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E-book Essays on Paula Rego : Smile When You Think about Hell

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Penilaian

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In the words of one of her exegetes, Paula Rego enters the Great Tradition of art by the back door, and once there lays down repeated visual statements concerning a binary world whose territorial lines are demarcated by the battle of the sexes (Rosengarten, 1999a, 6). In this pictorial universe, whose referent is realpolitik patriarchy, sexual politics set the agenda. The Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton stated, with some recklessness, that ‘the soul of woman is not concerned with history’ (Guitton, 1951, 221): ‘the truth is that woman is more near to the human than man, so easily estranged from what is human. [...] One of the missions of woman, after that of generation, is to reconcile man to man and to disappear. She does not herself perform those deeds which transform history, but she is the hidden foundation for them’ (Guitton, 1951, 228). This view, belied by the intensity with which Roman Catholicism has deemed it necessary to deny the female historical role from Eve onwards, neglects also a vast world of experience that historiography has only recently begun to uncover. If a woman’s home is her castle, in one form or another ‘history has intruded upon the household and disrupted its traditional order’ (Armstrong, 1996, 157), but the reverse also applies. The family as cornerstone of the social fabric has itself the power to change from homely to that unheimlich(unhomely, uncanny) in which Freud detected the potential for psychic — and arguably political — anarchy (Freud, 1919, 335–76). Working from the standpoint of the ‘counterhistorian’ — which, as will be argued, is the position reproduced in a visual medium by Paula Rego — Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt write as follows:To mainstream historians, gender relations had appeared too stable and universal for historical analysis. [...] The feminist historian denied its naturalness by subjecting it to historical analysis [...] to show that gender relations, despite the endurance of male domination, only appear to stand outside of the historical processes. [...] Feminist counterhistorians raised a metahistorical question: What was it that made phenomena ‘historical,’ and why did so much ‘culture’ fail to qualify? (Gallagher and Greenblatt, 2000, 59)In the work of Paula Rego, as her observers have often remarked, and as the well-known feminist aphorism would have it, the personal always becomes political: ‘public and private are not separate but intersective’ (Lowder Newton, 1989, 156). More unusually, however, as will be argued over the course of these essays, the political is translated back into the immediately accessible vocabulary of the personal: history is paraphrased in images drawn from domestic life, and national politics find expression through the familiar lexicon of interpersonal relations.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

750 MAN e

Penerbit

USA : Open Book Publishers., 2019

Deskripsi Fisik

513 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781783747580

Klasifikasi

750

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Painting and Paintings

Info Detail Spesifik

-

Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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