conclusion of the 1970s served as preface to her recommendations for the future.

It is high time that we take critical stock of the present state and future direction of 16

both feminist art and feminist art criticism...the criteria for feminist art (let alone for effective feminist art) have changed radically in the last couple of years...(37)

The tasks of the 1970s had been, she said, "the discovery and presentation of art by women, past and present;" "the development of a new language for writing about this art - often polemic and poetic, always anti-formalist;" and "the creation of a history of and theories about the forms and meanings of this...art by women."(38) Clearly, these are tasks of feminist writers, including critics. Without discarding any of these tasks, Roth added a task for the 1980s, "the undertaking of a far more critical mode of writing about this art than was possible or necessary in the last decade. "(39) She called for feminists to protest against ineffective feminist art, by which she meant overworked and poor treatments of themes popular to feminists (e.g., autobiography and ritual), and for a narrowing of the definition of feminist art that had become "a blanket term...to describe all art by women that concerns itself with the enormous subject of women's experiences and consciousness."(40) To be feminist, she said, art must be both political and spiritual (Roth does not define this latter term, but seems to mean a commitment to the women's community and bonds between women). She 17

introduces her essay with a quote from Adrienne Rich:

in rejecting polarities, it tells us, women reaffirm

the existence of all persons who have been negatively

def ined.

Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews took

Roth's divisions as a springboard for their essay published seven years later, "The Feminist Critique of

Art History." It is the most comprehensive analysis of

the feminist art criticism to date. (41) Gouma-Peterson and Mathews pose some divisions in the feminist art movement, notably "first generation" and "second generation" feminist art critics and historians. The emphasis of "first-generation" critics is identified as exposing discriminations in the art world and advocating their reform, and the identification of women's unique contributions to art.

"Second-generation" critics are said to emphasize analysis of social structures that determine these conditions, using interdisciplinary methods of social criticism. The subject of "first-generation" critics is woman and gender; the subject of "second-generation" critics is culture and how it defines gender. The former seeks to define a fixed set of qualities, the latter to understand gender as not fixed but continually in process. Themes of the "first generation" identified by Gouma-Peterson and Mathews are the art/craft issue, female sensibility, female

body art and sexuality. "First-generation" and

"second-generation" are similar to divisions Roth and

Lippard have identified as, respectively, spiritual and political, and cultural and socialist.(42) Despite excoriations to the contrary,(43) Gouma-Peterson and

Mathews are careful not to describe "first-generation" critics as essentialist, although they do note these claims as made by others. In responding to an article by Deborah Cherry that they see as pushing

"first-generation" feminists into a biologically deterministic camp, "which they by no means all occupy," they respond: "on the contrary, although first-generation feminists often investigate specific traits that belong to the female, such traits are generally seen as culturally determined and changing through history as those determinants change."(44) And while they state that "both positions have potential worth, despite the fact that it is in the nature of the committed to deny it,"(45) the structure of the essay and their use of language imply their support for

"second-generation" criticism.(46)

Joanna Frueh identifies three stages in feminist art criticism: the resurrection of lost or ignored artists and "minor" arts; the celebrations of women's traditions, including the search for a female 19 sensibility; and a gender analysis of art, including interconnections between art objects, culture, and the historical context. This results in a questioning of traditional approaches to art, such as "'the dog-eared myth of intellectual n e u t r a l i t y (47) The feminist contribution to art criticism, she says, is an "overt personal engagement."(48) The goal of feminist art criticism as she sees it is mental freedom. Mental freedom involves not just the intellect, but knowledge gained through the body, emotions, wishes, and the intellect. The critical act, she concludes, is one way to invent a future with freedom. Feminist art criticism is "a chorus of possibilities, not a drone of proofs."(49) It should, she says, be spirited. In a later essay, Frueh identifies two approaches of feminist critics and artists. The first is related to the spirited, engaged criticism she has earlier identified. These critics, she says,

seek to locate the meaning of gender in social constructs as well as in biological difference. Called "essentialists" by those who view their thinking as naive and as biological determinism, these feminists look for positive, open-ended ways to define woman.(50)

The second group of feminist critics and artists has been influenced by the climate of the 1980s, a

"cooling-off period" in which feminism "has been subject to the "hyper-intellectualization" of 20 postmodern deconstructivist practices.(51) She feels the former groups' practices are truer to the root meanings of "theory," as "'imaginative contemplation of reality'" and "'insight.'"

Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis present what they call four theories of women's art (or, as they term it, "women's cultural production"[52]). They support the artmaking of but one of these: women's art that situates women so they can respond to the patriarchy. The importance of their determination is that artwork must be located within a theoretical framework, posed by feminist writers including critics.

The premise of their evaluation is that feminists need to understand the structures of women's oppression and that artwork must form a dialectic with male culture.

(They claim art made in the other three categories - art made to glorify women's essential powers; art made in the traditional forms and media as subcultural resistance; and women's art submerged or outside the dominant culture - does not have this theoretical support.) The implication of their evaluation is that feminist art must evolve from a theoretical reflection on representation: that feminist art should evolve from feminist theory and criticism.

Deborah Bright is critical of what she calls the liberal feminist approach to writing about gender 21

because she says it has "proved to be historically

unresponsive to differences among women and the complex

interrelationships between male sexism and other forms

of oppression like racism, ethnocentrism, imperialism,

and h o m o p h o b i a (53) She perceives the liberals as

"essentialists," "grounding their arguments in a

perception of the eternal and immutable difference

between the biological sexes, the one compelled by

nature to dominate and subjugate the other." Opposite

the essentialists she identifies the "'social

constructionist' theorists" whose position is "that men's and women's gender identities and social

relations are not universally given, but culturally and historically produced and regulated (and therefore

remediable)." Feminist debates "oscillate" between

these "two poles" in Bright's description.(54) She calls for theories and practices that decode and expose how gender is constructed.

Arlene Raven also identifies two schools of contemporary feminist art and criticism, calling them the physical and the social (or the essentialists and the postmodern deconstructionists/appropriationists).

The two have co-existed since the 1960s, when

"second-wave feminism" emerged (the so-called

"first-wave" was centered around women's struggle for suffrage.) The physical has, in the 1980s she laments, 22

become unfashionable, a condition that she relates to

the cultural context of political and economic

conservatism in the United States. Raven argues that

the schism between feminist critics is a myth since

practitioners of both schools understand culture as a

negative force for women. She develops a metaphor for

culture in Cinderella's tiny glass slipper.

Cinderella's step sisters, whose feet do not fit the

shoe, represent all women who do not fit into (or

reject) cultural constraints of femininity.(55) Raven

acknowledges (as have Gouma-Peterson and Mathews) that

the methods of the two schools differ. She looks for a

synthesis of the physical and the social. She does not

believe that women will be liberated from cultural

constraints without recognizing their bodies. In answer

to charges of biological essential ism, she says,

"'Innate' femininity said to inform female imagery,

ritual, and body art was not formulated without

consideration of human invention and social environment."(56) Elsewhere, she continues this

defense: "identification with other women [in the late

1960s and early 1970s] became a political concept" and a "self-conscious" strategy.(57) Raven calls for an elemental physicality, "an existential grasp of things-in-themselves beneath their manufactured 23

representations."(58) She is critical of postmodern

criticism.

Of coarse there is an exhilarating freedom in creating the world from scratch. But there may be a limitation, at least in clarity, in any philosophy which denies biological realities when rejecting biological determinism. Arguments that there is no biologically determined femininity - which can be supported or assaulted by social ideals and practice - have been used as authentication for recent art. They represent (along with cosmetic surgery for all middle-class citizens) escapist science f ictions.(59)

She calls for a re-valuing of the body and a "speaking

directly to the senses" as a feminist act underlying

not only feminist criticism but the feminist vision of

the world transformed.

Can women put forth visions unmarred by primary distortions of consciousness - living in society but out of body, or in the body but shunned from culture? If women can be sensual, physical, and eternal, could biology be transformed? Could our thinking about the body also be transformed, from the dank, unruly, and natural that must be civilized, to a model of rhythms and relationships upon which a society can be built?(60)

Raven bids for a re-casting of our assumptions of the body and postulates an alternative social structure based on the body's rhythms and relationships.

Craig Owens looks at feminist criticism in

relationship to postmodernism in "The Discourse of

Others: Feminists and postmodernism." Identifying the postmodern critique as characterized by "a crisis of 24

cultural authority, specifically of the authority

vested in Western European culture and its

institutions," postmodern discourse he says aspires to

the status of a theory of contemporary culture.(61)

Owens does not "posit identity between" feminist and

postmodernist critiques, but rather looks at the

"implications of [the] intersection."(62) Both

critiques consider representation in the postmodern

age, but the focus of the feminist examination is the

representation of women, that the postmodernists have

neglected (what Owens calls "'a remarkable

oversight1"[63]). The feminist postmodern critique,

according to Owens, is a synthesis of postmodern

methods of Marxism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, but

the feminists reject any single theory. For theory has

what Owens calls "totalizing ambitions...claim to

account for every form of social experience," and, as

well, sets up a "distance between itself and its

objects - a distance which objectifies and masters." (64) So, feminists may use psychoanalysis, but they concentrate on analyzing how and why the privileging of vision in Freudian psychoanalysis not only supports the authority of modernism, but supports

the authority of male privilege. The feminist critique thus arrives at a different meaning than the postmodern critique. One of the examples Owens uses to illustrate 25 this conclusion is the feminist interpretation of the the refusal of authorship. Authorship is understood by postmodernists as an expression of modernist tendencies towards cultural authority, and the celebration of the individual and his self-expression. In the feminist critique, the refusal of authorship is not so much this refusal of modernism as a "refusal of the role of creator as 'father.'" The refusal critiques not only modernism and patriarchy, but postmodernist indifference to feminist issues. Owens' analysis differs from others included in this section because he acknowledges only one strain of feminist art criticism.(65)

Cassandra Langer advances what she has identified as "gynergenic art criticism," which is a form of feminist art criticism. It is "activist" and

"revolutionary" as opposed to merely "aware" which, she says, describes most feminist criticism.(66) In gynergenic criticism language, methods, assumptions, values, and images created by the patriarchy are questioned. Gynergenic criticism formulates alternatives to the identity created for women by men through actively seeking "woman-centered" terms. The

"gynergenic perspective" emphasizes "women's perceptions, language and experiences in our society."(67) Langer does not clearly define 26

"woman-centered," which may be the root of confusion over the meaning of the gynergenic critique.(68) The critique is self-conscious, aggressive, and "actively concerned with creating alternatives."(69) In a later article, Langer searches for what she calls a

"gyn-aesthetic criticism." Feminist criticism is "only a stepping stone" to it.

When I say "actively gyn-aesthetic" I mean charting a heretofore uncharted territory, in a self-determing act of will, based on women's own feelings and thoughts, centered in their own experience in society and culture. This means the critic has freed herself - as much as possible - from patriarchal definitions ... she has defined her own territory...(70)

Gyn-aesthetic or gynergenic criticism poses a vision, more than a strategy, to represent an ideal and to hold out for its possibility. "A network of possibilities," it represents a "multiverse, rather than a universe," and "will open the door to a world of equals respecting each others' differences, rather than repressing them."(71)

The eight viewpoints about feminist art criticism presented in this section could form a diverse anthology of thinking on feminist art criticism. In an effort to let the reader experience the diversity much as I initially did, no conceptual continuity has been imposed upon them. Perhaps the reader experiences the 27 sense of "crisis" in feminist art criticism described by Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis:

To say there is a crisis in contemporary criticism might seem like overstating the case for a situation in which critical definitions and methods merely lack precision and rigor. Yet it cannot be disputed that in terms of the feminist issue of the representation of women and the figuration of female sexuality in artf a crisis does exist.(72)

The crisis between critics can be seen within a context of crisis arising from the challenge to traditions brought about by all feminist art criticism. Sandra

Langer, who talks about this kind of crisis, concludes:

"the practice of a feminist theory of art and its criticism is not easy to define."(73) It is this sense of crisis, and the need for a framework of understanding that have led me to pose a conceptual framework for understanding, which is the subject of the next chapter. 28

Reference Notes: introduction

(1) Janet Radcliffe Richards, The Sceptical Feminist (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).

(2) Sandra Langer, "Is There a New Feminist Criticism? Women Artists News 10, nos. 5-6 (September 1985): 5. Future references to this article will be abbreviated as "New Feminist Criticism."

(3) Elaine Showalter argues this in discussing feminist literary criticism. "Women's Time, Women's Space: Writing the History of Feminist Criticism," in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987) . Future references to this article will be abbreviated as "Women's Time." Of feminist art practice, Griselda Pollock has asked, '"What is feminist art?'" Her reply: "There is no such entity; no homogenous movement defined by characteristic style, favoured media or typical subject matter. There are instead feminist artistic practices that cannot be comprehended by the standard procedures and protocols of modernist art history and criticism." "Feminism and Modernism," in Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement 1970-1985, ed. Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, 79-122 (London: Pandora Press, 1987), 80.

(4) From a conversation between Suzanne Lacy and Moira Roth, cited from Moira Roth, "visions and Re-Visions: Rosa Luxemburg and the Artist's Mother," Artforum 19, no. 3 (November 1980): 37. Future references to this article will be abbreviated as "Visions: Rosa." Lacy rejects the latter definiton given here as less evolved.

(5) Donald Kuspit, "Editor's Preface" to Crossing Over: Feminism and Art of Social Concern, by Arlene Raven (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987), x i i i .

(6) Annette Kuhn distinguishes feminist cultural interventions from cultural interventions by women. The latter are defined as activities that stimulate women to become involved in culture, and could include the nineteenth century call for women to engage in china painting as dilettantes. Annette Kuhn, Women1s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London, 1982), 8. 29

(7) Griselda Pollock, "Feminism and Modernism," 93.

(8) "There are still many kinds of art practice in this century but only selected forms which can be construed within the Modernist protocols are ratified by art criticisim and taken to be 'modern art.' Modernism can therefore be called hegemonic since it is in relationship to it that all other contemporary practices are defined and classified." Ibid., 100.

(9) Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn, "Feminist scholarship and the social construction of woman," in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1985), 22. Feminist art critics do not have to undertake a decoding and critique of social structures per se to be meet this definition, but such a critique is implicit in their strategies. (Greene and Kahn, as well as Pollock, would not agree with the latitude of my definition. The projects they prescribe for feminist criticism are precisely decoding and active intervention techniques.)

(10) Feminist art critics, Joanna Frueh points out, are often trained in art history. "Towards a Theory of Feminist Criticism" [part I], New Art Examiner 12 (January 1985), 41. Future references to this essay will be abbreviated as "Feminist Theory I." Some of the critics mentioned in this document who are trained as historians are Arlene Raven, Joanna Frueh, Sandra Langer, Carol Duncan, Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews, Linda Nochlin, Moira Roth, Josephine Withers, and Griselda Pollock. Lucy Lippard was trained as a writer. Many feminists who write art criticism are practicing artists: e.g. Harmony Hammond, Carol Jacobsen, and Mary Kelly.

(11) Frueh, "Feminist Theory I," 41.

(12) Literary feminists have ennumerated numerous reservations about the practice of feminist criticism by males. Elaine Showalter argues men and women have a different stake in the practice of feminist criticism and that "male theorists borrow the language of feminist criticism without a willingness to explore the masculinist bias of their own reading system." "Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and The Woman of The Year," Raritan (Fall 1983): 131. Nina Auerbach 30

indicates her wariness of male feminists, because their interest in feminist criticism could stem from its vogueishness rather than from a deep commitment. "Engorging the Patriarchy, " in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987). "Feminist theorizing has emerged as a professional cachet," accuses Annette Kolodny. "The male critic rushes to prove that he is at least 'something of a feminist.'" "Respectability is Eroding the Revolutionary Potential of Feminist Criticism," The Chronicle of Higher Education, (May 4, 1988 ): A52.. Jane Marcus demands that male feminist criticis surrender their paternal privileges or qualify their practice as "phallic 'feminist' criticism." "Still Practice: A/Wrested Alphabet," in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington: University of Indiana Pres, 1987), 79-97. Feminist art critic and historian Sandra Langer is tentative: I do not say that such a criticism cannot be practiced by male critics, but that they must undertake a hell of a lot more responsibility to be taken seriously...Most males will not grant women's experience full parity, will not admit the need to study it, will not keep up with the literature in a fast expanding field." "New Feminist Criticism," 4-5. These issues are valid, yet to exclude males from the possibility of practicing feminist criticism affirms binary categories based on biological difference.

(13) I am aware that some feminists identify "otherness" as desirable. While I am sympathetic to their arguments, my vision is of a pluralistic society, where varieties of thinking are understood to exist laterally, without divisions between hegemonic and "others."

(14) Elaine Showalter, "Women's Time," 30-44. Although Showalter is a literary critic, her comments transfer directly to the practice of feminist art critics.

(15) These methods include use of psychoanalysis, revisionist marxism, semiotics, deconstruction, and post-structural ism.

(16) I work to include myself among white feminists who are sensitive to the voices of other races, ethnicities, classes, sexual persuasions, and 31

body types. The cultural backgrounds of Western middle-class white women predicate certain ways of understanding, just as does the cultural background of every human. I mean this as less of an apologia, because we are all programmed by our cultural inscriptions than the recognition of an inbuilt limitation. As a white feminist with but a reading knowledge of the issues of women of other races, classes, ethnicities, and nationalities, I do not feel I should act as interpreter and spokesperson for them. Feminist criticism exists in the black and chicana populations. There is also a respectable body of lesbian feminist criticism.

(17) Deborah Bright calls the separation of objects by medium "a rather dated conceit of formalist art history which tends to obscure issues of content and history in favor of a seemingly self-evident unity of expressive form and materials." Deborah Bright, "Engendered Dilemmas (or, why we don't need more articles on 'Gender and the Media)," Views 10, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 13. In "Feminism and Modernism," Griselda Pollock calls the separation of art into styles, media, and subject matter a Modernist construct (p. 80).

(18) For an academic treatment of feminist film criticism, see Lucie Arbuthnot, "Main Trends in Feminist Criticism in Film, Literature, and Art History: The Decade of the 1970's" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1982).

(19) See, for example, Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt, "Introduction: toward a material'st-feminist criticism, •' in Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture, ed. Deborah Rosenfelt and Judith Newton, xv-xxxix (New York: Methuen, 1985) .

(20) Joanna Frueh describes feminist literary criticism as "far more sophisticated" and uses the framework developed by a feminist literary theorist as model for her explanation of feminist art criticism. "Feminist Theory I," 42. Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews refer to feminist literary criticism as more evolved and more sophisticated in "The Feminist Critique of Art History."

(21) Although, as feminist literary scholars are quick to point out, feminist literary criticism is often only marginally tolerated. See, for instance, 32

Sandra M. Gilbert's essay, "What Do Feminist Critics Want? A Postcard from the Volcano," in Feminist Literary Criticism; Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985) .

(22) The reader is referred to an essay by Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews, "The Feminist Critique of Art History," Art Bulletin 69, no. 3 (September 1987): 326-357 for a synthesis of feminist art criticism in relationship to the feminist art movement, although certain limitations of the essay mentioned in footnote 48 should be kept in mind. For background on the feminist art movement, the reader is referred to Jacqueline Skiles, "The United States: 1970-1980," in Women Artists of the World, ed. Cindy Lyle, Sylvia Moore, and Cynthia Navaretta (New York: Midmarch Associates, Publishers, 1984), 69-76; Lucy Lippard, "Sweeping Exchanges: The contribution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s," in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984): 149-158 (reprinted from Art Journal [Fall-Winter 1980]); Lawrence Alloway, "Women's Art in the '70s," in Feminist Collage: Educating Women in the Visual Arts, ed. Judy Loeb (New York: Teachers College Press, 1979), 59-77 (reprinted from Art in America [May-June 1976]); "The Women's Movement in Art, 1986," excerpts of discussions by ten persons in a panel presentation for the 1986 Women's Caucus for Art annual conference, Arts Magazine 61, no. 1 (September 1986): 54-56; Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, "Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art-Making," in Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, ed. Arlene Raven, Cassandra L. Langer, and Joanna Frueh (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987) (reprinted from LIP [1981/82]; the essay also appeared in an edited version in Screen [Summer 1980]); "Mary Kelly, "On sexual politics and art," in Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement 1970-1985, ed. Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker (London: Pandora Press, 1987), 303-312 (reprinted from Art and Politics, ed. Brandon Taylor (Winchester School of Art, 1980); and Lisa Tickner, "Feminism, Femininity, and Women's Art," LIP: Feminist Arts Journal [Australia] 8 (1984). For a review of the feminist art movement in Britain, the reader is referred to Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement 1970-1985, ed. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (London: Pandora Press, 1987), and especially the editors' essay in this anthology "Fifteen years of feminist action: from practical strategies to strategic practices," 3-78. 33

(23) Linda Nochlin, "Why Are There No Great Women Artists?" in Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, ed. Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1971), 493. Reprinted as "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" in Art and Sexual Politics; Womens Liberation, Women Artists, and Art History, ed. Thomas B. Hess (New York: Collier Books, 1971) and in Art News 69, no. 9 (January 1971).

(24) Despite her emphasis on social conditions, Nochlin concluded that women shouldn't snivel about their oppression, and called for them to challenge their conditions with clear minds: What is important is that women face up to the reality of their history and of their present situation, without making excuses or puffing mediocrity. Disadvantage may indeed be an excuse; it is not, however, an intellectual position. Rather, using their situation as underdogs in the realm of grandeur and outsiders in the realm of ideology as a vantage point, women can reveal institutional and intellectual weaknesses in general, and, at the same time that they destroy false consciousness,' take part in the creation of institutions in which clear thought - and true greatness - are challenges open to anyone, man or woman, courageous enough to take the necessary risk, the leap into the unknown. Ibid., 509. The tone of this is ambiguous: is Nochlin returning to a traditional use of great? What differentiates greatness from mediocrity? Many interpreters of this passage have understood it as an ultimate return to the status quo, leading them to criticism not only of the essay but of Nochlin as well. See, for example, footnote 27 of this chapter.

(25) Lise Vogel, "Fine Arts and Feminism: The Awakening Consciousness," Feminist Studies 2, no. 1 (1974): 5. The article has recently been republished in Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, ed. Arlene Raven, Cassandra L. Langer, and Joanna Frueh (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988), 21-57.

(26) Ibid., 24. Vogel defined cultural feminism as "an uncritical overemphasis on women that obscures and denigrates other questions, above all those concerning class and race" (p. 26). In this essay, 34

Vogel is critical of most feminist scholarship in the arts, analyzing in detail the essays in Woman as Sex Object. Studies in Erotic Art 1730-1970, ed. Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin. Of Nochlin's "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" she claims the author is caught in trying to solve the oppression of women through reversal: specifically, making men the objects of women's actions. This is an unvisionary stance, Vogel argues, that ignores class and race and ultimately remains tied to the status quo.

(27) Gloria Feman Orenstein, Review Essay: "Art History," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 2 (1975): 506.

(28) The prejudice of male critics has been a factor in this, according to Cindy Nemser, in "Art Criticism and Women Artists," Journal of Aesthetic Education, (June 1973): 73-83.

