Griselda Pollock

Griselda Pollock. The issue is thinking

My name is Griselda Pollock and I have been thinking about feminist questions for about 50 years.

I have also been involved in a number of different activities engaged with social history of art, which is sometimes in tension with the feminist questions. Obviously, increasingly, we have been aware of the need to expand beyond the European perspective and engage with the post-colonial thinking, and I have been very much engaged with that sense of questioning my own assumptions and normalities and engaging with other artists who challenge me to think in a more expanded way. I don't want to use the notion of global, but increasingly I think we're talking about planetary because we are concerned with the earth that we are standing on and I think feminist thinking plays into that.

I feel I've been always on the edges, asking questions from these sort of places not in the center. So, I find myself very puzzled to be welcomed and invited, and even awkward about who is this person that they think is coming because when you write books, you write with a sense of needing to say things to the world from a kind of protected place if you’re sitting in front of your computer. And the person who is present is not the person who is the same as the voice of the book. So, this is going to be an interesting conversation because of as it were there's the Griselda Pollock of the book, which is quite a fierce voice at some time, and a much more I suppose, not less confident, but continuously perplexed person trying to think about the world that we're in and how to engage with art as a form of knowledge as well as a form of understanding of that world.

In the late 1960s there were very many groups who were in revolt, and feminism isn't a perspective, it's a revolt.

So, we had students revolting against a kind of authoritarian education system, which wasn't adequate to the world they were living in. We had African American citizens of the United States revolting against the endemic and still structural racism. We had an alliance of gay and lesbian women and men who were protesting against the lack of safety and human rights for them to express the nature of their sexualities and desires and who they wanted to love or, you know, be with. And the women's movement… We called it the women's movement; we did not use the word feminist at this point. The women's movement was another of these revolts which brought together a huge international range of women around three or four things very importantly. One is access to equal economic potentiality, because women were poor. Access to rights to control their own sexualities and their bodies, because without that you couldn't participate in the labor work and therefore earn your living. And we wanted justice for the diversity of women. And we wanted the recognition that we did play a role in caring for children for the future generations. So, I want to say one thing about that, which is it's not that women are mothers, or you know women choose to have children or don't have children, etc. But we have to understand we are all in this situation of belonging to one world and caring for the world that has to come.

So, I've been very influenced by Hannah Arendt about this idea of thinking about the relationships between adults and children, present and future and women play a particular role in that. In some way, they were obliged to play a role, forced to have children in such ways that they could not also participate in the world of work and professions or self-realization. And so, we had to have all of those elements. You had to change the employment system. You had to change the money women were paid. You had to change the childcare. You had to change those conditions and obviously control and well-being of one's sexuality.

So, if we put that into a context, there had been women revolting for two centuries at least in the West. We have revolts from the Greeks, from the Romans. There are mediaeval feminists, Great Hildegard of Bingen right the way through to Christine de Pizan, who wrote a book called The City of Women, imagining a world ruled by women.

Through the 17th century you have major figures. There are 18th century women intellectuals. In the 19th century, the turn of the 18th century, when we get political revolution, we suddenly get this notion like the vindication of the rights of women or challenging the droit de l'homme, you know, the rights of men, by saying it should be the rights of humanity.

And this gathers momentum in the late 19th century, with many countries witnessing women campaigning for the right to work, to be doctors, to have access to education and to participate as a political subject. Now, that continues through the 20th century in ways that get lost because, obviously, the rise of fascism in many countries, including Spain and Italy and Germany, and at the time, the communist countries, it was specifically patriarchal. Much of the principles of fascism say we must get women back into being people who make babies and are subordinate to men.

So, we have to understand that the long history of women's movements and feminist thinking is, as it were, interrupted by this terrifying moment in the middle of the 20th century, which includes obviously genocide and all forms of kind of totalitarian violence. And so, when my moment of the late 60s comes along, we not only have these many groups in revolt against what capitalist modernity and indeed what fascist modernity and totalitarian modernity were, but then we had been not educated to understand this long history.

So, we were sort of stranded and we thought we were going to be like the suffragettes, or we could go back to the 19th and the campaigns for the vote, but we didn't understand the long struggle. And so, this produced then not just a political movement, with demands and campaigns and demonstrations and changing the law… And I was very involved in the campaign to get a legal prohibition on discrimination on grounds of sex in the workplace in Britain. That was my first activity, you know, because I thought I was a new suffragette, so I was going to be political. But then we began to realize that to do that we needed knowledge, and we needed to understand ourselves.

