The creation of a corpus of texts analyzing art and art history with the help of feminist theories dates back to the 1970s. Female theorists question this discipline for having set up asymmetrical positions that are to be found again in representations and that have real consequences for the oppression of women. A key tool, the concept of gender refers to the hierarchical division of roles in a society according to sex, which contributes to the construction of norms of masculinity and of femininity--in close connection with the categories of race, class, and sexual orientation. Practices and ideologies may differ, but the main idea is that the personal is political--and, by way of consequence, so is every representation. Such rich theoretical developments have remained in an embryonic state in France (Dumont, Sofio, 2007), where understanding of art from this standpoint enjoys little legitimacy. Appropriation of these tools for thought allows one to develop a different conception of art history. I propose, therefore, to offer an overview of these developments, of the stakes involved and their complexities–with an emphasis on the passage from a state of championing woman’s identity to a rejection thereof and from there to the multiplication of identity-based referents.(1)

The Legacy of the First Feminist Generation: Celebration of a Collective Identity and Critique of the Manufacture of Art History

        The resurgence of the feminist movement in the 1970s brought with it some interventions in the world of art. Among these interventions were efforts to create works and theories that would reflect the themes of the movement, historical research projects that would reconstruct a history of women, and, finally, attempts to reread male artists’ works and career paths with the aid of these tools. They allowed a deconstruction of the schemata at work in the manufacture of art history: a history of individual careers and dominant movements; an ignorance about gender, class, race--and, later, inclusion of sexuality--to the benefit of a white male heterosexual universalism confined to the well-off social classes; a focus on elite art and a rejection of popular art; the rejection of all art that does not correspond to avant-garde criteria; and a formalistic vision of art (Robinson, 2001). Feminist schools were established in the United States that placed the sociocultural experience of women at the heart of creative activities. Laura Cottingham has retraced the contributions of the California feminist movement to art history, with an emphasis on the opening up to a plurality of media and to feminist content, these practices being fed by experiences of “consciousness raising” and the artistic and political events of the late 1960s (Cottingham, 2000). Within the movement itself, conflict between an essentialist approach and a constructivist approach was rife, which reflected the diversity of representational practices and politics. An affirmative celebration of women’s culture and women’s bodies was considered a political act. The symbolic stakes at issue in the use of performance are represented in the work In Mourning and In Rage--a paradigm of activist feminist art questioning the ties between the personal and the social, economic, and sexual politics of the time (Wack, 2007)--and in Womanhouse--practical involvement on the part of students from Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro’s feminist school, which opened the doors to a collective, politicized, multimedia kind of creative work. The Woman’s Building also saw the creation of identity-based minority groups such as the Lesbian Art Project or the Black Feminism movement (Farrington, 2005).
        The movement’s impact was to upend the approach of Lucy Lippard (Lippard, 1976), who tried to create another way of judging art. She showed the work of women artists, analyzed the main themes of feminist artists (Lippard, 1980), questioned the manufacture of art history, and drew up an appraisal of feminist contributions to art (Lippard, 1984): introduction of autobiographical and emotional content, celebration of popular art, and replacement of the centered image (in reference to the female sex) with multifaceted collages. This contribution gave more to a social history of art than to modernist formalism. In another foundational text, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" (1971), Linda Nochlin questioned a system that privileges or marginalizes work, showing that it was institutionally impossible for women to succeed, as they were excluded from promotional circuits. She then analyzed the specificity of their activities in connection with historical circumstances (Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt) and coorganized the 1976 Women Artists 1550-1950 exhibition, which was symbolic of the effort to rediscover artists of the past. Next, she studied power relationships as represented in the works of women and men of centuries past (Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays, 1988; French translation: Femmes, art et pouvoir, 1993). Women’s acquiescence was said to stem from the need to feel in tune with the patriarchal order, while what feminist criticism aims to demystify is the discourse contained in visual imagery. Finally, in London, the founding of the Women’s Art History Collective in 1972 led to the publication of Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (1981). English women having been more influenced by Marxism and psychoanalysis, Rozika Parker and Griselda Pollock’s text retraced the social history of women as much as the history of their dismissal by the sexist ideologies structuring the discipline. Analyzing the stereotypes applied to feminine art, they offered an account of the ways in which female visual artists negotiated with existing artistic codes and institutions in order to be able to produce art in every age, despite constraints of class as well as of sex. This questioning of ideologies and of the values underlying the manufacture of art history was to lead Pollock to postulate that feminists must intervene in art history in order to undo the dominant ideologies and values impregnating representations (Pollock, 1988).

