Art History’s Feminist Emergency

Over the last decade, as the disputes surrounding socially engaged art have been historicized, the repercussions of the 2008 financial crisis have hit, and the global circuitry of biennials and art fairs has peaked, not to mention the crises brought on by Black Lives Matter, far right nationalisms, and now a global pandemic, there has been a renewed urgency regarding the relevance—and precarity—of art history as a discipline (Grant and Price 2020, Joselit 2020, Petrovich 2020, Mirzoeff 2020, Bishop 2020). Like art history, feminism, too, finds itself at a crossroads and facing new challenges in a post #metoo but ever more highly segregated global economy, which was recently described at a major international conference as our “feminist emergency” of today.1 Both feminism and art history are independent, broad fields encompassing a range of ideas and approaches. As art historians Victoria Horne and Lara Perry have emphasized, if feminism “designates political organizing and activities aimed towards transforming the asymmetrical gendered relations that structure historical, legal, economic and social systems,” art history addresses historical and contemporary cultural practices, especially those dealing with art production, the market, criticism, and institutions (2017, 2). Their different aims aside, feminism and feminist theory have long struggled to maintain a degree of agency within art history. After the so-called “second wave” feminist movement infiltrated the discipline in the 1970s and 1980s, a certain taking for granted has haunted feminism’s position within art history, a phenomenon several scholars have recently sought to elucidate (Dimitrakaki and Perry 2015, Grant 2011, Horne and Perry 2017). While informative and necessary, none of these investigations consider the Nordic region. Taking these issues into account, this article contemplates my research of the last four years within the Nordic context to explore how and why feminism has been relatively left out of the deliberations concerning the state of art history today.2 I address what I see as the paradigmatic feminist double-bind within art history: a dual tension between feminism’s status as historical movement and tendency to be historicized, versus its function as critical theory and activism, by looking at the Danish case. Drawing upon the identification of some larger patterns within Danish art history and the detailed problematics of feminist art history’s double bind, I argue that feminism is germane to art history—and to its future. By reflecting on a recent feminist art historical endeavor, the international conference Fast Forward: Women in European Art, 1970-Present at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the following offers some ideas on how a feminist art historical approach can make a constructive and crucial contribution to the field and the issues it faces today.

The activism, art works, and exhibitions produced during the "second wave" feminist period in Denmark were well documented, which has come in handy for the relatively few but important art historical revisitations in the literature. 4 The first moment when this occurred was around the early 2000s, and then again about ten years later. Two of the most important examples are View: Feminist Strategies in Danish Visual Art (2004), produced by the artists' collective Women Down the Pub, and a major retrospective exhibition at the Statens Museum for Kunst, What's Happening?, 2015 [2], and its catalogue.
These feminist interventions into art history and the art museum have been accompanied by a handful of volumes that either took the form of thematic journal issues seeking to introduce international feminist art theory to the Danish context (Vest Hansen 1999, Jørgensen 2003 or assessments of the local artistic landscape in feminist and representational terms (Høyer Hansen 2005, Jørgensen 2015).
Despite the groundbreaking work done by women artists in Denmark in the 1970s and 1980s and the few significant critical studies that address feminist art in the local context in the decades thereafter, a more sustained critical dialogue about the issues they provoked  (Christensen 2016, 252-53). 5

