The narrative of feminism is in constant flux and feminist art is merely a representation of this narrative. It cannot be attributed purely to one art historical movement or to another. From the humanism of the renaissance to the post-structuralism of the postmodern, feminism and all of its mechanisms has existed, albeit at times subversively. It has had many different incarnations and identities throughout the course of history, most notably during the women’s movement of the 60s and 70s, however feminism by no means began or ended there, nor is it confined to one area of the world in one and only one it form. It is incongruous to propose that feminist art is thus confined solely to Modern Art, though it is an understandable conclusion to be made within the context of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s “postmodern condition”[i] in which society is being conceived of as a metaphysically connected web of identity, performance and history with a non-meaning that parallels traditional constructions of gender. Postmodern theory asks, if we are all undeniably slaves to a chaotic collection of realities, are we, ourselves real, and for that matter, are any of our concerns in regards to gender? The dissonance created by the blind acceptance of non-realities and the tragic knowledge of the futile present has constructed a misanthropic understanding of feminism and art in general. How we conceive of any postmodern art, paradoxically does not allow for its existence in our reality. The conclusion always seems to be that we ought to ignore the significance of these representations as they happen around us, these performances and these histories. It is a feat not easily achieved given their ubiquity, and one that is detrimental to feminist and post-structuralist/queer ideology.
The history of feminism has evolved alongside art history, even in times where its ideology was hidden within the confines of what is now known as the "male gaze", it wasn’t until the modernist period, when existing ideological structures began to crumble exposing a patriarchal decline, that feminist art began to rear its “abject” head, demanding recognition, though of what specifically was characteristically vague. As the rights of women slowly became equal in economic and political relevance to those of men, so to did the significance of feminist art, the most radical period of which happened at the tail end of modernism, as technological advancement and media plurality contributed significantly to a movement that contrasted radically with the first wave of feminism. During the 1960s, the most modern of artistic mediums, the photographic image, became a tool through which feminist artists could portray the "other side of the coin", inserting a feminist narrative into an otherwise male-centric social consciousness. Its existence sounded what was arguably the end of modernism and the beginning of a greater acceptance of the narrative of the individual as opposed the metanarrative[ii] of overall human rights that somehow had managed not to include the supposed much of society. It is now, from a post-modern context more important than ever to understand the intersection of these narratives, so that we may relieve ourselves of the burden of postmodern malaise that dictates "there is no meaning here". Here we look at the photographic works of three female artists over the course of feminist escalation from the second wave feminism of the 1960s to the contemporary intersectional feminism of the post-modern era to highlight the undeniable intersection of postmodernism and feminism to begin to dissect the concept of the elusive male and female gazes.
Not all feminism is created equal. There will always be political and ideological difference within feminism and within the postmodern, thus it cannot be conceived of as a “metanarrative” as it is not specifically one thing or another. According to Jean-Paul Lyotard, a metanarrative is an overarching universal truth[iii], we cannot assume that feminism is universal, as it differs from culture to culture, however one could argue that feminism is a sub-category of the metanarrative of human rights that declairs all human's equal. During the decline of Modernism, one might not have called Diane Arbus a “feminist artists” in the traditional conception of feminism. Her subject matter is not focused wholly on an exclusively “feminine” experience, though it is imbibed with a female auteurism that would have spoken to a feminine experience at the time. A lot of Diane Arbus’ non-commercial work revolved around marginalised areas of a community such as people with congenital disorders, twins, nudists and the queer community. The art of her photography is traditionally modern by virtue of her medium. Arbus was attempting to break through a binary system of moral aestheticism that had clouded the art world and the commercial photographic industry in which she had worked for many years; the idea that a work of art could either be beautiful, or grotesque, that a portrait could either be beautiful or grotesque, that a person could either be beautiful or grotesque and not chaotically fluctuate between many different states from moment to moment. To Arbus, this was the folly of art that reduced society to an object. A subject rather than an object is not necessarily feminine or masculine, strong or weak, empowered or pitiable, yet as Susan Sontag has stated, “humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still revelling its age-old habit in mere images of truth”[iv]. Arbus forces the attention of the viewer onto alternate modes of being, exposing a bias within the community towards a traditional, and structural standard. It is here that we may understand a core principle of feminism within a modern context that necessarily conforms to post-structuralism, a key aspect of postmodernity.
Opinions of Arbus have been heavily divided throughout the years, critics of her time were concerned mainly with the abject nature of her photographs and their portrayal of the dualistic psychology of the self, and second wave feminists such as Germaine Greer, condemned her for forcing grotesque misrepresentations of her subjects, especially when the subject of Germaine Greer was being misrepresented. In an article for the Guardian Greer reminisces, “She held the Rolleiflex at waist height with the lens right in my face. She bent her head to look through the viewfinder on top of the camera, and waited. In her viewfinder I must have looked like a guppy or like one of the unfortunate babies into whose faces Arbus used to poke her lens so that their snotty tear-stained features filled her picture frame (eg, A Child Crying, NJ, 1967). I knew that at that distance anybody's face would have more pores than features. I was wearing no make-up and hadn't even had time to wash my face or comb my hair.”[v] Diane Arbus, in her photographic confrontation with one of the era’s most influential feminists in 1971 outlines a problem inherent to society’s understanding of female identity; which is horrified at “ incorrect” incarnations of femininity, or indeed "incorrect" humanity. To Greer, it was commonplace for her to be photographed in good light with make up and hair neatly combed. She revelled in the image of herself that she put on everyday and it was appalling to her to be represented otherwise. To most of society, being photographed at one’s best is the only appropriate way to be photographed. Having bad posture or looking sad or angry is not a reason to be photographed. This standard has always been more relevant to women, as their appearance has always been a greater virtue from a patriarchal point of view and feminists such as Greer were eager to subvert this paradigm. However Germaine Greer’s anger at the way “ugliness” was “stolen” from her and put on display is a kind of hypocrisy that was common with the second wave feminism that modernist art is associated with, where feminists were quite happy to criticise the male gaze yet remained horrified when they stepped outside of it as it would make them even less than “other”. It is difficult to say if Arbus can be categorised in terms of feminism. In her art, she had become committed to exposing the hyper-real aspect of commercial photography, pointing the finger at the mechanics of how we construct our external identities, much the same way a post-modern artist such as Barbara Kruger would, however as Arbus is confined to our historically modern interpretations of her work, so to is our conception of her feminism, which is arguably polarizingly different to that of Germaine Greer.
