FEMINISM & ART (9 VIEWS)
FEMINISM & ART (9 VIEWS)
HOW MIGHT WE ASSESS FEMINISM'S INITIAL IMPACTS ON
ART, ITS SUBSEQUENT HISTORICIZATION, AND ITS
CONTINUING INFLUENCE? ARTFORUM ASKED LINDA
NOCHLIN, ANDREA FRASER, AMELIA JONES, DAN
CAMERON, COLLIER SCHORR, JAN AVGIKOS, CATHERINE
DE ZEGHER, ADRIAN PIPER, AND PEGGY PHELAN TO
CONSIDER THIS QUESTION IN AN ONLINE ROUNDTABLE
ASSEMBLED IN AUGUST. THEIR RESPONSES-REFINED BY
THE PARTICIPANTS AND PRESENTED IN THE FOLLOWING
PAGES-SUGGEST THAT FEMINISM AND FEMINIST
DISCOURSES AS THEY HAVE FOUND EXPRESSION IN
CONTEMPORARY ART ARE AMBIVALENT ("IN THE FULLEST
SENSE OF THAT TERM," AS PHELAN PUTS IT),
MULTIFACETED, AND EVER EVOLVING.
LINDA NOCHLIN
As a participant in the women's art movement of
the late '60s and early '70s, I have decidedly
mixed feelings about the historicization of
feminism. It is difficult to see lived experience
transformed into historical text. Things that
seemed open and dynamic are now pinned down and
displayed like butterflies in a case. Of course,
there is also the tendency to idealize the past,
to see the women's art movement as totally
united. This was not the case: Although all of us
were for justice, equity, and a fair shake for
women artists, critics, and academics, our views
were extremely varied, and we were often at odds
with one another. I, for instance, disagreed with
the perhaps unconscious essentialism of those who
propagated Central Imagery as a compositional
characteristic of women's art, or believed in
Great Goddesses, or saw women as victims.
Today, it seems to me that the fundamental
differences within feminism exist between those
artists and critics who think of "woman" as a
fixed category and those who think of it as
something more fluid, constructed, and variable.
There is also a difference between those who
think of feminist art and art history as critical
practices and those who think that pure,
"positive" images of woman are possible-that
there is some essence of femininity out there to
be captured. Perhaps '70s feminism, powerful and
necessary though it was, is now outmoded;
feminism has transformed and is itself
transformed in contemporary practice. Feminist
politics today is far more multivalent and
self-aware; the battle lines are less clearly
drawn. The binaries-oppressor/victim, good
woman/bad man, pure/impure, beautiful/ugly,
active/passive-are not the point of feminist art
anymore. Ambiguity, androgyny, and
self-consciousness, both formal and psychic, are
de rigueur in challenging thought and practice.
But there is no point in asking how relevant
feminism is to art practice, history, and
criticism today, since feminist consciousness is
pervasive even when unacknowledged or demeaned.
Feminism is not only overtly present but has over
the past thirty years irrevocably changed the way
we think about art, the body, the relationship
between the viewer and the artwork, and the
standing of the various media.
Despite its import, there remains a general lack
of interest in feminism in American museums,
which is unfortunate, to say the least-but which
is only part of a more general refusal by museums
to deal with anything controversial. (The
Brooklyn Museum, which is opening an important
center for feminist art with a regular exhibition
program, is a rare exception.) It is hard to
imagine an American museum putting on a show like
Louvre curator Regis Michel's "Possess and
Destroy: Sexual Strategies in Western Art"
(2000), which demonstrated that much of the great
drawing of the past is based on cruelty toward
the female body. The show included Renaissance
artists, continued through the nineteenth century
with Ingres and Degas, and ended with Picasso. Of
course, most of their pieces, drawn from the
Louvre collection, were beautiful. Michel's show
and catalogue essay made you think about this
strange, contradictory relationship-between
morality, as it were, and aesthetics-which has
long marked the high and low cultures of our
civilization.
In 1971, I wrote an essay titled "Why Have There
Been No Great Women Artists?" but I don't really
believe that "greatness" is the issue at present.
Women artists are recognized as among the most
stimulating, provocative, and visually inventive
of contemporary artmakers. Recently I have been
particularly intrigued by the writings of Aby
Warburg, and Georges Didi-Huberman's fascinating
book about him, detailing the relation of the
Nachleben (afterlife) of antique images to
contemporary feminist art. For example, Pipilotti
Rist's Ever Is Over All, 1997, a wonderful video
of an energetic woman marching down a city street
smashing car windows with a kind of iron flower,
is vitalized by the "afterlife" of the antique
maenad and her thyrsus-the female activist is
even dressed in drapery of a sort! Or take Sam
Taylor-Wood's poignant large-scale self-portrait
Fuck, Suck, Spank, Wank, 1993, which brings up
antique and Renaissance memories in the
contrapposto pose, the escaping strands of hair,
the trousers falling about the sitter's feet
(displaced classical drapery)-it's Venus,
transposed by Botticelli and made utterly new in
the artist's studio, with a cabbage instead of a
scallop shell. This photograph is as harmoniously
composed as any Greek frieze, and much the richer
for its references, however unusual, to the past.