Feminism and art history/historiography
What are we to make of this silence and resurfacing in a country that has built a national image out of gender equality? The problem is not simply a Danish or Nordic one, but present throughout Anglo-European art history and its related institutions. In their book Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions, art historians Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry document how over the past 40 years, as feminism has become more visible within institutions, it has "lost its bite" and been unable to succeed in affecting sustainable change (3). One reason they posit for this is that museums and galleries tend to relinquish their responsibility for creating a comprehensive feminist agenda, instead looking to external art historians to undertake the work for them (180). Reflecting feminism's double bind of historicism and activism, my own experience with Danish art institutions similarly suggests that feminism presents a dual problem: it is either viewed as representing a dated and completed activist project no longer relevant for the art of today, or its activist associations appear too threatening or alienating-something feminist art historian Griselda Pollock describes as a trauma-for institutions to attract their publics (2016). 7 While Nordic art history's feminist silences betray blind spots and missed opportunities in ways that reflect trends elsewhere, the Nordic case is still revealing for the field. If Nordic artists created radical feminist art and undertook subversive activist projects concurrently with their international sisters, they did so within the framework of the welfare state, where gender equality and the common good have been upheld as longstanding national values. And yet, even within this seemingly favorable environment, the equality for many women has been far from achieved, both within society at large, but also within the It becomes clear that within art history, the contours of the continued issue of gender inequality and feminism's unrealized potential have been overshadowed-perhaps even partially caused-by the perceived image of the egalitarian Nordic welfare state. As a result, a disconnect has persisted that has prevented the radical and speculative potential of feminist theory and approaches from effectively infiltrating the Nordic art world and its history. The resulting implicit view has been that there is little need to reconsider women artists in terms of their gender since they have already achieved equality and have been treated democratically; this has even generated the idea that gender is a dépassé topic altogether. 8 Indeed, except for some notable exceptions by art historians such as Griselda Pollock and Dimitrakaki, the taking for granted of feminism's role within art historyas either historical moment or already completed activist project-has hindered feminist theory from being consistently deployed as a vigorous approach within the field (2018). Historian Judith M. Bennett has documented how history has been problematic for feminism, arguing for renewed and sustained historical scrutiny: "feminism is impoverished by an inattention to history. By broadening our temporal horizons, we can produce both better feminist history and better feminist theory" (2006, 31). 9 These conflicting paradigms suggest that it is actually feminism's history that holds the potential to reanimate feminism within art history. In their recent volume Feminism and Art History Now: Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice, Horne and Perry have made crucial inroads in this respect with their call for rehabilitated attention to history and historiography to reactivate feminism in the discipline, and thereby, art history itself. They argue that a critical, sustained revisiting of feminist art history and its periodic absences is necessary if we are to begin using feminist theory effectively for addressing art and its histories now: [The] critical and revolutionary feminist dimension enjoins us to look to the present and future and break with the patriarchal past; while the art historical process demands that we review and reflect on our relations with that which has gone before.
[…] to do justice to both impulses: to formulate a politics for the present and future, which acknowledges, but does not reduce us to, the past (2017, 2).

They continue:
The writing of art history … emerged as a critical site for intervening within the production of modern subjectivities and related historical operations of dominance and exploitation. […] We must continue to ask how we can understand and write about the past and present of art in a manner that does not simply recuperate women and feminism to established circuits of meaning-and value-production. But this requires that as these circuits evolve, so should our tools (7).
These scholars provide a poignant reminder of the critical importance of actively addressing feminism's history and its historiography as a means for realizing the activist potential of feminism and feminist theory to redress art history as a field-one that is capable of reflecting and critiquing the myriad global urgencies we are faced with living in the world today. In this respect, historicizing feminist art history is not a process of neutralization and distancing, but of empowerment and active engagement.
It is a process that Horne and Perry describe as a "disruptive renarration" that "aims to displace the viscous canonical history that insistently coheres a singular sense of the feminist art movement […] to avoid producing corrective accounts, in favor of historical accounts that struggle with 'alternative ways of telling feminist stories'" (16). 10 When we write art's history, we must do so in a manner that self-reflexively acknowledges historiography's double operation, in which history actively informs the present, while the present informs our understanding of history. Such attention, moreover, allows for a greater capacity for applying feminism, its histories and theories, as a presciently critical and activist tool for reapproaching, rewriting, and re-theorizing art history as a discipline relevant to its present moment.

Feminist futures
The above-cited concerns informing art history's femi- The keynotes further reflected the dual historical/ activist aims of the conference, with captivating talks by Tania Ørum, Maura Reilly, Angela Dimitrakaki, and Amelia Jones, who tackled no less than: the activist experience of the 1970s; a searing indictment on the international and Nordic art worlds' lack of equality between the sexes; the instrumentalizing of feminism and conditions of gender violence and privilege within neoliberalism, and the problematic manner in which "woman" reinscribes the binary thinking that feminism seeks to deconstruct, respectively.
The selection and experience of the contributions to the Fast Forward conference was an agonistic exercise in bridge-building, omission-addressing, silence-answering, and activist-historicism-activism. It reflected a fundamentally intersectional and dialogical approach that balanced a reflexive historical criticality in parallel with a determined reckoning with the art world's perilous present. Building on a special Nordic focus, the we attempted to create renewed discourse among various generational, racial, class, disciplinary, and national divides. As a vigorous intervention into art history's feminist emergency, the hope is that the conversations and dialogue it initiated not only create a fuller understanding of why feminism is crucial for art history's future, but also how and why we do art and art history in the first place.  Greaves 2021, 3-12. 5 About the persistence of inequality see Hansen 2005. 6 These statistics are consistent, despite some promising attempts to address the situation, including the 2020 decision of the Council for Visual Arts in the City of Copenhagen to impose gender quotas on the purchase of art for the municipality.