Unexpected turns: Griselda Pollock and feminist temporality in art historiography

Abstract

This article aims to address the matter of a feminist temporality in Griselda Pollock’s “Unexpected Turns” text. For that purpose, the intellectual trajectory of the art historian is presented, along with her relations with feminist theory and practice, and how the question of the canon has been elaborated throughout her intellectual production. Furthermore, Pollock’s question is presented: how could a feminist art historiography benefit from a different way of writing, without evolutionary schemes? Following the art historian Aby Warburg and three concepts of his authorship, Nachleben, Pathosformeln and his Mnemosyne Atlas, Griselda Pollock proposes an unexpected turn. In this article, the author’s relationships with Walter Benjamin and Georges Didi-Huberman’s considerations of time in history and art are also examined. If a feminist praxis is inscribed in an endless becoming, far from being concluded, a feminist art history could turn itself to the temporality of politics, inscribed in a model of heterogeneous and dialectical time.