(29) This one issue consumed much of the energy of feminist critics, aestheticians, historians, and artists in the 1970s. For a sampling, see Renee Sandell, "Female Aesthetics" The Women's Movement and Its Aesthetic Split," Journal of Aesthetic Education 14, no. 4 (October 1980): 106-109; Vivian Gornick, "Toward a Definition of Female Sensibility," in Essays in Feminism (New York, 1978); Judy Chicago, Through the Flower: My Struggles as a Woman Artist (Garden City, 1973); Joan Semmel and April Kingsley, "Sexual Imagery in Women's Art," Woman's Art Journal 1 (Spring/Summer 1980): 1-6; Julia Penelope Stanley and Susan J, Wolfe, "Toward a Feminist Aesthetic," Chrysalis 6 (1978): 57-71; and Patricia Mathews, "What is Female Imagery?" Women Artists News 10 (November 1984): 5-7. Although at one point Orenstein's analysis of the female sensibility inferred a biologically different aesthetic, ultimately she deferred to the unknown: The debate cannot be resolved until all women's art training is revised and based on the new data emerging from the women's movement in the arts. It is too early to tell what still unimaginable aesthetic may then evolve. What is clear is that the history of art will no longer be the same...Biological and sociological research informs us that the variability in physical and mental abilities and proclivities within one sex alone is far more extreme than between the two sexes...we may find that any all-female tendency, as it emerges, will 35

resemble to a greater or lesser degree the art that is being produced by male artists of the day. On the other hand, as decades go by, we may see that several characteristics of this particular tendency tend to disappear while others tend to remain fixed. Ibid., 521.

(30) Ibid., 525.

(31) Alloway, "Women's Art in the '70s," 67.

(32) Ibid. Harmony Hammond is critical of Alloway's analysis, calling it a "patronizing progress report." She distrusts his call for a feminist theory Harmony Hammond, "Horseblinders," in Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art, and the Martial Arts (New York: Time and Space Ltd. Press, 1984), 100. Reprinted from Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, no. 9 (1980).

(33) Alloway, of course, was not prophetic in this observation because a flood of discussion about female sensibility, from many fronts within the women's movement, followed his accusation.

(34) Lucy Lippard, "Sweeping Exchanges: The Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s," in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984), 149. Reprinted from Art Journal (Fall-Winter 1980).

(35) Lucy Lippard, "Hot Potatoes: Art and Politics in 1980," in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984), 161-172.

(36) Lucy Lippard, "(I) Some Political Posters and (II) Some Questions They Raise About Art and Politics," in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984), 34.

(37) Roth, "Visions: Rosa," 36.

(38) Ibid.

(39) Ibid.

(40) Ibid., 37.

(41) In response to Cassandra Langer's comments, Gouma-Peterson and Mathews disclaim that they have 36

written on feminist art criticism in "On Feminist Criticism,” Women Artists News 12, nos. 4 & 5 (Fall/Winter 1987): 32, 31). Yet the content of the essay is equally feminist art history and art criticism. Indeed, the words "art criticism" introduce the abstract. An essay by Patricia Mathews on feminist art criticism is scheduled to appear this year in Art Criticism.

(42) Roth, "Visions: Rosa;" and Lucy Lippard, "Prefatory Note" to section on feminist art in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984), 88-89. Josephine Withers has identified "stage one feminism" and "second stage feminism" in the women's art movement, that roughly correspond to Gouma-Peterson and Mathews' generations of feminist art history and criticism. "Stage one" resulted from women's anger over their marginalization which "prompted an inward search for an authentic female voice and women's culture." "Stage two" feminists "typically have turned outward and...have taken on the world as the subject of their art..." Josephine Withers, "Speakeasy Looks at Feminism Today," New Art Examiner 14, no. 11 (Summer 1987): 14.

(43) See Cassandra Langer, "Feminist Art History: Critique Critiqued," Women Artists News 12, nos. 4 & 5 (Fall/Winter 1987): 38, 62.

(44) Gouma-Peterson and Mathews, 347.

(45) Ibid., 349.

(46) The essay attempts a comprehensive and complex overview, with ideas often presented through writers (which makes it almost a who's who of feminist art history and criticism). Such a presentation, whether intended or not, causes some omissions: e.g. the failure to develop the ideas of critics such as Frueh, Raven, Vogel, and Carey Lovelace, and the use of a footnote to acknowledge the change in Lucy Lippard's perspective on feminism during the past decade. They term "second-generation" critiques more "sophisticated" (p. 350), and "first-generation" ones "conservative" (p. 353). In transitioning between so-called "first-generation" and "second-generation" approaches, they will often use conjunctions such as "however." They imply a "lag" (a word they use to describe the evolution of feminist art criticism as compared to feminist literary criticism) between "first-" and "second-generation" feminist criticisms. Gouma-Peterson 37 and Mathews tend to conclude paragraphs as well as the whole article with arguments for the newer critiques. Indeed, it would seem that one of the premises they set out to prove in their article is the superiority of "second-generation" critiques over those of the "first-generation." On the second page of their article, they state "we believe such an approach ["to prove that women have been as accomplished...as men," which is a "first-generation" project] is ultimately self-defeating, for it fixes women within preexisting structures without questioning the validity of these structures" (p. 327). They present problems with "first-generation" strategy but fail to produce critical analysis of "second-generation" criticism that is of equal strength. Yet others perceive problems. The most piercing come from outside art criticism: for example, Linda Alcoff has pointed to the position of women within social constructivist positions as ultimately nominalist, for at the basis of their deconstructive activities lies nothing. Linda Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 415-422) . For other perceived limitations of Gouma-Peterson and Mathews' article, see Cassandra Langer, "Feminist Art History: Critique Critiqued," and Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, "An Exchange on the Feminist Critique of Art History," The Art Bulletin 71, no. 1 (March 1989): 124-126.

(47) Frueh, "Feminist Theory I," 43. Frueh quotes Annette Kolodny, "Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory and Practie of a Feminist Literary Criticism," Feminist Studies 6, no. 1 (Spring 1980); reprinted in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 144-167.

(48) Frueh, "Feminist Theory I," 42.

(49) Joanna Frueh, "Towards a Feminist Theory of Art Criticism, Part II," New Art Examiner 12, no. 9 (June 1985): 32. Reprinted with Part I as "Towards a Feminist Theory of Art Criticism," in Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, ed. Arlene Raven, Cassandra Langer, and Joanna Frueh (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988), 158-166.

(50) Joanna Frueh, "A Chorus of Women's Voices," New Art Examiner 15, no. 9 (May 1988): 25. This article is hereafter referred to as "Chorus." 38

(51) Ibid., 25.

(52) Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, 88.

(53) Deborah Bright, 12. Bright's article is an expose on the state of current feminism particularly as manifested in feminist art criticism of the media. "Liberal feminism" as Bright uses it seems to be synonymous with cultural feminism.

(54) Ibid., 13.

(55) Arlene Raven, "Cinderella's Sisters' Feet," Village Voice Art Supplement 32 (October 6, 1987): 6-9. Future references to this essay will be shortened to "Cinderella."

(56) Arlene Raven, "The Last Essay on Feminist Art Criticism," in Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, ed. Arlene Raven, Cassandra Langer, and Joanna Frueh (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987), 231. Future references to this essay will be shortened to "Last Essay."

(57) Ibid., 230 and Raven , "Cinderella," 6.

(58) Raven, "Last Essay," 235.

(59) Ibid.

(60) Ibid., 238.

(61) Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 57. discourse is also described as a critique of the modernist perspective. For an indepth analysis of the modernist critique see Mary Kelly, "Re-viewing Modernist Criticism," in Ar t After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum , 1984). For an indepth look at feminism and modernism, see Griselda Pol lock's essay, "Feminism and Modernism. II

(62) Ibid., 59.

(63) Ibid., 60. He borrows this phrase from Jacques Lacan, "Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality," in Feminine Sexuality, ed. J. 39

Mitchell and J. Rose (New York: Norton and Pantheon, 1982), 87.

(64) Ibid., 63.

(65) Robert Storr's "Other 'Others'" responds to Owens' myopia. In Village Voice Art Supplement 32 (October 6, 1987): 15-17.

(66) Cassandra L. Langer, "Against the Grain: A Working Gynergenic Art Criticism," in Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, ed. Arlene Raven, Cassandra L. Langer, and Joanna Frueh (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, Inc., 1987), 112. Reprinted from International Journal of Women's Studies 5, no. 3 (1982).

(67) Ibid., 113.

(68) Confusion and antagonisms between feminist critics occasionally erupt in published exchange. See, for example, Cassandra Langer's response to Gouma-Peterson and Mathews' "The Feminist Critique of Art History:" "Feminist Art History: Critique Critiqued," and the ensuing response by Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews, "On Feminist Criticism." To understand "woman-centered," Langer refers the reader to Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology, Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature, and Adrienne Rich's A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, On Lies, Secrets, and Silences, and The Dream of a Common Language for understanding. Not defining "woman-centered" seems to stem from a desire not to prematurely fix its meaning. My understanding of it as it is presently used is as a womanly essence, as yet unknown, that exists unmarred under the patriarchal inscription. There is indication that it represents an ideal - less biologically based than idealistically based - a possibility of alternative ways of knowing. Many writers, for instance, stress that essentialism is a self-conscious strategy.

(69) Ibid., 117.

(70) Langer, "New Feminist Criticism," 5.

(71) Ibid.

(72) Barry and Flitterman-Lewis, 87. Storr testifies to a similar split in "Other 'Others'." As 40 might be expected, a similar crisis exists in feminist literary criticism. See, for example, Cora Kaplan, "Pandora's box: subjectivity, class, and sexuality in socialist feminist criticism," in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (London: Methuen, 1985), 146-176.

(73) Langer, "New Feminist Criticism," 5. CHAPTER II

A CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING OF CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST ART CRITICISM IN THE 1980S

Annette Kolodny, a literary critic, remarks,

in our heart of hearts, of course, most critics are really structuralists (whether or not they accept the label) because what we are seeking are patterns (or structures) that can order and explain the otherwise inchoate; thus, we invent, or believe we discover, relational patternings in the texts we read...(1)

Her observation, although not a basis for all feminist art criticism, underlies the impulse of

this chapter. As exemplified by the sampling of definitions and prescriptions in the previous chapter, those who practice feminist art criticism utilize a diversity of critical strategies, leading

in some cases to quite different readings. In

this chapter, I present a structure for a holistic understanding of these sister analyses. The preface for this structure has three caveats. That the strategies (which will be defined as strands) of feminist art criticism not be understood as

41 42

isolated from each other is the first caveat; that they

not be conceived in any kind of hierarchy of

qualitative evaluation nor of chronological occurrence

is the second caveat; that their co-existence not be

understood to represent equal numbers of practitioners

is the third.

In the first part of this chapter, then, I will examine three undertakings, which I call "projects," of all contemporary feminist art criticism: self-knowledge, political consciousness-raising, and social analysis. After defining each project, I will

identify each as underlying a strand of contemporary feminist art criticism. The strands vary in their respective emphases and motivating impulses, and in approaches practitioners take and methods they prescribe to effect change. The overarching project of critics of all three strands is the most elementary goal of the feminist movement: to make the world a better place to live for women.(2) Within this vision is equality between women and men, and recognition of the importance of women's voices and experiences. The significant ways the strands overlap is why I have chosen to first approach my explication of contemporary feminist art criticism as a group of projects. 43

Contemporary Projects

I have earlier defined feminist art criticism as writing that reflects a consciousness of women's social and economic positions in the world and/or that reflects a woman's consciousness about women. Active

(if sometimes implicitly) in all feminist art criticism is challenge to social structures and situations that oppress women and advocacy of women's rights. The three projects delineated below embody these consciousnesses, advocacies, and challenges, and are undertakings of all feminist art critics.

Self-Knowledge and Subjectivity

Self-knowledge has been associated with the contemporary women's movement since its emergence in the 1960s. It seems to have grown out of the technique of "consciousness-raising."(3) A buzz word associated with the women's movement in the 1970s, consciousness-raising was first adopted by the New York

Radical Women in the 1960s as a method to uncover women's own thoughts, perceptions, and experiences as a foundation separate from those patriarchally constructed. (4) With this body of knowledge and understanding, the goal was for women to become aware of themselves as a social and political class. Such awareness was understood as prerequisite to reordering 44 society. Although originally intended as a revolutionary tool by the New York Radical Women, during outreach efforts consciousness-raising became separated from its ultimate goal. It became known as the technique for self-discovery and personal liberation that is most often associated with the consciousness-raising of the "women's liberation" movement. Personal liberation became a goal and an end in itself.(5) Whatever the ultimate use of the technique - political or personal - some kind of self-knowledge has been a basic project of feminists, and is a discernible characteristic of feminist art criticism.

Self-knowledge in art criticism allows for the subjective experience as valid and important in understanding the world, including works of art. In art critic Lucy Lippard's words, "there is a new freedom to say how I feel and to respond to all art on a far more personal level." (6) It is a conscious strategy, as its roots in consciousness-raising indicate, and not the by-product of a biological tendency in women towards subjectivity. 45

Political Consciousness-Raising

The contemporary feminist movement grew in

response to oppression of women on various political

fronts during the 1960s, an era charged with political

activism. The National Organization for Women (known

as NOW) was organized in 1966 in response to the Equal

Employment Opportunity Commission. Women involved in

the New Left struggles for civil rights and against the

Vietnam War bonded together in response to their subordinate treatment within their own counterculture movement. The feminist movement is, of course, a political movement. Consciousness-raising in its original associations is a political strategy. The New

York Radical Women adopted the technique from the writings of Karl Marx, who believed the ruled class comes to consciousness in opposition to the ruling class. Inasmuch as a class existed by Marx's definition only if it was conscious of itself and hostile to another group, class consciousness had to form dialectically in opposition to the ideology of the ruling class.(7) Class members, then, necessarily had to see the world from the perspective of their own true class interests and not from the interests of the oppressor class. (The formation of a consciousness with recognition of its opposition were qualitative

"raisings.") The first use of the technique by the New 46

York Radical Women was true to this context. Radical feminists meant the practice to provide means for analyzing the collective situation of women, not individual freedom and self-knowledge that have come to be its popular ends. Political action, the overarching goal, was to grow out of these collective understandings of women.

There are many other ways to go about showing the women's movement as a political movement. And there are certainly other groups of feminists that have approached political action differently than did the

New York Radical Women, and with profound successes.

All of these actions and groups feed into the spirit of the feminist movement as political. Within feminist art criticism, the project of political consciousness-raising reflects such diversity. These practices, though varied, are political in the sense that their practitioners' goal is change through governmental and social means. There is a sense of activism in such criticism. Donald Kuspit reflects this in introducing Arlene Raven's collection of feminist essays on art: feminist art (and, by implication, writing about it) is "not simply art made by women, but art used to make an ideological point about women. It exists to educate and ultimately transform society by bringing society to consciousness 47 of woman's underdog condition."(8) The activist project underlies all feminist art criticism.

Social Analysis

Linda Nochlin's milestone essay "Why Are There No

Great Woman Artists?" pointed to an absence of women as artists in the history of art texts and an absence of women as generators of what we as a culture define as important art and even worthy of the title "art." She located cause for such absences in social structures that relegate women to inferior positions in society, art being one of these structures.

Art is not a free, autonomous activity of a superendowed individual, influenced by previous artists, and, more vaguely and superficially, by "social forces," but rather...art making, both in terms of the development of the art maker and the nature and quality of the work of art itself, occurs in a social situation, is an integral element of the social structure, and is mediated and determined by specific and definable social institutions.(9)

Analysis of how the structures underlying our social institutions construct women and their roles in society characterize a third project of feminist critics.

Systems of analysis developed outside feminist scholarship are adapted to incorporate gender issues.

Marxism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and cultural critiques such as deconstruction and post-structuralism are the basis of these modifications. On the basis of 48

the conclusions of such analyses, they make their calls

for change.

Self-knowledge and subjectivity, political

consciousness-raising, and social analysis are projects

of the feminist movement, including the feminist art movement. They are underlying projects, that take

distinguishable forms and emphasize varying activities.

Each also forms the basis of a different strand of

feminist criticism. In the next three sections, I

discuss the manifestation of these projects as practices of feminist art critics.

In "woman-centered criticism," the validation of

subjectivity which is part of self-knowledge becomes a

celebration of what Joanna Frueh has termed "personal engagement"(10) with works of art and a celebration of women. "Activist feminist criticism" designates criticism that emphasizes particularly the political projects of feminists by reporting on the political content of feminist art and championing its political causes. "Postmodern feminist criticism" refers to the use by feminist critics of analyses such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics towards understanding the social and cultural forces that oppress women. In describing these as practices - conceptualized here as strands - I use examples that focus on qualities that characterize each as a separate strand of feminist art 49 criticism. I have introduced them first as projects, however, because each project threads through each strand of feminist art criticism in some form. Their manifestation as different practices does not imply the strands as mutually exclusive, but as primary emphases where other factors (including these projects) are at play.

Women-Centered Feminist Art Criticism; Celebrating Women, Self-Knowledge, and Subjectivity

In an article on allegory for Art Journal, feminist critic Joanna Frueh's descriptions of ten allegorical paintings become celebrations of women and qualities traditionally associated with women. Of an untitled painting by Janet Cooling she writes,

Sometimes the women turn away from us to face the night, to face nature. They seem to take in nature, breathe and see it, and nature takes them in...Nature never turns against the women, even when they have pressed themselves into the molds of fashion and pose with their suburban homes.(11)

Interpreting Margaret Bailey Doogan's "Basic Black with

Pearls" she begins, "You probably wouldn't want her.

She screams at other women and men. She grimaces and smirks, as if she knows some disgusting truth and sees through your lies;" and ends, "Because she makes the ugly faces of a real woman, she is uncommonly beautiful."(12) Through each of these paintings, Frueh projects strong women independent of men and male 50 culture. She communicates, respectively, woman united with nature, and a strong woman in touch with herself who rejects socially established standards for what women should be. We might not think of strength and

independence when viewing the images of these women if

it were not for Frueh's interpretation. Through her words, the images are recontextualized: "The beauty of strong, creative women is 'ugly' by misogynistic standards of 'beauty,'" claims radical feminist Mary

Daly. Frueh practices what Mary Daly calls a "ludic cerebration," which Daly defines as "the free play of intuition in our own space" and "arises from the lived experience of be-ing."(13) Daly has been an influential proponent of the celebration of women and women's self-knowledge, and of traits that can be identified as female. According to her, women are associated with life, and it is their life-giving abilities that make men parasitic upon them. She proposes that women recharge their energies and special traits through bonding with other women.

Feminist critic and historian Sandra Langer works to validate the work of a man, Robert De Niro, because of what she perceives as his truth to self:

His ultimate justification for making art rests in his unrelenting dedication to a lifelong process of self-correction based on a tradition of painting rooted in his knowledge of his chosen craft. This 51

continuous artistic discourse on self and self-object, to use Kohut's term, is the heart of the inexhaustible creativity that is De Niro's everyday world. His art is an expression of his need for a harmonious, completely integrated life...(14)

Arlene Raven's writing is also suffused with a vision of traditionally "feminine" qualities. She projects these as values for the world at large.

Raven's treatment of California painter Tom Knechtel's work is an example. in it she searches for man's bodily essence in the wild horse (the bred horse in our culture often serving as symbol for the victories and conquests of males). In Knechtel's horses, Raven perceives,

Unlike men's dreams of battles or visions, the horse dreams of straw, manure, the wood sides of his stable, of a hand moving over his nose and his back, or the texture of food...Horse flesh is (rendered) palpable, scents and senses visceral; animal vitality, potency, lust...As the beast dreams drawing nearer the man, he draws his own reins taut to himself. This is the tension of an internal dialogue with desire...Passion held back - not enacted - yet expressed.(15)

Raven finds in Knechtel's art a "journey into images into the thinking/feeling self to find the man in human."(16) It is a self-knowledge informed by thoughts and passions. Frueh celebrates these same sentiments in the work of Cooling and Doogan. Both are visions of the human embodied with qualities traditionally associated with femininity: emotionality 52

PLATE I. Tom Knechtel, Progeny, gouache on paper, 14 3/8" x 14 3/8", 1981. Photo: Bill Miller. PLATE II. Suzanne Lacy, "Guerilla Action on Sidewalks," in Three Weeks in May, performance, May 1977. Photo: s. Lacy 54

and intuitiveness. Raven substitutes in Knechtel's art

pleasure for power, the feminist alternative suggested

by Marilyn French in her treatise Beyond Power: On

Women, Men, and Morals:

an ideal of personal integrity and pleasure; it condemns the pursuit of power, stratification, and the repudiation of body and feeling that patriarchy instills in the public world...the highest value of feminism is pleasure, not power.(17)

French's suggestion encompasses the belief that women

are different. Its conclusion is that if values ascribed to women governed our lives, the world would

be very different. Frueh and Raven seem to suggest

that coming to know one's self outside the patriarchal system will result in (or is at least preliminary to)

changing the world.

It is important to understand the celebrations of woman-centered critics as conscious strategies in the

feminist project for social change. These critics are sometimes accused of "essentialism": of seeking to define women as socially different because of their biological difference. Critics of essentialism argue that such universalizing tendencies perpetuate stereotypes, and leave women in a ghetto marked for easy discrimination. Woman-centered critics would place qualities traditionally associated with women

(e.g., empathy, emotional sensitivity, intuitiveness, 55 closeness to nature, gentleness, and commitment to

life-affirming pursuits) in all humans, as qualities of great value. They indicate these qualities are lost by the hegemonic patriarchal culture, are preserved by women, and are necessary for all. Self-knowledge as a kind of truth is stressed as a route to a better world.

Activist Feminist Art Criticism: Working to Raise the Political Consciousness of Audiences

Lucy Lippard calls her writing "advocacy criticism": "As an advocate, I like to see myself as a medium through which a dialogue or exchange is facilitated, resulting in an indirect collaboration between artist, writer, and reader/viewer."(18) She reports on and defends activist art. During the 1980s,

Lippard has become involved in political art on a wider spectrum than that created by feminists. She comments that feminism was "a crucial factor" in her development,(19) which is to say that she has not abandoned her commitment to feminist political art; she additionally writes about political art that is not specifically feminist. Suzanne Lacy is an example of the kind of artist Lippard chooses to discuss. Lacy's performance pieces include rap sessions on oppression, a demonstration for women murdered by the hillside strangler, and a performance on aging. Although her work culminates in what Lippard describes as 56

"recognizable 'art pieces'...in fact the real work

includes the yearlong organizing and workshops that led up to it, as well as film and documentation that may

follow."(20) Lacy's process involves community

involvement, and an effort to raise the awareness of

those involved about needed social changes and political actions to implement change. Lippard champions the art of many kinds of activists. A further taste of her subjects are art in feminist collectives and art about reproductive rights and sexuality. Lippard comments,

These considerations have led to a radically different approach to artmaking. Tactics, or strategies of communication and distribution, enter into the creative process, as do activities usually considered separate from it, such as community work, meetings, graphic design, postering. The most impressive...delve down and move out into social life itself, through long-term activities.(21)

Lippard's activism within criticism (she is a political activist in other ways too) means a reporting and championing of these forms of art that merge with politics.

Arlene Raven, in an essay titled "Commemoration:

Public Sculpture and Performance," similarly reports on activist art. Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, Suzanne

Lacy's 1984 performance with 154 older women, revealed experiences of growing old in America against the PLATE III. Suzanne Lacy, Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, performance, 1985. Photo: Liz Cisco 58

PLATE IV. COULD THIS WOMAN BE AN ARTIST ? Facsimile of illustrations accompanying John Perreault's "Women Artists Are Also Worker Artists." Photo: Roy Pearson.

Could this woman be an artist? 59

background of the timeless ocean. The performance,

says Raven, created "for a moment a vision of their physical beauty and a world in which older people are

cherished."(22) What draws Raven to this performance

is "Lacy's primary commitment... clearly to social process,"(23) that is "not a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images."(24)

As with Lippard, a motivation for writing about this art is to spread the message.

