Beyond the Canon: Feminists, Postmodernism, and the History of Art

Author(s): Karen-Edis Barzman

Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Summer, 1994), pp.
327-339
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
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 KAREN-EDIS BARZMAN
Beyond the Canon: Feminists, Postmodernism,
and the History of Art
Feminist discourses have two things in com-
mon. The most obvious is their concern with
gender as a term of difference.1 Equally impor-
tant, though frequently overlooked, are their
political gestures. In other words, they set them-
selves up in opposition to something else ("pa-
triarchy," "masculinism," "the dominant cul-
ture") with the intention of transforming the
status quo and affecting distribution of power
in the process.
By analogy, we might expect feminist art his-
tories to be political or oppositional, and some
will argue that, in practice, they are. Indeed,
feminists have opposed the exclusion of women
from the canon for over twenty years and, more
recently, have refused meaning "imposed" by
male critics. Yet these gestures constitute an
immanent critique of art history at best, leaving
the field's most problematic assumptions and
practices intact. Perhaps it is time to stop wor-
rying about female artists and their objects, at
least temporarily, in order to cast a critical eye
on art history itself.
What is needed is distance from conven-
tional patterns of thought and discourse to plot
the naturalizing of practices that have been
culturally constituted, institutionally autho-
rized, and, therefore, open to challenge. In
1971, when Linda Nochlin responded to that
insinuating question, "Why have there been
no great women artists?," she engaged in this
kind of analysis to great effect.2 Pointing to
the institutionalized exclusion of women from
professional training in early modern Europe,
she exposed art history's construction of the
modern myth of the (male) artist of "genius,"
springing ex nihilo into preeminence. But rather
than using her work as a model for further anal-
ysis of art history's constructions of "truth"
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52:3 Summer 1994
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(including their own contributions to this pro-
cess, to which they have remained largely inno-
cent), most feminists who followed in the field
never got beyond the impulse to celebrate the
material creativity of women, which was also
central to Nochlin's early work-and very
much in keeping with the liberal feminism of
the 1970s.
The question is: Why do feminists still spend
so much time talking about artists and their
objects? That the traditional art histories have
always done so is not a compelling justifica-
tion. The assumptions informing this conven-
tional practice revolve around received notions
of subjectivity (both the artist's and our own) in
the production of meaning, based on the fol-
lowing convictions: 1) that female artists have
something to say (like their male counterparts)
which is worthy of the attention of humankind;
2) that their intended meaning is invested in
objects and their attendant texts; and 3) that
this meaning must be uncovered and correctly
interpreted, or that the operations of ideology in
the dominant culture's "misreading" of this
meaning must be exposed in feminist "master-
readings," presented rhetorically as though be-
yond refute.
I consider myself a feminist, insofar as my
work addresses the intrication of gender and
power. Yet I am concerned with the discursive
practices outlined above which surface fre-
quently in feminist art histories. They project a
homogeneous reading audience in the process
of fixing meaning, as they also assume that
feminist readers have some shared identity tran-
scending difference(s) among them. Thus they
reinforce the same reader-text relations as those
set up by the dominant art histories, which do
not encourage us to become critical viewers,
328 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
readers, or writers ourselves. Operating on the
premise of absolute truth and falsity, current
feminist art histories implicitly reaffirm the
structure of hierarchical relations and asym-
metries of power at the moment of their recep-
tion, having the potential to seduce us into
"submissive stupefaction" while denying us the
pleasure of coming to interpretation on our own
terms.3
Although I will address these practices sep-
arately, I will try to indicate how the privileging
of material production on the one hand and the
"master-reading" as a discursive strategy on
the other are interrelated with respect to basic
assumptions about the self and the production
of meaning. I will argue that these assumptions
have been rendered problematic by postmodern
thought. I will also suggest how postmodern
theories of subjectivity, community, and the
process of signification can help us think beyond
material production as an exclusive focus
beyond the (or a) canon as a structural frame-
work for art historical discourse-to facilitate a
variety of feminist agendas for viewing, read-
ing, and writing subjects.4
I. FEMINIST ART HISTORY: MOVING
BEYOND MATERIAL PRODUCTION
Currently, there are three basic approaches to
the topic of gender and art. Two of these ap-
proaches have kept the discourse tied to material
production as a privileged point of analysis
the first, focusing on female artists and their
objects, by stated intention; the second, a struc-
turalist semiotics of "Woman" in representa-
tion, only by convention. I will argue that a
third approach, which I qualify as "post-
modern," would be the most effective for trans-
forming the field, particularly from a feminist
perspective.
1) The first of the approaches focuses on
female producers of material culture, whom fem-
inists have attempted to reconstitute in narrative,
and on female-produced objects and their texts,
for which they have attempted to fix truths con-
cerning meaning. Often central to this approach
is the assumption that the artist herself can best
tell us the meaning or the significance of her
work. This kind of feminist art history may
include attempts to expose "misreadings" in
contemporary male-authored criticism or in his-
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toriography, for example, by recourse to
women's diaries, letters, interviews, or to the
works of art themselves. It is sometimes said that
critical language ought to derive directly from
these kinds of texts. Finally, there is often an
attempt to reveal how the misreadings of male
critics and historians come to inform the domi-
nant art histories. Barbara Lynes's O'Keeffe,
Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929 (1989) and
Mary Garrard's Artemisia Gentileschi (1989) are
representative examples of this kind of feminist
intervention in modem and pre-modern areas of
concentration.5 Although not monographic in
format, Janet Wolff's Feminine Sentences: Essays
on Women and Culture (1990) belongs in this
category as well.6 Wolff addresses the relation
between textual strategies in production and
practices of reading and viewing, which she calls
"the sociology of reception."7 Yet she is equally
concerned with rethinking the concept of "the
modem" to include women's artistic production
(leaving "art" relatively unproblematized as an
exclusionary category, which I shall discuss
below). Thus her book is first and foremost an
indictment of art history as it excludes women
from the canon.
This first approach works effectively as a
way of bringing into balance one of the gen-
dered asymmetries of the dominant culture. It
calls upon the reader to valorize women's mate-
rial creativity and the authority of female artists
as interpreters of meanings on the premise that
they have authored the works. Several problems
arise, however, with an exclusive focus on au-
thorial intention and the production of objects
or imagery, some of which are particularly
acute for feminists working outside of modern-
ism as an area of concentration. In the seven-
teenth century, for instance, there were only so
many women like Artemisia Gentileschi or
Judith Leyster who painted on canvas. And for
the sixteenth century, how many more Sofonisba
Anguissolas are likely to be found? A focus on
material production leaves feminists in pre-
modern art history with an extremely limited
array of subjects as potential objects of inquiry.
