Title of the original edition: Vision and Difference.

Griselda Pollock
Feminism, femininity and the histories of art
First English edition, 1988
First edition in Spanish, 2013

© Griselda Pollock, 1988

© of the introduction, Laura Malosetti Costa, 2013
©Translation by Azucena Gaettini, 2013
©Published by Fiordo, 2013
Tacuarí 628 (C1071AAN), City of Buenos Aires, Argentina
[email protected]
www.fiordoeditorial.com. ar
Review of the edition: Julia
ArizaCover design: Pablo
FontLayout: Diana de la Fuente

ISBN 978-987-28386-4-5
The deposit established by law 11,723 has been made

Printed in Argentina / Printed in ArgentinaTotal or partial

reproduction of this work
Vision and difference
is prohibited without written permission from the publisher.
Feminism, femininity and art history
4 Pollock, Griselda
Vision and difference: feminism, femininity and art history.
- the ed. - Buenos Aires: Fjord, 2013.
352 p. ; 21x14 cm.
Translated by: Azucena Gaettini
ISBN 978-987-28386-4-5
1. History of Art. YO. Gaettini, Azucena, trans. II. TitleCDD Introduction
709
by Laura Malosetti
Cataloging date: 06/08/2013 Costa

Translation of
Azucena Gaettini
18 Laura Malosetti Costa 1
Feminist
the destiny of the other, defining ourselves (with Julia Kristeva) in a principle interventions in art history: An
of coexistence: if the other does not exist, why do I exist? introduction
Based on the work of artists such as Bracha Ettinger, Horst Hoheisel,
Mary Kelly, Charlotte Salomon and Art Spiegelman, and an analysis of
paradigmatic films such as Shoah by Claude Lanzmann and Night and Fog by
Alain Resnais, among others, Pollock developed an incisive and original
thought on these issues: the need to become a witness, to not forget, the place
of art in overcoming trauma and constructing a cultural memory, ethics and
the limits of representations and the persistence and transmission of memory,
Does including women in art history mean creating a feminist art history? 3
becoming aware that each gaze, ours, is unique, situated, under siege.
Demanding that women be considered not only changes what is studied and
what becomes relevant to research, but also challenges existing disciplines on
a political level. Women were not omitted due to forgetfulness or mere
prejudice; the structural sexism of most academic disciplines actively
LAURA MALOSETTI COSTA
contributes to the production and perpetuation of gender hierarchies. What
we learn about the world and its people obeys an ideological pattern that is
consistent with the social order within which that knowledge is produced.
Women's studies is not only concerned with women, but with the social
systems and ideological schemes that sustain men's domination over women
within other mutually influential regimes of power, primarily class and race. 4

3 I loosely paraphrase Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Placing women's history in

history", Neu> Left Review, no. 133, May-June 1982, p. 6.
4 The pioneering analysis of these issues, which has much to teach feminist -
studies, while demanding that they include among their considerations the
deconstruction of imperialist discourse and practice,
 Feminist interventions in art history 21
20 Griselda Pollock

However, feminist art history had its origins within art history. The first Indeed, Linda Nochlin was calling for a paradigm shift. The notion of paradigm
question was: were there any female artists? Initially, they were thought of in terms had become quite popular among social historians of art, who borrowed it from
defined by the procedures and protocols typical of art history: the life and work of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to account for the crisis that
the artist (monographs), the sets of pieces that make up a work (catalogues - in the early 1970s overturned existing certainties and conventions in the field of art
raisonnés), questions of style and iconography, membership in artistic movements history.4 A paradigm defines the shared objectives within the field of art history.
and groups; and, of course, in terms of quality. It soon became clear that such a way
of thinking would be a straitjacket, causing our studies of women artists to reproduce
and secure the normative status of male artists and their art, whose superiority 3 Linda Nochlin, “Why have there been no great women artists?”, in Elizabeth Baker and
remained unquestioned under the guise of the categories of Art and Artist. As early Thomas B. Hess (ed.), Art and Sexual Politics, London, Collier Macmillan, 1973, p.
as 1971, Linda Nochlin warned us of the dead end we would reach when looking for 2. (There is a Spanish translation: «Why have there been no great female artists?», in
female versions of Michelangelo. The criterion of greatness was already defined by Karen Cordero Reiman and Inda Sáenz (comp.), Feminist Criticism in the Theory
and History of Art, Mexico City, Ibero-American University/National Autonomous
masculinity. The answer to the question “Why have there been no great female
University of Mexico, 2007, pp. 17-43). See also the article in which Nochlin asks
artists?” was not going to be advantageous for women if we maintained the the question that logically follows from the previous one: “Why did great male artists
constraints of the categories of art history, which already specified in advance what exist?”, in “The de-politicization of Gustave Courbet. Transformation and
kind of answer such a question merited. Historically, women were not significant rehabilitation under the Third Republic”, October, no. 22, autumn 1982.
artists (although their existence could not be denied once we began to unearth the 4 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1962. (There is a Spanish translation: The structure of the
evidence) because they did not have the innate seed of genius (the phallus) that is the
natural property of men. That is why Nochlin wrote:

found in Edward Said, Orientalism, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. (There
is a Spanish translation: Orientalismo, Madrid, Libertarias, 1990).
A feminist critique of the discipline is needed that can transcend cultural and
ideological limitations, revealing the biases and inadequacies not only in
relation to the question of women artists, but in the formulation of crucial
questions for the discipline as a whole. The so-called "women's question", far
from being a minor and peripheral issue, can become a catalyst, a powerful
intellectual instrument capable of pointing out the most basic and "natural"
assumptions, providing a paradigm for other types of internal questioning and
creating links with paradigms established by radical approaches within other
fields.3
22 Griselda Pollock Feminist interventions in art history 23