I have discussed the criticism of Lucy Lippard without mentioning feminism and socialism. Lippard has written numerous times that she is a "Leftist."(25)

She allies herself with Marxist feminism, but does not identify herself as a Marxist feminist because she does not formally use the tools of Marxist analysis. A frequent subject of critics who identify themselves with Marxism and feminism is similar to Lippard's: art made by and about non-mainstream persons. Popular subjects of these critics are working class women and women in non-technocratic countries, the socio-economic context in which art is created, the influence of that context on the nature of the work created, and women's places in that context. The critiques of these feminists are vehicles for raising the art public's awareness of these issues. 60

Several articles published in the past few years in the journal of the Society for Photographic

Education, exposure, inform readers of women's co-operative projects and art in the lives of working class women in developing countries. Aneta Sperber, for example, describes Plessigraphe, a women's photography co-operative in Montreal that documented feminist activities and women's lives. Sperber reports on the group in a journalistic style: giving information to the readership of exposure, noting

Pleissigraphe was an alternative to male-dominated commercial photography.(26) Katya Mandoki looks at photographs of women wrestlers in Mexico. Noting that wrestling is, in Mexico, a lower class sport whose objective "lies in making intelligible the causes of suffering and the sense of defeat in a well-defined situation," (27) she identifies the strength of machos in Mexico as of "an abundance and a uniformity enviable to any confirmed misogynist."(28) Women wrestlers from the lower classes, "where machos beat their women to show them affection," (29) represent challenges to both gender and class identities, which Mandoki both reports on and analyzes in terms of Mexican culture, class and gender issues, and artistic consumption. Both

Mandoki's and Sperber's discussions of women's class 61 and economic relationships to art are Marxist in their focus on class and economic issues.

Underlying feminist art criticism is the drive to correct the evils of society. This means there is a political element in all feminist criticism. The examples I have cited are intended to function directly and specifically as political acts, much as a pro-abortion choice speech functions as a political act. Activist criticism could be subsumed under woman-centered and postmodern strands, for it expresses a voice rather than an ideological understanding of who women are. But it is also a strategy for change, as are the woman-centered and postmodern strands, which is why I have chosen to present it as a strand. That the voice of activist critics can ideologically be either woman-centered or postmodern, however, makes this strand the least concisely defined.

Social Analysis and Feminist Art Criticism; "The Fault Lies Not in Our Stars, Our Hormones, Our Menstrual Cycles, or Our Empty internal Spaces, but in Our Institutions and Our Education"(30)

Analysis of how the structures underlying our social institutions construct what women are and their places in society characterize the writing of many feminist critics today. Their approaches are varied, synthesizing feminism with psychoanalysis, Marxism, semiotics, and/or post-structuralism and 62

deconstruction. These approaches are sometimes grouped

under the rubric of feminist postmodernism, and I

follow suit when referring to them collectively.

Feminist postmodernists locate gender as a dynamic

element in all human experiences. Gendered experience

and the structure of gender, as projected by postmodern

feminist critics, are shaped by their historical

context. Gender is not "fixed"(31) by biological sex

or any other characteristics attributed to women as

inalienable, but determined by the social, economic,

cultural, and racial factors of a specific historical

period. Postmodern practitioners doubt that truth,

knowledge, the self, science, and language are stable,

universal properties. There is no single authority of

understanding. There is no appeal to what Craig Owens

has called a "grand recit" (32) for legitimacy.

Feminists extend the postmodern critique in considering

the relationship of truth to modernism, the self,

science, and et cetera (objects of postmodern analysis)

to our perceptions of women. There are few feminist

art critics that can succinctly be identified as

"Marxist-feminist" or "feminist semiotic" because they extend their rejection of authority to these systems of analysis. In the next few pages, I describe varieties of postmodern feminist art criticism. 63

In the above section on activist feminist art criticism, I discussed feminism and Marxism as a political practice. It is also a social analysis, as evidenced by Mandoki's essay on "La Lucha Libre." In

John Perreault's "Women Artists Are Also Worker

Artists," the thesis is that our marketing, packaging, and investment systems determine which art is highly acclaimed and even what art is. These systems leave women out, he argues ("The statistics are appalling."[33]), because women's art has not achieved market parity. He offers an analysis of a complex set of social and economic relationships that, he claims, determine recognition and economic success in the art world. Perreault's proposed solution is to reorganize our values about professionalism and art making to prioritize work by artists who are not financially successful.

It is unhealthy to pretend that more than a few can earn their way with their art, that art is a career like any other...Making a living off your art is either a matter of luck or the result of huckerism [sic] and/or the artists' bowing to the market.(34)

This argument and vision are Marxist and feminist because they examine gender in its relationship to class and economics. Perreault's essay is liberally illustrated with large archival photographs of women in the workplace, each photograph captioned, "COULD THESE 64

WOMEN BE ARTISTS?" (or, for photographs of a lone woman

at work, "COULD THIS WOMAN BE AN ARTIST?"). They seem

meant to jolt the viewer's pre-conceived notions of

"artist."

Feminist art critics concerned with psychoanalysis

take an anti-psychoanalysis stance, or use a modified

version of psychoanalysis to explain the functions of

the art object. The former stance is a critique of the

traditional model of binary oppositions such as

male/female, culture/nature, and mind/body. Sylvia

Kolbowski's analysis of Robert Mapplethorpe's

photographs of woman body builder Lisa Lyon (collected

in Mapplethorpe's book Lady) works to deconstruct the

Freudian notion of woman as castrated (i.e. not whole) male. The book's layout alternates between photographs

featuring Lyon in traditional feminine poses and ones

"in which the body reads as almost exclusively male."(35) This alternation between feminine and masculine poses is, in Kolbowski's interpretation, a

"recovery of the pre-Oedipal, 'whole' mother."(36)

What appears to take place in Lady (a word which holds in itself the sense of a sexuality repressed) is the disavowal of the mother's supposed castration by grafting the signs of the male body onto the female. The body's movement from relaxed to flexed and back, evident in the progress of the photographs, seems reassuring: seeing is not believing.(37) 65

Kolbowski is critical of this concept of psychoanalysis

and of Mapplethorpe's assumption of it, calling it a

"violence done not only to this woman, but to women in

g e n e r a l (38) Her analysis of the images works to

expose how this thinking damages women psychologically

and socially.

Feminist psychoanalysis refers to and develops in

part from Jacques Lacan's rereading of Freud's static

concepts of "genital identity" and "normative

sexuality."(39) Sexuality and female identity are

considered part of a symbolic structure in Lacanian

psychoanalysis, where humans are in a continual state

of becoming. The unconscious and sexuality are

constructed through the symbolic structures of

language.(40) Feminist critics using psychoanalysis

seek to determine how psychological make-ups are

socially determined. Art critic Kate Linker seeks to

explain the mother-child bond in Mary Kelly's

Post-Partum Document, a multimedia installation in six

sections and 135 parts, that Kelly worked on during

1973-1976. Through ordered arrangements of feeding

charts and diapers, baby vests, diaries, hand molds,

and imprints of words, Kelly documents the first six

years of her relationship with her son. Juxtaposed with these relics are diary entries and theoretical notes. In analyzing Document, Linker works to reveal 66 the mother evolving as much as the child, and how each is "positioned within the human network through decisive processes of language a c q u i s i t i o n (41) She argues for "motherhood as a specific moment of femininity constructed within social p r o c e s s e s (42)

The hand molds, word imprints, charts and dirty nappies are revealed as fetishes, employed as substitutes for the loss of child-as-phallus. According to psychoanalytic theory, the fetish is a substitutive object, employed to disavow; in so doing, it acknowledges woman's castration. Though Linker's analysis begins to sound like what Kolbowski criticizes in her interpretation of Mapplethorpe's Lady, she explains that,

man as well as woman is castrated, is partial..."So the man is 'castrated' by not being total, just as the woman is 'castrated' by not being a man. Whatever relation of lack man feels, lack of wholeness, lack in/of being, is projected onto woman's lack of phallus, lack of maleness...By these means and extreme phallic proportions, the whole is to man as man is to the whole."(43)

Linker argues that Kelly places her narcissistic and fetishistic relationship with her child "in a larger context... the fetishistic nature of all representations, based in the inevitable division between subject and object."(44) Woman is to man, then, "a fetish - 'the filler for the void'"(45) made when the boy child discovers his mother is without 67 phallus. This is a symbolic completion, not a biological one. Linker asserts the importance of images in constructing gender identity, "a human subject in process, in perpetual formation; it is one that views the unconscious and sexuality as constructed through language, through modes of representation."(46)

Humans are, as described by Linker, socially positioned, constructed "across social institutions and discourses"(47):

reality can be known only through the forms that articulate it, there can be no reality outside of representation. With its synonyms, truth and meaning, it is a fiction produced by its cultural representations, a construction discursively shaped and solidified through repetition... Representation, hardly neutral, acts to regulate and define the subjects it addresses, positioning them by class or by sex, in active or passive relations to meaning. Over time these fixed positions acquire the status of identities."(48)

This analysis moves to social issues associated with a social critique, in order to explain women's psychological profiles.

Craig Owens(49) interprets photographer Cindy

Sherman's "film stills" as challenge to the Freudian notion of fixed gender identity within adults. For the stills, Sherman photographed herself costumed and posed in mimicry of various heroines of grade-B Hollywood films of the late 1950s and early 1960s. A premise of feminist film criticism (as explained by Laura 68

Mulvey[50]) has been that Hollywood films portray women as objects of the male gaze. Owens asks of Sherman's play-acting if it is not "an acting out of the psychoanalytic notion of femininity as masquerade, that is, as a representation of male desire?"(51) Feminist scholars studying Freud note he privileged vision over the other senses. (52) Owens' JLnterpretation accounts for the privileging of the male gaze assumed by

Hollywood filmmakers. If "seeing is believing," the authority of vision is thwarted in Sherman's photographs because she cannot be visually fixed "in a stable and stabilizing identity."(53) Through the pictures her identity changes and she escapes definition. Seeing, then, is not believing.

Part of the characterization of postmodern practices, as I have earlier mentioned, is their interdisciplinary nature, indicated by Linker's and

Owens' considerations of socialization in psychoanalytic practices. "No one narrative can possibly account for all aspects of human experience" sums up the feminist postmodernist approach to knowledge.(54) The subject of Owens' interpretation is the process of encoding, its effect on viewers, and how these codes can be thwarted through strategic interventions. The analysis is not what the PLATE V. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still # 48, photograph, 1979. 70 photographs say about women, but the influence the original film stills have had on women's self-definitions and the effect on men of Sherman's undermining culturally established visual codes.

Implicit in Owens' treatment of Sherman's work is what is described in film and literature as a semiological analysis.(55) Semiology, from the Greek semeion,

"sign," was defined by Ferdinand de Saussure, who coined the term, as "a science that studies the life of signs within a society." In film, this analysis has been used to examine the relationship of the image to reality.(56) What appears to be the mirror of reality in a photograph, film, et cetera, is more accurately the image of the system of values held by the image maker and thus by the image-maker's society.(57) There is a division of meaning produced by an image in its denotative sense (its surface representation) and in its connotative sense (its meaning based on cultural assumptions and beliefs of image-maker and image-viewer). Importance is placed on the role of the viewer in creating meaning of an image.(58) In his analysis of Sherman's film stills, Owens concentrates on the construction of meaning for the male viewer via cultural codes. He asks if Sherman isn't, with her masquerade of changing identities, simultaneously 71 mocking and confounding male desire and male narcissism

implicit in the man's objectification of women.

In an analysis of Sherrie Levine's photographic appropriations (Levine has copied the photographs of

Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, and others),

Abigail Solomon-Godeau also focuses on cultural codes:

The rephotographed Walker Evans photographs, whose graininess and obvious screen clearly attest to their already reproduced status, underline the cultural and representational codes that structure our reading of (respectively) The Great Depression, the rural poor, female social victims, and the style of Walker Evans.(59)

Solomon-Godeau reasons "codes," not what the images denote, are the means by which we understand Levine's photographs, and all images. She includes also the style of the original photographer, implying that style

itself carries connotations that effect our understanding. She claims that by copying images of other artists, Levine rejects originality, authorship, subjectivity, and the authority of an artwork.

Solomon-Godeau discusses Levine's rejection of these criteria, which are basic to Modernist practice in art, (60) as challenges to art in a capitalist system and to art governed by a partriarchal system. Her

interpretation thus arrives at a juncture between feminism and Marxism and semiotics. 72

Discussion

The projects of self-knowledge and subjectivity, activism, and analysis are not unique to feminist art criticism. in the nineteenth century Baudelaire called for a criticism "passionate, partisan, political."(61)

Feminist art criticism meets this call and so does the criticism of some contemporary nonfeminists. In "Not

About Julian Schnabel," an article that appeared in

Artforum in 1981, Rene Ricard places himself in the nucleus of his essay.

Sandro Chia's recent show was all about masterpiece: the unforgettable image of a woman farting music. It looks like a museum postcard you've already bought. The idea of masterpiece is distinct, to me, from the urge to possess. I can sometimes recognize a masterpiece but would I want it? Often yes but not always. Then again there is art that precludes its being a masterpiece - like Piero Manzoni, whom I adore. And turning once more, there are pictures I would like to have that I recognize as junk but which fulfill a spiritual, stylish, emotional, decorative, status, puerile, selfish, financial, temporary, iconoclastic, amusing...(62)

Ricard always gets back to himself in this article. He is commenting on the art world, but visibly and always through himself. Locally, I can remember a review in the criticism tabloid Columbus Art not too long ago in which a local critic - male - reviewed an installation by fantasizing a walk through the piece, much as Frueh and Raven extend their art reviews to include not only 73

what they see but the imaginative realm where the work

takes them. Such writing permits subjectivity and

self-knowledge. What makes the writing of

woman-centered critics feminist is that the subjective

imaginative realm exists not only as personal expression but as a vision of the world after the

feminist revolution.

Tulsa and Teenage Lust are two books of photographs by Larry Clark. The subjects of the photographs are friends and associates of Clark, and show a world of drugs, addiction, prostitution, and

violence. Of a series depicting teenage male prostitutes, Alex Sweetman asks,

But why is Clark interested in them? Prostitution is a metaphor for consumer society. One works at a job one does not like in order to get money to buy what one does like. The central myth is one of metamorphosis through consumption... Drugs epitomize the condition of our world. Like Alice in Wonderland, all one need to do is take a pill and be transformed. Our whole notion of freedom of choice has become freedom of choice in the marketplace.(63)

Sweetman parallels Clark's image-making to the work of

johns: selling glimpses of the underworld to a voyeuristic bourgeoisie for monetary gain. Ultimately, he admonishes the failure of drug programs and censorship to change the evils of society. Clearly,

Sweetman's project is political activism. If it were 74

feminist, the play of gender into this scenario would

be considered.

Art critics Thomas Lawson, Douglas Crimp, and Hal

Foster analyze art as reflection of ideological or

cultural constructs rather than of reality. Feminist

postmodern critics take the structure of their

arguments, in part at least, from the same sources that

feed the analyses of these critics: from Roland

Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel

Foucault, among others.(64) Self-knowledge and

subjectivity, political activism, and social analysis

become feminist art criticism when they combine with a

focus on women's issues or women in relationship to

art.

During the past few years, feminist theoreticians

have been working to clarify the roots and branches of

the feminist movement. Ideological roots vary among

these branches and are reflected in the strands of

feminist art criticism outlined in the previous

section. The project of self-knowledge in feminist

criticism is related to "cultural” and "radical"

feminisms, and the consciousness-raising techniques

that informed them. "Cultural feminism" is associated with the recognition, maintenance, and celebration of women's culture(s). The political basis for cultural feminism is in the belief that change will come about 75 by celebrating women's strengths, and by bonding among

themselves. "Radical feminism" grew out of the New

Left movements in the 1960s. Radical feminists, however, blame a patriarchy and not capitalism for the

ills of women. All men are implicated in this patriarchy, for "all men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy. All men have oppressed women."(65) Radical women argue that men and women are fundamentally different. They propose a separate society of women based on love, emotion, intuition, and personal relationships.(66)

Woman-centered critics, such as Frueh, celebrate these attributes traditionally ascribed to women and a transformed world based on the model of women's culture. Self-knowledge and the strength of such knowledge feeding into culture is the means through which transformation is envisioned. At times, woman-centered critics gesture towards a separatist society: for example, when Frueh says, "Sometimes the women turn away from us to face the night, to face nature."(67)

The basis of change for "activist" feminist art criticism as it is delineated here can be rooted in cultural feminism or in the socialist branch of feminism.(68) Synthesis of socialism and feminism is evident in Lucy Lippard's statement, "The 76

transformation of society, at the heart of both

feminism and socialism, will not take place until

feminist strategies are acknowledged and fully

integrated into the struggle."(69) The focus of change

for activist practitioners rests on political

practices. Their criticism, in reporting on political

art, is a political act, in the same way a banner in a

protest march is a political act.

Socialist feminism also underlies social analyses

of feminist art critics. In reiteration, this strand

also is influenced by post-structuralist, semiologic,

psychoanalytic, and other systems of philosophical and

sociological thought that culminate in a postmodernist

view of the world. With the analytic tools of these

systems, feminist postmodern critics seek to understand

the role social structures play in constructing human

actions and beliefs. They claim their practices

political, and at times refer to themselves as

"radical" feminists, "political" feminists, or

"socialist-Marxist" feminists. Their primary focus is

not women, nor humans, nor political solutions, but the social constructs that form the way we approach women and the way these now oppress women.

The impulses for feminist art critiques might correspond to what Sydney Kaplan has identified as wellsprings for feminist literary criticism: love and 77 anger. The roots of love are an appreciation for women: as she terms it, "passion and identification."

The roots of anger grow from the misinterpretation, oppression, and trivialization of women under the traditions of the status quo.(70) Woman-centered criticism, in its celebration of subjectivity and personal experiences, in its commitment to women's culture as a social alternative, appears to be motivated by love of women. Activist and postmodern feminist criticisms seem motivated by anger for women's devalued status in society.

I emphasize again that these different practices are not mutually exclusive. I have purposely introduced them first as projects. The translation of projects into strands identifies primary emphases within different practices. In explaining different strands, at times I used writing from the same critic to exemplify those different strands (for example,

Perreault's "Are Women Artists Also Worker Artists?").

Feminist art critics mutually agree that women are important and should hold places of equal respect to those of their male peers, and that change is possible and worth pursuing. All feminist art criticism is, in this sense, both woman-centered and activist, motivated by love and anger. The methods of these criticisms differ. The analysis of woman-centered critics 78

identifies positive human qualities and celebrates

them. The strategy both identifies, revalues, and

empowers, with the object being to fully re-vision the social structure of the world. They largely bypass the problems of the world as it is currently. The

long-range goal of activist and postmodern feminist critics is also complete social change. The operational goal of the postmodern feminist critique is exposure of the imperialist fibers of our society that overpower non-male, non-white, non-Westernized, and not wealthy persons, leaving a few white men in charge.

The strategy utilizes techniques of cultural analysis to expose these injustices. The operational goal of activist critics is similar to that of postmodern feminists', but they emphasize the political message of the artworks rather than the analysis of culture.

The differing strategies through which change is envisioned often show as schisms, at times almost

internecine factions. Lucy Lippard, writing in 1980, outlined the schism between cultural and socialist feminists:

"Cultural feminists" (with their connective concept of women and nature) tend to perceive "socialist feminists" as male-identified, unfeeling intellectuals bound to an impersonal and finally antifemale economic overview; while "socialist feminists" tend to perceive "cultural feminists" as a woozy crowd of women in sheets taking refuge in a matriarchal "herstory" that is reactionary, 79

escapist and possibly fascist in its suggestions of biological superiority.(71)

The schisms in the feminist movement carry over to the

feminist art community. Woman-centered critics are

rebuked for having dissipated the feminist movement's

goal of socially and politically based change -- for,

as Lippard terms it, "taking refuge" outside the stage

where real change can be implemented. Moreover,

because they celebrate a common denominator of and

bonding between all women, they are suspected of being

essentialistic, which their censors feel is dangerous -

whether the essentialism is of biological or social

origins. The fear of a "female territory" is that it

imprisons women in the extant social expectations for

women, ultimately tying them to their sex and ignoring

individual, cultural, and historical differences

between women.(72) Arlene Raven defends the approach

by positing "biologically oriented female imagery" as a

"self-conscious antithesis to the historical

environment of phallic imagery, challenging human-made,

value-laden signs in which the social 'essence' of one

gender dominates over another" [emphasis added].(73)

Frueh defends her woman-centered approach in saying

that its goal is "mental freedom," including both

intellectual and emotional responses.(74) The woman-centered critic works to free herself from the 80 bonds of what we are acculturated to think about, allowing visions of a totally different world - perhaps not yet imagined - to occur.

Postmodern feminist theory is criticized as

"elitistically obscure," based on ideas generated by men, and "overly intellectual": privileging the mind over the body.(75) In their denial of any individual essence, postmodern criticism is sometimes feared as nominalism: "they deny the subject's ability to reflect on the social discourse and challenge its determinations,"(76) they do not offer any reconstruction of the individual. "Nominalism threatens to wipe out feminism itself."(77) A difference between the woman-centered and postmodern feminist positions is the dichotomy between an essential femaleness and the impossibility of a self-contained, authentic self. "Woman-centered" critics search for an essence of women under the inscriptions of patriarchy. Most acknowledge that women exist in a socio-cultural context, but believe that "fixed" attributes can be found within a specific historic age.(78) Postmodern critics reject the notion that there is anything to find.

The strands should not - at least without very careful and thorough consideration - be understood as existing in a hierarchy where qualitative judgments are 81

attached. The issues involved are complex, and

premature evaluation can needlessly extend polarities

and oppositions. The identification of strands and

projects should be understood to support the complexity

of feminist thought today. Some feminist critics

support both "woman-centered" and "postmodern"

tendencies. Griselda Pollock, for instance, states

we must stress the heterogeneity of women's art work, the specificity of individual producers and products. Yet we must recognize what women share - as a result of nurture not nature, i.e., the historically variable social systems which produce sexual differentiation.(79) [I have taken the liberty of extending "women's art work" to feminist art criticism.]

In the next chapter, the three strands of feminist

art criticism (woman-centered, activist, and postmodern) are examined further by study of one artist's work, and - to additionally narrow time and content - one series by this artist. The artist is May

Stevens, whose professional career spans almost two score years. With a significant exhibition record,

including solo exhibitions at the New Museum of

Contemporary Art and college art galleries nationwide, she has also received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts awards. 82

Reference Notes: A Conceptual Understanding of Contemporary Feminist Art Criticism

(1) Annette Kolodny, "Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism," in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays in Women, Literature, and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 159. Kolodny is, of course, not reducing all criticism to the structuralist technique.

(2) Ivan Illich, in Gender (London: Marion Boyars Publishers, Ltd., 1983), documents the pervasive double standard toward the sexes that exists in most areas of our society. One example (of many) he gives is discrimination against women in the workplace. He identifies three types: income discrimination, occupation discrimination, and participatory discrimination. Income discrimination results when women earn less than men doing the same work. Proportionately more women in low-paying jobs than in high-paying jobs is occupational discrimination. Participation discrimination indicates a lower participation rate of one sex in the labor force. He cites census figures that indicate the integration of more women into the labor force has consistently resulted in increasing occupation discrimination. "At least 80% of employed women are working in female-dominated occupations" states Gatlin. And while she connects an economic need to why women work, "at the same time, continued sexism, acceptance of capitalist values, and entrenched business practices have prevented any radical change in employment opportunities and workplace conditions." Rochelle Gatlin, American Women Since 1945 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 197.

