This is Fascinating
Dr. X posts this from the Prado in Madrid, Iowa:
"If only someone would make a more serious effort to promote, interpret, and de-code women's art. If only there were some grants or something."
posted by Latouche at Large at 11:01 PM
1 Comments:
An indulgent comment:
First, I want to say that last week someone compared my work to Cecily Brown's and I was very pleased. She's a better painter, http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/cecily_brown.htm,
female, younger, and of course she's showing at the Gagosian gallery. A friend and fellow UW MFA is a more successful painter than I am - why? Her work is better, she works incredibly hard, and she doesn't neglect organization.
I say this only to suggest that my sympathy is real but not infinite. Art is a really hard career no matter how you approach it or who you are; I still believe that if you really are exceptional, and circulate your work, it will be recognized. Maybe not this decade but next; shows follow both trends and merit, the cycle will catch up with good work.
The Academic art world is fairly balanced, though hardly perfectly.
GRADUATE ENROLLMENT IN M.F.A. PROGRAMS IN VISUAL ARTS (1995-1996)
Totals Percentage Compare to Total Faculty
Total Enrollment 3816
Female: 2180 57% 42%
Female of Color: 284 7% 2%
Male: 1636 43% 58%
Male of Color: 210 6% 5%
Overall, there percentage of professors who are women is considerably higher in MFA programs than in most academic field. You can make a much better case for racial bias.
This is, to say the least, complicated. Art is complicated. Society is complicated. The combination of the two is complicated times complicated.
The commercial gallery world is horribly sexist; it is also cutthroat and often desperate. New York's gallery scene is much harder on women than the West Coast, and I hate to say this, but from the women I've talked to about their experiences, on top of the regular old white boy's network, it also seems to be more wrapped up in some of the misogyny and internal social networking in the male gay community, and to the extent that this community has influence in Chelsea (kind of a lot), it makes it very hard for women to break in.
(Not so true of San Francisco, by the way. I don't hear the same horror stories from women artists about California.)
But the balancing point mentioned in the article is true - after an initial burst of liberation and innovation among women artists, the identity art of the 80's and 90's began to wear thin, because much of it was depending on novelty and confrontation, which are interesting, but only go so far. Young women who were recently trained in these Judy Chicago and Barbara Kruger style techniques (This means you, Evergreen State College) were unable to reproduce their success, because the technique depended on confrontation, and like Dada 80 years earlier, once it's shock power had been exhausted, it lost much of its aesthetic power.
And it is true that women artists self-identifying as feminist artists, tend to have less respect than women artists like Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, or Helen Frankenthaler, an older generation who tended to bristle at even being called "women artists", which suggested that their status as artists was less important than their status as women. One was driven primarily by political ideology wrapped up in literary theory, the other by visual aesthetics. And visual art is fundamentally, well, you finish the thought.
But it is also true that social pressures tend to force women out of the profession. Success at art- the occasional lucky show or cover of Art in America aside, requires decades of deep focus, and women have much more pressure on them to be less individualistic- this isn't coming from the art world so much as it's coming from everywhere. It is a heartbreaking truth that serious women artists were commonly advised not to have families. The sexism in the larger culture which tells women to avoid risk is also a factor - contemporary art, which has long defined art as almost requiring transformative risk taking, is an aesthetic which tends to push women away. That great line "Feminism is the radical idea that women are people too," gets lost in feminist art, which seemed to view the art world itself as a primary opponent, rather than an opportunity for anyone with a better idea to get their voice heard. But it does supply that, very unevenly, and often well after you're dead.
And that is a particular knotty problem for young women artists - the older identity movements, coming from other women, tells them they should be more aggressive and confrontational. (The classic example is the Guerilla Girls) But their social experiences may have been the opposite, and this may feel forced. And if they, say, want to paint as best as they can, they can get accused of perpetrating a anti-feminist backlash, as per this article.
And that is related to another problem: economic class. In distant history, the women painters (Artemisia being a notable exception) who had the social status to avoid family obligations enough to make artwork tended to paint the fairly bucolic and aristocratic subjects they were around, making the work less interesting in the post-Romantic art world, which began to value innovation above everything. It's been observed more than once that most of the great artists were middle class, not wealthy; if I can venture a hypothesis, I think it's because the middle classes have a stronger incentive to view the world with clarity. The performance artist Karen Finley, is from a family so wealthy her transgressiveness feels less like a negation of social and gender norms and more like the indulgence of class privilege.
Any ideologically loaded artwork is likely to weaken when it depended on its immediate political and social context for its power, and those contexts change. Feminism has bad rap as an ART strategy because of this, along with any set of isms and to coin a phrase, ianities. Ironically, even Warhol, the bete noir of meaningful artworks, is due for a hard fall here, as his irony and distance, heavily dependent on its own social context for its effect, wears into irrelevancy in the very Warholian (flat, collective, pop-ish and ubiquitous) cultural climate.
I leave with the thought of Lee Krasner and Elaine DeKooning, both tremendously gifted artists who all but abandoned their own careers to support their husbands. Without this support, Jackson and Willem would have gotten nowhere - many, maybe most of the abstract expressionists, the radical, gifted bigger than life artists who put America at the forefront of Art world, had brilliant, organized wives who handled their publicity and their business affairs, and sacrificed their own art careers to do so. While the apparent nobility of this was appealing it was also a career-ending trap for them.
The work must come first. We all struggle, we all need help; the goal is make sure the opportunities are not just fair but known and open. The substance of the expression is the business of the artists, not the curators.
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