When the second wave of feminism, between 1960 and the late 1980s, asked why there were no works by women in museums, Griselda Pollock (Bloemfontein, South Africa, 75 years old) offered some answers. The art historian revealed in her research that the relegation of the female sex responds to a system socially and culturally constructed for centuries. Since the Renaissance, female painters were not allowed to take nude classes and were limited to the decorative arts, while the ideal of artistic genius was elevated with masculine attributes.
After the publication of former teachers (1981, in Spain in 2021 by Akal), Pollock has not stopped giving workshops in artistic spaces on both sides of the Atlantic. Emeritus professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Leeds (United Kingdom), she has visited Spain regularly since 1969, when she arrived as au pairand on this occasion he will give a seminar on Friday at the Reina Sofía Museum this Friday, October 25 titled I shouldn’t be here, maybe.
Which of the Spanish museums are you most interested in for your research?
I have enjoyed many. I loved going to the Prado Museum, going up to the top floor and walking through those kinds of galleries, and meeting a Leonardo da Vinci that you don’t think is a da Vinci, but he definitely is. I also participated with the Thyssen in a symposium last January, regarding the exhibition Teachers. I participated via Zoom because I have decided not to contribute to carbon air pollution and I haven’t flown in five years. I have broken my rule by coming here because it takes three days to arrive by boat.
But to which of them can a feminist perspective be implemented?
Let me clarify something. The work I do is called feminist interventions in art histories. Most museums present a history of art, and it is not about adding a feminist perspective, but rather about undoing and deconstructing the history that most museums present, which is based on periods, movements, styles and masters. I am interested in asking museums to show the public something more than this great national narrative about the greatness of Spanish art. You cannot simply add women to that history, because it is already built on hierarchies, supremacies and nationalisms. The Prado has a huge collection of art from different periods and countries, but it feels like they are there to say how great Spain was, and it was; It was a great empire. I call that differentiating the canon. I’m not teaching something different, but I want to show different aspects of what is presented as the main story.
The Prado Museum has a huge collection of art from different periods and countries, but it feels like they are there to tell how great Spain was.
How then to show the feminine side of history in a context like that of the National Prado Museum?
It is not enough for the Prado to add women to its collection, because I know that it has already had exhibitions of women artists, but they call them women artists. When you do an exhibition of Velázquez, you don’t say: “I’m doing an exhibition of a male artist”; He is simply an artist. The artist does not have sex; It’s just Velázquez. But when it comes to another group that questions heteronormativity, Eurocentrism or the masculine, they give it an adjective: they call it women artists, artists queer or artists with disabilities. So, you immediately notice that there is a hierarchy. Everything that is not the norm gets a label.
What I think museums need to do is understand that structure and deconstruct it. You can invite me to do a feminist exhibition, but that doesn’t deconstruct the structure. You can set up a sample like the one in Teachers at the Thyssen with all those female creators, but what do they have in common? I am different from other women, because of my age, religion, history, sexuality. I am not just another woman, just as you are not just another man. Every time I have some experience, people tell me “well, you’re a woman.” I am, it’s a fact, but it’s not the most interesting thing about me; I am an intellectual, art historian and a very bad painter.
Museums are an educational arm of the nation and they must ask themselves what image I am showing of human beings and whether it is a mirror in which everyone would see themselves reflected. The answer is no, because in most museums I learn that no woman has done anything in the history of art worth putting on the walls of a museum. Every woman who goes to a museum learns that we are useless, unintelligent and uncreative, that we have done nothing that builds the history of Western civilization. But that doesn’t change if you simply put a few women in the institution.
Don’t you agree that art made by women should be treated as a genre in itself or in specialized galleries?
I agree if they organize the rest of their rooms under the same category. People must be taught that each work of art has something to see and learn, regardless of whether it is a piece by a very important artist or from the baroque. Art should be treated as a way of learning about the complexity of the world, about how people have understood their bodies, sexualities, pleasures, in very diverse ways. Museums tell a single Art Story, but we can use all works of art to tell many stories. We don’t educate people enough to understand how interesting art is, because we just say this is a Rembrandt, but we don’t explain why Rembrandt was able to paint all those paintings, who commissioned them, or why they had the money to authorize it.
Do you feel that your studies in the early 1980s have influenced this wave of books and exhibitions about women?
No, because everything I have written over the last 50 years would not lead me to do an exhibition of women artists as a collective group. One of my examples is usually the famous painter Artemisia Gentileschi, who was very interested in Caravaggio. I wanted to understand what Caravaggio did with painting and then do something with it, but not like he did it. So another way of doing exhibitions is to show those conversations that took place between the creators, instead of saying: “here is a Caravaggio, here is a Gentileschi.” You present the same issue and show how each person has resolved it. How many times can you have a painting of a virgin and a baby Jesus, and still find variants of how you arrange them in the same space and make it work?
How to achieve a transition to an egalitarian collection naturally and without meeting the gender quota?
I’m not going to tell you how to do it, but I can think of ideas. I have curated exhibitions in which I have included creators of different nationalities, ethnicities, sexualities and genders, but I put them in the same conversation. I don’t worry about labels, but about themes, problems and how artists approach and solve them from different points of view. The exhibition has been inclusive, but the members announced themselves, without me having to say this is a man queer or this other one is a woman from India. The viewer has to do some work and say “okay, how do these eight artists offer me different perspectives on something?”
I did a degree in art history and I didn’t learn anything about women
What led you to question the role of women in art and writing? former teachers in 1981?
I did a degree in art history and learned nothing about women. We were doctoral students with the co-author [Rozsika Parker]feminists. At the time, Americans were writing books about women artists made invisible by history and the obstacles they endured. In the seventies there were already eight books about it, so we asked ourselves what makes our book different, and we found several things. One of them is that women were only excluded from art history in the 20th century.
In fact, until 1950 it was very easy to find information about female authors; His works were in all the important places, in the basements, but they were there. We draw on those collections to say here is a history of women’s art. But then we were surprised when people like Ernst Gombrich wrote the first art history books in the 1950s and 1960s without including any women. The other thing we discovered was that there is a whole structure behind why women have been excluded and treated as second-rank citizens. We not only wanted the names of the artists, but also to understand who was interested in erasing the fact that there were women scientists, philosophers and creators.
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