And in certain concentrations, such as medieval
studies, the problem is compounded by the fact
that so much production was anonymous. Are
we to assume that there can be no feminist art
history where there are no named female pro-
ducers of objects we might call "art"?
Barzman Beyond the Canon: Feminists, Postmodernism, and the History of Art 329
Feminists could, of course, expand the defi-
nition of art to include things other than paint-
ing, sculpture, and architecture and thereby
increase the number of female artists.8 By
doing this, they would be refusing the arbitrary
hierarchical distinctions imposed upon objects
by art history itself (which has privileged cer-
tain media by convention, relegating most pro-
duction to a lesser status). But if they engage in
this practice, they would be making some arbi-
trary distinctions of their own, given that "art"
does not exist outside of discourse, although
humanly crafted objects and generated images
do. And if they are not prepared to rationalize
why they draw the line with embroidery or
quilting, for example, they have only one other
option, which is to make "art" so inclusive as
to render it meaningless as a term of distinc-
tion. In this case, of course, they would no
longer be writing "art" history, which perhaps
is the last thing they want to be writing in this
postmodern moment. But if one repudiates con-
ventional distinctions between art and popular
culture (which is to say, between "high" and
"low"), one needs to theorize what to put in its
place.9
When it comes to intentionality and female
artists, it is easy to sympathize with the femi-
nist refusal of meaning imposed by male critics
and historiographers, especially when such
readings are perceived to undercut the artist's
"intended" meaning and the works' "true" sig-
nificance. This is the overriding argument in
Lynes's book on O'Keeffe and, to a lesser ex-
tent, in Garrard's treatment of Gentileschi. The
implication here is that men who write about art
intervene in the production of meaning and that
the meaning they produce is anything but right,
let alone neutral. But what of feminist interven-
tions in the production of meaning? When femi-
nists posit a particular reading as the "truthful"
interpretation, does their own situatedness in-
trude, as they maintain it does in the readings of
their male counterparts? Given that we come to
objects and their texts as a plurality of subjects
(with respect to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation, age), can any of us really serve as
arbiters of truth for reading audiences, which are
heterogeneous communities of individuals?
I shall return shortly to the notion of truth
and falsity in interpretation. I want to acknowl-
edge that at this point many will be tempted to
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fall back on the practices of traditional art his-
tory, invoking "the primary sources," including
the works of art themselves, as a support or
guarantee in the development of a "correct"
interpretation. The primary sources have gener-
ally been taken as the most authoritative, hav-
ing issued forth from the artists themselves. In
the case of O'Keeffe, Lynes marshals a battery
of primary material to document the artist's
objections to the critical characterization of
her work and to outline an alternative image
publicized by O'Keeffe (" [which O'Keeffe]
believed appropriately described herself and her
intentions as an artist ...").10 Here Lynes posits
the artist as an individual completely transpar-
ent to herself and also gives us to understand
that her subjectivity can be made wholly com-
prehensible if we only attend to her voice
through the primary sources.
Postmodern thought renders such assump-
tions about subjectivity and intentionality prob-
lematic.1" From a postmodern perspective it
begins to seems doubtful that any of us could
ever fully comprehend ourselves in thought
(despite Cartesian-based arguments to the con-
trary) or could make our needs, desires, and
intentions wholly transparent to others. This is
not to say that we ought not attend on some
level to artists' assertions about the meaning of
their works, but simply that we ought to see
their readings as situated, limited, and marked
by a specificity that cannot be universalized as
paradigmatic for all those who are "biolog-
ically female" or for those who have also been
marginalized in and through culture.
2) A second approach to the topic of gender
and art invites us to contemplate women as the
object of the look rather than as the subject of
the look-not women artists but Woman in rep-
resentation. Although at times unacknowledged,
structuralist semiotics or theories of interpreta-
tion often inform this kind of approach, partic-
ularly those based on the work of the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.12 Thus we are
talking about a text-based analysis initially
focusing on the formal processes by which
signs are deployed in representation, beginning
with Woman as she is variously constituted in
social terms (for example, "virgin," "witch,"
"muse," "prostitute"). The premise is that mean-
ing cannot be construed if Woman as sign is
removed from the chain of signifiers. She can-
330 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
not be pulled out of context, as is often the case,
for example, in iconographic studies, for the
total structure of signification is at issue. With
this approach feminists have proceeded by
identifying silences within works figuring
Woman. They have asked: What is left unsaid
in particular figurations?, or, in psychoanalytic
terms, what is repressed? Or they have attempted
to identify tensions among them by asking:
How do the various figurations contradict one
another? The purpose is to find narrative gaps
or to create ruptures within which to isolate the
operations of "patriarchy" in the ideological
constitution and consolidation of meaning.
Structuralist interpretation clearly holds out
promise for feminists working in periods domi-
nated by male artists. After all, Woman has
been put into male-generated discourse in count-
less ways that seem to beg this kind of symp-
tomatic reading. Nonetheless, current feminist
appropriations of this method seem to shift our
focus from the discursive construction of Woman
back once again to women artists, their material
creativity, and their exclusion from the canon.
Griselda Pollock's work is an interesting case in
point. One of the most widely read feminist art
historians in the late 1980s and early '90s, Pol-
lock employs a variety of theories, from histori-
cal materialism to psychoanalysis and struc-
turalist semiotics. In Vision and Difference she
devotes an entire chapter to a semiotic reading
of Woman as sign-interestingly, in Pre-Raph-
aelite art history rather than Pre-Raphaelite art
itself.'3 With her co-author Deborah Cherry,
Pollock uses the essay to "analyse the recipro-
cal positioning of masculine creator and pas-
sive feminine object" in art historical texts that
still form the continuing basis for studies of
Pre-Raphaelitism.14 The "masculine creator"
in this instance is the artist Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, the "passive feminine object" is the
model Elizabeth Siddall (also an artist in her
own right), and the authors' professed point of
departure is the attempt to write Siddall and
other female Pre-Raphaelites into art history.
