Son[i]a #254
Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock argues that the absence of women in the history of art is not the result of forgetfulness, negligence, or prejudice. It should be understood as the result of a systematic effort to perpetuate the ideological apparatus and the gender hierarchy in our society. As such, she suggests that instead of thinking in terms of a feminist art history, we should think about “feminist intervention” in art’s histories: both to change the present by means of how we re-present the past, and, in the same gesture, refuse to allow art historians to ignore living artists and thus, contribute to the struggles of today’s producers.
A key exponent of feminism in the disciplines of art history and cultural studies, and the author of more than twenty books, Griselda Pollock explores the complex relationship between gender, representation, and power, crossing them with feminist criticism (and practices), Marxism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial theory.
In this podcast Griselda Pollock talks about her involvement in the Women’s Movement in England in the seventies, and about the points of convergence between feminism and art history. She gives a detailed analysis of the ideas set out in ‘Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology’, a seminal text written with Rozsika Parker in 1981, in which they chart a new cultural imaginary based on works created by women artists throughout history.
In her 1987 ‘Feminist Interventions in Art’s Histories’, Pollock advocates the need to decentralise and diversify knowledge, and to design resistance strategies specific to each socio-political context. And, last but not least, drawing on her most recent essay ‘Is Feminism a Bad Memory or a Virtual Future?’, Griselda reflects on memory technologies, trauma, Oedipal and mother-child relationships, narratives of progress, and Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial ethics.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with writer, researcher and curator Maite Garbayo-Maeztu that we were unable to include the first time around.
Fefa Vila
Fefa Vila Nuñez is a queer feminist ‘artivist’, sociologist, mother, essayist, teacher, and many other things. Fefa was one of the founders of the lesbian collective LSD (1993-1998), which was, together with La Radical Gai, one of the touchstones of queer artivism in Spain in the 1990s. Through their political-artistic actions, LSD and La Radi defended new ways of understanding the body, sex, life, death, desire, friendship, family and work relationships, and political action. In this podcast, Fefa Vila reflects aloud on queerness as a state of radical estrangement, which is constantly being redefined. She also talks about the need to experience other forms of sociability, about other affective-relational models and about motherhood.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Griselda Pollock that we were unable to include the first time around.
Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey contextualises, updates, and elucidates on the far-reaching impact of her key text "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", where she coined the notion of the “male gaze” in classic Hollywood cinema and addressed the power asymmetry in representation and assigned gender roles, thus emphasising the patriarchal ideological agenda of the American film industry. At the same time, she opens up the debate with the notions of the “queer gaze” and the “universal whiteness” of Hollywood. Mulvey also defends orality as a form of "history from below", citing the example of “compilation films” (films that use archival footage re-written with new narrative) as a space for a new feminist film practice.