Suchismita Ukil M.A.

First Semester SURVEYING WESTERN ART

The Other: Re-discovering the Women Artists and the Concept of Feminism in Art
"So long as a woman refrains from unsexing herself, let her dabble in anything. The woman of genius does not exist. When she does, she is a man." th --A 19 century commentator Feminism as we know it today, or the second wave of feminism as an ideology, developed in the late 1960s and soon found itself a strong base within every facet of the society including art, literature and politics. The historical (often masculine) study of femininity documents feminine identity linked to passivity, nurturing, cooperation, gentleness and relationship to motherhood, with an emphasis upon the relegation of women to the private sphere, the sphere of domesticity. Feminists and sociologists have challenged the stereotypes relating to 'femininity', 'female identity' and the binary categories man/mind, woman/nature which dominate many conceptions of sexual difference, including the reduction of sociocultural processes to biological givens. For French feminist theorists (e.g. Cixious, Kristeva), 'feminine' is an arbitrary category given to woman's 1 th appearance or behaviour by patriarchy. In this essay, we are going to look at the women artists of the 20 century and try to ascertain whether it would be pertinent to term their art as feminine or feminist as well as challenge the notion or the myth of great art, if there is such a thing as the feminine aesthetic and feminist imagery, at the same time raising questions as to who or what makes an artist great and trying to destroy the stereotypes associated with feminist art. Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men. They show it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth. 2 --Simone de Beauvoir Griselda Pollock vociferously states that since the beginning of the womens movement, one of the major tasks faced by the feminists was to restructure the representation of the female in the various art forms as unfavourable depiction and reading of art history might further the cultural hegemony which has already existed. The notion of free, individual creativity has always been associated with the male, whereas art by women is always accompanied with a feminine adjectival prefix. Women artists have been deliberately kept 3 th away from the canon whereas a close scrutiny of the 20 century would provide us with enough examples of consistent and constant contribution by them. There has been substantial amount of literature prior to this, where women artists have been criticised for having a feminine aesthetic typifying the paintings presented by them as inferior art. This gender differentiation in turn has played a significant role in hailing the masculine art 4 and upholding it as great or serious, at the same time reducing the so-called feminine art as the other. Also, any art which challenges the set perceptions of history and tries to provide different explanations is again cast off. Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist, in her famous work SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, reverses the roles of the sexes projecting the man as an essentially weak individual who resorts to symbolism and obscurity to prove himself as superior to the other (woman), thus creating a divide in order to disguise his own insecurity. She states that Great Art, which is in actual fact created by men and that obscurity, evasiveness, incomprehensibility, indirectness, ambiguity and boredom (present in their art) are marks of 5 depth and brilliance , is great is told to us by the male authorities and we have no space to challenge their assertions as only those with fine sensibilities can truly appreciate their greatness. She goes on to say that appreciating is the only leisure activity of the so-called cultivated, that that their inability to create leads them to spectate, that absorbing culture is a desperate, frantic attempt to groove in an ungroovy world, escape

Collins internet-linked dictionary of Sociology (Sociology Defined and Explained), Ed. By David Jary and Julia Jary, 2006 2 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972; first pub. France, 1949), p. 175 3 Differencing The Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Arts Histories, Griselda Pollock, 1999 4 Women, Art and Ideology: Questions for Feminist Art Historians, Griselda Pollock (Womans Art Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring-Summer, 1983) pp. 39-47) 5 SCUM Manifesto (London: The Matriarchy Study Group, 1983, first pub. 1968) pp. 23-26, Valerie Solanas

