The Obstacle Race
Mullarkey, Maureen
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...That such protesting Catholics once existed, to say nothing of the fact that some are still around, is enough to draw regular outbursts of sarcastic scorn from Andrew Greeley...
...The essay looked forward to a feminist critique of art history that, if answered adequately, could "provide a paradigm" for the tendency of women to settle, like sediment, to the bottom in other fields as well...
...In their shocked confrontation with the brutalities of the modern world, these people found little guidance and less help from theologians, scholars, political or ecclesiastical leaders...
...The diction hoists women back onto the same dreary pedestal that has been a major obstacle in any of women's races: women are nicer people than men...
...Moral Teaching of the New Testament, Rev...
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...Finally, critics will find plenty of ammunition in the interviews: here is a woman who reports that by the time she joined the resistance, she had come to look upon her religious community "only as a base of operations...
...Not knowing what questions to ask of her data, Greer's emphasis throughout is on tone rather than substance...
...It is a facile potboiler, the latest and glossiest reminder that women can still cash in on each other as a cause c$leTJre...
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...True, it is "one of the more galling ironies of history" that the works of Gwen John, unvalued in her lifetime, are now financing the Centre des Etudes Maritain...
...Tintoretto's force of personality is disparaged as"an overriding artistic ego...
...It is quite another thing to trivialize the fact Of that achievement, as Greer does, by using it as a sentimental warning against "the power of love...
...The real reason they continue to disturb, even enrage, is that they exposed the reality of our situation in this century of war...
...Were women excluded from these low-status pools initially...
...Face to face with the processes and demands of art ("pusillanimous, pettifogging, bourgeois art"), Greer goes right on pulling the rug out from under her own claim to seriousness...
...Her prose has no choice but to lie under the weight of so much half, digested roughage...
...program or as unclassified students...
...ButThe Obstacle Race isn't all that interested in either the stuff of history or of art...
...Neither the author nor his subjects yet realize that the progression has been experienced before...
...She never misses a chance to contrast "the marauding activities of heterosexual men" with the "high moral purposc" and "unremitting search for purity" of her women...
...Without crediting Nochlin for the germinal idea or its thematic breakdowns, Greer attempt s just such a paradigm...
...She ducks and dives into the data in search of significance with the compulsion of a waterfowl hunting for a meal...
...Meconis traces their paths including his own, from early personal decisions to resist the war, through pacifist draft card burning, the wildfire spread of draft board raids, and the long trials which drained funds and divided friends, to the gradual erosion of networks of communications and "actions communities" amid charges of "elitism and sexism...
...While agreeing that the media title "Catholic Left" is "sociologically inaccurate," Meconis nevertheless supplies an appendix of 232 names of the "core members" of just that group, those who took part in " 'serious' (e.g...
...On the other hand, Suzanne Valadon's adulteries "kept her libido intact...
...then came the final realization that the radical commitment must be universal, embracing all the above and patriarchy as well...
...Or were they gradually eased out as the creation ofpeintures du roi slowly changed th e position of painters from anonymous artisans to status symbols of the court...
...Those of us who are more' 'responsible" than the Berrigans and their friends refuse to admit that things are that bad...
...Women's paintirlg "relates to other acts of loving...
...But it is no more galling than the current 6-figure sales of the same paintings that brought Modigliani, in his lifetime, no more than the price of a meal...
...The real subject of the book is not women as artists but Greer herself as a gentleman-scholar...
...JACOB'S LADDER THEOLOGY AND SPIRITUALITY IN THE tHOUGHT or AUSTIN rARRER By Charles Hefting A lucid introduction to the theology, biblical ~ - criticism and sermons of a remarkable twentieth century Anglican scholar and preacher...
...Art history: argument-by-anecdote TBE OBSTACLE RACE: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work Germaine Greer Farrar, Straus & Glroux, $25, 373 pp...
...She has a naive preference for "spontaneity" without quite knowing what that means in a work of art and with no grasp of the extent to which painfully acquired discipline informs successful spontaneity...
...Offedngs include: Psalms and Wisdom Literature, Rev...
...Many then stumbled into a supposedly revolutionary commitment to end capitalism and imperialism...
...Isn't that what the Pennsylvania Academy had in mind when it substituted a cow for a nude model in its life classes for women in the 1880's...
...What discussion there is is cursory and misleading...
...She seized what she wanted from art and life, and tore it free with both hands...
...For those less insecure, there are life stories in the anti-war resistance as important for us as was the lonely witness of a Jagerstatter for the postwar generation...
...Commonweal: 636.in gaining an understanding of women's history in the arts...
