Seeing and Consciousness

Women, Class and Representation

Gen Doy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000323344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Through its provocative examination of feminist and Marxist approaches to women's art and female representations, this book challenges the widespread belief that Marxism has nothing valuable to contribute to women's studies. The author argues that, from the French Revolution through to the present, gender and class have shaped visual imagery. She shows how Marxist theory can function to question some of the premises of feminist art histories and to provide a more accurate understanding of the meaning(s) of visual imagery.

1 Marxist Theory, Feminism(s) and Women's History

In this chapter I will consider some of the debates between Marxist and feminist art historians around the issues of gender, class and representation which have emerged in recent years, mainly in the English-speaking academic world. It will be my aim here to question the notions that all those studying women in cultural production are feminists of one sort or another, and that Marxism is fatally and irredeemably flawed as a method for understanding women in cultural history. It is not my aim here to belittle the immensely valuable contributions of feminist artists and scholars to our knowledge and awareness of women's art in the modem period. Important steps forward have been taken in the development of theoretical analysis, one important example of which is the application of psychoanalysis to our understanding of spectatorship,¹

1. The literature in recent years on women and art history is vast. For useful bibliographical and historical orientation see in particular Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews, 'The Feminist Critique of Art History', The Art Bulletin, vol. 69, no. 3, Sept. 1987, pp. 326-57, and Lisa Tickner, 'Feminism and Art History', Genders, vol. 3, Fall 1988, pp. 92-128.

What I do want to do, though, is to challenge the notion that focus on gender struggle, as the prime means of understanding historical and cultural change, gives us an accurate understanding of the ways in which women represented themselves, and were represented by men. As a first step, I want to look at some theoretical positions of various influential historians of visual culture over the last few years.

Fairly recently, in 1992, I attended the British conference of the Association of Art Historians at the University of Leeds. T.J. Clark and Griselda Pollock were two of the three main plenary speakers, and the theoretical concerns of the conference were very much presented as a debate between these two individuals, representing opposing viewpoints. Their contributions were certainly perceived as oppositional by large numbers of the conference participants. In an important sense, this was a valid perception of different approaches, but also in some ways a limited one. While it is true that Pollock has become probably the main spokesperson for feminist art history, and Clark the mam Marxist art historian of the 1980s, the rather confrontational presentation of their material on that occasion did little to even open a dialogue on the question of whether a Marxist history of women's culture was possible.

Clark, whose books and articles on French nineteenth-century art can be said to have shifted the study of the period onto a new level of debate, opened the proceedings.² To underline this oppositional confrontation of different genders and different approaches, Griselda Pollock, Professor of the Social and Critical Histories of Art at Leeds University and a hugely influential figure in women's art historical studies, chose to present a feminist art historical epistolary journey to conscious awareness of the meaning of Manet's painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergére, 1882 (Courtauld Galleries, London). It was perceived by the conference participants that Pollock had chosen this work precisely as a 'critique' of Clark's 'patriarchal' discussion of this painting in his book The Painting of Modern Life, published in 1985. As we shall see in more detail later, Pollock has had many critical points to make about Clark's approach. However for the moment I will point out what she writes specifically about Clark's discussion of Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere.

2. Clark's works include his ground-breaking studies of art in France and the 1848 Revolution, The Absolute Bourgeois. Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851, London, 1973, and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, London, 1973, and his more recent The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, London, 1985.

She claims that Clark's discussion of the representation of 'modernity' in Parisian painting

is a mighty but flawed argument on many levels but here I wish to attend to its particular closures on the issue of sexuality. For Clark the founding fact is class ... Although Clark nods in the direction of feminism by acknowledging that these paintings [Manet's Olympia (1863) and A Bar at the Folies-Bergére (1882)] imply a masculine viewer/consumer, the manner in which this is done ensures the normalcy of that position leaving it below the threshold of historical investigation and theoretical analysis.³

3. G. Pollock, Vision and Difference. Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, London and New York, 1988, pp. 52-3.

In fact Clark does discuss women, sexuality and spectatorship at some length in his book, but what is really at the root of Pollock's dissatisfaction with his approach is that, precisely as she says in one of her briefer statements, for Clark the basis of understanding history and culture is class, not gender. Consequently, for Pollock, who takes the opposite view, Clark will never adequately theorise or present to his readers an understanding of women's oppressed position in relation to modern society and culture.

I would argue that Pollock's argument here is not conclusive, for one may quite clearly believe that class is the basic motor force of historical struggle without necessarily being prevented from analysing spectatorship, artistic production and the experience of women. What the key issue is for Pollock and large numbers, perhaps even the majority, of other feminists engaged in the study of cultural history is that gender difference is crucial and far outweighs other historical, social and cultural factors. This is true of different kinds of feminist approaches, as I will discuss later.

The kind of either/or approach epitomised by the format of the Leeds Art Historians Conference is unfortunate, but ultimately true. Either class is seen as paramount in a Marxist analysis of cultural history, or else gender struggle is seen as the most crucial factor in explaining why particular art works are made the way they are. Of course Marxist art historians discuss gender, and feminist art historians discuss class on many occasions. But attempts to construct theoretical foundations of a Marxist feminism and/ or socialist feminism, which unites Marxist and feminist theory on the basis of sound historical investigation have, not surprisingly, been of limited success, as I will explain in more detail later.⁴

4. See for example: M. Barrett, Women's Oppression Today. Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis, 4th edn, London, 1985; L. Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women. Toward a Unitary Theory, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1989; and the interesting articles by Jane Kelly, Josette Trat and the resolution 'Positive action and party-building among women' in International Marxist Review, no. 14, Winter 1992, ISSN 0269-3739.

