Aesthetic Choice: Feminist Perspectives on Art (1971-1979)
Judy Chicago: 'Woman as Artist' (1971)
Defining Female Experience in Art
Georgia O'Keeffe is presented as the first great female artist because her work is fundamentally based on a female experience.
The presence of the "cunt" as an image in art (observed in O'Keeffe, Bontecou, Barbara Hepworth, Miriam Schapiro, and Chicago's own work) is not accidental. It directly stems from the principal struggle of every female artist: to define the inherent nature of the female.
This struggle is crucial because society generally does not acknowledge or accept women as active, aggressive, or creative individuals.
Consequently, every female artist must independently assess the nature of a female, challenge societal definitions, and build her art upon this self-struggle.
Male Misperception and Inadequate Criticism
When art depicting female experience (such as "cunt" imagery) is viewed by men, their responses are colored by socially conditioned feelings about women.
The term "cunt" is often laden with contempt, e.g., "she is a dumb cunt."
If a female artist's work is deemed "good" by the male art establishment, it is frequently despite its authentic revelation of female experience, and because it adheres to formal criteria consistent with what the male establishment deems important.
The existing tools of art criticism and evaluation, which are primarily based on male experience, are inherently inadequate for accurately apprehending or dealing with the work of women artists who aim to create art stemming from their unique experience.
As a result, a woman's art cannot be accurately perceived until women themselves are accurately perceived within society.
The only exception to this misperception involves women who attempt to create art in a manner akin to men, having accepted the art-making framework dictated by and serving male interests.
Male vs. Female Approach to Art
The prevailing value structure of society is reflected in the art world: most valued art is made by white men and emphasizes "visual specifics" rather than human struggle.
This is attributed to the societal taboo against men expressing direct feeling; they are raised to suppress emotion, often remaining emotionally infantile.
In art-making, men tend to be very intellectual, focusing on systems, concepts, and ideas as appropriate bases for art.
Women, conversely, are raised with an orientation towards feeling and less toward abstract thought.
They often approach art-making more directly, seeing it as a vehicle for feeling.
However, the existing art language excludes a direct content or feeling orientation.
Therefore, women's work, especially when deeply emotional, is often misperceived.
This misperception mechanism is rooted in art evaluation based on values introduced and imposed by men in a society that devalues female feelings.
When a man encounters a woman's deeply feeling-oriented work, he is likely to:
(a) Approach it similarly to a man's work.
(b) Expect intellectually apprehensible ideas.
(c) Disregard ideas that don't conform to his reality conception as unreal or invalid.
(d) Be unwilling to experience reality from a woman's perspective.
This mindset leaves men unprepared to truly experience or evaluate such art.
If the work explores traditionally feminine feelings (softness, vulnerability, gentleness, delicacy), male viewers may experience "terror" due to their training to deny the feminine aspect within themselves.
The Woman Artist's Struggle for Recognition
To compensate for uncomprehending responses, women artists often try to prove their worth by creating work extreme in scale, ambition, or scope, demonstrating drive, determination, toughness, or integrity.
Alternatively, she might become a "lady artist," accepting a minor status within the art world.
In both scenarios, she is not solely focused on art-making but also on navigating her social status, either struggling against or compromising with the constraints of being a woman.
She might choose subject matter approximating male experiences and avoid images that reveal her as a woman, resisting identification with female identity because it is associated with contempt.
This struggle to conform leads to a loss of self, as she diminishes her own strength and creative energy by fleeing her femaleness instead of embracing it.
The most challenging task for a woman artist is to claim her unique female identity, to embrace and love what society despises.
Marjorie Kramer: 'Some Thoughts on Feminist Art' (1971)
Debating the Nature of Feminist Art
Kramer's discussions with Red-Stocking Artists explored defining "Feminist Art,"
Questions included whether it should encompass any strong painting by a woman (e.g., non-objective work), art unconsciously expressing a feminist perspective, or work consciously making a political statement through subject matter and content.
Rejection of "Anatomy is Destiny" and "Feminine Aesthetic"
Kramer unequivocally rejected the "Anatomy is Destiny" theory, which suggests women possess an inherited "feminine quality" that pervades their art, constituting a "feminine aesthetic" characterized by "innerspace" (vaginas) or delicacy.
She noted that Henry Moore (a male artist) also creates holes, and Bonnard's work (also male) can possess a "feminine" quality, debunking the idea of exclusive female forms.
The notion that women paint "cunts" as a uniquely female expression is also dismissed, as men have predominantly painted such imagery (and war) for centuries.
