{"id":2627,"date":"2019-02-27T18:27:43","date_gmt":"2019-02-27T18:27:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/?p=2627"},"modified":"2019-05-16T15:31:06","modified_gmt":"2019-05-16T15:31:06","slug":"myths-gender-screen-culture-collaboration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/myths-gender-screen-culture-collaboration\/","title":{"rendered":"Myths of Gender and Screen Culture: Part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

Other columns in this series:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Introduction<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Part 1:\u00a0The Myth of Gender<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Part 2: The Myth of the F-Word<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Part 4: The Myth of Collaboration II<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Part 5: The Myth of Equality<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

In a 2017 interview with DCist<\/span><\/a>, influential feminist artist Judy Chicago made a blunt observation that\u2019s applicable across a range of creative fields: \u201c<\/span>There has been in the art world for a very long time a certain illusion about the single male genius.\u201d Cinema is no exception, and one need only consider Andrew Sarris\u2019s <\/span>pantheon of film directors<\/span><\/a> from his 1968 book <\/span>The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968<\/i><\/strong> for concrete evidence of this.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSingle male genius\u201d and other fairy tales<\/h4>\n

The conflation of \u201cgenius\u201d with \u201csingle male genius\u201d has a long, broad history, and comes with certain privileges. Of the recent allegations against musician Ryan Adams, <\/span>Laura Snaps at The Guardian notes<\/span><\/a> “The concept of male genius insulates against all manner of sin. Bad behavior can be blamed on his prerequisite troubled past. His trademark sensitivity offers plausible deniability when he is accused of less-than-sensitive behavior. His complexity underpins his so-called genius.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

So seemingly conventional is this wisdom for women across the arts, it is perhaps therefore unsurprising that many feminist critics have long been skeptical about how terms like \u201cgenius\u201d are deployed in the first place. <\/span><\/p>\n

A famous example is art historian Linda Nochlin\u2019s foundational 1971 essay \u201c<\/span>Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?<\/span><\/a>\u201d, which painstakingly maps out why this question is rigged from the outset. Noting the centuries-long tendency to associate men with the concept of \u201cgenius\u201d to a near mythic degree, she contextualizes the popular legends surrounding artists like Vincent van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as \u201cfairy tales and self-fulfilling prophecy\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nochlin notes the question is booby-trapped for maximum dismissal as \u201cit falsifies the nature of the issue at the same time that it insidiously supplies its own answer: \u2018There have been no great women artists because women are incapable of greatness.\u2019\u201d The knee-jerk reaction is to posit examples to the contrary \u2014 Artemisia Gentileschi! Georgia O\u2019Keefe! Louise Bourgeois! \u2014 which, while logical, has the negative effect of validating the question rather than addressing the cultural, systematic, and institutional realities that disadvantage women artists in the first place.<\/span><\/p>\n

With the rise of second-wave feminism, art practice itself revealed activist and community-building potential and as such there is a long history of women working collectively to make art (such as Judy Chicago\u2019s landmark installation, 1979\u2019s The Dinner Party<\/em>; see below).<\/span><\/p>\n