Category: Art

With a degree in Fine Art the world’s my oyster!!

CREATIVE JOURNAL—Feminist Art History

It’s quite shocking, really, the way that women have been institutionally excluded from art history. Not only is it shocking, but the implications of this exclusion are eye-opening.

Building on a Foucaultian methodology, Linda Nochlin’s Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (Nochlin, 1971) and Griselda Pollock’s Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity (Pollock, 1981) work to expose the systems involved in the above mentioned process of exclusion. Much more than Foucault’s rather dry and disengaged litanies in The Order of Things, It’s really driven home for me the way that positions are normalised – we think we act rationally but are really working to and through a set of prejudices.

The Nochlin and Pollock texts are from the early 90’s when Feminist Art Historical thinking was progressing beyond the rehabilitation of potentially hidden or forgotten female artists, into an area where the fundamental institutional structures would need to be addressed.

The realisation that applying the standards of “genius”, developed with respect to a male-oriented and produced system, to women was effectively playing into the hands of this patriarchal system by acknowledging and hence reinforcing those standards.

At this time it had become apparent to these writers that it was the system itself that, far from dispassionately judging the male and female artists equally, was biased in it’s very constitution towards one side. These “standards” relied on institutional systems that had been developed by and for the exclusion women – it was more or less impossible for women to attain to these standards.

Maybe I’m being naïve and maybe this is in the “nature” of things (the creation of any kind of standards), but for a group as large as a particular sex to be excluded in this way, and for this to go relatively unremarked upon for so long, firstly confronts you with the problems feminists were addressing at this moment in time, and secondly makes you think about what other exclusions may be in effect.

Thinking in terms of the judgment of artistic excellence that these particular exclusionary systems sought to address, it seems to me that in order to judge their effectiveness, far from looking at it from the point of view of their results (i.e. the artists that make it to the canon), one might first assess the ways to reach those standards and the systems that are in place to allow one to reach them. From there one may be able to identify the institutionally excluded groups by the inverse of those who are included.

Of course, one could always argue that any judgement excludes someone. In very real terms this is self-evident. However for a judgement to be “fair”, which perhaps is what is being striven for here (at least by feminists in this case and other excluded groups in other situations), it must be seen to have standards that are able to be applied equally and are applied equally in reality. That, however, is another story.

I have avoided getting into the whole what is “sex” and “gender” discussion (Irigary) as, at least for me, it would hopelessly complicate the matter. Maybe when I have a better grip of the argument . . .

  • Nochlin, L. (1971). Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? In Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays. London: Thames & Hudson, 1988. pp. 145–178.
  • Pollock, G. (1988). Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity. In Mirzoeff, N. The Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge, 1998. pp. 74–84.

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EXHIBITION—Tino Sehgal—This Success—ICA, London

I missed the previous two installments of this, the final part of a trilogy of works by Tino Sehgal. The piece is called—at least for the day I went to see it—This Success (2007), but the next time I visit it may be called This Failure. I’m not sure what criteria are being used to judge whether it’s a success or a failure that particular day.

The piece takes place in the main room at the ICA, and when you enter you’re presented with various groups of children generally doing what children do, i.e. running around, playing, talking and shouting. Immediately you’re approached by a small group of children and one by one they announce:

Hello, my name is —, and I think this show is a success.

before returning to their games.

In addition to the children, there seemed to be a small group of adult supervisors plus some other people who may have been other visitors to the show, talking with the children.

We went through the room to the exit at the other end, and found that the upstairs galleries were all closed. A very helpful invigilator let us know that the room we’d just passed through was the full extent of the exhibition – he also gave us a potted summary of the history of the pieces which I’ll expand on here. I missed the previous works, so I’ve quoted others for accounts of the events.

In 2005 Tino presented This objective of that object (2004) – here’s an account from Art in America at the time:

When I entered the gallery, two other visitors were sitting near the entrance, and as the interpreters’ voices began to rise, one of them started to interject a question, at which point the actors excitedly exclaimed “we have a question, we have a question.” The visitor, who apparently knew “how to play,” asked, “what do you think of Henri Bergson’s theory of creative evolution?,” prompting an interpreter to knowingly (perhaps too knowingly) expound on the philosopher’s treatise, which somehow led to musings on music, and back to the group’s initial misunderstanding of “creative evolution” as “creative revolution.” At the end of one long digression, the group simultaneously leaned back on their heels, let out a whoop and bounced around the space, pogo-like, changing positions with each other. It was utterly silly. (Cash, 2005)

The next piece–This Progress—took place in 2006 and consisted of a series of conversations with progressively ageing ‘performers’, starting with a child and ending with a 70-year-old. The Independent newspaper judged the piece to be “. . . both condescending and emotionally directive and implies the superiority of the artist, while actually being cod philosophy. . . . lacking in real intellectual or metaphoric content . . .” (Hubbard, 2006)

My experience of the latest piece, the last in this ‘series’, proved to be underwhelming in comparison to these accounts of the earlier pieces. I’m not a great chatter, especially with children. The invigilator mentioned earlier encouraged us to interact a bit, but I didn’t feel comfortable trying to strike up a conversation with them.

However, beyond my own experience, it also has to be judged as a completion or resolution piece, given its place at the end of the series of three works produced for the ICA.

The long-term aspect of the series is particularly significant, I think, and leads to questions like: were the formats of all the pieces decided in advance? did the reactions to the previous pieces affect later works? if so, it would obviously be interesting to know how, as this would cast light on the nature and meaning of them as well as on Tino’s work process.

