Luce Irigaray formulates a ‘double demand — for both equality and difference’ (p.81). Had a similar theoretical model been adopted in early feminist histories of Art?
Authors Note on Upload
I wrote this essay as part of the module Reading Sexual Difference during my MA in 2024 at the University of Leeds. Despite this, it does not delve into the realm of psychoanalytical feminist theory in large detail, rather only touches upon it. I wanted to use the module as an opportunity to take a historiographical dive into the pioneering art historical feminist work that is Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology. Looking back at the writing, it would have been nice to apply some of the methods that Pollock and Parker used in the book to an artwork itself. In the future, this is an exercise I would like to delve back into. Although the essay has its problems in some areas, is in some ways repetitive, and in no way makes any original claims, it is one I am proud of and always enjoy reading back. I think it marks one of the breakthroughs in my art historical journey thus far. Writing this essay helped me to understand the politically intense moment in art history where feminism interjected with sheer force. It also introduced me to the fascinating work of the theorist, Luce Irigary. If you choose to read it, I hope you enjoy it.
Introduction
This essay takes a theoretical vice as its starting point and asks in what ways it has been negotiated at a particular moment in the history of art. It uses as its cultural artefact, a certain type of art history that emerged during the 1970s, which has become known as ‘feminist’. Branded as an ‘intervention in the History of Art’ rather than an extension of mainstream art history, I question how the ‘double demand’, expressed by French philosopher Luce Irigaray (1930-), has been articulated in art histories that concern women and the feminine. Having noted this, what is the framework of the ‘double demand’ that Irigaray speaks of and how does it work?
In a published interview dating back to 1985, at the height of the worldwide women’s liberation movements, Irigaray stated ‘women are obviously not expected to renounce equality in the sphere of civil rights. [But] how can the double demand – of both equality and difference – be articulated?’.[1] Irigaray poses a complex problem and begins to manufacture a theoretical framework in the context of second-wave feminism that is inherently deconstructive. She noted that a dialectical process was needed, whereby the feminist movement could achieve its imminent demand for civil rights – bodily autonomy, the right to equal work, equal pay, maternity rights, and so on (inherently political concerns) – whilst simultaneously debunking the patriarchal power system that had allowed the absence of such rights to formulate. Suppose women had simply strived for equality, which the purpose of mainstream liberal feminism has always aimed to do. In that case, they leave ‘intact the power structure itself’ and resubject ‘themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratic order.’[2] This is because we live in a system that discursively and psychologically subjects us to the order of imbalance that is sexual difference: a prevailing system that is built on ‘the construction of [differences] that designate asymmetrical division of human subjects – based on a produced hierarchy signified linguistically by the opposition: masculine (+/x) / feminine (-/not-x).’[3] Understood in these terms, Iirgaray’s formulation of the ‘double demand’ illustrates how simply generating equilibrium across the sexes keeps in place and actively produces both psycho-sexual and psycho-linguistic systems of masculine phallic domination in which women are always ‘othered’ and/or lacking. She thus calls for a method of ‘intervention’ whereby the system is jammed and broken down from the inside outward, which would give those who are consigned under the signifier ‘woman’ the space to negotiate what that means outside of the parameters of phallocentrism, whilst also striving for equality in the name of civil rights. She poses the use of ‘mimicry’, as in women ‘assuming the feminine deliberately’ as a mode of thwarting it, and a call for a new feminine language, achieved through a ‘playful crossing’, in the name of women themselves.[4]
Such a task is mammoth, but thinking in these terms was a crucial part of the beginning of a project that began to use thinking itself to break down patriarchal power structures of sexual difference through interruption, mediation, and interference in all walks of society and culture – hence using terminology such as ‘intervention’ to frame it. In this mode, a call for ‘equality and difference’ in feminism could begin to be enacted.
Was a similar theoretical model adopted in histories of art during the 1970s-80s? If so, how had it been negotiated and in what ways did it begin to change the modes in which the history of art was written and transposed? These questions are the central concerns of this short essay. I take as my cultural artefact, the 1981 book Old Mistress: Women, Art, and Ideology, co-written by art historians Griselda Pollock (1949-) and Rozika Parker (1945-2010). This book, as I will illustrate, employed a particular art historical method – known as ‘feminist interventions in the history of art’ – and built upon theories of emerging sexual difference, engaging with the dialectic of equality and difference. I must note, that Irigaray’s formulation comes after Old Mistresses itself. Its usage here is as a theoretical and methodological framework that allows me to understand Pollock and Parker’s feminist task, as they began to foster a discourse in the history of art that was inherently disruptive and feminist. They themselves did not utilise this exact theoretical model in the context that Irigaray was using it, but it becomes useful in theorising Pollock and Parker’s feminist task. Through analysing and tracing a selection of Pollock and Parker’s methods, I will ask if a similar model of Irigaray’s formulation of ‘equality and difference’ has been negotiated in this version of the history of art.
