In his essay “The Phantom Limb. Carole Rama and the History of Art,” the philosopher Paul B. Preciado writes: “Invisibilise, discover and reduce to an identity: these are three epistemological operations that the hegemonic discourse of art history has deployed to construct the norm. [. . .] When a work is ‘discovered’ or unveiled, it is also likely to be subject to eclipse by the third discursive strategy: classifying the artistic work based on the parameters of biopolitical control that seek above all to assign identity.”¹ This is a process that I unfortunately became aware of when preparing the retrospective of the artist Hessie at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse in 2017, then at the MUSAC in León in 2018.² My naïve desire was to rehabilitate an artist whose powerful and complex textile work I had discovered during the elles@centrepompidou exhibition in 2009. Fascinated by the radical nature of both the work and the artist, I conducted some critical and curatorial research with a view to shining a light on a Franco-Caribbean artist who had fallen into obscurity. My initial frustration was to find that this revaluation of old masters was first of all to delight the art market, especially gallery owners. Secondly, instead of undertaking a self-diagnosis and assuming its share of responsibility in this process of invisibilisation, the art world was more inclined to present Hessie as the poor victim of her husband, the painter Dado (1933–2010). It is however reductive and caricatural to present the artist as a woman victim of Dado’s imposing shadow without questioning the phallocentric view that the art world then casts on her work. But it seems easier to blame domestic and social patriarchy so as not to have to question institutional sexism and racism. So rather than asking why curators, exhibition organisers, gallery owners and collectors stopped looking at, exhibiting and buying Hessie’s work at the end of the 1980s, we prefer to blame the husband.

Finally, the critical reception placed far too much emphasis on Hessie’s Cuban origins, whereas, throughout her life, the artist maintained an elegant but firm distance from discourses, biographical accounts in particular, declaring in the catalogue of her monographic exhibition at the ARC 2 in 1975: “No man’s land. The artist declines all responsibility for her identity, be it her private life, or statements about her work.”³

In this context, the obsession with the artist’s origins seemed to betray her desire for freedom, for the independence to be and to do what she wanted without ticking boxes or pre-established labels. An obsession made all the more absurd by the fact that her Cuban origins turned out to be false. This focus on biopolitical parameters ultimately says more about the fantasies and prejudices of art professionals than about the artist herself. As Adrian Piper wrote: “I am, after all, not an ‘other’ to myself; that is a category imposed on me by Euroethnics who purport to refer to me but in fact denote their own psychosociological constructs.”⁴

For all these reasons, I felt a strange sense of guilt, of complicity, as if my research, instead of subverting art history’s discriminatory system actually fed it. I was then reminded of Linda Nochlin’s warnings in her seminal essay on feminist art history Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (1971).⁵ In addition to analysing the institutional mechanisms put in place to keep women out of the field of artistic creation, the art historian understands that feminism’s major challenge in the history of art is not so much the rehabilitation of forgotten women artists as the deconstruction of the myth of the great artist. In order to put an end to the systemic invisibilisation of women artists, and to finally free ourselves from the vicious circle of invisibilisation, discovery and reduction to an identity, we must fight the evil at its root and undo all institutional mechanisms of discrimination.

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