At 8:53 AM -0500 1/6/03, Frederick Pollack wrote:
>It is as bad to say
>"it's far more complex" as it is to say "it's all very simple" if either
>is said automatically. In the present case, I see two alternatives:
>there is an ideal of what is artistically good (which is constantly
>adapting to absorb "new" ideas from "other" groups and cultures); or
>there is one art (and, a fortiori, truth) for gays, one for white men,
>one (or ultimately two?) for blacks, one for straight women, one for gay
>women.

Hi Frederick - it's difficult, in an email, to signal some of the
complexities I'm talking about.  Which is why I mentioned Mary
Coleridge.  She was such a fan of ST that she changed her name, and
she learned much from his poetry and thought, and used it with skill
to her own ends.  She was, just as were, say, certain aspects of
Elizabeth Barrett's work (epic), edited out of history.  Not because
her work "failed" the "standards" test, but in Coleridge's case,
because she was a woman who was strutting around in what were
considered to be male clothes, writing with the authority and skill
that were supposed to be male.  This has always caused hostile
reactions and sadly, still does.  (I'm very surprised you consider
Artemisia Gentileschi and Aphra Benn mediocre artists, btw...)

This is why so many women writers of the time adopted male
pseudonyms, because if they appeared to be male, they found their
work was acceptable.  Now this suggests something other than
"objective" application of "standards" in these judgments.  I am not
suggesting (and actually, I don't think even Eagleton does) that
aesthetic is purely ideological, but I am suggesting that in the
judgments which exclude those worthy of inclusion there is certainly
a blinkering ideology at work.  Another more recent example is the
exclusion of all those extraordinary women surrealist painters from
the history of surrealism, until their recent reclamation; or the
recent fetishisation of Frida Kahlo, who deserves rather better than
her current popstar status as compensation for being ignored for most
of the 20C.  If you look at the work, it's not because it wasn't
interesting, in some cases amazing; the exclusion doesn't necessarily
come from the artists' contemporary peers, because in most cases
these women worked within milieux in which they were recognised as
artists; it's because of how histories of movements are written, how
anthologies are chosen, how these things are curated in the museums
of culture: a question of cultural "judgments" which in many cases
are shaped or influenced by contemporary prejudices and blindnesses.
I'm afraid these judgments are not always just or accurate, and it is
not merely "post structural obfuscation" to say so; though I really
think you can't beat Harold Bloom for obfuscation.

Best

A
--



Alison Croggon
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