Introduction
At the beginning of the 20th century, women artists were already reaping the benefits
that other women had fought for in the 19th century. They were able to study at the
same art academies as men, apply for scholarships, participate in the life classes, enter
competitions and win prizes. Further more, they could present their work at
international exhibitions and sell it in galleries, they received commissions, and they
played an active part in the art scene.[i]
I think women have been involved in making art in most times and places, despite
difficulties in training and trading their work, and gaining recognition. However, in
the contemporary art scene, many famous female artists are known primarily for the
fact that they make use of their naked bodies in their art practice. Moreover, in many
of these contemporary images, the female artists use different angles and points of
view. This raises the question “How and why do female artists use their naked
body in contemporary art practice?
The Guerrilla Girls began in 1985, after a few members attended an exhibition titled
“An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture” held by the Museum of Modern
Art in New York
The ratio of artists of color was even smaller, none of whom were women artists
either.
One of their most famous posters was plastered across New York City
Its headline read, "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?" The
Guerrilla Girls conducted a “weenie court” at New York ’s Metropolitan Museum
Art, counting naked males and naked females in the artworks as well as numbers of
female artists in the collection. Less than 5% of the artists in the Met's modern art
sections were women, but 85% of the nudes were female. Their design was rejected
by The Public Art Fund as a billboard so the Guerrilla Girls ran it as an ad in the
public buses in New York City
reproduced in many, many textbooks on all subjects from geography to art history to
women's studies. The GGs went back in 2005 to do a recount and found that there are
now fewer women artists shown at the Met, but more naked males in the artworks.
Members of the original group proclaim that no one knows their identities, except for
some of their mothers and/or partners. They never reveal the number of members of
the group, implying that there are many Guerrilla Girls, or at least Guerrilla Girl
supporters, all over the world.
The Guerrilla Girls chose their name “guerrilla” because they “…wanted to play with
the fear of guerrilla warfare, to make people afraid of who [they] might be and where
[they] might strike next”. They call themselves “girls” instead of “women” to reclaim
the belittling usage of the word and to shock and to upset people, particularly other
feminist groups. The idea of wearing gorilla masks came from a need to have a
disguise, and the story is that in an early meeting, an original member misspelled
“Guerrilla” as “Gorilla”.[ii]
I included this poster in the essay because it’s very interesting that In 1989, when the
GGs did the first version of this poster, less than 5% of the artists hanging in the
Modern and Contemporary Sections of New York 's Metropolitan Museum
were women, but 85% of the nudes were female. In the Fall of 2004 the GGs went
back and recounted. SURPRISE. Not much had changed. In fact, there were a few
less women artists than fifteen years before!
Why is this still the case? This question is the starting point for my essay. I think a
large part of the answer relates to the theory of the “Male Gaze”.
written in 1973 and published in
Screen. It later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other
Pleasures, and numerous other anthologies. Her article was one of the first major
essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic
framework, influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Prior to
Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz had attempted
to use psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema, but Mulvey's
contribution was to inaugurate the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis, and
feminism.
Mulvey's article engaged in no empirical research on film audiences. She instead
stated that she intended to make a "political use" of Freud and Lacan, and then used
some of their concepts to argue that the cinematic apparatus of classical
cinema inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position, with the figure of
the woman on screen as the object of desire. In the era of classical
viewers were encouraged to identify with the protagonist of the film, who tended to
be a man. Meanwhile,
according to Mulvey, coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness."
We look at the women in these images (1, 2, 3, 4) and they cannot look back, cannot
block our ‘gaze’. Within the images men look at women as if they are there for their
visual pleasure, visual consumption. Image 2 (Nancy Gauze) plays around with the
idea of the ‘male gaze’, the image of the model is repeated endlessly and controlled
by the cameraman who delivers her for our consumption. In image 4 we see the
female model ‘take control’ by using the camera herself. This presents the model as
independent, in-control. However, she is still simply available to ‘us’ – the consumer
of the advertisement (positioned as male).
This essay emerged from my curiosity about female artists and the way they
represent themselves, their naked body, in 21st century contemporary art.
There are a few female artists who use their body naked in contemporary art such as
Orlan, Hannah Wilkie, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Saville, Nan Goldin
Natacha Merritt, Ghada Amer, Helen Chadwick, Yoko Ono, Tracye Emin, Helen
Chadwick.
Here, I would like to give examples of 2 female artists and their use of their own
naked bodies. Ghada Amer (Egyptian) and Natacha Merritt(New Yorker).