within a scientific community, what it proposes to investigate and explain, its production, consumption, distribution and exchange, distinguishing between each of
procedures and limits. It is the matrix of the discipline. A paradigm shift occurs the activities in order to encompass them as a distinct instance within a structured
when it is discovered that the dominant mode of research and elaboration of and differentiated totality. Each activity is mediated by the other instances and
explanations fails to satisfactorily account for the phenomena that that science or cannot exist or complete its purpose without the others, within a system in which
discipline is tasked with analyzing. production has priority because it is what sets everything in motion. However, each
When thinking about the history of art in the 19th and 20th centuries, the has its own specificity, which distinguishes it within that non-organic totality. Marx
takes the example of art to explain how the production of an object generates and
dominant paradigm has been the modernist history of art (a topic that will be
conditions its consumption, and vice versa.
analyzed at the beginning of chapter 2). This is not a flawed paradigm, but rather one
that can ideologically constrain analysis by stipulating what is and is not possible to Production not only provides a material for a need, but also a need for the
discuss in relation to the creation and reception of art. In fact, modernist art history material. When consumption emerges from its first immediacy and its natural
shares with other established modalities of art history certain key conceptions about crudeness (...) it is mediated as an impulse by the object. The need for the
creativity and the suprasocial qualities of the aesthetic world. 5 A clear indication of latter felt through consumption is created by the perception of the object. The
the power of ideology is seen in the fact that in 1974, when the social art historian art object - just like any other product - creates an audience sensitive to art,
T^J. Clark published an article in the Times Literary Supplement in which he opened capable of aesthetic enjoyment. Thus production not only produces an object
the debate from a Marxist position, entitled "On the Conditions of Artistic for the subject, but also a subject for the object. Production, therefore,
Creation."6 produces consumption by 1) creating the material for it; 2) determining the
After a few years, the term "production" would become inevitable and mode of consumption; 3) provoking in the consumer the
consumption would take the place of reception, 7 which reflects the diffusion, based need for products that she originally created as objects. Consequently, the
on the social history of art, of categories object of consumption, the mode of consumption and the impulse to consume.
Similarly, consumption produces the producer's disposition, requiring it as a
need that determines the purpose of production.8
scientific revolutions, Mexico City, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1971). categories
of analysis derived from the Grundrisse ("Fundamental Elements"), Karl Marx's This formulation banishes the typical narrative of art history according to which
introductory methodological work. The introduction to this manuscript, which came a virtuous individual (man) creates, out of personal need, a concrete work of art that
to light only in the mid-1950s, has been a key source for rethinking the social
analysis of culture. In the opening section, Marx attempts to think through how to then leaves the private place of creation to open itself to the world, where it will be
conceptualize the totality of social forces, each of which has its own distinctive admired and treasured by art lovers who express the human capacity to value
effects and conditions of existence and yet depends on the others in the whole. Its beautiful objects. The discipline of art history, like literary criticism, naturalizes
focus is on political economy and therefore it analyses the relationships between these assumptions. What we are taught is how to appreciate the greatness of the artist
5 For a classic definition see Mark Roskill, What is Art History?, London, Thames & and the quality of the artistic objects.
Hudson, 1976. This kind of ideology is refuted by the idea that we must study the totality of
6 T. J. Clark, "On the conditions of artistic creation", Times Literary Supplement, May social relations that shape the conditions of production and consumption of the
24, 1974, pp. 561-563.
7 See, for example, the title and currency proposed by Janet Wolff in The Social 8 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1973 [1857- 1858], p. 93-
Production of Art, London, Macmillan Press, 1981. (There is a Spanish translation: (Spanish translation is cited: «Introduction», in Elements of the Critique of Political
The Social Production of Art, Madrid, Istmo, 1997). Economy (draft). 1857-1858, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 1980, p. 6).
24 Griselda Pollock Feminist interventions in art history 25

objects designated in that process as "art." Writing about the paradigm shift in
literary criticism, a discipline related to art history, Raymond Williams observes:

What strikes me is that almost all contemporary forms of critical theory are
theories about consumption. That is, they care about understanding an object
in such a way that it is useful and can be correctly consumed.9

The alternative approach is to treat the work of art not as an object but as a
practice. Williams recommends first analyzing the nature and then the conditions of
a practice. Thus, we will account for the general conditions of social production and
consumption that prevail in a specific society, processes that ultimately determine
the conditions of a specific form of social activity and production: cultural practice.
But then, since all activities that contribute to the formation of a society are
practices, we can move with considerable sophistication from the basic Marxist
formulation that all cultural practices depend on and are reducible to economic
practices (the famous idea of the base-superstructure relation) to the conception of a
complex social totality in which many interrelated practices operate that constitute
and are ultimately determined within the matrix of that social formation that Marx
formulated as the mode of production. In another essay, Raymond Williams argues
that:

The fatally flawed approach of any such study is to start from the assumption
of separate orders, as when we habitually assume that political institutions and
conventions belong to a different and autonomous order from artistic
institutions and conventions. Politics and art, together with science, religion,
family life and the other categories that we characterize as absolutes,
correspond to a whole world of active and interacting relationships (...). If we
start from the total texture, we can proceed with the study of individual
activities and their connections with other types. Nevertheless,

in Problems in Materialism and Culture, London, Verso Books, 1980, p. 46.