Like Garrard and Lynes in their critiques of
male-authored criticism, Pollock and Cherry
expose the fiction that art history uncovers neu-
tral knowledge, which they accomplish by plot-
ting the ideological production of meaning in
the dominant Pre-Raphaelite texts. There are
problems, however, with their approach. The
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first is their insistent emphasis on writing
women like Siddall into the pages of art history,
which is peculiar to many feminists in the field
but not dictated by structuralism per se. The
second is their assumption (which is central to
structuralist theories) that when it comes to
objects and their texts (or to art history's texts
about objects and their texts, in this instance
Pre-Raphaelite art history), the process of sig-
nification is immanent or internal to them.15 By
focusing on formal features within objects/
texts, the approach tends to overlook the fact
that works of art (and histories of art as well)
do not perform their operations in a vacuum or
for the benefit of passive recipients. Pollock's
and Cherry's essay does not account for the fact
that the process of signifying always implies an
audience-that is, that the conditions of recep-
tion, the specific contexts within which vari-
ously situated readings can and do take place,
and finally those variously situated readings
themselves (including our own), provide poten-
tial and, I would argue, necessary subjects of
investigation in our field.
With few exceptions, the dominant art histo-
ries have obscured what one might call the rhe-
torical aspects of signification, and feminist art
histories have followed suit.16 In part this may
be attributed to the Marxist foundation of much
feminist work in the field, particularly coming
out of Anglo-Australian circles. Here I do not
intend to reject Marxist theorizing but simply to
point out the insistent focus on material produc-
tion by Marxist art historians at the expense of
distribution or consumption. This establishes
priorities in Marxist/feminist art history that
have led to discursive limits, and these limits
are ultimately arbitrary and therefore open to
question.'7 The conventional privileging of ma-
terial production reveals the limited way in
which feminist art historians construe women's
interventions in cultural production, along with
the interventions of other marginalized groups.
And it is precisely at this point that we would
do well to explore a third approach to gender
and art, one that invites us to see cultural pro-
duction in different terms.
3) I want to begin this section by casting my
assertions in the form of questions. Must we
take material creativity or the generation of
imagery as the exclusive site of cultural pro-
duction? When it comes to visual signification,
Barzman Beyond the Canon: Feminists, Postmodernism, and the History of Art 331
what of the role of s/he who is addressed, the
viewer/beholder/spectator? It is a point of fact
that more people intervene in culture as con-
sumers of material objects or receivers of visual
imagery than as producers themselves. The very
young, the aged, the infirm, the disabled-
these are only some of the many who are re-
sponsible for the production of few material
artifacts; are they to be discounted out of hand
from cultural production?
I myself do not even doodle. Yet I watch TV,
look at magazine ads, and even on occasion go
to museums. In the process of signifying, ob-
jects/texts do not "address" me, a completely
passive recipient of meaning. I am engaged by
them (albeit to varying degrees); I engage with
them dynamically, and thus I must be centrally
implicated in the process of signification.
This digression on the rhetorical aspects of
signification or meaning-production prompts
me to suggest that reception is an obvious and
legitimate focus for feminists in the field.18
Such an approach to gender and art clearly
departs from current feminist practice, which
has been linked by convention to the concerns
of practicing female artists since Nochlin's
groundbreaking piece in the early 1970s.19 My
advocating a shift in feminist art history from
an exclusive focus on material production to
one that includes or even privileges reception
(at least temporarily) does not abrogate appre-
ciation of current work by female artists who
still find themselves consigned to the margins
of the art world. I want to acknowledge their
contributions as well as the political efficacy of
inserting these women-along with artists of
color, regardless of gender-into the canonic
mix of material producers, given the institu-
tionalized nature of sexism and racism in con-
temporary culture. I also acknowledge wide-
spread resistance to dismantling the canon, even
within feminist art, art critical, and art histori-
cal circles-due in part to the attendant privi-
leges that membership in a star-system might
bring to those locked out but poised at the
threshold. Yet I fail to see what feminists ac-
complish, especially those in pre-modern art
history, by restricting their focus to what is in
the end a comparatively negligible number of
female producers. I fail to see how we lift our-
selves out of the discursive quagmire that is art
history by tying ourselves to the agendas of
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contemporary female artists and feminist critics.
Their agendas do not necessarily coincide with
ours, despite the fact that we may find ourselves
in sympathy with them. In fact, I would argue
that focusing exclusively on women's material
creativity is fundamentally problematic in fem-
inist art history, regardless of one's area of spe-
cialization and definition of "art." If what hap-
pens at the moment of reading is as important
in the process of meaning-production as the
conditions and events surrounding the creation
of the object/text itself, then audience, address,
and reception are legitimate and necessary ob-
jects of our inquiry.20
II. TRANSFORMING READER-TEXT
RELATIONS: TOWARDS A POSTMODERN
FEMINIST ART HISTORY
At this point I would like to turn from the
reception of art to the reception of art history. I
want to address a practice to which I alluded
above, that of feminists positing absolute truth.
I would argue that this practice serves to polar-
ize, to bring closure to debate, and ultimately to
compromise feminist agendas.
Within their own discourse, most feminist art
historians unwittingly replicate discursive strat-
egies inherited from the dominant art his-
tories-in particular, the "master-reading," by
means of which they assert the correctness or
truthfulness of their interpretations. Frequently
at work in the master-reading is a (perhaps un-
intentional) mystification of interpretive meth-
ods or a dependence on so much erudition that
the reader is disarmed and even daunted at the
moment of reception, a moment in which
asymmetrical power relations between writer
and reader are at least implicitly affirmed.
Feminists who cast their interpretive work in
the form of a master-reading are perpetuating
the same reader-text relations as those who con-
tribute to the dominant art histories. An inter-
pretation of primary material with rhetorical
tour de force, coupled with a political agenda
with which many feminists in principle find it
easy to sympathize, frequently leads to submis-
sive reading. Pollock's essay "Woman as Sign:
Psychoanalytic Readings" is a good example of
the daunting use of a method that deploys diffi-
cult theories not traditionally part of the art
historian's education (especially in pre-modern
332 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
areas)-in this case, psychoanalytic theory.21 A
general lack of familiarity with Pollock's theo-
retical framework (not to mention with post-
modern critiques of the framework) disarms
many readers and prevents them from engaging
critically with this text.22
I am making an example of "Woman as
Sign" because some would point to it and to
similar work as a model, arguing that Pollock
does address reception and the rhetorical aspects
of signification, which I have argued above she
does not. Of course, it is clear that Pollock
addresses reception here. To this end, she em-
ploys classic Freudian theories of the castra-
tion-complex and fetishization, along with
Lacanian theories of desire and the imaginary,
to uncover not the private obsessions of the
artist (again, Rossetti), but the psychological
conditions of reception in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Thus she casts as fetish the fragmented
figures, schematized faces, and blank looks of
many of Rossetti's painted women, arguing that
they operate not on a manifest level but on a
displaced level of signification, as the substitute
for what is lacking on the castrated maternal
body. Pollock terms this economy of vision
"fetishistic scopophilia," in which a compensa-
tory pleasure is said to be derived by the viewer
looking at a beautified object that oscillates
between the forever threatening (castration)
and the perpetually desired (the pre-Oedipal,
phallic mother of the individual's infancy).
