The grace of time: Narrativity, sexuality and a visual encounter in the virtual feminist museum

Art History

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 174-213

  Pollock, Griselda ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249118433     PISSN: 01416790     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0141-6790.2003.02602007.x     Document Type: Review

References (69)

1. Malcolm Baker, 'Canova's Three Graces and changing attitudes to sculpture', Figured in Marble; The Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture, London, 2000.
2. Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist, New Haven and London, 2000.
3. Alison Yarrington, 'The Three Graces and the Temple of Feminine Virtue', Sculpture Journal, Vol .7, 2002, pp. 30-43.
4. For one recent discussion, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le Temps, Paris, 2000. Didi-Huberman advances the notion of anachronism with considerable persuasiveness.
5. Nanette Salomon, 'The Art Historical Canon; Sins of Omission', reprinted in D. Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, Oxford: 1998, pp. 344-55.
6. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and the Sexuality, London, 1992;
7. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body; Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, Manchester, 1992.
8. The classic tales of the viewing of Praxiteles's Knidian Venus are preserved in Pliny and Lucian, and are discussed by Nanette Salomon in her 'The Venus Pudica: uncovering art history's hidden agendas and pernicious pedigrees', in G. Pollock (ed.), Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts, London, 1996, pp. 69-87.
9. reprinted in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Oxford, 1986, pp. 187-213. Distinguishing linear time (project, teleology, progress, nation state) from cyclical (repetition) and monumental (eternity) time, Julia Kristeva analysed the complex relations of femininity to both political time and the temporality of the symbolic order. This tension plays itself out in generations of feminism which, in differing ways, seek access to the political time of the nation state in the name of modernization and progress, while also through literature and art, exploring the longer durée of sexual difference, the body, sexuality and reproduction. Identifying the delusions of both positions, she argues for a Hegelian resolution of their contradiction in a suspension of anthropomorphism and realization via language of the singularity of each subject - a theme recently returned to in her work on women and genius.
10. Kristeva, 'Le temps des femmes' in The Kristeva Reader, p. 193.
11. It might be pointed out that most survey texts place the beginning of art history either in some ancient texts or more often with Vasari's Vite. Rather than work with this 'great man' theory of the origins of our discipline, I am using a Foucauldian discourse analysis that would look to the institutionalization of the practice through university curricula and pedagogy, publication and a corresponding development of the museum. I locate these features in the nineteenth century and refer the reader to an excellent examination of the racializing nationalisms of the foundations of modern art history: Margaret Olin's 'From Bezal'el to Max Lieberman: Jewish Art in Nineteenth Century Art-Historical Texts', in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, ed. Catherine Soussloff, Berkeley, 1999, pp. 19-40.
12. The proposition is in dialogue with the theorizations of the feminine sub-symbolic Matrixial dimension proposed by Bracha Ettinger, also advanced in Inside the Visible; 'The With-In-Visible Screen', pp. 89-113.
13. John Kenworthy-Brown, 'The Sculpture Gallery at Woburn Abbey and the Architecture of the Temple of the Graces', in Timothy Clifford, John Kenworthy-Brown and Hugh Honour, The Three Graces by Antonio Canova, London, 1995, pp. 61-71.
14. When its fate was settled a major conference was held and the resulting publication documents this history and many others of the sculpture: Clifford, Kenworthy-Brown and Honour, The Three Graces by Antonio Canova. I am indebted to this volume.
15. Roland Barthes, 'The Photographic Message', Image-Music-Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath, London, 1977, pp. 15-31.
16. For more recent discussions of sculpture, reproduction and photography, see Sculpture and its Reproductions, eds Anthony Hughes and Erich Ranfft, London, 1997,
