Rather, using as a vantage point their situation as underdogs in the realm of the grandeur, and outsiders of that ideology, women can reveal institutional and intellectual weaknesses in general, and, at the same time that they destroy false consciousness, take part in the creation of institutions in which clear thought β and true greatness β are challenges open to anyone, man or woman, courageous enough to take the necessary risk, the leap into the unknown. The present situation in its ambivalence opens the way to a reordering of priorities.
Poststructuralism has brought out the multiplicity of criteria for any given text. When one eliminates the notion of a decisive reading, the notion of closure and dominance comes to an end. To do so, we must disregard the notion of any inflexible paradigm of quality capable of excluding other standards.
All the more so when it is abstract painting that is in question, this being the most resistant and decisive discourse within modernism. Modernism is a dialogue of objects, not producers, and its normative voice has drowned out the feminine. Now that voice has become hoarse and academic in its insistent repetition of its master narrative. In order to discover what is retrievable from the abstract project, we must subject it to an interrogation that is neither submissive nor cynical.
Theoretically, the paradigms of modernist abstract painting are ones that anyone could partake of: individualism, self-consciousness, empiricism, rationality, self-reflection, a utopian or idealized notion of progress.
The only problem was that these universalist ideals veiled the masculinist particularity of the conventions and institutions within which these ideas were posited as the norm.
