In two lectures four decades apart, féminist art historian and curator Griselda Pollock denounces the gender politics of art education and resituates the major geopolitical and ideological shifts in the world since 1968.
Feminism, Pedagogy, and the Studio: Reflections Across Four Decades brings together two lectures delivered by Griselda Pollock in 1985 and 2022.
In 1985, Griselda Pollock critically examined the gender politics of twentieth-century art education that, she argued, reinforced masculinist and individualist ideologies within capitalist conditions of artistic production. She linked the cult of authorship to the nonrecognition of women as artists, even in the face of the evidence of women's considerable participation in modern art. She explored the impact of a critical post-modern and feminist artistic engagement with theories of meaning, subjectivity, and the image drawn from outside the "studio" model. She ultimately proposed "feminist interventions in art's histories," where expanded histories— including race, class, gender, and sexuality—challenge both the monographic-all-male model of the hero artist and the hegemony of formalist art theory.
Almost forty years later, in 2022, she revisited the impact of "1968" and its theoretical revolution. She historically situates the major geopolitical an ideological shifts since 1989 (The Fall of the Berlin Wall) and 2001 (9/11), and notably since 2007 the touch-screen phone (linking to the internet and social media). She identifies a troubling cultural tendency post-2010 that, with thanks to Derrida, she terms "insta-grammatology." Finally, she calls for a critical analysis of how the "grammar" of social media reduces the spectrum of nuanced thinking and performs a political surveillance of ideas.
The Scratching the Surface collection offers self-reflexive accounts by pedagogues working with and in art schools, university departments of creative writing and of visual arts, and the educational spaces of art centers and museums—institutions often presumed to be progressive. The series interrogate the transformative possibilities and constraints of emancipatory pedagogies in the fields of visual art, performance, literature, art history, research, and art criticism.The series is particularly interested in artistic pedagogies in contexts of coloniality. Taken from a poem by Audre Lorde, the title underlines the determination to undo and question certainties, bias, norms, and the fabric of pedagogical models. Co-published with the Villa Arson in Nice, Scratching the Surface is edited by Sophie Orlando (scientific editor) and Alice Dusapin.
Griselda Pollock (born 1949 in South Africa) is a feminist art historian and curator. Now Emerita Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds, she also created and directed the transdisciplinary Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History. She is the 2020 Laureate of the Holberg Prize, in 2023, she received the CAA Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art, and in 2024, the Prix Mondial Nessim Habif from the University of Geneva.