I am not talking about anything as academic as
influence here nor anything as trendy as
appropriation. I am speaking, quite literally, of
the afterlife of elements of the Western
tradition achieving new meaning in the work of
women artists who use them as both continuity and
critique in the representation of women.
ANDREA FRASER
I consider myself a second-generation feminist-I
don't mean historically, as in second wave, but
biographically. My mother got involved in the
women's movement in the early '70s and came out
shortly thereafter. I spent the second half of my
childhood in an all-woman, lesbian-feminist
household. At thirteen, I cut school and took a
bus to San Francisco to go to the unveiling of
Judy Chicago's Dinner Party at SF MoMA (a
friend's mother worked on the project). When I
moved to New York a few years later, I was
confused to find that the feminist discourse I
encountered in the art world constructed itself
in opposition to the feminism I grew up with. I
could appreciate critiques of the essentialist
and normative aspects of '70s cultural feminism,
but those critiques often seemed to dismiss the
activism of radical feminism as well.
I see my work in the '80s as very much an effort
to integrate the performative and interventional
dimensions of feminist work from the '70s into an
engagement with the construction of femininity
and female subject positions within discourse,
representation, and, above all, institutions. My
attraction to institutional critique had
everything to do with what Griselda Pollock has
described as the gendered myths, values,
assumptions, silences, and prejudices that
underlay the institutional inscription of
artistic subjects and works. I understood
institutional critique as a feminist practice,
not only in terms of the politics of inclusion
and exclusion, but in terms of the hierarchical
systems of classification that mandate exclusion,
and of the monopolies on definitions of
legitimate culture and cultural legitimacy that
empower exclusion.
Feminism not only provided institutional critique
with a critical object. More important, it
provided a practical methodology. In the context
of paradigms of site-specificity defined by
physical, urban, architectural, geographical, or
geological spaces and places, the constitutive
sites of feminist practice were above all the
body and the political, social, sexual, and
intersubjective relations in which that body
exists: a kind of "relational specificity" that I
see as fundamentally feminist. But what I found
most radical about feminist site-specificity was
less its substantive reformulation of "site" than
the reflexivity demanded by its relational turn.
I understood "The personal is political" above
all as a call for a relationally specific
practice of critical self-reflexivity. And for me
it mandated an institutional critique that
engaged the body within institutions as a
gendered body, and the subject of institutional
discourse as a sexed subject, but a subject whose
desires and fantasies and even whose body itself
are constructed within that institution.
I continued to pursue a feminist institutional
critique into the '90s, especially through the
work of the V-Girls, a performance group in which
I collaborated with Martha Baer, Jessica
Chalmers, Erin Cramer, and Marianne Weems. In my
own work in the course of the decade, however,
the feminist site-specificity that informed my
artistic strategies often seemed to lead me away
from explicitly feminist content. The principles
of that site-specificity demanded that I engage
the most determining forces of the sites in which
I worked. In the context of cultural
institutions, the most determining forces seemed
most often to work their effects through
hierarchies of capital and competence-hierarchies
that are often bound up, historically and
institutionally, with gender but which also
seemed able to traverse gender in increasingly
agile ways. At the same time, my conception of
institutional critique as an ethical rather than
a political practice-a practice, that is,
concerned not with the condition of being
dominated so much as the condition of being
dominant-also seemed to lead me away from
explicitly feminist engagements. While that
notion of an ethical practice was also deeply
rooted in feminism-particularly in feminist
critiques of expertise and mastery-it led me away
from work through which I might engage my own
experiences of gender-based domination or even
determination. So while I continued to consider
myself a feminist, it become more difficult for
me to consider my work feminist.
Recently, however, that began to change. When I
returned to performance a few years ago to engage
the position of the artist, I was brought back to
the very genderedness of institutional
inscriptions of the artist's body and of the
fantasies of freedom and satisfaction,
recognition and reward, for which that body
serves as a kind of screen. Returning to
performance also meant returning to my own body
as a primary site, to my own subjectivity, and
also, reflexively, to my own (institutionally
constituted) fantasies as objects of critique.
What is ironic is that feminism itself made it
possible for the female artist to serve as a site
for the production and reproduction of such
fantasies. That fact may be responsible for the
fundamental ambivalence of what I consider a
feminist institutional critique, an ambivalence
that is for me, once again, rooted in my personal
history as much as in the history of feminist
practice. As I explain at the end of my recent
performance Official Welcome, my mother was also
an artist, a good one, who never got any
recognition.
I don't feel any need to apologize for the
feminist art practices of the '70s. The women's
art movement was one of the most important of the
twentieth century, above all because of the
degree to which it was integrated into a
political movement. It was a political movement
that expanded the definition and scope of what we
understand as political struggle to relations of
power and domination in every domain and
dimension of public and private life. One of the
things that made the women's art movement so
powerful was the way it overcame narrow
definitions of aesthetic culture and of political
struggle at the very same time, and did so within
a project of integrating cultural, social, and
subjective transformation into a single practice.
