Women Making Art

History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics

Marsha Meskimmon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135130886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Women have been making art for centuries, yet their work has been seen as secondary or has gone unrecognized altogether. Women Making Art asks why this is so, and what it would take for us to realize the extent of women's extraordinary contribution to the arts.

Marsha Meskimmon mobilizes contemporary feminist thinking to reconsider how and why women have made art. She examines work by a wide range of women artists from different cultures and historical periods, including Rebecca Horn, Rachel Whiteread, Shirin Neshat and Maya Lin, emphasizing the diversity of women's art and the importance of differences between women.

Part I

History

Introduction

Any investigation of women making art by necessity addresses history. The very fact that the work of women artists is still less well known than that of their male counterparts raises questions concerning women's historical role in cultural production and in the construction of art's histories. The phenomenon of women making art intervenes at this juncture, severing any seamless link between ‘history’ as a series of past events, people and observable facts, from ‘history’ as the process of recounting such events, evaluating the facts, and bringing them forth in the present. Both the conventional historical record and the recording process fail at the point of women's art, the very point at which they would need to recognise and account for difference.

There was a time in the recent past when it might have been thought that women were not very often active as artists, historically, or were unsuccessful in the artworld. However, some three decades’ worth of scholarship on historical women artists now makes such a contention seem nonsensical. Women were active in all areas of cultural production in the past, despite the (sometimes extreme) opposition they faced personally, socially and professionally. In fact, many women artists, over at least the last five centuries in the west, were highly successful and gained notice and patronage from their contemporaries. Yet their historical legacy has not equalled that of their male counterparts, and this is a fact which requires an explanation. Were these noteworthy and successful women really making art of lesser quality than the men of their generation or were the women who made art excluded from the historical practices by which artists were assured a legacy?

To examine questions such as these, it is imperative to break with any lingering historical positivism and refute linear, progressive narratives of the past and the trope of the ‘objective’, disinterested historian, rendering bygone events transparent to reveal their inherent truth. In itself, it is hardly novel to challenge such monolithic models of history; indeed, it is possibly more difficult to sustain the fiction of history as a unilateral and stable explanatory force, than to acknowledge the multiple perspectives and located interests which constitute histories. But for subjects and materials which have been marginalised by mainstream, historical meta-narrative, reconceiving histories is a political as well as scholarly act. Women artists and women's art are not benefited by any adherence to the exclusionary logic of the canonical traditions of art history which forever cast them as second-rate, peripheral and of little lasting value. The challenge to the historian is to critique those paradigms which marginalise women artists and their work, while, at the same time, finding alternative structures through which to configure histories otherwise.

Structures which emphasise the embodied situation of historical subjects, the material processes, rather than universal principles, of history, and the perspectival practices of historians in evaluating the past are useful to this task. Placing the emphasis upon embodiment, process and praxis does not just reverse the positions of the centre and its margins, creating, for example, an ‘alternative canon’, a separate but equal list of ‘great’ women artists. Working with histories as multiple, perspectival and dialogic, dismantles the centre–periphery paradigm, enabling women's art to be seen and heard in its own right, sometimes for the first time.

One key insight derived from understanding subjects as embodied and historically situated is negative – there is no universal ‘woman artist’. Simply put, a ‘woman artist’ in Victorian England was not the same as a ‘woman artist’ in Russia at the time of the Third International. Women making art negotiated diverse socio-cultural, economic and temporal contexts, combining the complex categories of ‘woman’ and ‘artist’ in many different ways. Indeed, women's access to art, and success within its remit, often depended upon contingencies of class, age, economic status, urban or rural locus and national, ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ origin – factors which could brutally distinguish between women in terms of power and privilege. Histories which articulate corporeal specificity mobilise differences between women, not just between men and women, and these differences are critical to any project designed to explore the multi-faceted histories of women's art.

