TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110890/1108591.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                PUBLIC IMAGES, Page 61

ART

Quarreling over Quality


A feminist critique blasts old assumptions about how we judge
an artist's works

By EDWARD M. GOMEZ/PARIS -- With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/
New York


    Mention feminism and art in the same breath, and some art
critics begin to fume. "The feminist movement has not come up
with a single talent heretofore unknown to us," insists Hilton
Kramer, the founding editor of the New Criterion, a monthly arts
review. "It tells us nothing about the qualities one should be
studying in a work of art." But those are fighting words to the
legions of artists, critics and scholars who have devoted the
past 20 years to developing a feminist critique of art history.
Their efforts have virtually set the agenda for academic
discussion and have begun to overturn the standard textbook
reading of visual art as an orderly march of styles from cave
paintings to postmodernism.

    Chipping away at the cultural canon, feminist artists
beginning in the 1970s sought to rewrite art history to include
overlooked female talents. Miriam Schapiro, Judy Chicago, Nancy
Spero and other U.S. artists and historians, along with
colleagues in Europe, began to exhume female artists of the
past. They included medieval mystics and such Renaissance
artists as Cremona-born Sofonisba Anguissola, who painted at the
court of Philip II of Spain, and Artemisia Gentileschi of Rome,
a painter's daughter who, like her father, was influenced by
Caravaggio's eye-popping naturalism. To feminist admirers, the
value of these women's paintings is self-evident. But some
scholars complain that the sex of an artist has nothing to do
with the quality of a work.

    This issue of quality lies at the heart of the debate
between supporters and foes of the feminist critique. What does
it mean to say that a given painting or sculpture has the
enduring quality of a masterpiece? Who defines this, and what
biases does it reflect? Traditionally, quality has referred to
the degree of excellence and accomplishment in a work of art,
reflected in its form or content. The term is used to identify
artists who demonstrate the highest technical skills and most
mature or "serious" treatment of their subject matter. Works of
the highest quality, or masterpieces, serve as yardsticks by
which to measure all other works: the good, the bad or the mere
passing fad. But feminists like art professor Whitney Chadwick
of San Francisco State University insist that there simply is
no "objective factor called quality that someone sophisticated
and knowledgeable can immediately deduce."

    Chadwick, author of the recent book Women, Art and Society,
and like-minded scholars argue that a work of art reflects the
culture, the times and also the sex of its creator. They contend
that a mostly white male heterosexual establishment has shaped
the form and content as well as the critical evaluation of
Western art, giving scant attention to female artists whose work
may reflect a sensibility different from theirs. "The old belief
held that a work of art was the same, no matter when or where
or who looked at it," says Linda Nochlin, a Yale University art
professor and a leading feminist historian. "The `new' art
history considers the gender of both artist and observer." For
whose pleasure, for example, have all the female nudes in
Western art been painted or sculpted?

    The subject is explosive, says Chadwick, because to question
quality not only challenges cultural history but also "threatens
the dealers, curators, critics and auctioneers who control the
system that assigns value to artists' works." That may be so,
says Kirk Varnedoe, director of the department of painting and
sculpture at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, who does not
completely accept or reject the feminist critique. But to
dismiss the notion of quality, he says, also challenges the very
purpose of art criticism and art appreciation. Says Varnedoe:
"One is never relieved of the burden of making judgments about
relative quality -- nor should one be."

    While the scholars squabble, practicing artists such as
Schapiro, Chicago and Spero have tried to create a new, women's
art. Their work has incorporated techniques of traditional
"women's work" -- quilting, embroidery, crafts -- or explored
female sexuality. Inspired by Islamic and Near Eastern designs,
Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff and others have produced large works
resembling huge swatches of patterned fabric. Their tableaux
infused geometric abstraction's smooth, minimalist surfaces with
an explosion of zigzags and curlicues. Thus during the 1970s
emerged the style called pattern and decoration.

    Of course, not all female artists today are overtly
feminist. Gender has not explicitly been an issue in the work
of Susan Rothenberg or Jennifer Bartlett, two of the most
successful contemporary painters. Nor does it dominate the work
of media artist Jenny Holzer, who this year became the first
woman to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale. Still, the
force of feminism has helped improve the odds that a female
artist's work will be exhibited and taken seriously. This
year's most visible example was "The Decade Show," a
three-museum summer exhibition in New York City that featured
a multiracial roster of artists, including many women.

    "Feminism seeded the democratization of art," says Schapiro.
Traditionalists may snicker, but under its influence mainstream
critical discourse has broadened to consider the social,
historical and political contexts in which art is produced.
Rediscovered female artists are not listed in every syllabus,
but more and more students, art educators point out, are eager
to learn about ignored talents. How to select which ones to
study? Says Spero: "It's so subjective. It always comes down to
that old chestnut, quality." Whether feminists like it or not,
the viewer's quest for quality may be as fundamental, and
inevitable, as the artist's urge to create.