The challenge for contemporary feminist art
practice is to continue that project. However, in
a context in which that historical relationship
between cultural and political practice no longer
exists, the danger posed for-and by-contemporary
feminist art practice is the abstraction of
"feminist art" from feminism.
AMELIA JONES
I don't think feminism has moved beyond anything,
nor do I think it's productive to bracket off the
'70s as some primitive period of feminist
theorizing that has been superseded. Each
climactic moment of feminist art-history
theorizing and artmaking has developed in complex
relationship with other discourses and with the
feminisms that preceded it. I think the
all-too-common tendency in feminist art writing
to legislate which feminisms are good-i.e.,
productive or theoretically sound-is less
interesting than accounts exploring the
historical complexities of why and when
particular ideas in feminism were developed.
After all, one person's "good" feminism is
another person's "bad" feminism. And such
judgments throw us right back into the abhorrent
(to feminism, I think) role of legislating value.
Today, I think feminisms need to address and
theorize gendered identity so as to accommodate
the intersectionality (per Kimberlé Crenshaw's
valuable theorization in her essay on the
Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings) of how we
position ourselves in the world and how we are
understood by others. Women, if there is such a
discrete category-Sandy Stone and others might
argue otherwise-are never perceived simply or
exclusively as women: Our feminine identity is
always already imbricated in other aspects of our
perceived and experienced identity. Every woman
of color and every queer woman knows this because
she has to. She has no choice.
I see the most interesting artists instinctively
or explicitly working through intersectional
identifications, producing work that navigates
the complexities of identity in the contemporary
world of highly technologized global capitalism.
All we have to do is think about the difference
between how "American" (as an identity category)
was understood on September 10, 2001, and how it
is now understood today (after 9/11, in the midst
of the Bush presidency) to understand why
conceptions of gendered identity from the '70s,
'80s, and even '90s (with its "Bad Girls" shows)
must be rethought. A woman wearing a veil on a
Manhattan subway reads very differently today
from how she would have read before 9/11 (and
before the current US administration suddenly
noticed the misogyny of the Taliban). Given this
situation, I find myself admiring and learning
from Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum, Trinh T.
Minh-ha, Kara Walker, Renée Cox, Susan
Smith-Pinelo, and Laura Aguilar-artists whose
work presses a feminist critique into, and along
with, a critique of racial and ethnic identity,
as these inflect sexual identifications of all
kinds-and from artists such as Susan Silton, Mira
Schor, and Catherine Opie who explore gendered
experience through aspects of pleasure and sexual
orientation or self-identified sexual
positionalities.
I think the crux of the problem (if there is one)
for feminist visual practice and analysis lies in
how we approach identity, and how we theorize and
do interpretation. I would like to see feminist
art historians, critics, and theorists become
more sensitive to the philosophical difficulties
of attempting to break down authoritative modes
of analysis (per the '70s and '80s models of
feminist critical practice) while retaining a
political and coalitional thrust in our practice.
That is, we want to argue for certain "ways of
seeing" (as John Berger would have it) but
without legislating these ways as the only ways.
We want to be forceful, passionate, and
politicized without sliding into prescriptions of
what everyone else should or must do in order to
be considered feminist. We might be more
flexible, acknowledging when our models no longer
work, rather than trying to hang on to them at
the cost of blinding ourselves to new kinds of
visual culture and critical practice. Part of
this project, for me, has to do with being a
historian. In my "Sexual Politics" show at the
UCLA Hammer Museum in 1996, my goal was to look
again at artworks, such as those from the '60s
and '70s by Hannah Wilke and Judy Chicago, that
had been legislated out of dominant narratives of
feminist art history, in order to understand the
trajectory of debates surrounding feminist art.
If we ignore works that have been determined (by
feminists) to exemplify "bad" feminist practices,
then we are in danger of getting very confused
about the complexity of past decades' feminist
debates.
DAN CAMERON
In discussing feminism within the art world
today, I have to confess to feeling somewhat
estranged by a discourse that often seems distant
from my experience of contemporary art and
theory. Perhaps that is compounded by the fact
that I am writing this from Turkey, where so many
issues associated with the "heroic" phase of '70s
feminism are at the forefront of current popular
debate-precisely because the women's movement of
the past is very much a phenomenon of the present
here and in other less-industrialized countries.
(My research over the past several years has
taken me to countries like Brazil, South Africa,
Thailand, and Turkey, where achievements that we
take for granted-birth control, antirape laws,
no-fault divorce-are sometimes a matter of
women's life and death.) The women's movement has
triggered broad cultural changes with
extraordinary social and political repercussions,
and therefore I believe that addressing
contemporary feminism from a global perspective
is of particular importance. Granted, no feminist
has yet been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize
or offered a retrospective by MoMA, but I would
rather focus on the movement's ongoing
accomplishments than on its underrecognition (or
underestimation) within mainstream culture. I
have always believed that it is semidelusional to
seek reward from the very system you have set out
to reform.
