Week 5 - The Monstrous and the Marvelous

Sheela-na-gigs and Other Unruly Women

• Other ways they have been interpreted and re-interpreted in modern times.
• Originated from the continent, yet changing over the centuries to represent an Irish past.
• Superfluous in meaning, refusing to be pinned down to one meaning, role or interpretation.

History - Meaning and Function

• 1167 – Derbforgaill, wife of Tigernán O’Rourke, King of Bréife
  
• Developed the Nun’s Church of Clonmacnois, decorated with Twelfth Century Romanesque style.
  
• Her family was associated with the control of the Kingdom of Mide, yet patronage motivated by penitence.
  
• Abducted by her husband’s rival Mac Murchada, who was eventually fined and banished fourteen years later. The abduction and punishment were politically motivated.
  
• Mac Murchada retuned in 1152 with Anglo-Norman allies and began conquering Ireland; Derbforgaill was blamed for bringing ‘shame on her husband, and disaster to her country’ pp. 314. She spent decades repenting for her misdeeds and after many unhappy years died at Mellifont in 1193.
  
• Benshenchas – catalogue of famous women of Ireland, including Derbforgaill. Here she was depicted as a political pawn of the male heroes of her era; tempting and deadly, beautiful and ugly (through aggressive sexuality), with a human body meant to stand for land and kingdom.
  
• Her representation in keeping with the contradictory methods in which women are perceived in Ireland, similar to the Sheela-na-gig.
  
• Her church is problematic in its association to the introduction of the Sheela-na-gig into Irish architecture. Sheela-na-gigs are defined by naked female figures displaying their genitals, yet it is often debated as to whether the churches images are actually Sheela-na-gigs.
  
• Sheela-na-gigs – generally located on or near doorways and windows
  
• Located on Churches and eventually moving to castles
  
• Associated with the Classical depiction of Terra (Mother Earth) and influenced by the grotesque acrobats of lust in French and English Churches of the Twelfth Century opposed to Irish depiction (thus suggested to be an early incarnation)
  
• Debateable as to whether it is female at all, yet the main message lies in the open threatening body, a vulva (female signifier) and gender ambiguity (baldness, skeletal form).
  
• Began in Ireland as an Anglo-Norman import as a representation of the sin of lust, re-enforcing the view of the Irish as bestial, vice-ridden and their sexually impropriety in so to justify an English invasion.
  
• Gerald of Wales characterized the Irish as deformed with tendencies to bestiality, incest and with no laws regarding marriage or inaugurating kings.
  
• Their outward appearance was known to signify inner depravity, and the Sheela-na-gig as a symbol of unruly lust fit perfectly.
  
• All these used as an ancient propaganda and rhetoric for war and conquest.
  
• Thirteenth Century – the Sheela-na-gig’s meaning shifted to an apotropaic icon due to the Anglo-Norman absorption of Irish ways becoming Irish, whilst the old English were perceived as more and more Irish. The Sheela-na-gigs followed suit parting ways with their continental beginnings, resisting the naturalistic erotic forms.
  
• The Sheela-na-gig has been linked to Irish intellectual traditions of strong, sexually aggressive women connected with the protection of Kingship, such as the Morrigan (shifting from hideous to beautiful as circumstance dictated. Similarly, the Benshenchas identifies that women engaged in multiple marriages reflecting political fortunes of their families and the law provided fourteen accounts for women to divorce, were her husband unable to sexually perform.
  
• The unsatisfied longing for sex caused women to turn ugly, the goddess of Irish sovereignty was considered an old crone until sex with the future king transformed her to be beautiful and fertile. The English also adhered to this portrayal which explains the appearance of Sheela-na-gigs on a number of churches and castles associated with the patronage of powerful Irish and Anglo-Norman aristocratic families; thus the Sheela-na-gig’s embodiment of something politically and culturally Irish.
  
• The image of the Sheela-na-gig startles and disrupts by stalking and shrieking with open mouths and wombs, opposed to the alluring bodies of the medieval representations of lust. They are commonly naked (as in the legendary tales of sexually aggressive women) and transfer thorough shrieking wombs their voices of doom to caste/church walls – voices intended to preserve the social order and consequences of subduing to vice.
  
• Sheela-na-gigs are associated with power through distribution and their placement on churches and castles suggest their architecture of authority.
  
• Whilst products of different architects at different times and purposes they are all roughly archaic compared to medieval Irish sculpture, a style used to depict death and decay.
  
• Sheela-na-gigs come in a variety of forms; some reach forwards to pull open the vagina (such as the specimine found in the Figile River, County Offaly), some masturbate and many are bald.
  
• Their open bodies on churches allow for comparisons with Ecclesia (a Twelfth Century identification of Mary), a closed, fertile and accepting virgin opposed to the open, shrieking, dead, barren and sexually repulsive Sheela-na-gigs as warnings of the mouth of Hell.
  
• Many are placed horizontal or upside down to depict powerlessness and defeat as controlled danger, yet upright manifestations apotropaically act as guardians.
  
• Despite differentiation they all illustrate one characteristic unseen in Europe; the correlation between the vagina and mouth; when one is a slit as is the other, the same account adheres when one represents an open cavern.
  
• Relations are made to the vagina dentata; the wandering womb and mouth of hell. As man-made creations, the Sheela-na-gigs and their empty wombs usurp the power of the female body or contrast with the perfection of divine creation.
  
• The majority are ambiguously gendered, many have breasts but are withered and streaked. Most are bloated with bulbous heads and sagging flesh; monstrous and inhuman, nothing suggests it is female opposed to male.
  
• The core of their name routes to the term hag but also to an effeminate man or any gender leaning to the opposite sex, an ambiguity of gender. The most terrifying images of the time transgressed male and female boundaries, the living and the dead, the animal and the supernatural.
  
• Sheela-na-gigs embody religious and political threats. The literary tradition of powerful women as the re-interpretation of the Sheela-na-gig as a protective symbol also provided a historical tradition for real life subversive women.
  
• Tradition and reality were kept alive in the consciousness of the Irish, the Pagan and Celtic associations between the land and protective female figures combining strength, beauty, age, youth and fertility.
  
• Interpretation and re-interpretation dominate scholarship regarding Sheela-na-gigs, this analysis can tell us of scholarships history and its positioning of Sheela-na-gigs to mirror new cultural values; past objects intersect and present an agenda becoming icons of a romanticised past.


• Two Nineteenth Century drawings of the Moycarky and Rochestown Sheela-na-gigs show large breasted, slender women masturbating. Their feminisation and sexualisation show the high-art tradition’s influence of voyeuristic pleasure of a naked and passive feminine idol.
  