Despite Pollock's professed interest in recep-
tion, she does not address the active role of
(and choices available to) the spectator in
meaning-production. Instead, she insists once
again that representational practices or things
internal to the work (Rossetti's half-length fig-
ures, "blank" faces, etc.) determine meaning
for viewers. Thus the viewer is posited as the
passive recipient of fixed meaning, establishing
a model of reception that is antithetical to a
feminist agenda of change (if we are locked
into certain readings, for example, how can we
ever hope to read against the grain or to resist
imposed subjectivities?). Moreover, Pollock un-
wittingly overlooks female viewers, given that
she limits her discussion to the putative fears
and fantasies of the male unconscious (as it is
constructed in classic Freudian theory). When
she argues that Rossetti's paintings provided a
pleasure that compensated for the unconscious
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fear of castration, one might well ask: What of
female spectators, who are always already cas-
trated in Freudian terms (in and of itself a prob-
lem for much feminist theorizing)?
One might argue that Pollock is talking here
about a particular reading of a specific group of
individuals in a limited historical context (i.e.,
Rossetti's contemporaries) as she tries to uncover
the effect of his art on anticipated audiences.
But in theorizing the original viewers of this
art, she conceives of them only in the most
abstract of terms. She removes them completely
from the contingencies of their own (varied)
social experiences, of most significance to us
here ignoring differences of gender while using
psychoanalytic theories that depend centrally
on such differences in the process of explaining
individual behavior and thought.
Finally, Pollock's work in "Woman as Sign"
is based on the assumption that it is possible to
gain unmediated access to the psychological
conditions of reception of Rossetti's art in the
nineteenth century without intruding in the pro-
cess herself. Pollock writes "masterfully," as
though she were recording an objective and
truthful account of what Rossetti's work really
signified to the male viewer (we now know that
women are not addressed here). Yet she does
not explicitly situate herself ideologically for
the reader, nor does she acknowledge the con-
structed nature of the discourses informing her
own work. In the end, all Pollock can provide is
her own symptomatic reading, adding one more
layer to a dense series of interpretations-sub-
jective and ideological, as all historical writing
must be.
In work of recent years Nochlin also theo-
rizes her readers and her own intrusions in
meaning-production in only the most abstract
of terms. Despite attempts to situate herself as a
subject in discourse ("For me, reading as a
woman but nevertheless reading from a certain
position of knowledge and hence privilege....
Reading as a woman who happens to be an art
historian.... [R]eading as an art historian who
happens to be a woman ..."), Nochlin implicitly
expects her readers to transcend their own sub-
jectivities and embrace universalized moral
imperatives (her own, of course) in a collective
resistance to the dominant art histories.23 Many
will respond sympathetically to Nochlin's im-
peratives. The "rational reader" might well
Barzman Beyond the Canon: Feminists, Postmodernism, and the History of Art 333
find her arguments compelling. But, in fact, the
very problem is Nochlin's implicit dependence
on the notion of rationalism. The operative
assumption in her work is that rational argu-
ments will cause us to rally together despite our
differences. Then we will freely take up her
cause, which is to storm the house of meaning
from which she has been shut out (the metaphor
is her own), and thus empower ourselves within
that house, which I take to mean the institutions
of art history within which certain kinds of
interpretation are valorized (while others clearly
are not).24 The problem is that many feminists
are not willing to put aside differences, even in
the face of rational argument, in order to "em-
power" themselves in someone else's cause. We
have not been successful in effacing self-inter-
est or in fostering empathetic ties of solidarity
based on (ostensibly) shared experiences of
oppression. African-American, Jewish, White
Australian, Asian, and Chicana women (to
name just a few) do not embrace the same moral
and political imperatives. And I, for one, am
not convinced that we ought to continue trying.
Not all of us want to get into Nochlin's or even
Pollock's house of meaning, nor would entry
into those houses serve all of our varied inter-
ests equally.
The Feminist Reader is illusory. We are a
plurality of readers, and there is conflict within
our fragmented community; there are tensions
that erupt amidst voices of contradiction. We do
not speak as one, nor do we come to texts in
unity. Therefore we cannot presume to address
the reader as though we do, any more than we
can assume a shared identity with that reader.25
III. POSTMODERN DIALECTIC AS A
POLITICAL STRATEGY
Feminist master-readings constitute a polarizing
kind of strategy. They pit themselves against the
dominant art histories simply by inverting their
underlying logic, which rhetorically forecloses
alternatives in the structure of interpretation.
They work to efface difference and carry with
them the impulse to reduce multiplicity into
homogeneity.26
In addition to Nochlin, I would point once
again to Lynes, Garrard, Pollock, and Cherry
for examples of the master-reading in feminist
art history. My intention here is not to set these
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women up as "straw men," nor to negate their
work, which surely has its place in art history's
discursive field. They have all succeeded in
providing alternative readings to that of the
dominant culture, and thus they may be said to
have engaged in oppositional practice in key
respects. However, they also posit their inter-
pretations as "correct." They presume to read
authoritatively for their audiences, universaliz-
ing their own situated perceptions, fixing mean-
ing with the stamp of finality, and thus rhetori-
cally denying their readers the possibility of
intervening in interpretation themselves.27
The impulse to collapse difference into ho-
mogeneity in a viewing and/or reading commu-
nity is understandable among feminists, given
their still relatively small numbers and the pre-
supposition (which is difficult to resist) that if
they speak univocally, they will speak to greater
effect. In fact, this presupposition carries no
essential truth within it and has the potential to
compromise feminist agendas. This is because
unity does not represent equality for all voices.
For feminists, it would simply replicate the
entrenched structure of domination/subordina-
tion based on privileges of age, class, race, and
sexual orientation, only now with women on
top as well as at the bottom. At best, it might
shake up the terms of privilege within that same
hierarchical structure, leading to the inevitable
question: Who should be on top? Lesbians?
Asian women? Black women? Black lesbians?
Young women? Older women? Liberal femi-
nists? Marxist feminists? The concerns of all of
those listed above are intricated, to be sure, but
often in an obscure or conflictual fashion, or
sometimes not at all beyond a commitment to
use gender as a point of departure in the trans-
formation of art history's entrenched struc-
tures.28 I am suggesting that it is only around a
commitment to transform those structures that
a sense of feminist community in art history
can be expected to cohere.
