Week 7 - Bodies of Difference: Embodiment and Representation

Carol Duncan, "MOMAs's Hot Mamas', Art Journal 1989, 171-178
Duncan introduces to her argument the “artifacts of rule”, these are objects which inadvertently confirm the male’s social superiority over female identity, a vast collection of which are found in the Museum of Modern Art New York. Here she suggests that MOMA’s “new” collection is mostly unchanged, still beginning with Cézanne and ending with Abstract expressionism.
Duncan deduces that the museum is crowded with selective images of whores, prostitutes and all women at the lowest of the social scale, and asks “what do sexually available bodies on a monumental scale have to do with art?” Why is it prestigious and why are these “heroes” celebrated?

The museum acts as a spiritually masculinized quest, suggesting that art is primarily a male endeavor, yet the transcendence is more likely to be based on fears and desires of the female form.
Males create for themselves a distorted form of a dangerous woman-creature who is overpowering, castrating and devouring. At this plane of culture, modern art museums appear intelligible despite its misogynistic traits. Whilst abstract expressionism may appear to lack this discrimination, it is its goal to escape the physical and biological, rebelling against the mother and the biological female form.

MOMA’s few women artists are considered anomalies since they de-gender the ritual ordeal, they are kept at a minority since the female presence is only necessary in its imagery, not its artists. Male imagery is both mentally and physically active, and not sexually available. These representations emit the impression of highly self conscious, psychologically complex beings whose sexual feelings are leavened with poetic pain, frustration, heroic fear, protective irony and artistic motivation.

As Duncan states, the interiors are mostly the same and the collection is hardly revised; always seated at the doorway at these monuments of ultimate freedom are De Kooning’s Women I. It commands so much importance that when it was loaned to another museum on load it was replaced by Woman II, this is because of their exceptionally successful deployment as ritual artifacts that masculinize the museum’s space. Woman I emerged in 1951 – 52 as a large, vulgar, sexual, and dangerous beast, sporting iconic frontality, a toothy mouth and large bulging eyes. It is reminiscent of mainstream pornography, opening its thighs to present a self exposing vagina.

These attributes are present in tribal art and that of the Gorgon, and like the Gorgon she simultaneously suggests and avoids the explicit act sexual display. As the mother goddess her lust for blood is emphasized and conjures powerlessness in men who stand before her, representing castration, the vagina dentate and the feeling of inadequacy before women in male psychic development. These fears shared in communal myth and imagery appear to create universal higher truths, and like the Gorgons in her Ancient Greek shrine it becomes worshipped in the high cultural house of the modern world.
The ubiquitous Woman I strikes a paradoxically, ambiguous yet dangerous truth – like the medusa the hero must look at her flat image through the shield, placing it at the centre of his work he secures the aura of myth and mystical authority. She is monumental, iconic and teasing, frighteningly ambiguous, associating with both high art and smutty magazine centerfolds. Yet she is rendered harmless due what De Kooning calls her “silliness”, these ambiguities allow for a chance to overcome this monster cultural and psychological place to enact the myth of the artist-hero, asserting patriarchal privilege of objectifying sexual fantasy as high culture.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, on November 15^th 1887 gaining private painting instruction at an early age. At eighteen years old she studied at the school of the Art Institute Chicago and became a member of the Art Student League in New York City. Following a conventional European curriculum she trained in the art of still life, life and cast drawing, developed wholly in America, unlike many of her contemporaries.