Kramer prefers to assume that no inherent "feminine aesthetic" exists.
She asserts that if such an aesthetic truly exists, its nature will only become apparent after global societal changes eliminate male oppression, allowing women to live in equivalent environments to men.
Historically, "feminine sensibility" has been analogous to "slave sensibility."
Two Main Kinds of Feminist Painting
Kramer believes not all a woman artist's paintings are or should be feminist; women should retain broad choices in subject matter, including traditional genres like landscape, where men's and women's views may converge. Good art, irrespective of feminist labels, is always valuable.
She identifies two primary categories of feminist painting, both elucidating women's perspectives, sympathetic to women, and socially legible (communicating artist intention):
Unconscious Feminist Painting: Arises from a woman's experience but isn't overtly political.
Examples include male nudes, self-portraits, portraits, or depictions of women's confined reality (e.g., views of kitchens, household appliances) rendered in a way distinct from a male perspective.
Alice Neel's unromantic nude of a hot, pregnant woman, depicting pregnancy as a burden, is cited as an example, emanating from a feminist consciousness.
Conscious Feminist Painting: Art that intentionally functions as a political statement in its subject matter and content.
Anti-Exploitative and Accessible Art
Feminist paintings are sympathetic to women by refraining from degrading, exploiting, or highlighting weaknesses (practices she argues men like DeKooning have already "eloquently" carried out).
Works portraying women as objects, monsters, or those by artists like Wesselman or Pop Art, often defended as satire, are dismissed as fundamentally part of women's exploitation.
Kramer also criticizes male artists who project their "idea of reality" onto young women's bodies, resulting in "tortured twisted slashed up nudes" that demonstrate hostility disguised as avant-garde philosophy; these works exploit women as mere symbols.
Feminist art is not "art for art's sake"—it is distinct from an exclusive system serving wealthy collectors, trustees, and superstar artists, whose audience is limited to a privileged few or the "Avant-Garde."
Instead, feminist art reaches out to a broader audience, particularly women, by communicating a shared "truth."
Form, Content, and Subject Matter
Kramer debates whether feminist painting can be abstract, concluding that while abstraction can convey abstract ideas (e.g., power, violence, flux, order), feminism is not an abstract quality.
She believes that images in feminist paintings must be socially legible and figurative to communicate their message effectively.
Formal strength is essential: Feminist art must possess the same high quality in drawing, structure, and formal solidity as any other art. Strong content should enhance aesthetic excellence, not excuse poor or sloppy form.
She differentiates between subject matter and content/meaning:
At a Figurative Artists' Group meeting on male tradition of the nude, some men brought work that, despite varying subject matter, implicitly reinforced women's traditional roles (e.g., men with clothes, a generic mother and child).
In contrast, Janet Sawyer's feminist painting of a nude mother and child, with the child offering a globe to the viewer, painted her self-portrait with her third child. Kramer reacted with "oh my god, how does she do it," praising its warm, familiar, yet unidealized and unromantic portrayal. This painting, by depicting the authentic, complex reality of motherhood, conveyed a profoundly different content.
Consciously feminist paintings can explore themes such as women in positions of power, women engaged in work or revolution, women as active individuals, the suffering and struggles women endure, their progress, or various truths from a woman's point of view.
The women's movement is seen as a healthy source of energy, focused on changing the world for the better, which promises to produce significant feminist art in the coming decade.
Pat Mainardi: 'A Feminine Sensibility?' (1972)
The "Feminine Sensibility" as a Red Herring
Mainardi argues that the question of "gender in art" is a "red herring" designed to obscure the more fundamental question of whether any genuine art is being made at all, by anyone.
She attributes this preoccupation to America's focus on sex, exemplified by the youth culture's sexual revolution preceding political or economic ones.
The art world questions a "feminine sensibility" but never a "masculine sensibility" because men have historically monopolized art, granting themselves the freedom to express any emotion or idea (sensitivity, boldness, loves, hates, politics, religion, color, light, form, space, or anatomy). Men have created nearly all known art forms.
For women, the only artistic freedom worth pursuing is the freedom to claim the same breadth of expression, countering past limitations that confined women's art to their anatomy or a desire for male anatomy, as interpreted by men.
Critique of a Codified "Female Aesthetic"
Mainardi expresses no surprise that a "right wing" within the women artists' movement attempts to codify a "female aesthetic" that validates art by women only if it can be analyzed in terms of female anatomy, thereby defining what is "truly female."
