Bachelors (October Books) - Hardcover

Krauss, Rosalind E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262112396 ISBN 13: 9780262112390

Publisher: Mit Pr, 1999

Synopsis

Since the 1970s Rosalind Krauss has been exploring the art of painters, sculptors, and photographers, examining the intersection of these artists concerns with the major currents of postwar visual culture: the question of the commodity, the status of the subject, issues of representation and abstraction, and the viability of individual media.

These essays on nine women artists—gathered as Bachelors—are framed by the question, born of feminism, "What evaluative criteria can be applied to women's art?" In the case of surrealism, in particular, some have claimed that surrealist women artists must either redraw the lines of their practice or participate in the movement's misogyny. Krauss resists that claim, for these "bachelors" are artists whose expressive strategies challenge the very ideals of unity and mastery identified with masculinist aesthetics. Some of this work, such as the "part object" (Louise Bourgeois) or the "formless" (Cindy Sherman) could be said to find its power in strategies associated with such concepts as ecriture feminine. In the work of Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, or Sherrie Levine, one can make the case that the power of the work can be revealed only by recourse to another type of logic altogether. Bachelors attempts to do justice to these and other artists (Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Louise Lawler, Francesca Woodman) in the terms their works demand.

About this title

About the Author

Rosalind Krauss is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University. She is the author of The Optical Unconscious, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, The Picasso Papers, and Passages in Modern Sculpture and the coauthor of Formless: A User's Guide.

Reviews

The esteemed Krauss (art, Columbia) is prominent in the field of deconstructionist, feminist, and psychoanalytical art criticism. This collection of her essays applies the theories to nine women artists, neo-Duchampian "bachelors" who mostly practiced photography, sculpture, and some filmmaking and painting. The artists distinguished by this complex rhetorical discourse include Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, Sherrie Levine, and Louise Lawler. Krauss demonstrates how each achieved the "feminization" of the male gaze. Although the formal notation of semiological analysis is clarified in an endnote, from the beginning Krauss assumes her readers to be totally conversant with and attuned to the scholasticism of postmodern art theory. Appropriate mainly for graduate- and professional-level collections.?Mary Hamel-Schwulst, Towson Univ., MD
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262112396
• ISBN 13: 9780262112390
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 222