On “Being included in revised versions of art history”

Even after taking a lovely weekend off to mentally and physically reboot in the beer-and-barbeque laden crucible of a post-Canada Day weekend, I’ve come back to the internet to find that commentary around Jerry Saltz’s crusade to amend the scarcity of female artists in MoMA’s Painting and Sculpture collection is still going strong. Edward Winkleman kindly reproduced Saltz’s Facebook summation of his conversation with Ann Temkin, MoMA’s Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, on his blog last week, which provides a solid grounding for the stats and rationale behind the debate. A broader story of Saltz’s online evangelism was provided today at Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes, which took a much-needed step back to query Saltz’s status as a critic counter to his intensely personal stake in the New York art scene.

I think Green makes some damn good points about the implications of what Saltz is playing at here - especially given the limitation of his discourse to a relatively small circle of art world insiders via bloody Facebook - but the point that truly blunts my ability to get behind Saltz’s admirable efforts comes down to his kneejerk elevation of Painting and Sculpture above the other disciplines. Quoting from his letter of June 19 to Ann Temkin (forestalling any argument that MoMA’s collection, taken as a whole, is significantly less misogynist than it may appear):

I’m also aware that MoMA considers the entire museum (minus special exhibitions) as the Permanent Collection. I don’t. And I don’t think many others do, either. I think that the Story of Modernism is told primarily on these two all-important floors.

Thankfully, once Temkin took her opportunity to have a friendly in-person chat with Saltz, she didn’t shy away from pointing out the painfully obvious:

Excluding drawing, design, printmaking, photography, etc. (areas where women are represented and made great contributions) reinforces an outmoded and strictly “masculinist” approach to art by privileging painting and sculpture.

At first as she said this my heart sank. Of course she’s right.

While Saltz does show self-awareness of his own bias, the acknowledgement doesn’t seem to have impacted his stance in any meaningful way. I think Temkin struck at a far deeper disparity in modern art history than Saltz’s reductive gender question, and that addressing her take on MoMA’s shortcomings would ultimately be a far more productive exercise.

Further, I can’t help but wonder if the somewhat ugly historical fact of woman’s under-representation in these categories of modern art is something that demands recognition and even preservation in those institutions choosing to provide a canonical image of that moment in art.

I think about the brazen, unapologetic outrage of the Guerrilla Girls, and wonder if their project could ever make sense in the context of a MoMA collection that’s been painstakingly reconfigured to ignore an ugly reality of the diminished status of women artists throughout modernity. I wonder if there’s a different degree of recognition that can come out of the present MoMA collection, one that can serve as an admonitory warning to today’s art establishment and a trigger for future women artists. That awareness seems, in some ways, more valuable than any sort of consolation prize Jerry Saltz is hoping to manipulate out of MoMA’s curatorial team.

The Guerrilla Girls poster above cites “Being included in revised versions of art history” as one of the many advantages of being a woman artist, right up there with “Not being stuck in a tenured teaching position” and “Being reassured that whatever kind of art you make it will be labeled feminine.” I know Saltz is already engaging in the revisionism, and wonder if his agenda extends as far as the latter point as well. Because no doubt the many overlooked female painters and sculptors of modernism possess some mysterious womanly essence or chora or whatever that’s lacking in their male counterparts and making for such an incomplete history of colour field painting. Or something.

The MoMA sausage-fest is certainly a problem, but this crusade of gender and numbers may not be the solution it needs, not when there are greater opportunities to rethink the breadth of modern art beyond those two “masculine” disciplines. I know we’re a ways off from a post-gender world, but there’s better ways to get there than this.

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