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Art & Artist  Oct 73  revised from earlier catalog

Why Separate Women's Art
Lucy Lippard

In a few years, women's art exhibitions, issues of magazines focused on women's art alone, women's art classes, etc.. will hopefully be unnecessary. For  the time being, however, acknowledged discrimination against women pervades the international art world in subtle and often cruel forms. (A prime recent example: the machinations gone through by Documenta's organizers to pretend interest in a recommended group of American women artists whose work was finally never even viewed.) While women are tolerated in the 'housekeeping' positions (curator, critic, dealer), the primary function of art-making is reserved largely for men. Women's magazines and exhibitions serve to point out that there are indeed a huge number of unjustifiably unknown women artists, that they are not inferior to male artists, and perhaps, that their concerns and sensibilities, like their experiences, are often different from those of their male colleagues.

Whenever there is a Women's show, or a Black Artists show, or any similarly 'segregated' event, objections are raised on the basis that art is art and has no sex and color. That's all very well. Art has no sex and color; but artists do, and there has bene considerable discrimination against artists of a certain sex and a certain color. A women's show is no more arbitrary a manner of bringing together a group of art works than is a show of 'artists under 35,' or 'German Art Since 1930', or artists who paint people or landscapes or cats or abstractions. When you open a magazine or enter an exhibition, you have to look at what is there individually, no matter how vague or arbitrary the label under which it is hanging. If you can't enjoy good art because it is hanging with other art by one political group or another, but you can enjoy art if it is grouped under the imposition of a movement or a theme or an editor's whim, then you probably aren't enjoying art anyway.

The most obvious manifestation of discrimination in the art world has been the absence of women's work from major galleries and museums. A couple of years ago, even a sympathetic observer could dredge up the names of no more than 20 women artists who were known at all. Even other women artists had trouble doing so. This, I suspect, was as much a psychological block on their part as a statistical fact, having to do with not wanting to be identified as a 'woman artist', a curious complaint since most of these people were perfectly willing to assert their femininity on other levels. A simultaneous pride in uniqueness and an underlying inferiority seemed then to affect the ranks of women artists themselves. Yet once the protests and meetings and shows began in New York, women's own memories loosened up to the point where endless friends from art school who had been working away in silence suddenly began to surface, and groups began to get together for consciousness-raising, for esthetic discussion, for political actions, to remedy the years of suppression.

Grisly tales of maltreatment and inhumanity emerged from these sessions, including those from art school students whose professors classically discouraged them by saying things like 'There are no great women artists and never will be' (see Linda Nochlin's answer to that one in Art News, Jan. 1971); 'Women can't use power tools, or make sculpture'; or 'All successful women sculptors are Lesbians'; 'Sleep with me and I'll get you into graduate school'; and, above all, 'you'll just get married and have babies, there's no point in getting so serious'. This treatment was often handed out by well-meaning men so conditioned that it never occurred to them that they were making it impossible for many women to continue working. The survivors became understandably reluctant to identify with other women's art (understood as inferior art), thus encouraging the isolation which, until recently, made so many women artists accomplices to their own professional murders.

Nor do women art students have role models with whom they can identify, for although some 75% of the undergraduate student body in (American) art schools are women, approximately 98% of their instructors are male. Thus it becomes clear to these students that women can't succeed, when so few teach, lecture, are invited as 'visiting artists', or are included in the exhibitions at such schools. Organizations like the Women's Art Registry (a slide collection founded in response to the constant comment that 'there are no women