Hilary Robinson

Within the Pale in from: Beyond the Pale: the construction of femininity in the curating of an exhibition season at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Abstract In the winter of 1994–1995 the Irish Museum of Modem Art, Dublin (IMMA) held a season of exhibitions under the umbrella title from: Beyond the Pale. The publicity for the season high‐lighted two issues in particular: the English colonial concept of ‘the pale’ as it was developed in Dublin, and the positioning of Irish culture in relation to this in a post‐colonial period; and the importance of the concept of ‘the feminine’ in contemporary art practices. This paper explores how women and ‘the feminine’ were positioned by from: Beyond the Pale. It does this in two ways: by analyzing the framing’ of the season—in particular, the publicity leaflets and the catalogue; and by then attending to the curating of the two main exhibitions of the season. Through focussing on this framework (rather than particular exhibits) the paper argues that the season, despite its intentions to the contrary, re‐built its own ‘pale’ and located women and ‘the feminine’ as occupying an emblematic, ‘other’, or ‘primitive’ p...

Disruptive Women Artists: An Irigarayan Reading of Irish Visual Culture

At present, argues Luce Irigaray, `we are still not born women’ [1]. We have not attained our full subjectivity, or our syntax in the Symbolic; we struggle to achieve the creation of objects of mediation between ourselves. We have not become women because we have no horizon corresponding to our morphology, nor do we have our genealogies. Women’ s genealogies (by which I understand Irigaray to mean the culture in an appropriate syntax passed from woman to woman through the generations) have been utterly disrupted by patriarchal social, sexual, legal, cultural and religious structures. Irigaray argues that as women within those structures we have no sense of our potential for an appropriate divinity, one which accords to female morphologies, no appropriate transcendental, no universal which allows us an horizon towards which we can move. We see that such patriarchal structures grant our mothers no respect, but without an horizon of possibilities leading us to do otherwise, we reproduce those structures. Mother to daughter, in a state of immediacy, we are not in position to become the subjects, women. Irigaray proposes that to be `born women’ Ð to achieve our subjectivity as womenÐ we must achieve appropriate forms of mediation. This essay aims to set out a framework through which it is possible to read some artworks by Irish women as disruptive of the representation of `Woman’ in Irish culture because of their attempts to restructure a genealogy of women. An initial discussion of iconic representations of women in Irish myth and religion outlines how they produce the representation `Woman’ as a cypher of nation, while reducing actual women, politically and empirically, to mothers. Luce Irigaray’s arguments for resisting such a reduction through the strategic representation of the mother± daughter couple within a reassertion of women’s genealogies will be identi® ed as a means of resistance to present structures of representation. I will demonstrate how this adds new legibility to some recent artworks by Irish women.