• Ghostliness and deathliness are also common in the Sheela-na-gigs iconography and may have originally marked graves.
  
• During the late Eighteenth Century the Rev. Mr. Tyrrell buried a Sheela-na-gig near Lusk in the belief that it had power of the living, negated only through burial in a similar fashion to our real dead. However their origins are older than the context of their discovery due to Twelfth Century animation.


• In the Nineteenth Century Ireland was a post-colonial country. When the Sheela-na-giugs were being discovered the English categorized the Irish as aggressive, uncivilised and grotesque animals just as they did in the post-colonial Twelfth and Sixteenth Centuries.
  
• But buried Sheela-na-gigs are still a threat as Canadian, Dale Colleen Hamilton was denied access to them for study. She wrote in complaint to the Irish times in which their name was debated over national security due to their placement next to the seat of Irish government. Hidden they confirmed Nineteenth Century morals of censorship and Sheela-na-gigs became an agent to control the past, but transformed into feminist power by contemporary artists.


• Sheela-na-gigs are associated with land, sovereignty and power. They are disruptive yet part of a pre-established male dominated order, becoming powerful or powerless in different situations. They become typical of the portrait of women created by Irish historians, judges and literati who use the same term, caillech to refer to hags, wives, crones, nuns and witches.
  
• Typical to the interest and fear of the unheimlich, the former heim of human beings and become a Freudian association of death. Only the history of Sheela-na-gigs can show the past and present uniting in images reproduced, redefined to preserve a tradition and past that are less faithful as historic memory than a strategy of representing authority in terms of artifice and the archaic.
  
  

Madeline Cavinness

Throughout her reading Caviness suggests that it is the fragmented form which forms the image of the grotesque. It seems to be quite an ambiguous statement that something fragmented may constitute something, but as we have seen in the case of the Sheela-na-gigs, contradictions are often the case in relation to the female and the grotesque.

Francisco Zurbarán’s altar piece representing St. Agatha depicts the sensual, demure and yet mundane saint holding a silver platter with her own severed breast. Mundane in its extremity that she offers her breasts to function as a fetish to displace unwanted attention to her body. Ambiguous in the sense that she is a grown woman rejecting her biologically female attributes it is almost as if she is renouncing her womanhood, but is it at a physical or spiritual level? It is almost as if she is dismembering herself in order to confront and avoid the male gaze.

Yet it appears as if the aesthetic codes of the piece have been employed in order to deduce erotic content, there is a distancing and refusal of the body despite the sado-erotic tendencies of torture and mutilation. The often caricatural and bizarrely cut up images of the medieval period in order to specifically avoid any inclination of sex and eroticism and were used as a medium for communications with the deity of the saint.

These severed body parts may also act as relics and after around 1150 casts of real and degradable relics were often made in metal to be devoted by celibate priests.

Severed bodies signal the dismemberment of the phallic gaze due to their blocked voyeurism.

Caviness suggest that the segregated body also applied to male saints through arms, hands and feet including the genitals and the foreskin of Christ, however they were always ex-votos and made of wax or silver. Furthermore the Passion of Christ may be viewed as a sado-erotic example of the displacement of body parts, opposed to the signification of sexual desire. Real Members would be mostly reduced to the bone and the skin replaced with precious metal and jewels, undergoing an aesthetic transformation and denying any representational reference. Their masculinity is not altered or decreased, whereas as women are de-feminized through the mutilation and thus cease becoming the objects of desire. The ideal of the erotic male is immediately assumes a homoerotic quality, assuming that the male lacks eroticism, only its desire.

Reverencing body parts re-affirmed spiritual life as pieces of the body evoke the lack of the Saint’s, however this was eventually disfavored for relics such as the crutches of the healed.

The silver or the wax cast would be used in order to eliminate the notion of Decay as it ceased to be an effective artistic tool to de-eroticise the female, thus suggesting the notion of sexual fantasy. Thus the violence of hacking a body to pieces removes the sexual desire as individual parts lose their original signifying function. Fragmentation decreases the power of the grotesque body, yet also aids as a technique for survival, for example the self-mutilation of Eusebia and her nuns to avoid rape by advancing soldiers, thus their passion turning to anger and violence so to immediately martyr them.

Jenny Saville

The following images I have collected for my research on the grotesque are the works of Jenny Saville, a YBA of the 1990s and graduate of Glasgow School of Art. She achieved great success in her early years as she was pursued by Charles Saatchi and quickly gained a controversial and admirable reputation. Within her colossal portraits of enormous women, we find a rather imposing and remarkable sensation through her depiction of large globs of flesh suggesting ‘big, fat, ugly women’ [1], along with the anxiety of confronting images of such large scale scale. These images develop the epitome of the grotesque in modern society through the notion of fat; an alien substance to the body, stipulating any excess as a lack of control and a lack of beauty.

[Fig 01]

Taking a closer look at Branded [Oil on canvas, 2.13 × 1.83m, 1992] [Fig 01]we see a massively obese woman, viewed from a low angle, exasperating further her immense size. She is enormous, a figure in which not even the gigantic canvas can contain. To the lower right we can see her presenting to us her folds whilst across her skin we see Saville’s scratched in words; “support”, “delicate”, “petite”, and “decorative”, the branded ideas of femininity that are scorched into contemporary women. We see similar connotations in a study of Propped [Oil on canvas, 2.13 × 1.83m, 1992] [Fig 02], in which an analogous figure perches upon a heightened pedestal. Saville again scratched into the paint, this time quoting French feminist writings, suggesting the notion of coined pet-names such as ‘chic’ or ‘bird’, placing woman on a pedestal and reducing her to that of an animal. Yet these images defy these painted stereotypes and expectancies, creating a new image, one that we may loath and fear, they are disobedient, wallow[ing] in [the] glory of expansiveness’ [2], not how they should be, we gaze upon these and question how we look at the female body.

[Fig 02]

These women do not hold to the Twentieth Century model of beauty, through their deviance and they fight against it, they are the opposite of what is expected, a post-modern. Saville’s images surround the celebrity and the nip/tuck culture, they primarily based upon physical and biological concerns. However in a sense Saville sets the grotesque free, ‘break[ing] up and tear[ing] apart our self-image’ [3] shaming those who define the grotesque through shallow pre-conceptions with their own mantle.

