Week 5 - The Monstrous and the Marvelous

Sheela-na-gigs and Other Unruly Women

• Other ways they have been interpreted and re-interpreted in modern times.
• Originated from the continent, yet changing over the centuries to represent an Irish past.
• Superfluous in meaning, refusing to be pinned down to one meaning, role or interpretation.

History - Meaning and Function

• 1167 – Derbforgaill, wife of Tigernán O’Rourke, King of Bréife
  
• Developed the Nun’s Church of Clonmacnois, decorated with Twelfth Century Romanesque style.
  
• Her family was associated with the control of the Kingdom of Mide, yet patronage motivated by penitence.
  
• Abducted by her husband’s rival Mac Murchada, who was eventually fined and banished fourteen years later. The abduction and punishment were politically motivated.
  
• Mac Murchada retuned in 1152 with Anglo-Norman allies and began conquering Ireland; Derbforgaill was blamed for bringing ‘shame on her husband, and disaster to her country’ pp. 314. She spent decades repenting for her misdeeds and after many unhappy years died at Mellifont in 1193.
  
• Benshenchas – catalogue of famous women of Ireland, including Derbforgaill. Here she was depicted as a political pawn of the male heroes of her era; tempting and deadly, beautiful and ugly (through aggressive sexuality), with a human body meant to stand for land and kingdom.
  
• Her representation in keeping with the contradictory methods in which women are perceived in Ireland, similar to the Sheela-na-gig.
  
• Her church is problematic in its association to the introduction of the Sheela-na-gig into Irish architecture. Sheela-na-gigs are defined by naked female figures displaying their genitals, yet it is often debated as to whether the churches images are actually Sheela-na-gigs.
  
• Sheela-na-gigs – generally located on or near doorways and windows
  
• Located on Churches and eventually moving to castles
  
• Associated with the Classical depiction of Terra (Mother Earth) and influenced by the grotesque acrobats of lust in French and English Churches of the Twelfth Century opposed to Irish depiction (thus suggested to be an early incarnation)
  
• Debateable as to whether it is female at all, yet the main message lies in the open threatening body, a vulva (female signifier) and gender ambiguity (baldness, skeletal form).
  
• Began in Ireland as an Anglo-Norman import as a representation of the sin of lust, re-enforcing the view of the Irish as bestial, vice-ridden and their sexually impropriety in so to justify an English invasion.
  
• Gerald of Wales characterized the Irish as deformed with tendencies to bestiality, incest and with no laws regarding marriage or inaugurating kings.
  
• Their outward appearance was known to signify inner depravity, and the Sheela-na-gig as a symbol of unruly lust fit perfectly.
  
• All these used as an ancient propaganda and rhetoric for war and conquest.
  
• Thirteenth Century – the Sheela-na-gig’s meaning shifted to an apotropaic icon due to the Anglo-Norman absorption of Irish ways becoming Irish, whilst the old English were perceived as more and more Irish. The Sheela-na-gigs followed suit parting ways with their continental beginnings, resisting the naturalistic erotic forms.
  
• The Sheela-na-gig has been linked to Irish intellectual traditions of strong, sexually aggressive women connected with the protection of Kingship, such as the Morrigan (shifting from hideous to beautiful as circumstance dictated. Similarly, the Benshenchas identifies that women engaged in multiple marriages reflecting political fortunes of their families and the law provided fourteen accounts for women to divorce, were her husband unable to sexually perform.
  
• The unsatisfied longing for sex caused women to turn ugly, the goddess of Irish sovereignty was considered an old crone until sex with the future king transformed her to be beautiful and fertile. The English also adhered to this portrayal which explains the appearance of Sheela-na-gigs on a number of churches and castles associated with the patronage of powerful Irish and Anglo-Norman aristocratic families; thus the Sheela-na-gig’s embodiment of something politically and culturally Irish.
  
• The image of the Sheela-na-gig startles and disrupts by stalking and shrieking with open mouths and wombs, opposed to the alluring bodies of the medieval representations of lust. They are commonly naked (as in the legendary tales of sexually aggressive women) and transfer thorough shrieking wombs their voices of doom to caste/church walls – voices intended to preserve the social order and consequences of subduing to vice.
  
