All language subtitles for The 2020 Holberg Conversation with Griselda Pollock

[Music]

it is a great honor to welcome the 2020

holbrook laureate

griselda pollock to the holberg

conversation welcome

thank you very much i'm delighted to be

here

are professor of social and critical

histories of art and the founding

director of the center for cultural

analysis

theory in history at the university of

leeds

first of all i would like to

congratulate you on receiving the

holberg prize this year

as the hallberg committee expresses in

their statement of motivation

you have received the price for your and

i quote groundbreaking contributions to

feminist history of art

and cultural studies your work has not

only helped to transform the discipline

of art history and the art historical

canine

but your scholarly practices also

exercised a profound influence

on numerous other fields including

cinema studies

psychoanalysis histories of modernism

and modernity

theories of trauma memory and affect to

mention only a few

your work is marked by this forceful

investment in challenging received

wisdoms

and hierarchies of value from a feminist

perspective

this critical orientation runs through

your close to 30 monographs

more than 20 edited collections and

several 100 scholarly articles and

essays

publications which indeed has led you to

become as the holbrook committee writes

a beacon for generations of art

historians and cultural analysts

such as myself perhaps we can start by

going back to your arrival in academia

as a student in the late 1960s and early

1970s

what was the discipline of art history

like at that time and what compelled you

to start working with a history of art

from a feminist perspective

well thank you very much for such a

lovely generous

uh introduction i i'm always alarmed

when i hear these sorts of things

because just

as a an everyday scholar i have been

teaching i've been writing i've been

doing what academics

um are meant to do and i am so honored

that someone nominated me and that this

prize has been awarded

not just to me but precisely for this

relationship between feminism and art

history so i think it's a very

good place to start i did not know

that there was such a subject as art

history i went to university to study

law because i'd been inspired by tv

programs like perry mason and i thought

i was going to bring the world to rights

by becoming

you know an advocate or a lawyer and

then i was too young to go to university

ask me

they ended offered me a place at oxford

but said go away and think about it and

i came back and decided i would do

history

which was my mother's subject so i have

a very very solid historical basis

from my my first degree but during my

final year

i listened to some lectures by the great

art historian francis haskell

on 19th century napoleonic

and romantic painting which i would have

walked past if i'd been in an art

gallery because i'd have had no way

of understanding it but he gave these

astonishing lectures about

the whole meaning of napoleon the

revolution the disappointment the

formation of empire the melancholy of

the defeat of napoleon

and i suddenly saw these works were

doing something

in this complex history of the french

revolution but in a dramatic

theatricalized and

passionate way so i took a the only

option for art history my history degree

was introduced that very year

and i studied the 19th century with

francis haskell called baudelaire and

the artists of his time

now we must understand that art history

has a history

and in the 1960s there was very little

in the way of an art history of the 19th

century

there were some very important french

studies and some

very important fact danish studies

trying to give us the beginning of a

shape

of what happened in the 19th century of

realism impressionism post-impressionism

john rieveldt's book the history of

impressions in the first attempt at a

documentary history

only appeared in 1947 and the great sort

of

blockbuster exhibitions the sort of

celebrity status

of manny and duggar and pizarro and sura

which

came in the 80s and 90s with all these

big blockbuster exhibitions

it didn't exist so it was a very fragile

space to go into

and so i went to the courthouse to do my

m.a and

found not something that i want to

dismiss as conservative i want to

situate it so if you'll bear with me i

just need to

help the listeners to understand a bit

of this so art history

has a history we have classical writings

from you know from the greek classical

world like aristotle and

pliny from the latin world we have

medieval writings when we then get

visari and the idea that you study

artists by

art by studying artists the biographical

model

then we get the 18th century they hook

up with philosophy and say what is

beauty how are we going to say

is art all about beauty and we get the

first history of classical art

and then the 19th century the art

history becomes part of the humboldt

university this model that we still have

in most of europe

with all these new disciplines philology

theology linguistics literature history

and art history becomes part of that and

you know forms part of the university

and we get the beginnings of

a form of art history which is what did

each nation do

so french school german school italian

school

spanish school nobody studies the

british school because there isn't any

british art

they borrow it from everybody else apart

from medieval embroidery

etc so we get the first thing which is

art history becomes associated with

nation building

and art is seen to be the spirit of the

nation so if you're german that's

lutheran christianity you know if it's

italian it's catholic christianity so

there's already a racism being built

into

who is going to represent the nation and

it is not exclusively but largely these

great men

the vazari model and then when we get to

modern art

we are going to encounter a movement in

modern art which will change the terms

of the study of art that's theological

and historical

because it's going to be our everyday

life and new forms from new

consciousness

but we also get people like virflin

saying what makes

art history or the history of art

different from the history of literature

or culture in general so they come up

with the idea of form

that the internal autonomous

transformation of form

which takes the mode of styles is what

makes art history

specific this is great we absolutely

needed it

but then what happens in the 20th

century as i inherited art history

is if you were a renaissance scholar or

medieval scholar you studied iconography

and if you were looking at the modern

the 19th 20th century

it was purely formalist which means art

is autonomous it just

develops out of its own internal

purposes

so as a historian and uh interested in

what drove

people to find new forms why were there

napoleonic paintings

why did they become romantically

melancholy it's

in that imprecation of artistic

forms and practices and artistic

thinking with historical urgency

now there was a tradition of social

history of art

in europe very influenced by marxism

particularly associated with

budapest with antal and hauser and all

these great

thinkers in in the sunni circle

uh in in budapest in the 1920s but that

kind of got repressed because

in the during the 20th century fascism

the third reich particularly and

communism

took art over and used it

for its very overtly ideological

purposes

so in the 1950s as a reaction against

fascism and communism

using art the west

created a notion that art in the west

was

free democratic and that was the sign of

that was

individual and absolutely no political

or historical agenda

so if we understand that situation and

then i arrive

along with a whole generation of people

of the generation of 68

and i think it's worth putting to people

that the generation of 68 are the people

who grew up as the children of those

who'd lived through

and witnessed the holocaust auschwitz

hiroshima in some sense the legacy of

both

both world wars and our generation

was is i would say post-traumatic

which is a way to understand this wasn't

just any old rebellion

it was a sense in which we were being

delivered a world of modernity that

promised us progress and everything was

better

when all we were seeing was modernity

had delivered us

unspeakable political and human

catastrophe

and so the the revolt of this generation

the demand for civil rights to say

the unfinished business of racism in the

united states

the unfinished business of

decolonization

and the violence with which the attempts

to be free were met

and also obviously the two great other

movements

are the gay and lesbian movement to say

why should we be instead socially police

criminalized in our desire

and then we have the particular

phenomenon of the women's movement

so you've got these negative

legacies and these dynamic forces of

civil rights

gay and lesbian rights women's movement

rights and a whole kind of sense that we

had to remake the world

against in the face of totalitarianism

both fascist and communist

and also a growing sense that while

post-war capitalism gave us all these

goods and all this shiny american

pop culture it was soulless and empty

and heartless and poverty wasn't going

away and cruelty wasn't going away

and so in the pursuit of sort of a sense

of

urgency as a generation as an

as a historian i then turn to thinking

what does that mean for art history

i can't accept it's pure autonomy it's

pure individualism

because the minute i looked at it i

realized that that story of art

was absolutely itself eurocentric

white christiano-centric racist

heterocratic and sexist now we didn't

have all those lovely terms yet

but we had a very strong sense that

these things were all

intimately related but i could speak

