Still writing from memory at the moment… and trying to put together a course essay for next week.
Am looking forward (with great terror – is that possible?) to my final PgDip project due in late September. I’m going to be looking at Agnes Martin’s grid paintings and wondering whether they are inscribed with gender in any way. For the most part I would argue not, except for the fact that she was female. I don’t find straightforward arguments convincing, such as looking at Martin’s ‘feminine’ delicacy or hand-crafted style – as Naomi Wolff points out in The Beauty Myth male delicacy (she gives the biological example of testicles) is even more extremely delicate than perceived female delicacy. (Ann Wagner makes similar and more complex points in this realm on the feminist interpretation of Eva Hesse’s oevre).
I’m a little confused by Griselda Pollock’s reading of Martin’s work in ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes’ – sometimes the psychoanalytic references get so obscure… but I’m hoping a couple of days of close reading and chasing up footnotes in a quiet library might solve that problem. Pollock is convinced that Martin’s paintings again have that ‘feminine’ essence (although she wouldn’t call it that), writing that Martin’s works in museums radiate a peaceful feeling in comparison to her
And obviously Rosalind Krauss’s incredible (in all senses of the word?), gender-free piece ‘The /Cloud/’ transforms Martin’s paintings with beautiful theory, but I’m unsure what this contributes to the debate on gender-inscription itself. I totally agree with her that ‘art made by women needs no special pleading’, however that art made by women is different to that made by men is another question.
Any other history of art, psychoanalysis or gender students on this site who’d be interested in helping me out?
