User:Shelly Nazareth/Griselda Pollock

Griselda Pollock

Griselda Pollock 2019

Griselda Frances Sinclair Pollock (born 11 March 1949) is an accomplished art historian and cultural analyst of international, postcolonial feminist studies in the visual arts and visual culture. Since 1977, Pollock has been one of the most influential scholars of modern, avant-garde art, postmodern art, and contemporary art. She is a major influence in feminist theory, feminist art history and gender studies. She is renowned for her innovative feminist approaches to art history which aim to deconstruct the lack of appreciation and importance of women in art as other than objects for the male gaze.

Pollock conducts various studies that offer concrete historical analyses regarding the dynamics of the social structures that create sexual politic environments within art history. Through her contributions to feminism, Pollock has written various texts exclusively focused on women to intentionally drift away from traditional art history which concentrated primarily on the work of male artists due to its inherently sexist undertones. Pollock's initiative enabled the overdue exposure and appreciation needed for many female artists such as Mary Cassatt, Eva Hesse and Charlotte Salomon for which she personally wrote about. Her theoretical and methodological innovations which were first released up to 3 decades ago such as the ones on her book Vision and Difference 1988, are still influential and studied till this day since many of her remarks apply to modern day contemporary concerns such as the political subtexts that women are still portrayed with in advertising.

Life and Work

Currently based in the United Kingdom, Pollock was born in South Africa, Boemfontein to Alan Winton Seton Pollock and Kathleen Alexandra (née Sinclair), Griselda Pollock grew up in both French and English Canada. Moving to Britain during her teens years, Pollock studied Modern History at Oxford (1967–1970) and History of European Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art (1970–72). She received her doctorate in 1980 for a study of Vincent van Goghand Dutch Art: A reading of his notions of the modern. After teaching at Reading and Manchester universities, Pollock joined the University of Leeds in 1977 as lecturer in History of Art and Film and was appointed to a Personal Chair in Social and Critical Histories of Art in 1990. In 2001, she became Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds, where she is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art. She was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Courtauld Institute in 2019.

Art history

Pollock's interest and involvement in the women's movement motivated her to create change in the world of art history and how women are perceived in it. This change which was attempted by many researchers before her was only possible due to her innovative approaches observed in her book Vision and Difference, 1988. In this book she identifies the world's political system to be the main issue with women's depiction. In more detail, she does this by explaining the relationship between systems of representation and ideology which in turn divulge the visual language used by political advertising to depict women in society. The knowledge of these strategies of representation brought the possibility for feminist activists to implement the change necessary to the construction of women in art and as seen today, in society in general.

Her work challenges mainstream models of art and art history that have excluded the role of women in art. She examines the interaction of the social categories of gender, class and race, crucially researching the relationship between them and psychoanalysis and art, and drawing on the work of such French cultural theorists as Michel Foucault. Her theorization of subjectivity takes both psychoanalysis and Foucault's ideas about social control into account.

A range of concepts developed by Pollock which serve to theorize and practice critical feminist interventions in art's histories are: old mistresses, vision and difference, avant-garde gambits, generations and geographies, differencing the canon and most recently, the virtual feminist museum.

On 5 March 2020, Pollock was named as the 2020 Holberg Prize Laureate "for her groundbreaking contributions to feminist art history and cultural studies.".

Cultural studies and cultural analysis

Pollock is the founding director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds. Initiated with a grant from the then AHRB in 2001, CentreCATH is a transdisciplinary project connecting fine art, histories of art and cultural studies across the shared engagements with class, gender, sexuality, post colonial critique and queer theory. In 2007, with Max Silverman, Pollock initiated the research project Concentrationary Memories: The Politics of Representation which explores the concept of an anxious and vigilant form of cultural memory analysing the devastating effects of the totalitarian assault on the human condition and alert to the persistent not only of this perpetual threat, but is invasion of popular culture. The project explored the forms of aesthetic resistance to totalitarian terror. Four edited collections have been produced: Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics and Political Resistance in Night and Fog by Alain Resnais Winner of 2011 Fraszna-Krausz Prize for Best Book on the Moving Image (London and New York: Berghan 2011); Concentrationary Memory: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (London: I B Tauris, 2013), Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (London: I B Tauris ,2015) and Concentrationary Art: Jean Cayrol, the Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-war Film, Literature, Music and the Visual Arts (Berghahn, 2019) (2019).