9 Raymond Williams, "Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory,"

26 Griselda Pollock Feminist interventions in art history 27

We tend to start with the categories themselves, which has repeatedly led to a very Changing the paradigm in art history, therefore, involves more than just adding
damaging suppression of relationships.10 new materials—women and their history—to existing categories and methods: it has
led us to entirely new ways of conceptualizing what we study and how we study it.
Williams thus formulates one of the main arguments about methodology One of the related disciplines within which radical new approaches had begun to
proposed by Marx in the Grundrisse. There Marx wondered where to begin his develop when we began to work on these issues was the social history of art. The
analysis. It is easy to start with what seems to be a self-evident category, such as theoretical and methodological debates of Marxist historiography are very necessary
"population" in Marxist theory, or "art" in our case, but the category is meaningless and of great relevance in the generation of a feminist paradigm for the study of what
unless its components are understood. So what method should be followed? is appropriate to rename as cultural production. The difficult but necessary
relationship between feminist art history and Marxist historiography is the subject of
If I started, then, with the population, I would have a chaotic representation of the second chapter of this book. While it is important to question the paternal
the whole and, by becoming more and more precise, I would analytically authority of Marxism—according to which sexual divisions are practically natural
arrive at ever simpler concepts: from the concrete represented I would arrive
and inevitable and therefore unworthy of theoretical analysis—it is equally important
at ever more subtle abstractions until reaching the simplest determinations. At
to take advantage of the theoretical and historiographical revolution that the Marxist
this point, he would have to resume his return journey until he found the tradition represents. A feminist historical materialism does not simply substitute
town again, but this time he would not have a chaotic representation of a class for gender, but seeks to unravel the intricate interdependence between class,
whole, but rather a rich totality with multiple determinations and gender, and also race, in all forms of historical practice. However, it is a strategic
relationships.11 priority to insist on the recognition

If we were to take art as a starting point, we would have a chaotic

representation, a generic term that brings together a diverse range of complex
ideological, economic and social factors and practices. It would therefore be
convenient to divide the concept into production, criticism, patronage, stylistic
influences, iconographic sources, exhibitions, commerce, teaching, publications,
sign systems, audiences, etc. There are many art books that approach the subject in
this fragmented way and only re-cover the whole by bringing together the chapters
that deal with those components separately. But by approaching it in this way, the
subject is left on the analytical plane of subtle abstractions, that is, of elements
abstracted from their concrete interactions. We therefore retrace our steps to try to
see art as a social practice, as a totality with many relationships and determinations,
that is, with pressures and limits.

10 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1980

£1961], pp. 55-56. (Spanish translation cited: The Long Revolution, Buenos Aires,
Nueva Visión, 2003, p. 50).
11 Marx, op. cit., p. 11 of the Spanish translation.
28 Griselda Pollock Feminist interventions in art history 29

foundation of the power of sexuality and gender as significant historical forces, as unlike trees, cannot be seen, but which we know theoretically condition our
powerful as any of the other matrices privileged by Marxism or other forms of existence. In one of the classic texts that enunciate this phenomenon, The 18th
historical or cultural analysis. In the third chapter I develop a feminist analysis of the Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Karl Marx uses the metaphor of the stage and
foundational conditions of modernism in the eroticized and gendered space of the the staging on several occasions to explain the way in which the fundamental
modern city, directly questioning the authority of the historical-social narrative that economic transformations of French society were interpreted in the political arena of
categorically rejects feminism as a necessary corollary. The intention is to displace 1848-1851, a political level that functioned as a representation but which later
the limiting effects of such partial rereadings and reveal how feminist materialist actively made effective the conditions of economic and social development in
analyses not only address specific issues associated with women within cultural France. Cultural practice as a site of such representation has been analyzed in terms
history, but also consensual and central problems. derived from Marx's initial perspectives on the relationship between the economic
However, there were other models that were developed in analogous disciplines, level
such as literary studies and film theory, just to name the most influential. Initially,
the immediate concern was to develop new ways of analyzing a text. The idea that a
beautiful object or a good book was the expression of the author/artist's genius and 12 Roland Barthes, “The rhetoric of the image,” in Stephen Heath (ed.), Image-
Muszc-Text, London, Fontana, 1977, remains a classic example of this
that it (sic) was the medium through which the highest aspirations of human culture
analytical practice. (There is a Spanish translation: «Rhetoric of the image», in
were manifested, was displaced by the emphasis on the productive activity of texts: AA.W, Semiology, Buenos Aires, Tiempo Contemporáneo, 1970).
scenes in which one works, writes or produces signs; and in which one reads, looks.
How does the social and the historical operate in the production and consumption of
texts? What do texts do from a social point of view?
Cultural practices were defined as signifying systems, as practices of
representation^ sites not of production of beautiful things that evoke beautiful
feelings but of production of meanings and positions from which those meanings are
to be consumed. It is necessary, then, to define representation in various ways. The
term "representation" indicates that images and texts are not mirrors of the world
that merely reflect their sources. "Representation" emphasizes something being
reshaped, codified in rhetorical, textual, or pictorial terms quite different from its
social existence.12 Representation can also be understood as something that
"articulates" in a visible or socially palpable way social processes that determine
representation, but which are then, in fact, affected and altered by the forms,
practices, and effects of representation. In the first meaning, it is understood that the
representation of trees, people, places is structured according to the conventions and
codes of representation practices such as painting, photography, literature and others.
In the second meaning, which inevitably includes the first, representation expresses -
puts into words, makes visible, brings together - social practices and forces that,
30 Griselda Pollock Feminist interventions in art history 31

