Reading the work of Griselda Pollock
This panel will respond to, critique, and put to work a range of critical concepts developed by feminist art historian and cultural analyst Griselda Pollock; and we are honoured that she will be the respondent to the panel.
The panel will explore her intellectual project, evidenced in a body of work of over 25 books and 200 essays. It is a project characterised by the sharing of feminist enquiry and knowledge, and the creation of concepts with which to develop, theorise, practice and critique feminist interventions; it is dedicated to writing of art’s histories while also radically challenging the discipline Art History. While books like Old Mistresses (1981; with R. Parker), Differencing the Canon (1999), and the anthologising project Generations and Geographies (1996) were fundamental to creating a field we might call feminist art history, other works from ‘What’s Wrong with Images of Women?’ (1977) to Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum (2007) and Killing Men & Dying Women (2022) have profoundly influenced broader visual culture and cultural analysis, including museology; historiography; trauma, film and cultural memory studies. Artists under consideration have ranged from Bracha Ettinger to Lubaina Himid, Van Gogh to Marilyn Monroe.
We have encouraged papers with focus rather than broad-sweep, with attention to particular publications, themes, artists, or periods of Pollock’s work; and/or exploring, responding to and critiquing her work’s development of feminist and postcolonial analyses of gender, race, class.
Session Convenors:
Hilary Robinson, Loughborough University
Elspeth Mitchell, University of Leeds
Speakers:
Evangelia Danadaki, University of Leeds, UK
Becoming matrixially aware: Griselda Pollock’s reading of Bracha L. Ettinger
According to Griselda Pollock “Ettinger alongside Irigaray and Kristeva has become one of the most influential theorists writing today in the field of French psychoanalysis” (Pollock, 2006). Pollock affirms Ettinger’s ‘conceptual revolution’ in psychoanalysis and philosophy as she expands our understanding of human subjectivity beyond the phallic psychoanalytical limitations and approaches the ‘feminine’ beyond the masculine-feminine antithesis (Pollock, 2022). Thinking through the ‘feminine’ is to contest current and inherited structures of thoughts and systems of identity and representation that are based on cuts, exclusion and the rejection of the other while foreclosing the feminine and the maternal. Theorizing the ‘feminine’ is a proposal to think outside (the phallic and neoliberal) conception of the subject getting access to (sub-symbolic) spaces that are not mapped by the hegemonic paradigm of castration (Pollock, 2006). My presentation wishes to approach Griselda Pollock’s writings on the theoretico-aesthetic practice of Bracha L. Ettinger with special attention to the question of trans-subjectivization in close relation to artworking. My aim is to highlight the matrixial understanding of producing, viewing and interpreting art to (a). give justice to the feminine beyond the semantic universe, (b). embrace plurality as a key-component of human subjectivity and contemporary art, and (c). question the phallic logic of separations generated by the castration paradigm. Reading Ettinger through-and-with Pollock will illuminate the performative, critical and ethical potentiality of art to create shared body-spaces, where “the several comes before the one”(Ettinger, 1993) and the subject emerges-together-with the other within the matrixial web of conscious-and-unconscious sharing.
Celia Graham-Dixon, University of Reading, UK
Responding with rather than to: Griselda Pollock, Bracha Ettinger and the Matrixial aesthetic encounter
In Griselda Pollock’s 2013 book After-affects, After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum, she states that ‘Matrixial theory recasts thinking about our relations to, hence capacities for compassion and hospitality towards others as well as offering another pathway to understanding contemporary aesthetics in its formal artistic or literary practices as a site of transformational encounter. It has ramifications for contemporary aesthetic theory and hence rethinking art’s histories’ (2013: xxiv). In this paper, I will discuss how Pollock has worked with Bracha Ettinger’s Matrixial theory and artistic practice to build a contemporary aesthetic approach that responds with rather than to aesthetic encounters. Assessing Pollock’s encounter with Louise Bourgeois’s giant steel spider, Maman (1999), as explored in After-affects, After-images, I will examine how she works with Ettinger’s concept of the Matrixial m/Other to articulate the grief, yearning and connectivity that is at stake in Bourgeois’s practice. Paying particular attention to her analysis of Maman as a vocative calling out – ‘Maman!’ (2013: 113), I will explore not only what this compassionate encounter brings to bear on Bourgeois’s work but how it elucidates and contributes to the subjective, aesthetic and ethical transformation that is central to Ettinger’s theory and practice.