[1] Jenny Saville – Flesh and Blood, Dir. Nichola Black, BBC Glasgow, 1995

[2] Patricia Ellis, 100 – The Work that Changed British Art, London, Jonathan Cape, 2001

[3] Jenny Saville, Saville, New York, Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2005, pp. 9

Bibliography

Saville – Flesh and Blood, Dir. Nichola Black, BBC Glasgow, 1995

Gemma de Cruz, Ant Noises at the Saatchi Gallery 2: Catalogue 2, London, Saatchi Gallery Publishing, 2000

Patricia Ellis, 100 – The Work that Changed British Art, London, Jonathan Cape, 2003

Sarah Kent, Shark Infested Waters: the Saatchi collection of British Art in the 90s, London, Zwemmer, 1994

Jenny Saville, Saville, New York, Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2005, pp. 9

Kiki Smith

• Born Nuremberg, 18 Jan 1954
  
• She was brought up in New Jersey and attended Hartford Art School, CT (1974–6).
  
• By manipulating everyday materials such as glass, ceramic, fabric and paper, Smith’s work examined the dichotomy between the psychological and physiological power of the body
  
• Her influences came not from her father, Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith, but from his female contemporaries Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Lee Bontecou.
  
• Smith’s full-size sculptures of the body such as Pee-Body a naked female couple is stoic figures, yet is psychologically impeded by leaking bodily fluids from her vagina; grotesque and offensive to the male gaze, the piece destroys male desire yet envisages the trembling and powerless woman, sparking her defeat and a sado-masochistic eroticism through violent male tendencies.
  

Lilith, 1995 (Silicon on bronze and glass)

• Represents the Hebrew legend; Adam's first wife who rejected him and fled the Garden of Eden, Lilith as a historical figure is widely regarded as symbol of feminine strength
• She is cast in bronze looking sharply over her shoulder, clinging to the wall upside down on all fours like a supernatural creature from movies such as The Exorcist peering at the viewer with disturbing glass eyes
• Suggests the classical portrayal of women in art history as harmonious and self-contained
• Defines woman through lived experience, the body crouches and cowers in powerlessness yet threatens using historical associations of rejection and strength through a piercing gaze. It is rater similar to De Kooning’s Woman I in its ambiguities becoming grotesque to the male eye, reversing art history’s grasp upon women and exposing the inequalities that women pose in elitist institutions such as the MOMA.

Bibliography

Projects 24: Kiki Smith (exh. cat., New York, MOMA, 1990)

Kiki Smith (exh. cat., Montreal, Mus. F.A.; Fort Worth, TX, Mod. A. Mus.; 1996–7)

Kiki Smith: All Creatures Great and Small, Hannover, Kestner-Ges, 1998

J. Bird, ed.: Otherworlds: The Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith, London, 2003

Wendy Weitman, Kiki Smith : prints, books & things, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2003

Sarah Lack, Kiki Smith, Grove Art Online, < from="search&session_search_id=" hitnum="1&section="> [Accessed 3 May 2008]

Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005, Traditional Fine Arts Organization, < imgurl="http://www.tfaoi.com/cm/3cm/3cm490.jpg&imgrefurl=" h="337&w=" sz="9&hl=" start="1&um=" tbnid="dCNuiqCUWkfheM:&tbnh=" tbnw="106&prev="> [Accessed 3 May 2008]

Week 4 - Hildegard Von Bingem and Myticism

Hildegard of Bingen’s medieval image, The Fall is iconographically identified as of the Byzantine style. Here we can see symbolism of flatness and a lack of spatial unity or tonality considered at the time to be sufficient for the representation through iconography.

 

The image is rather surprising in its imagery, straying away from type-cast Christian forms, uninhibited by such constraints developed during the Renaissance. Once Rome had converted to the Christian religion and the move from Pagan to Christian imagery was evident and Ancient Greece offered the notion of fictional forms through imagination in order to represent the body that were not primarily concerned with beauty. Adam embodies a quality of beauty; his pale white colour compliments the Christian association with purity. As he sleeps he is unaware of such new advances and the sole element of sin is given to her. Capturing the vision is the stars of gold creating an ambiguous representation of she who tempted him, originally invested with good intentions before her corruption.

 

As Adam figure sleeps to the tree and a wing shaped cloud disperses from his side towards the serpent in the tree. Represented by the cloud’s stars opposed to a human form is Eve who is fashioned from Adam’s ribs whilst he sleeps, it is indicative here that humans are created to be bright and beautiful in order to replace fallen angels. Her multitude represents Eve and her descendants, imaging her to be the necessary mediator of time, as people need to reproduce – we are not gods, but created by God. She acts as the transfer of humanity beyond the Garden of Eden.

The dark and ominous black tree of the image morphs its branches into that of a serpent, its black venom infecting her and the fall from Eden becomes evident through the image’s formlessness and the infiltration of Eden into Hell through the fiery mouth of the tree.

 

The standard Canon of Christianity is often told in an implicitly misogynistic tone. As the unseen creation of God from Adam, she in turn creates the patriarchal structures of the world due to being held responsible for the fall of humankind into sin.  She may only be redeemed by the Virgin Mary who in turn becomes the new eve bearing the child of God. However, Hildegard’s image suggests that Eve is responsible for humanity’s development and growth. Her sin is interpreted as curiosity compelling her to learn about her world and the things in it; here we find not the notion of the damnation of mankind due to the female but an effigy of God’s gift of free, and the psychological and physical changes we experience as we move into adulthood.

 

The piece was created by the Byzantine mystic named Hildegard op Bingen as part of her book of Scivias. Despite Catholicism’s categorical rejection of women’s role in the church, she was the first to be allowed to preach. Writing of female sexuality, health and morality she stayed within a convent for the majority of her life apparently receiving direct encounters from God. Despite her gender, eight volume of her work was received and accepted by the church. Having been educated by the anchorite Jutta from the age of eight, Hildegard trained as a mystic, forming as a threat to ecclesiastic Patriarchal system due to here direct encounters with the divine.

 

The image, like the rest of her work, is completely unique to her time, as Byzantium representations often utilized the generic human figure in which to represent women and men. Yet, instead of viewing it as a primitive and undeveloped era of creativity and development, ‘The Fall’ demonstrates the sophistication of the Byzantine age through its use of iconography inspired by the unseen godliness of the divine.  Through her visionary works of imagination Hildegard, provides a alternative teaching of Christianity in the representation of alleged universal concepts creating a diversity in form concerning gender and the structure of hierarchies within religious institutions.

Week 3 - Portraiture and Power

Who was Anicia Juliana?

Who was Anicia Juliana? How can her portrait from the Vienna Dioscurides be understood as an embodiment of dynastic ideology?