Art History as a Masculine Discourse
Griselda Pollock and Rozika Parker’s book, Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology was pioneering in the emergence of histories of art that concerned women and society. Within its pages, they began to wrestle with the history of art and feminism, implementing action that worked to establish a formulation of ‘equality’ and ‘difference’, perhaps in similar ways to Irigaray. They wrote the book during what has become known as the ‘second-wave feminist’ movement. Founding and working with the Women Art History Collective (1973-75), they began critical research on women artists in art history.
One of the modes in which they achieved this was by reformulating art history as a specific ‘discourse’. Building on the philosophical work of Michel Foucault, Pollock and Parker saw art history as a ‘groups of statements, patterns of thinking, practices of pedagogy and induction into modes of thought [that] […] actively constituted their field and its objects. […] art was what the art historical expert stated it was.’[5] In this sense, they viewed art history as a stream of knowledge that actively excluded women artists, not one that had simply forgotten them. Before 1972, when both Pollock and Parker were undergraduate students in art history, the subject was not understood as a ‘discourse’ in this sense. Rather, it was regarded as an academic discipline that examined individual artists and artworks in a positivist, purely biographical, iconographical mode, that ‘reflected’ society as it was in a given moment or period.[6] Their book, which had emerged out of the Feminist Art Collective and the Women’s Liberation Movement worked in ways to interrupt art history for what it had become. Building on and critiquing the important work done by art historians such as Linda Nochlin and her famous essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (1971), Old Mistress, began to use ‘sex’ as a probe, to show how,
feminism could shift the entire paradigm of art historical thinking, opening hegemonically formalist Art History and its exclusive [masculine and white] canons to all forms of social, institutional and cultural factors shaping difference (be that class, race, gender or sexuality) as the grounds for exclusion from access to art and recognition.[7]
When Pollock and Parker wrote ‘shift’, they did not mean to replace one art history for another. Art historical work had been done up until this point, which acknowledged women artists that had been forgotten. Books such as Women in the Fine Arts from the Seventieth Century to the Twentieth (1974), The Obstacle Race: The Fortune of Women Painters and Their Work (1979), Women and Art: A History of Women Painters and Sculptures from the Renaissance to the Middle Ages (1978), and, Women Artist: Recognition and Reappraisal from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (1976) did this.[8] Yet, these works of scholarship, important as they were, only reinstated the exclusiveness Pollock and Parker were attempting to renegotiate. They only worked to establish a separate space in art history (outside of the mainstream academic discipline) whereby women’s artists could be reintegrated whilst remaining in the patriarchal mould. As Pollock and Parker emphasize in Old Mistress, these books were never taken seriously in scholarly worlds and were always attached to patriarchal notions of womanhood – passiveness, delicateness, daintiness, and sweetness.[9] ‘Shift’, in this sense, then, was used as a way of implying ‘intervention’. As Irigaray had inferred when speaking on her formulation of equality and difference concerning the French feminist movement, Pollock and Parker were aware that feminist art historians had to work from inside the discipline to unshackle the masculine white canon. In the same way that redistributing power relations made women ostensibly ‘equal’ to men, simply adding women to art history, although giving women artists historical recognition, would keep in place prevailing structures that had excluded them from art history originally. What this meant was, redefining art history as a discourse, as ‘groups of statements, patterns of thinking, practices of pedagogy and induction into modes of thought’ that actively othered women from the prevailing canon under structures of sexual difference and interfering with it – hence the use of terminology such as ‘opening’. [10]
Similarly to Irigaray’s establishment of equality and difference, Pollock and Parker’s project was inherently deconstructive, one which relied on working inside and outside the mainstream art historical canon to interrupt it. Attention had to be paid to society and its contexts, its ideologies, and the modes in which structures of sexual difference had shaped art historical discourse and, equally, how art history had shaped sexual difference; the process had to be examined dialectically as they both relied on one another. It involved viewing images, artworks, and visual cultures as phenomena that actively produced masculine power structures and kept them in place. As Pollock argues, ‘society is a historical process and history cannot be reduced to a manageable block of information; it has to be grasped as a complex of processes and relationships.’[11]
The process of redefining art history as a discourse – as a set of practices that worked under specific sexual, capital, and colonial ideologies – was Parker and Pollock’s mediation, their profound intervention that wrestled with art history to reshape it. Giving recognition to female artists throughout history, whilst also uncovering how they had been actively othered by the discipline, was a mode of them recognising difference whilst striving for historical equality. Their work in Old Mistresses illustrated how women ‘negotiated’ their difference (their femininity) throughout historical periods.
