Bachelors

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Annotation Since the 1970s Rosalind Krauss has been exploring the art of painters, sculptors, and photographers, examining the intersection of these artists concerns with the major currents ofpostwar visual culture: the question of the commodity, the status of the subject, issues ofrepresentation and abstraction, and the viability of individual media. These essays on nine womenartists--gathered as Bachelors--are framed by the question, born of feminism, "What evaluativecriteria can be applied to women's art?" In the case of surrealism, in particular, some have claimedthat surrealist women artists must either redraw the lines of their practice or participate in themovement's misogyny. Krauss resists that claim, for these "bachelors" are artists whose expressivestrategies challenge the very ideals of unity and mastery identified with masculinist aesthetics. Some of this work, such as the "part object" (Louise Bourgeois) or the "formless" (Cindy Sherman)could be said to find its power in strategies associated with such concepts as écriture feminine. Inthe work of Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, or Sherrie Levine, one can make the case that the power of thework can be revealed only by recourse to another type of logic altogether. Bachelors attempts to dojustice to these and other artists (Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Louise Lawler, Francesca Woodman) inthe terms their works demand