in my own voice as a feminist

right we could be part of you know

marxist groups we could part of

civil rights groups but the women's

movement was what gave

me a sense that i belonged to a

collectivity that had launched itself

onto the stage of history

as women and created a concept

gender just as there was class created

by marx

race created by the decolonizing

thinkers

the women's movement gave us the

category of gender

and a system and my

exploration of this was not only what

does it mean for

art history if i'm studying art to think

about these kinds of

intimacies between culture and history

and

its ways of telling itself but also

how on earth would i unpick this legacy

what would i have to do to create a new

kind of work so

it's very important that feminist art

history isn't a sort of

subset there's you know stylistic

history and formalist history and

iconographic history

you know an anti-racist history and you

know everybody and then we've just got a

little

you can have a panel at a conference

let's have the feminists

it was part of this kind of crystal

of um youthful rejections

of a dream of modernity which had been

betrayed

that is a wonderful answer that brings

up many central aspects of your early

work

which on the one hand has been marked by

investment and thinking critically

about the social history of art which

was drawing on marx's thinking

while on the other hand your

participation in the women's movement

that was so central to your work on

developing feminist approaches to the

history of art

together with groups such as the women's

art history collective

how did you work on bringing these two

important critical perspectives in

productive exchange with each other

well yeah thank you for that that

question um

what is very important to convey to

people was

um one of my first kind of um

i suppose realizations was that

well art history has a history and we

could begin to say

where what is what is the current point

that's being dominant and how could we

reach back and examine this history and

think differently about it

but we could also understand it's it's

sort of central shape

these arguments about you know nation

period movement style great master i was

also

being able through this encounter with

different kinds of new theoretical

formulations that were part of the

revolutions of the 50s and 60s

i'd say is understanding art history as

a discourse

that art history itself

is a pattern of statements that are

producing particular meanings while

excluding others

privileging certain ways of thinking

while making others seem to be

non-art historical outside that's

sociology

which i was often told you know you can

do sociology if you want but you won't

do art history

you have to not do these sort of social

history questions

so um we knew there was something wrong

and i was beginning to see the shape of

that problem

of centered on the great white male

artist and the

consistent exclusion in modern art

history and the art history of the

modern of women

we didn't have any formal classes

so everything happened outside academy

we set up reading groups

we wanted to read marks or we wanted to

read freud or we wanted to read foucault

or we wanted to explore psychoanalysis

there were little magazines there were

ad hoc symposia there were people

sharing and teaching each other

and the women's art history collective

was part of that sense where

some artists some designers some art

writers some art historians got together

and said

how do we do this now we had linda

nachland's essay

why have there been no great women

artists i had

um jan merdal i think it's janmer del

not guna madel

a book about ankle vat which he'd

visited

with the vietnam war 100 just a hundred

miles away

and he was asking himself what is it to

go and look at angkor vat why this is

happening the bombing of cambodia and

the vietnam war so

we would we had that and we had john

burgess ways of seeing

so we were kind of putting things

together and becoming aware

that something amazing was happening in

paris

which was being imported and translated

largely through

film theory and largely through what it

ultimately emerged as cultural studies

so it's not as if these theories were on

the shelf

i didn't even know such a thing called

theory existed

i knew that there were problems that

different

thinkers were thinking about

and for which they were giving us

concepts with which to think

so understanding you know the

relay social relations of production if

you in class if you were studying

marx but also how to think through

complex totalities

fuco was giving us the sense of um

the archaeology of knowledge the

formation of the terms in which we study

things and the notion that um

our objects of study are produced by the

way we do it

and this produces the expert and the

object and none of us are intending to

be

you know cruel to disabled or mad

or criminal people but expertise makes

you

the the agent of a system

and the object in the person who's ill

or

you know afflicted psychologically

becomes a mad person or a criminal

person

and as he began to write about sexuality

we began to think about the body who's

controlling the body who's

what discourses there about the body and

it seemed art history

needed to be in conversation with all of

this

and i would like to just say one thing

which is

my sort of insight into this which is

in 1905 we get this incredible moment of

five revolutions

einstein says what's the physical world

socio says what is language

husel husserl asks what is being and

founds

phenomenology and that tradition freud

asks what is the mind

and bergson is asking could we have a

material foundation for

imagination and memory now

these we know happened in 1905 this

extraordinary

tradition or explosion of revolutions i

think it took until the 50s and 60s

for those events to kind of percolate

and

change the arts and humanities

so as i just went to university 67

there's a translate publication of la

casa

there's um the beginning of foucault's

publication and then we're going to get

christian mets and various writers in

film theory

and so it's really is a generational

moment

of intense investigation and the

legacies of these great modern questions

what is the mind

you know the psyche psych analysis what

is being phenomenology what is language

semiotics structuralism

post-structuralism

what is difference these big questions

and i see that's my my formation so it's

not a

bricolage of let's go to the supermarket

and borrow a bit of these theories

we knew that these were all interrelated

challenges to a certain uh facile

humanistic idea that is represented

whether it's by the great writer the

great thinker the national canon

know the great artist and we could use

those to burrow into this question of

how does what the way we say it the

concepts we have to think with

and the concepts that we don't yet have

how do they

limit our ability to understand these

human

and social processes as they

form themselves into complex

relationships and not simple ones

your workers from the start been

characterized by an attempt to develop

languages and concepts

that enable us to pose new questions to

art and society

this is also the case in your phd

dissertation which centered on the work

of vincent van gogh

this is an artist whose work you've

continued to write about both together

with fred orton

as well as alone up until today as one

of the most well-known artists in the

world

van gogh his work is surrounded by these

endless and

quite conservative mythologies of genius

gender masculinity and death

how did your interest in funko come

about okay that that's a lovely question

and i'm going to sort of

i'd like perhaps to sort of give this

sort of

janus-like figure that for anybody

trying to think a kind of feminist what

i came to call a feminist intervention

in arts histories

so this phrase is to say there are many

more histories than the one that is

official and given

and canonized in the museums or

canonized in sort of academic teaching

and the histories are more plural

because there are different

centers to different histories centers

from people from

outside the west centers for people who

are queer

centers for people who are women trying

to think through this and obviously

there are queer women

and queer women queer women from the

outside

europe so i mean these great

conversations etc so

as we um were kind of exploring those

um multiple histories the idea is not to

make a new

sub-category but to intervene and

explore them and my question was from

feminism

and feminism has two sides one is to

critique sexism

which is therefore we are against sexism

we pick it out we identify it

the other is for feminism because we

have never had

a world explored through uh

women's perspectives in women's voices

in this intellectual revolution that we

call feminism

was the first time women in large

numbers went to university and

studied in their own name they didn't

become

intellectual transvestites and

patriarchal ventriloquists

speaking the sort of authoritative that

we questioned and so

every discipline in the university

curriculum has been

challenged by feminism from genetics

through to philosophy

so in my art historical project there's

two sides as well

one is you have to deconstruct the myth

of the great artist

you you can't just simply say well add

women to it because the great artist is

not just

just a fact of somebody who's an artist

it's it's already a mythic figure

there's a life story that goes with it

it's compounded by the ways people

interview

artists it's the way that they are are

celebrated and and

treated and and um discussed and spoken

about

and then you have the woman artist and

the minute i say woman artist the word

woman