• Sheela-na-gigs are associated with power through distribution and their placement on churches and castles suggest their architecture of authority.
  
• Whilst products of different architects at different times and purposes they are all roughly archaic compared to medieval Irish sculpture, a style used to depict death and decay.
  
• Sheela-na-gigs come in a variety of forms; some reach forwards to pull open the vagina (such as the specimine found in the Figile River, County Offaly), some masturbate and many are bald.
  
• Their open bodies on churches allow for comparisons with Ecclesia (a Twelfth Century identification of Mary), a closed, fertile and accepting virgin opposed to the open, shrieking, dead, barren and sexually repulsive Sheela-na-gigs as warnings of the mouth of Hell.
  
• Many are placed horizontal or upside down to depict powerlessness and defeat as controlled danger, yet upright manifestations apotropaically act as guardians.
  
• Despite differentiation they all illustrate one characteristic unseen in Europe; the correlation between the vagina and mouth; when one is a slit as is the other, the same account adheres when one represents an open cavern.
  
• Relations are made to the vagina dentata; the wandering womb and mouth of hell. As man-made creations, the Sheela-na-gigs and their empty wombs usurp the power of the female body or contrast with the perfection of divine creation.
  
• The majority are ambiguously gendered, many have breasts but are withered and streaked. Most are bloated with bulbous heads and sagging flesh; monstrous and inhuman, nothing suggests it is female opposed to male.
  
• The core of their name routes to the term hag but also to an effeminate man or any gender leaning to the opposite sex, an ambiguity of gender. The most terrifying images of the time transgressed male and female boundaries, the living and the dead, the animal and the supernatural.
  
• Sheela-na-gigs embody religious and political threats. The literary tradition of powerful women as the re-interpretation of the Sheela-na-gig as a protective symbol also provided a historical tradition for real life subversive women.
  
• Tradition and reality were kept alive in the consciousness of the Irish, the Pagan and Celtic associations between the land and protective female figures combining strength, beauty, age, youth and fertility.
  
• Interpretation and re-interpretation dominate scholarship regarding Sheela-na-gigs, this analysis can tell us of scholarships history and its positioning of Sheela-na-gigs to mirror new cultural values; past objects intersect and present an agenda becoming icons of a romanticised past.


• Two Nineteenth Century drawings of the Moycarky and Rochestown Sheela-na-gigs show large breasted, slender women masturbating. Their feminisation and sexualisation show the high-art tradition’s influence of voyeuristic pleasure of a naked and passive feminine idol.
  
• Ghostliness and deathliness are also common in the Sheela-na-gigs iconography and may have originally marked graves.
  
• During the late Eighteenth Century the Rev. Mr. Tyrrell buried a Sheela-na-gig near Lusk in the belief that it had power of the living, negated only through burial in a similar fashion to our real dead. However their origins are older than the context of their discovery due to Twelfth Century animation.


• In the Nineteenth Century Ireland was a post-colonial country. When the Sheela-na-giugs were being discovered the English categorized the Irish as aggressive, uncivilised and grotesque animals just as they did in the post-colonial Twelfth and Sixteenth Centuries.
  
• But buried Sheela-na-gigs are still a threat as Canadian, Dale Colleen Hamilton was denied access to them for study. She wrote in complaint to the Irish times in which their name was debated over national security due to their placement next to the seat of Irish government. Hidden they confirmed Nineteenth Century morals of censorship and Sheela-na-gigs became an agent to control the past, but transformed into feminist power by contemporary artists.


• Sheela-na-gigs are associated with land, sovereignty and power. They are disruptive yet part of a pre-established male dominated order, becoming powerful or powerless in different situations. They become typical of the portrait of women created by Irish historians, judges and literati who use the same term, caillech to refer to hags, wives, crones, nuns and witches.
  
• Typical to the interest and fear of the unheimlich, the former heim of human beings and become a Freudian association of death. Only the history of Sheela-na-gigs can show the past and present uniting in images reproduced, redefined to preserve a tradition and past that are less faithful as historic memory than a strategy of representing authority in terms of artifice and the archaic.
  
