Femininmasculin. - book reviews

These books also return us to the question, Do the humanities matter? Is there such a thing as a discipline of the humanities? I trust the reader will understand my argument: There is and they do. Art historians engage in reading both art and history. Current work in the area of cultural history suggests a variety of approaches to criticism, but the significance of historical consideration is basic to the field. Methodologies that are wedded to gender theory, as formalism was the essential creed of late modernism, model and explain how we look now. The historian must be aware of and respect the limits of subjectivity, then grapple with objects. The data in these texts, however often deployed at the service of ideology, can, applied with discipline and an awareness of the specific political bias, provoke a sensitivity to the present that is one function of a liberal education.

Notes

1. Sherry Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" in Michelle Zimbalist Rolsaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Woman, Culture, and Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974).

2. Surely Hildebrand (1847-1921) cannot be considered a Nazi sculptor.

3. Bernard Rudofsky, The Unfashionable Human Body (New York: Prentice Hall, 1986); this book is cited by Dutton.

4. Michel Feher with Romona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi, Fragments for a History of the Human Body (New York: Zone Books, 1989). These volumes, distributed by MIT, constituted numbers 3, 4, and 5 of the Zone Books series.

5. The cover image, Tono Stano's Sense, has already been lifted by Hollywood for the poster of Showgirls; even as that movie was failing at the box office, its producers filed suit against an escort service that had adapted the image in a line drawing on its calling card. Body should serve as a sourcebook for such designers far into the future.

6. Remy Saisselin, The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers, 1984). Susan Buck-Morss's recent writings would provide an enlightening critique in this area. The direction indicated by her "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered," October 62 (Fall 1992), raises many possibilities for a post-Soviet critique of production and consumption. The tired assumption of consumption as feminine must be discarded as a corruption of Marxism and unworthy of further intellectual consideration. A corollary of this is the acceptance of the realities of "feminine" production through consumption, as in the realm of taste - decor, fashion, shopping - which issue is often provocatively raised by Tina Barney, who is in Posner's selection.

7. Richard Kendall and Griselda Pollock, Dealing with Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision (New York: Universe, 1991). Among the pleasures in an extended work that is likely to be absent in these assembled papers from symposia are observations on methodology such as Callen's in The Spectacular Body: "The inevitable linearity of the numbered catalogue imposes a clear beginning, middle and end in a manner quite alien to how art is actually conceived and made and in the case of Degas, to the Quixotic, repetitive and obsessive character of the artist's working methods. This type of art historical scholarship identifies 'artist' with 'logical, analytic mind'" (p. 78).