Beholding Art History: Vision, Place and Power

  • Griselda Pollock
Chapter

Abstract

In his book Painting as an Art, published in 1987, Richard Wollheim draws attention to the peculiarity of art history.1 Alone amongst those disciplines which deal with our cultural patrimony, the study of the visual arts stresses history over criticism, the common term for literature or music or dance studies. It is a point well worth noting. It might be said that some of the current debates which animate the field of art history pivot on the precise nature of the historical character of the visual arts. What is admissible as argument, evidence or concept, namely what social theory shapes the research or its conclusions is deeply contested. Part of the resistance from the conservative establishment against the revitalized Marxists and feminists of the second wave, the intense precisions of the structuralists and post-structuralists, the fantasies of the psychoanalyticals, is that their critical theories bring a lot of trouble into the field of vision. They make it difficult to look at art in the same old ways. The deployment of a variety of theories which interlace the visual arts with cultural sign systems or with discursive formations and ideological apparatuses are perceived by many a defender of tradition as introducing alien textualities into a virgin and pristine domain where, as with an attractive woman, all that is really required is some good hard looking.

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Notes

  1. 2.
    R. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), p. 8.Google Scholar
  2. 3.
    Ibid, p. 8.Google Scholar
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  4. 5.
    Since this paper was first written, Mieke Bal’s Reading Rembrandt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) has been published. Bal offers another model for intensive and sustained visual analysis of both the visual semiotics and the narrative textuality of paintings which stresses the active role of the spectator as producer or processor of meaning, taking responsibility for the necessary act of interpretation.Google Scholar
  5. 6.
    Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, ed. S. Heath (London: Fontana Collins, 1977), p. 148.Google Scholar
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    Griselda Pollock, ‘Agency and the Avant-Garde: Studies in Authorship and History by way of Van Gogh’, BLOCK, 15 (1989), pp. 4–15.Google Scholar
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    The idea was originally advanced by M. Schapiro in ‘The Nature of Abstract Art’, Marxist Quarterly, 1937,Google Scholar
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    For further discussion of this topic in relation to modernist and postmodernist debates about painting and femininity see G. Pollock, ‘Feminism, Painting and History’, in Destabilising Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, ed. M. Barrett and A. Phillips (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 138–76.Google Scholar
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    For fuller discussion of the import of Barthes and others on the theories of authorship in art history see C. Pollock, ‘Agency and the Avant-Garde: Studies in Authorship and History by Way of Van Gogh’, BLOCK, 15 (1989), pp. 5–15.Google Scholar
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    This argument is very compressed but I draw heavily upon the work of feminist historians who have analysed the class and gender effects of the social practices of childcare in nineteenth-century bourgeois households which lend historical density to Freud’s analytical studies of the psychic ‘cost’ at which white bourgeois masculine subject positions are adopted. See particularly Lee Davidoff, ‘Class and Gender in Victorian England,’ in J.L. Newton et. al., Sex and Class in Women’s History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).Google Scholar
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    The point is made in the analysis of cinematic images of women wearing glasses by M.A. Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator’, Screen, 23, 3–4 (1982), pp. 82–3.Google Scholar
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    Odilon Redon produced an image, female, profile, titled Silence, which Cora Kaplan discusses in ‘Language and Gender’ in her Sea Changes: Essays on Feminism and Culture (London: Verso, 1986).Google Scholar
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    This painting and its variants are discussed at length in my paper ‘The Gaze as a Question of Difference’, in Dealing with Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision, ed. R. Kendall and G. Pollock (London: Pandora, 1992).Google Scholar
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    The whole of this work is also available in book form: Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document (London: Routlege & Kegan Paul, 1983).Google Scholar
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    M. Kelly, ‘Desiring Images: Imaging Desire’, Wedge, 6 (1984), p. 5.Google Scholar
  40. 40.
    Mary Kelly, Interim (New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990).Google Scholar
  41. 41.
    Ibid, pp. 8–9.Google Scholar
  42. 42.
    Ibid, p. 9.Google Scholar

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© Macmillan Publishers Limited 1995

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  • Griselda Pollock

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