Deconstruction in the1980s: Representing without Direct Images and Revisiting Art History (Class, Race, and Gender)

        Postmodern artists and Deconstructionist women theorists have criticized the theories of the 1970s that privileged the factor of sex over other components of one’s identity. The complex and polemical reception of the Dinner Party, an icon of feminist art retraced by Amelia Jones (Jones, 1996), allows one to read about this development. The piece transgressed the codes of modernist formalist discourse (where the aesthetic object is seen as pure, affectless, removed from the popular sphere) through the use of both elite art and domestic kitsch. The use of images of the female sex and of craft techniques was a political act of rejection of male universality, but in the 1980s this work would be associated instead with the biological determinism of Cunt Art, as opposed to an art that questions the fluid structures of femininity (as defended by Lisa Tickner) and that seeks to deconstruct the pleasure men took in representations of women’s bodies. Pollock postulated a need for distancing in order to break the seductive connection between audience and image. The dominant forms of psychoanalysis and linguistics deny the effectiveness of all popular works, preferring strategies of disidentification. Feminist art thus had to avoid representation of the female body. Artists of color and lesbians questioned the universality of this white heterosexual experience. At the heart of these tensions, reception of the Dinner Party reflected quite well the passage from a preference for history to a preference for theory (Phelan, Reckitt, 2001) and a perpetual reworking of the history of feminist art.
        The essay by Laura Mulvey, a British film theorist, about the visual pleasure derived by the film audience had a big impact in the 1980s on account of its use of psychoanalysis (Mulvey, 1975). She postulated the existence of an active male gaze that holds power over a passive female object. Next, she integrated homosexual and bisexual experiences, leading one to think in terms of more variable positions, with people being able to adopt a mimetic position with regard to one or the other sex in terms of their sexuality. Poststructuralism, a certain kind of French feminism (Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray), and psychoanalytic theory were thus situated at the junction of these influences. They were to be found again in the works of Mary Kelly, Mira Schor, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and Sherrie Levine. The deconstruction of female identity leads to the impossibility of representing it, a rejection of seduction, and disembodied works. Pollock went on to analyze the relations of subjectivity, sexuality, and power in knowledge structures. Femininity is a mode of discourse and representation that forges the ideology of sexual difference. The emblematic work here is Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973-1979), which deals with the key moment in the manufacture of femininity--maternity--analyzed from the standpoint of the child’s development and of the mother’s fantasies (Kelly, 1983, 1996). Working with Freudian and Lacanian theories in order to understand the process of identity formation qua ideology in the first years of childhood, Kelly attempted to show the social construction of a subject through autobiographical and analytical discourse--but without representing the body.
        Starting from an acknowledgment of the absence of women in traditional art history, some have worked over this history with the tools of class and gender. Thus, Nochlin presented images of women at work in the nineteenth century (Nochlin, 1999), comparing the representations offered by Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet. Peasant women and urban working women represent the two facets of an ideology of social sexual relations where the pious, nurturing mother is contrasted with the eroticized city girl, yielding a vision of the established natural order and of resignation in Millet, the foregrounding of the evolving social context in Courbet, and Käthe Kollwitz’s subversion of and revolt against the image of the resigned, pious, maternal woman. Likewise, Gen Doy (Doy, 1995) analyzed the French Revolution of 1789, studying the position of women artists on the art market. In order to provide a new foundation for the analytical methods of art history, Pollock made as much use of social studies as she did of psychoanalysis or aesthetics. In “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” (Pollock, 1988), she attempted to deconstruct the male myths of modernity and analyzed the specific gender conditions of nineteenth-century works, the social and sexed constructions that determined their way of painting. These works thus occupied different positions in the sexual politics of viewing. Later, studies on various kinds of masculinity were developed, too: Abigail Solomon-Godeau analyzed the iconography of masculine ideals in French neoclassical art and the circumstances under which such iconography later disappeared (Solomon-Godeau, 1997). Lisa Gail Collins (Collins, 2002) questioned the representation of black female nudes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (mixing class, gender, and race). She underscored the relationships between the accepted aesthetic categories and the economics of the Black female labor market, thus explaining the position of Emma Amos, Alison Saar, and Renée Stout in the history of African-American women’s refusal to represent the nude female body.