17. Sculpture and Photographs: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson, Cambridge, 1998.
18. Heinrich Wölfflin, 'Comment photographier les sculptures', Pygmalion Photographe: La Sculpture Devant la Caméra, 1844-1936, Geneva: Musée de'art et d'histoire, 1985, pp. 127-31, 132-6.
19. For a significant discussion of what sculpture in its extended installation form demands of the viewer, see Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois' Spider: The Architecture of Art Writing, Chicago and London, 2001.
20. It should be noted perhaps that the infusing of marble with a flesh-like glow was one of the touchstones of Canova's finishing of his sculptures. See Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, p. 43.
21. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art, Harmondsworth, 1956.
22. Chapter 1 is entitled 'The Naked and the Nude'. This book was the object of one of the earliest feminist critiques by Rozsika Parker and a developed analysis occurs in Lynda Nead, The Female Nude.
23. For further psychoanalytically inflected discussion of this see Jacqueline Rose, 'Sexuality in the Field of Vision', in Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London, 1986, pp.224-33
24. the section 'Postmodern Oppositions', in Mary Kelly, Imaging Desire, Cambridge, Mass., 1996, esp. 'Desiring Images/Imaging Desire', pp. 122-9.
25. I am drawing here on the work of John Ellis and of Annette Kuhn who both attempt to distinguish the modern, industrial and commodity structure of pornography that give rise to particularities of staging a visual encounter through representational and circulation strategies. John Ellis, 'On Pornography', Screen, vol. 21, no.1, 1980, pp.81-108;
26. Annette Kuhn, Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, London, 1982, esp. 'The Body in the Machine'.
27. Hubertus van Amelunxen, 'Skiagraphia: L'exposition du sculpté', in Dominique Païni and Michel Frizot, Paris, 2000. This reversal from positive to negative recolours the sculptures, rendering their marmorean whiteness ebony black. The profound significance of the politics of pigmentation, of colour - what Fanon would later call the racial-epidermal schema - cannot be underestimated in the aesthetics of neoclassical sculpture. Photography's complex relationship with the representation of racializing discourse and its difficulty in creating a semiotic adequate to the appearances of peoples other than those of pale-skinned European stock is discussed in my
28. 'Territories of Desire', Travellers' Tales, eds George Robertson et al., London, 1994, pp. 63-92.
29. See also, for discussions of these issues in eighteenth-century culture, David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century, Ithaca, 2002;
30. Jennifer Devere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture, Durham, 1998;
31. Michel Frizot and Dominique Paini, Sculpter-Photographier: Photographie/Sculpture, Paris, 1993.
32. The definitive study of this arcane tradition is to be found in Edgar Wind, 'Seneca's Three Graces', in Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, Harmondsworth, 1958, pp. 26-35,
33. See also David Rostand, 'Ekphrasis and the Renaissance Painting: Observations on Alberti's Third Book in Florilegium Columbianum', Essays in Honor of Paul Kristeller, eds K-L.Selig and R. Somerville, Ithaca, 1987: 'The ancients represented [the Three Graces] dressed in loose transparent robes, with smiling faces and hands intertwined; they thereby wished to signify liberality, for one of the sisters gives, another receives, and the third returns the favour, all of which degrees should be present in the act of liberality.' (p.156)
34. Rostand, 'Ekphrasis and the Renaissance Painting', p. 156.
35. For a relatively recent review of feminist issues in classical archaeology, see Shelby Brown, '"Ways of Seeing" Women in Antiquity: An Introduction to Feminism in Classical Archaeology and Ancient Art History', in Naked Truths: Women, Sexuality and Gender in Classical Art and Archaeology, eds Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow and Claire L. Lyons, London and New York, 1997, pp. 12-42.
36. Among the many dictionaries I consulted I can mention Mike Dixon-Kennedy, Encyclopaedia of Greco-Roman Mythology, California, 1998.
37. 'Charis', Lexicon Iconologicum Classicae Mythologiae, Zürich and Munich, 1986, p. 192.
38. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Harmondsworth, 1960,
39. Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual, New York, 1913.
40. For a discussion of the evolution of Warburg's distinctive thesis of the pathosformel, or pathosformula, see Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: an Intellectual Biography, London, 1970.
41. For an interesting analysis of its more contemporary sources in nineteenth-century psychology, see Sigrid Schade, 'Charcot and the Spectacle of the Hysterical Body. The "pathos formula" as an aesthetic staging of psychiatric discourse - a blind spot in the reception of Warburg', Art History, vol.18, no.4, 1995, pp. 499-517.
42. I am thinking here of the Derridian trajectory and its use in a critique of art history and anterior narrative offered by Mieke Bal in Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art-Preposterous History, Chicago and London, 1999;
43. Louise Bourgeois' Spider: The Architecture of Art Writing; and Looking In: The Art of Viewing, London, 2001.
44. Her major revision to iconography is developed in Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition, Cambridge, 1992.
45. See Julia Kristeva, 'Experiencing the Phallus as Extraneous, or Women's Twofold Oedipus Complex', in Julia Kristeva 1966-1996-Aesthetics.Politics. Ethics, special issue of parallax, no.8, 1998, p.41;
46. Levinas's most significant comments on the feminine are made in conversation with the painter-theorist Bracha Ettinger, published as Bracha Ettinger, What Would Eurydice Say? Paris, 1997,
47. his ideas are discussed in Griselda Pollock, 'The Presence of the Future: Feminine and Jewish Difference.', Issues in Architecture, Art and Design, vol. 5, no.l, 1997, pp 37-63.
48. Wind, 'Seneca's Three Graces', p.28.
49. Wurd, 'Seneca's Three Graces', p. 30.
50. Cited in Graham McCann, Marilyn Monroe, Cambridge, 1988, p. 80.
51. The phrase gylandric comes from the work of the pre-historian Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, London, 2000.
52. Kathleen Woodward, Ageing and its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions, Bloomington, 1991.
53. The photograph by Mark Richards of the Daily Mail appeared in the Observer, 26 January 1997.
54. Jo Spence, the Family Album 1939-1979 is reproduced in Jo Spence, Putting Myself in the Picture: A Personal Political and Photographic Autobiography, London, 1986.
55. Claudine Mitchell, 'Intellectuality and Sexuality: Camille Claudel, the Fin de Siècle Sculptress', Art History, vol. 12, no. 4, 1989, pp. 419-47, 431.
56. Mitchell, 'Intellectuality and Sexuality', p. 430.
57. Melanie Manchot, Look At You Loving Me: Bilder Meiner Mutter von 1995-1998, Basel, 1998; London, 1999.
58. I want to thank Felicia Huppert of Cambridge University for bringing this work to my attention. Ella Dreyfus, Age and Consent, Sydney, 1999, first shown at Stills Gallery, Sydney, 17 March-17 April 1999.
59. See also Art, Age and Gender: Women Explore the Issues, London: Orleans House Gallery, 2002.
60. Alison Rowley, 'On Viewing Three Paintings by Jenny Saville: rethinking a feminist practice of painting', in Griselda Pollock, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, London, 1996, pp.86-109. This is one of the first serious feminist analyses of this painting practice.
61. See Linda Nochlin, 'Floating in Gender Nirvana', Art in America, March 2000, pp. 95-7.
62. Nanette Salomon, 'Contrapposto: Inscribing (Homo)Erotic Time in the Body', unpublished paper, CIHA, London, 2000.
63. Mark Cousins, 'The Insistence of the Image: Hitchcock's Vertigo', in Art: Sublimation or Symptom, ed. Parveen Adams, New York, 2003.
64. Edmond Engelman, Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud's Home and Offices, Vienna 1938, New York, 1976.
65. George Dimock, 'The Pictures over Freud's Couch', in Mieke Bal & Inge Boer (eds), The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis, Amsterdam, 1994, pp. 239-50.
66. Sigmund Freud, 'Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's "Gradiva"' [1907], vol. 14 of Penguin Freud Library, London, 1985, pp. 27-118.
67. Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud's Aesthetics, trans. Winifred Woodhull, New York, 1988.
68. Kofman, The Childhood of Art, p. 178.
69. Hélène Cixous, 'The Laugh of the Medusa', trans. Keith and Paula Cohen, in E. Marks and I. De Courtivron, New French Feminisms, Brighton, 1981, pp. 245-64.