women in art -- what does it mean???

• representations featuring women?
• art meant to educate women (and men) about gender roles?
• artists who are women?

"INTERVENTIONS" INTO ART HISTORY (how women get into art history)

1. reconstitution of individual creator's careers -Vigeé-Lebrun

2. examination of gender biases that kept women out of art history survey texts

• Jansen
• Hartt

3. role of women as patrons

• Mme. Pompadour
• Gertrude Stein

4. analysis of art academies / art institutions (Cassatt)

• whether or not women can enter academy
• whether or not classes are mixed
• whether women can draw the nude model

5. construction of gender in visual images (& purpose)

• Venus of Willendorff (the very idea of "venus")
• Manet vs. Cabanel
• Cindy Sherman

SEMIOTICS, DECONSTRUCTION & ART HISTORY

• Semiotics = study of signs... language itself is a sign can an image or a word possibly mean the same thing to all people???
• Deconstruction = breaking down [x] through intellectual examination. Result is often the destabilization of confidence in "truth" or "meaning"

Problems with words/phrases like

• "woman" -- shows dependence on "man"
• "art history" -- masculinist discourse
• "historical context" -- can be manipulated by cropping and "spin control"
• "artist" -- is there a masculine connotation? -- can there be an "individual" creation?
• "meaning" -- fluid / shifting constantly
• "audience" -- who's doing the looking? -- who's being looked at? (power struggle taking place?) (manipulation/control taking place?)

ASSUMPTION: Women artists (and models) participated (either willingly or unwillingly... or wittingly/unwittingly in the [masculinist] process of art history specifically and cultural development in general.

MY RULES:

• I choose to not eliminate certain aspects (data, specific works of art, etc.) due to patriarchal / masculinist influence
• it is o.k. to assert something you cannot prove at this moment so long as you have identified a way to try to prove it
• it is not o.k. to take an "anything goes" attitude and alter or exclude data you know to exist in order to create or strengthen your argument

Reason groups of Feminist scholars will exclude data

• The data itself was made and collected under a patriarchal system and therefore is "suspect"
• The structure of all systems should be abandoned and new systems should be created for women [only].

I. Why have their been no great women artists?

• art history "canon" and why women have been excluded
• why it's so hard to find works by women artists (2nd class destroyed)
• why it's so hard to find information on women in general (archive systems)
• women's education and training (generally results in them being "followers"
• place women's education more likely to take place -- convent, which has strata implied only upper class there... family had to pay dowry; also boarding houses for wealthy wives and widows. Only place in middle age society where a woman could be trained as a painter. Book illustrators, women expected to involve themselves with moral upbringing of children, especially girls.
• things that give women a leg-up: family ties; class/social status (ex. in Renaissance "fashionable" for female children to be educated... but more so if only girls in the family)

II. Considerations of Media -weaving, sewing etc. -"folk art" incl. quilting

III. Hierarchy of Subject Matter History Painting (incl. mythology) Portraits (esp. incl. children) Landscape Still Life, especially "Flowers"

IV. Subject Matter that reinforces "womenÍs role" used by both women & men