The Follies of Feminist Art Historians - Case Study Example

‘Investment in the look is not as privileged in women as in men. More than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets a distance, and maintains a distance. In our culture the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch and hearing has brought about an impoverishment of bodily relations. The moment the look dominates, the body loses materiality.’ Luce Irigaray, 1978. Interview in M.-F. Hans and G. Lapouge, eds. Les Femmes, la pornographie et l’erotisme. Paris, p. 50. In 2006, Kathe Kollwitz’s talk on Frida Kahlo on the Guerrilla Girls at the Tate Modern & Open University Days offered the British Public a retrospect on New York Bitch Culture. Instigated by the follies of feminist art historians in the former colony, the UK was invited to join in their activist rubric with the following introduction, “We're feminist masked avengers in the tradition of anonymous do-gooders like Robin Hood, Wonder Woman and Batman. How do we expose sexism, racism and corruption in politics, art, film and pop culture? The Guerrilla Girls propose, following the subtleties of French theorist, Luce Irigaray’s protractions on objectification of the body within traditional narration, with facts, humour and outrageous visuals. Our work has been passed around the world by our tireless supporters [and notwithstanding] The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art.” The transition of the Tate Galleries from a nineteenth century national museum, dedicated to patrimony and the evolution of imperialist administration of Culture in Britain, to the era of reflexive query by the Guerilla Girls and their challenge to sexist narratives of difference within cultural authority at the Museum, says much about the transformation of the institution, and its capacity to evolve in a responsive manner toward feminist art as a genre and a platform of public education. Founded in 1897, as the National Gallery of British Art, the national collection of Modern Art as well as the national collection of British art was built in a moment in which the colonial and imperial interests of Britain were still salient, if not in governance, in trade. The plantation funded Tate Gallery was founded after Sir Henry Tate, a sugar magnate and collector of Victorian art, whom laid the foundations through stewardship of the permanent collection. The Tate Gallery was originally housed in the current building occupied by Tate Britain which in Millbank, London. By 2000, the Tate Gallery had transformed itself into the current institution, which consists of four museums: 1) Tate Britain which houses British art from 1500 to the present; 2) Tate Modern which exhibits the Tate's collection of British and International Modern and Contemporary Art from 1900 to the present; 2) Tate Liverpool which mirrors the Tate Modern on a smaller scale; and 4) Tate St Ives which shows local Modern and Contemporary Art by artists. Luce Irigaray’s quote reminds us, that the visual objectification of women by men in the history of cultural production in Europe, has been one of continuity; activities dedicated to the subjection resulting from the objectivity of this ‘knowing’ gaze has by no means been confined to this gendered dichotomy nor the boundaries of this geographic location. However, assumptions laid forth by feminists since the latter half of the twentieth century, indicated that the ownership of the privileged gaze has quite consistently been contained and controlled mostly by white, European and North American, intellectual men, and by extension, national publics where their perspective is most representative. The history of the self-other constructed relationship between this “knowing” observer and his subjects is well documented in all types of artistic, scientific and historical production. The historical root of the Tate Galleries as a national gallery with, the implicit boundaries between the three said productions being constituted by the same ideological framework of oppositions, contributes to this essay in that interpretation of the narrative arc of the Museum’s collections, must then, be reviewed through recognition of this ontology. In Jean François Lyotard’s (1996) Les Immatériaux, he examines models of Modernity in the cultural institution. Parallel to Irigaray’s continental perspective from the point of view of psycho-analysis, Lyotard’s review of the potentialities of variance within art and museum exhibition are investigated by way of ‘the atmosphere of the exhibition’ at Georges Pompadieu Centre in Paris. Unlike North American strategies from the 1990s which evolved into ‘environmental psychology,’ the European school was instantiated through the lens of Lacanian discourse engagement, and in particular, Lyotard’s well known adherence to democratic play. In between the Immature Modern project, and the Unsexed progressions to follow post modern interpretations, Lyotard somewhat ‘scientific’ classificatory denotation is most readily addressed in the middle progression; an Increate dissemination of power in the post modern moment that creator-author-sender no longer can be contributed to ownership. On both sides of the pond, license in narrative arc, then, now finds itself the subject of professionalization. Interpolations of psychology based theoretical strategies, also reflective of the larger feminist art critique project, now stand as core ethical considerations within curatorial best practice, and post colonial recommendations toward sufficient rendering of cultural artefacts by official institutions. Associations: ‘the atmosphere of the exhibition’ Immature. The modern project: from Discourse on Method. Descartes Several models offered to a modernity without any heritage Postmodern counter-metaphors: an infant-housing and an infant-city undergoing constant modification [ . . .] the cosmos as immense fallout of the explosion that engulfs the measure of time. Increate. Modern: an intelligent subject Endowed with an imagination and will, analyses ‘data’ in elements, and then either re-creates them (simulacra) Or creates them anew (artefacts). The metaphysics and politics of a subject confronting materials Postmodern: the human subject does not have exclusive rights in the situation of creator-author-sender Immediate. Modern: to gain mastery not only over space, but also over time To control the behaviour of an object, it is necessary to be able to arrive immediately at its pertinent variables. Quantitative analysis and synthesis to be affected in picoseconds (10−12 of a second). The principle of ‘saving time’ extends from daily life (all video systems, robots, transport, storage, pay) to knowledge (data banks, electronic files) and art (the use of the computer for musical composition in real time). The ideal of saving time lies in the absolute speed of a performative (type: ‘I declare war on you’) or a quasi-performative (type: ‘Let there be light’). Unmasterable, immanent. Postmodern: no given is contemporaneous with its presentation, The generalisation of the principle of movement generalises relativity, even where the knowledge of human facts is concerned. Loss of the ideal of a transparent society simple to itself. The pursuit of immediacy everywhere reveals a complexity which cannot be mastered ‘all at once’. Unsexed. The classics imagined that the difference between the sexes could be transcended by hermaphroditism and ‘angelism’. The moderns use the law of this difference to reconstruct psychism (psychoanalysis). Postmodern: to achieve by medicine classical angelism and to fabricate a third sex, a synthetic sex (transexuals as the unsexed). In the contemporary moment, public intellectuals whom provide lecture resource at institutions like the Tate Galleries in the UK have met the challenge that the so called ‘crisis in representation’ sought to contain through counter to colonial, imperialist, and sexist praxis in museum and other cultural settings. Curators at the Tate have been central to those efforts, and the extrapolation of traditional methodologies from the field of Museology into new configurations of exhibition planning, public education and publishing in order to meet goals set forth within the major (and minor) intellectual movements throughout the past century underscore the institution’s dedication to a project of dialogue with a loyal public reliant upon the high caliber reputation of the organization. The most universal critique leveraged within the broader polemic of the ‘crisis of representation’ has been, of course, late capitalist efforts toward crafting competent curatorial relation with the promise of Art and History as a series of independent ‘self-conscious’ historiographies. If the Tate Galleries’ collections are engaged in this discussion, and one could effectively argue that they are indeed central to this global discussion within Britain, and especially at it pertains to the history of imperialism and cultural production, the implications of those collective efforts has produced a widespread discourse over the nature of the appropriateness of ‘thematic’ rather than other models of exhibition. While not necessarily in disunion with the traditional canon of timeline based exhibition, and the various institutions of the Tate certainly illustrate this, the inculcation of a more responsive and responsible orientation toward Britain’s past and its contemporary role in regard to both domestic and international art and patrimony speaks much about the Museum’s position in the broader social and cultural critique. The depth of engaged in those critiques, and to the effect that each step of the curatorial process from acquisition to exhibition works in reference toward construction of a certain kind of national ethnograph(ies). If theme is identity within the terrain of artistic schools, and this is made credible by way of Western Art History’s lineage of artist affiliation and training in accordance with those movements, the translation of artistic identities as a particular form of ethnography induces apt orientation for theorists on the relation between the specialized activities of the curator, and other culturally interested professionals such as anthropologist and sociologists. The story telling capacity of Museum’s is great, and the specialists of this visual narrative craft have deep implication in what James Clifford articulates is the historical activity of making the ‘knowing’ gaze official. Curatorial efforts, like ethnographic ones, are bound up with a larger complex “ideology claiming transparency of representation and immediacy of experience” (2). Drawing on an array of essays, focused on the artificial nature of constructing cultural accounts, Clifford attempts to blur the boundaries between the categories of representation and the modes of authority that have political stakes in perpetuating them; and they are ‘always caught up in invention’ (2). Pointing to a ‘series of historical pressures, ‘enabled by post and neo-colonial shifts in the global political order of things, he argues, the cultural expert ‘no longer speaks with automatic authority for others defined as unable to speak for themselves’ (10). ‘Cultures do not hold still for their portraits’ maintains Clifford, and ‘attempts to make them do so always involve simplification and exclusion, selection of temporal focus, the construction of a particular self-other relationship, and the imposition or negotiation of a power relationship’ (10). By identifying the limits of representative authority and its transparent self as an inherent subject to historical production, the ‘unknown’ location of the cultural expert is unmasked and the Other is able to gaze back. The question is how and to what effect will this engage or dis-engage the capacity of the curatorial exhibition? Clifford imagines this new analytical terrain will be best served through what Derrida has defined as a ‘grammatology’ or semiotics of expression hinged on an ‘interplay of voices’ conceptualized as part of a ‘discursive rather than [mere] visual paradigm’ (12). In this multi-dimensional space, a ‘the evocative the performative elements are made legitimate. Focused on a geographic topography of human experience, Clifford’s