Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

116 SESSION II
work “are not truly in the past for us,” writes Kasahara.
“They still exist in the present and future. The soldiers,
prisoners, comfort women, and ordinary citizens were
undoubtedly forced to do what they did during wartime.
In a similar way, without realizing it, we are forced to
live under the warlike conditions of the present. The
anxious-looking faces of the girls in the family picture
could be me. The people running away could be the people of
Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechen or Sudan.” (Kasahara:
2005, 155) (my emphasis)
THE FEMINIST ART HISTORIAN AS PUB-
LIC INTELLECTUAL: SO THAT WE DO NOT
LOOK AWAY
Kasahara’s remarks tell that us that in the 21 st century, we
are all carrying an enormous traumatic weight. Many
nations are convulsed by the wounds of civil war, colonialism
and liberations struggles, revolution, communal and
sectarian violence, state terrorism and dictatorship,
fundamentalism and globalization, famine and natural
disaster. And although there are real differences of class,
race, ethnicity between her—Kasahara, a Japanese—
and the people of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechen,
and Sudan, there are certain conditions and structures
of (in) humanity she shares and suffers with them.
But without diminishing the real horrors of global
trauma that Kasahara so eloquently brought our
attention to, this paper has suggested, at the very outset,
that women and children, particularly the subaltern
who cannot speak, are the ones most deeply traumatized
by systemic and historically contingent violence. As a
mute ideological battleground between patriarchy and
imperialism, women’s bodies continue to suffer crimes
which happen “not only in camps and situations of
extremity or abnormality,” (Pollock, 1995), but in
the very fabric of their daily lives—in family, labor
and sexual relations. In Darfur for example, women
in refugee camps dread collecting wood, which they
desperately need, for fear of being raped outside their
immediate family groups; in South Africa, migrant
working women come to the cities to sell in the
markets but have nowhere to live sleep in a row, huddled
together for warmth and security, taking turns each
night to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the others
by sleeping at the ends of the row where the women
are regularly, casually and consistently raped by passing
men. (Pollock, 1995)
Faced with the gendered dimension of widespread abuse
and suffering, we may ask ourselves: what has art history
and art got to do with it? What role does the feminist
public intellectual—as artist and as art historian—play in
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
challenging the very regimes that perpetuate violence?
Edward Said once stated that “there has been no major
revolution in modern history without intellectuals;
conversely, there has been no major counter-revolutionary
movement without intellectuals.” (Said: 1994, 8) In the
end however, the intellectual who makes a difference is
one who represents all those people and issues that are
routinely forgotten or swept under the rug; someone
who raises embarrassing questions to routinely confront
orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them);
someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments
or corporations; and someone who fights for the weak
“on the basis of universal principles: that all human beings
are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior
concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or
nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of
these standards need to be testified and fought against
courageously.” (9)
Being a public intellectual has little to do with expertise
and specialization; instead, an intellectual “ought to be
an amateur, someone who considers that to be a thinking
and concerned member of a society one is entitled to
raise moral issues at the heart of even the most technical
and professionalized activity…” (61) In the study of the
very specialized area of contemporary art for example,
what matters is not technical formalism, impersonal
theories and methodologies, but a sensitivity to the
historical and real experiences, the choices and decisions,
commitments and alignments that actually went into
the making of the work.
For the feminist art historian, this sensitivity is honed by
a revolutionary movement that aligns itself with other
movements that challenge the status quo, particularly
those linked with social and political projects for human
rights on an international scale. However, as Griselda
Pollock rightly asserts, feminism is the sole revolutionary
movement that addresses the “question of gender and
does so politically to show that gender is not a natural
but a social and historical construction of power
relations and interests.” (Pollock: 2004, 215) Sensitized
by a sensibility honed by this movement, art historians
and curators like Kasahara are equipped with a “tuning
fork” that re-attunes her to hear, to listen to the voices
of women artists and see their images. Situated between
documentation and fabrication, recent art by women
I have discussed in this paper have recently become
deeply engaged with the question of trauma “and how
to move on through and from its haunting possession.”
(Pollock, 2005)
Crimes are committed against women, because they are