As noted earlier, Linda Nochlin’s paper, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? started an important conversation regarding the history of art concerning women artists. Her claim that there had not been any great women artists, was drawn up on the argument that women had not been educated the same as men, and that they had been institutionally oppressed. That they had not been provided with the same materials, the same classes, the same amount of time and money.[12] All of this is true, but as Pollock and Parker illustrate in Old Mistresses, it did not mean there were not women artists, or that women artists were not as ambiguous or forthright as their male counterparts. Rather, for Pollock and Parker, the purposeful exclusion of women from mainstream 19th-century academies forced them to make art in different ways directly due to their position as women. They suggest that historians should negotiate this difference. Women and men did not make art in the same way, but that did not mean women’s artwork was any less technical, intricate, and painterly. They emphasize this by analysing Artemisia Gentileschi's self-portrait as La Pittura (n.d). Despite her exclusion from mainstream academies, they show how she still painted the human form from her reflection rather than from a model. This is, in the view of Pollock and Parker, a negotiation of sexual difference and must be analysed in order to understand the specificity of women artists in their moment. As they put it, ‘because of the economic, social, and ideological effects of sexual difference in Western, patriarchal culture, women have spoken and acted from a different place within [a given] society and culture.’[13] This allowed them to renegotiate the balance and strive for ‘equality,’ but also to understand that women and men made art in diverse ways because of their sociological, cultural, and psychological sexualities. Using this methodology throughout Old Mistresses and in analysing numerous women's work, Pollock and Parker were able to grasp how modern art had been co-created by men and women. Yet it was ‘difference’ that ultimately shaped how artists, worked under these signs.
In renegotiating modernist art history as a discourse that actively and purposefully excluded women from the history of art, Pollock and Parker were able to employ a formulation of equality and difference that ties in with Irigaray’s. Although in different contexts, the formulation of interrupting art history for what it had become – a hegemonically male-centred discipline – was a mode of striving for equality whilst also negotiating differences that female artists had historically had to face. In this vein, similarly to how Irigarary proposes, the feminist intervention in the history of art was deeply radical; it worked from within to deconstruct and form the dialectic between equality and difference that was needed to puncture the discourse of mainstream art history at a particularly unprecedented moment in the history of the twentieth century, one which was fuelled by activism in both mainstream and academic worlds.
The Masculine Language of Art History.
A central aspect of Irigaray’s concept of equality and difference involves challenging what she refers to as ‘phallocentric’ language. Influenced by her training at the Ecole Freudienne de Paris, her work with Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), and her background in psychoanalysis she argues that humans are subject to systems dominated by the ‘phallus’.[14] In The Poverty of Psychoanalysis (1977), she observes that ‘in language [langue], the masculine noun always governs the agreement. The subjects always speak in the same gender (unless it exposes the flaw of the truth?). The phallus […] is the emblem, the signifier and the product of the single-sex.’[15] In this sense, what has come to constitute ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in the society (or the ‘agreement’ as Irigaray puts it), is governed by a symbolic order that prevails masculinity over femininity, over years and years of linguistic development. Femininity has been diminished to a cypher consistently operating in a state of lack, unconsciously manifested in our everyday lexicon. However, as Irigaray notes, in society and culture language is taken as ‘sexually neutral’ and perpetually diminishes women to the phallus unless it is debunked. In this system, femininity can only operate in a mode that is both governed and other to masculinity. It is always understood in a narrow framework which sits neatly with our conception of what constitutes “women”.
Noting this is a conscious understanding of how language, always taken as neutral, creates systems of difference which affect those operating under the signifiers of masculinity and femininity diversely, always prevailing the first over the latter. This is one reason why Irigaray calls for negotiation of both equality and difference. As I have underpinned concerning discourse, regardless of whether or not women and men have equal power distribution politically, women will always be subjected to prevailing symbolic structures that other them, unless language is altered in some way. In her view, feminist movements must break this system, by utilising their phallocratic feminine position, consistently ‘playing’ with language to unshackle it. Irigaray calls for an ‘examination’ of the operation of the ‘grammar’ in each figure of discourse – a call to bring to bear the ‘silences’ of discourse which consistently repress the feminine.[16] Intervening rather than replacing, this cesura in language would give space for the feminine to speak outside the parameters of phallocentrism, establishing a move toward ‘difference’ and ‘equality’.
Similarly, Pollock and Parker’s project of intervening in the history of art also relied on debunking inherently gendered language. After establishing art history as a discourse, they then needed to puncture the language that created it. In the case of Old Mistresses, the approach to language is not taken in the exact format as Irigaray understands it in The Power of Discourse (in its pure psychoanalytical mode) but is understood as inherently masculine and patriarchal. It is comprehended as the mechanism which subverts women to unexplored depths of the history of art. Like Irigaray, both Pollock and Parker viewed that language, in the context of modernist art history, had become gender/sexually neutral, but was in fact, dominated by masculine presupposition and always hierarchically placed male artists over women artists. Their work in Old Mistresses uncovered how everyday vernacular used in the history of art was the exact tool that actively excluded/othered women and formed the discourse (as they understood it) that generated a white hegemonically masculine canon. As Pollock puts it in the 2013 preface:
Language is one field of this operation. Therefore, the terms ‘art’ and ‘artist’, seemingly neutral terms, in fact register, without having to advertise it openly, a privileging of masculinity as synonymous with creativity because in order to indicate that an artist is a woman, the neutral term artist must be qualified by an adjective.[17]
Pollock highlights that noting the contribution of women artists in art history always relies on signifying their femaleness. In the context that Old Mistresses was written, and still today, this was not the case for the male artist. In referring to an artist-man, one would just, as Pollock highlights above, call them an artist in the ‘neutral’ form. Such a neutralisation has a long history in the formation of what has come to constitute an ‘artist’ in modernist art historical discourse. During the 1970s, when Pollock and Parker were writing their book, ‘Artist’ was widely associated with the Ideology of the ‘Genius’ – a special learned person imbued with creative ‘greatness’, inborn with ‘instinctive abilities that are mysterious […] hard to explain, and possibly divinely inspired’.[18] This ideological presupposition came out of the formation of sexual differences and the development of patriarchal language structures, which always othered the women artists into a narrow framework concentrated on specific attributes which signified their femaleness. Thus, as I pointed out concerning Pollock and Parker’s work on art history as a discourse, simply providing women with historical recognition (viewed here as equality) would keep in place the language structures that subjected them to this othered position in the history of art. Old Mistresses then was as much a negotiation of the contributions of artist-women and the differences in language that subjected them. It was a structural analysis of the language which worked to purposefully exclude the efforts of artist-women and a mode of debunking the power structures that side-lined them out of the brackets of creativity. Working in this way gave Pollock and Parker the space to further a formulation of equality and difference which works in a similar vein to Irigaray’s puncture in phallocratic language.
It was not necessarily about showing how women created art in the name of difference (in the name of the feminine), although many contemporary 1970/80s artists did, but instead about bringing to bear the ways language structures forced women to make art from a different place under specific regimes of patriarchal femaleness whilst simultaneously othering them and removing them from mainstream art history. Their chapter, ‘Gods Little Artist’ in Old Mistresses, (or indeed the whole book) highlights how the ideological category of the ‘Genius’ – as I have highlighted, a title imbued with greatness and creativity – formed a sub-category of the female artists, in which they became unimaginative and banal in the history of art. Pollock and Parker argue that modernist art history ignores how its language ‘obscures a dialectical relationship of women artists to the dominant definitions of artist.’[19] This intervention flips the traditional schema of modernist art historical language on its head and shows how ‘difference’ is the exact phenomenon that has allowed the conception of the dominant masculine canon to manifest. Without othering women, through patriarchal language, art history would not have been able to form its modern (and indeed contemporary) definition of ‘artist’. This powerful critique of art histories’ masculine, autocratic language gave space for Pollock and Parker to negotiate the equality of female artists whilst all the while keeping note of the distinct differences they worked from and within, showing that both male and female artists co-created modernism in the history of art.
Another way they achieved an intervention of equality and difference from and within the masculine language of art history was by creating concepts. Like Irigaray, Pollock and Parker played with language and allowed it to do ‘thinking’ for them. Take the title of their book for example, ‘Old Mistresses’. Appropriated from the National Gallery’s 1972 exhibition, Old Mistresses: Women Artists of the Past, they playfully and radically highlight how there was no equivalent term to ‘master’ to refer to ‘great’ women artists.[20] Master is a gendered adjective and has been used to refer to men who have control of others. Mistress, on the other hand, is a term used to refer to kept women usually subservient to a man of some kind. Their use of the term ‘old mistress’ shows how in art history, masculine ideological language structures have subverted women artists to a standard outside of the bracket of ‘genius’ ‘greatness’ and ‘creativity’, always lesser to men. As they highlight, ‘despite the enormous increase in numbers of women artists during the twentieth century […] the assumption persists that art is created by men’.[21] By utilising the term Old Mistress as the title of their book, they were able to frame their intervention in art history through a specific feminist lens, and consistently highlight the contributions of women artists (giving them historical recognition) and highlight their difference. Old Mistresses, came to signify the deeply complicated and intricated contributions of historical and contemporary female artists at point of difference, whilst shattering the sedimented masculine art historical language.