(3) These histories and my understanding of consciousness-raising are dependent upon explanations given by Josephine Donovan in her chapter on feminism and Marxism in Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1985), 65-90; Kathie Sarachild, "Consciousness Raising: A Radical Weapon," in Feminist Revolution (New Paltz, N.Y.: Redstockings, Inc., 1975), 131-137; Brooke, "The Retreat to Cultural Feminism," and Carol Hanish, "The Liberal Takeover of Women's Liberation," both in Feminist Revolution; Gatlin's American Women Since 1945; and Barbara Sinclair Deckard, The Women's Movement: political. 83

Socioeconomic, and Psychological Issues (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1983) .

(4) Kathie Sarachild, "Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon," in Feminist Revolution (New Paltz, N.Y.: Redstockings, Inc., 1975), 131-137.

(5) "Women's liberation" is another term first used within radical groups. When radical women picketed the "Miss America" contest in 1967 and marched on Arlington Cemetery, the media picked up the term in a more generic sense and it has been understood by the general public to designate National Organization of Women (NOW) actions and all other feminist groups ever since. The radical feminists abandoned the term because of this (Deckard, 329-330).

(6) Lucy Lippard, "Changing Since Changing," in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art, by Lucy R. Lippard (New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1976), 2 .

(7) Donovan, 67.

(8) Donald Kuspit, "Editor's Preface" to Arlene Raven, Crossing Over: Feminism and Art of Social Concern (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, Inc., 1987) , xi i i.

(9) Linda Nochlin, "Why Are There No Great Women Artists?" in Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, edited by Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1971), 493.

(10) Joanna Frueh, "Toward a Feminist Theory of Art" [part I], New Art Examiner 12 (January 1985): 42.

(11) Joanna Frueh, "Allegory: An-Other World," Art Journal 45 (Winter 1985): 323-329.

(12) Ibid.

(13) The lived experience of be-ing" Daly defines as "intuiting, reasoning, loving, imaging, making, acting, as well as couraging, hoping and playing that are always there when one is really living." Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, 49. Quoted from Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism [Boston: Beacon Press, 1978], 23-24. Daly reconsiders over two hundred words in Gyn/Ecology. To many words she adds a hyphen, to help the reader hear 84 them in a new way. In the case of "be-ing," a conscious strength of presence is emphasized.

(14) Sandra Langer, "Harmonious Imagination: Paintings by Robert De Niro," Arts Magazine 9 (May 1986): 13.

(15) Tom Knechtel, in a letter to Arlene Raven. Quoted in Arlene Raven, "Dark Horse: New Paintings by Tom Knechtel," Arts Magazine 55 (April 1981): 146-147.

(16) Ibid., 147.

(17) Marilyn French, Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals (New York: Summit Books, 1985), 487. The pleasure principle is not the highest value of all feminists. Some consider this emphasis escapism, and a failure to confront problems in ways that will effect change. The substitution of power for pleasure, of course, sets up a binary relationship between these two human drives. (Professor Marantz commented, for example, "Power is one means towards achieving pleasure!") Many feminists are opposed to binarism: "The hierarchical opposition of marked and unmarked terms...is the dominant form both of representing difference and justifying its subordination in our society." Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminism and Postmodernism," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 62.

(18) Lucy Lippard, "Headlines, Heartlines, Hardlines: Advocacy Criticism as Activism," in Cultures in Contention, edited by Douglas Kahn and Diane Neumaier (Seattle, Wash.: The Real Comet Press, 1985), 246.

(19) Ibid.

(20) Lucy Lippard, "Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Advocacy," in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985), 343.

(21) Ibid., 343.

(22) Arlene Raven, "Commemoration: Public Sculpture and Performance," in Crossing Over: Feminism and Art of Social Concern (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI 85

Research Press, 1988), 205. Raven quotes Moira Roth (source not given).

(23) Ibid. Raven quotes Jacki Apple's "Commentary: Intermedia," Media Arts 1 (Summer 1984): 11. ■

(24) Ibid., 204. Quoted from Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), no page number given.

(25) For example, Lucy Lippard with David Coxhead, "Growing Up," Art Monthly [U.K.], no. 32 (1979-80), 4-9; and Lippard, "Headlines, Heartlines, Hardlines."

(26) Aneta Sperber, "Photoquebequoise," exposure 24 (Fall 1986) : 35-39. Reen Pilkington reports on another such collective in "Monocrone - A Women's [South London] Photography Collective," exposure 24 (Fall 1986) : 46-53.

(27) Katya Mandoki, "The Double Struggle: Photographing 'La Lucha Libre'," translated by Susan Cergol, exposure 22 (Summer 1984): 29.

(28) Ibid., 30.

(29) Ibid.

(30) Nochlin, 483.

(31) Hester Eisenstein, Introduction to The Future of Difference, edited by Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston: G.K. Hall and Co. for Barnard College Women's Center, 1980), xv-xxiv; and Lisa Tickner, "Sexuality and/in Representation: Five British Artists," in On Representation and Sexuality [exhibition catalog], (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984).

(32) Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Post-Modernist Culture, edited by Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 64.

(33) John Perreault, "Women Artists Are Also Worker Artists," Village Voice Art Supplement 32 (October 6, 1987): 12.

(34) Ibid., 13. 86

(35) Sylvia Kolbowski, "Covering Mapplethorpe's Lady," Art in America 71 (Summer 1983): 11.

(36) Ibid.

(37) Ibid.

(38) Ibid.

(39) Feminist psychoanalytic critical readings are also based on Nancy Chodorow's Object-Relations Theory, which explains how a child becomes a socialized adult, stressing social relationships rather than instinctual drives and emphasizing as a basis to sexual identity and character formation the child's early relationship with the mother rather than the later Oedipal conflict.

(40) Kate Linker, "Representation and Sexuality," in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum, 1984), 394.

(41) Ibid., 403.

(42) Ibid.

(43) Ibid., 400. Quoted material within this passage is from Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982) .

(44) Linker 404.

(45) Ibid., 401.

(46) Ibid., 394.

(47) Ibid.,

(48) Ibid.,

(49) Some f inists deny men's ability to be nist critics Owens' essay meets the definition for feminist art criticism that I have elsewhere set out, so it is included in this study. See pages 3-7 and footnotes 15 and 16 of chapter I of this study for these explanations.

(50) Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16 (Autumn 1975). 87

(51) Owens, 75.

(52) Donovan, "Feminism and Freudianism," chap. in Feminist Theory, 91-116.

(53) Owens, 75.

(54) Owens, 64. For example, some feminists find Marxism fails to sufficiently take into account the individual and they have turned to psychoanalysis "in an effort to fill this lacuna." Lucie B. Arbuthnot, Main Trends in Feminist Criticism in Film, Literature, and Art History: The Decade of the 1970s, Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1982, 172. The psychoanalytic approach to feminism is sometimes found wanting fpr having failed women's individuality, "They write not about women, but about Woman, an abstract essence of femininity" is how one writer sums up this problem. Linda Andre, "Body Language: Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti," exposure 22 (Summer 1984): 22.

(55) Feminist critics of literature and film label various critical analyses "semiotic" or "post-structuralist" or "structuralist," "Marxist," or "psychoanalytic." Feminist art critics do not frequently use these terms in referring to their methodological approach to criticism, nor do they routinely cite the literature bases of these analyses. Parveen Adams, Rosalind Coward, and Elizabeth Cowie, "Editorial," m/f (1978): 3-5. This may be because feminist art criticism is not as theoretically evolved as is feminist criticism of literature and film. There are salient exceptions to this: for example, the work of Griselda Pollock, Linda Andre, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau. More and more feminist art critics are citing philosophers, sociologists, and literary theoreticians outside of art and women's studies. Some feminist art critics (for example, Joanna Frueh and Arlene Raven) seem to have made a conscious choice not to base their arguments on non-feminist theoreticians' works.

(56) Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London: Duckworth, 1983). Quoted from Arbuthnot, 150.

(57) Elizabeth Cowie, for example, in an essay entitled "Women, Representation and the Image," emphasizes that both "real life" and film are unnatural, because both are highly encoded. Thus, the verite to life in the film comes not from the close 88 reflection of life i_n the film, but from the sharing of codes in both life and film. Screen Education, no. 23 (Summer 1977), 15-22.

(58) Arbuthnot, 151-152.

(59) Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "Winning the Game When the Rules Have Been Changed: Art Photography and Postmodernism," exposure 23 (Spring 1985): 7.

(60) Mary Kelly, "Re-viewing Modernist Criticism," in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984).

(61) Cited by Donald Kuspit in "Editor's Preface" to Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, edited by Arlene Raven, Sandra Langer, and Joanna Frueh (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988), ix.

(62) Rene Ricard, "Not About Julian Schnabel," Artforum 19 (Summer 1981): 76.

(63) Alex Sweetman, "Larry Clark: Drugs and Violence, Rhythm and Blues," exposure 24, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 14-15.

(64) It is interesting to note, in light of schisms between feminist critics, the antipathy between non-feminist postmodern critics and neo-expressionist critics like Kuspit. Patrick Frank cites the deconstructors' attack on neo-expressionism in the January 1983 issue of Art in America and Donald Kuspit's hot response, "Tired Criticism, Tired Radicalism," in the April issue of the same magazine. Patrick Frank, "A Fan's Guide to Art Criticism," New Art Examiner 12 (April 1985): 24-27.

(65) "Redstockings' Manifesto," in Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak, Masculine/Feminine (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 273. Emphases in original text.

(66) Woman-centered criticism should be understood as not necessarily biologically essentialist, but as a strategy for social change that is experimental. Cultural feminism and woman-centered criticism are easily misunderstood as essentialist because the characteristics they choose to emphasize are among those traditionally associated with femininity as naturally determined. Some feminists in the nineteenth century who celebrated a woman's spirituality - e.g. 89

Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Cady Stanton - decidedly connected women's characteristics to biology. (Others did not -e.g. Charlotte Perkins Gilman attributed men's and women's variances to different prehistoric roles. I am indebted to Kim Finley for discussions that stimulated these distinctions.

(67) Frueh, "Allegory," p. 326. "Turn[ing] away to face the night" may also be a metaphor for the ability to surrender the security of the world as it is and to embrace the vision of a different world.

(68) Lately, the term "materialist-feminist" is used to designate feminisms which broaden the scope of "socialism" to consider all factors (e.g., gender and class and race and ethnicity and nationality and size and age and sexual preference) in determining a person's social status and her or his background identity. See, for example, Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt, "Introduction: toward a materialist-feminist criticism," in Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class, and Race in Literature and Culture, ed. Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), xv-xxxix.

(69) Lucy Lippard, "Issue and Taboo," in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984), 125.

(70) Sidney Janet Kaplan, "Varieties of Feminist Art," in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (New York: Methuen, 1985), 37-58.

(71) Lucy Lippard, "Prefatory Note" to section on feminist art in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York: E.P.Dutton, inc., 1984), 88.

(72) Linda Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 13 (Spring 1988): 405-437.

(73) Raven, "Cinderella," 6.

(74) Frueh, "Towards a Feminist Theory," 44.

(75) Christine Tamblyn, "New Approaches to Feminist Theory," High Performance, no. 38 (Vol. 10, no. 2, 1987), 5; and Raven, "Cinderella." Robert Storr terms postmodern critics' writing strategies "palaver" 90 that replaces political activism. "Other 'Others,'" Village Voice Art Supplement 32 (October 6, 1987): 15-17. Other feminists voicing concern with feminist postmodern criticism include Annette Kolodny in "Respectability is Eroding the Revolutionary Potential of Feminist Criticism," The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 4, 1988), A52; Arlene Raven in "Cinderella's Sisters' Feet," Village Voice Art Supplement 32 (October 6, 1987): 6-9; Diane Neumaier in "Alfred, Harry, Emmet, Georgia, Barbara, Edith, and me," exposure 22 (Summer 1984): 5-8; and Linda Andre in "Body Language: Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti," exposure 22 (Summer 1984): 19-17.

(76) Alcoff, 417.

(77) Ibid., 419.

(78) Eisenstein, "Introduction" to The Future of Difference and Tickner, "Sexuality and/in Representation: Five British Artists."

(79) Griselda Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity," in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988). Lucy Lippard and Lisa Tickner also support the coexistence of both positions. See Lippard's "Issue and Taboo" and Tickner's "Nancy Spero and Images of la peinture feminine," Nancy Spero [exhibition catalog], (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1987): 5-19. CHAPTER III

FEMINIST ART CRITICISM AND MAY STEVENS' ORDINARY. EXTRAORDINARY SERIES

Background to the Series and the Artist

The Ordinary. Extraordinary series began in 1976 with two collages made for the first issue of Heresies, a feminist periodical of art and politics of which May

Stevens is a founding member. One of these, titled Two

Women, she describes as

a collage of words and images of Rosa Luxemburg, Polish/German revolutionary leader and theoretician, murder victim (1871-1919) juxtaposed with images and words of Alice Stevens (born 1895-) , housewife, mother, washer and ironer, inmate of hospitals and nursing homes...[that] examine and document the mark of a political woman and marking the life of a woman whose life would otherwise be unmarked.(1)

Housewife and mental patient Alice Stevens was the mother of May Stevens. She died, at age 89, in 1985.

Rosa Luxemburg was a leader in the Socialist Democratic

Party (SPD) of Germany, and later in the Spartacus

League that broke off from the SPD. A theoretician,

91 PLATE VI. May Stevens, Two Women, mixed-media collaap. 10.5" x 13.5", 1976. ------93

her brand of marxism was humanitarian and stressed democracy and mass action to socialism. She was a comrade but also a critic of Lenin; she opposed the use of terror by socialist g o v e r n m e n t s (2)

She has been called "one of the most original socialist

thinkers of the twentieth century."(3) She was murdered for her leadership in the Spartacus League.

Dedicated to a socialist revolution, she was not a

feminist, although a close friend, Clara Zetkin, was a

leader in the German women's movement for suffrage. (4)

Stevens' second collage published in the inaugural

issue of Heresies was Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg.

The subject of Stevens' work prior to the

Ordinary. Extraordinary series was often political

issues. Prior to 1968, however, Stevens also painted portraits of her child, landscapes, and still lifes:

traditional categories of painting, and critics of

Stevens' work have treated these paintings as

nonpolitical. The work that is understood as political

began in 1951 when she painted The Martinsville Seven,

referring to a politicized trial of seven black men

accused of rape in Virginia. In the early 1960s, she

responded to the fight for civil rights in Alabama with

a series titled Freedom Riders; a number of drawings

and prints of the dead Malcolm X followed Freedom

Riders. From 1967-1977, Stevens painted a series that PLATE VII. May Stevens, Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg mixed media collage, 16.5" x 10", 1976.

4

'j M I «u

f o #z&>*> m ■A* 1 95 she called Big Daddy. "Big Daddy" is sharp-edged and boldly colored, a caricature of a nationalistic ideology that marks bigotry, sexism, and imperialistic attitudes. The figure originated with a portrait of

Stevens' father, but "finally had little to do with the man it was based on."(5)

Another phase in Stevens' work is marked by four large canvases executed 1972-1978. They bring together autobiographical subjects in a realistic style. In

Artist's Studio (After Courbet), for example, Stevens is seated before a Big Daddy canvas, surrounded by friends, artists, and critics. Fifteen identifiable figures are in Mysteries and Politics, including Rosa and Alice whose images are incorporated into the background.(6) Soho Women Artists portrays persons within Stevens' circle of friends. The backdrop is a

Big Daddy painting and the image of Artemesia

Gentileschi. In all three of these paintings, Stevens makes reference to her artistic preoccupations. A fourth canvas, Artemesia Gentileschi, is portrait of this seventeenth century Italian artist who "doubles for the artist [Stevens]...a powerful expression of womanly and artistic pride."(7)

Ordinary. Extraordinary is yet underway as of this writing. Collages composed of photographs, xeroxed images and words, and over-written passages pre-date PLATE VIII. May Stevens, Big Three, part of series known as "Bid Daddy,” acrylic on canvas, 72" x 90", 1975. PLATE IX. May Stevens, Masteries and Politics, acrylic on canvas, 78" x 142", 1978. 98

large painterly canvases. Individual works may combine

Rosa and Alice, or may depict them separately. The

large canvas Demonstration, for example, centers on the protest in Germany accompanying the murders of

Luxemburg and a second Spartacist leader, Karl

Liebknecht. Go Gentle juxtaposes Alice the child, the adolescent, and the mute and gesticulating elderly woman. Forming the Fifth international locates Alice and Rosa as peers and co-collaborators.

May Stevens is an eloquent spokesperson for feminism, socialist revolution, and for the intent, meaning, and background of her work. Many critics discussing Ordinary. Extraordinary make direct reference to Stevens' statements; some critics would seem to rely heavily upon them. In spite of this, and in spite of Stevens' political stance, the feminist readings of her work vary, underscoring the variety of approaches to feminism that feminist art critics embrace. Following are analytic descriptions of articles by several feminist critics who have developed interpretations of Ordinary. Extraordinary. These descriptions ptovide examples of the three stands of feminist art criticism - woman-centered, activist, and postmodern feminist - that I outlined in the preceding chapter. 99

Selected Woman-Centered Interpretations

Woman-centered feminist art criticism celebrates

women and qualities traditionally associated with

women. "Woman" is understood as different from man.

Traditionally "female qualities," that stress

life-affirming pursuits, emotion and intuition,

empathy, and a closeness to nature, are celebrated.

Revaluing these qualities (a self-conscious process)

empowers women and forges bonds between them.

In "Women Look at Women: Feminist Art for the

Eighties," one of the artists Arlene Raven discusses is

May Stevens. The focus of her examination is female bonds that, she says, Stevens "re-members" across "the

tradition of the female void."(8) Raven stresses the

communal ground of Alice, who "'lost year by year the

habit of speaking'"(9) and was institutionalized for

silence, and Rosa, who was institutionalized and murdered for speaking. Both women were oppressed by

the "power and patriarchy"(10) that Stevens has also

represented in Big Daddy. Raven understands this

"re-membering" of female bonds as a feminist strategy

for change. The "'female void cannot be cured by

conjunction with the male'...The mother-daughter bond

is crucial to survival," she exclaims. "Without

connection we remain dead, unborn - not alive - to 100

ourselves and one a n o t h e r (11) The celebration of

mother-daughter bond is used as a metaphor for bonds

between all women. Raven talks about "equaliz[ing]"

different terms of women's lives, a "common void," a

"supra-historical community," "the common conditions

under which all women have lived." indeed, she

introduces her analysis of Stevens' work with a quote

from Marge Piercy's "Looking at Quilts:" "she did not

doubt what we had forgotten." The "forgotten" signals

an essential femaleness, as if women instinctively know

in a special way that transcends historical context.

Raven compares Stevens to Mary Daly's spinster,

"Weaving a women's traditfon and unsnarling,

unknotting, untying, unweaving the traditions of the

female void."(12) These "spinster" activities singly

and cumulatively signal belief that a female knowledge

can exist under and in spite of the imprints of

cultural and historical frameworks. This knowledge is

thought to be shared between all women, uncovered by

breaking through, or "a-mazing," the "Male Maze"

("spinning through and beyond the Fathers' foreground

which is the arena of games").(13)

Where Raven discusses the importance of mother-daughter bonds as a model for union between all

women, Josephine Withers specifically locates Rosa as

Stevens' spiritual mother.(14) Ordinary. Extraordinary 101 is, she writes in a paper published in Feminist

Studies, the artist's "exploration of the relationships between herself and Rosa Luxemburg - her adopted

'ideal' mother - and her own mother, Alice Stevens, and ultimately between Rosa Luxemburg and Alice

S t e v e n s (15) According to Withers, Stevens forges these bonds by recovering the unknown and lost Alice and Rosa (16) to forge contemporary bonds of strength between women. The critic interprets the large white area in the center of the painting Fore River as a metaphor for "the river of life and for the birth canal," that "bring[s] Luxemburg's spirit from the realm of history into a more immediately felt present."(17) The artist is argued also to "midwife

Alice Stevens's rebirth," for the mute and passive

Alice is "vividly modeled" and emphatically gestures in some of her portraits.

For both of them "the effort to communicate what was important to them dominates their lives and gives meaning to their lives...So their effort to communicate can come through me to the present situation."(18)

The cyclic nature of motherhood weaves through

Withers' interpretation. Stevens rebirths Alice, and rebirths Rosa, giving them voices, an act of a daughter reclaiming her mothers. At the same time, it is a symbolic act of motherhood in the sense that mothers give birth to life that includes voice. Withers PLATE X. May Stevens, Fore River, oil on canvas, 78" x 120", 1983. 102 103 extends the cycle in noting Stevens' own son took the photographs of Alice that the artist used in painting her mother. Further, the artist's coming to grips with the death of this son is understood as eventually effecting a more expressionist quality in her paintings. Withers concludes that the myth of Demeter and Persephone, "a story which has to do with the psychological as well as the physical separation of daughter from mother, with the splintering of those aspects within the self, and with the mother's cyclical rescue of Persephone from death"(19) is reversed.

Persephone now brings Demeter back from death. Stevens rescues both mothers from oblivion, placing women's lives (in both extraordinary and ordinary aspects) as historically significant. "Naming, marking, and making visible the forgotten [the same forgotten Raven identifies] are powerful acts. They are also political acts, the foundations upon which any change in the world takes place."(20) The political method that

Withers espouses - "naming, marking, and making visible" - is consistent with woman-centered criticism and cultural feminism. Bonding and re-valuing are part of the process.

Withers feels Stevens' painting Voices exemplifies women's instinctive and "supra-historical" (to borrow

Raven's term) knowing. It is based on the public 104

funeral procession of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. "With

this painting," she claims, "Stevens transformed her pictorial sources and painted from what she knew, not

simply from what she had learned about Luxemburg."(21)

Withers uses formal elements within the painting to

support this claim. She notes the use of xerox imagery

in much of Stevens' work, that signals the generations

of translations through which we know Luxemburg. In

Voices, however, Stevens uses paint, and the synthesis

of paint with Luxemburg's famous words "Ich bin, ich war, ich werde seinl" ("I am, I was, I will be!") scratched across the top of the painting signals a

"cognitive and aesthetic understanding."(22) This same mastery of understanding Withers finds evident in Go

Gentle. The figure in the painting, this time Alice, projects a movement and a dynamism representative of discoveries Stevens has made, rather than being merely graphically representative of Alice. These "cognitive and aesthetic understandings" refer, again, to a

"woman's way of knowing."(23)

Withers projects through the mother-daughter bond the same bonding between all women that Raven envisions, a "re-membering" across "the female void."

In Fore River, Alice and Rosa "come together in a nontemporal dimension," accomplishing a union of spirits between women. The fluid style of painting and PLATE XI. May Stevens, Voices, acrylic on canvas, 79" x 118", 1983. PLATE XII. May Stevens, Gentle, acrylic on canvas, 78" x 142", 1983. 107

its composition are seen to support this union. Clues

to the artist's presence in the painting (for example

the artist's hand at the bottom right) underscore the

continuum between all women, "'part of a political

intention of the erasing of class, of differences.'"(24) Withers describes the cupping of

the hand as a "yoni," a vulva-shaped gesture, amidst

"skeins of paint," making reference to women's shared biological anatomy and fiber arts, traditionally arts of women in the Westernized world.