Yelin Zhao, Independent Scholar
Spaces of Femininity and Feminine Space: A Dialogue between Griselda Pollock and Wu Hung
This paper brings Griselda Pollock’s early essay, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’ (1988), into conversation with a recent publication in Chinese art history, Feminine Space in Chinese Painting (2019). Authored by Wu Hung, a prominent Chinese art historian and recipient of CAA’s Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art in 2022, Feminine Space in Chinese Painting is one of the few attempts that refuse to isolate women figures out into singular categories such as ‘ladies’ paintings’ and ‘beauty paintings’. Instead, it explores the total pictorial and social space that is ‘perceived and represented as a woman’ (Wu 2018).
Wu does not cite Pollock’s work. In fact, I do not think the two authors have ever engaged each other’s work extensively and there are some essential differences in their thinking and study. Yet, Wu’s proposal of the concept of ‘feminine space’ resonates with Pollock’s essay not only in their focus on the space – as represented, perceived, imagined and lived, but also their engagement with ‘the sexual politics of looking’ that ‘secure[s] a particular social ordering of sexual difference’ (Pollock 1988, p.66). This paper thus seeks to highlight this missed connection. Through close reading, the paper critically reviews Pollock’s concept of ‘Spaces of Femininity’ in different social-historical contexts, and identifies its boundaries and limitations.
Micol Hebron, Chapman University, USA
Cybermodernity and the Spaces of Artificial Femininity: The Male Gaze and the Female Form in the Landscape of Artificial Intelligence
This paper investigates the enduring relevance of Griselda Pollock’s “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” in the context of contemporary digital art, specifically focusing on the male gaze and misogynist compositions that are pervasive in the outputs of text-to-image generative Artificial Intelligence. This paper argues that AI-generated depictions of the female form perpetuate a visual language that reifies the male gaze and formal structures of patriarchy. By analyzing the point of view, positioning of the body in space, the compositional elements of the surrounding environment, and the gesture and poses of female figures, I will show that the primary tenets of Pollock’s influential essay from the pre-digital era can be used to effectively analyze and describe the sexism that is pervasive in AI images today.
Despite the technology’s promise and potential for innovation, its outputs often reflect a masculine perspective, echoing Pollock’s observations that women are positioned as commodities for spectacle in modern urban spaces. As the painters in the modernist era of Pollock’s essay were predominantly male, so too are the CEOs of modern tech companies, the computer programmers, and the users of AI. The terrain of the uncanny valley of AI is not unlike the hermeneutical landscape of the modern city as described by Pollock. In this case, Pollock’s modern city is swapped out for the digital terrain of large language models and datasets, but within which the female form remains an object for visual consumption by the male gaze.
Katrina Whitehead, University of Huddersfield, UK
How women are portrayed in crime popular culture through the (fe)male gaze
Griselda Pollock, in The missing wit(h)ness: Monroe, fascinance and the unguarded intimacy of being dead (2018), questions if there is violence in publishing an image of Marilyn Monroe’s autopsy image. “Can there be an unfinished death that confers a different kind of immortality?” This ‘unfinished death’ can be seen in Marilyn Monroe’s autopsy photograph.
Researching how women are portrayed in popular crime culture, I can suggest that this unfinished death can also be seen in the smiling tropes of deceased female victims portrayed in the newspapers, or the endless photographs of Princess Diana who appears to live on, years after her death. Whilst Pollock identifies that she was visibly shocked at seeing this image of Monroe, which she had never seen before despite extensive reading of biographies about the actress, it would not be the type of image exploited on the cinematic screen, where a more pleasing-to-the-eye scene would instead be evidenced.
There is a dichotomy in how we are used to seeing Monroe in smiling and glamorous poses, compared to this shocking and unethical portrayal of her face. Regarding Pollock’s question, we can agree that there is violence in this image, but it is a violence received by the viewer not violence in connection with the fate of the victim. This violence is not because we don’t want to confront death, but because we can only be confronted with this violence through the rose-tinted spectacles of the media, to process it in the least shocking and trauma-free way possible.
Respondent: Griselda Pollock, Emerita, University of Leeds
Griselda Pollock will respond to the complete session of presentations.