Conclusion
I have used Luce Irigaray’s formulation of ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ (or the double demand) to theorise Pollock and Parker’s early art historical project. By taking their pioneering book, Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology as my case study, I have shown how their ‘feminist intervention in the history of art’, provided both recognition (taken here as equality) for historical female artists as well as a negotiation of their specific (sexual) difference. Originally unpacking an understanding of Irigaray’s theory, my essay has shown how Pollock and Parker intervened in the history of art in two ways.
The first section of the essay highlights how Pollock and Parker have negotiated the essence of Irigaray’s formulation by re-establishing art history as a specific discourse in the context of the second-wave women’s liberation movement. This meant viewing art history as a stream of knowledge, patterns, and styles of thinking that actively excluded women from the hegemonic canon, whilst also othering them. My essay traces parts of Old Mistresses, where Pollock and Parker achieve this. Restabilising art history as a discourse, allowed these two art historians to negotiate a sense of equality and difference concerning artists, women, and the feminine.
The second mode in which my essay has highlighted how Pollock and Parker achieved a sense of Irigaray’s concept has been by stressing their critique of the language of art history, which was, at that moment, hegemonically masculine. In a similar mode to Irigaray, although not specifically in a psychoanalytical context, my essay has shown how Pollock and Parker began using masculine language against itself. In doing so, they were able to formulate a sense of equality for historical women artists and as well as highlight the specific ways language creates spheres of difference for male and female artists. One way in which my essay has achieved this is by analysing the title of Old Mistresses and showing how it playfully critiques the patriarchal language of art history, intervening in the power balance.
Both Irigaray’s and Pollock and Parker’s works of scholarship are intricate and highly complex. I understand that they do not match without fault. Yet, this essay hoped to capture how the essence of Irigaray’s theory of equality and difference was perhaps negotiated in the history of art at a particular moment. Both Irigaray, Pollock and Parker, were writing at a time of specific feminist significance. Although their theories differ in many ways, a particular demand for a sense of equality and difference is at large in Pollock and Parker’s feminist art historical task. Both Irigaray and these two now influential art historians understood that ‘intervention’ was needed in movements, theories, and notions concerning women and femininity. Without such, nothing would have changed. My essay has attempted to showcase this understanding, and how it had come to impact the formation of art histories concerning feminism and sexual difference during the 1970s and early 1980s.
Endnotes
[1] Luce, Irigaray ‘The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine’, in The Sex Which is not One, (Cornell U.P., 1985) pp. 68-85 (p.81).
[2] Irigaray, p. 81.
[3] Griselda Pollock, Killing Men and Dying Women: Imagining Difference in 1950s New York Painting, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), p.1-27 (p. 17).
[4] Irigaray, p.76-77.
[5] Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology, New Edition (London: I.B Tauris, 2013) p. xviii.
[6] Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, ‘Memories Still to Come’, in Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) pp. i-xxii.
[7] Parker and Pollock, p. xviii.
[8] Rozika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Pandora, 1981) pp.
[9] Parker and Pollock, pp. 1-49.
[10] Parker and Pollock, p. xviii.
[11] Griselda Pollock, ‘Women, Art and Ideology: Questions for Feminist Art Historians’, in Women’s Art Journal, Vol.4 No.1 (1983), pp. 39-47 (p.43).
[12] Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (1971), in Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (New York, NY: Routledge, 1988) pp. 145-177.
[13] Pollock and Parker, p.49.
[14]‘Luce Irigaray (1930-)’, Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: A peer-reviewed academic resource <https://iep.utm.edu/irigaray/> [Accessed: 25 May 2024].
[15] Luce Irigaray, “The Poverty of Psychoanalysis” (1977), reprinted in Margaret Whitford, eds, The Irigaray Reader (Malden: Blackwell Publishers Ltd) pp. 79-105 (p.79).
[16] Irigaray, pp. 75.
[17] Pollock and Parker (2013), p.xix.
[18] Jonathan Harris, “Genius”, in Art History: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2006) pp. 130-131 (p.130).
[19] Pollock and Parker, p.81.
[20] Pollock and Parker, p.1-50.
[21] Pollock and Parker, p.6.