and the politician.12 Finally, representation implies a third inflection, since it means production of social subjects. The impact of these procedures on the study of cultural
something represented for, directed at, a reader/spectator/consumer. practices completely displaces purely stylistic or iconographic treatments of isolated
Theories of representation have been developed in relation to Marxist debates groups of objects. Cultural practices have a function of great social significance in
on ideology. Ideology does not refer only to a set of ideas or beliefs, but is defined as the articulation of meanings to understand the world, in the negotiation of social
the systematic ordering of a hierarchy of meanings and the establishment of a series conflicts, in the production of social subjects.
of positions to assimilate those meanings. It refers to material practices embodied in Just as fundamental as these “radical approaches in other fields” was the
concrete social institutions through which social systems, their conflicts and massive expansion of feminist studies related to the resurgence of women's
contradictions, are negotiated in terms of struggles, within social formations, movements in the late 1960s. Women's studies emerged in almost all academic
between the dominators and the dominated, the exploiters and the exploited. In disciplines, challenging the "politics of knowledge."13 But what is the object of the
ideology, cultural practices are the means by which we understand the social
processes in which we are caught up and even produced. But if knowledge is
ideological, partial, conditioned by power and social position, for the individual it is 14 Dale Spender (ed.), M.en's Studies Modified. The Impact of feminism on the
Academic Disciplines, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1981.
also a site of struggle and confusion.
Understanding what specific artistic practices do, as well as their social
meanings and effects, therefore requires a dual approach. Firstly, the practice must
be located as part of the social struggles between classes, races and genders,
articulating it with other places of representation. But secondly, we must analyse
how any specific practice operates, what meaning it produces, in what way it
produces it and for whom. Semiotic analysis provides the tools necessary for the
systematic description of the way in which images or languages or any other system
of signs (fashion, eating habits, travel habits, etc.) produce meanings and positions
from which to consume those meanings. However, the mere formal analysis of a
system of signs can easily lead to losing contact with the social dimension of any
practice. Semiotic analysis, instead approached from the advances in theories on
ideology and based on the examination that psychoanalysis makes of the production
and sexualization of subjectivity, generated new ways of understanding the role that
cultural activities play in the production of meanings and, more importantly, in the

12 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, in Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, Selected Works in One Volume, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1970. (There is a
Spanish translation: The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Barcelona, Ariel, 1968). See
also, for a broader analysis of the topic, Stuart Hall, «The “political” and the “economic"
in Marx's theory of classes", in Alan Hunt (ed.), Class and Class Structure, London,
Lawrence & Wishart, 1977. (There is a Spanish translation: «The “political” and the
“economic” in the Marxist theory of classes», in AA.VV., Classes and structure of 13classes, Mexico City, Our Time, 1981).
32 Griselda Pollock Feminist interventions in art history 33

women's studies? Re-inscribing women in history involves a real reformulation of The problematic nature of a feminist analysis of visual culture as part of a broader
disciplines, but it can leave disciplinary boundaries intact. The very division of feminist enterprise could be defined in the following terms: the social construction of
knowledge into watertight compartments has political effects. Social and feminist sexual difference. But it would be necessary to complement this analysis with that of
studies of cultural practices in the visual arts are generally expelled from the realm the psychic construction of sexual difference, which is the place where the socially
of art history and labeled as a “sociological approach,” as if reference to social determined distinction that privileges sex as a criterion of power is inscribed within
conditions and ideological determinations were to introduce concerns foreign to the individuals, through family social relations.
very different world of art. But if we aspire to erode false divisions, what would be It is true that we must point out discrimination against women and correct the
the unifying framework for an analysis that includes women? fact that they have been omitted from history. But that can easily become a negative
In her introduction to the collective anthology Women in Society. enterprise with limited objectives, basically of correction and improvement. In the
Interdisciplinary Essays, the group responsible for the course “Women in Society” history of art we have documented the artistic activity of the
taught at Cambridge University in 1970, questioned the possibility of even taking the
term “women” for granted:
15 The Cambridge Women's Studies Group, Women in Society. Interdisciplinary Essays,
At first glance, it would seem that concepts such as male/female, man/woman, London, Virago, 1981, p. 3. Emphasis mine.
16 Mary Kelly, "On sexual politics and art", in Brandon Taylor (ed.), Art and Politics,
individual/family are so obvious that they do not require any "decoding" but Winchester, Winchester School of Art, 1980, republished in Rozsika Parker and
can be traced back through various social or historical changes. These changes, Griselda Pollock, Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement 1970- 1985,
for example, would give a 17th-century English woman a different social London, Pandora Press, 1987.
identity than a low-caste woman in present-day India, or ascribe different
functions to the family in industrial and preindustrial societies. But the
problem with these two examples is that they leave the supposed subject of
these changes (the woman, the family) with an apparently coherent identity
that is transferred from one century to another or from one society to another,
as if it were something that already existed independently of the particular
circumstances. One of the purposes of this book, and of our course as it
developed, is to question that coherence: to show that it is built from social
facts that can also be questioned in a similar way. This book therefore focuses
on themes that refer us back to the social sphere rather than the individual
sphere, placing emphasis on the social construction of sexual difference.^

At a conference, artist Mary Kelly was asked to answer the question: “What is
feminist art?” She redirected it as follows: “What is the problematic of feminist
artistic practice?”,16 where “problematic” referred to the theoretical and
methodological field from which statements are made and knowledge is produced.
 Griselda Pollock Feminist interventions in art history 35
3
4
women and repeatedly exposed the prejudice that veiled the recognition of women's meaning. For example, a woman visiting the Royal Academy in London in the mid-
participation in culture.17 But has it really had any effect? Occasionally, courses on 19th century carried with her an ideological baggage consisting of illustrated
women and art are given a marginal place, which does not replace the dominant newspapers, novels, diaries, magazines, books on child care, sermons, etiquette
paradigm. And even there there is cause for alarm. For example, at the institution manuals, conversations on medicine, etc., which were aimed at bourgeois women
where I work, the degree curriculum is four years, and within that curriculum and were consumed in various ways by them, bombarded with these representations
students are exposed to feminist critiques of art history and a course on of what a lady should be. But not all of these speeches said the same thing, contrary
contemporary feminist artists for twenty weeks, a two-semester course. However, an to what the basic thesis on the dominant ideology would have us believe. Each of
external advisor questioned whether there was too much feminism in our course. Of them distinctively articulated the pressing question of how to define masculinity and
course, bias should be of great concern to us, but no one seems to be too concerned femininity in the terms of an imperialist capitalist system, and in ways determined by
about the massive masculinism of the rest of the classes. Anxiety reflects that there the institutional origin, producers, and audiences of those materials. But in the
is something bigger at stake than the mere mention of women. Feminist interconnections, repetitions and similarities a regime of truth was generated that
interventions demand the recognition of power relations between genders, making prevailed and provided a large framework of intelligibility within which certain
visible the mechanisms of male power, the social construction of sexual difference ways of understanding were preferred and others were considered unthinkable.
and the role that cultural representations play in that construction. Therefore, the painting of a woman who has chosen a sexual partner outside the
While we discuss women, family, jobs, or any other topic we work on, as marriage bond could be read as a woman fallen from grace, a force that broke with
feminists we continue to hold the category of woman, family, and separate spheres
as something socially given. When we insist that sexual difference is produced
through an interconnected series of social practices and institutions of which families
are a part,