is an adjective it qualifies the term

artist

which means she's not an artist she's a

woman artist or a black artist or a

queer artist

which means the normative artist is

white and masculine

and heterosexual and probably western

everything that you have to add a

qualifier to you've already

disqualified from being part of the

automatic

thing that the concept you hear when

somebody says artist

so you have to deconstruct that and you

have to understand what is the nature of

the myth and van gogh is the perfect

myth

for the 20th century because he is

uh inheritor of a great

tradition of the notion of the suffering

artist

of the sort of artist as mad the artist

is genius the artist is

isolated but he becomes a perfect figure

for the artist in capitalism because it

says

you just had you know you will be

rewarded after your death because we'll

love your work

even though you suffered now

that's one side and so van gogh will

come there hold on to him for a moment

but the other side then was i had to

deconstruct equally

the myth of the woman artist i had to

reveal

that anytime somebody wrote about an

artist who was a woman

they spoke of her with certain feminine

stereotypes

her work was weaker it was lyrical it

was not epic it was pastoral

right she wasn't an innovator she was a

follower

and i found that actually when you

studied art history

although 20th century art history more

or less wipes women out

it leaves a few in there in order to

function

as this negative foil you'll mention

somebody you'll mention david this

neoclassical

you know uh french artist of the great

revolutionary period

and then you might say and then there's

the sweet softness of elizabeth vijay

lebron

you know and we'll show a picture of her

with her daughter so

the domestication whereas you'll see

david's self-portrait you know with his

terrible injury and his palette

and i did a beautiful comparison of

elizabeth vijay lebron

representation of uber a romantic artist

who's

looking away you know and looking at his

palette you know and then

her self-portrait borrows from rubens's

portrait of the woman and the straw hat

his wife

and appears therefore even though she

has a palette

to have a completely different

iconography for even what is the body of

woman

and the body of man the artist now to go

back to van gogh

what i felt was

that i had been taken in 1961 as a child

to an exhibition and i think now in

retrospect as i worked on this it was

the first

exhibition i went to and i remember

vividly going through

the dark dark rooms with his paintings

when he's in

holland of impoverished miserated

emaciated peasants and bent bodies

and angled outlines of their bodies and

lump and faces and huge hands and then

suddenly it gets a bit lighter when he

goes to paris and then there's this

absolutely ecstatic you know arrival in

the south

you know just like just northerners when

we go on holiday to the south

you know we are in sunshine you know as

opposed to this lovely gray northern

lights we have

and then of course you take you get

taken

to his death all of a sudden you

you come along and then they say he's

committed suicide and i i find this

narrative traumatic

i find it christological and when i

studied lust for life the film by

minelli

he uh van gogh shoots himself in a kind

of crucifixion scene

this evocation of the notion of this

artist's sacrifice but i was so

shocked at being led through this

in an exhibition during the death and i

encountered it again in the next

van gogh exhibition in 69 that i saw and

i i felt troubled by this narrative

on two levels if someone kills

themselves which we now know

and we now think he suffered from um

bipolar disorder

and that it's a terrible level of

anguish that depression produces such

that you want it

you don't want to live you don't want to

be dead but you don't want to feel

anymore and we have a would have a very

different view

of the illness but rather than this

story that

inevitably he was unloved and he was

things so he's driven to this

this point and i thought well maybe

there's another narrative

which is much more interesting which is

van gogh is a highly

intelligent amateur he's self-taught

he never goes to art things he reminds

me a little bit of my father

and other people i know who didn't go to

university who are hungry for knowledge

they read

incredibly widely they are very

knowledgeable but what happens when you

do go to university is you get

disciplined you have a method of saying

this is you know let's argue over it

that but this is serious stuff oh this

is a major stuff

van gaal consumed everything english

literature

german literature russian literature

dutch literature

um french literature he was a passionate

reader of dickens he was a passionate

reader of zola

these are the great novels of 19th

century exploration of the

city right these are

dickens gave us the concept of what the

city is as a place of darkness and crime

and

mystery that requires a detective zola

it's the place of

darkness and crime and and degradation

but so i looked at van gaal and said

what would happen if you thought about

him in terms of the city

and the country you saw him as an artist

struggling

with modernity in terms of

under thinking the city is the place

where i'll i'll be able to discern the

character of modernity

or know i will go back to the country

where i will be safe from modernity and

we will

idolize the peasants and misrecognize

their

unbelievably harsh life for a simple

life

and then as he you can begin to see how

van gogh's career bounces backwards and

forwards

but then i discovered that when he went

to france

all he is talking about is holland but

not

holland the netherlands of the 19th

century

but of the 17th century he says i'm

i'm in the land of ricedale i'm in the

land of hoberma

he writes to gogar and bernard these

key figures in the development of what

we think of post-impressionism who are

pushing ahead after impressionism he

says go to the louvre and look at

rembrandt

so this is a complicated story to argue

but

it's it's justifiable in all sorts of

ways and that's documentable

so i i wanted to sort of both do an

analysis of the myth of van gaal

which is in everybody's mind the artist

everybody's heard of

a celebrity created by a whole series of

exhibitions after the first second world

war

and what was it that that story served

and what would it be

if i said let's have

a kind of a much more complex rich and

perplexing sense

of an artist who is self-taught

struggling with modernity and missing

what everybody else the gauguins and the

suzannes he doesn't understand what

they're doing he doesn't understand

manet

he doesn't understand that but he

arrives at the point at which

modern art did arrive which is to say we

actually can't manage modernity we

are going to flee it and we'll flee into

abstraction

so i think it's a very interesting thing

to say

how do you undo this tight

structure of the legend which makes him

the representation of the

the artist the suffering artist the

masculine artist

and if i can undo that and produce a

more historical account of this

absolutely iconic artist i can also

invite people

to undo the stereotype of the woman

artist

and produce an argument which says

actually when you study it

men and women co-created art

and particularly co-created modernism

and

impressionism is the first egalitarian

art movement

with mary cassatt morisso if gonzalez

and marie brachman absolutely there in

the organization and if we could get

there

i don't have to make a special case for

women the case is historical

there they were everywhere you looked

in 1981 you published the book old

mistresses women art and ideology

together with the art historian

psychotherapist rosica parker

this landmark book has been republished

in several editions including this year

and in the book you develop a structural

critique of sexism in the art world

and you argue for the importance of

changing the rules of the game as you

say of art history

including how we understand the notion

of art the subject of the artists

and concepts of value and quality

the title of the book reads in itself as

a kind of a conceptual intervention that

troubles established terms in art

history

such as old masters what was the impetus

for you and parker's work on this

seminal book

the title comes from an exhibition that

um

two american art historians um

and i'm having a little a moment which

is elizabeth brown and

her colleague created at the baltimore

museum of arts because

they were part of this early movement

amongst curators and art historians

who discovered works by artists who are

women in the basements

of their museums and the term old

masters in art history

or in fact the old the art market refers

to art from the 16th to the 18th century

so they wanted to show that

the term four artists great artists of

the past of this great era

was already gender specific and you

couldn't have a feminine equivalent

because if you say old mistresses

it doesn't have the sense of master it

has the hence sense of being a sexual

a kept woman or in fact it's the origin

of mrs the mistress of

somebody so they already said look it's

it's their

language we don't even have a way to

speak this so

there were a number of books in the

1970s 60s and 70s which were you know

our hidden heritage

you know women artists from this to that

there's a lot of documentation that

simply because it was very easy to find

them

i think it's very important for the

public to understand although no art

historians were teaching

an art history of the west with women in

it it was very easy for us to find the

dictionaries to find the archives to

find the paintings

so when rosie parker and i decided we

would write our book

based on conversations we've done with