Teaching at schools in Virginia, Texas and South Carolina, she shifted course in 1915 to follow her own artistic instincts, experimenting with an individual style. She gained support from artist and gallery owner Alfred Steiglitz and exhibited in his gallery known as 291 for the first time in 1916, as her supporter and promoter of her work, he also became her lover and they married in 1924 .
O’Keeffe moved to Mexico City due to the feelings of oppression she felt the city presented, and for the next twenty years she would travel West during the Summer months to paint in solitude and return every Winter to exhibit at Steiglitz’s galleries. After Steiglitz’s death, O’Keeffe moved to New Mexico in 1949 in order to explore the myriads nuances found in a relatively limited number of subjects surrounding landscapes, flowers and bones. It is the form of O’Keeff’s work that is essential, her simplification of detail through her lack of specificity throughout these three subjects despite her primary observation and familiarity create synthesized abstract symbols of nature and generalized representations transcending more specific categories and becoming universal motifs to be used in other contexts.

Cow’s Skull: Red, White and Blue, 1931

Oil on Canvas

The Bones of O’Keeffe’s cow’s skull cut sharply into the centre of something that is keenly alive in the landscape of the desert, despite its vast, empty and untouchable terrain, it represents beauty, purity and danger. In the eloquent construction of line and form a symbolic image raising issues of nationalism and religion arises. The piece retains a simple composition; the frontal skull becomes an image of power almost like that of a sacred relic, although it’s upright positioning and ‘cowboy’ associations appear to suggest a phallic form, an idolized symbol of masculinity. Further more the religious connotation is exemplified through the compositional formation of a cross configuration using the skull’s extended horns and vertical support, the ultimate symbol of masculinity, a fetishized male god. As the title re-iterates, we also see the American flag colours reinforcing the sacredness of the landscape in regards to nationalism.

Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses, 1931

Oil on Canvas

Despite the near identical composition to Red, White and Blue we find many of the same forms yet the piece manages to achieve the opposite effect, delivering light-heartedness through subtle humour. Here the masculine imagery of the skull is feminised with a beautiful flower in its hair, and further abstracted and softened with subtle undertones. Due to the generalized form the flowers appear to represent the vulvas we find in Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, in which an alternative reading may suggest the masculiniztion of the feminine through the imagery of the skull.

From the Faraway Nearby, 1937

Oil on Canvas

From the Faraway Nearby reintroduces the imagery of the skull yet combines it with that of the Western landscape, its expansive emptiness and the exhilaration induced by its spatial experience. The impossible and mythical beast portrayed is a statement not on death or the temporality of life but a statement of what endures and is eternal. Resting upon the landscape it expresses similarities to the earth’s peaks in colour and contrast becoming an extension of the landscape itself.

The skull gains an ambiguous spatial depth as it looms towards the picture plane causing the landscape to recede quickly, developing an enormous depth variance which flattens the landscape.

Bibliography

Buhler Lynes Barbara, Catalogue Raisonné Volume 2, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1999

Hutton Turner Elizabeth, Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, London, Washington DC and Yale University Press, 1999

Messinger Lisa Mintz, Gorgia O’Keeffe, New York, Thames and Hudson, 1989

Robinson Roxanna, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1989

Judy Chicago
Dinner Party-Place Setting, Ceramic Plate of Georgia O'Keefe, 1974-1979

Georgia O'Keeffe's is the last place setting at The Dinner Party. Of the works in the installation it posses the most height, signifying O’Keeffe’s liberation and success as a female artist. The imagery on O'Keeffe's plate incorporates the forms she used in her own flower paintings, such as Black Iris (1926), with the vulvic central core used throughout The Dinner Party. Whilst Chicago pays tribute to O'Keeffe's originality and the imagery, she also acknowledges the influence O'Keefe had on later feminist artists, claiming her work as "pivotal in the development of an authentically female iconography" (Chicago,The Dinner Party, 155).On the runner are airbrushed colours corresponding to the plate's colour palette; Chicago chose these colours to represent fine art painting, and O'Keeffe's participation in that tradition. A piece of raw Belgian linen, which is used for art canvases, is attached to cherry wood stretcher bars. At the front of the runner, the first initial of O'Keeffe's name is stitched using the style of her famous skull paintings, which were influenced by the American West. The embroidered letter "G" suggests the antler formations of such works as The Faraway Nearby (1937), suggesting a kindred bond between two.