The works seems to draw on aspects of institutional critique in its reflexive posing of aspects of the reception of the work back onto the audience. What are we thinking as we look at art? What if the art just asks us the same questions back at us?

All artworks implicitly give us the tools with which to judge them. They position themselves in a space of meanings, in relation to all other objects or artworks that we know of, providing methods by which we make our meanings from them.

Tino’s work seems to work on a similar level to Joseph Kosuth’s definition works, where there is an attempt to investigate the structures society uses to present knowledge and create meanings. Tino’s work uses the medium of conversation to present his meanings, thus fitting into the more recent conception of a relational aesthetic (Bourriaud, 2002) but also as part of an attempt to problematise the transmission of meaning, and hence the nature of the author’s rôle, a subject that could be fruitfully explored in relation to the post-structuralist writings of Foucault and Barthes.

I’ll pursue this line of thought in an essay I’m writing for my course. This is due for completion on the 1 May 2007, so I should be able to post it here soon after.

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EXHIBITION—Paranoia—Freud Museum

We were asked to visit the Freud Museum as part of the Framing Art course and in the process think about and try to articulate our responses to it.

At the same time as being the home of Sigmund Freud for the last year of his life, with everything that that entails physically and symbolically, the Museum was also hosting an exhibition of contemporary artworks based on the theme of ‘paranoia’. This juxtaposition of two powerful, potential attributions led to some interesting situations and feelings in the house.

At first glance the house is a fairly typical suburban detached house, in a well-off neighborhood in North London. The first indication that all is not as it seems are the set of three wooden signs staked in the grass on either side of the path to the front door. On them are painted “NO ENTRY”, “NO TRAVELLERS” and “KEEP OUT”1 and—to be fair—caused us to think that there must be another entrance somewhere round the side of the house. If that’s not effective art, then I don’t what is.

Having negotiated our confusion over these messages, we were able to get inside the house. It’s really quite small, with 5 rooms on the ground floor and 3 on the first. The rooms are again styled in a fairly typical British suburban manner, all persian and chinese rugs throughout, and antique furniture. However interspersed amongst this are Freud’s large collection of antiquities from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Orient, which Freud used as symbolic of the activity of the unconscious: “They were, in fact, I said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation”.

The objects also have a life of their own, beyond simply historical artifacts from Sigmund Freud’s life. Many of them are accompanied by small typewritten labels which give them further meanings relating to Freud’s psychoanalytic analyses. This makes the progress through the house somewhat unsettling, as one is forced to see the house through two sets of eyes concurrently, on the one hand regarding it as a historically significant residence, with all the social and quotidian meanings involved with that; and on the other as a screen through which to read each object as holding symbolic meaning.

The entry of the exhibition to the house add yet a further layer of meanings to the space. The objects are a mixture of photography, painting/drawing and free-standing objects. In many cases the objects are created to work with the existing milieus, and one finds oneself performing a process of double-take at certain points, to try and negotiate the potential readings of any particular view. Glass flamingos2 drink from antique bowls in the study, while others crowd round a table as ghostly remnants. Swimmers with missing limbs are projected onto the ceiling in the library3, as if we’re underwater, below them. Less effective for me were the myriad monitors placed around the house showing videos. Their lack of integration with the surrounding settings seemed jarring, they demanded you mentally remove yourself from the house and enter their little world. Many of these videos seemed trite, however Jean Gabriel Periot’s piece4 impressed me with its mélange of music and snapshots of roads leading to the gas chamber. Having just watched this me and my partner sat on a sofa in the next room and discussed in front of the beautifully effective wolf and deer video (with gunshot)5.

Overall the exhibition was pretty average, with a the few outstanding pieces mentioned above. The premise was a good one, but I felt not dealt with well by most of the artists. If I was to look at one aspect of the house from a Freudian perspective (not that I know much about Freud’s work) I’d have to draw attention to the pacing dog outside in the garden, trying to get in. I’m sure I could read something into that.

  1. Daniel Baker, Wish You Were Here, 2007 installation
  2. Nike Savvas, Zero to Infinity, 2004 installation
  3. Tatjana Struger, Positions, 2004 video
  4. Jean Gabriel Periot, Dies irae, 2005 video
  5. Mircea Cantor, Deeparture, 2005, video

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BOOKS: Blanchot and Bourdieu

I received two new books yesterday to add the library, Maurice Blanchot’s Friendship and Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel’s The Love of Art.

The Bourdieu/Darbel book is one which we’ve been reading in relation to the Framing Art course, looking at museums and their relations with their audiences. The Love of Art is a report on a series of what were essentially market research studies of the visitors to various museums in France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Poland and Greece during 1964–5. They examined the demographic profiles of the visitors to the various targeted sites and their histories in relation to that museum, and to museums and art in general, as well as their perceived needs from the institution, and impressions of it.

Friendship is a collection of essays by Blanchot, a critic and philosopher whose writing cropped up in our readings around the Museums and Photography session for the same course. In particular with reference to André Malraux’s Museum Without Walls. An essay in this collection of Blanchot’s criticism, entitled The Museum, Art, and Time, discusses Malraux’s writings on the museumification of art. I’ve yet to read this essay, but isn’t that the joy of collecting books: The potentialities that they offer for future reading and the sheer impossibility of ever completing them all? Potentialities, by Giorgio Agamben – another book I bought recently and have yet to read.

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