Stressing these multi-faceted histories dismantles both progressive teleologies and a priori principles of historical development. In the case of women artists, for example, there is no evidence of an inevitable, uni-directional advance; women's participation in the arts did not simply ‘increase’ in any obvious, chronological manner and women artists today are not at the pinnacle of a slow march toward equality. Similarly, women's historical involvement with the arts demonstrates no uniform relationship between gender, aesthetics and history. The micro-histories of women making art can neither ‘prove’ nor ‘test’ the existence of a universal macro-history of women and art. Rather, it is the material specificity of micro-historical instances of women's art practice which constitutes the wider, macro-historical field. Understanding the processes by which polyvalent micro-histories construct what we understand as the macro-historical frame, acknowledges that patterns emerge across historical accounts of women's art-making without occluding the significant differences these also evince.

To recognise the historical interventions made by women's art means taking art's address to history seriously, expanding our relationship to material and visual practices as configurations of historical knowledge. To explore art-making as a form of historical agency means more than asking what past event or figure is pictured by an artwork, who or what is commemorated by the work or what set of circumstances led to the production of the piece. These might all be important elements in taking an historical approach to a work, but they are far too literal to delineate the full potential art has to reconceive histories. In this stronger sense, I am arguing that the visual and material arts can address history in ways that writing and speaking cannot; this is not to privilege art over other forms, but to recognise the specificity of its intervention. Acknowledging that art works in particular and powerful ways, especially in terms of mobilising the senses and the imagination as significant cognitive faculties, means that our modes of writing with, to and about its effects have an important part to play. If there are no objective, disembodied historians and no transparent, immaterial histories, then art, and the writing of and with art, are themselves formative of the histories of which they speak.

In the three chapters which constitute the Part of the present volume devoted to ‘History’, these insights have been crucial. The material addressed within the chapters is highly selective, and the particular historical moments covered are certainly not inclusive, yet neither are they random. Each chapter takes as its central pivot a double crisis point between history as the events of the past and history as the record of those events. The Holocaust, with which the volume opens, epitomises this double break. As an historical fact, the brutal genocide of millions of Jews, gypsies, political dissidents, homosexuals and others defined as non-human by the obscene logic of National Socialism, destroyed whole generations, the very fabric of historical continuity. And the corporeal loss of the Holocaust was so great that history, as a sense-making of the world, faltered; many scholars simply declared the Holocaust beyond history, unable to be conceived, addressed or represented.

The second and third chapters, focusing on the anglophone African diaspora and the decolonisation of Viet Nam, also examine extreme forms of conflict which have led to crises in historical explanation. The African diaspora is steeped in the brutality of the colonial practice of chattel slavery and its near-complete destruction of familial genealogy for the generations of those descended from slaves. Yet one of the most striking aspects of black feminist interventions into this history is its emphasis upon survival – and a survival of more than just the bodies of women subject to inhuman treatment, the survival of beauty, creativity and strong bonds between women across generations and over time. The long process of decolonisation in Viet Nam also marks a crisis point in historical narrative, particularly the narratives engendered by the developed west. Unable to represent Viet Nam within the singular logic of east and west or the Cold War bi-polar pair of communism and capitalism, the power of representation itself came to be questioned and the answers were not always easily consumed. Significantly, all three points of crisis which focus the chapters of this section have been pivotal points for the construction of alternative forms of history which legitimate location, perspective, embodiment and difference.

If the cases examined in the chapters each challenge a seamless historical paradigm, they also interrogate the complex relationship between aesthetics and sexual politics. The injunction not to aestheticise the Holocaust, typified by Theodor Adorno's rejection of lyric poetry in the wake of Auschwitz, has been mirrored by a strong opposition to feminist explorations of the event, argued to trivialise or marginalise its significance. By contrast, black feminists have stressed frequently that the reinstatement of African diasporan women as significant subjects of history relies on a wide variety of practices, from academic scholarship to political activism, and that art-making is key amongst these. An extraordinary body of art and theory has been produced by African diasporan women drawing together new and renewed aesthetic forms of historical inscription which operate at the nexus of racial and sexual difference. The problem of ‘representation’, as both political and aesthetic, is taken up by the third chapter by focusing on Viet Nam. Since the conventions of representation speak of political bodies and the body politic, articulating sexed subjectivity provides a counterpoint to assimilative liberalism and neo-classicising figuration.