Anicia Juliana (ca. 462 - ca. 528) was a Roman imperial princess, the daughter of the Western Roman Emperor Olybrius, of the House of Anicii. With her husband Areobindus, whom she married in 479, she spent her life at the pre-Justinian court of Constantinople, of which she was considered "both the most aristocratic and the wealthiest inhabitant" [1] The two bore a son named Flavius Anicius Olybrius who held the consulship in 491, an age fifteen years before his father. He went on to marry Eirene, daughter of the emperor Anastasius I, a marriage which Juliana had hoped he would inherit him the throne. Sadly when Anastasius died there was no clear successor and the throne was given to an elderly and uneducated guard of the emperor, Justin I. Despite being offered the throne, Aerobindus declined in 512 after a series of riots had broken out in the city. To the dispair of Juliana he later fled leaving little chance of her occupying the throne, disappointed that her husband had failed her, the ascension of Justin I was the last straw. A true blue-blood of generations of royalty, Juliana was disgusted that her rightful title be given to an elderly guard to was born a peasant; it was now that she needed to concretely declare her own royal past, present and future, a statement made not only with the medical treatise of Dioscorides but of her basilica she built in 215, dedicated to St. Polyeuctus. Juliana's basilica was built during the last three years of her life and replaced another which built by the Empress Eudocia. Much larger is scale and grandeur, its goal was to highlight her illustrious pedigree which ran back to Theodosius I and Constantine the Great and to stand as a challenge to the reigning dynasty of Justin I. To further emphasise herself as the rightful ruler, St. Polyeuctus’ relics, including his skull, were transferred to Constantinople during the Fifth Century; this movement of relics increased the importance of the Capital, and the choice for Saint Polyeuktos was used to stress the imperial family connections with Eudocia. It stood for ten years as the city's largest and most sumptuous church until Justinian's extension of the Hagia Sophia. Immortalized in the poems of the Palatine Anthology (Greek poems of Byzantium and classic periods), Juliana was commonly praised for her royal decent and glorifies the church she built for the city, hailing to her past, present and future family lines. Lines such as 'she alone has conquered time and surpassed the wisdom of Soloman' [2] depict the great respect and authority she commanded throughout the years of her life.

 

Juliana is known chiefly for her portrait in the magnificently illuminated medical treatise of Dioscorides, which is now preserved in Vienna. The manuscript was commissioned for her by the people of Onoratou in gratitude for a church she built for them. Her strong, magestic pose enthralled between the personifications of Magnanimity (Megalopsychia) and Prudence (Sophrosyne) immediately commands authority and suggests lineage with the gods.

Anicia is presented with the closed book by the allegory of the ‘Gratitude for the arts’. Possibly Her Embodiment of dynastic ideology is exemplified in the inscription at her feet, reading ‘Great Patron’, and is reinforced by her attire. This navy lined robe with crown was worn only by those granted with ecclesiastic power to be used throughout the state. Imperial duties and patronage were reserved for men, however in Juliana this is not the case suggesting her to be of great importance and stature.

 

[1] Maas, Michael, The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005. pp. 439

[2] Harrison, R. M., A Temple for Byzantium: The Discovery and Excavation of Anicia Juliana’s Palace-church in Istanbul, London : Harvey Miller, 1989

 

Bibliography

 

Harrison, R. M., A Temple for Byzantium: The Discovery and Excavation of Anicia Juliana’s Palace-church in Istanbul, London : Harvey Miller, 1989

Maas, Michael, The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005

 Natalie Harris Bluestone, Double Vision: Perspectives on Gender and the Visual Arts, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995

Week 2 - Power and the Image

The Museum of Modern Art New York

• Established 1929
  Museum moved to current location on 53rd Street in 1939 by Nelson Rockefella, who later became Governor of New York in 1958


• 2.5 million visitors per year


• 1950s – model for American cities with aspirations of high culture and capitals of the free world


• Houses some of the world greats of the Twentieth Century; Picasso, Cézanne, Van Gogh etc


• Its library and archives hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and periodicals, as well as individual files on more than 70,000 artists
  

MOMA is described by Duncan and Wallach as that of an ‘architectural experience’, in which its content and subject consist of the activities commencing within its spaces. Its ceremonial architecture and floor plan mean to create its experience and impose particular consciousnesses with a definite structure and set of values, these being the incorporation of an ideology characterized by corporate Capitalism. This does seem unsurprising, after all the entire museum was founded by the Rockefella family, a particularly wealthy and elite clan whose members upwardly strove to such lofty administrative positions as the Governor of New York.

MOMA is identified as a ceremonial building in which to foster ritual, as would a place of worship. However, unlike a church whose exterior enhances its rituals by marking the iconographic program inside, MOMA does not. The objects within a church also serve this same purpose but MOMA’s walls are specifically built to house objects, with its architecturally created ritual added later. A space is made for the sake of walls and objects, thus the collection is not the iconographic program. The museum structures consciousness and ‘schools’ people to believe that they look at art objects within the museum, appearing to be a means (the housing of art objects) opposed to it's actual role as an end (a ritualistic practice). The objects indeed shape the ritual, yet they only become socially visible as art once determined by experts, thus becoming an iconographic program to be bought and sold on the art market.

Duncan and Wallach come to describe MOMA's exterior design as a clean, purified and efficient ‘new aesthetic’, its blank and impersonal appearance separating the public and the private worlds on a metaphoric level from the museums higher values and the city’s sidewalk. This architectural language depicts an age of corporate capitalism, a community reduced to a mass of individuals who value only subjective experience. The passage inside is greatly dramatized moving from the pedestrian world into MOMA’s higher values though only a glass membrane with no stairs, architecturally constructed to draw in visitors by removing psychological and physical barriers. Inside the large, lightened and open spaces present a heightened sense of choice of navigation with the museum's garden immediately ahead, large rooms for major retrospectives (such as Rauchenburg, Picasso) and smaller rooms for temporary exhibits. Yet this multitude is spatially disorientating and free choice becomes confusion, only to be comprehended once the main route of the permanent collection is experienced.

