Griselda Pollock
I Should Not Be Here, perhaps: Feminist Thought and Memories of Artworking in the Dystopia of AI
Germaine Krull, Études de nu (Nude Studies), 1930
Museo Reina Sofía
Held on 25 oct 2024
The Museo Reina Sofía’s Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair invites art historian Griselda Pollock to speak at its annual programme of master lectures, which reflects upon the historiography of art and its limits and vanishing points.
Since her first publications, today considered classics of feminist art history — Old Mistresses. Women, Art, Ideology, originally published in 1981 (Bloomsbury Academic 2020), with Rozsika Parker, and Vision and Difference. Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (Routledge 1988) — Pollock has expanded the limits of the discipline with her material and historical analysis of sexual politics and their translation into modes of visual representation. Not only does her feminist re-reading of the canon offer new and rich understandings of classic works and re-introduce “mistresses” inside historiography, it also shines a light on the persistent problem of the feminine as an object defined by the male gaze and the consequences for contemporary creative practice and self-representation.
This lecture sees Pollock address how to apply the feminist perspective to the sphere of museography, understanding the term “feminist” not simply as the “cosmetic correction of adding a few women to our half-empty museums”. Rather, as a critical interrogation of the contemporary museum within the circuits of entertainment capital, tourism and speculation, as reflected in her book Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Routledge 2007).
Consequently, Pollock seeks to incorporate the “nameless science” of historian Aby Warburg, an interdisciplinary approach which looks to reconstruct relationships between images — made by women, about women — beyond traditional museum categories such as “nation, style, period, movement, master, work”, in such a way that discourse about art transcends the individual notion of author and creation.
Programme
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Griselda Pollock
(Bloemfontein, South Africa, 1949) is a professor emerita in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds (UK), where she has been a Personal Chair in Social and Critical Histories of Art since 1990. Her concerns focus on feminist, social, queer and postcolonial interventions in art history, in addition to the representation and memory of visual culture. In 2020, she was awarded the Holberg Prize for her outstanding academic work. Her most recent publications most notably include Killing Men & Dying Women: Imagining Difference in 1950s New York Painting (Manchester University Press, 2022) and Woman in Art. Helen Rosenau's ‘Little Book’ of 1944 (Yale University Press, 2023), a homage to Helen Rosenau, a forerunner in feminist art history.
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
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Miriam Martín and Ana Useros