Sixteen years ago I published an article in Flash
Art titled "Post-Feminism," proposing that the
rise of neo-Conceptual photography as an
explicitly feminist project signaled a shift that
required a retooling of what was meant by
feminist practice in the art world. As a curator
and writer, I still cannot imagine feminism in
the past tense; I experience it as a constantly
evolving phenomenon, one that informs my
responses to the ever-subtler shadings of value
in contemporary art production. Since
"Post-Feminism," I have tried to expand my own
sense of feminism, so that not only are class,
race, and sexual preference enmeshed in the
discussion, but also war, poverty, and the
environment. What worries me at times is what
seems a tacit backing off from the prospect of
radical practice, as if the future of art were
not completely dependent on the assimilation of
today's most radical practices into tomorrow's
mainstream.
Which leads me to feminism's historicization and
the corresponding implication that the art
history of the '60s and '70s has already been
written. The quagmire might be hypersimplified as
the Carolee Schneemann/Matthew Barney question:
If Schneemann is a clear historical forerunner of
Barney, why is her work marginalized by every
major art institution and historian, while he is
held up as the embodiment (pun intended) of great
art in our time? My answer is simple: The
historian in each of us knows that we are all, at
best, only contributing to a history that will be
written long after we are gone. Yes, as curator
of Schneemann's 1996 retrospective at the New
Museum, I was quite content with having
momentarily pushed that argument to the forefront
of critical discourse, just as I was dismayed by
the inflated rhetoric surrounding Barney's recent
survey at the Guggenheim. But if I sincerely
believe that Schneemann's contribution will be
seen as having far surpassed that of Barney's a
hundred years from now, why should I grant much
importance to what big museums do today? To
paraphrase one of the most hoary clichés of the
counterculture, they are part of the problem, not
the solution.
One other compelling point concerns the
broadening influence of feminist principles,
including the increased artistic investigation
into the global epidemic of violence. I am
thinking of Colombian artist Doris Salcedo's
exploration of the more pernicious effects of
mass murder on an entire culture; of Serbian
artist Milica Tomic's gripping video of herself
suffering the visible marks of invisibly
inflicted wounds as she calmly repeats in several
languages, "I am Milica Tomic"; of Indian artist
Nalini Malani's lonely campaign against
anti-Muslim violence within her home state of
Gujarat (the heart of Hindu nationalism). These
examples, while perhaps seemingly peripheral to
the concerns of American or Western European
artists-one exception is New York artist Marlene
McCarty, whose terrifying drawings viscerally
explore violence against women-deserve
consideration with regard to a culture that
methodically exports real and simulated violence
on an unprecedented scale. Hence, they might also
be thought of as representing a further
extension, and a replenishment, of feminist art
from the roots of its development thirty years
ago.
In conclusion, it might make sense to speak to
how a growing hunger for spiritual fulfillment in
a spiritually degraded society is leading people
to feminist art (or, I could add, any other
idealistic art practice). I recall the New
Museum's experience hosting the Adrian Piper
retrospective a couple of years ago: Having
thought of Piper as a bit of a cult figure, we
were unprepared for the hoards of
twenty-somethings who, filling our galleries,
seemed entirely comfortable with what they were
experiencing. At the time, I reflected that most
art skips a generation before finding its
audience and that a generation raised on the
Internet no longer questions the precepts of
Conceptual art. Now I'm happy to expand that
thought to propose that feminism, as a
phenomenon, must seem refreshingly radical to a
generation raised on Baywatch. Or, to put it more
generously, this generation, facing a previously
unimagined set of challenges, assumptions, and
possibilities, can now experience feminism as
something its founders never could: a historical
continuity, flowing from one generation to the
next, always adaptable to the needs and strengths
of a new wave of the curious and the bold.
COLLIER SCHORR
It is interesting that the "destruction of
pleasure" is sometimes cited in relation to
earlier feminisms. I never thought that women in
the '70s movements were rejecting
pleasure-rather, they were claiming authorship of
it. Of course, this is the perspective of someone
who grew up reading her mother's copies of Ms.
magazine. I think we often overlook the fact that
bra burning was actually sexy and that women's
sexuality had to-if only momentarily and
symbolically-extricate itself from the masculine
domain in order to write itself into the script.
For me, feminism has often been the by-product of
a heterosexual constitution. As excited as I was
by late-'80s and early-'90s postfeminism and
French theory, as applied to the work of Barbara
Kruger and Laurie Simmons and others, these
arguments were situated in a dialogue with men.
At that point, you began to see a schism between
the goals of a more homogeneous feminism and the
ideologies of queer theory. In fact, queer
theory, which includes the possibility of
changing one's gender through grammar (i.e., a
woman sees herself as a man, so she calls herself
a man, a "he"), could hardly be seen as
celebratory of femininity when it offers a clear
desire for masculine privilege. In that sense,
contemporary queer theory actually almost becomes
reactive conservatism: The same woman-who may
sleep with other women-adopts a different gender
and simultaneously opts out of homosexuality. The
advent of this nonsurgical sex change has all the
uncomfortable baggage of racial "passing" and
creates, in its most political sense, an erasure
of early feminism. But then we must ask: Is
feminism a celebration of the "feminine" or of
freedom and optimal choice? Clearly, the two are
not always the same.