MOMA’s permanent collection is described to be a Labyrinth, the Western mythical construction whose architectural traits historically represent a cave to be walked through, the personages of woman and the notion of death and rebirth ending in triumph through spiritual enlightenment. It is the permanent collection that draws in the public yet its path consists of a succession of twists and turns through small cul-de-sacs creating a concrete depiction of a subjective History of Modern Art, an experience unavoidable due to the collections immaculate reputation maintained by repeated publications and press releases. It is this tactic that, despite the museum’s obvious faults has materialized such statements as ‘It has been singularly important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world’ (1) and its viewing as an 'unparalleled overview of modern and contemporary art' (2). Whilst the museum suggests that an individual’s ability contributes with individual gifts of genius, the works actually conform to a historical pattern; a dogmatic laying out of ‘key moments’ in Art’s History. The most important works are framed by doors, acting as signposts to the authorized history, whilst the lesser pieces are often placed in corners. All in all the effect of a history of progressive dematerialization is evident through the succession of art movements. The collection’s foremost chronology surrounds Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism with all other movements subordinate. Beginning with Cézanne, all ahead overshadow him with Picasso as the perennial figure, suggesting that as art progresses it improves, which is not necessarily the case. In the final room Art History receives freedom from the material world through the floor’s only window. The third floor immediately displays Guernica to depict the move from Cubism to Surrealism and the collection eventually settles at Abstract Expressionism, fulfilling the historical scheme that prophesized it. What is suggested is that the architecture exists for the individual pieces but the building is actually given its meaning and articulation from them, creating an illogical paradox. Even Michael Compton (Keeper of Education and Exhibitions at the Tate) admits that the collections are designed so that people ‘look at each painting for an average of 1.6 seconds…they can hardly be thinking anything but: ah, that’s an example of Cubism…they will never actually confront the individual painting’ (3) – a statement that suggests a ritual structured by the iconographic program opposed to the individual works.

MOMA's Sculpture garden
Speech is prohibited and the experience is private, strangers serve only to intrude. The luminous bare walls are unsubstantiated by comparison to the work on them; they exist outside of time and history. The gaze of the mother and the feminine find us through Picasso and Mondrian’s whores; upward striving consciousness is associated with male whilst a regressive and devouring unconscious is associated with the female. In fact, Wikipedia’s index of the masterpieces that the museum holds includes only Cindy Sherman, Georgia O'Keefe and Frida Kahlo, with none others present. In the garden she is positive, fertile and procreative, yet in the Labyrinth creativity is the male norm. We are confronted with the notion that her land and water must be overcome to be enjoyed, to be experienced only after the enlightening task that is navigation through the Labyrinth, casting us as pure subjectivity. The final Abstract Expressionist experience is of the mystical and sublime in which spirit eclipses reason and the biological realm of the woman.

Overall what is projected is a structure of values and ideals in which the female spectator is a lived experience; need and love are apparent as mundane and vulgar, everyday experiences that must be renounced. Detachment from this may be resolved through enlightenment until only a timeless human condition remains. Abstract Expressionism concludes the collection to the visible the triumph of spirit, here only the visible is real creating a struggle of the material and spiritual, of the corporeal existence and the divine. It is an agent of alienation, an attribute acting as religion's equivalent to freedom, yet freedom in turn is the goal of artistic expression. Thus, this seclusive act takes its role as a modern substitute and is executed within MOMA's walls, the labyrinth is a realm of inversion, not transcendence, and the mundane returns. Owned by irrational powers, the upward individual striving of the modern world is mirrored inside, recreating a symbolic social experience that appears positive in the eyes of competition. What we see is a refuge from materialism, but the museum actually exalts the mundane values and experiences that it rejects by elevating them to the timeless and universal realm of the spirit, a contradiction in itself.

I cannot agree more on many of the suggestions that Duncan and Wallach bring forth, it is intrinsically obvious that there exists is a widened gap existing between the male and female artist in which masterpieces as associated with that of the male figure, and as suggested earlier in the course that a ‘woman artist’ is not in fact an artist but a separate entity. The inequalities and discriminations are evident and unjustifiable and the collection appears to backtrack and act as a paradoxical entity in relation to the aims that it seeks to achieve; however I must disagree with the rejection of the museum’s capitalist and corporate iconography and philosophy. The Twentieth Century Western World existed as a Capitalist culture, as does the Twenty First Century, and whether or not our current state is ethical or indeed right or wrong, it is our current economic and social situation. Considering this implication, is art not meant to mirror the zeitgeist of the time? It is true that the History of Modern art exists as a construct, and indeed this 'Indefinite Story' is entirely subjective to a handful of cultural elite, but by adhering to their narrow sensibilities and tastes we are simply viewing a depiction of the social situations of the Twentieth Century. In any case, we could not possibly receive a true and objective image of the History of Modern Art as no building on Earth would be able to house such a widened array of knowledge, and whilst it displeases me to say so, a narrow view is necessary to appeal to the masses, the tourist who expects a 'quick fix' opposed to a lengthy and arduous exploration of the visual arts. Unfortunately the museum is not wholly funded by the tax payer and must operate like a business; whilst the true nature of art practice is the notion of free expression, the corporations that house such marvels must make a profit in order to continue to bring us the triumphs of the last Century (or at least their version of it). The iconographical program may push around the viewer giving them the illusion of choice but does it not give the uneducated viewer a sense of direction? The text states that the educated viewer would most likely visit MOMA in order to view a specific exhibition whilst the tourist would be drawn in by the permanent collections. Duncan and Wallach inform us that those knowing little about modern art would find their confusion originating from their heightened sense of choice and the ambiguities of where to begin, whereas those knowledgeable in the arts may take from the museum what they wish and further pursue their research elsewhere. It is a matter of choice and selection and whilst I recognize the dogmatic and narrow collection of the MOMA, I believe that it presents us with a place in which to begin, to satisfy and inspire a further craving for knowledge and sensibility whilst presenting an accurate criticism and analysis of the misogynistic and corporate elitism of the Twentieth Century. For if we expect to be handed a widened view of the heights of artistic culture on a silver platter we are simply denying our compulsions to search for ourselves in order to quench our knowledgeable thirst. (1) [(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Modern_Art) Kleiner, Fred S.; Christin J. Mamiya (2005). "The Development of Modernist Art : The Early 20th Century", Gardner's Art Through The Ages : The Western Perspective. Thomson Wadsworth, 796]

(2) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Modern_Art)^ http://www.newyorkartworld.com/museums/momamuseum.html.

(3) Duncan and Wallach, 'MOMA: Ordeal and Triumph on 53th Street', Studio International, 1976, pp. 53



Las Meninas

• 1656 painting by Diego Velázquez


• Oil on Canvas


• Painted during the court of Philip IV of Spain


• One of the most widely discussed paintings in Western culture


• Creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted
  

At first glance, Las Meninas appears to be a collection of individuals present within one scene; a painter, a girl, her maids, dwarves, a dog, a visitor and the reflection of a couple in the mirror. Initially we can take only this from the image, yet beneath such a simplistic analysis lies a collaborative web of delicate perceptions interlinking, connected by the relationships that lie between the observer and the observed. What we find here, if we take the time to observe is a vast array of meaning produced by the representation of space and the construction of a viewing position.