the horror of a sterile, mindless existence. Her radical ideas become very evident when she claims that man being purely sexual and hollow and without the ability to give life cannot aptly depict life in any which way. Even though Solanas work is an interesting read and provides food for thought, one cannot absolutely agree with her as it is highly intransigent and tends to denigrate the male sex in order to prove her point. And the feminist art or the feminist movement at large, as opposed to radical feminism (initially atleast), was certainly not about that but about finding a balance along with creating a niche for women artists who had been marginalised for a long time now. The development of female art is not to be viewed as reactionary, like its counterpart, the male School of Virility. (Shulamith Firestone) Along the same lines as Solanas, Project Womanhouse, where 21 art students from Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) turned a dilapidated house in Los Angeles into an art exhibit, is perhaps a landmark in revolutionising art and bringing about feminist art and imagery to the forefront. It was started in 1972 by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro at the idea of Paula Harper, an art historian who was teaching at CalArts during that time, to create a collaborative art installation in a house. There were several noteworthy installations such as the Bridal Staircase by Kathy Huberland, where a mannequin bride was placed on the stairs with her long bridal train leading to the kitchen and becoming progressively greyer and dingier along its length; Judy Chicagos Menstruation Bathroom, which depicted a white bathroom with a shelf full of feminine hygiene products and a trash can full of used feminine hygiene products, the red splayed against the white walls creating a stark impression; and performance acts such as He and She, where actors were seen as having both the sex organs and Birth Trilogy, where performers crawled through a birth canal 7 tunnel made of the legs of other women. Faith Wildings 15-minute monologue titled Waiting as a part of
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Ibid. Waiting . . . Waiting . . . Waiting . . . Waiting for someone to come in Waiting for someone to hold me Waiting for someone to feed me Waiting for someone to change my diaper Waiting . . . Waiting to scrawl, to walk, waiting to talk Waiting to be cuddled Waiting for someone to take me outside Waiting for someone to play with me Waiting for someone to take me outside Waiting for someone to read to me, dress me, tie my shoes Waiting for Mommy to brush my hair Waiting for her to curl my hair Waiting to wear my frilly dress Waiting to be a pretty girl Waiting to grow up Waiting . . . Waiting for my breasts to develop Waiting to wear a bra Waiting to menstruate Waiting to read forbidden books Waiting to stop being clumsy Waiting to have a good figure Waiting for my first date Waiting to have a boyfriend Waiting to go to a party, to be asked to dance, to dance close Waiting to be beautiful Waiting for the secret Waiting for life to begin Waiting

Waiting to be somebody Waiting to wear makeup Waiting for my pimples to go away Waiting to wear lipstick, to wear high heels and stockings Waiting to get dressed up, to shave my legs Waiting to be pretty Waiting . . . Waiting for him to notice me, to call me Waiting for him to ask me out Waiting for him to pay attention to me Waiting for him to fall in love with me Waiting for him to kiss me, touch me, touch my breasts Waiting for him to pass my house Waiting for him to tell me Im beautiful Waiting for him to ask me to go steady Waiting to neck, to make out, waiting to go all the way Waiting to smoke, to drink, to stay out late Waiting to be a woman Waiting . . . Waiting for my great love Waiting for the perfect man Waiting for Mr. Right Waiting . . . Waiting to get married Waiting for my wedding day Waiting for my wedding night Waiting for sex Waiting for him to make the first move Waiting for him to excite me Waiting for him to give me pleasure Waiting for him to give me an orgasm Waiting . . . Waiting for him to come home, to fill my time Waiting . . . Waiting for my baby to come Waiting for my belly to swell Waiting for my breasts to fill with milk Waiting to feel my baby move Waiting for my legs to stop swelling Waiting for the first contractions Waiting for the contractions to end Waiting for the head to emerge Waiting for the first scream, the afterbirth Waiting to hold my baby Waiting for my baby to suck my milk Waiting for my baby to stop crying Waiting for my baby to sleep through the night Waiting for my breasts to dry up Waiting to get my figure back, for the stretch marks to go away Waiting for some time to myself Waiting to be beautiful again Waiting for my child to go to school Waiting for life to begin again Waiting . . . Waiting for my children to come home from school Waiting for them to grow up, to leave home Waiting to be myself

the performance is also of tremendous significance. This project was fashioned in such a way so as to shock the spectators, to provoke them into a reaction.