the women's art history collective

we asked ourselves two questions what

did we have to add

to this existing rediscovery model

putting women back on show organizing

exhibitions

making survey histories of women artists

and the other was that we both had a

supervisor

at the courthole institute later the

director of the tate gallery alan bones

who laughed at me he said get on with

your thesis

don't worry about this trivial subject

it's ridiculous

and you're wasting your intelligence on

something that has no

value and so we wanted to know

why alan bernese could laugh at us

studying women artists it's not the same

as saying oh they're no good

it was you know it was beneath contempt

it was ridiculous

and we thought if we could understand

why that's possible

we would have not just been rediscovery

and returning our hidden heritage to the

bookshelves where it will stay

we would be able to understand what the

structural function of art historical

discourse is to produce

an art history without women to produce

an art history in which it is

normal for the artist to be a man and a

straight man

and to suppress all other complexity and

to suppress

women specifically except in so far as

you reference them as i said before to

be

this stereotype of lack

so what we wanted to do was to analyze

the discourse the pattern

and we opened this by saying the

quotation from virginia woolf who says

if you go to the british museum you'll

find that there's

hundreds of books telling women what

they are

but very few written by women exploring

so you have to critique the the the the

old master model

and reveal it for what it is reveal

which is the great discovery when we

studied it

that women artists are recorded in

all the forms of art history including

vasari

including pliny you know went back to

all these these great people we have

classical art we know their names

right up to the formation of these big

dictionaries of all the artists of the

world

created by the germans at the beginning

of the 20th century

and 20th century art history modern art

history the one that was being published

by feiden and thames and hudson and was

being taught

they erased women absolutely so when i

was studying

no woman was taught to me no artist

woman was ever mentioned

and yet artists that i write about now

were living then

side by side they were in the height of

their careers

but they were being disappeared in their

lifetimes so we had to analyze art

history

we had to analyze the feminine

stereotype

we showed also the hierarchy between art

made in

oil and canvas versus textiles

needlework that particular what we

called crafty women

we then had looked at the ways in which

women negotiated this contradiction

between the image of the artist as the

masculine

and the image of the woman in the form

of the self-portraiture

and explored their diaries and writings

and then in the final

chapter we wanted to argue

explore the ways in which women what we

said negotiated

their situations of difference and they

made art as much because of the

specificity or the difference of their

situation

as despite it now normally people say

women were discriminated against so

linda nachland argues

women artists were discriminated against

and as a result there never were any

great women artists but once we get rid

of discrimination they'll be free

and i think our argument has won out

because women have not been

any more systematically recognized and

integrated

once we removed overt discrimination

i not been given access to education art

education

or not being chosen we still have a

minute number of women

being exhibited their art being bought

the museums are still three-quarters

empty as far as i'm concerned

and at the same time we don't have a

language to say how women

negotiated difference now this is the

really crucial thing because it's not

there are women and i say that this is

what women are and this is what men

are we're talking about not having a

unitary solitary

hegemonic ideal but exploring how

difference

is creative sometimes difficult

but it's negotiated so in the final

chapter

we were looking at artists of the 20th

century particularly in surrealism

but my favorite which i i've come back

to because i've just re

gone back to this question is to compare

jackson pollock's painting method with

the painting method of helen frankentala

so we've got two

abstract artists for whom the manner in

which you put

paint on canvas is the process

and is the effect and you ask yourself

the question not

do men have men things in their minds

and they drop it on canvas and women

have women things on their mind and they

bleed it into their canvas

but how does an art practice that

involves the body in its own movements

involves a certain kind of revery as you

engage in a kind of almost a ritual

practice of moving paint

is there a way in which that is

inscribing

something that comes from different ways

in which we live our embodied lives

live our psychic lives live the time

lines of our lives to live the sort of

time space

of masculinities and femininities

because

we also can't ask you know ignore the

question

that you know the the kind of image of

van gaal and the image of jackson

pollock are these very

heterosexual images which also silence

the question of queer subjectivities let

alone black queer subjectivities black

subjectivities

so my idea for what i model for old

mistresses works for

ex you know exploring artists of

color artists of different sexualities

and genders

and we were constantly aware that we

could not simply

propose a kind of question of gender

over these others

but what feminists meant was to ask the

question of

difference as simultaneously sometimes a

constraint

there are obstacles and limitations but

there are also possibilities

and in you know contributions to the

world

so reading artists like artemisia

gentileschi or

elizabeth vijay lebron or rosa bonner or

mary cassatt or helen frankenthal or lee

krasner

this becomes not a matter of saying here

are the women artists you've missed out

but here are situations in art making

for instance the 1950s the mccarthyite

era the cold war

all these elements and i've just

finished a book based on a long

chapter that i i wrote many in the 1990s

called killing men and dying women which

is trying to explore

how to imagine the

questions of sexual difference and

abstract painting

in this particular moment without kind

of

using gender man and woman but

exploring masculinities femininities

issues of class issues of jewishness all

of these are complex forms of difference

which will be negotiated

and it's my job as an art historian to

to read them

not just to celebrate the greatness and

give you the reasons why you should find

great

but to read the artwork as a piece of

work as a working

and this kind of project coming from old

mistresses

has led me as i look back as to what i

subsequently wrote

you'll see i don't often write

monographs i have written on mary kasat

and on charlotte solomon and i'm trying

to write my book on van gogh which i've

failed to write for generations but lots

and lots of pieces on the way

but what i tend to do is to take

problems so my books are

old mistresses women art and ideology

and then

vision and difference so this is

absolutely what i'm talking about how

does that

question of visuality of the image and

difference how can we read that

um then gender and the color of art

history

how do you unpick the implicit racism in

art history

and then on the other hand the next one

was how do you deal with the

postcolonial

that artists don't come from europe but

we don't want to have

ethnic nationalism to say they're

japanese or chinese or korean

so i came up with this concept of

generations and geographies in which

each artist is understood in a kind of

familial

biographical history but also a kind of

a timeline of the history of their own

society

and they're also in a sort of

geographical space line because they may

have been

you know born in in taipei but live in

new york and practice in berlin

right so you need these double axes

which are not confining artists as

representatives of nations or

ethnicities or

genders or classes but are dynamically

living

in these different ways and then the

next big one which was an answer to old

mistresses was

in the 1990s i said given what i wrote

we wrote in old mistresses why has the

cannon not

disappeared so what do we do with the

cannon why is it

in place how does feminism deal with it

and i came up with this sort of deridian

concept of differencing the canon

which brings us back to van gogh bit

which is there's an essay

in that book on van gogh and also on

toulouse la trek

to show that a feminist interest

in the questions of the sort of the

psychoanalytical and the psychosocial

condition of an artist in relation to

the question of

the mother right and question of of

uh how the mother figures for

all subjects i could read that in van

gogh and i couldn't read it in van gaal

if some part of that psychosocial

formation was not available to me as

well

so i was both differencing the canon by

introducing him to a feminist reading

at the same time situating myself as the

reader

in terms of this shared question of the

psychosocial formation of subjectivity

and then my most recent concept is

called the virtual feminist museum and

this comes

about because um i think

i always said to myself that the the

curators the keepers of the canon

the people who are the gatekeepers of

museums and

and and indeed academic publishing do

not think i'm a real art historian

because i mix up psychoanalysis and

sociology and philosophy

but you can see i'm i'm always focused

on reading the work that is about art

history i

am an artistry but they wouldn't trust

