Strategic Oblivion: 1970s Feminist Art in 1980s Art History

Abstract

Addressing the question of how “in-groups” are constituted within art history and how particular art practices are assigned value, this paper studies the devaluation of 1970s feminist art practice by 1980s anti-essentialist feminist criticism. The early work of Judy Chicago, who attempted to represent “female experience” through “central core” or vulvar imagery, highlights this issue, since it was rejected as “essentialist” by 1980s feminist critics who privileged a Brechtian approach to visual practice. Paradoxically, this rejection took its force from an essentializing fixing of the meanings of such imagery. Re-reading Chicago’s work through poststructuralism (rather than in opposition to it), this paper proposes a 1990s version of feminist visual theory that might accomodate issues of female pleasure and desire rather than foreclosing them, and that would open up the investedness of all criticism (feminist, modernist, and otherwise).