critical
... See moreFeminist thought has never meant limiting women to the study of women's issues. Thus feminist work in and on art history is not just about the restitution of women artists to official histories (…). It must mean broadening the entire field of intellectual endeavour to acknowledge the significance of sexual and other differences amidst the play of
If modernism wasn’t the end point of art history and the ultimate form of artistic expression, then what was it? If we don’t let it bully its way to the front of the line and center stage, crowding out everything that came before, during, and whatever comes after, what does it look like? And what will it look like as it recedes farther and farther... See more
What Does the New MoMA Mean for Modernism? And What Was Modernism Anyway?
But in general, the story was one of rigid progression that looked, on the museum walls, almost inevitable. Which is exactly as the museum intended: An institution that came of age at the imperial height of the American Century, funded during the Cold War in part with CIA money meant to exalt and export a showcase of free expression (sometimes... See more
What Does the New MoMA Mean for Modernism? And What Was Modernism Anyway?
The political point of feminist art history must be to change the present by means of how we re-represent the past. That means we must refuse the art historian’s permitted ignorance of living artists and contribute to the present-day struggles of living producers.
Fifth, there was modernism’s grand teleology — the whack-rationalist idea that history was to proceed in a predefined order. If you didn’t fit, know, or care, or were a visionary, an artist of color, or female, tough luck. Only the things in its timeline were deemed progress. Progress was to be the goal of all art.
What Does the New MoMA Mean for Modernism? And What Was Modernism Anyway?
... See moreIt was Rozsika Parker' s and my opening salvo, Old Misttesses: Women, Art and ldeology, in 1981, that /irst tracked what we could now call, pace Fredric ]ameson, 'the political unconscious' of art history as a discursive formation institutionalized in museum and academy in the twentieth century. We argued that despite art's deceptive marginality in
... See moreIn the end, all our histories will be just that: stories we tell ourselves, narratives of retrospective self-affirmation, fictions of and for resistance that are, nonetheless, answerable to a sense of the real processes of lived and suffered histories. Thus to enter critically into the problematic of narrative, representation, history and the
... See moreThe pluralization of the histories of art is especially significant since it opens out the field of historical interpretation beyond a selective tradition, The Story of Art, a canonical version masquerading as the only history of art. Whose stories are told, in whose interests? Whose stories will we need to find? How can we read differently?
... See moreAn image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced, it is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved - for a few moments or a few centuries. Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a