From Library Journal
The esteemed Krauss (art, Columbia) is prominent in the field of deconstructionist, feminist, and psychoanalytical art criticism. This collection of her essays applies the theories to nine women artists, neo-Duchampian "bachelors" who mostly practiced photography, sculpture, and some filmmaking and painting. The artists distinguished by this complex rhetorical discourse include Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, Sherrie Levine, and Louise Lawler. Krauss demonstrates how each achieved the "feminization" of the male gaze. Although the formal notation of semiological analysis is clarified in an endnote, from the beginning Krauss assumes her readers to be totally conversant with and attuned to the scholasticism of postmodern art theory. Appropriate mainly for graduate- and professional-level collections.?Mary Hamel-Schwulst, Towson Univ., MDCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Suzanne Ramljak
...Krauss's analysis is grounded in careful observation of specific works ... [and] ultimately brings us to a closer appreciation of the art in question.


Publisher's Weekly, February 8, 1999
"The individual essays are remarkable for their sharpness and thickness of their argument..."


Art Times, April 1999
"A provocative and astute analysis of the works of nine women artists, Bachelors redefines some old ideas about surrealist art while offering some innovative parameters on feminist art."


Art Times, April 1999
"A provocative and astute analysis of the works of nine women artists, Bachelors redefines some old ideas about surrealist art while offering some innovative parameters on feminist art."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

These essays on nine women artists - gathered as Bachelors - are framed by the question, born of feminism, "What evaluative criteria can be applied to women's art?"

FROM THE CRITICS

Art Times

A provocative and astute analysis of the works of nine women artists, Bachelors redefines some old ideas about surrealist art while offering some innovative parameters on feminist art.

Publishers Weekly

A juicy conundrum lies at the heart of this collection of essays by the prominent art historian and co-founder of the art/theory journal October: the work of nine women artists of this century (one painter, three sculptors and five photographers) are considered under the rubric "Bachelors." Unsurprisingly, Krauss (The Optical Unconscious) grapples with the topic of gender and engages in some fancy footwork around the question of what it might mean to call a woman a "bachelor," and the expected motifs of indeterminacy, androgyny and transgression do arise again and again. But other than abstruse discussions in three of the essays of the "bachelor machine" as conceived by Marcel Duchamp in his canonical, surrealist assemblage The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), the bachelor conceit remains more a tease than a clearly unifying concept. The individual essays are remarkable for the sharpness and thickness of their arguments. Beginning with the supposed sadism and misogyny of the surrealist movement--which she recasts as an espousal of formlessness, fluidity and even femininity--Krauss topples one after another chestnut of art criticism, including those of scholarly feminism. In the end, bachelors or no, Claude Cahun, Agnes Martin, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman all powerfully illustrate her contention that "art made by women needs no special pleading." B&w illustrations. (Mar.)

Library Journal

The esteemed Krauss (art, Columbia) is prominent in the field of deconstructionist, feminist, and psychoanalytical art criticism. This collection of her essays applies the theories to nine women artists, neo-Duchampian "bachelors" who mostly practiced photography, sculpture, and some filmmaking and painting. The artists distinguished by this complex rhetorical discourse include Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, Sherrie Levine, and Louise Lawler. Krauss demonstrates how each achieved the "feminization" of the male gaze. Although the formal notation of semiological analysis is clarified in an endnote, from the beginning Krauss assumes her readers to be totally conversant with and attuned to the scholasticism of postmodern art theory. Appropriate mainly for graduate- and professional-level collections.--Mary Hamel-Schwulst, Towson Univ., MD

Suzanne Ramljak - The New York Times Book Review