Withers claims Stevens was influenced in conceptualizing the series by Adrienne Rich's Of Woman

Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Rich

talks of a split within some women who recognize both biological and role model mother figures. (25) Whereas

Rich cautions against this splitting of self-identification, Withers believes Stevens is challenging that a woman must choose one over the other, because aspects of both the ordinary and the extraordinary make up the lives of all women. Hence, we see the ordinary of Rosa in some of Stevens' collages: love letters this revolutionary giant penned from prison that reveal her longing for "ordinary life" and "personal happiness." Alice becomes extraordinary at the tip of her daughter's brush, who paints monumental canvases of her. 108

Together in Forming the Fifth international, Rosa and Alice converse in a garden. They are, writes

Withers, "presumably speaking of the revolution... which, Stevens implies in the title, must include women's voices if it is to succeed."(26) (The Second

International, of which Rosa Luxemburg was a part, brought socialist leaders of Europe together to confer on revolutionary social changes.) Withers notes the difference in the treatment of the two figures - Alice boldly modeled and Rosa "flatly painted in the same grisaille as the earlier pictures...[so that she] appears to sink back into the painting and to remain just beyond our touch."(27) These incongruities are understood by Withers as "giving visual form to the fluctuating, uneven, and imperfectly remembered ways in which she - and we - apprehend the world."(28)

Withers' essay has prepared us to understand the revolution as a cultural one, achieved through revaluing and elevating women's experiences, claiming them worthy of remembering.

The subject of Ordinary. Extraordinary is understood as "a dialogue with history" by Melissa

Dabakijs. in her essay on the series, "Re-imagining

Women's History." (29) Stevens has created, the critic argues, a history that places women centrally, and connects them across time and cultural barriers: PLATE XIII. May Stevens, Forming the Fifth International, acrylic on canvas, 78" x 115", 1985. 109 110

"Through this extraordinary series, all women become part of the shared knowledge of our culture."(30) It

is important to link the personal into history for collective action, she argues.

Dabakis understands the series as a reinterpretation of the past. "History is a living and dynamic force, functioning dialectically with the present;" all history is "filtered through consciousness."(31) Contemporary thought influences our understanding of the past, and is influenced by this history. "Stevens imaginatively reconstructs

Rosa's story - using the conventions of Western art in creating a modern myth and/or history for women."(32)

The written historical references Stevens uses in connection with Luxemburg, Dabakis points out, are not arbitrary. They describe the photographs, and include aspects of Luxemburg's revolutionary stance and of her humanity. The history Stevens creates, however,

Dabakis describes as a history that we can experience.

In The Murderers of Rosa Luxemburg, for instance, the anonymous faces in a sea of black are

reminiscent of those that enhabit the nightmare worlds of James Ensor, Emil Nolde, and Edvard Munch...[they] peer out at the viewer with unrelenting intensity...Stevens' threatening painting re-imagines the experience of horror as Luxemburg was knocked to the ground by the rifle butt of her murderer, Otto Runge. Her view of the soldiers louring over her now becomes our Ill

view and our experience. The viewer enacts the drama of Rosa's death.(33)

By painting Rosa and Alice, and moreover by engaging us in their recreated histories, Dabakis concludes,

the conspiracy of silence has been broken; history has been re-engaged and lives in the present. These paintings assert Stevens' belief that Rosa's death is not an ending, but an unfinished story.(34)

Much as Withers does, Dabakis describes Rosa as a

"powerful social fighter who infused her revolutionary goals with a tender and humane spirit." Alice, a

"working-class woman" whose life was "marginal," is made "public and monumental" by her daughter's depictions. (35) The juxtaposition of the two figures suggests "that Alice resided beneath Rosa and Rosa beneath Alice;" that they exist as "pentimenti" for each other.(36) They symbolize not only the synthesis of public and private categories, suggesting the feminist credo "the personal is the political," but also a common bond connecting all women. Rosa perceived socialism to be made "from inside out,"(37) first in the hearts and homes of those affected, then in the political arena. Dabakis finds the shape of a uterus and birth canal in the outline of a bust of Rosa in the collage Ordinary Extraordinary from Stevens' book. The form is, she says, "an abstract shape connecting Alice, Rosa, and May. The bonding of PLATE XIV. May Stevens, The Murderers of Rosa Luxemburg, acrylic on canvas, 78" x 129", 1986. 112 PLATE XV. May Stevens, Ordinary. Extraordinary, detail image from artist's book, 1980^

c onenrtiu buck je itfm Ie faq j’attaqu

rant k bien

KiLX&aCuA. . 4.

v u l o a £ ^ vai. <

'i

j uq Jj i . Suit 3 1 1 114

womanhood and the symbolism of mother - both natural

and adopted - come together to shape this image."(38)

Alice and Rosa are presented as equals in the series,

Dabakis tells us. In Forming the Fifth International,

the two women seem to be talking together. Alice turns

away from us, as she might if we were to have met her,

but she seems to talk to Rosa. Difference, the way

Dabakis represents it, is fundamental not between

women, but between men and women: paintings of Rosa's

death show what happens to women within patriarchy.

Dabakis describes at length the life of Rosa

Luxemburg. It is a sympathetic portrait, that conveys

the strength of Luxemburg's revolutionary fervor as

well as her personal appeal. Stevens' choice of

Luxemburg as a subject, says Dabakis, is from her

"commitment to history, feminism, and social ism*. " (39)

The focus of Dabakis's essay might be seen as a

synthesis of woman-centered and activist criticisms.

The purpose of activist criticism is to raise the

awareness of the viewer of the political content in the work, to "spread the word," so to speak, and further a political message. Dabakis's message is towards

redefinition of history, one that, in addition to public deeds, acknowledges personal aspects of

historical figures as well as the input of the

receiver. It might be argued that Dabakis' long 115

description of Luxemburg is activist; it is not about

art, of course, but it infers a revolutionary spirit,

that is particularly exhilarating when Dabakis argues

that Rosa fought for women like Alice. These lend a

political fervor to Dabakis' overarching vision of a

unified ground for all women. We are reminded that the

woman-centered critique is within the feminist movement

for social change, that the feminist movement is

political.

Selected Activist interpretations

Activist feminist art criticism reports and

champions art that is aimed at social change through

political actions. The goal of these critics is to

disseminate the message of this art. The criticism

itself is intended to function as a political act. In

writing about Ordinary. Extraordinary, Carol Jacobsen

is interested in Stevens as a political and feminist

artist working towards social change through political

and feminist systems. She begins in establishing that

"the feminist perspective of May Stevens's art...came

out of her participation in the politics of the

Left." (40) We are reminded of the political issue

implied by the title of Stevens' 1951 painting The

Martinsville Seven, and of her work in the 1960s made 116 in response to civil rights issues, the Vietnam war, and later with Big Daddy, male dominance. Jacobsen claims Stevens' work, in keeping with the treatment of political art in this country, has been undervalued because of its activist strategy. The critic acknowledges personal content in Stevens' work, but contextualizes it within the political: "her vision is always infused with socialist politics." (41)

In using Rosa and Alice, Jacobsen explains,

"Stevens hoped to implement the socialist strategy of integrating theory with practice by beginning with real individuals."(42) The visual and conceptual link between these two disparate women is, she argues, "tied together by politics and the artist's dark vision."(43)

It is in this context that Jacobsen also explains

Stevens' use of "the personal as political," for the artist choses from her personal life to make a political statement. This varies from Withers' use of the personal and the political, that identifies the personal as primary knowledge source for the latter.

The connotation of Jacobsen's use does not leave the political as dependent on the personal, but rather the personal in service of the political.

Jacobsen explains Stevens' choices of media and imagery as decisions based on the communicative impact of the political message. The artist's decisions of 117 form and medium for works of the Ordinary.

Extraordinary series were made, she says, "for their capacity to best transmit to her [Stevens'] audience those ideas which affected her own political consciousness."(44) The recurring use of a photograph of Luxemburg after her murder is an

icon of that aborted revolution [the international socialist revolution for which Luxemburg fought]..serv[ing] to counterpoint her [Stevens'] concern with understanding Luxemburg as a woman who was a 'born fighter,' who relentlessly struggled for equality and change.(45)

The spontaneity and expressionism evident in the way the very large canvases (e.g. Vo ices and Procession) were painted echo "protest marches, [that] literally and formally refer to 'movement,' and...also recall the political assassinations of our own times."(46) The use of photomontage Jacobsen ties to its original communicative impact in post-World War I Berlin:

photomontage was "a new entity which tore from the chaos of war and revolution an entirely new image; and they [the artists using it] were aware that their method possessed a propaganda power which their contemporaries had not the courage to exploit."(47)

The disjunctures and contradictions between media, styles, and content in the series she argues are

"analogous to the socialist theory of permanent revolution." (48) Jacobsen concludes her essay by quoting from a statement fervent in its activist PLATE XVI. May Stevens, Procession, acrylic on canvas, 78" x 120", 1983. 119

message, that accompanied Stevens' 1988 installation,

"One Plus or Minus One." It reads,

Presence. Absence. Substitution. Proportion. Quota. Power. Powerlessness. One Less. One more or less. Rosa Luxemburg flared across the European dark like a meteor, an aberration. Her murder restores the usual dark. The waitress brings her tray. The usual faces look out. Order is restored. In Berlin. In Chile. In El Salvador. (49)

Jacobsen's establishment of Stevens as a feminist artist is within this larger political context.

Stevens' early commitment to feminism is understood as outgrowth of her political commitment to social change.

The circumstances of Alice's life, that at one time made her image "too terrible to deal with," become

"'the clearest argument for the liberation of women.'"(50) Through May Stevens, Alice Stevens defies her prescribed social role of silence, has a voice and is remembered. This Jacobsen understands as a political act. The importance of a contemporary feminist movement intertwined with activism is implicit when Jacobsen says,

Although many of Stevens's images of Rosa Luxemburg come out of the same revolution [of which the Berlin Dadaists were a part], she has no intention of leaving them there, in their strictly historical context. Rather, by collaging them with contemporary feminist analysis, Stevens aims the new composite at our awareness of the world today. (51) 120

Figure 1. May Stevens, The Second International, from the installation "One Plus or Minus One," photomural, 11' x 17', 1988.

Figure 2. May Stevens, Eden Hotel, from the installation, "One Plus or Minus One," photomural, 11' x 17', 1988. 121

This message has a similarity to Dabakis' that history is a dialectic between past and present. Jacobsen does not color this dialectic with a union of women across time and culture, however, as Dabakis does. In

Jacobsen's analysis, we are left with an understanding of Ordinary. Extraordinary as a political art where the socialist voice is meshed with the feminist. The cry of anger that Sydney Janet Kaplan identifies as an impetus for feminist criticism sounds loud in

Jacobsen's essay.

"Masses and Meetings" is an essay by Lucy Lippard on the Ordinary. Extraordinary series. Lippard, like

Jacobsen, positions Stevens as a political artist, and outlines the political content of the artist's previous work. She acknowledges the artist as an activist, but notes that some socialists take issue with Stevens' work because it is accepted in "high art" circles.

Stevens has been criticized for not placing her work on the streets and in other situations that would make it accessible to the masses. Lippard iterates Stevens' defense, that art needs to be accepted as "'socially useful per se.'"(52) The critic acknowledges her own past reprovals of the work, and her own migration towards accepting the work as political:

"the ideological input in art...is only valid and powerful when it is first internalized"...No matter how intelligent, 122

visually striking, or well-meaning a "socially concerned" work of art may be, it will not be fully effective unless this lesson is learned.(53)

Lippard searches for political activism in the work on which she can report and champion. The paintings function "as still points in the whirlpool of activism.

They are the anchors on which weigh her teaching, public speaking, writing, and feminism." Lippard offers examples of Stevens' extra-artistic political activism. For example, she describes in Stevens' teaching (Stevens teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and frequently teaches courses at colleges as a visiting professor) an emphasis on art of the disenfranchised, particularly on that of women of color.

Issues of class thread through the Lippard essay.

According to the critic, Stevens attacks "the middle-class nature of the women's movement by juxtaposing the lives of two women at opposite ends of the social scale." Against Luxemburg's "brilliant, prolific, often poetic words" used in the collages "are juxtaposed...Alice Stevens' occasionally broken silences," she observes. Of her mother, Stevens has written - and Lippard quotes,

Poverty (class) ground her down from the beginning (when it took a bright child out of school to make her a mother's helper to the rich folk on the hill) and used male 123

dominance to do it (her brother was kept in school) and religion to sanctify the arrangement and squelch her own desire. (54)

Lippard develops the issue of class in a discussion of how the artist deals with death in the Ordinary.

Extraordinary series. Death is understood as a part of life, "a becoming instead of an ending." The serial imagery and collage often used by Stevens indicate death and rebirth "'in some fluid way - its continuity and circularity.1"(55) Lippard compares Procession and

Voices, canvases that portray public demonstrations of protest and grief at Luxemburg's funeral, with Go

Gentle and Fore River, multiple portraits of the artist's mother on canvas that, although painted, maintain the effect of collage. The four paintings convey a "politics of mortality" (emphasis mine), says

Lippard: Stevens redeems the lives of the murdered

Luxemburg and Liebknecht as reminders of historical continuity in the political struggle for socialist change. In redeeming them, there is a show of unity and strength over death and the present. In Go Gentle,

Alice's figure fades "towards her inevitable future."

All four paintings, then, are "demonstrations of outrage and solidarity by which we counter the morbidity and futility connected with death - the death of ideals as well as of people." The canal in the center of Fore River is both a symbol for life 124

(Withers' interpretation as well) and a symbol for the emptiness of Alice's life. Lippard infers through

Rosa's phrase "Ich war, Ich bin, Ich werde sein" that

Stevens searches for the cyclical nature of death. The words are, emphasizes Lippard, the "legacy of a revolutionary whose voice is still heard."(56) This is to be contrasted with the context in which Withers uses this exclamation, which is as evidence that Stevens has achieved a personal understanding of Rosa Luxemburg.

This attainment is important to a woman-centered feminist: it signals a woman's knowledge from within, unshackled from the fetters of male culture.

It is within the context of internalized revolution that Lippard analyzes political and personal aspects of the work. Stevens is held up, through quotes, as an artist bringing together the "political" and the "spiritual." ("The spiritual" refers to

"visions of personal freedom, self-definition...[in the] struggle for social and political change." It is usually associated with cultural feminism.[57])

Lippard quotes her as saying,

"I think there is great impoverishment in not putting them [the spiritual and the political] together...I do have a social responsibility...But it always means what I define it as...I have only to follow what I can do and am. That's the source..." 125

Stevens' "'ideology is a lived one.'"(58) Lippard notes Stevens' admiration for the personal,

nonrevolutionary side of Luxemburg, for instance. The

artist is understood to "empathize" with Luxemburg

(although Luxemburg is not positioned as Stevens' mother) . Lippard interprets this "empathy" less out of woman-woman bonds than as Stevens' affinity to

Luxemburg's revolutionary passion and to certain kinds of sublety evident in Luxemburg's correspondence.(59)

When Lippard interprets Voices and Procession as

"'demonstrating' emotion," she parallels the dissonance

in the work (such as "'juxtapositions deliberately left unharmonized...elements [that] do not "cohere" into harmonious composition'"[60]) with Stevens the person:

"This dialectic between harsh and gentle characterizes

Stevens herself as well as her art." In Lippard's

interpretation, "the personal is political" means the

importance of the whole person involved in political actions, that the political fervor be internalized to

be effective. The personal supports the political in

the interpretations of both Lippard and Jacobsen, unlike the politicization of the personal in the woman-centered position.

Lippard's interpretation is activist in the sense

that through Stevens' artwork the critic supports political causes that she backs. Lippard is sensitive 126 to the emotional and personal dimensions of Stevens and of the work, both because they contribute to the strength of the artist's political conviction as discussed above, and because the spiritual is another

important dimension of people.(61) Lippard's essay might well be understood as social analysis. She writes of class and class difference between women. I place it within the activist strand because her

interpretation begins and concludes with the political

impact of the work, because she champions the cause of political revolution through Stevens' work, and because she focuses in her essay on more than an analysis of class. The essay is a clear example, however, of the overlap between strands.

Selected Postmodern Feminist Interpretations

"Postmodern" interpretations in feminist art criticism are analyses of the structures underlying our social institutions and how these construct women and their relative social positions. Gender is understood as determined by social situations: the economic, cultural, and racial factors of a particular historical period. "Woman" is not understood as "fixed" by her biological sex, but rather by these historical factors. 127

The focus of Patricia Mathews' essay "A Dialogue of Silence: May Stevens' Ordinary. Extraordinary,

1977-86" is on the creation of a new narrative that can describe the world and women's experiences in it. She uses Paul Ricoeur's sense of narrative, an "'open' interpretive structure.'" (62) Coherence and continuity of information necessary to orthodox narrative are not elements of the new narrative and action is

"choreographed more than composed." In the series, as she explains it, opposites form a dialectic: "the ordinary and the extraordinary, the personal and the political, the marked and the unmarked, the marking and the re-marking." (62) The dialectic forms a redescription of unspoken narrative action. In Go

Gentle, the critic perceives a "cinematic sense of climax and resolution" in Alice's lost voice returning as mute gestures. (This is the "dialogue of silence" referred to in the essay title.) Alice communicates only with herself. She is not telling us anything specific, nor transferring information. Meaning of her dialogue lies in her inarticulate discourse of gestures. Mathews calls Alice's silence "uncorrupted," since words convey an "ideological certainty that ultimately denies their validity."(64) Alice's new-found voice of gestures has "authority and power.

It reverberates with almost prophetic resonance."(65) 128

Her hands appear as hands in divining prophesy, explains Mathews. In some of the paintings, Alice is calm, in others she gestures wildly. in some, such as

Go Gentle, she does both. Mathews describes the combination of these states as a narrative sequence felt through "stillness interrupted by gesture."

Silence and agitation are sequences in Rosa paintings as well: for instance, in Demonstration, harsh energetic brushstrokes slash out Rosa's revolutionary words above the silence represented by her coffin.

Time is emphasized rather than information.

Stevens' use of various media, sizes, and subjects in the series, as well as the complex compositions in some of the pieces, reveal what Mathews describes as underlying "disruption, disunity, and discontinuity."(66) The disunified elements in the work are, she argues, a product of "discontinuous narrative content [two different women living in different historical contexts and the incongruous structures of each of their lives] as well as signifiers of society's fragmentation."(67) Alice's different portrayals in Go Gentle show this. She is benign, then explosive, then calm and inquisitive: "the progression of the sequence of a life is disrupted by its failure and a raging against that failure."(68)

Rosa's murder was a violence that ruptured the PLATE XVII. May Stevens, Demonstration, acrylic on canvas, 78" x 120", 1982. continuity of her statement "ich bin, ich war, ich

werde sein." Stevens' techniques and use of media,

Mathews continues, are characteristic of postmodernism.

Her use of collage, for instance, is a "Postmodern

technique par excellence."(69) Mathews calls upon the

ideas of various social philosophers that describe the

postmodern concept of image appropriation. They have

to do with images and contexts and meaning:

understanding an image in its original context and in a

new context, "double meanings" - meanings perceived

simultaneously from original and present contexts, the

deactivation and reactivation of images between

contexts, and the recasting of the totality of an image

by the connotations of its earlier contexts.(70) The

photographs of Alice and Rosa as children, for

instance, are images of hope; collaged next to images

of their agedness and death, they come to mean what has

been destroyed as a result of "society's betrayal of

women and the elderly."(71) Mathews pinpoints the gap created by the discrepancies of the juxtaposed images as the locus for meaning. She finds several stories emerge from the discontinuous narrative, different scales, media, persons, times, yearnings, memories, and moods within the series. These emergent multiple texts are described as forming a horizontal network of meanings, with the result being that many women, not 131

just two individuals, are represented. The stories

intertwine, and move in and out of focus.(72)

The object of Mathews' analysis is women and how,

through new narrative, the postmodern world view

coalesces with feminism. Feminism began this

dismantling of ideology through exposing contradictions

in myths about women, she argues. Ordinary.

Extraordinary, part of a narrative and figurative art

of the last decade that challenges aesthetic and social

assumptions, is not nihilist and sensationalist as is

the work of some male painters (Mathews cites Salle,

Fischl, Mariani, and Chia). The critic sets the series

within a feminist purview by claiming personal issues

are terms used by the artist to examine women's lives

and exclusions and that Stevens recaptures the lives of

Rosa and Alice as stories and histories of women for

other women. She further establishes the work as

feminist by examining issues of power and powerlessness

in Alice's loss of voice and her assumption of a new

narrative outside the patriarchal system. Stevens

wants to "'understand and redescribe I these women's]

life stories in ways that allow for change and

beneficial action in the world,'" claims Mathews.(73)

The focus on new narrative as an expression of the postmodern condition signals Mathews' essay as a postmodern critique. She is describing social 132

conditions through Stevens' series. It is feminist

because the focus is women's experiences of oppression

within these conditions.

The project of another feminist critic, Lisa

Tickner, is also social analysis, and she too perceives

disruption and discontinuity in the lives of women.

Tickner studies the disjunctive compositions and media

used by Stevens as metaphors for variable perceptions

and states of consciousness in women. Tickner considers

disruption and disunity a state of consciousness out of

the lived experience that constructs us. The medium of

collage, she says, lends itself to express these

shifting states. The media give a sense of different

levels of consciousness,

of things seeping through, disappearing...it seems real, more real than something that's on one level and spelled out and limited and confined. Always in flux and always changing.(74)

The viewer must "coax significance (and pleasure) out

of a series of juxtapositions deliberately left

unharmonized," much as she must out of life. The parts

of each collage are "things lived in themselves" but

they also have new significance in their new contexts.

She notes, as does Mathews, the different states

through which these images pass and the different meanings they take on and give to different contexts.

Tickner argues the series is partly about 133 representations too: about their feeling and memory, their survival as fragments, their meaning in a new context. She understands them as "metaphor for the erosions and erasions to which both material objects and memories are subject." She finds the same shifts between Alice and Rosa in youth and in agedness and death used by Mathews. Borrowing a term from Claude

Levi-Strauss, Tickner calls the disjunctive compositions and media "'bricolage,'" where there is a fluidity between meaning and representation: the signified changes into the signifying and vice versa.(75)

Stevens' technique also takes from "different modes of experience" (the different class experiences of Rosa and Alice) and "different systems of meaning

(family albums, Edwardian dresses, political pamphlets, private letters, remembered speech, police photographs)." They are

emotionally charged and dense with their original reference...'pieced,' to use a female metaphor, in new patterns of association and contiguity: imbricated and interleaved.

This transforms the male tradition, concludes Tickner, asserting the interdependence of the conventionally opposed - the public and the private, politics and autobiography. 134

Tickner notes the public and the private as

inseparable realms in Stevens' work. Their coexistence became inseparable in the artist's work with Big Daddy, she reminds us, where politics and autobiography met.

The juxtaposition of Alice and Rosa in Ordinary.

Extraordinary is also understood as a union of traditional opposites. Alice and Rosa represent an unremembered domestic woman and, by traditional standards, a politically important woman whose life and deeds are publicly recorded. Tickner notes how Stevens shows that both women are both ordinary and extraordinary. Alice and Rosa's juxtaposition came out of Stevens' awareness of a split in the women's movement between women of different classes. There is

"something of the mutual interdependence - for women - of public and private tyranny" in the series. The personal and the political are inferred among these

"imbricated and interleaved" differences. The

"personal" by Tickner's definition, however, is "not the personal as the private and authentic domain of individual sensation - but the personal as a place of contradiction, of conflicting pressures and desires; a place circumscribed and compromised for women by the operations of hegemonic power." In this definition, political and personal polarities have been constructed for the purpose of control, to establish powerful and 135 powerless classes of people (men and women, respectively, among these). Tickner does not convey, however, that women naturally conjoin the opposing.

Tickner's analysis of consciousness and women's experiences in the world is an understanding of consciousness and experience as socially constructed.

She argues this is communicated by subjects, media, and treatment in Ordinary. Extraordinary.