Judy Chicago, The Menstruation Bathroom, Womanhouse Waiting for excitement Waiting for him to tell me something interesting, to ask me how I feel Waiting for him to stop being crabby, reach for my hand, kiss me good morning Waiting for fulfilment Waiting for the children to marry Waiting for something to happen Waiting . . . Waiting to lose weight Waiting for the first gray hair Waiting for menopause Waiting to grow wise Waiting . . . Waiting for my body to break down, to get ugly Waiting for my flesh to sag Waiting for my breasts to shrivel up Waiting for a visit from my children, for letters Waiting for my friends to die Waiting for my husband to die Waiting . . . Waiting to get sick Waiting for things to get better Waiting for winter to end Waiting for the mirror to tell me that Im old Waiting for a good bowel movement Waiting for the pain to go away Waiting for the struggle to end Waiting for release Waiting for morning Waiting for the end of the day Waiting for sleep Waiting

And not just Womanhouse, Carolee Schneemann was producing such radical art for a long time before 1972. She is famous for her performance act, Interior Scroll, in which she pulls a scroll of paper out of her vagina, which has text written on it, all the while reading from it to the audience. "I thought of the vagina in many ways-- physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the sources of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation. I saw the vagina as a translucent chamber of which the serpent was an outward model: enlivened by its passage from the visible to the invisible, a spiralled coil ringed with the shape of desire and generative mysteries, attributes of both female and male sexual power. This source of interior knowledge would be symbolized as the primary index unifying spirit and flesh in Goddess 8 worship." Marina Abramovic, often called the grandmother of performance art, is another such example. The psychical organisation orders the women to channel all their emotional energy on men, while the men sublimate theirs into work, says Shulamith Firestone. Women inspired most great works of art (if not being directly involved in the production), thus becoming the muse, the very core of the history of art borne out of great men. And so the female nudes (the opposite sex stimulated men) became a regular and where male 9 nudes reached a high point, the men were homosexual. Women failed to leave an indelible mark in the art scene in the past as they had to participate and compete in an all male culture on male terms while being pressurised to prove themselves without discarding their female roles. The tool for representing, for objectifying ones experience in order to deal with it, culture is so saturated with male bias that women almost never have a chance to see themselves culturally through their own eyes... Thus because cultural dicta are set by men, presenting only the male view...women are kept from 10 th achieving an authentic picture of their reality. Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt from the 19 century Impressionist School portrayed what could be called female subject matter and were thus categorised as minor painters as they had a lifted a set of traditions which were not their own, they were socially conditioned to depict life a certain way and remained in the sidelines while Renoir and Monet, who were also known for depicting scenes from the household did pretty well for themselves. The problem lay in the fact that they were trying to outdo men in a culture created by them, in whose creation they had no role to play, and which could be easily manipulated by them. For a true female aesthetic to emerge it would take a complete denial of all cultural tradition, starting with unlearning whatever one has been taught to believe as the absolute truth. Sherry B. Ortner, a cultural anthropologist, is not convinced that devaluation of women at the hands of men is a result of biological determinism. She postulates that this might have occurred due to the fact that women are closer to nature than men, the latter being identified with culture (lacking natural creative functions, they tend to assert their creativity externally, artificially) at most times and there is a general tendency for culture to subvert nature. De Beauvoir reviews the physiological structure, development, and functions of the human 11 and concludes that the female, to a greater extent than the male, is the prey of the species. Guerrilla Girls, a feminist New York based group founded in 1985 by unnamed women "artists, writers, performers and film makers who fight discrimination", came up with a list in one of their notices in 1989:

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Carolee Schneemann, from her website http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/interiorscroll.html Shulamith Firestone, (Male) Culture from The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (London: The Womens Press, 1979; first pub. 1970), pp. 148-160 10 Ibid. 11 Sherry B. Ortner, Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture? from Feminist Studies, 1 (2) (1972), pp. 5-31

The above publication is very obviously a satire, but it does manage to capture the essence of discrimination and marginalisation faced by the women artists at the hands of the critics around that time and even before. Another poster, using Ingres Odalisque, by the Guerrilla Girls which gained popularity worldwide:

The Guerrilla Girls might be propagandist, all of political groups with an agenda almost always are, but they end up raising significant and valid questions such as why have the women artists been neglected by the art 12 historians and why have there been no great women artists in the past. Nochlin asserts that if daintiness and a nuanced treatment of the medium along with the portrayal of domestic lifestyle be the parameters for femininity, then Rosa Bonheurs Horse Fair was nothing but delicate and the Dutch Little Masters, Chardin and the impressionists-Renoir and Monet- as well as Cassatt and Morisot have been known to illustrate household and children, the point here being that the subject matter or even the style of painting should not be criteria for a quintessential feminine style. Courbet was probably one of the first modernist artists to paint the female sex organ- the cunt- in his masterpiece Lorigine du mondeforbidden site of specularity and ultimate object of male desire; repressed or displaced in the classical scene of 13 castration anxiety, it has also been constructed as the very source of artistic creation itself.

Rosa Bonheur, Horse Fair

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Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists, Linda Nochlin, 1971 Linda Nochlin, Courbets Lorigine du monde: The Original without an Original from October, 37 (1985), pp. 77-86

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Claude Renoir Painting

Mary Cassatt, The Maternal Kiss Nochlin further says that great art is never just the expression of the artists emotions on the canvas; it is more than that, with a particular style, free of conventions developed over years of practice and experimentation. In this sense, there are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cezanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even in the very recent times, for Willem de Kooning or Andy Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were large numbers of hidden great women

artists...then what are the feminists fighting for? Things remain oppressive for those who were not fortunate enough to be born white males, women and blacks included. The entire brouhaha surrounding the Great Artist is all but a myth, as for most of the initial great artists art was just a profession of the lower social classes, passed from father to son. The absence of women from the art scene also holds true for the aristocracy, who might have dabbled in art but never took it up professionally, providing patronage instead. It is probable that the amount of time devoted to social functions made it impossible for both the upper class men and women in general to take it up as a full-fledged profession. The notion of individual genius as something innate does not exist per se, and scholars such as Piaget have stressed upon the fact that ability or intelligence is built-up step by step from infancy onwards based on observation and the patterns of adaptation-accommodation. Feminist art emerged as a direct response to patriarchy and division of power and laws, questioning the depiction of women by the great artists as virgins, whores or mythical creatures, objectifying the female form giving sexual connotations to it, assigning traits such as vulnerability, passivity, nature and purity to women, and using feminist imagery to challenge such gender stereotypes along with raising key political issues and exploring a female heritage. As Simone de Beauvoir put it, one is not born a woman, one becomes one. Some of the women artists, who often go unmentioned are Artemisia Gentileschi, Rosa Bonheur, Angelica Kauffman, Kathe Kollwitz, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Suzanne Valadon, Georgia OKeefe, Judy Chicago, Alice Neel, Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, Faith Ringgold, Bridget Riley, Lee Krasner, Audrey Flack, Eva Hesse, Marisol, Meret Oppenheim, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Cindy Sherman, Miriam Schapiro, Guerrilla Girls, Barbara Kruger, Emily Karaka, Jacqueline Fahey, Carole Shepheard, Robyn Kahukiwa. Feminist art was neither a style nor a movement, but instead was a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life. That what was revolutionary was not its forms but its content. (Lucy Lippard) A few examples of feminist art as follows:

The above three paintings are by Georgia O Keeffe. She did a series on Black Iris. One cannot help but notice the resemblance between the flower and the vagina in these images. Marjorie Kramer is of the view that there is no such thing as the Anatomy is Destiny theory, that women have some inherent feminine quality which encompasses all their works and constitutes a feminine aesthetic such as vaginal images. Henry Moore does holes as much as Georgia OKeeffe and Bonnards work has a feminine 14 quality... Up to now, feminine sensibility has been slave sensibility. What Kramer is trying to say is that there
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Marjorie Kramer, Some Thoughts On Feminist Art, from Women and Art, 1 (1971), p. 3