Foucault insists on the importance of objectively assessing the importance of all possible forms of perception, even of those that unseen to ourselves, that do not exist upon the physical plane. He presents to us the question; Are we seen or seeing?

Let us consider the canvas that the painter stands beside. From where we stand we cannot see what is on its face, is it finished or has it only just begun? Yet the painter's eyes gaze at us, grasping us and bringing us into the scene and onto the inaccessible face of the canvas, still ambiguous as to whether it is ourselves depicted it seems almost certain, yet we can never be sure due to its deceptive placement.

A light beams in through from the window on the right, settling onto both the represented space inside Las Meninas and onto the volume that we as viewers inhabit, which in turn makes the painter visible to us and vise-versa, aiding to establish the scene and making us explicitly aware that we are actually being observed within the act of observation, reversing our gaze into a dual action. However this light appears bend the laws of physics and seems to be very selective in its distribution of visibility; of the paintings on the back wall there appears to be little depth as they are shrouded in darkness. Only one is visible, housing two silhouettes offering what we are denied from the other paintings. The painting is actually a mirror but from its physical impossibility it is of no surprise that it may be mistaken for a painting, after all neither the painter not the other figures in the room are represented in it, it is modified only to show what is outside the painting and what the figures glare at. Thus we are presented with two figures who are unseen and possibly existing in the same space that we do creating what Foucault calls a 'metathesis of visibility' (1) affecting the space represented in Las Meninas and its representation. Ideally, since the painter gazes upon us as the subject of his painting we are allowed the see the doubly invisible - the image of what is both before the painting and on the face of the painter's canvas.

According to Foucault we must pretend not to know who is in the mirror to assess the reflection in its own terms; we know that this is a painting by Velázquez representing himself in his studio painting a canvas of Philip IV and his wife (who are indirectly visible within the mirror), whilst the Infata Margarita has come to watch with her entourage. However, this is not necessarily adequate in which to objectively asess the relationship of the piece's compositional structure to the meanings produced through our viewing position. Further afield, Foucault suggests that the 'relationship of language to painting is an infinate relation' (2), meaning that neither can be described using the other's terms, but must be used as equivalents and substitutes.

The mirror's image represents the reverse of the canvas, and reinforces the window's power, it too depicts what is outside of the painting, yet the window uses a cointinuous movement from left to right to unite the figures with what they are observing whilst the mirror instantaneously reaches out to the invisible observed rendering them visible to us but indifferent t oall other gazes.

Looking away from the mirror is a bright rectangle; a shining doorway revaling steps that seemingly lead to nowhere, the corridoor dissipated in light. On the limitless background we seea man holding back a curtain, he may be entering, leaving or observing but it is doing so without the attention of the others. He looks at us, possibly even appearing from where we stand. Un like the reflection he is real, he comes in and out simultaneously whilst the mirror creates an oscillation between the interior and exterior.

We now have a full cycle of representation opened by light; starting from the painter's gaze we percieve the back of the canvas, the paintings on the wall, the mirror, the doorway, several more paintings and the slit of the window. Of the eight characters in the scene five of them look outwards, the Infata occupying the vertical centre of the painting. As he face lies one third from the bottom of the piece she is identified as the principle theme of the composition, with two secondary figures leaning in towards her and two pairs of two figures on the right side, one of each looking out, becoming one pair. The following two diagrams can be deciphered in order to confirm the gazes of each figure/object. From this point we can see two possible entries

1. a pivoting movement frozen by spectacle that would be invisible had not these characters offered us the possibility of seeing in the mirror the double the observe. Here the Infata is vertically superimposed onto the mirror whilst they both face forwards. From each there springs a line of vision, the mirror's long and the Infata's short, which meet sharply to mark where we stand. In short, we are determined by these two figures.
   


2. What is in this space? Even the figures in the mirror contemplate this, it is a scene that looks out at a scene. The two stages of being observed and observing are uncoupled at the two lower corners; on the left is teh canvas which makes the exterior point into the spectacle and to the right is a dog who neither moves nor looks, acting only as an object to be seen.

We sense the presence of the figures' respectful gazes recognise of Sovereigns and recognise them in the mirror. They are the most pale and unreal of all the figures and their presence is ignored, yet despite this withdrawal it is their gaze that is the centre in which the representation is ordered, the Infata's and the mirror's becoming subordinate to it. They become the symbolically Sovereign centre due to their triple function, the superimposition of the model's gaze, the painter's as he composes and our own as we contemplate. Through this unity in relatioin to representation it cannot be invisible. Our reality outside the painting is projected within and defracted into three forms;

1. on the left - the painter pallette as a self portrait


2. on the right - the visitor ready to enter/leave viewing the royals spectacle


3. the centre - the reflection of the King and Queen as richly dressed, motionless and patiert models
   

Representation represents itself through faces, eyes and gestures. Yet in this dispersion is a void, the disappearance of its foundation, the person it resembles and to whose eyes it is only a resemblance. Representation now freed from the relation that impeded it can become a resemblance in its pure form.

(1) Michael Foucault, 'Las Meninas' in The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, London, Routledge, 1996 pp. 8

(2) Ibid, pp. 9

Week 1 - What's it all About?

Lee Krasner

(Notes from Ellen Landau, Krasner, Lee, Grove Art Online, < http://0-www.groveart.com.wam.leeds.ac.uk:80/shared/views/article.html?from=search&session_search_id=770913010&hitnum=1&section=art.047912 > [Accessed 3 May 2008])

• American painter
• 1926 she enrolled at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science in Manhattan.
• 1928 she transferred to the National Academy of Design
• Due to the Depression she was forced to work at menial jobs by day and attend art classes at night
• In the early 1930s she experimented with the prevalent style of social realism and the enigmatic imagery of Giorgio De Chirico and Joan Miró,
• Immediately grasping the most radical tenets of Fauvism, Cubism and Hofmann’s own theories, she began to create powerful abstract still-lifes and diagrammatic figure studies.
• Krasner met Jackson Pollock, with whom she had taken part in an exhibition in 1941 organized by John Graham to demonstrate that American art was now equal in stature to European art
• She responded immediately to Pollock’s work, believing that he was ‘a living force’ with whom others would have to contend and introduced him to numerous artists and critics who could help him further his goals.
• Their involvement during the early 1940s in the Surrealist circle of Peggy Guggenheim was fruitful for both of them.
• Unfortunately, however, Krasner’s growing admiration for Pollock’s work and immersion in his career proved initially debilitating for her own art.
• She entered a protracted fallow period during which she produced overworked ‘grey slabs’ as she called them, with no recognizable style or imagery.
• Krasner and Pollock’s marriage in 1945 and moved to the rural village of The Springs, turned out to be artistically rewarding: stimulated by Pollock’s development of his all-over poured style but painting in her own idiom
• During the period of 1953–5, despite marital problems centred on Pollock’s alcoholism, Krasner made a significant technical move into the medium of collage.
• Using as a support colour field paintings such as Untitled (1951; New York, MOMA), which she considered unsuccessful, from her first one-woman show at the Betty Parsons Gallery (1951), she pasted large dramatic shapes cut from her own and Pollock’s discarded canvases in works such as Milkweed (1955)
• 
• Untitled, 1951 Milkweed, 1955