me right because you might mislead the

public because you might come along and

ask them to

think something which is not canonical

and official knowledge

so i never got to do any exhibitions and

yet i think

the exhibition is this lovely form where

you

you have a certain proposition made to

you by somebody who chooses a group of

works to be there

and then individually we wander in and

we make our own conversations we see a

relationship between this or that

we bring our own lives and say this

means a lot to me where's that one you

say it's great but it doesn't mean a lot

to me

so i wanted a form in which i wasn't

going to be authoritatively

writing about artworks and illustrating

them

as the subset to my story i wanted

people to have a sense that here's a

collection of things that i think

talk to each other in non-canonical ways

breaking through different medium you

know sometimes a film shot sometimes a

drawing a painting

sometimes a poster something like that

which indicates this

cultural conversation across all the

media and then

my text is not illustrated it's my

proposition it's my reading

but it means that i'm i found myself

getting close

to abby vargok who's an early 20th

century

art historian that we sort of recently

recovered

who made these great panels and put art

together

in ways that defied the story of nation

period movement style master

he he had an idea of images migrating

and their meanings changing

in relation to different times so i

don't then look like someone who's done

the big book on michelangelo or the big

book on

artemisia gentileschi i have created

concepts with which to think a feminist

project

exploring difference and diversity

i think your work on the virtual

feminist museum is a key example and

have you worked to develop

new forms of practice after all you're

parker's critique of the flawed logic

behind the attempt to write

artist women into the established canine

in old mistresses

is now almost 40 years old yet we see

the art museums today keep throwing

shows after shows

that centers on bringing rediscovered

artist women into the canine

there's a kind of cruel optimism at play

here for while these shows seem to

suggest that something is changing

the logic of the canine seems to secure

that everything remains the same

but the virtual feminist museum offers a

different alternative here it seems

to these kind of add-on histories

offered by rediscovery shows

as it seems to create not just a

different context for revisioning art

history

but also a different kind of encounter

with art itself

to me there seems to be a political and

i'm almost tempted to say utopian

gesture at play in your work on creating

these new forms of encounter

thank you so much for bringing that up

because that the the encounters in the

virtual famous museum is the the

the full title of the book time space

and the archive and that the concept of

encounter i i take from my

kind of sublet sort of you know the work

that goes on beside of i've very long

been interested in the work of an artist

who's also a psychoanalytical theorist

bracha

littenbergberg ettinger known as bracha

ettinger now

and i encountered her work in in the

1990s and i was absolutely compelled by

her painting primarily that's what i

encountered first at her as an artist

but then i discovered that she had sort

of translated the

discoveries she was making in her own

painting as

a child born into the double catastrophe

of uh the nachbar and the holocaust

and trying to negotiate again like my

generation the 68 this sort of traumatic

legacy

of unsolved nationalisms and ethnicisms

and the legacies of

european genocide so um and she

offers a particular theory of

subjectivity

as encounter of

understanding the term encounter is a

term which is

i think so perfect for our thinking

about art history

and the experience we have of art

because so much of art history

has become a kind of master discourse

this is

i do the historic research i tell you

what it means i tell you what's great

this is the canon this is why you should

be studying this

and the museum uh lays this out

spatially tells you the story leads you

through the minor works to the great

works

doesn't give you a freedom to i mean

obviously you have a freedom to wander

but actually there is a logic

in that and i wanted this uh notion that

you cannot predict what comes out of the

encounter

i am not the master artist or in telling

you what these works mean or why women

are important

i'm trying to find out how to bring to

other people's attention things that

require all of my skill all of my

intelligence all of my learning to

enable me to fragilize myself to

sensitize myself

to what might be happening in this work

what is this work

doing and so the idea of the encounter

is as you say precisely a kind of

political

mode that challenges the authoritative

the hegemonic

the official the canonized the exclusive

dominant story that is given to you as

knowledge as history

as the story of art while at the same

time

offering very serious and very deep

propositions arguments

right that there's something there so in

my book

on uh um encounters in the virtual

museum

i have a section called visions of sex

which is

exploring the kind of whole in

kind of interest in the question of the

body and desire

and sexuality in the beginning of 20th

century that that echoes with

um d.h lawrence's novels it echoes with

obviously the impact of freud and

psychoanalysis

it echoes with women

entering modernism and you know not

painting venuses but beginning to

explore how would the representation of

their bodies

and one of my key chapters is about

josephine baker

african-american dancer who's known for

performing these very erotic semi-nude

images that people see as completely

exploitative racist and exploitative and

that she's subject to the colonializing

gays

but when i studied her talking about

what it meant

as a woman a black an african-american

woman whose history is that of

sexual abuse as a race a piece of

property

in the in era of enslavement and bearing

the the mark of being seen as a sort of

dark and and and sort of degenerate

race by racist society what it meant for

her

to discover her own beauty as a dancing

body as a black body

and that her dancing was as it were her

authoring her own musicality

knowingly in defiance of a gaze that

could easily

treat her in its to a racist view

but she was not succumbing to it at the

same time i went on to look at what

happened to the body

after the holocaust because what we

witnessed being done

in the real through the concentration

camps and through the

extermination camps has meant we no

longer can pretend that the tradition

of the christian body or raphael's

three graces these bodies of beauty or

giorgione's lovely nude lying in the

landscape

once you see women lying in a landscape

you've been shot to death just for being

jewish

in the photograph there is a rupture and

i want it in the book to show that art

history

has ignored this it fails to understand

the depth of the rupture

of what happened in the 20th century and

we are on two sides of it

and this brought me to a chapter in my

book on charlotte solomon

whom i've now written an entire book

about

because she comes to us on the other

side of the rupture because she was

murdered in auschwitz

but her work was made before that was

conceivable

in this period i call before auschwitz

so i'm also rewriting or rethinking the

the epochs right so the normal art

history you'll get in a museum would be

um you know modernism we'll have some

cubism and fauvism and then we'll have

some dish style and then we'll

you know move on to some of the sort of

surrealism and then we'll get to

abstract expressionism

and then they don't know what happened

they'll probably get pop art and

minimalism

and then they have to have just

contemporary art

right but they still try to give you

that map well

you know where is the first world war

where is the second world war

where is the depression where is the

first flights

you know where are the um uh the the

sort of um

obviously the holocaust where is the

sense of the

nuclear cold war the threat of the cold

war

so if you just have a chronological

survey and that

you you miss this sense that art is

shaped by these historical events but

also gives a form

to them and the transformation of art

is that so my second installation of the

virtual feminist museum is called after

affects after images

trauma and aesthetic transformation

because the big question then is

what can art do in the face of

um in sense the defeat of modernity the

the kind of

the the understanding that its promise

was betrayed

still has the promise democracy freedom

justice rights

but we witness these terrible betrayals

and we have to come to terms with

them but at the same time art now

deals with that and so much of our 20th

late 20th early 21st century art is

now not suddenly conceptual because it

stopped being formal

it still has to transform produce

formulations

right and i think museums are

unable to understand

what the social history what feminist

art history um

would require of it as a form

in order to enable people to see that so

that

that's why i've used the book form to

say here are some of the

the terms we might think about once you

put them in play you will see the work

for what it's doing and forming for us

as a transport station of trauma

that not everybody will encounter and

meet it's the encounter

is not predictable right because there

isn't

a right story and you're not learning

the right story

you're opening yourself up to what

artists

ask of us through the forms that they've

created

for formulating suffering

joy ecstasy pleasure

desire all these death life all these

big questions and i think people would

have

