Open Access

Isabelle Graw

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• My study on the work of women artists is based on the premise that they generally find themselves in a specific situation, a situation that is not due to the biological but to the social status that is assigned to them. I therefore do not assume an essential "differance" or some kind of female principle - far from it. The fact that the work of women artists is considered comparable in this study has more to do with what I call "processes of recognition." In fact, there are certain patterns of reception that can be observed and analyzed and that renders their work comparable. What I focus on is the way in which women artists have tried - through their work - to direct these "processes of recognition" or to change them. Special emphasis is given to the art work - I start from its close examination and elaborate theoretical models from it. The purpose of this study is a double one: It tries to do justice to specific art works while setting it in relation to the "horizon of values" within the art world. EvenMy study on the work of women artists is based on the premise that they generally find themselves in a specific situation, a situation that is not due to the biological but to the social status that is assigned to them. I therefore do not assume an essential "differance" or some kind of female principle - far from it. The fact that the work of women artists is considered comparable in this study has more to do with what I call "processes of recognition." In fact, there are certain patterns of reception that can be observed and analyzed and that renders their work comparable. What I focus on is the way in which women artists have tried - through their work - to direct these "processes of recognition" or to change them. Special emphasis is given to the art work - I start from its close examination and elaborate theoretical models from it. The purpose of this study is a double one: It tries to do justice to specific art works while setting it in relation to the "horizon of values" within the art world. Even those artworks which seem highly idiosyncratic are, in the view of this study, communicating with this horizon. Methodologically, two methods that are usually considered to exist far apart each other are combined: The sociological field examination of Pierre Bourdieu and the modernist sensibility of the early Clement Greenberg. Art works are set in relation to what Bourdieu has called the "space of the possible" - a space, he has defined as a given, that one has to count on. As a space this is characterised by a certain amount of possible constraints and possible uses. But while Bourdieu considers the possible uses of the space as limited, I consider it changeable - when elements of Judith Butler's model of performativity are employed. Meanwhile, art works are treated in an attentive way, with a special sensibility for their internal structure and materiality, for their surface or texture for instance. What is at stake in this study is once again the mediation between what Adorno called "Allgemeines und Besonderes" - the general and the particular. This method is not gender specific -it could be applied to the works of male artists as well. The concept of appropration is a key term in this study - for many reasons: It is assumed that artistic production is defined by appropriation in a new way, since Duchamp at the latest. Meaning is produced also through what has been appropriated. Appropriation is a concept that stands for the transition between aesthetics and ethics: It is an aesthetic key term and the central term for performative gender studies. One of the main insights of Gender Studies, that gender identity is constitued through an iterative performance, wouldn´t be conceivable without the notion of appropriation. Next to the figure of appropration which focuses on artistic production, the figure of the "exceptional woman" is introduced, in order to reflect upon the status of women artists and their reception. Like appropriation which implies a relationship between the appropriator and the appropriated, the figure of the "exceptional woman" implies the relationship between exception and rule. I work with this figure starting from the empirical observation that there has almost always been only one single woman artist per artistic formation that has been considered successful. Appropriation and exception - both terms are set into a dynamic relation. Because appropriation describes the possibility, to appropriate something, to possess it and to lay claims upon it. A claim that was by no means naturally given or foreseen for women artists. Therefore, an exceptional status was assigned to those women artists who actually made that claim, whose work stood for a practice of appropriation that was considered successful.…