So, one of the other features of that moment was women getting together in all sorts of different collectives across Europe and elsewhere to talk with each other and to try and do an archaeology. Was there anything that came before? Who should we read? Who could give us resources for understanding why at the end of the 20th century we were so deprived of rights and had to revolt again like this? So that produces then a feminist intellectual revolution. Now, there had been a sort of a feminist cultural revolution in the 1920s and 30s. We have this rich moment where women become part of all the modernist movements and there are poets and musicians and dancers and artists. But again, and that was very much focused in Paris, everybody came there, but with the World War, that literally exploded out, everybody separated, and it was stopped.

But that's, I think, the most important thing to say, that it is an intellectual revolution in knowledge, in which women are taking a role to say we need to know. We need to know about sociology, anthropology, history, psychoanalysis, economies, everything, every area, which included people like me in art history saying: well, what about what happened in art? And that was why we then were very much in the spirit of 1968, the student’s movement, which was the concept of enquiry. You have to enquire; you have to investigate.

So, out of that has come this huge volume of feminist philosophers, people doing literary criticism, sociology, theologians, legal theorists, economists and of course cultural people and art historians. And each of us began to investigate our own worlds. And I think it's important: it's not a feminist perspective because the minute you bring large numbers of women together, there are old and young, there are straight and queer, there are physically able and just physically less able in different ways, there are people from this part of the world, that part, there are middle class women, there are working class women, there are black women, there are white women.

There is no unity, and the crucial thing about that moment was we were discovering how complex this was. So, if you have a patriarchal society that says you are women and all of you cannot have the same privileges as we give to most men, not all men, because obviously there's still class and race and other things, the tendency is to say, we will unite in the name of the word that you put on us. But the minute we said: «women of the world, unite», we said, actually, there are no «women», there are very complex different questions, and it was very sometimes painful because we had to negotiate assumptions that white women had, and black women questioned us or middle-class women and working-class women or straight women and lesbian women.

So, it becomes, I think it's this question of this movement, this enquiry, and then out of that has come a number of tools or pathways or resources for rethinking any of the institutions we're in. So, we have to rethink how you teach at a university, what you teach, what you do within a museum, what is the museum for, what are you showing and so, question this idea that we are somehow an addition. All of my work has started off with saying: why is the structure the way it is and what will we need to do to deconstruct it? And we don't know the full outcome, right? Because it's not as if feminism is “I want X”. Obviously, there are demands, I do want equal pay, you know, we did want health care, we did want freedom from violence, you know, sexual violence, particularly, freedom from domestic abuse, all these things that we could put down as political agenda. But the question of when we finally moved from the women's movement, this revolt, into something called feminism, it was huge. And so many different perspectives. And mine is just one because I followed that through the question of art and its history and of representation and of creativity. And that comes close to the people doing literature, some to do with history and sociology. But clearly, I'm not doing a lot about the economics of the labor market.

So, there's not a feminist perspective. There is a historic revolt of women against what we then be able to say that amidst all these different historical moments, there has been this consistent hierarchy between men and women. And it produces two groups: the existence of making gender an access of power simultaneously produces men as people who have power, even though they’re powerless in many other situations. And you produce women as what is not man.  And that’s what we’re struggling with, this hierarchy of this asymmetrical access of power and of meaning. And so, we had to say well, if they tell us what women are, because we’re not men, so we’re not intelligent, we’re not creative, we just make babies, we can’t be trusted to run a country or do an operation and a surgery, who are we?

The other big question is that all of this work that we've been doing and why art comes into it is this investigation, who and what are those people that a patriarchal system calls women, given that we realize as women we are just as diverse, complex, singular, different, in conflict with each other as men.

I always say that my work is based on creating concepts with which to think our way into the complexity of the situation and out of the problem. Concepts are necessary because they are ways in which we take hold of something and then we can examine it. So, if we just said there are feminist perspectives in art history, we have a situation where everybody can carry on and they can say, oh, yes, Griselda, you can come and say these little things, but we don't have to change anything because you are doing it. So that's why the intervention is you have to say, I'm going into the main institution, I don't just want to be a nice subsection, have a few exhibitions of women artists and everybody's happy. It's looking at the ends.

One of the things that happened again in the 1960s and 70s was that we started paying attention to how these ways of thinking exist, how they come to be produced and then how they are reproduced. So, one of the areas that we were very interested in was the invention of the museum, because the museum has a history. OK, so there are collections in the past that people had collected things and there were places where, like a church, is already a kind of space which has all sorts of art objects trying to tell people something, but there’s a purpose to tell them about life and death and hell and heaven and all the rest of it. But the museum emerges at a particular point in history as a public institution. So, we already interest in the sense that there is something other than the king and queen's beautiful collection in their palaces, etc. And it's indicating that we're moving into the modern period where there is a public space.