The potency of '70s feminist art existed in its
direct correlation to the advent of the women's
movement. Performative gestures, avant-garde film
techniques, and nontraditional materials were
used by artists in immediate contact with the
emotional and political concerns of women. Their
work was in no way ambiguous, suggestive, or
reflective, as much art of the later '90s and
present may be. (The same case can be made for
work by David Wojnarowicz, or the Silence=Death
projects, which specifically engaged a
contemporaneous political struggle.) Such
artwork, made at the epicenter of activism but
now seen without the backdrop of a particular
crisis, may be considered illustrative. Yet I
think there remains a correlation between how
disenfranchised women feel and how women artists
represent women. For example, why is Cindy
Sherman's work so continually relevant to young
artists and to collectors, while Kruger seems
banished to a world of book bags and bumper
stickers? With Sherman, an artist I have always
admired, we have a body of work that exudes
criticality from every adroit gaze; she remasters
feminine cinematic clichés. But is the work so
successful in the art world and among the general
population because it challenges the mainstays of
patriarchal society or because the narcissism and
presentation of the solitary, longing, or
trashed-out woman is a crowd pleaser? And is it
that very flexibility that attracts younger
photographers? Sherman's work is successful
because it retains illustrative powers while
simultaneously serving as a celebration of every
feminine stereotype. In fact, still photography
is the most problematic of the mediums, because
it is the eternal pause-and, to paraphrase Stevie
Smith, one often can't tell the difference
between someone waving and someone drowning.
Ambiguity is a luxury. With every piece I make, I
am aware that my feminism may be difficult to
detect. This bothered me for some time-the idea
that I might make work that seems to deny a
female presence. And I cannot say I've resolved
this; perhaps, like Kara Walker, I find myself
swimming in the fantasy of the crisis. But, in
this vein, I have thought a great deal about
Richard Prince's work, which has linked a crisis
within masculinity to that within femininity. I
lived for a time with his Spiritual America,
1983, the portrait of the prepubescent Brooke
Shields: The success of that piece is as a
critical commentary about representation and the
feminine body in photography and about the look
and shape of desire. The secret surprise within
that photograph was that its appropriation
allowed it to exist. We could look at the image
not as it was originally-a pornographic picture
of a child made with an ambitious mother's
permission-but as a critique. For me, an
important facet of understanding the picture was
to look at the idea of masculine desire mediated
by historical feminism and '80s postfeminism.
Living with this glistening and truly disturbing
photograph gave me the opportunity to examine my
own desirous gaze. Was it different from the
author's because of gender differences, or was it
similar because we both were attracted to women?
Are men and women different? I can't remember if
Ms. magazine answered that question for me or not.
JAN AVGIKOS
Twenty years or so ago, during my student days in
the South, I found my way into feminist art and
theorizing more or less on my own-that is, the
subject wasn't offered in my school's art-history
curriculum, even though historical anthologies of
women artists had begun to be published and
revisionism was already well under way. The
almighty canon's flaws had been revealed, a
spotlight had been shone on biases and practices
that remained white male-centric-and yet it
seemed that nothing had changed. It was just lip
service-all talk and no action. Today, of course,
things are different. The influences that derive
from feminist art are so pervasive as to be
immeasurable, and it turns out the questions once
posed by women, for women are of critical import
to everyone. (Remember Lutz Bacher's Vargas pinup
images shown at Pat Hearn in the early '90s? In
the politicized climate of those times, the works
achieved meaning on the basis of who was
presenting them-a woman, not a man. Today we have
Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin both painting
voluptuous blond women, and their paintings are
often discussed in the same breath. Clearly
something has changed.)
What was feminist art then? What is it now? Today
we point with ease to the virtues and attributes
of feminist models of fragmentation, pluralism,
diversity, subjectivity, activism-all leitmotivs
of postmodernity. We recognize that with respect
to the twenty-first-century forces of technology,
mass culture, and globalization we (as
individuals) are all "feminized" subjects. But
when it comes to talking specifically about
contemporary feminist art, we quickly discover
that there is little consensus. It's important
that we acknowledge this disarray and fluidity,
that we not commit ourselves to histories that
write out the "problems" that feminine models
embody (and disembody)-the unofficial, the
marginal, the in-between, the idiosyncratic, the
elusive, the impossible to represent.
And so, having learned that in writing history,
it's impossible to get it right-to be
sufficiently comprehensive and "objective"-I want
to introduce a few very basic questions about how
feminism plays today in contemporary art. For
example, if feminist art is so important, why is
it still perennially neglected and relegated to a
relatively minor note? Why haven't there been
major museum shows, one right after the other?
Are we to believe that the jury is still out on
the subject of feminist art or, worse yet,
permanently hung? Why is a show such as "Gloria:
Another Look at Feminist Art of the 1970s,"
presented at the venerable nonprofit White
Columns last fall, viewed as a "major
achievement"? It was a very nice curatorial
effort, and flat-out fabulous to see the visual
and material icons of feminist art, but those two
tiny, crammed galleries and the low-budget feel
of the exhibition reeked of marginality. It was a
"boutique" event. And chronic neglect doesn't
simply manifest at the level of zero big shows.
We lack the sorts of visual intimacy with the
objects and artifacts of feminist art that are
sustained by repeated encounters.
