click here <\/a> for some images.) Elaine Pagels lectured on campus this quarter, and among the stories from one of the Gnostic gospels (I will try to find the reference) is that of a woman who heard Paul preach, was converted, and started traveling with him. After being harassed on the road one day, she decided that it would be better to travel as a man. Paul was outraged, and refused to baptize her until she was properly dressed. Turning to a ditch at the side of the road, she reached down for a handful of water and, pouring it over her own head, baptized herself. I love this myth, and I loved having a very well respected historian tell it to a standing room only crowd in a large auditorium. I find these stories very powerful and very heartening, and they war with the critical, deconstructionist side of me that feels that anything taken to heart emotionally and unquestioningly is ultimately a dangerous route back into reliance on dominant modes of social control.<\/p>\nIn terms of my own work, feminist mythmaking is rampant at least throughout the art and art history of the 1970s, and has come under question in the 90s as art historians have begun to argue that the whole idea of a great artist is inherently patriarchal. I tend to agree, in that it glorifies the subject-genius at the expense of considering the web of social contexts in which the artist exists and which shape his or her work and success, and yet I also have to admit that there is something in me that thrills when I see a really great work, something that wants to stand in dumb admiration rather than analyzing its content, form, and context. The bit below is a reading response I wrote for my Feminist and Queer Art History, 1971-present class, a historical survey of art historical work with feminist and queer perspectives. It addresses, in a slightly tighter and less meandering way than the above, the positive side of the issue I\u2019m interested in \u2013 do we need a sense of a feminist past to be able to proceed with our future, although I wonder, is this a desire we had at an early less confident point and should we, as Kristeva suggests, steer clear of the dangers of too much emotional reliance on a quasi-religious belief in that history. I have, purposely, left the definition of myth very vague, (I have been using it loosely as history interpreted with desire) because I think that\u2019s an interesting question in and of itself. Another favorite art historian argues that it is impossible to read\/see with anything but desire\/personal context, and from that perspective perhaps all our histories are myths.<\/p>\n
Linda Nochlin\u2019s article \u201cWhy Have There Been No Great Woman Artists?\u201d accurately predicts on the second page the direction in which feminist art history has been most influential when she says \u201cA feminist critique of the discipline of art history is needed which can pierce cultural-ideological limitations, to reveal biases and inadequacies not merely in regard to the question of women artists, but in the formation of the crucial questions of the discipline as a whole.\u201d (2) Such a demand may, however, have been ahead of its time. When I look at the feminist art and writing of the 1970s, including Nochlin\u2019s own, the women involved could more accurately be described as creating a framework of positive images and history than as deconstructing the basic assumptions of art and art history. I do not want to trivialize these projects, but rather to acknowledge them as absolutely essential for the radical way they changed how women artists and art historians thought of themselves, which laid the groundwork for the later more intense critiques Nochlin calls for.<\/p>\n
Nochlin herself acknowledges this in \u201cMemoirs of an Ad-Hoc Art Historian\u201d when she writes of what women have said to her about the Women Artists show, \u201cThat show changed my life. I never knew before that I, as a woman artist or art-worker, had a history. After that show, I knew I was part of a long tradition and it gave me the courage to go on.\u201d (33) In other words, women were finally getting to have a share in the kind of history that Nochlin calls \u201cthe whole myth of the Great Artist,\u201d (7) and discovering how empowering it was. Knowing that there were others who had struggled as they had struggled, had made the same sacrifices for their art, had fought the same doubts and continued on seems to have made all the difference for these women artists and art historians of the 1970s. I think this recovery of women artists may be a necessary step for the larger project of destroying these myths that Nochlin wanted to engage in, and to some extent I question how possible it is for us to truly let go of all our heroic artistic mythology, even as I whole heartedly believe she is right. I saw Judy Chicago\u2019s Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum of Art last year, a feminist mythologizing project if there ever was one, and found the experience deeply moving. From a 2003 perspective it was moving in part because I have not had to struggle in the same way that those women, those of the history portrayed or those of the 1970s who made it, did, mostly due to their efforts. But along with the swelling forms struggling to rise off the plates as women\u2019s liberation increased through the centuries, I felt a corresponding rise of my own resolve to continue the struggle in the myriad areas that remain to be changed. Julia Kristeva accused feminism of becoming a religion in her 1979 essay \u201cWomen\u2019s Time,\u201d and I have to admit that seeing the Dinner Party is probably as close as I have ever come to a religious experience.<\/p>\n
In \u201cVaginal Iconography\u201d Barbara Rose addresses something of the mental effect of this experience when she compares feminist art to the \u201cBlack is Beautiful\u201d art of the Black Power movement, which she sees as \u201cessential in creating not only an ideology of equality, but a psychology built on the confidence that black is as good as white.\u201d (576) Before women could proceed with a project of tearing down and rebuilding an entire way of thinking about a discipline, women needed the confidence that they were worthy, beautiful to themselves beyond the codified and frequently represented signs of their sexual availability to men, strong, and not monstrous in their desires, as their desire and actual sexual organs had so frequently been termed. As Rose writes,
\u201cFor much of the feminist art that has been labeled \u2018erotic\u2019 because it depicts or alludes to genital images is nothing of the sort. It is designed to arouse women, but not sexually\u2026 What is interesting about them is the manner in which they worshipfully allude to female genitalia as icons \u2013 as strong, clean, well made, and whole as the masculine totems to which we are accustomed.\u201d (576)
Both the vaginal imagery of many feminist artists in the 1970s as well as the feminist art history recover projects were in a sense engaged in creating the psychological supports for women that the myth of the Great Artist has provided for centuries to white male artists. Crucial among these supports were the feelings of having a history, a community, a vocabulary, and an audience.<\/p>\n
In this context, Nochlin\u2019s article reads more as an examination of the norms and institutions by which the white male Great Artist was constructed so that women might be able to finally become Great Artists than a true attack on the bedrock assumptions of the discipline. She closes the section on Rosa Bonheur with a summary of what she sees as the reason she could not achieve greatness, \u201cthe voice of the feminine mystique with its potpourri of ambivalent narcissism and internalized guilt subtly dilutes and subverts that total inner confidence, that absolute certitude and self-determination (moral and esthetic), demanded by the highest and most innovative work in art.\u201d (36) Despite Nochlin\u2019s astute assessments of the role of the broader social context in creating the Great Artist, she is not yet ready to give up that ideal goal, and in that sense is very much part of what I see as the 1970s project to create the psychological, historical, mythical, and iconographical framework for women to create great art and become great art historians.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Certain contemporary thinkers consider, as it is well known, that modernity is characterized as the first epoch in human history in which human beings attempt to live without religion. In its present form, is not feminism in the process of becoming one? – Julia Kristeva This quote from Julia Kristeva\u2019s 1979 article \u201cWomen\u2019s Time\u201d brings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alfabus.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}