So, we can track in sort of sociological norms the emergence of the notion of a public space and the question of the management of that public space. And so, whether it's the school or the museum, or in some sense the political sphere, they are going to be instructing these growing numbers of people, including people who are now coming from the countryside to live in the cities in a range of things. So, they're going to teach them how to be Spanish people or French people or German people.

So, you're going to have histories of this country, the archaeology, you know, the monuments, you know, and this is where art history is born. Art history is born out of nationalism, 19th century nationalism, where the idea of bringing together the works that have been made in one country and get brought together with the idea that one country is defined by having one language. And in many cases, one country has one language and one official religion. And then you have one language, one religion, one history before the nation started falling apart again. This was the idea, you had to bring everybody in the name of certain things. And art history serves that purpose when people use this public space, not the private museum.

And of course, Napoleon is crucial because he comes and robs everybody of their private things and makes the Louvre and everybody models this. And you have a notion of public instruction of inducting the citizens into an image of who they are. And that can include sort of a humanist kind of idea that human beings are great creative people or they're great scientists or they're great things, but also that they're great artists.

So, the writing of art history is already involved in a kind of ideological program. And interestingly, this is an aside, when they do write these beginnings of histories of their things, you can see why you're going to create a kind of great man version of history. So, you want the great discoverers, you want the great artists, you want the great thinkers, you want the great philosophers. They don't immediately exclude women because there are often quite a lot of important women in those areas. Art history does not become actively gender exclusive until the 20th century. So, this is very crucial.

So, museums are a 19th century phenomenon, and we analyze this ideological project of what they're doing because they are instructing people who are going to have to become participants and citizens of these new modern societies. You don't have to instruct the farmers in the fields when they're all separated out because the local Lord will do it, or the local church will tell them what they should be doing, and they'll get their ideology from that. Once you get the sort of the kind of public space, something different happens. And art history becomes very central to the telling of these national stories and they select certain artists to be the representatives of the spirit of this nation. So, we begin to get not just the great artists but these really important figures. And it's interesting that obviously at that point, women are not considered part of the nation in the same way.

And so, you're not going to say, oh, here's a great woman artist who can represent the nation because you are as modern bourgeois society becomes. It's going to introduce a new kind of sexism. So, when we look at the Middle Ages or we look at even the early modern period, there is discrimination, there's difficulties that women have, but if you're in certain classes, it's specific to that class. So, a noble woman might be in a different position from a noble man, but she's still a noble woman and different from others.

So, this question of asking ourselves, what is the role now of museums… Sociologically, they have become arms of tourism, civic economies, and they therefore have to tell stories or give people experiences that are completely different from actually what my feminist interventions were wanting to be, which is critical self-understanding of all these things that are forming us. So, I don't want to participate in a museum that's concerned with nationalism. I don't want to participate in a museum that's concerned with the heroization of certain figures. I want it to be a different kind of sense of… not public education, because that's sort of top down, but discovery.

So that's why the interventions are in arts histories. You can do this in English because you have Historia del Arte, or you could have Historias del Arte, but in English you say History of Art and Art History. But if I say arts histories, I'm saying there are more ways to tell the story of art than the official story. So, when you go to university and study History of Art, in most cases, it's chronological, it's national, you learn who the great artists are, you learn to understand the great paintings, but you do it in a way that's based on never asking the question: how did this come about? What's the fundamental economic, political, and ideological basis of why somebody has to paint a painting like that? Or what are they trying to negotiate as, you know, like your wonderful Velázquez, with his fantastic portrait Las Meninas? Nobody knows what that painting is doing, but it's so fascinating to ask all the possibilities of, you know, what Velázquez might have thought he was doing, what was possible for him to imagine, what is possible for him not to imagine, but done, nonetheless.

You know, this is why these are very interesting, whereas what we do is to say, this is a great painting, it represents, you know, early 17th century, 16th century, I mean all these things. We are not enabling our publics to understand how complex art is, as itself a language for thinking, but sometimes for persuading or reproducing an ideology because somebody's paid you to do it, but there's always something that escapes. And the art, the many kinds of histories I want to tell are the ones that make it possible for people to say, not just I came, I liked it, I didn't like it, or it was interesting, or it wasn't interesting, but how do these people think, and what are they thinking when they put a picture together?

