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Overview
Since the 1970s Rosalind Krauss has been exploring the art of painters, sculptors,and photographers, examining the intersection of these artists concerns with the major currents of postwar visual culture: the question of the commodity, the status of the subject, issues of representation and abstraction, and the viability of individual media.These essays on nine women artists—gathered as Bachelors—are framed by the question, born of feminism, "What evaluative criteria can be applied to women's art?" In the case of surrealism, in particular, some have claimed that surrealist women artists must either redraw the lines of their practice or participate in the movement's misogyny. Krauss resists that claim, for these "bachelors" are artists whose expressive strategies challenge the very ideals of unity and mastery identified with masculinist aesthetics.
Some of this work, such as the "part object" (Louise Bourgeois) or the "formless" (Cindy Sherman)could be said to find its power in strategies associated with such concepts as écriture feminine. In the work of Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, or Sherrie Levine, one can make the case that the power of the work can be revealed only by recourse to another type of logic altogether. Bachelors attempts to do justice to these and other artists (Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Louise Lawler, Francesca Woodman) in the terms their works demand.
Synopsis
These essays on nine women artists are framed by the question, born of feminism, "What evaluative criteria can be applied to women's art?"
Art Times
A provocative and astute analysis of the works of nine women artists, Bachelors redefines some old ideas about surrealist art while offering some innovative parameters on feminist art.
Editorials
Art Times
A provocative and astute analysis of the works of nine women artists, Bachelors redefines some old ideas about surrealist art while offering some innovative parameters on feminist art.Publishers Weekly -
A juicy conundrum lies at the heart of this collection of essays by the prominent art historian and co-founder of the art/theory journal October: the work of nine women artists of this century (one painter, three sculptors and five photographers) are considered under the rubric "Bachelors." Unsurprisingly, Krauss (The Optical Unconscious) grapples with the topic of gender and engages in some fancy footwork around the question of what it might mean to call a woman a "bachelor," and the expected motifs of indeterminacy, androgyny and transgression do arise again and again. But other than abstruse discussions in three of the essays of the "bachelor machine" as conceived by Marcel Duchamp in his canonical, surrealist assemblage The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), the bachelor conceit remains more a tease than a clearly unifying concept. The individual essays are remarkable for the sharpness and thickness of their arguments. Beginning with the supposed sadism and misogyny of the surrealist movement--which she recasts as an espousal of formlessness, fluidity and even femininity--Krauss topples one after another chestnut of art criticism, including those of scholarly feminism. In the end, bachelors or no, Claude Cahun, Agnes Martin, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman all powerfully illustrate her contention that "art made by women needs no special pleading." B&w illustrations. (Mar.)Library Journal
The esteemed Krauss (art, Columbia) is prominent in the field of deconstructionist, feminist, and psychoanalytical art criticism. This collection of her essays applies the theories to nine women artists, neo-Duchampian "bachelors" who mostly practiced photography, sculpture, and some filmmaking and painting. The artists distinguished by this complex rhetorical discourse include Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, Sherrie Levine, and Louise Lawler. Krauss demonstrates how each achieved the "feminization" of the male gaze. Although the formal notation of semiological analysis is clarified in an endnote, from the beginning Krauss assumes her readers to be totally conversant with and attuned to the scholasticism of postmodern art theory. Appropriate mainly for graduate- and professional-level collections.--Mary Hamel-Schwulst, Towson Univ., MDSuzanne Ramljak
...Krauss's analysis is grounded in careful observation of specific works, and even when her theorizing goes far afield, it ultimately brings us to a closer appreciation of the art in question.— The New York Times Book Review
Carol Zemel
Stimulating, difficult and often dazzling...Bachelors is a smart and often profound book that makes a valuable contribution to the gendered field it abhors.—Women's Review of Books