Summary and Discussion

The essays examined above were chosen because the analysis in each was long enough that a thesis was developed and a strand of feminist criticism could be discerned. Most notably excluded is Donald Kuspit's

"May Stevens in the Self's Heroic and Unheroic

Past." (76) Kuspit understands Stevens as an individual, who is a woman. Her relationship to the world as a woman and her relationship to other women are not objects of his study. Stevens, embued with the anxiety and solitude of individual artistic genius, is working through her personal life, according to

Kuspit's interpretation. Kuspit is not unsympathetic to feminism, but he does not develop Stevens' work as an issue of women's culture or women's oppression. 136

Stevens' work is also the object of or part of many shorter and less developed critiques. The objective of this comparative study, however, was not comprehensiveness but rather comparison of feminist critical strategies.

Underlying reviews of Ordinary. Extraordinary by

Raven, Withers, and Dabakis is belief in "woman:" a woman that can be excavated from beneath the inscriptions of culture. Raven, Withers, and Dabakis celebrate through Stevens' series this concept and women in general. Implicit in this celebration is the love of women that Sidney Janet Kaplan identifies as impetus for some feminist criticism. Their critiques imply that a better world is possible through the projects of feminism. Dabakis, of course, analyzes the social construct of history also, and argues for the revisionist concept laid out by feminist historians.

My locating her within the woman-centered position is indicative of the focus of my method, which is to understand the ideological beliefs informing feminist art critics. The concept of woman according to the postmodernist strand is as an unfixed entity, shaped by the forces of socialization. Through acculturation exists material from which bonds can be built, thus it would be incorrect to think that the postmodernist position would necessarily do away with all bonds. But 137 the position recognizes and leaves space for differences among women. "All women" do not, and cannot, "become part of [a] shared knowledge of our culture,"(77) and a "common bond connecting all women" is rejected.(78) Alice and Rosa may, in some ways, be able to reside beneath each other, but their class, economic, and educational backgrounds make them more different than alike to the postmodernist feminist critic. In Mathews' essay, for example, Alice and Rosa are compared and juxtaposed, but the critic does not infer that they are chipped from the same block of female substance. Hence the ultimate object of a woman-centered and postmodern feminist critique is different. In the former, it is woman; in the latter, it is social constructs that produce gender (and race and class and ethnicity and polarities among and within them). And once again, the subject "woman" is "fixed" within cultural and historical frameworks to the woman-centered critic and not fixed but continually evolving across cultural influences to the postmodern feminist critic.

The activist and postmodernist critiques are fueled by anger from women's oppression. As I have earlier mentioned, the activist critique is a voice and not an ideologically based belief system about the nature of women. Consequently, a feminist writing an 138 activist critique might be woman-centered or postmodern. The political elements of Dabakis' essay

(that seem to be fueled by both love and anger) are still undergirded by a concept of a fixed womanly identity. Behind Jacobsen's activist essay is the postmodernist world view. She considers Alice and Rosa disparate subjects, joined "together by politics and the artist's dark vision."(79)

The schisms outlined in the last chapter do not erupt into internecine strife in the writing of any of these critics. Their strategies for interpreting the work, and their conceptual and procedural approaches to how feminism should attain its goal of changing the world, are different in ways that have been delineated in the above analyses. What do these differences and schisms mean?

In delineating different strains, cum categories, of feminist criticism, am I perpetuating polarities that serve to oppress some persons and groups while glorifying others? Gouma-Peterson and Mathews, for example, have been sharply criticized for their qualitative ranking of critical approaches in their article, "The Feminist Critique of Art History," and for establishing discontinuity between critics.(80) 139

Of the different impulses of love and anger for feminist criticism, Sydney Janet Kaplan concludes that a plurality of approaches to feminist literary criticism is important. Quoting a colleague, Annette

Kolodny, she argues for "'a playful pluralism, responsive to the possibilities of multiple critical schools and methods, but captive of none.'"(81)

Kolodny has responded to denigration of feminist criticism for appearing "'more like a set of interchangeable strategies than any coherent school or shared goal orientation,'"(82) saying that diversity should

finally place us securely where, all along, we should have been: camped out...with the other pluralists and pluralisms...[because] to the imputed "truth" or "accuracy" of these findings the feminist must oppose the painfully obvious truism that what is attended to in a literary work, and hence what is reported about it, is often determined not so much by the work itself as by the critical technique or aesthetic criteria through which it is filtered or, rather, read and decoded. All the feminist is asserting, then, is her own equivalent right to liberate new (and perhaps different) significances from these same texts; and at the same time, her right to choose which features of a text she takes as relevant...(83)

("An art object" can uniformly be substituted in this quote for "a literary work.") Hence, concludes

Kolodny, different feminist interpretations of the same text should be understood as variations of feminism. 140

Sandra Langer calls differences "a necessary polarity to spark creativity."(84) And Joanna Frueh calls feminist art criticism a "chorus of p o s s i b i l i t i e s (85)

Yet pluralism in feminism should not be understood as the women's extension of the "anything goes" pluralism of the art of the 1970s. As Rozsika Parker and

Griselda Pollock have pointed out, the base for the feminist art movement "is a mass movement of women for radical social change and this makes it a revolutionary force."(86) Pluralism within the feminist movement should be understood as a variety of strategies towards accomplishing the goal of social change.

The different strands might be viewed within the context of a rhetorical movement, a thesis developed by

Diane Hope in a study of tensions in Radical Feminism in the 1960s and '70s. (87) The basis of her claim is that because movements can become trapped in their own rhetoric, challenges are vital to the health and growth of the movement. Indeed, Martha Rosier found just this in the Women's Building in Los Angeles, that was the locus of the feminist art movement in Southern

California in the 1970s. "The rhetoric" of radical cultural feminism, she said, "outruns program and practice."(88) She identified a need for theory as a basis of feminist projects. In the twelve years since

Rosier's essay appeared, theories with different f* > - 141

ideological bases have developed from the projects of the feminist art movement, and these theories about women are at the basis of differences already

identified between woman-centered and postmodern feminist critical strands. The divisions between the two strands have elements of what Hope would call a rhetorical social movement, because they are carried forward through language and because factions are identified through their persuasive claims, not by their political actions. Robert Storr has (less scientifically) observed this in feminist art criticism: "the key [to the 'split' among feminist critics and artists] is language." (89) Hope has identified three characteristics of a rhetorical movement. Between woman-centered and postmodern strands, feminist art criticism encompasses all three characteristics. First, feminist art critics are differentiated from mainstream of critics, and from each other. Second, among the strands there is a symbolic drama of conflict, involving different plots

(strategies), motives (love and experimental visions of a recreatecd world for woman-centered critics, and anger and exposure of repressive instruments of the mainstream social structure for postmodern critics), and characters (different critics). Third, in response to tensions between conflicting characters (critics), 142

different styles have developed: woman-centered critics

search for new and experimental uses of language whereas postmodern critics utilize the postmodern discourses. The tension created between the critical strands, then, is considered positive. Arlene Raven calls "the antagonism" between woman-centered and postmodern critics a

fiction...[because] even biologically oriented 'female imagery’ was introduced as a self-conscious antithesis into the historical environment of phallic imagery, challenging human-made, value-laden signs in which the social 'essence' of one gender dominated over another.(90)

Her statement indicates the orchestration of feminist art criticism through language. The medium of criticism is language, and if it is effective in its persuasion, it is rhetorical. Viewing feminist criticism as rhetorical does not negate its political effectiveness. Combined with the political conservatism of the present it may be the only way to carry on the feminist art movement with regular visibility in mainstream journal publications.

Griselda Pollock and Roszika Parker affirm that the political climate demands action effective to it, and those actions in the 1980s are strategic interventions

(such as language) rather than overt political actions. (91) 143

There are feminists who are trying to transcend

the dilemmas of the "essentialism" associated with the

woman-centered critique and the "nominalism" underlying

the postmodernist critique by developing a third

course. In an article on the ideological split within

the feminist movement, Linda Alcoff identifies the

polar positions as "cultural" (earlier associated with

woman-centered criticism) and "post-structural"

(associated with postmodern feminist criticism)

feminisms. She refers to cultural feminism as

"essentialist" because it offers "a homogeneous,

unproblematized, and ahistorical conception of women."

Yet she is equally concerned that in conceiving of the

subject as constructed by social forces, post-structuralist feminists erase the individual.

("How can we ground a feminist politics that

deconstructs the female subject? Nominalism threatens

to wipe out feminism itself."[92]) Alcoff concludes,

"We cannot simply embrace the paradox...feminism needs

to transcend the dilemma by developing...an alternative

theory of the subject that avoids both essentialism and nominalism."(93) What she proposes, stemming from the work of Teresa de Laurentis and Denise Riley, is what she calls "positionality." An individual is produced through self-reflection on his or her specific

interactions with the world. A fluid and ongoing 144 process, it is dependent on an individual's conscious realization of herself. Woman is

a relational term identifiable only within a (constantly moving) context...[and] the position that women find themselves in can be actively utilized...as a location for the construction of meaning, a place from where meaning is constructed, rather than simply the place where a meaning can be discovered...The concept of woman as positionality shows how women use their positional perspective as a place from which values are interpreted and constructed rather than a locus of an already determined set of values.(94)

An individual woman can influence her own mental construction and how she makes meaning of the social forces at work. Identity is the product of an individual's interpretation of her own history.

Does positionality lie under the varying critiques of Stevens' work? The "weaving a women's tradition and unsnarling, unknotting, untying, unweaving the traditions of the female void"(95) that Raven discusses may be understood as aggressively taking an identity, as opposed to being assigned one. Raven has elsewhere stressed that the woman-centered position is self-conscious.(96) The course picked by woman-centered critics is at times indistinguishable from biological essence, and has historical precedence in nineteenth century writings by women where a biological difference was posited. There remains in my mind strong indication that the woman-centered critic 145

is both taking a self-referential position within her historial context and refusing to release belief in a

female subject inscribed into the body of each woman.

Stevens herself may be taking the "positional perspective" Alcoff sees as a third course,

interpreting and constructing values about women in both their differences and similarities. I, at this point, am not sure. I am not advocating positionality as superior to other feminisms, although Alcoff's concept warrants further consideration. For now, feminist criticism seems best conceived and accepted in

its pluralistic state, without resolutions. In

Stevens' words, "I don't want a false resolution...I would rather have it not fit than force it, or cut off something, or deny something I believe in." (97) 146

Reference Notes: Feminist Criticism And May Stevens' Ordinary. Extraordinary Series

(1) May Stevens, Ordinary. Extraordinary [artist's book] (New York: Privately printed, 1980), n.p.

(2) John A. Walker, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht: Revolution, Remembrance, Representation (London: Pentonville Gallery, 1986), n.p.

(3) Melissa Dabakis, "Re-imagining Women's History," in Rosa Alice May Stevens Ordinary Extraordinary, edited by Melissa Dabakis and Janis Bell (Gambier, Ohio: Kenyon College, 1988), 14.

(4) Ibid., 18.

(5) May Stevens, "My Work and My Working-Class Father," in Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work, edited by Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 108.

(6) The frequency of references to Rosa Luxemburg and Alice Stevens, as well as possible confusion between Alice and May Stevens lead me to this mode of reference. Critics discussing the series often adopt this shorthand.

(7) Alan Wallach, "May Stevens: On the Stage of History," Arts Magazine 53 (November 1978): 151. In Gentileschi's own self-portrait, she is depicted at her easel. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock have commented, it sould seem that Gentileschi was at least partially aware of some of the contradictions in her position as a professional painter and the current representations of women's supposed relationship to art. In an allegorical self-portrait, she represents a woman artist painting. In addition to the represention of a painter at work...the concept of this picture plays on the contradiction between woman s painter's muse, symbolic emobodiment of the art, and woman as a professional practitioner of the art. Old Mistresses: Woman, Art, and ideology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 25. Wallach notes of Stevens' choice of Gentileschi and Luxemburg that they are figures she admires. If there is symbolism in the choice, it may be in Stevens' 147

identification with these figures on some level: for instance, in Gentileschi as a woman artist and in Luxemburg as a revolutionary who insisted in a proletarian revolution led and administered by the working classes.

(8) Arlene Raven, "Women Look at Women: Feminist Art for the Eighties," chap. in Crossing Over: Feminism and Art of Social Concern (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, Inc., 1988), 15 & 16. Reprinted catalog essay from a 1981 exhibition of the same name at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA, 1981. Future references to this essay will be abbreviated as "Women Look at Women." "Re-member" is a term used by Mary Daly to describe a goal of the feminist journey towards reclaiming women for themselves: "that we may re-member the dismembered body of our heritage." Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 23.

(9) Ibid., 15; quoted from May Stevens, Ordinary. Extraordinary.

(10) Ibid.

(11) Ibid. Quote is from Nor Hall, Mothers and Daughters.

(12) Ibid., 16.

(13) Daly, 2. This essay is an example of the conscious use of myths as empowerment. in writing published later, Raven seems to have shifted her understanding of women's knowledge to account for the permeation of cultural imprint. See for example "Cinderella's Sisters' Feet," Village Voice Art Supplement 32 (October 6, 1987): 6-9.

(14) Stevens herself has referred to Luxemburg as a spiritual mother, in "Looking Backward in Order to Look Forward: Memories of a Racist Girlhood," Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics 4, no. 3 (1982) , 23.

(15) Josephine Withers, "Revisioning Our Foremothers: Reflections on the Ordinary. Extraordinary Art of May Stevens," Feminist Studies 13 (Fall 1987) : 485.

(16) Recovering lost and unknown women artists has been a long-term project of feminist art historians. 148

(17) Ibid., 492.

(18) Ibid., 491-492. Quoted from "Dialogue with May Stevens and Josephine Withers," University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park, Maryland, 24 January 1985. Withers quotes the artist.

(19) Ibid., 495-496.

(20) Ibid., 496.

(21) Ibid., 491.

(22) Withers does not define "cognitive understanding," but the context suggests a sensory or intuitive knowing.

(23) I adjust these words from a book's title, Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind, by Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clincy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

(24) Withers, 492. Quoted from "Dialogue with May Stevens and Josephine Withers."

(25) Ibid., 489.

(26) Ibid., 493.

(27) Ibid., 493-494.

(28) Ibid., 493.

(29) Dabaki s , 13.

(30) Ibid., 30. I understand "our culture" to refer to women's culture, because elsewhere Dabakis refers to "a [singular] history for women" (pp. 22- and "the bonding of womanhood" (p. 23).

(31) Ibid., 13 & 23.

(32) Ibid., 22-23.

(33) Ibid., 28.

(34) Ibid., 25-26.

(35) Ibid., 13. 149

(36) Ibid., 23.

(37) Ibid., 19.

(38) Ibid., 23.

(39) Ibid., 20.

(40) Carol Jacobsen, "Two Lives: Oridnary. Extraordinary," Art in America (February 1989): 153.

(41) Ibid., 154.

(42) Ibid.

(43) Ibid., 183.

(44) Ibid., 154.

(45) Ibid., 183.

(46) Ibid.

(47) Ibid., 185. Quoted material is from Raoul Hausmann, lecture given in Berlin in connection with the first major exhibition of photomontage in 1931.

(48) Ibid., 183.

(49) Ibid., 185. The installation was shown at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and at the Orchard Gallery in Derry, Northern Ireland. The waitress is shown in one of the One Plus or Minus One photomurals and in Eden Hotel. She serves drinks to the murderers of Luxemburg and Liebknecht the day after the murders took place.

(50) Ibid., 154. Quoted from May Stevens, "My Work and My Working-Class Father," 115.

(51) Ibid., 185.

(52) Lucy Lippard, "Masses and Meetings," in May Stevens: Ordinary. Extraordinary. A Summation 1977-1984 (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1984), unpaginated. Because pages in this catalog are not paginated, further quotes whose reference would consist only of a page number will not be footnoted. Quoted material is May Stevens' words.

(53) Words in quotes are Stevens'. 150

(54) Lippard quotes Stevens' "My Work and My Working-Class Father," 112.

(55) Lippard quotes Stevens.

(56) Rosa wrote "Ich war, Ich bin, Ich werde sein" five days before she was murdered, in the context of "Tomorrow the revolution will rear its head once again...and will proclaim, with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I will be!"

(57) Judy Davis and Juanita Weaver, "Dimensions of Spirituality," in The Politics of Women's Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power Within the Feminist Movement, edited by Charlene Spretnak (Garden City, N.J.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1982), 368-369.

(58) Lippard quotes Stevens.

(59) Lippard quotes Luxemburg's correspondence twice to illustrate this: It is above all now the tendency of my taste...in scientific work as well as in art, to treasure only the simple, the calm and the noble.

My dear, do me a favor, and stop underlining words in your letters; it sets my teeth on edge. The world is not full of idiots who, as you think, understand only when bashed over the head with a club.

Of Stevens, Lippard writes, Stevens says she loves color, loves its sensuousness as it's put on the canvas, but she can't use it gratuitously...I identify with the roots of this puritanical abstention. It is...part of a tradition of respect for the sensuous and the power of the senses...("Masses and Meetings," n.p.)

(60) Lippard quotes Lisa Tickner, "May Stevens," in May Stevens, Ordinary. Extraordinary. A Summation 1977-1984 (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1984), unpaginated.

(61) Elsewhere, Lippard has stated that woman-centered feminist art practices and feminist activist practices are integrated. Early in the feminist movement of the 1970s, Lippard devoted great energies to identifying an inherently female art. 151

Although she later abandoned the effort in recognition of the cultural imprint that cannot be stripped away, she refuses to finally separate and reject cultural feminism. For example, in defending her choice of artists for an exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London, she stated, It seems to me that to reject all of these aspects of women's experience as dangerous stereotypes often means simultaneous rejection of some of the more valuable aspects of our female identities. Though used against us now, their final disappearance would serve the dominant culture all too well. Lucy Lippard, "Issue and Taboo," catalog essay for Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists, 1980, reprinted in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (London: E.P. Dutton, 1984), 147.

(62) Patricia Mathews, "A Dialogue of Silence: May Stevens' Ordinary. Extraordinary, 1977-86," Art Criticism 3 no. 2 (1987): 35.

(63) Ibid.

(64) Ibid., 36.

(65) Ibid., 37.

(66) Ibid.

(67) Ibid.

(68) Ibid., 38.

(69) Ibid. Jacobsen has interpreted Stevens' use of collage as representative of a revolutionary break with the continuity of the past. Mathews' use also has to do with a break with the past, but a break with the artistic past of Modernism, rather than a socio-political break.

(70) These ideas are attributed to, respectively, Waiter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes.

(71) Ibid., 39.

(72) Multiple styles and images are understood as multiple states of consciousness in Tickner's analysis that is discussed below. 152

(73) Ibid, 35. Mathews quotes On Narrative, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981) , viii-ix.

(74) Tickner, unpaginated. Because pages in this catalog are not numbered, further quotes whose reference would consist only of a page number will not be footnoted.

(75) Tickner quotes Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1972), 17-19.

(76) Donald Kuspit's "May Stevens in the Self's Heroic and Unheroic Past," in May Stevens Ordinary Extraordinary. A Summation 1977-1984 (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1984) .

(77) Dabakis, 30.

(78) Ibid., 19.

(79) Jacobsen, 183.

(80) Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, "Discussion: An Exchange on the Feminist Critique of Art History," Art Bulletin 71 (March 1989): 124-126; and Cassandra Langer, "Feminist Art History: Critique Critiqued," Women Artist News 12 (Fall/Winter 1987):38, 62.

(81) Sidney Janet Kaplan, "Varieties of Feminist Art," in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Gayle Greene and Coppelxa Kahn (New York: Methuen, 1985), 54. Quoted from Annette Kolodny, "Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism," in Feminist Literary Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).

(82) Kolodny, "Dancing Through the Minefield," 159. Kolodny quotes from an earlier article, "Literary Criticism," signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2 (Winter 1976): 420.

(83) Ibid., 159-160.

(84) Langer, "Feminist Art History..." 38. 153

(85) Joanna Frueh, "Towards a Theory of Feminist Art Criticism, part II," New Art Examiner 12, no. 9 (June 1985): 32-34.

(86) Griselda Pollock, "Feminism and Modernism," in Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement 1970-1985, edited by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (London: Pandora Press, 1987), 80.

(87) Diane S. Hope, "A Rhetorical Definition of Movements: The Drama and Rebirth in Radical Feminism" (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York, 1975, UMI Order no. 76-1445). The need for tension in the feminist movement has also been identified by Jo Freeman, in The Politics of Women's Liberation (New York: McKay, 1975), 6. Sandra Langer brought Freeman's discussion into the realm of feminism and art - as a tension between practice and theory - in her article "Emerging Feminist Art Histsory," Art Criticism 1, no. 2 (1979): 66-83.

(88) Martha Rosier, "The Private and the Public: Feminist Art in California," Artforum 16, no. 1 (September 1977): 68.

(89) Robert Storr, "Other 'Others,'" Village Voice Art Supplement 32 (October 6, 1987): 16.

(90) Arlene Raven, "Cinderella's Sisters' Feet," 6.

(91) Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, "Fifteen years of feminist action: from practical strategies to strategic practices," in Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement 1970-1985, edited by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1987), 73. Deborah Bright also notes the conservative political climate of the last decade in the United States, England, and Canada and its effect on feminism in "Engendered Dilemmas (or, why we don't need more articles on 'Gender and the Media,'" views 10 (Spring 1989): 12-20.

(92) Linda Alcoff, "Cultural Femininism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13 (Spring, 1988): 418-419.

(93) Ibid., 421.

(94) Ibid., 434. 154

(95) Raven, "Women Look at Women," 16.

(96) Raven, "Cinderella's Sisters' Feet," 6.

(97) Sue Kelly, "Autobiography in Contemporary Art," unpublished thesis, Middlesex Polytechnic, England, 1986, 75. Quoted from Withers, 490. CHAPTER IV

IMPLICATIONS OF FEMINIST ART CRITICISM FOR ART EDUCATION

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.(1)

The considerations of this chapter are stimulated by calls from feminists that the experience cf "woman" and the multiple world views of women of different classes, ethnicities, races, and nationalities be heard. They need to permeate our understanding of the world, however, for change to take place. That these be heard in the halls of governance is important.

Education, however, is realized as the underlying

instrument for change. (2) Often the calls of feminist educators overlap with those calling for pluralistic education, with feminist educators maintaining the

importance of issues of gender in widening this scope.

Feminist art educators are among these voices. Some art educators writing on the use of art criticism in art education call for broadening the focus of such activities. In this chapter, I will synthesize these

155 156 calls with those of feminist educators and critics.

Background to the need for such a synthesis (the failings of education and the goals of art education) is general, meant not to be comprehensive but rather to highlight arguments made at length by others.(3) I will begin with feminists, move to art educators, and conclude with a synthesis.

The Context: Women and Art

In her seminal essay, "Why Are There No Great

Women Artists," Linda Nochlin did not search for overlooked women. She focused on the concept of greatness as a quality not innate or transcendant, but one culturally determined.

Beneath the question [why are there no great women artists?] lie naive, distorted assumptions about the making of art in general, much less the making of great art. These assumptions link together such unlikely superstars as Michelangelo and Van Gogh, Raphael and Jackson Pollock.

