Feminism

Feminisms LCA Level 5 Lecture Programme        Tutor: Dr Madeleine Newman

What is feminism?

O.E.D: ‘The advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.’

‘The issue of rights for women first became prominent during the French and American revolutions in the late 18th century. In Britain it was not until the emergence of the suffragette movement in the late 19th century that there was significant political change. A ‘second wave’ of feminism arose in the 1960s, with an emphasis on unity and sisterhood; seminal figures included Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer.’

Tate Glossary: Feminist Art

‘May be defined as art by women artists made consciously in the light of developments in feminist art theory since about 1970.’

Key Questions: What is gender?; What is a feminist critique of art history (discipline) and museum (institution)?; Why ‘feminisms’?

Case study 1970s: Feminisms and their methodologies

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974-1979   Mary Kelly, Post Partum Document, 1973-79

‘The most signal omission of feminist art history to date is our failure to analyse why modern art history ignores the existence of women artists. Why it has become silent about them, why it has consistently dismissed as insignificant those it did acknowledge. To confront these questions enables us to identify the unacknowledged ideology which informs the practice of this discipline and the values which decide its classification and interpretation in all of art.’

Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, 1981 p.49

‘What is feminist art? There is no such entity; no homogenous movement defined by a characteristic style, favoured media or typical subject- matter. There are instead feminist art practices which cannot be comprehended by the standard procedures and protocols of modernist art history and criticism which depend upon isolating aesthetic considerations such as style or media.’

Griselda Pollock, ‘Feminism and Modernism’ in Parker, R. and Pollock, G. Framing Feminism: Art and the Woman’s Movement, 1970-85, (London: Pandora Press, 1987)

‘I’d like to make a distinction between “feminist practice” and “the feminist problematic” in art (problematic in the sense that a concept cannot be isolated from the general theoretical or ideological framework in which it is used). One aspect of the problematic is that it points out the absence of a notion of practice in the way the question is currently phrased and most familiarly posed- ‘What is feminist art?’’

Mary Kelly, ‘Art and Sexual Politics’, 1977 in Kelly, M. Imaging Desire, (London: MIT Press, 1996)

‘In the work by artists we name women, we should not read for signs of a known femininity- womanhood, women like us…..- but for signs of femininity’s structurally conditioned and dissonant struggle with the already existing, historically specific definitions and changing dispositions of the terms Man and Woman within sexual difference….. We can read for inscriptions of the feminine – which do not come from a fixed origin, this female painter, that women artist, but from those working in the predicament of femininity in phallocentric culture in their diverse formations and varying systems of representation.’

Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories, (London: Routledge, 1999.)

  

Bibliography:

• Lippard, L. From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art, (New York: Dutton, 1976.)
• Parker, R. and Pollock, G, Framing Feminism: Art and the Woman’s Movement, 1970-85, (London: Pandora Press, 1987.)
• Pollock, G. Differencing the Canon : Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories, (London: Routledge, 1999.)
• Pollock, G. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, (London: Routledge, 1988.)
• Chicago, J. Through the Flower my Struggle as a Woman Artist, (New York: Doubleday and Company, INC, 1973.)
• Chicago, J. The Dinner Party, (New York: Penguin Books, 1996.)
• Kelly, M. Post Partum Document, (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983.)
• Iverson, M., Crimp, D., Bhabha, H. Mary Kelly, (London: Phaidon Press, 1997)