Viewpoint continues...
Another art history professor, Bernard Herman, engaged his students in a collaborative project at the University of Delaware, taking students out into the historic African American community of New London Road to investigate personal histories and stories, to result in the construction of a monument. Public uproar over what promised to be highly phallic imagery is mollified by the finished sculptures, but what proves to be more significant are two books created out of the process, ""People Were Close" and "Food Brings People Together," a cookbook.
Honored in a special panel, "Feminism, Fantasies, Memories, Futures," Art historian Linda Nochlin had, as a young professor at Vassar, posed the provocative question "Why have there been no great women artists?" First published in "ARTnews" in 1971 the essay, which held fault not with some inherent deficiency in our gender, but in the educational and societal framework around us, was accompanied by a pair of photographs, a vintage one where a strapping lass displays her "humps" above a tray of apples, in the other (which Nochlin created) a simpering, vaguely Aboriginal male offers a flaccid organ with a tray of bananas. This image caused significant uproar at the 2007 event, and it is difficult to quite imagine public response in 1971.
Nochlin's accomplishments, critical essays and books served as a point of departure for larger explorations in the world of art. The current issue of "ARTnews," dedicated to "Feminist Art: The Next Wave," features Nochlin addressing the topic of "Great Women Artists" and other critics exploring the topic of feminism, in particular why "The F-Word" is so unfashionable. While women have made great strides in the past three decades, it is not time, as one panelist put it, "for the Guerrilla Girls to hang up their gorilla suits."
Feminism seems, in fact, the order of the day; panelist Moira Roth cites art critic Holland Cotter's declaration in the January 29 New York Times that "Feminist Art Finally Takes Center Stage" with a symposium featuring both Nochlin and art historian Lucy Lippard packing the MoMA, and feminist-themed shows headlining at major museums on both coasts. Cotter states ". 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."
It snowed all day Wednesday, and the activity of navigating the sidewalk and street from one hotel to the other became an adventure. The few inches of snow that fell remained, brown and a bit slushy, in the road, while the sidewalks remained generally clear but slippery. Panelists begin dropping from their sessions like flies as flights were cancelled, passengers sitting disgruntled in terminals or on runways.
I am sloshing my way to Marcia Tanner's panel, "Can Geeks be Humanists?" Tanner, an independent curator based in Berkeley, has a provocative vision of art which elevates the human condition while often pursuing feminist concerns. Her abstract poses the issue of how, or why, new media artists may avoid the pitfall of alienating the viewer.
Other panelists' agendas appear a bit murky; Andrea Ackerman, trained as a psychiatrist, presented a monochromatic, bald, vision of humanity ("Yawn," "Woman Waking") which could not match the intensity of her breathtakingly vivid "Breathing Rose"; still, she made a number of interesting points, particularly referencing Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and its themes of synthetic life as being suspect, soulless, and possibly evil.
Claudia Hart, who presented a voluptuous nude swinging over the camera and back, with browning trees in the background, gets some kind of prestidigitation award for presenting her response to Tanner's question in the context of Marxist social discourse and the ontological approach of the French school of Deconstruction. John Slepian shared his dynamic "little_one," a cuddly, digitized cross between an infant and something from the movie "Eraserhead." Claudia Valdez, filling in for a stranded Sabrina Raaf, explored themes of nuclear holocaust with an anti-war sensibility, and Gail Wight, New Media professor at Stanford, shared her explorations of the darker sides of scientific research and the sacrifices of living creatures made in the name of scientific advancement.
"Reversal, Artists Talk About Art History" was chaired by art historian Reva Wolf, who proposed turning the tables. The three artists she selected, Peter Halley, George Quasha and Faith Ringgold, offered widely disparate views on the topic. Ringgold, art professor emeritus at UC San Diego, persisting in the notion that artists are "just born that way" shared her magical, intimate vision of life as an African American woman. Her richly-textured world is based in narrative, and indeed she found her talk to best take the form of a folktale.
Halley, who seemed like a ringer of sorts, having obtained a degree in art history from Yale, read a lengthy "love-letter" to art historians. Having gotten over his early rejection at Yale, he now directs the graduate program in painting and printmaking there. (He also received, in 2001, the CAA award for art criticism.) Quasha, the most aggressively philosophical of the trio, held forth on the teachings of art historian Thomas McEvilley, as well as the life-transformative effect T.S. Eliot's poetry had on him as a young lad. The issue of primacy kept bobbing up, with Halley citing the near-collaboration between Warhol and Henry Geldzaler, who fed him ideas, and others bringing up Greenberg and Pollock, and the aging idea that the critic may, in many ways, be the true artist these days.
I had hoped to gain insight into the interaction of the artist with society, how the contemporary figure fits into its new ground, testing the strength of art historical ice in the climate of global warming. What I found was an assortment of thoughtful, passionate people gathered together, under rather adverse circumstances, for the common goal of exploring the same, or similar, questions. The prevailing message I heard was one of retaining artistic integrity and following the dictates of one's heart, while addressing the issues of relevance to society at large. Across the board, anti-war sentiment ran high.
One of the CAA award recipients, founding director of the Berkeley Art Museum Peter Selz, received the book award for his "The Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond" making a memorable statement for politically engaged work, addressing the "criminal invasion of Iraq, gender politics," and the like. Selz, who attributes receiving his first teaching job to a paper he gave at a CAA conference in 1955, also referenced Berthold Brecht's vision that art "is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." Priorities certainly were varied, with a healthy dose of traditional art history panels matched by large numbers of new media, feminist, queer, and world art related topics. As President Nicola Cartwright said in her introductory remarks, "It ain't your grandmother's CAA anymore." And, Amen to that.
