Women artists have been aggressive in their practice from inside and outside the discipline of painting in shaping representations of subjects beyond the historically constructed categories of traditional art. They have, for instance, created ingenious forms of expression offering immediate access to their issues, using ordinary, mass-produced materials. In doing this many assert it as a choice not to engage, transgress against, or compete with the historical authority of abstraction. Men have found it all too easy to maintain their ever “widened artistic options.” As for women who continue to paint, they are treated as if they had penises (unless they paint them) — but without the privileges in either case. An extra burden of blame is served to these women: why are you doing men’s work?

Thus women abstract painters are made to appear, anthropologically speaking, as Structural Males. But that the codes in painting have been exhausted is perhaps what makes these codes so interesting and vital, because and not in spite of painting’s history of phallocentrism, racism, Eurocentrism and class privilege. These are vivid grammars and conventions to be recognized, used to re-possess abstract painting and de-mystify its voice. It’s very simple and that clear: to change painting by looking at its historically inscribed meaning, and invert, skewer, reinvent, and even laugh at its conceit would be a most pleasurable subversion of the text, a way to break rocks with the gendered roles that we assume bind us.