ly The list of publications on this topic has already reached a considerable size. Those
interested in these and wishing to further explore the "female stereotype" can refer to
Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Torn, Art and Ideology,
London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981; reissued by Pandora Press in 1986.

lias, education, art studies, galleries and magazines, the hierarchies that sustain male
dominance are put under scrutiny and pressure. So what we study when we study the
visual arts is an instance of that production of difference that must necessarily be
considered within a double framework capable of contemplating: a) the specificity of
its effects as a concrete practice that has its own materials, resources, conditions,
participants, modes of training, competence, expertise, forms of consumption and
associated discourses, as well as its own codes and rhetoric; b) its interdependence
on other discourses and social practices, which collaborate in its intelligibility and its
36 Griselda Pollock Feminist interventions in art history 37

the order of the social structure, the embodiment of chaos, a contaminating threat to women, but also, to an equal extent, at studies of “the painting of modern life”
the purity of her condition as a woman, an animalized and brutalized creature close proposed by modernist and social art historians, who consider the unavoidable
to the working class due to the preponderance of her physical processes, and to problems of sexuality exclusively from a masculine point of view. My aim is
"primitive" peoples due to her sexual promiscuity, etc. precisely to show how a feminist intervention exceeds the local concern for “the
However, would the readings of a woman and a man diverge from each other? female question” and places gender in a central position within the terms of
To what extent would the representation differ if the producer of the image had been historical analysis (always in conjunction with other structures such as class and
a woman or a man? I will dwell on this issue in Chapter 3. One of the main race, which influence each other).
responsibilities of a feminist intervention must be the study of women as producers. An especially productive resource for cultural studies is “discourse analysis,”
But since we have problematized the category "woman" so that its historical modeled specifically on the writings of the French historian Michel Foucault, who
construction is precisely the object of our analysis, we will proceed, then, not from made a close study of what he called the human sciences: bodies of knowledge and
the presumption that there exists a feminine essence outside of social conditions, or ways of writing that took as their object of study—indeed producing as a category of
partially immune to them, but from the analysis of the dialectical relationship analysis—Man. Foucault introduced the notion of discursive formation to account
between the fact of being a person positioned in what is called "feminine" within for the systematic interconnections between a set of related statements that define a
social orders that vary with history and the historically specific ways in which we field of knowledge, its possibilities and occlusions. In this sense, art history can be
always get out of that position. Being a producer of art in the bourgeois Parisian analyzed not only in terms of "art of the past," but also as the discursive formation
society of the late 19th century was, in a certain way, a transgression of the that invented that entity, art, in order to study it. Art already existed before art
definition of femininity, a term that in itself carried with it an idea of class. Women history catalogued it, but as an organized discipline it defined what art is and how it
were supposed to be mothers and angels of the home who didn't work and certainly can be talked about. When Rozsika Parker and I wrote Old Mistresses: Women, Art
didn't earn money. However, the same social system that produced this ideology of and Ideology (1981), we posed the problem in the following way:
domesticity, which millions of women embraced and kept alive, also generated the
feminist revolution, which proposed a completely different set of definitions of what To discover the history of the relationship between women and art is in part to
constituted women's possibilities and ambitions; ideas that were, however, defended explain the way in which the history of art is written. Exposing their
and lived within the limits established by the dominant ideologies of femininity. In underlying values, assumptions, silences and prejudices is also understanding
the subtle negotiation of what is thinkable or beyond limits, the dominant social - that the way in which women artists are documented is crucial to the
definitions and practices through which these limits are produced and articulated are definition of art and the artist in our society.14
modified. This sometimes happens in a radical way, as in moments of maximum
collective political struggle, or less openly in the constant negotiations of the Art history itself must be understood as a series of representational practices that
contradictions in which every social system is immersed. In spaces where difference actively produce definitions of sexual difference and contribute to the current
is most insistently produced, such as the eroticized territories of the modern city that configuration of sexual politics and power relations. Art history is not merely -
I define in Chapter 3, it is possible to delineate more clearly the differential indifferent to women; it is a discourse centered on the masculine that contributes to
conditions of women's artistic practices in such a way that this delineation radically the social construction of sexual difference. As an ideological discourse, it is
transforms existing descriptions of the phenomenon. In that chapter, “Modernity and composed of procedures and techniques through which a specific representation of
Spaces of Femininity,” my argument is directed at feminists who study Impressionist
14 Parker and Pollock, op. cit., p. 3.
38 Griselda Pollock Feminist interventions in art history
39

what art is is created. This representation is based around the main figure of the artist
as a creative individual. Undoubtedly, the theories of the social production of art,
combined with the murder of the figure of the author perpetrated by the
structuralists, would also lead to the denunciation of the archaic individualism that
resided at the very heart of the discourse of art history. However, only feminists had
nothing to lose from the desacralization of the Genius. The individualism of which
the artist is the main symbol applies to only one gender. 19 The figure of the artist is
one of the main articulations of the contradictory nature of bourgeois ideals of
masculinity.20 This figure is firmly intertwined with the history of Marxist art, see if
not the work of T. J. Clark, the Open University course on modernism and modern
art, and even Louis Althusser's writings on Cremonini. 21 It has therefore become
imperative to deconstruct the ideological fabrication that privileges the male
individual in the discourse of art history. In Chapter 4, Deborah Cherry and I
examine the reciprocal positioning of the male creator and the passive female object
in the art history texts that still form the basis of Pre-Raphaelite scholarship. Our
point