a much greater engagement with art and

and and experience art not as something

to be consumed

as a fashionable item or go and stand in

front of museums and sort of

you know you know whenever they film

people in museums they're always

standing in sort of semi

religious or right because

many people don't have enough to say oh

i see that's what's going on

oh maybe that's interesting no i don't

agree with you but i do see something

going on

so i think there is a change you're

right absolutely and i

i think um i was forced into as it were

a book form and i've in terms of my own

curation

i've learned another thing which is i

curated an exhibition of bracha

ettinger's

work and then i had to write the book

afterwards

because i realized

bringing the work together paying the

fees you know

getting the taxes getting the delivery

isn't what has happened when the work

actually comes into

encounter itself encountering the space

encountering people

so i wrote this book called art writing

after the event

as a model for in a sense of not

thinking the curator

formulates and puts on the walls and

then we just have a few catalogs with

illustrations

it is a work of art itself for artists

to produce an exhibition

yeah your latest book charlotte solomon

theater of memory from 2018 is also

relevant to this regard

as it addresses the question of how we

encounter works of art in other ways

the book grows out of a more than 25

year long attempt of trying to

understand

what this specific artwork is really

about the piece called

leben orateata life question mark or

theater question mark

that charlotte solomon worked on in the

first years of the 1940s

in berlin and later in southern france

leading up to her deportation

and murder in auschwitz i wonder if you

could say something about the process

of writing this book as i think it

brings together so many important

strands of your work

not only the engagement with history of

art modernism

and the position of women and jewish

women in particular herein

but also your way of staying close to

the material in this case the more than

700 paintings

that constitute this work by solomon the

work you also read as a philosophical

inquiry

and as a document of social political

and historical

moment that can teach us something

important about trauma memory

and subjectivity in quite extraordinary

ways

absolutely i mean um you've described

the

the the project of labor no detail life

or theater beautifully there matthias

because

it's an art historical anomaly

most people to be considered an artist

have to be exhibited written about

documented their work has to be lots of

it it has to have a beginning a middle

and late career and it has to be in a

museum

and charlotte solomon who was murdered

when she was 26

began at the age of about 24 23 24

this monumental cycle which she produced

784 in fact she produced over a thousand

paintings

in possibly about a year and

we don't know what it is we don't know

entirely

why she made it there's nothing like it

in the history of

of art and yet it's completely conscious

of the history of art

it's very knowing it knows about opera

it knows about music it knows about

cabaret

it knows about um you know it's almost

sort of walter benjamin-esque in its

interest in in the sort of city and

memory

uh it's clearly influenced by a concept

nature there's a great engagement with

the first world war and a survivor of

the trenches and there's

all these issues and it's witness to the

rise of nazism

and she goes to art school in the third

reich

watching all her jewish professors

disappear being allowed to be there

because her father was a veteran of the

first world war and she's the only

jewish student in her class

she witnesses the degenerate art show

that was

all the modern art that hitler got

together in order to say it's jewish and

it's bolshevik and degenerate and will

be exiled from the new

you know aryan third reich uh so she got

a whole history of modern art

as a gift of of hitler very interesting

but she made this work

and so many of us when we discovered it

particularly in the feminist community

particularly in the kind of jewish

studies community particularly those of

us working

in and around the issue of the holocaust

immediately said

we must work on this and

most people have taken it as an

autobiography

have made it a kind of a visual and

frank

she's another woman victim of you know

young girl young woman victim of the

holocaust who left us this sort of

account of her life and i knew it wasn't

i you know in a kind of pig-headed sort

of way i said i just don't think this

is adequate to this there's too many

complexities to it

so what you you've been saying with us

is quite right the only thing i had to

do was to say

i have to be an artist or if i can do an

art historical analysis

i have to start what am i looking at

how would i describe it and i always

teach my students this

which is you must always start your work

with looking at things and i remember

when i was first

doing my 19th century work going back to

the beginning of this conversation the

courthold i went to the

um the the poem that was where the

modern paintings were and i remember

standing in front of

mane's olympia and saying

i don't think i know what to do so i

wrote it's very large

right there are two people in it you

know

there's a cat i just made myself start

with the stupidest

simplest what am i seeing and making

myself by describing it

begin to see it and i when i do my van

gogh research i was sent

to to the crawler muller which has this

wonderful collection of van gogh

drawings

and they put me in a little glass box

with all these incredibly precious boxes

and i looked at them and i thought

i don't have the first clue what is

because i'm you know i'm just a rookie

artist or in this point and so i take my

pencil and says

i didn't expect them to be so large

because they're these great

drawings that are imperial size and then

i noticed

that he pressed very heavily on the

outlines

and then i you know that was when that

led me to make and

he's copying he's these drawings are

like you copy

you know when you are not trained drawer

you when you're trained in draftsman

you're looking at space and volume and

you do all sorts of interesting ways to

get it no he just drew an outline so i

thought ah

copy book apprentice this is why he

could never do anything

because he never learned to draw volumes

so that's

that sense of how you make a discovery

is by just

what am i looking at you know what's it

made of

so with the labor not a tayata i taught

myself gouache painting and i copied

some of her paintings to say

how long would it take to do this what

does it feel

with this kind of material to make these

marks

what kind of brushes did she use how did

she establish things and i had to get

into this

process and then by analyzing

the different works with my refusal to

accept it's autobiographical

i concluded as you said that it's an

investigation if you have a

work which has two question marks

it's life or death right living or dying

life or theater two question marks

what is you know how did this come about

what what are the stakes involved

and so the the book is designed and

going back to the question we had before

i i knew how i would want that book

designed

because i want the reader not to get

this work follows this work this fault

works but what i realized is

if i treated it like a detective fiction

like a mystery something happens as a

crime

starts with a crime a woman kills

herself

not a crime but it is a crime in sense

because she kills herself because of

something

and it ends with the work where the

woman is

the image of the painter is painting her

first

painting so it and

it sort of ends where it's starting so

it's reverse time

and if you study detective fiction you

get all sorts of clues put in

all of which sort of make you think this

is what's going on oh it's him no it's

her

oh that's what's happening okay but

eventually

the idea is to bring it together in such

a way as you say

oh right that's what it is

so i wanted to treat this work as

a mystery it's asking questions

it's a philosophy of should i die

or should i kill someone or have some

did somebody die you know this is the

thing and once you do that

the paintings come to life and again

going back to what was saying before

about exhibitions they always exhibit it

um chronologically so people think

they're following a story

but i thought in a book i could go

backwards and forwards i could say

we're not going to do that logic i'm

going to have eight

paintings which will be keys and then i

can

open each work to a whole sequence

around it

so that i begin to plot out as as you're

saying the

the historical because it's the rise of

nazism but it's also the story

of three women and then

for ultimately four women one who kills

herself

another one who kills herself another

one um

well then there's three there's a

grandmother who also does and then

there's a singer

and then there's a professor and then

there's an artist and if i

treated it like a brestian play which we

all were characters

i wouldn't fall into this

autobiographical over personalizing

because people then when they write

about women they immediately talk about

charlotta

frieda merit louise

now we don't talk about pablo or ori or

gerhart

right the author name the patronym is

the artist's name

and then women are automatically things

and the first publications on charlotte

solomon were

charlotte a diary in pictures that's

fair enough they thought that but

my book is designed so as the reader

goes through each chapter

they meet the key painting these eight

key paintings

and then all the supplementary

enrichment

and the complementary images etc

enable me to build a story about