Here's another dispiriting example taken from the
logs of daily life. I'm thinking about a lecture
I gave last year on Roni Horn's work during her
exhibition at Dia. Looking at a wide range of her
art, from the first trip to Iceland to the
clowns, and working directly with her drawings,
photographs, sculptures, and book works, I
explored many subjectivities in her art-personal,
psychological, sexual, and, I posited, lesbian.
Several of her collectors attended the lecture,
and one called the artist the next day, joking
that she didn't know she was a collector of
"lesbian art." (Yuk, yuk.) The connotation was
that any such content in Horn's work was put
there by (my own) whimsy and could easily be
erased, as one would remove dust from the surface
of a sculpture. Meanwhile, Horn's market is well
established and can easily tolerate such
"aberrant" readings of the art. No one loses, and
everybody has a nice day. Feminism in art is
something that interests scholars and artists but
that dealers, museums, and most other people
often politely tolerate or assiduously avoid.
More generally, how relevant is feminism to art
practice, history, and criticism today? Many
models have mobilized from feminism, and feminism
has been contaminated a million times over.
There's room for that to happen. The more
complexities, the more freight we acknowledge,
the more relevant the work. Whether desired forms
of recognition occur today or tomorrow, one thing
is a given: Historical feminist art is poised to
be the next big thing-in part because we
increasingly need it to describe contemporary
practice and how we got where we are, but also
because much feminist art (particularly of the
vintage varieties) is affiliated with the search
for authenticity. I'm wondering if a near-future,
fuller cultural embrace of feminist thought and
practice in art might not catalyze when
"spiritual America"-what I call this widespread,
mainstream craving for authenticity-discovers the
emotional reservoirs in feminist art. (I think of
Madonna sponsoring MoMA's 1997 exhibition of
Cindy Sherman's "Untitled Film Stills" as an
example of this phenomenon.) It seems possible,
looking down the road, that these "spiritual
Americans" could discover feminist art and-seeing
their own image in the art-fall in love.
CATHERINE DE ZEGHER
Today, younger artists are clearly inspired by
the legacy of feminist practice and theory, and
at the core of their work is the intersection of
gender, class, race, and ethnicity. Mona Hatoum
and Ellen Gallagher come to mind, for example:
Transgressing the racial, ethnic, and gender
dictates of society, their work asks us to
consider the ambiguous boundary between the self
and otherness not as an occasion for horror and
fear but as an opening into a new form of
identity construction. The daughter of
Palestinian exiles in Lebanon and herself now an
exile in London, Hatoum has had to reconceive
herself as "subject matter out of place" and so
has inventively mapped reality at the fringes of
vision, reforming female imagery. Similarly,
Gallagher's work resists the intelligible
invocation of identity as it operates through the
stylized repetition of bodily gestures and
movements. For Gallagher, the possibility for
transformation is found in the interruption of
such repetition-or in a parodic repetition that,
in the words of Judith Butler, "exposes the
phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a
politically tenuous construction."
Indeed, in the second half of the twentieth
century, many artists have challenged the phallic
paradigm of binary thinking-rejection or
assimilation, aggression or identification-that
shapes everything from how art is viewed to how
societies treat immigrants. Against this
restrictive, modernist axis, they posed questions
of audience and distribution, of participation
and the "feminine"-making art imbued with
thoughtful reciprocity between artist and viewer.
New possibilities for connections in the shared
(exhibition) space between work, maker, and
beholder emerged. In this context, feminism,
often employing semiotics and psychoanalysis,
enabled us to see what formerly was (or still is)
eclipsed: what does not align with that which is
considered important at the moment, or which has
different conditions of perceptibility.
These artists have included many feminist
women-Hannah Höch, Carol Rama, Louise Bourgeois,
Lygia Clark, Nancy Spero, Adrian Piper, Martha
Rosler, Anna Maria Maiolino, and Joelle
Tuerlinckx, for example-but also men such as
Hélio Oiticica, Paul Thek, Cildo Meireles,
Richard Tuttle, Craigie Horsfield, Giuseppe
Penone, and Yun-Fei Ji. All these figures
recognized the great potential for notions of
relation and connectivity to provide a larger
understanding of what art could be. Consider
Clark, who-using terms like "matrix,"
"pregnancy," and "relational objects" to describe
her projects-is only lately being recognized. In
her last works, she called herself a therapist,
interpreting the experiences of the "patients"
who entered into her artistic "sessions,"
creating the possibility of a permanent change in
a person's sense and structure of self and the
world. While neither critics nor psychoanalysts
valued this turn in her work, Clark bridged the
separation between artistic domain and
psychotherapy-the latter having provided her with
the only theoretical structure available in the
'60s and '70s to apprehend her practice.