  

Madeline Cavinness

Throughout her reading Caviness suggests that it is the fragmented form which forms the image of the grotesque. It seems to be quite an ambiguous statement that something fragmented may constitute something, but as we have seen in the case of the Sheela-na-gigs, contradictions are often the case in relation to the female and the grotesque.

Francisco Zurbarán’s altar piece representing St. Agatha depicts the sensual, demure and yet mundane saint holding a silver platter with her own severed breast. Mundane in its extremity that she offers her breasts to function as a fetish to displace unwanted attention to her body. Ambiguous in the sense that she is a grown woman rejecting her biologically female attributes it is almost as if she is renouncing her womanhood, but is it at a physical or spiritual level? It is almost as if she is dismembering herself in order to confront and avoid the male gaze.

Yet it appears as if the aesthetic codes of the piece have been employed in order to deduce erotic content, there is a distancing and refusal of the body despite the sado-erotic tendencies of torture and mutilation. The often caricatural and bizarrely cut up images of the medieval period in order to specifically avoid any inclination of sex and eroticism and were used as a medium for communications with the deity of the saint.

These severed body parts may also act as relics and after around 1150 casts of real and degradable relics were often made in metal to be devoted by celibate priests.

Severed bodies signal the dismemberment of the phallic gaze due to their blocked voyeurism.

Caviness suggest that the segregated body also applied to male saints through arms, hands and feet including the genitals and the foreskin of Christ, however they were always ex-votos and made of wax or silver. Furthermore the Passion of Christ may be viewed as a sado-erotic example of the displacement of body parts, opposed to the signification of sexual desire. Real Members would be mostly reduced to the bone and the skin replaced with precious metal and jewels, undergoing an aesthetic transformation and denying any representational reference. Their masculinity is not altered or decreased, whereas as women are de-feminized through the mutilation and thus cease becoming the objects of desire. The ideal of the erotic male is immediately assumes a homoerotic quality, assuming that the male lacks eroticism, only its desire.

Reverencing body parts re-affirmed spiritual life as pieces of the body evoke the lack of the Saint’s, however this was eventually disfavored for relics such as the crutches of the healed.

The silver or the wax cast would be used in order to eliminate the notion of Decay as it ceased to be an effective artistic tool to de-eroticise the female, thus suggesting the notion of sexual fantasy. Thus the violence of hacking a body to pieces removes the sexual desire as individual parts lose their original signifying function. Fragmentation decreases the power of the grotesque body, yet also aids as a technique for survival, for example the self-mutilation of Eusebia and her nuns to avoid rape by advancing soldiers, thus their passion turning to anger and violence so to immediately martyr them.

Jenny Saville

The following images I have collected for my research on the grotesque are the works of Jenny Saville, a YBA of the 1990s and graduate of Glasgow School of Art. She achieved great success in her early years as she was pursued by Charles Saatchi and quickly gained a controversial and admirable reputation. Within her colossal portraits of enormous women, we find a rather imposing and remarkable sensation through her depiction of large globs of flesh suggesting ‘big, fat, ugly women’ [1], along with the anxiety of confronting images of such large scale scale. These images develop the epitome of the grotesque in modern society through the notion of fat; an alien substance to the body, stipulating any excess as a lack of control and a lack of beauty.

[Fig 01]

Taking a closer look at Branded [Oil on canvas, 2.13 × 1.83m, 1992] [Fig 01]we see a massively obese woman, viewed from a low angle, exasperating further her immense size. She is enormous, a figure in which not even the gigantic canvas can contain. To the lower right we can see her presenting to us her folds whilst across her skin we see Saville’s scratched in words; “support”, “delicate”, “petite”, and “decorative”, the branded ideas of femininity that are scorched into contemporary women. We see similar connotations in a study of Propped [Oil on canvas, 2.13 × 1.83m, 1992] [Fig 02], in which an analogous figure perches upon a heightened pedestal. Saville again scratched into the paint, this time quoting French feminist writings, suggesting the notion of coined pet-names such as ‘chic’ or ‘bird’, placing woman on a pedestal and reducing her to that of an animal. Yet these images defy these painted stereotypes and expectancies, creating a new image, one that we may loath and fear, they are disobedient, wallow[ing] in [the] glory of expansiveness’ [2], not how they should be, we gaze upon these and question how we look at the female body.