Merritt born in 1977, works with a digital camera, the Polaroid of the 90s, breaking
down the most intimate details into universally accessible bits of information. Eric
Kroll came across Natacha Merritt by chance on the internet, where she had put
several of her photographs. This was something that left the tradition of classical pin-
up and fetish photography, in which Kroll himself works, far behind.
in New York City. She emigrated from her birth country at age 11 and was educated
particularly the representation of female nudes in art history as ideal objects rather
than human beings with a sexuality and eroticism of their own. She is represented by
Cheim & Read Gallery
Both artists deal with privacy, and they do this in very different ways.
Women artists attempt to take control of the way they are represented as women, by
using and re-imagining dominant cultural norms. For Amer, she is trying to take
control of the culture enforcing secrecy and seclusion. While the artist Merritt
was trying to take control of a culture enforcing exposure. No curtain, no veil.
Anyone who has seen her Digital Diaries has intimate knowledge of Natacha Merritt,
and of her friends, male and female, and her acquaintances as well. But Merritt's
favourite motif is herself: she poses almost every minute of the day for her camera,
taking photographs of herself in bed, in the shower, having sex with her friend,
masturbating with and without accessories, from every imaginable angle and with the
camera usually at arms length. But for Ghada Amer, she paints picture without using
brush and paint. Her tools are needle and thread, used to produce surfaces covered
with densely intertwined yarn, recalling the paintings of Brice Marden, Alberto
Giacometti, or Cy Twombly. Yet despite the superficial textural similarity, the images
actually represent lascivious, perhaps even pornographic female figures, which
gradually manifest themselves as we gaze at the tangled surface- painstakingly crafted
and razor-sharp in impact. An immaterial phenomenon that suddenly takes on
physical presence.
Face to face with Merritt's photographs one can reflect on intimacy and publicity in
the digital age, on narcissism even, or on radical self-exploration with the help of the
camera. But this all sounds better as Natacha Merritt herself once put it: in her view,
she has found a new mode of masturbating her way into the next millennium.
Ghada Amer’s figures are repeated across the canvas, doubled, tripled, quadrupled,
their legs spread, their public triangles represented in rainbow colours, as if a
“typically female” pastime was literally playing with herself. An endless chain of
masturbating women veiled by a mass of cotton and long, dangling threads, as if
attempting to evade the viewer’s voyeuristic gaze.
While she describes herself as a painter and has won international recognition for her
abstract canvases embroidered with erotic motifs, Ghada Amer is a multimedia artist
whose entire body of work is infused with the same ideological and aesthetic
concerns. Her oeuvre includes examples of painting, drawing, sculpture, performance,
and installation.
Amer's multiple geographic relocations are reflected in her work. Her painting is
influenced by the idea of shifting meanings and the appropriation of the languages of
abstraction and expressionism. Her prints, drawings, and sculptures question clichéd
roles imposed on women; her garden projects connect embroidery and gardening as
specifically "feminine" activities; and her recent installations address the current
tumultuous political climate. Despite the differences between her Islamic upbringing
and Western models of behavior, Amer's work addresses universal problems, such as
the oppression of women, which are prevalent in all cultures. She does this by r
epresenting the submission of women to the tyranny of domestic life, the celebration
of female sexuality and pleasure, the incomprehensibility of love, the foolishness of
war and violence, and an overall quest for formal beauty, constitute the territory that
she explores and expresses in her art.
The similarities and radical differences between Merritt and Amer can be seen in
the following images.
Whilst Merritt uses narcissistic display, Amer uses self absorbed
contemplation. When we look at both artist’s work we can find a traditional
pornographic style in Merrit’s work, which many will find outside or beyond fine
art. However Amer’s work sits within a fine art framework; if pornography was the
‘graphic depiction of whores’ Amer has created the ‘graphic depiction of privacy’.
She created the women and domestic space using domestic practice showing the
private life of women.
Another outstanding difference is the way Merritt uses what could be seen as ‘boys
toys’ – men are the main consumers of the medium she uses. She uses technology,
such as the internet, which is a male arena, dominated by men. Whereas Amer uses
traditionally female domestic crafts, invoking a female, domestic arena.
This difference could also reflect on the cultural differences between the two women.
Western culture, exemplified by the internet, celebrates public forums, freedom of
speech and the democratization of the press. But for Islamic culture public conduct
and public space is tightly controlled, like no kissing in public.
For me, Merritt’s images repeat and possibly re-enforce the dominant culture, re-enact
the power of the ‘male gaze’. She uses standard pornographic formula but the fact that
a woman is ‘in control’ of their production seems to make little difference to the end
product. The ‘male gaze’ is undisturbed.
Amer’s images also use standard pornographic formula; the way the figures are posed
is almost identical to Merritt’s figures. However, Amer seems to subvert of resist the
stereotype. Her images seem to retain an essence of privacy, shrouded in an interior,
domestic and feminine space. The images are not blatant, we have to engage with
them, even interrogate them – they still remain partially closed to the ‘male gaze’.