I have come full circle since I began by
asserting that feminism de facto is oppositional
in nature, countering the voices of "patriarchy"
or "the dominant culture." In light of what I
have discussed above, it seems that feminist art
historians might serve their own interests best at
this point by refusing finality in the fixing of
meaning and depending instead on counter-
hegemonic practices that are relational and even
334 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
in some sense dialectical. Through relational
practices, readers can continuously (re)negoti-
ate their various positions with respect to the
hegemonic discourses. The rationale here is
twofold. First, the hegemonic discourses are
themselves never static, but constantly adjust-
ing to co-opt through accommodation those
aspects of oppositional discourses that do not
constitute a threat to their structural stability
(for example, by accommodating a relatively
negligible number of female producers in an
expanding canon). In fact, oppositional strate-
gies are often anticipated (hence the point/
counterpoint in public debate or speaker/re-
spondent at professional academic conferences),
and thus these strategies can be neutralized eas-
ily within institutionalized frameworks of dis-
course.29 Counter-hegemonic practices must be
unfixed, protean, ready to shift, for they are
themselves dislocated in and through the very
process of destabilizing the status quo.
In addition to the relational, these practices
have something of the dialectical driving them,
signaled by the dislocations they effect. As it
has been recuperated by the postmodern, dia-
lectic implies more than purely reactive coun-
ter-gestures, which are oppositional gestures, to
be sure, but ones often locked into a binary
relation with the hegemonic discourses, having
little or no effect in terms of transforming
overarching discursive structures. Reacting to
the exclusivity of the canon by insisting that
women be included, for example, is not the
same thing as inquiring into the discursive ef-
fects of canonicity in general. Thinking dialec-
tically suggests a model of practice that gets at
the tensions or contradictions internal to both
sides of a point/counterpoint, always gesturing
to a third position outside the terms of the
ongoing debate.
IV. THE MODEL OF RADICAL DEMOCRACY
I am not arguing here for a radical relativism
when it comes to interpretation, in which any-
thing goes because we cannot establish any-
thing with finality. I am arguing instead for
radical democracy, in which asymmetrical social
relations are (continuously) transformed as we
articulate a variety of viewing, reading, and
writing positions that compete in a shifting
field of discourse. The work of political theo-
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rists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe sug-
gests that a radical and plural democracy is the
most viable strategy for transforming political
and cultural institutions, social structures, and
the discursive practices that reinforce them.30
They point, among other things, to an extraor-
dinary range in the formal character of workers'
struggles since the late 1960s in Europe, indi-
cating how social relations beyond those of pro-
duction inevitably inform individuals' choices
concerning strategies of resistance and change.
Different and sometimes competing social de-
terminants contribute to workers' varying and
often incompatible senses of identity (young
versus old, immigrant versus native born, etc.)
while a residue of non-work-related social
experiences is brought with them inside the
factory or trade union. So too, feminist art
historians bring to their work a complexity of
identifications based on social relations and
experiences external to the field. In keeping
with Laclau and Mouffe, I would argue that
seeking a transcendent principle among the
many on which to found univocity compro-
mises the democratic process rather than deep-
ening it. 3
To conceive of a feminist community in art
history as an unstable alliance of plural and
even discordant voices means we no longer
have to speak of objects and/or texts in absolute
terms. It would be useful to adapt certain post-
modern insights to arrive at this point, a process
that we can begin by theorizing about art, art
history, the role of audience and reception in
the production of meaning, and our own situ-
atedness within the discursive field. At an even
more fundamental level we might begin to think
in terms of a coalition of unlike voices speaking
not in harmony (natural or socialized), but dis-
connected more often than not and struggling
in conflict in what is best described as a provi-
sional union. The attraction of this model for
those committed to the transformation of struc-
tures within an entrenched discourse like art
history will depend on changes in what Laclau
and Mouffe refer to as "the political imaginary
of the Left."32 In other words, it would entail
letting go of the prevailing notion of revolution-
ary change to be effected by a cohesive com-
munity of fully sutured individuals embracing
one ideological point of view from which to
reorganize the field. It would also mean think-
Barzman Beyond the Canon: Feminists, Postmodernism, and the History of Art 335
ing in terms of multiple points of rupture and
change. After all, the problems in art history
are not limited to one particular practice; there-
fore, it would be efficacious to get at its vul-
nerabilities with a variety of destabilizing ges-
tures and interventions.
I have discussed with many colleagues the
postmodern alternative to what are by now the
"dominant" feminist art histories, and I want to
conclude by responding to some of their con-
cerns. Most find the arguments here compelling
but are disappointed by my refusal to advocate
a particular method that could roundly be put
into practice. I sympathize with the desire for
prescription and reflect with a certain amount
of nostalgia on the days when feminist art his-
tory seemed as simple as borrowing a con-
cretized model and adapting it in practice. From
a postmodem perspective, however, I have come
to think of feminist interventions as necessarily
local and specific, based 1) on the contingen-
cies of the diverse areas of specialization
within which we operate; 2) on the "state of
research" within those areas; 3) on the relative
degrees of familiarity those of us within the
profession have with competing systems of
knowledge; and 4) on the subject position(s) on
offer and with which we individually identify at
any given moment (which are not always one
and the same). These are micro-practices of
resistance and change. There are no maps or
groundplans that I can provide for such inter-
ventions-no "recipes for the cookshops of the
future."33 Each must be theorized in and on its
own terms, and that we all have to do for our-
selves.34
Among other things, art history functions as
a social technology. We in this discipline en-
gage in cultural production even as we write
about it. Our texts are cultural artifacts of our
own making, which offer subject positions to
those whom we address. What kind(s) of readers
do we hope to engender? The submissive reader?
