Monday 22 March 2010

Feminist Theory - representation, the matrixial gaze

I also found a piece of writing by Maggie Humm who quotes Hirsch 1986 saying "modernist women address the increasing specularity of culture, as well as modernity's visual objectification of women by interweaving the objective with the subjective in visual images which, while acknowledging the material primacy of objects, do not privilege materiality at the expense of the psychic".

Humm goes on to say the following, " Where 'strategies' of representation in the visual arts, from painting to photography to film, have been institutionalised to lure our gaze and suture our desire to that which culture wishes to fix us', Pollock argues, 'Lichtenberg Ettinger's method permits a glimpse of another kind of vanishing point, a matrixial gaze', which is 'distinct' from the usual 'confrontation between practice and popular cultures' (Pollock 1994a). The characteristics of such a method resemble Woolf's modernist experiments; a use of fragmentary images, interruptions of linearity, traces of the imaginary and intricately worked surfaces".

1 comment:

  1. This is fantastic! Woolf's modernist experiments sound not too dissimilar from Gertrude Stein's. Baudelaire's descriptions of modernist experience focuses on the fragmentary.

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