Three Artists (Three Women).

The title of Anne Wagner's second book, Three Artists (Three Women), contains a reference to the poem by Sylvia Plath (not the film by Robert Altman), to the "Three Women" of birthing babies, living souls and dead. All three of the women Wagner's book will consider - Georgia O'Keeffe, Lee Krasner, Eva Hesse - were childless. Had they been infected by that condition spotted by one of Plath's women, the affliction of the men in her office?

There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it, That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions, Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed, Endlessly proceed - and the cold angels, the abstractions.

Wagner's three will not be cardboard or angels any more than they will become case studies in sexuality. The women artists here will be shown to be uncomfortable with the social roles ascribed to them, including that of "woman artist," but will not ally themselves with feminism per se. They are independent in the old avant-garde way. They will be modernists working on the edge of others' definitions and roles. They risk looking like men in the office.

None of this will pull even the most ardent feminist to the edge of her chair. But Wagner's book means to test the assumptions of some of her sisters while it proceeds to chart newer ground of interest to all: she will explore the old feminist chestnut by behaving like a literary critic, by studying the relation of these women and their work to words, mainly those of art critics past and present. O'Keeffe's work, for example, was first seen to be embodied by no less than O'Keeffe's own personal body; no amount of ambiguity between abstraction and figuration would stave off the perception. She would have to respond. O'Keeffe would come to write of her new flower paintings to Sherwood Anderson in 1924, seeing them as part of a quest for objectivity, including "two that I have no name for and I don't know where they come from." She was certainly not painting them in response to the words of the journalists: "they say such stupid things," she had written to somebody else two years earlier.

Wagner takes the remark with a grain of salt. Those journalists' words are going to be produced, slowly examined, and spun out into discussions by Wagner herself that produce a complex tissue of textuality around O'Keeffe, a textuality that does not want to settle down into a story. That shifting foundation of verbiage enables Wagner to produce a series of new readings that neither essentialize nor simplify. O'Keeffe will be seen to be a career artist, like one of the new women professionals examined by Joan Riviere in her classic 1929 essay "Womanliness as a Masquerade" (although Wagner does not keep the term clinical or explore the neurotic aspects of the subject, which for Riviere involved the masking of lesbians). Wagner will instead see the flower paintings as female masquerade, and as part of O'Keeffe's greater ambition to depict the spaces both inside and outside the body, spaces absent of identifying genitals, equally unclear about gender, as if the body could be seen as outside of gender too. Her discussions of O'Keeffe's paintings focus and dilate like this; it is best to think of them not as arguments but more as thoughts in the process of becoming interpretations. As a result however the reader is presented with a different kind of feminist art criticism, notable especially for the utter lack of priority given psychoanalysis.

When Wagner replaces the master text of Freud with many different kinds of texts, she is making a bold move in the field of feminist art criticism, although she thankfully does not take it as an occasion for volleys of polemic. The terms of psychoanalysis have not been banished altogether, but when they occur, they are simply folded in to take their place with the others. She keeps reading. The textual situations Wagner addresses become more complex as the book advances. Lee Krasner is studied through a cranky phrase she let drop in an interview, the petulant "I think my painting is so autobiographical if anyone can take the trouble to read it." Wagner, sympathetic, pulls other interviews forward, other recollections, more art criticism. She interrogates the structures of autobiography and self-portraiture, becomes most interested in the zones of impersonality and dialogic inference. Krasner's work is introduced as if it too were comparable to the spoken or written voice. But if language is the lens through which Wagner inspects her material, that material will always be resistant to linguistic formulation, just as the artists themselves were resistant. Neither Pollock nor Krasner, Wagner remarks at one point, "seems to have considered responding to painting a particularly verbal experience."

It is clear by the middle of the book that Wagner's techniques are to be classed as deconstruction, that her close, formal readings of paintings are not meant to be taken as formalist but are offered as pregnant critical operations giving rise to new issues, thoughts bleeding together, expanding the range of the object, not giving it a center or limits. Unlike other deconstructionists of the image, she will not advance linguistic concepts from structuralism or rhetoric to hone her perceptions into a clear, prescriptive model of analysis; Wagner refuses master models, refuses the rigor of a consistent logic. Instead, her discussion keeps turning over its evidence, shifting gears so as to keep the evidence from leading to a single conclusion. Wagner's deconstruction is one of bonelessness, of footsteps, of dissolve. It will suit her idea of modernism - not the one of flatness, but that of shift, negation, and staunch ambiguity. Not a modernism that can easily be shown to be itself a language.

Yet paradoxically, Wagner makes it a function of the world of words. Paradoxes need not be fatal; this one for instance is motivating. Her decision to write with the pen of deconstruction will however involve some sacrifices. The words social and political here become principally words, not practices. The reader is constantly referred to the professional artist's school education, though never given much of an account of what that involved or meant to the emergence of a woman's (painted) voice. Instead the focus is on what happened to the work of these women once they became committed, exhibiting professionals. It was not that their education stopped, but the proper word for the phenomenon under discussion is career.

Wagner's book provides a clear and chilling description of the collapse both critically and, it seems, in the mind of the American artist of the word art into that of career. Women were just as subject to this collapse of concepts as men. With it, art fell into the Darwinian logic of the marketplace: quality, that logic goes, will win its worldly success; inversely, sustained success will be the sign and further guarantee of quality. By 1960, artists wanting to conquer the New York art world would see the advantages of working the terms of success into their art, terms that were being given language by the art critics. One might turn critical or uncritical; no matter which, modern art remained nonetheless bound to this particular language game. Ambitious artists (there were, remember, other kinds) would use and need language in order to do even the most abstract work.

Hesse's sense of the direction of her art was bound up with her ambition for a brilliant career. Like O'Keeffe and Krasner she would make a marriage to a man she felt to be powerfully talented, they too would become what Klaus Theweleit, in Object-Choice, has called a production couple. And though Hesse's marriage would not last, through it her education to the art world and to art developed in a dialogue that accompanied other dialogues. All of this can be parsed out from Hesse's diaries, which Wagner will use to complicate the status of the text and to drive a wedge into the myth that Hesse's art and life were one. That idea, like so many others in the diaries, she so rightly observes, was a cultural construct.

No wonder art criticism works so well for Wagner's assessment of her artists' art and career strategies. For American art criticism achieved much of its twentieth-century credibility for its ability to stitch art and career together without giving the game away. But the critic lobbying for the survival of work on the marketplace was hardly the disinterested aesthete; critics were office workers, perhaps deluded ones, in a bourgeois enterprise; theirs were the reports of efficiency engineers hired to spot the lemons and target the gold. Can we see the gold as modernism still? Of course. Can we read this art criticism as detached, uninflected analysis? Only at some peril.

It will be important for someone to subject the power and role of the word in the art world to a long, hard analysis. Wagner's book leaves the problems posed by legitimation discourse for another day. She keeps her focus on the women, on their ambivalence about being women artists and on their ability to transfer some of their own contradictions and desires for sublimation into art's abstractions. The idea of modernism returns to join them. It makes a match. In the end this is a feminist criticism that takes its lead from the work of the women it studies: it will declare its independence, but she must submit to the drive of language; as for the necessity of modernism, she will not question it.

Molly Nesbit is a contributing editor of Artforum.