She observes that this so-called female aesthetic often aligns conveniently with prevailing art market trends: Minimalism when the theorizing began, and later, "sharp focus realism" (dubbed "paint by numbers for the upperclasses").
She attributes this opportunism to specific market pressures:
Women need unique art products to sell.
These products must be exclusive to women.
They should not overtly challenge market standards, maintaining similarity to popular male art and collector desires.
This "female aesthetic" should be based on form, not content, mirroring other art world standards.
Mainardi bluntly terms this entire endeavor "opportunist" and "reactionary," as it reverts to a form of biological determinism at a time when progressive movements are fighting against repressive ideas that define humanity based on physical traits.
She asserts that there is no inherent artistic capability unique to either men or women; if women are wise, they will avoid repeating men's mistakes, but otherwise, both genders are equally capable.
Feminist Art vs. Feminine Sensibility
Mainardi sharply differentiates between "feminist art" and a problematic "feminine sensibility" (the latter being what she critiques as opportunistic).
Feminist Art is defined as political propaganda art.
Like all political art, its primary allegiance must be to the political movement whose ideology it shares (feminism, defined as the economic, political, and social equality of women and men), not to the institutional art world (museums, galleries).
Crucially, feminist art could theoretically be made by men, though she notes it's unlikely given men's current political awareness.
She criticizes the art world's constant search for "new thrills" leading it to co-opt and commercialize a superficial version of "political art" (often aligned with right or center politics).
Examples include a "Collage of Indignation" show that excluded peace movement artists, and an Artnews article, "Posters of Protest," which she re-titles "Posters of Commerce."
Mainardi views any discussion of political art within institutional art world limitations and audiences as absurd, ridiculing the idea of creating political art for a museum like Rockefeller's MOMA.
Judith Stein: 'For a Truly Feminist Art' (1972)
Defining Feminist Art Beyond Imagery
Stein acknowledges the increasing debate about "feminist art" and existing definitions, such as "cunt paintings," depictions of rape and childbirth (from realists), or "central imagery" (from non-figurative painters).
While these ideas may be interesting, she deems them "incredibly limiting" because they confine feminist art to specific imagery.
Stein argues that the pursuit of feminist art should not impose limitations on women artists but instead aim to maximize their freedom to discover authentic means of expression.
The focus should shift from defining the content or specific "art projects" themselves to examining the art-making process and the system in which art exists.
Liberated Woman vs. Feminist
Stein draws a critical distinction:
A "liberated woman" is primarily self-interested, seeking personal advancement within the existing, male-defined world (e.g., equal pay, prestige, more orgasms, higher status). She wants to "make it in a man's world," a stance often associated with critiques of middle-class feminism.
A "feminist," in contrast, sees herself as part of a broader movement. She understands the implications of "sisterhood and marxism" and strives for a society where all people, not just women, can define their own existences, rather than simply claiming a larger slice of the "male-defined pie."
This distinction applies directly to women artists: many who claim the title "feminist artists" are, in reality, competing for power and status within the male-defined art system, seeking fame and fortune (display in prestigious museums and galleries).
Such artists often fail to fundamentally question the system itself, instead emulating the ego-centric, elitist role of the male artist.
Towards a Truly Feminist Art System
Stein believes a truly feminist art would not be predicated on creating "masterpieces" or merely engaging in "dialogues with oneself about oneself."
Instead, its core concerns would be the feminist movement itself and the construction of a feminist art system within a feminist society.
To define (and thus limit) what constitutes "feminist imagery" or set "laws" for feminist art is considered an "outrage."
She asserts that if an artist is genuinely a feminist (demonstrated through action, not just rhetoric) and is granted complete artistic freedom, her feminism will inherently manifest in her art.
This expression might not take obvious, trite, or male-defined forms like literal "cunts" or central imagery but will emerge in an authentically feminist way yet to be discovered.
Anne-Marie Sauzeau-Boetti: 'Negative Capability as Practice in Women's Art' (1979)
The essay opens with epigraphs:
Julia Kristeva: "I would call 'feminine' the moment of rupture and negativity which conditions the newness of any practice."
Alain Robbe-Grillet: "Let's be careful to remain in the margin: on this side of it, ideology catches us again, but beyond it, archangelism threatens to catch us."
Denial of Female Art and Male Humanism
Many women artists, particularly in Italy, deny the concept of "female art," feeling it implies a regressive return to the "gynaeceum" (traditional women's sphere).
This denial stems from a lack of confidence in defining "feminine" outside of male-invented metaphorical womanhood.