• In interviews Krasner consistently maintained that her life and work were inseparable, and it was immediately after Pollock’s violent death in 1956 that she created her most memorable and truly autobiographical paintings, large gestural works generated by whole body movement.
• From 1959 to 1962, working in his barn studio, she poured out her feelings of loss in explosive bursts of siena, umber and white
• By the mid-1960s, however, she had worked out her grief and anger and began painting lushly coloured, sharply focused, emblematic floral forms, taking a more lyrical and decorative Fauvist-inspired approach.
• During her last period of activity, the mid- to late 1970s, she returned to collage, this time using the medium to reflect directly upon her past.
• The influence of Pollock was important in the development of Krasner’s mature style, in which her ability to give key modernist concepts a personal inflection finally emerges as the leitmotif of her work. Her will established the Pollock–Krasner Foundation, set up in 1985 to aid artists in need.

Bibliography

Lee Krasner Paintings, Drawings and Collages (exh. cat. by B. H. Friedman, London, Whitechapel A.G., 1965)

E. G. Landau: ‘Lee Krasner’s Early Career, Part One: “Pushing in Different

Krasner/Pollock: A Working Relationship (exh. cat. by B. Rose, East Hampton, Guild Hall Mus.; New York U., Grey A.G.; 1981)

E. G. Landau and J. D. Grove: Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York, 1995)

A. M. Wagner: Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keefe (Berkeley, 1996)

Ellen Landau, Krasner, Lee, Grove Art Online, < http://0-www.groveart.com.wam.leeds.ac.uk:80/shared/views/article.html?from=search&session_search_id=770913010&hitnum=1&section=art.047912 > [Accessed 3 May 2008]

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler was born December 12, 1928 in New York and is most renound for her contribution to the 1946-1960 abstract expressionist movement. She studied at the Dalton School under Rufino Tamayo and at Bennington College in Vermont. She later went to marry fellow artist Robert Motherwell.

Mountains and Sea (1952), National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Frankenthaler’s career was launched in 1952 after she had produced Mountains and Sea, her most famous painting. Measuring seven feet by ten feet – it was painted in oils yet retained the effect of watercolour painting due to her use of unprepared canvas and heavily turpentine diluted paint, provoking a large amount of absorption, leaving the effect of a halo as the liquid evaporated. Known as ‘stain painting’ the technique was adopted by other artists such as Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, launching the second generation of the Colour Field School of painting; a Greenbergian style characterised by large areas of flat single colours. Eliminating the spiritual aspect of their work, they distinguished themselves from the abstract expressionists who worked at through gesture and painterly practice.

This method would leave the canvas with a halo effect around each area to which the paint was applied.

Gaining more acclaim for how she painted opposed to what she painted, as Hilton Kramer states ‘the reputation it has aquired a sort of ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’ of the Colour field school’ [1]

Frankenhaler was highly influenced by Pollock and Greenberg through his essay Modernist Painting [2] in which he describes the purest form of painting to be flatness of surface, shape and pigment and optical experience revised by tactile association.

Under his guidance she spent the summer of 1950 studying with Hans Hofmann , the catalyst of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

"It was all there. I wanted to live in this land. I had to live there, and master the language."

- at first seeing Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm, Number 30, 1950 (1950), Number One (1950), and Lavender Mist

"A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it—well, she did this and then she did that, and then she did that—there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-laboured efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute." [3]

The Bay (1963) established new directions in Frankenthaler’s art, introducing ideas that would dominate her work until the end of the decade. Unlike many of her works it was titled before completion due to its close resemblance to water (through her soaking method). Whilst not intended to represent a particular body of water it suggests the experience of liquid, something that affects the sensibilities.

Small’s Paradise (1964)

Whilst Frankenthaler’s art predominantly regards landscape associations Small’s Paradise is a play on the interior, using shapes within shapes. Whilst the squarish shapes inside are another dominant Fankenthaler motif it does so in Small’s Paradise in the form of a field encasing colour opposed to an open linear outline.

[1] Carmean, E. A. Helen Frankenthaler: a paintings retrospective, E.A. Carmean, Jr., New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 1989, pp. 12

[2] Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, from The Collected Essays and Criticism: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, eds. John O’Brian, (Chicago University Press: Chicago, 1993)

[3] Carmean, E. A. Helen Frankenthaler: a paintings retrospective, E.A. Carmean, Jr., New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 1989

Bibliography

Carmean, E. A. Helen Frankenthaler: a paintings retrospective, E.A. Carmean, Jr., New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 1989

Greenberg Clement, ‘Modernist Painting’, from The Collected Essays and Criticism: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, eds. John O’Brian, (Chicago University Press: Chicago, 1993)

Rowley, Alison Jane, Notes on the case of Mountains and Sea (1952) by Helen Frankenthaler: history, poiesis, memory / Alison Jane Rowley, Leeds, 2001

