Not only does 2001 mark the beginning of the millennium, it is also the thirty-year anniversary of Linda Nochlin's essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" (1971), which answered its own question by speaking to institutional restrictions, cultural biases, and psychic formations. This seems a particularly opportune time to revisit the question, and look at the ways in which both the question and the answers may have changed in the thirty years since 1971. The emphasis of the conference will be on the contemporary situation in the arts (namely, the last thirty years), but it will also entertain discussion of how art institutions have (or have not) been transformed and how art history and criticism have (or have not) been altered in the wake of that question, the women's movement, decades of feminist interrogation in the arts and elsewhere, including the arguments for and against identity politics, and between "essentialist" and "constructionist" feminism, that have taken place in the last decades, not to mention shifts in art practice and media (from the predominance of painting and sculpture to photography and video, mixed-media, installations, performances and site-specific work).
Some may feel that the question and its answers are no longer relevant; that the category "woman artist" should be moot by now; and that the qualifier "woman" in front of "artist" is a form of apology where none is needed, of segregation where none is warranted, and of implicit derogation which should not be perpetuated. Others will feel differently, and for a variety of reasons: that the sexism that underwrote institutions then still underwrites them now; that affirmative action is still needed in the arts; that the canon according to which "greatness" is measured still needs to be questioned and/or opened up; that, more positively, replacing a universalist conception of the artist and audience with a more pluralist one is all to the good and that therefore identifications such as "woman artist"-cut with other identifications along the lines of race, class and sexuality-are still required; that the gender-identifications assumed in the designation "woman artist" is a source of positive difference, of strength, and even of possible subversion and political and philosophical change. The aim is to celebrate and analyze the recent achievements of women in the visual arts. But we hope also to hear both of the views expressed above, and arguments from all sides of the question-from a range of women artists, art historians and art critics.
The conference will coincide with an exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum of 19th and 20th century women photographers. That exhibition will parallel the conference by focusing on the medium which, arguably, has replaced painting as the dominant pictorial medium of our time, which from its inception has been subject to different institutional constraints and discursive rules from those outlined by Nochlin, and which has admitted women into its ranks somewhat more readily than painting. Photography will not be the topic of the conference, however; it will be merely one area of practice represented by artists and art historians working in the multi-media art culture of the contemporary world.
Respondent: Molly Nesbit
12:30-2:00 p.m. - LUNCH BREAK
2:00-3:00 p.m. - Artist Speaker: Martha Rosler
Respondent: Brigid Doherty
Respondent: Emily Apter
12:30-2:00 p.m. - LUNCH BREAK
2:00-3:00 p.m. - Artist Speaker: Mary Kelly
Respondent: Maria DiBattista
Program
in the Study of Women and Gender,
prowom@princeton.edu