These artists argue that art is sexless, simply "good or bad," leading their artistic endeavors to align perfectly with the "cognitive order of male culture."
This perspective assumes culture is an asexual absolute, reducing women's artistic challenges to mere "historical backwardness" to be overcome through general social evolution and the example of an "emancipated female elite."
Ultimately, this stance reinforces male humanism as the unquestioned yardstick of value and strength.
Sauzeau-Boetti notes a trend among male art critics to theatrically accuse themselves of past exclusion of women, then "exalt" forgotten or re-emerging great women artists (e.g., Marisa Merz, Carla Accardi), thereby integrating them into the existing "economy of artistic expression" without challenging its fundamental structure.
Approaches to Women's Art in Italy (Europe)
Unlike the more overt, self-vindicative political strategies of USA feminist artists (e.g., California's "Womenspace" movement, Judy Chicago's Through the Flower), Italian women artists' awareness of their historical condition is often a private identification rather than a declared group movement.
Sauzeau-Boetti outlines several distinct approaches among Italian women artists who differentiate themselves due to discrimination or genuine internal difference:
Rediscovery and Exploration of the Body:
This approach delves into specific biology, physical boundaries, and sexuality, manifested through recurring materials, shapes, colors, rhythms, gestures, and internal/external spatial relationships.
In Italy (and Europe), the body theme often functions as a substratum—a foundational layer—rather than translating into an explicit, codified (and potentially ambiguous) iconography seen elsewhere.
Examples include body-art exploring blurred figures, the confused roots of women's physical and mental lack of identity, narcissism, self-denial, silence, and fragmentation.
Sauzeau-Boetti highlights the ambiguity of biological and uterine themes, as they risk exalting a "natural" identity that historically has been used to justify women's suppression, despite women's history being primarily cultural.
Ancestral Second Nature: Oppression and Negation:
This approach engages with women's historical oppression and negation, embracing elements of self-oppression and self-negation as points of departure. It involves rediscovering and vindicating traditional, often repressed, forms of cultural expression.
An example is the "thousands of lace doilies, more maniacal than modest," representing an atrophied yet authentic culture. The goal is not to merely reproduce these, but to acknowledge them as examples of smothered expression.
When rescued within art, these "memorized gestures" are freed from atavism and obsession, becoming a "free inventive activity" once their utilitarian function is removed and their value as a trace of profound intimacy between body and mind is restored.
This "free" activity implies respect for and a sense of belonging to often obsessive feminine rituals like knitting, patch-working, candle-melting, or fable-telling, transforming a previously "occult space" into one of free imagination.
Tackling Abstract Cognitive and Creative Processes (Emancipation as a Third Nature):
This demanding approach involves engaging with the most rarefied, least existential processes of male art, such as abstract art of the 1950s, programmed and optical art of the 1960s, or conceptual art.
Sauzeau-Boetti asserts that when a woman artist deeply lives as a woman within her profession and masterfully controls these artistic means, a gradual differentiation from this "father" art occurs.
This differentiation emerges from the daily interplay between intuition and cognitive mobilization, desire and intellectualism, and the female and male polarities within her.
Her language and relationship with technique transform as she gains the ability to symbolize historically unexpressed areas of life, entering a "double space of INCONGRUENCE."
Her work can still be appreciated through existing avant-garde cultural criteria (e.g., formal quality).
HOWEVER, it simultaneously functions as a landmark of an "ALIEN culture" (a "Fourth World," referencing Susan Sontag), gesturing towards different values and mind schemes. This is an indirect, risky path requiring appropriation and negation of existing expressive languages.
Critique of Ideological/Pamphletarian Feminist Art
Some younger artists and feminist supporters envision feminist art as a new artistic language, characterized as "accusatory, violent, hard, crude"—a direct contrast to traditional perceptions of women's gentleness. This reflects the violent and crude reality of women's daily abuse.
However, Sauzeau-Boetti argues that ideological and pamphletarian content alone cannot create genuine expressive art.
Explicit figuration or direct references to feminist themes (anger, body expropriation, body rediscovery) do not inherently guarantee a novel relationship with expressive instruments.
She states that while ideology provides a reassuring political project, when explicitly applied to artistic expression, it often becomes anti-revolutionary, leading to didactic and illustrative forms of art (akin to party or state art).
When women's art overtly accuses and vindicates, it re-enters the "legible cultural space" as militancy. To maintain an antagonistic stance (a form of dialogue), it might artificially recompose itself (e.g., using "provocative" Pop techniques), which ultimately betrays the fundamental disunity, "negativity," and "OTHERNESS" of women's experience.
