the gendered-genre hierarchy in mark tansey's and vija celmins’ realist monochromes

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Notes

notes

Talia Bettcher, Jane Dini, and Randal Parker provided comments and support.. I particularly appreciate the generosity of Mark Tansey in providing permission to reproduce Still Life in this essay. I would like to thank the Angelaki anonymous reviewers for bringing a number of important errors and omissions to my attention. Some errors have been corrected but I am sure others remain. The editor of this special issue, Moira Gatens, has been both patient and encouraging.

1 Ruysch was the most successful of all the women still-life painters. She was court painter to the Elector Palatine, Johann Wilhelm von Pfalz, and in 1750, the year of her death, an anthology of poetry hailing her talent was published (Jansen 55).

2 Images of both Triumph of the New York School and Mont Sainte-Victoire are widely viewable on the Internet.

3 For Tansey's relation to Continental philosophy see Taylor. For general discussions of the gendered-genre hierarchy in relation to still life see both Bryson and Schor.

4 Sandra Bartky describes this predicament as “double ontological shock” (18).

5 For discussions of postmodernism in relation to feminism and art see Jones 29–40 and Sulieman 225–45. For discussions of analytic methods and feminism see Garry 7–29.

6 The gendering of irony is a wonderful topic and I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers who raised it and suggested Lacan's formulae of sexuation as a place to explore it. I am sorry I haven’t had time to take it up in this essay.

7 See Diane Hill for a discussion of contemporary feminist artists who prioritize the experiential/visual in their work.

8 Not everyone gets a free pass, and not everyone is guaranteed an easy reception for importing academic philosophy into art. I was once stunned to hear a female philosopher's voice projected from a loudspeaker at the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum. The speaker turned out to be Adrian Piper and her brilliant video work, Cornered (1988), addressed racial “passing.”

9 Much of Celmins’ work is viewable online. Unfortunately, most of the impact of her work is lost in reproduction.

10 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for pointing out that my initial version of this essay appeared to endorse an immediate understanding of works of art. That was not my intention and I hope the current version makes that clear. I do want to emphasize, however, that a commitment to a historically contextualized understanding of artworks is compatible with the claim that visual attentional competencies directed to subtle formal properties are also required to understand Celmins’ work.

11 See Csikszentmihalyi's finding that in the USA women's favorite objects in the home are things that symbolize their relations to those they love (family photos, grandmother's vase, etc.) whereas men's favorite objects are things they can act on or manipulate like power saws and stereos. Compare Tansey's use of the photocopier to manipulate photographic images with Celmins’ tendency to cherish her source images.

12 For a discussion of Peeters’ preoccupation with depicting her own reflection in still-life paintings see Brusati 168–82.

13 For an opposing view see Bryson. I acknowledge that homage to domesticity and its values often denigrates women and their domestic work.