When I was taught art history, I was told, this is what the artists were doing, this is why they're important, this is the movement that they belong to, this is the style they practice, and so you get art history of nations, periods, movements, styles, and then you have the great master who is the best of the lot. Okay, whereas what I've learned from spending many years teaching artists as well as art historians is how did this get made? Why did it get made? What am I, my first question when I see work is what am I looking at? Not who did it, is it important, what's it about, but what am I looking at? And then, where does, you know, the material processes, where, you know, like, is it very big so I feel small? Do I have to go in close, so my body has to bend in? And, you know, all of these things are already involving me phenomenologically, and then that's enticing me with why do I want to look at it, you know, because we go to so many museums and we just walk past, we walk past, you know, then suddenly you say, well: «that's fascinating», and you say, what drew me in, or why are these major works, which are major works, you know, what is going on? What is it doing? So, I, my kind of feminist interventions in art history are not another story with women in, or just we're adding them to it, or we're only studying women, but what does art actually do? And how can you explore this sense of this peculiar activity that makes us want to learn by or see something, but we are actually being incited to think and to look. So, this question is to say, vision and difference, what is the gaze? What is the spectacle? And the museum then is a kind of, a kind of proposition in space.

The vast majority of museums, you have to walk up steps to get into them. If you don't walk up steps and you just go through a door, you think, what makes this different, right? I'm so interested. They borrow from the Greek temple that you have to rise up. And then I was found in hundreds of museums. I have huge numbers of photographs of this. They would always put a female nude in the entrance hall. Because we don't normally see women naked, but the only place we're allowed to see women naked, you know, is not pornography, but in art. And it was just to say, now you've gone to another territory. You suspend your normal things. Whereas, feminists said, no, I'm not going to suspend my normal assumptions. Why can no woman in an art gallery keep her clothes on? Right? Nobody else manages to, you know, I mean, it keeps, keep it, women keep their clothes on, but the minute you know, these female figures are in galleries, they've got no clothes.

It sounds a silly question, but it's essentially what, what happens when you turn the female body into an object, which isn't meant to be sexual, but it has to be a little sexual, but it represents that this is art. So, you suspend your judgement. This is another realm. And that female, that nude in the hallway or one, just, it's like a kind of, I mean, it's like you need to be Freud to say: this is a symptom. Everywhere I went, I found it that was the signifier that we crossed from everyday life into the museum. And once you're in the museum, you accept the terms.

But the thing is, we have to hold that, I mean, so we have theories, one of the great ones from the early 20th century throughout is phenomenology. What is it to be an embodied subject? But it's not just a body because you're a body psyche, right? Because what happens when you, for instance, bend down or stand up or lean forward or lean back, these are obviously body movements, but they have psychological and indeed political implications. You don't go into a gallery and sit down unless they put that there. So, you're already moving, right? If you go too close, it makes a noise. But if you're a painter, you want to see exactly how did they do that one? But going in there, I'm focusing my attention into something physical. And even if I raise my hand to say, how did they do that? I'm enacting something.

So, that's why, in a sense, feminist studies involve this very expanded set of resources from psychoanalysis to phenomenology to the history of institutions to theories of nationalism, and particularly term of ideology. And that's what in part I'm going to talk about, the sense of the loss now, the absence of those theoretical tools, which came from the enquête, the enquiries of the 68. We said we have… we need a whole different range of theories.

So, you have to have a theory of the psyche in the subject. You have to have a theory of history. You have to have a theory of the social formation economy. You have to have a theory of language. How does anything produce meaning? And in some sense, you have to have an acknowledgement of materiality, because visual arts are very material things.

What about art, feminist critique and artificial intelligence?

This is a very important thing and I'm going to talk about it a bit in my lecture, but I need to go back to two things. So, one of these new concepts that became very, very important, it came through semiotics and then through theories of ideology, particularly Roland Barthes and various others, was when we could say that there is not just art and then posters or, you know, other sorts of things, etc., but this concept that these, a range of different kinds of activities, are producing representations of the world to us and these are teaching us who we are within the world, right? So, the two things that we have to understand: art isn't just the expression of a beautiful creative spirit, it's a systematic representation often of power or of desire or of belief, you know, it's describing those things. So, purely saying this artist made this work in this style, at this time, as part of this period, doesn't tell us what the work is doing. Representation is an active process of all these elements coming together with a presupposition that there's a viewer who is capable of reading these signs.