While acknowledging the richness of feminist group expression as a militant instrument (like Chilean/Portuguese murales), Sauzeau-Boetti does not believe in "feminist art" as a distinct artistic genre.
For her, art is a "mysterious filtering process" requiring the individual "labyrinths of a single mind," the "privacy of alchemy," and the "possibility of exception and unorthodoxy," rather than adherence to a political or artistic rule.
Woman's Exclusion and "Negative Capability"
Woman's exclusion from history is emphatically historical, not natural.
Women have been historically absent because they have never established their OWN meanings through their OWN language within culture (and for themselves), instead adopting meanings established by men.
These new meanings cannot be conveyed through an "old" language (she uses the metaphor of filling an "old smelly pot with fresh water").
More profoundly, these new meanings CANNOT BE AFFIRMED AT ALL through any alternative positive management of artistic language.
This is because these meanings relate to a scattered reality and to a subject in the negative, whose aim is to displace the horizon, not merely alter it.
This process necessitates utilizing all the resources of "NEGATIVE CAPABILITY" (a concept from Keats, also seen in Duchamp), which involves embracing uncertainties and doubts without irritable reaching, allowing the feminine identity to bloom freely.
The true creative project of a woman, as a subject, involves BETRAYING the established expressive mechanisms of culture.
She expresses herself through breaks, within the gaps between the systematic spaces of artistic language.
This approach is not about accusation or vindication, but about TRANSGRESSION (closer to madness than to reason).
Examples of these "languages in the negative" include:
Carla Accardi's cuts and waves in braided transparent material.
Marisa Merz's waiting needles around curled void knitting.
Iole de Freitas's absent and broken body reflected from the other side of life.
Ketty La Rocca's quivering hands "embroidering" their own shape with calligraphy to escape metaphor and unreality.
This project is the only means to objectify feminine existence, characterized not by positive avant-garde subversion, but by a process of differentiation. Its goal is not to fix meanings but to break them up and multiply them.
Chadwick's assertion in Chapter 9, that the post-WWI "New Woman" was encouraged to consume wearable and textile art and manage family consumption, is largely refuted or complicated by the Week 3 readings, which prioritize systemic critique and artistic production over mere consumer roles within existing structures.
Judith Stein and Pat Mainardi offer the strongest refutations. Stein critically distinguishes between a "liberated woman"--who seeks personal advancement via consumption within male-defined systems--and a "feminist," who aims to fundamentally transform societal and art systems. For Stein, merely becoming a sophisticated consumer of "art" without challenging its underlying structures is not genuinely feminist. Mainardi similarly dismisses the "female aesthetic" as an "opportunist" market strategy, creating "unique art products" for women that avoid challenging market standards. While acknowledging women are targeted as consumers of these "art products," Mainardi views this as confining and reactionary, rather than empowering. She defines true feminist art as political propaganda, aiming for equality, not as commercialized consumption.
Judy Chicago focuses on the female artist as a producer, struggling to define female experience through creative output against male-centric criticism. Her concern lies with the authentic creation and valuation of art from a unique female perspective, not the consumption of existing market offerings.
Marjorie Kramer, advocating for "socially legible" feminist painting accessible to a broader female audience, critiques art that serves an "exclusive system" of wealthy collectors. This suggests a desire for art that transcends mere consumption by an elite, instead functioning as powerful communication for women, implicitly opposing the notion of women as passive consumers.
Anne-Marie Sauzeau-Boetti offers nuance concerning textile art. She explores approaches that recontextualize "feminine rituals" like "lace doilies" and knitting. These "memorized gestures," historically tied to utilitarian functions and "smothered expression," are re-envisioned as "free inventive activity" when rescued within art. This acknowledges women's deep historical connection to textile production and its artistic potential. However, Sauzeau-Boetti's goal is to liberate these expressions into a space of "Negative Capability"--a radical differentiation that "betrays the established expressive mechanisms of culture," moving far beyond simple consumption or utility towards profound artistic transformation.
In summary, while the Week 3 readings acknowledge women's historical engagement with textiles (Sauzeau-Boetti) and their targeting by art markets (Mainardi), they primarily refute Chadwick's argument if it implies that women's role as consumers or managers of consumption constitutes genuine artistic or feminist liberation. Instead, these authors position women as agents of creation and systemic critique, striving to redefine art and societal structures beyond market-driven consumer roles.