As more women started entering the work force in the 80s and 90s and art started moving away from the Modern, western society attempted to re-categorize the concept of “feminist” as it seemingly no longer applied to women who finally had agency over their bodies, their work and their property. These “post-feminists” were now expected to behave in accordance with a history that had not been documented, a history that didn’t exist for women. With postmodernism in its infancy, feminist artists, while also keeping with the abject of the modernist period, started to re-insert women into patriarchal histories, perhaps in a hopes to expose a male-centric view of history, or perhaps in a feeble attempt to heal old wounds.
Cindy Sherman in 1988 began a theatrically inspired body of work called “History Portraits” where she inserts herself, her female body, into a mixed bag of old masters who are all characteristically male. The series suggests a locus of identity, a separation of the objective body and the mask of subjective performance.[vi] In inserting women into the old masters, Sherman explores the ways in which we blind ourselves with our own image of what the world should be by excluding or reducing otherness within an existing hegemonic paradigm. This is important to Feminism, but also important to postmodernism. In simulacra and simulation, Jean Baudrillard theorises that humans will forever live in a hyper-reality of their own making. And in the absence of a memory to form identity, we will always replace it with a new one. “Forgetting extermination is part of extermination, because it is also the extermination of memory, of history, of the social, etc. This forgetting is as essential as the event, in any case unlocatable by us, inaccessible to us in its truth. This forgetting […] must be effaced by an artificial memory.”[vii] Part of postmodern feminist art is using simulation and accordance with hyper realities to reimagine feminist history after years of stories going systemically untold. One might call this delusional, however a key aspect of postmodernity is that it is all somewhat of a delusion. If one reconceptualises history, is that not the same as writing down a history with a gender bias that favours men? With representation being at the fore-front of our minds in terms of the creation of strong female character in the digital age, it must be remembered, always that;
“Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.” - Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966 - 1977
Alongside the theme of untold histories, postmodern feminism also concerns itself with the objectification of the female form. The mainstream media, ever the representation of the times, has made evident that people are still capable of “othering”, a mechanism that insists on limiting us to our biological forms. Post-structuralism struggles with human nature in the same way that humans struggle with identity. Identity is chaotic and evolving and yet somehow still bound by pre-determined factors, often manifesting themselves as unspoken rules within a society that imitate art. Traditionally men and women must abide by these rules, having been born into the systems that propagate them. Barbara Kruger’s photographic montages and bright and bold graphic statements about gender and the media highlight how these rules are imposed and how both men and women are slaves to them. Kruger does not discriminate in pointing out these flaws. The same blindness imposed by patriarchal hegemony on women is also the same force that is imposed upon men, however when one is on the top of a structure, it is difficult to see the use in dismantling the structure from below.
Susan Bordo in Unbearable Weight (1993) uses a postmodern approach to analyse the effect that contemporary media and advertising has had over women’s bodies. She argues that postmodern analysis can help us understand that “the body is made to be text” [viii]and to read advertising as such. In this way, we will come to understand how we embody messages and this lens can help society learn to “resist the pull of cultural messages about their bodies.”[ix]
However, truly freeing oneself of these structures is an incredibly difficult feat that involves dismantling an already established status quo. Barbara Kruger’s feminism is postmodern in that it is critical of a hypocrisy presented within a media that tells people that if they embody beauty and wealth that they will become it. Kruger identifies these hyper-realities that society consumes itself with, limiting its conception of identity. As it offers no alternate mode of being.
Postmodern Feminism seeks to understand experience. By its very nature, feminist art is necessarily postmodern as it embodies Baudrillard’s hyper realities that include individual identity and performance, informing our understanding how women’s (and men’s) experiences, resulting from race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and age, lead to different social positioning. Modern feminist artists such as Diane Arbus paved the way for postmodernists whose conception of feminism has evolved alongside many different narratives of female identity. These narratives are assimilated into postmodern thought through art and the media. Postmodernists such as Cindy Sherman reconstruct women’s histories, inserting them to a hyper-real feminist landscape where gender is constructed, while Barbara Kruger points a finger at the existing patriarchal structures that have contributed to a decimation of identity and meaning in a postmodern age. The intersection of postmodern philosophy and feminism decries the notion that feminism is exclusively a meta-narrative of modernism as it is an ongoing and evolving narrative of gender and identity.
[i] Lyotard, Jean-François, Geoffrey Bennington, and Brian Massumi. 1984. The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 20
[ii] Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge, 1984, p. 21
[iii] Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 1984, p. 29
[iv] Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography, Penguin Group, London, p.1
[v] Greer, Germaine, Wrestling with Diane Arbus, The Guardian, 8 October 2005 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/oct/08/photography
[vi] Respini, Eva, 2012, Cindy Sherman Interactive Exhibit, Museum of Modern Art, New York
[vii] Baudrillard, Jean, 1994, Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, p 81
[viii] Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable weight: feminism, Western culture, and the body. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 198
[ix] Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 1993, p. 211
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