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Who Are These Women?

Along the ramparts of the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art, there is a small exhibition of ancient female figurines, among them the oldest sculpture in the museum’s collection. What strange forms! Where are the supermodels, where are the Barbie dolls?

At the confluence of second-wave feminism and post-Freudian psychohistory, the mid-twentieth century saw a great burst of scholarship on images like these: the Great Mothers, the goddesses of wisdom and guile, the powerful matriarchs. These, the story goes, fell victim to the patriarchy of monotheistic religion (particularly Nicene Christianity) and were lost to the West, the lands of chivalrous knights, repressed popes, and femininity enslaved.

Through these figures, feminism found a prehistory. Its radical critique became more conservative than thou, a calling-back to those enigmatic epochs from which the stone and clay fragments came. The future no longer needed to be conjured out of thin air, for now feminism had a past to ground its future.

But who are these women? Do we know them, really? Are the psychohistorians correct? Scholarly whims can always change their tune—and in this case, often they did. Upon such rocks the future might be betrayed as well as built. Wouldn’t it be safer to make our revolutions ex nihilo, out of certainties in our hearts, rather than the vagaries of artifacts?

Eve ate of the apple and shared it with Adam, the apple that gave them knowledge of good and evil. Before you ask, Why Eve? (that important feminist question) ask, Why the apple? An apple isn’t some ancient flash drive upon which data might be stored. It contains no knowledge. Its contents download to the digestive system and only reach the brain when thoroughly rendered. Why, again, like the figurines, the object? Why are we so unable to conceive of new futures without entrusting ourselves to objects?

The objects, after all, have a life of their own.

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4 responses to “Who Are These Women?”

  1. What if the apple (or quince) DOES contain data?

    In this respect, I urge you to consider the situation created in Neil Stephenson’s Diamond Age. Certain static images “crash” the brain, hijacking its code and reprogramming it. The solution is not increased creativity–and therefore somehow escaping the terror of the past–but inoculation from a deadly virus. To use Sam Gill’s concept of storytracking, this means we must inoculate ourselves against viruses by tracking the genealogy of our narrative and noticing its false starts, spurs, and forks. If we want to save these objects from the ways that feminists have used them (to establish a more stable basis for interpretation) then our job should not be to hope that our academic colleagues will suddenly become ex nihilo creative geniuses. Instead we should ask how the objects have been used by these folks. This question doesn’t negate the power of the objects, as you rightly crib from Richard Davis’ The Lives of Indian Images, but situates it in ways that allow us to productively extend the “incorrect” or unsatisfying older models.

    Sry I haven’t been keeping up with your work. You’ve been a busy (and wonderfully successful) person. I’m trying to restart my blogging. Go on and help me out as I try to get into the swing of things during my comprehensive reading exam time….

  2. Mom Blogs – Blogs for Moms…

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  3. Molly

    Have you seen Alfred Gell’s Art & Agency? If not, you might enjoy it. I’d be interested to hear what you think of it.

  4. Wow, UCSB religious studies represent! Great to hear from you both.

    Dave, the new blog looks great. I’ll keep an eye on it. I’ve really got to read more Stephenson. Something seems especially creepy about your line, “hope that our academic colleagues will suddenly become ex nihilo creative geniuses.” I think of Tom C sarcastically talking about how everyone thinks philosophers just “make stuff up.” Definitively since Weber, the name of the game in academia has been information about things. At the very least, whatever your organizing theories are, a scholar should know about a bunch of things and be able to teach them to students. A category like wisdom doesn’t count. Weber says, find it elsewhere. What, anyway, would a museum be like with only theories and no things?

    Molly! No, I don’t know Gell, but I’ll keep an eye out for it. I found a little summary for beginners here:

    Art and Agency offers a new departure to study such responses because it singles out precisely that aspect of the interaction between works of art and their viewers that makes them similar to living beings: their agency, the power to influence their viewers, to make them act as if they are engaging not with dead matter, but with living persons. Because Gell’s is an anthropological theory of art, the stress is on the art nexus, the network of social relations in which art works are embedded; that is, on agency. It considers objects of art not in terms of their formal or aesthetic value or appreciation within the culture that produced them. Neither does it consider them as signs, visual codes to be deciphered or symbolic communications. Instead, Gell defined art objects in performative terms as systems of actions, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it. Art works thus considered are the equivalents of persons, more particularly social agents.

    I love the idea of works of art as persons.