19 Griselda Pollock, "Art, art school, culture: individualism after the death of the artist",
Block, no. 11, 1985-1986, and Exposure, vol. 24, no. 3, 1986.
20 For a further analysis of this point, see Griselda Pollock, «The history and position of
the contemporary woman artist», Aspects, no. 28, 1984.
21 The idea was raised in a seminar given by Adrian Rifkin at the University of Leeds in
1985. See also Simon Watney, "Modernist studies: the class of '83", Art History, vol.
7, no. 1, 1984. Regarding Althusser, see Louis Althusser, "Cremonini, painter of the
abstract" and "A letter on art...", in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, London:
New Left Books, 1971. (There are translations into Spanish, “Cremonini, painter of
the abstract” and “Letter on the knowledge of art”, in AA.VV., Writings on art,
Madrid, Tierra de Nadie, 2011).
40 Griselda Pollock
Feminist interventions in art history 41

From the start, it was an attempt to inscribe Elizabeth Siddall and other artists of the use that description to understand how it works. In her introduction she refers to the -
group within the history of art. But they are already there, carrying out a specific Parisian feminist group Psychanalyse et Politique and explains its members' interest
task in the costume they have been given. Any work that targeted historic producers in psychoanalysis:
like Elizabeth Siddall required a dual focus. Initially, a critical deconstruction was
necessary of the texts in which she was configured as the beloved inspiration and Influenced—albeit critically—by the peculiar interpretation of Freud
beautiful model of the fascinating Victorian genius Dante Gabriel Rossetti. proposed by Jacques Lacan, Psychanalyse et Politique uses psychoanalysis to
Furthermore, it was necessary to realize that her story was outside the discursive understand the operations of the unconscious. Her interest lies in analyzing
field of art history and within feminist historical research, which did not focus on how men and women live as men and women in the material conditions of
individuals but on the social conditions of London workers, who worked as their existence, both general and specific. They claim that psychoanalysis
milliners, models, in educational establishments, etc. In conjunction with the provides us with the concepts with which we can understand how psychology
analysis derived from Foucaultian models, we propose the notion of woman as a works; closely related to this, it offers us an analysis of the place and meaning
sign, a concept developed in an article by Elizabeth Cowie from 1978. 15 Cowie of sexuality and gender differences within society. So while Marxist theory
combined the structuralist anthropological analysis model on the exchange of explains the historical and economic situation, psychoanalysis—in
women as a communication system, with the semiotic theory of signifying systems. conjunction with the notions of ideology
Cowie's essay remains one of the pioneering theorizations of the social production of
sexual difference.16
Furthermore, the task of deconstruction must be complemented with a feminist
rewriting of art history in terms that place gender relations as a determining factor in
cultural production and significance. This involves making feminist readings, a term
borrowed from literary and film theory. Feminist readings work on texts that are
generally produced by men and in which there is no conscious feminist concern or
plan, but which can be reinterpreted based on feminist perceptions. In chapter 6 I
provide readings, derived from psychoanalysis, of the representations of women in -
selected texts by the painter Victoriano DG Rossetti. Psychoanalysis has been one of
the most important forces in feminist studies in Europe and the United Kingdom,
despite the spread of feminist suspicions regarding the sexist application of Freudian
theory throughout the twentieth century. As Juliet Mitchell points out in her
important book Psychoanalysis and Feminism, which challenges feminist criticism, -
Freudian theory does not prescribe patriarchal society but describes it, and we can

15 Elizabeth Cowie, "Woman as sign", M./F, no. 1, 1978.

16 For a further elaboration of this position and a very relevant critique, see Lon
Fleming, «Lévi-Strauss, feminism and the politics of representation», Block, no. 9,
1983.
42 Griselda Pollock Feminist interventions in art history 43

already reached by dialectical materialism— is the way of understanding case of Rossetti is studied not out of interest in the particularities of this artist but
ideology and sexuality.17 rather by the degree of generalization of the sexual formation that provides the
conditions of existence of the texts I analyze. To use Jacqueline Rose's phrase, we
Foucault developed a social description of the discursive construction of are faced with "bourgeois sexuality in the visual field."27
sexuality and argued that, in a fundamental sense, "sexuality" has a primarily Psychoanalytic theory allows us to recognize the specificity of the act of seeing
bourgeois origin. "It was first in the great middle classes that sexuality acquired, and being appealed to in visual terms. The construction of sexuality and its
albeit in a clearly defined and morally restricted form, a greater ideological underpinning of sexual difference is deeply involved with the act of seeing and with
significance."18 Foucault defines psychoanalysis itself as a product of the will to the “scopic field.” Visual representation is a privileged place (I will excuse the
know, of the construction and subjection of the sexualized body of the bourgeoisie. 19 Freudian pun).28 Rossetti's works are studied not as a secondary version of a founding
The use of psychoanalytic theory by contemporary feminists is not an escape from social moment, but as part of a continuum of representations from and to the
historical analysis towards some kind of universalist theory. Historically anchored as unconscious, and also as a manifest level of the way in which the bourgeoisie
a model of analysis (and as a technique to alleviate the extreme effects) of the
relationships, practices and social institutions that produced and regulated bourgeois
27 Jacqueline Rose, "Sexuality in che field of vision", in Sexuality in the Field of Vision,
sexuality, psychoanalysis reveals the creation of sexual difference. Foucault speaks London: Verso Books, 1986.
of class sexualities, but these fundamentally involve gendered sexualities. The 28 In the original, privileged site (privileged place), where site is homophone of sight
creation of male and female subjects decisively entailed the fabrication and (visca), hence the reference to the wordplay [N. [from T.]. mid-19th-century
regulation of the sexualities of those subjects designated as men and those metropolitan literature problematically negotiated male sexuality and sexual
positioning. The woman is the visual sign, but it is not a clear and evident
designated as women, radically different sexualities, barely complementary and even signifier. While Marxist cultural studies rightly privilege ideology, feminist
less compatible. However, these terms were ideological abstractions compared to the analyses focus on pleasure, on the mechanisms and administration of sexualized
careful distinctions maintained between "ladies" and "women" in class terms, as well pleasures organized by the main ideological apparatuses, none with greater
as between "gentlemen" and "workers." The social definitions of class and gender power than those involved in visual representation. Rossetti's works dramatize -
precisely the impulses and impediments that overdetermine the excessive
were intimately connected, but the problem of sexuality and the constant anxieties
representation of women in that period. The term "regime of representation" is
associated with it pressed the bourgeoisie with greater ideological significance. The coined to describe the formation of visual codes, and its institutional circulation
is a decisive advance against the periodization of art history according to patterns
17 Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Peminism, London: Allen Lane, 1974, p. xxii. of style and movement, for example Pre-Raphaelitism, Impressionism,
(The Spanish translation is cited, with a minor modification: Psychoanalysis and Symbolism and so on. Instead of superficial stylistic differences, structural
Feminism, Barcelona, Anagrama, 1976, pp. 16-17). similarities are highlighted.
18 The quote is from Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of In the final essay I consider the works of a group of female art producers from
Sexuality since 1800, Harlow, Longman, 1981, p. 33. Michel Foucault elaborates on
the UK in the 1970s and 1980s for whom psychoanalytic analysis of visual pleasures
this point in The History of Sexuality 1, London, Allen Lane, 1979: «It must be said
that there is a bourgeois sexuality, that there are class sexualities. Or rather, that was an important resource with which to produce feminist interventions in artistic
sexuality is originally and historically bourgeois and that it induces, in its successive practice. There are significant continuities between feminist art practice and feminist
displacements and transpositions, class effects of a specific character" (cited from art history, as the dividing walls that normally separate art production from art
History of Sexuality 1. The will to know, Mexico City, Siglo XXI, 2005 {1976], pp.
154-155). criticism and history are eroded by the larger community to which we belong as
19 Foucault, op. cit. feminists: the women's movement. We created our own community in order to
44 Griselda Pollock Feminist interventions in art history 45

dialogue and develop paradigms for our practices, interacting and providing
constructive feedback constantly. The political meaning of a feminist art history
must be to change the present by the way we re-present the past, which means that
we must reject the accepted ignorance of art historians regarding contemporary
artists and contribute to the struggles of contemporary female producers.
At the same time, there are other connections that make it pertinent to conclude
this book with an essay on feminist art in our time. If modernist art history provides
the paradigm that feminist art history of the modern period must challenge,
modernist criticism and practice are the target of contemporary art practice.
Modernist thought has been defined according to three basic principles: the
specificity of aesthetic experience, the self-sufficiency of the visual, the teleological
evolution of art independently of any other causality or social pressure. 29 Modernist
protocols stipulate what is validated as "modern art," that is, what is considered
relevant, progressive, and avant-garde. Art that engages with social reality is -
political, sociological, narrative, and lowers the artist's own concerns about the
nature of the medium or the human experience embodied in painted or carved
gestures. Feminist texts and artistic practices, in alliance with other radical groups,
have intervened to break the hegemony of modernist theories and practices that are
still active in art education in the so-called postmodernist culture. It's not that they
did it just to make room for female artists within the parameters of world art. The
point is to create a long-term and far-reaching political critique of the systems-

29 Charles Harrison, “Introduction: modernism, problems and methods”, units 1-2,

Modem Art and Modernism, Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1983, p. 5.
46 Griselda Pollock Feminist interventions in art history 47