She concludes that,

Art is not a free, autonomous activity of a superendowed individual...[but] occurs in a social situation, is an integral element of the social structure, and is mediated and determined by specific social situations.(4)

Nochlin argues that both the art maker and the way her or his product is received are products of social and cultural contexts: it is within this context that 157 artistic value is determined. Her argument is a premise of this chapter. Women and their accomplishments have been undervalued by our society, in terms or recognition, economic value, and historical documentation. The accomplishments are sometimes not any different than those of males, but because they are done by women, they are less valued. At one time, it was widely publicized, for instance, that those girls accepted to prestigious colleges had higher grade averages than the males accepted. From such processes, the experiences of women become different from their male counterparts'. Women's accomplishments additionally differ from those of males because of cultural expectations and definitions of sex roles, that begin to inscribe at birth.(5) The outcome, as

Cheri Register has written, is

If women's work is organized differently from men's, if the day is structured differently, if space is inhabited differently, if styles of verbal communication are different, then it follows that women will have a different sense of beauty and pleasure.(6)

Register's statement must be understood not in support of further research into female sensibility, but as an observation that any such tendencies are constructed through the experiences of socialization. Virginia

Woolf similarly reasoned that women wrote primarily novels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 158

because of their circumstances, including numerous

daily interruptions and lack of training in writing

poetry. They moreover wrote novels where the

observation of character and the analysis of emotion

prevailed, because "Her sensibility had been educated

for centuries by the influences of the common

sitting-room."(7) The subjects and media traditionally

valued as the substance of great art are not

intrinsically more worthy than those subjects and media

that have been traditional arts of women.(8) Flowers

and children, needlepoint and watercolor, then, are not

secondary to history painting, oil and canvas. Yet the

cultural beliefs that condition social valuing are oriented towards acknowledging and according merit to

the experiences and products of males and male-dominated realms rather than those of females. We are taught to think the mechanics of war more important

than the details of mothering, and history painting more important than needlepoint. Nochlin reminds us that our values are products of our education when she writes, "The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstral cyles, or our empty internal spaces, but

in our institutions and our education."(9) In critiquing the exclusivity of Western art practices

(exclusive to women, racial and cultural minorities, and non-Westernized peoples), Griselda Pollock also 159 implicates art education. In teaching the modernist tradition of high art she argues that art education, along with museums and galleries, perpetuates the exclusion of these "others" both as artists and as determiners of artistic value. "Education has been named as one of the major ideological state apparatuses

- that is, not just a place of learning, but an institution where, as in the family, we are taught our places within a hierarchical system of class, gender and race relations."(10)

The Context; Art Education

The National Endowment for the Arts recently made a report to Congress about the arts in American schools. It is titled Toward Civilization and was published in 1987. Goals stated in this document include educating for an "enlightened citizenry" and to

"understand civilization." Prescribed guiding factors in the process of education are to be

"comprehensiveness" and "balance."(11) These are broad statements that are widely understood as overarching purposes of why we educate. They are reiterated with eloquence customary to such claims in Toward

Civilization. I have singled out this document only because it is a current exemplar.(12) Although women 160 are not singled out in this document, if we are to

"understand civilization," should this not include the experiences and learned perspectives of women?

Virginia Woolf, for example, thought it more important to history that women began to write in the late eighteenth century than were the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. (13)

Without... forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.(14)

Recognizing women and their experiences not only allows women a "sense of themselves," that the writers of

Toward Civilization argue important, but a more holistic "sense of our male and female selves" to males as well.

The Context: Art Criticism in Art Education

John Hospers, a philosopher and media critic who writes about criticism, has defined criticism as,

a means to an end: the end is increased understanding or appreciation of the work of art (or style, period, etc.), and the means employed is the written work of criticism. Criticism is occasionally read, as works of 161

art usually are, because it is enjoyable or entertaining or challenging, but usually its main function is to cast some light upon the work of art which the critic is discussing - to make the work intelligible to us, to illuminate it for us, to help us see things in it we failed to see before, or to put things we did see into a new pattern or perspective.(15)

In art education, the means is often talk, not writing.

But the "why" of criticism identified by Hospers - the

reasons for talking about art in the classroom - is the

same. Included in a list of reasons given by art educator Louis Lankford to define why art educators

include art criticism in the curriculum are that it

"broaden[s] the base of knowledge and experience for

those who use it" and that it "aids in the development of visual literacy, helping individuals to better understand and arrange the visual environment."(16)

Implied in these reasons, given both by Lankford and by

Hospers, are the same concerns underlying Toward

Civilization. First, a concern that the life worlds of students come into focus for them through education

(the "sense of themselves" called for in the report and the understanding and arranging of the visual environment that surrounds us that is mentioned by

Lankford). And second, that students' understandings be extended through new knowledges and experiences

(implied by the phrases "comprehensiveness" and

"understand civilization" used in the report, 162

Lankford's reference to broadening knowledge and experience, and Hospers' "new pattern or perspective").

If this answers the "why" of art criticism in art education, the "what" might be answered as follows. In art education, "art criticism" can be understood as a process through which we may come to appreciate, "'to comprehend with knowledge, judgment and discrimination,'" objects we call art.(17) Edmund

Feldman implies the appreciative function of art criticism in art education when he argues for its value in "the sharing of discoveries" about art and the human condition. Feldman also argues for the discriminatory properties of art criticism in "coping with the visual environment."(18) Yet, "our cultural beliefs condition our appreciative responses,"(19) a familiar refrain voiced by feminists too. The recognition of the cultural factor would seem to determine the need for an examination of culture within the realm of critical studies in art education. Yet, in fact, most attention to art criticism in art education results in an examination of the formal or expressive properties of works of art. Various art educators have recognized this as a problem. Dan Nadaner, in writing about the use of the social critique in art education, is critical of the pervasive reliance of art educators on formalism and self-expression. 163

Formalist aesthetics can not do the job; it tells me little to know that a war-toy commercial has a clean syncopated rhythm or a subtle balance in its set design. Sociology, morality, and ethics must enter the debate if the debate is to be adequate to its subject.(20)

Nadaner specifies faults with the ever-popular method put forth by Edmund Feldman, saying that,

Feldman outlines three criteria for evaluation: formalist, expressivist, and instrumental. While the instrumental category is meant to include social dimensions of experience, it does so by placing them outside of the ontology of the work itself. In Feldman's system the work is instrumental to the social end, which is different from placing the social dimension of meaning within the intrinsic structure of the work.(21)

Formalism and self-expression, he argues, are

"compatible with a social ideology that isolates meaning within the individual, and looks to an individualistic psychology to explain meaning...it is not cognizant of wider, equally relevant horizons." (22)

Nadaner notes the lack of social awareness in students from a study he did in film education, and argues students need to be encouraged to consider different world views.

Analysis of student critiques...demonstrated the perspectivistic, ethnocentric nature of the white middle-class student's understanding... There are many more world views than those crystallized in the modern art of Europe...and all of those world views and their dialogue with all of our world views deserve to be taken as the subject matter of art education.(23) 164

Nadaner suggests that within the purview of art education, ideologies be examined and critiqued. He points, in part, to feminist criticism as raising a challenge, placing art in what he calls a "problematic context(24) He calls for understanding knowledge as socially constructed within specific material and historical conditions.

The arguments of another art educator, Karen

Hamblen, concur with Nadaner's thoughts on this issue.

With aesthetics forming the most pervasive foundational area of art criticism theory and practice, it is not surprising that sociological relationships in the art critical process, the social significance of art objects studied, and students' socio-economic background have received short shrift in the 1iterature.(25)

She concludes that sociology and cross-cultural aesthetics need to be included, among other areas of study now overlooked, as foundations to art criticism

in art education.

Kristin Congdon argues for a language of criticism that permits for the world views of a variety of people. The familiar formats of criticism used in art education, she notes, were created by Western academically oriented Caucasians.(26) I add that, academics being fully dominated until recently by males, the formats are also masculine-biased. These formats "may hamper our enjoyment of art," she 165 continues, as well as "unnecessarily limit our intellectual growth."(27) While Congdon does not argue for women's world views, I think the expansion of understandings she calls for result from the same conditions presented feminists by the hegemonic order.

Feminism, Art Education, and Feminist Art Criticism

Current scholarship in feminist education is based on the premise that diverse peoples experience the world differently, that many concepts taught as

"universal" "may be valid only for the male experience

(and not even for all males)."(28) Because of this,

feminist researchers...attempt to capture this newly perceived variety. They have developed a notion of..comparative approaches in which each of several perspectives augments and challenges the others.(29)

Subjectivity and perspective are not only recognized, but understood as inevitably contributing to "the form and content of the evolving knowledge."(30) Maher and

Rathbone, writing on implications of feminist theory for teacher education, conclude general pedagogical implications. They call for a comparative strategy in presenting information, using different perspectives.

While they intend for such comparisons to arise, in part at least, from an interactive, collaborative, cooperative style of teaching, comparison of 166 differences within a particular area, such as feminist criticism, serves as a model towards understanding not only the existence of variety, but its legitimacy.

Allowing for a breadth of perspectives in interpreting art, and making students aware, through criticism in part, of different perspectives on art (feminism representing one set of these perspectives) allows for greater breadth of meaning in understanding of art.

The result of comparison, as argued by feminist educator Elizabeth Ellsworth, is that we come to see that all knowledge is partial and biased. We come to see that the true enemy is not the unknowable but systems of belief that efface the partial nature of any understanding.

What would it mean to recognize not only that a multiplicity of knowledges are present in the classroom as a result of the way difference has been used to structure social relations inside and outside the classroom, but that these knowledges are contradictory, partial, and irreducible? They cannot be made to "make sense" - they cannot be known, in terms of the single master discourse of an educational project's curriculum or theoretical framework.(31)

Ellsworth recognizes the need for the existence of pluralism as an educative model, as opposed to a norm of a single universal truth. Different ways of knowing and practices may not be reconcilable. Within feminist art criticism, woman-centered criticism, centered on a celebration of women's traits and bonds between women 167 as a route for change, may not be reconcilable with postmodern criticism, where the concept of "woman" is perceived as but a social construct. The pluralisms and their differences can be taught as acceptable.

Recognizing and tolerating differences should be the focus of learning, not judging one as superior by all standards. Ellsworth states her vision this way:

If you can talk to me in ways that show you understand that your knowledge of me, the world, and 'the Right thing to do' will always be partial, interested, and potentially oppressive to others, and if I can do the same, then we can work together on shaping and reshaping alliances for constructing circumstances in which students of difference can thrive.(32)

Patrocinio Schweickert proposes a "conversation" between pluralisms.(33) The aim of the conversation is comprehension, not agreement. Schweickert does seek coherence, though this need not be bound by consistency and uniformity. Within the art education classroom, the goal of art criticism becomes coherence in diversity and tolerance, rather than a coherence of

Jogical consistency.

If tolerance of diversity is one projected outcome of criticism activities, another is an extended understanding of "Otherness," the concept that originated with Simone de Beauvoir and examined by feminists for the last score of years. The "Other" defines each individual of every cultural group: a 168

potential within each of us as we relate to different

cultures. "The master...discovers...that He is just an

other among others." (34) In other words, "everyone is

someone else's 'Other.'"(35) The educational outcome

of conversations of plurality, and of our own

self-definitions as sometimes contradictory and

sometimes Other, support an understanding of self as a

process of becoming. The process, not the outcome, is

emphasized. Ellsworth borrows from Minh-ha when she

calls this a "never ending 'moving about:'"

In relation to education, I see this moving about as a strategy that affirms "you know me/I know you" while pointing insistently to the interested partialness of those knowings; and constantly reminding us that "you can't know me/I can't know you" while unsettling every definition of knowing arrived at. "(36)

We might also come to see that we are, within

ourselves, different things at once. Judith Mayne

asks, for instance, why women enjoy commercial

Hollywood films that were created from a male viewpoint, with women portrayed as objects of the male

gaze. Spectators of these films, female or male, can

identify with the woman in them through two routes: as

voyeurs or as objects of the looking. The female

spectator is caught between the two, in continuous conflict and tension. (37) We are caught, as Teresa de

Laurentis proposes, between "woman - the configuration

of patriarchal ideology - and women, historical 169 subjects who live in a tangential relation to that configuration.(38) Mayne understands this state as one of positive tension, that she calls "both/and." She quotes historian Linda Gordon in concluding, "'This in-between would not imply resolution...[it] is rather a condition of being constantly pulled, usually off balance, sometimes teetering wildly, almost always tense.'"(39) The focus in teaching would be the realization of these internal differences, and that individuality is produced through self-reflection on our internal processing of our external worlds.

In proposing three approaches for integrating feminist scholarship into education, it is the pluralistic approach that Georgia Collins advocates.

Pluralists work towards "a reconstructed inclusive art community with institutions embracing a variety of values and practices, drawn from both the male art establishment and the female countermovement."(40)

Activist and postmodern feminist criticisms work towards such reconstruction, although most practitioners probably envision a reconstruction of such extreme dimensions that it might be understood as revolutionary. "The individual would be free to seek congenial situations and audiences without prejudice or penalty."(41) 170

Collins also names "integrationist" and

"separatist" approaches towards feminist art education.

Integrationists seek to integrate women into the existing system of art, purged of its sex biases. A project of feminist critics and historians in the 1970s was the recovery and restoration of women artists to the art rosters. This early project sought no structural change in the art world. An integrationist approach to art criticism would have a balance of male-made and female-made objects to be critiqued. Its teacher practitioner would seek to remediate women students deficient in skills and sensibilities necessary to success in the art world. Integration characterizes none of the types of feminist art criticism that I have outlined in this document.

Woman-centered, advocacy, and postmodern feminist art criticism each champion fundamental changes in the art world. The second approach delineated by Collins is

"separatism." Separatists call for the establishment of a separate community of women in art, "with values, practices, and institutions more nearly coincident with women's common and distinct experience." Woman- centered criticism could be adapted to a separatist approach, where female students would be encouraged to approach artworks via a different set of criteria than male students. These criteria would be based 171

exclusively on the female experience with art. The

comparison could be interesting and enlightening and

offer new interpretations of art. Because pluralism

includes many viewpoints and approaches at once,

Collins is not rejecting the other approaches she has named. Pluralism and feminism are not substitutes for

formalism and expressionism.(42) Neither should they be seen as a stylistic movement or a call for freedom

of self-expression, which underlay 1970s pluralism in art. Pluralism in feminism should be understood as a

theoretical stance(43) towards culture which allows not only differences and that no particular is better, but for gaps and areas that cannot be equally experienced by everyone. Feminists seeking change in the art world have assessed relations "between a range of potential practices and the sites of their effective deployment within a field contested by official and emergent cultural strategies." (44)

Feminist art criticism should be understood to offer to art education a fundamental questioning of the values in art via the "accident of history" that has left art practices "sexist," (45) new interpretations of art, and perhaps even compensation for the precedures, biases, deletions, and role models that have often left female students feeling like "others."(46) Criticism that is non-feminist can also offer new interpretations 172

of art and bring a questioning to traditional ways of

understanding the nature of art. Other types of

criticism acknowledge subjectivity and bias, and are

written as advocacy. But none defers to the importance

of women as a force in and a perspective on art and its

traditions - traditions that inform the practice of art

education. Feminist art criticism, as a group of

verbal discourses that intersect on women's issues and

art, allows for expanded understanding and appreciation

of art. It includes women as equal partners in the

enterprises of art and education. The projects of

feminist criticism brought into education can help

bring gender into focus. They contribute to bringing

society to a more tolerant, encompassing, pluralistic

state.

I began this chapter with a quote from

Shakespeare's Hamlet. Shakespeare is one of the most

oft and traditionally quoted litterateurs, and in

citing him I trail hosts of scholars who legitimate

whatever they argue with the stamp of this man's

eloquence. I take small pleasure in adapting them to a

context whose stance is against the traditions in which

they are ensconsed. Perhaps I should attribute the quote to Shakespeare's sister, the invisible voice of a

woman forgotten by mainstream history and unearthed

first by the imagination of Virginia Woolf. But 173 lately, the voices of women who have lived are heard.

They remind us that there are historical subjects of many voices, that "Shakespeare's sister's" represents but one. Acknowledging that one woman's words cannot speak "truth" for all women any more than those of

Shakespeare speak for all humans, I conclude with the words of artist and poet May Stevens,

let the space between speak, the empty space that we each can fill as that which is present and juxtaposed stirs up, brings into life, new aspects, shadings, modulations.(47) 174

Reference Notes: Implications of Feminist Art Criticism for Art Education

(1) William Shakespeare, Hamlet.

(2) Education is one of three areas identified by Lise Vogel for developing the feminist project in art (criticism and history of art are the other two). Lise Vogel, "Fine Arts and Feminism: The Awakening Consciousness," Feminist Studies 2, no. 1 (1974): 25-26. Feminist education includes, as Renee Sandell has pointed out, both formal and informal means. Renee K. Sandell, "Feminist Art Education: Definition, Assessment and Application to Contemporary Art Education," (Ph.D. dissertation, The Ohio State University, 1978).

(3) See Ibid., and Georgia Collins and Renee Sandell, Women, Art, and Education (Reston, Va.: NAEA, 1984) .

(4) Linda Nochlin, "Why Are There No Great Women Artists?" in Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, edited by Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran (New York: Basic Books, Inc./signet, 1971), 481. Even within Nochlin's critique, another feminist art critic and historian, Gloria F. Orenstein, detects an implicit acceptance of the traditional structure of art history. Nochlin assumes, remarks Orenstein, "that if we are not familiar with the names of great women artists obviously then none existed." Orenstein poses a different question, one underlying Eleanor Tufts' study of women artists, Our Hidden Heritage, "why is so little known about great women artists of the past?" Gloria Feman Orenstein, "Review Essay: Art History," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 2 (1975): 507. Lise Vogel criticizes Nochlin's essay for similar reasons, saying that Nochlin fails to imagine alternatives and is mired in an idea of the reversal of sexual objectification. Lise Vogel, "Fine Arts and Feminism: The Awakening Consciousness," Feminist Studies 2, no. 1 (1974): 20-22.

(5) A study cited by Letty Cottin Pogrebin in Growing Up Free: Raising Your Child in the Eighties (New York: McGraw Hill, Inc., 1980) indicates that male babies raised in American homes, for instance, are allowed to cry longer than female babies. This is just one example of many differences that Pogrebin has compiled. Numerous studies document that children have been socialized to know the expectations of their 175 gender by the time they are of preschool age. See, for example, Jerome Kagan, "The Emergence of Sex Differences," School Review 80 (February 1972): 219-227; Lawrence Kohlberg, "A Cognitive-Developmental Analysis of "Children's Sex-Role Concepts and Attitudes," in The Development of Sex Differences, edited by Eleanor Maccoby (Palo Alto, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1966), although Carol Gilligan, in In a Different Voice has now challenged the assumptions conveyed in Kohlberg's work; Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Nagy Jacklin, The Psychology of Sex Differences (Palo Alto, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1974); Betty Levy, "The School's Role in the Sex-Role Stereotyping of Girls: A Feminist Review of the Literature," Feminist Studies 1 (Summer 1972): 5-23; and Betty Levy and Judith Stacey, "Sexism in the Elementary School: A Backward and Forward Look," Phi Delta Kappan 55 (October 1973): 105-109, 123.

(6) Cheri Register, "Review Essay: Literary Criticism," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 6, no. 2 (1980): 272.

(7) Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929), 70.

(8) Arlene Raven, "Picture This Or Why Is Art Important?" (Houston, Tex: The Judy Chicago Word Image Network, 1982).

(9) Nochlin, 483.

(10) Griselda Pollock, "Art, Art School, Culture: Individualism After the Death of the Artist," exposure 24, no. 3 (Fall 1986): 23. Pollock refers to Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses; Notes Towards and Investigation," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays and K. Jones and K. Williamson, "The Birth of the Schoolroom," in Ideology and Consciousnous 6 (1979) . Pollock argues similarly in "Feminism and Modernism," in Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement, 1970-1985, edited by Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock (London: Pandora Press, 1987), 79-124. The arguments and evidences posed by Nochlin and Pollock are developed in the field of art education by Renee Sandell in her doctoral study, "Feminist Art Education: Definition, Assessment, and Application to Contemporary Art Education," especially in the section titled "Sexism in Art;" and by Sandell and Georgia 176

Collins in Feminist Art Education. The reader is referred to their research.

(11) National Endowment for the Arts, Toward Civilization (Washington, D.C.: The National Endowment for the Arts, 1987). Reprinted in NAEA News 30, no. 3 (June 1988): 3.

(12) I am aware that - and have purposely - mixed ideological perspectives underlying Toward Civilization and my arguments for feminist criticism in education. The "enlightenment" envisioned in Toward Civilization is an valuing of a set "truths" understood as universal, whereas the "enlightenment advocated here is a pluralistic understanding of all values and knowledges. Another document (with the same singular universal perspective) I could have quoted for these educational goals is the Getty Center for Education in the A r t ’s Beyond Creating. Georgia Collins and Renee Sandell challenge the educational approach espoused in this document (discipline-based art education) from a feminist and pluralist standpoint in "Informing the Promise of DBAE: Remember the Women, Children, and Other Folk," Journal of Multi-Cultural and Cross Cultural Research in Art Education 6, no. 1 (Fall 1988): 55-63.

(13) Woolf, 68.

(14) Ibid., 68-69.

(15) John Hospers, "Artistic Criticism," in Understanding the Arts (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice Hall, Inc., 1982): 297.

(16) E. Louis Lankford, "A Phenomenological Methodology for Art Criticism," Studies in Art Education 25, no. 3 (1984): 151.

(17) Webster's Third New international Dictionary. Quoted from Kenneth Marantz, "The Work of Art and the Object of Appreciation," in Improving the Teaching of Art Appreciation, Research and Development Team for lthe improvement of Teaching Art Appreciation in the Secondary Schools, David W. Ecker, Project Director, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education, Burearu of Research. Final report RF 2006. I cite from page 1 of a retyped version from the author. 177

(18) Edmund B. Feldman, "The Teacher as Model Critic," Journal of Aesthetic Education 7, no. 1 (1973): 50, 53. My own understanding of "art appreciation" as a function of "art criticism" is the result of numerous conversations with Professor Marantz on the subject. While we are at odds in our understandings, I have come to understand that "art appreciation," as used by Professor Marantz in his 1966 article, is today divided and subsumed within the headings of practices in art education that are called art criticism and art history. The goals of these activities in art education include appreciation. This goal is, of course, a different outcome than that practiced by critics and historians of art.

(19) Marantz, 12-13.

(20) Dan Nadaner, "Critique and Intervention: Implications of Social Theory for Art Education," Studies in Art Education 26, no. 1 (Fall 1984): 25.

(21) Ibid.,, footnote

(22) Ibid.,, 25.

(23) Ibid.,, 21.

(24) Ibid.,r 22.

(25) Karen A. Hamblen Art Criticism Instruction: Theoretical and Research Foundations, Sociological Relationships, and Teaching Methodologies," Studies in Art Education 27, no. 4 (1986): 167.

(26) Kristin G. Congdon, "Multi-Cultural Approaches to Art Criticism," Studies in Art Education 30, no. 3 (Spring 1989).

(27) Ibid., 182.

(28) Frances Maher and Charles Rathbone, "Teacher Education and Feminist Theory: Some Implications for Practice," American Journal of Education 94, no. 2 (1986): 214.

(29) Ibid., 216.

(30) Ibid., 216-217. 178

(31) Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering: Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy,” paper presented at the 10th Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice, Bergamo Conference Center, Dayton, Ohio, October 26-29, 1988, unpublished, 14-15.

(32) Ibid., 16.

(33) Patrocinio Schweickert, "What Are We Doing, Really? - Feminist Criticism and the Problem of Theory," Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory (Fall 1985). Citations from author's manuscript. Although Schweickert is focused on the pluralisms within feminist literary criticism, I would extend her conceptual model of the conversation to the classroom.

(34) Trinh T. Minh-ha, "Introduction" to Discourse 8 (Fall-Winter 1986-1987): 3.

(35) Ellsworth, 15. Ellsworth quotes Mary Gentile, Film Feminisms: Theory and Practice (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 7.

