Singular Women: Writing the Artist"An interesting and original collection. A must for all those interested in women artists and the women who have written about them."—Linda Nochlin, author of Representing Women "Kristen Frederickson and Sarah Webb have provided us with a missing link, a truly feminist art history that connects with the work done in the 1970s and thankfully ignores the 'post-feminist' hiatus. Singular Women is a model for future scholarship on women's art. If only the books it inspires are as rigorous, vigorous, varied, and readable as this one."—Lucy Lippard, author of The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on Art "The most provocative, challenging, and intimate writing to appear in feminist art history since Linda Nochlin launched the field with her essay 'Why Are There No Great Women Artists?' Thirty years later there are both great women artists and great women writers. This book assembles some of the best and boldest among them. Not afraid to address the boring, the failed, the neglected, or the masterpiece, Singular Women sets the standard for feminist art history of the twenty-first century."—Peggy Phelan, author of the survey essay in Art and Feminism, ed. Helena Reckitt "This important volume addresses the vexed question whether the traditional monograph, rightly under suspicion in recent years, can be reinvented to serve feminist art history well. Its excellent--and varied--essays answer with a confident and convincing affirmative, demonstrating how we can talk about women's art practice without abandoning the biographical and social stories that enable and illuminate it."—Janet Wolff, author of Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism "Contributes new understandings to the now familiar problems of writing biographies of artists and, in particular, writing about a woman artist. It re-inscribes the woman artist in the discourse while probing—through a variety of approaches—the possibilities for a critical discourse on and appreciation of the woman artist."—Catherine M. Soussloff, author of The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept "Demonstrates how women historians have had to develop close relationships (real or imagined) with the artists about whom they write. The reader is allowed to see the desire that constitutes, but is normally hidden within, the writing of history."—Jane Blocker, author of Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile |
Contents
Histories Silences and Stories | 7 |
Artemisias Trial by Cinema | 27 |
Mary D Garrard Interviewed by Kristen Frederickson and Sarah E Webb | 36 |
Judith Leyster | 42 |
So What Are You Working On? Categorizing The Exceptional Woman | 54 |
The Becoming Landscapes of Clementina Viscountess Hawarden and Sally Mann | 72 |
New Light on Harriet Powers | 87 |
A Sermon in Patchwork | 101 |
The Rediscovery of Jo Nivison Hopper | 136 |
Writing about Eleanor Raymond | 152 |
Elizabeth Catlett | 169 |
Subjectivity AutoBiography and the Artist Named Pereira | 185 |
Rethinking the Monograph as a Feminist | 206 |
Writing about Carolee Schneemanns Epistolary Practice | 219 |
Mark Making Writing and Erasure | 244 |
Bibliography | 257 |
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Page 5 - In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.
Page 5 - The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions.
Page 5 - The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding