“Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity, and Histories of Art” by Griselda Pollock

My latest acquisition from a secondhand bookstore, this is essentially a collection of seven essays on feminist art history and art critiques. Now let me just preface this by saying that I have never formally studied any of this. I simply am an art enthusiast who likes to think about things and is a feminist. And that’s really it.

So having said that, there was probably a lot of this book that went wayyyy over my head. But there was also a decent amount that I was able to pick up on as I read as well. In particular, I really liked Pollack’s discussion of how there isn’t a trans-historical female experience. Assuming that women have been through the same things throughout history and that they have responded to these challenges in the same way over time erases so much of progress and so much of the context that the work existed in. I know that I’m guilty of this, if you see an image of a woman being bothered by a man, I tend to assume that that’s exactly what’s happening here. However, Pollock brings up that symbolism is different over time, this could be a portrayal of a country’s refusal to enter a trading agreement or have some other political connotation entirely separate from an individual woman’s experiences.

Similarly, I thought she did an excellent job discussing the context that art pieces existed in. Instead of taking a typical approach to why there aren’t female art masters by arguing that women made art just as well as men, she went about this by pointing out how the entire construct of art and what we appreciate is dictated by men and their viewpoints. Which begs the question of how we can even tell what female artists are great or not, but I don’t think Pollock is interested in that answer. She simply wants to expose the fact that the game is rigged and we don’t have a good way of getting around it at this time.

I do think that this book would benefit from more basic explanations of concepts. For example, Pollock repeatedly discusses the modernist movement, as well as postmodernism. Now I’m a huge fan of postmodernism, and I have a good grasp on what that movement entails. But both terms refer to such huge swaths of thought and ways of looking at art, that I was never 100% sure exactly what aspect she was discussing. Maybe there’s a specific angle to modernism that gets discussed in art history circles, but I’m not in those, I had to fumble my way through and figure it out as I went.

This definitely was a book worth reading, and possibly one worth revisiting later as I pick up more knowledge of art history and feminist theory. Even if I didn’t understand it all, there were arguments that I thought were very well explained and articulated that I will be thinking about for a while. I just hope that someday I can go back and understand the rest of it as well.