The reader perpetually re-inscribing him/her-
self within prevailing discursive patterns and
structures? Or the reader who also works to
shift the parameters of the field? I cannot resist
stating the painfully obvious: asking readers to
accept with finality our own interpretations is
simply not the same as asking them to engage
critically and inviting them to produce inter-
pretations of their own. We can no longer oper-
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ate on the assumption that we will succeed in
mobilizing a heterogeneous community simply
by overlaying rational arguments with the moral
or political imperatives of the dominant Others
among us. We are viewers/readers/writers of
difference. We produce meaning-we produce
meaning-and the meaning we produce is par-
tial, contingent, cannot be universalized. These
are some of the most basic assumptions of post-
modern theory. Given where we stand in the
history of art history, it seems timely to give
them serious thought.35
KAREN-EDIS BARZMAN
Department of the History of Art
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
1. Women who have a marginal place with respect to the
dominant white culture were the first to inflect feminist
thought and politics with issues of race and class. While in
recent years many feminists have been quick to acknowl-
edge the centrality of these terms, in addition to gender, for
a discourse that addresses the constitution, silencing, and
oppression of "Others," white women have yet to address
these issues consistently in their work. For women of color
writing on feminism, see, for example, Bell Hooks, Ain't I a
Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End
Press, 1981), Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Bos-
ton: South End Press, 1984), and more recently Black
Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press,
1992). See also Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other:
Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Indiana University
Press, 1989) and Julie M. Peteet, "Authenticity and Gender:
The Presentation of Culture," Arab Women: Old Bound-
aries, New Frontiers, ed. Judith Tucker (Indiana University
Press, 1993), pp. 49-62, where issues of race, gender,
nationalism, dispossession, and cultural hybridization are
brought to bear on the problematics of representation and
self-representation. Critiques of colonialism and imperial-
ism, which are addressed in the works cited above, have
entered the discourse of certain white Marxist feminists. In
the field of art history, this is apparent in Abigail Solomon-
Godeau, "Going Native: Founding Father of Primitivism
and Prototype of the Savage Artist," Art in America 77
(1989): 118-129 and 161, in which paintings by Gauguin of
Tahitian women are placed at the juncture of colonialism,
racism, and sexism. In a paper delivered at the Women's
Caucus for Art 1990 National Conference in New York City,
"Can Art History Survive Feminism?," Griselda Pollock
developed similar arguments.
2. Linda Nochlin, "Why Have There Been No Great
Women Artists?," most recently anthologized in Nochlin's
Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (New York: Har-
per & Row, 1988). The article first appeared in Art News 69
(1971): 21-46.
3. On submissive reading and the abandonment of dy-
namic engagement with the text, see Robert Scholes, Semi-
 336 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
otics and Interpretation (Yale University Press, 1982), chap -
ter 4, "Narration and Narrativity in Film and Fiction,"
where Scholes uses "narrativity" to refer to "an active par-
ticipation [in a] process by which a perceiver actively con-
structs a story from the fictional data provided by any
narrative medium" (p. 60).
I would like to posit art history as a narrative medium.
Despite its basis in factual rather than fictional data ("fac-
tual" here referring to information about embodied subjects
and past events), the history we produce does not provide
unmediated access to an already constituted reality, as
many believe by convention. When we speak or write about
art and artists, we engage in a narrative mode of represen-
tation, imposing order and assigning functions to elements
in a story we construct. On the function of narrativity in the
production of historical texts, see Hayden White, "'Figur-
ing the nature of the times deceased': Literary Theory and
Historical Writing," The Future of Literary Theory (New
York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 19-43.
4. I employ the term "postmodern" with the understand-
ing that it has occasioned debate within feminist circles, not
the least because certain strains eschew the critique of the
macrostructures in and through which social asymmetries
have been maintained; or because they dispense with no-
tions of autonomy and agency, without which it is difficult
to conceive of the process of change at the heart of femi-
nism itself. I acknowledge that, for some, postmodernism is
dead. Nevertheless, postmodern discourse was/is not mono-
lithic, and I would point to a body of literature on the
selective appropriation of postmodern thought for feminist
agendas as a useful model. This literature lays particular
emphasis on postmodern alternatives to biological essen-
tialism and the rationalism of liberal thought, which still
serve as stumbling blocks, in my opinion, to the advance of
feminism in the 1990s. On the significance of certain as-
pects of postmodernism for feminism, see Jane Flax, "Post-
modernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory,"
Signs 12 (1987): 621-643, Thinking Fragments: Psycho-
analysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contempo-
rary West (University of California Press, 1990), and Dis-
puted Subjects: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Politics and
Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1993). See also Chris
Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987) and Linda Nicholson, ed.,
Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990), in
particular Nancy Fraser and Linda J. Nicholson, "Social
Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Fem-
inism and Postmodernism," pp. 19-38. For an alternative
view, see Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Com-
munity, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New
York: Routledge, 1992), in particular, chapter 7, "Feminism
and the Question of Postmodernism," where the alliance
between postmodernism and feminism is held to compro-
mise the latter's emancipatory project.
5. Barbara Lynes, O'Keeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics,
1916-1929 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989); Mary
Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female
Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton University Press,
1989).
6. Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women
and Culture (University of California Press, 1990).
7. Wolff, pp. 4 ff.
8. There are feminists who have initiated a move beyond
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artistic production limited exclusively to material culture in
order to consider performance and spectacle in which em-
bodied, speaking subjects come to figure centrally as
"objects" of analysis. See, for example, Lisa Tickner, The
Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign
1907-14 (University of Chicago Press, 1988), in which mass
demonstration in Britain in the early twentieth century is
discussed as spectacle produced and controlled by active
female agents who were also responsible for the performa-
tive aspects of the spectacle. This kind of approach is still
relatively restricted in feminist art history, which I distin-
guish from feminist art criticism that addresses the work of
contemporary "performance artists." See also my "Self-
Fashioning and the Female Mystic," forthcoming in an
anthology entitled Picturing Women in the Renaissance and
Baroque, eds. Sara Matthews Grieco and Geraldine A.
Johnson. Here I discuss the female mystic's presentation of
the self through performative acts involving two- and
three-dimensional examples of sacred art with elaborate
miming. I also point to linguistic acts, including the mys-
tic's change of names at the time of profession in a religious
order. The shift from one marker to another (from baptized
to professed name) and the unstable evocations of each
(given the impossibility of taming signs to single referents)
function neatly as a trope for the instability and plurality of
the subject herself. Rather than constituting a problem in
interpretation, however, I would argue that this opens up
strategic possibilities. Current critical theories insist on the
impossibility of access to, or of unmediated representation
of, (an)other's social experience. But in the mystic's meto-
nymic marking of the self, surely the social and the semio-
tic collide, opening a critical space for discussions of her
subjective maneuvering within representation and the play
of language itself.
9. On the vigilant attempt to maintain conventional dis-
tinctions between high art and mass culture in the critical
discourse of modernism, particularly as codified in the
1940s and '50s, see Andreas Huyssen, After the Great
Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Indiana
University Press, 1986), as well as Huyssen's "Mapping the
Postmodern," Feminism/Postmodernism, pp. 234-277.