Unfortunately Clark made no reply or defence of Marxist theory as a valid means of analysing women's art or the representation of women. His own plenary lecture revealed a scholar who, while still proclaiming himself a Marxist, neither demonstrated this in his method of lecturing, nor any longer seemed very clear theoretically what the practice of a Marxist was. He appeared rather disorientated, politically and in his art historical practice. Clark said that gender oppression 'was the most basic form of oppression' in history, and also that Marxism would virtually have to go back to the drawing board and rethink almost everything. It must be said that most people at the conference were hardly brimming with optimism, as the day on which Clark gave his talk dawned with the news that a Conservative government had, yet again, been re-elected in Britain.

However this was not the main reason for Clark's uncertainties, I think. Although he believes that the former Soviet Union has been state capitalist for many years, he nevertheless seems unclear what, as a Marxist, he would say about the process of its economic disintegration. He further confused his audience by projecting a concluding slide to his talk which showed Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre with Fidel Castro. The point of this image was left unclarified. Clark's rejection of any notion of a Marxist political party further complicates his position. Summing up, I would argue that Clark's position at present is in difficulties for a whole number of reasons, some of them totally outside his control, but a major one is his seeming unwillingness to take on the arguments of feminist art historians. However this stance by Clark, under quite strong pressure, does not therefore prove that a Marxist analysis is incapable of understanding women in relation to the visual arts.

This occasionally bitterly debated opposition between Marxist and feminist approaches to art history is not new and has characterised much of the last fifteen to twenty years, when radical new work was being published in the field of art history. Sometimes referred to as 'the new art history', a body of work investigating questions of class, gender and race in art was produced.⁵ At other times, or simultaneously, these developments were described as constituting a project to found a 'social history of art', as opposed to types of art history which largely ignored, or actively argued against considering, wider questions of social, economic and cultural history.

5. See, for example, A. Rees and F. Borzello (eds), The New Art History, London, 1986.

Indeed one of Clark s most influential contributions, which motivated a whole generation of younger scholars, including Pollock (and me), was his writing 'On the Social History of Art' .⁶ Clark argued for a 'social history of art' which attempted to understand art works as part of a complex interaction of economic, political and cultural factors. For Clark, this was an attempt to re-elaborate (or perhaps elaborate is more accurate) a Marxist method of understanding art which several earlier scholars had tried to develop. These included Meyer Schapiro and Max Raphael.⁷ However Clark's call for a 'social history of art' had certain problematic features, and an insistence on a Marxist history of art would have been clearer, in principle, and might have encouraged more debate in practice as to how, precisely, a Marxist theory of art would relate to issues of gender, race and so on. However this may not be something that Clark could have foreseen.

6. T.J. Clark, 'On the Social History of Art', in Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1948 Revolution, London, 1973, pp. 9-20.

7. See for example: M. Schapiro, 'The Nature of Abstract Art', Marxist Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 1, Jan-March 1937, pp. 77-98; and M. Raphael, The Demands of Art, London, 1968, M. Raphael, Proudhon, Marx, Picasso. Three Essays in Marxist Aesthetics, London, 1981, has a very useful introduction by John Tagg which deals with Raphael's contribution to the development of a Marxist art history.

It has been quite possible for 'social histories of art to be produced which really do not in any way critically engage with notions of art, creativity, artistic value and other supposedly neutral terms used by art historians. Michael Baxandall's book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, published in 1972 by Oxford University Press, could be cited as an example. A similar point has been made by O.K. Werckmeister, who states:

In the following twenty years [since 1968] art history as the social history of art production irresistibly came to prevail in the discipline, but on grounds other than those advanced by its Marxist critique. The historic reasons for this startling trend remain to be explored. Internally, it was prompted by art history's institutional growth, interdisciplinary expansion, accumulative bibliographical cross-referencing and scientific research technology. In the end, the social history of art became a commonplace pursuit for which only the methods remained subject to debate. It has never yielded any consistent conclusions beyond specific fields of inquiry, on how art is in fact determined by the social process. The term 'context' became the codeword for this state of indeterminacy.⁸

8. O.K. Werckmeister, 'A Working Perspective for Marxist Art History Today', The Oxford Art Journal, vol. 14, no. 2, 1991, p. 84.

Unfortunately Werckmeister tends to make huge generalisations in his article without really backing up his arguments with specific examples, but there is an important kernel of truth in this particular point. Since few scholars tried to elaborate a Marxist history of art, in practice and theory, all kinds of different approaches could co-exist, not entirely happily, under the banner of 'the social history of art', including approaches which were Marxist and some which were feminist in inspiration. This had not been Clark's original project and he specifically argued against it at the time.

Apart from Clark, the other major Marxist art historian w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Plate Section
• Introduction
• 1 Marxist Theory, Feminism(s) and Women's History
• 2 Women and the Bourgeois Revolution of 1789: Artists, Mothers and Makers of (Art) History
• 3 Gender and Class in Early Modernist Painting: a Reassessment
• 4 Women, Class and Photography: the Paris Commune of 1871
• 5 Russia and the Soviet Union C.1880-C.1940: 'Patriarchal' Culture or 'Totalitarian Androgeny'?
• 6 Women and Nazi Art: Nazi Women and. Art
• 7 The Postmodern, Gender and Race
• Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography
• Index