...ldAUREEN MULLARKEY is a painter whose works were shown in exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum this summer...
...02138 Please enclose .50 for postage and handling 9 November 1979:637At heart, The Obstacle Race is not a new book...
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...Perhaps in our uneasy arrogance we have reason to be grateful that at least s~.me people insisted, and continue to ingist, that more is needed...
...Greer's own word choice gives the book an embarrassingly antique cast...
...It isn't evenpassionate criticism...
...She has little understanding of the ways in which a painter's vocabulary is acquired and no comprehension of the function of artistic influences...
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...Another appendix indicates that only 54% of the identified membership on whom information was available identified themselves as Catholic...
...In the text, Meconis provides little analysis of his data, relying instead upon his interviews and selected publications...
...little is discussed...
...Spring semester begins January 14, 1980 and ends May 2, 1980...
...For every anecdote featuring the pathos of a woman's predicament, there are corresponding anecdotes about men in parallel predicaments...
...Maureen MuUarkey W H. AUDEN once remarked: "It's 9 less morally confusing to be goosed by a traveling salesman than by a bishop...
...In the end, it is the level of the prose, and its generative logic, that causes Greer's credibility to crack and pe~J like color from a Florentine fresco...
...Juan Lozano, C.M.F...
...Meconis has not written as he intended the "critical history of the Catholic Left as a social movement," but he has provided a story of real people living "with clumsy grace" in a hard time...
...Yet the years of resistance were for some participants a "holy time" when they "were living at the top of [their] freedom," when lives were changed, ripples spread, and for them at least, things would never again be the same...
...It is The Female Eunuch gone artsy and gussied up with footnotes (listing sources in the obligatory French and German) in a strained attempt at academic respectability...
...And that's too bad, because Greer comes on like a bishop...
...She gives the game away when she tells us that Degas's drawing is "weak" next to Suzanne Valadon's or that Diego Rivera achieved nothing but "rhetoric...
...Dm4d O'Brlon T HE FRONT-PAGE evening-TV appearanee of priest-criminals and sisterradicals remains one of the most startling features of a period of American history best captured in historian William O'Neal's Coming Apart...
...Never mind all those murals in Mexico City's National Palace: Diego Rivera was jus~ a nasty adulterer...
...Yet, we also find the innocence, seriousness, and real courage which marked the resistance...
...DAVID O'BPaEN teaches history at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts and is the author of The Renewal of American Catholicism...
...Reading Charles Meconis's admittedly flawed book may help insure that some at least learn something and do not forget everything...
...Towns maintained anonymous pools of artists into the Renaissance...
...When they were younger and had not yet learned the need for realism, or "hardanalysis," or patience, there was then a "holy time...
...They are more apt to titillate than inform...
...Less concentration on "betrayal by sexuai love" and greater attention to social assumptions and their attendant economics would have provided more usable insights...
...He claims that the group significantly influenced opinion in and out of the church, but provides no real evidence to support the contention...
...Beneath it all are large, very large truths we would all prefer to forget...
...Anecdotes are the small talk of history...
...Remembering the resistance CLUMSY GRACE The American Catholic Left, 1961-1975 Charles A o Meconfs Smamry, SS.9S, 224 pp...
...hostile to established peace organizations and leaders, suspicious of all forms of"elitism" and in many cases well distanced from the church, if not its faith, they remain unable to understand their world or to seize their time...
...Finally, the word "left" itself is questionable, for the "risky action" criteria fits no clear political or ideological category...
...if we can only find the right combination of critical intelligence, military power, moral realism, and personal patience, everything will come out sane in the end...
...for us there never was...
...Telephone: 312/274-3000...
...Painting was a trade like any other and, like all crafts under the guild system, largely a family business...
...Richard Costigan, S.J...
...Greer approaches her subject as if the history of women in art were nothing more than the acting out, over centuries, of the psycho-drama of Svengali and Trilby...
...Everything is mentioned...
...Influence is presented as a kind of rape...
...For a while "the Berrigans" symbolized the apparent disintegration of the nation and its supposedly most conservative, dependable religions institution...
...In an age-that recognized art work for the manual labor that it is, wishing to be an artist was like wishing to be a shoemaker...
...She talks about '.'excellence" but has no criteria for it...
...Might we suspect, in some dark recess of our hearts, that someday there must be...
...Frederick Moriarty, S.J...
...in the anthologyArt and Sexual Politics, edited by Thomas Hess and Elizabeth Baker...
...But no, it is intended as straight socio-historical analysis...
...Greer wants us to know that the racy, irreverent upstart of The Female Eunuch earned a mortar-board...