10. Lynes, p. 2.
11. A critique of modernism's self-present, unitary sub-
ject of rationality and intention is found in poststructural-
ism and psychoanalysis. Therefore, I include them loosely
within "postmodernism." However, certain aspects of psy-
choanalysis (including French feminist appropriations) are
antithetical to postmodern theories of the constitution of
subjectivity-for instance, notions of essential femininity
repressed by patriarchy, which resonate in the work of Luce
Irigaray, or H6lene Cixous's eternal Voice of the Mother, its
pre-Oedipal "song before the Law" (known through the
body), and the metaphysical and universalizing aspects of
her theories on femininity and writing with respect to the
bodily song. For key works by Irigaray see Speculum of the
Other Woman (Cornell University Press, 1985) and This Sex
Which Is Not One (Cornell University Press, 1985), both
originally published in French in 1974 and 1977, respec-
tively. For Cixous, see "The Laugh of the Medusa," Signs 1
(1976): 875-893 (a translation by Keith Cohen and Paula
Cohen of a revised version of Cixous's "Le Rire de la
Meduse," in LArc, 1975, pp. 39-54).
12. On the structuralist linguistics of Saussure see Ferdi-
Barzman Beyond the Canon: Feminists, Postmodernism, and the History of Art 337
nand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, eds.
Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Reidlinger
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1959). For a summary of
Saussurean structuralism see Robert Scholes, Structuralism
in Literature (Yale University Press, 1974), in particular,
pp. 13-22 and John Sturrock, Structuralism and Since:
From Lvi Strauss to Derrida (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979), pp. 1-18.
13. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity,
Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge,
1988), chapter 4 (with Deborah Cherry), "The Representa-
tion of Elizabeth Siddall."
14. Pollock and Cherry, p. 11.
15. This is also the case in Nochlin's contributions to the
exhibition catalogue Courbet Reconsidered (Brooklyn:
Brooklyn Museum, 1988), entitled "Courbet's Real Alle-
gory: Rereading The Painter's Studio," pp. 17-41. Her inter-
est in structuralist analysis is evident in her description of
Courbet's Painter's Studio as "a system of signs producing
meaning" (p. 22), and herein lies the problem-her under-
standing of how meaning is produced. In the preceding
sentence she states that there are "myriad concrete mean-
ings produced by the painting itself" which might be inde-
pendent of any intentions of the artist and at times in
opposition to his intentions (p. 22). She then goes on to
assert that the "authoritative" interpretation of the work
currently in circulation will not dissuade her from an inter-
pretation of her own. In fact she asserts that we can all
collaborate in the production of meaning because the paint-
ing is literally as well as figuratively unfinished and incom-
plete-figuratively because it is an allegory, which is by its
very nature marked by a disunity between signifier and
signified, between things and meanings. Here she quotes
Terry Eagleton ("The more things and meanings disengage,
the more obvious become the material operations of the
allegories that fumble to re-unite them"), after which she
asserts: "[lIt is precisely in that 'fumble'-that uncol-
onized territory between ball and hand, as it were-in the
gaps between things and meanings ... that the really inter-
esting meanings of Courbet's allegory are produced ..."
(p. 23). Nochlin then identifies certain things within the
work which thrust themselves most insistently upon her
attention, commanding her gaze, and from which she ap-
pears to draw meaning rather than to participate in its pro-
duction (pp. 25 ff.). For her, then, meaning is still imma-
nent, supplied (indeed, phallically "thrust" upon her) by
the object and its text. Thus the notion that we can, or do,
participate in the process of signification is compromised.
16. Unlike feminists in art history, those in film criticism
and theory have had much to say on the rhetorical aspects of
signification. See Annette Kuhn, Women's Pictures: Feminism
and Cinema (London: Verso, 1982), to cite just one example.
Exploring the dynamic aspects of signification in the area of
film has depended on a thorough grounding in psychoana-
lytic and poststructuralist theories of interpretation, which
developed out of a rapidly expanding body of specialized
literature until very recently unexplored by art historians.
On art history's reticence about reception and the role of
audience in the production of meaning see Lisa Tickner,
"Feminism, Art History, and Sexual Difference," Genders
3 (1988): 92-128, although here reception and audience are
discussed almost exclusively in psychoanalytic terms-
"psychoanalysis suggests that the ways in which images
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gender and position the spectator are ... significant ...'
(p. 113)-without indicating wherein lies the spectator's
ability to resist or transcend interpellation. In other words,
we are left to wonder about the agency of the spectator in
the process of signification.
17. Additional problems for feminist art histories with
respect to orthodox Marxist theory are the tendency toward
economic determinism and a totalizing metanarrative that
universalizes truth, the occlusion of gender (construction)
and race relations in discussions of oppression and emanci-
pation, and the neglect of family relations (including child-
hood relations) and the role of fantasy and desire in the
development of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In Dis-
puted Subjects Flax suggests that attempts to include the
above would result in the very implosion of Marxist theory
itself (pp. 11-13). On attempts to develop poststructuralist
materialist feminisms, which address the issues outlined
above with emphasis on the construction of the subject in
and by language as well as other aspects of material life, see
Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean, Materialist Feminisms
(Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993) and Rosemary Hen-
nessy, Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse
(New York: Routledge, 1993).
18. We already have a body of literature on the relation-
ship between viewer and object/text. Such work, however,
has clearly not been feminist in orientation. It tends to
universalize aspects of reception while taking the gender of
the viewer for granted. And, in the case of Michael Fried
for example, it privileges the "initial act of beholding," that
of the so-called "painter-beholder," which brings us right
back to production and authorial intention. Fried might take
issue with my quibbling about distinctions between produc-
tion and reception, for he has at times claimed that conven-
tional distinctions between production and reception are all
but effaced in certain works of art. For example, in "The
Structure of Beholding in Courbet's Burial at Ornans," in
Critical Inquiry 9 (1983): 635-683, he states: "[M]y em-
phasis on the relationship between painting and beholder
has been from the outset social in its implications, being
concerned with the encoding ... of a highly specific practice
or indeed work of beholding that mediates between produc-
tion and reception to the extent of almost but not quite
effacing the distinction between the two" (p. 677, note 5).
But here production is construed as material production by
the hand of the artist, not production of meaning at the
moment of reception-unless of course we care to assume
the role of the painter-beholder, in which case our own
subjectivity is effaced. As for us, Fried asks: "[W]ho are
we? The beholder tout court? But the beholder tout court is
an abstraction" (p. 677).
