In Conversation with Griselda Pollock

This interview took place on 23^rd February 2014 at Peterhouse when Griselda Pollock gave a talk at the Perne Club. It was subsequently published in DODO, the Peterhouse newspaper, Lent issue.

Having written over twenty-seven books in her academic career and ruffled some heavy patriarchal feathers, the disarmingly modest Griselda Pollock describes herself as an ‘old fart’. It is very hard to agree though as she holds an entire room of Cambridge graduates and fellows in rapt and moves with frightening agility between female politicians, Angelina Jolie, the male gaze, FGM and innumerable other compelling but vastly different topics. The only thing that ties them all together is feminism or, plainly put, the fact that they all affect the lives of women.

Griselda Pollock has dedicated her multiple lives as an academic, art historian, activist and woman to the cause of feminism. Last week she was in Peterhouse to give deliver a paper titled ‘After-Feminism’.

We chatted briefly before her talk on many subjects including the position of women in politics, the cultures of impunity and sexual harassment and finally, about the depiction, treatment and subjectivities of women in art. Here is an extract of the conversation -

Speaking of Thatcher and Gandhi, do you think having women in politics, although it’s very empowering in its own right, is necessarily the same as having feminism in politics?

That then is part of the double structure which is what is the iconography of women in public...what does that do? What does that do to any person who is woman? Politics is a place where women can be. But obviously processes by which women have to struggle to even be there make such a primary aim that it is not a of matter of saying we don’t need women in politics because we need feminists  but we do become feminists at the point we realize we need absolutely to transform the entire world. It’s that other dimension and I suppose that is what the difficult thing is for us to grasp that at the moment because the representation of women – for example, in the light of the death of Mrs. Thatcher in the British imagination – is confusion between the powerful woman who really is simply a phallic fantasy and that question of the right to consistently revolt against the status quo, to demand change - but a change you and I cannot yet imagine.

I mean I can imagine the changes I could've asked for but if only the full understanding of what my generation did was not caricatured and misrepresented and forgotten or you know, hidden again then your generation could ask other questions that our generation could not have even seen.

Is it always about generations? Do all places across the globe experience the same wave of feminism at the same time?

I resist the whole concept of the waves. I think that is a complete red-herring and I think it’s a form of historiographical construction which not only metaphorically has the idea of an endless ocean. I mean, what is a wave? It is not a construction. It is not something you build. So what happened if you had a multi-storied house - what if you talked about certain people building certain foundations and others said no, no that is not it and found another room - if we imaged it in terms of architectural buildings as opposed to something like the sea, endlessly washing away.

The other thing about the generations is that precisely the model of the familial - the idea that we are generations creates this sort of mother-daughter relationship - this Oedipal succession - well no, not Oedipal, because the mother-daughter isn't Oedipal – but at the same time, there is this sense of understanding, not in a familiar way but in that it is important.  Each historical moment, each political generation is confronted with certain immediate possibilities, necessities, imperatives that become significant and are not consistent of the time. So the image of globe with light bulbs going off, because, you know, Korea coming out of Emergency or Taiwan going into democracy or Eastern Europe coming out of Stalinism or China in its post-Socialist rediscovery of gender. All of these things have their specificities but at the same time you can image it in terms of the revolution of the enlightenment which was about virtue, and then the bourgeois revolution which was about rights and then the 1970s when it was a question about the body which I think is still an unfinished business.

Earlier this month, Georg Baselitz said that “Women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact’.  Last year Charles Saatchi was photographed trying to strangle his wife. Do you think misogyny is experiencing a sudden resurgence in the art world?

I think there are two different aspects to this. I certainly think that misogyny is much less constrained in both the real, statistically measurable violence against women, and symbolically, in terms of the tolerance. If you think about what Helen Mirren said in the Golden Globes about protesting against the gratuitous violence against women that becomes part of every narrative that we see, it is quite unnerving.

And where do you locate Baselitz in this?

Baselitz is just foolish really. He is a tired, old man. His words are not to be taken seriously and what was fascinating in that interview was that if he had said those things forty, thirty years ago he would have said women cannot paint and I cannot think of a single woman to name but now he said women can't paint although I will allow you Agnes Martin, and you know, Rosemarie Trockel. He named others and yes, he said they are no Picassos but that admission would not have been possible thirty years ago because he would not even have those names in his head. So his argument was unpicked by the very fact that he could summon up all these names and all these examples. So we have made certain kinds of progress. But the fact that anyone reported that as anything other than an embarrassing example of a person from the dark ages is not great.

At the same time, Gerhard Richter's painting sold for 21.22 or 25 million just six months before the Baselitz’s comment so we do know that financially and symbolically, still, the most valued things in the world are by a white, European man even when the most exciting art in the world is being made by men and women all over the world and certainly not in painting.

What is it like being a feminist public intellectual in the present times? Does being a feminist in academia provide any respite from the kind of hate speech, internet trolling and street violence that social activists, bloggers and young women frequently face?

Yes and no. Yes insofar as being of a certain age that I am, I don’t participate at all in social networking. I am not susceptible to it and whatever is out there about me or with me does not touch me. Being an intellectual allows me the space to work with many young women because I provide a space where people want to think about these things can do so with some dignity and intellectual ambition. So, my experience of being a public feminist intellectual is actually that of being perpetually nourished by the fact that feminism is a life and death interest to a range of women and some men who stand with it. I do think it is extraordinary the degree to which the development of these social networking sites and trolling and cyberbullying is creating new spaces for not only violence towards women and their denigration but also the whole issue sexualization and norms with which people have to engage with. The issue around sexuality, particularly, is the interface between pornography on the internet and the normalization of the pornographic as the standard of sexuality which has a very direct link to hate speech, misogyny and what young men think women are.

What is your view on the reports of exploitation and unsanitary living conditions for low-wage workers working for the Guggenheim museum in Abu Dhabi? Do you think in this case art has become a site of oppression?

Any institution can become a site of oppression. Art is not a site of oppression but then art institution is a different thing from art itself. Art institutions are part of a massive space of real capital investment and subject to everything going on there as well as increasingly the level of financial capital investment is so extreme compared to even thirty years ago that it is also going to be the site of new, symbolic investments and therefore seemingly shields these institutions from being viewed just as another of the major financial institution of the world.

Many works of the canon glorify rape, sexual torture and objectification of women (Rubens, Titian, Le Sueur to name a few) - should they still be accessible to textbooks and academic curriculum as examples of great art?

I do not believe in the category of great art. I think you study art because it has to be interrogated and read. This is the work of feminist re-reading and queer reading and postcolonial reading - to alter the kind of way that people understand the world through having to encounter these inscriptions in different ways.

It matters enormously how you frame these works of art and that has been resisted in the museums so far.

Art history is often seen as a less profitable disciple than others. President Obama recently said that workers could make more money in "skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree". Do you think moneymaking should become the main focus for degree seekers?

Two answers : I do not think that you get a degree in order to get a job. That is a betrayal of everything both positive and negative about the legecies of the modern university project. If we have a concept of democracy, every eighteen-year-old has a right to a period of self-development through education. This whole notion that you start thinking from the age of seventeen 'how am I going to insert into the economic machine is ultimately destructive of democracy. It has to be defeated and resisted.

Secondly, there are two kinds of art history. I revolted against the art history because I think it IS in the service of the market in certain ways. The kind of art history I teach is enabling people to understand the symbolic as well as the material structures of the world through their iconographies and social applications.

So it is one of the best educations you could get but I would not send people off to study at Christie's.

End of interview.