Feminist Art History: Disposal Strategy or Worldview?

Just a few random thoughts on Patricia Mathews’ The Politics of Feminist Art History of 1997.

1. The state of the field she describes is fractured and plural although feminism has become central to the work and thinking of many students and scholars across academic fields. Multiple strategies have existed within art history of uncovering female artists and their experiences, undermining the ideological power structure that supports a hierarchy of differences and rethinking female subjectivity from a psychoanalytic perspective. (Kristeva fits in here.)

2. In terms of what we’ve studied so far, the category of female nude, familiar to all of us from the Venus of Urbino on down through history, has become a semiotic sign. Mathews calls this conventional image “an emptied act, an act without a subject, an artifice that functions as a screen on which is projected the masculinist fantasies of power and control.” How loaded is that: Saussure, Lacan’s the mirror stage and Foucauldian ideology all in one!

3. I found hope in Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s “Matrix,” also used by Griselda Pollock. It is an expansion or augmentation of Lacan’s phallocentric world with a feminine dimension or space maternal and life giving to both the body and the intellect.

4. I can’t speak to the experience of Black feminists today, but I have read in the recent past that feminist artists of color often felt subjected to multiple hierarchies and divisions. They felt divided from white feminists by race and subordinated by male artists of color because of their gender. Maybe some of you can fill me in here.

5. T. J. Clark would most likely approve of Mathew’s contextual interpretation of Valadon’s nudes taking into account “a synchronic search for the conditions and terms of a cultural moment and the acts of a n individual artist within that moment as s/he transmits and transforms those conditions in works of art..” (100). In this case it is Paris of the 1890’s to the 1930’s that she is interrogating focusing in on class and gender.

6. Regarding the masquerade of femininity which Mathews describes as the expected and often dutilfully performed gender act of women, photographs of Marilyn Monroe by Richard Avedon are instructive. Avedon shot. photograph after photograph of Monroe smiling, posing, basically performing for the camera and the male photographer in the role of seductive, alluring and sexually desirable movie star. There is one photo in which she has relaxed her body and let the mask slip. She looks self-absorbed, deflated, emotionally distant, just like Valadon’s female nudes. In this photo she has moved from object to subject.