RESEARCH NOTES - Unframed Practices and Politics of Women's Contemporary Painting

My conclusion is that this is basically an intellectualized Stuckism but instead refers effectively to gender issues and not the institution as such (the lines got very blurry there). Postmodern conditioning and all it's incoherence absent here. Can't be dealing with that.

UNFRAMED PRACTICES AND POLITICS OF WOMEN'S CONTEMPORARY PAINTING, edited by Rosemary Betterton, I.B Tauris & Co Ltd, 2004 - explores the current state of making and thinking about painting by women. It aims to reclaim a space for different practices of women's painting and to assert that these are important if we are concerned with the current meanings of both art and gender.

• Painting has ceased to be central to current critical debates about contemporary art in the western world
• Gender issues that have been foregrounded by women's movement over the previous 30 years are deemed irrelevant to the making of new art
• The twin peaks of postmodernism and post-feminism, however ill defined, appear to have overshadowed any serious consideration of the contemporary practices and politics of women who paint
• Sterile set of oppositions such as traditional or new media, abstraction and realism, feminist or non-feminist Marsha Meskimmon suggests are simply inadequate to contain the complexities of contemporary practice by women
• Groundplans exhibition in 1989, with nine women painters
• There have been sporadic attempts to address the relations between women, painting and feminism over the last decade, there has been no sustained critical analysis of women';s painting and i remains, as Fran Lloyd commented, 'one of the most undervalued sites of feminst practice in Britain'. (Llyod 2000: 37) Part of the reason must go back to the sustained critique of painting as a reactionary masculinist discourse by feminist artists such as JUDY CHICAGO and critical theorist like Griselda Pollock since early 1970's
• Many women artists at the time rejected painting in favour of less 'tainted' media such as performance, video or installation
• issues of racial and cultural identities are histories are crucial, for writers like PARTOU and ROSA LEE, their respective Iranian and Chinese identities are an implicit factor in their work, alongside gender and generation. The attention given to the specificities of race and place, to culture and identity, marks this kind of painting out from the modernist assumption of a universalized aesthetic or a postmodernist play of signifiers detached from histories and politics - the 'play'
• Why do I, as a feminist, still invest desires and pleasures in painting? I think the answer lies less in question of political content and more in issues of gendered spectatorship and embodiment. By evoking my sense of being a carnal subject, a female subject in a fleshy body, painting can begin to articulate complex pleasures and displeasures attached to looking and being as a woman. It is the material qualities of paint, its ambiguity and resistance, over and above the signified meaning of a specific painting
• Pitfall of feminist criticism that asserted in the past - destruction of visual pleasure was in itself, a feminist act.
• Practices... BARB BOLT explains, paintings can be understood, in C.S. Peirce's term as 'dynamic objects', that is they exceed pure signification and can be understood as bringing something new into being
• Bolt argues, paintings are not merely images, but materializations that can have an insistent presence as objects, which is why a slide or photograph is never enough
• For Lee as for Bolt, painting is a means of an engagement with and a bringing into something that has previously not existed, rather than a re-presentation of a pre-existent event
• Lee identifies characteristics that exceed the purely visual and relate to somatic senses of touch, rhythm and gesture, as well ad different kinds of rhythm. Roger Fry, ' not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent. They aim not an illusion but at reality'. For Lily Bruscoe, as for Eva Hesse, the act of making art is 'absurd' or 'impossible'.
• Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, the act of painting is figured as 'bound up with some sort of love. As its close painting finally emerges as a response to "emptiness" ... It is a practice, in which some sort of retrieval is attempted'. (Rowley 2003)
• Partou, this may be a desire to retrieve the self or to move beyond the bounaries of self towards forgotten others in the works of SUSAN HILLER, LUBAINA HIMID and PAM SKELTON
• Painting; it is an ongoing and relational (two key shifts) painting as a system of signs within semiotic analysis to a concept of painting as having an indexical relation to the world
• Bolt 2003 (second shift) towards an understanding of painting as an inter-subjective process: 'a practice of co-emergence involving the play of objects, bodies, materials, technologies and discourse' (shifting away from being solely an 'object')
• 'Personal is political'. For REBECCA FORTNUM, this involves using her art 'as a way of reflecting and understanding [her] place in the world'. The question of what it means to produce work as an embodied, sxed, raced, classed and historically situated subject is implicit. Marsha Meskimmon points out, both the embodiment of subjects and the situatedness of knowledges have been crucial concepts in recent feminist theory.
• the studio: For Partou, it is by 'a naked female body stating herself in paint' that she can challenge the male rtist's right to monopolise the symbolic space of the studio.
• Partou 2003. In exploring what it means to paint from - and with - a female body, she renders explicit issues of gender, nudity and the assumed identity of the artist.
• By reasserting her own socially gendered I/eye, Partou does not simply occupy the body and space of the male artist, but displaces him in a 'political and intimate' project of self-representation as both the subject and the object of her work. Her series of self-portraits resists fixed ontology; anti-definition. Looking at paintings unfold over time and, is materially situated. (Fortnum 2003).
• hyper-masculine