Projecting a Feminist Criticism

Feminism, or at least the self-consciousness of femaleness, has opened the way for a new context within which to think about art by women. So far, such thinking (and feminist criticism itself) is only tentative. Within the old, "progressive," or "evolutionary" contexts, much women's art is "not innovative," or "retrograde" (or so I have been told repeatedly by men since I started writing about women; they say I no longer qualify for the "avant-garde"). Some women artists are consciously reacting against avant-gardism and retrenching in aesthetic areas neglected or ignored in the past; others are unaffected by such rebellious motivations but continue to work in "personal" modes that outwardly resemble varied art styles of the recent past. One of the major questions facing feminist criticism has to be whether stylistic innovation is indeed the only innovation, or whether other aspects of originality have yet to be investigated: "Maybe the existing forms of art for the ideas men have had are inadequate for the ideas women have." 1 Susana Torre suggests that perhaps women, unable to identify with historical styles, are really more interested in art itself, in self-expression and its collective history and communication, differing from the traditional notion of the avant-garde by opposing not styles and forms, but ideologies. 2