a work that is what i call it suspended

between the

event and the everyday and the event

covers in sense the grand historical

landscape

of the 20s 30s and 40s weimar

the end of weimar the rise of the third

reich and then of course the

the the the war and the occupation of

france and her

her jeopardy as a jewish rep refugee in

france

but at the same time the everyday is

entirely this question that

feminism has made us ask about that what

seems to be not historical and not

political and not

social the everyday is the world of

intimacy domesticity uh indeed sexual

abuse

desire fantasy um

and and a different set of relations so

this is in a sense the culmination of

it's the only it's the book i could only

write

after 50 years of being an art historian

it needed all the things we've talked

about today

understanding art history understanding

the discourse understanding the problems

understanding the exclusions developing

concepts becoming aware like in

modernity in the spaces of femininity

this sense of how

different spaces in impressionist

painting allow us to understand

psychosocial existence embodiment desire

what is important or different or

indifferent to different groups

um why sexuality and commercial

sexuality is this big

area but why the relationships between

women or children

and adults becomes a sort of place for

mary cassette so when i came also with

having

dedicated all of the 90s to developing

courses on

the formation of the cultural memory of

the holocaust

and the entry of the holocaust into

cultural representation museums

films visual art literature philosophy

theology i was able to sort of you know

prepare myself and then because of the

work with

bracha ettinger and the interest in

psychoanalysis that i originally got

from

film theory as it passed into feminist

psychoanalysis

and trauma theory i had the tools with

which

to do this close reading

and hopefully make this work

something other than an autobiography in

pictures

of a tragic set of stories and i have an

argument

which was then confirmed and we got a

lost document came back

but i did re-read this book in

anticipation

of this conversation knowing it as i did

when i wrote it

i advised no one to read it in bed it's

too heavy it would fall on your nose and

break it if you're reading it

the only way i think to read it is to

take it chapter by chapter to take these

little sweets

and have us an experience between it of

how

how it's building this architecture

to enable people to um

arrive at the sense of the shocking

the wonderful things she did the

philosophical thing this artist did like

no other

but also how those realities of the

event and every day

might have led to something

which i won't reveal to you because

you'll discover it if you read the book

but it is

absolutely shattered everybody in the

charlotte salomon world

to discover that she could say do i die

or does he die do i kill or do i live

and that really takes us to the depths

of

his when we talk about trauma or

historic

um events that are so unimaginable

as living on the cusp of imprisonment

and death at the hands of the nazis then

that's what i want people to feel not

the banal smoothed over

but the intensity and the brilliance and

the depth

that art takes us to if we prepare

ourselves

adequately to encounter it

this brings us to your work with a

large-scale research project on

concentrationary memories

that you've developed with max silverman

over the last 15 years or so

this project really exemplifies how you

develop concepts

that allow us to work across statical

social and political histories

in new ways the concept of the

concentrationary invites us to consider

practices of dehumanization not only

as these extraordinary events but as

processes that are sparing on the

everyday

in totalitarian regimes and contexts

it offers an approach to analyze and

theorize the destruction of humanity

also beside and beyond the concentration

camps in world war

ii and today where new forms of fascism

seem to be on the rise where populations

are relegated to

slow deaths and detention camps this

concept of the concentration area seems

to have much to offer

how did the project on the concentration

or memory develop

thank you very much that's it's a really

important part so um

the center cathode is a

transdisciplinary and that's not an

interdisciplinary

it means that we bring different

disciplines together around a shared

concept

and so we look at it from these

different very specific i do

understand disciplinary ways of thinking

are it's not a mishmash

concentration memories followed on from

the fact that both max

and i were um deeply influenced by

sigmund bowman

who was the professor of sociology at

leeds and then emeritus at leeds and

in 1989 his book holocaust and modernity

shattered the world

by making this connection that the

holocaust

intensifies not the product of modernity

was made a possibility by

the rationality the logic of modernity

and we were both teaching holocaust

studies and he was in french literature

and i'm one of the first people to do a

course in

holocaust studies in in cultural studies

and and and visual arts history of art

um

but we increasingly became aware that

there was a confusion

between extermination genocidal

extermination which happens

in four or five key sites

in poland during thing called operation

reinhardt

it extends a little bit later at

auschwitz most of those sites are

destroyed and gone and most the people

who were sent to extermination camps

were jewish and died within one to two

hours of being there

the concentration camp predates

extermination

and is a form which we find not only in

used by people in you know cuba

and british and south africa and

uh other and other societies beforehand

but it becomes an instrument of a terror

of a society that is going to be ruled

by terror

and the political deportees from france

many of them left wing that's why they

were opposed to the third reich

when they survived they came back and

they gave us this kind of anatomy of

what they called luniver consultation

that this is a society created within a

society

to erode it from within and

post-war the man who wrote the universe

concentrating david will say

learned about the gulags that stalin was

setting up

and learned about the use of the old

concentration camp

sites in germany by the east german

communist regime and so we're suddenly

going to realize that this wasn't

finished as you know the extermination

did destroy six million people and is is

finished but the concentrationary

is a phenomenon of of totalitarianism

which

societies i mean you could look at the

dictatorships in latin america you could

look at apartheid that's a

concentrational society

and increasingly we can see the elements

of that

in our way of dealing with asylum

seekers we are creating camps

we are depriving people of the rights to

have rights

in all sorts of ways our society uh

is permeate a bit but so we wanted to

look at this

holocaust memory is a memory in which

you mourn

the devastation and destruction of the

jewish civilization of europe

and the six million people who were

destroyed and all the

philosophers and the laughters and the

artists like charlotte solomon who never

lived to be themselves because of that

we also mourn and we mourn at the

everyday

but concentrationary memory is one

that's meant to agitate

us to say look about you this virus

they even call it the plague la peste

this

disease of the concentrationary doesn't

lie

buried under the ruins of auschwitz it's

alive and well

and permeates our society so

concentration manary

is a way of asking ourselves to be

vigilant to know its signs and to be

vigilant for all aspects of it

that are present and concentrationary

imaginaries

which is an element of that is i became

aware that

elements of what we had understood as

the concentration rate permeates popular

culture

it's a condition of so much of the

increasingly

violent nature of cinema

the nature in which every film i go to

in which i know and accept that somebody

won't make it to the end

who are the casualties go back to my

vanguard thing who who do we allow to

do do we sacrifice now

they're always the lower paid actors you

know if he's a high paid he'll probably

make it to the end of the movie etc

but we do not mourn the deaths

of many of them who pass through a movie

a black man will be shot

you know a woman will be raped as the

condition or murdered or

you know mutilated as the condition for

the story we don't

mourn it we're not affected by it so

one of myself and benjamin hanover

cousin

we worked on this kind of concentration

imaginaries how is it

seeped into percolated into reshaped

normalized our expectations of a world

in which we are indifferent to the abuse

of the humanity of another

now that's very intimate with the

feminist project

the ettinger project of what makes me

unable not to share so there's the

impossibility of not sharing

the pain of the other is the feminist

position

and how do we get to an ethical politics

in which we cannot

tolerate the diminution of human

beings as human beings so i think

concentration remember coming out of a

historical

sort of a distinction and a framing of

the two different elements of

totalitarianism and genocidal racism

comes to something that we now have to

say it seeps into our culture it's

normalized itself we have to be

vigilant and wary of all these

um kind of softening of the edges of our

own acute

ethical compassion

and uh in we have also just published

the third one which we did

one on concentrational film

concentration memories concentrationary

imaginaries which is about pop terrorist

terror and popular culture

and now concentrationary art which

bridges between the notion of what is it

to return