Later, in the '90s, artist and psychoanalyst
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger developed the
groundbreaking theory of the "matrixial": a
relational and fluid space of co-emergence
involving not only an altered perception of art
but also a redefinition of the "feminine." She
used a metaphorically loaded image-of mother and
unborn child in the latest stages of pregnancy-to
conceptualize an archaic experience of several
unknown partial subjects co-emerging and
co-affecting and to generate a symbol for an
intersubjective encounter radically different
from the historically predominant (phallic)
model. The naming is most important, as it allows
the feminine to become legible in works of
art-radically extending and reshaping our
understanding of some artistic practices and
their temporary eclipse. As Griselda Pollock
argues: "If we allow ourselves to introduce into
culture another symbolic signifier to stand
beside the phallus (signifier of difference and
division in terms of absence and loss
orchestrating these either/or models), could we
not be on the way to allowing the invisible
feminine bodily specificity to enter and realign
aspects of our consciousness and unconsciousness?
. . . This feminist theorization is not an
alternative in opposition to the phallus; rather,
the opening up of the symbolic field to extended
possibilities which, in a nonphallic logic, do
not need to displace the other in order to be."
The work of Oiticica and Rosler (most recently in
this year's Venice Biennale) and Horsfield (in
Documentas 10 and 11) has often included
large-scale collaborative and social projects,
another significant relational model, and their
extensive writings have clarified this
sociopolitical attitude. For Horsfield, the
artwork is only realized in togetherness,
conversation, and communality-questioning, in
effect, the validity of modernist notions of
alienation and separation in the formation of
art. Another current example is the Royal Art
Lodge, whose young artists similarly overturn
modernist formulations of artistic solitude and
negativity, but only while appearing to pursue no
particular aim other than to spend time together
and share domestic jokes and concerns. Many other
collectives and collaborations appeared in
Lawrence Rinder's Whitney Biennal and also in
Okwui Enwezor's Documenta 11, whose curatorial
project I consider feminist, despite it not
having been defined as such.
Considering all these artists' practices, I am
hopeful that it will be possible to "degender"
and "deracialize" difference and to think of it
in positive, nonreifying terms. If modernism's
radical and inventive strategies were dependent
on alienation, separation, negativity, violence,
and de(con)struction, the twenty-first century
may well develop an aesthetics of relation and
reciprocity defined by reconstruction, inclusion,
connectivity, binding impulses, and even by
healing attitudes.
ADRIAN PIPER
After reading all of this stimulating talk I find
I have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all. After
reading all of this stimulating talk I find I
have nothing to contribute after all.
Sorry, and thanks. Sorry, and thanks. Sorry, and
thanks. Sorry, and thanks. Sorry, and thanks.
Sorry, and thanks. Sorry, and thanks. Sorry, and
thanks. Sorry, and thanks. Sorry, and thanks.
Sorry, and thanks. Sorry, and thanks. Sorry, and
thanks. Sorry, and thanks. Sorry, and thanks.
Sorry, and thanks. Sorry, and thanks. Sorry, and
thanks. Sorry, and thanks.
PEGGY PHELAN
Feminism belongs on the shortlist of recent
intellectual revolutions that includes Darwinism,
Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Like these other
dramatic sea changes, feminism radically alters
our perception of history, value, meaning, and
experience. The world no longer looks the way it
did before feminism, and artists, those maestros
of revision, quickly absorbed, translated,
extended, and recorded the force of this new
vision. Feminist artists of the '70s-from body
artists such as Carolee Schneemann and Hannah
Wilke to Earth artists such as Ana Mendieta and
Mary Beth Edelson-revised the categories of what
art is and to whom it is addressed. But the
history of feminist achievement is much messier,
more contradictory, and more ambivalent, in the
fullest sense of that term, than the
epistemological and cultural transformations
achieved by Darwin, Marx, Engels, and Freud. This
ambivalence, sewn right into the political and
intellectual core of feminism, has made it
extraordinarily difficult to assess feminism's
influence and to take its measure in contemporary
art.
Almost from the start, the feminism that swept
the West in the '60s and '70s was beset with the
problem of belatedness on the one hand (how could
it have taken so long to see the sanctioned
hatred of women at the heart of modernity?) and
enormous anxiety about its radical we-want-it-now
"fringe" on the other. Not surprisingly,
therefore, feminism's history is rife with
betrayal, envy, and schisms. Women of color,
lesbians, sex adventurers, transsexuals, and
even, weirdly, straight white women have suffered
the pain of being outcast from the community they
want/ed to love and be loved by. Thus the story
of feminist awakening is a traumatic one. What
makes this awakening more than a melodrama of the
anguished soul is that it is a collective trauma
that happened with an acceleration and
pervasiveness that short-circuited and helped
repress some of the high personal costs that
individual women and men paid for its success.
The notion that "the personal is political" was
widely successful in establishing the politics of
everyday life and exposing the politics of the
art world but not always up to sorting out the
emotional and psychic fallout from such rigorous
equations. (Laura Cottingham's important video
Not For Sale, 1998, documents some of these
fallouts but concentrates on celebrating
heroines.) In pointing out this trauma, I am not
minimizing feminism's astonishing achievements,
especially in art: It is undeniable that the
political passion inspired by feminist
consciousness infused art in ways that cannot be
undone. Nonetheless, as an intellectual and
political revolution, feminism differs from
previous epistemological transformations because
it refuses to be "merely" an intellectual matter.
Assessing its influence requires that one go
beyond intellectual assessments of feminist
history and take into consideration emotional and
psychic costs and benefits. Central to these
costs and benefits is a pervasiveness of
ambivalence that now dominates our lives.
