Review
'In this complex and excessive book Griselda Pollock defies the conventions of reason in the history of art and culture. Creating the 'rooms' of a series of imaginary exhibitions in which women artists such as Frida Kahlo or Charlotte Salomon freely mingle with Sigmund Freud and Aby Warburg, converse with one another out of their time and place, or hear Walter Benjamin on the radio, she invents a new, feminist history for the future. Out of the fragments and traumas of near and ancient pasts, she offers the hope for a political and cultural archaeology of our time.' - Adrian Rifkin, Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmith's College, University of London, UK
'A significant contribution to feminist art history... An incredibly ambitious, methodologically complex, and intellectually rich book. Pollock provides us with creative ways to conceptualize the field of art history that have the possibility to transform how we interpret and exhibit images... with Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum, it is no wonder why Pollock continues to be one of our great art historians.' - Woman's Art Journal
Product Description
Continuing her feminist reconceptualisation of the ways we can experience and study the visual arts, world renowned art historian and cultural analyst, Griselda Pollock proposes a series of new encounters through virtual exhibitions with art made by women over the twentieth century. Challenging the dominant museum models of art and history that have been so exclusive of women's artistic contributions to the twentieth century, the virtual feminist museum stages some of the complex relations between femininity, modernity and representation.
Griselda Pollock draws on the models of both Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas and Freud's private museum of antiquities as well as Ettinger's concept of subjectivity as encounter to propose a differencing journey through time, space and archive. Featuring studies of Canova 's Three Graces and women artist's modernist reclamations of the female body, the book traverses the rupture of fascism and the Holocaust and ponders the significance of painting and drawing in their aftermath.
Artists featured include: Georgia O'Keeffe, Josephine Baker, Gluck, Charlotte Salomon, Bracha Ettinger and Christine Taylor Patten.
