Stephanie Koziej, Oct 20 2014
WGS 700: Pro- seminar, Prof. H. Sparks
Article review: Michelle Meagher Telling Stories about Feminist Art (2011)
An application of Clare Hemmings’ Telling Feminist Stories (2005)
Summary
Maegher starts her article1 with a double observation: First of all there is a “recent surge
of interest in feminist art, its futures, and its history” (Meagher, 2011: 297),
characterized by “an impulse to produce an historical corrective to the stories
conventionally told about art’s feminist 1970’s […] in the face of long standing
assumptions about seventies art’s essentialism, universalism, and faith in selfexpression (Meagher, 2011: 298). For example by art exhibitions, symposiums or
writings, with WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Butler, 20072) as it’s most
monumental example (Meagher, 2011: 299, 300).
However, and this brings us to her second observation, “insofar as [these
reparative correctives are] structured around the urge to dispel myths of the feminist
past, it remains haunted by those myths” (Meagher, 2011: 298) and still serve to create
“an unbridgeable generational divide within the field of art” (Meagher, 2011: 299).
Maegher explains how Hemmings’ 2005 article Telling Feminist Stories3, gave her a
“valuable model” to recognize this second problematic observation, or in other words,
helped her to think “about the production, circulation, and reception of dominant
narratives within feminist art’s history” (Meagher, 2011: 298).
Meagher Michelle (2011) ‘Telling Stories about Feminist Art’, Feminist Theory 12(3), 297-316.
(read the article on: http://fty.sagepub.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/content/12/3/297.full.pdf+html)
2 Butler Cornelia (ed.) (2007) WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
3 Hemmings Clare (2005) ‘Telling Feminist Stories’. Feminist Theory 6(2): 115–139.
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Meagher also explains how Hemmings’ 2005 article offers her the necessary
methodological instruments to analyze this impasse contemporary feminist art history
has brought itself into. Like Hemmings, Meagher will suggest that the reparative
initiatives like MACK! need to be accompanied by a larger set of questions about the
story they attempt to dislodge. Mimicking Hemmings, Maegher reminds us that what is
important is not if these stories that are told (and re-told in their ‘repairing’ version) are
true; what is more important is the question “What is going on in the present when
feminist stories about the recent past are being told?” (Meagher, 2011: 298).
What follows is the ‘flesh’ of Maegher’s article, which can be divided in four parts. In the
first section, titled Revisiting the past and imagining the future she focuses in more detail
on this contemporary urge on the part of feminist art historians, critics, and curators to
revisit the history of the Feminist Art Movement.
In section two, Telling stories, she explores the presumed origin of a generational
model by which feminist art history is generally organized. She zooms in on the “the
debates incurred by the installation of a generational model, calling attention to the
contexted nature of the terms deployed in the construction of the narrative” (Meagher,
2011: 299).
In the third part, Essentialism in art: circles, domes, and eggs, Maegher offers an
analysis of “essentialism” as a concept contributed to first-generation feminist artists
from the 1970’ies, and characterized by “naïve faith in conceptions like sisterhood,
experiential knowledge, and complemented by an uncritical acceptance of the category
of ‘woman’ ” and therefore dismissed (Meagher, 2011: 306). Their work is often
organized around discussions of so-called ‘feminine sensibility’ in art and works around
qualities associated with the feminine, including circles, domes, and eggs” (Meagher,
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2011: 307). Maegher explains how recent art historians have recognized that this first
generation of feminist artists has been mischaracterized and that they deserve a second
look. But following Hemmings, she claims that this effort is not enough, since the
narrative of a generational division is still present.
This brings us finally to the fourth and last part of Meagher’s text, titled
Generations. Here she turns to recent scholarship on feminist art (e.g., Judith Butler4)
and concludes by suggesting that the narrative organized around a generational divide –
between essentialist first generation that gets displaced by a poststructuralist second
generation – persists, “not because it is true (it’s not) but because it performs the
function of disidentification” within and for the field of art (Meagher, 2011: 314). She
concludes in the spirit of Hemming’s with the insight that “as valuable as it may be to
offer alternatives to the conventional story that circulates trough the field of feminist
art, it is equally as valuable to interrogate those that persist.
Criticism
Let us first turn to some of the strengths of Maegher’s article. This is a very good
example of how an article from the discipline of WGSS theory (i.e. Hemmings 2005
Telling Feminist Stories) get’s applied or ‘cross-fertilizes’ with another – could we say
more traditional – discipline: Art History. And it shows us the extend of the intellectual
reach of Hemmings’ article to another area of contemporary WGSS work: Feminist Art
History.
Her detailed reading of Hemmings, makes Maegher’s article also an interesting
compliment to Hemmings’ theory about re-thinking feminist stories, because it offers
Butler Judith (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York:
Routledge
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the reader more examples, but also examples of a different kind. I would even say that
Maeger’s article could make Hemmings theory more easily accessible. Let me elaborate a
little bit more on this argument. The “essentialist” feminists from the 1970’s that
Hemmings refers to in her article, are writers and theorists with many articles and
books behind their name. It will therefore take a long time to get familiar with their
work. The “essentialists” Maegher refers to, produce artworks. Their work is visual and
could therefore function as a compliment or even a more easily accessible way to
understand what is at steak in Hemmings argument about Feminist stories (and why we
should reconsider them). To say it bluntly, one look at Judy Chicago’s piece The Dinner
Table (1974-1979) could already make us more familiar with “essentialism”, while we
have to spend hours and hours reading Irigaray’s works. With this, of course, I do not
suggest that we should not read Irigaray (or any other theorist mentioned by
Hemmings), I just suggest that these visual artworks are a good asset to understanding
Hemmings arguments.
Let me, related to this last point, jump to some of the weaknesses of Maeghers
article. Maegher’s use of “essentialism” in Feminist Art History, needs more elaboration.
Maegher explains how “Essentialist” in feminist art history get’s associated with naivety,
but also with “non-intellectual”. This in comparison to “savy” intellectual artists “with
strong allegiances to Marx, Althusser, and Lacan”(Meagher, 2011: 301), or a “social
constructivist, psychoanalytic, Brechtian feminist crowd” (Meagher, 2011:303). I found
this very confusing, because this seems to be very far from the meaning of “essentialism”
of the Feminist Theories that Hemmings talks about. If we for example turn to Irigaray who in WGSS is considered very much essentialist, and often used as an example in
Hemmings’ article – than we can agree that she is maybe considered naïve (by the nonessetiolists of the 90’ies and beyond), but never non-intellectual. And her ideas very
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much imply ideas of Marx, Lacan and other Psychoanalysts! I think, therefore, that
Maeghers article would have benefitted from an elaboration or at least a recognition of
the differences between the definition of “essentialist” in Feminist Theory and Feminist
Art History.
Let me conclude this paper with one final point. According to me, Maegher does
not give Hemmings enough credit. Since Maegher’s theory (and even title) obviously
very much draws from Hemmings, I suggest that Maegher should have referred to
Hemmings in the title of this article (for example Telling stories about feminism – an
application of Hemmings article Telling Feminist Stories ) or at least mention Hemmings
in her summary, as a pivotal author she draws her theory of stories in feminist art from.
She does cite Hemming 9 times throughout her 20 pages long article, but a reference in
the title seems necessary to me.
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