from the camp with the figure of lazarus

the returner who carries the dead and

now

you know we think about all those men

and women who served in all the wars

that everybody says you know they never

spoke right they didn't my father didn't

speak they didn't say what they went

through

um i think this weekend they're marking

the

uh end of the war in japan in europe

that they're and of course many of the

people there said might

they lived in the the camps of the

japanese they never spoke of it

you know and that silence then gets

passed on and generations

don't know what it was that their

fathers or their mothers

endured and then it but it's passed on

so this question of trauma and

transmission

or memory in the failure of memory or

the failure of vigilance

and why in the the heart of this is

hannah arendt that we

whose argument about totalitarianism and

the human condition

suddenly became so urgent for me as

a framing that although she was never a

feminist

actually led me to um you know a

question if i can just read this that i

really

do want to say which is how can feminist

thought break the cycle of crimes

against humanity

that are so symbolically bound up with

both the negation of humanity

to the feminine to women an

identification of death

and the face of horror like the medusa

with women

who are seen as threatening or killing

or the killed why is gender the

repressed question

of the analysis of contemporary violence

so they all weave in together

as different facets of a kind of

expanded transdisciplinary

cultural studies but in each of the

books

the core of what i contribute is this

close close reading of art

working what art does the work of art

as something doing something producing

something

wanting to be read in complex ways in

order to have its effect

and not just to be celebrated as

now as an object which has a huge price

tag

or the thing the the exhibition you must

see

the artist you must know the name

you know the celebrity and all those

things are now

worse than when i started because

they're entirely financialized

and the market is the thing determining

uh

sales and and artists now entertainment

on television with these same old

stories these heroic stories

and all of what we've done for the last

50 years as feminists

and cultural analysts is you know not

taken into the world not given to the

public

in the terms that can give them a sense

of being enabled to understand their

world

your work testifies to the ways in which

art history and cultural analysis can

enable people to better understand the

world that we live in

in the face of many urgencies of our

times we are dependent on critical tools

to help us

identify and describe the problems as

well as to find ways to responding to

them

i'm thinking here for instance the

ongoing corona pandemic

which is the reason why we're talking to

each other unsafe social distance

between leeds and copenhagen

and around us different social movements

from me too to black lives matter

are fighting structural sexism racism

and discrimination

in society as well as in cultural

institutions such as the university and

the art museum

what do you think that we art historians

and cultural analysts can offer in

response to these urgencies of our time

yeah i think i'd answer that by saying

two things one is um

we are probably going to look to artists

and writers and even

philosophers and psychologists to help

us

understand what we're actually living

through because we are

in the midst of it and we don't have

terms so i looked up some of the stuff

about the spanish flu

to see whether or not there are traces

of that in literature did it reshape and

some people even argue

that the fracturing and the fragmentary

and the devastated quality of modernism

was itself a register not only of the

first world war but of the pandemic

and this terrifying encounter with this

sort of viral death

uh that came with the spanish flu um i

think we will be

asking ourselves huge questions because

we don't know how long will this will

last

we live in an age with things oh it's

going to be over soon it's not we will

never go back to normal

we will never have the same trust um

because

this virus will come and they have been

warning like bill gates

in 2015 said the next big danger in the

world

he gave a great talk a ted talk 2015 you

must prepare

for a pandemic a viral pandemic so i

think this

is a huge issue and what we need to do

is it's not

um art history it's we we need to know

how to read art as having already talked

to its own history

given forms to the the formless

sense of menace or fear or panic or

uncertainty

or anger or rage and also we need to

i think bring art and and cultural

analysis

and the the rigors and disciplines of

ways of

thinking conceptualization testing

concepts against evidence

because we also live in an era of the

social media in which the platform

is now binaristic to a degree

i'm for you i'm against you i'm

canceling you you're right you're not

right

you say something about this and you are

absolutely will send you death threats

this is a cultural phenomenon that we

are passively

allowing to occur at the price of a

quality of humanity

which is not let's be reasonable in an

old-fashioned you know

this is just you know badly behaved what

is that this is a culture and i will

you know put it online i think social

media and particularly some of those

platforms

will prove in the future to have been

historically devastating

for humanity i think this is of a

seriousness that we should

take it and we learn this fry we are

always 50 years too late

right just as i said at the beginning i

you know i'm you know post

a post talk you know post traumatic

generation 68

you know the 1989 us but now it's not

the 1989ers

you know but the kids who are born you

know after the beginning of the 20th

you know my students you know were

probably three when you know

9 11 happened you know and they don't

even notice that 2007 the smartphone

changed the world right

all of this is just normal to them but i

think this

is a a a challenge for education it's a

challenge for us in the arts and

humanities

and the one thing i always say to people

about art history

is if it is the art history that makes

you analyze the cultural and the visual

and the

image and these processes

of of that that shape our very sense of

what reality

is more so than even the literary or the

philosophical or theological or the

day people are exposed to images we can

teach people to read their own culture

and find a distance within it to

negotiate it

they probably won't be as critical as i

am because i'm

another generation and i am not a

millennial but

we need to speak to them not as to say

but

we have tools that might enable you to

find the space

to make the decisions about which part

of your culture

is dehumanizing totalitarian

in its way and which is for justice and

freedom

and will make us unable to tolerate

the levels of human suffering that are

the reality of our world and have just

been

made infinitely worse by

the pandemic because natural disasters

are human disasters and they

impact in terms of class race

ability all the key factors and gender

all of them make the pandemic infinitely

worse

perhaps i could convince you to share

some of the work you're currently

engaged in

and perhaps also some of the work that

the holberg price might enable you to

undertake

if you already have started making plans

i i have um i have four books that i

have to write

one is feminism a bad memory to recover

the memory of feminism explain it

holocaust and cultural memory um

the van gogh book and a book on uh

marilyn monroe which is a book about the

1950s america and the 1950s and

the interface between high culture and

popular culture so i've got lots

lined up i've also got lots of artists

that i have to help

one of the things i i feel in the

pandemic is

lots of young artists have come out of

art school and have

not only very little opportunity to work

as artists but not any

very little opportunity to to work

because they would support themselves as

being baristas and

you know museum guards and all these

kinds of casual places which keep

the the emerging artists so i i'm

working

with a project in leeds to do something

at least directly for

the the first of four generations of

students who've just left that

emerging group in their twenties as well

as older artists because lots of women

become artists later in their lives so

there's those um

i i want to create some continuity of

somebody who will teach

feminist theory in the way that i feel

it needs to be taught with this level

of understood it's not just a little

somebody to teach a few women

artists it's it's feminist theory for

most art history um

i i want to do some scholarships and i i

think there are

a number of um projects that will

be specific to my research developing

supporting mentoring

um in in the future so i'm in the

beginnings of processes but the pandemic

has also made

not only that this is virtual but has

hit

a particular community of artists uh

very seriously and that's

that i'm going to do that quite locally

in leeds because

encouraging other people to do the same

for each of their cities

thank you so much grisola pollock for

engaging in conversation today

and congratulations once more on the

hubbard praise

well thank you very much yourself

because i know you've done a great deal

of work to understand it

and shape this and it's been an absolute

delight

to talk with you and since this is

actually so far the only

moment of really feeling that i'm part

of the holberg community

i can't thank you enough for having done

it so profoundly and so intelligently

and it's been a delight to talk with you

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