The missing future. The museum to the test of Griselda Pollock’s feminist criticism

Abstract

Griselda Pollock, author of the seminal book Vision and Difference (1988), is among the most influential voices of critical reflection on the representation and presence of women in art and in its history. Her rigorous research path through the practices and institutions of art which in the museum has found a place for confrontation and verification for a thought that declares itself to be "feminist" and "situated”. Encounters on the Virtual feminist museum (2007) is a complex cartography of the extensive investigation that Pollock has been conducting for years on the museum institution and its dynamics of exclusion and integration, on the processes of fetishization and the construction of memory that affect art of women, a critical itinerary that also crosses the question of the archive and the figure of the atlas. It is in the light of this theoretical framework that Pollock then analyzed the reception of the artists' work and their museum destiny in individual cases: The missing future: Moma and modern women, published in the collective volume Modern Women. Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art (2010), follows that setting, for instance. 

The essay aims to analyze the theoretical knots of Griselda Pollock's feminist museological reflection and its influence on the debate that today affects the social role and the ethical, as well as cultural, value of the museum.