by Jon Lackman | 16 February 2007 | Conferences, News
Some 500 people pour into the session honoring Linda Nochlin and then break out in sustained applause at the first mention of her name. Distinguished panelists present talks directly or indirectly related to her work. Chair Tamar Garb begins on a personal note, by observing that when she began studying art history in the 1970s, there were few role models for budding women art historians such as herself. She credits Nochlin with bringing about today’s rather different situation. She notes that there are other signs of accomplishment. Institutions such as MoMA now feel able to present panels on feminism and feminist art. But it’s important that feminism not become a history piece, its work considered complete. Garb finishes with an anecdote that illustrates in a small way the interchange that existed throughout Nochlin’s career between her and contemporary artists: Nochlin was looking for an image to point up the ridiculousness of images that associate female sexuality with abundant fruit. She imagined a nude man posed with a plate of sausages, and suggested the idea to Louise Bourgeois. Bourgeois replied, “No. Use bananas.” So she did.
(Full disclosure: Nochlin is an advisor to Art History Newsletter contributors.)
Molly Nesbit seems at first as if she might get personal as well, explaining how happy she is to be on the panel, but then says, “But I’ve got work to do,” to chuckles. She proceeds to cover considerable ground as she relates Nochlin’s famous 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” to other important works of the time, including Gordon Matta-Clark’s first film, “Tree Dance,” which played on screen throughout Nesbit’s talk — a novel and poetically effective move on her part. (This panel showed admirable creativity toward the conference paper format in general.) Nesbit then discusses the power politics that were unfolding around Nochlin in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as some of Hannah Arendt’s writings from this time. Arendt argued that thinking was essential. (Toward the end of the session, Nochlin concurs, drawing more than a few laughs, “Thinking is an important thing to do. I don’t do enough of it! ‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.’”) An obvious enough point, one would think, and yet clearly we didn’t have enough thinking going on because we’re ending up with men like Eichmann. There is a philosophical tradition of distrusting thinking that goes back to Socrates, who wouldn’t say that thinking corrupts but nor would he say that it improves. How does all this relate exactly to Nochlin’s essay? That is (mostly) left to the listener to imagine.
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, after removing her shoes so that she is level with the microphone, which apparently cannot reach up very high (dare we read symbolism into this?), considers the work of Polish contemporary artists Grzeszykowska & Smaga and Krzysztof Wodiczko. Why is unclear, until Lajer-Burcharth explains that these artists are concerned with “interiority,” that sense of inner life often described by writers since the 18th century that has just as often considered to be absent from or denied to women. Interiority seems particularly unattainable in America today, a world of increasing technological surveillance and heightened suspicion, yet perhaps women can “critically return to the womb,” she suggests. The womb as an imaginary space that engages the imagination, not as a return to the idea of woman as mother. Luce Irigaray argued that women, in order to become autonomous subjects, must turn to a place where something positive could be articulated, where they could be something other than the receptacle for men’s subjective projections. (Irigaray however rejected turning to the womb). Lajer-Burcharth shows Louise Bourgeois’ “Femme Maison,” “a woman who is a dwelling for herself,” and then suggests that the womb is a powerfully evocative metaphor because it is two things — it is you and your child, or it is your mother and you, the two separated by a membrane that at once separates and allows exchange, “a separate but porous barrier,” “a screen that allows us to share the space of the self, first of all with ourselves.” At the end of the session, Nochlin delivers an appreciation of these thoughts, noting without shame but with some curiosity, “I don’t feel I have any interiority. I never think of having anything inside, except organs. Why don’t I feel it?”
Abigail Solomon-Godeau begins by quoting Holland Cotter’s recent statement in the New York Times on the occasion of the MoMA feminism symposium, “curators and critics have increasingly come to see that feminism has generated the most influential art impulses of the late 20th and early 21st century. There is almost no new work that has not in some way been shaped by it. When you look at Matthew Barney, you’re basically seeing pilfered elements of feminist art, unacknowledged as such.” Solomon-Godeau notes wryly that yes, women now regularly appear in exhibitions, even solo exhibitions! But Cotter is celebrating a bit too much too soon. Head counts, of women in gallery and museum shows, in textbooks, and so on, still fall far short of parity. She also warns against the trend among feminism observers to slight “first-generation” feminist artists of the 1960s and 1970s, who are now said to have been essentialist, in favor of the supposedly more sophisticated “second generation,” which came of age in the 1980s. She then considers the work of those many contemporary women artists who have incorporated themselves and/or shoes into their works, especially Birgit Jürgenssen — in terms of the fetish. (As Nochlin later notes, “It’s hard to be a woman and not get a little fetishistic about shoes.”) She also singles out Valie Export, as having mined psychosexual gesture more radically than, say, Marcel Duchamp ever did. She speaks at one point, with a smile, of “an already made readymade fetish.” (Anyone want to try to unpack that one?) She concludes by encouraging listeners to “change the object itself,” by changing the apparatuses that produce the object, noting that those apparatuses still slight women, even for example the recent survey Art Since 1900.
The subtly puckish and irresistibly enthusiastic Moira Roth delivers the last talk, one that is organized into sections, yet full of productive ambiguity and poetry. She begins by remembering Nochlin’s enthusiastic singing of Spanish Civil War songs on car trips through California, and her own enthusiasm upon sending Nochlin seventy poems on the occasion of her seventieth birthday. Nochlin, Roth relates, writes poetry herself; recent sonnets were devoted to the subject of Aby Warburg. Throughout her talk, Roth plays audio tapes of Nochlin reading — from her poetry, from her papers, from her emails. It’s a creative choice that gives her paper the unusual and refreshing feeling of a dialogue between minds across decades.
At one point during the Q&A, today’s feminists are accused of having become too safe, too academic, too estranged from practical goals. Tamar Garb asserts that feminism has always been and still is “a utopian project, to change the world. It may have failed in many ways, but it’s ongoing.” Nochlin concludes the session by arguing that feminism should persist and should always be critical, never searching for essences, because there can never be any. It must get to the heart of those ideologies that oppress women and men, never attempting to thrust special virtues upon women. “I oppose the Iraq war not as a woman but as a human being.” “Any moral virtue is good for men and women equally.” “Women are not more gentle. Look at some of them in your local supermarket talking to their kids … not to speak of Abu Ghraib. We are all sufficient to stand, but free to fall.”