Black Iris (1926)
Straying away from O’Keeffe, Chicago reminds of us what the female body provides; the flowering arrangement of the vagina yet the commitment and determination of O’Keeffe. The fetish of the vulva seeks to displace the obscene and uses the humour of Shelly Lowell and Sam Haskins I order to subvert the inherent disgust of female genitalia by indulging in clichés and innuendos. Chicago reverses the situation of women by re-presenting a joke regarding the notion of a universally understood subject opposed to being dictated to by the authority of art institutions.
Nonetheless, the 1970s presented women with a new sense of authority over their bodies; the dark greenish colouring and the convulsions of flesh confuse the boundaries of inside and out thus removing women from the erotic gaze.

Bibliography

Madeline Caviness, ‘The De-eroticised Body: Aesthetic Codes, Fragmentation, and the problem of agency, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001

Amelia Jones, Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner part in Feminist Art History, Los Angeles, 1996

Lucie Smith, Judy Chicago: an American Vision, New York, Watson-Guptill Publications, 2000

Sylvia Sleigh
Philip Golub Reclining, 1971

Using the role reversal, Sleigh explored the question of values attached to the traditional representations of women and men, and the absence in Western art of erotic portraits of men juxtaposed the idealized stances traditionally given to gods or figure-heads with commonplace contemporary settings. These portraits are also characterized by an almost obsessive attention to detail such as body hair being elaborated in all its various peculiarities. Sleigh’s Goddesses are modelled by friends, portrayed in real-life situations rather than anonymous women. Here Philip is passively positioned in a traditional reclining pose, juxtaposed with his long bouffant hair style it suggests a certain androgyny challenging the notion of the traditional nude. We can see Sleigh who reminds us that the painting was created through the process of making art, thus losing any erotic qualities it may have had. The painting’s role reversal has received great criticism due to the reactionary tactic of objectifying the male yet it appears to state more clearly the objectification of women, simply using the tactic of reversal so that we may actually ‘see’ a situation that our eyes are so de-sensitized by.

Bibliography

C. Streifer Rubinstein: American Women Artists: From Early Indian Times to the Present, Boston, 1982, pp. 401–3

P. Dunford: A Biographical Dictionary of Women Artists in Europe and America since 1850, Hemel Hempstead, 1990

Sylvia Sleigh: Invitation to a Voyage and Other Works, Milwaukee, WI, A. Mus.; Muncie, IN, Ball State U., A.G.; Youngstown, OH, Butler Inst. Amer. A.; 1990





Suzanne Valadon
The Blue Room, 1923

Born September 23 1865
The first female painter permitted to join the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.
Dies April 7 1938
Valadon was encouraged as an artist by Edgar Degas and highly regarded by Picasso, George Braque and Andre Derain. As a beautiful woman she modelled for Renoir, de Chavannes and Lautrec, radically shaping her ideals of the model as an object. Her work is ‘characterized a certain tension between expectations set up by genre and the way she actually represents the female body’ [1] due to her experience of being the subject matter. As we can see through the models traditional reclining pose, and luscious Manet-esque surroundings juxtaposed with her slightly masculine figure and refusal to even expose partial nudity her work endeavoured to depict women untainted by the voyeur, suggesting resistance to the dominant representations of women in the early twentieth-century, and would also account for the ‘confusion of critics, who have described her work as both ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ [2].
[1] Rosemary Betterton, ‘How do Women Look?: Suzanne Valadon and the Nude, Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts, London, Pandora Publishing, 1987, pp. 222
[2] Ibid, pp. 222

Bibliography
Rosemary Betterton, ‘How do Women Look?: Suzanne Valadon and the Nude, Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts, London, Pandora Publishing, 1987

Patricia Matthews, ‘Returning the Gaze: Diverse Representations of the Nude in the Art of Suzanne Valadon’, Art Bulletin, 1991, 73