Crucially, none of the three chapters asserts a separate ‘women's history’ of the Holocaust, African diaspora or Viet Nam conflict; rather, they present histories as partial and perspectival, arguing that the multiple, differently inflected positions of women can yield significant insights into these events and mobilise histories otherwise muted. The chapters are micro-histories, detailed examinations of particular conceptual tropes such as exile, covenant, gesture, cartography and representation, designed to realign expected meta-narratives by shifting our attention to an overlooked feature, an under-considered idea or a response not yet included in the dominant accounts.

This historical realignment is an effect of history-making in the present, of mediation, reinscription and reconfiguration through materials, ideas and images. The works which form the basis of each chapter's argument intervene in the production of historical knowledge. These works do not comment upon or merely reflect histories which exist beyond them and it is their visual, material, spatial and conceptual intervention in the processes of constructing histories which is at stake in the chapters. For that reason, the chapters never take histories or works of art as self-evident or as transparent vehicles of truth, but rather focus upon the ways in which women making art negotiate historical parameters, engendering meanings in materiality.

In writing with these works, rather than about them, I am seeking to mobilise a few particular interpretations and ideas which are resonant with the artworks and histories being explored, but I am not attempting to determine and assert the full meaning of these complex pieces once and for all. Indeed, I do not even think such a task is possible. The chapters are structured to emphasise the writing/making of histories in the present, the material mediations through which histories are constructed and the significance of the detail or fragment in the wider, macro-historical frame. It is a deliberate strategy to use two works from the recent past as a lens through which to explore earlier events, comparing and contrasting these to elicit a theme which connects gender, history and aesthetics. However, as the chapters unfold, the themes take on variations as the works are brought into contact with other practices and ideas – as does history itself. In the end, the macro-historical field is reconstituted by the extraordinary work of women artists at the micro-historical interstices between embodiment, location and practice.

1 Exiled histories:
Holocaust and Heimat

In addition to the ‘intervals of silence’ that I made visually palpable, there are the omissions of time – both narrative time and chronological time – that I recorded in my interviews…. The significance of these narratives thus lies in the very fact of disruption. What remains unsaid cannot simply be pieced together, or adroitly bridged.

(Deborah Lefkowitz on her film Intervals of Silence: Being Jewish in
Germany (1990))¹

Buchenwald

shaven dome of a skull

the cerebral execution machine camouflaged inside a height scale

neck bone oracle

no birds upon the hill, no sound

the dead are joined in fear

forming a leaden skin belljar suspended over Weimar

even trees refuse to grow here

the energy absorbed from inside the earth

weighing down with stones the camp's perimeter

(Rebecca Horn, from her work Concert for Buchenwald (1999) )²

What address can be made to the Holocaust which does not contend with absence, exile and loss? Holocaust survivors live in an exilic condition, past and present permanently inscribed by an inexorable abyss. Those of us who come after the Holocaust live in a history scarred by the extreme evidence of inhumanity. Both Deborah Lefkowitz's film Intervals of Silence: Being Jewish in Germany (1990), and Rebecca Horn's Weimar installation, Concert for Buchenwald (1999), worked within the conditions of exile and loss, engendering history against the grain of a forgetfulness seeking to ‘unlearn’ the terrible lessons of the past. Intervals of Silence did not shrink from evoking the traumatic void expressed by silence and temporal discontinuity and Concert for Buchenwald intoned an ashen, voiceless performance. But if these works acknowledged the magnitude of the exilic chasm which was and is the Holocaust, they never implied that such devastation stands beyond history, a tremendum which leaves us mute and helpless. Arguing against the possibility of recovering what Jürgen Habermas termed a ‘conventional’ history or identity,³ Intervals of Silence and Concert for Buchenwald offered the potential to reconstitute history and identity by other means. The work of this art enacts what Geoffrey Hartman called ‘a counterforce to manufactured and monolithic memory’,⁴ materialised by an attention to location, corporeal specificity and coextensive difference.

Exile is constitutive of the Holocaust; the Third Reich created exiles throughout the world as political dissidents, homosexuals, left-wing art...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Women Making Art
• Part I History
• Part II Subjectivity
• Part III Aesthetics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index