is always a need for good art and it should be produced irrespective of the artists gender. Landscape, for example, where both the sexes have been more or less in agreement, has been projected beautifully by men and women artists. The two main kinds of feminist painting are conscious and unconscious, from the womens perspective. Unconscious feminist art could be male nudes, self-portraits, portraits, scenes from the domestic life (kitchen) whereas conscious feminist art is borne out of ones own experience and essentially feminist aesthetic comes out of female consciousness. Such art does not exploit women or portray them to be some sort of weak/man-eating monsters/objects of only sexual desire. Feminist art cannot be in quintessence abstract, it has to convey some sort of progressive truth, has to be socially legible. As is stated over and over again by feminist art historians and theoreticians, the woman artist tends to directly associate with emotions which shows very blatantly in her works, and is often misconstrued by the male in the society who tends to judge it on the parameters set out by him. So if a womans work is deeply involved with her feelings as a female it is likely that a man will: (a) approach it in the same way as he does the work of a man; (b) expect ideas which he can apprehend intellectually; (c) disregard as unreal or invalid ideas that do not 15 conform to his conception of reality; and/or (d) be unwilling to experience reality as if he were a woman. The all-man is generally conditioned to be afraid of the purported feminine feelings and thus there is a common disdain for anything remotely linked with feelings of softness, vulnerability, gentleness, delicacy and so on and so forth. In order to make it into a mans world, the woman artist is liable to prove that shes as good as a man, thus often not wanting to associate with the female which is treated as an object. Critics of feminist art have stated that it is opportunist, reactionary, rooted in biological determinism, and instead of being progressive it is propagandist sharing its ideologies with the political movement of which it is a part. Feminist art is very distinctly different from feminine sensibility. As Pat Mainardi very bluntly put it: 1. Women have got to have something to sell. 2. It had to be something you couldnt buy from a man but could only get from a woman. 3. It shouldnt challenge too many of the markets standards at once but should be similar to what men are doing and collectors want. 16 4. Female aesthetic should be based on form, not on content, just like everything else in the artworld. Judith Stein counters Mainardis claims of feminist art being a regressive thing by differentiating between a liberated woman and feminist. The former would compete in a mans world on his terms and try to create a niche for herself whereas the feminist sees herself as a part of the broader movement. She understands the implications of sisterhood and Marxism. She does not strive for a bigger piece of the male-defined pie, but 17 rather towards a society where not only all women, but all people are able to define their own existences. Now, art which comes directly out of a feminist such as this could not be degenerate. Also, one fails to understand why the feminist imageries of rape, childbirth and cunt paintings are looked down upon. Art need not be beautiful, it could be disturbing and haunting. As long as it leaves an impact on ones consciousness and is memorable, the purpose is solved and is just as great as any other works by the masters. Often it is 18 considered negative but from the womens point of view it is quite positive, an act of truthfulness. Publically showcasing pain and suffering has a therapeutic effect. Also, women, who have been bestowed with the gift of giving life, have been reduced to tools for procreation and this anguish is portrayed though images of labour of childbirth and the trials and tribulations of mothering. In order to truly and absolutely liberate 19 themselves and attain closure, feminist artists tend to annihilate themselves. The feminist iconography of the body often tells us less about essential experiences of being female than about how patriarchy has 20 mapped and controlled the female body and used it as an object of exchange between men.

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Judy Chicago, Woman As Artist, from Everywoman, 2 (7) (1972), pp. 24-25 Pat Mainardi, A Feminine Sensibility?, from Feminist Art Journal, 1 (1) (1972), pp. 4, 25 17 Judith Stein, For A Truly Feminist Art, from The Big News, 1 (9) (1972), p. 3 18 Luce Irigaray, How Can We Create our Beauty?, from Je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference, trans. A. Martin (London: Routledge, 1993) pp. 107-111 (originally published in France in 1990) 19 Ibid. 20 Whitney Chadwick, Negotiating the Feminist Divide, from Heresies, 24 (1989), pp. 23-25

