Bachelors

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.)