...here too, is that awkward, embarrassing use of profanity and street jargon by priests and sisters with MAs and PhDs...
...Despite Greer's assumed role as a "feminist art historian," the book isn't history...
...Her inability to focus coherently on what is meant by artistic quality leaves her resorting to an apology for women's work that is based on the denigration of men's...
...It is one thing to decry the circumstances that make the extent of a woman's achievement dependent on the prestige of male promoters and protectors...
...felonious) nonviolent action to protest the war in Indochina," admitting as well some who took "equivalent risks," such as refusing to testify before grand juries...
...Omitted are Dorothy Day, Gordon Zahn and Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, to say nothing of the hundreds of persons equally opposed to "poverty, racism and war" but unsure that the "core group" l~new what it was doing...
...Their awakened consciences led them to a simple opposition to the war...
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...Greer has trou.ble deciding what sense to make of her own inventory...
...Many of the names belong to women whose claim to attention rests less on a body of work than On their resemblance to the heroines of 19th century dime novels...
...PHEME PERKINS teaches theology at Boston College and is the author of The Gnostic Dialogue (Paulist...
...Greer's heroines are encased in that same mixture of overwrought phrasing ("She drank deep of his polluted well") and sensationalism that characterizes pulp confessions...
...He writes a regular column for Commonweal...
...Loyola Theology School Loyola University Graduate Courses in Theology...
...Media and participants alike exaggerated the importance of the "Catholic Left...
...THOMAS POWERS is the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (Knopf...
...The Obstacle Race is scholarship parodying itself and one would like tO think it was written tongue-in-cheek...
...Greer labels Nochlin's title query "a false question" and shifts attention to "the real question: What is the contribution of women to the visual aris...
...It would be useful to know these things REVIEWERS ROBERT G. HOYT is executive editor of Christianity and Crisis and one of the editor-writers of The Terrible Choice: The Abortion Dilemma (Bantam...
...These courses may be taken in the M.A...
...Argument-by-anecdote turns out to be no argument at all...
...With Clumsy Grace is a kind of collecfive autobiography, a memoir, based on trial transcripts,some excellent oral history, and a poorly selected list of publications...
...Asking that question need not mean we move into Philip Berrigan and Liz McAlister's Jonah House, but it could suggest that now as in 1968, the proper response to Commonweal: 638...
...Much of the book reads like Gothic romance...
...If there is little to be learned here about women, there is even less to be learned about the making of art...
...It is a curiously inarticulate book...
...There is, in fact, so much latent hysteria in Greer's use of the word love that one begins to suspect The Obstacle Race was written for Salem spinsters...
...here are the simplistic criticisms of the church as irretrievably implicated in imperialism, capitalism and war...
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...Men paint just to shoW off...
...The single most poignant truth to emerge from this book is tltat scoring points with anecdotes is not the same thing as making meaning out of historical data...
...For instance in discussing the middle ages and the Renaissance, there is no attempt to clarify the position of women vis-d-vis the status of the arts...
...There were few "openings" for men or women outside the family workshop...
...In her pre-occupation with love as the bSte-noire of women mists, Greer keeps missing the point of her own anecdotes...
...Grace and Person, Sr...
...Mary Peter McGinty, C.S.J...
...The listing of names is relentless...
...She swallows ~. whatever looks e&ble, leaving the reader to cough up the weeds...
...Anyone who picks up The Obstacle Race, Germaine Greer's first book since The Female...
...Here is the history of an important portion of the Catholic peace movement, those who risked jail, as they understand that history...
...What were the strictures and conditions that permitted women into certain craft guilds while denying them entry to others...
...Mary Peter McGinty, C.S.J., LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, 6525 North Sheridan Road, Chicago, Illinoin 60626...
...national politics changed little, the cultural revolution was the shortest lived in history, and the church was hardly reconstructed on pacifist or socialist lines...
...much less are they able yet to write their own history...
...The angularities of history are too numerous to permit anyone to play the point-system as superficially as Greer does and get away with it...
...The same qualities in a woman evoke song from Greer;, "Boldness was her hallmark, boldness of conception, boldness of design, boldness of execution, and she lived with the same uncompromising boldness...
...Eunuch of i970, is likely to get goosed...
...What she achieves is a coffee-table catalogue of also-rans that only underscores the rueful implications of women's absence from the roster of masters...
...In 1971 Vassar art historian Linda Nochlin published an essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists...
...Religion and Politics in Christian History, Rev...
...It is an evasion that permits Greer to substitute compilation for inquiry...
Vol. 106 • November 1979 • No. 20