[Fig 02]

These women do not hold to the Twentieth Century model of beauty, through their deviance and they fight against it, they are the opposite of what is expected, a post-modern. Saville’s images surround the celebrity and the nip/tuck culture, they primarily based upon physical and biological concerns. However in a sense Saville sets the grotesque free, ‘break[ing] up and tear[ing] apart our self-image’ [3] shaming those who define the grotesque through shallow pre-conceptions with their own mantle.

[1] Jenny Saville – Flesh and Blood, Dir. Nichola Black, BBC Glasgow, 1995

[2] Patricia Ellis, 100 – The Work that Changed British Art, London, Jonathan Cape, 2001

[3] Jenny Saville, Saville, New York, Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2005, pp. 9

Bibliography

Saville – Flesh and Blood, Dir. Nichola Black, BBC Glasgow, 1995

Gemma de Cruz, Ant Noises at the Saatchi Gallery 2: Catalogue 2, London, Saatchi Gallery Publishing, 2000

Patricia Ellis, 100 – The Work that Changed British Art, London, Jonathan Cape, 2003

Sarah Kent, Shark Infested Waters: the Saatchi collection of British Art in the 90s, London, Zwemmer, 1994

Jenny Saville, Saville, New York, Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2005, pp. 9

Kiki Smith

• Born Nuremberg, 18 Jan 1954
  
• She was brought up in New Jersey and attended Hartford Art School, CT (1974–6).
  
• By manipulating everyday materials such as glass, ceramic, fabric and paper, Smith’s work examined the dichotomy between the psychological and physiological power of the body
  
• Her influences came not from her father, Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith, but from his female contemporaries Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Lee Bontecou.
  
• Smith’s full-size sculptures of the body such as Pee-Body a naked female couple is stoic figures, yet is psychologically impeded by leaking bodily fluids from her vagina; grotesque and offensive to the male gaze, the piece destroys male desire yet envisages the trembling and powerless woman, sparking her defeat and a sado-masochistic eroticism through violent male tendencies.
  

Lilith, 1995 (Silicon on bronze and glass)

• Represents the Hebrew legend; Adam's first wife who rejected him and fled the Garden of Eden, Lilith as a historical figure is widely regarded as symbol of feminine strength
• She is cast in bronze looking sharply over her shoulder, clinging to the wall upside down on all fours like a supernatural creature from movies such as The Exorcist peering at the viewer with disturbing glass eyes
• Suggests the classical portrayal of women in art history as harmonious and self-contained
• Defines woman through lived experience, the body crouches and cowers in powerlessness yet threatens using historical associations of rejection and strength through a piercing gaze. It is rater similar to De Kooning’s Woman I in its ambiguities becoming grotesque to the male eye, reversing art history’s grasp upon women and exposing the inequalities that women pose in elitist institutions such as the MOMA.

Bibliography

Projects 24: Kiki Smith (exh. cat., New York, MOMA, 1990)

Kiki Smith (exh. cat., Montreal, Mus. F.A.; Fort Worth, TX, Mod. A. Mus.; 1996–7)

Kiki Smith: All Creatures Great and Small, Hannover, Kestner-Ges, 1998

J. Bird, ed.: Otherworlds: The Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith, London, 2003

Wendy Weitman, Kiki Smith : prints, books & things, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2003

Sarah Lack, Kiki Smith, Grove Art Online, < from="search&session_search_id=" hitnum="1&section="> [Accessed 3 May 2008]

Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005, Traditional Fine Arts Organization, < imgurl="http://www.tfaoi.com/cm/3cm/3cm490.jpg&imgrefurl=" h="337&w=" sz="9&hl=" start="1&um=" tbnid="dCNuiqCUWkfheM:&tbnh=" tbnw="106&prev="> [Accessed 3 May 2008]