Griselda Pollock

Nicola Scott s2676115

An exciting direction that Griselda Pollock has taken in her more recent writing on feminism and art is a reconsideration of the spatiotemporal location of feminist avant-garde moments.  I also want to then use a short quote to illustrate this idea, and give an example of Pollock’s style of art criticism.

As we’ve discussed, Pollock’s writing repositioned the focus from formal styles and artistic genius found in academic art history and “instead began to interrogate the way works of art generate cultural meanings and help produce and reproduce social relations” (Skinner 2003, p. 90). In this way Pollock brings together in her writing both a study of the historical and social context at the time  and place in which the work of art is made and viewed, and an investigation of the way individual subjects  think about themselves, and relate to the society and culture in which they are embedded.

Lately her advocacy of contestation /consideration of all notions of ‘naturalness’ as socially/ideologically constructed has extended to transdisciplinary and intertemporal or interspatial “encounters” to “generate productive ‘exchange and confrontation’ between different intellectual approaches, and thus avoid narrow, academic insularity” (Skinner 2003, pp. 90-91). This approach evolved in part from reading Julia Kristeva’s essay  ‘Women’s Time’ (1979), which had a formative influence on Pollock’s thinking (Skinner in Costello & Vickery, 2007, p. 231). This essay discussed two generations of the women’s movement: first, the Suffragettes aimed to “insert women into the linear time of history and nation”, while the second, after 1968, wanted “to give voice to an irreducible identity which has no equivalent in the opposite sex, and in effect to refuse the limitations and boundaries imposed by patriarchal linear and historical time. Kristeva suggests, and Pollock seems to have taken up, the notion of a third space for feminine generations, characterised by the idea of trajectories that depict traces which loop and collide across time and space.

I think this is an interesting and strategic way to think about and connect artistic practices and moments, and one that opens up new spaces for analysis and discussion that a linear or historical view of art history does not perhaps encourage or allow for. An example of this can be seen in the introductory essay Pollock wrote for the 1996 exhibition ‘Inside The Visible. An elliptical traverse of twentieth century art: In, of and from the feminine’, which included the work of 37 women artists from around the globe and which was not chronological nor a survey, but rather used four “overlapping thematic sections” to trace connections between different generations of women from the 1920s to the 1990s (Skinner 2007, p. 232). So we can see this kind of thinking across generations and places. I think the following quote, from ‘Moments and temporalities of the Avant-Garde “in, of, and from the feminine”’ (Pollock 2010, pp. 795-796), clarifies this approach a bit and demonstrates Pollock’s stance that ideas of modernity, postmodernity and the avant-garde are problematically gendered. It also gives a sense of how simultaneously dense and sharp Pollock’s writing can be:

Why has modernist culture been so unable imaginatively to integrate women’s creativity into its narratives of radicalism, innovation, dissidence, or transgression?...My real question...is structural: how is “the feminine” implicated in the avant-garde at the level of both theory and practice?...Challenging the linear temporality associated with the avant-garde as the progressive as well as transgressive agency of modernist culture, I suggest that there were diverse and discontinuous avant-garde moments at which the defining collision of social and aesthetic radicalisms occurred.                                                         

In other words, while women participated in canonical avant-garde moments, there were also other political or cultural moments particularly significant to gender and sexual difference that intersect with these radical moments in art’s modernist history.

References

Pollock, G 2010 ‘Moments and temporalities of the Avant-Garde “in, of, and from the feminine”’, New Literary History, Vol. 41, No. 4.

Skinner, K 2003, ‘Griselda Pollock’, in C Murray (ed.), Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century, Routledge, London.

Skinner, K 2007, ‘Griselda Pollock’, in D Costello and J Vickery (eds.), Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, Berg Publishers, Oxford.