Louise Nevelson

• Born Louise Berliawsky, September 23^rd 1899 Kiev, Ukraine
• 1905, her family had immigrated to the United States and settled in Rockland, Maine.
• In 1920 she married Charles Nevelson who takes her to New York. It is here that she studied visual and performing arts, with Frederick Kiesler.
• In 1928 Nevelson enrolled at the Art Students League in and studied with Hilla Rebay. During this period, she was introduced to the work of Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso.
• In 1931, while traveling in Europe, she briefly attended Hans Hofmann’s school in Munich. Nevelson returned to New York in 1932 and assisted Diego Rivera on murals he was executing under the WPA Federal Art Project. Shortly thereafter, in the early 1930s, she turned to sculpture.
• Between 1933 and 1936, Nevelson’s work was included in numerous group exhibitions in New York, and in 1937 she joined the WPA as a teacher for the Educational Alliance School of Art
• Nevelson’s first solo show took place in 1941 at the Nierendorf Gallery in New York. In 1943, she began her Farm assemblages, in which pieces of wood and found objects were incorporated. She studied etching with Stanley William Hayter at his Atelier 17 in New York in 1947, and in 1949–50 worked in marble and terra-cotta and executed her totemic Game Figures.
• Nevelson showed in 1953 and 1955 at the Grand Central Moderns Gallery in New York. In 1957, she made her first reliefs in shadow boxes as well as her first wall.
• Two years later, Nevelson participated in her first important museum exhibition, Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Martha Jackson Gallery gave her a solo show.
• She was included in the Venice Biennale in 1962.
• Elected president of National Artists Equity in 1965 and the following year she became vice-president of the International Association of Artists.
• Her first major museum retrospective took place in 1967 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Princeton University commissioned Nevelson to create a monumental outdoor steel sculpture in 1969, the same year the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gave her a solo exhibition.
• Other Nevelson shows took place in 1970 at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in 1973 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
• Dies 1988, New York City

• Predominantly created black sculptures of assembled wood objects that transcended space and transformed the viewer.
• 

• Whilst her work is unfeminine and appears to contain adherence to mainstream aesthetics, through her flamboyant appearance consisting of large fake eyelashes and enormous earrings she seems to adopt what Linda Nochlin calls ‘Frilly blouse syndrome’ [1]; the rejection of feminine roles in her profession yet the adoption of ultra-feminine items of clothing to insist on proving her ‘prowess as pie baker’ [2]. Consequently it affirms that even today we still have stereotypical values on masculinity and femininity; that the masculine artist is considered to be productive whilst the female plays at home with her hobbies and crafts. Ideally it subverts the inner confidence of stronger women by feeling she has to adhere to a stereotype.

[1] Nochlin Linda, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, Art and Sexual Politics, edited by Elizabeth C. Baker and Thomas B. Hess, New York, Collier Books, 1972, pp. 34

[2] Ibid, pp. 34

Bibliography

C. Roberts: Nevelson (Paris, 1964)

V. E. Johnson: Louise Nevelson: Prints and Drawings, 1953–1966 (New York, 1967)

A. B. Glimcher: Louise Nevelson (New York, 1972)

M. Friedman: Nevelson Wood Sculptures (New York, 1973)

Nevelson, Louise, 1899-1988. Nevelson wood sculptures: an exhibition organized by Walker Art Center / by Martin Friedman, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973

How can women become great artists when the term ‘woman artist’ implies the profession to be exclusively a male realm?

In her essay, Linda Nichlin asks the question; ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ Searching for an alternative way in which to write art history she suggests that women are not only subordinated by the art world but that this inequality is naturalised by the notion of “artist genius” in order to reduce the questioning of this ideology.

Nochlin suggests that in our society it is probable that there are different levels of greatness for men and women, an explanation that seems plausible due to the different situations that men and women experience. She makes the point that throughout the ages, women artists stray very little in style from their male counterparts, and appear closer to the artists of their time opposed to each other. Whilst the stereotype of the inward looking female artist is still prominent she suggests that they are no more so than Redon or Corot, if this is the case why are these differences maintained in art historical texts? Nochlin identifies that in the Canon of art history there have been no great women artists, only interesting ones who have not been sufficiently referenced. For women and ethnic minorities, greatness occurs in exceptional circumstances and there are no equivalents for the Masters of old. It is the paradigms of art history which are at fault, praising the artist as an individual and the creation of myths and fairytales of the genius. These stories commonly assert the notion of the ‘boy wonder’ [1]; the innate genius who’s drive to create is independent of outside encouragement and permeates the divine, whereas women are generally thought to be lacking this ‘golden nugget’ [2] of genius. Methods straying from these paradigms, such as socio-political analysis are often considered unscholarly and too broad, yet once we do so we find that a romantic and elitist subculture is exposed denying women the adequate institutional education often required for success, only granting them privileges once they were no longer necessary. The notion of genius places education secondary and forces us to believe this ideology to be natural and timeless.

Nochlin acknowledges aspects of social-gendering such as the books of polite society in the nineteenth century encouraging women in the visual arts to an extent, as a ‘suitable accomplishment’ for a lady, to dabble as hobby. They also stress for women not to become over proficient in one activity, favouring an all round ‘generally useful’ [3] woman. Whilst activities such as art maintains cheerfulness, the true career of women is that of marriage and motherhood, inadvertently allowing the construction of a superior/inferior relationship to men, eliminating women competitors.

Nochlin’s final conclusion suggests that women should face up to the reality of the situation and use their position as underdogs in order to expose the failings and inconsistencies the institutions of art history. The notion may be interpreted as a defeatist attitude, choosing the reject one’s goals to aspire to that which is inaccessible and to rebel against it instead; after all it is highly difficult to be appreciated in art even if one is a white middle class male. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the minorities discussed by Nochlin have these difficulties multiplied tenfold, through discrimination opposed to lack of originality. Women and minorities need a voice and whilst it may at times seem futile, the writings of authors such as Nochlin, Parker and Pollock have opened new perspectives to the world we live in today. The message is clear, we need to change the way we look at art for a less subjective and equal approach, for once we expose the institutional biases towards women we find those that affect race and sexuality too.

In Feminist Interventions in Art’s Histories Griselda Pollock’s asks whether adding women to art history is plausible due to the implications of simultaneously producing a feminist art history. Including female artists in art history suggests an obligated addition and suggests practices such as positive discrimination, we cannot simply place them into our intellectual view without just cause. A specific feminist art history on the other hand implies an insular and exclusive system which may lack an all-encompassing study. Whilst the great women, black and homosexual artists must be appreciated, the term suggests their structuring through compromise of the male greats, which is certainly not the aim of feminism.

Pollock goes on to describe that capitalism has greatly effected our perception of art, becoming a commodity opposed to an intellectualised practice. Contextually this provides a useful aid to when undertaking the sublimation of signs and labels all things non-masculine, due to the high marketability of physical and discriminatory art objects.

The goals brought forward by Pollock and Nochlin aim to revolutionise knowledge in order to change the present and alter the way in which we view the past so we may analyse not only women, but ethnic and sexual minorities as first class citizens opposed to objects of masculine desire and fear. We must not simply attempt to recognise these groups and plead their case for equality, but develop a new paradigm in art history in order to reject the elitist superstructures that manufacture a history of white, middle class males.

[1] Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, Art and Sexual Politics, edited by Elizabeth C. Baker and Thomas B. Hess, New York, Collier Books, 1972, pp. 7
[2] Ibid, pp. 8
[3] Ibid, pp. 28