19. See, for example, Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patri-
cia Mathews, "The Feminist Critique of Art History," Art
Bulletin 69 (1987): 326-357, where the link is implicit in
the authors' decision to treat feminist art and contemporary
criticism along with feminist art history. See also Pollock's
Vision and Difference for such statements as: "One of the
primary responsibilities of a feminist intervention [in art
history] must be the study of women as producers" (p. 10);
"The political point of feminist art history must be to
change the present by means of how we represent the past.
That means we must refuse the art historian's permitted
ignorance of living artists and contribute to present day
struggles of living producers" (p. 14).
 338 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
20. It is important to distinguish among diverse practices
and differing conditions of reception in an historically
responsible fashion. In my own work on the figuration of
mystics in seventeenth-century Florence, for example, I
want to discuss reception as it is local and contingent-that
of a cloistered nun as distinct from that of her male confes-
sor, neither of which can be collapsed into that of contem-
porary theorists and critics of art.
Yet while many would concur that this constitutes the
most responsible way to proceed in historical analysis, my
own intrusions as interpreter are inevitable. The diverse
accounts of reception which are contemporary to the pro-
duction of the work and to which I turn provide no direct
access to the thoughts and reactions of seventeenth-century
viewers. The sources are texts I must interpret, and in the
process of reading, I will produce meaning in and through a
narrative account of reception that is as much autoreferen-
tial as anything else. Hence my own intervention in cultural
production-in and through a discourse that constitutes its
object of inquiry rather than discovering or finding it.
21. Pollock, Vision and Difference, chapter 6.
22. Here I do not mean to imply that complex theory is
or should be beyond the purview or professional compe-
tence of pre-modernists. I merely point out that this has
been the case and has been made to seem inevitable and
legitimate by "experts" in the field whose status and au-
thority within the current discursive formation depend on
maintaining the prevailing arrangement.
23. See Nochlin's work in Courbet Reconsidered, pp. 27
and 37.
24. For a critique of the notion of rationalism leading to
empowerment and/or (self)emancipation, see Flax, "Post-
modernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory." See
also Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Why Doesn't This Feel Em-
powering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Criti-
cal Pedagogy," Harvard Educational Review 59 (1989):
297-324, wherein a postmodern feminist critique similar to
that of Flax addresses professor/student relations which, I
would maintain, are analogous to writer/reader relations in
professionalized discourses like art history.
25. Moreover, I would argue that our individual concerns
are themselves never constant but always shifting, for iden-
tity itself is multiple, the self unstable (split, as it were,
between conscious and unconscious), the voice fragmented
and in contradiction with itself. We are each of us the site of
difference, and the interpretation(s) we offer are partial at
best, even with respect to our own subjectivities.
26. On the feminist challenge to work constructively
with the concept of difference within their community, see
Iris Young, "The Ideal of Community and the Politics of
Difference," Feminism/Postmodernism, pp. 300-323. On
women and difference within the context of cultural pro-
duction see Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender:
Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Indiana University
Press, 1987), in particular chapter 8, "Rethinking Women's
Cinema: Aesthetics and Feminist Theory."
27. Wolff's Feminine Sentences assumes a curious place
in this literature, given that she calls for work on the "soci-
ology of reception" in the introduction, emphasizing "prac-
tices of reading and viewing, and ... the contexts and insti-
tutions of reception" (p. 5). Theoretically, this kind of
approach would take into account the situated partiality of
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all readings, including the art historian's. Although Wolff
includes a brief theoretical justification for such work,
which is consonant in certain respects with the position I
am articulating here, her interest in female artistic produc-
tion distracts her from developing this line of inquiry in the
essays that follow (she acknowledges: "In those essays in
which I deal with cultural politics [two out of eight], this
dimension is so far inadequately examined," p. 5). More-
over, she rejects the model of radical democracy I argue for
below, insisting (much like Nochlin) on a "rational project"
that draws "on the communalities of women's experience"
(p. 8). My own experience in women's groups and organi-
zations (both within and outside the academy) bears out
what I have argued here-that rational appeals to "commu-
nality" have not secured ties of solidarity, at least not in the
1980s and '90s with the foregrounding of difference.
(Parenthetically I would call attention here to the review
of Feminine Sentences by Amelia Jones in Art History 15
[1992]: 253-262. Jones offers an insightful and more devel-
oped critique of Wolff's book along similar lines. The
review appeared after the drafting of this article.)
28. We can no longer even take seriously the argument
that feminists are all "women." Postmodern feminism,
drawing on Foucault in large part, has questioned the fixed,
exclusive categories of dimorphic sex based on biology
("male" and "female"). We need do no more than invoke
the body of the hermaphrodite, which can serve to mark the
midpoint in an infinite array of biologically sexed bodies.
Who is unambiguously "female" or truly "a woman"?
Moreover, what of the growing number of "men" whose
work addresses gender and power and who consider them-
selves feminists?
29. On this point, see also de Lauretis, "Feminist Stud-
ies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Contexts," Feminist
StudieslCritical Studies (Indiana University Press, 1986), in
particular p. 3.
30. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
(London: Verso, 1985).
31. Laclau and Mouffe, pp. 167-168.
32. Laclau and Mouffe, p. 177.
33. The reference to "cookshops of the future" is drawn
from Marx's Afterword to the second edition of Capital.
For this particular rendering of the phrase in English, see
Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1985), p. 36.
34. Flax argues in Disputed Subjects that "the truth tests
for our knowledge are pragmatic, not ocular ones. I would
look at their consequences (which we can know only in-
completely) and their utility for specific purposes at spe-
cific times for specific groups" (p. 154). By claiming that
truth tests for knowledge are not "ocular," she already
implies that they cannot be theorized in universal terms
("theorize" coming from the Greek "to look at"). In Femi-
nist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, Weedon analo-
gously argues that "[details] of an adequate feminist poli-
tics ... cannot be specified in advance since the precise
configuration of power relations [never stable/always shift-
ing] in any situation will determine how best we can act"
(p. 11). Clearly these are positions I endorse with respect to
feminist practices in art history.
35. I would like to thank Ronald Bernier, Roger Crum,
Barzman Beyond the Canon: Feminists, Postmodernism, and the History of Art 339

Michael Howard, Amelia Jones, Keith Moxey, David Ruther-
ford, Jana Sawicki, Melinda Schlitt, Patricia Simons, Blake
Stimson, and this journal's anonymous readers for their
constructive comments as I worked through various drafts.
I am also grateful to the graduate students and faculty of the
Art Department at Stanford University who provided a
stimulating environment within which I began to think crit-
ically about feminist art history during the winter and
spring of 1988. Special thanks to Deanna Shemek and Jane
Tylus who encouraged me to begin reading critical theory.

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