I come from Thailand
how they should ac in public.So my own art work explores themes of display and
consumption in relation to my identity as a Thai woman observing British culture.
The Thai Restaurant, a frontline in European contact with Thai culture, provides a
backdrop to my explorations of sexuality and cultural consumption.
So why is it significant that myself and Ghada portray ourselves naked? I would
suggest that Ghada seeks to shock the viewer by presenting herself as an Egyptian
woman displaying herself naked in a public way. She comes from a culture where this
is extremely taboo.
However, as an artist she seems to be taking control of her own self-representation,
and challenging the cultural norms that try to suppress female sexuality. She presents
an image of women experiencing their own sexuality and pleasure in the absence of
men – asserting their independence and their right to self expression.
In my art work I use my naked body to gain the audience’s attention, making
them stop and engage with my story about Thai women and British social life.
I am using my body as an object, and this has three distinct meanings.
Firstly, to reclaim the stereotype of the Thai women, often seen as sexually available,
little more than a prostitute. This is often represented by jokes and casual comments
about Thai women as objects of commercial exchange.
Secondly, the ‘greeting’ statue from the Thai Restaurant. This symbolizes Thai
culture, Thai food. The statues have a blank expression. The audience can super
impose anything on them.
Thirdly, my emotions, gesture, and body language is often defensive, inward, denying
access to my inner self, attempting to block the ‘male gaze’.
The two women artists I have chosen to focus on use their naked bodies in very
different ways. Why they do this is a very difficult question to answer. Both seek to
shock: Merritt by explicit self display in a pornographic style. For a woman to adopt
this style still has shock value; but the end product (the images) are conventional,
mainstream pornography.
As I have already suggested, Amer’s shock value stems from her identity as an
Egyptian woman from an Islamic background. Female display and sexuality is strictly
controlled in Islamic culture. However, Amer’s work goes beyond simple shock
tactics. The female models in her work celebrate a private, domestic exploration of
female sexuality: a sensuality echoed in and linked to the rich textures of female craft
or domestic tasks.
Both artists say something about ownership:
I own myself, my body, and I can choose to exploit myself.
I own myself, my body, and I have the right to explore and keep you at a distance.
ii Guerrilla Girls, “Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls”. New York
iii Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) Originally Published - Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 page 7-8
Continuing from Laura Mulvey theory
The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image
of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman
stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic
presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies. Recent
writing in Screen about psychoanalysis and the cinema has not sufficiently brought
out the importance of the representation of the female form in a symbolic order in
which, in the last resort, it speaks castration and nothing else. To summarize briefly:
the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is two-fold. She first
symbolises the castration threat by her real absence of a penis, and second thereby
raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the
process is at an end, it does not last into the world of law and language except as a
memory which oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack.
Both are posited on nature (or on anatomy in Freud's famous phrase). Woman's desire
is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound, she can exist only in
relation to castration and cannot transcend it. She turns her child into the signifier of
her own desire to possess a penis (the condition, she imagines, of entry into the
symbolic). Either she must gracefully give way to the word, the Name of the Father
and the Law, or else struggle to keep her child down with her in the half-light of the
imaginary. Woman then stands in patriarchal
culture as signifier for the male other,
bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions
through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied
to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.
There is an obvious interest in this analysis for feminists, a beauty in its exact
rendering of the frustration experienced under the phallocentric order. It gets us nearer
to the roots of our oppression, it brings an articulation of the problem closer, it faces
us with the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a
language (formed critically at the moment of arrival of language) while still caught
within the language of the patriarchy. There is no way in which we can produce an
alternative out of the blue, but we can begin to make a break by examining patriarchy
with the tools it provides, of which psychoanalysis is not the only but an important
one. We are still separated by a great gap from important issues for the female
unconscious which are scarcely relevant to psychoanalytic theory: the sexing of the
female infant and her relationship to the symbolic, the sexually mature woman as non-
mother, maternity outside the signification of the phallus, the vagina.... But, at this
point, psychoanalytic theory as it now stands can at least advance our understanding
of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught.iii
Appendix
During the research for this essay I encountered many words I did not understand, as English is my second language. Many of the terms and concepts used in art theory have no Thai equivalent. I have therefore had to compile a working dictionary of my own.
Gig’s Dictionary
Feminist movementThe feminist movement (also known as the Women's Movement, Women's Liberation, or simply, Women's Lib) is a series of campaigns on issues such as reproductive rights, domestic violence, maternity leave, equal pay, voting rights, sexual harassment, and sexual violence. The goals of the movement vary from country to country, e.g. opposition to female genital cutting in
Fetish
Sexual fetishism, or erotic fetishism, is the sexual arousal brought on by any object, situation or body part not conventionally viewed as being sexual in nature. Sexual fetishism may be regarded, e.g. in psychiatric medicine, as a disorder of sexual preference or as an enhancing element to a relationship causing a better sexual bond between the partners. The sexual acts involving fetishes are characteristically depersonalized and objectified, even when they involve a partner. Body parts may also be the subject of sexual fetishes (also known as partialism) in which the body part preferred by the fetishist takes a sexual precedence over the owner.
