Encounters In The Virtual Feminist Museum

Griselda Pollock. Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: time, space and the archive. 280pp. Routledge, 2007.

 

 

Encounters In The Virtual Feminist Museum
By Madeleine Jones

On 10 March, 1914, Mary Richardson visited London’s National Gallery to see Valázquez’s Rokeby Venus, an iconic representation of female beauty. Richardson paused before the painting, apparently in contemplation of what a 2003 BBC documentary described as “the most smackable backside in art,” then whipped out a meat cleaver concealed on her person, and slashed the painting several times before being restrained. Shortly afterwards she announced that the mutilation was a protest against the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst: “If there is an outcry against my deed, let everyone remember that such an outcry is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of Mrs. Pankhurst and other beautiful living women.”

Close to a century later, Griselda Pollock, Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art at Leeds University, finds that there are still feminist battles to be fought in the Museum—and that they are to be fought for the museum itself. Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum is a multi-faceted, subtle, and frequently convincing insight into the gender politics and cultural valances surrounding the exhibition (broadly understood) of art, and an ambitious revisionist art history that offers a fresh look at the lives and work of scores of important (and often under-appreciated) women artists, and juxtaposes them in a bold, imaginative, and often extremely productive manner.

The book opens with some postcards from the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, showing off its new acquisition, Canova’s Three Graces. The cards show details from the statue: hair curled up above the nape of a neck; three bottoms; a close up of one bottom. The postcards lead into a formidably learned and theoretically sophisticated discussion of the politics of exhibition, which moves easily from the 19th century origins of art photography, through discussions of youth and old age, hermaphroditism, 1970s jeans adverts, and the fetishization of hair. Finally, we reach the Mnemosyne Atlas, the collection of over 1000 art images in reproduction that Aby Warburg arranged in the 1930s to show the development of form and expression in Western art. It is an apt image for Pollock’s book, which she consciously adopts.

The model goes some way to explaining the study’s frenetic variety, which is at once impressive and rather irritating. Pollock does not aim for sustained or systematic argument, but proceeds by piling on and juxtaposing more images, artists, analyses. Where this approach is successful, it is exhilarating to read. But elsewhere, too often, one is left with the impression that the forward movement is arbitrary, and that any general conclusions might have been altered, had only a different set of images or artists been thrown together instead.

The three chapters of Part One deal with issues in museum history. The next chapter (Part Two) figures itself as a gallery: a floor-plan is given for the arrangement of the works discussed in the “virtual museum.” But in the final three chapters, Part Three, subtitled “After Auschwitz,” the book-as-gallery device is dropped, and we find three biographical discussions of groups of women artists, with no obvious relation to the issues surrounding art collection or exhibition.

These extended biographical passages are some of the most enjoyable in the book. Readers might object to liberties taken in Pollock’s thumbnail sketches of artists’ lives (as she acknowledges, there is no way of knowing whether Charlotte Salomon listened to Walter Benjamin’s radio shows as a child, or visited Frida Kahlo’s Paris show) but Pollock’s combination of Marxist-influenced insistence on the importance of material and social circumstances for the cultural output and sensitivity to artists’ personal experience is beguiling.

Yet for all her fascination with artists’ lives, Pollock draws back from saying that these determined their artistic production: “Is there a difference we can reclaim that stems simply from the gender of the author? No.”

What separates Pollock from many other writers on feminist art history is her refusal to consider femininity solely as a barrier to accomplishment or recognition (though she accepts the importance of discrimination in art history), rather she posits it as a positive and complex artistic accomplishment. The feminine for Pollock is rather the renegotiation of the masculine gaze “in order to install in culture some other means of signifying subjectivity and shaping meaning from the hitherto unsignified space of feminine differences.” This position is not revolutionary, but rarely is it given such sustained scholarly attention.

While the book’s miscellaneous quality means it lacks overall coherence, it is admirable that individual discussions never seem cursory—Pollock is clearly on top of her material. There is much of value to anyone interested in theoretical issues surrounding museums and in feminist art; general readers will find much that is new in the discussion of artists; many readers will appreciate the wide range of material covered. Most of all the book is to be applauded for showing that even in a culture where it is often assumed that feminism has achieved all it can and further discussion can amount only to truism, feminism can make a complex and nuanced contribution to artistic discussion.