From Virginia Woolf to the post-moderns: developments in a feminist aesthetic

Abstract

Contemporary feminist art theory and practIce has, by and large, turned away from a modernist affirmation of the autonomy of art from IHe towards a post-modern problematisation of the specIfIc category of the aesthetIc. The modernist assertion of the freedom of the autonomous work is held to be inconsistent with feminism's requirements for a committed art responsive to the needs of a determinate publIc. To a contemporary feminism concerned to establlsh the specIfIcity, the legitimate difference, of the feminine, a post-modern ethos whIch repudiates any hierarchisation of world-views and endorses a democratIc plurallsm as the only defensible value appears as the more attractive option. The following paper interrogates the supposition of the radIcal inappropriateness of a modernist aesthetIc to the critIcal requirements of a feminist perspective and challenges the supposed appropriateness of a post-modern standpoint to these needs. Part One of the paper considers a specIfIc case of modernism'S relevance to a feminist art practIce. examine the, admittedly not unambiguous, support Woolf's feminism finds in her allegiance to a modernist aesthetIc developed by the Bloomsbury group. The second part of the paper considers the unacceptable consequences of a radIcal, indiscriminate jettisoning of the main aspirations of modernist art theory for a feminist aesthetIc. Several attempts at constructing a post-modern feminist art are critIcally evaluated and the fundamental inadequacy of these enterprises is traced to an underlying incoherence in the objectives of a post-modern feminism.