Heterosexuality consists of sexual behavior, practices, and identity predicated on preference or desire for the other sex. As a sexual orientation, heterosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, physical or romantic attractions primarily to persons of the opposite sex"; it also refers to "an individual’s sense of personal and social identity based on those attractions, behaviors expressing them, and membership in a community of others who share them". The term is usually applied to human beings, but it is also observed in all mammals.
The physical action of heterosexual fertilization is the only means of sexual reproductive capability among humans without the use of assisted reproductive technology. The associations with romantic love and identity in addition to its original, exclusively sexual, meaning dates back to early human societies and gender role separation. As such, gender role separation has been the subject of considerable scholarly commentary and study in human societies since the earliest written records. Heterosexuality has been more intensely studied by medicine and later biology disciplines, and more recently that of psychology. Heterosexuality, along with bisexuality and homosexuality together make up the heterosexual-homosexual continuum.
Male gaze
The 'Gaze' is a psycholanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan to describe a condition where the mature autonomous subject observes "the observation of himself" in a mirror. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject has her autonymity brought into question by the projection of her 'identity' on to an exterior object. "tat tvam asi" (that which you are) This concept is bound with his theory of the mirror stage, where in childhood, conceives the formation of external identities, (Lacan posits a mirror but any object will do) Lacan suggests that the effect 'Gaze' of the mirror can similarly be produced by any conceivable object, i e. A chair or a television screen. The idea that a chair or a television screen can stare back at one is not read literally by Lacan or his adherents and this misconception is popularly stated by his detractors to attempt discredit him.
Michael Foucault also had a distinct conception of the gaze medical gaze in his social theories, although the common usage of the term is of the Lacanian one.
In cinema theory, Laura Mulvey identifies the Male Gaze, in sympathy with the Lacanian statement that "Woman is a symptom of man." what this means is that femininity is a social construct, and that the feminine object the object petit a, or the object of desire, is what constitutes the male lack, and thus his positive identity.
Bracha Ettinger extends this notion of the male gaze in the Matrixial Gaze where two figures looking at each other effectively constitute a double gaze. One where the "Male Gaze" is placed opposite to the "Female Gaze" and thus both positive entities constitute each other from a lack. This umbrella concept of the gaze is precisely what scholars such as Slavoj Zizek claim is the Lacanian definition of "The Gaze."
Patriarchy is a social system in which the father or eldest male is head of the household, having authority over women and children. Patriarchy also refers to a system of government by males, and to the dominance of men in social or cultural systems. It may also include title being traced through the male line.
Manifesto
A manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature. However, manifestos relating to religious belief are generally referred to as a creed. Manifestos may also be life stance-related.
Manifesto is derived from the Italian word manifesto, itself derived from the Latin manifestum, meaning clear or conspicuous. Its first recorded use in English is from 1620, in Nathaniel Brent's translation of Paolo Sarpi's History of the council of Trent
Psychoanalytical film theory
The concepts of psychoanalysis have been applied to films in various ways. However, the 1970s and 1980s saw the development of theory that took concepts developed by the French psychoanalyst and writer Jacques Lacan and applied them to the experience of watching a film.
The film viewer is seen as the subject of a "gaze" that is largely "constructed" by the film itself, where what is on screen becomes the object of that subject's desire.
The viewing subject may be offered particular identifications (usually with a leading male character) from which to watch. The theory stresses the subject's longing for a completeness which the film may appear to offer through identification with an image; in fact, according to Lacanian theory, identification with the image is never anything but an illusion and the subject is always split simply by virtue of coming into existence.
Voyeurism
In clinical psychology, voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other activity usually considered to be of a private nature. In popular imagination the term is used in a more general sense to refer to someone who habitually observes others without their knowledge, with no necessary implication of sexual interest.
Voyeurism (from the French voyeur, "one who looks") can take several forms, but its principle characteristic is that the voyeur does not normally relate directly with the subject of their interest, who is often unaware of being observed. The voyeur may observe the subject from a distance, or use stealth to observe the subject with the use of peep-holes, two-way mirrors, hidden cameras, secret photography and other devices and strategies
Reference
Guerrilla Girls. Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls. New York
John Berger, Ways of seeing, British Broadcasting Coporation and Penguin Books, 1977
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)
Uta Grosenick, “Women Artist”, It’s a women’s world, Taschen, 2001
No comments:
Post a Comment