contemporary issues of representation that have an overdetermined effect on the central axes of our analysis of societies that were not only bourgeois, but also
social production of sexual difference and the related gender hierarchy. imperialist and colonizing. This concern is not clearly outlined in this body of
Equally important is the fact that ways are being discovered to address women writing, but when confronted by those who engage in struggles over this issue, we
as subjects without masking them as feminine objects of male desire, fantasy and must self-criticize and change our practices.
hatred. The dominant pleasures of the patriarchal visual field are deciphered and The core community from which this book emerges and to which it is
disturbed, and in the interstices, new pleasures are forged from political addressed is a loose community, composed of feminists from all over the world who
understandings of the conditions of our existence and our psychological structure. At research, write, dialogue with each other and speak for each other, with the aim of
the end of the third essay, when analyzing the work of Mary Cassatt and Berthe constructing a radically different understanding of our world, with all its horrors and
Morisot, I ask myself how women can speak/represent within a culture that defines hopes. It is impossible to give a list
the feminine as a silenced other, and to do so I use a quote from an article by Mary
Kelly, whose work is the main focus of chapter 7. This connection not only accounts
for the contribution of feminist art practitioners to the development of feminist art 30 Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, “Les Données Bretonnantes: la prairie de
representation”, Art History, vol. 3, no. 3, 1980, pp. 314-344; Fred Orton and
history, but expresses my concern to do immediately for current artists what we can Griselda Pollock, "Avant-gardes and partisans reviewed", Art History, vol. 4, no. 3,
only belatedly do for those of the past: re-inscribe them in history. 1981, republished in Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed, Manchester,
The essays collected in this book seek to be a contribution to the series of Manchester University Press, 1996.
diverse and heterogeneous practices that constitute the feminist intervention in the
history of art. It is not an abstraction but a historical practice conditioned by the
institutions in which this practice occurs, the class, race and gender position of its
producers. The focus of my concerns is certainly shaped by the conversational
community within which I work and to which I have access through journals,
conferences, exhibitions and educational institutions, which form the social
organisation of radical intellectual production in the United Kingdom. This
community is mixed, in which there are alliances forged thanks to common purposes
and contrary to the hegemony of the dominant paradigms, which presents both
advantages and disadvantages. For example, collaborative work analyzing the
institutions and practices of modernism and modernist art history, 30 and blindness to
the obvious gender issues present in these endeavors, have shaped my understanding
of the political goals and needs of feminist interventions, while providing me with an
invaluable understanding of dominant paradigms and their social bases,
indispensable to my feminist work. Furthermore, this work is not only Eurocentric
but ethnocentric. The position of black artists, whether men or women, past or
present, with all the cultural and class diversity of their communities and countries,
must be analyzed and documented. Race must also be recognized as one of the
 Griselda Pollock Feminist interventions in art history 49
48
full of all the women who inspired and supported me. Their recognition is in the art has become part of big business, an important component of the entertainment
texts that follow. The community is academic, it has the benefit of privileged access industry, a place of corporate investment. Take, for example, the Tate Gallery's The
to the money and time necessary to study and write. Yet, however much our Pre-Raphaelites exhibition in 1984, sponsored by a multinational corporation whose
activities may sometimes seem to compromise with the bastions of power and interests included not only mining, banking and property but also publishing, zoos,
privilege – and no doubt our visions narrow as a result – there still needs to be waxworks, as well as newspapers and magazines. What were they supporting? An
intellectual production at the heart of any political struggle. Some comfort can be exhibition that showed the public men looking at beautiful women as the natural
found in Christine Delphy's clear vision of feminist theory, which she sees as a order of creating beautiful things? In our review of the exhibition, Deborah Cherry
complement to the women's social movement: and I concluded:

Materialist feminism is, therefore, a way of doing intellectual things whose High Culture plays a specific role in the reproduction of the oppression of
advent is crucial for social movements, for the feminist struggle and also for women, in the circulation of relative values and meanings that contribute to
knowledge. For the first, it will be equivalent to the transition from utopian the ideological constructions of masculinity and femininity. By representing
socialism to scientific socialism and will have the same implications for the creativity as a masculine characteristic and Woman as the beautiful image
"development of this struggle. This way of doing things could not be limited - offered to the desiring gaze of man, High Culture systematically denies the
it would be impossible, even if it were proposed - to the population alone, to knowledge of women as producers of culture and meaning. In fact, High
the oppression of women alone; on the contrary, it would not leave any part of Culture takes a decisive position against feminism. Not only does it exclude
reality, any domain of knowledge, any aspect of the world untouched. Just as the knowledge of women artists that feminism produces, but it works in a
feminism as a movement aims to revolutionize social reality, feminism as a phallocentric signifying system in which women are seen as a sign within the
theoretical point of view—and both are indispensable to each other—must aim discourses of masculinity. The knowledge and meanings produced by events
to revolutionize knowledge.51 such as The Pre-Raphaelites are intimately connected with the functioning of
patriarchal power within our society.20
31 Christine Delphy, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (ed.), Neu> French
Feminisms: An Anthology, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1981, p. 198. (Spanish Many see art history as a defunct and irrelevant disciplinary demarcation. The
translation cited: For a materialist feminism: the main enemy and other texts, study of cultural production has bled so much and changed so radically from being
Barcelona, LaSal, 1985, p. 31).
an object to being a discursive and practical orientation that there is a total
breakdown in communication between art historians who still work within the norms
Feminism as a theoretical point of view represents a diversified field of of the discipline and those who question the paradigm. We are witnessing a
theorizations that are sometimes of considerable complexity. However, its paradigm shift that will rewrite all cultural history. For these reasons I suggest that
production and articulation are always supported by the political commitment to we no longer think of a feminist history of art but rather of a feminist intervention in
work for the liberation of women. the histories of art. We do not come from another discipline or an emerging
What does art history have to do with this struggle? Viewed as a remote and interdisciplinary formation, we do not speak of a "new art history" whose aim is to
narrow discipline that seeks to preserve and investigate objects and cultures of
limited, if not esoteric, interest, art history can seem downright irrelevant. However, 20 Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock, “Patriarchal power and the Pre-Raphaelites,”
Art History, vol. 7, no. 4, 1984, p. 494.
5° Griselda Pollock

make improvements, update the old according to the intellectual fashions of the
present or create a new theoretical soup. The feminist problem in this particular
social field takes shape in the terrain in which we fight, visual representations and
their practices. But ultimately it is defined within that collective critique of social,
economic and ideological power that is the women's movement.
2
Vision, voice and
powerFeminist art
storiesand marxism1

A social (feminist) history of art?

It should be obvious by now that I am not interested in social art history as part
of a cheerful diversification of the subject, which takes its place alongside other
varieties: formalist, "modernist," sub-Freudian, filmic, feminist, "radical" - all of
them rushing to find the New. By diversification, read disintegration.
T. J. Clark, "On the conditions of artistic creation", Times Literary
Supplement, May 24, 1974, p. 592

In the essay from which this quote comes, T. J. Clark describes a crisis in art history.
He begins by reminding his readers of a happier time, at the beginning of the
century, when art historians such as Dvorák and Riegl were considered great
historians, pioneers, and when art history was not reduced to its current role as
curator but participated in the

1 This is a revised edition of an article first published in English in Block, No. 6, 1982.