assumptions that ‘tectonic’ shifts in Culture, ‘influence, dominate, parody, translate and subvert one another [until there is] no Archimedian point from which to represent the world’ (22). The method of explication, then, becomes a ‘poetic’ disposition in the praxis of representation; the curator’s perspective one of many. I would argue that Clifford’s claim to a rejection of visualization has not gone far enough (18). To argue that ‘culture, and our views of ‘it’ are produced historically and actively contested’ does not dismantle the propagation of the theater like, uni-visual experience (18). Nor does calling for a ‘vision of a complex, problematic, partial’ a way to ‘more subtle concrete ways of writing and reading, to new conceptions of culture as interactive and historical’ completely serve to negate the ideology of visual imagining that is so inherent to the language and the doing of exhibitions (25). Sara Suleri also challenges the authority of revolutionary possibilities emergent from an epistemological field accustomed to common analytical use of binary relationships (such as colonizer and colonized). Suleri argues that such an over-emphasis on alterity can at best only scratch the surface of the kinds of individual nuances characterizing the negotiations that constituted colonial experiences. Here, alterist frameworks for interpreting the representation of culture most often replicate, rather than eradicate, the structure of the colonialism they are trying to refute. ‘By returning the repressed term of the other to the scene of colonialism’ argues Suleri both the cultural expert, and by proxy the audience-viewer, ‘split open the monolith of domination by giving space to the hitherto unheard perspective of the dominated subject’ (p.12). For Suleri and other critics of Britain’s imperialist leanings in cultural production, the value of representing art, and especially art rendered by artists from the former colonies is at issue, ‘since the subordinated subject ‘as other’ frequently serves as a site for the breakdown of interpretation: otherness as intransigence thus further serves as an excuse for the failure of reading’ (p.12). What is necessary, then, according to Suleri, is an approach that enables a more sophisticated engagement not only with the subtle complexities of colonial experience, but also the types of cultural and national creatures that were cultivated through them. For Anglo Indians, as well others in the Metropole, such transparencies at Tate Galleries and other national sites of patrimony, are at once and at the same time not only expressions or representations, but formative powers in social consciousness. In 1977, Jean-François Lyotard introduced the Instructions Paíennes and Rudiments Paíens: Genre Dissertatif, a theory of political resistance grounded in the critical capabilities of aesthetic forms. Setting up a challenge to the closed linguistic formulations of Hegelian dialectics, Lyotard’s perspective invokes the event–oriented focus of history making into question by locating critical possibilities in the inextricable, ontological alterities, of artistic critical/self–critical expression. True to the lineage of this insights, Lyotard even challenges politically correct collective performance as equally unjust; all meta-narratives of patriarchal power. Heralding the concomitant rise of the Western Republic, with the Modern invocation of ‘the pagan’ as a mode of political dissent, Lyotard emphasizes the affective, feminine character that aesthetics offer. As an intervention against what he calls the Eucharistic terrorism of sovereign narratives (i.e. nationalism), resistance to transcendental identifications can be, and are, performed by the disenfranchised, and as seen in contemporary art, through strategies of mimetic parody. In Lyotard’s terms, it is only through the chaotic doubling capabilities of the aesthetic form, that the ‘crisis in representation’ can be tackled. Imaginative expressions of the dispossessed are the site of ‘little narratives,’ the fuel for fodder of a totalizing destabilization of taken-for-granted institutional forms of patrimony toward an undetermined ‘pagan’ outcome. Lyotard’s work on the pagan aesthetic and on museology, have generated interesting implications for post modern engagements and ethical interventions. His works raise important issues about the mutually supportive teleologies at the core of all official forms of power, and counter tendencies to reify identity as a vehicle of political efficacy. Situated difference, rather than ‘identification’ allows those falling into the sphere of pagan aesthetics (i.e. feminist art) counter the dominant canon of Western thought. For curators at Tate Galleries, the dissemination of the collection’s vision through multi-media art installation and online university scholarship shows us that the syncretism imagined by Lyotard has indeed brought on an atmosphere of New Age cultural transmission; and one that substantially supports more traditional forms of philosophical elaboration. Works Cited Barker, E, 1999. Contemporary Cultures of Display. London: Open University. Carroll, David, 1987. Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida. New York & London: Metheun, Inc. Greenberg, R., ed., 1996. Thinking about Exhibitions. London: Routledge. Lyotard’s, Jean François, 1996. Les Immatériaux. In: Greenberg, R Ed., 1996. Thinking about Exhibitions. London: Routledge. Lyotard, Jean-François, 1977. Instructions Paiennes, Paris: Galilée. -- 1977.Rudiments Paiens: Genre Dissertatif, Paris: Union Générale d’Editions. -- 1993. Robert Harvey & Mark S. Roberts, eds. Toward the Postmodern. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Papadakis, A, ed., 1991. New Museology. Art &Design, 1991. Serota, N, 1996. Experience or Interpretation. London: Thames and Hudson. O’Doherty, B, 1986. Inside the White Cube. London: Lapis Press. Clifford, James, 1991. Partial Truths. In: Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.E., eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Suleri, Sara, 1992. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Read More