Surrealism offered many women their first glimpse of a world in which creative activity and liberation from 21 family-imposed social expectations might coexist. This is Frida Kahlo representing child birth, a central theme around which a large part of the feminist movement revolved. It very aptly depicts how painful it is to give life someone. It is most probable that in this particular painting, the mother died while giving birth. This is hinted at with the face of the mother being covered by a white cloth. It could also be that the painter could not or did not wish to directly show the pain on her face and thus decided to cover it. Another, more personal aspect of it could be the fact that Kahlo longed to have children all her life but could not and her yearning came out through her paintings. Kahlo is a classic example of marginalisation in terms of location and gender and she worked marvellously well given the circumstances she was presented with. Critical responses tend to gloss over Kahlos complex reworking of the personal, ignoring or minimising her interrogation of sexuality, sexual difference, marginality, 22 cultural identity, female subjectivity, politics and power. Hayden Herrera, the biographer of Kahlo, titled Frida, published in 1983, tended to overtly romanticise her life- by the end of the book it has been established that Frida Kahlos life revolved around love, marriage and pain; in short a traditional feminine sphere has been 23 presented. Her works questions marginal contexts and representations of the body and sexuality and
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Whitney Chadwick, Evolution of a Feminist Consciousness, Womans Art Journal, Vol. 7 No. 1 (SpringSummer 1986) pp. 37-42 22 Joan Borsa, Frida Kahlo: Marginalization and the Critical Female Subject from Third Text, 12 (1990), pp. 2140 23 Ibid.

instead of glorifying and celebrating the feminine form she parodies and capsizes the way women have been presented. It would take a denial of all cultural tradition for women to produce a true female art. It is not practically 25 possible to create a counter-culture as most of women artists worked within the larger masculine tradition and the aim of the feminist movement is not one of separatist at that. This leaves most historians frustrated and with the only doable alternative of modifying the existing tradition to our own convenience. In conclusion one would like to say that feminism in art theory cannot afford to just provide a perspective aiming to improve the structuring of art history. It is greater than that and the myths of a restricted masculine creativity and the inferiority of feminine art stretches beyond and into the ideological level in reproducing the hierarchy between the two sexes. There are differing opinions but more or less feminists are agreed upon the fact that culturally woman is constructed as the other to the man, who is the norm. The women artists who have been discussed above such as Keeffe and Kahlo are feminists with a distinct feminine/female aesthetic (refer to p. 8). The myth of great art has been destroyed; it was primarily a bunch of men professionally into painting for generations together, who patted each other on their shoulders since they had nobody else to do it for them. Also, that the theory of biological determinism does not hold true and has been discredited overall and has been replaced by the theory that women are closer to nature as opposed to men, who partook in the formation of culture which came to be dominated by them. Women by far and large were denigrated and labelled as machines for furthering the human race. Female artists were given the illusion of freedom of expression but in actuality were socially restricted to painting the domestic lifestyle. They had to compete in the male-game on male terms and were sidelined in most of cases. But this has come to change over the past few decades with the second wave of feminist movement where the set notions were finally challenged and paintings of artists such as Kahlo, Keeffe, Chicago, Schapiro etc. were brought to the forefront. Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro spearheaded the movement in art with their project Womanhouse and since then there was no looking back. Feminist art is still an ongoing process but in many cases has given way to post-feminism.
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References: 1. 2. Feminism--Art Theory: An Anthology 1968-2000, Ed. by Hilary Robinson, 2001 Differencing The Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Arts Histories, Griselda Pollock, 1999

Articles: 1. 2. Why Have There Been No GREAT Women Artists? by Linda Nochlin, 1971 Women, Art and Ideology: Questions For Feminist Art Historians by Griselda Pollock, Womens Art Journal, Vol. 4 No. 1 (Spring-Summer 1983), pp. 39-47

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Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: The Womans Press, 1970), p. 159 Silvia Bovenschen, Is There A Feminine Aesthetic?, from Feminist Aesthetics, ed. Gisela Ecker, trans. Beth Weckmueller (London: The Womens Press, 1985) pp. 23-50 (originally published in Germany in 1976)