Okay, then the second point is you say, we are learning ourselves through representations made to us and so, that was therefore the feminist critique of the systems of representation. What are the repetitions? How often do we see these certain kinds of things? What do we see women doing? What do we not see women doing? Then you come along and say, okay, let's look at work that's made by women: to what extent do they internalize the same assumptions, that is how to show what a woman is or are they interrogating how they have been represented through other kinds of representations? So this is important, you're not just adding great women artists to your, you know, story of art, here's another woman doing another painting, etc., you're still going to ask what are the politics of representation at all times and what is it doing to me when I meet this image and what would it do to me if I were able to have a language through which to say how it's shifting the existing systems of representation.

The reason that what we call art is important is because somebody has to make it, and they make it with so many things. They take a very long time to learn how to make anything and they study how to make anything from how the materials work, but also they learn to study other people, to see how art has ever been made and they become kind of walking encyclopedias of all sorts of different things and they learn to make their bodies, their hands and their eyes and their strengths and their things. I mean they observe, and they do it a lot to the point that they can make something happen, it literally becomes part of their bodies in an interesting way.

But clearly, once we get mechanical reproduction, beginning with, to some extent, photography and we have the great Walter Benjamin talking about art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Now we have gone beyond mechanical reproduction and we got into digital reproduction, and that of course we all love because now we've got JPEGs and TIFFs so we could just download everything and instead of my having to get out my camera and photograph everything and then have a slide and do all those apparatus for teaching art. It sounds so archaic now if you think about it. I still have all these slide collections and I don't know what to do with them. I still got an old carousel projector whereas now I just ask and come down and I can put together PowerPoints.

So, we are even teaching and presenting art in a completely different way. Now the issue of our drift from creating and using forms of mechanical and digital reproduction and the whole obviously effects of the computing revolution, the shift from that to artificial intelligence is one of the great leaps which I think is the most terrifying leap that we've ever made because in their attempt to reproduce or study cognitive processes and understand how systems of meaning that we have created as thinking humans work, they have come to the point where they've created machines that can outthink us because they have all these resources for doing it faster, compiling more information than we could ever hold in our minds and they don't have any consciousness in the sense that we have: I think that's not really interesting, but I might do that.

So, I think what looks like a simple progress from photography to video to film to digital combined with the development of the internet as a communication, a sort of file sharing system to the world wide web, which is another level of that particular system, once we leap into the 2007, to the smartphone, to the touchscreen smartphone combined with the use of internet web for social media, we have radically altered human beings.

Marxists say, ok, first you have a machine just to do something, then you have a machine to do that something that that something has to do, and then you create machines that will do it for you. Ultimately, we’ve created a machinic universe in which the inventors of it are themselves resigning from participating in this. And some of the darkest of the science fiction, I think will be true.

I think artists can make art with absolutely everything or anything. So, we can't say you can't make art with video you can't make art with film, and you can't make art with digital prints, but I think once you leap into artificial intelligence, something else is processing it for you in a kind of nemesis, but it has absolutely no reason ever to stop going further.

So, that's where I think the question of art becomes interesting as being archaic, you know, physically made this last remnant of this thing. It also is creative, not repetitive, not systemic, right? My experience with teaching in art schools and indeed going to exhibitions is you think: where did that come from? Nothing gave you a reason to think that somebody could make that leap, but of course there's layers and layers of experience and practice that leads to that leap. It's not just, you know, information with this incredible fast processing system and things such…

So, I think we need to be far more political, far more ethical, far more worried, far more concerned about the two things that are unique to this planet: one is water and the green, the blue and green planet, the earth that has maintained life, and two that there is life. And what is it happening that in the, you know, 2024 we are sitting here talking about being excited about a machine that mimics human thought without any ethics, politics, feeling, you know, which are the things that… I used to be very defensive of saying: oh, how does it make you feel? You know, it's all about these emotions, but it is an education in feeling, right? There is… One of the things I became very interested in more recently was this idea of art is a pathos, formula, formulation of affective states, which is why I got interested in trauma and mourning and all of those sorts of things. And I think a lot of contemporary art is clever and happily using all sorts of machines and to do certain things, but it is without affect and without ethics, and without those two things, we will destroy this planet and not very far along.

We should make ethical decisions. And I think artists should be part of our investigation, help us to keep thinking. The issue is thinking. So, all the stuff that I would say my feminist work has been about is trying to think and develop concepts with which to think the problematic of why on this planet we have ended up with a situation where none of us can walk safely as women in the streets without internal fear and real fear, that there are women in the vast majority of the world living lives that are worse than even the lives of our European mediaeval predecessors. The way there are 11- and 12-year-old children being sold, traded either into sex or trafficking or as child brides, where this question of murdering women, the femicide or the situation of our society…

And I think art should be engaging us with something much more central to the challenges of who we've been, what we´ve been, and I believe it can do that.