While it is more or less accurate to credit
Darwin, Marx, Engels, and Freud with the basic
discoveries that spurred evolutionism, socialism,
and psychoanalysis, crediting one or two people
with the origin of feminism is much more fraught.
Many historians of feminism note the influence of
Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan, but these
acknowledgments almost always come with a heavy
sense of apology for establishing an almost
arbitrary beginning point. (Registering the force
of belatedness in feminist history, most scholars
frequently refer to the feminism of the '60s and
'70s as "second wave.") Feminism's anxiety about
its origins is one reason why many feminist
artists in the '70s tried to revise art history,
recovering long-ignored work of women. Linda
Nochlin's 1971 essay "Why Have There Been No
Great Women Artists?" was the call that
revolutionized art history. Artists began to
"redo" masterpieces, insisting that the
historical imagination of the past include women
as more than objects of what Laura Mulvey aptly
dubbed "the male gaze." One consequence of this
art-historical revision was an acknowledgment
that the history of women's lives, experiences,
and intellectual and artistic contributions was
simply too vast to recover. This loss propelled a
political grief that was rehearsed again in the
'80s and '90s as AIDS and breast cancer began
killing more young people.
The recognition of ignorance at the heart of the
historical enterprise prior to feminism has had
an enormous influence on poststructuralist
philosophy, with its emphasis on the
"undecidability" of textual meaning and on
antiracist and anticolonialist theory-work often
animated by the aspiration to recover a history
centered on the experiences of slaves and the
disenfranchised. Taken together, these
aspirations have changed how history is written,
what counts as evidence, who can serve as
witness, and who can serve as judge. This role of
feminism in historiography illuminates the
broader story of feminism's revolutionary
achievements. Feminist thinking required more
than "filling in" missing content: It insisted on
revising the fundamental questions that defined
the disciplines. It also made clear how quickly
insights from the present will be themselves a
product of both blindness and insight. For
example, just as feminists of the '70s were
pained to see what dominant history had been long
blind to, so too did feminists of the '80s and
'90s regret and critique the previous
generation's blindness to differences of race,
class, and sexuality.
With art history as practice and method in mind,
it is worth revisiting the question frequently
posed to feminists today: "Is feminism passé?"
(It is useful to note that this same question
also haunts Marxism and psychoanalysis-and the
question about evolution is more severe: Does it
exist? The New York Times recently reported that
Americans are three times more likely to believe
in the Virgin Birth.) The structure of the
question is designed to elicit either a yes or
no, or something along the lines of "'70s
feminism is passé, but. . . ." A more generative
way to approach political and historical
continuity is to consider which questions exposed
by feminism in the '60s and '70s still persist
and what forms these questions take so far
removed from their initial exposure. AIDS and
global capital, for example, have radically
transformed the persistent question of women's
sexual freedom. For women in South Africa or
South Central Los Angeles, sexual freedom is
deeply connected to earlier feminist
conversations, but now refracted through medical
biology as well as differing local economies and
cultural politics. The zigzagging successes and
failures of feminism throughout the world
today-women are routinely prime ministers in some
places, and routinely maimed or killed for
alleged sexual infidelity in those and other
places-are symptoms of the ambivalence that still
haunts feminism as an intellectual revolution.
Yet that ambivalent zigzag is one of the most
radical consequences of feminism as thought
practice and, I believe, anticipates the likely
trajectory of the next great intellectual
revolution, the biogenetic one. Uneven
distribution, economic access, and the larger
forces of what we might call medical capital will
similarly compromise it.
Today, intellectual revolutions cannot but be
greeted with ambivalence. In this, feminism's
history and future are writ large. Thus feminism
remains for me the richest intellectual vantage
point for surveying the history of thought over
the past 150 years. It leaves nothing untouched
in the past or the future, and it infuses our
present with both its dismaying failures and its
astonishing achievements on the world stage.
Feminism makes ambivalence a necessary worldview.
In these days of hideous fundamentalism, the
capacity to acknowledge ambivalence is
revolutionary.
CONTRIBUTORS
Linda Nochlin is Lila Acheson Wallace Professor
of Modern Art at New York University's Institute
of Fine Arts.
Andrea Fraser 's midcareer retrospective is on
view at the Hamburger Kunstverein through
November 9.
Amelia Jones is Pilkington Chair and Professor in
the History of Art at the University of
Manchester, England.
Dan Cameron is senior curator at the New Museum
of Contemporary Art, New York, and curator of the
2003 Istanbul Biennial, which remains on view
through November 16.
Collier Schorr will have simultaneous shows of
new work at 303 Gallery, New York, and Modern
Art, London, in January 2004.
Jan Avgikos is a contributing editor of Artforum.
Catherine de Zegher is director of the Drawing Center, New York.
"Adrian Piper Since 1965: Meta-art and Art
Criticism" travels this month to the Museu d'Art
Contemporani de Barcelona.
Peggy Phelan is Ann O'Day Maples Professor in the Arts at Stanford University.
Many pics begin @ http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=5492&pagenum=0
Artforum International Magazine, New York, NY