(36) Ellsworth, 15.

(37) Judith Mayne, "Feminist Film Theory and Women at the Movies," Profess ion, (1987), 16.

(38) Mayne, 16. Mayne discusses ideas from de Laurentis's book Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

(39) Mayne, 18. Quoted from Linda Gordon, "What's New in Women's History," in Feminist Studies/ Critical Studies, edited by Teresa de Laurentis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 22.

(40) Georgia C. Collins, "Feminist Approaches to Education," Journal of Aesthetic Education 15, no. 2 (April 1981): 87. Collins developed the idea from from Gayle Grahm Yates, What Women Want, The Ideas of the Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975) (correspondence with Collins, February 24, 1989).

(41) Collins, 87.

(42) Pollock, 104. 179

(43) Owens, 62. Owens distinguishes the feminist theoretical stance from being "single-issue movement." He additionally warns that forcing a coalition of feminist voices as a single-issue movement which stands for other marginalized and oppressed groups quickly exhausts lengthy consideration of oppression and marginalization (p. 62).

(44) Ibid., 104.

(45) Annette Kolodny uses these phrases in reference to the literary canon, in "Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Thory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism, in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays in Women, Literature, and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 151.

(46) Similar offerings are posited (though not addressed to education) by Moira Roth in "Visions and Re-visions: Rosa Luxemburg and the Artist's Mother," in Artforum 19, no. 3 (November 1980): 36-39; Lucy R. Lippard in "Issue and Taboo," in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984), 123-148; and Griselda Pollock in "Feminism and Modernism." Georgia Collins addresses them to education in "Reflections on the Head of Medusa," Studies in Art Education 19, no. 2 (1978): 10-18 and in "Considering an Androgynous Model for Art Education," Studies in Art Education 18, no. 2 (1977): 54-62. In discussing types of questioning in the art classroom, Elizabeth Sacca notes that art teachers can provide support for a class context "where stereotyped notions of sex differences and the means of representing women and men can be challenged." Elizabeth J. Sacca, "Commentary: Invisible Women: Questioning Recognition and Status in Art Education," Studies in Art Education 30, no. 2 (Winter 1988).

(47) May Stevens, letter to Patricia Mathews, February 18, 1986. Quoted from Mathews, "A Dialogue of Silence: May Stevens' Ordinary/Extraordinary, 1977-86," Art Criticism 13, no. 2 (1982): 39. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Parveen, Rosalind Coward, and Elizabeth Cowie. "Editorial." m/f 1978: 3-5.

Alcoff, Linda. "Cultural Femininism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13, no. 3 (Spring, 1988): 405-437.

Alloway, Lawrence. "Women's Art in the '70s." In Feminist Collage: Educating Women in the Visual Arts, ed. Judy Loeb, 59-77. New York: Teachers College Press, 1979. Reprinted from Art in America (May-June 1976) .

Andre, Linda. "Body Language: Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti." exposure 22 (Summer 1984): 19-27.

Arbuthnot, Lucie B. "Main Trends in Feminist Criticism in Film, Literature, and Art History: The Decade of the 1970s." Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1982.

Auerbach, Nina. "Engorging the Patriarchy." In Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, 150-160. Ed. Shari Benstock. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987.

Barry, Judith and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. "Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art-Making." In Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, 87-98. Ed. Arlene Raven, Cassandra L. Langer, and Joanna Frueh. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987. Reprinted from LIP: Feminist Art Journal [Australia] (1981/19821 and in an edited version in Screen (Summer 1980).

Belenky, Mary Field, Blythe McVicker Clincy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule. Women1s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1986.

180 181

Bright, Deborah. "Engendered Dilemmas (or, why we don't need more articles on 'Gender and the Media'." Views 10, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 12-15, 20-2 1 .

Brooke. "Retreat to Cultural Feminism." In Feminist Revolution, 65-69. Ed. Kathie Sarachild. New Paltz, N.Y.: Redstockings, 1975.

Broude, Norma and Mary D. Garrard. "Discussion: An Exchange on the Feminist Critique of Art History." The Art Bulletin 71, no. 1 (March 1989): 124-126.

Cherry, Deborah. "Feminist Interventions: Feminist Imperatives." Art History 5 (1982): 501-508.

Chicago, Judy. Through the Flower: My Struggles as a Woman Artist. Garden City, N.J., 1973.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1978.

Collins, Georgia. "Considering an Androgynous Model for Art Education." Studies in Art Education 18, no. 2 (1977) , 54-62.

______. "Feminist Approaches to Art Education." Journal of Aesthetic Education 15 (April 1981): 83-94.

______. "Reflections on the Head of Medusa." Studies in Art Education 19, no. 2 (1978): 10-18.

______and Renee Sandell. "Informing the Promise of DBAE: Remember the Women, Children, and Other Folk." Journal of Multi-Cultural and Cross-Cultural Research in Art Education 6, no. 1 (Fall 1988) : 55-63.

______and ______. Women, Art, and Education. Reston, Va.: National Art Education Association, 1984 .

Congdon, Kristin G. "Multi-Cultural Approaches to Art Criticism." Studies in Art Education 30, no. 3 (Spring 1989). 182

Cowie, Elizabeth. "Women, Representation, and the Image.” Screen Education, no. 23 (Summer 1977), 15-22.

Coxhead, David. "Growing Up: Lucy Lippard with David Coxhead." Art Monthly [U.K.], no. 32 (1979-80), 4-9.

Dabakis, Melissa. "Re-imagining Women's History." Rosa Alice May Stevens Ordinary Extraordinary [exhibition catalog]. Ed. Melissa Dabakis and Janis Bell. Gambier, Ohio: Kenyon College, 1988.

Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.

Davis, Judy and Weaver, Juanita. "Dimensions of Spirituality." in The Politics of Women's Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power Within the Feminist Movement, 368-372. Ed. Charlene Spretnak. Garden City, N.J.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1982.

Deckard, Barbara Sinclair. The Women's Movement: Political, Socioeconomic, and Psychological Issues, third edition. New York: Harper and Row, 1983.

Donovan, Josephine. Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1985.

Eisenstein, Hester. "introduction." in The Future of Difference, xv-xxiv. Ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine. Boston: G.K. Hall and Co. for Barnard College Women's Center, 1980.

Ellsworth, Elizabeth. "Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering: Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy." Paper presented at the 10th Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice, Bergamo Conference Center, Dayton, Ohio, October 26-29, 1988, unpublished,

Feldman, Edmund B. "The Teacher as Model Critic." Journal of Aesthetic Education 7, no. 1 (1973): 50-57.

Frank, Patrick. "A Fan's Guide to Art Criticism." New Art Examiner 12 (April 1985): 24-27. 183

Freeman, Jo. The Politics of Women's Liberation. New York: McKay, 1975.

French, Marilyn. Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals. New York: Summit Books, 1985.

Frueh, Joanna. "Allegory, An-Other World." Art Journal 45 (Winter 1985): 323-329.

______. "A Chorus of Women's Voices." New Art Examiner 15 (May 1988): 25-27.

______. "Towards a Feminist Theory of Art Criticism" [part I]. New Art Examiner 12, no. 4 (January 1985): 41-44. Reprinted, with part II, as "Towards a Feminist Theory of Art Criticism." In Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, 153-166. Edited by Arlene Raven, Cassandra L. Langer, and Joanna Frueh. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987.

______. "Towards a Feminist Theory of Art Criticism, part II." New Art Examiner 12, no. 9 (June 1985): 32-34. Reprinted, with part I, as "Towards a Feminist Theory of Art Criticism." in Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, 153-166. Edited by Arlene Raven, Cassandra L. Langer, and Joanna Frueh. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987.

Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Norton, 1971. Originally published 1845.

Gardiner, Judith Kegan. "Mind mother: psychoanalysis and feminism." In Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, 113-145. Ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn. New York: Methuen, 1985.

Gatlin, Rochelle. American Women Since 1945. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987.

Getty Center for Education in the Arts. Beyond Creating. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Trust, 1985.

Gilbert, Sandra M. "What Do Feminist Critics Want? A Postcard from the Volcano." In Feminist Literary Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, 29-45. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. 184

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. His Religion and Hers. Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1976. Originally published 1923.

Gilligan, Carol. in a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.

______. The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1971.

Gornick, Vivian. "Toward a Definition of Female Sensibility." In Essays in Feminism. New York,

Gouma-Peterson, Thalia and Mathews, Patricia. "The Feminist Critique of Art History." Art Bulletin 69, no. 3 (September 1987): 326-357.

______. "On Feminist Criticism." Women Artists News 12, nos. 4 & 5 (Fall/Winter 1987): 32, 31.

Greene, Gayle and Kahn, Coppelia Kahn. "Feminist scholarship and the social construction of woman." In Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, 1-36. Ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn. London: Methuen, 1985.

Griffin, Susan. Woman and Nature: The Roaring inside Her. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1978.

Hamblen, Karen A. "Three Areas of Concern for Art Criticism instruction: Theoretical and Research Foundations, Sociological Relationships, and Teaching Methodologies." Studies in Art Education 27, no. 4 (1986): 163-173.

Hammond, Harmony. "Horseblinders." Chap. in Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art, and the Martial Arts. New York: Time and Space Ltd. Press, 1984. Reprinted from Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and politics, no. 9 (1980).

Hope, Diane s. "A Rhetorical Definition of Movements: The Drama of Rebirth in Radical Feminism." Ph.D. diss., State university of New York at Buffalo, 1975.

Hospers, John. "Artistic Criticism." Chap. in Understanding the Arts, 295-332. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1982. 185

Illich, Ivan. Gender. London: Marion Boyars Publishers, Ltd., 1983.

Jacobsen, Carol. "Two Lives: Ordinary/Extraordinary." Art in America 77, no. 2 (February 1989): 152-156; 183-185.

Kagan, Jerome. "The Emergence of Sex Differences." School Review 80 (February 1972): 219-227.

Kaplan, Cora. "Pandora's box: subjectivity, class and sexuality in socialist feminist criticism." in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, 146-176. Ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn. New York: Methuen, 1985.

Kaplan, Sydney Janet. "Varieties of feminist criticism." In Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, 37-58. Ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn. New York: Methuen, 1985.

Kelly, Mary. "On sexual politics and art." In Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement, 1970-1985, 303-312. Ed. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock. London: Pandora Press, 1987. Reprinted from Art and Politics. Ed. Brandon Taylor. Winchester School of Art, 1980).

______. "Re-viewing Modernist Criticism." In Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, 87-103. Ed. Brian Wallis. New York: New Museum, 1984.

Kohlberg, Lawrence. "A Cognitive-Developmental Analysis of Children's Sex-Role Concepts and Attitudes." In The Development of Sex Differences. Ed. Eleanor Maccoby. Palo Alto, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1966.

Kolbowski, Sylvia. "Covering Mapplethorpe's Lady." Art in America 71 (Summer 1983), 10-11.

Kolodny, Annette. "Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism." In The New Feminist Criticism: Essays in Women, Literature, and Theory, 144-167. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 186

. "Respectability is Eroding the Revolutionary Potential of Feminist Criticism." The Chronicle of Higher Education, (May 4, 1988), A52.

Kuhn, Annette. Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1982.

Kuspit, Donald B. Editor's Preface. Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, ix-x. Ed. Arlene Raven, Sandra Langer, and Joanna Frueh. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988.

. "May Stevens in the Self's Heroic and Unheroic Past." In May Stevens Ordinary Extraordinary. A Summation 1977-1984. Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1984.

______. "Tired Criticism, Tired Radicalism." Art in America (January 1983).

Langer, Sandra L. "Against the Grain: A Working Gynergenic Art Criticism." International Journal of Women's Studies 5, no. 3 (May-June 1982): 246-264. Reprinted in Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology,111-132. Ed. Arlene Raven, Cassandra L. Langer, and Joanna Frueh. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, Inc., 1987.

______. "Emerging Feminist Art Histsory." Art Criticism 1, no. 2 (1979): 66-83.

______. "Feminist Art History: Critique Critiqued." Women Artists News 12, nos. 4 & 5 (Fall/Winter 1987) : 38, 62.

______. "Harmonious Imagination: Paintings by Robert De Niro." Arts Magazine 9 (May 1986): 10-13.

. "Is There a New Feminist Criticism?" Women Artists News 10, nos. 5-6 (September 1985): 4-5.

Lankford, E. Louis. "A Phenomenological Methodology for Art Criticism." Studies in Art Education 25, no. 3 (1984): 151-158.

Levy, Betty. "The School's Role in the Sex-Role Stereotyping of Girls: A Feminist Review of the Literature." Feminist Studies 1 (Summer 1972): 5-23. 187

Levy, Betty and Judith Stacey. "Sexism in the Elementary School: A Backward and Forward Look." Phi Delta Kappan 55 (October 1973): 105-109, 123.

Linker, Kate. "Representation and Sexuality." In Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, 391- 415. Ed. Brian Wallis. New York: New Museum, 1984.

Lippard, Lucy R. "Changing Since Changing." Chap. in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art, 1-12. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1976.

______. "Headlines, Heartlines, Hardlines: Advocacy Criticism as Activism." In Cultures in Contention, 242-247. Ed. Douglas Kahn and Diane Neumaier. Seattle, Wash.: The Real Comet Press, 1985.

______. "Hot Potatoes: Art and Politics in 1980." Chap. in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change, 161-172. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984. Reprinted from Block, no. 4 (1981).

______. "Issue and Taboo." Chap. in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change, 125-148. New York: E.P. Dutton, inc., 1984. Reprinted from Issue: Social Strategies bv Women Artists [exhibition catalog). London: institute for Contemporary Arts, 1980.

______. "Masses and Meetings." In May Stevens: Ordinary. Extraordinary. A Summation 1977-1984 [exhibition catalog). Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1984.

______. Prefatory Note to section on feminist art. Chap. in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change, 88-89. New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984

______. "(I) Some Political Posters and (II) Some Questions They Raise About Art and Politics." Chap. in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change, 26-36. New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984. Reprinted from Data Arte, no. 19 (November-December 1975). 188

______. "Sweeping Exchanges: The Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s." Chap. in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change, 149-158. New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984. Reprinted from Art Journal (Fall-Winter 1980).

______. "Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power." Chap. in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, 341-358. Ed. Brian Wallis. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984.

Maccoby, Eleanor and Carol Nagy Jacklin. The Psychology of Sex Differences. Palo Alto, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1974.

Maher, Frances and Charles Rathbone. "Teacher Education and Feminist Theory: Some Implications for Practice." American Journal of Education 94, no. 2 (1986) : 214-235.

Mandoki, Katya. "The Double Struggle: 'La Lucha Libre.'" Translated by Susan Cergol. exposure 22 (Summer 1984): 29-34.

Marantz, Kenneth A. "The Work of Art and the Object of Appreciation." In Improving the Teaching of Art Appreciation. Research and Development Team for the Improvement of Teaching Art Appreciation in the Secondary Schools. David W. Ecker, Project Director. U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education, Bureau of Research. Final report RF 2006.

Marcus, Jane. "Still Practice: A/Wrested Alphabet." In Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, 79-97. Ed. Shari Benstock. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987.

Mathews, Patricia. "A Dialogue of Silence: May Stevens' Ordinary. Extraordinary, 1977-1986." Art Criticism 3, no. 2 (1987): 34-42.

______. "What is Female Imagery?" Women Artists News 10 (November 1984):5-7.

Mayne, Judith. "Feminist Film Theory and Women at the Movies." Profession (1987): 14-19.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. "introduction." Discourse 8 (Fall-Winter 1986-1987): 3-9. 189

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 16 (Autumn 1975). Reprinted in (among others) Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representationf 361-373. Ed. Brian Wallis. New York: New Museum, 1984.

Nadaner, Dan. "Critique and Intervention: Implications of Social Theory for Art Education." Studies in Art Education 26, no. 1 (Fall 1984): 20-26.

National Endowment for the Arts. Toward Civilization. Washington, D.C.: The National Endowment for the Arts, 1987. Reprinted in NAEA News 30, nos. 3-6 (June, August, October, December 1988).

Nemser, Cindy. "Art Criticism and Women Artists." Journal of Aesthetic Education, (June 1973): 73-83.

Neumaier, Diane. "Alfred, Harry, Emmet, Georgia, Barbara, Edith, and me." exposure 22 (Summer 1984): 5-8.

Newton, Judith and Deborah Rosenfelt. "Toward a materialist-feminist criticism." In Feminist Criticism and Social Change, xv-xxxix. Ed. Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt. New York: Methuen, 1985.

Nochlin, Linda. "Why Are There No Great Women Artists?" In Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, 480-510. Ed. Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1971. Reprinted as "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" In Art and Sexual Politics; Women's Liberation, Women Artists, and Art History. Ed. Thomas B. Hess. New York: Collier Books, 1971. Also reprinted in Art News 69, no. 9 (January 1971).

Orenstein, Gloria Feman. "Review Essay: Art History." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 2 (1975): 505-525.

Owens, Craig. "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism." In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, 57-82. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983. 190

Parker, Roszika and Pollock, Griselda. "Fifteen years of feminist action: from practical strategies to strategic practices." In Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement, 1970-1985, 3-78. Ed. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1987.

______. Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement, 1970-1985. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1987.

Perreault, John. "Women Artists Are Also Worker-Artists." Village Voice Art Supplement 32 (October 6, 1987): 10-13.

Pilkington, Reen. "Monocrone - A Women's [South London] Photography Collective." exposure 24 (Fall 1986) : 46-53.

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin. Growing Up Free: Raising Your Child in the Eighties. New York: McGraw Hill, Inc., 1980.

Pollock, Griselda. "Art, Art School, Culture: Individualism After the Death of the Artist." exposure 24, no. 3 (Fall 1986): 21-33..

______. "Feminism ana t.. .crnism." In Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement 1970-1985, 79-124. Ed. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1987.

______. "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity." Chap. in Vision and difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, 50-90. London: Routledge, 1988.

Raven, Arlene. "Cinderella's Sister's Feet." Village Voice Art Supplement 32 (October 6, 1987): 6-9.

______. "Commemoration: Public Sculpture and Performance." Chap. in Crossing Over: Feminism and Art of Social Concern, 199-208. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988.

_. "Dark Horse: New Paintings by Tom Knechtel." Arts Magazine 55 (April 1981): 146-147. 191

______. "The Last Essay on Feminist Art Criticism." In Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, 227-238. Ed. Arlene Raven, Cassandra Langer, and Joanna Frueh. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987.

______. "Picture This Or Why Is Art Important?" Houston, Tex.: The Judy Chicago Word & Image Network, 1982.

______. "Women Look At Women: Feminist Art for the Eighties." Chap. in Crossing Over: Feminism and Art of social Concern, 13-22. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987. Reprinted from Women Look At Women: Feminist Art for the Eighties [exhibition catalog], Allentown, Pa.: Muhlenberg College, 1981.

"Redstockings' Manifesto." In Mascu1ine/Feminine, 272-274. Ed. Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

Register, Cheri. "Review Essay: Literary Criticism." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 6, no. 2 (1980): 268-282.

Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language. New York: Norton, 1978.

______. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton, 1976.

______. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1979.

______. "Toward a Woman-Centered University." Chap. in On Lies, Secrets, and Silences. New York: Norton, 1979.

______. A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. New York: Norton, 1981.

Ricard, Rene. "Not About Julian Schnabel." Artforum 19, no. 10 (Summer 1981): 74-80.

Richards, Janet Radcliffe. The Sceptical Feminist. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

Rosier, Martha. "The Private and the Public: Feminist Art in California." Artforum 16, no. 1 (September 1977): 66-74. 192

Roth, Moira. "visions and Re-Visions: Rosa Luxemburg and the Artist's Mother." Artforum 19, no. 3 (November 1980): 36-39.

Sacca, Elizabeth J. "Commentary. Invisible Women: ^ Questioning Recognition and Status in Art Education." studies in Art Education 30, no. 2 (Winter 1988).

Sandell, Renee. "Female Aesthetics: The Women's Movement and Its Aesthetic Split." Journal of Aesthetic Education 14, no. 4 (October 1980): 106-109.

______. "Feminist Art Education: Definition, Assessment and Application to Contemporary Art Education." Ph. D. diss., The Ohio State University, 1978.

Sarachild, Kathie. "Consciousness Raising: A Radical Weapon." In Feminist Revolution, 131-137. Ed. Kathie Sarachild. New Paltz, N.Y.: Redstockings, Inc., 1975.

Schweickert, Patrocinio. "What Are We Doing, Really? - Feminist Criticism and the Problem of Theory." Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory (Fall 1985) .

Semmel, Joan and April Kingsley. "Sexual Imagery in Women's Art." Woman's Art Journal 1 (Spring/Summer 1980): 1-6.

Showalter, Elaine. "Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and The Woman of the Year." Raritan (Fall 1983) .

______. "Women's Time, Women's Space: Writing the History of Feminist Criticism." In Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, 30-44. Ed. Shari Benstock. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Skiles, Jacqueline. "The United States: 1970-1980." In Women Artists of the World, 69-76. Ed. Cindy Lyle, Sylvia Moore, and Cynthia Navaretta. New York: Midmarch Associates, Publishers, 1984.

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. "Winning the Game When the Rules Have Been Changed: Art Photography and Postmodernism." exposure 23 (Spring 1985). 193

Sperber, Aneta. "Photoquebequoise." exposure 22 (Summer 1984): 35-39.

Stanley, Julia Penelope and Susan J. Wolfe. "Toward a Feminist Aesthetic." Chrysalis 6 (1978): 57-71.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. The Woman’s Bible. New York: Arno Press, 1974.

Sternhill, Ruth. "A Whole New Poetics Beginning Here: Theories of Feminist Literary Criticism." Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1983.

Stevens, May. "Looking Backward in Order to Look Forward: Memories of a Racist Girlhood." Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics 4, no. 3 (1982).

______. "My Work and My Working-Class Father." In Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work. Ed. Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels, New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

Ordinary. Extraordinary. Artist's book. New York: Privately printed, 1980.

Storr, Robert. "Other 'Others.'" Village Voice Art Supplement 32 (October 6, 1987): 15-17.

Sweetman, Alex. "Larry Clark: Drugs and Violence, Rhythm and Blues." exposure 24, no. 2 (Summer 1986) .

Tamblyn, Christine. "New Approaches to Feminist Theory." High Performance, no. 38 (vol. 10, nc 2, 1987): 5.

Tickner, Lisa. "Feminism, Femininity, and Women's Art." LIP: Feminist Arts Journal [Australia] { (1984) .

______. "May Stevens." In May Stevens, Ordinary/Extraordinary. A Summation 1977-1984 [exhibition catalog]. Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1984.

. "Sexuality and/in Representation: Five British Artists." in Difference: On Representation and Sexuality [exhibition catalog], 19-30. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984. 194

Vogel, Lise. "Fine Arts and Feminism: The Awakening Consciousness." Feminist Studies 2, no. 1 (1974): 3-37. Reprinted in Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, 21-57. Ed. Arlene Raven, Cassandra L. Langer, and Joanna Frueh. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988.

Walker, John A. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht: Revolution, Remembrance, Representation. London: Pentonville Gallery, 1986.

Wallach, Alan. "May Stevens: On the Stage of History." Arts Magazine 53, no. 3 (November 1978): 150-151.

Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary. Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1972.

Withers, Josephine. "Revisioning Our Foreraothers: Reflections on the Ordinary. Extraordinary Art of May Stevens." Feminist Studies 13, no. 3 (Fall 1987) : 485-505.

______. "Speakeasy Looks at Feminism Today." New Art Examiner 14, no. 11 (Summer 1987): 13-14.

"The Women's Movement in Art." Arts Magazine 61, no. 1 (September 1986): 54-56.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929.