FEMINISMS, SEXUALITIES AND ARTS.
New keys for looking at contemporary arts and societies
Arco Notocias nº 29. Autumn 2003.
Under the generic title of Feminisms, Sexualities, and Arts, we have aimed to address the impact that the feminist movement, as well as other movements following in its wake revolving around sexual or gender differences, have had and continue to have in the social field, and particularly, that of art. The feminist reinterpretation of art history, as well as the artistic practices of the present and their analysis, imply, as pointed out by Pollock (1988), recognising the power hierarchies that rule relationships between the sexes, making visible the mechanisms on which masculine hegemony is based, unravelling the process of social construction of sexual difference, and examining the role that representation plays in this articulation of difference.
Art has an increasingly high profile in social debates (McClancy, 1997), and the political and economic reasons for its ever-growing prominence are easy to see. Some peoples and collectives, deprived of self-determination and discontented with how they are represented by others, want to represent themselves, and art is the most powerful medium for doing this. These collectives have used art objects, for example, to resist colonialism, subvert racism, denounce misogyny and homophobia, demolish stereotypes being used to subordinate them, to improve their individual conditions or that of the group, to defend the threatened idea of their own people's identity, even to reinvent this identity. However, the peculiar construction of categories of art and artists operating in our societies has been built up, as Méndez (1995) pointed out, according to a charismatic ideology of art which preaches the idea of neutrality, according to which neither artists nor artworks have sex, nor class, nor ethnicity. Or rather, by deliberately ignoring the social importance of these factors, it denies their repercussion on the social recognition of artworks and artists. Thus, women and other minority collectives have found themselves excluded from art history, and one of the principle mechanisms for carrying out this operation has consisted of, and continues to consist of, separating the concepts of art and society, creating a concept of Art with a capital ‘A' (moreover, one dividing different artistic disciplines into stagnant compartments), and cataloguing any other artistic manifestations under the label of ‘minor' arts, or crafts. This elitist construction of art is based on two central concepts: that of the genius and of the masterpiece . According to Méndez (1995), in Western societies we find a correlation between innatism and sexuation of the artistic gift, in the belief that artists are born, not made, accompanied by the corollary that genius is a masculine attribute, and that every great artist feels, from his earliest childhood, his call to an artistic vocation. The artist is a genius, his work is unique and permanent, its economic value is the fruit of verification of its authorship and the recognised, richly deserved fame of its creator.
Starting from the premise that all art comes out of and develops within a social context, and that understanding it and analysing it presupposes situating artists and their work in this context, we have organised two panel discussions titled ‘New Keys for Looking at Contemporary Arts and Societies, Parts I and II', and bringing together academics and artists with the aim of making some headway on the intricate relationship joining art and society together. It is a matter of debating the state of the different art worlds and the discourses that they generate from different perspectives, following a multi- and interdisciplinary logic that takes into account the fact that both contemporary societies and artworks are structured around categories of sex, gender, and sexuality with regard to others such as class, race, and age.
Xabier Arakistain, Independent curator.