Sexualities and Beyond: The Cyborg and Queer Multiplicities of the 1990s

        On account of the suppression of the category woman, postmodernism has been accused of causing the disappearance of activist feminism (Broude, Garrard, 2005). Linguistic and psychoanalytic interpretations have propped up the male power structure, evacuating the possibility of representing a feminist vision based on the real lives of women and rendering impossible a collective form of identification that contains political demands (Fuss, 1989; Donna Haraway in her cyborg theory). Combining analyses of specific experiences with a certain theoretical complexity, female theorists of the 1990s attempted to think the bodies of women as polymorphic, as sites of multiple forms of potential politicization. The polemical arguments that took place in the United States and the United Kingdom around the Bad Girls exhibitions (Bad Girls, 1993 and 1994, Cottingham, 2000) are emblematic of this effort at permanent reinterpretation around feminist concepts of art and key moments in its history (Jones, 2005; Cottingham, 2000). Cottingham virulently criticizes these shows, for they are said to reproduce the division between reproductive mothers and overly sexualized whores--while at the same time avoiding roles that are disruptive. This countergenealogy entertains but fails to give bodily form to the anger that characterizes feminist-inspired works. On the other hand, Tickner analyzed, through the work of five artists in the 1985 Difference exhibition, the relationships between the production of postmodern theory and creative works, emphasizing the work on the ideology of artists who sought to dislocate the dominant, naturalized discourses about sexuality, class, subjectivity, and representations, thereby taking away from the masculine and the feminine their central and certain character.
        For her part, Jones connected masculinity as an identity-based system with the masculinized role of the artist (Jones, 1994). She thinks that the performances of Yves Klein, Robert Morris, Vito Acconci, and Chris Burden were deconstructing gender even in the midst of the Sixties and Seventies, when it was thought that phallus and penis were identical. She underscores the ambivalence of men’s relationships with masculinity, certain performances disrupting the equation among phallus, penis, and artist as much as others reinforced it. On the topic of the variety of forms of masculinity, Richard Meyer mentions the taboo on the explicitly sexual representation of male bodies, the site for the projection of the phantasies of heterosexual feminist artists (Wack, 2007). Some have reflected on the creative work of lesbians (Elizabeth Ashburn, 1996, Cherry Smith, 1996, Harmony Hammond, 1994), underscoring the complexity involved in identifying a lesbian form of art--the visual being associated with a sexual identity, the choice generally being to show artists who define themselves as lesbians and works that reflect their experiences and their struggles. Other analyses have borne on feminist involvement with new technologies (the cyberfeminist Old Boy’s Network; Wilding, 1998). Jieun Rhee shows how Mariko Mori and Lee Bull’s creations of cyborgs are inserted within Asian stereotypes of gender--which goes against the desire expressed by Haraway, who concluded her Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway, 1985) with a statement of her preference for a cyborg future that would be beyond gender over a goddess future. Finally, Judith Halberstam (Halberstam, 2005) mentions queer representations in art in light of research on queer performances within alternative communities. She uses the debates over the relationships between avant-garde movements and subcultures in art history to analyze the queer visual arts, laying stress on the ambiguous (or transgender) representations done by Del La Grace Volcano, Linda Besemer, J. A. Nicholls, and Jenny Saville--while attempting a definition of lived experiences in queer space and time.
        As these polemics demonstrate, feminist theories of art are closely connected with the intellectual contexts of the various decades in question and intervene in an interactive way from one period to the next. The 1970s were a time of discovery of women’s creative work and represented a celebration of their specific experience within a parallel network. The 1980s were characterized by a transition toward a preference for theory and for identity-based deconstructions done in connection with Structuralism and psychoanalysis. A whole retrospective take on past centuries was worked out that later included postcolonial forms of thought and questions about various forms of masculinity. The 1990s saw the birth of the queer constellation, which established the idea of a maelstrom of specific characteristics and multicultural forms, the concept of a fluid identity situated far from the female subject alone. Borrowing its tools from past decades in order to act on precise points of identity (Spivak, 1996), the return to action claimed to be strategic. Finally, the present decade seems to be the moment for a challenge to Euro-American domination via the inclusion of issues coming from other continents, thus opening the way to a truly global history that would include the questions of race, sex, class, and gender in connection with the patriarchies and economic forms of domination peculiar to each culture.

Note

1. For a more fleshed out version, see Dumont (2007).

Bibliography