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Critical Perspectives on Linda Nochlin’s Feminist Scholarship

Chung Yeon Shim 1

1홍익대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Feminist studies and gender theories in art history and particularly in contemporary art have garnered greater scholarly attention since Linda Nochlin published a polemical article entitled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists” in 1971. Perusing major articles included in Nochlin’s books Women, Art and Power and Other Essays and The Politics of Vision, as well as focusing on her critical articles on contemporary artists such as Sylvia Sleigh, I trace the historical development of feminist perspective in her scholarship. Initially, this paper discusses the very central term she employs in her writing: “femininity”. By challenging “the-white-male-position-accepted-as-natural”, which has prevailed in the fields of art history and visual practice through the ages, Nochlin signals the danger of labeling “femininity” as a set of biologically determined characteristics. This feminist pioneer challenged general and biologically inspired distinctions favored by “Essential Feminists” such as Miriam Shapiro and Judy Chicago. Nochlin, in contrast, attempted to analyze the structural obstacles society presents to women by attacking the concept of male “genius”, and criticizing the positivist viewpoints in Hippolyte Taine’s meta-history in which a genius is an atemporal and enigmatic artist. By expanding her interest toward society and visual culture, Nochlin did not generalize women’s experiences. Rather she thought that gendered meanings of subjectivity and femininity can be seen in the culture and society. In this effort, she collaborated with other feminist scholars and curators to discover historically forgotten women artists while writing critical essays on artists such as Yvonne Jacquette and Sylvia Mangold. My paper goes on to analyze Nochlin’s main themes on “labor and class identity” in her article, “Morisot’s Wet Nurse: The Construction of Work and Leisure in Nineteenth-Century Painting”(1987). In this work, we see the trajectory of her feminist interests from Michel Foucault to Jacque Lacan and Louis Althusser in her discussions of “subjectivity” and “sexual difference.” By departing from the dichotomy of power structure and ideology on one side and women and men on the other, she moves toward “representation trope” in defining the politics of visuality in the artworks themselves. Interestingly enough, unlike other feminist scholars, Nochlin concludes that Morisot, rather ambiguously, is situated between labor and leisure, and mother and artist. Additionally, I explicate the remaining important critical terms in her articles: otherness and identity concerns. Her essay “The Imaginary Orient”, inspired by Edward Said’s Orientalism , questions the manner in which Orientalists such as Théodore Chassériau, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme depict the other in the age of burgeoning imperialism. She scrutinizes how imperial eyes penetrate the surface of Orientalist paintings, which were supposed to be l’effet de réel of the era to Parisian viewers. Nochlin subsequently furthered her research on identity and gender issues to encompass “Jewish problems” in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity . In conclusion, the paper explores her recent curatorial works of “Global Feminisms”-in line with other feminist exhibitions including “WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution”-as well as her recent publications of Bathers, Bodies, Beauty and the Visceral Eye and Self and History: A Tribute of Linda Nochlin. As Lucy Lippard noted in a speech at a feminist symposium, “The Feminist Future Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts,” at the Museum of Modern Art in February 2007, Feminism has been transformed into a significant “ism” in our society. As G. Pollock has noted, this exerted a role of “ethical hospitality”.

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