Against the crisis? The social and discursive figure of the female critic in France, the USA and Germany, ca. 1970s - 1990s

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Stephanie Marchal
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 549678070

The aim of the research project is to analyze and focus for the first time on what was happening in art criticism around 1970: This marks the beginning of a rhetoric of the "crisis" of criticism that continues to this day, while at the same time the new social and discourse figure of the female art critic appears in this hitherto androcentric field in the wake of feminist movements. The research project investigates this exciting, hitherto ignored coincidence using the example of the female critics considered representative of this upheaval. At the same time, Annette Michelson, Gertrud Koch and Helke Sander as well as Catherine Millet in the USA, the FRG and France presented new ethical-aesthetic agendas via their own journals, networked via a new theoretical reference system and carried out pioneering work in the linguistic and methodological development of partly new fields of artistic expression. In these changing critical practices, possibilities of a distancing and free appropriation of socially disciplinary, androcentrically shaped sets of rules into which the critics had grown up are tested. The project asks how they renegotiate questions of value and world relations in art from 'differently' socialized perspectives. The guiding thesis is that productive, previously (epistemically ignored) forms of criticism can be detected that question the notion of a crisis. Instead, we can speak of a repositioning moment of critique, which the project will profile in feedback to previous, 'modern' forms of critique. The connection between artistic forms of expression, media, epistemological and economic transformations and art-critical practices around 1970 will be investigated, also exploring the potential that talking about art (still) holds as a contribution to a successful culture of debate. The project makes a fundamental contribution to the (still unwritten) history of art criticism.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants