Griselda Pollock - Key theory and publications overview

Griselda Pollock - Key theory and publications overview

llewellyn millhouse s2684269

Griselda Pollock’s approach to art history and criticism utilises the central tenets of Marxism’s critical approach to society and culture, extending the existing framework of historical materialism to compose new feminist analyses of sexuality and gender identity. Building upon the Feminist art history movement of the 1970’s, exemplified by Linda Nochlin’s canonical Why have there been no great women artists? (Nochlin 1971), Griselda Pollock embraces the Marxist assertion that society is structured by relations of material inequality, but contends that society is equally structured by sexual inequality and gender divisions.

In the construction of the canon of art history in the twentieth century, Pollock determines that the exclusion and denigration of female artists in art history is a product of the patriarchal structure of bourgeois ideology. Despite women being involved in art making, twentieth century art history continues to define the artist and the artwork as a masculine phenomenon. As art and culture is marketed and produced by a culture industry that exists to perpetuate and reinforce bourgeois culture, hegemonic art history and criticism actively works to justify this culture, its structures, and institutions. Through this critical analysis of culture, Pollock suggests that the discrimination and exclusion of art made by females from art history cannot be remedied through equal representation or ‘becoming like a man’, as the populist Feminist movement of the 70’s suggested, but rather that discrimination and exclusion of the female is a visible symptom of liberal bourgeois society’s patriarchal nature. As liberal bourgeois society structures inequality throughout its economic and social order, through its proliferation of spectacular culture, Pollock suggests that Feminist art history requires a critique of the very structures and systems of representation which produce discrimination and unequal power relations.

In contrast to the push in the early 70’s for the insertion and assimilation of females into the patriarchal institutions of bourgeois culture in an attempt to equalise representation, Pollock asserts that these institutions, such as art history, are fundamentally structured to denigrate the female and deny women intellectual agency. Where the 70’s women’s movement promoted an essentialized femininity, which aimed to stand next to the existing masculine dominated culture, Pollock’s Feminism of the 1980’s critiqued the essential myths of individualism, the artist, and the social constructions of femininity and masculinity that define bourgeois culture.

Key Works

In Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, (Pollock & Parker 1981) Pollock addresses the exclusion of women artists from the conventions and canon of art history. Identifying the educational, institutional and psychological obstacles that prevent critical appraisal of art made by females, Pollock suggests that through prescribing a disparaging socially constructed femininity, women artists have been categorically disqualified by art historians as candidates for inclusion in the art canon. Pollock asserts,
‘Women’s art practice has never been absolutely forbidden, discouraged or refused, but rather contained and limited to its function as the means by which masculinity gains and sustains its supremacy in the important sphere of cultural production.’ (Pollock & Parker 1981)

In Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, (Pollock 1988) Pollock puts into place a feminist historical materialism which challenges the structural inequalities, specifically gender inequality, within art history and bourgeois culture as a whole. Pollock suggests an abandonment of traditional approaches to art criticism that are structurally discriminatory, suggesting a new methodology of art history and visual analysis comprising of Foucault’s notion of discourse formation, Marxist theory, semiotics, and psychoanalytical theory.

In Looking Back to the Future: Essays on Art, Life and Death, (Pollock 2001) Pollock examines how traditional forms of aesthetic appreciation do not take account of specific historical circumstances and socially determined subject positions. The traditional aesthetic appreciation approach to art, filtered through the paradigm and criteria of bourgeois ideology, is shown as inadequate. In its place Pollock advocates decipherment as a rival aesthetic sensibility, involving assembling one’s own meanings and deciphering intertextual references.  In decipherment the visual analysis is simultaneously perceptual and conceptual, reading art ‘as a social subjectivity within yet always transgressing the limits of power’(Pollock 2001).