Journal Entries

This week we will read a few classic articles about vision, gender and power.  

Critics and Art Historians Linda Nochlin, Laura Mulvey and John Berger all made a huge impact with these three pieces in the 1970s:

Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists (Links to an external site.)?”  (originally published in Artnews in 1971)

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/why-have-there-been-no-great-women-artists-4201/

Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”  Originally published in 1975 in Screen.  This illustrated version from Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York and Boston: New Museum of Contemporary Art, in association with Godine, 1984), pp. 361-373.

Ways of Seeing by John Berger,  1972  video (Links to an external site.).  Web text version of Ways of Seeing (Links to an external site.). 

Sturken & Cartwright: "Gender and the Gaze" 120-131.  (Nochlin, Mulvey and Berger's essays are also discussed here).

For your journal this week, I want you to  read ALL of the above and at least one of the following:

Maura Reilly ”Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills”  (you can also watch this Art21 interview with Cindy Sherman) (Links to an external site.)

Hatt / Klonk chapter on “Feminism” from Art history: A critical introduction to its methods Eds.  Michael Hatt, Charlotte Klonk   (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

Jack Halberstam “Queer Faces: Photography and Subcultural Lives” from  The visual culture reader / edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff.  (London ; New York : Routledge, 2013).

In your journal please DISCUSS:  

--Nochlin's thesis: why did women not become "great" artists in the past?

-- According to Mulvey, how do classic Hollywood films like those by Alfred Hitchcock (that she mentions) place the movie viewer in a gendered position?  How (according to Mulvey) does this relate to "visual pleasure"? Is this still the case in films you are familiar with?

--How has the idea of a white male "gaze" been disrupted in the past few decades? Use examples from the optional readings and/or the Sturken and Cartwright section.

Rubric